Prof. Dr. Wilfried Raussert / Publications

Book Covers

Narrating, Framing, Reflecting 'Disability" 21st-Century 'American' Perspectives.

Wilfried Raussert & Sarah-Lena Essifi (eds), Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2024.

Creatividad en conflicto: Perspectivas interdisciplinarias desde las Américas en contextos de crisis.

Kaltmeier, Olaf; Raussert, Wilfried y Steinitz, Matti (coords.):  Buenos Aires: CALAS-CLACSO; 2024.

Afros al frente: Racismo, resistencia y lucha. 

Gutiérrez Cham, Gerardo; Carlos Fregoso; Gisela; Raussert, Wilfried y Rey, Nicolás (coords.):Buenos Aires: CALAS-CLACSO; 2024.

Into the  chalice of your thoughts, De tus pensamientos, el cáliz.

Wilfried Raussert (co-author: Ann Fisher-Wirth). December 2023. Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, MEX.

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas. InterAmerican Studies Series 25. Ed. Wilfried Raussert and Matti Steinitz. Aug.. 2022. WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier; UNO University of New Orleans Press.

InterAmerican Perspectives in the 21st Century: Festschrift in Honor of Josef Raab.
Inter-American Studies/Estudio Interamericanos; 23. Ed. Wilfried Raussert and Olaf Kaltmeier. Trier/New Orleans: WVT/UNO. 2021.

The book is a commemorative publication for Josef Raab and this collection of essays presents recent lines of research and results in the field of InterAmerican Studies. The book also opens new perspectives for futore research. The collection of essays is interdisciplinary and brings together historical film, literary, and cultural studies approaches to the Americas. Renowned scholars and young researchers make this book a cross-disciplinary work highly suitable for scholars and students.

Cherishing the Past, Envisioning the Future.

Entangled Practices of Heritage and Utopia in the Americas. WVT and New Orleans Press, March 2021. Olaf Kaltmeier, Mirko Petersen, Wilfried Raussert, and Julia Roth, eds.

Recently political changes in the Americas have triggered new debates on temporality. The objective of this edited volume is to shed light on the background of these debates. In this regard, 'heritage' and 'utopia' are key terms used to explore the cultural, social, historical, and political entanglements within the Americas and their relation to coloniality, modernity, and contemporary neoliberal globalization. The contributions to this volume by well established scholars deal with important topics such as slavery, memory politics, populism and biotechnological innovations.

What's Going on: How Music Shapes the Social (Inter-american Studies)

Wilfried Raussert, University of New Orleans Press, January 2021.

This book begins from the premise that we are living in an age in which the social is in a continuous process of reinvention. The book is also grounded in the assumption that music is a perennial key player in the processes of reinventing the social since music holds the power to stimulate and transport visions of change through its appeal to all human senses in the Americas and beyond the American hemisphere. Chapters address the intersection of music and identity politics, the role of music in social movements, music's presence in commodity and tourist culture, music in the context of museum culture, music's presence in literature and the visual arts, and music documentary as alternative sonic historiography.

BLACK MATTERS
Afua Cooper and Wilfried Raussert, eds.
Roseway Publishing, October 2020.

Afua Cooper and Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. Cooper translates Raussert’s photos into poetry, painting a profound image of how history continues and is transformed, embodied in contemporary characters. Past and present comingle in this book. The dialogue between poet and photographer celebrates Black visibility — its power, beauty, and resilience. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African Diaspora around North America and Europe.

¿Hasta dónde llega la calle? Prácticas artísticas y espacio público
Wilfried Raussert. Bielefeld, kipu Verlag, April 2020.

Estimulado por una nueva ola de protestas en todo el mundo – desde el movimiento Ocupa, La Vida de los Negros Importa, la Primavera árabe y las diversas marchas por las calles contra gobiernos neoliberales en todo Latinoamérica –, Raussert examina cómo han desafiado las prácticas artísticas en el continente americano el control del espacio público en relación con el género, la raza, la sexualidad, la clase social y la edad en tres periodos (la década de los años veinte y treinta, la década de los años sesenta y setenta y el nuevo milenio).
Esta perspectiva interamericana arroja luz sobre aspiraciones utópicas comunes a través del tiempo y del lugar, como en los movimientos en red de los grupos indígenas, de los descendientes de africanos y de los diaspóricos, personificados por el lema zapatista: “Mientras los medios de comunicación sigan mintiendo, las paredes seguirán hablando”. En efecto, este libro de obligada lectura muestra cómo los artistas contestatarios subvierten la creciente privatización, consumerización y monitoreo electrónico del espacio público y su virtualización en los nuevos medios de comunicación en nuestra propia
época.

George Yúdice (Profesor de Estudios Latinoamericanos y Literatura moderna en la Universidad de Miami, EE.UU.)

Qué está pasando?
Wilfried Raussert. Bielefeld, kipu Verlag, April 2020.

El libro proporciona una mira- da innovadora a la relación entre la música y lo social. Traza la presencia de la música en el mundo de la política, la política de la identidad, el patrimonio cultural y el arte y la literatura. El libro establece la música como un actor clave en los procesos de reinvención de lo social.

The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas
W. Raussert, G.Anatol, S.Thies, S.Corona Berkin, J.C. Lozano, eds. Routledge March 2020.

Exploring the culture and media of the Americas, this handbook places particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences and focuses on the transnational or hemispheric dimensions of cultural flows and geocultural imaginaries that shape the literature, arts, media and other cultural expressions in the Americas. The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas charts the pervasive, asymmetrical flows of cultural products and capital and their importance in the development of the Americas. The volume offers a comprehensive understanding of how inter-American communication is constituted, framed and structured, and covers the artistic and political dimensions that have shaped literature, art and popular culture in the region. Forty-six chapters cover a range of inter-American key concepts and dynamics, divided into two parts:

1. Literature and Music deals with inter-American entanglements of artistic expressions in the Western Hemisphere, including music, dance, literary genres and developments.
2. Media and Visual Cultures explores the inter-American dimension of media production in the hemisphere, including cinema and television, photography and art, journalism, radio, digital culture and issues such as freedom of expression and intellectual property.

This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, political science; and cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary, globalization and media studies.

Book Review

!What's Going On' How Music Shapes the Social.
Wilfried Raussert. WVT Trier. Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe. 2020.

‘What’s Going On’: How Music Shapes the Social effectively argues that music serves as the core language of black culture and the modern experience.  Wilfried Raussert leads us on a beautifully researched journey through musical worlds in Brazil, Jamaica, and the American South among others as he explores the impact of black music on politics, culture, literature, and museums.

 —William R. Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, Emeritus (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Sonic Politics: Music and Social Movements in the Americas.
Wilfried Raussert and Olaf Kaltmeier, eds. Routledge June 2019.

This volume analyses the narration of the social through music and the seismographic function of music to detect social problems and envision alternatives. 
Beyond state-driven attempts to link musical production to the official narrative of the nation, mass musical movements emerged during the 20th century that provided countercultural and alternative narratives of the prevailing social context. The Americas contain numerous examples of the strong connection between music and politics; Woody Guthrie?s "This Land is Your Land" envisioned a socialist transformation of the U.S., the Chilean Nueva Canción created a narrative and affective frame for the recognition of popular culture as a central element of the cultural politics of the Chilean way to socialism, and Reggae emerged as a response to British colonialism, drawing inspiration and guidance from the pan-Africanist visions of Marcus Garvey. 
Providing a significant contribution to the study of music and politics/social movements from an inter-American perspective, this book will appeal to students and scholars of U.S. and Latin American Cultural Studies, Transnational Studies, History and Political Studies, Area Studies, and Music Studies. 
For the sound track of all songs covered in Sonic Politics , please see here

Crónicas Urbanas, Guadalajara: Ediciones de la Noche
Wilfried Raussert (2018)
Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara.

Urban Reflections: Photography and poetry in dialogue.
Wilfried Raussert / Ketaki Datta. Bielefeld, Guadalajara, Calcutta. June 2018. 

A book dedicated to all street artists and urban dwellers:
How many times do we walk the city? How many times are we present and at the same absent closing our eyes to people, things near? Our thoughts are caught up in matters of everyday life and we walk the street lost in glamorous sights. This book wants to unravel the beauty and politics of contemporary city space in the Americas. It wishes to create a dialogue between photography, poetry, and street art. 
Read, share, and enjoy the book in the public spaces of our cities: cafés, parks, street corners, the metro, the bus. It is designed as a little pocket gallery that you carry with you. The wish is to please the reader?s eyes, to inspire the reader?s mind, to hopefully touch the reader?s soul and to open people?s eyes to the city spaces around them beyond consumption. 
Wilfried Raussert, photographer; Kataki Datta, poet.

Book Review

Mesas de diálogo alrededor de la música popular del Sotavento Veracruzano.
Sirani González, Yaatsil Guevara González, W.Raussert, eds. México, 2018.

This co-authored book in English and Spanish presents empirical research results from the region and theoretical reflections about son veracruzano as hybrid popular music from the Veracruz region. The three authors shed new light on the music's local heritage, diaspora mobility, and shifting gender politics. The book also contains selected photographic material documenting the workshops conducted in the region.

Diferentes conceptos de tiempo en diálogo: el blues, el jazz y la novela afroamericana

Wilfried Raussert, Universidad de Guadalajara, 2017.

Mediante la exploración de la dimensión temporal de la música afroamericana en su desarrollo desde las primeras formas del blues y del jazz, hasta las secuencias libres y vertiginosas de blues y jazz de músicos como John Coltrane y Ornette Coleman, este libro aborda la música como una metáforo clave para el análisis del tiempo en la novela afroamericana desde el Renacimiento del Harlem hasta el periodo contemporáneo. Entre los autores analizados se incluye a Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison e Ishmael Reed. La investigación sobre la imaginación histórica de estos autores revela una relación de los conceptos alternativos de historia y cultura conforme éstos emergen a partir del impacto del tiempo muscial en el discurso novelístico. Este libro está dirigido a estudiosos y aficionados de la literatura, la música y los estudios culturales.

Art Begins in Streets-Art Lives in Streets, Wilfried Raussert, 2017

A Selective Walk through the Streets of Art in the Americas

The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies

Wilfried Raussert, ed. Routledge, 2017

An essential overview of this blossoming field, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies is the first collection to draw together the diverse approaches and perspectives on the field, highlighting the importance of Inter-American Studies as it is practiced today. Including contributions from canonical figures in the field as well as a younger generation of scholars, reflecting the foundation and emergence of the field and establishing links between older and newer methodologies, this Companion covers: 

- Theoretical reflections 
- Colonial and historical perspectives 
- Cultural and political intersections 
- Border discourses 
- Sites and mobilities 
- Literary and linguistic perspectives 
- Area studies, global studies, and postnational studies 
- Phenomena of transfer, interconnectedness, power asymmetry, and transversality within the Americas.

Mobile and Entangled America(s)

Maryemma Graham and Wilfried Raussert (Eds). Routledge, 2017.

This volume transcends celebrations of multiculturalism and condemnations of globalization through its insightful reflections on the positive and negative aspects of entanglements in the Americas. Essays on literature, music, media, travel, and biocultural and spiritual mobilities explore issues of identity and displacement, mobility and stasis, rupture and growth. A timely collection that pushes the boundaries of Inter-American Studies.
Catherine Leen, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
A resolutely interdisciplinary Inter-American Studies collection by an international group of scholars in ongoing dialogue. So rigorously do the editors stir up the collection's key concepts, "mobility and entanglement", that the words stopped striking me as opposites about halfway through the introduction, and seemed to increase in dynamism as author after author pushed them together to spark new insights in a vast range of cultural studies across the Americas. Not a metaphor or map in sight, this is a disorientating collection in the best sense of the word.
Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas, USA
A superb combination of focused case studies and high level conceptual thinking, this volume is an important monument in the ongoing development of Inter-American Studies. The articles gathered here closely examine a wide variety of cultural phenomena implicated in the "entanglements" which have defined the history of the Americas. From religious networks to music and dance, and across a range of literary and artistic works, the mobility of people, objects, and ideas in the Americas is expertly mapped. At the same time, the book represents a serious enterprise of theory building. Drawing on the histories of postcolonial thought, mobility studies, and work on human migration, Mobile and Entangled America(s) clearly establishes a new interdisciplinary field attentive both to the complexities of cultural form and the pervasiveness of power relations. Each article stands as a significant piece of scholarship on its own, but all are in dialogue with each other. The result is a richly satisfying and important volume of cultural scholarship.

Key Tropes in Inter-American Studies

Wilfried Raussert, Brian Rozema, Yolanda Campos, Marius Littschwager (Eds.). Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier/Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe. 2016.

This book is a key text for scholars and students that study the Americas in a multilingual and transdisciplinary fashion. The dialogical paradigm that underlies any sincere Inter-American scholarship makes clear that no single scholarly positioning can capture the complexity of Inter-American connectivity. This is what Inter-American Studies share with Global Studies: A necessity to negotiate multiple and at times conflictive paradigms to tackle its objects of investigation. The volume introduces eight key tropes in Inter-American Studies, as they have emerged from the work of the IAS web publication platform fiar forum for inter-american research since the latter's foundation in 2008. The editors have selected eight key tropes and regrouped essays from the period between 2008 and 2015 to highlight some of the most important paradigms for the pursuit of interdisciplinary Inter-American studies. The tropes include "colonial/decolonial," "independence," "religion," "border," "mobility," "race/indigeneity," "gender," and "decolonial reflections." The key tropes chosen should not be seen as separate entities for in many respects they are related or overlap to some degree; nor are they meant to be an exclusive list of terms. They function more as a representative selection to illustrate recent paradigms and their application. For every trope the editors have included one article in English and one in Spanish.

Cruzando fronteras en América/Crossing Boundaries in the Americas

Wilfried Raussert, Yolanda Minerva Campos García, Margarita Ramos Godínez, eds.

Cruzando fronteras en América/Crossing Boundaries in the Americas  . Tomo I. Universidad de Guadalajara, 2015.

Transcultural Literacy and Mobility

C. B. Claiborne and Wilfried Raussert. © 2014, Earthborne Press (apple e-book), Houston, Texas. 
ISBN: 978-1-62776-464-3 (ebk). This publication is copyrighted. No reproduction of any part may take place without written permission.

This co-authored book is a critical reflection on African American photography and cultural production through the lens of current global mobility studies. Migrations (particularly in the Americas), embody the complexity of cultural experience. Cultural symbols are not just appropriated but migrate as well. The migration brings new and different meanings that we see in dialog with the original cultural meanings. Media curation has to power to bring all of this into focus. Media curation has greatly expanded the possibilities for the heuristic exploration of the meaning of everyday events. This process known by names like photo-elicitation, auto-driving and visual sociology have been used since the invention of the photographic process. Sources for modern media curation can be expanded to film, video-clips, podcast, blogs and other content rich sources. Here we will focus on photographic images tracing African American cultural presence around the globe.

(Re)Discovering 'America'/(Re)Descubriendo 'America' - Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America/ Road movie y otras narrativas de viaje en America del Norte

Raussert, Wilfried and Graciela Martinez-Zalce, eds. WVT Trier and Bilingual Press, Trier/Tempe, AZ, 2012.

This collection of essays in English and in Spanish is concerned with the travels of a genre and related issues of artistic, national, and transnational identities. In recent decades there has been a reemergence of road movies on a global scale. This volume is especially interested in the expansion of the genre in the Americas-with a particular focus on what we like to label new and alternative road movies that have come out of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. As scholars and critics we intend to rediscover 'America' through the lens of a transnational, inter-American approach. While, cinematically speaking, we certainly can and have to trace the filmic origins of road movies to the U.S. and Hollywood, we want to emphasize the importance of revisiting the genre within a North-South perspective and to explore how the genre has changed through the cultural flows of globalization in recent decades.

"The conventional road narrative travels from the United States to some fantastic, utopian, foreign destination, but Raussert and Martínez-Zalce's collection (Re)Discovering 'America': Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America examines critically this trajectory from Mexican, German, Irish, and Canadian scholarly perspectives. Their contributors discover the other Americas so often forgotten in the conventional account of the road narrative. They open the road and make it move, as it should, in two directions. A 'Pan-American Highway' of the mind." 
John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities University of Southern California

Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film

Raussert, Wilfried and Jens Gurr (eds.). WVT: Trier; Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011.

'Complexity' has long been recognized as a key characteristic of urban life and has recently even been proposed as the key characteristic of the city suitable to serve as an integrating paradigm for urban research generally. However, despite a widely perceived affinity between the city and both the novel and film and the wealth of research on the city in literature and film, the specific issue of how literary texts represent urban complexity has received little explicit scholarly attention. From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, this volume explores how urban complexity is represented in fiction, film, and other media. Geographically, almost half of the essays in this volume are concerned with New York City as arguably the epitome of the urban. Further essays offer discussions of other North American cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, or Mexico City, as well as comparative views beyond North America. In their exploration of various facets of urban complexity, the essays cover a broad range of topics, mobility, intercultural encounters and cosmopolitanism, crime, violence and trauma, urban utopia and dystopia, socio-cultural heterogeneity, or conflicts over the use of urban space. With "complexity" increasingly becoming a focus of urban research across the disciplines, this volume contributes to the discussion by showing how analyses of literary and filmic urban imaginaries can point out the seismographic potential of urban cultural expression and can thus help to understand key developments in urban agglomerations in North America and beyond.

Cornbread and Cuchifritos: Ethnic Identity Politics, Transnationalization, and Transculturation in American Urban Popular Music

Raussert, Wilfried and Michelle Habell-Pallan (eds.). WVT: Trier; Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011.

With a nod to the recent shift to postnational and postnationalistic studies of the Americas the editors consider the study of popular music as paradigmatic for the shift from a purely national to transnational American Studies. After all, sounds travel fast, cross national and cultural boundaries constantly, and feed on cultural exchange both in processes of production and reception. Within the approach of tracing the routes of music and music's impact on identity formation the editors take the popularity of U.S. American Popular music more or less for granted. The volume aims to explore its impact on identity politics within the Americas and beyond, music's interconnectedness to the emergence of new fluid ethnicities in urban contexts, and music's historical links to processes of intercultural exchange. A major emphasis lies on the ethnic impact of U.S. American Popular music with a specific emphasis on Latino/a influences both on music within the United States and on the migration of sounds and music genres beyond national borders. Hence the compilation of essays aims at differentiating and rewriting existing histories of the emergence of U.S. American Popular music which focus primarily on intercultural exchange between European and African as well African American forms by exploring the yet absent Latino/a presence within these musical histories. At the same time the compilation intends to counter concepts of so-called world music, a label often used to homogenize fusion forms of music in times of globalization by emphasizing elements of ethnic as well as aesthetic differences in U.S. American Popular music and its global/local variations.

Remembering and Forgetting: Memory in Images and Texts

Raussert, Wilfried, Bond Love, Julia Andres, and Stephen Joyce(eds.) Bielefeld: AISTHESIS VERLAG. 2010.

This book is a collection of essays devoted to the representation and politics of memory in cultural texts. How individuals and communities use memory to navigate the current global situation is the subject of many of the essays collected in this volume, while other essays contextualize these strategies by examining functions and interrogations of memory in earlier geopolitical environments. Taken as a whole, they form a multifaceted exploration of how various forms of memory are discursively constructed and negotiated in literature, art, media, or other cultural modes of representation. The collection addresses a wide array of texts and cultural contexts.

Transcultural Visions of Identities in Images and Texts

Raussert, Wilfried, and Reinhard Isensee (eds.) Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2008.

As the editors hope, this volume, that is primarily the outcome of an international conference in honor of Günter H. Lenz at Humboldt-University Berlin in February 2005, will provide some answers to Shelley Fisher Fishkin's question "What would the field of American Studies look like if the transnational rather than the national were at its center?" The editors also express the hope that it will represent another major step in challenging the methodological nationalism of American Studies. The contributions engage with literary, political and cultural practices in America, past and present, set out to transcend long established paradigms of an American "exceptionalism" or critical approaches that hold on to the notion of a core Americanness as a single nationalist mythology of the United States. "America" then functions as a signifier that is configured in and by its presence outside and beyond the national borders of the United States of America. The overall thrust of our volume draws aupon concepts ot the "New American Studies," especially "Post-Nationalist American Studies." The re-definition and re-positioning of American Studies point towards significant shifts in research approaches, away from nation-state based myths as well as spatial configurations and signal a dynamically transnational and intercultural conceptualization of U.S. culture. Such turn in American Studies interprets "America" as a multiplicity of interpellations for which no single position has precedence and all interact in "a genuinely dialogic notion of cultural critique and of inter- and postnational American culture studies in order to bring into view that the always two-directional processes of transculturation" as well as constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of competing visions, and ideologies inside and outside the terrain of the United States (lenz).

Traveling Sounds. Music, Migration, and Identity in the U.S. and Beyond

Raussert, Wilfried, and John Miller Jones (eds.)Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008.

Within their approach to trace the routes of music and music?s impact on identity formation the editors take the popularity of American music more or less for granted. Most genres addressed in this study have emerged within the multiethnic United States or the Americas on a larger scale, most have traversed through the Americas and, in different adaptations, through different parts of the world. Tracing the migration of sounds, the editors see American music at home and abroad as an intricate part of a historical process of globalization and as embedded in complex and multidirectional processes of exchange and transformation. They under¬stand the migration of American forms of music not as a one-dimensional, homogenizing process of Americanization but rather as a multidirectional journey with diverse and multi-layered forms of music emerging in different and shifting locales. The contributors cover a broad range of musical genres, ranging from sacred music and avant-garde music to jazz, reggae, and rock. More¬over, crossovers between film, theater, video art and music are explored. In its interdisciplinary and international orientation this book will contribute to the new direction American Studies has taken recently and expand a cultural studies approach to the field of music at the same time. 
Prof. Dr. Wilfried Raussert is Professor for American Literature and Culture and Co-Director of Inter-American Studies at the University of Bielefeld. 
Dr. John Miller Jones is Lecturer for American Studies and Composition at the University of Mannheim.

Cultural Memory and Multiple Identities

Raussert, Wilfried, and Rüdiger Kunow (eds.). Berlin, New Brunswick: LIT Verlag, 2008.

Memory is one of the most important ways in which we construct individual and collective identities. Memory constantly surrounds us as in literature, films, historical accounts, psychologists's talk, or everyday conversations. At the same time, memory has become a culturally contested praxis in the context of 20th century identity politics inside and outside the academy. This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the discoursive construction of memory and seeks to explore the cultural work performed by these constructions. Approaching the juncture of memory and identity from an interdisciplinary and global approach and drawing on S. Hall's assertion that culture and identity are irrevocably intertwined through memory, the essays collected here provide informed readings on a variety of topics and contexts. In their opening remarks the editors establish a context in which the interrelationships between culture, identity and memory are played off against the problematics of loss of and reinvention of "self" in a globalized and yet localized world. In this collection which brings together work by young American Studies scholars from various European contexts and disciplinary fields, the reader will find contributions located in cultural and literary studies, the visual arts, philosophy, and history. In its disciplinary fields and international orientation this book is a showcase of the important work done by the current generation of Americanists in Europe. 
Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Kunow is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Potsdam and President of the German Assosciation for American Studies. 
Prof. Dr. Wilfried Raussert is Professor for American Literature and Culture and Co-Director of Inter-American Studies at the University of Bielefeld.

Amerikastudien/American Studies. A Quarterly.

Volume 51, No. 3. Guest editors: Banerje, Birkle, and Wilfried Raussert. Universitätsverlag Winter. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006.

Avantgarden in den USA. Zwischen Mainstream und kritischer Erneuerung 1940-1970.Nordamerikastudien

Raussert, Wilfried. Berlin/Frankfurt (M): Campus Verlag, 2003.

[Avantgarden in den USA book cover]

Die Avantgarde in den USA zeichnet sich durch kulturelle und ästhetische Grenzüberschreitungen aus, welche die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten amerikanischer Kultur erweitern. Wilfried Raussert untersucht die zweifache Funktion der Avantgarde als Teil der dominanten Kultur einerseits, als subversiv-erneuernde Gegenkraft andererseits. Dabei nimmt er unter anderem Bezug auf John Cage, Yoko Ono, Robert Pauschenberg, LeRoi Jones und Lenore Kandel.

Negotiating Temporal Differences. Blues, Jazz and Narrativity in African American Culture.

American Studies. A Monograph Series. Volume 87. Raussert, Wilfried. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2000.

Exploring the temporal dimension of African Amrican music in its development from early forms of blues and jazz to the free and fast-paced sequences of jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, this volume addresses music as a key metaphor for the analysis of time in African American culture. Two narrative strategies emerge from tracing the impact of musical time on narrativity in an intercultural sphere - novels by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Ntozake Shange representing the textual basis for critical analysis. First, the excursions into the field of music illustrate blues' and Jazz's pivotal role in shaping and redefining a particular African American sense of time from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary period. Second, the exploration of the writers's historical imagination unfolds a story about alternating concepts of history and culture, as they emerge from the impact of musical time on the novelistic discourse. This volume will be of interest to scholars of literature, music, and cultural studies.