Daniel Stein

Geoffroy de Laforcade

Cathy C. Waegner

Discrimination, stigmatization, xenophobia, heightened securitization – fear and blaming of "aliens within" – characterize the world infected by COVID-19. Such fears have a long cultural history, however, particularly in connecting pathology with race, poverty, and migration. This volume explores theory and narratives of disease, danger, and displacement through the lenses of cultural, literary, and film studies, historical representation, ethnics studies, sociology and cultural geography, classics, music, and linguistics. Investigations range from, for example, illness discourse in the ancient classics to images of perilous intruders in the Age of Trump, from the Haitian Revolution and subsequent zombie stereotypes to current, problematic refugee resettlement in the US South and Greek islands, from the urban underworld in nineteenth-century sensation novels to ethnic women "on the stroll" in coronavirus times. The collection is organized into three thematically intertwined parts: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass; Pathologizing the Other; Constructing and Countering Collapse. It examines changing or recurrent aporias in tropes of belonging and exclusion, as well as the birthing of new forms of identity, agency, and countercultural expression.

Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor

The Aliens Within

Page R. Laws

Cathy Covell Waegner

No other issue in our times of globalization has aroused such passionate debate as the increasingly complex transborder movements of people of all ethnicities, with the self-perceived “from-heres” often struggling to maintain the illusion of separateness from intruding “come-heres.” The paradigm of transculturality offers prospects to rethink, demystify and represent cultural unity and difference, assimilation and alterity, in a manner that acknowledges the fissures and the fictions in traditional cultural dichotomies such as the melodramatically instrumentalized “national” vs. “foreign.” The interdisciplinary essays compiled in Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other focus on the ways in which new diasporic and migrational patterns arouse ill will and conflict, but also negotiation and transcultural impulses, resulting in transformed meso-structures in media, schooling, and business. Investigating regional immigrant groups in the states of Virginia and North Rhine-Westphalia as well as the discourses and images in public media, films, literature, and cultural events, the studies both document the contest for geographical, work, and community space and place it in larger theoretical and specific historical contexts. Arising from an international project undertaken by senior and junior scholars from the fields of cultural studies, history, and sociology at Norfolk State University in Virginia and University of Siegen in Germany, these essays suggest that cultural citizenship can embody dynamic expressions of belonging and strategies of empowerment which shape political and economic communities, engendering in the process innovative forms of constantly negotiated, hybrid identity and transmigratory affiliation.

Geoffroy de Laforcade

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