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This chapter discusses the way song fragments function in the work of four novelists: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Christina Stead, and Charles Dickens. It considers silencing, particularly of women, as an aspect of fragmentation. It shows that women have long been associated with silence, despite having a cultural stereotype of garrulousness. The chapter also determines that intertexts empower the reader due to the ‘multi-accentuality’ of cultural texts and practices.

Unlike many books in the field, this is not a study of literary texts in cultural contexts but a book about cultural texts of the kind increasingly studied through literary approaches. The chapters analyse a wide range of different texts that are neither poems nor ‘literary’ novels and offer readings of them in the light of issues that arise in literary studies and elsewhere, from considerations of trauma to questions of time, from ethics to spatial dynamics. A number of preselected critical and theoretical perspectives are brought to bear, from ecocriticism to performativity theory to postcolonial studies, but these are used to suggest ways of reading specific texts more than the texts are used to illustrate theories

This introductory chapter focuses on the progressive potential of empathetic feeling to redress a scholarly bias against compassion, empathy, and sympathy, particularly in American studies. Rather than viewing empathy as a “passive ideal” and an impediment to political change, the chapter argues that it is an active cognitive process that can play an important role in changing attitudes and self-perception or even catalyzing action. Tying in with this volume's overall response to critics who believe that the forces of commodification render cultural consumption a tainted vehicle for cross-racial understanding, the chapter argues against a too-hasty dismissal of white consumption of black cultural texts as a potential conduit for social change. In addition, the chapter also discusses multiplex subjectivity and the insider–outsider debate as part of the book's broader ethnographic study.

Chapter 1 lays out the methodology of the study. It introduces William A. Johnson’s theory of ancient reading cultures and Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis) and cultural texts (kulturelle Texte). A key aspect of Johnson’s theory is the “bookroll-as-object.” He demonstrates that in some cultural contexts, the scroll as a material object became an emblem of group identity. A key aspect of Assmann’s theory is that texts cross the threshold from collective memory to cultural memory by means of textualization. Additionally, Assmann describes manuscripts as part of the decorated material culture of a group, and thereby also sees them as symbols of group identity. Both of these scholars point to how manuscripts, as part of a group’s material culture, contributed to the processes of identity construction and maintenance.

This chapter addresses a range of Arab-American literary and cultural texts that respond to the post-9/11 political and social terrain in the U.S. They capture and challenge homogenized depictions of Arab-Americans, forging in the process what can be identified as revisionaryor counterhegemonic spaces that redefine exclusionary conceptualizations of U.S. citizenship and belonging. In addition to problematizing simplistic types of post-9/11 patriotism that demand a unilateral type of U.S. national identity, the creation of these revisionary spaces responds to racial stereotyping, blanket labeling, and discriminatory profiling by insisting on complex representations of Arab-Americans. The chapter describes how 9/11 and other crises that happened/are happening in the Arab homeland position the formation and development of Arab-American identities within well-cemented racialized structures that hold the political relations between the U.S. and the Arab world at their center—a relationship that is dominated by U.S. political and military hegemony.

The book as a whole considers culture as an influential site of knowledge, one that proposes confusing analytics and characteristics—a so-called unsettling hermeneutic of American exceptionalism—in the late twentieth century. It presents an alternative reading and theorization of the Cold War and extended a comprehensive way of situating and interpreting Asian American cultural texts. This chapter discusses the connection between the War on Terror, our present imperial directive, and our past imperial mandate: the Cold War. Ultimately, it aims to achieve an extensive analysis of the intersecting lineage that prompted a contemporary moment of neoliberal globalization, imperial decree, and continuing gendered racial establishments of domination.

This chapter examines the implications of a developmentalist orientation for both official and alternative nationalisms through theorizations of the postcolonial nation. It focuses on the official national discourses of political speeches and government policies, and the refiguring and imagining of nations in various cultural texts. The chapter also analyzes infrastructures, such as the concrete and metaphoric road, railway, and bridge, which simultaneously turns national space into a free passage for goods, materials, labor, and commodities, and symbolizes the way chosen by the countries’ leaders toward successful development.