ABSTRACT This study examines the transmedial trajectory of Menschen im Hotel, the 1929 bestselling novel by Austrian writer Vicki Baum, with particular attention to its Hollywood adaptation Grand Hotel, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1932. After outlining the various adaptation processes that took place between the novel’s publication in Berlin and its transformation into a Hollywood film, the paper situates the setting of the Grand Hotel as a modern transmedial and transatlantic topos. The subsequent analysis focuses on specific transatlantic encounters depicted in Baum’s novel and on their negotiated adaptation in Hollywood. These dynamics highlight, on the one hand, the reception of American culture in the Weimar Republic, and on the other, the complex transcultural negotiations that shaped Baum’s work across media and national contexts.

ABSTRACT In this essay, the authors explore how in the context of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world the terms “African music” and “European music” were in the process of being developed and understood as discrete categories. Through two extended case studies – a musical encounter between a lutenist and Richard Ligon in Cape Verde, 1647, and a 1770s manuscript, the “Jamaican Airs,” that describes Black musical practices in Jamaica – they tease out the ways that continental listening was bound to the processes and outcomes of colonialism, racism, and slavery, ultimately arguing that historicizing the terms “African music” and “European music” could lead to a greater understanding of how musical discourse both reacted to and contributed to the shoring up of racial difference during the era of European colonial expansion.

ABSTRACT This essay positions seismic vibration at the centre of early modern imaginings of a vast and interconnected Atlantic world. Although transoceanic exchange of flora and fauna has received extensive scholarly attention, the circulation of acoustic knowledge has been largely overlooked. Focusing on eighteenth-century accounts, this study examines how earthquakes – natural phenomena more often heard and felt rather than seen – challenged ocularcentric models of perception by privileging vibrational epistemologies grounded in bodily sensation and auditory perception. Drawing on eighteenth-century texts that collapsed distinctions between sound, movement, and destruction, I argue that seismic listening practices contributed to early modern conceptions of the Atlantic world as an interconnected and resonant space. In doing so, this article brings historical sound studies into dialogue with Atlantic Studies, offering new ways of examining nature, empire, and embodiment.

ABSTRACT As a representative antebellum American, in Melville's "Benito Cereno" Amasa Delano represses his anxieties with his national identity, which provides him a false sense of stability on the open seas. He relies on an imagined geography of the sea that separates the Atlantic as a place of stable trade and travel from the Pacific as a region of lawlessness and frontier. Yet, Babo and the San Dominick deconstruct Delano's geographical dichotomy by identifying with both oceans – physically and symbolically – throughout the narrative. The African mutineers blur the stability-fragility dynamic of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, proving simultaneously that the former is not so stable and the latter not so lawless. In Delano, Melville outlines the contradictory construction of the sea in nineteenth century: it is where trans-Atlantic empires can expand but it is also the place that proffers the biggest threat to a stability and social order predicated on the enslavement of others.

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) in relation to Stefan Zweig. In the film, the Texan director has chosen an old department store in Görlitz, a small town in eastern Germany known as “Görliwood” for its popularity as a filming location, to stage the history of the imaginary hotel. This miniature world provides the semiotic backdrop against which the universal parable of evil triumphing over good is played out. Rather than a classic adaptation of a single text, the film should be considered a reinterpretation of several works by Zweig. The film’s protagonist comes to embody the writer’s idea of Central Europe erased by the Nazis. Although the protagonist is defeated by history, for the spectator he “wins” on an aesthetic and moral level. And yet, from today’s perspective his victory seems melancholic and insufficient: currently the leading political party in Görlitz is the far-right AFD.

ABSTRACT In this case study of transatlantic intermediality, I discuss the literary/screen pairing formed by Blaise Cendrar’s source novel Sutter’s Gold (English, 1926) and two film adaptations – James Cruze’s Sutter’s Gold (Universal Pictures) and Luis Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Kaiser of California, Tobis-Rota, Berlin), both from 1936. While the term “source” here indicates a shared historical personage and storyline, it is not to be understood as leading primarily to a study of fidelity or adapted text. What we have instead is an intercultural constellation exemplifying the porousness of the re-mediation process itself, whether dealing with Cendrars’s novel about the Gold Rush of 1848, film versions of it, interpreting the role of California’s famous pioneer, editing for the box office, or ideologically manipulating mythic memes of El Dorado for political purposes. All of this is inextricably tied up with the spectators, their standpoint, and the socio-historical mediations of the moment.

ABSTRACT This contribution is an interview with Roman Hüben, a director and screenwriter who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. After making several short films, such as Io ho un potere (2013) and Villa Ventura (2017), in 2022 he made the documentary Douglas Sirk – Hope as in Despair. His latest film Autostop (2025) is in distribution right now. His documentary film on Douglas Sirk, based on previously unpublished archival documents, sheds new light on a filmmaker who played a key role in the artistic dialogue between Europe and the United States before and after the Second World War.

ABSTRACT This study considers the representation and interaction of the written archive and the sonic repertoire in Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s General and Natural History of the Indies (1535). Focusing on Oviedo’s well-known descriptions of the Indigenous areíto, I show how the corrections in one of his extant manuscripts attest to the limits of the “archive” and the superiority of the “repertoire” as, in his words, “formas de historiar” [ways of telling history]. Oviedo also shows how the Spanish interpreted the sounds of Indigenous performance in the Caribbean with suspicion, even as they used their own performative practices as a ruse to achieve violent ends. Ultimately, this essay finds Spanish writing about sonic encounters in the New World to be not entirely successful in the effort to build distinctions and hierarchies between European and Indigenous cultures, as well as between an enduring archive and an ephemeral repertoire.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine how a 1704 Christmas negrilla (or villancico de negro) from the Santa Fe de Bogotá cathedral reimagines Black performance through intersections of local and transatlantic soundscapes. My central argument is that the piece’s metatheatrical portrayal of Black characters enacting a Christmas spectacle reproduces racial stereotypes that circulated throughout the early Atlantic world and also gestures toward African-New Granadan performance practices. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of fungibility, I consider how poetic references to music and performance commodify Black sounds for the stage even as they render the labor of musicians of African origin and descent audible. This focus on the interplay of voice, sound, and racial imagination ultimately contributes to broader understandings of how early modern sonic cultures shaped and circulated ideas of Blackness throughout the Atlantic world.

ABSTRACT This volume situates the Atlantic within the Blue Humanities, reframing water as both material force and epistemology. Moving beyond terrestrial paradigms, the essays explore the Atlantic as a dynamic process of circulation, turbulence, and ecological entanglement. Drawing on theorists such as Cohen, DeLoughrey, Mentz, and Neimanis, contributors examine how Anglophone fiction reimagines the ocean as archive, infrastructure, and actor, foregrounding its role in globalization, empire, and climate crisis. The collection charts a trajectory from canonical re-readings of maritime imagination to contemporary reinventions of labor, catastrophe, and ecological precarity, culminating in feminist, posthuman, and archipelagic perspectives. Reflection and refraction serve as guiding metaphors, highlighting literature’s capacity to mirror entanglement with the sea while refracting meaning through liquid instability. Ultimately, the Atlantic emerges as both cradle of modernity and site of its deepest wounds, compelling renewed ecocritical attention to water’s imaginative abundance and ethical urgency.