Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature, and Identity (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)

This volume seeks to weave applications of the dynamic concept of resonance to ethnic studies. Resonance refers to the ever broadening, multidirectional effects of movement or action, a concept significant for many disciplines. The individual chapters exchange the concept of static "intertextuality" for that of interactive "resonance," which encourages consideration of the mutual and processual influences among readings, paradigms, and social engagement in cultural analysis. International scholars of literary and cultural studies, linguistics, history, politics, or ethno-environmental studies contribute their work in this volume. Each chapter examines a specific ethnic phenomenon in terms of relevant literature, lived experience and theoretical approaches, or historical intervention, relating the given case study to parameters of resonance. The book offers dialogic transnational interchange, a play of eclectic ethnic voices, inquiries, perspectives, and differences. The studies in this interdisciplinary volume show that – through resonant engagement with(in) and between works – literary production can both enhance and disturb cultural narratives of ethnicity.

Yiorgos Kalogeras is Professor Emeritus, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has published articles and has edited volumes on the Greek presence in the USA. His most recent co-edited collection is Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2016). He is the President of MESEA.

Cathy C. Waegner taught American Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in 2013. She edited Mediating Indianness (Michigan State UP, 2015), as well as co-edited and published in volumes on diasporic ethnicities, transculturality, and (forthcoming, Lexington Books) aesthetic and activist interventions in migration.