Alfred Hornung Boeken

This volume focuses on the literature and culture of Arabs living in the United States who have gained new prominence after 9/11. For a proper assessment of their situation it seeks to provide basic information on the history and transculturation of immigrants from different parts of the Arab world. The contributions, which result from a teacher training conference, present survey articles on Arab American literature, politics and immigration laws, a case study of the transnational network of Arab families, discussions of Arab American fiction, film, theatre and poetry. The articles also address issues of teaching new forms of this literature and culture in the EFL classroom. Photographs of American mosques document the distribution of Islamic centers of worship and their integration into the urban landscape across the United States.

Contributors from five continents address the widespread geographical and political reverberations connected with the emergence of the name Obama in the media and in the consciousness of the world and relate it to the transformation of a field of studies from a national to a transnational or even global focus. The multi-ethnic biographies of the Obama family extend from its Luo origins in Kenya to Hawai‘i, Asia, and Europe and lend themselves to a Transnational American Studies approach. Auma Obama’s opening address on the future of the young Kenyan generation connects with considerations of her own life in Germany and with Michelle Obama’s initiatives at home and abroad. Essays on early American literature and the Civil Rights Movement suggest the shared historical roots of Transnational American Studies and African American identities and trace the resonances in Barack Obama’s politics and reform efforts, such as Obama Care. Further contributions explore the manifold media representations of and references to Obama in Bollywood, the films of Quentin Tarantino and Sönke Wortmann, hip hop culture, transnational affiliations, legal interrelations, interpictorial and intertextual creations.

This volume focuses on religious, historical, literary, cultural and political models, developed in America, for the realization and representation of American lives. These original articles demonstrate the importance of different forms of life writing for the disciplines of American Studies. Experts in the field such as literary and cultural critics Sidonie Smith, Craig Howes, Birgit Däwes, historian Thomas Bender, and writer critic Siri Hustvedt among others cover the wide range of the presentation and performance of selves in colonial literature, nature writing, immigrant and campaign auto/biographies, religion, film, TV series, rap music, graphic presentations, comics, and sports. Addressing the transnational self-affirmations of American citizens in Hawai'i, the Caribbean islands, on reservations, and in urban ghettos they represent the diversified panorama of American lives.

This volume examines the interrelations between ecological concerns and personal forms of writing in Europe, Asia, and America. It assembles contributions from an international conference of experts from four continents who provide new insights into the redefinition of the self in contact with nature in different parts of the world. Articles range from the American tradition of nature writing via the ecological traditions of Native Americans and ethnic communities to Asian attitudes of nature worship and the dangers to human and animal lives on planet earth. Beyond the familiar Anglo-American focus, these case studies, interpretations of auto/biographical texts and films begin to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern discourses and propose new approaches to the theoretical basis of ecocriticism and life writing.

The essays by American, Asian, Australian and European critics collected here demonstrate the opening up of auto/biography studies to the border-crossing implied by the concept of mediation: processes of social and cultural translation are examined in various forms – from photographic self-representation to oral histories – and practices, from media coverage through marketing of written lives to performing the self. These essays reveal that auto/biography goes much further than the narrow examination of an individual’s life; for instance, life narratives intersect human rights in post-Apartheid South Africa, genomics is haunted by the structure of eugenics, and quilting can reveal a material history to those who can decode it. In mediating these lives, the essays ask us to engage with diverse questions of ethics, gender politics, postcolonial critique, institutional frameworks, and the basic question of how acts of mediation influence the telling and re-telling of lives.

The contributions to this volume by European and American critics analyze different forms of representation and decoration in twentieth-century American literature and the arts from the critical perspective of a postmodern age. They range from theoretical discussions of non-representational art forms and the defense of literary representation against deconstructive practices to the manifestation of political representation in postcolonial works. The displacement of decorative elements in modern art and the resurgence of decoration in postmodernism is the focus of articles on modern American and contemporary ethnic painters as well as on American postcards. The interaction of representative and decorative techniques provides the basis for new readings of literary texts and for the analysis of technological intelligence.

This volume focuses on the intercultural constitution of the American continent, especially the interactions of indigenous native with European, African and Asian cultures in North America, from Puritanism to the 21st century. In an interdisciplinary dialogue of European and American critics, the contributions discuss immediate and long-range effects of intercultural encounters between settlers and ethnic groups, between immigrants and the Anglo-American mainstream society of the United States in literary, linguistic, architectural and visual expressions. The role of the media in the process of intercultural mediation as a specific feature of American culture is the topic of analyses of Ralph W. Emerson, American folk art, Irish drama, musicals, Bollywood films, and TV shows. 'Intercultural America' documents the need for a transnational form of American Studies.

In connection with recent postmodernist and poststructuralist analyses of gender constructions, sexuality has come to the forefront of discussions dealing with identity conceptions and definitions of culture as such. This volume sets out to explore the centrality of sexuality to cultural concerns. At the same time, this centrality also involves the necessity of a linkage of sexuality to other aspects of identity, e. g. race, class, and gender. Many of the essays investigate the sexualizing and/or gendering of ethnicity, an interrelation in which fascination and stigmatization are often intertwined. Not surprisingly, the latter liability of marginalized sexualities to stigmatization also figures in the exploration of the conflict between homosexuality and Western „love codes“. An intriguing aspect of the volume is thus the fact that although the essays investigate a vast array of often dissimilar concerns, they open up an interdisciplinary dialogue which maps out the full scope of tensions in which sexuality is located in American contemporary culture.

Alphonse "Al" Capone war einer der berüchtigtsten Verbrecher Amerikas. In den 1920er-Jahren kontrollierte er die Chicagoer Unterwelt und machte erfolgreiche Geschäfte mit illegalem Glücksspiel, Prostitution, Schutzgelderpressung und Alkoholhandel. So wurde er zum Symbol für die organisiere Kriminalität.Alfred Hornung recherchierte vor Ort und folgte den Spuren des legendären Gangsterbosses. Rigoros nutze der mehrfache Mörder die Aufstiegschancen des kapitalistischen Wirtschaftssystems für seine Zwecke. Er lebte den amerikanischen Traum auf seine Art, radikal und maßlos.

Jack Londons Leben war geprägt von der Suche nach Glück und Erfolg, oft am Rande der Kriminalität. Seine Werke, wie ›Der Seewolf‹ und ›Ruf der Wildnis‹, reflektieren seine Erfahrungen und den Überlebenskampf von Mensch und Tier. Alfred Hornung präsentiert eine umfassende Biographie, die Londons Relevanz für die Gegenwart neu bewertet.