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This chapter discusses the difficulties encountered in crossing cultural boundaries and in overcoming prejudices and discriminatory attitudes on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. It next examines the difficulty of writing off political realism, which views conflict as inevitable and insoluble short of violence. The latter part of the chapter presents an analysis of a number of concepts that would counter-argue for the possibility of a hybrid of federation and confederation.

We still know little about how Europeans differentiate each other in terms of cultural tastes and practices and how the latter relate to mobility practices and socio-demographic characteristics. We explore two areas of tastes (music and food) and investigate the role of concrete or symbolic geographic boundaries in people’s tastes. We assess whether there is a European cultural field that works with its own specific rules and tensions. The main cultural divisions and affinities between countries are discussed in light of debates about tensions between openness versus localness, highbrow versus lowbrow, and old versus young cultures. Cultural practices are seen as especially important in the Europeanisation of everyday life as they reflect cultural but also symbolic boundaries that cross the European social space.

This chapter discusses the Celluloid Princess, who personified many of the early issues connected to the anxiety about the racial and cultural boundaries of Americanness. This character was able to interact with white society, and it is her violent death which reflected this anxiety and social turmoil that marked the early twentieth century. Thanks to the complex images and cultural attitudes that were woven into the character of the Celluloid Princess, it made her an important figure among the thousands of Indian images that were found in early Westerns and Indian films.

Certain inconsistencies can be observed when looking into the relationship between musical and linguistic meaning. As Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests, music is the only language which is simultaneously understandable and untranslatable since, although it would be easy to translate between human languages, it would be difficult if not entirely impossible to translate music into music or music into language without having to alter the original material's meaning. On another note, it is perceived to be easier for music to overcome cultural boundaries than language since another culture's music is not as likely to entail losing interest when compared to a speech being delivered in a foreign language. However, we have to consider the translatability of language to that of music since languages present different ways of meaning transmissions between individuals, which music is unable to do.

Chapter Five looks at the appearance of taco trucks in Columbus, Ohio’s west side in the early 2000s and the progression of the community’s initially negative perception of the trucks to a positive one as the trucks have become a more integral part of the neighborhood. In so doing, the chapter evaluates the ways in which taco trucks have become symbolic of a cultural transgression. The taco truck thus interrupts previous established cultural boundaries of the neighborhood’s spaces and is deemed out of place by the previous community residents. The chapter demonstrates how, through cooking and eating practices that foster conviviality, an immigrant group can culturally redraw social boundaries to redefine culture.

This chapter examines the formal, historical and disciplinary consequences of cross-national influence and interstitial migrancy for English-language poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It analyzes the methodological and political implications of reshaping a humanistic subdiscipline to reflect the intercultural energies and mobilities of cross-national literary citizenship. This chapter also discusses the role of poetic transnationalism in helping us understand a world in which cultural boundaries are permeable and read like imaginative citizens of worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect and converge.

This chapter explores the efforts of the French government in establishing cultural boundaries in France during Charles de Gaulle’s tenure. De Gaulle appointed his longtime friend, novelist, and fellow resistance fighter, André Malraux as his first Minister of Culture, with the aim of creating a unified community strong enough to repel the encroaching influences of American culture, and restoring the great image of France. De Gaulle believed that in order to advance in modern times, a French citizen should have a sense of themselves and knowledge of their place, as part of the French people, within the world.

This chapter discusses the need to be able to recognize and dismiss gratuitous controversy that shocks the public without asking much from it other than to be shocked. It further states that people need controversy in their culture. Offensive art that transgresses cultural boundaries plays a vital role in preserving and not merely challenging aesthetic and moral traditions.

This chapter discusses why and with what consequences prevailing approaches to conflict resolution have neglected to engage many local traditions. Addressing the question of colonialism in more detail, the chapter argues for actively embracing difference in our efforts to know and address contemporary conflict. It then identifies seven themes — points of contention that cut across different approaches to conflict resolution, which readers can use as a lens for reading the following chapters. These themes include tensions such as those between the place of reason and emotion in conflict resolution, and the relationship between individuals and society. However, the chapter contends that highlighting such points of contention is not to draw a stark line between West and East or to suggest that one set of traditions is superior to the other; rather, processes of globalisation have merely rendered cultural boundaries porous.

This chapter considers Pollyanna in view of recent ideas of ecophobia—an unreasonable but deeply conditioned reaction against nature—taking the idea of dirt and disorder as matter out of place. The presence of the natural world in Pollyanna reveals contemporary perceptions of dirt as disorder and the natural world as intrusions into the domestic. Aunt Polly's desire for a well-cleaned and orderly house and her need to maintain the purity and order of the inside of her house against the outside can be considered in terms of how dirt and pollution relate to social structures and norms. The presence of dust and dirt represents a failure of control over the environment. Thus, cleanliness and good housekeeping become intrinsic to maintaining the social space of the home by instituting a cultural boundary whereby the clean and ordered house marks the difference between culture and the “other”—the natural world.

This chapter examines the transnational career of Alexandre Aja, one of the hot young horror directors who has migrated from his native country to the U.S film industry. It focuses on the characteristic features of Aja’s style and his thematic preoccupations, which have survived the transition from France to the United States. What emerges from the analysis is a reconsideration of the classic auteur’s creative autonomy within the context of genre cinema’s ability to transcend national and cultural boundaries.

This introductory chapter discusses the significance of analyzing the life story of Cnut, one of the most fascinating of the pre-Conquest kings of England. His life offers several new ways of examining late Anglo-Saxon England in addition to areas of neighbouring Scandinavia, as well as of questioning the established norms of how an English monarch could and should behave in the eleventh century. His regime spread beyond the British Isles and spanned multiple geographical boundaries in northern Europe. In ruling these nations, Cnut had to cross substantial cultural and linguistic boundaries, and appeal to local elites in each region in entirely different ways. The resulting regimes would profoundly change the societies of England and Denmark, and ultimately contribute significantly to the end of the Viking Age in Scandinavia.

This chapter discusses how Hamtramck residents engaged in public debates over the adhān, the Muslim call to prayer traditionally broadcast five times a day in Muslim-majority nations. The chapter introduces the concept of the “urban sensorium” to discuss how individuals on both sides of the debate described the adhān as rhythm that either facilitated or compromised harmonious relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans, and how residents engaged in shared listening as a mode of spatial and temporal embodied practice across religious lines. Expressions of Islamophobia fomented by media coverage of the call-to-prayer campaign gave rise to an interfaith alliance in which Hamtramck Muslim and Catholic Americans publicly demonstrated new forms of identification with one another. The chapter considers how Muslim sound altered social and sensory dimensions of city life and how the debates presented opportunities to expand the sensory and cultural boundaries of municipal belonging.