Fluchtpunkt Techno?

The term “conexión chilena” is regularly used in print media and internet articles to describe a group of DJs, some of them very successful, who fled as children with their families to Europe during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973–1990) and have become part of the growing EDM scene there since the 1990s. Names that are often mentioned in this context include Matías Aguayo, Andrés and Pier Bucci, Luciano (Lucien Nicolet), Martin Schopf/DJ Dandy Jack, Paula Schopf/DJ Chica Paula, Ricardo Villalobos and Cristian Vogel. Based on interviews and the analytical study of selected tracks by three of these artists, this article explores the question of the role that the “conexión” actually played. On the one hand, this question is applied to the work and career of the artists themselves, especially in light of developments in Chilean memory culture. On the other hand, it is applied to the early internationalization and transatlantic exchange in the field of techno and EDM. (Vorlage)

Writing in the New World

Over the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish American poetry and poetic theory experience a crucial moment of affirmation. Literary networks strengthen their circle of influence, and several authors, both creole and settlers, are able to promote their careers, further facilitated by the printing press. Books such as Miscelánea austral (Lima, 1602/1603) by Diego Dávalos y Figueroa, Grandeza mexicana (Mexico City, 1604) by Bernardo de Balbuena, and Parnaso antártico (Seville, 1608) by Diego Mexía contain a number of texts which lay the foundations for a new American poetics. They constitute a canon of New World authors who fashion themselves at the centre of a transatlantic exchange, both as followers and innovators of the peninsular literary tradition of the Renaissance. Framed within the rhetorical genre of “defences of poetry” and “defences of women”, these poets put forward an engaging critical representation of their own poetic identity.

Literary Transmigration George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Spirit of Transatlantic Exchange

Reading several letters from the eleven-year correspondence alongside Dred and Daniel Deronda, this paper argues that the model of transatlantic spiritual communication presented by Stowe and Eliot’s epistolary friendship takes on a new and potentially radical light when applied to the concept of a transnational and post racial spiritual community. Each text fundamentally challenges the ability of the realist novel to depict a nuanced understanding of racial identity through the use of spiritualist and religious discourse and imagery.

Political Satire, That Was The Week That Was, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

The political satire boom in the United States and the United Kingdom experienced a brief, albeit notorious success on British and American television, most notably represented by That Was The Week That Was. In the United States, the satire boom largely evaporated with the assassination of President Kennedy. This article examines the transatlantic history of this iconic programme during the Kennedy years and how that transatlantic exchange manifested in the midst of the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death with the British satirists’ hastily produced tribute episode a day after the American president’s assassination, its broadcast on NBC twice in the days following the assassination, and the Anglophilic response by American audiences to the programme in voluminous letters sent to the BBC.

‘Sinn Féin permits … in the heels of their shoes’: Cumann na mBan emigrants and transatlantic revolutionary exchange

The emigration of female revolutionary activists has largely eluded historical studies; their global movements transcend dominant national and regional conceptions of the Irish Revolution and challenge established narratives of political exile which are often cast in masculine terms. Drawing on Cumann na mBan nominal rolls and U.S. immigration records, this article investigates the scale of post-Civil War Cumann na mBan emigration and evaluates the geographical origins, timing and push-pull factors that defined their migration. Focusing on the United States in particular, it also measures the impact of the emigration and return migration of female revolutionaries – during the revolutionary period and in its immediate aftermath – on both the republican movement in Ireland and the fractured political landscapes of Irish America. Ultimately, this article argues that the cooperative transatlantic exchange networks of Cumann na mBan, and the consciously gendered revolutionary discourse they assisted in propagating in the diaspora, were integral to supporting the Irish Revolution at home and abroad.

Building America

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a biography of America’s first professionally trained architect and engineer. Born in 1764, Latrobe was raised in Moravian communities in England and Germany. His parents expected him to follow his father and brother into the ministry, but he rebelled against the church. Moved to London, he studied architecture and engineering. In 1795 he emigrated to the United States and became part of the period’s Transatlantic Exchange. Latrobe soon was famous for his neoclassical architecture, designing important buildings, including the US Capitol and Baltimore Basilica as well as private homes. Carpenters and millwrights who built structures more cheaply and less permanently than Latrobe challenged his efforts to establish architecture as a profession. Rarely during his twenty-five years in the United States was he financially secure, and when he was, he speculated on risky ventures that lost money. He declared bankruptcy in 1817 and moved to New Orleans, the sixth American city that he lived in, hoping to recoup his finances by installing a municipal water system. He died there of yellow fever in 1820. The themes that emerge in this biography are the critical role Latrobe played in the culture of the early republic through his buildings and his genius in neoclassical design. Like the nation’s political founders, Latrobe was committed to creating an exceptional nation, expressed in his case by buildings and internal improvements. Additionally, given the extensive primary sources available for this biography, an examination of his life reveals early American attitudes toward class, family, and religion.

Transatlantic Television Drama

A tide of high-quality television drama is sweeping the world. The new transnational television series has developed not only global appeal but innovative new modes of production, distribution, and reception. Nowhere is the transnational exchange of television drama more vital than between Britain and the United States, where it builds on more than sixty years of import, adaptation, coproduction, and fandom. This edited volume explores the transatlantic flow of television drama, focusing on key programs, industry strategies, critical debates, and audience reception, from an international roster of scholars and researchers. The chapters explore some of the most widely discussed programs on the transatlantic circuit. The book's first part focuses on media industries, tracing the history of transatlantic exchange and investigating contemporary practices such as coproduction, digital distribution, global partnerships, promotion, and branding. The second part concentrates on specific television texts and their negotiation of meaning across cultural contexts, exploring critical issues in the creation of transnational drama, such as heritage, proximity, performance, and self-reflexivity. Part III turns to the lively sphere of transatlantic fandom and commentary, including fan conventions, fan fiction, the role of both traditional and social media, and fan strategies for negotiating cultural differences. Transatlantic Television Drama provides a wide-ranging analysis of a phenomenon at the forefront of today’s television universe. It is focused on the serial dramatic programs that have gained the bulk of critical and popular attention and is particularly concerned with the impact of digital technologies on the production, distribution, and reception of television drama.

John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange

This book shows how the work of a major post-war American poet has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange, by reading crucial episodes in John Ashbery’s oeuvre in the context of an ‘other tradition’ of twentieth-century English poets he himself has defined. This line runs from the editor of Ashbery’s recent Collected Poems, Mark Ford, through Lee Harwood in the late 1960s, F. T. Prince in the 1950s, to ‘chronologically the first and therefore most important influence’ on his own work, W. H. Auden. Through detailed close readings of the poetry of Ashbery and these English poets, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery’s ‘minor’ aesthetic and a significant re-mapping of postwar English poetry are presented. The biographical slant of the book is highly significant, as it reads these writers’ poetry and correspondence together for the first time, suggesting how major poetic innovations arose from specific social contexts, from the particulars of relations between poets, and also from a broader climate of transatlantic exchange as registered by each poet. The result is that both Ashbery himself, and the landscape of post-war English poetry, are viewed in a significantly new light.

The Power of Godliness

The Power of Godliness explores Mormon liturgical history to elucidate Mormon cosmology and lived religion. Mormons use rituals, patterns of worship, and conceptions of priesthood to order their lives and the universe. What Mormons have meant by “priesthood” has evolved over time and in relation to ecclesiology, authority, gender, and race. For much of the nineteenth century, Mormons conceptualized their family relationships formalized through sealing rituals over their temple altars, as a priesthood and materialized heaven. This heavenly structure was eternal, and consequently church leaders struggled to fairly manage its construction. Ultimately, church leaders changed their emphasis from a gender-inclusive priesthood of heaven to a priesthood on earth that is discursively male. Baby blessings demonstrate this shift: from serving as an important delimiter of communal salvation among Mormons in the faith’s earliest years, they grew into an annunciation of the heaven created in temples and then became an important public demonstration of a priestly fatherhood. Mormon authority is further explored in the analysis of female ritual healing and in association with the creation of formal “ordinances” of the church. Last, Christian folk practice that has often been denigrated as “magic,” such as the use of seer stones, among Mormons is contextualized as part of a transatlantic exchange of ideas and peoples. Mormons integrated folk practitioners who believed in an open heaven by channeling their impulses through the formal liturgy of the church and organizing them through the priesthood bureaucracy.