In permanent transit: discourses and maps of the intercultural experience

In Permanent Transit: Discourses and Maps of the Intercultural Experience is a transnational project by authors from Portugal, Brazil, Macao, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States of America, that voices a truly intercultural dialogue. This compilation of essays from multiple origins, both in geographical and academic terms, covers an unexpected collection of areas often ignored by mainstream academia. It also tries to build effective epistemological bridges between anthropology, historiography, and gender, cultural, communication, literary, media, legal, and translation studies. The various colleagues invited to participate in this project created an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of migrations, traffics, technologies, communication, regulations, the media, and numerous other intercultural processes, in the context of past and present times. This is why In Permanent Transit offers a convergence of perspectives, combining conceptual and empirical work by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, educators, lawyers, media specialists, and literary studies writers, in their shared attempt to understand the many shades of the intercultural experience. In Permanent Transit: Discourses and Maps of the Intercultural Experience and its authors see the ‘intercultural’ as a movement, a journey, as a dynamic between cultures. Contemporary intercultural travel is indeed a global journey, a circumnavigation powered by the speed of new technologies. This concept of ‘intercultural’ underwrites all the comings and goings, the transmission and reception of information that are implicit in the communication, in the diversity and in the transit that the prefix ‘inter’ suggests, from the perverse intercultural dialogue of colonialism to the current cultural heteroglossia of the internet. This is why we examine the motivations, characteristics and regulations of cultural interactions in their perpetual movement, devoid of spatial or temporal borders, in a dangerous but stimulating indefinition of limits. Normative practices of modern research in the vast field of the Humanities do not privilege relations of permanence any longer, to the detriment of relations of movement, a perspective which changed as a result of the endless mobilities that travel the world today, constructed and mediated in multiple ways. As Stuart Hall (1994) states, the notions of belonging and homeland are now being reconceptualised in contexts of migration, deterritorialization, diaspora, virtuality, digitalization, and other features of the globalised world. Thus, cultural identities are not fixed, but fluid; not given but performed. In this way we cross the first great border to intercultural transit—the frontier created by the concept of culture itself—avoiding the commonplace notion of the intercultural as simply ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and steering clear of the fundamental error of an interculturalism that ignores the diversity and dynamism contained in its own definition. A book like this generates an interdisciplinary dialogue between fields that have traditionally ignored each other, because it is also intercultural at its source and subjects, not just in the objects that are examined. Because this book does not fear the alterity that, after all, it proposes to study. In Permanent Transit: Discourses and Maps of the Intercultural Experience functions as a sort of third space, to quote from Homi Bhabha (1999). A third space for hybridity, subversion, transgression. Hybridity—and cultural translation, which Bhabha regards as a synonym for hybridity—is politically subversive. Hybridity is the space where all binary divisions and antagonisms, typical for modernist political concepts, including the old opposition between theory and politics, do not work anymore. They don’t work in these pages either. New research centres, modern universities and evolving polytechnics have promoted cultural relationships and dynamics otherwise unimaginable. Present day converging interests are evident in the expectations of both publishers and the reading public and in the relations of power that shape stereotypical academic life. These notions and expectations persistently transform the output of young researchers, to the extent that they tend to adapt their practices and creative capabilities to professional and economic pressures. However, many of those young researchers often respond to such pressures with their own strategies, innovations and subversions, and seldom do they remain passive within the process of incorporation in large scale political and academic systems. Networks and echoes emanating from the international academic community spread rapidly throughout the globe and their multiple forms of cultural interaction bring with them their own forms of manipulation and subversion of power. These actions carried out in the ‘peripheries’—and which are, in turn, central in the lives and experiences of individuals—can be designated and described, more or less metaphorically, as “borderzones” (Bruner, 1996: 157-79), “intersecting discursive fields” (Tsing, 1993), academic diasporas, or “spaces on the side of the road” (Stewart, 1996), all of them reflecting the dialogic nature of culture.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.