Leopold Lippert

What happens to 'America' when it does not coincide with the geographical and institutional boundaries of the U.S. nation-state? What does 'America' mean when it is performed abroad and circulates among populations and publics outside U.S. national contexts? 'Performing America Abroad' explores an unlikely American studies archive: contemporary cultural performances in Austria and Germany which refer to the American cultural imaginary, but enact it with a 'transnational difference.' The book discusses the ambivalent cultural politics of these enactments in the context of neoliberal capitalism; specifically, it looks at several cross-racial performances of 'Indianness' on various Austrian stages, it examines queer political demonstrators on Vienna's central Ringstrasse, who celebrate the legacy of the 1969 New York Stonewall riots, and it discusses the 'Americanness' of a series of theatrical adaptations of Arthur Miller's 1949 play 'Death of a Salesman' in Germany and Austria.

Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism

Performing America Abroad

Ilka Saal

Katrin Horn

Pia Wiegmink

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies

Leopold Lippert

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