Transcultural Humanities – Between Globalization and
Postcolonial Re-Readings of History
First Annual International Workshop in the Duke-Bremen Series
June 17 – June 19, 2006, University of Bremen, Germany
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Sabine Broeck and Prof. Dr. Gisela Febel
(both University of Bremen)
Conference Report
Ulf Schulenberg
In his keynote address “Decolonial Humanities and Corporate Values,”
Walter Mignolo (Duke) elucidated the development of
the university from its beginning as an institution to what he called the corporate
university. His brief sketch of this development was supposed to prepare the ground
for his elaborations on the task and the possibility of what he termed intercultural
and transcultural decolonial humanities. Following Mignolo, what is referred to
today as the university was created in Western Christendom, and later on in Europe,
between the end of the eleventh and the end of the thirteenth centuries. The official
language of these universities was Latin, and the master epistemic frame was theology.
Mignolo underscored that the universities in Western Christendom ought to be seen
as one particular way of fulfilling the needs of Western Christians as far as education
and the transmission of knowledge to future generations were concerned. He called
it one particular “house of learning” using one particular language
among numerous other “houses of learning” using different languages
and being governed by different epistemic frames. In view of this plurality of possible
ways of understanding the task and the status of universities, the question inevitably
arises as to why the Western model of the university has become the model to be
expanded all over the world.
On Mignolo’s account, since the Renaissance the history of Western universities
has followed two parallel and complementary paths. The first point that ought to
be mentioned is the transformation of the Medieval university into the Renaissance
university. While this development took place within Europe, the second aspect worth
considering concerns the beginning of the imperial/colonial expansion of Western
universities. Regarding this colonial history of the university, one should see
that slowly but steadily British and French imperial or colonial expansions took
over the roles formerly played by Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Furthermore, it is crucial to understand that due to this epistemological
imperialism former houses of learning were displaced or radically reduced in importance
by Western models which took their place. The next point Mignolo addressed in his
talk was the transformation of the Renaissance university into the Enlightenment
(or Kantian-Humboldtian) university. He put a premium on the fact that this form
of university was supposed to serve the interests of a new social class and of the
emerging nation-states. According to Mignolo, a parallel process could be observed
in the colonies where a transformation of the colonial/Renaissance university into
the colonial/Enlightenment university was apparent. This kind of development could
be observed in many places around the world, with the founding of European universities
in India, China, Japan, the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mignolo used his brief history of the development of the Western university in order
to illustrate three main points. First, he called attention to the aforementioned
transformation of the Kantian-Humboldtian university into the corporate university,
a transformation which took place in capitalist and imperial countries. Mignolo’s
contention was that since World War II the principles that had animated the Kantian-Humboldtian
model and that had established its relation to the modern nation-state had been
displaced by the principles of the corporate university. Wheras the primary concern
of the Kantian-Humboldtian university had been the formation and education of the
citizens, the main goal of the corporate university was the training of experts
who would contribute to the growth and expansion of the capitalist market(s). The
second point whose importance Mignolo emphasized was that the corporate university
followed the path of the histories of imperial/colonial expansion and was taking
over the Renaissance and Enlightenment histories of colonial universities in South
America, North and South Africa, China, India, and Japan. Finally, he maintained
that an obvious pattern of a de-colonization of knowledge had already begun. Mignolo
submitted that this de-colonization of knowledge could take place, and was actually
taking place, within as well as outside the university as a Western and colonial/imperial
institution.
Mignolo closed his talk by directing attention to the
necessity of creating a new type of university. This new kind of school he called
a pluri-versity. A pluri-versity has two primary goals. First, a de-colonization
of knowledge and of being, that is, the attempt, as Mignolo put it, to help learning
to unlearn in order to re-learn and to learn to be (again). Second, a contribution
to the development of a pluri-national state (while the Kantian-Humboldtian university
was intimately interwoven with the idea of the nation-state). Mignolo’s suggestions
culminated in a brief discussion of the potential of an intercultural or transcultural
de-colonial humanities. This de-colonial and transcultural project ought to be developed,
within the university, by faculty and students, graduate and undergraduate, and
also by nonacademic intellectuals. It must not be managed from the top, that is,
by university managers. De-colonial humanities, as Mignolo made unequivocally clear,
signifies that education is not supposed to be at the service of the state or the
corporation, but at the service of the formerly disempowered. It is a new form of
empowerment which refuses to succumb to the power of the state and the mechanisms
of the capitalist market.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Berkeley) began his talk
“The Role of Ethnic Studies in the New Humanist Revolution” with an
elaboration on the complexity of the term “decolonial humanism.” His
suggestions concerning this “new humanism of the comdemned,” which is
supposed to change the West’s understanding of what it means to be human,
prepared the ground, as it were, for the main topic of his talk: the role ethnic
studies ought to play for the development of what he termed the new humanities.
Expanding on the context in which ethnic studies emerged, Maldonado-Torres argued
that it first came to prominence in the late 1960s. It was part of larger demands
from the Black Student Union and the Third World Student Front at San Francisco
State University and at the University of California, Berkeley. The year 1969, as
he underscored, should of course be seen in the context of what is commonly referred
to as the end of the Age of Europe, the anticolonial struggles after the Second
World War, and the civil rights movement.
Maldonado-Torres’s contention was that ethnic studies in general ought to
be interpreted as a massive intervention into the Kantian-Humboldtian understanding
of the task the university has to fulfill. Ethnic studies strove to offer a new
conception of study in the humanities, that is, it sought to develop new possibilities
for the production of scientific methods and, above all, it called attention to
the crucial nature of a new relationship between academic work, socio-political
problems, and community life. Maldonado-Torres stated
that the meaning of ethnic studies could not be properly grasped without taking
into consideration its relation to larger shifts in Western thought, or to what
he called previous humanist revolutions. Ethnic studies, on his account, belongs
to a set of political and epistemological interventions that promote a new humanist
revolution which offers the possibility of radically questioning and rethinking
the concept of the human, as well as the hierarchies, structures, and axioms of
the traditional human sciences. Throughout his talk, Maldonado-Torres maintained
that the idea of utopia was of utmost importance for the new identity politics.
In other words, ethnic studies should be considered a utopian site within the humanities.
In his talk “‘Ici est un autre’: Writing ‘After’ Migration
and Survival Knowledge in Cécile Wajsbrot and Sherko Fatah,”
Ottmar Ette (Potsdam) discussed two novels written by children of migration.
The protagonist and first-person narrator of Wajsbrot’s Mémorial
(2005) belongs to the second generation of immigrants, that is, she is a child of
migration seeking to make a new home. As Ette demonstrated it is crucial to see
that the children of migration, who have never experienced the movement of flight
from one place to another, do not dissolve completely in the new “here,”
but carry within them the “there” which once was their parents’
and ancestors’ “here” of a homeplace. In other words, these children
grow up feeling that something is not quite right, something is missing, and that
there is moreover something which cannot be named. The old flight routes and migrations,
the stories of the refugees, the expelled, and the rootless, are stored in the memory
transgenerationally and constitute what Ette called a vectorial (family-) memory
at precisely the moment when their parents intend their children to adapt to a new
“here,” to start a new life in a new place. However, the new “here”
is another one: “Ici est un autre.” Here (“ici”) is another
place, a there (“là-bas”). Ette’s contention was that Mémorial
ought to be regarded as contributing to the depiction of the current living conditions
on a planet shaped by countless migratory movements, movements of flight caused
by persecution, expulsion, and annihilation.
In spite of all the hopes invested in her by her parents, and in spite of her intimacy
with the French language, the nameless narrator of Wajsbrot’s novel does not
feel rooted in France. She does not have a fixed abode. Ette submitted that a text
like Mémorial called attention to one central task of literature,
namely, to reactivate the voices from the past, to transport them into the living
present and thereby to make them audible again. In this literature of migration,
the past and the present are firmly linked in a highly complex polylogue. To put
this somewhat differently, Ette argued that “ici” and “là-bas”
not only had to be understood in a spatial but also in a temporal way. In his opinion,
the “there” in Mémorial was made audible in the “here,”
the past in the present, and the “you” in the “we.” In this
context one ought to understand that it is the challenge of the narrator’s
generation to translate the first generation’s survival knowledge into the
life knowledge of the second generation. As Ette underscored, the narrator had to
escape from the reduction to only one time level and to strive to creatively reconnect
past, present, and future. Furthermore, she had to become fully aware of her own
life, and writing, without a fixed abode. This urges us, if we follow Ette, to realize
the need for a new kind of literature governed by the notions of polyphony and mobility,
a literature, that is, which is not committed to one single space, not even a place
of memory, but which rather chooses everywhere as its playground.
While Mémorial tells the story of a child of migration looking for
the traces of her family history and that of her community and trying to develop
a sense of identity, Sherko Fatah`s Im Grenzland (2001) deals with a smuggler
who seeks to secure his family’s income by transporting illegal luxury goods
across a border that has actually become impassable. Both texts center on a journey
to or through the borderlands, through a mined territory (literally and metaphorically).
Moreover, both deal with liminal experiences and the possibility of survival (knowledge).
Ette argued that both texts might be used to show that writing “after”
migration is still writing against the background of migration. This writing without
a fixed abode is not only characterized by the multilayered complexity of transspatial,
transtemporal, and transcultural structures, but it also should be seen as a form
of writing that neither dissolves in the space of what is commonly referred to as
national literature nor can it be subsumed under the category of world literature.
As Ette made clear at the end of his presentation, one of the primary future tasks
we as humanities scholars have to face is to rethink philology in terms of movement
Madina Tlostanova (Moscow, Bremen), in her talk “Between
Intellectual Mimicry and Neo-Imperial Revival: The Humanities of the Ex-Second World
in the Global Epistemic Context,” contended that contemporary subaltern theorists
often neglected the ex-second world, or ex-socialist block, because of its particular
status. While the ex-Third World, as she argued, had become “fashionable,”
Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union appeared as Others to both worlds, the West
and the non-West. Hence, this ambivalent positioning offers the possibility of developing
another, truly different perspective which no longer seeks to imitate the Western
or non-Western model. It is crucial to understand that it is from this position,
ambivalent, uncertain, and unpredictable, that the mechanisms of neoliberal globalization
might be critiqued, that is, the difference of the ex-second world allows one to
deconstruct the impact of globalization on culture, on the humanities, on the production
of knowledge, and on the understanding of epistemology. The last aspect was of primary
concern to Tlostanova. She advanced the argument that Russia’s subaltern positioning
was not so much a question of economics or politics, but that it was expressed epistemically.
She spoke of an epistemic and intellectual colonization of Russia by Western Europe
in this context. By this she meant that Russia had sought to copy the system of
education and the university as an institution from Western Europe. The Western
model appeared simultaneously as an unattainable ideal and as a rival to catch up
with. This had also contributed to the somewhat schizophrenic attitude of many Russian
intellectuals.
Elaborating on the development from the Kantian/Humboldtian model of the university
to the corporate university in Russia, Tlostanova throughout her talk underscored
that the humanities and social sciences in Russia were suffering from the fact that
they did not offer something original, but rather were governed by Eurocentric paradigms.
In order to further illustrate this change from the Kantian/Humboldtian university
to the corporate one, she briefly discussed a text by the Portuguese sociologist
Boaventura de Souza Santos: “The University in the Twenty-First Century: Toward
a Democratic and Emancipatory University Reform” (2004). In this piece, Santos
points out three forms of crisis of the modern university: the crisis of hegemony,
the crisis of legitimacy, and what he calls the institutional crisis. All three
crises direct attention to the present metamorphosis of the university due to the
impact of neoliberal globalization. Tlostanova discussed these crises with special
regard to Russian developments.
As a solution to the present crisis of Russian humanities Tlostanova proposed what
she termed the development of critical border perspectives and a critical border
thinking. Intellectuals, if we follow her suggestions, are supposed to take the
position of what she calls border alternative thinkers, that is, they ought to seek
to negotiate a way between the cultural metropolis and the colony, and at the same
time they are supposed to deconstruct both the dominating Eurocentric paradigm and
forms of nationalist or religious fundamentalisms. Wishing to reduce or even stop
the effectiveness of epistemic mimicry typical of Russian intellectuals, Tlostanova
admitted that this kind of border mentality often was expressed more productively
in cultural artifacts such as novels, movies, theater, and forms of linguistic and
cultural hybridity than in the realm of the humanities. In her opinion, Russian
and post-Soviet intellectuals ought to finally get rid of the chains of mental Eurocentrism,
find their own independent voice, and seek to enter into a dialogue with non-Western
epistemic models. According to Tlostanova, this deimperialization and decolonization
of the minds of Russian intellectuals, this gesture of rejecting their secondary
Eurocentrism, together with the change in their attitude toward the ex-Third World
and its epistemic legacy, is the only possibility of contributing to an intellectual
renaissance in Russia.
The talk of Gabriele Dietze (Berlin) centered on the
question of “Critical Occidentalism.” She discussed the following points:
Germany as an immigration country; the fact that Germany still considers itself
to be monocultural; the dialectics of Occidentalism and Orientalism; the present-day
situation of Orientalism in Germany; cultural neo-Orientalism and its sexual politics;
the rhetoric of racism in Germany and the question of biological racism; as well
as the construction of the Occidental man and woman. Dietze’s contention was
that critical Occidentalism might be used to describe Germany as a transnational
and multicultural society. Her primary focus was to elucidate the possibility of
transfering border thinking and postcolonial thinking to Germany.
In his talk “Repetition With A Difference – New Humanities and New Masters,”
Jean-Paul Rocchi (Paris) focused on Transcultural
or New Humanities and the question of epistemological ruptures. Right at the beginning
of his presentation he warned against the danger that transcultural humanities might
eventually produce new master narratives which are satisfied with offering new conceptual
frameworks utterly divorced from the world of practice, the realm of social change
and political struggle. On Rocchi’s account, epistemic ruptures which were
supposed to prepare political and social change often only sought to emulate those
patterns and structures and signs of domination they had set out to deconstruct
in the first place. As examples he named the masculinism and homophobia typical
of some approaches in the field of African American Studies and the racism that
can be detected in some versions of feminism.
In spite of the fact that the so-called Other has gained such prominence in the
humanities today, some questions are still being avoided. The most crucial of these,
as Rocchi underscored, center on the intricate interwovenness of power, knowledge,
and identities. Even a radical epistemological critique ought to be aware that it
is constantly in danger of becoming another quest for authority, legitimacy, and
recognition. In order to illustrate the complexity of this problem, Rocchi termed
epistemological ruptures the pharmakon of the humanities. It seemed perfectly legitimate
to consider them a cure since they offered new perspectives, but it was also possible
to advance the argument that those ruptures better be regarded as a poison since
they subordinated thinking to the fantasy of the theorist’s social ego. What
Rocchi repeatedly stressed in his talk was that epistemological ruptures must not
be divorced from the world of practice, or what he called mundane realities, that
is, the new humanities must not be satisfied with simply bearing witness to social
and political transformations. Furthermore, in order to prevent a new transdisciplinary
praxis from becoming a new universalism in the guise of cultural relativism, the
new methodology had to call attention to the necessity of the researchers’
self-interrogation. According to Rocchi, authors such as Fanon, Baldwin, and Du
Bois made us realize the importance of emotions, pain and pleasure, exhilaration
and madness for the endeavor to develop a new mode of thinking and a new consciousness.
The attempt to decolonize the mind offered the possibility of grasping the importance
of this kind of still living experience which was much more than raw material to
be rationalized. Moreover, decolonizing the mind was about inventing a new subject
to whom consciousness would also be about desire, doubt, and affects. Where, Rocchi
asked, was the place for desire, pain, pleasure, doubt, and affects, for personal
introspection and critical self-interrogation, in the work of theorists (including
those commonly associated with the new humanities)?
The production of knowledge, as Rocchi made unequivocally clear, had to be located
in the too often neglected or even ignored mundane realities. The newness of the
new humanities depended upon whether or not they would eventually prove themselves
to be capable of confronting what the traditional humanities had been seeking to
suppress for so long – the failure to know. While this kind of limitation
was seen as a severe problem in the field of theory, it played a crucial and positive
role in the field of art and literature. Rocchi mentioned a new generation of anglophone
black writers, such as Rozena Maart, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Melvin Dixon,
who had contributed to the development of a radically new understanding of identity.
Making sexual desire the vehicle of excess, this new literary practice should be
understood as a critique of any kind of predetermined identity. Novelists, poets,
and artists attempted to cross gender-related, sexual, racial, and national boundaries
and to introduce new perspectives. This black literature of post-identity defied
territorialization, and it illuminated the effects of a desiring consciousness which
opposed any form of determinism, teleology, and normativity. The subject’s
new agency, as Rocchi averred, ought to be seen as a politicized gesture of dissent,
originating in the subject’s life choices and aesthetic motivations, which
opposed culturally imposed allegiances to race, nation, gender, and normative sexuality.
In contrast to the texts of (most) theorists, in the work of post-identity writers
desire could be interpreted as the textual space of an ongoing self-interrogation
and self-transformation.
Manuela Boatca (Eichstätt) started her presentation
“Narcissism Revisited: Social Theoretical Implications and Postcolonial Antidotes”
with a brief discussion of the most radical changes in modern epistemology and in
the intellectual development of modernity in general. As the most decisive changes
she named the Copernican revolution, or what she also termed the cosmological blow
to the universal narcissism of man, Darwin’s theory of evolution as a biological
blow, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as a psychological blow. Following
Boatca, this depiction of the Western epistemological tradition is a common reference
point for most stories about the intellectual development of modernity, yet it completely
ignores what she called the geopolitical blow to occidental narcissism. By this
she meant the European discovery of America which signified a severe blow to Western
thought and the modern self-consciousness. Underscoring the significance of this
geopolitical blow for postcolonial studies, she contended that it was by ignoring,
or rather suppressing, the radical alterity of the New World that the categories
of analysis developed by European social sciences and used for the study of social
reality could claim universal relevance.
Boatca made clear that the primary aim of her talk was to elucidate the possibility
of developing a social theory which was transcultural and cosmopolitan, and that
this task required one to unthink and radically question contemporary theoretical
models. For postcolonial theories it is of utmost importance to understand the development
and function of Western abstract universalism. The aforementioned geopolitical blow
offers the possibility of grasping that this abstract universalism of Enlightenment
thought is a means for coping with the experience of radical alterity. In other
words, the discovery of the New World forced Western thinking to confront the notion
of alterity, and the result of this confrontation was an abstract universalism which
glossed over forms of difference, otherness, incommensurability, and heterogeneity
which did not fit into the master narrative. Furthermore, as Boatca maintained,
the idea of an abstract universalism goes hand in hand with the notion of a universal
history subsuming the whole of mankind under the project of Western modernity and
at the same time providing the legitimating rhetoric for further colonial expansion.
The universalizing paradigm of Western modernity has always sought to hide its local
history, that is, the fact that basically it is just another form of particularism.
A postcolonial re-reading of history, at Boatca pointed out, would not only have
to pay attention to the differences of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual
orientation silenced by Western abstract universalism, but it would also seek to
reveal the negative global consequences which the expansion of Western modernity
has had as far as the hierarchization of races and systems of economic, political,
and religious organization is concerned. At the end of her presentation, Boatca
underscored the possibility, and necessity, of combining insights from postcolonial
studies, on the one hand, and dependency theory and world-systems analysis, on the
other. She argued that the development and the expansion of the global capitalist
system required the combination of ideological and cultural mechanisms, which were
supposed to establish new hierarchical structures and which seemingly effortlessly
turned particularity into universality, with economic and political conditions which
were needed to prepare the conditions for implementing those structures in the first
place. A postcolonial theoretical approach, as Boatca averred, had to be capable
of adequately grasping the complexity of this combination.
In his presentation “Deprovincializing Sociology: Postcolonial Contributions,”
Sérgio Costa (Sáo Paulo, Flensburg)
tried to contribute to the dialogue between sociology and postcolonial studies.
While many sociologists have seemed somewhat reluctant to establish a dialogue between
these two fields, Costa’s contention was that they did not seem incompatible
at all. The insights of postcolonial studies do not necessarily lead to a destabilization
of sociology, but may on the contrary enrich it. At the beginning of his talk, Costa
focused on what he called the West-Rest dichotomy or polarity. He used this term
to call attention to the fact that in sociology the characteristics and specificities
of non-Western societies are often regarded and interpreted as an absence or incompleteness
since they are deduced from those societies that are commonly referred to as Western.
The West appears as civilized, sophisticated, advanced, and good, whereas the Rest
is seen as wild, underdeveloped, and bad in comparison. This West-Rest polarity
has also prepared the ground, of course, for the Western grand historical narrative
which reduces modern history to a success story of the urgently needed Westernization
of the world. That this success story does not leave room for the idea of different
temporalities, historicities, and desires goes without saying. According to Costa,
postcolonial strategies are particularly useful as far as the theoretical endeavor
of deconstructing this West-Rest dichotomy is concerned. At the center of his discussion
was the question of what sociology could learn from postcolonial studies.
In his discussion of the possibility of deconstructing the West-Rest dichotomy Costa
concentrated on three aspects. First, the critique of sociology’s teleological
understanding of history. Second, the search for a hybrid site of enunciation. Finally,
the question of a new understanding of subjectivity. Regarding the first aspect,
he pointed out that the postcolonial critique of sociology’s teleological
definition of modernity was to a certain extent justified. However, he also underlined
that the particular target of this critique was not sociology as such, but rather
a specific sociological school, namely, the macrosociology of modernization. In
Costa’s opinion, it is crucial to realize that this kind of critique can also
be found in the field of sociology itself, that is, the radical rhetoric of postcolonial
studies competes with and adds to a critique of macrosociological categories, their
universalism and teleology, that has been proposed within the framework of sociological
theories that have developed a new understanding of modernity and modernization.
Concerning the question of hybridity, Costa’s elaborations were unequivocal.
Hybridity and hybridization are of no interest to sociology. Not only did he advance
the argument that Bhabha’s concept of a Third Space seemed to be without relevance
for sociology, he also maintained that while hybridity might be investigated as
a discourse of actors, as a normative or analytical category it was innocuous.
Postcolonial studies are of primary importance to sociology, if we follow Costa,
because they urge us to reconceptualize our understanding of the relation between
difference, the subject, and politics. Authors such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy
demonstrate that the notion of a decentering of identity must not necessarily seek
to imitate the postmodern and poststructuralist complete fragmentation of the subject.
Furthermore, the new decentering ought to avoid the reification of the Western subject
typical of contemporary sociology. Costa argued that it was a question of discovering
the multiple differences, the subtleties, within binary differences, as well as
of recovering the intersections between race, class, gender, and ethnicity. When
sociology and postcolonial studies fruitfully come together, as he made clear, the
relation between the subject and discourse might be theorized in a new manner. Moreover,
the new understanding of subjectivity also offers the possibility of fully grasping
the importance of what he called the space of creativity of the subject.
The question that was of primary concern to Markus Wachowski
(Bremen) was the application of an occidental theory in the analysis of a non-occidental
phenomenon. In his talk “Shiite Islam: Being Rational Within the Irrational:
A Weberian Approach Beyond the Occidental Bias,” he briefly summarized a central
aspect of his dissertation project which analyzes a small Shiite branch of Islam
called Isma’iliya. Wachowski is mainly interested in the relation between
the intellectual rationalization or conception of the world typical of this version
of Islam, on the one hand, and the adherents’ worldview and their conduct
of life, on the other. In order to elucidate this relation, he applied a Weberian
approach. He drew attention to the question of whether it was possible to use Weber’s
theoretical framework in order to develop a possibility of depicting non-protestant
cultures and religions which went beyond Weber’s occidental bias. Wachowski
pointed out that most of what Weber had said about Islam was negative, and that
one might speak of a fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam
on Weber’s part. In a part that discussed Weber’s notion of rationality,
Wachowski differentiated between Weber’s use of rationality in a purposive
sense (“zweckrational”) and in an objective sense (”richtigkeitsrational”).
In this context, he elaborated on the notion of “objectivity” or “objective
truth” in connection with the Western definition of science, and he moreover
put a stress on the fact that Weber’s understanding of rationality was highly
biased and inevitably led to the establishment of hierarchies in asymmetric relations
(rational and objective science and its power of definition).
On Wachowski account, the meaning of rationality in Weber’s framework becomes
more obvious when one asks how this concept is related to its alleged opposite,
irrationality. It is precisely this latter concept, as Wachowski contended, that
is of utmost importance if one seeks to conceptually grasp Weber’s contemporary
significance for an analysis of non-Western phenomena. In Weber’s studies
of the concept of rationality, irrationality remains a blank. Irrationality in Weber,
following Wachowski, has two functions. First, it serves as what Wachoski called
a dead end, that is, it serves as that which has to be overcome. Irrationality denotes
the disorientations of, for instance, sufism and certain forms of salvation religion
lost in mysticism and otherworldly spheres. Irrationality in this sense is the exact
opposite of the desired disenchantment of the world, it blocks the road to the firm
establishment of occidental rationalism. The latter in turn is indispensable as
far as the fulfillment of capitalist desires is concerned. To put this somewhat
differently, Weber’s theory can be used, as Wachowski demonstrated, in order
to illustrate the intimate and at the samt time powerful connections between rationality
(primarily in the sense of objective knowledge and truth), protestantism, and capitalism.
Wachowski called the second meaning of irrationality the wild card. Under this category
can be subsumed everything that escapes from the grasp of rationalization and abstraction,
that is, the irrational in this sense means contingency, the world of practice,
and of daily desires. Since the world of abstraction and the world of practice are
linked through what Wachowski termed an ethical rationalization process, one has
to confront the problem that the more rational a worldview becomes, the more prominent
its irrational aspects become. Rationality, in other words, cannot be had without
irrationality, and the history of rationality can only be written by considering
the impact of its dialectical twin, as it were, irrationality. Wachowski closed
his remarks by drawing attention to the fact that his discussion of Weber’s
notion of rationality had led him to the idea that rationality could no longer function
as a means to implement hierarchies between cultures. Moreover, his re-reading of
Weber had led to the suggestion that the traditional Western concept of modernity
was obsolete and that one should rather speak of multiple modernities, each with
its own understanding of rationality and irrationality.
Anja Bandau (Berlin) divided her presentation “Circulating
Theory: The Concept of US-Mexican Border Literature and the Analytical Tools of
the Transcultural” into two parts. First, she offered a brief history of the
field of border studies, the way the concept of the border has been contested and
reinterpreted, and she also addressed the question of whether one might advance
the idea that this concept seems overused and too undifferentiated. In the second
part of her talk, she presented the literary production on the US-Mexican border
as a case study in order to illustrate her main ideas. According to Bandau, it was
due to the impact of border studies, which had reached center stage in the 1980s,
that one was offered the possibility of grasping the complexity of the idea that
borders were more than geopolitical dividing lines. In other words, border studies
called attention to the fact that borders were more than physical, geographical,
or material entities; national space was also characterized by those borders that
were inscribed on bodies by race, class, gender, ethnicity, and age. Accordingly,
the borderlands can be interpreted either as a concrete and delimited territory
or as a space governed by cultural flows, negotiations, and intersections. Since
the 1980s, border studies has become increasingly prominent and important. Together
with hybridity, it has become a powerful master concept, as it were, dominating
other conceptual frameworks, shaping comparative studies, and even structuring the
perception of everyday life.
Bandau stressed that the celebration of border studies, as well as the praise of
the concepts of hybridity and difference, ought to be seen critically. In order
to avoid a certain exhaustion of the concept or the idea of border studies, she
argued for the necessity of what she termed the co-concepts of gender, class, and
ethnicity. Rendering the conception of border studies more complex by introducing
these additional analytical categories offers the possibility of combining an analysis
of space (as borderlands), an analysis of the political and cultural processes effective
in this space, an analysis of the agents, and an interpretation of the cultural
products produced by these agents.
In order to clarify the meaning of border literature, Bandau elaborated on the complexity
of Chicano literature. Referring to the work of the Mexican critic Miguel Rodriguez
Lozano, she contended that border literature was not necessarily synonymous with
Chicano literature and that one should not ignore the literature of Mexico’s
Northern region. While Chicano literature metaphoricizes the border and homogenizes
the border space, the literature of Mexico’s North represents the border as
heterogeneous and immediate. The different positions also become clear when one
considers that Chicanos write from a diasporic situation, referring to an imaginary
homeland which they strive to “repossess” by symbolic strategies, whereas
the literature written on Mexican national territory is written from inside the
national space, as it were, and thus can refer differently to this territory. Bandau
argued that what made Rodriguez Lozano’s perspective so important was that
he saw the conceptual appropriation of the borderlands as reductive and metaphorical
and that he moreover urged one to realize that what was celebrated as an innovative
reconceptualization north of the border was severely critiqued south of it. In order
to further illuminate the meaning of border literature, Bandau closed her talk with
a brief discussion of Luis Humberto Crostwhaite’s Luna siempre es un amor
dificil (1994).
Right at the beginning of her talk “Transcultural Projects: A Challenge to
the Humanities,” Sabine Broeck (Bremen) stressed
that she understood transcultural studies in the humanities as a genuine reformation
of the humanities. She averred that transcultural studies were supposed to be much
more than a sort of comparative hermeneutics that eventually turned out to be utterly
incapable of criticizing traditional borders, fields, and institutions. One of the
primary concerns of transcultural studies, according to Broeck, was the attempt
to read beyond the imperatives of individual cultures. Broeck sought to elucidate
the necessity of what she called reading on the cuts, that is, a reading of the
in-between that would lead to a radical reorganization of knowledge production (new
epistemologies, new agents of knowledge, and new objects of culture).
Elaborating on the implications of a new transcultural studies, Broeck mentioned
four aspects. First, she contended that borders of national canons had to be radically
questioned. Second, she maintained that disciplinary borders had to be critiqued
(with the possible exception of the natural sciences). Third, language barrriers
had to be broken down. The final point she mentioned in this context concerned the
question of traditional epistemologies which had turned out to be compromised and
severely limited and hence had to be retheorized. In order to further illuminate
the implications of her suggestions, Broeck briefly discussed the new field of Black
European Studies for which she and others have been preparing the ground in the
last years. Not only was research in this field expected to lead to what she called
a critique of white asymmetry in philosophy, political studies, and historiography,
but Black European Studies would also, on a broader scale, contribute to a profound
recomposition of the academic landscape.
Broeck underlined the importance of flexible academic networks, including workshops
such as the Duke-Bremen Series and also summer schools, for the development of transcultural
studies. At the same time, she called attention to possible difficulties and dangers
transcultural studies most presumably would have to confront. Those reach from questions
such as the place of transcultural studies in the corporate university and in the
neo-liberal and/or neo-conservative political culture in general, to that of simply
providing people with transcultural skills or an understanding of chic and cool
hybridity in order to enhance their mobility and flexibility (and thereby completely
forgetting about the critical and counterhegemonic energy typical of transcultural
studies). Throughout her presentation, Broeck insisted on the fact that one must
not forget precisely this critical energy. She closed her remarks with a few words
about a necessary return to ethics, and she also reminded her listeners of the significance
of Derrida’s L’université sans condition for the project
of developing a sophisticated transcultural humanities and transcultural studies.
At the center of Alexandra Karentzos’s (Trier)
talk, “Optical Encyclopaedism: A Critical Encounter Between Postcolonial Art
and Art History,” was the “Fondation Arab pour l’image”
(FAI) or “Arab Image Foundation.” This archive, which was founded by
the artists Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, collects photographs from the Middle East
and North Africa, some of the material going back to the 19th century,
and presents them to the public. The question that preoccupied Karentzos in her
presentation was whether the work of the FAI ought to be considered a mere addition
to objects generally noticed by the West. Or does it, on the contrary, possess the
potential to be regarded as a radical critique of Western ordering and classification
systems, those systems that structure and govern knowledge? On her account, it does
possess this potential, and her primary concern was to show to what extent these
artworks disclose and question the basic Western structures of classification and
ascription, as well as the mechanisms of ethnic exclusion.
Following Karentzos, the colonizers introduced photography to the Middle East in
the mid-19th century. This kind of photography, as she stressed, produced
mainly stereotyped images of exotic motifs, landscapes, and antiquities. These typically
“exotic” photographs in turn reached Europe and had of course a profound
impact. While this exotic imagery still shapes our understanding of the Middle East,
the fact that there has also been an independent photography in the Middle East,
producing utterly different photos, has hardly been registered in the West yet.
In order to illuminate the importance of this different kind of photography, Karentzos
discussed the project “Mapping Sitting” by Zaatari and Raad. In this
project, the artists-curators used commercial photography from the 1950s, for instance,
studio passport photographs or institutional group portraits. Showing various photographs
from this project, Karentzos underscored that the FAI had to be considered as a
kind of counter-archive to the Western corpus of knowledge about the “Orient.”
Furthermore, she contended that the project, as the title indicated, took up the
themes of posing, measuring, and mapping. Those structures that allow the medium
of photography to generate and transport knowledge also offer the possibility of
localizing, classifying, and identifying ethnicity. It is crucial to grasp, as Karentzos
made clear, that “Mapping Sitting” radically, and at the same time playfully,
deconstructs these photographic and archival principles. Regarding the passport
photographs, the artists group the photos in a way that the resulting work parodies
the classification system of the archive. In one series of photos, for instance,
women are classified according to the print pattern of their blouses, that is, the
order relies on and is governed by an utterly contingent feature. To put this somewhat
differently, the artists challenge the foundations, seemingly firm and reliable,
of the Western ordering system.
By playfully deconstructing the Western logos, Raad and Zaatari create new orders
and open up new meanings. They parody those mechanisms working in colonialism that
classify people according to ethnic and religious categories. The works discussed
in Karentzos’s presentation do not simply supplement the Western art discourse,
but they rather challenge or radically question traditional epistemology and axioms
of knowledge. Karentzos, at the end of her talk, drew a parallel between the art
of the FAI and postcolonial theories. Insisting on the importance of irreducible
diversity and not offering a synthesizing or totalizing perspective, the art of
the FAI strives to offer a many-voiced, genuinely pluralistic counterpoint reading.
Hence, it ought to be regarded as a strategic intervention aiming at political consequences.
Following Christoph Singler (Besancon), it is crucial
to realize the importance of the question of whether a thing like postcolonial or
transcultural visual studies exists. Singler began his talk “Frontiers of
Visual Culture: Power of Taste, Taste of Power?” by briefly elaborating on
the pictorial turn. Radically questioning the predominance of the linguistic paradigm,
visual culture is often considered as a means to transgress national boundaries.
With regard to the recognition of non-Western art forms by Western art history,
Singler argued that in contemporary visual arts the line that Western aesthetics
had drawn between high and low, popular and elite, and Western and non-Western arts
had been abolished. The contemporary art scene, as he stated, welcomed non-Western
artists if they concentrated on issues that were of interest to postcolonial studies
or postcolonial visual studies, for instance, identity and transculturalism, migration,
racism, the integration of modernity and archaic social structures, etc. It was
in this context that Singler insisted on the importance of an urgently needed reexamination
of the concepts of “otherness” and “cultural difference.”
What is the meaning of radical “otherness” in intercultural (art) discourses
if the Western discourse seemingly has problems in accepting non-Western criteria
in its attempt to illuminate and appreciate non-Western arts?
In order to clarify his argument Singler chose three examples of non-Western art.
First, Havana Myths, from the Humboldt Series, by Atelier Morales. In his discussion
of this picture Singer raised the question of whether one needed a completely different
debate regarding the standards of Latin American arts. Inevitably the question arises
of whether we have really abandoned the various clichés which often govern
our approach to this kind of art. Furthermore, one must not avoid the question of
who defines which art forms are legitimate with regard to which culture. How is
marginality established in the realm of high art? All these positions, if we follow
Singler, are established on the basis of characteristics typical of Western modernity.
As his second example Singler chose the work of the Cuban artist Guido Llinás.
In Llinás’s work, as Singler averred, blackness as otherness is removed.
Insisting on his artistic autonomy, that is, on one of the primary characteristics
of Western modernism, this Cuban artist forces us to interpret blackness as a Cuban
political issue and not in terms of otherness. However, his genuinely modern position
as far as aesthetics is concerned must not be interpreted as an apolitical gesture
since he tries to locate black artists inside the modern project, as active participants
and not as passive figures on the margin. In his discussion of the work of Vicente
Pimentel, his final example, Singler contended that this artist strove to direct
attention to the importance of a common origin of black and white and at the same
time to the obvious denial of this shared origin by Western culture.
All three examples, in an either playful, ironic, or satirical manner, question
any simplistic understanding of the meaning of “otherness.” Thus, they
urge one to rethink the alleged necessity of this Western concept for the discourse
of visual studies. Wheras Pimentel finds the origin of mankind in African artwork,
Singler agreed with Michelle Wallace’s suggestion that we need more research
in African art if we want to show that Africa is more than just a myth constructed
in diaspora. According to him, one should look at non-Western art without too many
(Western) concepts in mind. One should seek to examine the strategies of black artists,
their desires and difficulties, instead of simply defending or judging them within
a Western theoretical framework. Singler emphasized that it was impossible to understand
the complexity of present-day art without the help of art history, yet at the same
time he proposed that new approaches to art history were indispensable.
Bernal Herrera (Costa Rica), in his talk “Modernity
and Colonial Worlds,” suggested a reconceptualization of modernity. At the
center of his discussion was the relation between periphery and metropolis. Following
Herrera, it is quite common among philosophers to advance the idea that peripheries
did not participate in modernity. Moreover, many historians have argued that the
peripheries’ primary function was to stimulate metropolitan processes. What
unites these two positions is that colonial worlds are radically reduced in their
historical importance. Even postmodern theoretical approaches have excluded colonial
worlds from modernity. Although they stress the crucial nature of difference, margins,
and peripheries, they tend to regard colonial cultures not as integral parts of
modernity, but as a form of otherness which is excluded from modernity and which
thus offers a perspective from which to analyze and criticize it. By contrast, Herrera’s
reconceptualization of modernity sees it as the development of two separate but
interdependent poles of action: colonial and metropolitan. Herrera emphasized that
according to his reconceptualization, colonial worlds were an integral part of modernity.
On his account, the Iberian colonial undertakings in America, beginning in the 16th
century, ought to be seen as the initiation of the colonial pole.
Herrera argued that his conception of modernity, which was governed by two poles,
did not imply a bipolar structure of opposing elements. The colonial pole and the
metropolitan pole are linked by numerous hybrid processes which include common elements
from both poles. Moreover, the poles cannot be reduced to specific geopolitical
milieus, that is, colonial developments can be detected in metropolitan societies
and vice versa. At the same time, however, one must not ignore the fact that at
the macro level some cultures have clearly functioned as sociopolitical and intellectual
metropolises, whereas others have acted as colonies and peripheries. Herrera underscored
that his suggested reconceptualization of modernity inevitably led to a reinterpretation
of processes that had hitherto been read from a metropolitan perspective. In other
words, such a reconceptualization would lead one to stop seeing the peripheries’
marginality as a mere disadvantage. On the contrary, it would urge one to understand
that it offers an epistemological advantage since it allows one to ask questions
and to propose answers which the metropolises have so far neglected, ignored, or
suppressed. Central to Herrera’s argument was that the colonial pole had appeared
one century before the metropolitan pole. Furthermore, there could be detected no
difference as far as the degreee of articulation was concerned. According to Herrera,
the colonial pole was more successful in achieving its goal than the metropolitan
pole, because the attempt to dominate the colonial populations was more successful
than the one to liberate the metropolitan ones.
What all this boils down to, if we follow Herrera, is that the colonial pole in
many respects made the metropolitan pole possible. Concerning the consequences of
his proposed bipolar conception of modernity, Herrera named two. First, the reconstitution
of modernity’s textual canon, that is, the inclusion of those authors in the
colonial worlds that have so far been marginalized or ignored. Second, an emphasis
upon the necessity of the attempt to grasp the complexity of colonial modernity.
What this means is that the lack of deployment of the metropolitan pole in the peripheries
should not be interpreted as an absence or imperfection of modernity, but rather
as the development of a colonial modernity in a genuine sense. This modernity is
as modern as the metropolitan one, yet it strives to achieve different goals. Herrera’s
bipolar version of modernity thus introduces a reading that centers on three aspects.
First, it offers the possibility of imagining and depicting the colonial pole as
modern. Second, it calls attention to the partly obvious, partly subtle or opaque
relationships with the metropolitan pole. Finally, it lets us read the metropolitan
from a peripheral point of view, or rather, from a genuinely critical perspective.
The final presentation of the conference was by Louise Meintjes
(Duke): “Sound Knowledge and Global Flow: Zulu Repercussions in a South African
Studio.” Offering a case study, Meintjes discussed the aesthetics of singing
in Zulu ngoma song-dance. Three steps were central to her talk. First, she focused
on the timbral qualities of the lead singer. Second, she linked his singing to the
practice and body aesthetic of ngoma dancing, thereby underlining the importance
of the question of how to get at body knowledge aesthetically (or how to develop
ways of thinking the body). Finally, she placed her analysis in the context of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic as experienced in a rural community in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.
What preoccupied Meintjes in her presentation, in which she showed film footage
shot by herself, was the importance of the voice in the context of withering bodies,
as well the function of the voice in the context of forms of silence about disease.
Governing and giving direction to her presentation, as Meintjes emphasized, was
the question of how to achieve an ethical, socially responsible, dialogical, and
transcultural humanities. Her contention was that a careful and detailed analysis
of aesthetic form could contribute to AIDS prevention and care work since aesthetic
expression offered a valuable insight into ways of knowing and into forms of appreciation.
In general, as she maintained, the study of art, or work in the field of aesthetics,
could assist biomedical and social scientists of HIV who seek to change behavior
and find ways of protecting and sustaining social life. Following Meintjes, the
importance and the complexity of the possibility of linking aesthetic experience
to social performance must not be ignored.