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Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture (rather than the infinite multitude of possible themes). More specifically, the volume outlines different models for the study of culture, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means to map both their transfer from one discipline, approach or culture of research to another, and also to identify the transformations which emerge through these processes of transfer. The volume serves to show that working with (travelling) concepts provides a unique strategy for research and research design which can open up a wide range of promising perspectives for interdisciplinary exchange. It offers an exemplary overview of an interdisciplinary and international approach to the travelling concepts that organize, structure and shape the study of culture. In doing so, the volume serves to initiate a dialogue that exceeds disciplinary and national boundaries and introduces a self-reflexive dimension to the field, thus affording a recognition of how deeply disciplinary premises and nation-specific research traditions affect different approaches in the study of culture.

In his study, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), British Caribbean writer David Dabydeen draws attention to the multiplicity of black figures in 18th century English paintings. Paintings by, for instance, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, John Hamilton Mortimer, and William Turner, are virtually populated with black figures. Typically, these paintings reduce the black figure to the status of an exotic detail (Eckstein 2005) and turn it into a fashionable commodity, i.e., a resource for gestures of superiority and related claims to ‘the right to look’ by white spectators. The “right to look”, writes Nikolas Mirzoeff in his Counterhistory of Visuality, is a precondition for “claims of autonomy” and recognition in the political sphere (Mirzoeff 2011, 1). Conversely, the denial of said right amounts to a misrecognition of subjectivity and the denial of political participation. In what follows we will first sketch some of the characteristics of the intermedial poetics in novels and then move on to more concrete configurations, namely verbal-visual configurations in postcolonial and transcultural fiction. We argue that many postcolonial and transcultural fictions use intermedial relations to enter into a critical dialogue with established visual archives and their mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Following Michel Foucault (2002) and Jacques Derrida (1996), we understand the archive first and foremost in a metaphorical sense, i.e., as an epistemic and normative framework, “a historical a priori”, that determines the registers of sayability and the respective truth value of discursive claims. Yet, we also go beyond this understanding by arguing that the archive is not exclusively discursively structured and can therefore not be reduced to “a system […] of enunciability” (Foucault 146). Rather, as research in the field of the visual turn (cf. Benthien/Weingart 2014) indicates, culturally normative archives are also derived from the range of available images, which establish, despite their heterogeneity, a regime of visibility. This regime of visibility perpetuates specific world-views, which are critical in structuring interpretations of reality and in determining forms of social recognition. Thus understood, the regime of visibility, prefigured by visual archives, is akin to Judith Butler’s concept of frames. Frames, according to Butler, mark “[t]he limits of […] what can appear”; they “circumscribe the domain in which […] certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors” (2004, xvii). Like archives, frames are always “politically saturated” (2010, 1), thus regulating forms of inclusion and exclusion in the public sphere. We suggest conceiving of the relation between literary visuality and the visual archive as interdependent and mutually transformative: While literary configurations of the visual are connected to and influenced by the archive, they are never fully determined by it. Rather, due to the liberties afforded by fiction, they can also reflect critically on the visual archive and add new perspectives and novel visibilities to it.

The article sets out to investigate configurations of literary visuality in Derek Walcott’s long poem , illustrating how an engagement with verbal-visual relations might add to our understanding of Walcott’s postcolonial aesthetics. It is argued that the evocation of Eurocentric visual practices constitutes an act of intermedial and transcultural translation, which both acknowledges the influence of imposed models and subjects them to creative processes of exchange.

This article sets out to explore configurations of literary musicality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), showing how intermedial relations between literature and music are linked to the novel’s exploration of transcultural histories of violence. Supporting but also displacing the larger verbal narrative, intermedial references in Open City produce a surplus of meaning, an unruly remainder. They do so by introducing musical frictions that resist and undermine the structural coherence of the text and gesture toward something nonlinear and latent. Modelled on the form of the fugue, the novel’s contrapuntal structure reveals the disjunctions, latencies, and elisions within hegemonic orders of knowledge and destabilize established notions of community, memory, and cosmopolitanism. To afford a fuller understanding of what we call the novel’s “intermedial poetics,” our essay will first provide a brief definition of the concept of intermediality, showing how references to music in the novel are connected to concepts of latency and atmosphere. Following this, we will investigate configurations of literary musicality in Open City. We argue that the contrapuntal structure of the novel clashes with the protagonist-narrator’s contrapuntal reading of urban spaces and histories, asking readers to rethink conventionalized notions of black diasporic subjects.

Taking as its point of departure Nelson Goodman's theory of symbol systems as delineated in his seminal book \"Ways of Worldmaking\", this volume gauges the possibilities and perspectives offered by the worldmaking approach as a model for the study of culture. Its main objectives are to explore the usefulness and scope of the approach for the study of culture and to supplement Goodman's philosophy of worldmaking with a number of complementary disciplinary perspectives, literary and cultural approaches, and new questions and applications. It focuses on three key issues or concepts which illuminate ways of worldmaking and their interdisciplinary relevance and ramifications, viz. (1) theoretical approaches to ways of worldmaking, (2) the impact of media on ways of worldmaking, and (3) narratives as ways of worldmaking. The volume serves to demonstrate how specific media and narratives affect the worlds that are created, and shows how these worlds are established as socially relevant. It also illustrates the extent to which ways of worldmaking are imbued with cultural values, and thus inevitably implicated in power relations.

My article sets out to explore the complex intersections between mobility, sentimentality and gendered identity in 18th-century sentimental travelogues. Practices of mobility, I argue, are central to the range and the limits of human agency, entailing and, indeed, producing ideologically charged notions of gender, nation and class. The focus of my paper is on the European travelogue. Considering that the 18th century was an age of global exploration, one could in fact argue that these travelogues were quite restricted in their spatial scope. Imperial explorations and the travel literature they spawned were certainly crucial to English people’s concepts of space and concomitant notions of nation and Britishness. European travelogues, by contrast, could hardly offer their readership the thrill of the new; by the middle of the century Europe was well-travelled and the noteworthy places to be visited by every serious Grand tourist have been described all too often. Yet, perhaps exactly because of the limited geographical scope, the predictable itineraries and the repetitive spatial structure, European travelogues offered manifold opportunities for explorations of the self and for self-conscious engagements with mobility. Indeed, while much of 18th-century literature concerned with global exploration was deeply steeped in Enlightenment empiricism, the European travelogue evolved into a site for writers to explore the expressive and personalized potentials of autodiegesis: “In this branch of the genre,” Katherine Turner points out, “narrative ingenuity, even authorial oddity, become crucial components of the text’s interest. “

The paper explores forms and functions of national images in 18 th -century British literature and other media. To this end it develops a framework for a cultural and historical imagology. Special emphasis is put on the role that narrative devices and intermedial strategies play in constructing concepts of national self and other. It will become clear that » national character « not only consists of the attributes typically predicated to a specific nation, but is also a formal and even aesthetic construct, which relies on processes of intermedial translation.