Cultures in Motion: (Publications in Partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University)

In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary.In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Cultures in Motion: An Introduction Daniel T. Rodgers 1 PART I: The Circulation of Cultural Practices 21 CHAPTER ONE: The Challenge Dance: Black-Irish Exchange in Antebellum America April F. Masten 23 CHAPTER TWO: Musical Itinerancy in a World of Nations: Germany, Its Music, and Its Musicians Celia Applegate 60 CHAPTER THREE: From Patriae Amator to Amator Pauperum and Back Again: Social Imagination and Social Change in the West between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ca. 300-600 Peter Brown 87 PART II: Objects in Transit 107 CHAPTER FOUR: Knowledge in Motion: Following Itineraries of Matter in the Early Modern World Pamela H. Smith 109 CHAPTER FIVE: Fashioning a Market: The Singer Sewing Machine in Colonial Lanka Nira Wickramasinghe 134 CHAPTER SIX: Speed Metal, Slow Tropics, Cold War: Alcoa in the Caribbean Mimi Sheller 165 PART III: Translations 195 CHAPTER SEVEN: The True Story of Ah Jake: Language, Labor, and Justice in Late-Nineteenth-Century Sierra County, California Mae M. Ngai 197 CHAPTER EIGHT: Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Europe Harold J. Cook 215 CHAPTER NINE: Transnational Feminism: Event, Temporality, and Performance at the 1975 International Women's Year Conference Jocelyn Olcott 241 AFTERWORDS 267-278 Itinerancy and Power Bhavani Raman 267 From Cultures to Cultural Practices and Back Again Helmut Reimitz 270 List of Papers 279 List of Contributors 283 Notes 285 Index 357

About the Author :
Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. Bhavani Raman is an associate professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Helmut Reimitz is a professor in the Department of History at Princeton University..

Review :
"Cultures in Motion represents first-rate scholarship and opens up a critical new space for historiography. Exploring the movement of things, ideas, and other cultural forms, the book—and the introduction in particular—gives an independent existence and importance to such work, and raises original questions about historical change and intercultural understandings."—Thomas Bender, author of A Nation Among Nations "This book provides a new approach to finding a language to describe the new realities that emerge from the interactions of geographically or temporally different cultural practices, material objects, and languages, as they meet in a given, shared space. The essays are engaging in subject matter and persuasively written, and the introduction is superb."—Barbara Metcalf, professor of history emerita, University of California, Davis "This successful collection of essays focuses on the inherent instability of cultural spheres and the increasing recognition that traditional models of comparative, global, and transcultural/transnational investigation do not do justice to the complexities of human history. Cultures in Motion defines the contours of a new way of thinking and researching cultural history."—Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study