(Pop) Cultures on the Move: Transnational Identifications and Cultural Exchange Between East and West
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
impressum_saravi_pontes_8_Layout 1 25.01.2018 11:01 Seite 1 impressum_saravi_pontes_8_Layout 1 25.01.2018 11:01 Seite 2 SARAVI PONTES – Beiträge zur internationalen Hochschulkooperation und zum interkulturellen Wissenschaftsaustausch Herausgegeben von Astrid M. Fellner, Roland Marti, Christoph Vatter, Elisabeth Venohr Band 8 impressum_saravi_pontes_8_Layout 1 25.01.2018 11:01 Seite 3 Astrid M. Fellner, Tetiana Ostapchuk, Bärbel Schlimbach (eds.) (Pop) Cultures on the Move: Transnational Identifications and Cultural Exchange Between East and West universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre impressum_saravi_pontes_8_Layout 1 25.01.2018 11:01 Seite 4 © 2018 universaar Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes Saarland University Press Presses Universitaires de la Sarre Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken ISBN 978-3-86223-229-1 gedruckte Ausgabe ISBN 978-3-86223-230-7 Online-Ausgabe ISSN 2198-0551 gedruckte Ausgabe ISSN 2198-056X Online-Ausgabe URN urn:nbn:de:bsz:291-universaar-1741 Projektbetreuung universaar : Natascha Magyar, Verena Wohlleben Satz: Bärbel Schlimbach Umschlaggestaltung: Julian Wichert Herstellung über: readbox unipress in der readbox publishing GmbH http://unipress.readbox.net Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen National bibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.d-nb.de> abrufbar. Table of Contents Introduction: (Pop) Cultures on the Move Astrid M. Fellner, Tetiana Ostapchuk, and Bärbel Schlimbach 7 Section 1 “What Does ‘America’ Mean?” “I mean … we have good coffee in Italy … why do we need Starbucks?”—‘America’ in the Construction and Negotiation of European Identities Marie-Louise Brunner, Stefan Diemer, and Selina Schmidt 17 “We Are Going to Go Gaga Together”: Celebrity Culture, Affective Encounters, and ‘American’ Pop Culture in Germany Astrid M. Fellner 35 Section 2 “Transcultural Identifications” Encoding and Decoding ‘Imagined Ukraines’ in American Movies Tetiana Ostapchuk 51 Transcultural Identity and Migration: Zachary Karabashliev’s 18 % Gray Alexandra Glavanakova 67 What Makes Don Quixote an American Hero? Oleksandr Pronkevych 87 Section 3 “Cultural Exchanges Between ‘America’ and ‘Europe’” “Once Upon a Time in the West”: Cross-Cultural Appropriations of Western Films Bärbel Schlimbach 107 Becoming Detroit: Techno Music and the German Post-Nation Narrative Sebastian Weier 123 Section 4 “Cultural Exchanges Between ‘East’ and ‘West’” Voicing the ‘Inappropriate’: Creative Strategies in Ukrainian and American Female Singer-Songwriters Iuliana Matasova 137 “American Boy, American Joy”—Gendered National Imaginations between Russia and the United States of America M. Katharina Wiedlack 151 Notes on Contributors 165 ASTRID M. FELLNER, TETIANA OSTAPCHUK, AND BÄRBEL SCHLIMBACH Introduction: (Pop) Cultures on the Move In writing about cultures on the move in the 1990s, Stephen Greenblatt ar- gued that cultural mobility was “not the expression of random mobility but of exchange” (“Culture” 229). Culture, according to him, “is a particular net- work of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas, and—through institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage—people” (“Culture” 229). It is in these negotiations of exchange that the characteristics, the direc- tions and destiny, but also the problems and conflicts of a particular culture emerge. Cultural exchange permits concepts to be exchanged and shared by different societies. Historically speaking, colonialism and imperialism have probably been the most powerful global designs that have constituted and ef- fected exchange between cultures. In times of globality, the dynamics of transnational cultural exchange and mobility are manifold. As a result, the “enterprise of tracking the restless and often unpredictable movement of texts, ideas, and whole cultures” (Greenblatt, Mobility 7) is notoriously difficult. This book analyzes transnational identifications and different forms of cultural exchange between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ that is between Europe and the U.S., and between Russia and the U.S. Conceiving of ‘American’ culture as complexly situated in the global context, most articles look at popular and mass culture. In analyzing transatlantic processes of cultural transfer and ex- change, this book, however, aims at looking in both directions: not only has ‘American’ popular culture traveled eastward but recent ‘American’ culture has also absorbed many elements of contemporary ‘European’ cultures. Import-export: the processes in which images, stereotypes, cultural meanings and pleasures of popular culture cross cultural borders and national bound- aries are manifold. (Pop) Cultures on the move always travel both ways on the highway of culture, intersecting at various points so as to form a densely connected global network. Our volume identifies such encounters, making 8 Fellner, Ostapchuk, Schlimbach visible the instances and moments of cultural exchange. Sites of these cultural encounters span literary and cultural texts: novels, music, film, and digital media culture. As all conference proceedings, this book is the outcome of interactions be- tween members of different cultures. Based on a collaborative project be- tween Saarland University, Germany, and Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Ukraine, the articles are the result of a virtual conference “Lan- guages, Literatures and Cultural Studies: Sites and Insights” that took place in January 2016. During this virtual conference, participants did not have to travel to a conference venue, but met in a web space that allowed them to share their presentations with other conference participants. The presenters were English and American Studies scholars from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Austria, and Germany, their disciplines ranging from literature and cultural studies, media studies, gender/queer studies to linguistics. The papers were available for registered participants via the conference website (http://cultural- studies.chdu.edu.ua/) to allow all participants to read all papers before the conference started. During the three days of the conference all participants could ask questions or post comments, and the authors had the opportunity to respond to comments and questions. The essays included here are selected papers of this virtual conference but they have been revised to fit the topic of this book. Examining how the signi- fier ‘America’ functions as an intermediary in the production of transnational identities, the articles investigate the transnational flow of cultural texts, ana- lyzing how, by whom, and to what purposes and effects (pop)cultural prac- tices have been appropriated and transferred to local contexts and how the significance of place, especially the category of the national, has changed in the process. Analyzing various spaces of cultural transmission, the following papers focus on patterns of movement and the flows of culture in order to ap- proximate the question of whether the dialogue with ‘America’ in the 21st century still plays a vital role in the production of ‘European’ identities. What specific role does the flexibility and adaptability of the signifier ‘American’ play in this intermediary function of American culture? This book gauges the potential and the limits of ‘American’ culture as a third term that can ‘other’ both national and European traditions (for identification or dis-identification) and can serve to reconstruct and to transgress national cultural identities. The nine articles which are compiled in this volume are arranged in four sections which highlight different thematic aspects and disciplinary angles. The articles in the first section “What Does ‘America’ Mean?” analyze how the signifier ‘America’ and American popular culture in general are in- fluential for European contexts and show how ‘American’ concepts are not Introduction 9 merely adapted or appropriated but influential for the accommodation within the context of newly emerging European identities. In turn, the articles in the second section “Transcultural Identifications” assess the importance of ‘American’ culture for ‘European’ cultural productions as well as mutual in- fluences of cultural productions across the Atlantic. The examples chosen to underline the authors’ arguments come from literature and film as well as popular culture. The third section “Cultural Exchanges Between ‘America’ and ‘Europe’” explores the mutual influences of ‘American’ and ‘European’ cultural productions with the help of two concrete examples: Western movies and Techno music. Finally, the articles in the fourth section “Cultural En- counters Between ‘East’ and ‘West’” examine two examples of Russian and Ukrainian music productions for their potential to utilize the trope of ‘America’ as a signifier to overcome national discourses in Russia and the Ukraine in post-Soviet times. In the opening essay “‘I mean … we have good coffee in Italy … why do we need Starbucks?’—‘America’ in the Construction and Negotiation of European Identities,” Marie-Louise Brunner, Stefan Diemer, and Selina Schmidt analyze the significance of ‘America’ in international conversations via Skype in the Corpus of Academic Spoken English compiled at Saarland University, Germany. The authors establish the linguistic and social contexts for negotiations of cultural identities between European students from dif-