Karsten Fitz Bücher

The study explores how Native American writers navigate the intersection of their cultural heritage and the dominant culture through the lens of transculturation. It presents a dynamic interaction between traditional worldviews and contemporary literary techniques, highlighting the works of authors like Anna Lee Walters and Thomas King. By framing this cultural encounter as a process rather than a conflict, the analysis underscores transculturation as a vital survival strategy for Native Americans, reflecting their ongoing adaptation and resilience in literature and society.

America has been hailed as the land of personal freedom, where the rights of the single citizen reign over the demands and expectations of the masses. Yet freedom of choice and the premium placed on private property also necessitated a counter force, a submission to authority, and pre-established patterns of behavior. And it led to a highly ambivalent notion of privacy, as an individual right situated between apparent opposites - private freedom and public order, liberalism and authoritarianism, (individual) autonomy and (communal) collectivity.'Cultures of Privacy - Paradigms, Transformations, Contestations' addresses the nation's struggles to harmonize these opposites, to reconcile the private and the public, both in a historical and comparative, transnational perspective. Individual contributions take issue with the staggering transformations of the public/private dichotomy, with the alleged erosion of privacy in the political arena, the "right to be let alone" in US legal culture, and the ambiguous hyperemphasis on the private in the media and in popular and literary culture (as in confessional blogs, social networks, and memoirs).

This volume brings together interdisciplinary research that attends to local specificity as well as the global - transnational - circulation of a visual image repertoire of Native Americans. Located at the intersection between Visual Culture Studies and American Studies, the contributions gathered here are investigating the transnational dimensions of the creation, production, circulation, consumption, projection, reception, and perception of visual representations of Native Americans from colonial times to the 21st century. „The Indian“ as image, stereotype, icon, and metaphor was - and often still is - fabricated in a transnational sphere of influence and needs to be read within the respective national, cultural, historical, and political contexts in which it was/is produced. Both, the cultural functions of such visual appropriations for those who construct them as well as the creative responses to these fabrications by Native American visual artists are scrutinized in this collection.