Abstract

The engagement with Chicana/o literary and cultural production in Germany began in the 1980s and continued to be strong throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was motivated by the heightened interest of German scholars of American Studies in civil rights activism and multiculturalism in the United States and later in the concept of the border, in hybrid/hyphenated identity constructions and in transnational perspectives on the United States. While in the early 1980s the political activism of the Chicano movement and the writings of the Chicano Renaissance were at the center of attention, in the late 1980s and the 1990s the impact of the spatial turn moved the peripheral spaces of the nation and in particular the U.S.-Mexican border as a cultural contact zone into focus. This idea, as José David Saldívar put it in a seminal book, Border Matters (1997), for the nation, placed Chicana/o and Border Studies in a crucial position in key debates in American Cultural Studies about American exceptionalism, postcoloniality and the Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan & Pease 1995). Additionally, in the 1990s Chicana literature – especially the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo – sparked the interest of feminist critics in American Studies in Germany. Since about 2000, Chicana/o and Border Studies have increasingly intersected with other disciplines, such as Comparative Literary Studies, Latin American Studies, and Inter-American Studies, while research interests have shifted from Chicana/o towards Latina/o and Hemispheric Studies, enlarging perspectives from the U.S.-Mexican border to the entire American continent. This has been accompanied by endeavors to investigate the ways in which the United States has throughout its history been economically, politically, and culturally entangled with other regions in the Americas.