Transmediality and Transculturality

The terms transmediality and transculturality by the ambiguity of the prefix denote transcendence as well as procedurality and provisionality. Since the mid-20th century, transmediality and transculturality have been launched into debates about cultural and medial sectionalisms when competing terms such as inter- or multiculturality and inter- or multimediality entrenched virulent distinctions for the organization of privilege and hierarchy. As pragmatic alternatives, transmediality and transculturality seek to describe experience with more comprehensive realism and greater temporary adequacy. The volume comprises essays by scholars from American Studies, Inter-American Studies, Media Studies, and Comparative Literature and Culture which explore transmediality and transculturality from different perspectives and in various cultural contexts and languages, covering a timespan that reaches from the Renaissance to the 21st century and a provenance of works from Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. A first section applies the concept of transmediality and traces its origin to notions of intermedia in post-World War II transatlantic culture; the second section of the volume is dedicated to the work of Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortíz who coined the term transculturation in the 1940s and instigated its academic discussion; and a third section offers essays that sound the contemporary potential of a correlation of both terms towards a general typology of cultural and medial phenomena.