The meeting of members of different cultures, frequently conceptualized in abstract terms, always involves the meeting of human bodies. This volume brings together contributions by scholars of various disciplines that address physical aspects and effects of cultural encounters in historical and present-day Settings. Bodies were and are not only markers of cultural identity and difference, endlessly inscribed and represented as the 'body politic' or 'the exotic other'; as battlegrounds of cross-cultural signification and identification bodies are also potential agents of change. While some essays address the elusiveness of the 'real' or material body, forever lost behind a veil of textual and visual representation, others analyze the performative effect of such representations - their function of disciplining colonized bodies and Subjects by integrating them into Western systems of cultural signification and scientific classification. Yet, as the volume also shows, formerly colonized people, far from Subjecting themselves completely to Western discourses of physical discipline, retain traditional body practices - whether in food culture, religious ritual, or musical performances. Such local reinscriptions escape the grip of Western culture and transform the global semantics of the body.

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Sebastian Jobs is post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate School "Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship" in RoStock and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Erfurt, Germany. Sebastian Jobs, Dr. phil. (2009, Universität Erfurt), Historiker; seit 2015 Juniorprofessor am John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien (FU Berlin); davor Postdoc an der FU Berlin, Universität RoStock und dem Deutschen Historischen Institut in Washington, DC; Studium der Geschichtswissenschaft in Erfurt, Beloit, WI und Berkeley, CA. Forschungsschwerpunkte: US-Geschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Sklaverei, Gerüchte, Politische Aufführungen und Rituale, Geschichte und Erinnerungspolitik.