Wilfried Raussert Knihy

Focusing on public art practices during significant social and political upheavals, this book explores the 1920s-1930s, 1960s-1970s, and the present day. It highlights how grassroots and avant-garde artists utilize public spaces as platforms for community engagement and social change. The study covers diverse movements, including Garveyism, Mexican muralism, and contemporary initiatives like Zapatista and Black Lives Matter, illustrating how art serves as a catalyst for redefining culture and creating new societal possibilities.

This edited compilation fosters a dialogue across various fields, conceptualizing disability and (mental) illnesses as cultural narratives for social critique. It explores contemporary cultural productions from the Americas, examining how they represent disability and the underlying structures of disease, racism, and sexism.

This book explores the continuous reinvention of the social through music, highlighting its role in identity politics, social movements, and cultural contexts. It examines music's influence beyond mere background sound, showcasing its transformative power in society, particularly through the lens of music from the Americas.

Halifax's Poet Laureate Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. The result is a jambalaya -- a dialogue between image and text. Cooper translates Raussert's photos into poetry, painting a profound image of what disembodied historical facts might look like when they are embodied in contemporary characters. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African diaspora around North America and Europe. The result is a work that amplifies black beauty and offers audible resistance.

This book is a key text for scholars and students that study the Americas in a multilingual and transdisciplinary fashion. The dialogical paradigm that underlies any sincere Inter-American scholarship makes clear that no single scholarly positioning can capture the complexity of Inter-American connectivity. This is what Inter-American Studies share with Global Studies: A necessity to negotiate multiple and at times conflictive paradigms to tackle its objects of investigation. The volume introduces eight key tropes in Inter- American Studies, as they have emerged from the work of the IAS web publication platform fiar forum for inter-american research since the latter's foundation in 2008.§The editors have selected eight key tropes and regrouped essays from the period between 2008 and 2015 to highlight some of the most important paradigms for the pursuit of interdisciplinary Inter-American studies. The tropes include 'colonial/decolonial,' 'independence,' 'religion,' 'border,' 'mobility,' 'race/indigeneity,' 'gender,' and 'decolonial reflections.' The key tropes chosen should not be seen as separate entities for in many respects they are related or overlap to some degree; nor are they meant to be an exclusive list of terms. They function more as a representative selection to illustrate recent paradigms and their application. For every trope the editors have included one article in English and one in Spanish.§§'fiar is an innovative international journal in the forefront of interdisciplinary research into Inter-American studies. It brings together writers and readers-researchers and an audience-that cut across linguistic and cultural lines and provides cultural comparisons that are as refreshing as they are necessary. Here the New World-the Americas-are explored in their plurality and in a global context. In rigorous and exciting ways, this journal examines significant topics, including indigenous peoples and those who complicate the relation between center and margin and those who cross borders.'§Jonathan Hart, Clare Hall; University of Cambridge

This book is a collection of essays devoted to the representation and politics of memory in cultural texts. How individuals and communities use memory to navigate the current global situation is the subject of many of the essays collected in this volume, while other essays contextualize these strategies by examining functions and interrogations of memory in earlier geopolitical environments. Taken as a whole, they form a multifaceted exploration of how various forms of memory are discursively constructed and negotiated in literature, art, media, or other cultural modes of representation. The collection addresses a wide array of texts and cultural contexts.

This volume, stemming from an international conference honoring Günter H. Lenz at Humboldt University Berlin in February 2005, aims to address Shelley Fisher Fishkin's inquiry about the impact of a transnational focus in American Studies. The editors aspire to challenge the methodological nationalism prevalent in the field. The contributions explore literary, political, and cultural practices in America, both historical and contemporary, seeking to move beyond entrenched paradigms of American “exceptionalism” and the notion of a singular Americanness as a nationalist mythology. Instead, “America” is presented as a signifier shaped by influences beyond its national borders. The volume draws on concepts from the “New American Studies,” particularly “Post-Nationalist American Studies,” signaling a shift in research approaches away from nation-state myths and towards a transnational and intercultural understanding of U.S. culture. This redefinition interprets “America” as a complex interplay of diverse interpellations, where no single perspective dominates. It promotes a dialogic cultural critique and inter- and postnational American culture studies, highlighting the bidirectional processes of transculturation and the competing visions and ideologies that exist both within and outside the United States.

Within their approach to trace the routes of music and music's impact on identity formation the editors take the popularity of American music more or less for granted. Most genres addressed in this study have emerged within the multiethnic United States or the Americas on a larger scale, most have traversed through the Americas and, in different adaptations, through different parts of the world. Tracing the migration of sounds, the editors see American music at home and abroad as an intricate part of a historical process of globalization and as embedded in complex and multidirectional processes of exchange and transformation. They understand the migration of American forms of music not as a one-dimensional, homogenizing process of Americanization but rather as a multidirectional journey with diverse and multi-layered forms of music emerging in different and shifting locales. The contributors cover a broad range of musical genres, ranging from sacred music and avant- garde music to jazz, reggae, and rock. Moreover, crossovers between film, theater, video art and music are explored. In its interdisciplinary and international orientation this book will contribute to the new direction American Studies has taken recently and expand a cultural studies approach to the field of music at the same time.