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This book challenges the cultural imbalance in current research traditions, and argues for a culturalist perspective in facilitating better intercultural exchange amidst accelerated processes of globalization. It is the first engagement with discourses in non-mainstream cultures. Covering a wide range of issues in public, professional, media, and intercultural communication, the twelve essays tackle culturally pressing issues by aligning viewpoints from various geo-political contexts.

This book reconnects the Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern Hispanic world. For two and a half centuries, the Philippine Islands were linked to Latin America and Spain through transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and culture. Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital locus of intercultural exchange and a significant conduit for the regional diffusion of Western music. Within Manila's ethnically diverse society, imported and local musics played a crucial role in the establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Philippines, and the advancement of Roman Catholic evangelization in surrounding territories. The metaphors of European counterpoint and enharmony are used to critique musical practices within the colonial milieu, where multiple styles and genres coexisted according to strict regulations enforced by state and ecclesiastical authorities. This study argues that the introduction and institutionalization of counterpoint acted as a powerful agent of colonialism throughout the Philippine Archipelago, and that contrapuntal structures were reflected in the social and cultural reorganization of Filipino communities under Spanish rule. Active indigenous appropriation of Spanish music and dance constituted a significant contribution to the process of hispanization. Sustained “enharmonic engagement” between Filipinos and Spaniards led to the synthesis of hybrid, syncretic genres and the emergence of performance styles that could contest and subvert hegemony. Manila's religious institutions resounded with sumptuous vocal and instrumental performances, while an annual calendar of festivities brought together many musical traditions of the native and immigrant populations in complex forms of artistic interaction and opposition.

This book explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and travel writing. The book’s four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration and intercultural exchange. Focusing on a range of remarkable Indian ‘arrivants’—scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists, including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore—this book examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora. If, as is now widely accepted, vocabularies of inhabitation, education, citizenship, and the law were in many cases developed in colonial spaces like India, and imported into Britain through various imperial networks, then, the book suggests, the presence of Indian travellers needs to be seen as more central to Britain’s understanding of itself, both in historical terms and in relation to the present day. The book demonstrates how the colonial encounter and its literature, in all its ambivalence and complexity, inflected social relations throughout the empire, including at its heart, in Britain itself.

Tracing the history of intercultural struggle and cooperation in the citrus belt of Greater Los Angeles, the author of this book explores the social and cultural forces that helped make the city the expansive and diverse metropolis that it is today. As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multi-ethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, the author argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.

This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. It examines these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis. Following a critique of how tradition has been viewed in terms of dichotomies like authenticity vs. inauthenticity, the book takes a novel perspective in which tradition figures as context-bound articulation. This makes it possible to view cultural traditions as resulting from interactions between people and the ambient contexts. Such interactions are analyzed from the past down to the Oceanian present—with indigenous agency being highlighted. The work focuses first on early encounters, initially between Pacific Islanders themselves and later with the European navigators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to clarify how meaningful actions and contexts interrelated in the past. The present-day memories of Pacific Islanders are examined to ask how such memories represent encounters that occurred long ago and how they influenced the social, political, economic, and religious changes that ensued. Next, the book addresses ongoing social and structural interactions that social actors enlist to shape their traditions within the context of globalization and then the repercussions that these intersections and intercultural exchanges of discourses and practices are having on active identity formation as practiced by Pacific Islanders.

By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange. This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling. Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.

This book examines the American government’s harnessing of dance to export an idealized image of “America,” focusing on the early decades of the Cold War and of the twenty-first century, periods when the State Department engaged in cultural diplomacy by sending American dance companies abroad to advance its foreign policy objectives. The companies who have traveled as American cultural ambassadors included the New York City Ballet, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Martha Graham Dance Company, Urban Bush Women, Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, ODC/Dance, and the Trey McIntyre Project—all chosen after a layered approvals process in which they were deemed to be appropriately “American.” Narrating the story of the dance-in-diplomacy programs from the perspective of the dancers who traveled on tours through the Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Eastern European communist bloc, the book exposes on-the-ground tensions as well as possibilities for intercultural exchange as the dancers reconciled their “official” status as cultural ambassadors with their identities as artists. Revealing the shifts in America’s foreign-policy agenda that were often the catalysts for tour planning and execution, the book sets the tours against the backdrop of history, in particular the US-Soviet standoff, the Cold War’s most foundational policy frame; postcolonial movements in Africa and Asia; and the eventual “collaborative turn” in American cultural diplomacy, the hallmark of the twenty-first-century programs that focused on building international relationships rather than exporting American superiority.