Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 94 Petra Eckhard, Klaus Rieser und Silvia Schultermandl (eds.), Contact Spaces of American Culture. Globalizing Local Phenomena. Münster [etc.]: LIT-Verlag, 2012. Julia Sattler Starting from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone,” and from the idea that Americanness and its production are always results of an encounter, the twelve essays in this volume explore a diversity of contact spaces, both physical (such as the inner city, the pirate ship, or the tent city) and metaphorical (such as the internet and global media circulation). The essays, even though different from each other in scope and in the approaches to this topic, look at contact spaces as sites of encounter, as sites of potential dialogue and solidarity, but also as sites of ambiguity, marginalization and tension. Contact, the “key variable” (9) of the collection, is explored from multiple points of entry ranging from literary to media and film studies as well as the social sciences. The articles use a variety of theoretical concepts that work together well with Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, from Foucault’s heterotopia to Mizuko Ito’s network localities. Alexandra Ganser’s essay on “The Pirate Ship as a Black Atlantic Heterotopia: Michel Maxwell Philip’s Emanuel Appadocca” discusses questions of legitimacy and illegitimacy negotiated in the novel via the representation of the pirate ship as multiethnic and transnational contact space. Eric Erbacher’s discussion of third wave gentrification in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, New York, shows that community development is both a contact space and a potential conflict zone, but one in which people can unite across different social, religious and ethnic groups once they have literally established a common ground and common goals. Kathy-Ann Tan, in her negotiation of “Makeshift Heterotopia(s): Tent Cities in North America,” draws attention to those who have been left behind by contemporary capitalism, and in part by the very processes discussed by Erbacher: she focuses on homelessness, public space and property ownership. The dialogue she initiates between homelessness and artistic engagements with tent cities and other temporary makeshift settlements opens a new contact space within American culture challenging the invisibility of the homeless and urban poor, and providing new strategies of thinking about economic deprivation, as well as about the links between art and social activism in the United States and beyond. In their discussion of social networks and both their American origins and their simultaneous independence from a specific locality, Eugen Banauch, Astrid Fellner and Susanne Hamscha open the way for new approaches to the complex dynamics between local and global levels in a world dominated by the internet as important contact space. Finally, Leo Lippert’s exploration of enacting “Indianness” in Austria presents a case study of a contemporary performance going beyond local and global modes of discussion. Encountering a version of an imaginary “America” in an “unexpected global setting” (255) challenges power relations and leads to question the Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 95 forms of knowledge circulating about “America” in the global realm, but also encourages reconsideration of the notion of the contact space and its implications for performances and enactments of “America” as a whole. All contributions to the collection make evident that the spatial dimension of both the local and the global has become essential to contemporary American Cultural Studies, and that reading contact spaces offers new and useful paths to understanding American Culture across different time periods and across different walks of life from trade to sports to subcultures, and from the mainstream to the marginalized. Contact spaces as discussed throughout the collection are always spaces of relationship, and spaces of social production; they potentially invite exploration of the unknown Other just as well as contestation of one’s individual perception of the world. At the same time, such spaces may also be spaces of exploitation and marginalization of the Other; or spaces of mediation in which established notions such as social class, gender or race can be newly negotiated through the encounter that is implied in the term contact space itself. In any case, the idea of the contact space hints at interaction, at a multilateral movement and the building of links and interconnections between the self and the Other, the historical and the contemporary, and the local and global levels of negotiation. The essays invite explorations of encounters and their spatial dimensions from different angles, while at the same time addressing the importance of representation and global media circulation which have generated new contact spaces of their own right: transnational, transcultural and oftentimes transgressive in their potential to overcome established borders. The dialogue between physical and metaphorical spaces that is initiated in many of the essays is a specific quality of this publication, and pays tribute to the globalized economies and transnational flows that have always shaped our encounters with America but have intensified tremendously through the internet and global media. Reading American culture via the notion of the contact space provides new insights into understanding processes of inclusion and exclusion as well as such notions as inside and outside, but also leads us to critically question our own role in shaping, questioning and representing such phenomena. Julia Sattler Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik Technische Universität Dortmund