Cultural Mobility

The flows of Manuel Castells, Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic, the traveling culture of James Clifford, Walter Benjamin's flâneur, Mary Louise Pratt's contact zones, the borderlands of Gloria Anzaldúa, and Tim Cresswell's mobile geographies define figures of movement that have served as rubrics and objects of scholarly discourse. Against and within the backdrop of academic interest in and familiarity with movement and mobility, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto works to define a field of “mobility studies.” What distinguishes this “manifesto” from other calls to study movement and mobility?Greenblatt asserts in his introduction that while the academy has attended to mobility, “the times and places in which [academic disciplines] see significant mobility occurring remain strictly limited” (3). Certainly, “mobility” has served more commonly as a keyword to describe both a theoretical perspective on and a descriptive statement of contemporary life (see, for example, Caren Kaplan's The Question of Travel or Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large). That said, the assumption that mobility is fundamentally modern has been complicated by many scholars who have studied earlier instances of cultural mobility, such as Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead. Beyond historical myopia, Greenblatt identifies another major impediment as the presumption that culture is not “contingent at all but ... fixed, inevitable, and strangely enduring” (16). Critics such as Appadurai and Liisa Malkki, whose work has addressed what Malkki calls a “sedentarist metaphysics” that normalizes stable, grounded culture, would agree.Where Greenblatt and his fellow authors depart most productively from familiar ground is in their common emphasis on what Greenblatt identifies as contingentia (16). Against the propensity to see mobility as modern, against the sedentarism of cultural definitions, against the tendency to find mobility in one remarkable or emblematic place (the Atlantic, the flâneur, the borderland), the collection's six authors seek to uncover small, specific, contingent moments of cultural exchange that lead to cultural change. Each essay focuses on a specific instance of cultural mobility, which leads to a collection widely varied in geographic and temporal focus. This breadth is reflected in the collection's authors, an international group of humanities scholars who were fellows together at Berlin's Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study).Heike Paul uncovers a fascinating new story about Uncle Tom's Cabin through well-researched attention to this single, well-known book's cultural mobility. Paul examines how German readers responded to the novel from the mid- and late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, focusing on how its translation into a different cultural context reframes race, slavery, and oppression. In the mid-nineteenth century, Paul shows how Germans traveling to the United States used the novel as a primer for American definitions of race, which led to a “single, highly generalized and ... static stereotype” that conflated African American and slave (134). By the late nineteenth century, Germans readers were framing the novel as a nostalgic icon of a bygone, pastoral era, evident in the appearance of names like “Onkel Toms Strasse” on Berlin maps and the proliferation of Uncle Tom merchandise. In the mid-twentieth century, a new reading emerged as German reprintings featured Uncle Tom not as a figure defined by nostalgia or pastoralism, or even race or nationality, but as a figure of class sympathy and interest.Such attention to cultural mobility as entailing movement- with-a-difference is theoretically and historically contextualized in Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus's “Word Literature beyond Goethe.” The essay recounts a key episode in the history of comparative literature: Goethe's call for “Weltliteratur.” Rather than “the archive of everything that had ever been written or the canon of great works transcending their national cultures,” for Goethe world literature models a process of “'international literary communication'” (106). Meyer-Kalkus emphasizes that Goethe's world literature required interaction across linguistic and national boundaries, interaction that would involve transformation, revision, and critique. Meyer-Kalkus contrasts Goethe's emphasis on difference—a difference that remains necessary to rather than obliterated by world literature—to the unifying and singularizing world vision of Marx. As such, “Weltliteratur” models not a closed system of accretion but a dynamic feedback loop that requires mutual recognition and communication across boundaries, a process—as Paul's essay shows—that can have unexpected consequences.The unpredictability of cultural mobility is the focus of Stephen Greenblatt's essay, “Theatrical Mobility.” He develops a unique methodology to study playwriting as modeled by Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists, which he asserts did not tend to a final, perfect form but was an ongoing process of revision, appropriation, and change. Inspired by and in collaboration with the American playwright and “cunning recycler” (78) Charles Mee, Greenblatt coauthors a play based on Shakespeare's lost Cardenio, provides funds to have it reworked by several playwrights and theater companies across the globe, and studies the results. Perhaps inadvertently, this essay emphasizes the economic bases—here, grant funds—that entwine the culturally mobile. Methodologically, Greenblatt's study breaks down the traditional divide between creation and critique. The breakdown of author/critic seems to be reflected in the format of his essay, which weaves a lovely, largely anecdotal tale of cultural production and translation. We learn that Greenblatt was not always pleased with the results of this process, as he receives a first-person lesson “in cultural mobility as misunderstanding” (95) when a Japanese playwright reworks the play in unexpected ways.The collection's other essays, such as Ines G. Županov's “The Wheel of Torment,” show more vividly the effects of cultural mobility and misunderstanding. Županov examines how two sixteenth-century Portuguese men, a doctor and an archbishop, write from colonial Goa about the dangerous instability of Portuguese Christian identity that was instigated by opening it up to the goods and ideas of an expanded imperial domain. For Garcia da Orta, the doctor, this instability makes it necessary to try to sustain the body of Portuguese identity through the very materials and circumstances that destabilized it in the first place. Thus, even as Goan air enervates Portuguese masculinity, the landscape provides natural curatives. In contrast, Don Gaspar, the archbishop, believes that the solution to oppressive openness is to turn inward: to shut off the body's openness to deleterious external effects—to resist the siren call of the senses—and thus shut down mobility and in so doing stabilize the internal, Portuguese Christian self.Pál Nyíri analyzes contemporary, mainly domestic Chinese tourism. Mobility as a sign and means of modernity—tourism, migration, travel—influenced the PRC to encourage Chinese citizens to travel. Nyiri's essay examines how the state controls this movement, belying the traditional assumption that mobility necessarily heralds change. China's domestic tourism landscape, for instance, polices tourists through a highly regulated tourism industry, from the system of tourist agents to the signage and accommodations at tourist spots. While the recent trend in backpacking suggests a modification in the tourist landscape and in the extent to which mobility remains under the control of the government, Nyiri's essay relates a telling story of how scholars need to attend not just to the fact of movement but also the mechanisms that enable it, what Greenblatt in his introduction calls the “management of movement” (19).Friederike Pannewick examines the Islamic tradition of performance by charting the movements of the Islamic religious and secular storytelling tradition, as epitomized in Arabian Nights, and the ta'ziya, “a kind of Shi‘ite passion play” (233). Pannewick tracks how these two performances change over time and space—charting their travels and changes from the seventh century through to the twenty-first, from the Middle East to the Americas (the ta'ziya, for instance, traveled from Iran to India to Trinidad). This kind of analysis, Pannewick argues, enables “a better understanding of what culture actually is—a continuous flux, a syncretical and ongoing process of exchange, interactions, and creative overlaps” that underlies cultural creation, exchange, and mobility (245).The authors' focus on specific moments of cultural mobility creates a collection that resists an overarching narrative of cultural mobility as teleological progress. Such a focus allows these authors to chart cultural transmission in all of its historic variability, instability, unexpectedness, inequality, and even violence; in short, as defined by contingentia. This principle is well articulated through the form of the collection itself. As a set of essays with diverse, distinct subjects, it productively avoids resolving mobility into a single locus (e.g., the Atlantic), time (e.g., modernity), or telos. The authors do share a set of principles, the “manifesto” that would define the study of cultural mobility. Authored by Greenblatt, the principles are that mobility studies must attend (1) to the literal as well as the figurative, (2) to the hidden as well as the “conspicuous,” and (3) to contact zones where “cultural goods are exchanged” (251) and at the same time (4) analyze the tension between individual and structure as well as (5) explain why culture seems so rooted and why mobility is often seen as threatening. The strength and weakness of this collection and its principles is that it reads less as a field-building manifesto and more as a cultural mobility reader, an astute extension and elaboration of extant theorizations and studies of mobility

Epistemology · Manifesto · Mobilities · Modernity · Presumption · Sociology · Anthropology · Law · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature

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