Olaf Kaltmeier

Stefan Rinke

Josef Raab

Mike Foley

Alice Nash

Mario Rufer

The colonial heritage and its renewed aftermaths – expressed in the inter-American experiences of slavery, indigeneity, dependence, and freedom movements, to mention only a few aspects – form a common ground of experience in the Western Hemisphere. The flow of peoples, goods, knowledge and finances have promoted interdependence and integration that cut across borders and link the countries of North and South America together. The nature of this transversally related and multiply interconnected region can only be captured through a transnational, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive approach. The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas explores the history and society of the Americas, placing particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences. Forty-four chapters cover a range of concepts and dynamics in the Americas from the colonial period until the present century: The shared histories and dynamics of Inter-American relationships are considered through pre-Hispanic empires, colonization, European hegemony, migration, multiculturalism, and political and economic interdependences. Key concepts are selected and explored from different geopolitical, disciplinary, and epistemological perspectives. Highlighting the contested character of key concepts that are usually defined in strict disciplinary terms, the Handbook provides the basis for a better and deeper understanding of inter-American entanglements. This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, political science cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary, and globalization studies.

The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas

Relying on the concept of a shared history, this book argues that we can speak of a shared heritage that is common in terms of the basic grammar of heritage and articulated histories, but divided alongside the basic difference between colonizers and colonized. This problematic is also evident in contemporary uses of the past. The last decades were crucial to the emergence of new debates: subcultures, new identities, hidden voices and multicultural discourse as a kind of new hegemonic platform also involving concepts of heritage and/or memory. Thereby we can observe a proliferation of heritage agents, especially beyond the scope of the nation state. This volume gets beyond a container vision of heritage that seeks to construct a diachronical continuity in a given territory. Instead, authors point out the relational character of heritage focusing on transnational and translocal flows and interchanges of ideas, concepts, and practices, as well as on the creation of contact zones where the meaning of heritage is negotiated and contested. Exploring the relevance of the politics of heritage and the uses of memory in the consolidation of these nation states, as well as in the current disputes over resistances, hidden memories, undermined pasts, or the politics of nostalgia, this book seeks to seize the local/global dimensions around heritage.

Mario Rufer

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