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Multiculturalism is one of the most controversial topics in both the United States and Germany.This interdisciplinary collection of essays by German scholars in American Studies and American scholars in German Studies analyze the \"other\" from this dual perspective and from their respective disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, political science, anthropology,and history. More particularly they examine multiculturalism in terms of national and ethnic identities, as well as gender and race, and look at the disciplines and institutions that produce and legitimize discourses on subjects such as minority literatures, feminism, and the notion of foreignness itself. What becomes clear is the fact that careful attention must be paid to the particular conditions and different ideological concepts that shape this term, i.e., the \"national\" historical, political, social, and institutional contexts in which it appears, circulates, and accrues meanings.

The process of secularization has been one of the most distinct features in the transatlantic sphere. While its trajectory in Europe has been assumed as linear, gradually ascending, and irreversible, this teleological paradigm of modernity has remained a contested ground in the United States ever since. In contrast to Europe, where appeals to divine authority and supernatural explanations of the universe have gradually lost their credibility, US-American culture and politics have always moved between two poles, that is, between religious fundamentalism and enlightened secularism. The dichotomy has evoked a debate among sociologists, political scientists, historians, and theologians about the validity of secularization theory that has been raging for more than twenty years. What is at stake in this debate is not simply the empirical evidence about the degree of religiosity, but the very categories that delineate the phenomenon. The article relates the repercussions of the discussion to the epistemology of American Studies and calls attention to the religious-secular matrix as a long-neglected paradigm of literary and cultural studies.

Chow, During, Heschel, Milich, and Pratt comment on Bill Brown's essay, The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)(2005). Brown replies to the comments.

In an international academic environment, where not only scholars but also theories, concepts, and terms travel and assume global and universal connotations, the local and the particular seem to have dropped out of sight. Hybridity and positioning, traveling theory and situated knowledge, indeterminacy and ambiguity have become productive issues in the discipline of Cultural Studies, but have obscured the appreciation of local contexts. Terms like modernity, postmodernity, feminism, gender, and, of course, multiculturalism are cases in point. More than any other notion, multiculturalism has provoked scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to transcend national boundaries and to interpret