ABSTRACT
The chapter argues for the relevance of cultural performance as both a subject of inquiry and a scholarly method for the study of past and present transnational processes. Transnational mobilities become manifest in concrete, local contact zones. As communal events, cultural performances located in these sites create cultural encounters and a shared experience of their participants; as site-specific events, they bear the potential to negotiate the possible tensions emerging in transnational contact zones and to enact social and political realities. Consequently, cultural performances offer alternative epistemologies of oftentimes fleeting and abstract transnational phenomena. The article uses historical and contemporary performances—the 1848 Emancipation Day celebration in Rochester, New York; and the 2017 Liberation Day anniversary at the Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial as well as a nearby German-American entertainment fair—to illustrate the political power of cultural performance and to demonstrate the usefulness of the study of cultural performances for examining transnational trajectories in American Studies.
