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The large-scale use of semantic transfer and inversion as rhetorical tactics is particularly prevalent in right-wing discourses and populist »alternative knowledge« production. The contributors to this volume analyze processes of re-semanticizing received meanings, effectually re-coding those meanings. They investigate to what extent rhetorical maneuvers serve to establish new and powerful belief systems beyond rational and democratic control. In addition to the contemporary rightwing and conspiracy narratives, the contributions examine the discursive fields around conceptions of human nature and the deep past, population politics, gender conceptions, use of land, identity politics, nationhood, and cultural heritage.

The large-scale use of semantic transfer and inversion as rhetorical tactics is particularly prevalent in right-wing discourses and populist "alternative knowledge" production. The contributors to this volume analyze processes of re-semanticizing received meanings, effectually re-coding those meanings. They investigate to what extent rhetorical maneuvers serve to establish new and powerful belief systems beyond rational and democratic control. In addition to the contemporary rightwing and conspiracy narratives, the contributions examine the discursive fields around conceptions of human nature and the deep past, population politics, gender conceptions, use of land, identity politics, nationhood, and cultural heritage.

Decolonizing "Prehistory" combines a critical investigation of the documentation of the American deep past with perspectives from Indigenous traditional knowledges and attention to ongoing systems of intellectual colonialism. Bringing together experts from American studies, archaeology, anthropology, legal studies, history, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers essential information about the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in North America, and their impact on American scientific discourse. The chapters in this book reveal how anthropology, archaeology, and cultural heritage have shaped the collective ideological construction of Indigenous cultures, while actively empowering the voices that disrupt conventional tropes and narratives of "prehistory." Constructions of America's ancient past—or the invention of American "prehistory"—occur in national and international political frameworks, which are characterized by struggles over racial and ethnic identities, access to resources and environmental stewardship, the commodification of culture for touristic purposes, and the exploitation of Indigenous knowledges and histories by industries ranging from education to film and fashion. The past's ongoing appeal reveals the relevance of these narratives to current-day concerns about individual and collective identities and pursuits of sovereignty and self-determination, as well as to questions of the origin—and destiny—of humanity. Decolonizing "Prehistory" critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices. Contributors: Rick Budhwa, Keith Thor Carlson, Kirsten Matoy Carlson, Jessica Christie, Philip J. Deloria, Melissa Gniadek, Annette Kolodny, Gesa Mackenthun, Christen Mucher, Naxaxalhts'i (aka Sonny McHalsie), Jeff Oliver, Mathieu Picas, Daniel Lord Smail, Coll Thrush

Encounters between cultures are also encounters between knowledge systems. This volume brings together a number of case studies that explore how some knowledge in cultural contact zones becomes transient, evanescent, and ephemeral. The essays examine various aspects of cultural, especially colonial, epistemic exchanges, placing special emphasis on the fate of those knowledges that are not easily appropriated by or translated from one cultural sphere into another and thus remain at the margins of cross-cultural exchanges. In addition, the imposition of colonial power is unthinkable without the strategic deployment and use of knowledge; most colonial states, including those of Germany in the Baltic and in West Africa, were knowledge-acquiring machines – yet, acquisition always includes rejection, detainment and subjugation of recalcitrant epistemes. Bringing together insights from various scholarly disciplines, including literary studies, history, historical anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume investigate how different or unfamiliar knowledge was, and in some cases still is, disarticulated by being belittled, discredited, and demonized. But they also show the strategies of resilience deployed by subjugated and subaltern people: the ways in which certain materials have escaped the coloniality of knowledge – how fragments and shards of other epistemologies remain inscribed in the polyphony and fuzziness of intercultural documents and archives.

Encounters between cultures are also encounters between knowledge systems. This volume brings together a number of case studies that explore how some knowledge in cultural contact zones becomes transient, evanescent, and ephemeral. The essays examine various aspects of cultural, especially colonial, epistemic exchanges, placing special emphasis on the fate of those knowledges that are not easily appropriated by or translated from one cultural sphere into another and thus remain at the margins of cross-cultural exchanges. In addition, the imposition of colonial power is unthinkable without the strategic deployment and use of knowledge; most colonial states, including those of Germany in the Baltic and in West Africa, were knowledge-acquiring machines – yet, acquisition always includes rejection, detainment and subjugation of recalcitrant epistemes. Bringing together insights from various scholarly disciplines, including literary studies, history, historical anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume investigate how different or unfamiliar knowledge was, and in some cases still is, disarticulated by being belittled, discredited, and demonized. But they also show the strategies of resilience deployed by subjugated and subaltern people: the ways in which certain materials have escaped the coloniality of knowledge – how fragments and shards of other epistemologies remain inscribed in the polyphony and fuzziness of intercultural documents and archives.

Ever since antiquity, but increasingly since the global transformation of the world order in the early modern period, communication between members of different cultural groups depended on translators, diplomats, traders, and other specialists with a knowledge of both cultures. Successful communication and traffic relied on the mediating agency of persons who had been exposed, often in their childhood or through captivities, to the customs and languages of both cultures involved in the contact. Other border crossers and go-betweens acted as missionaries, traders, political refugees, beachcombers, pirates, anthropologists, actors in zoos, runaway slaves, and itinerant doctors. Because of their frequently precarious lives, the written traces left by these figures are often thin. While some of their lives have to be carefully reconstructed through critical readings of the documents left by others (frequently by their enemies), others have left autobiographical texts which allow for a richer assessment of their function as cultural border crossers and mediators.With examples covering from various historical periods between the early modern period and the present, as well as geographical areas such as the Mediterranean, Africa, the Americas, Hawaii, New Zealand and northern Europe, scholars from various disciplines and methodological backgrounds – reaching from history to religious studies and from literary studies to ethnology – fathom the intricacies of in-betweeness and reflect on the impact which "agents of transculturation" have in situations of cultural, social and political encounters.

The intimate relationship between global European expansion since the early modern period and the concurrent beginnings of the scientific revolution has long been acknowledged. The contributions in this volume approach the entanglement of science and cultural encounters – many of them in colonial settings – from a variety of perspectives. Historical and historiographical survey essays sketch a transcultural history of knowledge and conduct a critical dialogue between the recent academic fields of Postcolonial Studies and Science & Empire Studies; a series of case studies explores the topos of Europe's 'great inventions', the scientific exploitation of culturally unfamiliar people and objects, the representation of indigenous cultures in discourses of geographical exploration, as well as non-European scientific practices. 'Entangled Knowledges' also refers to the critical practices of scholarship: various essays investigate scholarship's own failures in self-reflexivity, arising from an uncritical appropriation of cultural stereotypes and colonial myths, of which the discourse of Orientalism in historiography and residual racialist assumptions in modern genetics serve as examples. The volume thus contributes to the study of cultural and colonial relations as well as to the history of science and scholarship.

The meeting of members of different cultures, frequently conceptualized in abstract terms, always involves the meeting of human bodies. This volume brings together contributions by scholars of various disciplines that address physical aspects and effects of cultural encounters in historical and present-day settings. Bodies were and are not only markers of cultural identity and difference, endlessly inscribed and represented as the 'body politic' or 'the exotic other'; as battlegrounds of cross-cultural signification and identification bodies are also potential agents of change. While some essays address the elusiveness of the 'real' or material body, forever lost behind a veil of textual and visual representation, others analyze the performative effect of such representations – their function of disciplining colonized bodies and subjects by integrating them into Western systems of cultural signification and scientific classification. Yet, as the volume also shows, formerly colonized people, far from subjecting themselves completely to Western discourses of physical discipline, retain traditional body practices – whether in food culture, religious ritual, or musical performances. Such local reinscriptions escape the grip of Western culture and transform the global semantics of the body.