American Multiculturalism and Ethnic Survival

In this collection of essays, Americanists from the United States, Germany, and Latvia enter the scholarly debate about the ever increasing pluralization of societies on the North American continent by correlating the issues of multiculturalism and ethnic survival. Spanning six centuries and covering the cultural work and literary representation of eight ethnic groups in the USA and Canada, the essays demonstrate that the scope of the debate has to be widened to reflect the complexity of a subject which has too long been reduced to convenient but simplistic binaries.

Renate von Bardeleben, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Klaus H. Schmidt work in various fields of American Studies at the University of Mainz in Germersheim. They have published and edited numerous books and essays on a wide range of topics from colonial times to the present. Besides translation studies, their research focuses on autobiography, travel, gender, and ethnicity.

Contents: Renate von Bardeleben/Sabina Matter-Seibel/Klaus H. Schmidt: Introduction – Juan Bruce-Novoa: The Rhetorics of Latino Survival in the U.S.: 1528-1961 – Vincent Carretta: Revising One's Self: Constructing. Phillis Wheatley's Anglophone-African Identity – Udo J. Hebel: «Not a story to pass on»? The Pluralization of American Memory in Historical Dramas by Harlem Renaissance Women Playwrights – Charles T. Johnson: Dr. Charles J. Hexamer: Forgotten German-American Leader – Barbara Buchenau: Ethnic Performance and the Self-Representation of Frederic Philip Grove – Laura Hapke: Red Scares, Ethnicity, and the Jungle of Worlcing-Class Desire in the 1920s Novels of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair – Elke Kinkel: Thomas Mann in America: A Privileged German’s (Ethnic) Survival – Alvin H. Rosenfeld: Translating Atrocity – Harald Leder: Changing People's Minds? American Reorientation in Germany After World War II – John Purdy: Autoethnography and Issues of Representation in the Post-Indian Era – Sabina Matter-Seibel: Aliens, Translators, Native Speakers: Language and Identity in Asian-American Fiction – Maren Dingfelder Stone: Tulips, Windmills, and Wooden Shoes: Dutch-American Festive Culture as a Means of Ethnic Survival? – Horst Tonn: Ethnic Interventions: Hollywood Film and the New Multiculturalism – Justine Dymond: Ethnic Mysteries: Genre, «Race», and the Power of Law – Edgars Oši?š: Multicultural Canada: Two First Nations Voices – Suzanne Ferriss: Hybrid Subjectivities: Sexuality, Race, and Ethnicity. Inhaltsverzeichnis