Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 2 238 Michael Fuchs, Maria-Theresia Holub (eds.), Placing America. American Culture and its Spaces. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2013. Julia Sattler Placing America argues that throughout North American history, spaces - imaginary just as well as actual ones - have always triggered questions of identity and belonging, of power and resistance. Unsurprisingly, this idea has gained new momentum following the so-called spatial turn, the recognition that space should be a category of analysis in and of itself. The negotiation of the multiple and oftentimes controversial meanings of space within the literary and cultural fields has since become a topic of investigation in cultural studies, and specifically in North American studies. But how and where how can (other) fields within the humanities gain from the study of space, and what can they can contribute to disciplines whose primary object of study is spaces, disciplines such as architecture, spatial planning, some areas of engineering centering on, for example, urban complexity and its study? More specifically, how can the study of American spaces be helpful in the negotiation of transatlantic relations, and how can the literary and cultural studies use their expertise in ‘reading’ spaces with regard to such pressing problems as segregation or poverty? In 2010, a group of Austrian and international scholars gathered in Graz in order to discuss “Space, Place, and Time: The Construction of Identity in American Literature and Popular Culture.” The collection of essays in Placing America is one result of this look at American Culture through the lens of space. The collection places its main emphasis on notions of space and place and is built on the idea that the spatial and the temporal depend upon one another. The studies included mainly focus on the 20 th and 21 st centuries and on the United States and Canada. Placing America has four sections. The first deals with “[c]onstructing America from afar” and while the title may suggest otherwise, it concentrates exclusively on America from Western European points of views, more specifically, from Austrian and Norwegian perspectives. The section contains two essays, the first one investigating performances of America as evident in the Austrian documentary No Name City: Die Freiheit liegt südlich von Wien (2006) set in a Western-themed entertainment park, the second one looking at Sigmund Skard, the first professor of American Studies in Norway, and his perception of America and American progress on the other. Both articles, while addressing very different transnational conceptions of America, share a concern with how the relationship between Europe and an imaginary America depends on time and space as well as on circumstances: the space Leo Lippert constructs in his essay on No Name City is not so much the result of an actual transatlantic exchange but rather “an engagement with the ghost of America” (30); Ida Jahr’s article in turn shows how a specific version of America came to life in Norway through Skard’s attempt to find a tradition shared between the United States and Norway (cf. 50). While this part of Placing America Rezensionen 239 discusses many important points with regard to the placing of America in the transatlantic imaginary, limiting the focus to Western Europe here and, generally, throughout this volume is rather unfortunate considering the existing and emerging conflict lines of the 20 th and 21 st centuries and what they mean for a ‘placement’ of America. We may therefore rightfully ask: What about America in the Arab consciousness? What about the rising global power of China? And (once again): How can the humanities with their hermeneutic expertise contribute to the understanding of what is going on in transatlantic relations, when a version of America enters the East or vice versa? The second part, “Real Places and Imaginary Spaces” is mainly focused on representations of America in different genres, dealing with young adult fiction by the Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, the comic series DMZ (2005-2012) set in a dystopian American urban landscape after an invasion, and novels by Stephen King and Mark Z. Danielewski. The articles take us from the romanticized and fantastic to the surreal and dystopian. They examine central American themes such as family and identity, and how belonging to a certain group can be determined in a setting that has in many ways become ‘unreadable’. Georg Drennig’s “Fallujah Manhattan Transfer: The Sectarian Dystopia of Brian Wood’s DMZ” builds on the notion of heterotopias and reflects on the meaning of America in the face of both military intervention abroad and the atmosphere of threat that has become prevalent during the Bush Jr. administration. Michael Fuchs’s “The Black Hole at the Heart of America? Space, Family, and the Black Hallway in House of Leaves” explores the role of repression on the levels of family and nation. This part makes evident that spatial ideas of America are still strongly shaped by the frontier, which is implicitly or explicitly present in all the texts discussed here. It would be the ideal place to discuss larger notions with regard to reading spaces: How do different genres ‘narrate’ these places, what is the role of non-fictional texts in constructing America, and how does the notion of the frontier, which is so central for placing America, translate elsewhere? Part three, “Drawing Borders,” focuses on actual national and/ or cultural border spaces: the Canadian border with the U.S. is addressed as are the struggles within the bilingual, bicultural nation of Canada itself. The presence of Québec and the internal division of Canada has very real consequences for Canadian national identity as well as for the identities of those literarily living at the borders. The discussion in both articles, Yvonne Völkl’s “Meeting at the border. The Canadian ‘Two Solitudes’ in Érik Canuel’s Bon Cop, Bad Cop” and Evelyn P. Mayer’s “‘Romanized Gauls’: The Significance of the United States and the Canada-U.S. border for Canadian National Identity Construction” shows how practices of nation-making are influenced by real or imaginary borders and point to the problems inherent in the claims of a homogeneous Canadian identity; it makes evident that these complexities are often not recognized by outsiders, who think of Canada only in terms of its relationship to the U.S., a notion that has also become more complex following the introduction of border controls after 9/ 11. The final part, “Marginalized Cultural Spaces,” largely centers on the Native presence in North America. Diana Benea’s “Spaces of Native American Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 2 240 Ghostliness in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon” examines the haunted, ghostly spaces in the novel hinting at the invisibility and loss of the past on the one hand, and on tensions between individual and collective identities in the face of North American history at large on the other: the essay argues that early American identity developed in opposition to the natives - a topic that is also present in Madalina Prodan’s “Getting a Name: Searching for a Mixed-Blood Identity in Sherman Alexie’s Flight.” The final article of this part, by contrast, reflects on the spatial imagery in contemporary science discourses. Judith Kohlenberger discusses how these discourses are concerned with questions of identity, power and legitimacy and how cultural studies as a field contributes to practices of reading “[t]his Space called Science.” Overall, the volume covers a wide array of issues, text types, literary and cultural American spaces. It draws on an extensive body of theoretical ideas by scholars such as Butler, Said, Soja, Foucault or de Certeau. The articles give an overview of how America is ‘placed’ with regard to its national and transnational, central and marginal spaces, but also with regard to dystopian visions and scientific challenges. Each of these topics in itself would deserve further investigation, as would the co-dependency of time and space in the context of American cultural studies. At the same time, the scope of the volume remains limited to Western conceptions of the United States and Canada, as well as constrained to a rather ‘discipline-specific’ understanding of time and space. While of course interdisciplinary is not a must with regard to Placing America, the topic itself would be a starting point for a widening scope of interest as it invites and encourages discussion across spaces larger than the West as well as an active engagement with how the perceived ‘other’ discipline may ‘place’ America and open up new discussions and fields of investigation for further strengthening a placeand space-oriented study of America. Julia Sattler Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Technische Universität Dortmund, Deutschland Kerstin Knopf (ed.), North America in the 21 st Century. Tribal, Local, and Global. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011. Heidrun Mörtl North America in the 21 st Century - Tribal, Local, and Global is a festschrift for Hartmut Lutz. This volume of twenty-three articles by U.S. and international scholars touches on a variety of topics relating to the indigenous people of