Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (review)

The flows of Manuel Castells, Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic, the traveling culture of James Clifford, Walter Benjamin's flâneur, Mary Louise Pratt's contact zones, the borderlands of Gloria Anzaldúa, and Tim Cresswell's mobile geographies define figures of movement that have served as rubrics and objects of scholarly discourse. Against and within the backdrop of academic interest in and familiarity with movement and mobility, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto works to define a field of "mobility studies." What distinguishes this "manifesto" from other calls to study movement and mobility?

Greenblatt asserts in his introduction that while the academy has attended to mobility, "the times and places in which [academic disciplines] see significant mobility occurring remain strictly limited" (3). Certainly, "mobility" has served more commonly as a keyword to describe both a theoretical perspective on and a descriptive statement of contemporary life (see, for example, Caren Kaplan's The Question of Travel or Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large). That said, the assumption that mobility is fundamentally modern has been complicated by many scholars who have studied earlier instances of cultural mobility, such as Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead. Beyond historical myopia, Greenblatt identifies another major impediment as the presumption that culture is not "contingent at all but . . . fixed, inevitable, and strangely enduring" (16). Critics such as Appadurai and Liisa Malkki, whose work has addressed what Malkki calls a "sedentarist metaphysics" that normalizes stable, grounded culture, would agree.

Where Greenblatt and his fellow authors depart most productively from familiar ground is in their common emphasis on what Greenblatt identifies as contingentia (16). Against the propensity to see mobility as modern, against the sedentarism of cultural definitions, against the tendency to find mobility in one remarkable or emblematic place (the Atlantic, the flâneur, the borderland), the collection's six authors seek to uncover small, specific, contingent moments of cultural exchange that lead to cultural change. Each essay focuses on a specific instance of cultural mobility, which leads to a collection widely varied in geographic and temporal focus. This breadth is reflected in the collection's authors, an international group of humanities scholars who were fellows together at Berlin's Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study).

Heike Paul uncovers a fascinating new story about Uncle Tom's Cabin through well-researched attention to this single, well-known book's cultural mobility. Paul examines how German readers responded to the novel from the mid- and late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, focusing on how its translation into a different cultural context reframes race, slavery, and oppression. In the mid-nineteenth century, Paul shows how Germans traveling to the United States used the novel as a primer for American definitions of race, which led to a "single, highly generalized and ... static stereotype" that conflated African American and slave (134). By the late nineteenth century, Germans readers were framing the novel as a nostalgic icon of a bygone, pastoral era, evident in the appearance of names like "Onkel Toms Strasse" on Berlin maps and the proliferation of Uncle Tom merchandise. In the mid-twentieth century, a new reading emerged as German reprintings featured Uncle Tom not as a figure defined by nostalgia or pastoralism, or even race or nationality, but as a figure of class sympathy and interest.

Such attention to cultural mobility as entailing movement-with-a-difference is theoretically and historically contextualized in Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus's "Word Literature beyond Goethe." The essay recounts a key episode in the history of comparative literature: Goethe's call for "Weltliteratur." Rather than "the archive of everything that had ever been written or the canon of great works transcending their national cultures," for Goethe world literature models a process of "'international literary communication'" (106). Meyer-Kalkus emphasizes that Goethe's world literature required interaction across linguistic and national boundaries, interaction that would involve transformation, revision, and critique. Meyer-Kalkus contrasts...