Includes bibliographical references and index.

Ch. 1. Cultural mobility: an introduction / Stephen Greenblatt -- Ch. 2. "The wheel of torments": mobility and redemption in Portuguese colonial India (sixteenth century) / Ines G. Zupanov -- Ch. 3. Theatrical mobility / Stephen Greenblatt -- Ch. 4. World literature beyond Goethe / Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus -- Ch. 5. Cultural mobility between Boston and Berlin: how Germans have read and reread narratives of American slavery / Heike Paul -- Ch. 6. Struggling for mobility: migration, tourism and cultural authority in contemporary China / Pal Nyiri.

Cultural Mobility is a blueprint and a model for understanding the patterns of meaning that human societies create. It suggests that cultures, even traditional cultures, are rarely stable or fixed. Radical mobility is not a phenomenon of the twenty-first century alone, but is a key constituent element of human life in virtually all periods.