The forum for inter-american research was established by the American Studies Section of the English Department at Bielefeld University in order to foster, promote and publicize current topics in the studies of the Americas. fiar is the official journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS) General Editor: Wilfried Raussert Editors: Yolanda Campos Stephen Joyce Marius Littschwager Mahshid Mayar Luisa Raquel Lagos Ellermeier Paula Prescod Wilfried Raussert Susana Rocha Teixeira Brian Rozema Assistant Editor: Anne Lappert Editorial Board: Prof. Mita Banerjee, Mainz University, Germany Prof. William Boelhower, Louisiana State University, USA Prof. Nuala Finnegan, University College Cork, Ireland Prof. Emerita Lise Gauvin, Université de Montréal, Canada Prof. Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas, USA Dr. Jean-Louis Joachim, Université des Antilles, Martinique Prof. Djelal Kadir, Penn State University, USA Dr. Luz Angélica Kirschner, South Dakota State University, USA Prof. John Ochoa, Pennsylvania State University, USA Prof. John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California, USA Prof. David Ryan, University College Cork, Ireland Prof. Sebastian Thies, University of Tübingen, Germany Dr. Cécile Vigouroux, Simon Fraser University, Canada Design: Alina Muñoz Knudsen Contact: [email protected] [49] 521-106-3641 www.interamerica.de (European Standard Time) Postfach 100131 The association seeks to promote the interdisciplinary study of the Americas, focusing in particular on inter-connections between North, Central, and South American culture, literatu- re, media, language, history, society, politics, and economics. www.interamericanstudies.net Guest Editors of Vol. 13.1: Wilfried Raussert (Bielefeld University) Olaf Kaltmeier (Bielefeld University) Nadine Pollvogt (Bielefeld University) ____________________________________________________________________________ www.interamerica.de Vol. 13 No. 1 (Mar. 2020): Heritage-Boom: On Culture and Nature in the Americas Heritage-Boom: On Culture and Nature in the Americas (Introduction) � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �6 Olaf Kaltmeier (Bielefeld University, Germany) Wilfried Raussert (Bielefeld University, Germany) Language shift, language reclamation: The case of Nahuatl in Tuxpan, Jalisco, Mexico� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �8 Rosa H� Yáñez Rosales (Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico) Culture Heritage and Politics of Reconciliation: Reinventing the Blues in the Narratives of The Delta Blues Museum and the B�B� King Museum � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �23 Wilfried Raussert (Bielefeld University, Germany) Documentary “Sonic Bridges: Son Jarocho in South-North Dialogue” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �35 Wilfried Raussert (Bielefeld University, Germany) Alina Muñoz Knudsen (Bielefeld University, Germany) Voices of the Mississippi Blues � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �36 William Ferris (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States) Patrimonio colonial y refeudalización� Giros hacia la derecha en la cultura política en América Latina� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �56 Olaf Kaltmeier (Universidad de Bielefeld, Alemania) The Nature of the Brazilian Flag: An Environmental Turn under Military Rule (1964-1985) � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �69 Antoine Acker (University of Zurich, Switzerland) La construcción social de un espacio ‘prístino’: paisajes predominantes e interacciones funcionales en el sistema socio-ambiental Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo (1881-1987) � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �83 Anthony Goebel McDermott (Universidad de Costa Rica) David Chavarría Camacho (Universidad de Costa Rica) Ronny J� Viales Hurtado (Universidad de Costa Rica) National Parks of the southern Meta/Colombia in Post-acuerdo – A conflict- and actor-oriented analysis of the public debate � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �99 Yvonne Laudien (Bielefeld University, Germany) Las aguas termales de la cuenca Chapala-Santiago: un patrimonio natural en peligro � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �114 Cecilia Lezama Escalante (Universidad de Guadalajara, México) Alicia Torres Rodríguez (Universidad de Guadalajara, México) FORUM FOR INTER-AMERICAN RESEARCH (FIAR) VOL. 13.1 (MAR. 2020) 6-7 ISSN: 1867-1519 © forum for inter-american research Heritage-Boom: On Culture and Nature in the Americas (Introduction) OLAF KALTMEIER (BIELEFELD UNIVERSITY, GERMANY) WILFRIED RAUSSERT (BIELEFELD UNIVERSITY, GERMANY) Arguably every human society engages in and discourses made by scientific experts practices of memory in order to build identity emerged around the second half of the nineteenth and belonging. If autobiographical memory century in the context of nation building. The reconstructs life events, cultural memory can be nation’s attempt at a diachronic and harmonious understood as the communal effort to retrace narrative is at odds with the dynamics of the supposed original state or form of a cultural industrial revolution, internal migration, and event or cultural object, or in extended terms massive processes of urbanization disrupting the a natural event or natural object. Such act of processes of identity formation. Therefore, the restoration is a discursive construct that involves discourse of heritage is offered as a way to heal processes of discovery, selection, imagination, the flaws of modernity. It promises continuity and and reconstruction. Cultural memory refers to stability, continuing an invented origin that was communal conceptions of heritage and history, lost in the processes of modernization. (Herwitz and thus to more public forms of narrative such as 18; Smith 17). museum narratives, documentary films, national Without doubt, heritage is booming all over the park narratives, published histories in a popular world. Within the last years, we have witnessed or academic vein among others. Cultural memory an impressive qualitative and quantitative also consists in oral histories that members of expansion of heritage policies. Not only have a community share with each other. Just as international heritage organizations like the individual identity emerges from the narrative important UNESCO-World Heritage Center shape one gives one’s life through recalling it, expanded their scope dramatically, but the these historical accounts of a community foster cultural industry is blossoming with a “heritage life- a shared identity among its members. And like style” marked by nostalgia, vintage, and a “retro” the individual’s past which changes to fit present look. Performance and narration of heritage are circumstances, the community’s cultural and related to a globally established form, although natural heritage and history are revised as their appropriation depends on local patterns. In community moves in time. “How memory and Western European societies, heritage has often heritage are created, preserved, or changed been stylized into a depoliticized lifestyle factor. is always entangled in a network of power In postcolonial contexts, and throughout the relationships” (Raussert et al. 14). The growing Americas, “heritage has also transformed into internationalization of the circuits of mobility and a battleground for identity politics and for the capital, information and labor, cultural practice interpretation of history and its projection into and goods leaves individuals tied to “differing the future” (Kaltmeier 13). Especially in Latin and multiple cultural reference groups in a series America the general heritage boom and growing of multiple positionings” (Raussert and Kunow cultural industry are intrinsically entangled with 10). In an ever more globalized space that questions of coloniality and indigeneity. suggests borderless multiplicities without unity, According to David Herwitz, this is the main cultural differences, competing conceptions of reason why decolonizing societies enter into the memory and heritage, and conflicts of value heritage game and make their own heritage, seem omnipresent. (ibid. 17). although heritage itself is a western device. The notion of heritage that alludes to practices 7 O.KALTMEIER & W. RAUSSERT: HERITAGE-BOOM (INTRODUCTION) To do so is a rehabilitating move, a way 13-36. of self-assigning a future by taking over Kaltmeier, Olaf and Mario Rufer, “Introduction: the uses the ideology which allows them to ascribe of heritage and the postcolonial condition in Latin origin and destiny to the past, accretion America.” Entangled Heritages. Postcolonial Perspectives on the Uses of the Past in Latin and transmissibility to their ‘values’. And a America, edited by Olaf Kaltmeier and Mario Rufer, central part of the postcolonial dialectic is Routledge, 2017, pp. 1-12. re-conceptualizing the precolonial past as Raussert, Wilfried and Rüdiger Kunow. “Cultural Memory a heritage, finding a way to claim that past and Multiple Identities. An Interdisciplinary Approach as the origin of one’s future. (Herwitz 21) to Twentieth Century Identity Politics. Introduction.” Cultural Memory and Multiple Identities, edited by The politics and uses of heritage have their Rüdiger Kunow and Wilfried Raussert, LIT Verlag, 2008, pp. 7-18. pitfalls,