This volume collects papers put together by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Central Europe, North America, and Asia to explore how the imaginary geo-cultural space of Central Europe has acquired meanings over the past two centuries and how traveling images of an othered cultural space inserted into specific regional, national and social contexts and appropriated for negotiations of cultural identity and belonging as well as exclusion and colonization have laid the basis for a cultural essentialism which thinks culture through space and negotiates cultural status...

The contributions in this volume address the ways the two imagined (cultural) spaces commonly designed as Central Europe and North America have mutually attributed meanings to each other and set out to trace patterns and structures resulting from this process. Rather than concentrate on what happens when cultural forms and practices travel across the Atlantic the focus lies on the contexts of their insertion into the other culture. The articles draw attention to how those complexities and contradictions are resolved on an ideological basis in order to produce the kind of stability that is the...

This volume collects papers put together by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, which explore how the two imaginary geo-cultural spaces -Central Europe- and -(North) America- have mutually attributed meanings to each other over the past two centuries, how traveling images of an -othered- cultural space inserted into specific regional, national and social contexts and appropriated for negotiations of cultural identity and belonging as well as exclusion and colonization have laid the basis for a cultural essentialism which thinks culture through space and negotiates cultural status through...