The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity 9783110452181, 9783110440751

Table of contents :
Preface
Table of Contents
Introduction: Reconfiguring the Humanities
Part I: Transnational Interpolations of the Humanities
Transnational History versus International History: A Case of Revisionism ?
The Transnational Study of Culture: A Plea for Translation
Migrant, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History
Art History and the Culture of the Image: A Manifesto for Global Art History
Part II: Revisions of Modernity with and against Globality
Globality and Modernity: Making Concepts Raise Research Questions
‘African Renaissance’ – Between Pan-African Rhetoric and the Reality of National Identity Politics
Feeling Modern: Narratives of Slavery as Entangled Literary History
Theses on the Future of Language
Western Modernism at and beyond the Margins: František Kupka and Margaret Preston
Modern Work and Identity
Part III: Per/versions of Cultural Diversity: Including Exclusions
Global Pressures and Cultural Relativity: The Case of Media Anthropology
Long-Term Power Presentation Shifts: From Key Audio-Visual Narratives to an Update of Elias’s Theory on the Process of Civilization
Inner Language Spaces: Migration and Plurilingualism from a Psycholinguistic Perspective
Relational Diversity: Religious Pluralization and Politics of Cohesion
Manifesting Religion in Public: A Universal Human Right – An International Law – National Restrictions
Part IV: Peroration
Devolvement: From Modern Humanities towards Global Humanities
List of Illustrations
About the Authors
Index

Citation preview

The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity

Concepts for the Study of Culture

Edited by Doris Bachmann-Medick, Horst Carl, Wolfgang Hallet and Ansgar Nünning Editorial Board Mieke Bal, Hartmut Böhme, Sebastian Conrad, Vita Fortunati, Isabel Gil, Lawrence Grossberg, Richard Grusin, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ursula Heise, Claus Leggewie, Helmut Lethen, Christina Lutter, Andreas Reckwitz, Frederik Tygstrup and Barbie Zelizer

Volume 6

The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity Edited by Birgit Mersmann and Hans G. Kippenberg With the assistance of Owen Gurrey

This book was printed with financial support by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung.

ISBN 978-3-11-044075-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045218-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045111-5 ISSN 2190-3433 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Dr. Rainer Ostermann, München Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface Global Integration and Cultural Diversity – under this topical heading the opening conference of the Humanities Research Center at the international Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany (2012), studied the role of the humanities, including the social sciences, at the threshold of modernization and globalization. It engaged anew with both the socio-historical and theoretical entanglements of modernity and globalization and made them readable within the broader field and framework of cultural studies. The inaugural conference of the Humanities Research Center at Jacobs University was an opening move, heralding further research on the transformation of the humanities between global integration and cultural diversification. Its course-setting findings, which point towards a shift from modern to global humanities, are presented in this volume. All those who have invested their intellectual commitment, academic proficiency, lifeblood, personal energy, and practical skills to bring this book to fruition deserve the greatest credit and our sincere gratitude. Our first thanks go to the contributors of this volume for their passion for such a complex topic and their patience during the editing process. Included in the same heartfelt thanks is Owen Gurrey who has coordinated the communication between authors and editors and has given us the benefit of his exceptional gift for language to polish the style of individual contributions. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Doris Bachmann-Medick, who warmly endorsed our book project from the start and opened the door for its publication in the GCSC series “Concepts for the Study of Culture” with De Gruyter. Last but not least we would like to express our thanks to the De Gruyter publishing house, in particular Manuela Gerlof and Stella Diedrich, for professional and efficient collaboration, and the German Fritz Thyssen Foundation for their generous financial support of the conference event and the printing of this publication. We are full of hope that this volume will change and diversify the ways in which research in the humanities will be undertaken in the future. It is published in tribute to the Humanities at Jacobs University in Bremen, whose study programs have been closed down for economic reasons, while worldwide humanities departments are on the rise due to the unexpected and enduring power of local cultures in an age of globalization. Bremen, May 2015 Birgit Mersmann and Hans G. Kippenberg

Table of Contents Preface 

 V

Birgit Mersmann and Hans G. Kippenberg

Introduction: Reconfiguring the Humanities 

 1

Part I: Transnational Interpolations of the Humanities Corinna R. Unger Transnational History versus International History: A Case of Revisionism?   17 Doris Bachmann-Medick The Transnational Study of Culture: A Plea for Translation 

 29

Burcu Dogramaci Migrant, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History 

 50

Birgit Mersmann Art History and the Culture of the Image: A Manifesto for Global Art History   70 Part II: Revisions of Modernity with and against Globality Göran Therborn Globality and Modernity: Making Concepts Raise Research Questions 

  79

Rainer Tetzlaff ‘African Renaissance’ – Between Pan-African Rhetoric and the Reality of National Identity Politics   96 Elahe Haschemi Yekani Feeling Modern: Narratives of Slavery as Entangled Literary History  Jürgen Trabant Theses on the Future of Language 

 135

 117

VIII 

 Table of Contents

Isabel Wünsche

Western Modernism at and beyond the Margins: František Kupka and Margaret Preston   141 Klaus Kornwachs Modern Work and Identity 

 154

Part III: Per/versions of Cultural Diversity: Including Exclusions K. Ludwig Pfeiffer Global Pressures and Cultural Relativity: The Case of Media Anthropology   169 Peter Ludes Long-Term Power Presentation Shifts: From Key Audio-Visual Narratives to an Update of Elias’s Theory on the Process of Civilization   188 Bettina Lindorfer Inner Language Spaces: Migration and Plurilingualism from a Psycholinguistic Perspective   211 Alexander-Kenneth Nagel Relational Diversity: Religious Pluralization and Politics of Cohesion 

 227

Hans G. Kippenberg Manifesting Religion in Public: A Universal Human Right – An International Law – National Restrictions   242 Part IV: Peroration Birgit Mersmann and Hans G. Kippenberg Devolvement: From Modern Humanities towards Global Humanities  List of Illustrations 

 278

About the Authors 

 279

Index 

 285

 271

Birgit Mersmann and Hans G. Kippenberg

Introduction: Reconfiguring the Humanities In the last decades, the disposition and structure of the humanities historically formed in the age of modernity has come under scrutiny. Pushed by digitization and globalization, the humanities were forced to reorient and reimagine themselves.1 This volume aims to capture humanistic study at the threshold of modernization and globalization from a full range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.2 The relationship dynamics between global integration and cultural diversification constitutes the guiding force for observing the reconfiguration of the humanities under the impact of globalization. What changes in orientation have already taken place in and between different disciplines and areas of research over the course of recent cultural, economic, and scientific globalization? What new topics and methods have evolved? How can the humanities in conjunction with the social sciences develop and flourish in-between fragmentation, pluralization and homogenization? For historical and systemic reasons, our point of access in studying the transformation of (and within) the humanities is the radical societal change actuated by a political revolution and a media revolution – the collapse of the ruling orders in the East after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989/1990 and the emergence of the world wide web as a new digital tool for global integrative networking. New models of representation emerged alongside an ever expanding globalized capitalist system and the fractured fields of the humanities were left to wonder at this process of assimilation. Concepts such as global connectivity, network society, and cultural homogenization/diversification appeared as watchwords of the digital revolution. New digital territories and transnational networks were created, accelerating the rise of English as the one global language. The traversing of the globe by instantaneous communication has enabled flows of capital, people, goods, beliefs, fashions, knowledge, crimes, and drugs. This extra-spatial exchange has opened up a whole raft of identity models and sites for cultural, social as well as political conflict. It has given rise to the idea of cultural globalization and has caused a reappraisal of the concept of modernity.

1 Representative examples for the academic (geo)political, economic, and technological rethinking of the humanities are Beiner 2009, Nussbaum 2010, Bell 2010, Burdick 2012, Epstein 2012, Lauer/Aniydoho 2012, Findlay 2012, Small 2013, Bode/Arthur 2014, Jones 2014. 2 The 2012 inaugural conference of the Humanities Research Center at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, dedicated to the research on “Humanities, Modernity, Globalization,” was an opening move into this inquiry.

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The connector “and” fusing global integration with cultural diversity in the title is indicative of the primary goal of this book: It intends to explore new ways to join global studies and diversity studies in the intersecting fields of humanities and social sciences. At the base of this constructive fusion lies a bias, an opposition that has dominated the academic discourse on globalization since its inception and still haunts many minds. It is best formulated by quoting Arif Dirlik who has introduced the concept and condition of global modernity in his book Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism: “Is the world unifying, creating a common organizational structure and a new culture to bolster it, or is it fragmenting into units of various kinds and sizes that are at odds with one another and themselves fractured in many ways internally?” (Dirlik 2007, 1) In Dirlik’s view, there is no clear-cut answer to this either/or question. “The world we live in is too complicated to lend itself to this sort of teleological one-way answer. It is both unifying and fragmenting.” (Ibid.) The concept of global modernity justly reflects the tense intertwining, uneven, often conflictual relationship between unifying and fragmenting tendencies, between convergence and divergence, compliance and conflict. The peculiar unease embodied by the notion of global modernity, in particular the singular version that Dirlik favors over the plural, also mirrors the knotty, intricate relation between modernization and globalization. With the discourse on globalization, a new theoretical setting and resource of interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue for revisiting and reevaluating modernity and modernization theory is available. In order to prove its legitimacy, globalization theory, as diverse as it is, cannot avoid positioning itself in relation to modernization theory, be it in opposition to or conjunction with it. Consequently, globalization is set as both a continuation and disavowal of an earlier modernization. For one scholarly fraction, most prominently represented by Giddens (1990), globalization is a socio-historical consequence of modernity as the onset of capitalism. For other interpreters, such as Robertson, globality is inherent in modernity, it is not primarily a cause, but a condition of what he calls “divergent modernization.” (Robertson 1992) The contrary position, prominently advocated by Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2004), rejects the idea that globalization is a condition of modernization. Therein, globalization is regarded as a historical epoch contemporaneous with the era of postmodernism taking shape in the 1960s. True globalization theory therefore requires a postmodern analysis of cultural hybridization. Yet others such as Friedman (2005) believe in the premodernity of globalization. They are convinced that globalization predates the modern; that is, while being part of the development of ancient civilizations, globalization is “‘civilizational’ in nature.” (Featherstone/Lash/Robertson 1995, 6) The teleological principle apparently immanent in the concept of globalization as a dynamic process has



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not only led to various speculations about the historical beginning of the process of globalization – the set times include antiquity, the 1500s, 1800s, 1870–1920s, 1960s, 1989 –, but also raised opinions about its ending. The theory of postglobalism prevalent since the turn of the millennium states that the reawakened nationalism and protectionism, localism and fundamentalism appear “to define an epoch of radical deglobalization, the disintegration of the liberal world and the demise of globalism.” (McGrew 2007, 38) In the first phase of the globalization discourse, the debate was concentrating on the opposition between two tendencies: global homogenization versus global heterogenization; or, to put it bluntly in the words of Barber: “Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together – And What This Means for Democracy.” (Barber 1995) The homogenizers sympathized or even identified with the modernists. They clung to the idea of a world system, including the idea of a world society and world culture, searching for the universal in particularisms, be it commodification or time-space distanciation. The heterogenizers were convicted postmodernists; they privileged space over temporality, observed the dis- and re-embedding of traditional artefacts and activities through glocalization while prioritizing the local institutionalization of global particularisms. Whereas the modernist perspective acknowledges in globalization the constitution of novel clusters of meaning, resulting in new identity-spaces, the postmodernist view recognizes a hollowing-out of meaning production and identity construction. Meanwhile, the debate about global homogenization versus heterogenization has become obsolete; it has been overtaken by new attempts to think of both tendencies in conjunction. In the words of Roland Robertson, this means: “[…] the universal and the particular can and should be combined. The question for them is: how and in what form should these be synthesized? It is not whether they can be interrelated.” (Robertson 1995, 28) Based on this insight, the most pressing concern to be addressed in these times is: How do global integration and cultural diversification interplay? This volume has taken on the task of making these interactions visible, drawing them together into a newly conceptualized global humanities framework capable of integrating the various splintered and partly endangered fields of humanistic study. For academic research, the relational pattern of global integration and cultural diversification means multi-channeling, large-scale distributed models of scholarship. If the humanities do not want to risk being submerged in the rapids of uneven globalization flows, driven into academic seclusion by the increasing dominance of the technical and natural sciences and the heightened pressure to be economically profitable, the necessary conclusions to be drawn are obvious: The study of the humanities in the twenty-first century has to be reoriented and reconceptualized. The authors of this volume are keen to present new

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ways of bridging the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences with and against the onset of capitalism, divergent modernization, postmodern heterogeneity, and global reorganization. They resist joining the swansong on the mortality, dead end, and uselessness of the humanities that has become most visible in the posthumanism launched as a critical reflection on the modern humanist-centered humanities;3 they critically look behind the overstrained topos of the “crisis of the humanities,” acknowledging in it a clear symptom of the far-reaching global-digital paradigm change that currently affects not only the field of humanistic study, but also the overall system of the sciences at large. They avoid any monocultural science-political discussions that end up in a bifurcation of arguments for the cost/benefit of the humanities; they eschew the ongoing discussion on the value of the humanities, in its reasoning adversely spanned between educational utility and pure academic self-legitimacy, digital applicability and free intellectual thinking. Global integration and cultural diversification stand in as guiding principles for the destination and aspiration of this book. It is not meant as a critique of the current image problem of the humanities, although it includes critical reviews of the humanities; it is not intended as a manifesto, even though it contains manifesto-like texts and proclamations; not as a memento mori of the vanishing humanities, although it deals with aspects of decline, immobility, and loss; not as a (self-)defense of the humanities, although it might partially be read along these lines. Contrary to these tendentious valorizations, the book strives to provide a factual account of the situation of the humanities at the threshold between modernization and globalization. With this orientation, it hopes to make an innovative contribution to the contemporary history of science of the humanities (including the social sciences) from the perspective of modernity and globalization research. Studies in the history of science have shown that the overall configuration of the sciences, including their interdisciplinary constellation, has changed significantly throughout history. The sciences of the human have been included in the science system from its historical onset and also played a central role in there, but they have undergone substantial changes of definition, function, and composition with regard to incisive historical developments in society and science. Modernization and digital globalization have proven to mark major thresholds where paradigmatic shifts and realignments take place. Evidence of this for the reconfiguration of humanistic research can be seen in the ambitious four volume history of The Making of the Humanities, edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn. Therein, the transition from the early modern humanities disciplines 3 For this discourse see Hayles 1999, Haraway 2007, Wolfe 2009, Herbrechter 2013, More 2013, Roden 2014.



Introduction: Reconfiguring the Humanities 

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(before 1800) to modern disciplines (after 1800, with its peak period between 1850 and 2000) is invoked as “one of the most important transformations in intellectual history,” even “a conceptual and institutional revolution.” (Bod/Maat/ Weststeijn 2012, 9) The combination of disciplinary fragmentation and conceptual/methodological unity is seen as a particular characteristic of the making of the modern humanities. The fragmentation of the humanities was part of a larger process of academic institutionalization. Within the field of the classical humanities, the emergence of specialized scholarly disciplines such as philology, linguistics, history, art history, archaeology, and musicology occurred through the formation of new concepts, methodologies, journals and academic communities. The introduction of the comparative method, for instance, is indicative of this transformation; it led the way to comparative linguistis and gave rise to general linguistics as an academic discipline. The humanities, as they are (still) identified by us as modern disciplines, are the result of a science-cultural diversification: the distinction between the science of the human and the science of the natural established by Wilhelm Dilthey in his pathbreaking Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883). This division of the system of sciences anticipated what Charles Percy Snow would later, with the beginning of the culture debate, discuss as “The Two Cultures” of science (1959). We have to confront the fact that the European, in its origins predominantly German rise of the so-called Geisteswissenschaften to an autonomous and influential domain of science is part of a process of modern integration and diversification. The same holds true for the social sciences that formed and institutionalized as a modern science in reflection to the modernization of society. The totalizing world system of the natural sciences is built into the human sciences in order to secure the equivalence of the humanities with the natural sciences and force their independence. The modern claim of the sciences of the human is expressed in their ambition to become a universal science. Dilthey’s establishment of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) is devoted to “formulating a universally valid science which should provide the human sciences with a firm foundation and a unified internal coherency.”4 It is conceived as a basic science positioned between Lebensphilosophie and Wissenschaftstheorie.5 This all-inclusive universal framework of the human sciences became a serious problem when the modern world fell apart and the science system requested a reconfiguration of the “world in pieces.” The philosophical isolation of the human sciences was no longer esteemed “modern,” its Lebensphilosophie considered out of touch with 4 Dilthey in a letter to Husserl dating from 29 June 1911. Cit. according to Reid 2001, 407. 5 It was Gadamer who criticized Dilthey’s conceptualization of the Geisteswissenschaften as being undetermined between a philosophy of life and a theory of science. (Gadamer 1992, 346)

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the challenges of real life. Brought under pressure from the political, social, and media sphere, the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) broke with their totalizing science system; they opened towards Kulturwissenschaften and social sciences, and even looked for synergies with the technical, computational, natural, and life sciences. These new orientations demonstrate how adaptable, transformable, and survivable the humanities are or can be, if not confined to their classical role. In the introduction to the third volume of The Making of the Humanities, the editors argue that “practices in the sciences and humanities point at a continuum rather than a divide between the interpretative and the analytical, and between the subjective and the objective. More than that, with the current advent of digital humanities […] the two fields seem to have come together again in the twenty-first century.” (Bod/Maat/Weststeijn 2014, 13) This observation is a clear sign that the humanities at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century are in a decisive reorientation phase directed towards global humanities. The current transitional phase and atmosphere of change in the broad field of humanities is comparable to the historical formation phase of the modern humanities, although it is not imbued by the same spirit of optimism and hopes for the future. Even with respect to the liminal experience of threshold crossing, the significance of the global trespassing of the humanities can be considered equal to the science-cultural border crossing of the modern humanities. The scholarly evaluation that the historical transition from the early modern humanities disciplines to modern disciplines is “one of the most important transformations in intellectual history” involving “a conceptual and institutional revolution” (Bod/Maat/Weststeijn 2012, 9) can also be transferred to the transition from modern to global humanities. Actuated by the political revolution of 1989 and the digital media revolution, the global reorganization and reframing of the humanities amounts to an intellectual, conceptual, and institutional revolution in the history of science. Whereas the interdependence between the humanities and modernity has been studied extensively, comparatively little research has been done on the impact of globalization onto the reconfiguration of modern humanistic research. Our aim is to make the socio-historical and theoretical entanglements of modernity and globalization readable within the field of humanities. Our understanding of the humanities is not restricted to the modern tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, although the sciences of language, the arts, and history represent a main study focus. The term “humanities” is rather used as a generic term for the sciences of the human, including the cultural and social sciences. By this open approach, we hope to better understand the shifts and translations in the broader field, the encroachments, demarcations, and coalitions that occur through global integration and cultural diversification.



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The major issue of how humanistic research is reconfigured at the threshold of modernization and globalization is discussed in this volume from three different angles. The first examines transnational interpolations of the humanities as a potential indicator for a globalizing humanistic research. Transnationalization has been identified as one of the core characteristics of globalization processes, based on the assumption that transactions across the borders and beyond the representative actors of nation states have increased. In the light of this observation, it is meaningful to explore how the research focus, main orientation, and methodology of individual disciplines within modern humanities – of which most were historically shaped by the concept of the nation – have changed under political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of transnationalism. Corinna Unger approaches the humanistic threshold of modernization and globalization by comparing two central approaches in the field of history – international history versus transnational history. She clearly demonstrates that the institutional formation of transnational history as a reorientation in historical studies was born out of a new awareness of globalization phenomena in history, and that its main purpose was to challenge the hegemonic and restricting role of the nation state paradigm in both international and national history. However, her main conclusion is that international history and transnational history are not as different conceptually and methodologically as they are commonly portrayed. She argues that the historiographic debate “transnational history versus international history” should be understood as a case of scholarly revisionism in the field of history, reflecting the competition for institutional and financial resources on the national and international level of historical research, and that, contrary to attempts of dissociation, it would be more fruitful to link the two approaches constructively. Whereas Corinna Unger analyzes the academic debate on transnational history versus international history with critical observation distance, Doris Bachmann-Medick actively calls for a transnationalization of cultural studies in order to challenge the global hegemony of English/American cultural studies. She makes explicit that transnationalization does mean a critical internationalism along the lines of Spivak’s critical regionalism, and that this would include the de-Eurocentrizing and decolonizing of western-based research standards and categories. Respectively, the cultural diversification of cultural studies is expressed in the pluralization of the (singular) study of culture by involvement of different knowledge traditions and speaking positions. For developing transnational cultural studies and relocating them on the global map, the author advocates the analytical category of translation as a method of differentiation and practice of displacement. Cross-categorical translation in particular is proposed as an effective counter-strategy against hegemonic universalization tendencies,

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enabling cultural studies to make themselves translatable in the global knowledge-based society and science system. The two art-historical contributions follow along the same line of reasoning, arguing for a transnational reconfiguration of art history. Drawing on concrete studies of (e)migrating modern and contemporary artists, Burcu Dogramaci sees the necessity for an alternative historiographic concept of art history that involves “a narrative of encounters, of exchange, of the perforation of borders, of performativity, of wandering concepts and ideas, of migrant art practices and theories.” Reflecting on the global mobility and migration of artists, their nomadic methods and border-crossing concepts, she explores a new moving concept for art history, identified as transitory art history of transnational movements and global flows. Birgit Mersmann is actively engaged with a global reconceptualization of art history in response to transnational processes. She has formulated a manifesto for global art history that calls for a transcultural and image-critical revision of art history. Its claims are threefold: first a strategic postcolonial reconceptualization of global art history by the route of art history’s global history and colonial heritage; second a pronounced cross-cultural study perspective to diversify notions, concepts, and practices of art creation, mediation, and reception; and third a cultural-critical image studies approach to mediate crossculturally between the well-established field of European/North American art history and the emerging non-Western art histories, be they regional, local, or even national. In the second part, the volume deals with humanistic revisions of modernity with and against globality. With this focus, it seeks to reveal the complex entanglements and powerful interdependencies between modernization and globalization, be they harmonious or conflictual, synergetic or destructive in their effects. The sociologist Göran Therborn criticizes the descriptive use of the categories modernity and globality as meaning- and order-conferring labels in the humanities and social sciences. He suggests employing them as variable concepts to raise research questions and launch cognitive explorations. Implementing this research strategy, he undertakes a historicization of globality for rescuing it from flat late twentieth century globalization and performs an analytical leverage of modernity by showing variable roads to modernity and their effects on today’s social life and culture. The issue of globalization is embedded in human and civilizational history, thus emphasizing its relevance for the study of the human. Therborn identifies four important historical and cultural layers of humankind, namely civilizations, family systems, waves of globalization, and pathways to modernity, in order to analyze what he calls a social-cultural geology of the world. By this investigative approach, new humanistic deep-historical dimensions of the interplay between global integration and cultural diversification reach the surface of a flattened world view on globalization. On a theoretical



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level, the analytical leverage of the research categories globality and modernity results in the cultural pluralization and historical diversification of these same concepts. Under the title “African Renaissance,” the historian Rainer Tetzlaff raises the question whether the ideology of Pan-Africanism, developed after the end of the Cold War to initiate the “rebirth of a continent,” is still a relevant force today, facing the challenges of globalization and neo-liberal adjustments. His historical political analysis reveals that the cosmopolitan utopian ideal of Pan-Africanism increasingly collides with the reality of national and sub-national identity politics in many African states. The author diagnoses that the pan-African discourse is in decline due to external and internal factors, the disappearance of the Western colonial powers as external enemies and the internal social fragmentation in African societies, marked by political and economic struggles, xenophobic sentiments and ethnic tensions between immigrants and natives. From this perspective, fragmentation as a downside effect of globalization appears to have prevented the accomplishment of pan-African integration on the level of reality politics. In line with Therborn’s argument, the literary scholar Elahe Haschemi Yekani demonstrates how modernity, if framed globally, can even change the selfunderstanding of a particular national and cultural modernity. Focusing on autobiographical narratives of slavery by the black British writers Olaudah Equiano and Mary Seacole, she illustrates how the British affective relation to modernity, the “feeling modern,” together with Britishness as a specifically modern sense of identity are the result of an entangled literary history already in place before the formation of a national canon of British literature. Based on the finding that the black writers are writing themselves into modern Britishness, she argues for a greater interdisciplinary dialogue between global and literary history and gives the recommendation that postcolonial literary theory should more carefully consider the contemporaneous interrelations between the multiple entangled margins and centers. Jürgen Trabant’s “Theses on the Future of Language” reads as an antiglobalization manifesto for the protection of linguistic diversity. The future of language/s in the globalizing world of the twenty-first century is painted as a grim picture of involution and degeneration. The author’s concern is that the modern historical achievement of the ascension of European vulgar languages to modern high languages is getting lost under global/izing language conditions. Globalization is qualified as reestablishing a premodern language regime comparable to the diglossic medieval situation and their socio-political effects, with global English as the high language for the high discourses, and all other languages as low (vernacular) languages for everyday communication. Arguing from Hum-

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boldt’s dictum that “the human being is only human through language,” Trabant sees not only the diversity of language as an expression of the diversity of world views threatened, but, more existentially, the linguisticity of the human species endangered. He expresses the urgent need to care about language as a primary technique of thought production in times of global communication where language is radically reduced to its communicative function. Isabel Wünsche’s essay explores Western modernism at and beyond the margins. In light of a global art history and its promise to offer an alternative to the grand narratives of Western art history, she asks how inclusive and diversified the (western) concept of Western modernism is and to what extent an art that transcends national borders and integrates elements from various western and non-western traditions is necessarily global. Comparing modern aspirations in the work of the Czech painter František Kupka and the Australian artist Margaret Preston, she demonstrates that the global is a rather meaningless category for the interpretation of both works: While Kupka’s artistic interest was solely geared towards the universal and the cosmic, Preston’s shift towards native Australian art primarily served the goal of establishing a truly national Australian art. On these grounds, she opposes to forwardly identify transnationalism in modern art with globalism. Klaus Kornwachs analyzes how the modern functions of human labor, namely the creating and shaping of identity by building self-consciousness, are changing under working conditions of global and digital communication. Starting from a distinction between three kinds of self-consciousness, the Worlds-I, the Working-I and the Net-I, he discusses how modern labor identity – the identification of the worker with the product he creates – is undermined by user-controlled processes and structures of software and network technology. In his opinion, the degrees of freedom in shaping technologies are diminishing in the digital age. This loss will pose new challenges for the redefinition of work identities in the global network society. Digital humanities research on identity issues could make a valuable contribution to this problem. Part three of this volume concentrates on cultural diversity as a complement and counter-movement to global integration. It critically deals with its ambiguous constitution as both phenomenon and claim, ideologically moving between social cohesion and exclusion. As the title indicates, cultural diversity is not only employed as a political strategy for peaceful pluralization, but also subjugated to perversions of its multiversality, thus instigating its exploitation for nationalistic and fundamentalist purposes in the areas of social, cultural, religious and language politics. According to the literary and media theorist K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, media anthropology “ought to acquire the status of at least a critical symptom in the tensions,



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and their analysis, of globalizing pressures towards uniformity and persisting or new cultural diversity.” He discusses the diverse genealogies of media anthropology and their potential to study the universal and variational role of media for cultures and the human psyche. Considering institutional degeneration as a global phenomenon, the author sees new opportunities and creative potentials for individual autonomy and relates this, exemplarily, to the ascension of the novel to a global literary genre. If media anthropology would move closer to art and aesthetics, the author argues, it would be able to rediscover new layers of human universality as its main grounding. The diminishing of state-institutional power by globalization is endorsed in Peter Ludes’s comparative visual data analysis of centennial and annual TV reviews from Brazil, China, Germany, and the United States. One main finding is the significant decrease in the appearance of heads of state as decisive figures over the last few years, indicating a fundamental long-term power shift. As a general outcome of the extensive data analysis, the author observes more cultural diversity and exclusion than global integration. With regard to a global humanities methodology, he strongly proposes to update Norbert Elias’s theory of civilizational processes from the perspective of multiple modernity research and combine it with crosscultural and intergenerational big data analyses. The linguistic dimension of cultural diversity is treated in Bettina Lindorfer’s exploration of “Inner Language Spaces.” Based on self-conducted interviews, the author studies the attitudes and relations of migrants toward plurilingualism from a psycholinguistic point of view. Her particular research interest concerns the role the use of a second language plays in the inner experience of language. The evaluation of the interviews reveals that the idealization of bi- and multilingualism as a special diversity resource in the global world is contradicted by the inner language experience of the examined group of migrants. They expressed feelings of a lack of competence and control with regard to their second language skills and complained about the impoverishment of their first language. While undergoing psychoanalysis in their second language, shame turned out to be a central subject without being explicitly addressed by the interviewer. The overall findings suggest that linguistic diversity can and will change our inner space and intrapsychic worldview. The last two chapters of part three approach the issue of cultural diversity from a religious, sociological and legal perspective. The religious scholar Alexander-Kenneth Nagel critiques that the academic discussion about migration and pluralization tends to be overly metaphorical and undertheorized at the same time. He argues for a relational approach to religious diversity based on encounters and contact zones rather than abstract attributions. Drawing on an ethnographic case study on forms of interreligious encounter in the Ruhr Area,

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he illustrates how highly productive and innovative religious diversity in modern immigration societies is in creating new sociocultural forms for cohesion. Hans G. Kippenberg, a specialist for comparative religious studies, discusses how the human right to manifest a religion or belief in community with others in public was repeatedly redefined and renegotiated under the pressure of increasing religious diversity in migration societies and how this cultural diversification of the respective religious human right collided with national restrictions. Although the claims were based on common European law, the procedures helped to generate a new diversity of religious rights. The new public role of the communal exercise and public manifestation of religion makes clear that religious studies in a globalized world have to more openly cooperate with the political, social, and legal sciences in order to understand the tensions between private and public religion. The final chapter summarizes what the particular findings of humanistic research on global integration and cultural diversity mean for the future of the humanities, their threshold-crossing from modern to global humanities. The concerted efforts represented by the individual studies gathered in this volume will, we hope, enhance the transnational and transdisciplinary study of culture. By carrying the concept of culture beyond objects and practices of cultural production, mediation, and (re)presentation, and extending it to include academic and scientific cultures at large as defining places of cultural analysis and critical self-reflection on a global level, the study of culture gains a new foothold as a stimulus and promoter of transdisciplinary and transnational research, connecting the human, social, and natural sciences. By exploring different academic and disciplinary traditions, key concepts, and methodological frameworks for studying culture and for investigating how these transform under the impact of global integration and cultural diversification, new definitions, concepts, and practices of culture are laid bare. The study of culture within the humanities documents and reflects the mobility and migration of its concepts and methods, moving and translating between disciplines, research traditions, historical periods, academic institutions, and the public sphere. All of this makes it clear that an actor-network-based translational concept of culture that allows for the analysis of academic involvement in institutional networks as part of a global geopolitical history of science is needed, if we are to diversify the study of culture in a global, transnational perspective.



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References Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy. New York: Times Books, 1995. Beiner, Marcus. Humanities: Was Geisteswissenschaft macht. Und was sie ausmacht. Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2009. Bell, David A. “Reimagining the Humanities: Proposals for a New Century.” Dissent 57/4 (2010): 69–75. Bod, Rens, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, eds. The Making of the Humanities. Vol. II. From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Bod, Rens, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, eds. The Making of the Humanities. Vol. III. The Modern Humanities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Bode, Katherine, and Paul Longley Arthur, eds. Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Burdick, Anne, et al. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012. Dirlik, Arif. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, eds. Global Modernities. London/ Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 1995. Findlay, Len. “Rethinking the Humanities.” English Studies in Canada 38/1 (2012): 1–8. Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroads, 1992. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Haraway, Donna Joanne. When Species Meet. Posthumanities. Vol. 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Hayles, Catherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Jones, Steven E. The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, 2014. Lauer, Helen, and Kofi Anyidoho, eds. Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities through African Perspectives. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2012. McGrew, Anthony. “Globalization in Hard Times: Contention in the Academy and Beyond.” The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 29–53. More, Max, and Natasha-Vita More, eds. The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. Globalization or Empire? New York: Routledge, 2004. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

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Reid, James. “Dilthey’s Epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften: Between Lebensphilo­sophie and Wissenschaftstheorie.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 39/3 (2001): 407–436. Robertson, Roland. “Globality and Modernity.” Theory, Culture & Society 9 (1992): 153–161. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” Global Modernities. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson. London/ Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 1995. 25–44. Roden, David. Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. New York: Routledge, 2015. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Part 1: Transnational Interpolations of Part 1: the Humanities

Corinna R. Unger

Transnational History versus International History: A Case of Revisionism? 1 Introduction Transnational history has been experiencing a notable boom in recent years. Closely linked to contemporary concerns with processes of globalization, transnational history has been embraced by a large number of historians. Many of them are in favor of transnational history because they consider the prominence of the nation state and the emphasis on foreign relations and governmental policies in international history problematic. By focusing on non-governmental actors and their interactions across national borders, and through its emphasis on the role of culture and ideas, transnational history promises to provide a more pluralistic, more colorful view of historical events and phenomena affecting and challenging the nation state as well as individuals and societies across borders. While transnational history as an approach has produced a large number of immensely valuable studies and has enriched historiography in numerous ways, the juxtaposition of international and transnational history seems problematic. To my mind, the two approaches complement each other rather than cancelling each other out. Hence, in this essay I will argue that international history and transnational history are not as different conceptually and methodologically as they are often portrayed; that transnational history’s critique of the nation state paradigm serves as an argument to challenge the established status of international history; and that the debate can be understood first and foremost as an expression of the competition for institutional and other types of resources. Hence, one could frame the debate as a case of scholarly revisionism.

2 Revisionism in Historiography The term “revisionism” can be applied to many cases: “deniers and minimizers of the Holocaust; nationalist historians who attempted to revive national pride and myths; positivist modernizers against traditional nationalists; New Left historians who questioned the founding myths of the Cold War; social historians who undermined the totalitarian model; postmodernists who proposed new types of thinking about the past; oral historians who focused on individual experiences, and so on.” (Antonio 2007, 96) In the following, I consider revisionism the effort

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to challenge an established, dominant or hegemonic approach and replace it with a new, conceptually and/or methodologically different approach. Of course not every critique of an established approach qualifies as a revision. So “what range of activities must take place to qualify as revision?” (Spiegel 2007, 3) Specifically, does revisionism occur naturally as part of the normal processes entailed in doing history or is it stimulated by extensive shifts in patterns of social recruitment into the profession that mandate new arenas and forms of investigation to discover the historical roots of present concerns, whether social or intellectual? Is it forced upon historians from outside by developments in other disciplines or in the larger world in which they live, or does it occur as a result of interior, psychological shifts within individual historians whose work, because of its excellence and compelling character, attains exemplary status and generates widespread imitation? (Spiegel 2007, 3)

As these questions make clear, historiographical debates are part and expression of a society’s political debates and problems at a given moment. From the institutional point of view, revisionism serves to question the dominant perspective on scholarship in a given field and to promote alternatives. To do so, those allegedly representing the mainstream are being criticized for being “not objective,” “not scientific,” or not “up to date” enough and therefore not deserving to receive as much funding and public support as they do. In that sense, “revisionist” scholars try to establish, institutionalize and professionalize a new approach by presenting it as scientifically superior, and they claim those material and immaterial resources which are currently controlled by those identified with the mainstream.1 A classical example of revisionism is the debate in American and Western European scholarship about the origins of the Cold War: In the 1950s and 1960s, the members of the “orthodox” school of thought argued that Stalin and the Soviet Union were responsible for the heightening of tensions through provoking the United States and its allies. In the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called revisionists challenged this understanding and called it one-sided. They argued that American capitalist interests had driven the conflict between West and East and turned it into the Cold War. Later again, in the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called post-revisionists suggested that both the Soviets and the Americans had played a decisive part in turning the lingering conflict between East and West into the Cold War, and that the respective perceptions of the other side had led each power to assume that a “tough” approach was necessary. (Cf. Westad 2000) In many ways, Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the “paradigm shift” can be applied to this example. (Kuhn 1970) Yet in understanding the revision of the formerly orthodox expla1 On the competition for resources cf. Ash 2002.



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nation of the origins of the Cold War it is important to remember that several factors apart from the scholarly arguments were involved. For example, the majority of those who identified (or were identified) as “revisionists” belonged to a younger generation than those representing the orthodox approach. Many of the former were inspired by Marxist thinking, had been active in or influenced by the student movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, and felt that the scholarship practiced by their teachers was too closely tied to the American Cold War “national interest” to be able to look at the problem “objectively.” In attacking the explanation of the traditionalists, the revisionists also made a claim for resources and positions, signaling that a generational overhaul in university chairs and institutes was in order. This example shows that it is necessary to link “revisions in historiographical practice to social and economic changes and their ideological and political consequences.” (Spiegel 2007, 16) It is also important to note that the scholarly discussions and competitions constituting revisions are not taking place in a neutral, isolated academic sphere. Scholars contributing to revisionist debates are influenced by contemporary perceptions of challenges and problems affecting society, and thus contribute to the reproduction of political perspectives in historical work. “Historians have characteristic interests, and these are themselves at least partly the outcome of social and, insofar as they are different, historical factors. It is no surprise that, for example, when a particular society sees itself as being engaged in nation-building, its historiography is written in terms that reflect that; similarly for our current interest in globalization.” (Gorman 2007, 20) The same holds true with regard to the field of transnational history: In taking the hybrid nature of global societies and cultures as its premise, such work [transnational historiography; C.R.U.] seeks to make that hybridity the core of its intellectual analysis, and doubtless will generate new paradigms for the study of history that will affect not only our understanding of contemporary developments but will feed back into our analyses of the past. That the field of “transnationalism” should appear as the sign of this shift in consciousness, a field in part promoted by the movement of new groups of scholars into the profession – many of them members of the second generation of immigrant families – is hardly unexpected and may be seen as one of the social determinants of this reorientation and revision in current historiography. (Gorman 2007, 19)

Let us look at this nexus between “social changes” (Gorman 2007, 20) and historiographical revisions by surveying the development of transnational history in Western historiography.

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3 The Success Story of Transnational History When the term “transnational history” gained prominence in Western historiography in the 1980s, and even more so in the 1990s, many doubted that this trend would hold because the category “transnational” seemed too vague to possess meaningful analytical qualities. However, those in doubt were proven wrong. Today transnational history is a rapidly growing field. In recent years, many scholars in Western academia have tried to define what transnational history is, have outlined the opportunities and limitations of transnational history, and have provided overviews of the state of transnational history in their respective countries.2 The number of publications presenting themselves as transnational histories is continuously growing. Online platforms such as geschichte.transnational (“history.transnational”) have been established and gained in size and visibility.3 In 2009, Palgrave Macmillan published the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, a major reference work of more than 400 entries and 1.226 pages. (Iriye/ Saunier 2009) While its editors explicitly do not aim at establishing a new field, “the volume can nevertheless be seen as a sign that transnational history has begun to reach a reasonable level of maturity and legitimacy within the discipline of history.”4 Furthermore, an English-language book series dedicated to transnational history has been founded.5 In Western Europe and the United States there are efforts to establish institutes and graduate degree programs dedicated to transnational history.6 Hence, one can observe a notable trend toward the professionalization and institutionalization of the field as a sub-discipline of history. So what does transnational history do differently from other approaches? Methodologically, transnational history builds on a variety of approaches and 2 See, for example, Patel 2004, Clavin 2005, AHR 2006, Tyrrell 2009, Haupt/Kocka 2010. 3 geschichte.transnational is a platform hosted jointly by H-Soz-u-Kult, the largest German H-Net list, and Clio-online, a German online platform for historians. [accessed: 13 January 2013]. 4 Knudsen/Gram-Skjoldager 2014, 146. Unpublished manuscript. I thank the authors for allowing me to cite their text. 5 The Transnational History Series by Palgrave Macmillan. 6 There are Centers for Transnational History at the University of St. Andrew’s ( [accessed: 22 January 2013]) and at University College London ( [accessed: 22 January 2013]), the latter of which offers a Master’s Program in Transnational Studies. The Graduate Institute in Geneva features Transnational History as one of its International History program’s fields ( [accessed: 22 January 2013]). The College of William & Mary offers a Master’s Program in Comparative and Transnational History ( [accessed: 22 January 2013]).



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concepts. It is no coincidence that the terms “transnational history,” “entangled history,” and “histoire croisée” are often used together or even synonymously. The many scholars involved can hardly be expected to subscribe to a common understanding of what transnational history is; indeed, transnational history continues to have the problem of lacking a concise definition.7 However, the majority of historians involved might be willing to agree with Ian Tyrrell that transnational history studies “the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation” and thereby “denaturalises the nation.” (Tyrell 2007) Born out of an increasing awareness of phenomena associated with globalization, those interested in transnational history try to question, or overcome the paradigm of the nation state as a container and challenge its hegemonic role in international and national history. Consequently, they pay attention to events and processes taking place outside of, beneath, above, or parallel to the nation state, and they tend to be more interested in individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions that are not state institutions.8 As a result, many studies identifying as transnational history focus on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their international networks, on intellectual, political and migratory movements across space, on cosmopolitans and experts, on supranational integration and transformation, and on the exchange of goods, ideas and knowledge across space.9 By doing so, transnational history contributes to a number of efforts. To quote the editors of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: First, the historicization of interdependency and interconnection phenomena between national, regional or cultural spheres in the modern age, by charting the development of projects, designs and structures that have organized circulations and connections through and between them, in an uneven and non-linear way. Second, the advancement of knowledge on neglected or hazy regions of national and other self-contained territorial histories, by acknowledging foreign contributions to the design, discussion and implementation of patterns that are often seen as owing their features to domestic conditions. Third, the understanding of trends and protagonists that are often left on the periphery of national or comparative frameworks; and this leads us to the study of markets, trajectories, concepts, activities and organizations that thrived in-between and across the nations: international voluntary associations, loose transnational ideas networks, diasporas or commodities. (Iriye/Saunier 2009, xx)

7 For an overview of the different understandings of the term, see Clavin 2005, 433–434 and Tyrell 2007. 8 Cf. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Introduction,” in Iriye/Saunier 2009, xviii: “We are interested in links and flows, and want to track people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or in-between polities and societies.” 9 Among many others, see, for example, Woollacott/Deacon/Russell 2010, Snyder 2011, Manjapra/Bose 2010, Conway/Patel 2010.

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This description points at the effort of some representatives of transnational history to emphasize the contrast of their field with international history: While international historians are supposedly “realists” dealing with conflicts of power, especially with war, transnational historians are seemingly more interested in the peaceful side of history. According to this view, nation states historically have shown a tendency to be hostile toward each other, to close their borders to migrants, to deny citizenship and civil rights to foreigners, to protect their economies, and to encourage, at least indirectly, stereotypical views of other nations. A post-nationalist understanding of international politics would, at least indirectly, help promote cooperation among individuals and society regardless of their nationality. Hence, many studies in transnational history appear to be based on a post-nationalist, or “de-nationalized” (Iriye 2012, 9) perspective on international relations, one which sees international organizations as expressions and tools of supranational cooperation, if not as guarantors of stability and peace. (Knudsen/Gram-Skjoldager 2014, 151–152) The tendency to embrace internationalism and contribute to writing a history of progress in terms of the world’s continuous democratization suggests that transnational history is, to a certain degree, a political project.10 (Knudsen/Gram-Skjoldager 2014, 152) Its representatives do not need to be politically active to be “politically influential […] in virtue of the historical understanding they choose to express […].” (Gorman 2007, 23) So is transnational history experiencing such a boom because it has managed to capture the political vision and ambition of historians in Europe and the United States more successfully than other approaches? Is transnational history competing against international history and trying to replace it? To answer this question, let us turn to international history and look at how transnational history is different from or similar to it.

4 Transnational History in Context A Google search of the term “transnational history” yields 10,700,000 hits in 25 seconds. In comparison, “international history” yields 2,550,000,000 in 22 seconds.11 Of course those numbers need to be handled carefully, seeing that they do not say much about the content of the entries. However, I would argue that the general perception that transnational history is replacing international history as a field, or at least is challenging international history’s hegemony, might be 10 An example of such an interpretation is Iriye 2002. 11 www.google.com [accessed: 13 January 2013].



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slightly off. Institutionally and in terms of content, international history does not seem to be in danger of losing its prominent status in the historical field. Rather, the debates about transnational phenomena seem to have inspired an effort to rethink, renew, and revise older approaches of international history. For example, a few years ago the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations debated whether it was necessary or useful to rename its journal Diplomatic History. The reason for the debate was that diplomatic history as an approach seemed old-fashioned: It focused on the decisions of “dead white men” in high-ranking offices; it was exclusively concerned with official politics; it regarded those in charge as representing their respective nations, and thereby replicated a picture of international politics as politics between nation states. Many historians criticized what they considered to be a proto-Rankean view of history, arguing that other actors needed to be involved to overcome the top-down perspective on decision-making; that the traditional understanding of politics needed to be broadened toward ideas, culture, and gender; and that the source material needed to be complemented by documents of various origins.12 While the renaming did not take place, Diplomatic History since has published numerous articles taking up those demands. More generally, the field of international history has changed notably over the past decades, and it has significantly broadened its view. For example, a recent volume on international history that aims to provide an overview of the field contains entries on “classical” topics like war, diplomacy, international institutions, European integration, and hegemony, but also on fear and trust, networks, nation branding, transnational families, and social democracy.13 In the last ten to fifteen years, international history (or at least that part of international history whose members speak of themselves doing “new international history”) has added a range of new approaches to its toolbox, many of which show an imprint of historiographical developments in the 1990s and 2000s, notably in the field of cultural history. (Cf. Finney 2005, 20–23) For example, Cold War history, a classical field of international history, is witnessing a rapid broadening in topics and approaches, including scientific, environmental, media, social and cultural issues.14 Similarly, the study of “cultural codes” and the role of the media in

12 “SHAFR in the World.” Passport: The Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations Review (September 2011): 4–17. Also cf. Engel 2012. 13 Cf. Dülffer/Loth 2012. For an earlier overview on the history of international relations, also cf. Conze/Lappenküper/Müller 2004. 14 Among others, see Borstelmann 2003, Suri 2003, Oldenziel/Zachmann 2011, McNeill/Unger 2010.

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international diplomacy have become well established in international history.15 Studies on health, migration, labor, race and gender have left their mark on the understanding of colonial and imperial relations.16 The history of decolonization is not solely written as the history of decision-making in metropoles vis-à-vis the “periphery” but as the history of competing claims of power, knowledge, and entitlements.17 Furthermore, international history today is actively concerned with the influence of transnational phenomena on international politics, and with overarching processes like globalization. (Dülffer/Loth 2012, 3–4) Hence, the critique that international history is narrowly focused on “high politics” is not substantiated by actual research. Therefore the effort to distinguish international and transnational history seems to have another reason. From a structural point of view, it appears as if the claim that “transnational” is decidedly different from “international” serves as a tool to distinguish one approach from an older, allegedly more “conservative” political position. The effort to set oneself apart is part of a generational and institutional conflict, with a cohort of younger, more internationally experienced historians trying to secure access to the funding and institutional positions held by older historians who, in the majority, represent the nation state paradigm and have mainly stayed in their countries of origin. In essence, then, the discussion over international and transnational history seems to be an expression, or a reflection, of a revisionist debate. Yet whether it really is a debate, with two or more parties communicating with each other and exchanging opposing views, seems not entirely clear. One could argue that those promoting transnational history feel that they have to defend their position without being actually challenged by their alleged opponents. Many international historians are not strongly opposed to transnational history and regard it as a welcome addition to the established paradigm, not a replacement. International history should not be mistaken for the history of international relations between nation states. More generally, one cannot characterize international history as working on “hard politics” and transnational history as dealing with “soft power.” What about the argument that transnational history challenges the nationally fabricated institution of history as a discipline? It is obvious that history as a discipline at the time of its professionalization and institutionalization was very much shaped by the nation state and its interests, and that the structures and institutions that came into being at the time still have a large influence on the

15 See, among others, Paulmann 2005, Mösslang/Riotte 2008, Cull 2009. 16 See, among others, Cooper 1996, Buettner 2004. 17 See, among others, Sueur 2003, Burke 2013.



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field.18 Yet has transnational history achieved to dispose of this legacy? National academic institutions are of great importance with regard to education and socialization, funding, and reputation. Hence, while transnational historians might be questioning the importance of the nation state and its institutional structures, they are de facto part of those nationally anchored institutions and at least indirectly help to keep it alive. As Karen Gram-Skjoldager and Ann-Christina Knudsen show in their analysis of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, the majority of the authors identifying as representatives of transnational history are living and working in academic institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom. (Knudsen/Gram-Skjoldager 2014, 159) While their outlook on history might be genuinely transnational, the majority belongs to institutes established along or within the traditional disciplinary structures and has to work within the respective institutional constraints. Should transnational history become a fully established field in history, it will most likely do so in the framework defined by national academic structures.

5 Conclusion Transnational history offers a new way of doing history, and its innovative and dynamic character has enriched historical research in many ways. At the same time, transnational history, like other approaches, has a political agenda and is fighting for academic and institutional recognition. Furthermore, transnational history has its own shortcomings. For example, it has been criticized for neglecting the role and influence of power while overemphasizing interaction and exchange, internationalism and humanitarianism. (Clavin 2010, 626, 628) “A new transnational history of missionaries, cosmopolitan humanitarians and feminists, scientists, social reformers, public health officials, and others like them is not a substitute for colonial and national histories of the non-Western world,” according to Ian Tyrrell. (Tyrell 2009, 471) Most proponents of transnational history, I believe, would agree, and most of them seem to be aware of the necessity of including “hard” social, economic and political “facts.” Hence, the question whether transnational history is about to replace international history seems misleading; the important question is how the two approaches can cooperate and communicate with each other constructively and fruitfully. As the example shows, the establishment of new approaches in historiography does not necessarily imply that one approach is replaced by another. Instead, 18 Cf. Woolf 2011, Ch. 7; Iggers/Wang 2008, Ch. 3.

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we can observe that the proponents of a new perspective try to establish their position by emphasizing its difference vis-à-vis other approaches, even though the difference may in fact be less distinct. This does not mean that the differences are not important. They are, and to make them visible they need a label. Efforts to challenge an existing field in order to accelerate the establishment of a new approach do seem to happen more often “in greater frequency in ever-shrinking niches as specialization increases,” as the editors of the journal History and Theory put it in a call for papers on revision in history.19 Furthermore, a relatively new field like transnational history is more easily accessible to newcomers and outsiders competing for resources, which might also help to explain the willingness to embrace a new approach and emphasize its alleged contrast to more established fields. (Knudsen/Gram-Skjoldager 2014, 161) While at times the attack on established fields can appear like an all-out replacing of one approach, it is useful to remember that those revisions tend to be closely tied “to the experiences of a single generation,” as Gabrielle Spiegel has argued with regard to the linguistic turn of the 1990s and 2000s. (Spiegel 2007, 18) Seeing that the field of transnational history is currently reaching young adulthood, the following decade will prove exciting with regard to the development and future of the field.

References “AHR Conversation on Transnational History.” American Historical Review 111.5 (2006): 1440–1464. Antoniou, Giorgos. “The Lost Atlantis of Objectivity: The Revisionist Struggles between the Academic and Public Spheres.” History and Theory 46.4 (2007): 92–112. Ash, Mitchell G. “Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen für einander.” Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik: Bestandsaufnahmen zu Formationen, Brüchen und Kontinuitäten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner-Verlag, 2002. 32–51. Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Buettner, Elizabeth. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Clavin, Patricia. “Defining Transnationalism.” Contemporary European History 14 (2005): 421–439.

19  [accessed: 21 January 2013].



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Clavin, Patricia. “Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts.” European History Quarterly 40.4 (2010): 624–640. Conway, Martin, and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds. Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Conze, Eckart, Ulrich Lappenküper, and Guido Müller, eds. Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen: Erneuerung und Erweiterung einer historischen Disziplin. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Dülffer, Jost, and Wilfried Loth, eds. Dimensionen internationaler Geschichte. München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012. Engel, Jeffrey A. “Diplomatic History’s Ill-Deserved Reputation and Bright Future.” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (December 2012), [accessed: 13 January 2013]. Finney, Patrick. “Introduction: What Is International History?” International History. Ed. Patrick Finney. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 1–35. Gorman, Jonathan. “The Commonplaces of ‘Revision’ and their Implications for Historiographical Understanding.” History and Theory 46.4 (2007): 20–44. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Jürgen Kocka, eds. Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and Perspectives. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Iggers, Georg G., and Q. Edward Wang with the assistance of Supriya Mukherjee. A Global History of Modern Historiography. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008. Iriye, Akira. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Iriye, Akira, and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Knudsen, Ann-Christina L., and Karen Gram-Skjoldager, “Historiography and Narration in Transnational History.” Journal of Global History 9.1 (2014): 143–161. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Le Sueur, James D., ed. The Decolonization Reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Manjapra, Kris, and Sugata Bose, eds. Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. McNeill, J. R., and Corinna R. Unger, eds. Environmental Histories of the Cold War. Washington, DC/New York: German Historical Institute Washington, DC/Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mösslang, Markus, and Torsten Riotte, eds. The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oldenziel, Ruth, and Karin Zachmann. Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011.

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Patel, Kiran Klaus. “Überlegungen zu einer transnationalen Geschichte.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 52 (2004): 626–646. Paulmann, Johannes, ed. Auswärtige Repräsentationen: Deutsche Kulturdiplomatie nach 1945. Köln: Böhlau, 2005. Snyder, Sarah B. Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Spiegel, Gabrielle. “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography.” History and Theory 46.4 (2007): 1–19. Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Tyrrell, Ian. “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice.” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 453–474. Tyrrell, Ian. “What is Transnational History?” Excerpt from a paper given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in January 2007. [accessed: 13 January 2013]. Westad, Odd Arne, ed. Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Woolf, Daniel. A Global History of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Woollacott, Angela, Desley Deacon, and Penny Russell, eds. Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Doris Bachmann-Medick

The Transnational Study of Culture: A Plea for Translation* 1

1 Introduction “Culture […] is both transnational and translational.” (Bhabha 1994, 247) Homi Bhabha’s phrase remains striking and emphasizes the necessity of a dynamic view of culture. At the same time, it points to the increasing importance of developing transnational cultural studies explicitly from the perspective of translation and displacement. If we understand cultures as the unfolding of a multi-layered superposition and a blurring of boundaries, then intercultural differences form an integral part of the concept of culture. Within this transculturally open concept, the analysis of cultural forms and practices cannot be restricted to any single research tradition in the spectrum of studies of culture, which is bound to nation-specific traditions of knowledge and research. What is needed is a transnational enhancement of cultural studies. To avoid misunderstandings: Transnationalization does not mean the international distribution of European/Western forms and standards of the study of culture. The danger of intellectual imperialism would be too great. What it does mean is a critical internationalism – for example along the lines of a critical regionalism as presented by Gayatri Spivak in her book Other Asias. (2008, 1 ff., 131) Recently, perspectives put forward even by dominant British and American cultural studies conform to the idea of a critical internationalism, which takes into account the (power) differences of knowledge transfer worldwide. As Robert Stam and Ella Shohat state in their article in the comprehensive anthology Internationalizing Cultural Studies: “This unequal distribution of knowledge and prestige points to the necessity of de-Eurocentrizing and transnationalizing the field.” (Stam/Shohat 2005, 481) This includes the need both to pluralize the Western-based research of cultures towards an anti-Eurocentric project, and to regionalize it in order to question hegemonic premises, claims of universality, and centristic perspectives within Western cultural studies. Not surprisingly, this was only a reaction to growing pressure from the postcolonial predicament of cultural studies itself. (Cf. Abbas/Erni 2005, 2) * This contribution is the English translation of the German article “Transnationale Kulturwissenschaften: Ein Übersetzungskonzept,” published in: Lost or Found in Translation? Interkulturelle/Internationale Perspektiven der Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften. Eds. René Dietrich, Daniel Smilovski, and Ans­­gar Nünning. Trier: WVT 2011. 53–72.

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This pluralization of the study of culture, which from then on was relentlessly pursued, valorizes different knowledge traditions and takes them seriously as individual “speaking positions.” (Abbas/Erni 2005, 8; cf. Szeman 2006; Stratton/Ang 1996, 362) But this adjustment towards pluralization never went beyond mere lip service. So far, there are few analyses that question which (scientific-) historical and political conditions would have to be met and which categories would be needed to initiate a critical transnationalization – both towards “comparative (multi)Cultural Studies” (Stam/Shohat 2005, 492) and towards an epistemological decolonization in the humanities as demanded by Sérgio Costa in his article “Found in Networking? Geisteswissenschaften in der neuen Geopolitik des Wissens.” (Costa 2011, 46) Would it be sufficient simply to add the nation-specific or local variations of cultural studies in different parts of the world? Today, working with categories like connection, networking or cross-linkage presents itself as the obvious, established research perspective. Nevertheless even these categories can be misleading. It would be too easy, for instance, to employ them simply in the service of defining global networks, thereby hiding that these networks are heavily determined by power asymmetries and that they emerge out of historical non-contemporaneities. Bearing these problems in mind, it would be more constructive to bring translation as an analytical category to the fore – with special regard to its potential for recognizing and managing difference. Translation has not only become a leading category in the humanities (Apter 2006; Bachmann-Medick 2012; Bassnett 2011), but it might also further the humanities and the study of culture in their internationalization. (Cf. Bachmann-Medick 2014) From the perspective of culturally informed translation studies, the focus moves towards specific processes of translation as well as towards differences, ruptures und un-translatable moments in the global circulation of theories, concepts, categories and terminologies. We must learn to take up the category of translation, with its inherent awareness of difference, to uncover and emphasize possible connecting points with non-European research traditions in the study of culture. This would be particularly beneficial when discussing the revaluation of area studies, and in particular the new perspectives on ‘translocal’ linkages in global history. (Cf. Freitag/von Oppen 2010) Coupled with a revaluation of area studies, translation would also overcome its overly traditionalist and antiquated connotations – which have become (problematically) reinstated in the German Council of Science and Humanities’ recommendations for area studies from 2006 – that are based merely on exchange and cultural mediation, i.e. on a rather outmoded concept of translation that does not consider contemporary insights



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into the asymmetries of global and transregional connections.1 (Bachmann-Medick 2015) Emerging approaches to a transnationalization of the study of culture itself are already on their way to outlining a more complex concept of translation. Even now, translation acts as a category that inspires cultural studies to self-reflexively expand the pillars of its own research practice. Currently in focus is a greater emphasis on the interdisciplinarity of research within the study of culture, especially within its characteristic “study of transitional processes” (“Arbeit an Übergängen”) (Weigel 2001, 125), its “openness to translation” (Bachmann-Medick 2010, 384 ff.) or its “transition-logic.” (Wirth 2008, 25–27) These aspects underline the striking advantages of a translational perspective. Such a perspective can be achieved by making an epistemological leap that would extend the traditional cultural technique and practice of linguistic translation to more encompassing processes of transmission and mediation. This would not only allow us to discover new areas of research, but also present us with another, more extensive potential of translation. Translation would become a comprehensive analytical category, opening up new avenues for epistemological thought that could then lead to border thinking, the sounding out of intermediary spaces (between cultures, but also between disciplines and systems of knowledge), the acceptance and acknowledgement of differences, and the breaking open of ‘clustered’ complexes of problems and general terms (like modernization, identity, subject, work, religion, and so on). Owing to this epistemological benefit for analysis, the category of translation would therefore bring about a definitive translational turn across disciplines, one that would nevertheless remain bound to intercultural or cross-cultural communication and interaction. (Cf. Bachmann-Medick 2010, 238–283; 2016, 175–209; 2009) Facing the challenges of economic and cultural globalization, the study of culture cannot remain a stagnant, national enterprise limited to its own scholarly traditions. These traditions must learn to adapt to and apply the translational perspective to themselves from within the framework of a global project for transnational cultural studies. One of the central concerns for the study of culture today must be to find out whether there are any signs that lead to a global language, indeed to a global vocabulary as a condition of the possibility for such a project like a transnational study of culture, one which takes into account different 1 Here, regional/area studies themselves are still being emphasized as “mediators” between cultures. At the same time they “[...] offer models for translating and negotiating between different cultures, or political and social structures.” (Wissenschaftsrat 2006, 47) Here, translation is succinctly defined as “exchange with other countries,” instead of a complex process of transposition, including broad translation processes already within the respective culture and its traditions of knowledge and research.

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regional perspectives in the world. It will become crucial to encourage local registers of knowledge to participate in developing such a translational vocabulary.

2 Global Trans(re)lations Translations between cultures and systems of knowledge have become indispensible nowadays, especially as analytical tools: for the management and investigation of cultural as well as interreligious relations and conflicts; for the development of integrative strategies in so-called multicultural societies; and, last but not least, for exploring productive junctions between the humanities and the sciences. The different approaches in the study of culture also need to refer back to the trans(re)lations in a society’s everyday life. Furthermore, they need to reflect upon their often disparate ways of analysis, finding out either the extent to which they themselves are translatable within their specific methodological frameworks, or the ways in which they can offer themselves for analysis. In the end, increasing globalization cannot cloud the fact that there still are differences between various cultures of knowledge, systems of terminologies, thinking and acting. We need a sharpened attention to processes of transposition, mediation and insights into the single steps a translation procedure takes in order to better understand those differences – so as not to cover up too hastily either ruptures in intercultural interactions, distortions in the circulation of global representations, or obstructions on the stony paths of scientific travelling concepts. (Concerning travelling concepts, cf. Bal 2002; Said 1983; Clifford 1997; Neumann/Nünning 2012; Langenohl 2014; Bachmann-Medick 2014) To investigate all these potential ruptures in global relations, translation becomes an evermore important cultural technique. Even though we cannot ignore questions about the limits of global translatability, the increasing concentration on translation processes within cultural studies raises our awareness of recent as well as historical situations of cultural encounter – as complex processes of cultural translation. The same applies to the sphere of scholarly exchange. Translation opens up to a transnational practice that deals with highly complex processes of transmission and mediation – more far-reaching than the bipolar ‘exchanges’ between national languages or cultures of knowledge and scholarship within a nation state framework. These multilayered transnational issues at stake force the different perspectives on and approaches to cultural studies to take into account an increasingly complex understanding of translation – an understanding which explicitly transgresses a linguistic-textual framework and moves into the sphere of social and



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scholarly practice. Only if the concept is broadened in this way can translation rise to its full potential within cultural studies, a potential which translation studies scholar Lawrence Venuti had already pointed to in the late 1990s. (Venuti 1998, 9) In doing so, translation will be able to overcome the boundaries of its ‘discipline’ within translation studies and become a fundamental category of analysis for cultural and social sciences. Indeed, the most recent decisive translational stimuli stem from subtle cultural and social-scientific uses of the category of translation which, however, still need to be checked empirically for their practicability in most cases. Jürgen Habermas, for example, entreats religious communities in post-secular societies to translate their religious languages into a generally accessible secular language. (Habermas 2006) Joachim Renn bases the entire field of sociology on “translational relations” (Übersetzungsverhältnisse) (cf. Renn 2006), in which he strives for a new perspective on social integration in the face of existing differences, as well as for translational connectivities between different parts and groups of a society. That translation can be a key term for social theory is reflected in the area of migration studies, which is being re-discovered from the perspective of translational activities and the act of translating oneself. (Cf. Papastergiadis 2000; Vorderobermeier/Wolf 2008) Titles such as “Translating Terror” (cf. Bassnett 2005), “Violence and Translation” (Das 2002), or Translation and Conflict (Baker 2006) open up explicitly political horizons of translation. Here we can see the greatest broadening of the textual and linguistic realm towards a more encompassing critical insight into political usages and effects of translation: as a political-manipulative strategy, as a specific practice of power or even violence, but also as an important strategy for narrative legitimizations of war and conflict, with all the communicative situations and mobilizing attempts that go with it.

3 (Cross-)References and Transformations How can this broad category of translation help to increase the transnationalization of the study of culture? That depends on how far we look beyond the horizon of linguistic and textual translations with our sharpened attention, without rendering translation a mere metaphor. The cooperation with international translation studies can offer stimuli for analytical precision. Their own cultural turn (cf. Bassnett/Lefevere 1998; Venuti 2000; Bassnett 2002; Snell-Hornby 2006) was and is accompanied by adhering to an exact analytical translation process. We need to put the necessity of cultural translations – which has only been postulated for too long – into concrete terms within this framework. In this way it can be tested

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and verified for small, graspable units of communication like situations of interaction or mediation – even if these have to be tied back to broader horizons like power and dependencies, or discursive fields like Orientalism or colonialism for a proper contextualization. (Cf. Asad/Dixon 1985, 177; Venuti 1998, 158) A transnationalization of the study of culture can benefit from these context-sensitive and detail-oriented analyses of translation offered by translation studies, as well as from exposing the problems of the ‘original’ in its increasingly precarious status, its dubious authority, and its less than secure positioning. The study of culture today cannot assume any more that the ‘originals’ of their theories and approaches originated in the West and are only being copied or maybe translated outside of Europe. Nevertheless, single acts of translation are still coined by powerful hegemonic relations, even asymmetries, of a “global regime of translation.” (Sakai 1997, 2009) Such a framework for translation, including the translation of scholarly texts, academic approaches and debates, has to be critically reflected if there is to be a project of transnationalization within the study of culture. Attention has to be directed primarily towards contexts and frames of references, especially ‘between’ the different systems and cultures of knowledge. The potential of a third space, a tertium comparationis beyond a simple dualism opens up here, which has to be re-negotiated with every translation of one position, one perspective, and one scientific system into another. The area of social action itself offers revealing insights into the necessity of mediating communication through a common, general frame of reference. Martin Fuchs, a sociologist with a cultural anthropologist’s eye, has demonstrated this by way of the Dalit (the untouchables) in India. As highly marginalized slum dwellers, they have been and are attempting (especially since the mid-twentieth century) to make their voices heard and bring their claims across by translating their entitlement to human rights into the universalist framework of justice, freedom and equality. The powerful ‘language’ of Buddhism offers such a frame of reference to the Dalit. It allows them to discover the power of their own agency: They were now able to address the most denigrating aspects of their discrimination and existence publicly, most notably through new forms of literature, as many now felt empowered to speak up in the public arena and articulate their concerns and demands openly and forcefully. (Fuchs 2009, 31)

The reference point of Buddhism allowed the Dalit to connect to other social contexts and thus gain social recognition. Here, translation appears as an intentional act, as an active “reaching out to others” – a far-reaching perspective on translation, which allows different groups in a society to use translation as a “mode of agency.” (Fuchs 2009, 32) The already problematic bipolarity of the



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translation process does not work anymore in these practices of social translations. It becomes necessary to develop and use – even possibly universal – “third idioms” (in this case study the language of Buddhism) in order to gain frames of reference even for the acts of translating themselves. This demands a multipolar approach as translation does not mean simply bridging two unconnected poles. Rather than being a one-way process, translation becomes a sociological category for the analysis of complex relationships, which differs from a simple transfer in so far as it includes internal differences as well as the expectation of reciprocity and mutual transformations from the start. If we want to enhance the transnationalization of the study of culture, it is a natural assumption that these third idioms or third spaces need to be developed as tracks for translation in order to put reciprocity into practice. Of course we cannot simply assume that the practice of negotiating differences alone, emphasized by Homi Bhabha, offers such a new track. After all we would first need – according to the claim of sociologist Thomas Schwinn – a certain “standardisation of differences.” (Schwinn 2006, 225–227) Schwinn refers to standardized cognitive (by all means even normatively tainted) frameworks, within which differences can be articulated and communicated: for example, the reference to human rights, environmental, educational and health standards, etc. Common reference points like these as well as a formal standardization offer important ‘corridors’ of translatability (cf. Schwinn 2006, 209–211) despite all differences. They are needed, both for cultural and scientific translations, because systems of knowledge in themselves are especially difficult to hybridize; they rather co-exist unconnectedly. It would thus be a great step forward if, for example, Western academia accepted terms, methods, and insights from other traditions of science as “corridors” of translatability – instead of developing and formulating the decisive cognitive standards in technology and natural sciences from its own perspective only, in order to universalize these standards and send them around the world as travelling concepts.

4 Translation as Displacement Defined by their self-reflexivity, cultural studies/Kulturwissenschaften should be able to make cognitive standards ‘translatable.’ This means that they must be repeatedly re-localized with respect to different cultures of science and knowledge but after all, the acceptance and acceptability of these (Western) standards also has to face resistance, especially from cultures and societies which can set their own, different forms of knowledge and traditions against Western ideas.

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(Cf. Schwinn 2006, 224) But even when merely developing shared standards, difficult communication processes can be expected. We cannot simply assume smooth communication channels and ‘corridors’ (as Schwinn does); rather, there are breaks and ruptures, which might cause distorted appropriations or transformations. There is no way past the postcolonial predicament that paves the way for a kind of transnationalization broader than a one-way street. The postcolonial attention to power in any kind of translational relations (cf. Niranjana 1992; Bassnett/Trivedi 1999; Spivak 2000; Tymoczko/Gentzler 2002) has furthered a view of cultural translation as a process of transformation that is full of tensions and conflicts. This already goes beyond the scope of clearly defined positions or spheres, or the ‘fidelity’ to ‘originals’ of tradition, origin and identity. Therefore, it would be too rash to simply adopt the term “translational transnationalism” (Apter 2001, 5) to pave the way for an enlightened cosmopolitanism within the global politics of language, culture and translation. Instead, we should make use of studies of culture rooted in translation to track down the historical, social and political conditions of cross-cultural translations and science translations by looking at clearly defined problems. An impetus for this perspective would be Homi Bhabha’s unconventional coupling of “transnational and translational.” (1994, 247) This goes beyond a mere play on words in pointing out a task of transnational cultural studies which still needs to be put in concrete terms: Any transnational cultural study must ‘translate’, each time locally and specifically, what decentres and subverts this transnational globality, so that it does not become enthralled by the new global technologies of ideological transmission and cultural consumption. (Bhabha 1994, 241)

The range of the translation category goes even further. It demands to explicitly spell out vague visions of wholeness from a translational perspective, be they visions of culture or cultural studies, or of globalization. Translation scholar Michael Cronin assumes that global processes can be envisioned and analyzed as decentered when speaking of “globalization as translation.” (2003, 34) This opens the door for an actor-oriented approach to globalization. Owing to their own efforts in translating and adopting different perspectives step by step, actors even in a global civic society can work towards a bottom-up localization and thus actively define their place and establish networks and relationships. (Cf. Cronin 2006) The conceptual considerations put forward by Dipesh Chakrabarty (especially 2000, 2008, 2010), an Indian-Australian-American historian, demonstrate that the questions surrounding global translation processes cannot be answered without due reflection of the historical dimensions. Thus we need to re-interpret



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the transition of non-European countries (like India) to capitalism, but also the manifestation of multiple modernities, in the face of the fundamental idea of translation-as-displacement: not as the result of a linear process of universalization, but as the outcome of historical, colonially shaped differences and fractions in translations. (Cf. Chakrabarty 2014) “Translation [...] is the agency of difference.” (Haverkamp 1997, 7) A statement like this needs to be substantiated. Mere epistemological efforts will not lead us any further. Neither is it enough to simply break down those holistic and supposedly pure concepts like culture, identity, tradition to their conflicting parts. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008), historical substantiation and differentiation are indispensable when analyzing processes of cultural translation. Or, in the words of Latin America scholar Walter Mignolo, we have to do “theorizing across the colonial difference.” (Mignolo/Schiwy 2003, 4) Faced with global relationships defined by their displacements and multiple cultural affinities, we are forced to re-think our understanding of translation with regards to politics and power relations. This would have far-reaching consequences for the still prevailing idea of translation as ‘bridge-building.’ This very idea continues to be used as a set phrase, even as an ideological construct in the ‘exchange’ between scientific/academic cultures. Instead, it would be more productive and realistic to take a closer look at the easily ignored fractures and differences in the dynamic of translation processes. After all, the ‘in-between-situations’ of translational relations are closely linked to in-between-existences caused by world-wide migration, exile and diaspora. These overlaps and fractures between different affiliations could also apply to the migration of theories, which we cannot describe any more with the harmonistic travelling metaphor along the lines of travelling concepts. Translation is an important method of displacement and alienation, differentiation and mediation. It paves the way for an analysis of the ‘in-between-spaces’ celebrated by cultural studies – particularly by looking at them as ‘translation spaces’ in a more detailed way: as spaces for the configuration of relationships, situations, ‘identities’ and interactions by specific cultural translation processes. ‘In-between-spaces’ made accessible like this also have far-reaching epistemological and analytical potential because they foster translational perspectives, especially a search for cross-conceptualizations which are helpful in breaking up binary counter terms or even formulaic clusters. Thus, from a translational viewpoint, the umbrella term ‘intercultural’ could be tied back again to interaction processes of encounter, consisting of single steps of translation. This would help to make visible elements like understanding, mediation, misunderstandings, blockages, scepticism and defence, which so far have been frequently ignored. A translational approach like this makes the complexity of transfer and media-

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tion processes more transparent and thus easier to manage. At the same time it demonstrates the importance of going back to the roots of terminological pre-dispositions and – often unspoken – assumptions. They can be criticized and differentiated when looking at translation processes – for example, by dissecting master narratives or synthesizing terms like modernization, identity, society or culture (even running the risk that such a dissection and negotiation might be a Western-European-American strategy again).

5 “Cross-categorical Translation” instead 5 of Universalization One way for the study of culture/cultural studies to distance itself from universalizing Western ideas, models, concepts, theories, terms and categories in a transnational framework would be the dissection of general terms. But does Boris Buden (2005, 17) not have a point when he argues that we need “a new universalist perspective” in order to develop a common path of communication and understanding in the face of increasing ‘particularisms’? On this path, every “search for a universal basis of communication” is countered by the search for “the specific cultural origin of the particular.” (Shimada 1997, 260) Exactly this dilemma creates a productive force field for questions of and about translation. Biased attempts to universalize based on Eurocentric assumptions are questioned vehemently, especially from outside of Europe. They also expose the problem of the European privilege to translation and its traditional practice of translating foreign cultures and languages unilaterally into the European context. In the future, the critical reflection of translation in the study of culture will have to put more force into a change in perspectives. This means engaging with translation processes from different directions and with different localizations in order to understand how “translation processes are essential for the self-conception of all non-European cultures [...].” (Shimada 1997, 261; cf. Hermans 2006; Hung/Wakabayashi 2005; Ning/Yifeng 2008) Is it becoming more and more questionable to argue for global communication while grounding it on universalizations, which are still mainly defined by Western ideas? We cannot assume a global, extensive distribution based on universalizing transpositions. This assumption could and should be replaced by a critical view of local speaking positions and reciprocal global translation processes. Analyses focusing on the junctions where reciprocity in translation is possible are real eye-openers: for example, the common goal to find third idioms – like religious frames of reference (cf. Fuchs 2009), or the reference to human rights.



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(Cf. Tsing 1997) Approaches like these need impulses from outside of Europe to reconceptualize reflections on translation. Notably, scholars in Asia are currently developing potent non-Western concepts of translation with a strong reference to a translational turn – these go as far as demanding reciprocal translations and an exchange of theories beyond ethnocentric preconditioning. (Cf. Hung/Wakabayashi 2005; Ning 2007; Ning/Yifeng 2008) Dipesh Chakrabarty’s radical displacement of the question of translation itself shows how especially in this context epistemological and global problems are intertwined with politics of translation. Already the title of his book Provincializing Europe (2000) draws attention to the fact that Europe needs to make itself translatable because it is losing its historical hegemony by being integrated into shared and “entangled histories” (cf. Randeria 2002) and thereby being ‘provincialized.’ In this situation, Europe loses its assumed embodiment of the ‘original’ and its claim to being the major authority in defining universal terms and concepts. According to Chakrabarty, it can only become apparent how historical knowledge is being produced not only in Europe but also in the so-called third world by understanding translation as displacement beyond colonial boundaries. Thus, Provincializing Europe explicitly suggests a broadening of the analytical approach to processes of cultural and political translations, from cross-cultural to “cross-categorical.” Only then can we suspend Eurocentric, universalistic frames of reference and, instead, stay open to non-European categories of translation. To give a well-known example by Chakrabarty, this should allow for a translation of the Hindi term pani into the English term ‘water’ without having to go through the existing Western scientific specification, i.e. H2O. (Cf. Chakrabarty 2000, 83) In order to develop a common ground for reciprocal cultural translations, we need a specific mode of comparison which reflects the various ways of mediation and the problematic cultural affiliation of the respective tertium comparationis. This, following a translational turn, paves the way for an interesting epistemological perspective in the development of a transnational study of culture, a perspective which can only be drafted for now. (Bachmann-Medick 2014) Chakrabarty (2006, 2014) emphasizes how strongly “cross-categorical translations” are tied to the demand to contextualize and historicize those universalizing categories of analysis (like democracy, dignity of man, equality, etc.): A political historiography in non-European countries such as India in a postcolonial context can only be achieved through a critical revision of the predominance of European key categories of modernity, even through a new perspective of translation as displacement. The idea of translation, as compared to the idea of either transfer or travelling concepts, enables us to lay bare the single parts and junctures of a whole set of historical displacements: in this case, the transformation of the ‘original’ European term ‘proletariat’ in India based on new collective

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subjects of history like ‘subaltern,’ ‘masses,’ and ‘peasants’ reaching as far as the concept of ‘multitude’ proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004). According to Chakrabarty, translation as a difference-oriented concept needs to be tied back to its historical refractions: There is nothing like the cunning of reason that ensures that we all converge at the same terminal point in history in spite of our apparent, historical differences. Our historical differences actually make a difference. [...] The universal concepts of political modernity encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institutions, and practices through which they are translated and newly configured. (Chakrabarty 2014, 59)

When comparing cultures, the relevance of such an approach for developing a transnational study of culture becomes apparent – not least when attempting to easily bypass reference terms of a global, transnational historiography with the preset assumption of “entangled” or “connected histories.” The view needs to be sharpened through the lens of specific translation processes to see further. The relevance of a historical contextualization of cultural as well as scientific translation processes becomes blatantly obvious in a re-evaluation of universality in transcultural contact situations. Because homogeneous frames of reference are missing in the global sphere, self-consciously reflecting on culturally specific assumptions, frameworks, deep structures and translational perspectives becomes indispensible. Which terms are being assumed as a basis for transnational research? Are analytical categories like modernization, development, capitalism, family, democracy or work, really universally applicable and valid? Which translation processes are needed to open up the terms of transcultural analysis themselves – with the goal of finding functional equivalents on the practical level or the terminological systems of non-European societies?

6 The Transnational Study of Culture as a Mode 6 of Translation Studies We can only speak soundly of cross-cultural translation – including the translations among social and cultural studies themselves – if we aim towards “cross-categorical translations.” (Chakrabarty 2000, 85) This certainly implies one of the biggest challenges for any attempt at making transnational cultural studies as a mode of translation studies more distinguished. Here the individual disciplines within cultural research can further a transnationalization of the study of culture by bringing in their own current focus on translation. Just think about the decided discussions on restructuring a whole subject area, say in the field of comparative



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literature. Here the translational turn is far-reaching because it opens the subject area up to political contexts and forces a re-thinking from the borders of “translation zones.” (Apter 2006, 5) This term refers to arenas and conflict situations which hold great potential for translations whilst, at the same time, running the huge risk of mistranslations: diaspora communities, global media, conflict zones and war, as well as contact zones between different perceptions and realities. These ‘zones’ shed light on how “philology is linked to globalization, to Guantánamo Bay, to war and peace, to the Internet [...].” (Apter 2006, 11) It is certain that explosive issues like these for the comparative analysis of transcultural texts between “language wars,” “linguistic creolization” and multilingual situations have given a strong impetus to sociological and political usages of the translation category. Within the emerging field of translational migration studies, however, we need to elaborate on what it could mean to redefine migration alongside the concept of translation, and view self-translation as an important element of a permanent transformation process: “In an age of global migration we also need new social theories of flow and resistance and cultural theories of difference and translation.” (Papastergiadis 2000, 20) Even on the level of translational analyses in the social sciences, first attempts of using theories of cultural translation for examining the integration challenges of modern societies could be further investigated. It would certainly be a productive step to look at the opportunities for conflict resolution and the capacities for integration through a revaluation of translation processes. (Cf. Renn 2006; Renn/Straub/Shimada 2002) Finally, the increasingly transnational field of historiography shows a striking rediscovery of the translation category. Translation is being read and used here as a specific practice of historical mediation, through which colonialism, decolonization, missionary history, transitional processes of conversion and the transfer of concepts can be made accessible by the analysis of actions. (Cf. Richter 2005, 13; Howland 2003; Bermann/Wood 2005, especially 257–273; Lässig 2012) Within this framework, scholars are increasingly on the lookout for creative re-interpretations of basic political concepts like freedom, democracy and human rights (Bachmann-Medick 2013), for challenges in developing their own historical-political terms and concepts in the face of these Western travelling concepts (cf. Liu 1995, 1999; Sakai 1997) – even for practices of explicit non-equivalence. The limitations of a transdisciplinary and transcultural translational perspective become apparent in these processes, at least as long as they are still under the spell of verbal language pre-loads and fixations. So far only few approaches – for example, in research on missionaries and conversion, as well as in religious studies – apply the concept of cultural translation to the translation of images as an “analytical tool for image transmissions and religious conversions in general.” (Bräunlein 2008, 29) For a transnational study of culture there will be no way

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around the realization that image and picture translations in particular offer important insights into intercultural relations. Significant first steps are being made towards “Cultural (image) studies (Kulturbildwissenschaft) as translation theory” (Mersmann 2004, 107–109): “visual cultural translation is still under-represented in translation theory.” (Mersmann 2009) In the face of transnational media and image worlds, the translation of images is becoming increasingly controversial. We are faced with cultural differences and conflicting image cultures, even the prohibition of images, which have been exemplified in the debates and struggles about the Mohammed caricatures as well as in reactions to the obscene and scandalous torture pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison. The disciplines’ increasing willingness to open themselves up to the category of translation and to make themselves translatable offers an important springboard for more far-reaching questions of transnational translatability, as well as for the necessity of translation between the different, nation-specific cultures of knowledge within cultural studies/Kulturwissenschaften themselves. Currently there is too much commingling of hitherto new perspectives and too much deference towards Anglo-American theories even within Europe. (Cf. Bachmann-Medick 2014, new postscript 407 ff.) Which approaches are thus lost in translation? The task of translation is becoming increasingly relevant, especially beyond the borders of Europe, in particular regarding Latin American estudios culturales, which have been evolving more and more and coming to the fore. (Cf. among others Klengel 2008; Allatson 2007; Canclini 2005; Richard 2005; Moreiras 2001; Moraña 2000) Their development of distinct analytical categories (transculturation, testimonio, dependence, hybridization, etc.) questions the hegemonic master narrative of the U.S. as representative of cultural studies. The estudios culturales point out the necessity of outlining the prospective transnational study/ ies of culture in a more multi-layered way than ever before, thereby critically reflecting the power divide between different cultures of research – not least by following cross-categorical translations.

7 The Globalization of the Study of Culture as a 7 Challenge for Translation There is no straight path to the globalization of the study of culture. It will rather be re-translated and transformed from its ‘peripheries’ from outside of Europe. According to Stuart Hall, it needs to expose itself to translation processes in order to enable this development: “Cultural studies today is not only about globalization: it is being ‘globalized’ – a very uneven and contradictory process [...] What



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interests me about this is that, everywhere, cultural studies is going through this process of re-translation.” (Hall/Chen 1996, 393) With this statement Stuart Hall emphasized already at the beginning of the 1990s that the European strand of cultural studies not only needs to translate into the societal processes of internationalization and globalization, but to make itself translatable for Asian and African cultural studies within this process: Cultural studies is transformed once you begin to think what the Taiwanese situation is, what “the nation” means there; how internationalization and the new global economy is transforming your society. Until you go to cultural studies through these structures, not from within cultural studies itself but from these externalities, you don’t really translate it; you just borrow it, renovate it, play at recasting it. (Hall/Chen 1996, 397)

In this context, translation is completely disconnected from the idea of an (European) ‘original:’ I use [...] translation as a continuous process of re-articulation and re-contextualization, without any notion of a primary origin. So I am not using it in the sense that cultural studies was ‘really’ a fully-formed western project and is now taken up elsewhere. I mean that when­ever it enters a new cultural space, the terms change [...]. (Hall/Chen 1996, 393)

In order to realize this still unfulfilled project of cultural research as both a result of translation and translation studies, we need to develop methods and terms of analysis which do not mainly stem from Western research traditions but have yet to be developed from a “global conversation.” (Jacob 1999, 112) At the heart of this complex problem are prominent objections against the idea of a “global conversation” as too seamless, as trusting translation to be a straight path to communication and the overcoming of borders. Comparatist and Asia scholar Naoki Sakai, for example, argues that this apparently seamless “global conversation” is being undermined by the highly visible discontinuity of translation processes. According to Sakai, cultural studies/Kulturwissenschaften can only turn into translation studies if the former unmasks the global translation system as a regime of the “unity of national language,” as a “scheme of nationality” (Sakai 2009, 73) – if cultural studies reveals it as a modern scheme of “co-figuration” of national languages, which is used to define hegemonic borders and exclusive spaces. Nevertheless, translation can be empowered as a critical conceptual perspective and strategically used from within this regime of inequality. Following this idea, Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon have demonstrated the great potential for transnational cultural studies as translational studies: as “comparative cultural theory that is attentive to global traces in the theoretical knowledge produced in specific locations.” (Sakai/Solomon 2006, v) This does

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not mean that cultural studies, like travelling theories, find their way from the U.S. to the rest of the world. Rather, cultural studies should expose itself to the simultaneous development of theories in disparate sites of the world – and organize its publications in as many languages and voices as possible: in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean at the same time, as has been programmatically demonstrated by Traces (cf. Sakai/Solomon 2006), a multilingual series of publications. Ultimately, theory is not only a Western prerogative any more. As an epistemological project, the “dislocation of the West” (Sakai/Solomon 2006, 18) could be read as a counterpart to Chakrabarty’s historical approach to Provincializing Europe. This convergence demonstrates that a translational perspective can be the most far-reaching when it motivates different approaches to the study of culture to make themselves translatable to a global knowledge-based society and to work towards pluralization – quasi against the grain of a unilateral regime of translation. This might sound rather conceptual and abstract, but the contact and negotiation zones between different cultures of science and scholarship often seem to overlap with the increasingly volatile global political problem fields. These translational scenarios – most notably since 9/11 – are more and more dependent on professional translators and interpreters as mediators and cultural brokers with a sensitivity to cultural conflicts. They demand an enhanced critical competence for managing complex processes of cultural translation with regard to their political and ethical dimensions, as well as to their deeper power-related structures; reflecting their implicit strategies, their claim to power and hegemony, their manipulations and acts of violence – as well as their often surprising possibilities for intervention. Translation does not remain limited to the mere ‘exchange’ between cultures of knowledge and scholarship; it is slowly but surely turning into a “matter of war and peace.” (Apter 2006, 3) Under these circumstances, the study of culture’s inclusion of the transnational becomes more than a mere research project; it becomes a translation project located at the political level. Such a translation project, far from being reducible to a common universal language, is necessarily bound up with the different “speaking positions” inherent to the studies of culture – positions that precisely do not allow for the smoothing out of strained political, social and economic differences found in every corner of the globe. English translation by Mirjam Eiswirth



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Lebenswelten: Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften. Eds. Andreas Gipper and Susanne Klengel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. 121–137. Lässig, Simone. “Übersetzungen in der Geschichte – Geschichte als Übersetzung? Überlegungen zu einem analytischen Konzept und Forschungsgegenstand für die Geschichtswissenschaft.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38.2 (2012): 189–216. Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Character, and Translated Modernity. China 1900–1937. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Liu, Lydia. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 1999. Mersmann, Birgit. “Bildkulturwissenschaft als Kulturbildwissenschaft? Von der Notwendigkeit eines inter- und transkulturellen Iconic Turn.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 49.1 (2004): 91–109. Mersmann, Birgit. “Global Routes: Transmediation and Transculturation as Key Concepts of Translation Studies.” Transmediality and Transculturality. Eds. Nadja Gernalzick and Gabriele Pisarz-Ramírez. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 405–423. Mignolo, Walter, and Freya Schiwy. “Double Translation.” Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding. Eds. Tullio Maranhão and Bernhard Streck. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. 3–29. Moraña, Mabel, ed. Nuevas Perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina: El Desafío de los Estudios Culturales. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio/Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000. Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. Ning, Wang, ed. Thematic Issue on Translating Global Cultures. Neohelicon 34.2 (2007). Ning, Wang, and Sun Yifeng, eds. Translation, Globalization and Localisation: A Chinese Perspective. Clevedon/Buffalo et al.: Multilingual Matters, 2008. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley/Los Angeles et al.: University of California Press, 1992. Papastergiadis, Nikos. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Randeria, Shalini. “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in India.” Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness. Eds. Yehuda Elkana et al. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2002. 284–311. Renn, Joachim, Jürgen Straub, and Shingo Shimada, eds. Übersetzung als Medium des Kulturverstehens und sozialer Integration. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2002. Renn, Joachim. Übersetzungsverhältnisse: Perspektiven einer pragmatistischen Gesellschaftstheorie. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2006. Richard, Nelly. “Globalización Académica, Estudios Culturales y Crítica Latinoamericana.” Cultura, Política y Sociedad: Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Ed. Daniel Mato. Buenos Aires: CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales), 2005. 455–470. [accessed: 25 October 2015]. Richter, Melvin. “More than a Two-Way Traffic: Analyzing, Translating, and Comparing Political Concepts from Other Cultures.” Contributions 1.1 (2005): 7–20.

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Wirth, Uwe. “Vorüberlegungen zu einer Logik der Kulturforschung.” Kulturwissenschaft: Eine Auswahl grundlegender Texte. Ed. Uwe Wirth. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. 9–67. Wissenschaftsrat. Empfehlungen zu den Regionalstudien (area studies) in den Hochschulen und außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen, 2006. [accessed: 25 October 2015].

Burcu Dogramaci

Migrant, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History We live in a time of the neo-nomad, who is characterized by a growing need for flexibility and a furthering of the compression of space and time. (Körner 2000, 17)

In his Reith Lecture, “The Englishness of English Art,” broadcast by the BBC in October 1955, the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner posed the question of a genuinely English art and aesthetic, which he pursued with an art-geographical approach. What is quite remarkable is at that time, Pevsner had only been in the country for a little over 20 years. As an emigrant fleeing from the National Socialists, the art historian, who had studied under Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Pinder, arrived in London in 1934. In his book, Pevsner discusses life as a refugee, shaped by caesura, and his research question pertaining to the national characteristics of art: “[...] being neither English-born nor English-bred, having entered England only at the age of twenty-eight and lived in the country not much longer than twenty years. Twenty years is admittedly not a long time to learn to understand a country. On the other hand my antecedents might be accepted as especially useful for the task. For one thing the very fact of having come into a country with fresh eyes at some stage, and then of having settled down gradually to become part of it, may constitute a great advantage.” (Pevsner 1956, 9) While Pevsner found the different perspective he had on his new homeland as a foreigner particularly beneficial in recognizing local characteristics, by implication, it may be said that it was this change of location, forced upon him as a political refugee, that concentrated Pevsner’s interests on the art of his country of exile in the first place. Having dealt primarily with Saxon and Italian Baroque while in Germany, following his emigration, Pevsner focused particularly on the art and architecture of England (Crossley 2004, 10), which found its expression in the 46 volumes of the series The Buildings of England, first published in 1951. Through his experience with migration, Pevsner, naturalized as a British citizen in 1946, markedly changed the focus of his research in order to concentrate intensively on national topics. Although the art historian, with an eye toward Germany, placed value on the differentiation between “national” and “nationalistic,” Pevsner’s nationalization went hand in hand with a politicization: For example, he led a commission established by the British secret intelligence to Germany, which, shortly after the end of the Second World War, was to inspect the German consumer goods industry. (Cf. Sudrow 2012) Furthermore, in 1969, Pevsner was one of the few immigrant art historians to be knighted. (Crossley 2004, 3)



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While Pevsner’s migration can be read as an intense tale of identification and assimilation, yet the work of Vilém Flusser, who like Pevsner was an expatriate of National Socialism, contains a different narrative. While the paths of these two men crossed geographically – in 1940, Flusser also fled initially to London but migrated further to Brazil a short time later – the influence of emigration expressed in the Czech media theorist’s scholarly genesis is an entirely different one. Out of his existence characterized by upheaval, Flusser – a German speaking Czech, an expatriate in Great Britain, and a communications theorist in Brazil, who later lived in France – generated multilingual works. This multilingualism, which shaped Flusser’s literary production, his meandering between Portuguese, English, French and German, quintessentially rested on his experience with migration – especially since Flusser only rarely wrote in his native Czech language. This changing between languages, translating from one into the other and back again provided him with the opportunity to take on different perspectives. Flusser writes: “I am at home in at least four languages and see myself called upon and forced to constantly translate and retranslate my writing. In short: I have experience with homelands and the loss thereof.” (Flusser 1987, 41) This switching between languages could be read as an expression of a mobility that is conditioned by experiences with other homelands and cultures. Here, languages are a way of reflecting and reassuring, a “nomadic circling” (Guldin/Finger/Bernardo 2009, 48) that always returns to its point of origin. It therefore seems logical that Flusser, a migrant many times over, repeatedly reflected on modern nomadism. (Flusser 1995) In doing so, Flusser also expresses the idea that the concept of a settled way of life, associated with sitting, ownership and habitude stands in contrast to the nomad, which he connects with driving, experience and danger. (Flusser 1994) Mobility is the form of existence of nomadic cultures, which historically developed in the Old World desert belt – in West Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula to East Asia. In adapting to living conditions with scarce resources spread across vast expanses, the members of these cultures lived a life of wandering. (Hendricks 2003, 8) This archaic nomadism of migrant ethnic groups, which still exists today, is reborn and reflected in post-industrial societies (Haehnel 2007, 29) – in commuters, migrant workers, political refugees, employees of globally-oriented companies, students, (world) travelers and artists who, as scholarship recipients or exhibition participants, have a global presence. At the same time, a clear distinction must be made between the image of nomads traveling along established routes, wandering vagabonds or flâneurs, migrants who constantly change their place of residence, and the merely temporary traveler. (Adolphs 2007, 25) In this context, Caren Kaplan also posed the question of the “continuities and discontinuities between terms such as ‘travel,’

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‘displacement,’ and ‘location’ as well as between the particularized practices and identities of ‘exile,’ ‘tourist,’ and ‘nomad.’ All displacements are not the same.” (Kaplan 1996, 3) However, the often one-dimensional reception and connotations of these various transitive forms of existence – migration as alienation, travel as experience, nomadism or vagabondism as (artistic) freedom – ask to be viewed less as clearly differentiated possible forms of existence. Rather, the task is the bringing together of their points of intersection to analyze the potential that these concepts have. This kind of reassessment and overlapping of interpretation results in a renewed focus in understanding these terms by bringing them up to date. Nomads, migrants and travelers are connected by change and movement; by the (occasional) instability of their existence; the experience of new spaces, societies and languages. As figures of mobility and “border crossers,” they can inspire, for example, the development of other concepts for historiographies, which so far often have been defined primarily from across borders and thereby through principles of inclusion and exclusion. Pevsner’s “The Englishness of English Art” does not emphasize exchange and interdependencies so much as it calls upon the very idea of an autonomous national art as just one part of the mosaic of the story of national artistic characters as they have been written for many countries up to the present day. In this way, over the past two decades, there have been several exhibitions and publications searching for a genuinely German contemporary art: German Contemporary Photography (Cologne: Taschen, 1997), Made in Germany (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), New German Painting. Remix (Munich: Prestel, 2007). The principle of the wandering, mobile and transnational artist and nomadic models of thought bar themselves from this classification and canonization as national. On this topic, Kobena Mercer writes: “Migration throws objects, identities and ideas into flux. It has been a defining feature of modernity yet remains only hazily understood as a significant factor in numerous 20th-century artistic formations.” (Mercer 2008, 7) According to what this examination suggests, art history can be written as a narrative of encounters, of exchange, of the perforation of borders, of performativity, of wandering concepts and conceived ideas, of migrant art practices and theories. Attached to this, however, is the hazard of accepting the incompleteness of stories as well as breaks and gaps as inevitable components of a history of contacts and the products resulting from them.



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1 Cultural Contacts – (E)migrating Artists In general, the term “migrants” is “a neutral designation for ‘wanderers’ – for people who, for many different reasons, have left the land of their birth and live in another country.” (Terkessidis 2000, 6) The “border-crossing” artist, in whom the images of his old and new homelands cumulate, is captured in Francesco Clemente’s self-portrait Perseverance from 1981 (Fig. 1), created shortly after his move to New York.

Fig. 1: Francesco Clemente, Perseverance, 1981, oil on canvas, © 2015 Francesco Clemente.

It shows the artist nude, holding a miniature of the Roman Pantheon in his arms: The Italian painter portrays himself as a migrant, who is taking with him a miniaturized model of a monument that, for him, symbolizes his homeland. With this painting, Clemente seems to have wanted to ward off the fear of losing his pantheistic world of forms in his new surroundings of New York. It is reminiscent of the custom very common among migrants

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of displaying models of famous structures from their lands of origin as a way of assuring themselves of their distant homelands. (Burioni 2002, 58)

Here, precisely in his striding lunge and twisted torso, Clemente is a mobile figure straddling two cultures – the old European tradition and the present in New York. The vitality he emanates as a wanderer is expressed through his curiosity – Clemente talks about having only “discovered” America upon his arrival there (Crone/ Marsch 1987, 39) – while the small model in his arms could signify the desire to preserve the past within himself. Clemente, who spent his formative school years at a humanities-oriented high school in Naples and then studied architecture in Rome, had already traveled to India and Afghanistan as a young man, lived in Madras for a time and, since 1982, has kept an apartment and studio in New York. Several exhibitions have already pointed out the topographical relationships in Clemente’s pictures, which reflect this transnational work. (Cf. for example Clemente 1984) The move to New York had an impact on Clemente’s work; in early series such as Midnight Sun (1982) and Fourteen Stations (1982/1983), he dealt intensively with American Abstract Expressionism. Above all, his contact with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat influenced Clemente’s work in the 1980s, and beginning in 1984, the three of them developed a collaborative series of twelve pictures. (Cf. Foye 1990, 118) In Clemente’s Perseverance, a visual response to his jump across the Atlantic can be found in what he is bringing with him – a building that points to the artist’s cultural socialization in the Old World. Artistic migration is not always this clearly visually articulated. Far more often, conflicts with the new hemisphere or interactions between immigrants and the local art scene is only expressed in nuances of artistic work which is difficult to measure. Forty years before Clemente’s arrival, a large number of artists came to the city up the Hudson River, seeking shelter in North America after war had broken out on the European continent. While Francesco Clemente moved to his new chosen home of New York of his own accord, the emigration of European artists around 1940 was politically motivated: “Emigration is no voluntary act. The emigrant, for some reason, usually because he is being politically persecuted in his homeland, is forced to leave this homeland and can never return.” (Faktor-Flechtheim 1987, 31) Among the New York immigrants were central protagonists of French Surrealism. As early as 1939, thus before André Breton and André Masson, the Chilean painter Matta, who had only recently joined the French Surrealists, also landed in New York: At that time, at the age of 27, he was younger than many of the Surrealists and already spoke English, which must have made adapting to his land of exile easier. The Surrealists stranded in New York encountered a milieu that made it possible for them to continue their work under new auspices. In the 1930s, a virile art landscape had



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developed. At the end of the decade, three museums already characterized the scene: the Museum of Modern Art (1929), the Whitney Museum of Art (1931) and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (1939), later the Guggenheim Museum. Gallery owners such as Julien Levy and Pierre Matisse were in a position to give important impulses to the city through their exhibitions of European art, and they helped promote the immigrated Surrealists through shows such as Artists in Exile (1942, Pierre Matisse) or First Papers of Surrealism (1942). Along with jointly published magazines and galleries, the artists’ studios were particularly important “contact zones.”1 The workspaces of Surrealist immigrants as well as those of their young American colleagues, such as Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes and Arshile Gorky, were all located downtown, thus indicating the emergence of a local community.2 Matta’s studio on 9th Street in Manhattan was a central meeting place, a node in a network of artists, in which the connections between the American and European artists grew stronger. Around the beginning of 1943, Matta tried to form his own Surrealist group, independent from the “VVV” magazine circle, in which explicitly young American artists were to be included. (Ernst 1985, 311) Consequently, artists such as William Baziotes, Peter Busa, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock gathered on numerous afternoons in Matta’s studio. (Cf. Spender 2009, 202) Matta tried to win the attendees over with his central aesthetic and artistic ideas; one of Matta’s core concerns was automatism, which he saw as the fundamental approach to the art of his time. (Spender 2009, 198) This automatism was rooted in early Surrealism, a time when experiments involving freeing oneself from rational thought were being explored. Automatic writing, artistic production while asleep or under hypnosis, collective accidental art – all of these were attempts to relinquish control in favor of creative chaos; speed, for example, was one possible way of losing control. In Matta’s work, automatism expressed itself in automatic drawings, in scrawling and scribbled lines, as well as in his paintings, in dramatic gradients of color, in which the pigments almost seem to emerge as independent and autonomous actors. The experimental use of turpentine, which leads to the dissolving and smearing of paint, also belonged to Matta’s accidental practices. (Spender 2009, 20) The goal was the “shutting off” of central thoughts during the painting process. Matta attempted to implement this 1 Mary Louise Pratt describes “contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” (Pratt 1991, 34) In the context of this essay Pratt’s definition is adapted for the situation of exiled artists like Matta who met with local American artists in his studio and where the relations of power weren’t as clear as Pratt described it for her case. 2 Breton lived on 11th Street, Matta on 9th, Pollock and Ford on 11th, and Kiesler und Baziotes on 14th. Cf. Sawin 1995, 185.

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technique by first applying color to large areas with a sponge, which determined how the pictures would develop. Matta followed the traces left by the sponge with a brush and, from these traces, formulated the abstract elements of his painting. The American artists in Matta’s circle anticipated the idea of automatism – in 1942 Motherwell, Baziotes and Pollock, for example, wrote automatic poems together, a practice linked to corresponding collective practices found in early Surrealism. Even before the regular afternoon meetings in Matta’s studio, an intense exchange of ideas between Matta and Robert Motherwell had already taken place. In the spring of 1941, both traveled to an artist colony in the Mexican city of Taxco. There, Matta dealt with the volcanic landscape and the sunlight, which he synthesized with his inner impressions. One can clearly see that the experience of this landscape inspired him to create paintings such as The Earth is a Man from 1942. What is striking about Matta’s work is the absence of a point of reference on which to orient the perspective and narrative in the pictures. Everything seems to exist side by side and on top of one other. The movement of the pictures change; centers of energy can be found, but they cannot be placed in a logical relationship to one another or to their environment. The amorphous shapes flow through one another, their beginning and end indiscernible. What is also noteworthy is the way the pictures extend to the edge of the pictorial space and beyond – also a characteristic of abstract American art, which understood the edges of a picture less as a dramaturgical frame but as something that could be conquered by painting. While Matta began to take a more intense interest in myths, indigenous art and the region’s volcanic landscape through the trip to Mexico, Motherwell’s sketchbook from Mexico reveals a vivid examination of techniques of automatism. In it, abstractions can be seen floating in space. The ink drawings are composed of scribbled lines, some of which are filled-in with black. The intertwined shapes appear random and do not seem to follow any kind of compositional underlying idea; rather, Motherwell seems to extract forms through strong, thick brush strokes in a second step, forms that were initially created in the fine pen drawings by accident. Motherwell’s drawings from Mexico seem to relate to similar, earlier works by Matta. Essentially, it can be posited that the arrival of the Surrealists in around 1940 directly influenced a young American generation, who would later establish themselves as representatives of a genuinely American form of Expressionism. Furthermore, it is conceivable that the Surrealists, with their pictures that eluded reason and experimental artistic techniques, also changed the American public and influenced viewing habits. (Sawin 1995, 340) In doing so, they also seem to have been able to further pave the way for the American Expressionists. Additionally, the Surrealists imported an altered understanding of what an artist is, away from the object, toward a clearer subjectivism – work



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and artist were understood as a unit that rejected orienting itself on an external reality. (Rosenberg 1962, 101) On the other hand, immigrant artists such as Matta did not remain uninfluenced by their stay in America. Above all, the expanded picture formats, which stand out in Matta’s œuvre beginning with X Space and the Ego (1945, 202.2 x 457.2 cm), at the latest, may have been modelled after Jackson Pollock’s large-format paintings, which he began painting with Mural (1943).

2 Nomadic Artistic Concepts and Methods Among the group of artists who had emigrated to New York was Marcel Duchamp, who had assiduously cultivated contacts in the U.S. since his success at the Armory Show in 1913. Closely tied to Duchamp’s emigration is his Boîte-en-Valise (1941), in that the work can be read as an expression of a conceptual examination of his own artistic production in historically unstable times. As early as 1935, the artist had considered the thought of cataloging and compiling his own œuvre and decided against creating a catalogue raisonné in the form of a book. Instead he had a box built inside a suitcase in which he integrated 69 miniature reproductions of his works. In 1942, when Duchamp left the European continent and emigrated to New York, he was able to carry the ‘boîte’ along with him. Due to the fact that the transport of pieces of luggage is a main characteristic of emigration, and because the suitcase, above all else, has advanced in the reception of art as the “meta symbol of migration and mobility” (Hinrichsen 2010, 155), Duchamp’s artistic valise can be assigned an emblematic meaning. This is because the artist not only carried small copies of his original works with him, but transported a concentrated version of his ideas, which are not bound to one place: “Everything important that I have made fits in a small suitcase.” (Cit. in Weiss 1971, 976) To borrow from Tilmann Habermas’s description of “beloved objects,” objects tied to their owners (Habermas 1999, 7–19), in Duchamp’s case, one can speak instead of “beloved ideas or theories,” which the artist was able to take along on his migration in their objectified form as reproductions. This suitcase was Duchamp’s archive in times of instability and mobility, a “documentation of his work that he could easily transport, show and propagate during his emigration to America in 1942.” (Eiling 2010, 17) Duchamp’s suitcase influenced artists working conceptually in the 1960s and 1970s who also designed their own pieces of luggage. The FLUXKITs, which were created beginning in 1964, collected various contributions from Fluxus artists, such as George Maciunas, George Brecht and Nam June Paik, in a handy

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suitcase. These mobile boxes, divided into small compartments, which also invoke associations of a traveling salesman’s suitcase, contained three-dimensional objects and graphic material, labelled with name tags that represented the respective artists. These “Encyclopedias of FLUXUS Art” (Kellein 1986, 86) had an anti-institutional impetus and, in addition, offered a tangible framework for the artist collective. At the same time, the suitcase metaphor was not only an expression of the transnational composition of the participating artists but also had a participatory character. The owner of the FLUXKIT can carry his kit around with him and, when unpacking it, can constantly position the individual works in new relations to one another. Mobility is translated here on various levels. Another member of Fluxus, at least for a time, was the French artist Robert Filliou, for whom the geographical dissolution of boundaries was an essential feature of his artistic work as well as of his own existence. Active in the communist resistance against the German occupiers during the Second World War, Filliou, after 1945, lived in the U.S., was later sent on behalf of the United Nations to Japan and Korea and lived in Egypt, Spain and Denmark until he returned to France in 1959. (Cf. Jouval 2003, 8–9) These biographical details are not insignificant inasmuch as Filliou founded his “Territory of the Genial Republic” in 1971, which aimed to be an ideal society beyond national affiliation and underscored the independence of the inquisitive and questioning individual – according to Filliou, “You’re your own territory.” (Gintz 1985, 134) Filliou, for example, established an exhibition space in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as a territory of the Genial Republic, which visitors could help create. (Cf. Filliou 2003, 101) For Filliou, the operational point of departure of his research was a VW bus he had bought in the early 1970s, which indicated that the Genial Republic was to be bound less to a specific place than to the thoughts and actions of its citizens. In his self-description, Filliou drew upon the concept of the vagabond and the traveler: “le vagabond de l’art est toujours en voyage.” (cit. in Migration 2003, 137) Correspondingly, the artist repeatedly employed rhetorics of mobility, of temporality and transportation in his conceptual, installation-based and sculptural works. Thus, along with the hotel clothes hanger (I comme dans Poisson, 1961) and the box, one also encounters the motif of the suitcase. Filliou’s La Valise – Research in Dynamics and Comparative Statics from 1973 (Fig. 2) is a wooden suitcase to which two metal closures and a wire hanger (for a handle), stickers, and paper tags are attached. That Filliou’s suitcase is also most certainly a reference to Duchamp is supported by other works that refer to him, such as For Duchamp (1969) or Frozen Exhibition (1962). The manuscripts, concepts and an audio recording of the



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Fig. 2: Robert Filliou, La Valise. Research in Dynamics and Comparative Statics, 1973, Private Collection.

Whispered History of Art stored in Filliou’s valise once again articulate the concepts of portable ideas and theories: the suitcase is a necessary, indispensable utensil in Filliou’s life. It refers to the migratory nature of his life, which, lacking a social support system, often took on characteristics of vagabonding and yet allowed him to become a cosmopolite. […] Ultimately, the suitcase also signalizes the non-sedentary nature of thoughts […]. (Schmidt 1988, 72)

In his work, Filliou combined nomadism with a constant mobility of thought, which aimed at questioning apparent certainties, such as the canon of art history. Here, congruities can be found with the influential theories on nomadism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who understand nomadic thought and action as a deterritorialization and dissolution of boundaries, and as such, as a productive destabilization of structures. (Deleuze/Guattari 1977; Deleuze/Guattari 1997; Deleuze 1979) For Robert Filliou, (childlike) innocence and imagination were major parameters of liberating thought. The artist transposed these two terms into neon signs and installed them in a work space called Tool Shed (1969). This Permanent Creation Tool Shed experienced a mobile reformulation in the form of a construction trailer (around 1984) that Filliou, in honor of the 1987 Münster Sculpture Project, parked outside the city’s archeological museum. (Cf. Schmidt 1988, 132–133)

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The A-Z Escape Vehicles (1996) by the American artist Andrea Zittel (Fig. 3) are related to Filliou’s Tool Shed: small, transportable living units, which can be individually furnished by their owners.

Fig. 3: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Escape Vehicle Owned and Customized by Dean Valentine, 1996, shell: steel, insulation, wood, and glass; interior: metal, wood, glass, paint, television, wiring, and various objects, © Andrea Zittel. Image courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

With regard to their form, they resemble mobile homes; Zittel explains that she originally oriented herself on German models she saw during a DAAD residency in Berlin: “later, their structure and design vocabulary developed further



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and took on more of a Southern Californian appearance when I traveled from Germany to Southern California.” (Zittel 2008, 55) However – in contrast to the A-Z Travel Trailer Unit created in 1995 – they were specifically conceived without wheels. They can be transported to different spaces and left there for an indefinite period of time. For their users, they are getaway spots in which an imaginary journey can take place. Zittel showed the stainless steel A-Z Escape Vehicles, among other works, at the documenta X in Kassel (1997). The title of the work, oscillating between sculpture and design, implies the question of the direction of escape or the motor for the referenced “escapism.” In the series of works These things I know for sure (2005), the artist posits: “People are most happy when they are moving forwards towards something not quite yet attained.” Accordingly, aimless roaming can also be considered movement. Zittel continues, however, by saying: “I believe that I am happier when I am in a plane or car because I am moving towards an identifiable and attainable goal.” (Cf. Morsiani/ Smith 2006, 14) The poster design on which these reflections are written shows the view through a windshield of a lonely, barren, most likely American country road. (Cf. Zittel 2008, 140–141) In Zittel’s artistic translation, travel as a form of “permanent tourism” (Marsiani 2006, 24) appears to be an opportunity to acquire information and knowledge – whereas the end of the road lies in the shadows. The springboard for Zittel’s A-Z Escape Vehicles were multifunctional living units she originally conceived in the early 1990s for her first New York studio apartment, which combined the most important aspects of her life and work: workspace and bedroom, kitchen and bath, living area and dressing room. This design focused on a concrete space and her specific needs and was followed by the serial production of other A-Z living units, designed as “portable living units.” These reacted to the rise in constricted living spaces particularly in large cities: “comparable to a large, old-fashioned travel trunk, in the compartments of which a washing area or an entire tea set with cooking facilities can be accommodated, and which strive to offer the traveler all the usual comforts when away from home, A-Z constructs the ‘Living Units’ based on the central everyday aspects of life.” (Schumacher 2003, 21) The suitcase metaphor illustrates that Zittel’s living units aimed at facilitating mobility and changes in location. Here, living is understood not as being fixed to a specific place but as variable; downsizing one’s living space to a reduced housing unit that concentrates people’s needs in a compact space creates freedoms of mobility.

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3 Routes – Art (History) in Motion Airports, train stations and waiting rooms are places in which hardly any individual traces can be left behind. They are expressions of a transitory existence; for many, they are places where journeys begin or end, places of transition not suited for permanent residence. It is no coincidence that the topic of the early labor migration to Germany is concentrated almost exclusively in pictures of main train stations, in which many immigrants first set foot on German soil. The final stop for special trains with Gastarbeiter, or “guest workers,” from Italy, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia in the 1960s was platform 11 in Munich’s Central Station, from which those arriving were sent on to their employers spread across the entire country. (Terkessidis 2000, 19) Photographs from that time show the exhausted, fearful or hopeful people, who had just gotten off of the trains. Marc Augé refers to train stations as “non-places” (Augé 2012), in which no relational ties between people can develop. In these non-places, the paths of many people intersect, without them necessarily being acquainted or connected. One would be hard pressed to claim that modern modes of transportation function as homes or homelands, yet stations are often centers of attraction for marginalized people. Included among these people are migrants, as can be seen in the photographs taken by Candida Höfer in Cologne and Düsseldorf in the 1970s (Fig. 4), when the presence of immigration became clearly visible on the cities’ streets. In Höfer’s photographs it is precisely these areas surrounding train stations that appear again and again as classic “arrival zones” of migration when she focuses the camera on groups of “Gastarbeiter” talking in the street, lingering, or waiting in public seating areas. On the topic of the train station as a center of attraction, the writer John Berger writes: Migrant workers, already living in the metropolis, have the habit of visiting the main railway station. To talk in groups there, to watch the trains come in, to receive first-hand news from their country, to anticipate the day when they will begin the return journey. (Berger 2010, 68)

In Höfer’s early photographs, the waiting and the idleness they imply are counter images to the journeys that lie behind these people. As “foreigners” they first must travel many thousands of miles only to “sit and wait” in their new homelands. Hotels are also considered “non-places,” in that they mostly offer only a temporary place to reside and unlike apartments are spaces of transit. James Clifford describes the hotel as a “station, airport terminal, hospital: a place you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary.” (Clifford 1997, 17) In



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Fig. 4: Candida Höfer, Hauptbahnhof Düsseldorf 1975, from the slide projection Türken in Deutschland, 1979, © Candida Höfer/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.

literature and film, the inn is often a synonym for the anonymity of society (Vicky Baum, Menschen im Hotel, 1929), a space for the homeless (Wim Wenders, The Million Dollar Hotel, 2000) and of communication difficulties and loneliness (Sophia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003). At the same time, the hotel contains the dialectic between privacy and anonymity. Nowhere else do you spend such intimate time – you sleep, shower and eat breakfast in hotels – in such an impersonal environment. People who spend a lot of time in hotels, such as those who travel often for business or longer-term residents sometimes place personal objects throughout their rooms, in order to bring a little sense of home to the anonymity. However, each time a hotel guest checks out, the room is transformed back to its original state: it must be cleaned, and traces of guests must be removed because the next residents of the room want to enter into a virgin hotel room, renovated just for them. The stationery provided in hotel rooms can become a means of personal record, which connect its author(s) back to the anonymous place in which it was written. In 1982, the artist Martin Kippenberger began drawing on hotel stationery (Fig. 5), which suggests that based on the various items of stationery, which always carry the logo, name, and address of the hotel they are from, the artist’s travel routes can be inferred.

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Fig. 5: Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (Untitled, Hotel Hessischer Hof), 1996, mixed media on hotel stationery, © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.



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However, Kippenberger rarely used the paper from the hotel in which he was currently staying, and furthermore, friends would bring him hotel stationery. Thus, Kippenberger worked on paper from hotels in which he had never been or would invent his own hotel names. This renders the overlapping of artist and travel route problematic whilst at the same time counteracts the romantic image of the wandering, homeless, artistic individual. (Kempkes 2003, 234; Hermes 2005, 129) Nevertheless, Kippenberger’s obsessive drawing on hotel stationery – entire stacks were created during stays in Tokyo and on Syros – is an expression of his examination of objects that stand for traveling: The metaphor of travel plays a large role in these drawings done by a nomad, because the drawings take on the ‘flavour’ of the imagined place in which they were virtually created: one can imagine the documented places in the drawing as drawing locations as well. (Melcher 2003, 18)

The format and materiality of the stationery gave Kippenberger’s drawings a predetermined frame, and the artistic incorporation of the letterhead, by painting over or interacting with it (cf. Kippenberger 1992), points to the creative power the artist drew from these external, self-imposed constraints. Furthermore, since he did not move linearly in terms of content or motif – Kippenberger drew upon earlier phases of his work in his drawings – time and space intertwine in his hotel stationery drawings in a highly complex way. Movement and travel, even without actually referring to true travel routes, become inherent elements of an artist’s œuvre. The artist’s restlessness is part of his own narrative and since 2008 has also been expressed by the artist Nezaket Ekici at various locations in her performance/installation Work in Progress – Personal Map. On an imaginary map, she marks with hammer and nails the global stations of her professional existence and connects these with a string. In doing so, a cartography of her own life is created in which the strings overlap more and more and become a symbolic pattern of a transnational body of work. In the same manner, Ekici’s performances compile a log of the locations of her actions all over the world. This chosen impermanence of residence stands in opposition to returning home, which is a position that can be seen in Roman Ondák’s series Anti-nomads. (2000, Fig. 6, p. 66) Ondák asked family members and friends if they defined themselves as nomads or anti-nomads. He photographed them later in a setting of their choosing: on their own balcony, in their living room, on their bed, in their yard or at their place of work. These photographs were then produced as a series of postcards with 12 motifs, one from each subject, which brought together the concept of staying in one place (the people in the photographs) with that of movement

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Fig. 6: Roman Ondák, Casting Antinomads, 2000, Series of 120 photographs, Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; gb agency, Paris; Johnen Gallery, Berlin; kurimanzutto, Mexiko City.

(the medium of the postcard). Years later, Ondák had these postcards sent back to him from various countries with the message “Wish you were here.” Proximity and distance, homeland and far-away places, homesickness and wanderlust overlap in Ondák’s work: This series [...] traces the movements of these ‘anti-nomads,’ planting the notions of displacement and the uninterrupted flux of time in our imagination, reminding us that it is possible to travel ever more easily and quickly, both mentally and physically. (Royer 2010, 137)

Ondák’s work Antinomads shows, as do Kippenberger’s hotel stationery drawings and Nezaket Ekici’s performances, that artistic transformations of travel, routes and changes of location are extremely diverse. From the perspective of literary studies, Caren Kaplan writes about the pluralistic cultural representations of travel: “Obviously, travel generates a complex system of cultural representation.” (Kaplan 1996, 5) Nicolas Bourriaud discovered a new character in the motif of the wandering artist: To describe this new figure of the artist, I have coined the term semionaut: a creator of paths in a landscape of signs. Inhabitants of a fragmented world in which objects and forms leave the beds of their original cultures and disperse across the planet, they wander in search of



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connections to establish. Natives of a territory with no a priori borders, they find themselves in the same position as the hunter-gatherers of old, those nomads who created their universe by tireless crisscrossing space. (Bourriaud 2009, 102)

This mobility of the artist/subject and his production must be taken into account in an art historical analysis that deals with transitions, focuses on the processes of globalization, and refrains from canonizing only the static. The prerequisite for this is an understanding of art history as a history of movement, which traverses borders. Therefore it is necessary to examine points of contact and the works resulting from such points of convergence and divergence as well as to question migration not only as a demographic phenomenon but also as an artistic motive. Besides, it should be followed newer scientific approaches which see migration not only as transgression of territorial borders, but also stress the potential of migrants as agents of change and transition. (Gardner 2011, 7) Innovative art historical research should focus on the effects of migration and emigration on artistic productiveness and production, on subjects, motives, methods and theories. Not only categories like mobility, circulation, routes, places and recollections could be central for investigate on migration and nomadism. Furthermore it could be productive to reflect on artistic methods like sampling, remixing, deand recontextualizing3 and criss-crossing between the art genres as “migratory technics” of artmaking. English translation by Hayley Haupt

References Adolphs, Volker. Gehen, bleiben: Bewegung, Körper, Ort in der Kunst der Gegenwart. Exhibition catalog Kunstmuseum Bonn 2007. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007. Andrea Zittel. Critical Space. Ed. Paola Morsiani and Trevor Smith. Exhibition catalog Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 2006. München et. al.: Prestel, 2005. Andrea Zittel. Gouachen und Illustrationen. Ed. Theodora Vischer. Exhibition catalog Schaulager Basel 2008. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Augé, Marc. Nicht-Orte. 3rd ed. München: Beck, 2012. Berger, John. A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). London/New York: Verso, 2010. Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. Berlin: Sternberg, 2009.

3 Deleuze reflects in his essay “Pensée nomade” on nomadic practices of “decoding” or mixing up codes. (Deleuze 1979, 109)

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Burioni, Matteo. “Über die Stilaneignung bei Francesco Clemente und Rainer Fetting im Gegensatz zu Georg Baselitz.” Il Ritorno dei Giganti. Pittori in Germania 1975–1985. Dalla Collezione Deutsche Bank. Milano: Mazzotta, 2002. 58–61. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass. et. al.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Crone, Rainer, and Giorgia Marsh. Clemente. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Crossley, Paul. “Introduction.” Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner. Ed. Peter Draper. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. 1–25. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Rhizom (1976). Berlin: Merve, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomaden-Denken” (1973). Ibid. Nietzsche: Ein Lesebuch. Berlin: Merve, 1979. 105–121. Deleuze, Gilles. Tausend Plateaus: Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie (1980). Vol. 2. Berlin: Merve, 1997. Eiling, Alexander. “Welten in der Schachtel: Vom Reliquienkasten zur Boîte-en-Valise.” Welten in der Schachtel: Mary Bauermeister und die experimentelle Kunst der 1960er Jahre. Ed. Kerstin Skrobanek. Exhibition catalog Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen am Rhein 2010. Bielefeld: Kerber, 2010. 13–23. Ernst, Jimmy. Nicht gerade ein Stilleben: Erinnerungen an meinen Vater Max Ernst. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1985. Faktor-Flechtheim, Lili. “Emigration und Remigration.” Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit. Eds. Christa Dericum and Philipp Wambolt. Berlin: Kramer, 1987. 31–40. Flusser, Vilém. “Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit: Das brasilianische Beispiel.” Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit. Eds. Christa Dericum and Philipp Wambolt. Berlin: Kramer, 1987. 41–50. Flusser, Vilém. “Nomadische Überlegungen.” Ibid. Von der Freiheit des Migranten: Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus. Bensheim: Bollmann, 1994. 55–64. Flusser, Vilém. “Nomaden.” Nomadologie der Neunziger. Eds. Horst Gerhard Haberl and Peter Strasser. Steirischer Herbst, Graz 1990 bis 1995. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1995. 31–57. Foye, Raymond. “New York.” Francesco Clemente. Three Worlds. Ed. Ann Percy. Exhibition catalog, Philadelphia Museum of Art 1990. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. Francesco Clemente: Bilder und Skulpturen. Ed. Carl Haenlein. Exhibition catalog. Hannover: Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover, 1984. Gardner, Symmes. “Director’s Note.” Where Do We Migrate to? Exhibition catalog Center for Art Design and Visual Culture. Baltimore County: New York University of Maryland, 2011. 7–8. Gintz, Claude: “From Madness to Nomad-ness.” Art in America 73/6 (1985): 130–135. Guldin, Rainer, Anke Finger, and Gustavo Bernardo. Vilém Flusser. Paderborn: Fink, 2009. Habermas, Tilmann. Geliebte Objekte: Symbole und Instrumente der Identitätsbildung. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. Haehnel, Birgit. Regelwerk und Umgestaltung: Nomadistische Denkweisen in der Kunstwahrnehmung nach 1945. Berlin: Reimer, 2007. Hendricks, Alfred. “Menschen unterwegs – Mobilität als Erfolgsstrategie.” Unterwegs: Nomaden früher und heute. Ed. Alfred Hendricks. Gütersloh: Linnemann, 2003. 8–11. Hermes, Manfred. Martin Kippenberger. Köln: DuMont, 2005. Hinrichsen, Jan. “Der Koffer im Museum: Ein Metasymbol für Migration.” Reisebegleiter – mehr als nur Gepäck. Exhibition catalog. Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2010. 153–162.



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Jouval, Sylvie, and Robert Filliou. “Exposition pour le 3ème Oeil/Exhibition for the 3d Eye.” Robert Filliou – Genie ohne Talent. Ed. Heike van den Valentyn. Exhibition catalog Museum Kunst-Palast Düsseldorf 2003. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2003. 8–15. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1996. Kaplan, Caren. “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization.” PMLA 117/1 (2002): 32–42. Kellein, Thomas. ‘Fröhliche Wissenschaft:ʼ Das Archiv Sohm. Exhibition catalog. Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1986. Kempkes, Anke. “Zeichnungen/Drawings.” Nach Kippenberger/After Kippenberger. Eds. Eva Meyer-Hermann and Susanne Neuburger. Exhibition catalog Museum Moderner Kunst Ludwig, Wien. Wien: Schleebrügge Editor, 2003. 234–239. Kippenberger, Martin. Hotel-Hotel. Köln: König, 1992. Körner, Christoph. “In der Zeit des Neo-Nomaden: Von Bastarden und Hybriden.” Archithese 3 (2000): 12–17. Melcher, Ralph. “Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit: Martin Kippenbergers Zeichnungen.” Martin Kippenberger: Schattenspiel im Zweigwerk. Die Zeichnungen. Ed. Götz Adriani. Exhibition catalog Kunsthalle Tübingen 2003. Köln: DuMont, 2003. 14–19. Mercer, Kobena, ed. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers. London: MIT Press, 2008. Migration: Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, George Brecht, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Constant, Robert Filliou, Olafur Gislason, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Nicolas Humbert, Werner Penzel, Mario Merz, Marcel Odenbach, Kim Sooja. Ed. Friedemann Malsch and Christiane Meyer-Stoll. Exhibition catalog Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. Köln: König, 2003. Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Englishness of English Art. An Expanded and Annotated Version of the Reith Lectures Broadcast in October and November 1955. London: Architectural Press, 1956. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. Robert Filliou. Genie ohne Talent. Ed. Heike van der Valentyn. Exhibition catalog Museum Kunst-Palast Düsseldorf. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2003. Rosenberg, Harold. Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea. New York: Horizon Press, 1962. Royer, Elodie. “Antinomads:” Roman Ondák. Guide. Eds. Eric Mangion and Hemma Schmutz, Andrea Viliani. Köln: König, 2010. Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge MA et. al.: MIT Press, 1995. Schmidt, Hans-Werner. Robert Filliou 1926–1987: Zum Gedächtnis. Exhibition catalog. Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1988. Schumacher, Rainald. “Wie gelange ich ins Innere eines trojanischen Pferdes?” Andrea Zittel. Ed. Ingvild Goetz. Exhibition catalog Sammlung Goetz München. Hamburg: Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz, 2003. 15–47. Spender, Matthew. Arshile Gorky: Goats on the Roof. A Life in Letters and Documents. London: Ridinghouse, 2009. Sudrow, Anne, ed. Geheimreport Deutsches Design: Deutsche Konsumgüter im Visier des britischen Council of Industrial Design (1946). Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2012. Terkessidis, Mark. Migranten. Hamburg: Rotbuch-Verlag, 2000. Weiss, Evelyn. “‘La Boîte en valise’, ou, Das tragbare Museum.” Museen in Köln: Bulletin 10/8 (1971): 974–976. Zittel, Andrea. “Modellieren.” Andrea Zittel: Gouachen und Illustrationen. Ed. Theodora Vischer. Exhibition catalog Schaulager Basel 2008. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. 55.

Birgit Mersmann

Art History and the Culture of the Image: A Manifesto for Global Art History* 1 The Power of the Metaphysical and the 1 Universality of Art History The spectre of the universality of art history is haunting; a revenant living up when faced with the impending demise of occidental art and art history in the rapids of a globalizing art world. How universal is Art History? Not as a speculative object of world-embracing imaginations, but as a humanities discipline and method, a historiographical model, an academically institutionalized practice at universities and art schools? Can the spirit of art history principally be considered universal, unified by a common theoretical and methodological framework of a “general art science” (Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft)? Or, formulated even more hypothetically: Could Art History, in response to the global extension of both its study areas and its institutional, academic and non-academic structures, be developed into a universal discipline in the near future? Although there is a clear agreement among scholars that art is universal in the sense that artistic creativity is a universal anthropological phenomenon characteristic of humans’ desire for visual-symbolic self-expression,1 it is more than doubtful whether art history as an academic discipline could ever gain a universal status and, if so, whether this is or should be a worthwhile goal. Visual art may claim to be universal. Modern art has declared so by adopting a hegemonic internationalization strategy to promote visual abstraction as world language of art. In addition, some branches of modern art history in their reflection on the new world horizon of art aimed at transforming classical Western art history into a universal art history. (Cf. Mersmann 2014) These object- and field-related constructions of universality, including their art-anthropological and humanistic underpinnings, are increasingly under scrutiny in the transdisciplinarily reshaped field of current World Art Studies.2 However, the university discipline of * This contribution is the slightly revised English version of the article “Globalgeschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Ein kultur- und bildkritisches Manifest.” kritische berichte 2 (2012): 26–31. 1 Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt/Sütterlin 2007 in which art is treated as universal conditio humana and thereby world language. 2 A detailed reconceptualization of world art studies is proposed in Zijlmans/van Damme 2008.



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art history can never be(come) universal, because this would imply its temporal and geographical invariability, its generalizability as Allgemeine Kunstgeschichte (General Art History). First and foremost, it is the historical perspectivization of the subject and discipline of art history that vetoes its universalization. Nevertheless, art history can be global. On one side, this is evidenced by the historical fact that there have always existed regionally and culturally (including religiously) differentiated art histories as independent disciplinary branches and study approaches since the foundation of art history as a university discipline.3 On the other side, the global endeavour of art history is supported by current trends of remapping. Within the academic field of art history, new cultural and regional, but also national formations of art history, including its theories and methods, are underway. Triggered off by the excessive globalization push of the early 1990s, it went into full swing around 2000.4

2 The Burden of the Colonial Heritage. 2 Controversies over the Idea(l) of a Global 2 Art History Despite clear evidence that the academic discipline of art history, including its topics, contents and concepts are progressively determined by global perspectives and discourses, the complex issue of how to globally reconceptualize art history or, more carefully formulated, how to reshape art history in a global context has become more pressing than ever before in the history of art history. This situation is complicated by the fact that within the now existing field of art history, we are facing an internal diversification of art history into multiple art histories, shaped by different institutional frameworks such as the university, the museum, the academy, the art market, and art criticism. (Cf. Haxthausen 2002) Alone the intention to transform classical, West-based art history into a global art history confronts us with a major dilemma. The U.S. art historian James Elkins has called attention to it by provocatively asking: “Is Art History Global?”

3 For instance Western art history, European art history, nationally or regionally differentiated art histories within Europe (art history of the Netherlands, Italian art history, Roman art history), East Asian art history, Islamic art history, Jewish art history. 4 A prominent example for this new trend is the art history book Asian Art History in the TwentyFirst Century edited by Vishakha N. Desai (Williamstown, Massachusetts: Clark Art Institute, 2007).

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In his book of the same title5 he argues that Global Art History, as an academic discipline, can only be determined and devised by means of common research methods, approaches and theories. Taking scientific, pragmatic, and strategic interests into account, this seems to be the most viable path of mastering the difficult translation and negotiation processes for agreeing on one common program. However, the primarily method- and theory-driven approach to developing a global art history entails one crucial problem: the inevitability of art history’s formation and socialization as a modern Western science. It cannot be denied that the well-established institutional structures of the discipline of art history, as founded and developed in the Western culture and science system, exerts a significant impact on the global contemporary reconfiguration of art history’s profile. It is an undisputed fact that almost all relevant and influential scientific contributions to the problem of how to assess and theorize the phenomena and effects of the globalization of art are written by academics of art history and cultural studies who have been educated by, or work for, international universities following the Western academic model. The most powerful postcolonial theoreticians of culture of our time base their main ideas and writings, although modified, on Western theories, models, and methods. Apart from the globality of the subject of art-historical investigations, the applied theories and methods still appear to belong to a discourse of Western-centered art-historical dominance. However, to draw the conclusion from this bias, as Elkins does, that a global art history could only be united in a Western model, is not only absurd, but also rather arrogant in terms of its hegemonic claim, because it subjects non-Western art and art history to the historical tradition and power discourse of Western modernity, its knowledge and science system. The well-meaning intention to globally extend the theoretical and methodological framework of Western art history and theory for shaping a global art history amounts to a neo-colonialism of art history as modern Western science, or even a postcolonial neo-imperialism. Despite this criticism, the basic problem remains unsolved. Just because art history has originated as a Western discipline, forming its scientific history and theory within the European court and bourgeois culture, there exists a disciplinary and institutional vacuum of art-historical research in non-European and non-North-American world regions. How to escape this dilemma?

5 See in particular the introduction “Art History as a Global Discipline” by Elkins 2007, 3–23.



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3 The Historical Insufficiency: Towards a Global 3 History of Art History Global Art History, insofar as it has been proposed as a new art-historical approach, clearly lags behind its study object – the globalization of art. This belatedness is mostly due to the globo-economic acceleration dynamics in the circulation field of art production, art mediation, art marketing, and art distribution. The current debate, how to develop a global art history, on which foundations to base it, which premises to follow and which themes, concepts and methods to focus on, is foremost nurtured and led by foreign (inter)disciplinary discourses from cultural studies/Kulturwissenschaften and anthropology, the political, social, and partially also economic sciences. This is legitimate, and in times of inevitable transdisciplinary research also an urgently required, well-recognized science strategy. However, it reveals a certain disorientation and identity loss of art history, a helplessness and uncertainty of the modern Western discipline in face of the global reordering and diversification of the art world. It looks as if the discipline of art history, clinging to Danto’s famous proclamation of “The End of Art History,” would have survived itself, with the study object of global art as the relic of a hitherto unknown contemporaneity. Particularly the historical dimension of art history appears marginalized or simply absent from the tableau, as if in a global era of post-histoire dominated by the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous,” it would have lost its principal meaning and interpretative value. A global art history can only arrive at itself and convincingly define its requirements, orientation and research program when it systematically processes and critically scrutinizes its own history as global history. This historical reassessment should include the self-occupation with the colonial history of art history as modern Western discipline, as well as investigations into the founding and emancipative history of national and regional art histories, stretching from the era of imperialism to the epoch of post- and neo-colonialism in all parts of the world.6 A global science history of art history is an essential prerequisite in order to lay the foundations for a global art history. One of the main tasks of this major project must be to research the institutional history of art history at the crossroads between academic history and museum history. A strategic reconceptualization of global art history via the path of art history’s global history and colonial heritage would allow for tracing the routes of art

6 First postcolonial rewritings of Western art history as a subbranch of the historical sciences are undertaken in Schmidt-Linsenhoff 2010, Below/von Bismarck 2005; they are also addressed in Conrad 2002.

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history’s globalization in the form of concrete transactions between art institutions, their agents and representatives. Choosing this translational approach, the very danger of the abstract and diffuse, inherent to the category of the global as inconceivably comprehensive, could be avoided. Given this orientation, a global history of art history would always imply a regionalization of art history. It would instigate a process of decentralizing and diversifying the existing art history still embedded into a Western theoretical discourse, and thus unearth alternative histories, historical models, art definitions, and methods and academic practices of art history. Following both the historical geostrategic and science-political routes of global connectivity, it would considerably contribute to configure and also historically legitimate a transcultural history of art.7 Only when the historical basis for a multilocally operating art history is laid out, an appropriate and supportive theoretical and methodological framework for a substantially global art history as globally extended and transculturally defined academic discipline can be developed.

4 The Art Dilemma: Plea for an Image-Critical 4 Globalization of Art History Besides the science-historical roots of art history as a Western discipline, it is the central category of art which, due to its Western definitional authority, proves to be a basic dilemma and thus a reoccurring obstacle for the conceptualization of a global art history. The notion of art, as established as an autonomous aesthetic value system by the Western tradition of art history, has often obscured our view on artifacts that do not follow the Western art canon. Consequently, they are excluded as potential art-historical study objects. In the disciplinary divide between art history on one side and anthropology or regional studies on the other side (i.e. Indology, Egyptology, African Studies, Latin American Studies etc.), the definitional gap between Western art as a historical and aesthetic product, a phenomenon of the intellect (and by this of the humanistic sciences) versus 7 A conceptualization of global art history as transcultural art history is also advocated by Monica Juneja: “[...] a notion of ʻglobal art historyʼ conceptualized as transcultural can provide a way to rethink existing disciplinary frameworks. A transcultural history of art goes beyond the principle of additive extension and looks instead at the transformatory processes that constitute art practice through cultural encounters and relationships, whose traces can be followed back to the beginnings of history. Casting art history in a global/transcultural frame would involve questioning the taxonomies and values that have been built into the discipline since its inception and have been taken as universal.” (Juneja 2011, 281)



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non-Western artifacts as anthropological study objects of a history of civilization, socialization and material culture becomes evident. The rise of tradition-bound ethnographic art to global contemporary art, facilitated through the worldwide biennialization of the art (exhibition) market in the last two decades, has made clear that the classical categorizations and evaluation criteria are almost blurred; because of this revolutionary change, the clear division into the disciplinary frameworks of anthropology versus art history can no longer be upheld. (Cf. Belting 2007, 16–23) In order to avoid that art history with its European-grown, culturally and politically charged notion of art stands in its own way when it has the potential to rise to a global discipline, it should act in two complementary respects: It should cross-culturally scrutinize art definitions, but also move beyond the notion and conception of art. To my experience, the approach of image studies (Bildwissenschaften), which developed out of the discipline of art history by partly turning against it, its fixation on material art objects and aesthetic values, could serve as a feasible solution model. Culture-critical image studies could act as agents of translation studies in order to mediate interculturally between the well-established field of European-North-American art history on one side and the emerging non-Western art histories, be them regional, local or even national, on the other, as well as interdisciplinarily between art history and cultural studies. This mediating function is indispensable for meeting and mastering the transculturation of art in the past and present of globalization. Image studies have the ability to effectively develop new methods and theoretical frameworks for a global art history, since they a) do not operate with a fixed notion of art, but rather with an open image concept that also includes non-artistic images and visual practices; b) are characterized less by object access rather than by methodological and theoretical orientations; c) proceed inter- and transdisciplinarily, thus facilitating new conceptual syntheses; d) draw upon forms and functions of seeing, perceiving, and representing by which e) they can help to discern cultural differences and transculturations in the fluctuation zone between visual culture, cultural images, and visual art. Due to the fact that they are (until now) historically and politically unburdened, aesthetically neutral, and approach-oriented, they could not only help to culturally translate between Western/European and non-European art histories, but also facilitate the academic integration of global art studies into transnational visual cultural studies. Only on condition that critical image studies are conceived as cultural translation studies, are they able to productively constitute the design of a global art history. Seeing that Régis Debray’s mediological concept of transmission involves a cultural and media-anthropological component, it could provide a basis for the formation of image studies as transcultural art-historical studies, wherein the

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transcultural element would refer to the translation aspect of culture, to culture as (always) transit culture. (Mersmann 2008) With it, rift experiences and symbioses between Western and non-Western, regional, national and transnational art production and exhibition practice, art history and anthropology could be grasped. Furthermore, the intertwining of Western methods and theories of art history and non-Western art history and historiography can be revealed. By including cultural sociological aspects of art-historical production and theorization, by inquiring the media, agents, and institutions which take part in the image transmission and circulation processes, a transcultural iconology in the foot prints of Mitchell’s critical iconology could make a considerable contribution to the theoretical modelling and practical design of a global art history as scientific discipline.

References Below, Irene, and Beatrice von Bismarck, eds. Globalisierung/Hierarchisierung: Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte. Marburg: Jonas, 2005. Belting, Hans. “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age.” Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective. Eds. Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007. 16–41. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeira, eds. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus, and Christa Sütterlin. Weltsprache Kunst: Zur Natur- und Kunstgeschichte bildlicher Kommunikation. Wien: Brandstätter, 2007. Elkins, James, ed. Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge, 2007. Haxthausen, Charles W., ed. The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2002. Juneja, Monica. “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’.” Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture. Eds. Hans Belting et al. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011. 274–297. Mersmann, Birgit. “(Fern-)Verkehr der Bilder: Mediologie als methodischer Brückenschlag zwischen Bild- und Übersetzungswissenschaft.” Mediologie als Methode. Eds. Birgit Mersmann and Thomas Weber. Berlin: Avinus, 2008. 149–168. Mersmann, Birgit. “Embracing World Art: Art History’s Universal History and the Making of Image Studies.” The Making of the Humanities. Vol. 3. Eds. Rens Bod et al. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. 329–343. Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Victoria. Ästhetik der Differenz: Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert. 2 Volumes. Marburg: Jonas, 2010. Zijlmans, Kitty, and Wilfried van Damme, eds. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008.

Part 2: Revisions of Modernity with and against Part 2:Globality

Göran Therborn

Globality and Modernity: Making Concepts Raise Research Questions 1 Historicizing Globality and Leveraging 1 Modernity Grasping “Global integration and cultural diversity” requires at least two things from a humanities perspective. First, global integration, or globality, has to be historicized, rescued from flat late twentieth-century “globalization” and comprehended in its formation of today’s humankind. Secondly, cultural diversity has to be ordered into some meaningful patterns, for it not to be drowned in its own infinite waters of impressions and anecdotes. In a literal sense, globalization started about half a millennium ago, with the European conquest of the Americas. But we may with some fruitfulness use globalization as a variable, rather than as a category, then referring to socio-cultural phenomena and events reaching beyond any single political unit or civilization but having more or less of a planetary reach and/or impact. In this vein I have tried to lay bare what we may call a socio-cultural geology of the world, identifying extensive cultural layers underlying our assumptions, thoughts, and behaviors today. The four most important such historical layers of humankind are, civilizations, family systems, waves of globalization, and pathways to modernity. Civilizations constitute the foundational layer, a configuration of cosmology and worldview, of religion and of symbolic imaginations, with a distinctive pattern of livelihood at its center of everyday practices, and a particular definition of classicism, or original authenticity, usually with a classical language (occasionally two) and with a classical canon of art and ethics. From today’s vantage-point the five most important – in the sense of largest, refraining from any qualitative evaluation – civilizations are, 1. the Sinic – comprising China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam; 2. the Indic – of the South Asian sub-continent and the Indic part of “Indochina,” i.e., today’s Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, with traces also in Southern Vietnam and in Java; 3. the West Asian – including North Africa, Arabo-Iranian-Turkic, but with Arabic, the language of the Koran, as its classical language;

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4. the European, including most of the Americas and Oceania; and 5. the Sub-Saharan African. (Cf. Therborn 2011, Ch.1, and its list of sources) The civilizations provide the foundations of contemporary cultural diversity, expressed in religious and secular worldviews and view of humankind, and in different meanings of a “classical education,” of a classical text or piece of architecture. Any serious humanist is, of course, abstaining from trying to mobilize for or against a particular civilization for current political purposes. The family-sex-gender systems are usually embedded in the civilizations, but the former are more culturally flexible and historically changeable. Moreover, with the modern spread of religions – all of them except Buddhism always keen on sex and family –, gaps and contradictions between civilizations and sex-family-gender systems have developed. There is, for instance, more polygamy in (mainly) Catholic Burundi and Ruanda, than in any Muslim country outside Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from the family systems of the five big civilizations, we have today at least two others of sizeable proportions. Thanks to Buddhist insouciance and to Malay customs, Southeast Asia has a sex-family-gender system significantly different from the stern patriarchies of the rest of Asia. In the Americas, from the U.S. South of plantation slavery down to Rio de Janeiro, and on both sides of the Andes down to Paraguay, colonial slavery, serfdom, and sexuality created a dual, Creole, system of sex, gender, and family, still alive today. On one hand, a particularly rigid European White upper class patriarchy, and, on the other, a predatory masculinist sexuality with a maternalist family pattern among the popular classes, mostly of color – the latter significantly spawned by the predatory sexuality of the White ruling class men. (Cf. Therborn 2004, Ch. 1) The third geological layer of today’s societies and culture was created by waves of globalization, which we may define as socio-cultural thrusts of at least trans-continental or trans-oceanic, not necessarily planetary dimensions. We may designate them as waves, as they were rolling for a delimited period of time, long or short, and then receding, leaving enduring sediments behind. The first wave in this sense led to what Max Weber would later call the world religions. Given their long-lasting significance, this was a process remarkably compressed in time, although we would have to allow it almost five centuries, from the second third of the fourth century C.E to eighth century. This was the time when Christianity became European religion, instituted in the Roman empire, when Islam became the religion and Arabic the language of West Asia and North Africa, when Buddhism branched out from India to East Asia, and, in tandem with Hinduism and Sanskrit, penetrated the high culture of South East Asia and when Confucian moral philosophy traveled to Korea and Japan bringing Chinese ideograms as the language of high culture. This was also the time



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when the specificity of Sub-Saharan Africa was consolidated, not unknown and isolated as the Americas, but only marginally affected by the Eurasian cultural wave, as in Abyssinia, Nubia, and on the central East Coast. The Mongol wave of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was military rather than cultural – although it gave the Russians their word for money (dengi) –, and its effects were mostly indirect. One was its crushing blow to Arab culture, with the sacking of Baghdad, another the Eurasian imperial peace connecting Europe with Chinese science. More short-lived was the devastating effect of Eurasia, facilitating the spread of bubonic plague to fourteenth-century Europe. The first, strictly planetary wave of globalization was the European overseas colonialism of the sixteenth to early seventeenth century. It conquered the Americas and the Philippines for European Christianity, for European languages, and for European cultural classics. It began to leave European colonial footprints in South and Southeast Asia, while promoting a defensive cultural isolationism in East Asia. From mid-eighteenth century to l815 we had the planet’s first world war, between the British and the French, fought over, in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, in Egypt and “the Middle East,” India, Southeast Asia, and in South Africa, while generating rival explorations of the South Pacific and Australia. In the end, the British won, emerging as the superpower of the nineteenth century. India, Canada, and South Africa became predominantly English-speaking, as did Singapore – founded by the British as part of this wave –, and cricket became the main sport of South Asia as well as of the West Indies. The fifth wave of globalization, from 1830 – the French conquest of Algeria – to the end of World War I in l918, was driven by Euro-American imperialism and colonialism. Its overwhelming, lasting effect was the creation of the twenty-first century world of development and underdevelopment. The causal chains remain open to dispute. The once great Asian powers were decaying, from the Ottomans to Qing China. Africa had been ravaged by slave raids for centuries. Latin America was caught in post-independence factional conflicts. However, the European and Euro-American exploitation of the weak was outrageous. Loans to ambitious modernist rulers, e.g., of Tunisia, Egypt, and the whole Ottoman empire, were turned into extortionist usury, backed up by imperial military force. The emblematic event of the period were the British 1840s Opium Wars against China. Translated into the late twentieth to early twenty-first century, they were equivalent to an all-powerful Colombian navy bombarding the United States into free imports of cocaine and heroin. Then there was the primarily political globalization of l919–1991, when global economic exchange contracted and took a long time to recover its 1913 levels, but when the whole world became politicized. The Russian Revolution

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was the triggering event, with its inspiring effects on China, above all, but also in Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and in Latin America. This was the wave of world revolution and of world counter-revolution, of the Comintern and, from the l930s, of the Fascist Anti-Comintern Pact, of Germany, Italy, and Japan. This political globalization led on to World War II, and after that to the Cold War, ending with the implosion of the Soviet Union in l991. Our latest wave of globalization, thrust by financial capital, is hitting us from the mid-l980s and onwards. Its actual impact has so far been rather paradoxical. At the level of profits and wealth, it has been a bonanza of North Atlantic finance capital, its bankers and fund managers, while unleashing the crisis of 2008, the lasting effects of which have been mass unemployment. On the other hand, this has been the time of the global rise of the real economies of China, India, Brazil and others. (Cf. further Therborn 2011, Ch. 1) Finally, in an analysis of the socio-cultural geology of the contemporary world, there are the pathways to modernity. Here a conceptual clarification seems necessary.

2 Modernity: Label or Leverage for Analysis? Concepts play important roles in scholarship and in social discourse. One of the two most important has a name in German, untranslateable into other Western European languages, Sinnstiftung. Concepts provide meaning to a chaotic aggregate of phenomena. In English that function is usually given a much more mundane designation, more referring to a rustic kitchen than to a chamber of philosophy, “labeling.” “Modernity” and “globalization” are examples of such meaning- and order-conferring labels. However, concepts may also be used for analytical leverage, to use a word from the world of finance, as a means of expansion, in this case not of profits but of knowledge. Concepts may be used, not only to put a label on, to give a sense to what we observe. They may also be used to raise questions, to launch cognitive explorations. “Modernity” may be used as a shorthand for a current or recent culture. Then the concept is no more than a synonym, or a simple shorthand, as in books on Die Wiener [or Berliner] Moderne. Post-classical Latin modernus means no more than current, of today. But the word has acquired an epocal character, first in aesthetics and the arts – as “modernism” –, later in sociology as “modernization.” A fruitful use of the concept, then, is to ask: What does it mean to be modern?



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In my opinion, the best and the least idiosyncratic definition – though alas not yet mainstream –, it is to be unbound by tradition, by the wisdom of our fathers, by the skills of our masters, by any ancient authority. To be modern is a cultural time orientation, to the present and towards the future, no more, and no less. A modern culture, then, would be a culture where this time orientation is predominant, modernity an epoch of such predominance. Instead of fixing a label on what we are observing, and writing about, we would then be confronted with a number of questions, without any self-evident answer. When did modernity happen? Variously in different cultural spheres, in science, the different arts, in conceptions of history, politics, economics, family life? Did it take place in different ways and at different times in the world? If so, do the variable pathways to modernity have their effects on today’s social and cultural life?

3 The Roads to Modernity, and the Specificity 3 of the Early European Path Modernity always rose through cultural and social conflict, of one form or another. What decided the outcome might have ancient roots. Salvationist religions of a linear temporality, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, might have implied some advantages over cyclical religious conceptions as in Hinduism and Buddhism, or the more timeless spirituality of Africa or rationality of Confucianism. On the other hand, the former also could offer strong resistance to change because of its canonized and institutionalized authority, and thisworldly history was not perceived in linear terms by Christians, Muslims, and Jews for more than a thousand years. The European family system was clearly a facilitator of modern change: with its norms of freedom to marry (or not), its (mostly) bilateral descent rule, its Western European norm of neolocality, and its powerful occupational and territorial groupings overriding kinship, all enfeebling the iron grip of tradition. But in actual history it did not by itself provide any strong challenge to traditional authority, not even to the patriarchal family. The early colonial push by powers of the European seaboard, the second wave of globalization, was not a thrust of modernity, but a pursuit of premodern medieval warfare, very clear in the case of Spain and in the Papal Treaty of Tordesillas dividing the then known America between Portugal and Spain. However, the colonial discoveries did take Europeans out of the confines of their Ancient world, adding to a modern conception of knowledge, although the modern scientific breakthroughs were centered in physics and medicine, rather than in geography and botany.

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Here we have to leave the still far from settled issue of the causes of European modernity, focusing on the How? rather than the Why? question. The modern political rupture with the past took different forms and occurred at different times in different parts of the world. In an empirical work on the history of the right to vote (Therborn 1992) it dawned upon me, that all these differences may be summed up into four major pathways into modernity, defined by the conflict lines for and against the new, between modernity and tradition, between modernity and anti-modernity. They can be distinguished in general analytical terms, and therefore used not only to sort groups of countries but also as ideal types, two or more of which may have been taken in a particular country. How was the new political culture generated? Internally, in the given society, or imposed or imported from outside? Who were the forces of the new? A new stratum within the given society, an external force, or a part of the old internal elite? Where were the main forces of anti-modernity, of traditional authority and submission, inside or outside? In this vein we may distinguish four main conflictual configurations in the world. Originally they emerged as empirical generalisations, but they can also be used as ideal types, especially as they can be located in a logical property space. Not all logical combinations have been empirically significant, but the four main actual roads to modernity were opened up in the following ways. Table 1: Roads to/through Modernity by the Location of Forces and Cultures For and Against Forces of Pre/Anti-Modernity

Forces Pro-Modernity

Internal External Forced Europe Colonial Zone Internal External

Imported & Learnt Reactive Modernization

New Worlds

Note: Countries of Reactive, or externally induced, Modernization, e.g., Japan, Qing China, Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Iran, Siam/Thailand.

The new future orientation of the last centuries first emerged in Europe, not as a natural emanation of European Civilization, but out of conflicts internal to Europe, to North-western Europe primarily. In other words, the European route was one of civil war, violent or not, which pitted the forces of reason, enlightenment, nation/people, innovation, and change against those of the eternal truths of the Church, of the sublime wisdom and beauty of Ancient philosophy and art, of the divine rights of kings, of the ancient privileges of aristocracy, and of



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the customs of fathers and grandfathers. It was related to the rise of commerce, capital, and industry, built upon colonial accumulation overseas. Modern breakthroughs took place in different cultural spheres at different times. The European nation state asserted itself, against the states of princes and the cities of oligarchs, in a lengthy process of protracted struggles. The French Revolution was the continentally decisive event in establishing the course, but in England the process had started with the seventeenth-century revolutions, and the final victory came only in l917–1918 with the fall of the dynastic empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns. With the French Revolution, political theory, as well as political practice and institutions, became modern. Concepts like “reform” and “revolution” lost their original backward-looking or rotating denotation – inscribed in the literal meaning of the prefix “re” –, as in the Protestant Reformation or in Copernicus’ treatise “On the Revolution of Planets.” In mid-eighteenth century the French Grande Encyclopédie referred readers interested in “revolution” to an insightful article on – watch-making. With the French Revolution, revolution and reform were turned into keys to the future, a new interpretation soon confirmed in anti-revolutionary Britain during the long agitation for parliamentary “reform.” Somewhat before the Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment, in the work of John Millar, followed up by Adam Smith, had given European historiography an evolutionary perspective, heralding the emergence of a new “commercial” society succeeding the agrarian, and the prior hunting and gathering societies. In science and knowledge production the modern breakthrough came earlier, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon and René Descartes deposed the ancient authority of Aristotle, and a new field of empirical investigations opened, trailblazed already in the l560s by Vesalius’ anatomy, at last overtaking the more than milleniarian authority of Galenus. In arts and aesthetics there have been several changes and ruptures. The famous French literary Quérelle des Anciens et des Modernes took place in late seventeenth century, and before that there was the break of the Renaissance painters and architects with the Gothic of Giotto and others. But arguably the most decisive and radical opening to novelty began in mid-nineteenth and kept running until the last third of the twentieth century (and postmodernism), with the poetry of Baudelaire and the dethronement of historical painting by the Impressionists, followed by a whole series of dramatic ruptures, up to and including New York Abstract Expressionism in the l940s. In architecture the break out of the Ancient and the medieval repertoire started with late nineteenth-century Art Nouveau (German Jugendstil), soon followed by functionalism and the corporate International Style. In the New Worlds of European settlement, anti-modernity was, in the first rise of modern currents, perceived as mainly external, located in the conservative

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metropolis, in Britain to North America, in Spain and Portugal to Latin America, and, increasingly, in the local Others of the settler societies, the natives, the slaves, and the ex-slaves. Independence got rid of the external metropolis, but what to do with the local Others was to haunt the moderns of the New Worlds for a very long time. It still does. To the Colonial Zone, from North-western Africa to Southeast Asia, modernity arrived literally out of the barrel of guns, with the colonial conquest, subduing the internal forces of tradition. Colonialism by modern states, such as by nineteenthand twentieth-century European states, meant an imposition of modernity from outside, after having defeated native traditional authorities. But imposed European colonial modernity was in fact a mixture of a very delimited modernist thrust and neotraditionalism – of bolstered “indirect rule” and codified ethnic identities and customary law. Japanese twentieth-century colonialism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria was much more consistently modernist, pushing mass education and industrialization. Modernity in the Colonial Zone was not carried further by settlers, but by new generations of natives, of “évolués” who turned what they had learnt from their conquerors – about the possibility of change and of development, about nations, peoples, rights –, against their masters and created anti-colonial nationalism. This is the road to modernity by anti-colonial rebellion. The countries of Reactive Modernization were challenged and threatened by colonial domination, and in the face of these threats a part of the internal elite started to import innovation. Here modernity developed as pre-emptive reaction by a part of an internal elite perceiving their realm being under acute foreign threat, and imposed from above on the population, still following traditional orientations. The modernist project was in this case conservative in intent, aiming at enhancing the population’s capacity to defend an existing state. Initially this was generally conceived only in military terms, of acquiring modern arms, arms technology, and military organization, but that program was soon widened to economic technology, education, transport, public health, and political institutions. A new and stronger form of social cohesion was a central aim, seen as a key to the overwhelming strength of the threatening imperialist powers. Meiji Japan is the most successful and clear-cut example, but several premodern polities embarked upon it, Qing China, Joseon Korea, Siam of Chulalongkorn, The Ottoman Empire, Egypt of Muhammed Ali and his successors, Qajar Persia, Abyssinia.



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4 Ideal Types and Hybrids The four main routes to modernity were originally discovered, as an empirical generalization, in a study of the world history of the right to vote (Therborn 1992). But they may also be taken as ideal types, with the possibility that a given country may travel along two or more roads. The two most important hybrids in this sense are Russia and China, and their modern hybridity may be an important explanatory background to their Communist revolutions and their trajectory. Russia – the Tsarist empire as well as the Marxist labor movement opposing it – was part of Europe, and the latter’s path to modernity. But its relatively underdeveloped character also fostered a politics from above of a Reactive Modernization type, first launched by Peter I and later pursued by Stalin. Imperial China ended as an abortive Reactive Modernization, and the country came to include several colonial zones, port cities “concessions,” without ever being fully colonized. Through the Comintern, China after World War I imported, thirdly, an important European component, a revolutionary working class party and its ideology, which finally gained victory out of what was largely an anti-colonial war (against the Japanese).

5 Enduring Legacies of the Routes to Modernity The routes to modernity are not only of historical interest. They have left enduring, though not inalterable, legacies of politics, culture, and social relations. Here, only a brief catalogue can be given. They are treated with some more narrative flesh in previous works referred to above. The point here is that these different legacies of the different modes of modern breakthroughs, together with the traditions of civilizations, the variety of family systems, and the outcomes of the historical waves of globalization, make up an important part of contemporary cultural diversity. Here I shall indicate effects of the roads to modernity in three socio-cultural respects. (There are more.) 1. The conception of nation 2. The role of religion 3. Social relations of hierarchy-(in)equality

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5.1 Nation In a global perspective two aspects of the European nation stand out. One is its anchorage in a popular and territorial history, distinguished from the writ of princely power. European nations claim to be the (majoritarian) natives of the land. The other is its heavy, distinctive cultural load, with spoken language at its core, the mother tongue singled out by Herder in the eighteenth century, and central to the European national tradition ever since. The political dimension of the nation – important to the nation of “free-born Englishmen” – was most developed in the French Republican current from the Revolution, as a nation explicitly open to non-natives. However, after the Revolution’s embrace of all sympathizers, a mastering of the French language became required of all citizens of France, generating a large-scale program of turning “peasants into Frenchmen.” The creation of national languages, i.e., through standardization among several dialects and by grammatical and orthographic codification became a major task of European small nation intellectuals of the nineteenth century, from the Balkans to Norway. Where possible, minority languages were driven out of national culture. The European nation is first of all a historical language community. The settler states of the Americas had to create new nations, which mythologically and emblematically of course drew upon historical examples as symbolic resources – Ancient European Republicanism in the case of the U.S., historical Catholic experiences and pre-Columbian, e.g., Inca and Aztec, high culture in Hispanic America –, but which claimed no distinctive national history, and which shared their language with the colonial metropolis. Settler nations have two, intertwined nation conceptions, which set them apart from the rest of the world. One is that the natives, the long-term inhabitants of the territory, do not belong – or might be allowed in only under certain conditions. Even their existence has often been denied, and the territory before the settlers presented as terra nullius (no man’s land), or as, in some early Zionist conceptions, as “a land without people” best given to “a people without land.” The other, related, idea is of the nation as a club, to which desirable members could and should be recruited. Targeted immigration, from Europe, was a major dimension of nation-formation. Particularly in Latin American, Brazilian as well as, for instance, Argentine, discourse, this club member recruitment was explicitly referred to as “whitening” or “civilizing” the nation. For a long time, only people of external, European descent were regarded as full citizens of the new nations of the Americas and Australia. Nations of the Colonial Zone constitute a third variety. There were no historical territories, no singular historical peoples, only colonial boundaries. In a rare



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wise decision, African nationalist leaders decided to accept them all, however arbitrary and culturally divisive. Ali Jinnah did not, and British India, larger than any pre-colonial state of India, broke up into India – which Nehru refused to call Hindustan –, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, through terrible pogroms and wars of divorce. The colonial language is arguably the most ostentatious legacy of the colonial pathway to modernity, with its ensuing complicated and hierarchical relations of nation and culture. Multilingual nations – in Nigeria with 4.500 languages according to different estimates, India having at least 122 according to a recent linguistic census analysis. The only exceptions developed in areas of developed pre-colonial inter-lingual trade, in the Indonesian archipelago, where a Malay lingua franca developed, in the mid-twentieth century renamed Bahasa Indonesia by the nationalists; and in East Africa, in Tanzania and Kenya, where less successfully Swahili, the Bantu language developed out of the Arabian trade, was adopted as the national language, but along with English and local vernaculars. The European notion, common both to the French and the German conceptions of a nation, though for different reasons, that a nation is defined by its language, could not be applied in the ex-colonies. When it did, as in Pakistan, it had disastrous results, from 1952 bitterly dividing the Bengali-speaking East from the Urdu-promoting leaders of West Pakistan, where the Mughal hybrid of Urdu was not the majority mother tongue either. A general legacy of anti-colonialism is a strong nationalism, as the decisive modern mass politics, which takes different forms from the various roads to independence but without any systematic internal cleavages. Postcolonial culture also tends to be starkly divided between elite and mass culture. Elite culture is usually conducted in the language of the former colonial power, a language which the majority of the population does not understand. In the capital city, the colonial divide is usually reproduced, the postcolonial elite taking over the official buildings and the private mansions and villas of the colonizers. Colonial administrative practices tend to be kept, although often subverted by corruption and/or lack of state resources. Traditional authorities and rituals tend to persist, drawing upon both their colonial institutionalization and their national credentials. In spite of their use in colonial indirect rule, traditional leaders were often incorporated into modern anti-colonial nationalism. The founding program (from l948) of the radical Convention People’s Party in Ghana, for instance, demanded as its first objective: “Independence for the people of Ghana and their Odikros [traditional rulers].” Modern Malay nationalism, as the national Tunku Abdul Rahman museum in Kuala Lumpur narrates, started after World War II as a protest against British plans to reduce the powers of the traditional rulers and to institute an equal colo-

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nial citizenship for Malays, Chinese, and Tamils alike. But independent India did away with the princely states of India. The great linguistic diversity of most postcolonial states has meant a widespread maintenance of the language of the former colonial masters as the official or officious language of politics and business. Basically, the postcolonial nation is a colonial product, which implies a tendential reproduction inside the nation of the colonial divide of colonizer and colonized. The nation of Reactive Modernization is the premodern realm, and defined by the writ of the prince, the emperor, the king or the sultan. This was how the successful modernizers of Meiji Japan saw it, as well as the less successful rulers of Siam and Abyssinia, and the soon defeated modernizers of Joseon Korea, Qing China, and of the Ottoman Empire. It was a historical legacy of rule, synonymous with its ruling dynasty, who often, though not in Japan, gave the realm its everyday name. The modern task here was not national emancipation, but to build the realm into a nation. In Japan this was greatly facilitated by the high ethnic homogeneity of the country, and the low salience of intertwined religions. The most important measure of national unification was the abolition of the feudal daimyo domains, returning their lands “to the emperor.” The Meiji modernizers built a modern Japanese nation around the symbol and mystique of the Emperor, whose status, not his power, was more and more exalted as the modernization process progressed, culminating in the l930s and during the Pacific War. As the pillar of national culture, the emperor survived the “unconditional surrender” of l945. His preservation was the last and only Japanese condition, which the Americans finally accepted. In Japan and in Thailand of the twenty-first century the monarch is a sublime national icon, in comparison with which even British monarchical deference and protocol pale into civic celebrity. The great modernizer of Siam, king Chulalongkorn, officially Rama V (the Hinduist royal name), has even become a figure of religious devotion, as I could notice at his equestrian statue in Bangkok in 2007. National language and culture were not front issues. They were given by the realm, although the status of Sinic civilization culture came to suffer from the recurrent defeats of China. In the multinational and multicultural empires, of the Ottomans for instance, there was no national idiom to promote.

5.2 Religion In the internal conflicts of Europe the established Christian churches, Protestant as well as Catholic and Orthodox, were on the losing side of anti-modern tradition. The pattern was set by the English Civil War and by the French Revolution,



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in spite of the fact that the early Revolution also counted men from the lower clergy in its early front ranks, like the abbés Siéyès and Grégoire. In the nineteenth century the Papacy became the center of European anti-modernism. Protestantism fissioned between conservative High Church and often moderately progressive dissent (a major basis of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic liberalism), while Latin European and Latin American liberalism tended to anti-clerical secularism. This anti-modernist stance cost the European churches dearly, and Europe is today the most secularized part of the world. But there have been exceptions, where the Church became the main spokeswoman of the nation against foreign, usually modernizing powers. This happened in Catholic Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, in the Orthodox Balkans, and in Protestant Northern Ireland. In the Americas, the Dissenting Protestants of New England saw themselves as building a new social world, “a city upon a hill,” as well as being a vanguard to heaven. There was no established high church identified with British rule. North America today is the rich world center of religiosity. In Hispanic America, nationalism was often led by priests, like Hidalgo and Morelos in Mexico, or receiving its formulations from them. The Mexican nationalists fought under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who first appeared in 1531. The Church had been harassed by the Spanish Bourbons of the second half of the eighteenth century, and was no bloc in defence of royal Spanish power. The Enlightenment had entered part of the clergy, who often also identified more with the Indians than with the Spanish power, like the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Though European-inspired anti­-clericalism later reached Latin America, religiosity has remained a central feature of Latin American social life. God is consistently more important to Americans than to Europeans, more in the United States than in Ireland, not to speak of Great Britain, more to Brazilians than to Portuguese, more to the descendants of New Spain than to those of Old Spain, more to Argentines than to either Italians or Spaniards, more to Canadians than to either the French or the British. In the Colonial Zone, missionary religions, Christian much more than Muslim, have been conveyors of modernity, of modern education and health care, in particular. Many of the anti-colonialist leaders, particularly in Africa, were educated in missionary schools. Native religions, like Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, often re-organized and codified under the Christian colonial challenge, on the other hand, have benefited from nationalist promotion. Unorganized African religion has been able to draw upon the nationalist respect of traditional chiefs and customs. Colonial and ex-colonial societies have never been secularized. The modern postcolony is today among the most religious parts of the globe.

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In premodern East Asia, religion was always clearly subordinated to the secular rulers, and usually to a thisworldly official ethical culture, which might be summed up as Confucianism. This secular political subordination did not change with Reactive Modernization. East Asia today appears relatively secular by Euro-American standards of religious belief and practice, but it is hardly secular-ized. Its world is by no means “disenchanted” in the Weberian sense, but full of magical forces to be managed, like in the ex-Colonial Zone. Upon my visit to a Buddhist temple, a Japanese colleague made an offering for his daughter’s success in her upcoming exam. In East Asian Reactive Modernization, religion was never challenged. Regional religiosity was actually more strengthened than weakened. The Japanese modernizers pushed state Shintoism, the Siamese monarchy guarded its Hindu-Buddhist rituals of legitimacy. Foreign missionaries implanted a minoritarian Christianity, even in Japan and in China but most successfully in Korea (Protestant) and Vietnam (Catholic). In the Ottoman Empire by contrast, the Muslim clergy formed a bastion of reaction, overcome only by the shattering of the empire and the assertion of Mustafa Kemal pasha, creating a secular Turkish state from above, with a subdued but pervasive religiosity below. While the Siamese and Abyssinian monarchies successfully managed to enlist Buddhism and Christianity, respectively, as royal supports, the post-World War II modernizing Shah of Iran was finally felled by an Islamic revolution. Under widely variable contemporary conditions, religions are still massive forms of modern life. But they are no longer overwhelming. There are more Chinese citizens in China, 1320 million, than there are Muslims, of all varieties, in the world, around 1270 million, and only slightly more Catholics in the world than Indians in India, 1130 million and 1123 million, respectively. Christianity of all denominations is adhered to by a third of humankind, Islam by a fifth, Hinduism by 14–15 percent. The bulk of the remaining good third of humanity is made up of the secularized-cum-pluri-religious Chinese and Japanese, followed by Southeast Asian Buddhism (about 6 percent), African religions, and small minority beliefs, like Sikhism, Jainism, and Judaism.

5.3 Class, Ethnicity, and Inequality In Europe, the modern thrust focused on the hereditary privileges of the aristocracy and the high clergy, and on the estates society in general. The latter was gradually and unevenly followed by an industrial class society. The French Revolution replaced the rights and privileges of estates with a common national



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citizenship, and its land redistribution changed the distribution of income and wealth. “Class,” succeeding cultural/ceremonial “rank” emerged as a central concept of European social analysis in the aftermath of the French Revolution, referring to the economically based new internal inequality of national societies. Ethnic or racial relations and conflicts were marginal in Western Europe, though important in the East. From the dialectics of industrial capitalism came also, later, the force of equality – if not the victory of socialism as Marx had envisaged. Europe is the least unequal region of the world, in particular Europe east of the British Isles, west of Poland, and north of the Alps. In the Americas human equality was held to be “self-evident,” as the American Declaration of Independence put it. The key question then became: Who are the equals? And the answer was also self-evident at the time: White men (save servants). But White equality coexisted with Black slavery, and the racial divide is still visible today in the urban ghettoes. Moreover, the White equality which mattered to the Founding Fathers of the United States referred to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and did not include economics. It was existential and social. “Class” – except for “middle class,” supposedly everybody except the ethnic poor and the elite – has always had difficulties to coagulate in a society of settler individualism, ethnic immigration, and race. Hispanic American independence also included lofty declarations of civic equality, and also rarely respected. Latin America was always more hierarchical than Anglo-America, and racially hierarchical, from Québec to La Plata, rather than dichotomized. Ibero-America was primarily a land of conquistadores, rather than of settlers and immigrants. It is now one of the most unequal parts of the planet, combining Latin social hierarchies with legacies of extensive Indian servitude and of Black slavery, recently augmented by massive “informalization” of post-industrial, neoliberal labor markets. In the Colonial Zone, the demand for equality was above all for native equality with the colonizers. This set the stage for a postcolonial social division between the majority of the population, the poor, and the new political elite. Class organization has been confined to small modern enclaves, of dockers, railwaymen, miners, plantation workers, few industrial workers. Many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa are now similar to the Latin American ones in inequality, with even larger, marginalized urban slum populations. Corresponding to the racial divides of the Americas are ethnic ones in Africa, following locations in the colonial structure and/or the ethnic composition of the rulers. While a socio-cultural bifurcation of elite-population is a common feature of postcoloniality, national politics can, of course, make a major difference. In India important equalizing steps were taken after independence, most importantly

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land reform and a vast program of affirmative action for the lower, “Scheduled Castes,” providing special access to education and public employment. An organized industrial working class began to develop, centered in the textile industries of Bombay, although always a small minority – in late twentieth century largely smashed – in the overwhelming non-industrial postcolonial economy. To the ruling elites of Reactive Modernization, equality was above all equality among modern nations. This was directed against the humiliating unequal treaties which China, Japan, the Ottoman empire, and other premodern states had had forced upon them by the imperial powers of Europe and North America, providing special trade and port concessions and extra-territorial jurisdiction to those powers. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 Japan proposed a clause of “racial equality” in the covenant of the League of Nations, of equality among nations regardless of race. The White settler dominions, Australia shrillest of all, opposed it, and U.S. President Wilson had it thrown out of the preparing commission. However, the fact that today Japan and the two other Northeast Asian national development states most inspired by it, South Korea and Taiwan, constitute the economically least unequal region of the world, after Europe, also follow from the concerns of national cohesion and the notion of noblesse oblige characteristic of Reactive Modernization. Early on, the Meiji Restoration abolished the hereditary privileges of the samurai warrior estate, not upon popular demand but as part of a comprehensive programme of modern efficiency and cohesion. After World War II, fear of Communism was conducive to land reform. Although South Korea, after its belated democratization, has some rather strong trade unions, Northeast Asian income equality is hardly explainable by internal class relations of force. Existential status is another matter, the basically conservative Reactive Modernization wanted to preserve premodern hierarchy, etiquette, and deference, and has largely managed to do so. While class organization and class conflict have had limited importance in both regions, the current Northeast Asian pattern of inequality is the opposite of the North American, more status and less income inequality. Patriarchy and the rights of women could not break through as issues in the first decisive openings of political modernity, and gender equalization has its own trajectories, which can also be connected to the main historical pathways to modernity. (Therborn 2004) But that is another story. Women played a significant part in the early period of the French Revolution and in Paris, and some courageous female revolutionaries tried to push human rights beyond the “Rights of Man.” But they never managed to get a fair hearing in the male sites of power. The Revolution ended with an affirmation of a secularized patriarchy in the Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804, with its notorious clause of the husband being the “chef de famille,” kept in French legislation until 1970.



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Powerful women’s movements were pioneered in the United States of America and in other White settler countries, such as Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century, sustained by Protestant Christianity. They benefited from predominant modernist Liberalism, and from their capacity to appeal to the ethnic solidarity of Old Immigrant settlers. The first breakthrough of women´s political rights came along the frontiers of New World settlement, in Oceania and in the United States west of the Mississippi. (Cf. further Therborn 1992) However, the first egalitarian marriage legislation came in Northern Europe, right after World War I, by broad center-left reform in Scandinavia, by minoritarian radical revolution in Russia. The family was never swept away by modernity. In Europe and the Americas it was in the end strengthened by the successful industrial revolution. In other parts of the world, there was always much less challenge. When sociologists today ask people in the world to describe who they are, from a list of ten possibilities, a plurality of people choose “family or marital status.” Occupation is a clear second, gender and nationality, closely together, take the third and the fourth rungs. Family status is most frequently invoked as the person’s most important identity in the “individualization” countries of White Anglophony and of Scandinavia. However, family status has different meanings in the different family-sex-gender systems, which are also being reproduced. Enduring historical effects are not inalterable, of course. In recent years we have seen important efforts by progressive Latin American governments to reduce inherited inequalities. The main point is that modernity, in contrast to modernization, is a concept amenable to generating interesting research questions about the intriguing diversity of the inter-connected human world.

References Note: Since this article is largely based on previous books and research articles of mine, with a full apparatus of sources and references, the documentation is here left out, in order to keep the text crisp and easy to read. Below, therefore, are only references to those previous works, in which my sources and references are given. Therborn, Göran. “The Right to Vote and the Four World Routes to/through Modernity.” State Theory and State History. Ed. Rolf Torstendahl. London: Sage, 1992. 62–92. Therborn, Göran. Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000. London: Routledge, 2004. Therborn, Göran. The World: A Beginner’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.

Rainer Tetzlaff

‘African Renaissance’ – Between Pan-African Rhetoric and the Reality of National Identity Politics 1 Introduction: A Rebirth of a Continent? Africa has many faces. Which one best represents the continent since the end of the Cold War? Is the ideology of ‘Pan-Africanism,’ once a mainspring of political change in Africa, still a relevant force today – facing the challenges of globalization and neo-liberal adjustments? Is the adoption of the “Charter for the Cultural Renaissance of Africa” in 2006 by the newly established African Union (AU) an indication that Pan-African values can help to find answers to the ongoing questions of identity construction of postcolonial Africans? (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1: Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, 2010, Dakar, © dpa Picture-Alliance GmbH.

When we look at the 49 meter tall bronze statue in Dakar, Senegal – Le Monument de la Renaissance Africaine – unveiled in 2010 by President Abdoulaye Wade and located on top of a hundred and fifty meters tall hill outside the capital of



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Senegal, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean,1 one easily can get the impression that this breath-taking statue (the largest in Africa) represents a genuine sentiment of the ‘new Africa.’ But in truth it was and is a still hotly contested project among Africans: While some people admire the unique monument as a celebration of the continent’s ‘rebirth,’ at the same time this expensive gigantic monument, situated in an economically distressed African country, has been regarded as a scandal – an irresponsible squander of public funds. This contribution deals firstly with the recent debates on ‘African Renaissance’ which developed five years after the genocide in Rwanda (1994) and with the end of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa as a new version of Pan-Africanism, and secondly with the transformation of the ‘Organization of African Unity’ (OAU) to the ‘African Union’ (AU) in 2001 as Africa’s political response to her threatening marginalization in the world after the end of the Cold War. As several African intellectuals and politicians in Southern Africa, in Senegal, Benin, Zambia, Ghana and in Libya were claiming since the 1990s, nothing less than the ‘rebirth of a continent’ was at stake, advocated for in a spirit of Pan-Africanism. In the midst of a historical moment that combined aggressive neoliberal economic restructuring, requested by IMF and the World Bank as ‘structural adjustment,’ with political democratization and increasing cultural and religious tensions between ethnic groups, the theme of cultural ‘renaissance’ flagged an optimistic discourse of legitimization among certain African elites. At the end of the twentieth century the political rhetoric of African Renaissance was perhaps best captured by the flourishing of newspapers, radio and television, and literature that is accompa­nying the progressive decline of state-sponsored censorship. A new generation of African reporters, writers, and scholars remain firmly committed to protecting and strengthening the democratic achieve of the last decade of the twentieth century. As a result, the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an exciting period of change and opportunity for all those interested in the future evolution of the African conti­nent and its peoples. (Schrader 2000, 2)

Many observers believed that Africa was at a turning point of its history. ‘Founding elections’ for multi-party democracies were taking place in more than 30 countries out of 48 sub-Saharan states. The global ‘third wave of democratization’ (Samuel Huntington) had finally reached Africa. Was the optimistic reform impulse sustainable? 1 The statue was designed by the Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby and built by a North Korean company in the style of ‘realistic art’ of the previous socialist countries. The formal dedication occurred on 4 April 2010, Senegal’s National Day, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the country’s independence from France.

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It is widely recognized that Western media provide at best an incomplete, and often a highly stereotypical image of African politics. News editors interested in ‘what will sell’ most often cover the sensational events, such as famines and ‘floods of refugees,’ military coups d’état, ethnic cleansing (called ‘tribal conflicts’) and rape of women by soldiers and tribal militias. All these negative items neatly fit the perceptions and preconceived notions of their mass audiences. This one-sided understanding of Africa has contributed to the continuation of Afro-pessimism in the sense that Africans ‘never’ will be capable of reversing what is perceived as the African continent’s eventual slide towards political violence, state collapse, mass poverty and religious clashes between Islamists and Christians. Recently Leo J. de Haan, the former Director of the African Studies Center in Leiden/Netherlands, took the lack of confidence in Western countries in the competence of South African government to organize the World Cup (soccer games) in 2009 successfully as “a sign that there stills exists a stereo­type of African incompetence, despite the social and economic progress Africa has witnessed in the last decade.” (de Haan 2010, 95 f.) Although one cannot deny the qualification of various depressing reports on corruption, state failures, ‘ethnic conflicts’ etc. in Africa’s postcolonial societies, it would be unfair and misleading to oversee latest reformist endeavors by politicians as well as the active engagement of civil society groups in domestic struggles for ‘good governance.’ At least in Southern Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Liberia, Benin and Senegal, people were eager to present the world a much more positive image of Africa as an emerging civilization, gradually catching up with other parts of the global community of modern states. In stark contrast with its rather unsuccessful predecessor (OAU), the newly formed African Union (AU) established one important innovation: It is now committed to condemn “unconstitutional changes of government.”2 It is also remarkable that several new institutions were founded since 2001, like the African Union (AU), its Peace and Security Council (PSC), the Pan-African Parliament, the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as the flagship of the political reform agenda, or the eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) which are recognized by the AU.3 New ‘regulating ideas’ such as African ownership in development, collective responsibility, non-indifference vis-à-vis gross violations of human rights were adopted as the essence of a widely proclaimed ‘African Renaissance.’ Let us focus on the ana2 As a result, the AU suspended Mauritania, Guinea, Niger, and Madagascar from its membership between 2008 and 2010. Unconstitutional extensions to presidential terms, however, have not been sanctioned. 3 The most developed and promising regional integration project is the Southern African Development Community, SADC. (Cf. Peters 2010)



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lytical perspective by asking: Can an ordinary citizen of an African state hope that the Pan-African proclamation of an ‘African Renaissance’ will change his living conditions and prospects of a better future for him and his children? The official inauguration of the AU took place in July 2002, in Durban, South Africa, and was accompanied, even in Africa, with a lot of critical comments: The Cameroonian journalist Emmanuel Wongibe, for example, commented the transformation of the OAU into the African Union in 2001 as follows: Even the most optimistic of Pan-Africanists cannot help but be scared by the sheer magnitude of the hurdles to be overcome to make this a reality. Africa’s poor infrastructure, political divisions, development crises, knee-deep indebtedness, the multi­plicity of conflicts, the spread of infectious diseases, and the lack of finances for the organization are some of the immediate problems […] Among the challenges the African Union will face is that of finance. With an informally projected budget of US $100 million – three times the current OAU budget, many people are wondering how the funds will be raised. Unpaid dues by member states were a perennial problem of the OAU, and there is no sign that things will change with the Union. (Wongibe 2001, 29)

2 Changing Self-definitions and Images 2 of Pan-Africanism The Pan-African movement has been the principal agency for self-definition of Africans in the twentieth century. This conception of self has been manifest both at the subject level in the race consciousness of the African peoples and at the objective level in the organizational forms which aspired to give expression to the ideas of African identity and liberation. It is a product of identity construction by elites and it has developed many faces. In the beginning it was heavily influenced by the ideas of Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) from Jamaica, founder of the United Negro Improvement Association. Originally, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was an idea by Afro-American intellectuals. The battle of Adwa of 1896 (in which the Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II defeated an Italian invasion army) gave Pan-African intellectuals a boost. The internationally much-admired victory of Adwa spared the country the experience of colonialism, and shaped the Ethiopian national psyche by a feeling of uniqueness. Therefore Ethiopia became “a beacon of liberty” for all Africans and the symbol for Africa’s independence. (Kreuter 2010, 114) Four years later, the first Pan-African Conference was held in London, organized by the Trinidadian teacher and lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams (1869–1911).

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Later, in the context of decolonization after 1945, Pan-Africanism became a historic anti-colonial movement for the liberation of all African colonies, a mass movement of “redemp­tion” of the black race, inspired by the great visionary Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972).4 Overcoming ‘unjust’ state borders between emerging nation states that had been drawn once by colonialists through the creation of a continental federal system like the United States of America – that was a leading vision of Kwame Nkrumah. The reality was different: Between 1952 and 2012, 88 successful military coups in Africa happened. Of those, 63 occurred prior to 1990, and ten cases since the adoption of the Lomé Declaration of the African Union in July 2000, banning military coups and adapting sanctions against regimes born out of this. Since then “a significant reduction in the occurrence of this phenomenon” was stated. (Souaré 2014, 69) During a third postcolonial phase until today, as ‘African Renaissance,’ it became the name of the vision of cultural and economic recovery under conditions of international competition in the neo-liberal age of globalization. This ideology was propagated mainly by three African presidents: Thabo Mbeki from South Africa, Abdoulaye Wade from Senegal and Olusegun Obasanjo from Nigeria. It represented an attempt by Africa’s political class to improve Africa’s image in the eyes of the international donor community as a reliable equal ‘partner for development.’ It was an outward-looking concept by alienated political elites, while quite different social struggles developed at the grass-root level where thorny questions of coexistence between native Africans and (immigrated) foreign Africans were well to the fore. Currently, facing the challenge of Islamist fundamentalism in East and West Africa, the spirit of Pan-African cooperation may regain a strong push (in West Africa) out of necessity (Gandois 2014) in order to mobilize political trust between regional governments, to pool resources and soldiers to unite forces against a common hostile religious and political aggression in the gown of Al-Qaeda. In the period between 2009 and 2011, “Al-Qaeda activities have been registered in 19 African nations and regions.” (Krech 2011, 132) The most aggressive African group – the Sunni terrorist group Boko Haram of Nigeria (meaning ‘Western education is sin’) has become more and more involved with Al-Qaeda and several fighters from Boko Haram have been given military training by Al-Shabab in Somalia. As the brief history of Pan-Africanism has shown, in its more than hundred years of existence, the meaning of Pan-Africanism has changed several times, according to the international circumstances and the self-defined perception of elites of Africa’s role in past and presence. While it had started as an esoteric movement of intellectuals that attacked racial discrimination and advocated the 4 Nkrumah’s most important publication bears the title Africa Must Unite (1963).



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global solidarity of Blacks in America, the Caribbean and in colonial Africa, after 1945 it changed its function in the period of decolonization into a continental political movement for the national liberation of all African colonies. The most repre­sentative Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in 1945. The Manchester Congress differed from the earlier ones because it managed to involve various trade unions as representatives of the African masses. Several future political leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) attended the Manchester Conference – both belonged later to the architects of the Organization of the African Unity (OAU), founded in 1963 in Addis Ababa. Many observers regarded this event as the beginning of an ‘African Renaissance,’ the first ‘African Renaissance.’ The idea of an ‘African Renaissance’ or ‘African Unity’ became a common theme in the 1950s and 1960s during the era of African emancipation from colonial rule, inspired by the Pan-African ideas of Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, Ghana. It was also reinforced by the unlucky involvement of the United Nations during the Congo crisis which led to the secretly arranged brutal murder of the first elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 by Belgian and U.S.-American security forces. The idea of Pan-Africanism achieved its first political climax in 1963 with the foundation of the Organization of African Unity by 32 delegations from African countries in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, a country which had repeatedly and successfully resisted European imperialism. Since then, “African solutions to African problems” became a mantra in Pan-African diplomacy, until today (Jonah 2009, 67–68) – in theory at least.

3 The Proclamation of an ‘African Renaissance’ 3 and Their Critics In the following section we will focus on some contradictory developments within the third stage of Pan-Africanism: the proclamation of an ‘African Renaissance’ by South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) to install ‘African responsibility for African problems’ and to strengthen self-confidence by making African Unity a reality.5 President Mandela’s willingness to embrace his former captors of nearly twenty-eight years to construct a new South Africa – the peaceful multi-ethnic rainbow nation – embodied the vision of a new dynamic generation of development-oriented African leaders, such as Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, 5 Due to space constraints I will not deal here with AU’s various political activities in the field of conflict resolution and peace-building in Africa, in connection with UN peace efforts.

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Meles Zenavi in Ethiopia, Isayas Afeworki in Eritrea and Paul Kagame in Rwanda. In the beginning it looked like a group of strong patriotic leaders who would be able and willing to make a difference; therefore they were praised and received strong support by the United States of America.6 In South Africa, the Renaissance-debate had been triggered by President Nelson Mandela, when addressing an OAU meeting in June 1994: We must face the matter squarely that where there is something wrong in how we govern ourselves, it must be said that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are illgoverned. The time has come for a new birth. We know that we have in ourselves, as Africans, to change all this. We must assert our will to do so. We must say that there is no obstacle big enough to stop us from bringing about an African Renaissance. (Mandela, cit. in Meredith 2005, 676)

Mandela advocated building a ‘rainbow nation,’ the symbol of a multi-cultural nation as home for all races and nations. Some years later, the idea of an ‘African Renaissance’ was taken up by Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, who, during his term as president of South Africa (1999–2008), turned it into a personal crusade. He referred to the African Renaissance as a reinforcement of post-Apartheid South Africa’s commitment to the continent regarding the establishment of genuine and stable democracies in all Africa, in which the system of good governance will flourish because they would derive their authority and legitimacy from the will of the people. His aim was to improve the image of Africa in order to attract urgently needed foreign investment and make the new South Africa an attractive global trading nation in line with the neo-liberal policy of structural adjustment. In a speech given to a Japanese audience in Tokyo in 1998, he referred to the past glories for which Africa was renowned: The pyramids of Egypt; the Benin ‘bronzes of Nigeria’; the obelisks of Aksum in Ethio­pia; the libraries of Timbuktu in Mali; the stone fortress of Zimbabwe; the ancient rock art of South Africa. When I survey all this and much more besides, I find nothing to sustain the long-held dogma of African exceptionalism, according to which the color black becomes a symbol of fear, evil and death. […] The fall of dictators like Mobutu in 1997 marked ‘the death of neocolonialism on our continent’ […] The African Renaissance, in all its parts, can only succeed if its aims and objectives are defined by Afri­cans themselves, if its programs are designed by ourselves and if we take responsi­bility for the success or failure of our policies. (T. Mbeki, cit. in Meredith 2005, 676 f.)

6 It looks like an irony of history that all four leaders developed as authoritarian leaders with little respect for free and faire elections; they all suppressed political opponents by force, limited the freedom of speech, and tried to gain output-legitimacy through stimulating economic growth.



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Inspired by earlier notions of self-reliance (in the sense of Pan-African ownership over African affairs) the ‘African Renaissance’ provided a philosophical basis for a new policy formula­tion. In May 1996 the South African people adopted a new constitution, the first democratic constitution, and on behalf of the African National Congress (Africa’s oldest political party) Thabo Mbeki held his famous “I am an African” speech. It was the power of the liberal civic conception of citizenship that influenced him to deliver his widely quoted speech that sought to define South African identity as a cosmopolitan one rather than a nativist one. In it he stated that the constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, color, gender or historical origins. It is a firm assertion made by our-selves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to death that the people shall govern. […] It [African Renaissance] seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny. […] The time has come that we make a super-human effort to […] create for ourselves a glorious future […] that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes. Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now. (Mbeki 1998, 5–7)

Besides the triumphal tone of the speech and its cosmopolitan message (‘South Africa be­longs to all’), it expresses clearly a criticism of the governance performance of Africa’s first generation of political leaders. This politically ambitious speech was widely reported and commented on and it gave the ‘renaissance’ notion some momentum. In its aftermath sev­eral African presidents, among them Julius Nyerere from Tanzania and Yoweri Museveni from Uganda, discussed the question how political balkanization, bad governance and aid dependency from the Western donor community could be ended. While the notion ‘African Renaissance’ never materialized as a full-fledged, concise new paradigm, it managed to rally policy-makers, bureaucrats and intellectuals alike behind an idea still highly useful as a concept of African self-respect and pride.

4 ‘African Renaissance’ as a Cosmopolitan Utopia Unfortunately, the nice pan-African rhetoric had little impact on the real social and economic developments on the ground. During his nine years as president, Thabo Mbeki failed to give life to his African Renaissance utopia because it reflected an elitist top-down approach. His denial of the link between HIV and

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AIDS cost the life of 330,000 people between 2000 and 2005; ca. 40 percent of HIV-positive South Africans were not receiving treatment. Average life expectancy dropped from 62 in 1990 to 50 in 2007. (Freedom House 2010, 602) Social inequality grew in South Africa since the end of the apartheid policy, and the gap between rich and poor was among the world’s largest. Persistent inequality was in part due to the government’s failure to educate young South Africans, particularly black ones. Youth unemployment was over 50 percent.7 As president and leader of the ANC he was forced to resign in 2008 and was replaced by his internal rival – the much more popular polygamist Jacob Zuma, married to several wives, charged with rape and corruption. In May 2006 a “Native Club” was founded as a lobby organization of black businessmen against neo-liberal ideology of the Mbeki government. The formation of the Native Club came as a major challenge to those who favored the spirit of ‘rainbowism’ as introduced by the Nelson Mandela administration in 1994. The Club’s vision included the protection and promotion of indigenous languages. When the Native Club came under heavy criticism by white liberal intellectuals as retrogressive and as nothing but reverse-racism, one of its supporters traced the roots of the Native Club “to Afro-radical liberation traditions of Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and Négritude.” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009, 72–74) It is not without irony that several years later, Mbeki’s brother – Moeletsi Mbeki, a journalist, private business entrepreneur and political commentator – in his book Architects of Poverty blamed the current African political elites of “massive mismanagement, with the help of Western powers, of the economic surplus generated in Africa in the past 40 years […] African political elites today sustain and reproduce themselves by perpetuating the neo-colonial state and its attendant socio-economic systems of exploitation, devised by the colonialists.” (Mbeki 2009, 16–17) To the self-posed question ‘What went wrong with postcolonial politics?,’ Moeletsi Mbeki, “the only South African commentator whose opinions make headlines news” (Steinberg 2008, 5), gave an answer that might not have amused his famous (but un­popular) brother, because it looks like the sheer opposite of his Pan-African Renaissance ideal: As heirs of the colonial state, political elites exploited their strong position in relation to the private sector (1) to bolster their standards of living to levels comparable with those of the middle and upper classes of the West; (2) to undertake half-hearted, lossmaking industrialization projects that were not supported by the necessary technical and managerial educational development; and (3) to transfer vast amounts of economic surplus generated by agriculture and extractive industries, such as oil, diamonds, metals and timber, to deve7 Figures according to the article “Sad South Africa: Cry, the beloved country” in The Economist, 20 October 2012, 22–23.



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loped countries as capital flight, while simultaneously obtaining vast loans from developed countries. (M. Mbeki 2009, 9)

The virtual debate between the two brothers, between the President Mbeki as a representative of the ruling political class, and the journalist and business Mbeki as an excluded representative of the urban middle classes (who suffer from selfish state interventions) demonstrates the deep difference between a politically constructed idealistic ideology and the disillusioning practice of power politics which seemed to ignore the proclaimed values. Even more disturbing was the heavy reliance of the advocacies of the African Renaissance idea (‘The New Africa’) on the expectation of getting huge amounts of hard currencies from Western countries for its implementation. In August 1999 representatives of African governments met in Accra and issued a declaration: “Africa is demanding $777 trillion from Western Europe and the Americas in reparation for enslaving Africans while colonizing the continent.”8 Two years later the “New Partnership for Africa’s Development” (NEPAD) was launched by three presidents (Thabo Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Abdoulaye of Senegal) and presented at the G8 Summit in Genoa for Western financial support, trumpeted as ‘Africa’s own initiative.’ It also included an ‘African Peer Review Mechanism’ (APRM) by which African leaders who misrule their countries would be subject to criticism by fellow African leaders according to commonly agreed standards. This bold APRM-idea looked like a substantial effort by African leaders to become ‘masters of their own destiny,’ but at the same time it was directed to convince western donors that it would be imperative and worth-while to support Africa’s new policy financially. At Genoa, NEPAD promoters made a request for $64 billion in Western investment in Africa (which was refused by the G8 states). Not all African intellectuals, however, were happy with this approach. George Ayittey, for example, criticized the aid-dependency trap African leaders seem incapable of breaking out of: The fact is, the resources Africa desperately needs to launch into self-sustaining growth and prosperity can be found in Africa itself. […] Capital flight out of Africa is at least $20 billion annually. Part of the capital flight out of Africa represents wealth created legitimately by business owners who have little faith in keeping it in Africa. The rest represents loot stolen by corrupt African leaders and politicians. (Ayittey 2005, 324)

Postcolonial African states were not able to reduce its large external debts of about $290 billion (Adebajo/Paterson 2012, 3), in spite of new loans from the World Bank and other foreign donors to “highly indebted poor countries” (HIPC). For 8 According to Pan African News Agency, 18 August 1999, cit. in Ayittey 2005, 318.

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most African governments, their insistence on an ‘African crafted Renaissance’ and at the same time the policy of accelerated integration of Africa’s economies into global markets by massive foreign aid, were not perceived as shameful contradictions, rather as two desirable goals going hand in hand. External actors are providing over 55 percent of the AU’s core budget in 2013.

5 The Pan-African Reality at the Bottom The increase of political violence against African immigrants and ethnic minority communities in South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, DR Congo, Rwanda, Ivory Coast and other African countries, suffering from rapid urbanization, combined with ever increasing youth unemployment, is a sad but clear indication of a steady tendency of weakening African solidarity as a common value. Under conditions of social stress, immigrants all over Africa are often seen by ‘native’ inhabitants as ‘others’ with envy, because they are seen as competitors for jobs, houses and social welfare programs. Most notorious was Ghana’s expulsion of 100,000 aliens, mostly from Nigeria or Burkina Faso, in 1968. In the 1990s, the Côte d’Ivoire government’s campaign for ‘ivoirité’ aimed at excluding from full participation in national life people who came, sometimes generations back, from Burkina Faso or Mali. Anxieties about unemployment and trade competition – and the propagation of xenophobic images – have been behind this exclusionary version of citizenship. (Cooper 2002, 104) With increasing land pressures, water scarcity and growing unemployment among young school leavers in many African societies, new forms of a narrow nationalism and even xenophobia developed. The emerging citizen-stranger dichotomy and its manipulation by the political elite lie at the heart of many political power conflicts. (Akokpari 2008) In the case of Ivory Coast during the last decade, using citizen-immigrant-dichotomy as a political weapon of exclusion of competitors turned a once politically stable and economically flourishing country into a civil war country with devastating consequences for its population and its neighbor-states.9 The bloody identity-power-conflict in the Ivory Coast was not a singular appearance in postcolonial Africa. For example, in May 2008, a wave of xenopho-

9 Opposition leader Alassane Quattara was disqualified from contesting the election under the new citizenship provisions in the Constitution, much to the chagrin of the Dioula and the entire Ivorian immigrant community. (Cf. Akokpari 2008, 101–103)



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bic violence spread all over South Africa. More than 60 people, mainly citizens from failing states like Somalia and Zimbabwe, were killed by mob violence. The South African writer Jonny Steinberg, author of Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (2011), reported: Between 11 and 26 May 2008, 62 people, the majority of them foreign nationals, were killed by mobs in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and elsewhere. Some 35,000 were driven from their homes. An untold number of shacks were burnt to the ground. The troubles were dubbed South Africa’s ‘xenophobic riots.’ They constitute the first sustained nationwide eruption of social unrest since the beginning of South Africa’s democratic era in 1994. (Steinberg 2008, 1)

As far as the young perpetrators were concerned, Steinberg (who interviewed many perpetrators and victims) reported a shocking episode by quoting the victim Benny Sithole10 who luckily had survived the riot: On the lips of those, who had gathered to loot and kill, were freedom songs composed during the struggle against Apartheid. Only now, they no longer sang of white minority rule, but of foreigners, and of the jobs, houses and women the foreigners had stolen […] Young unemployed South African men of Dark City, people I know very well, people who sit and play dice all day long, started to take things from our stalls. They walked up and took handfuls of tomatoes and cabbages. Some of the older people came and called the younger ones to task, and they went back to playing dice […] Some South African neighbours came to me and said you must go. If you stay you will die. (Steinberg 2008, 1)

He left Alexandria and never returned.

6 Xenophobia and ‘Nativism’ as Negations 6 of ‘African Renaissance’ Xenophobia in Africa as elsewhere is often constructed by frustrated people, local opinion leaders and nationalist media. Hate attacks against foreigners are not a sudden eruption and not only the spontaneous action of criminals, rather they mirror “a latent mindset in the midst of society. Dirty xenophobic thinking too easily and too quickly leads to dirty actions.” (Kersting 2009, 16) But how can we explain the emergence of xenophobia and turning nationalism into nativism? 10 Benny Sithole was an economically successful immigrant from Mozambique, married to a South African woman. The couple was well integrated in the suburb Alexandria near Johannesburg until his business and house were looted by frustrated Xhosa youngsters. Built to accommodate 60,000 people, Alexandra is now home to about 400,000. (Steinberg 2008)

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One plausible explanation is given by Norbert Kersting from the University of Stellenbosch. During colonial times, people fighting for national liberation had an external enemy (the colonial power), a situation that encouraged Pan-African leaders to include different social and ethnic groups and to condemn ‘tribalism.’ After independence there was no ‘external enemy’ anymore and the new form of nationalism in the context of development and nation-building, called developmental nationalism, often disguised the social tensions and social inequalities between different ethnic and regional groups: Peoples’ perceptions of foreigners from other African countries are not strongly re­lated to the discourse of Pan-Africanism run by African elites and the middle class. These mostly see people from African countries as comrades who supported the liberation struggle. In the low income areas perceptions of citizens from other African countries are different. Poor African migrants […] are not accepted or even tolerated in most of the low-income areas. Traditional instruments for integration, which were working well in rural areas are not applicable in the urban contexts […]. Therefore the postcolonial strategy of nativism and autochthony contradicts all strategies of broad integration and multicultural societies. Its motto is ‘Africa for the native Africans’ instead of ‘Africa for All.’11 (Kersting 2009, 16 f.)

The change of perceptions of national identity is – of course – dependent on the material conditions under which people live or survive. With increasing resource shortages and socio-economic stress, immigrated Africans are gradually viewed by ‘natives’ as ‘stranger communities’ and are easily regarded as scapegoats threatening their own interests. This recent change of national identity perceptions among under- and middle class Africans from a perception of being part of a Pan-African community to that of a citizens of a liberated nation to that of a ‘cultural nationalist’ or a ‘native son’ of the soil (cf. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009, 65), is a continental phenomenon, as was stated by the cultural anthropologist Bruce Whitehouse: The anti-immigration violence that raged in South Africa in May 2008 is only the most visible recent manifestation of this sentiment. Since 2005 hundreds of West African migrants have been subject to arrest, mistreatment and deportation, often in contra­vention of existing laws, from Equatorial Guinea to Libya and from Morocco to Mozambique. Whether by government authorities or local mobs, African migrants on the continent routinely face robbery, violence, and rape. (Whitehouse 2009, 54)

Within the South African context at least, there are still other causes to explain the xenophobic riots. Jonny Steinberg shed some light on the internal power 11 As it was stated in South Africa’s Freedom Charta and the African Union’s Charta.



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struggles and old ethnic tensions among political camps of the South African population. Under the ANC government people learnt “to see their democracy as a struggle for state patronage.” (Steinberg 2008, 4) They did not experience their ANC government as a developmental state, able to stimulate economic growth, industrial productivity and employment, rather as a “distributive state,” directed by an unproductive elite that “has gathered around a pork barrel and is creating little.” As a consequence, the economy was understood by the citizens “as static lump of which everyone feeds, and that each morsel taken by a foreigner was thus a morsel lost to a South African.” (Steinberg 2008, 5)

7 ‘African Renaissance:’ The Gap between 7 Academic Debate and Displaced Ideal in 7 the Political Praxis In regard to African intellectuals, one cannot overlook the emergence of a new generation of young optimistic intellectuals and politicians – raising their voice by criticizing the systematic shortcomings of the usual governance by Africa’s big men – repressive, selfish, often corrupt and cynical presidents for life-time. They constituted the bulk of the first postcolonial generation of neo-patrimonial leaders. (Ayittey 2005, Meredith 2005, Guest 2005, Tetzlaff 2008, Wrong 2009, Mbeki 2009, Mills 2010) As a visible representative of the new generation favoring Africa’s Renaissance, one can single out Peter Anyang Nyong’o, once an idealistic political scientist in Kenya who later be­came a Junior Minister and today holds the post as a General Secretary of the ruling party in Kenya. In 2002 he advocated “the comeback of pan-Africanism as the only viable continen­tal ideology for saving Africa from sinking further into the dungeon of political, social and economic decay.” (Nyong’o 2002a, 21) He admired the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah and was searching for an African Renaissance by a “critical appreciation” of his African heritage (so the title of his book). That did not prevent him from admitting that he as a school boy at a missionary station was strongly impressed by his noble teachers from Britain who “indoctrinated him to be a servant of the people.” But when he has left school and later university he discovered a dishonest, selfish ruling elite in Africa that was “really ruining Africa’s chances for development,” and accused it: Corruption is the end result of trait that is pathological in the culture of the ruling elite. It begins with the endemic impulse to want to escape poverty through the use of political power and the exhibition of a culture of richness that must be displayed in ostentation and

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consumption. The more ostentatious one becomes the more one wants to improve on the artifacts of ostentation, be they houses, cars, wives, holi­days, rings, public donations and so on. This propels a never-ending consumer culture that, of necessity, must misappropriate public goods and misuse public power. (Nyong’o 2002, 101)

Today African intellectuals like Greg Mills, Moeletsi Mbeki, George Ayittey, Jonny Steinberg and many other authors (including Robert Guest and Michaela Wrong) sing the same tune as Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o did twenty years ago. How difficult it must be to implement all the nice intentions like serving the people, in the present context of power struggles in Africa, may be seen from a recent report in Africa Confidential on Kenya’s political culture of cronyism. It says that “party Secretary General Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o took advantage of the Prime Minister’s absence to install his own cronies in several strategic seats. His man, Jack Ranguma, was declared the winner, although most observers were convinced that Adhiambo had won.” (Africa Confidential 2013, 8) Often people have good intentions, but the circumstances are stronger than them. It lies in the logic of the African policies of distributive democracy to teach the citizens to see their democracy as a struggle for state patronage. Obviously the Kenyan Minister Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o belongs to the group of African intellectuals who had promulgated once the ‘Renaissance’ talk and meanwhile have lost faith in it. It is possible that the failure of NEPAD – its incompetence to find a solution to the Zimbabwean tragedy – has contributed to the disillusion. Contrary to all self-binding commitments to democracy, human rights and good governance by NEPAD officials, no initiative was taken when in the 2008 elections dictator Robert Mugabe (who had lost the election with 43,2  percent of the vote compared to 47,9  percent for opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai) stayed in office, by a mix of ballot-rigging, intimidation, and brutal repression of all critics. Some commentators have said that the presence of some three million Zimbabweans in South Africa was the result of the failure of Mbeki’s policy of quiet diplomacy towards Mugabe. (Steinberg 2008, 2) In an act of misplaced loyalty, nearly all African leaders (the president of Botswana was an exception) refused to denounce this despot whose selfish reign has impoverished a whole nation. One can agree with Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate (born in Ethiopia): “Solidarity degenerates to a false virtue when it helps to coat injustice and falsehood.” (Asserate 2010, 260)



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8 A Survey of Students from Jacobs University 8 Bremen: Lost Confidence in Pan-African Values? The investigation of the political relevance of Pan-African slogans for present day Africa will be complemented by two short case studies which can give some further evidence of a diminishing importance of the earlier (Nkrumah’s) version of Pan-Africanism. In December 2012 as a lecturer at Jacobs University teaching African politics, I took the opportunity to conduct an anonymous survey to find out the views of African students at Jacobs University Bremen on a broad set of political and cultural issues.12 One third of all African students at Jacobs University participated in the survey and thirty answered the questionnaire including the question “What is your understanding of Pan-Africanism?.” To my great surprise, 22 out of 30 participants had no idea what Pan-Africanism stands for (including those who did not answer this question at all); only eight students (the majority coming from Ethiopia) gave answers to the above mentioned question and shared the opinion that Pan-Africanism stands for African Unity or intends “to promote African culture.” (One student mentioned the name of Kwame Nkrumah.) One Bachelor student from Ethiopia wrote: I think we should first have emotional unity before physically removing borders and making Africa – the United States of Africa. There are too many different opinions, cultures, economic differences that Pan-Africanism can actually be band. (Boateng/Njenga/Tetzlaff 2012, Survey No.1)

Another Bachelor student, a woman from Ethiopia, presented her personal view as follows: Pan-Africanism is a movement that woke up Africans that were under constant oc­cupation under the Europeans and instigated the freedom movements all over Africa. It reminds us Africans of the unfortunate past we have had and we can use that as a consolidation of our relative backwardness but not as an excuse. (Boateng/Njenga/Tetzlaff 2012, Survey No.2).

Possibly, the history and ideology of Pan-Africanism as a topic of curricula of African schools does not any more enjoy a high priority, besides may-be Ethiopia, the country that proudly hosts the headquarters of the OAU, respectively the African Union since 1963.

12 The survey was conducted together with Robin Wanjiru Njenga from Kenya and Oheneba Agyenim Boateng from Ghana, both students of Jacobs University Bremen, as assistants.

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This empirical evidence from African students at Jacobs University fits to my evaluation of the journal African Renaissance, edited and published in London since 2004 by Jideofor Adibe. The two-monthly journal (with subscription rates of 150 to 250 British Pounds for six issues) is containing mainly ambitious views of African and Afro-American social scientists, dealing with the cultural heritage of African societies, with identity questions and current political crises in Africa, with neo-imperialism and the failures of African governments. In some thirty relevant articles in issues between 2004 and 2012 I could not find any direct reference to the history, ideology or myth of Pan-Africanism, rather an appeal to go back to Africa’s pre-colonial cultural roots, as for example propagated by the late Senegalese Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop, who praised the Egypt of the pharaohs. It seems that African academics have lost confidence in the usefulness of African Renaissance ideas. (Ferguson 2006)

9 Conclusion and Outlook: African Renaissance’s 8 Great Aspirations and Some Institutional 8 Progress The African Union remains in early stages but it is gathering momentum aged ten. Increasingly, new pan-African institutions such as the Peace and Security Council (PSC) are affirming a strong position in defense of democracy, good governance, African ownership and abhor unconstitutional takeovers. (Tetzlaff 2014) However, work with civil society organizations and outreach to African people is hampered by lack of adequate funding for more innovative activities that are inclusive. (Kingah 2014, 186, 193; Souaré 2014, 83) In addition to that, African Union’s new institutions did not find a common strategy to arrange for sufficient political pressure on those repressive African governments who are acting against all AU principles and declarations of good governance and African ownership. Therefore the political image of the African Union as a reliable partner in international developmental affairs suffers from a credibility gap. Although member states pay most of the AU’s operational budget, 97 percent of AU programs are paid by foreign countries or institutions. This often complained aid dependency from European and North American countries is a scandal, which the new Chairwoman of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma wants to change as soon as possible, even if that means “getting member states to pay higher dues.” (Africa Confidential 2013, 2)



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When discussing the relevance of African Renaissance and other pan-African ideas it is advisable to differentiate between three groups of Africans: From time to time the political elites in power-positions enjoy dealing with the melodious phrases of Pan-Africanism in an optimistic posture, in order to strengthen their outside legitimacy as true representatives of the African common good. In the 1990s, the African Union proclaimed an ‘African Renaissance’ and thus signaled the commitment of Africa’s governments to concepts of multi-party democracy, good governance and structural adjustment to neo-liberal market reforms. Some progress has been achieved. Secondly, there are the theorizing social scientists who in the beginning were seriously engaged in discussions on African identity questions, African values and on the roots of ethnic conflicts. They seem to have lost confidence in the usefulness of the vague pan-African ideas as a solution to the current challenges of catching-up with the development successes in other parts of the world. Finally we investigated the political horizon of the ordinary citizens in low income areas in Southern Africa. People suffering from competition for jobs and being part of host-immigrant tensions do not care at all about Pan-African solidarity phrases, understandably. Cultural attitudes of social distance and xenophobia against “foreigners” from other African countries are gaining ground in countries like South Africa, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya, or Ethiopia. At least two reasons for the decline of the pan-African discourse were found. First, the Western colonial powers as ‘external enemies’ of African cultures do not exist anymore and with their disappearance the political necessity to look for common strategies among African societies has gone. Second, with increasing material stress situations for ordinary citizens, internal social fragmentation processes, political struggles for state patronage, xenophobic sentiments and so called ‘ethnic tensions’ between immigrants and natives are gaining in importance. That indicates a transformation of progressive developmental nationalism in a Nkrumahian sense (“Africa for all”) into a retrogressive cultural nationalism, sub-nationalism (tribalism) and/or nativism (“Africa for the native Africans only,” Ivory Coast, South Africa). Different claims and rights of insiders and outsiders, placed and displaced peoples produce imagined identities and mental borders between African people. Pan-Africanism as a source of emotional strength and national pride for academics, and especially for disillusioned students, seems to have lost relevance (apparently with the exception of major continental sport events like the World Cup in South Africa). As far as the institutional aspect of Pan-Africanism is concerned, the balance sheet after a decade of promised reforms in a spirit of Pan-Africanism is still meager. By October 2012, only 31 countries had joined the APRM, which sets and

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investigates standards of governance.13 The voluntary mechanism has sought to address democratic deficits and to oversee important tax and electoral reforms – 16 countries have been through its review process. However, compliance with the mechanism has been hampered by the non-binding nature of its findings and capacity constraints at the national level. With a new foreign threat, however, such as the Islamist terrorism that today affects nearly one third of all Africans, the Pan-African heritage can possibly regain some political relevance in future. The latest political developments in West Africa point to this direction – the violent attacks of non-state actors on the West African state Mali triggered off intensive political consultations and actions among West African governments to react commonly to this unexpected assault on their power, wealth and African identity. In April 2010 Algeria, Mali, Mauretania and Niger announced the establishment of a ‘Joint Headquarters for Major Operations in the Sahara’ against ‘Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’ (AQIM). Possibly, West African states are now placed again at “a critical juncture” of their postcolonial history, defined as “a major event or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society” (Acemoglu/Robinson 2012, 101), thus offering the chance of a new political orientation towards the real needs of the people. Is that the case, then Pan-Africanism as a mobilizing ideology of defending African cultures and development interests could regain new drive.

References Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson, eds. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business, 2012. Adebajo, Adekeye, ed. From Global Apartheid to Global Village: Africa and The United Nations. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. Adibe, Jideofor. “Is it in Our Stars? Culture and Current Crises of Governance in Africa.” The Journal of African Renaissance 3/6 (2006): 5–7. Africa Confidential 54/3 (2013). Akokpari, John. “‘You don’t Belong Here:’ Citizenship, the State and Africa’s Conflicts. Reflections on Ivory Coast.” The Roots of African Conflicts. Eds. Alfred Ndema and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. Oxford: James Currey, 2008, 88–105. Ayittey, George BN. Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa’s Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

13 The first six countries which were evaluated by APRM-Africans were Algeria, Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa. The vague recommendations of the experts remained politically without consequences.



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Boateng, Oheneba Agyenim, Robin Wanjiru Njenga, and Rainer Tetzlaff. A Survey of African Students at Jacobs University Bremen of Pan-Africanism and other questions. Bremen December 2012. Unpublished manuscript. Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Diallo, Garba. “The Philosophical Foundations of African Democracy: Could this Be a Basis for Solving the Current Crises?” African Renaissance 3 (November/December 2006): 13–22. Ferguson, James. “Chrysalis: The Life and Death of the African Renaissance in a Zambian Internet Magazine.” Ibid. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2006. 113–154. Freedom in the World 2010. The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties. New York: Freedom House, 2010. Fandrych, Sabine. Die Afrikanische Union – auf dem Weg zu den United States of Africa? Ed. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Hintergrundinformationen aus der internationalen Zusammenarbeit. Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Referat Afrika, 2008. Gandois, Hélène. “Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).” The Democratization of International Institutions. First International Democracy Report. Chapter 14. Eds. Lucio Levi, Giovanni Finizio, and Nicola Vallinoto. London/New York: Routledge 2014. 196–206. Guest, Robert. The Shakled Continent: Africa’s Past, Presence and Future. London: Macmillan/ Pan Books, 2005. De Haan, Leo. “Perspectives on African Studies and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Africa Spectrum 1 (2010): 3–29. Jonah, James O.C. “The Security Council, the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, and the Secretariat.” From Global Apartheid to Global Village. Ed. Adekeje Adebajo. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. 65–86. Journal of African Cultural Studies, edited by Akin Oyètádè. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, since 1997. Kersting, Norbert. “New Nationalism and Xenophobia in Africa – a New Inclination?” Africa Spectrum 1 (2009): 7–18. Kingah, Stephen S. “African Union.” The Democratization of International Institutions. First International Democracy Report. Eds. Lucio Levi, Giovanni Finizio, and Nicola Vallinoto. Chapter 13. London/New York: Routledge, 2014. 183–194 Kitissou, Marcel. “Conflicting Stories and Contending Images of Africa.” African Renaissance 5/2 (March/April 2008): 8–18. Krech, Hans. “The Growing Influence of Al-Qaeda on the African Continent.” Africa Spectrum 46/2 (2011): 125–137. Kreuter, Marie-Luise, and Rolf P. Schwiedrzik-Kreuter. Äthiopien von innen und außen, gestern und heute. Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2010. Mbeki, Moeletsi. Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing. Johannesburg: Macmillan/Picador Africa, 2009. Mbeki, Thabo. “I am an African.” Occasional Papers. Ed. Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung (KAS). Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 1998. Mbeki, Thabo. “Partnerschaft auf Augenhöhe – Fiktion oder Wirklichkeit?” Schicksal Afrika. Ed. Horst Köhler. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2010. 68–76. Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.

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Mills, Greg. Why Africa is Poor: And What Africans Can Do about It. Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2010. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Africa for Africans or Africa for ‘Natives’ Only? ‘New Nationalism’ and Nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa.” Africa Spectrum 1 (2009): 61–78. Njoku, Uzochukwu J. “Reflecting on Assassinations and Destructions in Nigeria’s Socio-Political Culture.” African Renaissance 3/6 (November/December 2006): 45–48. Nyong’o, Peter Anyang’, ed. Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa: Studies in African Political Economy. London/New Jersey: United Nations University Zed Books, 1987. Nyong’o, Peter Anyang’. “Unity or Poverty: The Dilemmas of Progress in Africa since Independence.” New Partnership for Africa’s Development NEPAD: A New Path? Eds. Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, Aseghedech Ghirmazion, and Davinder Lamba. Nairobi/Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation 2002. 19–34. Nyong’o, Peter Anyang’. The Study of African Politics: A Critical Appreciation of a Heritage. African Scientists Reflections. No. 3. Nairobi: Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2002a. Peters, Wolff-Christian. The Quest for an African Community: Regional Integration and its Role in Achieving African Unity – the Case of SADC. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2010. Schraeder, Peter. African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transition. London: Macmillan, 2000. Souarè, Issaka K. “The African Union as a Norm Entrepreneur on Military Coups d’ État in Africa (1952–2012): An Empirical Assessment.” Journal of Modern African Studies 52/1 (2014): 69–94. Steinberg, Jonny. “South Africa’s Xenophobic Eruption.” Occasional Paper 169 (November 2008): 1–13. Tetzlaff, Rainer. “Afrikanische Union: Große Pläne und kleine Fortschritte.” Regionale Integration. Eds. Andreas Grimmel and Cord Jakobeit. Nomos: Baden-Baden, 2014. Whitehouse, Bruce. “Discrimination, Despoliation and Irreconcilable Difference: Host-Immigrant Tensions in Brazzaville, Congo.” Africa Spektrum 1 (2009): 39–60. Wongibe, Emmanuel. “Africa at the Crossroads.” Development and Cooperation 5 (2001): 28–29. Wrong, Michaela. It’s our Turn to Eat: A Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower. London: Fourth Estate, 2009.

Elahe Haschemi Yekani

Feeling Modern: Narratives of Slavery as Entangled Literary History The entanglement of marginalized and canonical literary voices becomes increasingly relevant in a contemporary effort to understand modern literary history in a global framework. In the British context the debates on the abolition of slavery have been central to the very formation of the British enlightenment and the emergence of the British middle-class, especially with its focus on feeling and empathy as the feeling for Others.1 This also shaped the emerging novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The act of reading as empathetic identification with Others – accelerated by the technical revolutions and increased literacy at the time – becomes the principal means of emotional access to this middle-class identity. Modernity in this understanding is also a product of affective relationality. The eventual success of the abolitionist movement enabled the British to imagine themselves as exceptionally modern and progressive in their renunciation of slavery following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in 1833. This British response is set against the United States’ deplored holding on to the – as it was called then – “peculiar institution” of slavery which was abolished in the U.S. only some thirty years later with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment at the close of the Civil War in 1865.2 Moreover, Britain’s role as pioneering the earliest form of what might be labeled a ‘human rights campaign’ avant la lettre informs Britain’s contemporary attempts in reconstructing a ‘multicultural past.’ By emphasizing the achievements of revolutionary modern Black subjects whose testimonies have survived to this day, there is a danger in celebrating an all too ‘happy multicultural’ British archive of slavery and the abolitionist cause. This essay will focus specifically on the Black British writers Olaudah Equiano and Mary Seacole whose writing from the literary margin I will align and read as entangled with probably the most prominent British literary voice of the nineteenth century: Charles Dickens and his non-fictional writings on the politics of slavery in the U.S. in his American Notes. Specif1 Brycchan Carey argues that the discourses of abolition and sentimentality have given rise to a specific “sentimental rhetoric” which emphasizes the “power of sympathy to raise awareness of suffering.” (2005, 2) 2 Gallagher highlights how this shift in public opinion also affected the role of the British navy enforcing the abolition of the slave trade on the Atlantic: “In 1789, they [the British] were the most active slave-traders among European nations, holding 57.9 per cent of the Atlantic trade; by 1808 they had declared slave-trading piracy and were committed to its termination in the Atlantic.” (Gallagher 2000, 85)

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ically, the paper looks at the ways in which a modern British identity is linked to a rejection of slavery from a personal autobiographical point of view and a more detached perspective of social commentary – both of which address an assumed sympathizing British audience. This affective relation to modernity – the “feeling modern” of the title – is the product of intercultural dynamics that are already in place at a time when national canons first come into being. Framing modernity globally, thus, challenges understandings of the British novel, Britishness, and more generally, modernity itself as well as attempts to remember and reconstruct a ‘past multiculturalism’ today.3

1 Entangled Literary History To begin with, I want to expound upon my understanding of “entangled literary history.” The fields of history and historiography have offered productive attempts to read European history as always already in relation to the history of colonization. These approaches are linked to labels such as connected or entangled histories as well as histoire croisée and transatlantic modernism. (Cf. Conrad/Randeria 2002; Werner/Zimmermann 2006) It is no coincidence, I argue, that in one of the most influential articles in this strand of historical research, “Provincializing Europe. Postcoloniality and the Critique of History” (1992), Dipesh Chakrabarty often references literature and specifically autobiography as a prominent field in which conceptions of modernity are established and challenged. Reading and writing become key spheres in which to claim modern subject status which is why I deem it necessary to bring into greater interdisciplinary dialogue the realms of global and literary history. For the field of literary studies, Edward Said proposed already in 1994 to look at the “comparative literature of imperialism” to understand “different experiences contrapuntally” and as “intertwined and overlapping histories.” (1994, 18) Daniel Carey revisits Said’s foundational text Culture and Imperialism and explains Said’s contrapuntal reading practice as follows: “As we might expect from his naming of the practice, the first analysis comes from an analogy with music. Said remarks that in classical music, the theory of coun3 In a co-written paper with Beatrice Michaelis we have commented in greater detail on the “queer” politics of archives of race and the current politics of remembering Black Britons like Equiano, Sancho and Seacole in Britain as well as the reluctance to employ the category ‘race’ in analyses of German mediaeval texts; cf. Michaelis/Haschemi Yekani (2014). Additionally, a more detailed and differently framed reading of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures stressing the affective importance of the politics of the family in her Wonderful Adventures was published as Haschemi Yekani (2012). Both articles include earlier versions of some of the arguments stated here.



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terpoint depends on the relationship between multiple themes, none of which are dominant.” (2009, 109) However, Carey criticizes that in postcolonial contrapuntal readings of canonical classics, there is a tendency to superimpose anachronistic categories onto literary texts. In this way, Carey argues, contrapuntal readings turn into palimpsestic readings, overwriting the original text with another one. In his rereading of Robinson Crusoe against the backdrop of this critique, Carey highlights that the category of ‘chattel slavery’ obscures the more complicated eighteenth-century framework of servitude. In addition to Carey’s call for postcolonial readings closer to the actual text and the need to take seriously the historically specific connotations of concepts, I want to emphasize another problematic aspect in postcolonial literary reading practices. Too often these have not taken into consideration the contemporaneous interrelation between “metropole and colony” in focusing on the metropolitan texts exclusively. This demand, to look at the entangled or related literary discourses, is, of course, not new and Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler had already urged to rethink the postcolonial research agenda in 1997 in their edited collection Tensions of Empire to analyze “how both colonies and metropoles shared in the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion.” (1997, 3) Concurrently, Brycchan Carey stresses the centrality of slavery in this context: “We can no longer approach writing about slavery as somehow separate, or as a special case. Rather, we must see it as central to the development of European, American, and African culture, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries.” (2005, 13) Nevertheless, there is still a tendency in postcolonial literary studies to focus exclusively on either how writers in Britain, such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, have been shaped by the culture of imperialism. Or, the critical attention is shifted to the literatures in English across the globe with an emphasis on the localized meanings of ‘oppositional writing’ that is seen as ‘writing back’ to the canon only in later twentieth-century postcolonial literature (largely inspired by the path-breaking study The Empire Writes Back by Ashcroft, Gareth and Griffiths). Thus, despite the double focus of postcolonial theory as a temporal after colonialism and an epistemological beyond colonialism, postcolonial literary theory for a long time has privileged this model of writing back to the center, a challenging of Eurocentrism only after the fact of European modernity and imperialism. In this way, one fails to take into consideration the simultaneous entanglement of various (emerging) literary voices during the rise of European modernity in the eighteenth and the age of empire in the nineteenth century. The decentering of the hegemonic story of “English literature” is not disrupted for good by adding a framework of English Literatures (all over the world) or adding a section on multicultural or transcultural literature (preferably for the twentieth century). Said’s contrapuntal reading might be called well-trodden ter-

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ritory in postcolonial studies; but one that if taken seriously alters histories of modernity, and this path has not been explored in all its consequences with reference to the emergence of the modern British canon. This globalized perspective on British literature does not only state the addition of Black British writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a curious fact, but acknowledges their presence as indeed formative for the construction of Britishness which we now imagine to have become a challenged identity only under the auspices of twentieth-century migration. As a consequence, close readings of early Black British literature tend to overemphasize the investment of the ‘mimic’ colonial subject into colonial culture and thus fail to note the investment into Otherness that is necessary for hegemonic self-definition. Homi Bhabha’s widely applied (and by now also criticized) concepts of hybridity and mimicry (cf. Bhabha 1994, critically, for example, Young 1995; Brah/Coombes 2000; Ha 2005) seem not always to do justice to the simultaneity of Other cultures. Despite the fact that Bhabha himself emphasizes that there is no stable original culture, it becomes difficult in his reasoning to imagine an outside of colonial discourse or a colonial discourse that can come into being only in entanglement or simultaneously with other histories and is not antecedent to them. Reading writings of the early Black Atlantic I am not only interested in the ways in which these colonial subjects seek approval or how in mimicking the English they destabilize the notion of a coherent identity (which they undoubtedly do) (Bhabha 1994, 122), I also want to study the British emotional investment in early Black Britons as historical figures today. Nevertheless, to say that marginal and hegemonic voices are entangled by no means is to imply that they were equal. Rather, I want to stress that the hegemonic center does not exist as this stable powerful entity into which the powerless and marginalized seek entrance. It is through the inclusion of colonial subjects such as Equiano and Seacole that a notion of an inclusive/enlightened British identity is consolidated today – especially with regard to the construction of a ‘happy’ archive of (un)remembering slavery. But before turning to the contemporary politics of the archive, I want to read and comment on the two previously mentioned Black British texts as affective responses to slavery and feeling modern.



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2 Olaudah Equiano and the Project of Becoming 2 Modern Generically Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself combines elements of the autobiography, the spiritual autobiography or the genre of the apologia. The text can also be read as a captivity narrative, travel book or adventure story. It functions as a predecessor to the nineteenth-century slave narrative and has by now become one of the most prominent pieces of early Black writing and was published first by subscription in 1789. Equiano was allegedly kidnapped with his sister into slavery at the age of eleven, transported to Barbados in the West Indies and after a few days transported to Virginia. There he is bought by a planter and then sold to a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy (who named him Gustavus Vassa) who takes him to England but there breaks his promise and sells him into slavery once more to the West Indies in 1762. Equiano eventually buys his freedom in the West Indies.4 Subsequently, Equiano becomes the most prominent and professional Black spokesperson of abolition in Britain and tours widely with his narrative. His subscription list is used as a moral argument in the abolitionist cause. In 1792, the first attempt to pass an abolition bill fails because of the protest by the British planter lobby. Equiano died in 1797 after he had retired to some wealth resulting from his writing in 1794 even before the slave trade was eventually abolished in Britain in 1807. In Equiano’s writing the paradoxical convergence of slavery and modernity becomes tangible. In his comprehensive study on Slavery and the Culture of Taste of 2011 Simon Gikandi states: In Britain as elsewhere in Europe, the promotion of a culture of sense and sensibility, of politeness and conduct operated as if the problem of enslavement belonged to distant reaches of empire far away from the domestic scene in which new identities were being constructed. (Gikandi 2011, 90)

At a time when the so-called enlightened subject is finding its voice, legally slaves were not “inferior subjects” but “a special kind of property.” (Gikandi 2011, 91)

4 I reconstruct his biography from the literary source here. Whether Equiano was born in 1745 in present-day Nigeria or, in fact, in South Carolina in the U.S. remains unclear today. Vincent Carretta is the editorial and biographical authority in this regard. (Cf. Carretta’s Introduction to the 2003 Penguin edition)

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Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic5 (1993) still offers one of the richest points of departure in theorizing modern subjectivity in relation to the violence of transatlantic slavery. Gilroy criticizes Hegel’s “dialectic of intersubjective dependency and recognition.” (Gilroy 1993, 68) The Hegelian slave, or bondsman to be more precise, prefers bondage rather than death. (Cf. Hegel 1970 [1807], 113–120) In narratives of real slavery, however, the choice of death rather than continued servitude undermines Hegel’s allegory.6 Consequently, modernity, i.e. modern subjectivity, and slavery are intertwined phenomena, temporally and philosophically, and I would add that the dimension of feeling – to feel pain and to feel/ understand the pain of others becomes crucial for the abolitionist campaign. Modernity and affect are interrelated here. As the historian Ute Frevert points out (2011, 14), the conception of middle-class subjectivity is reliant on the attribution of the ‘realness’/authenticity of feelings and sympathy (in contrast to the false feeling and pretense of the aristocracy and the working classes and non-European societies who supposedly lacked feeling and refinement altogether). Sympathy and sensibility become middle-class virtues. But Frevert to a certain degree reinstates these borders as fixed. Looking at early Black Atlantic writing, we see how those subjects that are supposedly excluded from these norms can quite consciously cite them – even before they are fully recognized citizens. Gikandi accordingly argues: “culture became the most obvious form of social mobility and self-making in the century that invented the modern individual.”7 (Gikandi 2011, 55) Legally, one important milestone is, of course, the Somerset Case of 1772. The degradation of people to property is challenged when the fugitive slave James 5 Gilroy defines the Black Atlantic world as follows: “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world.” (1993, 3) 6 Mbembe, with reference to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993), disentangles the project of modernity as reliant on modes of necropower. Working through and expanding Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower (cf. Foucault 2002), Mbembe explains that regulation not only refers to the control of life, but spectacularly in the form of necropower also to death. While for Foucault racism, for example, is a product of biopower, Mbembe highlights that there is an independent necropower that to a large degree underpins the project of modernity and in some ways is precedent to biopower. When we focus on life exclusively, we do not recognize the agency in death, as Gilroy has pointed out with recourse to slave suicides. (Cf. especially 1993, 46–71) We fail to see those who are the constitutive outside of modernity. 7 Gikandi has described the situation of the slave aptly as characterized by “temporal dislocation” and “genealogical isolation.” (Cf. Gikandi 2011, 86) He argues “the transformation of the slave from a figure of bondage to a reading or writing subject would mark the moment of arrival into the kingdom of culture and taste, which was nothing less than coming into selfhood out of bondage.” (Gikandi 2011, 86)



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Somerset wins his case and cannot be re-sold into West Indian slavery once he entered British soil. This is seen by many as the beginning of Britain’s paradoxical exceptional standing of outlawing slavery at home while profiting financially from its plantations abroad. ‘Chattel slavery’ is safely pushed out of sight and connected to the Americas and, indeed, early Black British subjects – even if in servitude – were often more fashionable ‘house servants’ rather than slaves. Nonetheless, the sentimental emotionalizing image of the kneeling shackled slave on the Wedgwood Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society, pleading “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” is showing, on the one hand, a subservient man in need of help, on the other hand, this Black man becomes part of the ‘family of man’ for the first time. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (abbreviated as IN in the following) also displays such strategies of ‘becoming modern’ mostly through the reference to shared Christianity but also in an appeal to feeling. The abolitionist campaign repeatedly scandalized accounts of bodily harm, and this can be linked to what Sara Ahmed (2010a) describes as a combination of an affective response and an emotion that is attributed as such. The generic convention of the autobiography – to testify to experiences first-hand – is part, of course, of an appeal to culturalized feeling, and here the mentioned eighteenth-century cult of sensibility is central. But by providing gruesome details about slavery the texts will also evoke a bodily affective response in their readers and the description of the slave ship during the middle passage becomes the literary topos par excellence to generate sympathy. When Equiano is made to enter the slave ship forcefully, he is overcome with terror and faints (IN 55). Immediately, the place is constructed as a site that removes him from the realm of the human: The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. […] In this situation I expected every hour to share the fate of my companions, some of whom were almost daily brought upon deck at the point of death, which I began to hope would soon put an end to my miseries. (IN 58)

Again, suicide, which Gilroy describes as the most radical form of agency, appears in a situation of deprived humanity. Equiano “hopes for death” in light of “this wretched situation” and “scene of horror almost inconceivable.” But interest-

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ingly, Equiano rejects this form of dehumanization by turning the tables around and continually emphasizing that the slave holders themselves are inhumane and given their treatment of men, women and children cannot be called Christians. Hazel Carby calls this a strategy of “mutual non-recognition.” (2009, 632) Equiano is the single focalizer of the text but offers multiple routes of identification, emphasizing different aspects of his identity. Focalization, according to Gérard Genette (1980) and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2001) refers to the point of view of a text but also includes cognitive, emotive and ideological orientation rather than just function as the answer to the question “who sees?” in a narrative. These early Black autobiographical accounts narratologically perform avant la lettre what W.E.B. Du Bois later called “double consciousness” in his “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). (Cf. Eckstein 2006) The narratives present themselves to a white audience and in this process perform a reflection of what it means to be seen through the eyes of another; but the texts in this way also alter conceptions of identity. The presumably white Others, who read the text, need to engage with Equiano. Consequently, Carby reads Equiano’s text almost as a utopian, postcolonial identity before the fact: Equiano speaks as a composite subject, a subject inhabiting multiple differences, as African, as black, as British, as Christian, as a diasporic and transnational citizen of the world, and in the process offers his readers the possibility of imagining a more complex cultural and national identity for themselves. (Carby 2009, 634–635)

I would, however, be less optimistic in the readers’ capacity to empathize with Equiano’s multiplicity. The narrative follows a specific pattern of conversion. On his way to becoming British, commerce and the Christian belief in Providence8 are the generic prerequisites to become a self-made man or ‘his own man’, and here is a clear parallel to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the concept of the homo economicus. Equiano accurately notes all his transactions (e.g. IN 166), and recounts the history of inner-African slavery (IN 38–39). His critique is predominantly directed at the inhumane slave trade. Through the paradoxical adoption of the model of the imperial white mercantilist man, Equiano can eventually buy his own freedom. This construction seems to offer subjects like him a narrative space to claim a distinct Black British9 identity – often in disavowal 8 Cf. “I consider myself as a particular favourite of Heaven, and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life.” (IN 31) 9 Let me add a few words of clarification here: I am using the word British rather than English because the notion of Britishness is related to both the British Isles and the British empire as encompassing more than one nation and Seacole, as will become apparent, for example, bases her claim to inclusion on a Scottish-Jamaican heritage (both part of Britain/the British empire).



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of an (U.S.)-American identity that they still find too strongly engrained in the horrors of chattel slavery. In Britain, he starts to feel more like a paid servant than a slave: It was now between two and three years since I first came to England, a great part of which I had spent at sea; so that I became inured to that service, and began to consider myself as happily situated; for my master treated me always extremely well; and my attachment and gratitude to him were very great. From the various scenes I had beheld on ship-board, I soon grew a stranger to terror of every kind, and was, in that respect at least, almost an Englishman. (IN 77)

Equiano constructs a vicinity to modern Englishness (he is almost an Englishman) which distances him from the Atlantic horrors of slavery that did not grant him agency. To achieve this end, Equiano’s sexuality needs to be downplayed textually. His Narrative is characterized by omissions and the problematic relation to white femininity. While he lovingly talks about his African family of origin in the beginning, especially his mother and his sister, his later white English wife is mentioned in one sentence only. (Cf. IN 235) Nevertheless, Equiano also highlights the double standards of white society – and here indeed the sympathies of the reader are directed to the plight of Others. He criticizes that every Black man who looks at a white woman is treated as a rapist while at the same time the crass abuse of female slaves by their white owners is tolerated. (Cf. IN 109) Interracial relations are a sensitive issue here: We can notice a strategic downplaying of the actual racial intermarriage of Equiano (at this time considered ‘miscegenation’ in the U.S., but never illegal in Britain) but still an acknowledgement of interracial rape. The notion that the supposedly separate races ‘mix’ is, of course, at the heart of many racist fears and could undermine the binary of Black and white altogether. The metaphorical sphere of familial belonging and the actual make-up of ‘multicultural societies’ remain conflictingly intertwined. In his narrative, Equiano, accordingly, seeks to evoke a less threatening version of Christian commonality as depicted on the Wedgwood Medallion. To put it somewhat bluntly, Equiano’s Both terms remain conflictingly related, and it is short-sighted to assume a closed/static national identity of Englishness versus a more flexible/inclusive Britishness. On the one hand, Englishness functions as the powerful norm of imperial identity formation that often superimposes Britishness, on the other hand, both Englishness and Britishness are themselves mobilized in the colonial encounter. Hence, I will often use British in ways that imply hegemonic expressions of Englishness. Gallagher sees Britishness as a “platform for national heterogeneity.” (2000, 80) She explains: “Britain, many would now agree, began less as a homeland than as a way of being abroad. It did not pre-exist its empire and then ‘expand’ overseas, but was instead produced by expansion and might therefore by analysed as a phenomenon of extra-territorialization.” (Gallagher 2000, 78)

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narrative follows the path from the ‘unhappy’ slave whose only agency lies in suicide to the happy moneyed modern multicultural subject.

3 Mary Seacole and the Transatlantic Politics 3 of Slavery In contrast to Equiano, Mary Seacole is already born a freewoman and is writing post-emancipation. This is a particularly interesting period in which the consensus in the British public sphere had shifted while the U.S. remained deeply divided on the issue of slavery until after the Civil War. Often referred to as the “Black Florence Nightingale” the Jamaican-born nurse rose to considerable fame during her lifetime after she travelled to the Crimea to take care of British soldiers and was encouraged to write an autobiography, which was published by Blackwood in July 1857 as the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (abbreviated as WA in the following).10 Before the Crimean War, Seacole, who had a Scottish father and a Jamaican mother, stayed in England only for shorter periods of time that are hardly mentioned in her autobiography. Nonetheless, Seacole strongly identifies as British, and her account is considered the earliest first-person narrative of a female Black British subject. War, it seems, becomes a way for her to inscribe herself into the national body in her support of the British colonial endeavour. Almost all critical responses address this conflicted identification and the dilemma of how Seacole’s narrative can be understood within a postcolonial framework as the story of a subject who had to navigate complicated territories of national belonging.11 During Seacole’s travels her complexion is, of course, no small obstacle. Nonetheless, Seacole herself shares many of the British racial prejudices (both nega-

10 The book sold very well – how well exactly, has come under scrutiny. Helen Rappaport (2005) mentions ‘only’ a second edition and sees Seacole’s return to Jamaica in 1859 as a sign that she had not had such a great success after all and that her fame lasted only for two brief years until her book was eventually rediscovered in 1984 (and republished in 2005). Seacole did, however, return to London where she died and was buried in 1881. 11 Consequently, Seacole’s affirmative attitude regarding British colonial policies has caused unease in the way she can be positioned as a Black British subject today. Sandra Pouchet Paquet mentions critically “Seacole seeks English recognition and courts English approval” (1992, 652), others stress the “hybrid” or “liminal” process of identification (cf. Baggett 2005; Silku 2008), a notion of “exile” (McKenna 1997), or “mobile subjectivity.” (Fish 1997, 477) Simon Gikandi, for instance, states that at that period in time, “Englishness is an identity [that] must [be] claim[ed] through gestures of writing and reinvention” (1996, 128), and on the level of Seacole’s narrated journey to gain British approval this certainly holds true.



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tive and positive) and thereby enhances a feeling of familiarity with her reading audience. Seacole employs a black servant, Mac, and a cook, Francis, (whose hair she describes as “wool” (WA 103)), she talks about an acquaintance as “Jew Johnny” (WA 84) (in the Crimea, Greeks and Turks are addressed generically as Johnny by the British) and calls a Turkish officer “Captain Ali Baba.” (WA 97) Her own encounter with racism, however, is downplayed emotionally and often combined with humor or distancing narrative techniques. Racists are almost always U.S.-Americans (whom she calls Yankees) rather than British – except for the short London episode in which she recalls her first visit to the capital: I shall never forget my first impressions of London. […] Strangely enough, some of the most vivid of my recollections are the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion’s complexion. I am only a little brown – a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject for their rude wit. (WA 13)

Seacole introduces racism as a “strange recollection” and a street-boys’ joke, not a British problem – and she even includes a joke about her companion’s complexion. Here, again Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion is helpful. She argues: Racism is a pain that is hard to bear. Consciousness of racism becomes retrospective, and the question of timing does matter. You learn not to see racism as a way of bearing the pain. (Ahmed 2010a, 43)

Seacole makes herself British by stopping to feel addressed by racism – this is a retrospective act which occurs in writing her autobiography. Although she hints at the possibility that her rejection for Nightingale’s service might also have had its reasons in prejudice, she strategically tones this down in her narrative. She takes the negative and hurtful affect and turns it into a piece of writing which works to uphold and support the British military and nation state and grants her emotional inclusion into a community. Consequently, the emphasis on American racism is far more relevant for her self-construction, as the following extract demonstrates: [M]y experience of travel had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the Northern States) are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words. I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic – and I do confess to a little – it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors […]

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is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me? (WA 21)

The vocabulary of family ties is striking here. Seacole has never been a slave, but there is a distant kinship in her African heritage that connects her to African American slaves. Moreover, in the same quote she also calls American slave holders “our distant cousins” which includes her in the group of the British.12 This shows her at least tripartite identification with Afro-Caribbean Britishness, as we would call it today. Seacole also recounts how in Panama, where she stayed before the Crimean War, the Americans celebrate Independence Day, and one of the drunken men toasts her, mentioning that they would bleach her skin if they could. (WA 49) “Aunty Seacole” – a relative after all –, who takes care of them, needs to be whitened in the American logic. But Seacole is strongly offended by this condescending ‘offer’ and drinks to “the general reformation of American manners.” (WA 49) This “prejudice” against American manners or the lack thereof evokes familiarity with a British audience that in all likelihood shares this preconception. In Seacole’s attempts to become part of the British family, gender, race and sexuality are interrelated, both literally in Seacole’s care for soldiers at the front and metaphorically in her attempts to be perceived as the ‘mother of the nation.’ Sandra Gunning emphasizes a difference between the “desexualized U.S. image of the black mammy” (2001, 954), who takes care of the white children on plantations, and the role of surrogate13 mother, sister, and wife that Seacole performs who is always also evoking the stereotype of the Caribbean mix-raced “hotelkeeper welcoming male attention.” (2001, 971) Seacole, a widow, has to refute this image by emphasizing her “service to the brave British army” as “doctress, nurse, and ‘mother’.”14 (WA 110) Rather than eliciting sexual attention from the British soldiers, she courts approval by the British army. But Seacole should also not be understood as a naïve colonial subject caught in ‘false consciousness.’ Despite Seacole’s eventual financial losses there is a spirit of capitalism here that is based on emotional ties. After all, she sells the British goods to the soldiers to make them feel at home. Part of this sentiment, of feeling modern (and British) is 12 Gunning elaborates that Seacole seems to disapprove of American chattel slavery, but is critical of West Indian ex-slaves. She thereby acknowledges British abolitionist sentiment while catering to racist stereotypes about the ‘laziness’ of the formerly enslaved who now threaten the dominance of the British West Indian planter class. (Cf. 2001, 966) 13 Robinson, too, speaks of how Seacole establishes a relationship of “accepted surrogacy.” (1994, 547) 14 Historians today speculate about an ‘illegitimate daughter’ whom Seacole strategically leaves out of her account of her life as a British war heroine. (Cf. Ramdin 2005; Rappaport 2005)



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her simultaneous applauding of British military grandeur and the repudiation of American slavery.

4 Charles Dickens on Slavery in the U.S. In contrast to Seacole’s journey to the ‘Motherland’, Charles Dickens set out in January 1842 to spend six months travelling the U.S., which for many British authors had become a ‘mythical’ destination – again in familial terms: the rebellious offspring of the former colony. He subsequently published his travel writing as American Notes for General Circulation (abbreviated as AN in the following) – alluding to the copyright infringements so prevalent in America at the time, a great concern to him. The British-American transatlantic bond is an uneasy relationship. Dickens does not want to offend his readers in America – after all a paying public – but nevertheless succumbed to the British convention voiced in travelogues of the time which harshly criticized American manners, a sentiment he also shares with Seacole as demonstrated. But most importantly, some controversy arose from the final chapter before the concluding remarks simply entitled “Slavery.” In the context of the narrative recounting his travels, this chapter is strangely isolated. Therein Dickens condemns the “atrocities” of the system of slavery. He refutes American claims that most slave owners treat their slaves well and who argue that it “is not so bad as you in England take it to be.” (AN 251) He also contests that statements about the abolitionist discourse are exaggerated. Dickens denounces three types of slave owners: moderate ones who inherited their slaves and treat them well, those who buy and ‘breed’ slaves and deny any harm, and those who cannot endure the notion of equality and want to be served. He continues to list several ads of runaway slaves which detail the physical harm they have suffered such as the cutting off of ears and other forms of maiming that Dickens is sure will sicken and repel his readers. (AN 258) In this context it is important to note that almost all of this information is taken second-hand. Dickens cuts his actual journey short and witnesses slavery only very peripherally and simply reproduces information from abolitionist pamphlets in this chapter. His writing is part of a larger transnational public sphere as Amanda Claybaugh explains: Dickens’s tour participated in some Anglo-American networks (suffrage and anti-slavery reform) while attempting to regulate another (the literary marketplace). But his travel book shows that social reform and the literary marketplace cannot be separated so easily. (Claybaugh 2006, 440)

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But although Claybaugh mentions the abolitionist campaign as part of this transnational public sphere, she does not include authors from the Black Atlantic as part of this literary exchange. But it is specifically the parallel reading of Equiano, Seacole and Dickens which shows that the construction of a British exceptional enlightened response to slavery caters to a self-definition from the margin and the center by gesturing towards America as a third transnational Other. In this way, their responses to slavery can be read as entangled. Despite the widely held ‘postcolonial consensus’ that Britishness (as well as Englishness) is not a stable identity, most interpretations of Equiano’s and Seacole’s autobiographies repeatedly stress that they are writing themselves into Britishness (in contrast to the later postcolonial paradigm of ‘writing back’ to the center). This framing – as much as it can be seen as a narrative project on the textual level – to a certain degree fails to acknowledge the need to construct Britishness as inclusive, as a way to reinstate British identity as more enlightened in its reaction to slavery than the U.S. Justifying their colonial expansion, the British hold on to the myth of ‘just rule’ and the civilizing mission for which accounts such as Seacole’s become increasingly relevant in times of crisis. The New Imperialism of the end of the nineteenth century is bolstered by docile colonial subjects like Seacole whose narrative is published as mentioned in 1857, the year of the Indian Rebellion/Mutiny after all. In response to news of the Mutiny, Seacole was prepared to serve the British army once more in India but these plans never panned out for reasons not entirely known to us. This probably most traumatic event in the history of the empire gestures to yet another colonial Other, namely the ‘ungrateful rebellious Oriental Other’ in India.15 The so-called Sepoy Mutiny, which led to the establishment of direct rule over India as a colony in 1858, also seems to have aroused a more conformist response from Dickens. Grace Moore writes, “between 1854 and 1857 his [Dickens’s] view of the state of the nation had become entangled with his anger at overseas crises, firstly in the Crimea and, more dramatically, in India in 1857.” (2004, 3) Both Seacole and Dickens thus paradoxically voice public disdain for American slavery, while supporting the British empire. Enticed by sensationalist writing about British women and children being killed in a massacre during the Mutiny, Dickens calls for what could be conceived of as “genocidal” revenge against the “Oriental race” in a letter.16 He writes: “I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.” (Letter to Angela Bur15 Cf. Gautam Chakravarty’s (2005) study of so-called “Mutiny novels” for a detailed discussion of literary responses to the events of 1857. 16 Dickens had infamously replicated racist stereotypes earlier in his essays “The Noble Savage” (1853 in Household Words). But Moore (2004) also argues that Dickens’ later writing in the



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dett-Coutts, Pilgrim Letters, Vol. 8, 459) Despite many references to the empire in Dickens’s writing (cf. Moore 2004), it is the ideal of the Victorian home that he re-centers. This is also obvious in his mockery for the so-called “telescopic philanthropy” of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House (1852–1853), for example. It is the plight of the poor at home, the “dark continent” in urban London, rather than the actual African continent that he is interested in. Equiano’s transatlantic journey into modernity – from Africa to the U.S. and to Britain – as well as Seacole’s Jamaican British as much as Dickens’s genuinely English – if such a thing ever existed – contradictory positions on slavery in the U.S. and the Mutiny in India underscore the need to draw more complicated colonial maps than focus on just (one) (literary) center and (one) margin.

5 The Politics of Remembering Slavery and the 5 Reconstruction of a British ‘Multicultural’ Past To conclude, I want to briefly discuss some consequences that the described construction of an exceptional British response to slavery has for current politics of remembrance. Recent queer work on negativity cautions that an emphasis on happiness in politics must remain dubious. In her work on feminist killjoys, Ahmed (2010b) highlights the limiting aspects of “happiness” which is often evoked in order to foreclose more radical challenges to norms. The legacies of subjects such as Equiano and Seacole are increasingly emphasized in the politics of remembering slavery sparked by the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007. While the history of the U.S. and the impact of slavery for the construction of American families has been at the core of heated debates for a long time, it is only more recently in the wake of the bicentennial that Britain is beginning to address this past more seriously as part of a national (and shameful) heritage. (Cf. Gohrisch et al. 2009; Korte/Pirker 2011) Slavery enabled much of Britain’s financial wealth, the rise of its banks, especially in port cities like Liverpool, London and Bristol. What exactly led to the eventual abolition of slavery in Britain is disputed among historians today. (Cf. B. Carey 2005, 10–13) James Walvin, for instance, links the success of the British abolition campaign to the rise of free trade rather than a purely moral success of the abolitionists. (Cf. 2007, 99) However, the roles and accomplishments of Black British subjects are increasingly highlighted in this memorial culture. Mary Seacole was voted “great1860s is again much more cautious complicating easy and straightforward judgments of Dickens’ notions of race.

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est black Briton” in a 2004 poll that came in response to the BBC’s Great Britons debate, which had been won by Winston Churchill but had no Black people in the top 100 which caused some dismay. (Cf. BBC News 2004, cf. also Rupprecht 2006, 202–203) The national politics of remembrance of Britain are remarkable here, replacing one hero of war with another. I argue then that this contemporary appropriation of early Black Britons seems to function as a retrospective reconstruction of Britishness as ‘always already multicultural’ and inclusive thereby resorting to an all too happy archive. Today, as much as in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the construction of British identity is shaped and contested from multiple entangled margins and centers simultaneously which need to be taken seriously in a globalized account of British literature and modernity.

References Primary Sources Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition. Volume 8: 1856–1858. Eds. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. 1842. Ed. Patricia Ingham. London/ New York: Penguin, 2000. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1852–1853. Ed. Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin, 2003. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. 1789. Ed. Vincent Carretta. London: Penguin, 2003. Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. Ed. Sara Salih. London: Penguin, 2005.

Secondary Sources Ahmed, Sara. “Creating Disturbance: Feminism, Happiness and Affective Differences.” Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. Eds. Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen. London: Routledge, 2010a. 31–44. Ahmed, Sara. “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).” S&F Online 8.3 (2010b). [accessed: 10 January 2012]. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Baggett, Paul. “Caught between Homes: Mary Seacole and the Question of Cultural Identity.” MaComère 3 (2000): 45–56. BBC News. “Nurse named greatest black Briton,” 10 February 2004. [accessed: 22 January 2012]. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.



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Brah, Avtar, and Annie E. Coombes, eds. Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. Carby, Hazel V. “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects.” Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 624–657. Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Carey, Daniel. “Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery, and Postcolonial Theory.” The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Eds. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 105–136. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History.” Cultural Studies 6 (1992): 337–357. Chakravarty, Gautam. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Claybaugh, Amanda. “Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States.” Victorian Studies 48.3 (2006): 439–460. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeria. “Geteilte Geschichten: Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt.” Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Eds. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2002. 9–49. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda.” Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 1–56. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: McClurg, 1903. Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Fish, Cheryl. “Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.” Women’s Studies 26 (1997): 475–495. Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey. Eds. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald and David Macey. New York: Picador, 2002. Frevert, Ute, et al. Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2011. Gallagher, Catherine. “Floating Signifiers of Britishness in the Novels of the Anti-Slave-Trade Squadron.” Dickens and the Children of Empire. Ed. Wendy S. Jacobson. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. 78–93. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York/ Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1996. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gohrisch, Jana, Bernd-Peter Lange, and Irmgard Maassen, eds. “Special Issue: Slavery and the British.” Hard Times 85 (2009). Gunning, Sandra. “Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26.4 (2001): 949–981. Ha, Kien Nghi. Hype um Hybridität: Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus. Bielefeld: transcript, 2005.

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Haschemi Yekani, Elahe. “(M)Other Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures: The Politics of Imagining the British Family.” Anglistentag 2011: Freiburg. Proceedings. Eds. Monika Fludernik and Benjamin Kohlmann. Trier: WVT, 2012. 339–351. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes. 1807. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1970. Korte, Barbara, and Eva Ulrike Pirker. Black History – White History: Britain’s Historical Programme between Windrush and Wilberforce. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. McKenna, Bernard. “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole’s England and Caribbean.” Philological Quarterly 76.2 (1997): 219–239. Michaelis, Beatrice, and Elahe Haschemi Yekani. “Queering Archives of Race and Slavery – Or, on Being Wilfully Untimely and Unhappy.” Postcoloniality – Decoloniality – Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Eds. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2014. 269–283. Moore, Grace. Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African American Review 26.4 (1992): 651–663. Ramdin, Ron. Mary Seacole. London: Haus, 2005. Rappaport, Helen. “The Invitation that Never Came: Mary Seacole after the Crimea.” History Today 55.2 (2005): 9–15. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2009. Robinson, Amy. “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Feminist Studies 20.3 (1994): 537–557. Rupprecht, Anita. “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857): Colonial Identity and the Geographical Imagination.” Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century. Eds. David Lambert and Alan Lester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 176–203. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. New York: Vintage, 1994. Silku, Rezzan Kocaoner. “Wonderful Adventures: Transcending Liminality and Redefining Identity in Mary Jane Grant Seacole’s Autobiography.” Ariel 39.1–2 (2008): 113–127. Walvin, James. Britain’s Slave Empire. Stroud: Tempus, 2007. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45.1 (2006): 30–50. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Jürgen Trabant

Theses on the Future of Language The situation: The loquacious species chats without interruption. The modern media have led to an explosion of linguistic activities, spoken and written. Silence and moments without linguistic activity have nearly disappeared from our lives. There seems to be no danger for the future of language. However: Language is endangered with regard to languages (langues) (thesis 1) as well as to language (langage) or the linguisticity of the species (thesis 2). And there is no hope for overcoming these dangers (thesis 3). Thesis 1: Mankind talks and writes, but in fewer and fewer and lesser languages (langues). Modernization decreases the number of languages and globalization lowers the status of the remaining ones. Thesis 1.1: The death – or better: abandonment – of many languages is inevitable. According to serious predictions, only 600 from the still existing 6000 languages will survive by the end of the century. Why we should care: Languages are not only communicative devices but – and this is specifically human – they are primarily techniques of thought production: “Language is the formative organ of thought,” “Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken.” (Humboldt 1903–1936, Vol. VII, 53) Modern linguistic insights have refuted the classical (and trivial) Aristotelian conviction that human thought is universally the same and that languages are only materially different, arbitrary sign systems for the communication of that universal thought. Since Humboldt, at least, we know that languages do not only “represent” thought, but that they “produce” thought, or, as Humboldt puts it, that they “discover the truth:” It is self-evident from the mutual interdependence of thought and word that languages are not so much means for representing the truth already recognized but rather for discovering the truth previously unknown. (Humboldt 1903–1936, Vol. IV, 27)

And since there is not only one language and since language manifests itself in the plurality of languages, human thought is produced as a plethora of different semantic ensembles, hence: Their diversity is not one of sounds and signs but a diversity of world views. (Humboldt, Vol. IV, 27)

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From the point of view of communication this fact makes the plurality of languages a still deeper obstacle to communication, but from the point of view of cognition the different world views are a cognitive wealth. If now thousands of languages disappear, thousands of ways of conceiving the world will disappear. This is a loss of cognitive possibilities, one that, according to David Crystal, causes profound grief: Language death is a terrible loss, to all who come into contact with it. Facing the loss of language or culture involves the same stages of grief that one experiences in the process of death and dying. (Crystal 2000, 163)

Thesis 1.2: Since 600 languages will survive, the “big” languages (national languages) will not disappear. But they will be degraded to vernacular languages in the process of globalization. One High Global Language will exclusively be used for the superior discourses. Why we should care (I am considering the European case only): In medieval times, Latin was the language of higher discourse (with the exception of poetry) and of distant communication (Distanzsprache) and the languages of the people (vulgare) were the languages of lower, everyday speech and of proximity (Nähesprache). In a process that lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the European vulgar languages have risen to “high languages,” substituting thus the medieval diglossia Latin-High/Vulgare-Low. This ascension to the height of Latin proved that the vulgar languages were not inferior but as good as Latin. The European nations took enormous pride in the heightening of the status of their languages and in the ausbau of the languages (their structural and lexical adaptation to all discursive needs) that accompanied the rise of the languages to prestige and cultural splendor. The enthusiastic appropriation of their languages was at the same time an outburst of unprecedented scientific and cultural creativity. The creative “explosion” of the European cultures was undoubtedly linked to the rising of the vulgar languages to “high languages.” Globalization now re-establishes a language regime comparable to the medieval diglossic situation – and with “medieval” socio-political effects: Global English is the high language for the high discourses, all other languages are low languages (vernacular) for everyday communication. The status of the languages goes down, their ausbau is stopped or reduced (e.g. there will be no new German words for new scientific inventions). The emergence of an English speaking aristocracy on top of the nations deepens dramatically the social division of the European societies, destroying old national cohesions and solidarities and hampering new solidarities yet to arise (why should migrants learn the “low” national lan-



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guage?). It condemns the old cultures to oblivion or folklore at best (as can be seen in former colonial processes). If then, at the end of that process, the old languages disappear eventually, cf. 1.1. for the consequences. Thesis 2: The loquacious species chats without interruption. The modern media have led to an explosion of linguistic activities, spoken and written. There seems to be no danger for the future of language (langage). There are however some indicators that, due to the recent media revolution on the one side and due to societal changes on the other side, humankind transforms its cognitive system and hence its linguisticity. Thesis 2.1: New media: The revolutionary psychodynamic changes produced by the transition from orality to literacy have been described by Walter Ong (1982). We do not yet know very well what the post-scriptural new media revolution we are living through does to our brains, souls and societies. We do not yet know what the ubiquity and continuous presence of images and music does to our brains. To old professors from the Gutenberg Galaxy it seems to weaken e.g. the capacity of our students to structure texts, i.e. linear written compositions and sequential argumentations. We do not yet know how the never-ending verbal production affects our social systems (e.g. the ubiquitous and eternal parental presence through mobile phones, the explosion of mobbing through net anonymity, the disappearance of shame and privacy). The completely new systematic position of language in the new mediatic surroundings cannot be without consequences to our linguisticity. Thesis 2.2: Societal changes: Dynamic processes in modern societies seem to split up the two dimensions of the linguistic activity into an unarticulated bodily communicative behavior (Bühler’s: “expression” and “appeal”) on the one side and a precise scientific or practical designation of objects (Bühler’s “representation”) on the other. (Bühler 1934/1999, 28) “Normal” and complete speech (in the old times) implies a speaker and a hearer and an articulated linguistic utterance conveying some information on the world. In her linguistic activity the speaker, in her “representation” of the world (or Humboldtian: in her “formation of thought”), “expresses” herself and “appeals” to the hearer (who in his turn becomes the expressing, appealing and representing speaker). The speech event is “symptom,” “signal” and “sign” at the same time. The pragmatic (or communicative) and the semantic (or cognitive) dimen-

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sion go together in normal speech. Now, my French colleague Merlin-Kajman (2003) observes – at the margins of our societies – the appearance of a communicative behavior that eliminates the representational dimension of verbal language and therefore also articulation. The gregarious communication of young men relies on touching, tattoos, spitting, inarticulate sounds, a kind of exaggeration of Bourdieu’s “gueule” and the proletarian hexis. (Bourdieu 2001, 127 f.) The absence or weakening of the presentational dimension (the specifically human dimension of language) shifts language toward animal communication, toward symptoms and signals. Two other French literary scholars, Judet de la Combe and Wismann (2004), criticize, on the contrary, the exaggeration of the representational dimension in the linguistic behavior in the modern world: The need of objective designation in the scientific, technological and commercial world eliminates the expressive and the appellative dimensions of language and transforms language into signs. The essentially communicative and cognitive human linguistic animal is transformed into a cold and rational sign-producing designation machine. Even if these scenarios seem somewhat exaggerated, the dynamics of modern societies favor this splitting up of language into its two dimensions, into a non-rational “cry of passion” and “langage d’action,” known to Condillac (1746/1973, 195) as the wild beginning of language, and into an objective designation that lies beyond language – so to say at its end – as its scientific refinement. That scission, caused by social exclusion on the one side and technological sophistication on the other side, clearly jeopardizes the very nature of language, its human synthesis of expression, appeal and representation. Thesis 3: There is no hope for language. Language has only few defenders and lovers. Why is this so? Language has two handicaps: diversity and vagueness (variation). a) Language manifests itself in different languages (the communicative problem). b) Language is vague and not precise (the cognitive problem). Diversity and vagueness are the basis of a persistent critical attitude towards language throughout the intellectual history of the West. Thesis 3.1: Europe fights against language from the very beginning: a) Against diversity: In the story of the Babel Tower the Bible presents diversity as a punishment, as an obstacle to global communication.



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b) Against vagueness, obscurity: From the very beginning of philosophy or scientific thought in Greece, language is criticized as a bad image of the world, hence as an obstacle to scientific knowledge. Plato – and with him the European philosophy as a whole – dreams of the absence of language as a condition of true knowledge. Thesis 3.2: The animosity against language becomes ferocious when Europe realizes the depth of linguistic diversity. When through deeper insights into the languages of the world, the European language reflexion understands that languages are not only – as Aristotle thought – different sounds but different thoughts, modern science and scientific philosophy start a war against language, in 1620, with Bacon’s Novum Organum, a war that is still going on in modern analytical philosophy since Frege in the 1890s. Diversity and vagueness (obscurity) are the linguistic enemies of philosophy. Hence one global language and well defined “signs” are the remedies to those linguistic diseases. Thesis 3.3: There are however a few thinkers who think of language diversity as a cognitive wealth and who know that vagueness and obscurity of language is a necessary condition of non-scientific creative speech and, as such, a pre-condition of truth and science (Leibniz, Herder, Humboldt). Linguistics is based on that conviction since it is research into the “marvellous variety of the operations of the human mind.” (Leibniz 1765/1966, 293) The positive evaluation of linguistic diversity and the “vague” semantics of language remains however a minority position in our civilization, the more so as it is contrary to the uniforming and rational tendencies of the globalized world. Hence: Since there are only few and weak activities in favor of language in our world, more and more languages will disappear and the linguisticity of the human being is in danger. And since “the human being is human only through language,” “Der Mensch ist nur Mensch durch Sprache” (Humboldt 1903–1936, Vol. IV, 15), it is the human being who is at stake here.

References Aristotle. The Categories on Interpretation & Prior Analytics. London: Heinemann/Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (Loeb’s Classics), 1962. Bacon, Francis. The New Organon (1620). Eds. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. Langage et Pouvoir Symbolique. Paris: Fayard/Seuil, 2001.

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Bühler, Karl. Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (1934). 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 1999. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. Essai sur l’Origine des Connaissances Humaines (1746). Ed. Charles Porset. Auvers-sur-Oise: Galilée, 1973. Crystal, David. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Frege, Gottlob. Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung: Fünf logische Studien. 7th ed. Ed. Günther Patzig. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1994. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Gesammelte Schriften. 17 Volumes. Ed. Albert Leitzmann et al. Berlin: Behr, 1903–1936. Judet de la Combe, Pierre, and Heinz Wismann. L’Avenir des Langues: Repenser les Humanités. Paris: Cerf, 2004. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain (1765). Ed. Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. La Langue est-elle Fasciste? Langue, Pouvoir, Enseignement. Paris: Seuil, 2003. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Tomasello, Michael. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2008. Trabant, Jürgen. Geschichte des europäischen Sprachdenkens: Von Platon bis Wittgenstein. München: Beck, 2006.

Isabel Wünsche

Western Modernism at and beyond the Margins: František Kupka and Margaret Preston Discussions about the intersection of modernism and the global in the field of art history generally recognize two approaches: one is “World Art History,” the other “Global Art History.” The first – if we accept that one can agree upon a definition of art at all – is relatively unambiguous in nature and all-inclusive; a work in this category might be included in any one of numerous and varied narratives, regardless of its context, geographical origin, or reception. (Summers 2003; Onians 2004; Zijlmans/Damme 2008) Practically speaking, the study of World Art History as pursued institutionally tends to break things down geographically by continent, thus promoting geographically based collaborations between specialists for Europe, the Near East and/or Asia, Africa, North America, Latin and South America, Australia and Oceania, and possibly other geographical and cultural subdivisions.1 Global Art History is perhaps a less inclusive approach, but having originated in a twenty-first century context, it takes better account of present-day considerations of “the nexus between the logic of global circulation of contemporary art and the recourse artists seek to the local as a space of authenticity and nostalgia.” (Juneja 2011, 277) Arguments for and against the notion of a global art history were first raised by James Elkins in a seminar among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. (Elkins 2006) Naturally, the question arises as to who or what is to be considered “global” – the artist (as “a global player”), the subject, or the medium? Is the reception of the work global, and if so, for whom is it really accessible and within what sort of institutional and/or cultural framework? Or perhaps the question should be “for whom is it not accessible,” since we tend to forget that much of the world’s population lacks access to sufficient supplies of food and clean water, not to mention education, the World Wide Web, or an art gallery.

1 See for example: the School of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK and the Programme in Art of the Contemporary World and World Art Studies, Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands.

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Clearly a global dimension that transcends national borders and local cultural traditions is intrinsic to the concept of modernism; this is reflected in the descriptive language of modernist discourse: 1. Universal – making reference, without exception, to each and every individual in a given category; a phenomenon present everywhere or under all conditions and implying underlying biological patterns and anthropological factors. 2. Cosmopolitan – derived from the Greek cosmos and polites; a cultural elite, well educated, mobile, and usually able to speak five or more languages, thus having a worldwide outlook; although clearly a Western phenomenon, it is interesting to note that the reach and outlook of such groups was, in many cases, not restricted to the Western world. 3. International – transcending political borders; a term that, directly or indirectly, carries a much more ideological connotation, e.g., the Communist International, breaking down national borders and power structures. In my own research into the art and culture of modernism and the historic avantgarde movements, I find it useful and enlightening to investigate and compare the use of these terms and their associated meanings throughout the various historical periods, e.g., at the turn of the century, during the interwar period, and then during the Cold War. Global Art History strives to transcend national cultural and artistic boundaries and to offer an alternative model to the grand narratives of Western art history. This leads me to pose two questions: 1. How inclusive and diversified is our concept of Western modernism? 2. To what extent is an art that transcends national borders and integrates elements from various Western and non-Western traditions necessarily global? In this essay, I explore these two aspects with respect to the artistic development of two representatives of modernist art who do not fit into the established narratives and theoretical discussions of Western modernism: František Kupka, a Czech male painter who spent most of his life in France in close proximity to the Puteaux Cubists; and Margaret Preston, an Australian female artist who started out with a traditional artistic training, then discovered modernism in Germany, France, and England, returned with it to Australia, and eventually became an advocate of Australian Aboriginal art.



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1 František Kupka: Universalist Aspirations 1 in Abstract Painting The Czech painter František Kupka (1871–1957), one of the pioneers of abstract art, has received relatively little attention as compared to his contemporaries, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Born in Opočno in Eastern Bohemia in 1871, Kupka was apprenticed to a master saddler, who, as it happened, initiated him into the practice of spiritualism, thus allowing him to earn a living as a medium while studying art in Prague and Vienna. He received his artistic training in the Nazarene tradition at the School of Applied Arts, in Jaroměř; at the Department of Historical and Religious Painting, at the Prague Art Academy; and in the master class of August Eisenmenger, at the Vienna Art Academy. In 1893, while still in Vienna, Kupka was introduced to theosophy; he joined a theosophist brotherhood, and in 1894, became a disciple of the “idea painter” and “kohlrabi apostle,” Karl Diefenbach, an eccentric practitioner of Körperkultur (physical fitness), who argued for a return to nature and promoted a vegetarian diet. (Mladek 1975, 13–37) Kupka’s move from Vienna to Paris, in 1896, marked a shift in his life and work. He left Central Europe with a metaphysical mindset, but soon began to reject mysticism in favor of the observation of the phenomena of modern life and an interest in contemporary scientific and technological achievements, including the electric light bulb, the moving picture, chrono-photography, and X-rays. In 1899, Kupka began working as an illustrator, and in the following decade he provided satirical drawings for various journals, including Cocorico, L’Illustration, Le Canard Sauvage, and Les Temps Nouveaux, as well as for the anarchist magazine L’Assiette au Beurre. In 1904, he accepted an offer to illustrate the six-volume L’Homme et la Terre (Mankind and the Earth), a comprehensive history of humanity from antiquity to the present by the French geographer and well-known anarchist Elisée Reclus (Fig. 1). (Reclus 1905–1908) This project provided Kupka with an opportunity to deeply immerse himself in the study of geography, archaeology, and ancient history, but also prompted his interest in contemporary science and led him to attend lectures in physics and physiology at the Sorbonne and to work in the biological laboratory there. (Vachtová 1995, 15) The conclusions Kupka drew from his engagement with the contemporary sciences can be traced in his treatise Tvoření v umění výtvarném (Creation in the Plastic Arts), on which he worked between 1907 and 1913, but which was published in a Czech translation only in 1923. (Kupka 1923, 1989, 1990, 1999) In it, Kupka attempts to reconcile the findings of modern science with his own aesthetic considerations, but his manifold conclusions are often

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Fig. 1: František Kupka, “Science and Religion,” 1905–08, for Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (Mankind and Earth), 6 Vols. (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908), © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

contradictory. Believing that “physiology and biology could well become a compulsory grammar for every artist” (Kupka 1923, 209, cit. in Anděl 1997, 88), he recommended courses at the Polytechnic and the School of Medicine as part of the basic training of the modern artist. (Kupka 1989, 72, cit. in Brullé/Theinhardt 1997, 153) Yet at the same time, he declared that “as long as artists will be artists, they will never reproduce nature with the objectivity of scientists.” (Kupka 1989, 95, cit. in Brullé/Theinhardt 1997, 154) Kupka acknowledged that scientific knowledge could provide artists with an inexhaustible source of inspiration (Kupka 1989, 43), and scientific positivism provided him with a method of analyzing the creative process and making it comprehensible. (Kupka 1989, 71, cit. in Brullé/ Theinhardt 1997, 156) Although embracing scientific knowledge, Kupka draws a clear distinction between art and science and insisted that “art moves in the



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opposite direction from science, which is often an arid attempt to see things as they are.” (Kupka c. 1924, cit. in Brullé/Theinhardt 1997, 155) While most modernist and avant-garde artists drew their inspiration from the experiences of urban life and the advances of technology, Kupka derived his artistic inspiration from his observation of nature. His pictorial imagery embraces the cosmic and the microcosmic as well as the organic and the geometric, and his sources variously include flower petals, ice crystals, rock formations, and stars in the Milky Way. He marveled at the human form as much as at the organic cells seen through a microscope and the planets observed through a telescope. His holistic approach to life and art was based on the idea of the interconnectedness of all forms in nature and the understanding that their forms and functions evolve in response to forces in their environment: “The form of all things, living, moving, immobile depends on the interaction of two influences – the dynamism of the organism itself and the impact exercised by the environment – factors that function in a rapport of resistance and reciprocal tension.” (Kupka 1989, 115, cit. in Blum 1997, 115) He delighted in the study of the changes of animate and inanimate forms in the natural world, identifying therein an unending process of chance and evolution resulting from the organism’s response to its environment. In his art, Kupka thus strove to unveil the underlying rhythms and harmonies of the cosmos. His paintings of the “Organic Cycle,” including Creation, Cosmic Spring, A Tale of Pistels and Stamen (Fig. 2), and Around a Point, allude to natural structures such as rock outcroppings, crystals of frost on a window, stalactite and stalagmite concretions, organic plant structures, concentric ripples of water, rays of sunlight, banks of clouds, photographs of the moon, and models of the planets. These paintings were never mere descriptions of natural phenomena, but served as pictorial representations of cosmic parables, evoking biological phenomena because they were organized on the same structural principles as living matter. (Vachtová 1968, 256) In 1910, Kupka noted: “Formerly I was seeking to give form to an idea; now I am seeking the idea which corresponds to the form.” (Kupka 1910–11, cit. in Rowell 1975, 76) In the series of paintings, he focuses on the idea of a universal movement, penetrating the universe and shaping matter, thus initiating the process of creation. Kupka’s case is an interesting one because the artist, although living in Paris (and later in Puteaux), the major European art center of the time, and in close proximity to artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, was a loner who kept his distance from the Cubist circles, as he explained in a letter to his friend, the Vienna art critic Arthur Roessler, in 1913: “I personally know the Paris-based followers of Picasso, but they feel that I have my reasons to not encourage them to visit me, and I do not visit them. In fact, I live the life of a hermit.” (Kupka 1913)

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Fig. 2: František Kupka, A Tale of Pistels and Stamen II or III, 1918–19, oil on canvas, WilhelmHack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

However, the reasons for the limited reception of Kupka’s art seem not only to lie in his eccentric and reclusive personality (Vachtová 1981, 84–95), but also in the complex nature and non-linear development of his work. Kupka, born in 1871 and living until 1957, experienced most of the major artistic developments of the early twentieth century, from Impressionism to Pop Art, but never wished to be associated with any of its groups or movements. He rejected the “Orphist” label, emphasizing along with Hans Arp that his art was necessarily “concrete” and not “abstract.” (Fauchereau 1989, 7) His works, including historical and allegorical subjects, satirical drawings, symbolist paintings, semi-abstract and abstract compositions, and machine-like imagery, defy traditional classification; he often worked simultaneously on different thematic series’ and tended to return to previously painted canvases to work them over again. Kupka refused to publicly comment on his work, resented art dealers, and held only a handful of exhibi-



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tions during his lifetime. He had no students or followers, either in France or in the Czech lands, and does not fit into any national tradition. Scholars disagree strongly on his artistic heritage. Ludmila Vachtová attributes his arrival at non-objectivity to the artistic atmosphere of Paris (Vachtová 1968, 13–38), whereas Mela Mladek emphasizes his central European roots. (Mladek 1975, 13–37; Fauchereau 1989, 7) For Kupka, “local” extended to the edge of his garden, and “national” became lost in the displacement between Prague, Vienna, and Paris. Kupka’s sole focus was on the universal and cosmic. His paintings depict a vision of the “great theatre of nature,” but at the same time serve as a metaphor for artistic creation, which is part of the overall creative process and connects art “with the movements and events of the whole cosmos.” (Kupka 1989, 114) The global is a rather meaningless category for Kupka as well as for the interpretation of his art and intellectual thought because, like many of the pioneers of abstract painting, he believed that this new form of artistic expression would be the basis for a universal visual language, one based on anthropological, psychological, and aesthetic considerations and thus accessible to all regardless of nationality, culture, or class.

2 Margaret Preston: Searching for a Modern, 2 National Australian Art The Australian artist Margaret Preston (1875–1963) is celebrated for her “innovative, passionate, and lifelong pursuit of an Australian sensibility in her art, and her commitment to the development of a national cultural identity.” (Cashman) Preston, born Margaret Rose McPherson, came from an Adelaide middle-class family and received her first artistic training at the age of twelve. (Butler 1987, 1–33; Cashman; Seivl 1988) She went on to study at the prestigious National Gallery of Victoria Art School, in Melbourne, from 1889 to 1898. In 1898, she returned to Adelaide and continued her studies at the Adelaide School of Design, Painting, and Technical Arts. In her own words: “Excellent tuition was found for me, and I was well taught to draw the outward show of dancing fauns, Donatello heads, etc. I was well surrounded by tradition, and taught only through tradition.” (Preston 1923, 20; Preston 2003, 25; Stephen/McNamara/Goad 2006, 66) Preston spent time in Europe between 1904 and 1906 and again between 1912 and 1919. During her first stay, she lived in Munich and Paris, but also traveled in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. In Munich, she was confronted for the first time with European modernism, specifically the works of the Munich Secession. Her

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initial difficulty with this new kind of art and her self-confidence in her own, traditional, training is evident from her correspondence, in which she writes: “Half [of the] German art is mad and vicious and a good deal of it is dull; I am glad to say my work stands with the best of them…;” but then, six months later: “I am starting to think that perhaps the mad and vicious show has something in it.” (Preston 1923, 20; Preston 2003, 26; Stephen/McNamara/Goad 2006, 67) In Paris, Preston encountered the works of the French Post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin as well as of Matisse and Picasso. She also had the opportunity to exhibit her own work, participating in the Paris Salons of 1905 and 1906. Her discovery of Japanese art and design at the Musée Guimet proved to be a seminal experience, one that radically altered her perception of artistic expression. The influence of Japanese art, particularly its focus on asymmetry and close-up observations of natural patterns, is evident in her work throughout the 1910s and 1920s such as, for example, Implement Blue (Fig. 3), which is dominated by still-life paintings. (Cashman) In 1919, she returned to Australia and then married William George Preston (1881–1978), a successful businessman; the couple settled in Mosman, outside of Sydney. A mature artist, with a financially secure basis, she was able to travel and to experiment with new styles and techniques. Her travels included visits to New Caledonia and the New Hebrides, South East Asia and China, and North Queensland in the 1920s, and Ceylon, Africa, and India in the 1950s. After her return to Australia, Preston became a leading artist-advocate of Aboriginalism. (McLean 1998) She was one of the first to study and promote Aboriginal art as a source for a distinctive Australian identity. (Jones 1988, 16) In this pursuit, she allied herself with cultural anthropologists; together with A. P. Elkin (they were both members of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales), she laid the groundwork for the reception of Aboriginal art in the 1940s and 1950s. She was instrumental in organizing several exhibitions of Aboriginal art, the first of which was held at the National Museum of Victoria in 1929. (Griffiths 1996, 181–183) Between 1925 and 1941, Preston contributed four articles to Sydney Ure Smith’s journal, Art in Australia, urging that Aboriginal art become the foundation and inspiration of a modern, national Australian art. In her 1925 essay “The Indigenous Art of Australia,” she writes: “it is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring […]. Our landscape teems with forms that are not English or French in shape. If you would see the human figure in a few lines, there is a painted basket from Alligator River, North Queensland, and some very amusing drawings on a filet, North West Australia.” (Preston 1925, 32–45; Stephen/McNamara/Goad, 2006, 155–160) It is interesting to note that when Preston’s own artistic style was at its most modern, she turned to Australian Indigenous



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Fig. 3: Margaret Preston, Implement Blue, 1927, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of New South Wales, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

art as a source for a true, national Australian art. Her works from this period, during which she began to employ “aboriginal designs” and a restricted palette of natural colors in her art, express her firm desire to resolve this dichotomy in her own art. During her second visit to Europe, in 1912, Preston attended the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, in London, organized by Roger Fry, in which Matisse and Picasso were well represented. She stayed in both Paris and Brittany in the period 1913–1914, and at the outbreak of World War I settled in London, where she exhibited her first woodcuts with the Society of Women Artists, studied pottery at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, and became familiar with the designs of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury group. During this time, she began to

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reject academic realism and develop a new modernist style. In 1918, she taught hospitalized soldiers ceramics, basket-weaving, and printmaking at the Seale Hayne Neurological Military Hospital in Devonshire. Between 1932 and 1939, Preston lived in Berowra, a rural area (the bush), where she pursued her primary artistic concern, the development of a national cultural identity in Australian art (Fig. 4). For her, it offered “a chance for Australia to have a national art – an art taken from its primitive peoples, the Australian aborigines; an art for Australia from Australians.” (Preston 1940, 63; Preston 2003, 80; Stephen/McNamara/ Goad 2006, 399) What began in the 1920s as an effort to promote Aboriginal art above all as a source for crafts and decoration became, in the 1940s, a passionate plea for the recognition of the aesthetic value of Aboriginal art.

Fig. 4: Margaret Preston, Australia, 1875–1963, Aboriginal landscape, 1941, Sydney, oil on canvas, 40.0 x 52.0 cm, D. & J.T. Mortlock Bequest Fund 1982, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

Preston’s case is particularly interesting. She came to European modernism as a classically trained outsider and, like few other artists, was exposed to a broad



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sampling of the various modernist movements in Germany, France, and Great Britain. Her sojourns in Paris also afforded her the opportunity to study the artistic principles of Japanese (and also Chinese) art. Not long after her return to Australia she became an advocate of Australian Aboriginal art, eventually moving from an appreciation of its decorative qualities to an understanding of its spiritual and cultural meanings. In her own work, in particular her prints, she merges the decorativeness of French Post-Impressionists, the techniques of Japanese woodblocks, and the motifs of Aboriginal art. It is possible to view Preston as an early example of global modernism, and her inclusion in the 2012 documenta would seem to indicate such a reading. At the same time, through her efforts to validate Australia’s own native, cultural roots and somehow relate them to present-day Western modernism, she still strives to free Australia from its colonial past. The juxtaposition of these two artists, Kupka and Preston, demonstrates that while modernism in art is clearly not restricted to the Western world, there are still blind spots, even within the Western canon of modernism. More specifically, the dominant canon and practices of art historical interpretation of modernism have not only obscured artistic achievements outside the Western world but also hindered, for various reasons, appropriate recognition of numerous artists within the Western art world. A century later, the discipline still predominantly focuses on the (male) masters who took full advantage of the promotional system of the modern art world, including exhibition venues, galleries, art critics, dealers, and publications, and clearly defined stylistic developments provided with plausible theoretical explanations and grand narratives courtesy of the (male) art historians and critics vested in the modernist canon. Kupka, who though in terms of the output and quality of his work as well as his theoretical considerations is on par with Kandinsky and Mondrian, is not generally viewed as such. As a peripheral figure from the outskirts of Eastern Europe who moved to Paris, the most important art center of the time, he failed to associate with major figures such as Picasso or Matisse and did not avail himself of the support of art dealers, critics, or exhibition societies. Kupka, the largely asocial modernist who participated in the Lebensreform movement and freemasonry throughout his life, demonstratively arrived at abstraction before Kandinsky, but nonetheless remains the lesser figure. Most of the credit for the emergence of abstract painting goes to Kandinsky, who courted the contemporary critics, historians, and dealers; promoted his work with extensive theoretical treatises; and maintained an extensive correspondence. Preston, the cosmopolitan, an avid promoter of European modernism, eventually turned to the art of the Australian Aboriginals, not to advocate a more open and aesthetically diversified approach to modern art, but to establish a true national Australian art. Although not the first Australian artist to employ Indige-

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nous symbols, Preston viewed Aboriginal art as the key to establishing a national art that reflected the spirit of the land and the soul of the vast and ancient continent of Australia, thus forcing mainstream society to face the validity of Aboriginal culture at a time when Indigenous people and their beliefs were shunned by white-Australian society. However, although she advocated a more inclusive view of Aboriginal art, she has been criticized for exploiting Indigenous art and for removing Aboriginal motifs from their contexts and using them for purely aesthetic purposes. Preston’s nationalism was not only at odds with the cosmopolitan character of modernism; her work has also initiated an ongoing debate by artists, art historians, and anthropologists about the modernism of Aboriginal culture. (Stephen/McNamara/ Goad 2006, 155) Transcending modernist Western styles and aesthetic categories, Preston did not arrive at the formulation of the global or universal but instead the establishment of a national Australian art, which ideally would belong to and equal in artistic achievement and aesthetic value Western modernism but, at the same time, respect Australia’s unique cultural traditions. Thus, the combination of a cosmopolitan cultural outlook and an art that transcends national borders and integrates elements from various Western and non-Western traditions does not necessarily lead to a global perspective.

References Anděl, Jaroslav. “A Wanderer between Chaos and Order.” In Anděl/Kosinski 1997. 85–95. Anděl, Jaroslav, and Dorothy Kosinski, eds. Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction. Ostfildern-Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997. Blum, Laurence Lyon. “Amorpha.” In Anděl/Kosinski 1997. 114–116. Brullé, Pierre, and Marketa Theinhardt. “Painting Despite Everything: František Kupka on Creation in the Plastic Arts.” In Anděl/Kosinski 1997. 151–164. Butler, Roger. “A Biography.” The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné. Canberra: Australian National Gallery; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987. 1–33. Cashman, Katrina. “Life & Work.” Margaret Preston – Australian Artist. ETT Imprint, n. d. [accessed: 20 August 2013]. Elkins, James, ed. Is Art History Global? New York: Routledge, 2006. Fauchereau, Serge. Kupka. New York: Rizzoli, 1989. Griffiths, Tom. Hunters and Collectors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jones, Philip. “Perceptions of Aboriginal Art: A History.” Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. Ed. Peter Sutton. Viking: Ringwood, 1988. Juneja, Monica. “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’.” Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture. Eds. Hans Belting, Jakob Birken, and Andrea Buddensieg. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2011. 274–297.



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František Kupka 1871–1957. A Retrospective. Exhibition catalog. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975. František Kupka: The Other Reality. Exhibition catalog. Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1995. Kupka, František. Letter to Arthur Rössler, Puteaux, 2 February 1913. Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Vienna. Kupka, František. Tvoreni V Umeni Vytvarnem. Prague: S.V.U. Manes, 1923. Reprint: Prague: Brody, 1999. French edition: Kupka, F. La Création Dans Les Arts Plastiques. Paris: Diagonales, 1989. German edition: Smolik, Noemi, ed. František Kupka: Die Schöpfung in der bildenden Kunst. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1990. McLean, Ian. “Aboriginalism: White Aborigines and Australian Nationalism.” Australian Humanities Review 10 (1998): 1 [accessed: 20 August 2013]. Mladek, Meda. “Central European Influences.” František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalog. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975. 13–37. Onians, John. Atlas of World Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Preston, Margaret. “The Indigenous Art of Australia.” Art in Australia. Third series. No. 11 (March 1925): 32–45. Reprint in: Stephen/McNamara/Goad 2006. 155–160. Preston, Margaret. Art and Australia: Selected Writing 1920–1950. Sydney: Richmond, 2003. Preston, Margaret. “Paintings in Arnhem Land.” Art in Australia. No. 81 (November 1940): 61–63. Reprint in: Stephen/McNamara/Goad 2006. 396–399. Preston, Margaret. “Why I Became a Convert to Modern Art.” The Home. Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1923): 20. Reprint in: Stephen/McNamara/Goad 2006. 65–68. Reclus, Elisée. L’Homme et la Terre (Mankind and the Earth). 6 vols. Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908. (The first five volumes were published in 1905, the sixth volume followed in 1908.) Rowell, Margit. “František Kupka: A Metaphysics of Abstraction.” František Kupka 1871–1957: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalog. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975. 47–80. Seivl, Isobel. “Preston, Margaret Rose (1875–1963).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. (Published in hardcopy 1988.) National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, n.d. [accessed: 20 August 2013]. Stephen, Ann, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad. Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2006. Summers, David. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London: Phaidon, 2003. Vachtová, Ludmila. František Kupka: Pioneer of Abstract Art. New York, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book, 1968. Vachtová, Ludmila. “The Stigma of the Outsider.” Frank Kupka. Exhibition catalog. Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1981. 84–95. Vachtová, Ludmila. “The Other Reality with a Claim to Universality.” František Kupka: The Other Reality. Exhibition catalog. Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1995. 8–20. Zijlmans, Kitty, Wilfried van Damme, eds. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008.

Klaus Kornwachs

Modern Work and Identity 1 Introduction The title of this paper contains a homonymous term: Since the period of German Idealism the concept of identity is laden with euphemisms.1 The nineteenth century has prepared the ground for the concept of the identity of mind’s “I,” particularly by Schelling. (Schelling 1801, 113 ff.) Within the realm of individual psychology, Sigmund Freud didn’t use the term explicitly. (Cf. Dubiel 1976, IV, Sp. 147) Nevertheless it represents the background for social psychological theories about the “I” of a subject. Firstly, it was George H. Mead who coined the concept of “self.” It has been translated in German as “Identität” with the notion of some abilities of the subject, i.e. reflexivity, a certain behavior and attitude toward oneself and other subjects. By this lies the possibility to observe and recognize oneself in terms of the social counterpart. 2 For Goffmann, there is on the one hand a personal identity that exists as an ‘indescernibility’ of the individual person, resulting from the organic and biographical characteristics of that person, their uniqueness as it were, as well as resulting from the observation of moral and legal responsibilies. On the other hand there is a kind of social identity resulting from the expectations which are institutionalized in roles. The discrepancy between subjective needs and norms, established in institutions is potentially able to prevent the integration between these two kinds of identity.3 Jürgen Habermas has adopted both concepts:4 There is vertical self-certification of the 1 We omit here the logical and mathematical meaning of identity (“=”). Cf. Dubiel (1976), IV, Sp. 148–151. 2 Cf. Mead 1965, according to Dubiel 1976, IV, Sp. 150. This phenomenon is described as “taking the role of the other.” Beside the “self” Mead described two other parts of personal identity: The one is “Me,” conceptualized as a reflexive “I,” and resulting from the sum of expectations of a further individual in a generalized meaning. It adopts the attitude of the other. This part of identity remembers the “Über-Ich” of Sigmund Freud. This coincides with the “father” as a generalized other. (Cf. Dubiel 1976, IV, Sp. 149) The other is the “I,” more impulsively acting, reflecting spontaneity and creativity which is not explainable by experiences of interactions. The utterances of the “I” demand for the forms of expressions, ruled by the “Me.” This phenomenon is described by Mead as an institution: “An institution is nothing but an organization of attitudes which we all carry in us.” Cit. in Dubiel 1976, IV, Sp. 149. The personality is composed of “Me” and “I.” Cf. also Mead 1995, 244. 3 Cf. Goffman 1967, according to Dubiel 1976, IV, Sp. 150. 4 Habermas has adopted the concept of personal and social identity from Erving Goffman; cf. Dubiel 1976, IV, Sp. 150. Cf. also Habermas 1969, 178–203.



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coherence of biographical issues by personal (subjective) identity, and there is a horizontal satisfaction of different requirements of institutions in which the individual has to fulfill a role.5 Both aspects may run into a conflict – particularly if the institutions are employment contract situations with respective expectations. Furthermore, another meaning of identity is playing a role within our working on the internet. How can we be sure that the actual counterpart communicating or cooperating with me is really the individual as he is announcing, or as I take him to be. This problem of identification with all the technical and organizational facets of online authenticity, that which is regulated by law – e.g. proof of person with an identity card will be not the topic here.6 Moreover, the question is whether the personal and social identity may be influenced by contemporary organizational and technical possibilities. We have to look in particular to the world’s biggest machine, the World Wide Web with its two billion users and five billion phone connections with increasing tendency. (Cf. UN-Organisation for Telecommunication (ITU) 2010)

2  Human Labor – Basics We must face three big influences on the form, structure and content of human labor: globalization, modernization, and digitization. These three factors have been extensively discussed elsewhere in terms of the demographic changes in industrialized countries, the growing portion of youth in developing countries and economic growth in so-called threshold countries. Each new development in technology interacts with other technologies and in turn gives birth to new ones. Moreover, technologies and culture are interacting all the time. All this is as well conditioned as influences by organizational habits and attitudes, capital flow and knowledge production. Nevertheless, human labor has three basic functions which seem to be independent of technologies used. These three factors have been defined in the history of Philosophy at different times. (Kornwachs 2013) The most important and obvious function of labor is founded in the necessity to reproduce the living condition of the human species. Consequently in a society with labor division there is the necessity of exchange of goods and the results of human labor are laid bare. This can only be made in a fair manner when there is 5 Ibid. 6 Identity in this meaning is to ensure that I am the indicated individual, not another one. In French, a passport is named as “carte d’ identité.” In another context one speaks about Facebook identity.

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a property on what has been created by that work. Therefore there must be a right to acquire property by work. Within a developed economy this is equivalent with the right to earn money with work.7 A very important function of human labor is represented by social participation, i.e. to be a member of a community producing goods and services, say “useful” things, and to be an individual needed by the community.8 In other words: Labour is a social event. Last but not least we have a very modern function of labor: creating and shaping an identity by building up self-consciousness by work. This idea was born in medieval philosophy. St. Thomas Aquinas postulated: “The active working man founds himself again in his work.”9 Nevertheless this holds only for artists and scholars in privileged situations. The discussion in the nineteenthth century generalized this insight and made it free from these privileges. Each worker reflects himself in his own work, provided his work has not been alienated and expropriated by exploitation or by any narrow-minded economic conditions. It was Karl Marx who mapped the concept of personal identity onto the ability of man to create himself by work.10

3 Net Issues Welf Schröter has put forward the hypothesis that the working place and organization of labor are moving more and more into the net. (Schröter 2007, 243–244) What are the consequences for the globalization of the labor market and for the individual worker? How do we understand how this shapes the organization of modern work? Already in the 1980s one could estimate certain tendencies: the aimed “telematic” reachability at any place and any time by the patron would suspend the separation between labor time and idle time. Moreover, the domestic nuisance factor

7 Cf. Brocker 1992, analyzing John Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” (1690). 8 All these have been already analyzed by Karl Marx. Cf. Kornwachs 2007. 9 “Even thus habit is acquired by acts, and by the acquired habit one acts yet more perfectly, [...]” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II, 2 quaestio 182, art. 4, reply to objection 2. Translated from Latin, cf. [accessed: 16 January 2016]. 10 “Indem aber für den sozialistischen Menschen die ganze sogenannte Weltgeschichte nichts anderes ist als die Erzeugung des Menschen durch die menschliche Arbeit, als das Werden der Natur für den Menschen, so hat er also den anschaulichen, unwiderstehlichen Beweis von seiner Geburt durch sich selbst, von seinem Entstehungsprozeß.” (Cf. Marx in MEW, Vol. 40 = Erg. Band 1, 1973, 546)



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would play a role, condensing at least towards a disciplining of the private teleworker’s life. In several explorations a reduction of personal presence in the firm was presumed, decreasing the social factor of labor. Additionally, there would be a lack of direct communication, of the possibilities to be corrected, of the social contacts within the firm which is considered to be the place of work as such. Finally the peril of social isolation we have mentioned poses several problems in the fields that have thus far been identified: changed requirements for vocational and professional training, the salary, the operative organization between domestic working place and firm and the reliability of information and communication technologies used. Today, the sophistic distinction between tele-presence (i.e. reachability by communication technology) and tele-working (working with the help of communication technology)11 is the subject of smiles. At least one clear picture has emerged: That the exploitation and management of ‘place of work’ and ‘time of work’ are the subjects of radical changes. Today, the tele-working place has been substituted by the “net” with all its known and unknown future impacts. We can state that the borders between time and place of work and non-work as well as the borders between work and non-work have become diffuse. To illustrate this we introduce five steps with which the dissolution of the worker from the factory may have happened and will perhaps continue to happen. The zero step is the classical state: People are working in factories or offices with fixed time. The first step is represented by the travelling salesman: He works abroad but mostly in fixed times including slight variations. The second step is the already mentioned teleworking – here the work is done in a private environment (home office) with negotiable time structure. Here the boundaries between work time and idle or private time begin to be blurred. In a third step, the freelancer (e.g. journalists) is completely free in time and place, but he has to meet the deadline for his work, according to his contract. The fourth step is given by “entrepreneur of himself.” He has the full risk and responsibility to his work everywhere and at any time. In the fifth step, the roles of firms, clients, bosses and labor unionists converge to the “prosumer”:12 Everybody is producing and consuming – there is a total professional presence with new time, place and organizational structures. Obviously this seems to be very speculative. The problems of this dissolution are obvious. Concerning the first function of labor, i.e. to generate property, one can ask who the owner of my time in the different steps really is. This we will not only exchange, offer and sell working 11 Cf. Kornwachs 1994. For a comprehensive understanding, see also Reichwald 2000. 12 A contraction of the both words: producer and consumer. The term of the prosumer has been introduced by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave. (Cf. Toffler 1980, 264–266)

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power, goods and services, but also functions (boss or clergy/entrepreneur or servant) throughout social structures. The second function we mentioned, participation, is converted into the problem of the place of solidarity and the interests of representation of homeworkers, freelancers and so on. Indeed, there is no effective union of contract workers and freelancers. With respect to identity which could be developed by working the blurring borders between work and non-work do not allow anymore to distinguish between a private moral and the role responsibility one has in an enterprise or in an office. The question of divided identities appears, according to the book title: “Who am I and If Yes, How Many?”13 Today, we are used to work with the help of the net. In this case the net is conceived as a mean like a phone, a desk, a filing cabinet, letters, calculators, drawing board and so on. We are communicating, writing mails, archiving files, sending results of our work to other partners, making tables, drawing, checking texts, modeling and calculating simulations – all thus together with colleagues around the world in a synchronic or a-synchronic way. This has become a nearby everyday experience, self understandable in a modern world of human labor. We are also used working within the net, too. We are not only fixed to a certain working place within an enterprise or within a home office, but we are reachable within the net, we can be found there, and we use to act within the net as a space of action and communication.14 Thus the normal working place is substituted by the function of reachability. The same holds for the working time. The former apprehension has become true, but they do not provoke affrights anymore. Nevertheless, the content of work has been changed dramatically. A further connotation of working-in-net means to work in order to form new or to improve existing net structures; i.e. shaping the tools for work like programs, from installations of an own working place up to the design of organizations and institutions. Here the limits of own scopes can be experienced very drastically. Moreover at this point there are the questions for criteria, control and structure of institutional power. These conditions ultimately determine the modalities of working places, work times, and contents of work, too. The status of individuals as well as institutions, the questions of reward and salary, and last but not least the problem of the production forms is also a matter of influence. Today, this production forms we are calling culture of work.

13 In German: “Wer bin ich und wenn ja, wieviele?ˮ (Precht 2007) 14 Instead of the parole in the communist manifest: “Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch” (“Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”) in Marx/Engels 1959, 459–493, we could state: “Net workers in all the world, unite!.”



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4 The I’s of Work, the I’s of World, and the I’s 4 of Net If the hypothesis is taken serious, that our labor and moreover the work is enabled, mediated and conditioned by the net, we have an interesting connection between the basic function of human labor and the way how we work with the help of net, within the net and how we shape the net by labor structures. In the following I would restrict myself to the third function – the production of identity. Identity means to be aware of ones own biographic history. A precondition for that is a memory. Identity means to be aware of ones own existence. There is also the connotation of being acknowledged, according to the hypothesis of Georg Wilhelm Hegel: “Self-Consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’.”15 We could add, that self-consciousness includes to knowing who, and where I am and what kind of roles I am actually playing. It also includes to know and to be able to observe my own thinking. For the sake of a broader investigation, it is reasonable to introduce three kinds of self-consciousness: The Worlds–I: Identity as an individual person (Welt-Ich) in relation to family, community, society, in relation also to education, biography, geography, politics, and history. The Working–I: Identity as a professional person (Arbeits-Ich) in relation to vocational training, professional biography, job and company. It can be constituted by products & services, but also by quality, a particular art, science, passion, etc. The Net–I: A separate net identity (Netz-Ich) that appears as an identity in social networks (hoax, anonymous, playing a role) as well as an identity which an author has (blogs, arts, science etc.) or as an identity of an owner of work.

15 “Das Selbstbewußtsein ist an und für sich, indem, und dadurch, daß es für ein Anderes an und für sich ist; d. h. es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes.” Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, “Phänomenologie des Geistes – Selbstständigkeit und Unselbstständigkeit des Selbstbewußtseins; Herrschaft und Knechtschaft.” In Hegel 1999, 109 (§178). Translation from German, cf. [accessed: 16 January 2016].

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5 Shaping Technology and Identity There are three kinds of death in the world: There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network. (Guy Almes)16

The thesis of Guy Almes is quite alarming and provocative. Turned positive, it could be interpreted that man’s existence is replaced by his presence on the web. What is meant here is “social existence” in the meaning of social identity by Jürgen Habermas. Since it is still one of the most basic functions of the job of being able to earn a living, the work is forcing us into a particular form of social existence: that of being present on the web. However, there are two other basic functions of the job, which are closely connected: social participation and the development of identity. Today we know from psychological research on unemployment how the ego strength starts to deplete in a frightening way when unemployment endures. The way to say “I” becomes brittle, the identity that is fed also from memories of one’s own social history, begins to erode. Identity without a coherent memory, without any sense of continuity is not possible. The identity-creating function of human labor is not conceivable without the question of meaning. Meaningless work offers no context in which the worker can self-identify due to the fact that there is such an extreme division between the labour and the product produced. Therefore those forms of labor were and are often used as a punishment. The other side is the extreme flexibility of labor by universal machines. Richard Sennett reported about feeling the futility of working with people not only permanently working at other places and environments and with irregular hours, but also with nearby universal machines (Sennett 1989): Today they are baking bread, tomorrow they will produce screws, the day after they will control a warehouse. The surfaces are the same: the screen, yet the contents are equally abstract; figures, diagrams and structures – only the label changes. The control processes remains equal in their abstractness. (Sennett 1989) If this is so – why don’t we shape our employment such that the personal identity and social identity could coincide, or at least come much closer to each other? Such a workplace, designed according to information and communication technology could yet provoke the thought that one has a much greater degree of 16 Guy Almes has been the Director of the Academy for Advanced Telecommunications and Learning Technologies, Texas A&M University, Tamu, since August 2006.  The citation is well spread in web pages, the original source could not be verified.



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freedom in the design of software technology than in mechanical-physical jobs. It is impossible to design against physics, but one should not draw against ergonomics too. Design of equipment which affects the small scale structure of work and the workplace itself plays a role on the micro-level, but the associated boundary conditions also depend on the arrangements at the meso-level (e.g. in-house or industry-standard structures). It goes even further: In a manner more and more direct, the design of the macro-level, i.e. the design of the network and its use, its infrastructure, its possibilities and limitations, determines the work on site, its technological and organizational capacities. Of course, this is indirectly affected by the globalized economy which increasingly dictates the conditions of production. A responsible shaping of technology would move in the medium of all three levels, and this should be done reactively in the sense of a repair or maintenance operation. Despite some attempts of all kinds of internet censorship on the one hand and anarchic, chaotic structures on the other, the net, in fact, has increasingly become a place of work. This place can be shaped and indeed it must be shaped. Nevertheless, it is necessary to enable a participation of the people involved. One should prefer a kind of proactive shaping, not only reactive corrections. It is possible to change and modernize, but to do this with the stakeholders, whether they are in regular, free or precarious employment. However, this is only feasible if the prospective proponents of a technology – in a planning phase and later in a possible introduction phase – meet not only brave opposing individuals but an organized, legitimate and competent representation of all people involved. Despite all this, who belongs to the participants and stakeholders, e.g. when the restructuring of the intra-network of a global media company is under construction? How can effective advocacy be built up, when the “work” as a result of human labor loses its importance compared with the service and the methods which have become goods? Let us call them a “net-union” or “union of networkers.” But who are the patrons and bosses? Of course, the organizational forms of potential participation and solidarity have not yet developed completely – the traditional forms – based on regular employment with fixed locations, times, job descriptions and employment contracts still remain the norm. The effort is paid, proportional to working time, not the success rate. Under ideal conditions the employment holds for an entire working life. However, if not the effort, but only the result of labor is paid, how can participation, solidarity, but also justice be organized? An appropriate form of advocacy has yet to be developed for the emergent fact that times, places, and activities which constitute the scaffolding of work have been made more flexible than ever.

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Forms of cooperation are preconditions for labor division as well as for division of contracts and they constitute institutions, organizations, and their structures. These forms of cooperation presuppose that the cooperating individual is able to recognize its own interests and the interests of its counterpart. To exchange and communicate without saying “I” with respect to personal and social issues is no doubt impossible. We are always on the way to acquiring our identity, i.e. on the way, to saying “me” as well as “I.”17 Therefore, identity and the ability to cooperate belong together. It is therefore advisable to facilitate interaction for all of the people involved in a more or less ritualized manner. This could be done on the one hand by the organized, legitimate and competent representatives of the participating contractors; and on the other with legitimate and competent representatives of the order-giving side. Moreover the proponents of the technologies or services should be included too, thus extending the cooperation across all sectors. An emergence of identity including social and personal identity, leads to self-awareness in what is a well known Hegelian double meaning of the term. It is possible that a person may observe him/herself and may assess this for him/ herself. Thus the individual knows who it is in itself, i.e. what role it may play. It seems that in the world of labor three forms of I’s and Me’s have been developed as mentioned above. The World’s-I, the Working-I and the Net-I. Each ‘I’ have interests that lead to the perception of each other and the world of labor division and cooperation. Plato has described this cooperation already in his dialogue Politeia (The Republic).18 Working in the network directly affects the possibilities of perception, cooperation and the division of labor, and thus the possibilities to locate an identity. The conditions for identity formation by work are still meaningful in that they are constitutive of the work, the continuity of the topics and of the work content. In this, the worker gains the possibility of finding himself in his work product (“opus”), and the matching up of activity and a professional biography. Therefore one should avoid interruptions within professional biographies in favor of a continuing change, in favor of recognition, and of the possibility of external reflexivity. Extreme flexibility threatens the meaningfulness of work and working conditions, the abrupt change of tasks and jobs destroys the continuity; extreme division of labor prevents the working man to recognize the result of his work as his own “work.” Deskilling, i.e. the loss of professional competence leads to ruptures in the professional biography. How can we organize attention, recognition, acknowledgement and even solidarity when working in, on, and with the help of 17 Here we use the distinction between I and Me according to Mead 1965. 18 Cf. Plato, The Republic, 2nd book, 369e-370a.



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the network? Identifying offers – do they come only from the net? Does being the director or producer of one’s own biography on the net (e.g Facebook’s Timeline) allow us to think about ourselves outside of work and outside of the network? Or does it confound the power of the ubiquity of the net-I by this process? This we will call here the external reflexivity.

6 Degrees of Freedom in Shaping Technologies We are quite free to design information and communication systems. At least at the very beginning, it is possible to program network in such or such a way, so to agree on some communication protocols – and yet one may see that the result of this process is also a reflection of power relations. We have become accustomed to distinguish the concept of freedom to do something and freedom from something (exemption from ...). The first term implies freedom as an opportunity, as a chance and as the availability of options. In a Socratic view this concept means the freedom to do the best thing (according to knowledge and choice). This is a freedom of the will. The second term focuses more on liberation, i.e. the removal of restrictions and access to opportunities, which one should have available anyway, or to what one has a right. This is the freedom of action. It can be seen immediately that freedom to presupposes freedom from. This peculiar dialectic of freedom may be loosening up by the changing shape of technology. We begin with the relationship between freedom and automation. The automation frees us from the compulsion, which is given by the coupling of machine time and labor time. It gives us the freedom to let the machine work. We are free to make our work more flexible than ever before. Moreover, from 1900 to the present, automation has led to a halving of the labor time, with respect to life time, year and week. This could be interpreted as a liberation. Looking at automation itself, we have a certain freedom designing its structure in that we can decide what is automated, we are free to decide when to use the machine in automatic mode or manual operation mode, we can take back the automation, and we can affect the memory of the controller. This frees up options: Instead of operating machines, we supervise them, we decouple the running time of the machine from the time we operate them, we can make more precise and complex processes, we can repeat the same processes very often – and can use the time gained to think about how we replace the automation through computerization of work. This digitization has opened vast degrees of freedom to design and to shape. At the same time it forces us to become

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computer scientists, programmers, and screen watchers. Yet despite all this, the reliability is deceptive – we need to maintain, to repair, and to inspect. The more complex the automation is, the less we are ready and willing to do without it – it becomes irreversible. All those benefits exert a constraint too. This exemption outlined above has subsequently generated an enormous flexibility; i.e. that everything controllable by a particular process can also be carried out by an operator who is able to operate and control this process. We are no longer producing, but we only manage and control the production process and its individual steps. However, this flexibility has its downsides – Richard Sennett has described it vividly. (Sennett 1989) Extreme flexibility as indicated above undermines an important piece of the determination of human labor: identity. As it is known, higher complexity demands other mechanisms of control, commands and communication, improved skills, more intensive and more extensive attention. It leads to a compression of performance, to more abstract tasks and problem solution methods. Last but not least it also leads to an abandonment of tradition. The network can certainly be regarded as a large technical system that contains many intelligent components. In designing intelligent systems we usually have enormous degrees of freedom. We can choose the field of application, the degree of adaptability and the ontology of the knowledge base. The high adaptability allows a maximal variable repeatability of a class of comparable processes – and this class is very extensive. This freedom in the design of a technical system is only limited by physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, by the state of technical knowledge, and by the costs. However, one quickly runs into the situation in which one is indeed free to choose the criteria, but not the choice of alternatives. A kind of freedom of choice of what is on offer. One can build fast or slow systems, but one cannot determine anymore whether such systems are built and used at all. This leads to compulsive applications of already existing models. An example may be found in the cards technology: It is impossible to refuse its use once it has been introduced and accepted. It is equally impossible to substitute all these fast processes that have embedded themselves in to the fabric of technological interface and therefore we have irreversible installations we cannot leave without a great deal of damage. Seen formally, we have in the design of our technologies almost any freedom of definition. We are free – comparable with the possibility to invent games that are limited only by logical rules and internal consistency requirements – to define ourselves by the possible parameters emanating from our technologies. Anyone who accepts the rules of the game can join. So it comes down to who first uses his freedom.



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Smart grids, smart objects et cetera are based on an ontology that has been previously modeled by an operator or designer of the system. The degrees of freedom for the user are potentially confusing, but de facto they are finite and they are part of the model. What the user must be able to do should coincide with the operator’s interests. This could be done also to learn the user’s interests. Nevertheless, this is rarely the case, as daily experience shows. The user has to obey the rules of the game and all format requirements – Facebook and other social networks have unavoidable surfaces with advertising and the entries user’s make are partly narrowly formalized and lend themselves to compulsion by their size and format. Apart from any (ab-)using of user’s data with which he “pays” and finances these services, one might ask the question, how much restriction of freedom is required to make “smart” networks successful? There are only smart networks when they are paid by someone who has no interest in secondary use such as the advertising function. This case is rare, of course. So far, the need for smarter systems that restrict the freedom of design has been asserted. Usually the argument is structured as follows: Automation technology XYZ resolves more than half of all service incidents [in IT] without any human intervention. The central importance of automation is to reduce error rates. Even during routine activities, the human error rate is about 10 percent. By automating, the error rate drops to zero. Or in other words, the need for worldwide and cross-company controllability of autonomous logistic processes forces the automotive industry to introduce RFID-based Automotive Networks. In both examples, we are bound to certain features in the design when there are economical and technical interests. Therefore, one is less free than thought. Many processes will be the subject of automation once again, and thus they will be inevitably pressed in a format that allows secondary automation and further computerization. With respect to identity we can support the hypothesis that by automation the identity-generating part of work content is shifted towards the process and its structure. A lot of working steps have been substituted by programs, and the operation of programs is hidden behind a surface. Only this surface is known by the worker when working with net. The content of work has been shifted in the process to rule the known surface. Thus the result of work (“opus”) is no more a product, but the very structure of a user-controlled process. Whether this may lead to new identities will be one of the necessary topics of future research.

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References Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1985. Brocker, Manfred. Arbeit und Eigentum. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992. Dubiel, Helmut. “Identität, Ich-Identität.ˮ Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol IV. Eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe, 1976. Sp. 148–151. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Über Techniken der Bewältigung beschädigter Identitäten. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1967. Habermas, Jürgen. Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. “Phänomenologie des Geistes.ˮ Ibid. Hauptwerke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 2. Hamburg: Meiner, 1999. Kornwachs, Klaus. “Telearbeit und Telepräsenz.ˮ Kommunikation und Metropole. Workshop Berlin 1994. Materialien. Ed. Alcatel SEL Stiftung. Stuttgart: Alcatel SEL Stiftung, 1994. 12–20. Kornwachs, Klaus. “Kapital und Arbeit – warum wir Marx wieder lesen sollten.ˮ Humanökologie und Kapitalismuskritik. Band zur Vortragsreihe des Humanökologischen Zentrums der BTU Cottbus 2005–2006. Aktuelle Reihe 1. Eds. Wolfgang Schluchter and Elisabeth MeyerRenschhausen. Cottbus: Humanökologisches Zentrum der BTU Cottbus 2007. 111–142. Kornwachs, Klaus. “Arbeits-Ich – Welt-Ich – Netz-Ich.ˮ Wer bin ich im Netz und wie viele? Über Ungleichzeitigkeiten des „Ich“ in der Arbeitswelt. Eds. Welf Schröter et al. Mössingen: Thalheimer, 2013. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. London: A. Churchhill, 1689. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Manifest der Kommunistischen Parteiˮ (London 1848). Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW). Vol. 4. Berlin: Dietz, 1959. 457–493. Marx, Karl. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripteˮ (1844). Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW). Vol. 40. Supplementary Volume 1. Berlin: Dietz, 1973. 465–588. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Plato. “The Republicˮ (Politeia). Translation by Benjamin Jowett. [accessed: 16 January 2016]. Precht, Richard David. Wer bin ich und wenn ja, wieviele? 24th ed. München: Goldmann, 2007. Reichwald, Ralf. Telekooperation: Verteilte Arbeits- und Organisationsformen. Berlin: Springer, 2000. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. “Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie.ˮ 1801. Ibid. Werke. Vol. 4. Ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856 ff. Schröter, Welf. “Wie wir morgen arbeiten werden – Umgestaltung der Arbeit für alle?ˮ Ed. Klaus Kornwachs. Bedingungen und Triebkräfte technologischer Innovationen: Acatech diskutiert. Stuttgart: Fraunhofer-Verlag, 2007. 241–251. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989; German: Der flexible Mensch: Die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus. Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuchverlag, 2006. Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York: William Morrow & Comp., 1980.

Part 3: Per/versions of Cultural Diversity: Part 3: Including Exclusions

K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

Global Pressures and Cultural Relativity: The Case of Media Anthropology 1 Genealogical Sketches One way to come to terms with globalization is to see it as a series of empirical trends which, led on by economic, financial and technological developments, have developed and continue to develop much more than merely empirical, that is systematic and structural consequences world-wide for all levels and departments of life and work. This article is concerned with what we broadly call the sectors of culture and the media. Here, the empirical consequences of globalization consist, for instance, in the prefabrication of international bestsellers in the book trade by global marketing campaigns. In systematic terms, and more interestingly to my mind, however, globalization has triggered a sharpened awareness of (what systems theory would call) the fairly universal functional equivalences and variations of media and their crucial role for culture(s) and the human psyche. This is what the kind of media anthropology advocated here is about. Sources of and potentials for conflict have, if anything, increased in the modern world. We need, therefore, as many insights as possible into the ways in which people evaluate their experience and shape their orientations. Since roughly the end of the nineteenth century, when government propaganda came fully into its own, when newspapers acquired and demonstrated political and ideological clout and were, conversely, used by politics for that purpose, the awareness that media play a crucial role in shaping, if not producing altogether those evaluations and orientations has steadily grown.1 Inquiries into the general (possibly even universal) functional mechanisms of seemingly specific media under (again more than just) specific conditions could then be seen as the task, or one of the tasks, of media anthropology. In that capacity, media anthropology ought to acquire the status of at least a critical symptom in the tensions, and their analysis, of globalizing pressures towards uniformity and persisting or new cultural diversity. In a more radical, but still historically anchored perspective media anthropology looks like a necessity because, in the face of technological impact and experimental possibilities, the distinction between human beings and media (even if the term was not used in its present dominating sense) broke down already in the nineteenth century. Media technologies may enforce Brave 1 For the U.S. in particular see Starr 2004, especially the introduction pp. 1–3.

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New World-like human uniformity, but they may also – this is for instance Stefan Rieger’s main point – work towards an enhancement of the individuality of individuals.2 A number of media students, then, might have been surprised to encounter, in a 2009 issue of the scholarly journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, a debate between John Postill and Mark Allen Peterson with the ominous title: “What is the Point of Media Anthropology?” (Postill/Peterson 2009, 334– 344) It is true that the debaters constructed a persuasive case not only for a point, but for several points to be adduced in favour of the fledgling field. Yet questions about the point of something are and remain dangerous. There is the well-known joke about conferences being either point- or useless or both. In the midst of a veritable boom which seems to have taken off with the new millennium – Postill for instance rightly singles out the fact that the “period between 2002 and 2005 alone saw the publication of no less than four overviews of this emerging subfield” (Postill/Peterson 2009, 334) –, the question concerning the point of media anthropology raises suspicion and doubt. There is the suspicion, fed also by the highly heterogeneous make-up of the overviews, both internally and in comparison with each other, that media anthropology, especially with its emphasis on global mass media, follows the facile fashions of self-description proffered by the main profiteers of globalization, that is multinational, more or less global companies. There are, to be sure, many interesting case studies on mass media. We might cite, for instance, an article by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang on “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitism in a Chinese Metropolis” (Yang 2002) in one of the overviews. But, heavy as the impact of the mass media may be: In this and other cases, the impact becomes interesting because – I would say only because – of the ineluctable specificity of a regional history behind it. That specificity will not go away. It is therefore rather unclear which discipline might justifiably claim (alluding to a meanwhile unspeakable privilege) the ius primae investigationis, that is the necessary conceptual closeness and distance to the phenomena, the affinity and the power of defamiliarization and estrangement which we rightly deem necessary for analysis. Likewise, we may be assailed by doubts while subscribing to one of the noblest goals of media anthropology as formulated by Peterson and endorsed by Postill, that is “a decentred West.” (Postill/Peterson 2009, 334) It only takes a brief glance 2 Cf. Rieger 2000, 13–14. Cf. p. 17 for the notion of the human being as the “medium of media.” Rieger’s German term for the enhancement is “Steigerung” or “Steigerbarkeit der Individualität der Individuen.” (p. 12) This chimes in with Arnold Gehlen’s diagnosis that there is no need to worry about the extinction of individuality – it is a quasi-natural product of modernity and its agencies. (Gehlen 1957, 114)



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at the language in which modern world-bestseller books are almost invariably written and the ways in which they are produced and marketed in order to see that, while a certain decentering is unavoidably going on, a strong Western bias continues to assert itself. The West has been decentered, to some extent, on statistical economic, military and political counts. But in so-called cultural matters, broad and narrow, all the indignation flaring up around, say, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon notwithstanding, the situation is far less clear. That situation might be partly comparable to and illuminated by the one the British aristocracy finds itself in. Ousted from its traditional positions of political and economic power, it continues to thrive as a collection of prestigious cultural icons.3 There is the uncomfortable possibility that the modes of scholarship, including media anthropology, like the present article itself, might in fact help to stabilize Western styles and concepts. It does seem easier to integrate, for instance, Japanese or ‘Asian’ aesthetic vocabulary into Western terminology than the other way around.4 It is widely agreed that, at the turn of the first millennium, Europe lagged – socioculturally, technologically, scientifically – far behind some other cultural areas, whether Arab, Chinese or Indian. Later, however, a certain type of rationality, intimately bound up with the medium of Greek writing, appears to have developed in Europe and gained, with the dynamics of the United States pushing ahead, a strong universalizing momentum on various levels, including concept formation.5 In such contexts, both trite and extremely controversial as it may sound, we might also ponder the limited linguistic, ideological and ethical universalism of human rights again. I do think, however, that one can escape most of the traps of Eurocentrism (including its North-American transformations) by distinguishing between normative and heuristic or operational forms.6 Once we are put on the track of globally sounding names for conceptually efficient, not just genetically present local matters, quite different stories about the emergence, justification and nature of media anthropology can be told. Thus, one year before the debate mentioned above, another debate took place in the Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften (2008), headed by the Canadian German Studies and media theory expert Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and assisted, sometimes contradicted by four Germans (including myself). All of them, claiming a lot of international experience, had tried to make sense of what Winthrop-Young 3 Cf. Cannadine 2005 (1990), especially Chapter 12: “The Reconstruction of Social Prestige.” 4 For what I take to be a very good example see Miner 1990. 5 This has been debated very often in the wake of Max Weber. It would be presumptuous on my part to commit myself to any definite position here. See the perceptive essay by Schluchter 2005, especially pp. 246–254 on the European deployment of a unique historical process. 6 Cf. Schluchter 2005 on “Rationalität,” 244–246, and Pfeiffer 1999, 47–49.

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saw as the deplorable transition from leading, cutting-edge German media theory (including of course media anthropology) to media studies as one more saddening example for the rather narrow-minded missionary zeal which had already marred German national literary scholarship. (Winthrop-Young 2008, 113–152) To look at media anthropology from a German point of view or even, horribile dictū, as a considerably Germanized affair, may appear disgustingly provincial or worse. It does however appear hard to deny that there are, in relatively very conspicuous forms, quite a few German intellectual traditions remarkable for particularly emphatic universal claims. (And it would not be difficult to ‘explain’ that by having recourse to German religious and sociopolitical history. I do not have to go into the (world-)historical catastrophes engineered by the trivialized and fanaticized sociopolitical versions – German ‘nature’ as a remedy for the woes of the world – of universalized claims.) One of these traditions, philosophical anthropology, is indeed commonly seen both as betraying, in the very universality of its claims, a clear and recognized, if peculiar German orientation. Philosophical anthropology should also be seen, in terms of disciplinary histories, as a strong element in the genealogy of media anthropology. In its more recent varieties, from Arnold Gehlen to Gernot Böhme, philosophical anthropology, long before the explicit advent of media anthropology, displayed an acute awareness of the havoc created by media and technologies in what one used to look upon as specifically, perhaps one could even say authentically social or individual experience. The dissolution of experience was described by terms like second-hand experience, being civilized, the media creation (‘breeding’) of the imaginary and the like. (Cf. Gehlen 1957, 47–51; Böhme 1985, 172, 174, 190 f.) Consequently, genealogies of media anthropology, as of many other concerns, are diverse. I will later add aesthetics to the collection of forerunners. I doubt that the end products of such genealogies, provisional as they must remain, will ever shake off the imprints of their local origins completely. Let me sketch right here, however, one more story which illuminates the emergence of fairly general media perspectives in the midst of what appears as a very specific German social situation some time after World War II. In a book of essays written between 1949 and 1964, the notable German sociologist Helmut Schelsky felt compelled to start a new “search for reality.”7 (Schelsky 1979) The title of the book was reflected in its central essay: “The Loss of Reality in Modern Society.” Schelsky asserts that societies characterized by (what were generally regarded as basic sociological concepts of) rank and class, by institutions like the family, by distinctions of gender and age, employer and employee, country and city had been important and possibly unique, but limited to an interlude. (Schelsky 1979, 396) Social mobility was 7 Cf. pp. 394–409, “Der Realitätsverlust der modernen Gesellschaft” (1954), for the central essay.



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depriving these concepts of their structuring and diagnostic power, of their distinctive accuracy, that is “simply their reality.” (Schelsky 1979, 397) Political parties and associations of all kinds, for instance book clubs, suddenly did not represent “truly sociological configurations any more.” (Schelsky 1979, 398) So-called social reality fell apart into abstract, especially bureaucratic superstructures and small intimate groups. (Schelsky 1979, 402 f.) The latter, however, did not regain, or reintegrate themselves into the effective reality of social processes. Nor were they able to develop and maintain their own reliable realities of intimate individualization. Rather, for models from feeling via orientation of action down to life seen as a whole, they came to depend on what one might call the abundant or rather overwhelming image supply from the media departments, like radio, TV, movies, press and later for instance rock music, of abstract superstructures of a mostly market-driven nature. For former times and in many cases not only for the West, one could add, and maybe one still can to some extent, image and model suppliers like novels, plays and operas.8 (Schelsky 1979, 408)

2 Transformations of Cultural Sociology (1): 2 Media Anthropology and Media Rituals It would not be overly bold to say that oscillations between cultural sociology and media anthropology have turned into the trademark of whole departments of sociology in German universities. This could be said, for instance, for the department at Konstanz University. There are Karin Knorr Cetina’s “epistemic cultures,” characterized by epistemic “disunity,” in which the universal standards of science may easily collide with local traditions and indeed with the accumulated, culture-bound experience of researchers and practitioners. This is especially true for clinical experience in medicine. (That there may be ‘national’ styles in the sciences is of course an old topic in the history of science.) There is the order of rituals as a basic concept in the cultural sociology of Hans-Georg Soeffner. The extension of the concept to phenomena ranging from torture to talk shows (some might argue that the two are not so different anyway) establishes a direct link with Media Anthropology, edited by Rothenbuhler and Coman (2005), echoing one of the overviews mentioned by Postill. Quite recently, Bernhard Giesen has relaunched sociology by basing it not on notions of order, but of rather open interim situations, situations in-between (“Zwischenlagen”), in which general

8 This thesis is pushed in even stronger terms in Schelsky 1955, 118.

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structural trends may be undercut by contingencies, surprises, and resistance of various kinds or vice versa.9 An anthropology of media needs to take only a small step in order to foreground the role which media must take in the scenarios set up by these recent types of cultural sociology. Concentrating, for example, on ritualized media events, the anthropological turn tends to do away with the assumption that the function of rituals consists mainly in the production, stabilization or reinforcement of a specific social order. Rituals rather initiate a general (‘anthropological’) mode of enhanced experience, of transitory communicative intensification. It is the intensity, not the specific symbolic content which is crucial.10 The staging of such rituals acquires urgency to the extent in which an event like the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon appears to destroy all notions of social and symbolic order. In such cases, rituals will often employ culturally specific techniques of resymbolization like epic stories about heroic firefighters and thereby reassert cultural identity, that is, more generally, cultural diversity. Generally, however, media rituals rush in where myths, religion, and older rituals nowadays often fear to tread: They are supposed to transcend the functionality of everyday routines.11 Likewise, a conceptual urge toward media anthropology makes itself felt in Giesen’s notion of socioculturally basic situations in-between. The theatricality of politics today is not a wrong road momentarily taken and soon abandoned, but a constitutive element of “postmodern democracy.” (Giesen 2010, 221) If anything, of course, a more or less universal theatricality of politics is much older. Media-wise, it is often submerged or latent, yet it resurfaces from time to time in ways not to be ignored. Plato, for one, has a slightly strange passage in the Laws (817b), constructing the case of a group of tragic actors who want to be admitted into the ideal state. They are refused and told that the ideal state as an imitation of the best life is itself the truest of tragedies and does not need therefore a tragic theater. For Plato, this theater, one must assume, had come heavily under suspicion of fiction, because it had been removed from its older ritualistically and socially crucial earlier essence. (That essence, too, had of course become totally unpalatable for the philosopher.) From the vantage-point of today, the book by Clifford Geertz on the Balinese theater state is not devoted to 9 Cf. Soeffner 1999 with Rothenbuhler/Coman 2005 and Giesen 2010. 10 In cultural sociology, this is controversial; Soeffner, for one, still leans on the symbolically expressive side of rituals. 11 See the essays, in Rothenbuhler/Coman 2005, by Nick Couldry, “Media Rituals: Beyond Functionalism,” 59–69, and by Rothenbuhler, “Ground Zero, the Firemen, and the Symbolics of Touch on 9–11 and After,” 176–187. These positions are compatible with Giesen’s emphasis on non-everyday events (Giesen 2010, 59) and the ways in which they may be used to resymbolize cultural order. (Giesen 2010, 61)



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a rare or exotic phenomenon belonging to cultural anthropology, but to a potentially universal example of what media anthropology can be. (Geertz 1980) Even in its explicit (‘Balinese’) form, to say nothing of its more latent or implicit versions, forms of the theater state have occurred, in part, much more often in the West (e.g. French absolutism, but also more modern dictatorial regimes, the early English Stuarts, but partly also the Tudors et cetera) than is commonly assumed. The lack of awareness is certainly also due to a fairly universal energy in Western mentalities: The differentiation of cognitive, symbolic and conceptual areas makes us believe – in a trivialized Platonizing attitude – in the separate realities of what is thus distinguished. For many centuries we have had all kinds of stages, as well as political thought, theory, and science. Consequently we should have politics without the stage. Both today’s media scenes and media anthropology of the ritualistic kind teach us otherwise. That does not mean that the two domains simply merge into one indistinct hotchpotch. It does mean, though, that it is or has become more difficult to keep them apart.

3 Transformations of Cultural Sociology (2): 3 Media Anthropology and Institutional 3 Degeneration A second model of media anthropology of greater importance than the ritually oriented model discussed in part 2 could take Giesen’s conceptual prerequisite for his situations in-between as a starting point. This is primarily the notion of human identity. We feel certain that there is something like this, but we never find it in a clear-cut and finished form. (Giesen 2010, 11) This diagnosis cries out for a reformulation in terms of a general, transcultural media anthropology. Not that the media could or should tell us what identity is or ought to be. But we need processes of medialization, in which forms and layers of identity, chances and risks of (inter)action, are presented in an attractive, one might even say: possibly charismatic shape. While this is a consummation devoutly to be wished, it rarely occurs within the humdrum routines of everyday life. That is one of the reasons why, to some extent transculturally, there was so much talk about the “buried life” (as Matthew Arnold’s 1852 poem of that title has it) in the nineteenth century. The version of media anthropology targeted in this context will have to shift attention from the mass media to those media which, in traditional parlance, would be closer to the arts. Mass media and technologies, important as they are, frequently and in terms of experience, remain unattractive. They tend

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to present, as Schelsky, quoting the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, put it, the choice of a partner like the acquisition of a car: You choose from a number of available models. (Schelsky 1955, 118) That may satisfy an enormous number of people, but it is, to repeat myself, not exactly interesting. Sociologically, what is interesting is that social differentiation will produce subtler, more complex and challenging forms of experience and emotion. This is not merely a matter of elites, rather, it can be shown anthropologically that early on in human evolution, ‘artificial’ mental and emotional ‘climates’ have established themselves. The emphasis on emotions in fields like philosophy and neurobiology or brain research has meanwhile caught up with the evolutionary perspective.12 On the other side, increases in social complexity and an awareness of the manifold sources for social conflict, have almost done away with dreams and realities of the golden simple life. One can postulate, then, at least a high probability for a more or less universal tendency toward a continuous reappraisal or ‘restaging’ of possible relations between individuals and larger systems. The tendency may be triggered by local and regional conditions. But it will be enacted at least today in mostly transcultural media formats. For older periods the frequency of such formats will be lower; interests in media anthropology must be satisfied by the search for media analogies (like the analogies, often pointed out, between Western opera and Japanese Kabuki or Bunraku puppet theater with respect to oscillations between recitation and singing but with a common emphasis on ‘performance’). By contrast, the ‘Western novel’ has expanded into a global medium for renegotiations between individuals and larger systems. Given the sweeping thrust of abstract superstructures like global players of all kinds, the individual does not really count. On the other hand, the persistence and the intelligence of individual (sometimes even group) emotion must at some point be taken into account. Enforced renegotiations in that respect, shaped into attractively clear and complex forms by media mainly from novels via films to internet formats today, have been variously conceptualized. Bruno Latour suggested that we have never been really modern (Latour 1991). Deleuze and Guattari wrote about archaisms with current function. (Deleuze/Guattari 2009, 261) In art theory, one might think of Ellen Dissanayake’s important theses about art as an intimately adaptive and, at the same time, artificializing, ‘making special’ universal. (Dissanayake 1992, 2000) We may not be able to say much about the empirical range and strength of the need for media as stylizations, or “enhancements” (Rieger 2000, cf. fn. 2) of individualities emerging in the encounters between indi12 See, for anthropology and evolution, Claessens 1980, 55–69, also 156–158 on narrative as an evolutionary achievement and necessity; for philosophy, Nussbaum 2001; for neurobiology and brain research, Damasio 1999.



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viduals and systems, but, larger claims of systems theory notwithstanding, that need is structurally built especially into modern societies. There is a group of important writers, some of them (Gehlen, Schelsky) mentioned already, who variously called themselves or were called economists, sociologists, cultural analysts or critics, even anthropologists. They were acutely aware of the historical powers of modernization, especially of the emergence of self-regulating systems of all kinds, legal, technological and so forth, which extended their reach and range continuously into global dimensions and which seemed, in the process, inexorably to suck up persons into their orbits. The writers I am concerned with here no longer followed Marx and his tragically Romantic notion of alienation. They might talk, in the wake and extension of Max Weber’s notions of bureaucracy, of modern civilization and its technological-scientific superstructures sealing up individual life (Schelsky 1979, 465), of experience becoming secondhand (Gehlen 1957, 47–51), of everything being makeable, but no longer given. (Freyer 1955, 15–31) On the other hand, they did not push that diagnosis to the extremes of contemporary systems theory where the basic distinction between system and environment logically ends up with the existence of nothing but systems. For these writers, the very heterogeneity of the various systems, their frictions with an older type of social organization called institutions, produces tensions, contradictions and gaps through which “the chance for the autonomy of the person” (Schelsky 1958, 17–18; translation by the author) may emerge with new strength. If, however, that autonomy does not want to share the fate of nineteenth century buried individual inner lives mourned by Matthew Arnold in the rather one-sided perspective of his 1852 poem mentioned above (after all, there was a lot of talk about these inner lives in novels, dramatic monologues etc.), it needs media which allow it to become attractively and intelligibly visible. For globalization, one would have add that, in spite of the awesome power wielded by hegemonic economic, technological, financial and scientific superstructures and systems and because of their complexities, tensions, gaps and therefore chances for individual autonomy have increased. But so has the need for media which represent, enact and flesh them out. Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), for one, described, originally in 1944, what he called the “great transformation” from 1814 to 1914 as a long period of (relative) peace but drastic socioeconomic changes. The emergence of a self-adjusting market is not just a matter of new systemic operations. It shakes up older institutions without eliminating them. Institutions are thoroughly regulated, but not necessarily self-regulated small, medium-sized or large entities (the family, smaller communities as both social units and personal networks, schools, churches, official departments, even the nation). As long as they function well, they regulate individual behavior in a relatively concrete way. In principle then, institutions

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and individuals, for better or worse, can connect. The operational self-assertion of systems like the self-regulating market however, must, even if never complete, be paid for by “institutional degeneration.” (Polanyi 1957, 96, cf. 3–5) Institutional degeneration – a lack of expectability and reliability in institutional ‘behavior’ – in its turn increases both individual opportunities and personal instability. If problems of instability get the upper hand, they are mostly handed over to disciplines either new or newly taking a therapeutic turn: psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapies of all kinds. If the individual is torn between opportunities and instability, it is normally specific media which take over the task of creating attractive – that is attractively problematic and problematically attractive – forms of ambiguity and ambivalence.

4 Institutional Degeneration and the Novel Institutional degeneration – the uncertainty, the disputes about what to expect from churches, schools, universities, politics – has expanded, I contend, into a global phenomenon. In terms of media anthropology, that means that the very Western media format of the novel follows suit and has turned into a global format in its own turn. This has all taken place over a period where the speed and the flexibility of technology has created much more advanced media. Novels will come to be written in situations in which institutional degeneration of some sort is not just a historical fact, but is perceived as a structural or systemic, individually destabilizing problem. The eighteenth-century Western novel had been set up as a discursive net handling what was otherwise becoming an intractable complexity, a cultural job for which the relatively simple action patterns of drama had become ill suited. The nineteenth-century novel had to manage the modelling of shifting emotional and intellectual patterns, for which the prevailing public ideologies, social, religious or otherwise, were far too simple, and for which the newly assertive scientific theories like Darwinism proved unpalatable. Many scholarly books have demonstrated both the invasion of literature and mentalities in general by Darwinian modes of thought. At the same time, they have made it clear that such modes do not supply us with a sufficiently comprehensive and complex picture of humanity. George Meredith had already given a succinct form to that criticism in the “Prelude” to his crucial novel The Egoist (1879): Sameness is “our modern malady” to which science has added “the extension of a tail.” “We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from Science.” (Meredith 1947, 2)



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Today, the joint impact of such trends from both centuries has come to haunt non-Western countries, with predictable results: The compression of time provokes discrepancies in complexity and wild swings of the narrative pendulum. An important and transcultural job of the novel consists in the patterning of human interiority. This is an urgent and difficult task, because tensions between inner states and the public language of emotions can hardly ever be completely resolved, because inner states and social events can hardly ever be harmoniously coordinated. In fact, all too often, pressures from both sides are such that novelists feel tempted or coerced to turn the ‘soul’ into a mere “sujet de fiction” and thereby plunging it into what Gustave Thibon called “l’irréalisme moderne” – the compulsion to form images and ideas about all kinds of matters which go far beyond the individual’s – including the writer’s – mental capacities. (Thibon, cit. in Gehlen 1975, 113; cf. Freyer 1955, 111) Media anthropology would interpret that as a general problem of writing, especially ‘literary’ writing which, in spite of censorship of various kinds, is normally allowed and sometimes even encouraged to explore hidden complexities and difficult cultural agenda. Media anthropology must draw inspiration here from one of its predecessors. Aesthetics is a typical discourse in which local origins unfold universal tendencies. It sprang up mainly in eighteenth-century Germany as claims (‘middle-class’ claims in the model of Terry Eagleton which I adopt here more or less) for the diversified potential of sense and body-related perceptions and their psychological repercussions. (Cf. Eagleton 1990, especially 3, 16, 28) It thus stood in lieu of a political protest against the ‘abstract’ and rigid distinctions and enforcements of rank and class, a political protest for which the time was not ripe. The fighting strength of aesthetic discourse was supposed to come to fruition mainly on the theatrical stage where the interpenetrations between sense perception, body movements and psychological implications gained paradigmatic shape. Or so theoreticians and practitioners of the theater hoped. At no other time, Peter-André Alt has said with particular respect to Schiller, had claims for the theater been pushed to such extremes. (Alt 2000, Vol. 1, 382) The plans of theatrical theory were noble, but the facts remained melancholy. Correlating and fine-tuning perceptions, gestures, feelings and convictions ran against both rigid social norms and an open range of other possibilities. Instead of a diversified, but coordinated communicative impact challenging the established hierarchy, frictions and fragmentation emerged within the very enterprise called aesthetic and its social substratum. Perhaps it was only David Garrick in England, fairly at ease with an aristocratic life style and its poses, whose acting resolved, through sheer artistry of movement, such problems to the unending delight of audiences. Aesthetics, in any case, turned, amongst other things, into what it had never been intended to become: the analysis, endowed with universal reach, of the rel-

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ative power of the arts and media to bring the human need for self-interpretation and self-enactment into its best possible forms. Once the theatrical euphoria had died down, the potential of writing poetry, autobiography and finally novels came into focus. Writing, as it did not implausibly appear, was capable of encompassing any- and everything. Hegel especially produced a diagnosis which could serve still today as an explanation of the global strength and the basic weakness of extended forms of writing, that is especially the novel in its coupling of empiricism and imagination. He uses – I assume, because of his amused contempt for the novel which, though acknowledged as existing, did not quite make it into his system – the traditional or probably rather the Romantic term of ‘poetry’ (German “Poesie”), but is targeting, as the last paragraph in particular shows, much more the novel: Therefore, however completely poetry produces the totality of beauty once and for all in a most spiritual way, nevertheless spirituality constitutes at the same time precisely the deficiency of this final sphere of art. In the system of the arts we can regard poetry as the polar opposite of architecture. Architecture cannot so subordinate the sensuous material to the spiritual content as to be able to form that material into an adequate shape of the spirit; poetry, on the other hand, goes so far in its negative treatment of its sensuous material that it reduces the opposite of heavy spatial matter, namely sound, to a meaningless sign instead of making it, as architecture makes its material, into a meaningful symbol. But in this way poetry destroys the fusion of spiritual inwardness with external existence to an extent that begins to be incompatible with the original conception of art, with the result that poetry runs the risk of losing itself in a transition from the region of sense into that of the spirit. The beautiful mean between these extremes of architecture and poetry is occupied by sculpture, painting, and music, because each of these arts works the spiritual content entirely into a natural medium and makes it intelligible alike to sense and to spirit. For although painting and music, as romantic arts, do adopt a material which is already more ideal, yet on the other hand for the immediacy of tangible objects, which begins to evaporate in the enhanced ideality of the medium, they substitute the wealth of detail and the more varied configuration which colour and sound are providing in a richer way than is requirable from the material of sculpture. Poetry for its part likewise looks for a substitute; it brings the objective world before our eyes in a breadth and variety which even painting cannot achieve, at least on a single canvas, and yet this always remains only a real existence in the inner consciousness.13 (Hegel 1975, 968 ff.)

One can and should, I propose, treat such types of analysis in aesthetics as an early, but still basic form of media anthropology. The analysis looks for correlations between the potential residing in or emerging from what came to be called the materiality, that is the material – or, with respect to for instance musical genres, also the performative – aspects of an art or a medium, and its impact on 13 For a functional-historical account of aesthetics see Eagleton 1990, especially 3, 8–9, 13–16, 20-21.



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human consciousness.14 Inquiries of that kind in themselves will call forth, like in the case of the novel, a limited or provisional global quality in many arts or media normally seen in their cultural specificity only. Thus, Pat Easterling has drawn systematic comparisons between ancient Greek tragedies and modern rock concerts, football hysteria and drug culture. The “show for Dionysus,” a god of “multiform and elusive nature,” branches out into the opposite directions of both ecstatic performance and “performance traditions of exceptional sophistication and complexity.”15 Aesthetics thus stimulated a sharper awareness of the psychocultural efficiency of the arts within, at best, an intercultural horizon. Media anthropology does the same for the arts and/as media in a hypothetically global perspective. In the process, media anthropology does not really confront a fundamentally altered situation. But it inherits a crucial burden of aesthetics in more troublesome forms – the tensions between media determined predominantly by their material and performative conditions and those depending on the materially and performatively weak techniques and technologies of writing and print. In the novels conceived and marketed globally today, the Hegelian dilemma quoted above resurfaces: Counteracting the drive towards interiority the novel “brings the objective world before our eyes in a breadth and variety” of nowadays potentially global dimensions. But that variety renders the multifariousness and turmoil of the inner life of consciousness even more intractable. It drives consciousness into a “wild ontology” (Foucault’s “ontologie sauvage”) which some readers enjoy as the epitome of the creative imagination but which, in principle, haunts a type of human being “qui se donne seulement dans le movement qui le destine au non-être.”16 This wild ontology “dévoile moins ce qui fonde les êtres que ce qui les porte un instant à une forme précaire et secrètement déjà les mine de l’intérieur pour les détruire.”17 (Foucault 1966, 291) There appears to have been established one form of novel in which the destabilizing wild ontology is brought more or less under control and in which the novel itself, including film and TV versions, has achieved full global impact. This is the detective novel. Entrenched as it may be and in fact has been in the most diverse and indeed ideological cultural environments, it has always also maintained a level of anthropological experience and, for instance, scientific cogni-

14 Cf. Gumbrecht/Pfeiffer 1994 for theories and case studies in that respect. 15 Easterling 1997, 53; see also p. 36. 16 “[…] one trying to express the indissociable being and non-being of all beings.” (Foucault 2005, 303) 17 “discloses not so much what gives beings their foundation as what bears them for an instant towards a precarious form and yet is already secretly sapping them from within in order to destroy them.” (Foucault 2005, 303)

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tion. Anthropologically challenging and hard to routinize,18 establishing a level of reality and experience of its own, there is the boundary experience of violent death. Forms and motivations of murder are certainly often culture-related. But their detection is not. The recent wave of forensic anthropologists in detective novels and films tremendously increases the universality of detection; it is surely not just a fad, but a necessary and central cognitive element. On the whole, though, language-based media will achieve only a limited and provisional global status. Whatever shows up, be it provisionally or stubbornly, as diversity or singularity, can be mastered fully, that is represented in its specificity and transformed into universal perceptibility, only in media using more strongly the tacit semiotic power of materials and performance. In that sense, the basic prerequisites for media anthropology were laid out by André Leroi-Gourhan in his groundbreaking book Le Geste et la Parole (2 vols., 1964–1965).19 Leroi-Gourhan insisted that media must touch both our imagination and our visceral and muscular sensibility if they really want to engage our attention and stimulate our self-shaping. He would also have joined Anthony Storr and his characterization of music in a theory of human arousal through direct contact with the nervous system which, once established, may ramify into cultural (including semantic and even ideological) uses. (Storr 1992, especially 50–51) Close connections could also be established with Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow as optimal experience. (Csikszentmihalyi 1990)

5 Media Anthropology and Media Romanticism It is true that a certain price has to be paid for the variety of media anthropology which, following in the footsteps of Leroi-Gourhan, is favored here. While it could certainly analyze mobile phone technology, its global and local uses, its impact on unifying and multiplying styles of communicative behavior, it would rather emphasize the problematic relation of mobile phones both with the nervous system and some more material parts of the human body. Generally, it would prefer to deal with media still clearly relatable, theoretically and 18 Cf. the forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan in Kathy Reichs’ (herself a forensic anthropologist) Death du Jour: “Though it is my business, I have never grown immune to the sight of violent death.” (Reichs 2001, 439) 19 Cf. Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. With respect to the cognitive and culturally universal role of the “tacit component” within “the art of knowing,” Michael Polanyi’s pioneering work is still crucially relevant: Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1964 (1958), Part One and Two.



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empirically, to the arts instead of the mass media tackled by other varieties. More than twenty years ago, Csikszentmihalyi excluded watching TV from the range of activities leading to optimal experience. (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 119–120) I would have done the same, although for certain formats, like the aforementioned detective-cum-forensic anthropologist-films from almost all around the world, I am not at all sure any more. In any case, media anthropology in the wake of Leroi-Gourhan or Csikszentmihalyi could also be called media romanticism. The title of media romanticist was bestowed upon Harold Innis, predecessor of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, by Eric A. Havelock, who, for all his work for instance on Greek orality and its implications, might have earned the title himself. The reason for the award, Havelock said, was supplied by a certain preference Innis had for the spoken word, that is for the participation of as many parts of the person in communication as possible. (Havelock 1997, 26) Clearly, in contemporary communication technologies, there is no space for such concerns. Universality is rather established by the exclusion of bodily presence and the neutralization of space. Even so, for the time being, Innis’ restriction or nostalgic preference appears to be still legitimate for a media anthropology which would relate itself both to aesthetics and to philosophical anthropology. The media orientation does not try to abolish the oscillation of the philosophical tradition between conceptions of human essence and radical human openness. But it does try to detect regularities and analogies in the infinite varieties of human self-projections. In most of those, assumptions about the involvement of both the human psyche and the human body play a crucial role. Sketching some theoretical and material connections should render the motivations for this type somewhat more plausible. First, this type of media anthropology continues the kind of analysis which Georg Simmel undertook with respect to fashion (which, not only in McLuhan’s perspective, can and should be called a medium). Fashion functions as a double bridge for both individual liberties and social pressures in keeping relations and couplings between the two alive, bringing them prototypically into good and attractive shapes. Fashion, as we know it in the West, need not be looked upon as a universal phenomenon per se. But its “psychosocial” function,20 the need, in Dissanayake’s sense, to create something special, that is especially attractive arising out of the common need for individual-social relations, could be called universal. Second, an analogous bridging and shaping function of universally-oriented media emerges in the discrepancies between inner individual states, the variously called affects, feelings, and emotions, and the social, conventional names which language provides for them. In literary studies, T. S. Eliot’s well-known 20 Cf., also with respect to Simmel/Monneyron 2006, 30–34, 50–52.

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criticism that the play Hamlet did not provide an “objective correlative” for Hamlet’s emotions set up, in 1919, a remarkably early example for a type of analysis only taken up again really in recent times when Peter Sloterdijk inquired into the time, including the proper circumstances, of and for wrath. (Sloterdijk 2006) In neurobiology, Damasio in particular appears to be aware of the tensions. This means that, Schelsky’s critical comparison of car-buying and partner selection notwithstanding (or rather because of it), that we also need other media, closer to the arts or indeed arts themselves, for the powerful and attractive shaping of indeterminate, but often very violent inner affective masses and their mediation with conventionalized emotional codes. The conflicts between these two dimensions have kept Western media/arts like the theater and opera and their intercultural analogies very busy indeed. More recently, combinations of poetry and music, to some extent in rock music, to another in the songs of artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and others, have partly taken over this job in globally effective ways from opera. Finally, it would appear that film qualifies, in many of its instances, as a candidate for media romanticism with well-nigh universal appeal. It is true, of course, that filmic images will normally betray their culture-specific origins. But it seems also true that the ‘moving’ dynamics of images and the technological possibilities of enhancing their effect tend to leave those origins behind. Here I part company with Leroi-Gourhan because he lumps all kinds of “audiovisual” technologies together and suspects them of pre-empting the individual effort of the imagination which societies need in order to keep their important chains of action in the necessary state of complex vitality. Rather, I join Edgar Morin who, almost ten years before and in contrast to Leroi-Gourhan had stressed the imaginative stimulation brought about by filmic techniques and technologies. The frequently used close-up of the human face, for instance, does not tell us that human beings have a soul (such parlance has strictly speaking become impossible since we have no way of saying what that soul might be), but it does irrefutably suggest that spiritual-mental-psychological elements must be reckoned with in the human game. Similarly, within the seemingly neutral typology of images in the film theory of Gilles Deleuze (images of perception, action and affect), images of affects and emotion clearly gain a privileged position. Close-ups and montage, already in the films of Eisenstein, work irresistibly towards the evocation of pathos and, indeed, towards the “coherence” of an “organic-pathetic totality.”21 In such ways film, based on advanced technologies, aligns itself with movements which, in their ubiquitous technological modernity, form part of, Max 21 See all of the last subchapters in Leroi-Gourhan’s chapter VI, furthermore Morin 1956, 114, and Deleuze 1989, 18, 59.



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Weber’s sense, of the disenchantment of the world. But it functions also as a primary medium, more precisely, because of its compositional complexity, as an intermedium for the re-enchantment of the world in its suggestive shaping of what looks like a “comprehensive humanity.” The Swiss writer Adolf Muschg used that expression in order to characterize the films of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. In one of these nice turns in which stereotypes about cultural specificity unmask themselves, Kurosawa was held to be very Japanese in the West and very Western in Japan. In any case, shocked by the great Kanto earthquake in 1923, he rephrased the notion of comprehensive humanity in the following way: “[...] I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings are all about.” (Muschg 1991, 25) To claim that there is such a thing as a comprehensive humanity would then be pretentious. But to look for arts and media in which those pretentions are transformed into aesthetically distinguished suggestions is a legitimate, if slightly romantic task of media anthropology.

References Alt, Peter-André. Schiller: Leben – Werk – Zeit. 2 Volumes. München: C. H. Beck, 2000. Böhme, Gernot. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985. Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. 1990. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Claessens, Dieter. Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Damasio, Antonio R. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. Das Bewegungs-Bild: Kino I. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2009. Dissanayake, Ellen. Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Easterling, P. E. “A Show for Dionysus.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Ed. P. E. Easterling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Freyer, Hans. Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters. Stuttgart: DVA, 1955.

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Geertz, Clifford. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Gehlen, Arnold. Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter: Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957 Gehlen, Arnold. Urmensch und Spätkultur: Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen. Frankfurt a.M.: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1975. Giesen, Bernhard. Zwischenlagen: Das Außerordentliche als Grund der sozialen Wirklichkeit. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2010. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. Materialities of Communication. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Havelock, Eric. “Harold A. Innis – der Geschichtsphilosoph.” Harold A. Innis: Kreuzwege der Kommunikation. Ausgewählte Texte. Ed. Karlheinz Barck. Wien/New York: Springer, 1997. 14–27. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Trans. T. M. Knox. 2 Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Knorr Cetina, Karin. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass./ London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Latour, Bruno. Nous N’Avons Jamais Été Modernes: Essai d’Anthropologie Symétrique. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1991. (We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) Meredith, George. The Egoist. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Monneyron, Frédéric. La Sociologie de la Mode. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. Morin, Edgar. Le Cinéma ou l’Homme Imaginaire: Essai d’Anthropologie Sociologique. Paris: Minuit, 1956. Muschg, Adolf. Zeichenverschiebung: Über japanische Lebens- und Denkart. Eggingen: Edition Isele, 1991. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig. Das Mediale und das Imaginäre: Dimensionen kulturanthropologischer Medientheorie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Postill, John, and Mark Allen Peterson. “What is the Point of Media Anthropology?” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 17/3 (2009): 334–344. Reichs, Kathy. Déjà Dead / Death du Jour. London: Quality Paperbacks Direct, 2001. Rieger, Stefan. Die Individualität der Medien: Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. Rothenbuhler, Eric W., and Mihai Coman, eds. Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks/London/ New Delhi: Sage, 2005. Schelsky, Helmut. Soziologie der Sexualität. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955. Schelsky, Helmut. Introduction (“Einführung”) to the German edition of David Riesman. The Lonely Crowd: Die einsame Masse. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958. 7–19. Schelsky, Helmut. Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie der Bundesrepublik. 1965. München: Goldmann, 1979.



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Schluchter, Wolfgang. “Rationalität – das Spezifikum Europas?” Die kulturellen Werte Europas. Eds. Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2005. 237–264. Sloterdijk, Peter. Zorn und Zeit: Politisch-psychologischer Versuch. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. “Überlegungen zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals.” Die Kultur des Rituals: Inszenierungen, Praktiken, Symbole. Eds. Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas. München: Fink, 2004. 149–176. Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Storr, Anthony. Music and the Mind. London: HarperCollins, 1992. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Von gelobten und verfluchten Medienländern: Kanadischer Gesprächsvorschlag zu einem deutschen Theoriephänomen.” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 2 (2008): 113–152. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re) Cosmopolitism in a Chinese Metropolis.” Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Eds. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2002. 189–210.

Peter Ludes

Long-Term Power Presentation Shifts: From Key Audio-Visual Narratives to an Update of Elias’s Theory on the Process of Civilization Norbert Elias (1977/2009, 9, 16–17) highlighted three major long-term “complementary processes of functional differentiation, social integration, and civilization” as common characteristics of what other authors tried to subsume under various concepts of modernization. (Cf., e.g., Eisenstadt 2010, 2; cf. Eisenstadt 2002). The pace and rhythm of these processes as well as the modes of their complementarities and tensions vary considerably across historical epochs and world cultural zones. Also the prevailing formats and scopes of societal self-observations via various mass media differ significantly and have been reshaped time and again. Yet it is obvious, that throughout the twentieth century and accelerating in the beginning of the twenty-first century, mass-mediated audio-visual self-observations have become ever more important. The following interpretations of the detailed analyses of more than a hundred and fifty hours of centennial and annual TV reviews from Brazil, China, Germany, and the United States will focus on dominant power presentation patterns (Section 1). Combining previous visual and textual analyses mainly from the United States and Germany with recent computer-aided analyses of centennial and annual reviews from the four cultures will allow for an updating of Elias’s theory of civilizing processes (Section 2). Thereby, some general complementarities and tensions between various dimensions of functional differentiation, social integration, and civilization will be integrated in a model of multiple modernizations (Section 3).

1 Power Presentations 1.1 Centennial Reviews In his book The World: A Beginner’s Guide, Göran Therborn highlighted the following global patterns of power: “Because of politics and culture, human struggles for recognition and status become much more than fights for the most attractive (fe)males. […] They organize societies in symbolically laden hierarchical orders, castes, estates, classes, elites and the rest.” (Therborn 2011, 86) Since TV became globally by far the most important mass medium, its major information programs,



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centennial and annual reviews shape and frame collective (audio-)visual memories and ranking orders. Regular TV information programs can be considered as more pertinent for behaviour standards for more encompassing figurations than previously analyzed books on good manners – not only due to their wider scope and repetition, but also due to the more vivid character of moving visuals. (Cf. Baur and Ernst 2011, especially 132 f. and 135 f., n7 for data-driven insights) Broadcast and satellite TV viewing time remained worldwide more than three hours daily on average per person. (Nordicom 2010, 140) The re-usage and transformation of videos to online platforms will become an ever more important element of digital cultures. But we must be very cautious concerning the gross over-generalization implied in any denotation of, e.g., Brazilian, Chinese, German, or U.S.-American televisions or cultures: There are certainly highly significant distinctions in terms of generations, regions, income groups, rural-urban cleavages et cetera. Yet TV centennial and annual reviews provide us with a major probe of mass mediated collective visual presentation patterns and memories, reaching millions of people in repeated ritualistic cycles. As Eisenstadt summarized his life-long studies on various major civilizations, we must think in terms of “multiple modernities,” “multiple rationalities; and/or in multiple concrete experiences and traditions of different human communities.” (Eisenstadt 2010, 5) This insight also applies to power presentations, natural or war catastrophes, political, economic, or cultural crises. For in “each transition, media representations have played a crucial role of reimagiNation.” “Current research shows that […] global media images are recontextualized through national broadcasting frames.” (Beck/Levy 2013, 9, 17) In order to empirically detect long-term power presentations, we analyzed the centennial reviews from Brazilian, Chinese, and U.S. TV stations as well as the public broadcasting review in Germany and more than 95 hours of TV annual reviews from these four cultures, from 1999 to 2011. The running time of the TV centennial reviews in Brazil, China, Germany, and the United States (Total: 55:22:56) analyzed was: Table 1: Screen-running time of TV centennial reviews from the four cultures (hh:mm:ss) Country

Brazil

Screen-running time 3:40:36 Total 55:22:56

China

Germany

USA

29:02:52

16:30:00

6:09:28

The Brazilian Testemunha da História – Os Fatos que Marcaram o Século XX no Brasil e no Mundo (Witness of History – with Boris Casoy), broadcast in 2001, lasting 3 hours, 40 minutes, 36 seconds, was shown in Rederecord. It focuses not only on Brazil, but also covers many other countries and regions on a variety

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of topics: science and technology, entertainment, economy, international and national politics, natural disasters, and sports. This centennial review points back to Brazilian inferiority to Europe and the United States in the major part of the twentieth century, both in terms of the small percentage of coverage on Brazil itself, namely 12 %, and in terms of the major figures of the twentieth century, which were highlighted. The Twentieth Century of China highlights humiliation, Sino-Japanese wars, revolutions, and the emerging world power of China. It was first broadcast on CCTV1 (China Central Television), on January 02, 2000. Its director was Xiaoqing Chen. This review consists of 52 episodes, each with 6 or 7 parts and lasts 29 hours, 2 minutes, 52 seconds.1 The major epochs covered are the Qing dynasty (covered from 1899–1911), The Republic of China (1912–1949), and the People’s Republic of China (since 1949). It focuses on Revolutions (1911), Sino-Japanese Wars (1937–1945), Civil Wars (1945–1949), selected economic and social crises (1900–1949), and social progress (1949–1999). The major key audio-visual narratives of Chinese history in the twentieth century are presented as trends from humiliation to pride, from poverty to prosperousness, from a closed country to an open one, and from wars to peace. Multiple crises, especially international wars and civil wars, are the major themes of the first half of the twentieth century in China’s history. However, since then, a shift towards economic growth and a substantial improvement of the living conditions is highlighted. Nevertheless, the major topic in this Chinese TV centennial review is war. The countries taken into account are, far ahead of any other China, then Japan, and a few minor enemies or later competitors. The particular key audio-visual narrative structures of crises in the second half of the twentieth century indicate the following patterns: Political crises are solved by the Chinese Communist Party, the reminiscence of wars is used to encourage nationalism and enhance the legitimacy of and loyalty to party leadership. The Chinese review emphasizes the long and victorious national communist war to end the century of humiliation from the mid-nineteenth  to the mid-twentieth century and the rise of a world power under Communist Party leadership. As Zhao argues, the state “is invested with the normative expectations of promoting positive freedoms, defending territorial sovereignty, promoting national integration, as well as engendering social economic developments.” (Zhao 2012, 150) The German TV centennial review on 100 years, the countdown, the Images of the Century, produced by Guido Knopp, was first aired by the public broadcaster ZDF, at the end of 1999, and covers 1900–1999 in 99 episodes – the time in total 1 Based on the calculation of the videos exhibited on [accessed: 27 February 2013].



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is 16 hours, 30 minutes. This German self-portrayal focuses on the world wars in Europe as “catastrophes” of violence, hardly connected to previous economic or international crises, and, e.g., on the revolutionary street battles against tanks in East Berlin, 1953, Budapest, 1956, Prague, 1968, Beijing 1989, and Moscow 1991. The various, very short and usually issue-specific centennial reviews of the major commercial TV stations in the U.S. present their history implicitly as an account of God’s Own Country of the United States of America. They were broadcast on ABC, CBS, and NBC, from January 1999 to January 2000, totally 6 hours, 9 minutes, 28 seconds. Different from the Brazilian, Chinese, and German TV centennial reviews, their major focus is on human interest soft news, ahead of wars and the sciences. The U.S. centennial reviews cover the United States far ahead of any other country, as the major contestant on the murderous battlefields of the two world wars. The centennial reviews very rarely mention events in China, Japan, or the Soviet Union. There is a clear U.S. self-portrayal as the militarily, morally, technologically, politically, economically, culturally super(ior) world power. The U.S. centennial reviews celebrate a century of American global mission, grounded in democratic-moral and military-economic-cultural superiority. The TV centennial reviews from Brazil, China, Germany, and the U.S. show a continuation of national priorities and perspectives and imply a continuation of historical experiences and evaluations, a repertory of stereotypes for very few countries, issues, actors, but hardly any preparation for global risks or new (types of) crises. More particularly, these mass mediated self-observations of Brazil, China, Germany, and the United States focus on easily visible actors and events and international wars almost taken for granted as fate in Brazil and Germany, as national and the party’s mission in China and moral vision in the United States. Eric Hobsbawm concluded in his Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (1994, Ch. 15): The world of the twenty-first century will be transformed by violence and probably more by social breakdowns than by revolutionary crises. The visual analysis of the selected reviews supports this diagnosis as an inherited framework of violent problems and clashes. The general formal structure of the detected Key Audio-Visual Narratives in the selected digital media of Brazil, China, Germany, and the United States consists of: 1. Introduction: expose the setting, location and characters of the story 2. Exposition: the problem or task to be solved or challenged is portrayed and the relationships between the major actors are shown 3. Break: a dramatic moment, often combined with a dramatic comment by a main character 4. Action: fast and loud, spectacular scenes to draw attention 5. Outro: mostly somewhat calmer and slower footage.

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Mass mediated Key Audio-Visual Narratives thereby shape horizons, repertories of experience and habits and function as frameworks for alternatives in current and future power exercises, challenges, and various crises. This similar format implies a shared mode of narrating and remembering decisive past events for future horizons. (Cf. Bateman 2014a and 2014b) For example, the key centennial mass mediated audio-visual narratives of China, which were sketched above, show long periods of wars for gaining legitimate state power. The most widely disseminated collective audio-visual highlights of the twentieth century show that these – as most mass communications – have not become global (meaning, e.g., covering all parts of the world). Yet, mass mediated national “catastrophes” of the past century constitute major factors for conceiving new types of global crises in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The major information programs by the main TV stations continue a nationalistic worldview, focusing on a few (types of) actors as decisive: it is a small (screen) world almost of peers in appearance. History is constructed as a dramatic event series, held together by “anchor persons.” The Key Audio-Visual Narratives offer few answers to why something happened, name hardly any causes, reasons, patterns of developments: It is a history of often unconnected situations, almost beyond learning (by seeing), rationalization or continuous traits of civilization. The (legitimate) monopolization of (the exercise of) physical force and the successful taxation even of a majority of the populations were (or continue to be?) an exception. Individual actors with even a few options of limited rational choices are very exceptional. Yet there are long-term trends from completely male- and often soldiers-dominated phases to somewhat mixed actor types and non-violent challenges. Steven Pinker (2011) showed more generally how the monopolization of physical force and the civilization of behavior standards and personality structures, commerce, feminization, i.e. the increasing respect for “the interests and values of women,” cosmopolitanism, i.e., the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media and the “Escalator of Reason” combined to the historic decrease of violence. Among these factors, mass mediated national catastrophes as even the world wars are labeled and economic or political crises of the past century constitute major factors for conceiving new types of global crises and alternatives for actions in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

1.2 Annual Reviews Television annual reviews of the beginning of the twenty-first century refer to fundamental shifts of the “Future of Power:” “Conventional wisdom has always held



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that the state with the largest military prevails, but in an information age, it may be the states (or non-states) with the best story that wins. […] The ability to get the outcomes we want will rest upon a new narrative of smart power.” (Nye 2011, Xiii and XVii) For example, European issues were seldom taken into account in the last decade on China Central Television (CCTV), yet in 2011, European disunity was portrayed as a heterogeneous agglomeration of disunited blue Smurfs (CCTV13, 2011 annual review), under the leadership of a strong, yet sometimes ridiculous German Chancellor Merkel, kissing her companion, former French President Sarkozy. China Central Television usually focuses on Beijing, the harmonious social relations inside China, and the increasing power balance against other decreasing world powers, very often only the United States. Interviews with common people address privileged urban citizens, embodying the vision of more freedom of consumption. German and U.S. TV annual reviews present more problems than those of CCTV. The President of the U.S., the leaders of the member states of the EU and increasingly the German Chancellor are portrayed as the decisive actors, partially driven by unforeseen crises due to financial turbulences across the EU and the Eurozone. Heads of state are presented as the major deciders, despite all transformations of the nation states in globalizing interdependencies. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, however, heads of state often are presented as driven by financial markets. All interdependencies beyond easy personalization and short-term horizons are neglected. Thereby, personal small group experiences are projected to all kinds of national and international relations, simulating transparency and obviousness, even some reliability of the national and personal habits of political leaders and their transnational responsibilities. Norbert Elias stated in 1984 (204): “Specific sets of meaningful social symbols have at the same time the function of a means of communication and of a means of orientation.” Yet, they also disseminate various degrees of excommunication and disinformation, especially for intercultural relations. Thereby, they do not only contribute to integrating or even monopolizing spurts, but also to new types of cultural diversity and exclusion. In an attempt to “de-westernize” previous diagnoses of civilizing processes under the particular perspective of televisions, our intercultural research team takes into account TV annual reviews from Brazil and China as well as Germany and the U.S.; I selected the beginning year of 1999 in order to also archive and analyze centennial reviews.2 China Central Television (CCTV) has been taken 2 Our research team consisted of Professor Otthein Herzog, Juliana Cunha Costa, Jianxiu Hao, and Jan Mueller, all of Jacobs University Bremen. Our website www.keyvisuals.org offers access to my two Powerpoint presentations, which complement this book contribution. They offer integrated videos and detailed accounts of the samples and coding results: “Chinese, German, and

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into account since 2008; therefore, data prior to 2008 are not collected (except CCTV1). CCTV-新闻, or CCTV13, is CCTV’s news channel in Chinese language; it was set up in 2003, rooted in CCTV1, which was the major news and comprehensive channel. Afterwards, CCTV1 has become mainly a comprehensive channel, including diverse entertaining and informational programs. Referring back to analyses of German and U.S. TV news, broadcast from 1949 or 1952 to 1998, the power presentation patterns showed the following common standards (Ludes 2001, Ludes 2011 and www.keyvisuals.org): heads of state gave speeches, signed contracts, met other heads of state, appeared among crowds, and visited other celebrities. These few presentation patterns cover more than half of the videos in our sample of TV news in the U.S. and Germany from 1949 to 1998. In contrast, common people were mostly visualized as victims in catastrophes, applauding publics, or – less often – as demonstrators. The presentation time ratios of all heads of state vs. common people in the major TV news in Germany and the U.S. from 1949 or 1952 until 1998 were as follows (Ludes 2001, Ch. 18.4, 377 of the CD-ROM, Table 4.6): In the U.S., in the CBS Evening News, it was on average 13:9, only in November 1989 (in the week of the fall of the Berlin wall), it was in favour of common people, namely heads of state to common people 13:29. In the Federal Republic of Germany, in the public service Tagesschau, it was on average 15:5, even in November 1989, it was in favor of heads of state: When compared to common people the ratio was then 30:14. This preponderance of heads of state changed significantly during the past decade, especially after the world financial crisis since 2008. The presentation ratio between heads of state and common people shifted to an average in Germany of 1:4.6 and 1:2.2 in the U.S. Whether this power presentation ratio shift can be interpreted as a visual indicator of a power shift in favour of common people and a spurt in functional democratization is open to question. There are also signs that the TV annual reviews in Germany and the United States share a more general trend towards what has been dubbed ‘infotainment’ under new competition rules. Since 2002, Chinese TV annual reviews on CCTV1 showed common people far more often than heads of state – and in power presentation ratios far ahead of TV annual reviews in Germany or the U.S. This raises the basic question on how to interpret mass and network mediated visual data. Yet, also Pew surveys show some functional democratization in China compared to the U.S. Since 2006, more than 80% of China’s population was satisfied with their country’s general situation, compared to Germany with a percentage ranging from 29 to 43% and the U.S. from US Televisions: Long-Term Power Shifts” from 2012 and “Narratives of Crises on TV: Centennial Reviews from Four Cultures” from 2013.



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21 to 29%.3 By 2013, Germany was the only country with a major change – with more than 57% of the population expressing satisfaction with the country’s direction. For China and the U.S. satisfaction remained fairly stable at 85% and 31% respectively. The average presentation ratio between heads of state and common people in the major Chinese TV annual review is 1:19.4. In the 2010 annual review, no heads of state are shown. This special year-end edition promotes social role models, from volunteers of the World Expo in Shanghai and a warm-hearted couple voluntarily taking care of an old man living in the same community without any children, to a man donating blood. Stefan Kramer, Professor for the Society of China at the University of Leipzig (now at the University of Cologne), clarified in his mail from June 7, 2011 to me: These CCTV1 reviews intend to use the presentation of everyday people in order to enhance collective identity in terms of a harmonious society. In addition to these quantifiable results of our media content analyses, I refer only to a few visual examples.4 In contrast, as already stated, common people were mainly depicted as audience, demonstrators, or victims in catastrophes. China Central Television did not show deviations from a harmonious society. They present political and military leaders as benevolent caretakers, yet the major Chinese online platform Youku (the analysis of which cannot be presented here) tends to show some examples for local corruption or pollution. Finally, U.S. Televisions tend to downsize American Presidents in domestic campaigns, yet always support them in international crises, especially when going to war.

1.3 Communication Contexts and Economic Upheavals In the context of empirical communication research, e.g., interviews with journalists, guides in newsrooms, audience shares and reception analyses, TV news, centennial and annual reviews can be partially interpreted as observers of behaviour patterns and widely distributed (audio-)visual means of orientation. In China, they are also clearly “mouthpieces of the party.” Major media professionals regularly switch to positions as party functionaries thereby internalizing both, political and journalistic rules of behavior and personality structures. As Zhao highlights quoting a speech by Hu Jintao. (Hu 2004) 3  [accessed: 10 June 2012 and 17 September 2013]. 4 See the corresponding Powerpoint presentation with integrated videos in the category of research 2012 on www.keyvisuals.org.

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The ideological field has always been an important battle ground in the fierce struggles between us and enemy forces […] A problem in this front will lead to social chaos, even the loss of regime power […] a very important reason for the disintegration of the Soviet Union. (Zhao 2012, 152)

Even more fundamentally opposed to “Western” conceptions and conditions of journalistic means of orientation, the Chinese state “retains its power to appoint media officials” and “also established a comprehensive system of managing journalistic credentials.” (Zhao 2012, 155) These characteristics support Hanitzsch’s results from an international comparison “that political influences are not sufficiently factored in traditional analyses of the journalistic field, especially when state and public ownership of media comes into play.” (Hanitzsch 2011, 491; cf. Hanitzsch/Mellado 2011) All journalistic and scientific accounts as well as televisual presentations have their specific biases. “The experiences and assumptions of scholars located in the ‘advanced global North’ have defined the problems investigated and the methods employed to investigate them. This has always meant that the primary concerns of the field were defined by representatives of a small part of the human story.” (Sparks 2013, 122) Moreover, it is crucial to understand that there are many social developments hardly ever visualized in the mass media. TV news and annual reviews focus almost exclusively on urban centers and leading politicians, much less on representatives of economic, religious, military, or scientific institutions. This set of systematic biases appears to reflect more basic power balances for, e.g., “the main obstacle to China’s transition to a private consumption-driven growth pattern is the entrenchment of coastal urban-industrial vested interests in the political system” (Hung 2012, 146), which is also evident in the key visual narratives of CCTV’s annual reviews. Long-term experiences, anxieties, or hopes are almost never taken into account or visualized in the mass media news or reviews. The Chinese “century of humiliation” from the mid-nineteenth century to the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 is not referred to in TV annual reviews of the past years. It can however be assumed that as a national narrative it has left widespread scars on most Chinese people. But schools are still the primary social institutions that transmit national narratives about the past […] For example, the Party has conducted major revisions of its schools’ history textbooks since 1991. In the new textbooks, a patriotic narrative replaced the old class-struggle narrative. The official Maoist ‘victor narrative’ (China won national independence) was also superseded by a new ‘victimization narrative,’ which blames the ‘West’ for China’s suffering. (Wang 2008, 783 f.)



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In his biography of Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China, Ezra F. Vogel argues more generally: The transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society and the spread of a common national culture are among the most fundamental changes that have occurred in Chinese society since the country’s unification in 221 B.C. (Vogel 2011, 706)

With a long-term perspective, leading back before the “century of humiliation,” Asia, broadly construed, was the dominant region in the world economy. Calculated as percentage of world GDP from about 1000 to 2008, the Western world’s share rose from about 10% in 1000 to the culminating point of more than 56% in 1950, declining to about 38% in 2008. Asia declined from about 70% in 1000 to the minimum of almost 19% in 1950, rising to more than 43% in 2008. Focusing on the comparison between the U.S. and China since 1950, the following shift becomes apparent: In 1950, the U.S. had a share of 27.3% of the world GDP, declining to 18.6% in 2008, whereas that of China rose from 4.6% in 1950 to 17.5% in 2008. (Maddison 2008; Kentor et al. 2012) According to the Human Development Report 2013 (2), “Brazil, China and India combined are projected to account for 40% of global output by 2050, up from 10% in 1950.” Despite all problems of historical statistics and projections, these data show some plausible economic power upheavals and long-term shifts. Vogel argues: When China began opening in the 1980s, there were virtually no rules in place for food and drugs, product and workplace safety, working conditions, minimum wages, or construction codes. […] The situation in China under Deng was reminiscent of the rapacious capitalism of nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, when there were no anti-trust laws and no laws to protect workers. […] In some ways the situation in China during the Deng era was also similar to the nineteenth-century American West before there were local laws and courts.5 (Vogel 2011, 707)

Since the mid-nineties of the past century, it became ever more obvious that economy, society, and culture (to use the subtitle of Manuel Castells’s trilogy The Information Age, published from 1996–1998) have been transformed by continuously updated information and communication technologies. Mass media and network communication are not only forums and factors for public communication, they have become driving forces for “soft power.” (Nye 2011) Therefore, globalizing audio-visual narratives on CCTV and Youku indicate media presen5 Cf. also Mennell 2003, de Swaan 2003, and Mao’s calls for violence as summarized in Chang/ Halliday 2005, especially chapters 45–51.

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tations of emerging power networks and coordinated horizons for assumptions about current and potential future conditions for action. Moreover, visual analyses intend to detect patterns of presentation and reasoning usually beyond surveys or explicit verbal communication. A future focus on the presentation of the four modernizations emphasized in the People’s Republic of China since the seventies would include namely agriculture, industry, defense, and science. In terms of the propagation of long-term cultural memories, the Chinese national habits can be expected to lead to a transformed resurgence of a millennium of superiority. The following section will argue beyond the limited evidence presented so far. I will draw some general conclusions, mainly from my own empirical research during the past 25 years. (Cf. Ludes 1989, 2001 and 2011) Thereby I intend to contribute to an “updated” outline of a theory of civilizing processes, combining textual, statistical, and visual analyses and synopses. The combination of insights into communicative intentions and unplanned social processes should lead beyond one-sided perspectives.

2 Updating Elias’s Outline of a Theory 2 on the Process of Civilization 2.1 Re-Modeling Civilizing Patterns Somewhat similar to Marx’s diagnosis of a monopolization of the means of production, Elias postulated a more general monopolization of various means of constraint and control, integrating increasing interdependencies: 1. An increase of population size, communication, the division of labor, the use of money and urbanization 2. An increase of taxes and the domination by centers of power 3. The decrease of power and income of the aristocracy, its loss of the monopoly of the effective use of weapons, enhancing their dependence on others 4. A development of new war technologies 5. The purchase of soldiers, and a monopolization of the state’s exercise of physical force financed by taxes. Therborn argued more generally: “The evolution of humankind is a contingent, open-ended process, driven primarily through five fields of forces of the mode of livelihood, of demographic ecology, of distributions of recognition, rank and



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respect, of cultures of learning, communication and values, and of politics” (Therborn 2011, 84) and distinguished “five ancient civilizations” (Therborn 2011, 7), namely the Sinic, the Indic, the West Asian Muslim civilization, the European, and the sub-Saharan African. (Cf. Therborn’s contribution to this volume) The Sinic civilization, “centred in China, it spread far outside Han culture, to Korea, Japan and Vietnam […] is the oldest of all major civilizations today.” Taking into account here only “attributions of recognition, rank and respect,” it must be observed that these have become a partial prerogative for mass mediated visual presentation patterns, both in terms of domestic power presentation ratios, as illustrated in Section One, as well as intercultural perceptions. Among the top countries, shown in CBS TV annual reviews, 1999 to 2009, China received about 7% of screening time, behind the United States, Iraq, and Russia (Ludes 2011b, 55), whereas CCTV 4 and 9 reviews of 2008 and 2009 showed the United States in more than 30%. Concerning “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of China?” the Pew research center arrived at the following percentages for favorable views for these selected countries for 2002 to 2011: China for itself 88% to 95%, Germany 46% in 2005 to 34% in 2011 and the U.S. 43% in 2005 to 51% in 2011. China’s self-awareness is unmatched, Germany’s favorable view declined and it rose in the U.S.6 In contrast: “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of the EU,” in China fluctuated from favorable 40% in 2007 and 39 % in 2009 to 47% in 2010 and 32% in 2011, in Germany rather stably 68, 65, 62, and 66%, and in the U.S. significantly lower 47, 56, 57, and 55%.7 In global terms, China is expected to become the major world power. In 15 of 22 nations, the balance of opinion is that China either will replace or already has replaced the United States as the world’s leading superpower. […] Among Americans, the percentage saying that China will eventually overshadow or has already overshadowed the U.S. has increased from 33% in 2009 to 46% in 2011.8

However, such survey data sometimes shift considerably: “As for the Chinese, their views about the U.S. have shifted substantially since 2010. The number of Chinese who regard the U.S. favorably has fallen 15 percentage points in the last two years, from 58% to 43%.”9 6  [accessed: 10 June 2012]. 7  [accessed: 10 June 2012]. 8  [accessed: 10 June 2012]. 9  [accessed: 10 June 2012].

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Mass and network mediated televisions have transformed previous observations in print media; therefore contributions to a better understanding of civilizing processes since the mid-fifties of the past century should take visual analyses of screen media contents into account. This does not mean that televisions and visual analyses provide us with a priority of insights, but they offer inevitable means of (dis-)orientation and (ex-)communication for all human beings involved and thereby also for more detached observers. Contributing to Elias’s “outline of a theory of civilizing processes” (Elias 1939/2000, Vol. 2, Part 4), the following interdependencies of media upheavals and shifts of civilizing processes (Ludes 2011, Ch. 4.2) can be observed: 1. The “social constraint towards self-constraint” has become less obvious for those figurations whose humans participate regularly in various communication processes characterized by infotainment, entertainment, or edutainment. 2. The “spread of the pressure for foresight and self-constraint” has been shortened by ever more up to date real time interfaces. 3. “Diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties” have been radically supplemented or eroded by new types of increasing contrasts and fundamentally different (tele-)visions in multicultural, multi-modern, and multimedia societies. These contrasts are dramatized in most mass media. 4. The “courtization of the warriors” has been undermined by means of mass destruction available to small numbers of warriors or terrorists, even to children soldiers beyond traditional courtizations. (Cf., e.g., Münkler 2004, Freedman/ Thussu 2012) Waging (civil) wars or terrorist acts for viewers far beyond immediate relations has put violence and its control under the impact of televisions. 5. “The muting of drives: psychologization and rationalization” has relied on basic security levels concerning food and housing, health and non-violence. This increase in the level of personal security has been achieved almost worldwide but by no means universal. “Classes living permanently in danger of starving to death or of being killed by enemies can hardly develop or maintain those stable restraints characteristic of the more civilized types of conduct.” (Elias 1939/2000, 428 f.) But, for example, “In 2005 more than 1 billion people in low-income countries had no access to clean drinking water, and some 2.5 billion lived without water sanitation [...] Contaminated water and poor sanitation kill about 4,000 children every day [...] Deaths among adults raise this to at least 1.7 million fatalities per year. Add other waterborne diseases, and the total surpasses 5 million. In contrast, automobile accidents claim about 1.2 million lives per year [...] roughly equal to the combined total of all homicides and suicides, and armed conflicts kill about 300,000 people per year.” (Smil 2008, 199) Yet these dark sides of human survival fights hardly enter widely distributed television programs, probably because



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these billions of people are neither considered as potential consumers nor as potential political threats by major economic and political decision-makers and therefore also by media professionals. 6. “Shame and repugnance” have been fundamentally re-configured via new television formats, online portals, and social forums, which show behavior, highly indecent according to earlier standards of acceptability. The proliferation of images that cause shame, repugnance and discomfort has increased with clearer images and a more pervasive hold on the ordinary lives of people in so called ‘reality’ television shows or social forums. 7. “Increasing constraints on the upper class: increasing pressures from below” have already been quite different in societies like China, whose sheer size of territory and population was far beyond the scope of France, Germany, the UK, mainly taken into account by Elias. As Max Weber stated in Economy and Society (1920, here 2009, 349): “Because of the tremendous expansion of the empire, and the small number of officials relative to the size of the population, the Chinese administration was neither intensive nor was it centralized under the average ruler. The directives of the central agencies were treated by subordinate offices as discretionary rather than binding.” (Cf. also Brandstadter 2003 and Stebbins 2009)

2.2 Integration and Exclusion Globalizing “income or wealth elites” (cf., e.g., Levy 2011) of the twenty-first century own residences in many countries, they control multinational corporations and have several passports. They send their children to international schools and universities. Therefore, we cannot assume universally similar balances of constraints on “the upper classes.” As Phillips and Osborne recently claimed on www.projectcensored.org: 1,500 billionaires possess two times as much wealth as the 2.5 billion least wealthy people. [...] Estimates are that the total world’s wealth is close to $200 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 percent of that total; meanwhile, the poorest half of the global population together possesses less than 2 percent of global wealth. The World Bank reports that in 2008, 1.29 billion people were living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, and 1.2 billion more were living on less than $2.00 a day. Thirty-five thousand people, mostly young children, die every day from starvation.10

10  [ac­cessed: 1 October 2013].

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Yet, human poverty was considerably reduced during the last years. Therefore, we can conclude that so-called globalizing processes are characterized both by the exclusion and integration of billions of people when taking into account the major means of subsistence. Elias’s thought experiment of 1984 (224 f.) highlights the mutual complementarities of the means of violence and the means of orientation: “One may doubt whether a vast industrializing empire requiring for its advance a relatively high standard of secular knowledge could be kept together by the threat of physical force alone.” Gorbachev’s combination of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) undermined the party control in general; as quoted above, high officials from the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China tried to learn from the Soviet experience of failure and to propagate economic perestroika without media glasnost. (Cf. Sparks 2010) In a new author’s note to the revised English translation of Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, Elias stated: Thus, in the political strategies of China, for instance, one can discover a level of selfrestraint at least on a par with that of the most highly developed industrial nations. Although in terms of its own economic development China still lags behind, its state formation process in terms of duration and continuity surpasses that of most other existing state societies of our time.11 (2000, 410)

Deng Xiaoping’s selected works from 1982 to 1992 partially support this interpretation yet also show some ambivalence in Deng’s talk with former President Richard Nixon on 31 October 1989: The United States should take the initiative putting an end to the strains in Sino-American relations […] each country should proceed from its own long-term interests, and at the same time respect the interests of the other […] if the developing countries of the Third World, like China, have no national self-respect and do not cherish their independence, they will not enjoy that independence for long. (Deng 1994, 320 f.)

This refers back to Deng’s talk with Mikhail Gorbachev on 16 May 1989: Starting from the Opium War […] China was subjected to aggression and enslavement by foreign powers and reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal status. […] The countries that took greatest advantage of China were Japan and czarist Russia – and at certain times and concerning certain questions, the Soviet Union. (Deng 1994, 284)

11 Ideas concerning scientific knowledge power were also focused on in Elias’s Knowledge and Power from 1984. Cf. Gu 2011, for example chapter 15, concerning the significant increase of China’s investment into education.



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But the challenge to Elias’s “outline” of a theory of civilizing processes is more fundamental. As Therborn concludes: “Global high culture and learning will become increasingly de-Europeanized and Asianized. […] The relative weight of the two cultures, the territorial and the virtual, will probably not be decided on the cultural field, but by what will happen to the geopolitics of state power.” (Therborn 2011, 225 f.; cf. also Ferguson 2011) In terms of the much more particular televisions reviewed here, we must be aware of their biases, which reduce visual evidence and require additional sources as well as the more fundamental theories advanced by Elias and Therborn. Let me conclude here that Therborn’s The World from 2011 is indeed “A Beginner’s Guide” realistically not starting from any pre-eminence of European developments or theories, but from a multitude of civilizations. This insight should be combined with the synopsis of new types of data like global statistics and comparative national televisions in order to carry on the torch of our insights into burning issues. Moreover: “Chinese communication scholars are obliged to confront a new conjuncture that requires a new para­digm in order to combine theory and practice on the basis of ‘Chinese characteristics’.” (Zhengrong et al. 2013, 148)

3. Multiple Modernizations 3.1 Chinese Scenarios Internally, China’s stability can be threatened by a considerable number of the “have-less” of a new “working-class network society” comprising about 150 million internal migrants, “more than 30 million laid-off workers, another 100 million or so retirees, and a large number of the 189 million youth between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, including about 30 million students as well as school dropouts, unemployed and underemployed youth.” (Qiu 2009, 4) As emphasized in the special Human Development Report of China 2007/2008: At the broadest level, the difficulties faced by internal migrant laborers and their families in accessing all basic public services in their new urban settings serve as a large impediment. An integrated national social insurance system that allows workers to carry their benefits from one job to another, and from rural areas to urban areas, would allow workers to move to new employment without incurring large losses in their pensions and great risks of losing other forms of insurance. (Qiu 2009, 31, 45)

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Despite the Pew research center’s survey figures summarized above, one can therefore assume that several millions of Chinese citizens are less satisfied than the opinion polls indicate, at least if they are immediate victims of dangerous working conditions, polluted environments, or police beat ups – and become more aware of increasing inequality and increasingly visible corruption. As John Keane argued: There is also a vast labyrinth of surveillance that depends on a well-organised, reportedly 40,000-strong Internet police force. Skilled at snooping on Wi-Fi users in cyber cafés and hotels, it uses sophisticated data-mining software that tracks down keywords on social networking sites such as Xiaonei and search engines such as Baidu, along the way issuing warnings to Web hosts to amend or delete content considered unproductive of ‘harmony.’ (Keane 2012, 29)

Demonstrations and strikes are potential threats to the powerful party and various economic leaders, especially as more corruption scandals will be made public on less controllable blogs. If I may offer a thought experiment: The technical possibilities in developing new software blocking the “Great Firewall” and challenging internet censorship would open up new opportunities for making public the atrocities of the Chinese repression agencies. At the same time, such developments would enable networking among oppositionist movements. Combined with the increasing awareness of environmental pollution and a relative decline of the growth of GDP per capita, due to, e.g., more senior citizens in the pension age without real pension rights, new protest will be expressed in the streets, at educational institutions, and at work places in various major cities. New generations no longer feel the crash down of the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989 – and at least some members of the military, police, and secret service will be less prepared and inclined to kill peaceful demonstrators. The reluctance towards using physical violence probably will also enhance somewhat due to the widely propagated harmonious society. The contemporary lack of concrete experiences with violence on a large scale becomes more prevalent, the farther away the political and military, secret service, and police leaders move from the Second World War, the cultural revolution, and the repression of the occupation of Tiananmen Square by democratic protestors or “the counter-revolutionary rebellion” in Deng’s words (quoted above) in 1989. Such long-term impacts can be experienced, memorized, and ordered in many societies in different ways for different groups of people and according to economic, political, or military challenges or threats. Such collective memories and horizons provide contemporary actors with some background assumptions framing and shaping even highly innovative “networks of outrage and hope.” (Castells 2012)



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3.2 More Cultural Diversity and Exclusion than 3.2 Global Integration I use the more colloquial term of “habits” rather than “habitus” in order to highlight a shift from very long-term continuities of behavior standards and personality traits even across generations to more fluid ones. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, habits are driven on mainly by the new presentation patterns of mass mediated communication and social forums, increasingly also across previous cultural borders. Nevertheless also some of these more fluid habits carry on modified “learned practices and standards that have become so much part of ourselves that they feel self-evident and natural […] congealed history, absorbed into our bodies.” (Kuipers 2010, 3) In China, e.g., the look back to a global superiority in the major part of the second millennium has prepared a historical self-awareness and a national pride. The century of humiliation from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century still lingers on in most of the political, military, and educational leaders’ minds, deeply engrained by school and mass media. This past humiliation implies some basic feeling of having been existentially threatened, which reminds me of Elias’s emphasis on Poland and Germany as the two major European countries with historical experiences of a long-term lack of national sovereignty. The experience and repeated narrative of the victory against the Japanese aggressor in the Second World War provides another master trend of national habits, which supports again the feeling of the necessity of being prepared against attacks from any foreign power – as was also expressed in Deng’s talk with Gorbachev in May 1989 (quoted above). There are distinct experiences of modernity or multiple modernities within and between national cultures, which are strategically framed by media presentations, combined with long-term conventions of seeing and showing. National habits are therefore neither static nor one-dimensional. This pattern gains in importance when we finally turn to so-called global information and knowledge societies. (Cf. especially Mansell/Tremblay 2013) In terms of access to mass and network media, humankind lives in a highly stratified world. If we use traditional majority rules, any talk of global information or communication is misleading. Local, regional, culture-specific domain assumptions, taboos, traditions, and standards of “information and knowledge” prevail. Existential threats, religious or tacit knowledge as well as the (Bill) Gates- or Windows-keepers condition the definition, acceptance, inclusion or exclusion of wide varieties of mass media or scientific knowledge. The fragility of modern societies is in large part due to conflicts concerning old scarcities of means for survival in large parts of the world – more than due

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to often fundamentally different understandings of what can be considered as information or knowledge. The shifting balances of ignorance and knowledge and their contradictory definitions and interpretations leave little space for common knowledge and truly common sense: In global terms, the latter is a very scarce resource. In a sense more global than many types and interpretations of knowledge are the formats in which mass media present information, entertainment, commercials or the various mixtures of these major genres. In contrast to, e.g., books on good manners, prayers or sermons, widely distributed mass media re-produce similarly standardized formats, from book chapters or newspaper articles to radio or television broadcasts and the design of websites and social forums. But these common formats are put into national and regional contexts, based on and framed by national education institutions, languages, and hierarchies of relevance. Norris and Inglehart understood globalization “to be multidimensional, encompassing economic aspects, such as the flow of trade, labor, and capital; social aspects, such as interpersonal contacts and mediated information flows; political dimensions, including the integration of countries into international and regional organizations.” (Norris/Inglehart 2009, 6) More specifically: “The mass media are only one avenue for learning about the world […] Socialization processes include all the factors and agencies whereby values, attitudes, roles, skills, and patterns of behavior are transmitted from one generation to the next […].” (Norris/Inglehart 2009, 39) Therefore, we must combine the comparison of long-term power shifts with synopses of only partially globalizing standards of behavior, knowledge, and the awareness of different views. For such comparisons, languages are the major components, usually taken for granted as mother tongues or modes of scholarly communication to identify and classify personal experiences, statistical categories, or media genres. Therefore, linguistics and literary studies continue to be necessary also for comparative media studies and sociological theories. In this line of argument, the data and interpretations presented show more cultural diversity and exclusion than global integration.

Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to inspiring conversations with Norbert Elias, from 1980 to 1988, in Bielefeld, Bloomington, and Amsterdam, as well as with Johan Goudsblom during my visits to Amsterdam in the eighties. This research would have been impossible without the dialogues with Jianxiu Hao, who performed the



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analysis of the Chinese reviews: Thank you so much. Parts of this essay were presented at the opening conference of the new Humanities, Modernity, Globalization Research Center at Jacobs University Bremen on 7 June 2012, dedicated to the topic of this volume, at the conference on “Re-Inventing Elias: for an open sociology” at the University of Amsterdam, 23 June 2012, at the University of Leipzig in their Masterclass “Parallaxes of Knowledge” on 3 July 2012, and on 29 August 2013, at the 11th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Turin, “Crisis, Critique, and Change:” “Narratives of Crises on TV: Centennial Reviews from Four Cultures.” I am grateful to personal talks with Göran Therborn, emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Stefan Kramer, Professor for the Society of China, Leipzig, and Dominic Sachsenmaier, Professor of Modern Asian History and Coordinator of the Research Center on “Transformations in Europe and Asia: Markets, States, Societies” at Jacobs University Bremen until 2015 (now at the University of Göttingen).

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[accessed: 1 October 2013]. Qiu, Jack. Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2009. Smil, Vaclav. Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. Sparks, Colin. “China’s Media in Comparative Perspective.” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010): 552–566. Sparks, Colin. “Global Media Studies: Its Development and Dilemmas.” Media, Culture & Society 35/1 (2013): 121–131. Stebbins, Andrew. The Chinese Civilizing Process: Eliasian Thought as an Effective Analytical Tool for the Chinese Cultural Context. PhD thesis. Perth: Murdoch University, 2009. Therborn, Göran. The World: A Beginner’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Therborn, Göran. “Globality and Modernity: Making Concepts Raise Research Questions.” (in this volume) Vogel, Ezra. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Von Bernstorff, Andreas Graf, and Annika Serfass. “Siegen ohne zu kämpfen.” politik & kommunikation (March 2012): 37–38. Wang, Zheng. “National Humiliation, History Education, and the Politics of Historical Memory: Patriotic Education Campaign in China.” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2008): 783–806. Weber, Max. “China: The Chinese Empire, Deep Kinship Ties, Sib Fetters upon the Economy, and Patrimonial Structure of Law.” 1920. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with other Writings on the Rise of the West. 4th ed. Translated, edited and introduced by Stephen Kalberg. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 349–369. Zhao, Yuezhi. “Understanding China’s Media System in a World Historical Context.” Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Eds. Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 143–173.

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Zhengrong, Hu, Zhang Lei, and Ji Deqiang. “Globalization, social reform, and the shifting paradigms of communication studies in China.” Media, Culture & Society 35/1 (2013): 147–155.

Bettina Lindorfer

Inner Language Spaces: Migration and Plurilingualism from a Psycholinguistic Perspective At a first glance, modernization and globalization bring about a unification of the global linguistic landscape, which threatens to repress minor languages. Different accents and ‘dialects’ run counter to this process of unification though. All the more, opposite trends come into view in a micro-perspective. On the one hand, people who acquired multilingual skills through migration alter language and culture as the second language enriches the culture of the mother tongue. On the other hand, mobility and flexibility cause a diversifying process that illustrates patterns and regularities of multilingualism and multiculturalism. The following discussions consider the conflicts and synergy effects of the process at issue. “I can see the advantages of speaking German now with my current therapist,” says a French woman who has been living in Berlin for nine years, who previously underwent psychoanalysis for many years in her own language. She continues, “I think my dream would almost be to forget my mother tongue, because in Muttersprache there is Mother and when I speak in German I don’t have the weight of my mother.” (P8: 32:12) In contrast to this an Italian woman stresses that for her, a “dream had come true” when she was able to talk about her psychoanalytical experiences for the first time in her mother tongue. Being able to talk (with colleagues) in her own language about it, was like a “bridge back,” enabling her to be reunited with something – her own psychoanalysis in her second language, German – that had until now been separate. (P1: 14:17) Many statements of this kind suggest that people who recount something about themselves in a second language – not only in psychotherapy, incidentally – perceive what they are relating with less emotion and as something more separate from themselves than if they were saying ‘the same thing’ in their own language. An Italian man (late 40s) who for ten years underwent a traditional psychoanalysis in his second language confirms this to be his experience, namely that his two languages represent ‘two worlds’ for him, “two differentiated and separate worlds” which were “naturally connected.”12 (P2: 32:58) The flaw inherent in this ‘natural connection’ was described by an Italian woman who, at the time of her analysis had been living in Berlin for three years and who quit therapy 12 “due mondi differenziati, separati che però ovviamente uniti dentro di me.” (P2: 32:58)

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after one and a half years: “it was as though I couldn’t really bring my Italian world with me into the analysis.” (P12: 15:28) I could go on with similar quotes. And incidentally this two-fold ‘lingualworld-view’ is enunciated not only by bilingual people who undergo psychoanalysis for reasons of mental health, but also those who do so in the course of training to become therapists. How do such statements fit with “transnational linguistic capital as a resource in a globalized world,” which, for example, Jürgen Gerhards (2010) refers to regarding a second and/or foreign language? With reference to Fodor (1975) and Pinker’s ‘mentalese’ Gerhards assumes the interplay between language and worldview to be a myth. (Gerhards 2010, 17) But as well as having a ‘socializing’ function, Gerhards concedes – to quote Max Weber – that language also has a ‘communalizing’ function,13 which is based “on the subjectively felt togetherness of those involved” and describes a kind of identity function. This does not prevent him however from arguing, at the end of his book, that “the dominance of English as the lingua franca be not only accepted as a necessity but also actively promoted” (Gerhards 2010, 214), so that the people of Europe can at last “communicate in one and the same language,” “profit from the European economic area,” “enter political negotiations” and “enter into [transnational] love relationships.” (Gerhards 2010, 213) In the following, I would like to explore what role the use of a second language plays in the inner experience of language. Given the tremendous acceleration over the last decades of global communication networks and the high volume of multimedia, this question arises with increasing frequency for an increasing number of people. Put simply, I would like to explore in this paper what impact ‘globalization’ has upon language for multilinguals, by focussing on people who live in a second language – that is, Kluge’s Type 1 of migration. Table 1: Following Kluge 2005, 64

International migration National migration

With language change

Without language change

Type 1 Turkish in Germany Type 3 Catalan in South-Spain

Type 2 Spanish in Argentina Type 4 (Sicilian in Italy)

The subjects of this enquiry are bilingual people who after having emigrated have undergone psychotherapy in a second language. My focus is their experience of bilingualism in the course of this therapy, especially in the way they deal with periods lived in their first language. The hypothesis is that bilingual people who 13 Weber 1985, 21, cit. in Gerhards 2010, 37.



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have to talk about very personal and occasionally painful experiences in a second language, not only have to manage a complicated linguistic situation, but also become highly sensitized to the differences in linguistic expression between their first and second languages. Perhaps one could imagine some therapy sessions as being like an inner-bilingual workshop in slow motion and put under the microscope. The paper aims to show that for multilinguals it is a big challenge to express themselves in a second language in these emotional and intimate arenas. My aim is to provide insight into their ‘lingual worldview:’ what I call ‘inner language spaces.’ The paper will be divided into four parts: In section one I will identify the subjects of this study. In section two I will situate the work in a specific area of study and explain my methods. Section three will then begin to provide insights into the results of my questionnaire and I will draw up these conclusions in section four.14

1 Multilingual – Highly Educated/Qualified – 1 (Trans-)Migrant What does it mean to be a multilingual, well-educated (highly qualified) migrant? What is the experience of highly qualified migrants with a multilingual repertoire when they are verbalizing and reflecting in a second language (L2) upon personal, intimate and often painful memories lived in their first language (L1)? By ‘bi-’ or ‘multilingual’ I understand – following Georges Lüdis’ definition – “individual[s] who at some point in their life ha[ve] regularly used two or more languages in daily communication and who can switch from one language to the other.” (Lüdi 1996, 234; cf. Lüdi/Py 2003, 10) For me multilingualism is independent of the symmetry of linguistic competence, the modalities of language acquisition and the distance between the competence in each language. For me the decisive factor for multilingualism is social interaction. I would therefore like to distance myself from a definition which only considers that bilingualism is where both languages are mastered at the level of a native speaker, and that an absolute symmetry exists in the use of both. This definition most frequently only applies to those who have grown up bilingually (“double first language acquisition”). (Klein 1987; Oksaar 2003; Kielhöfer 2001; Bausch et al. 2003) We will see how 14 I must apologize in advance for dealing with a work in progress. Neither the collection of data nor an evaluation of the survey have yet been fully completed at this stage.

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many bilingual people (by my definition: people who speak and interact in two languages) suffer from not achieving a kind of perfect or symmetrical bilingualism and thus even develop a kind of inferiority complex. For me a migrant is someone who, during the course of his/her life, has changed his/her place of residence.15 The ‘migrants’ I am interested in often do not think of themselves as ‘migrants.’ More likely will they refer to themselves as ‘expat, professional, specialist’ (Erfurt/Amelina 2008, 24) since the term ‘migrant’ is generally associated with educational disadvantage and parallel societies. Highly qualified migrants are indeed often transmigrants in that they repeatedly only remain in one place for a few years before moving on to another place (and language), which in its turn may be only temporary. Due to their professional anchorage, highly qualified individuals are often considered (well-)integrated or at least free of problems of integration. Since Cohen’s study of ‘Expatriate Communities’ (1977) it has been known that particu­ larly highly qualified migrants often develop a subsystem within a host society – in other words a socially exclusive society which has the tendency not to learn the language of its adoptive country and whose interaction is at best extended to speakers of English. High failure rates illustrate the unsatisfactory nature of their supposed ‘integration’ into a host society. One may suppose that the ‘soft factor’ of language rather than professional capability, is responsible for a 15–85 percent early return to their native country.16 Until now there has been very little research in this field. This must largely be due to the fact that – more than others – the groups of people under the study represent patterns of linguistic migration which operate at different levels in political and economic terms in an increasingly globalized professional marketplace. These people seemingly elude an abstract/conceptual definition and as transmigrants they are distinguished by a very individual way of life and structured individual language contacts. Often they come from ‘migrational families,’ and can be under pressure to perpetuate a way of life which marked their childhood and which incurred no small amount of suffering for them as either children or adolescents. The individuals who are the focus of my research were ‘settled,’ at least during the time of a therapy lasting several years.

15 See the definition on the homepage of the Berlin-Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung, [accessed: 16 January 2016]. 16 These quite broad numbers are given by Deller 1996, 284–285; cf. Erfurt/Amelina 2008, 27.



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2 Area of Study – Body of Work – Method My research is based upon the language attitudes of multilinguals in migration. My target group – multilingual migrants with many years of therapy in a second language – are people who have lived an intensely personal experience in a second language and who on account of this have become extremely sensitized to the articulation of this personal experience. The method I employ is a thematic interview, following Schütze’s narrative interview. I am interested in the experiences and communication strategies which the interviewees report, and those observable during the course of our conversation.17 The first aim is to try to have as natural a conversation as possible with the interviewee on the subject of lingual self-awareness. The second is to try and get them to do most of the talking. To my knowledge, the linguistic consciousness of migrants undergoing therapy in a second language has not yet been properly researched. Up until now only the comments and observations of the therapists who conducted the treatments were available. (Grinberg 1984; Kronsteiner 2003; Möhring (ed.) 1995; Pedrina et al. (ed.) 1999; Winter-Heider 2009; Zeul 1995) The affective weight of an individual’s language has however (indirectly) been discussed in research on migrants without directly questioning those concerned. The fact that this hasn’t happened yet must presumably be related to the fact that access to the patients is far from easy. They are not registered in any central directory but research relies upon the psychotherapists’ support, and they are naturally in no hurry to pass on the names of their (ex-)patients or those who might be best suited to taking part in the study. Nor, understandably, can great enthusiasm be discerned amongst relevant subjects to participating in a survey of this kind: judging by the poor response to date, the hurdle (for former patients) of taking the initiative and registering as a participant still seems insurmountable. Significant numbers of participants in this study were therefore future therapists themselves, with a quasiprofessional interest in the questions raised. I conducted a total of 19 interviews. The core of this research consists of 17 multilingual interviews (languages spoken were German, French, English, Italian and Portuguese) and 2 conducted in German lasting between 0:29:21 and 1:16:00 hours (average duration approximately 40 minutes).18 Most interviews were conducted bilingually, one was trilingual and two were monolingual. My interviewees are first generation adult migrants, living in major cities: Berlin, Rome, and Paris. Approximately a third came from bilingual families. Participants 1–7 were those 17 In parallel to this survey, I am also interviewing educated, multilingual adults who have not undergone therapy and international students with double or multi language acquisition. 18 In this case the first languages of the informants were Syrian, Arabic and Turkish.

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who had parents who spoke another language and, P 9, 10, 15 were those who had grandparents who spoke another language. About a third of the interviewees could be described as transmigrants. Two (female) interviewees had undergone years of therapy in both their first and second languages and at least three shorter therapies in their first language. At the time of therapy they had lived for at least 5 years in their adoptive countries. The majority of participants were female (only 3 were male),19 aged between 32 and 67, with an average age of 43. Participants received an information leaflet, the questionnaire, and a form in which they were asked to explain their consent to participation. Subsequently an appointment was made for about an hour’s conversation to which they were asked to bring the completed questionnaire about their linguistic background, the acquisition of their second language and the competence and frequency with which they use the respective languages.20 At the start of each interview I briefly explained the method of the thematic interview but also invited the participants to ‘talk freely.’ The questions I prepared were designed mainly to provide open cues whilst at the same time trying to ensure that all my points were addressed. All interviews were based on the same framework which – if possible – I prepared for each participant in ‘his or her’ language. In each interview the first question always addressed the meaning of the interviewee’s bilingualism “What does it mean to you to be bilingual?.” The remaining questions followed my outline but were adapted to the structure of each interview. I tried to allow as natural a conversation as possible to emerge (the recording device was used discretely). Shortly after each interview I noted my general impressions as well as any initial paralinguistic anomalies.21 The conversation revolved around the three following key questions which were not, however, posed directly as questions: 1. What differences in the experience and expression of emotionality are apparent between first and second language? Content as well as performance (i.e. accent, code-mixings, gestures) must also be considered. 2. How do interviewees deal with emotionally loaded words in their first language during therapy?

19 This might be due to the predominant participation of (future) therapists. 20 Partly in rooms of Humboldt University, partly in chambers of the Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaft; two conversations took place in a coffee shop; the predominant number in the participants’ apartments. 21 The interviews were recorded with an Olympus Linear PCM Recorder LS-5 and extracts transcribed with the help of the freely available transcription software f5. The first three interviews with Syrian, Turkish and British participants were originally conceived as ‘pre-survey’ but proved to be usable for the survey.



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3. Do they perceive themselves differently when speaking in their second language? Results are available to similar, related surveys. Even in the case of early second language acquisition, the ability to express affect appears to be differently trained in each language. (Wierzbicka 1996; Hoffman 1989) With regard to emotionality, Pavlenko combines quantitative and qualitative methods in his survey of 389 people, showing on the one hand that language dominance is the decisive factor in emotional expression (cf. Dewaele 2009, 114), but on the other, with a qualitative analysis of accounts (Pavlenkow 2004) a second language may also be the more emotional language where linguistic socialization has encouraged it. Koven, Pavlenko and Dewaele have done research in self-perception and external perception in the use of first and second languages. In a three-step study of 23 French-Portuguese bilinguals, Koven (1998) ascertained that bilinguals perceived themselves differently when using French or Portuguese. Initially they were interviewed regarding their feelings when speaking each language, next they were asked to recount a single incident in both languages, and finally these stories were evaluated by an individual of the same age and background in relation to how the emotions were conveyed in each language. In 2006 in a quantitative and qualitative case study of the daughters of Portuguese immigrants who had grown up in France, Koven documented that the women were perceived as angrier and generally more intense when they spoke French and appeared calmer and more reserved in Portuguese. The self-perception of 1039 bi- and multilinguals indicates that, when discussing their linguistic self, two thirds of them are aware of a change in personality when they switch language: “two thirds do perceive a personality change when switching languages, at least in some contexts.” (Pavlenko 2006, 27) At the same time it was emphasized that this was not only true for migrants or those who acquire a second language later in life, but also for adults who have grown up bilingually. Emotion in a first language appears significantly greater in regard to taboo words.22 (Dewaele 2009, 121)23

22 What is interesting here is the observation of P3: for her, vulgar associations of the Turkish swearword öküz ‘oxen’ also determine the interpretation of the German swearword Ochse ‘oxen,’ turning the German one into a bad word for her. The German (Dreck-)Sau, which sounds grave to most of German speakers, however, sounds less serious to her. (P3: 1:08:12) 23 This is confirmed by my research in response to the question which language participants use when swearing; participants admit that they tend to fall back on their first language.

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3 Insight into Results I can only give a brief insight into the responses of my – as yet incomplete – study and would therefore like to limit myself to a few aspects of my findings. To start with I grant that the self-expression of every participant hinges upon a multitude of diverse factors, such as when each language was acquired, the intensity and nature of acquisition, how close first and second languages are, individual motivation and aptitude etc. – factors which can only be explored here in little detail. In this paper, I will leave aside important factors such as the various schools of therapy each therapist trained in (Freudian, Kleinian, tiefenpsychologisch), whether the therapist treats patients in their mother tongue or also in a second language and to what extent therapists have mastered the mother tongue of their patient. 24 The only criterion for participation was that they should have undergone therapy for more than a year in a second language. To summarize I can say that most of the participants mentioned that they had not reflected much on the subject of language before undergoing psychoanalysis, and remarked that it was only in the course of their therapy that they encountered differences and problems in the use of their second language. A further result is that all participants except one considered their bilingualism to have been an enrichment of their therapy and emphasized mostly positive aspects of it. However, four participants (P1, P6, P7 and P11) at first discussed negative consequences of their bilingualism in relation to their migration (they said they were “nowhere really at home” and testified to an “impoverishment” or “a loss of intensity in their mother tongue.” I would like to give some further results of my survey before finally discussing two peculiarities of the interviews and answers – namely the frequency of the subject of shame and a self-critical evaluation of the participants’ bilingualism. One subject concerns the doubts the interviewees have about being understood in the second language. These doubts firstly concern their own linguistic competence and secondly, the receptive capacity of the therapist (P1: 7:43). Together with their doubts concerning linguistic competence the participants express doubts about the possibility of saying in their second language relating to certain things felt in their first language: I felt the limits, I felt that I couldn’t transport certain things, because the German language doesn’t have these expressions [Arabic bersek] at its disposal. (P4: 27:37) There are certain things which you can’t really translate, expressions which come spontaneously to your mind, expressions of the body [des expressions du corps quoi]. (P13: 11:17) 24 At least three informants had experiences in such interalloglot therapies as well.



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Another participant argues that the sensuality of the Italian expression la mia donna‚ ‘my woman/my lady’ is not translatable into German (P1: 08:58); another complained about the non-translatability of Italian song texts which had been crucial for him: “avevo fatto veramente fatica a tradurglielo in tedesco.” (P2: 25:39) (English: I was really tired of translating it for [the analyst] into German (P2: 25:39)) All of the participants could name linguistic expressions in their first language which at certain moments in the therapy played an important role and were difficult to translate in the polyphony they experienced: Engl. something I have to get off my chest. Sard. inpoiare ‘to swim and to be naked’ Turk. ayip (shame, ignominy, it’s bad manners to...) Arab. bersek ‘pubic hair;’ literally: beside the stomach/the belly Turk. öküz ‘ox’ (bad Turkish swear word) Thai. Thong pai [‘golden leaf:’ name of the nursemaid] (P6: 15:10) The second point concerns communicative strategies as a patient in therapy in a foreign culture. First the choice of analyst: Some participants chose for at least one of their treatments a psychoanalyst who was him-/herself a bilingual migrant of another culture. Although most participants declared never to have spoken in their mother tongue in therapy, many of them remembered having used at least sometimes an expression of L1 to manage the non-translatability of personal first language key words: “first I said it in Italian and then I translated it into German.” (P2: 28:39; cf. P9 f; 28:00; P7; 26:12; P6 f; 12:12) One participant in this context used the expression: “in my actual therapy I authorize myself sometimes to say central words first in English and then to translate them.” (P13: 21:10) Furthermore, I would like to reveal some communicative strategies which I observed during the interviews.25 Three of the participants (all transmigrants) manifested an accent in whatever language they spoke during the bi- or trilingual conversation (P5, P6, P9) and, when attention was drawn to it declared that they had an accent in every language:26 only one of them declared seeing this as a positive characteristic of herself; she (L1 = French) said that she feels herself to belong nowhere (“except for Trastevere”) and this gives her “distance from the

25 Nearly all of the participants had an accent to varying degrees in German, and in the utterances of all but one the prosody differed clearly from that of a native German speaker. Two did not have an accent and one of these two had no prosody in speaking German. 26 I mentioned this accent and approached them about it.

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French and Italians” [les Français et les Italiens]; “this is the greatest possible liberty.” (P10: 43:19) A further characteristic of the conversations was code-mixing and codeswitching phenomena which differed in frequency among the participants. This is the only point at which a clear difference emerged between those who had already finished their psychoanalysis (9) and those who either hadn’t yet finished their training (3) or those having just undergone analysis for mental health (7). One interviewee (P15) was linguistically so conspicuous that the conversation had in parts the characteristics of ‘hybrid talk,’ Itali-esco or Ital-man (half Italian, half German): P15 certainly wasn’t aware of all the code-switching and mixing she did, but she declared that in conversations with an Italian friend in Berlin a similar mixing occurs (“there is always a chaos, a mixture” [si fa sempre un caos, un misto]). (P10: 37:05) Further consequences of code-mixing certainly are verbal slips due to interferences reported in the interviews. There are slips in which the second language is taken too literally – as in the misinterpretation of German “Was fehlt ihrem Kind?” as a reproach of error/failure [Verfehlung] as a mother (P1: 1:10:46) 27 or the slip in Italian “pene” [‘male organ’] instead of “penna” [‘pen’] of a native French speaker; on the other hand there are slips in which the construction of the first language leads to a different meaning in the second language (typical interference). This is the case when P12 wrongly said to her analyst, “You know that better than me,” instead of “You know that as well as I do,” because of Italian “lo sa meglio di me.” (P12: 17:51) These Freudian slips could also be observed during the interviews: The Italian P12 says several times, “I have interrupted my analysis” [“ich habe die Analyse unterbrochen”] instead of ‘stopped’ [‘abgebrochen’]. The French P11 more than once says that after having lived for so many years in Germany, “meine Muttersprache verharmt immer mehr”. The word *verharmt [* = nonexistent word!] is a wrongly pronounced ‘verarmt,’ that is ‘impoverished’ (the pronunciation of the Germanic h is a hypercorrection for the French speaker). But this wrong word makes allusions to German verhärmt‚ ‘careworn,’ and old German harm‚ ‘damage’, ‘loss’. The same French participant relates that when she arrived in Germany in 1989 she had “untergetaucht in die deutsche Sprache” [‘disappeared in the German language’] instead of ‘immersed herself’ [‘eingetaucht’] (because of French se plonger dans) which could be interpreted as an escape from the careworn and damaged French. 27 The patient after having said that her child was ill, misinterpreted the question of her analyst, “What’s wrong with your child?” [Was fehlt ihrem Kind?] as a reproach of failing [Verfehlung] as a mother. (P1: 1:10:46)



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In many conversations I observed the participants’ deep reflection on language. Particularly those who had had long treatments – or a didactic treatment in the context of psychoanalytic training – used strong language images like “every language is a kind of tissue through which your inside is structured” [“die jeweilige Sprache ist ja sozusagen das Gewebe, über das sich dein Inneres strukturiert”] (P3: 53:39); “language is in the end the bearer of your emotions” [“letztendlich der Träger der Emotion”]. Another participant admired “how much psychoanalysis is hiding already in language” [“wieviel Psychoanalyse schon in der Sprache steckt”]. (P4: 39:16) And remember the “two differentiated and separate worlds” that the two languages represented for P9, as we saw earlier. This participant seemed to compare the relationship between his two languages with that between consciousness and pre-consciousness. (P9: 45:35) So, one effect of therapeutic work with language was – to quote P4: 38:06 – “this tendency to think much about words.” Another was to create “better words in the second language.” Four of the participants even reported self-coined neologisms in German – perhaps not for being able to express their thoughts better but to bring them to a point (to get to the point) and to find a new key word in a second language, like *Ehrgeist (a mixture of ‘honour’ and ‘spirit’) instead of German Ehrgeiz ‘ambition’ (P4: 27:37), *eingemistelt, literally *‘mistletoe-d’ from Italian invischiato (‘settled in / nested in psychoanalysis’) or *verpeint‚ literally *‘awkward-ed’ instead of ‘peinlich berührt.’ Some wrote poems in both languages during the time of their analysis, others created anagrams of their own names (P9: amo Lacan; Mao + Lacan). But there is not only such philosophical thinking about language and poetry to be discovered, there are also fanciful idealizations to be found about what analysis in their first language could have been or could be in the future. “[Having done the analysis in the second language] I have the impression that I have missed something” [“ich habe das Gefühl, dass ich etwas verpasst habe”] (P2: 03:29); “I’m sure there would have been more emotionality in the first language.” (P5 and P1) Particularly those who were confronted very early with a second language (P1, P3, P6) articulated fantasies about monolingual paradise: “somewhere I think that someone has promised me that this [French] must be the mother tongue and that it should be completely in my possession” [“quelque part j’ai l’impression que quelqu’un m’a promis que ça devrait être la langue maternelle et que ça devrait être complètement dans ma possession”] or they have fantasies about other (“genial”) bilinguals who “never mix,” “never switch,” “never confuse anything.” A last finding is that most of the participants declared perceiving themselves differently in their different languages: “I’m older in English,” says an American having lived in Berlin since 1989 (P14); “I’m more aggressive in English,” says P6

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who went to boarding school and university in Britain “and more reflective and less spontaneous in German” (where she has lived for 10 years). I would like to end with two characteristics which seem quite significant for this group of participants: Nearly all said that they found themselves freer in the second language, more distanced and less inhibited. P9 who after having undergone analysis in a second language for years and also having had analysis in her first language, said it in a quite direct way: “I think that my own language carries a totally different weight” [“la propria lingua secondo me ha tutt’altro peso”]. (P9: 43:48) Most of the participants gave ‘a lesser sense of shame’ as one of the reasons for the liberty felt in the second language. (P5 24:01; P6 12:12; P3; P1: 35:37; indirectly P4) Significant for all groups is the critical self-perception of their own bilingualism. Instead of being happy about it, they talked of impoverishment in the first language (P11: 02:58), of “missing something everywhere/in every language” (P10; P6; P5; P7) or even the feeling of “always being dominated” by the language question.

4 Conclusion Perhaps one of the surprising results of the survey is that throughout, multilingualism – alongside migration – seems not to be experienced as uniquely enriching but often in the long term as actively impoverishing the first language. My impression then of how self-critical an evaluation the participants would give themselves is based on the requisite understanding that their mother tongue is subject to the same pressures of psychoanalytical investigation. I think that much of this critical self-assessment with regard to linguistic ability is due to a totally idealized notion of what ‘bilingualism’ constitutes, and is in no way just a neurotic tick. This idealisation of total linguistic mastery became apparent in several ways. At least three interviewees, for instance, denied being bilingual in response to the question “What does it mean to you to be bilingual?” (this is after 10 years’ residence in a adoptive country and intensive contact with a second language). (Cf. Dewaele 2009, 103–104) For others, it became apparent in the complaints about ‘gaps,’ ‘impoverishment’ and ‘missing depth’ (P3: 1:07:22) which participants put forward in relation to their first language the longer they had been in a host country. It is important here to distinguish between double first language acquisition – i.e. simultaneous second language acquisition since the beginning of life with continued exposure to both languages – and the acquisition of a second language as an adult. But my impression is, that behind the self-critical remarks of these participants lies an ideal that restrains individuals rather than guides them. And this idealization seemingly plays a large part in their suffering feelings of being



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different as multilinguals. For example, if her text was allowed to show traces of her asymmetrical language mastery, P6 would not always have the sense when she asked colleagues or friends for help writing German reports that she was being ‘instructed.’ (Cf. Auer/Wei 2009) There exists a vulnerablility as the acquisitor sees herself as not competent, not naming herself as bilingual. In this respect, analysis seems to offer a space where it is possible to say everything and this also includes grammatical error.28 Not all participants were able to take advantage of this freedom. (see P12) A second surprising result is that for at least half of the participants, shame became a central theme, without any questions having been asked about this subject at all. Three participants explicitly said that they would feel too ashamed to undertake analysis in their first language. Similarly the response of P9 indicates a complete block in this regard; when asked during analysis in French to say something about her mother in her own language, she was overcome with emotion and was unable to speak.29 About one half of the participants report that they were able to talk about inner conflicts and experiences with ‘greater detachment’ and ‘more freely’ in their second language.30 This experience is also shared by Nancy Huston, an Anglo-Canadian author who emigrated from Calgary to Paris as a student and for whom French became the preferred language for writing: compared to my mother tongue, the French language was less burdened with emotion and therefore less dangerous. It was cold and I approached it coldly. It was uniform. It was a smooth and homogeneous substance, one might say neutral. In the beginning, I realize now, this conveyed an enormous liberty to me in writing – because I didn’t know with respect to what, or against what background I was writing.31

Amati Mehler et al. also comment on this issue: We are increasingly convinced that learning a new language – at whatever age – offers a crucial opportunity to renegotiate and restore intrapsychic situations and hereby to fundamentally change our inner world. (Amati Mehler et al. 2010, 356) 28 See P2: 00:18:23–3: “Ich hatte nie diesen Druck gehabt, ich müsste unbedingt eine perfekte Deutsch sprechen. Das war nie meine Anliegen – wenigstens nicht in der Analyse” oder P13: 21:10: “je m’autorise de prononcer d’abord l’expression en langue maternelle.” 29 “une émotion terrible, je n’ai pas pu parlé.” (P9: 11:10) 30 “mi sono sentita libera di poter parlare di tutto di maniera distante” (P1: 35:37), cf. P3: 21:40 and P9: 46:47. 31 “la langue française (et pas seulement ses mots tabous) était, par rapport à ma langue maternelle, moins chargée d’affect et donc moins dangereuse. Elle était froide, et je l’abordais froidement. Elle m’était égale. C’était une substance lisse et homogène, autant dire neutre. Au début, je m’en rends compte maintenant, cela me conférait une immense liberté dans l’écriture. (Huston, Nord perdu, 1999 cit. in Dewaele 2009, 111)

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Due to a greater distance from a second language “intrapsychic situations can be renegotiated and restored,” which means its words do not have the same effect as those of a native language. Furthermore, a second language often is not “under control” in the same way as a native language is: What looks like a more relaxed relationship to words and rules of grammar creates loopholes for distorted idioms and verbal slip-ups, or slips of the tongue, through which associations take a completely new direction. If language work in a second language is understood as something different than ‘the same work’ in a first language, the question is to which consequences the issue gives rise. The attitude to work is inherently bound up with our inner significatory register and as a consequence language theory is that words are not only instruments of communication, but also have a cognitive function (even Gerhards does not deny this) and in addition to this – which seems more important here – is that words do something themselves. (De Swaan 2004, 572) A consequence in language politics is that the relationship between a first and second language can in no way be understood as a strict ‘either-or’ as De Swaan suggests: Still I think that parents and children [of migrant families and other ethnic minorities] would prefer to learn the national language as well as possible than to forever float about in the wash water of their native language. (De Swaan 2004, 572)

Particularly problematic in this quote is the word ‘than.’ The point of learning a second language is not to leave the “wash water of [...] native language” as soon as possible and to disappear in a second language; the point is to integrate both into your inner space. This is what my interviews show: You do not simply transfer to a second language but, although you may speak the language exclusively for years, your first language continues to work inside you. It is like a life force or, as mentioned in another survey by a student who has been immersed in the English language for the last four years, “My native language is a part of me, my blood, what flows through me daily.”

References Altarriba, Jeanette. “Does Cariño Equal ‘Liking’? A Theoretical Approach to Conceptual Nonequivalence between Languages.” International Journal of Bilingualism 7/3 (2003): 305–322. Amati Mehler, Jacqueline. The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension. Madison, Conn.: International University Press, 1993.



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Amati Mehler, Jacqueline. Das Babel des Unbewussten: Muttersprache und Fremdsprachen in der Psychoanalyse. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2010. Auer, Peter, and Li Wei, eds. Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2009. Auer, Peter. “Introduction: Multilingualism as a Problem? Monolingualism as a Problem?” In Auer/Wei (eds.) 2009, 1–12. Bausch, Karl-Richard et al., eds. Handbuch Fremdsprachenunterricht. 4th ed. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. Cohen, Erik. Expatriate Communities. London: Sage, 1977. Deller, Jürgen. “Interkulturelle Eignungsdiagnostik.” Psychologie interkulturellen Handelns. Ed. Alexander Thomas. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1996. 283–316. De Swaan, Abram. “Endangered Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Linguistic Sentimentalism.” European Review 12, 4 (2004): 567–580. Dewaele, Jean-Marc. “Becoming Bi- or Multi-Lingual Later in Life.” In Auer/Wei 2009, 101–130. Erfurt, Jürgen, and Maria Amelina, eds. Elitenmigration und Mehrsprachigkeit. Osnabrück: Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie (OBST) 75, 2008. Fodor, Jerry A. The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell, 1975. Gerhards, Jürgen. Mehrsprachigkeit im vereinten Europa: Transnationales sprachliches Kapital als Ressource in einer globalisierten Welt. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010. Grinberg, León, and Rebeca Grinberg, eds. Psichoanálisis de la Migración y del Exilio. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. Harmondsworth etc.: Penguin Books, 1990. Huston, Nancy. Nord Perdu suivi de Douze France. Arles: Actes Sud, 1999. Kielhöfer, Bernd. “Spracherwerb.” Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik. Vol. 1,2. Eds. Günter Holtus et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. 34–63. Klein, Wolfgang: Zweitspracherwerb. Eine Einführung. 2nd ed. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1987. Kluge, Bettina. Identitätskonstitution im Gespräch: Südchilenische Migrantinnen in Santiago de Chile. Frankfurt a.M.: Vervuert, 2005. Koven, Michèle. “Two Languages in the Self / The Self in Two Languages: French Portuguese Bilinguals’ Verbal Enactments and Experiences of Self in Narrative Discourse.” Ethos 26/4 (1998): 410–455. Koven, Michèle. “Feeling in two Languages: A Comparative Analysis of a Bilingual’s Affective Displays in French and Portuguese.” In Pavlenko 2006, 84–117. Koven, Michèle. Selves in Two Languages: Bilinguals’ Verbal Enactments of Identity in French and Portuguese. Amsterdam et al.: Benjamins, 2007. Kronsteiner, Ruth. Kultur und Migration in der Psychotherapie. Frankfurt a.M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2003. Lüdi, Georges. “Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit.” Kontaktlinguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung. HSK 12.2. Eds. Hans Goebl et al. Berlin et al.: De Gruyter, 1996. 320–327. Lüdi, Georges, and Bernard Py. Être Bilingue: Zweisprachigkeit durch Migration. 3rd ed. Bern et al.: Lang, 2003. Mey, Günter, and Katja Mruck. “Interviews.” Handbuch: Qualitative Forschung in der Psychologie. Eds. G. Mey and K. Mruck. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010. 423–435.

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Alexander-Kenneth Nagel

Relational Diversity: Religious Pluralization and Politics of Cohesion 1 Introduction In 2010 the German Ruhr area came to celebrate itself as “European Capital of Culture,” an award which is granted by the European Commission on a yearly basis. One part of the extensive image campaign for the Ruhr Cultural Metropolis (“Kulturmetropole Ruhr”) was a huge poster showing a religious procession of Tamil Hindus on a country road near the Westphalian city of Hamm. The visual message of the picture was based on a harsh contrast between the colorful garments of the worshippers (and the goddess) and the monotonous scenery of cornfields and industrial smokestacks. Two banners on the upper right of the poster stated: “Future needs origin. In our region it comes from 170 nations” and “We are the European Capital of Culture 2010.” At the bottom there was another lettering which proclaimed: “Where this is possible, everything is possible.” The poster reflects the fundamental ambivalence of dealing with cultural and religious diversity in modern immigration societies. On the one hand, diversity is embraced as a regional resource which enriches the cultural landscape, on the other hand there are severe sceptical and exotistic undertones shining through in the last statement. Hence, it remains unclear whether it is diversity itself which is advertised, or its successful moderation – or domestication – by regional authorities. This tension between the appreciation of religious pluralization and its governance in terms of social cohesion points to a more general ambiguity between modern claims for a universal “We” and a postmodern notion of a “World in Pieces” (Geertz 2000, 218–263) which is coming under scrutiny in this volume. In my paper, I will address these matters from a sociology of religion point of view which is both programmatic, conceptual and empirical. In programmatic terms (section 1), I will argue for a relational approach to religious diversity which does not restrict itself to a mere topography of religious communities, but focuses on religious pluralization as a matter of encounter and contact zones. In conceptual terms (section 2), I will propose a heuristic model of migration, religious pluralization, encounter and governance and distinguish between three manifestations of diversity (abstract, concrete and relational diversity). In empirical terms (section 3), I will provide evidence for the striking variety of approaches to frame and moderate religious contact in modern immigration societies. Drawing from an ethnographic case study on forms of interreligious encounter in the Ruhr

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area, I will present a preliminary typology of interreligious activities and illustrate how they are shaped by the above mentioned tension between universalism and particularism.

2 Beyond Metaphors: A ‘Relational’ Approach to 2 Religious Pluralization Scholarly debates about migration and religious pluralization are remarkably relying on what might be called metaphors of isolation. The words may differ, but the images remain the same: E.g. in the German discussion the concept of a “parallel society” (“Parallelgesellschaft”) has become both widespread and influential. The spatial metaphor is strong: Parallels, so we have learned at school, are straight lines which never touch each other, but rather they go on in an infinite space. Likewise, religious migrant communities are bound to dwell separated and segregated from each other, be it as a result of incommensurable truth claims or of a deeply rooted resentment against the host society. As a matter of course, these implications persist despite all sorts of academic rationalization and reasoning. For instance, social scientists have defined parallel societies by internal cultural or religious homogeneity, social, civic and economic segregation, a duplication of the institutions of the host country and areal self-separation on a voluntary basis. (Meyer 2002) Especially the last point underlines the proximity of scholarly and political debate since voluntary dissociation can easily be judged as an assault to social cohesion. In the Anglophone discussion, related metaphors have been somewhat less abstract and geometric: Terms like “ethnic colony” (Rumbaut 1994, 755) or “religious enclavement” (Turner 2007, 291) dwell on the awkward notion of migrant colonies gradually expanding to the country of arrival and paradoxically turn an existing anti-imperialist discourse against immigrants who may themselves have come from some of the former colonies. To put it into a nutshell, the academic discussion about migration and pluralization tends to be overmetaphorical and undertheorized at the same time.1 The reasons for this imbalance are manifold and cannot be discussed in depth here. However, I would like to highlight two factors, namely political discourse and cultural legacy. On the one hand, diversity debates are always overshadowed by political discourses which seek for straightforward evidence instead of ambig1 This is not to say that metaphors could not be theoretically productive. Much in contrast, they have a strong heuristic potential which provides a good starting point for further reasoning about the conditions, mechanisms and consequences in place.



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uous complexity and thus privilege metaphorical reasoning. On the other hand, more subtle and more powerful, the political apparatus itself is grounded in a cultural legacy of ‘diaspora’ as a tale of woe which insinuates a pessimistic view of religious diversity. At the very core of this anti-pluralistic mentality there are Biblical narrations of the people of Israel being captured, dispersed and taken into exile to distant Babylon. These early stories of religion and migration are far from celebrating the new and inspiring environment, but indulge in longing for the distant homeland (“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,” Ps. 137, 1), deploring the ignorance and malignity of the “host society” (“and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion,” Ps. 137, 3) and cultivating fantasies of violence against their suppressors (“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones,” Ps. 137, 8–9). Quite obviously, both a critical exegesis of the Biblical sources and a proper investigation of their rich history of reception in music, arts and literature are far beyond the scope of this article. What I want to suggest here is that the unconscious reception of a religious tale of woe still shapes actual debates on migration and religious pluralization and grants plausibility to isolative metaphors of religious communities as parallel societies, enclaves or colonies. In contrast, proponents of a European history of religion have pointed out that from ancient times over the Middle Ages until the early modern period religious diversity has been the rule rather than the exception in Europe. (Auffarth 2007, 126–133; Kippenberg/von Stuckrad 2003) Even though ancient religious communities have been referred to as “mystery cults” (Kloft 1999) the early pluralist setting was not privatized, in the sense of being “restricted to private virtue” (Berger 1967, 134), but eminently public. Rituals, such as the so called “Taurobolium,” which involved an ox being slaughtered over a pit and a devotee being covered in its blood, were everything but subtle and attracted considerable public attention. (Duthoy 1969, 89) Likewise, Jörg Rüpke has illustrated how religious diversity became both visible and tangible in ancient cityscapes where representative buildings of various religious communities were established next to each other. (Rüpke 2007) Given these pluralistic conditions it comes as a surprise that ancient city states also proved to be reluctant and restrictive against new religions and applied discourses of endangerment which are astonishingly similar to modern anti-pluralistic debates. A prominent victim were the early Christian communities who were suspiciously eyed as a Jewish sect refusing to incorporate itself into the majority culture in important matters such as funeral rites and public sacrifice meals. Moreover, social reformist ideas like the egalitarian vision of a community in Christ, nourished doubts about the Christian loyalty to the consti-

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tution of the ancient slaveholder society. It is striking that not only the general discourse, but the very same topics (self-segregation, cemeteries, dietary laws and constitutional loyalty) are recurring in actual debates about Islam in Europe, which now, ironically, is referred to as Christian occident. The historical ubiquity of both fruitful religious coexistence (see above) and assimilationist criticism underlines that the tension between particularity and universalism is not at all distinctive of modernity, but represents a continuing pattern in the global history of religious diversity. In view of these historical insights and the preliminary observations of a metaphorical overbalance in diversity debates it seems all the more appropriate to argue for a ‘relational’ approach to religious pluralization. In contrast to merely descriptive attempts of mapping the variety of religious communities in a given area, a relational perspective focuses on the structural ties and semantic references of these communities to each other, to their country of origin and institutions of the country of arrival. In contrast to statistical macro-analyses of the impacts of religious pluralization on the religious field (Iannaccone/Stark 1994, Bruce 1999, Voas et al. 2002) a relational approach does not search for causal mechanisms or effects in the abstract space of aggregated survey data, but is to investigate the meso-level of concrete interreligious interaction. In this regard, it does not presuppose the notion of an instrumental or norm-driven actor, but analyzes religious “trans-action” as a social space which enables and configures concepts of agency. (Emirbayer 1997, 287) In the next section, I will translate these general programmatic considerations into a tangible model of migration, pluralization and religious encounter.

3 Varieties of Diversity – A Model In this section I will present a heuristic model to explore the connection between migration, religious pluralization, encounter and governance in relational terms. The model is to intermediate between my programmatic call for a non-isolationalist approach to religious diversity and the empirical insights which will be presented in the following section. As such, the model can be understood as an invitation to build a middle-range theory of the ‘varieties of pluralization’ in modern immigration societies even though it does not at all claim to cure the above mentioned imbalance of metaphor and theory.



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Fig. 1: Model for the varieties of pluralization in modern immigration societies. Designed by the author.

Figure 1 highlights three processes which are empirically strongly intertwined, yet can and should be distinguished in analytical terms: religious pluralization due to immigration and self-organization (i), the translation of abstract diversity into concrete situations of religious encounter (ii), and attempts to govern and moderate interreligious contact with a view to social cohesion (iii). It may be a truism that processes of migration go hand in hand with cultural and religious pluralization. In Germany and beyond, this development has gained considerable momentum by large-scale labor migration in the 1950s and 1960s when recruiting agreements were signed with predominantly Muslim countries, such as Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco. Later on, refugees, such as Vietnamese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, Kurdish Yezides and Orthodox Christians of several origins further added to the diverse picture. As a matter of fact, however, such pluralization remained ‘abstract’ as long as religion was restricted to personal practice and a vague sense of affiliation. While Christian migrants found themselves catered for by the established churches, other religious traditions were pushed into a pattern of “believing without belonging.” (Davie 1994) Consequently, the self-organization of religious migrant communities became crucial in translating abstract affiliation into concrete membership, participation and encounter. Previous studies have suggested a distinction of three

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phases of religious institutionalization (Baumann 2004, Lehmann 2004): the first phase is characterized by loose gatherings of religious laymen which take place in private premises or community centers. In the second phase, these networks establish simple organizational structures, e.g. by forming registered associations. Through membership fees and donations it is now possible to rent spaces for worship and to invite religious dignitaries from the country of origin or bigger diaspora communities. Likewise, the third phase is marked by a further division of labor and the separation of religious and worldly duties, which may lead to the employment of part- or even full-time cult personnel. Along with the establishment of a community in terms of wealth and status and the development of a sense of being “home away from home” (Ballard 1994), claims arise for representative religious buildings as well as public participation and visibility. At the same time, these very claims raise the public awareness of the particular community (and of religious pluralization as such), thus triggering interreligious and intercultural contact. Even though the above mentioned phase models can be criticized for their linear and teleological approach to institutionalization, they have so far served well in grasping the institutional dynamics of various religious migrant communities. Yet, representation and visibility are only one mechanism to convert abstract religious diversity into concrete interreligious encounter. Another mode of relational analysis, which may be less intuitive, but certainly not less widespread, is looking at what I call peripheral contact zones. The basic idea is that religious minorities may find themselves adjacent to each other due to similar socioeconomic restrictions. A good example are temples hosting both Hindus and Sikhs or multiethnic mosques or churches. (Hutter 2012, 357) In these cases different religious groups agree on a temporary joint venture which is bound to be revoked as soon as one of the groups is established enough to “do its own thing.” Such interreligious contact zones can also be the result of transformations on the side of the majority religion in the country of arrival. E.g. in the German city of Dortmund a formerly Catholic church was sold to a Serbian Orthodox community which resold part of the premises to a Thai Buddhist Temple, thus creating a multireligious site. (Nagel 2012, 605) Likewise, Harris and Young report the (literal) conversion of a local Anglican church in England into an interfaith house. (Harris/Young 2009, 11) Given that religion and its place within an increasingly globalizing process of migration and inter-relation has been thrust in to public awareness along with the increasing visibility of religious minorities, it is no surprise that ‘concrete diversity’ attracts civic and administrative attempts of governance. In Germany public authorities have long been reluctant to deal with religious diversity referring to principles of government neutrality. In recent years, however, religious matters



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have become an important policy issue on the local, national and supranational level. On the local level, religion is now being included in urban integration plans and the so-called “Deutsche Islam Konferenz” represents a national endeavor of diversity governance. Moreover, some German federal states (Länder), such as Bremen and Hamburg, have signed treaties with Muslim associations and paved the way for a further institutionalization and incorporation of Islam in administrative terms. On the supranational level the Council of Europe has published a number of “Guidelines for Interfaith Dialogue.” (COE 2006) Beyond these recent political developments the governance of religious diversity has primarily been a matter of civil society, which produced a variety of different approaches. (Cf. also Schuppert 2012) In the following section, I will present a typology of interreligious activities and discuss their underlying notions of diversity and cohesion. I will argue that efforts of diversity governance contribute to producing a distinct form of diversity: unlike abstract and concrete diversity, relational diversity is not just an attribute of a given population, but a social figuration which reconciles the above mentioned tension between diversity and cohesion, and particularity and universalism on the meso-level.

4 Relational Diversity in Practice: Evidence from 4 Interreligious Activities Having discussed the programmatic and conceptual implications of a relational perspective to religious diversity I will now provide some empirical evidence of – what I call – relational diversity. The results draw from data collected in a research project on “Interreligious Activities and Religious Encounter in the RuhrArea,” which is supported by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the course of this project we have performed participant observation in 25 interreligious events and conducted 19 in-depth interviews with religious organizers in order to learn more about the rationales of different formats of organized interreligious contact. While earlier studies have focused on Christian-Muslim encounter (Klinkhammer et al. 2011), we decided to go beyond the (more or less) hidden Abrahamic agenda of interreligious dialogue and purposefully included contested (Baha’i), polytheistic (Hinduism) and non-theistic traditions (Buddhism) in my sample. The data was transcribed and analyzed following a grounded theory coding procedure, which led to the emergence of five categories of interreligious activities, namely neighborhood initiatives, dialogue meetings, prayers for peace, school services, and festivals which can be charac-

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terized by their particular social structure and composition as well as their distinct notion of diversity and cohesion. Interreligious neighborhood initiatives are dense local networks of religious representatives and laymen whose primary goal is to promote religious understanding and community cohesion in a local neighborhood. In terms of governance neighborhood initiatives represent a localized grassroots approach to religious diversity “in the quarter.” Hence, they do usually not involve state actors, but are carried and administered by the established churches and take place in parish halls or even in private premises. Due to their local scale and relatively long history of collaboration, participants in neighborhood initiatives usually know each other personally. The level of religious and confessional diversity tends to be higher than in other activities since neighborhood initiatives basically address all religious communities in a given area without having to observe a certain quorum of “world religions.” In my sample, neighborhood initiatives were the only format which included representatives of smaller minorities, such as Sikhs, and smaller Christian denominations, such as the New Apostolic and the Old Catholic Church. In terms of cohesion neighborhood initiatives rely on an emphatic reference to a common neighborhood as an inclusive social space transcending religious differences – and an exclusive notion of what marks a ‘proper’ religion. This notion became very explicit in several meetings when participants evoked the image of a pan-religious community besieged by “non-believers” who try to discredit religion and were identified as a “common enemy.” Implicitly, the understanding of a proper religion was much narrower and closely tied to an Abrahamic model characterized by monotheism, ethics of solidarity, sacred writings – and the dignity of tradition, which excludes all kinds of new religious movements appearing later in history than the Baha’i. 2 Dialogue Meetings are discussion groups covering dogmatic or ethical issues in comparative manner and on a regular basis. The social structure of dialogue circles is marked by a hard core of activists, mostly religious specialists (clerics or teachers) and a loose periphery of casual visitors, i.e. people with issue-specific interests. My sample of dialogue meetings involves a thematic range from theological matters, such as “the character of Joseph” or “strong women in the world religions” to more general ethical questions, such as “social human rights” or 1

2 Pragmatic as it may be, this solution poses a general question, i.e. what is the appropriate age for a legitimate religious tradition? While Baha’i have come to be widely acknowledged as the youngest child within the Abrahamic family, no peace prayer in my sample has ever involved ‘new’ religious movements, such as Jehovas Witnesses or Mormons. This narrow scope might be a German peculiarity, since Griera and Forteza (2011) provide a number of divergent examples for other European countries.



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“How can we care for our elderly?.” The degree of religious diversity in dialogue groups is rather moderate and clearly centered around an Abrahamic consensus of Christianity, Islam and Judaism as major world religions. Similar to neighborhood initiatives dialogue meetings do usually not involve state actors and are held in religious premises (often alternating between the participating mosques, synagogues and churches). Due to the controversial nature of some topics and the dialogic format itself these meetings may attract a variety of stakeholders, such as sympathizers of anti-pluralistic political movements. How is the balance between diversity (of religious traditions and political opinions) and cohesion to be achieved in this setting? My results suggest two different mechanisms which are often applied complementary to each other: cultivating difference and discovering common ground. The cultivation of difference implies an acknowledgement and embrace of diversity and is deeply rooted in pluralistic reasoning whereas discovering common ground seeks to intellectually even out religious differences, e.g. by reference to a common origin or systematic similarities. Interreligious Prayers for Peace are joint worship events which involve lections and liturgical elements from different religious traditions. Similar to neighborhood initiatives they address a wide variety of religious minorities and are characterized by a high degree of diversity. In my sample, peace prayers were the only interreligious activity which explicitly included polytheistic and non-theistic traditions. In comparison to the other activities, interreligious prayers had more participants (between 30 and 100), most of whom were not acquainted with each other. In terms of governance peace prayers offer a number of opportunities for public authorities to become involved. One interreligious prayer in my sample was organized in cooperation between the city council and a renowned local dialogue initiative. It was held in the town hall and opened by the mayor who took the opportunity to advertise the achievements of his government regarding social peace. The balance between diversity and cohesion is achieved by a remarkable ritual design which stages religious boundaries in order to transgress them: Typically, peace prayers rely on consecutive readings or recitations by religious representatives and result in a common prayer for unanimity and understanding. In contrast to the previous formats, peace prayers are less based on cognitive interreligious exchange, but on joint religious experience and ritual performance. Given their formalized structure, the diverse setting of interreligious prayers entails practical protocolary challenges as to the order and speaking time of the traditions involved. A common solution is to ‘sort’ religions according to their alleged age. This historical approach is an attempt to deal with religious diversity and superiority claims in a neutral and objective way. At the same time, however, it carries strong ethnocentric implications of ‘proper’ religions being based on some kind of holy founding scripture.

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Similar to peace prayers, interreligious school services are multi-religious worship sessions held at state run or religious schools in order to celebrate students’ successful graduation or their transition to a secondary school. These services are typically offered at schools in districts with a high share of immigrants and address both pupils and their families. In my sample they involved Protestant and Catholic representatives as well as an imam of the Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB), the biggest Muslim association in Germany. Hence, the degree of religious diversity is rather limited and restricted to communities who are well established and acknowledged. It is likely that this restrictive policy is due to the public framework of school services which are held during schooldays and in school venues and involve religious dignitaries as well as teachers. The interreligious setting is marked by a liturgical framework which is strongly inspired by (Protestant) Christian practice. It includes short lections and prayers from each faith tradition as well as songs and sketches which have been prepared in class. The balance between diversity and cohesion is achieved by a guiding notion of the class community or age cohort embracing religious differences. Finally, interreligious festivals refer to public events based on a programmatic notion of religious encounter. These festivals may range from interreligious feasts to tournaments, such as the annual interreligious soccer competition “Kick-off for Dialogue” (Anstoß zum Dialog) in Dortmund, which involves two teams of Christian and Muslim clerics, supervised by a Jewish referee. Interreligious festivals may combine different elements of the previous formats, e.g. the interreligious soccer tournament involved an interreligious quiz for children as well as Muslim and Jewish youth groups performing traditional dances. In contrast to other activities, interreligious festivals are characterized by a large number of participants and high fluctuation; they do not usually include liturgical action, such as prayer or worship and lack a clear-cut distinction between religious and cultural boundaries. Similar to peace prayers interreligious festivals may become a stage for public authorities. For instance, the above mentioned tournament included addresses by the mayor and the chief of police who highlighted the analogy of sportive and intercultural fairness. Such political moderation is one of several modes to balance diversity and cohesion during interreligious festivals: The soccer game resembles peace prayers as it takes a “ludic” approach of literally playing with religious differences. The particularity of religious traditions is being evoked, for instance by the composition of teams, and potential interreligious conflict is reframed as productive competition. In contrast, interreligious feasts, such as common Iftar-celebrations, dwell on a strong sense of unity through commensality admitting diversity in the form of short explanations on particular religious festive dishes and dietary rules.



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As a matter of fact, this preliminary typology can neither claim to be exhaustive nor disjunctive. In the sample there remain activities which are being notoriously difficult to categorize. An example are interreligious get-togethers, such as the initiative “ZusammenSetzen” in Wuppertal, which meet in private living rooms and are largely based on personal encounter and biographical narrating. Other border cases are temporary interreligious roundtables or open days which are established during the planning process for representative mosques and tend to be issue-specific and apologetic. Finally, the typology does not account for the variety of artistic responses to religious pluralization, e.g. interreligious rooms of silence in hospitals or airports. Nevertheless, the distinction between interreligious neighborhood initiatives, dialogue meetings, peace prayers, school services and festivals provides a snapshot of a highly dynamic field and elucidates the variety of civic approaches to religious diversity. It should be clear, that, regardless from their institutional attachment or constitution, the above mentioned activities are not just disparate single events, but represent social figurations of their own kind. As such, they have incorporated the tension between particularity and universalism and provide different institutional solutions to balance claims for diversity and for cohesion. In my concluding remarks, I will provide a comparative discussion of these approaches and argue for a relational understanding of religious diversity apt to bridge the gap between global integration and cultural diversity.

5 Conclusion: Interreligious Encounter and 5 Entangled History In this paper, my aim was to outline a sociology of religion perspective to religious pluralization and the governance of interreligious encounter. In order to prevent airy theorizing on the one hand and empirical muddle on the other, I have presented my argument on a programmatic, conceptual and empirical level. On the programmatic level, I have argued for a relational approach to religious diversity which mediates between merely topographic endeavors and statistical macro-analysis and focuses on the meso-level of concrete interreligious interaction. On the conceptual level, I have fleshed out the relational research program and offered a heuristic model to conceive of the connection between processes of migration, religious pluralization, encounter and governance. Moreover, I have proposed a terminological distinction between abstract, concrete and relational diversity. While abstract diversity refers to individual religious affiliation and personal practice, concrete diversity reflects visibility and encounter which go

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hand in hand with religious self-organization. Abstract and concrete diversity denote attributes of a population, whereas relational diversity refers to the social figurations which come into play when interreligious contact is becoming subject to attempts of governance. Hence, the empirical level of my investigation was to examine interreligious activities as governance arrangements in response to religious pluralization. The empirical evidence suggests that there has evolved a variety of different approaches which can be distinguished regarding their underlying notions of religious diversity and their strategies to balance particularity and cohesion. Interreligious neighborhood initiatives allow for a high degree of diversity between and within religious traditions. They achieve cohesion by administering a bright boundary between believers and non-believers and by reference to the local neighborhood as an inclusive social space. In comparison, interreligious dialogue meetings admit a lesser degree of diversity as they have to observe a certain quorum of ‘world religions.’ They apply two basic modes of diversity management, i.e. the cultivation of religious differences and the intellectual discovery of theological common ground. This ambiguity between exposing and deconstructing religious diversity is also characteristic of interreligious peace prayers which include a broad variety of theistic, polytheistic and nontheistic religious traditions. In contrast to dialogue meetings, peace prayers rely on a performative rather than cognitive approach to reconcile diversity and cohesion. In short, peace prayers evoke religious boundaries – in order to transgress them in a final shared prayer for unanimity. Similar to peace prayers, interreligious school services are based on joint worship and ritual practice. At the same time they have proved much more restrictive with regard to religious diversity admitting only representatives of well-established communities, such as mainline Protestants and Catholics as well as the Turkish Islamic Union for Religious Affairs. In terms of cohesion, school services dwell on a strong notion of the class community or age cohort outshining religious differences. Finally, interreligious festivals combine several of the above mentioned characteristics in a distinctive way: They resemble neighborhood initiatives in their focus on the local community and dialogue meetings in their sense of cultivating religious boundaries. They are similar to peace prayers and school services in emphasizing interreligious practice and experience. In order to achieve the balance between diversity and cohesion interreligious festivals offer two additional strategies, a ludic approach which reframes religious conflict as sportive competition, and a commensal approach relying on a holistic understanding of hospitality. In a comparative perspective the notions of religious diversity throughout different forms of interreligious activities have proved to be closely tied to concepts of a proper or legitimate religion. My evidence suggests two basic models of ‘inter-



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religious religion,’ which I call the Abrahamic and the World Religion model. The Abrahamic model is based on the common Biblical origin of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well as on theological consensus regarding monotheism, ethics of solidarity and the significance of a Holy Scripture. It was most prominent in dialogue meetings and interreligious school services and pervasive in all other forms of encounter as well. The World Religion model was rooted in the dignity of tradition, a general appreciation of human rights and the attachment to some sort of sacred writings. It was prominent in peace prayers and the commensal kind of interreligious festivals. The dignity of tradition is often valued by its alleged seniority, i.e. the age of its founding scriptures, which prevents all sorts of new religious movements from being included in the scope of accepted diversity. In this respect, there seemed to be a tacit agreement that the Baha’i are the last permissible religion on the timescale which makes them literally the Seal of Prophets. The inclusive or exclusive sense of religious diversity was closely connected to the more or less official nature of encounter. Hence, interreligious school services and dialogue meetings appeared to be selective in terms of establishment and reputation whereas peace prayers proved to be more inclusive. Moreover, there is a significant difference between inter- and intrareligious diversity: Most of the activities under investigation (with the exception of neighborhood initiatives) implied a representative mode of communication with one person speaking in the name of one religious tradition which abetted essentialism and inhibited all kinds of intrareligious heterodoxy. Along with different understandings of diversity there went various approaches of cohesion politics which can be modeled on (at least) four different scales: First, the access to diversity can be cognitive, involving comparative theological reasoning and intellectual enlightenment, or experience-based, e.g. resting on joint worship practice. Second, religious boundary work may either focus on the cultivation of religious differences in order to construct and maintain bright boundaries between religious traditions or aim at leveling differences and blurring boundaries. (Alba 2005; Lamont and Molnár 2002) The first mode is pluralist in embracing (or tolerating) the religious other whereas the second mode creates a sense of unity by the deconstruction of difference. Likewise (and third) the collective framing of cohesion politics can range between the poles of community and society. (Tönnies 1957) Communitarian settings are marked by some initial collective identity, for instance as an age cohort (school services) or local neighborhood (neighborhood initiatives) while societal settings are based on a notion of difference combined with a convergence of interest (dialogue meetings). Consequently (and fourth), the reference point of cohesion may lie within or outside the religious field. Hence, peace prayers achieve internal cohesion by literally forming a super-religious community whereas interreligious festivals

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and neighborhood initiatives externalize the locus of solidarity to another social entity. Taking a step back, what lesson can be learned from these results for the role of the humanities at the threshold of modernization and globalization? As tentative as it may be, my analysis has shown that religious diversity in modern immigration societies is far from being planished so as to fit the universal norms of efficiency and bureaucracy. Neither does it just ‘survive,’ an awkward atavism of doubtful folkloristic value, but it is highly productive and innovative in creating new sociocultural forms. These new domains of diversity, however, can just occur to those who look for them, which puts not only an empirical, but also – and all the more – a heuristic challenge. In this paper, I have argued for a relational approach to religious diversity which conceives of diversity in terms of concrete encounter rather than abstract attributes. This change of perspective also implied reconsidering the methodology and unit of analysis: Instead of mapping single religious communities or analyzing aggregated individual data, I chose to examine interreligious activities as structured events of symbolic interaction which require interactive methods, such as participant observation. Beyond the subject-matter of religion a meso-level approach to relational diversity embodied in symbolic interaction has a lot to offer for the interdisciplinary debate within the humanities, including the social sciences, as it grounds airy meta-debates about global and entangled history in a tangible analysis of cultural practice.

References Alba, Richard. “Bright vs. Blurred Boundaries: Second-Generation Assimilation and Exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (2005): 20–49. Auffarth, Christoph. “Pluralismus, Religion und Mittelalter: Das Mittelalter als Teil der Europäischen Religionsgeschichte.” Religiöser Pluralismus im Mittelalter? Besichtigung einer Epoche der europäischen Religionsgeschichte. Ed. Christoph Auffahrt. Münster: LIT, 2007. 11–23. Ballard, Roger. “The Emergence of Desh Pardesh.” Desh Pardesh: The South Asian Presence in Britain. Eds. Roger Ballard and Marcus Banks. London: Hurst, 1994. 1–34. Baumann, Martin. “Religion und ihre Bedeutung für Migranten.” Religion – Migration – Integration in Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft. Ed. Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration. Berlin/Bonn: Bundesdruckerei, 2004. 19–30. Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Double Day, 1967. Bruce, Steve. “The Supply-Side Model of Religion: The Nordic and Baltic States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39 (1999): 32–46. COE. 12 Guidelines for Interfaith Dialogue at Local Level. Strassburg: Council of Europe, 2006.



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Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging. New York: Wiley, 1994. Duthoy, Robert. The Taurobolium, its Evolution and Terminology. Leiden: Brill, 1969. Emirbayer, Mustafa. “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 281–317. Geertz, Clifford. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Griera, Mar, and Maria Forteza. “New Actors in the Governance of Religious Diversity in European Cities: The Role of Interfaith Platforms.” Religious Actors in the Public Sphere: Means, Objectives and Effects. Eds. Jeff Haynes and Anna Henning. New York: Routledge, 2011. 113–131. Harris, Margaret, and Patricia Young. Bridging Community Divides: The Impact of Grassroots Bridge Building Activities. London: Institute for Voluntary Action Research, 2009. Hutter, Manfred. “‘Half Mandir and Half Gurdwara’: Three Local Hindu Communities in Manila, Jakarta, and Cologne.” Numen 59 (2012): 344–365 Iannaccone, Laurence R., and Rodney Stark. “A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1994): 230–252. Kippenberg, Hans G., and Kocku von Stuckrad. Einführung in die Religionswissenschaft: Gegenstände und Begriffe. München: Beck, 2003. Klinkhammer, Gritt et al. Interreligiöse und interkulturelle Dialoge mit Muslimen in Deutschland: Eine quantitative und qualitative Evaluation. Bremen: Selbstverlag, 2011. Kloft, Hans. Mysterienkulte der Antike: Götter, Menschen, Rituale. München: Beck, 1999. Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–195. Lehmann, Karsten. “Migration und die dadurch bedingten religiösen Pluralisierungsprozesse.” Religion – Migration – Integration in Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft. Ed. Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration. Berlin/Bonn: Bundesdruckerei 2004, 31–48. Meyer, Thomas. “Parallelgesellschaft und Demokratie.” Die Bürgergesellschaft: Perspektiven für Bürgerbeteiligung und Bürgerkommunikation. Eds. Thomas Meyer and Reinhard Weil. Bonn: Dietz, 2002. 343–372. Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth. “Religionssoziologie in ‘relationalistischer’ Perspektive: Migration und religiöse Netzwerke.” Transnationale Vergesellschaftungen: Verhandlungen des 35. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Frankfurt am Main 2010. Ed. Hans-Georg Soeffner. Wiesbaden: VS, 2012. 603–614. Rumbaut, Rubén. “The Crucible Within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented Assimilation Among Children of Immigrants.” International Migration Review 28 (1994): 748–794. Rüpke, Jörg. “Integrationsgeschichten: Gruppenreligionen in Rom.” Gruppenreligionen im römischen Reich. Ed. Jörg Rüpke. Tübingen: Mohr, 2007. 113–126. Schuppert, Gunnar Folke. When Governance meets Religion: Governancestrukturen und Governanceakteure im Bereich des Religiösen. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Society. New Jersey: Transaction, 1957. Turner, Bryan S. “The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (2007): 287–303. Voas, David et al. “Religious Pluralism and Participation: Why Previous Research is Wrong.” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 212–230.

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Manifesting Religion in Public: A Universal Human Right – An International Law – National Restrictions Considering that religion or belief, for anyone who professes either, is one of the fundamental elements in his conception of life […]. (Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief [1981], Preamble)

It is common wisdom that the process of secularization is typical to modern nation states and that it entails a loss of legal privileges for religious organizations. There are developments in modern Europe and elsewhere that confirm this assumption. But on the other hand an international Human Rights System emerged that protects the public manifestations of religions against state interference. This paper scrutinizes the international declarations and conventions that secure a safe place for the manifestations of religions in the national and transnational world order and how they shape the public presence of religious communities.

1 Freedom of Religion – An Inalienable 1 Human Right The Article on freedom of religion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) goes beyond the simple affirmation of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Two rights are especially prominent: That everyone can change his or her religion or belief, and that everyone can manifest this religion or belief in community with others. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. (UDHR 1948, Article 18)

Religious freedom is often understood as one particular form of the freedom of expression, but what is involved here is a communal right to manifest religion in public. Unlike the “expression” of opinions, “manifesting” refers to an acknowledged form of praxis. The subjective right is derived from an objective religion.



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(Van Dijk/Van Hoof 1998, 544–548) Hence specific further rights are linked to the freedom of religion: the right to change one’s faith, and the right to a collective public manifestation.1 The right to change one’s faith was introduced by the Lebanese member of the commission that drew up the UDHR, Charles Malik, a Christian politician and philosopher. (Glendon 2002, 69 f.) The right to collective manifestation has its origin in a British supplement to the draft. (Glendon 2002, 285) In addition to private freedom of religion, a right to the public expression of collective religious practices is ensured. The perspective is communalist.2 This perspective can also be seen in the fact that the UDHR anchored human rights in collective activities. This generates not only rights, but also duties. Article 29 (1) “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. (2) In the exercise of his freedoms and rights, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and for meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.” (UDHR, Article 29) The word “community” in the first sentence refers to all the possible forms of the formation of the community or society in which the human person attains his or her identity. Duties are generated by the rights that are made accessible by membership in a community, such as one’s relatives, an ethnic group, a language, religion, or nation. The unfolding of the personality is made possible, but simultaneously restricted, by the rights and freedoms of other persons. The concept of the “democratic society” (instead of the concept of the “democratic state”) was included in the article only after lengthy discussions. It does not refer to state institutions (elections, parliament, executive, judiciary), but to the primary level of the citizens and their organizations.3 As Hans Joas puts it, democracy in this

1 The analogy to speaking a language is obvious. If there exists a right to speak one’s own mother tongue, the linguistic community in which it is spoken must also be protected. Johannes Morsink describes the controversial process that led to the formulation of Article 18 (Morsink 1999). States should provide a legal framework within which the citizens could practice their religion freely. In order to ensure this, the committee adopted a lengthy text by the British delegation that envisaged a coexistence of various religions in one and the same nation. The right to criticize religion thereby moved out of the center of attention. It was ensured by positioning freedom of thought before that of religion. The Islamic states, both then and afterwards, were interested in formulations that did not envisage a falling away from the faith community and that were intended to protect the faith community from unfair missionary activity. 2 Morsink 1999, 258–263. 3 Morsink 1999, 61–65 (“The Term ‘Democracy’ in Articles 27 and 29”); 241–252 (“The Duties and Communities of Article 29”).

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context is not an alternative to other principles of political organization: It is the idea of the community itself.4 The UDHR formulates communal rights to freedom that were claimed against the totalitarian political forces of Communism and National Socialism. The authors of the UDHR were very conscious of the destruction wrought by these systems. Already the first declarations of human rights, in the United States of America and France at the end of the eighteenth century, indicated a similar direction to be taken. At that period, inalienable human rights were posited in opposition to the powers of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the church, which were infringing these rights. The citizens inferred from this oppression that they had the right to replace these powers by new governments, and to restrict the rights of these governments by means of constitutions. The outcome was the federal state of the United States of America and the French Republic. Although there can be no doubt that the article in the UDHR refers to religion, the text speaks in a stereotypical fashion, here and in other passages (like other United Nations documents), of “religion and belief.” What is the point of this? In 1993, the Human Rights Committee (HRC) noted in a commentary on Article 18 that the recurring phrases “religion and belief” gives personal convictions a legal right instead of limiting it to its institutional form. Other subjective convictions have the same rights as religious convictions. Theistic, non-theistic, and even atheistic convictions enjoy equal protection. This applies also to so-called new religions and to religious minorities.5

4 Hans Joas begins his investigation of the prehistory of the debate about communitarianism with this thesis: “Gemeinschaft und Demokratie in den USA. Die vergessene Vorgeschichte der Kommunitarismus-Diskussion.” (Brumlik/Brunkhorst 1993, 49–62) 5 United Nations Human Rights Committee General Comment 1993, 22 (2). “Article 18 protects theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess any religion or belief. The terms ‘belief’ and ‘religion’ are to be broadly construed. Article 18 is not limited in its application to traditional religions or to religions and beliefs with institutional characteristics or practices analogous to those of traditional religions. The Committee therefore views with concern any tendency to discriminate against any religion or belief for any reason, including the fact that they are newly established, or represent religious minorities that may be the subject of hostility on the part of a predominant religious community.” ( [accessed: October 30, 2015])



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2 Religion in International Conventions on 2 Human Rights When the UDHR was formulated, it was part of a further-reaching political project. This solemn declaration was to be followed up by international laws that would give the rights to freedom a legally binding character. This was achieved by means of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which was adopted in 1966 after many years of consultations, and came into effect in 1973. The Covenant declared that the enshrining of human rights in law fell within the competence of the states. Article 18 of the ICCPR added a clause containing restrictions that derived from the sovereignty of the Nation States: (3) Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. (ICCPR, Article 18)

This means that the right to manifest one’s religion or belief was completely tied to the national political community. The claim to universal validity of the value of religious freedom encounters its boundaries in the requirements of the nation state to which the petitioner belongs. After the Covenant came into force, committees of the United Nations supervised the observance of the treaty. Regional associations of states in Europe, Latin America, and Africa were founded and issued their own declarations of human rights, which basically kept to the model of the UDHR in the matter of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. In Europe, a Court of Human Rights was set up, to which persons affected (whether natural or juridical) could take their cases when they believed that their rights were infringed.

3 Arcot Krishnaswami’s Study of Discrimination: 3 Expanding the Religious Field In 1960, during the process of discussing the ICCPR, the Study of Discrimination in the Matter of Religious Rights and Practices was published. Arcot Krishnaswami has written it at the request of a sub-commission of the Commission for Human Rights. (Krishnaswami 1960) This study defended the fundamental significance of the basic right to freedom of religion, and it had a lasting impact on later

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United Nations documents on human rights.6 A high societal value was ascribed to religious freedom. Krishnaswami saw it as a good that can safeguard peace; accordingly, it is in the public interest to defend it. Where religious freedom was trampled underfoot, this led not only to unutterable misery, but also to persecutions of entire groups. For the sake of freedom, it is necessary to put a stop to the discrimination of religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other religions are forces that extend the boundaries of good neighborliness and brotherliness. In a special way, they represent the spirit of brotherhood to which Article 1 of the UDHR appeals. The right to change from one religion to other religions or convictions, such as atheism, moved into the background. Similarly, Article 18 of the ICCPR avoided speaking of the change of religion or conviction. It speaks only of the freedom “to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.” (Lerner 2000, 15) Krishnaswami interpreted Article 18 of the UDHR in conjunction with Article 29, which affirms that the individual can develop his personality freely and fully only by fulfilling his obligations vis-à-vis the community. This opened up the prospect of including other religious practices. According to Article 18 of the UDHR, it was permissible to manifest publicly the “religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Krishnaswami expanded and specified the list of religious rights. Under the “freedom to comply with what is prescribed or authorized by a religion or belief,” he listed the following (page numbers in square brackets): (i) worship [31], (ii) processions [32], (iii) pilgrimages [32], (iv) equipment and symbols [33], (v) arrangements for disposal of the dead [34], (vi) observance of holidays and days of rest [35], (vii) dietary practices [36], (viii–x) the celebration of marriage and its dissolution by divorce , [36–38], (xi) the dissemination of the religion or belief [39], and (xii) training of personnel [41]. Then follows a list of actions that can be incompatible with the prescriptions of a religion or belief, and from which the believer has the right to be exempted: (i) taking an oath [42], (ii) military service [43], (iii) participation in religious or civic ceremonies [44], (iv) secrecy of the confession [44], (v) registering by the state of membership in a religion, and participation in vaccination programs.7

6 Cf. Lerner 2000, 9. 7 “Compulsory prevention or treatment of disease …” [45].



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3.1 The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All 3.1 Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on 3.1 Religion or Belief (1981) This comprehensive extension of religious rights also left its mark upon the Declaration that the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted in 1981. Its preamble takes over Krishnaswami’s assessment.8 Considering that the disregard and infringement of human rights and fundamental freedoms, in particular of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or whatever belief, have brought, directly or indirectly, wars and great suffering to mankind, especially where they serve as a means of foreign interference in the internal affairs of other States and amount to kindling hatred between peoples and nations, […] Considering that religion or belief, for anyone who professes either, is one of the fundamental elements in his conception of life and that freedom of religion or belief should be fully respected and guaranteed, […] Convinced that freedom of religion and belief should also contribute to the attainment of the goals of world peace, social justice and friendship among peoples and to the elimination of ideologies or practices of colonialism and racial discrimination […].9

Article 6 of this Declaration likewise agreed with Krishnaswami’s 1981 study in specifying the religious rights. In addition to those already mentioned by Krishnaswami, we also find the rights “to establish and maintain appropriate charitable or humanitarian institutions” (Article. 6 [b]) and “to establish and maintain communications with individuals and communities in matters of religion or belief at the national and international levels.” (Article 6. [i]) Elizabeth Odio Benito has called all these rights “corollary freedoms.” Some of them indisputably fall under the heading of “teaching, practice, worship and observance,” as indicated in the UDHR. Others specify further institutions and activities: places of assembly, objects used in worship, publications, financial donations, education, and holidays.10 All these are protected manifestations of religion or belief. The canopy 8 The history and the obligatory character of the Declaration are presented by Sullivan 1988. 9  [accessed: 4 November 2014]. 10 Article 6: “In accordance with article 1 of the present Declaration, and subject to the provisions of article 1, paragraph 3, the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief shall include, inter alia, the following freedoms: To worship or assemble in connexion with a religion or belief, and to establish and maintain places for these purposes; To establish and maintain appropriate charitable or humanitarian institutions; To make, acquire and use to an adequate extent the necessary articles and materials related to the rites or customs of a religion or belief; To write, issue and disseminate relevant publications in these areas;

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that protects the human right to religious fellowship is thereby extended to cover linked forms of society and communication. This also affects the discourse about religion as a fundamental element in the human “conception of life.” This means that more must be involved than the basic right of an individual: Considering that religion or belief, for anyone who professes either, is one of the fundamental elements in his conception of life and that freedom of religion or belief should be fully respected and guaranteed […].11

4 Foreign Policy at the Service of 4 Religious Freedom From the 1970s onwards, there was a rapid increase in the number of Non-Governmental Organizations,12 associations of citizens who worked on a national and a worldwide basis to promote the observance of human rights, and who could get accreditation to the United Nations. Some of these groups acted out of religious convictions, others for ethical and political reasons, when they demanded that human rights be granted both in principle and in practice. (Frantz/Martens 2006; Flanigan 2010; Cmiel 2004; Forsythe 2013, Ch. 7: “Non-governmental Organizations and Human Rights”) Kathryn Sikkink uses the metaphor of a boomerang effect to describe the political dynamic that this has repeatedly generated. If a state disregards the claims of such an organization and refuses to take corrective action in its territory, the organization can contact sister organizations in other countries and ask them to put pressure on their own governments to help ensure that human rights are observed in the state that is withholding them. (Sikkinik 2011, Keck/ Sikkink 1988, Ch. 3: “Human Rights Advocacy Networks in Latin America”) The Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the agreements at the subsequent meeting in Vienna had the boomerang effect that Kathryn Sikkink describes. In 1978, To teach a religion or belief in places suitable for these purposes; To solicit and receive voluntary financial and other contributions from individuals and institutions; To train, appoint, elect or designate by succession appropriate leaders called for by the requirements of one’s religion or belief; To observe days of rest and to celebrate holidays and ceremonies in accordance with the precepts of one’s religion or belief; To establish and maintain communications with individuals and communities in matters of religion and belief at the national and international levels.” 11  [accessed: 4 November 2014]. 12 “Compulsory prevention or treatment of disease …” [45].



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Aryeh Neier set up the small Helsinki Watch group, an NGO that gave birth to the Human Rights Watch. In the turmoil of 1989, religious communities and associations were among the groups in Eastern Europe that demanded the new freedoms for themselves and fought for a democratization of their states. (Sikkinik 2011, 106 f.; Neier 2012, 204–232) The United States of America made the observance of religious rights an instrument of their foreign policy. This was a success on the part of the Christian Right, which had grown in strength. While liberal churches had largely ceased to conduct international missionary campaigns, Evangelical and fundamental groups had become all the more active in this field. With the aid of influential senators, they persuaded Congress to pass the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) in 1998:13 An Act to express United States foreign policy with respect to, and to strengthen United States advocacy on behalf of, individuals persecuted in foreign countries on account of religion; to authorize United States actions in response to violations of religious freedom in foreign countries; to establish an Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom within the Department of State, a Commission on International Religious Freedom, and a Special Advisor on International Religious Freedom within the National Security Council; and for other purposes. (International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) 1998)

This law required the Executive to promote religious freedom everywhere in the world and to act on behalf of persons who were persecuted because of their faith; it authorized the United States government to take measures against countries in which religious freedom was violated. A Standing Commission was given the task of making known violations of religious freedom and making policy proposals. It is affirmed that the United States is particularly called to implement this policy, since the origin and the existence of the country are based on freedom of religion. Throughout its entire history, from the time of its foundation by persons who were persecuted for religious reasons down to the present day, the United States is said to have upheld this principle. There is only a little step from this affirmation to the claim that the United States thereby fulfills a salvation-historical mission; this step is taken in Evangelical fundamentalist thinking. (Kippenberg 2007) In this way, spaces for action opened up everywhere in the world, and Evangelical missionaries made diligent use of them. (Hertzke 2004) In addition to large religious organizations, local churches profited from this law: They founded congregations

13 Amstutz locates this episode in a long history of Evangelical involvement in foreign policy. (Amstutz 2004, 147–151)

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abroad and collaborated with their “sister churches.”14 When they encountered opposition in many countries, they justified themselves by appealing to the conventions on human rights; and they could count on the support of the American government. As Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, there is a dangerous element in these convictions. A promise of protection was able to turn into a political ideology that justified military force – and that is a perversion, since human rights, as a political praxis, are not above criticism. They are not regulations that politicians tell other countries to follow. Rather, they empower people to independent thinking and to criticism.15

5 The European Human Rights Regime The history of the European Convention on Human Rights is a classic example of a regional human rights regime that results when it becomes possible to take one’s own state before a transnational court and demand the implementation of human rights. (Donnelly 2003, 138–143; Forsythe 2013, 155–180) The individual possesses basic rights independently of his citizenship in one of the member states; the appeal to human rights imposes a restriction on the principle of the sovereignty of nation states. (Hoffmann 2010, 23) The Council of Europe enacted a Convention on Human Rights in 1950. After numerous states (including Turkey) acceded to this Convention, it came into force in 1953. By 2014, all the European states, including those in Eastern Europe with the exception of Belarus, had become members of the Convention. By acceding to it, they have committed themselves to guarantee participation in human rights to every person who is subject to their authority. To ensure this, a transnational court was established in Strasbourg. Article 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) followed Article 18 of the UDHR: 9 (1). Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this includes the freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with

14 For a presentation of the missionary methods, cf. Brower/Gifford/Rose 1996, Ch. 9: “Spreading the Word: Organizational Techniques, Theological Emphases, and Pastoral Power;” on the “sister church” model, cf. Bakker 2014. 15 Instead of making the list of those basic rights that are acknowledged in the West the standard for judging other states, Michael Ignatieff proposes focusing on elementary violations of basic rights: Ignatieff et al. 2001a (cf. also review by Carter 2002); Ignatieff 2001b.



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others and in public or in private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.16 (ECHR, 10 f.)

This is followed by a section about limitations on the manifestation of these freedoms. Article 29 (2) of the UDHR had already envisaged a restriction on the exercise of rights and freedom.17 The ICCPR heightened this restriction on the public manifestation of religion, which is also found in the European Convention of Human Rights: 9 (2): Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. (ECHR, 11)

When they acceded to the Convention, the states agreed to a review of their legislation, although the European Court was not a constitutional court, nor did it have the right to abrogate national laws. (Tulkens 2009, 2576 f.) The review looked at the following questions: Did the laws prescribe the restrictions? Were they unavoidable in a democratic society, in order to ensure public safety, order, health, and morals, and to protect the rights and freedoms of other persons? If someone regarded the limitations imposed on his manifestation of religion or belief as contrary to the law, and the courts of his country rejected his complaint, he could bring charges against the state before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg. The application of the criteria of Article 9 (2) proved to be anything but simple. The complaints against restrictions on the freedom of manifestation came from nationals living in member states with constitutions that had regulated the relationships between the state and religion in diverse ways, and that did not consider a change of their laws. There were states such as France or Turkey, in which religions had a place in the public sphere only to the extent that this was given to 16 The order in the UDHR is: teaching, practice, worship, and ritual observance; in the ICCPR, the order is: worship, ritual observance, practice, and teaching. 17 Article 29: (1) “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

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them by the state (secularism; laicism); other states, such as Greece, the United Kingdom, or Scandinavian countries recognized the majority religion as a state church; and others again practiced models of cooperation between the churches or religious communities and the state (e.g., Germany, Austria). The problem was made more acute by the expanding religious diversity in the European countries, as a consequence of worker’s migration (including Muslims), of new religious movements, and finally, of the accession to the Convention of Eastern European countries with their national churches. (Anthony 2005, 49 f.; Michalski 2006) In all these countries and cases, the inhabitants were now to have an equal right to manifestation, and they were able to make a legal complaint if this right was restricted. The 1981 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief had greatly extended the religious field. The courts would have to decide whether, and to what extent, a legal restriction was legitimate or discriminatory. The arguments for and against the restriction had to be presented to the ECtHR, which would then take its decision. (Habermas 1998, 563 f.) The legal procedure decided about the legitimacy of manifesting one’s religion or belief. In this way, a third level of the validity of human rights came into existence: In addition to the Declaration of universal rights and its juridification in international conventions and treaties, a legal discourse emerged among the European states involving an exchange of arguments about the public manifestation of religion and of its practices.18

5.1 The Clarification of Controversial Concepts The Court reacted to this problem by going beyond a mere verdict in several exemplary cases, and providing a detailed justification of the system on which the decision was based. We are told by a verdict in 1978 that the intention of the Court was to explain, to safeguard, and to develop the rules that were a consequence of the Convention: this was necessary in order to create universal standards for the protection of human rights in the member states. (Gerards 2009, 424–427) Seen in this light, its verdicts certainly contained something of a “constitutional component.” (Garlicki 2009) In cases concerning Article 9, 213 verdicts were delivered between 1962 and 21 March 2012, including appeals.19 18 For a detailed presentation and analysis of academic conflicts about freedom of religion in Germany, cf. Reuter 2014. 19 An overview is provided by the Department of Legal Studies at the University of Trier: [accessed: 31 October 2015]. This overview does not claim to be exhaustive.



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In 2009, two manuals commissioned by the Council of Europe were published, with the aim of clarifying fundamental concepts and rules that are particularly disputed: the Manual on the Wearing of Religious Symbols in Europe, written by Malcolm D. Evans (Evans 2009), and the Manual on Hate Speech, written by Anne Weber. (Weber 2009) The first handbook contains verdicts of the ECtHR on controversies about restrictions on public manifestation; the second contains verdicts on the protection of religion against insults. In an accompanying press release, the Council of Europe explained its intention:20 The manuals aim to clarify both concepts, which have caused intense controversy in Europe in the last years, and to guide policy makers, experts and others mainly through the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.

5.2 The Margin of Appreciation of Nation States One fundamental concept that helped to find a solution was that of a margin of appreciation of the member states in the restrictions they imposed on public manifestation. In 1976, the Court had to decide whether British authorities could confiscate a school textbook on the grounds that it was obscene and liable to corrupt young people – the book contained a chapter about sexuality, in which it discussed masturbation, orgasm, sexual intercourse, petting, and contraception. The publisher regarded this as an infringement of his right to express his opinions freely (Article 10 of the ECHR). After British courts had rejected this complaint, the ECtHR took the side of the British authorities. After examining the reasons for the British verdict, the Court concluded: It is not possible to find in the domestic law of the various Contracting States a uniform European conception of morals. The view taken by their respective laws of the requirements of morals varies from time to time and from place to place, especially in our era which is characterized by a rapid and far-reaching evolution of opinions on the subject. By reason of their direct and continuous contact with the vital forces of their countries, State authorities are in principle in a better position than the international judge to give an opinion on the exact content of these requirements as well as on the ‘necessity’ of a ‘restriction’ or ‘penalty’ intended to meet them.21

20 Press Release 799 (2008), text on the homepage of the Council of Europe, Directorate of Communication [accessed: 24 November 2014]. Two appendixes to this document contain extensive so-called Factsheets on the two offenses. Cf. Lerner 2000, 42–44. 21  [accessed: 31 October 31, 2015].

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The Court did not declare itself to be incompetent in general terms. It simply acknowledged that moral views hold sway in the member states that make it necessary to prohibit the dissemination of the book, even if other member states take a different view on this point. (Evans 2009, 20 f.) In the case of religion too, the Court acknowledged a similar margin of appreciation. Is it acceptable to refuse the Otto Preminger Institute in Austria a license to show the film Das Liebeskonzil by the Austrian director Werner Schroe­ ter?22 The Austrian authorities justified their prohibition by saying that the film offended the feelings of Catholics, and the European Court ruled in 1994 that this justification was sufficient: As in the case of ‘morals’ it is not possible to discern throughout Europe a uniform conception of the significance of religion in society […]. For that reason it is not possible to arrive at a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a permissible interference with the exercise of the right to freedom of expression where such expression is directed against the religious feelings of others. A certain margin of appreciation is therefore to be left to the national authorities in assessing the existence and extent of the necessity of such interference.23

The doctrine of the “margin of appreciation” makes it possible to take into account the diversity of moral and religious sensibilities in reviewing a national restriction on manifestation.24 The European Court cannot identify a European consensus on matters of morality or religion, but although it acknowledges national reasons for restrictions, it also tests their plausibility. The principle of the “margin of appreciation” and its application has given rise to controversies. It has been claimed that the Court is opening the door wide to cultural relativism. While some assert that minorities draw the short straw and universal standards are made impossible (Benvenisti 1999), others say that when the Court reviews the local standards of evaluation, assesses them, and describes them using its own conceptuality, it helps to bridge the gap between the general and language of the Convention and the specific language of the claims that are made.25 As will become clear, both sides can point to verdicts that support their view.

22  (50) [accessed: 31 October, 2015]. 23 Otto-Preminger-Institut versus Austria – Chamber Judgment 20 Sep. 1994 § 50. [accessed: 31 October, 2015]. 24 For basic articles explaining the notion cf. Brems 1996 and Nigro 2010. 25 Brems 1996, 312–314. For a debate with both positions, cf. Mahoney 1998 (“The Doctrine of the Margin of Appreciation under the European Convention on Human Rights: Its Legitimacy in Theory and Application in Practice”).



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5.3 Restrictions on Public Manifestations Cases like that of Buscarini and Balda v. San Marino were relatively simple. The two men were elected to the parliament of San Marino, but before they could take their seats, an electoral law of 1909 required them to take an oath on “the holy Gospels.” The Court saw this as a violation of the freedom of conscience guaranteed in Article 9; but it also regarded the one-sided reference of the oath formula to Christianity as inappropriate.26 More arguments were necessary in order to assess the admissibility of a complaint by a British pacifist against her government in 1978 (Arrowsmith v. UK, Report of the European Commission on Human Rights, 12.10.1978). Pat Arrowsmith had distributed leaflets in front of the barracks of soldiers who were leaving for Northern Ireland, urging them to refuse to take part in military service. Since such an exhortation is prohibited, she was sentenced to imprisonment. She complained to the Strasbourg Court that her right to freedom and safety in accordance with Article 5 had been infringed, but the Commission did not agree with her (§ 63–66). Nor had her right to the “manifestation” of her belief (Article 9) been violated. The Commission does indeed acknowledge pacifism as a settled belief in accordance with Article 9 (1), and it sees the plaintiff as a convinced pacifist who rejects violence in principle (§ 68–69). But the Commission rejects the idea that the distribution of leaflets appealing to soldiers to desert is the manifestation of a religious praxis (§ 69). It continues: The Commission considers that the term ‘practice’ as employed in Art. 9 (1) does not cover each act which is motivated or influenced by a religion or a belief. […] However, when the actions of individuals do not actually express the belief concerned they cannot be considered to be as such protected by Art. 9 (1), even when they are motivated or influenced by it (§ 71).27

The specific act of distributing an appeal to soldiers to act in contradiction of the law is not motivated by religion or belief (§ 72–75). And an action that is religiously motivated is not per se a protected “public manifestation.” (Evans C. 2001, 105 f.; Evans M. 1997, 216) One of the judges contradicted this view in a dissenting opinion. Mr. Opsahl stated that whereas he agreed with the distinction between a religious motivation and the public manifestation of religious action, otherwise any act motivated by beliefs criminal ones could be protected. 26  [accessed: 14 Novem­ ber 2014]. 27  [ac­ cessed: 25 November 2014].

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On the other hand, one cannot in my opinion generally exclude from Art. 9 all acts which are declared unlawful according to the law of the land if they do not necessarily manifest a belief, provided they are clearly motivated by it.-I consider that Art. 9 must, in principle, be applicable to a great many acts which are not, on their face, necessarily manifesting the underlying or motivating belief, if that is what they genuinely do. This is important where such acts cannot readily be seen as protected by other provisions of the Convention. Such is the case as regards, e.g. religious or conscientious objection to civil or professional duties.28

5.4 The Right of a Religious Body as Such Another lawsuit made it necessary to clarify the rights of religious organizations. Are their rights only derived from the subjective human rights of their members, or does the organization possess a right of its own? In 1977, after complaints, the Swedish consumer ombudsman forbade Scientology to advertise the Hubbard electrometer, which it had praised as a valuable aid in the measurement and transformation of states of mind. Scientology regarded this as an unjustified restriction on their religious praxis, and complained to the Court in Strasbourg. But before the Court discussed the complaint (which it then rejected), it had to admit the complaint in the first place. The Commission declared that it would take this opportunity to revise its previous view that only natural persons had the right of action, and that the distinction in Article 9 (1) between a church and its members was artificial, since it was the church that presented the application on behalf of its members. Accordingly, it must be acknowledged that the church, as a corporate body, likewise possesses these rights and can exercise them (X. and Church of Scientology v. Sweden).29 28  (p.  41) [accessed: 25 November 2014]. 29 X. and Church of Scientology v. Sweden (Application No. 7805/77, 5 May 1979) § 2. “The Commission, however, would take this opportunity to revise its view as expressed in Application No. 3798/68. It is now of the opinion that the above distinction between the Church and its members under Article 9 (1) is essentially artificial […] When a church body lodges an application under the Convention, it does so, in reality, on behalf of its members. It should therefore be accepted that a church body is capable of possessing and exercising the rights contained in Article 9 (1) in its own capacity as a representative of its members. This interpretation is in part supported from the first paragraph of Article 10 which, through its reference to ‘enterprises,’ foresees that a non-governmental organisation like the applicant Church is capable of having and exercising the right to freedom of expression. Accordingly, the Church of Scientology, as a non-governmental organization, can properly be considered to be an applicant within the meaning of Article 25 (1) of the Convention.” [accessed: 14 November 2014].



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In the case Hasan and Chaush v. Bulgaria (2000), the Bulgarian government took a decision about the appointment of the national Mufti after a lengthy dispute in the country’s Islamic community. Fikri Sali Hasan, who had lost out, and another member of the community complained against this intervention. The Court agreed with them that Article 9 had been violated: The Court recalls that religious communities traditionally and universally exist in the form of organized structures. They abide by rules which are often seen by followers as being of a divine origin. Religious ceremonies have their meaning and sacred value for the believers if they have been conducted by ministers empowered for that purpose in compliance with these rules. The personality of the religious ministers is undoubtedly of importance to every member of the community. Participation in the life of the community is thus a manifestation of one’s religion, protected by Article 9 of the Convention. Where the organisation of the religious community is at issue, Article 9 of the Convention must be interpreted in the light of Article 11, which safeguards associative life against unjustified State interference. Seen in this perspective, the believers’ right to freedom of religion encompasses the expectation that the community will be allowed to function peacefully, free from arbitrary State intervention. Indeed, the autonomous existence of religious communities is indispensable for pluralism in a democratic society and is thus an issue at the very heart of the protection which Article 9 affords. It directly concerns not only the organization of the community as such but also the effective enjoyment of the right to freedom of religion by all its active members. Were the organisational life of the community not protected by Article 9 of the Convention, all other aspects of the individual’s freedom of religion would become vulnerable (§ 62).30

The verdict in the case of Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia and Others v. Moldova (2001) affirms once again that an autonomous right to existence on the part of religious bodies, independently of the state, is necessary for a democratic society.31

5.5 Religious Pluralism as a Legal Norm The justification (§ 114–119) refers to a judgment that established criteria: Kokkinakis v. Greece (1993). It is not only quoted in the present case, but is also taken as a precedent by judges and lawyers in other verdicts. Minos Kokkinakis, a Jehovah’s Witness, was tried and convicted by the Greek state for violating the prohibition of engaging in unfair missionary work: He had attempted to explain to his neighbor the beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Kokkinakis appealed against this in Stras30 Case of Hasan and Chaush v. Bulgaria (Application No. 30985/96 26 October 2000): [accessed: 14 November 2014]. 31 Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia and Others v. Moldova (Application No. 45701/99): ), § 114–119 [accessed: 14 No­vem­ ber 2014].

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bourg. The majority of the judges found nothing objectionable in the Greek law;32 but they held that the Greek judiciary ought to have drawn a distinction between a legally permitted manifestation of faith and a dishonest proselytizing. Public manifestations of faith ought never to be prohibited. The justification of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in article 9 is crucial and has often been quoted: As enshrined in article 9, freedom of thought, conscience and religion is one of the foundations of a ‘democratic society’ within the meaning of the Convention. It is, in its religious dimension, one of the most vital elements that go to make up the identity of believers and their conception of life, but it is also a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, skeptics and the unconcerned. The pluralism indissociable from a democratic society, which has been clearly won over the centuries, depends on it.33

This justification sheds light on a number of other verdicts, some of which are contradictory and disputed. In Italy, Soile Lautsi had demanded that her two children should be taught in a classroom without a Christian crucifix on the wall. When this demand was rejected by the Italian courts, she brought the dispute before the Court in Strasbourg in 2006.34 She claimed that the cross in a state school violated both the principle of the secular nature of the state and her right to educate her children in accordance with her convictions, which was guaranteed by Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR.35 The government held that the presence of the cross in Italy’s state schools was authorized by decrees of 1924 and 1928, and that its primary significance was not religious: It represented one of the values from which Italian democracy lived. In the first trial, in 2006, the ECHR took the side of the mother and declared that the state had violated its obligation to observe confessional neutrality. It was ordered to pay the mother compensation. In the appeal trial, in 2011, the Grand Chamber reached the opposite verdict.36 It began by examining the praxis in other member states. The cross was forbidden in state schools in only a few of these: in Macedonia, France, and Georgia. In some member states, as in Italy, its presence was specifically prescribed (Austria, Poland, some German federal states, Swiss municipalities). In 32 Only one of the Strasbourg judges declared in his separate opinion that such a criminalization was a contravention of the European Convention. 33 Kokkinakis v. Greece, Judgment 25 May 1993, § 31. [accessed: 14 November 2014]. 34  [accessed: 14 November 2014]. 35 “The State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions” (§ 27). 36  [ac­cessed: 14 November 2014].



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other member states, it was present in schools without any specific regulations (Spain, Greece, Malta, San Marino, Rumania) (§ 27). Some of the member states who were involved in the trial declared that half of all Europeans lived in non-secular states; a state that supported only the secular, as opposed to the religious, would not in the least be neutral (§ 47). All this led to a new evaluation: There is no evidence before the Court that the display of a religious symbol on classroom walls may have an influence on pupils and so it cannot reasonably be asserted that it does or does not have an effect on young persons whose convictions are still in the process of being formed.37 (§ 66)

The Court evaluated the public manifestation of the Christian faith, not from the perspective of individual religious freedom, but from that of the right of a (political) community to the public manifestation of its religion. We find a different logic in verdicts about claims by Muslims to manifest their religion in public. One case, Dahlab v. Switzerland, concerned the banning of the headscarf in a Swiss state school.38 The plaintiff, Lucia Dahlab, had been appointed by the State Council of the canton of Geneva to a teaching post at a primary school in 1990. In 1991, she converted to Islam and wore the headscarf for three years without being challenged, until the Geneva school authority forbade this in 1996. On 15 February 2001, the European Court held this restriction of the manifestation of religion to be acceptable, since its aim was to protect the rights and freedoms of primary school children between the ages of four and eight, who are particularly easy to influence. The written justification of the verdict went beyond the concrete case and discloses a religious practice contradicting a principle of a democratic society. The applicant’s pupils were aged between four and eight, an age at which children wonder about many things and are also more easily influenced than older pupils. In those circumstances, it cannot be denied outright that the wearing of a headscarf might have some kind of proselytizing effect, seeing that it appears to be imposed on women by a precept which is laid down in the Koran and which, as the Federal Court noted, is hard to square with the principle of gender equality. It therefore appears difficult to reconcile the wearing of an Islamic headscarf with the message of tolerance, respect for others and, above all, equality and nondiscrimination that all teachers in a democratic society must convey to their pupils.39

37  (p. 28), [accessed: 14 November 2014]. 38 Dahlab v. Switzerland (Application No. 42393/98, 15.2.2001), [accessed: 14 November 2014]. 39  (p. 9), [accessed: 14 November 2014].

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This verdict made enormous waves. A bearer of basic rights who had appealed for her rights to be observed became the object of moral accusations as one who defended the inequality of the sexes, and hence a praxis that was incompatible with a secular democratic society. “The right-holder ceases to be Ms. Dahlab and she becomes someone ‘accused’.” (C. Evans 2006, 7) The Court ought also to have looked at the personal reasons for wearing the headscarf. If it had done so, it would have realized that Muslim women throughout the world had gone over to wearing the headscarf from the 1970s onwards, as a result of their own decision. Empirical studies show the variety of motives that led them to do this – motives that had been accepted by other courts. (Cf. Ahmed 2011; Hafez 2011; Bowring 2010) This kind of ambiguity is in fact typical of Islam, as Thomas Bauer (2011) has shown. If, however, the headscarf is a decision by the woman herself, not something forced on her by others, the Court would have had the task of seeking a balance between the woman’s right to personal self-determination and a restriction of her religious praxis in the primary school. (Marshall 2008, 636) But the Court applies the criterion of exemplarity for a democratic society, when it evaluates the restriction of the individual right to public manifestation. The Court acted in a similar manner in the case of Leyla Ṣahin’s complaint against Turkey.40 She had studied medicine in Bursa, and then enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Istanbul in 1997. When she arrived for a written examination in March, 1998, she was refused admittance because she wore a headscarf. The University administration had sent out a circular letter one month earlier, stating that students with headscarves (and beards) would not be admitted to academic events, and that their names would be removed from the list of students (§ 11–13). The plaintiff requested that this circular letter be rescinded in her case. She justified this by appealing to Article 9 of the European Convention (§ 64). She also declared that the choice of the headscarf was not directed against the republic and its values, nor was it intended to win other persons over to Islam (§ 85–87). When her complaint was rejected by the Turkish courts that were competent to hear it, she applied to the Court in Strasbourg. In this case too, the Court looked at how this problem was dealt with in other member countries of the Council of Europe. Since there was a great variety in Europe, Turkey was allowed a national margin of appreciation with regard to the necessity of the measure that was taken (§ 102). And here too, the Court added a kind of demonstration of this necessity: In such a context, where the values of pluralism, respect for the rights of others and, in particular, equality before the law of men and women are being taught and applied in practice,

40 Leyla Ṣahin v. Turkey (Application No. 44774/98, 10.11.2005), [accessed: 14 November 2014].



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it is understandable that the relevant authorities should wish to preserve the secular nature of the institution concerned and so consider it contrary to such values to allow religious attire, including, as in the present case, the Islamic headscarf, to be worn (§ 116).41

Instead of examining whether the judgment against wearing the headscarf is genuinely necessary according to the criteria of the European Convention, the Court simply regarded secularism and the equality of the sexes as the higher good. This did not go uncriticized. The Court had committed itself to a concept of secularity as a public arena without religion. As José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Paul Weller have shown, however, secularity can also refer to a public arena in which a variety of religious views and communities compete with one another on an equal footing.42 The Human Rights Commission of the United Nations criticized the position taken by the ECHR as well. (Lindholm 2012; Martinez-Torrón 2012; Moe 2012) With regard to cases involving Muslim issues, the application of the margin of appreciation obviously disadvantaged Muslims.

5.6 The Protection of Religions against Public Defamation Rights to protection were linked to the right to the public manifestation of religions and beliefs. The freedom of expression is not absolute. It is subordinate to formalities, conditions, restrictions, or the threat of penalties. These are envisaged by the law and are necessary in a democratic society. These include also the good reputation and the rights of other persons (European Convention, Article 10 [2]). The Court frequently has to decide in lawsuits concerning incitement to hatred. The ICCPR says: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law” (Article 20 [2]). Although the European Convention does not contain this precise prescription, the compilation of Anne Weber’s Manual on Hate Speech shows that numerous legal instruments exist. (Weber 2009, 7–17) According to the Council of Europe, the term “hate speech” covers every kind of statement that spreads, incites, promotes, or justifies racial hatred, xenophobia, Anti-Semitism, or other forms of hatred. Such statements are based on intolerance, aggressive nationalism 41 Leyla Ṣahin v. Turkey (Application No. 44774/98, 10.11.2005), (p. 29), [accessed: 14 November 2014]. 42 Paul Weller (2007) has discussed the relationship that comes to light here between human rights, religion, and secularity, in “‘Human Right,’ ‘Religion’ and the ‘Secular’: Variant Constructions of Religion(s), State(s) and Society(ies).” The secular context can assume various forms in law.

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and ethnocentricity, discrimination, and hostility against minorities, migrants, and post-migrants. (Weber 2009, 3) But it does not cover generally critical statements about religion, even when these are shocking or objectionable. (Weber 2009, 52) Blasphemy was long a punishable offense in the national laws of a number of European states. (Kippenberg 2010) In England, prosecutions were rare, but they did occur even in the twentieth century. In 1976, the publisher of the fortnightly newspaper Gay News was prosecuted under these laws (Levy 1993), after he published the poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name” by James Kirkup. The love that is given a voice here is that of the Roman centurion on Golgotha, who took the body of the dead Jesus down from the cross and had homosexual intercourse with it; this was described in obscene detail. Mary Whitehouse, an activist against cultural permissiveness, then took the newspaper and its editor, Denis Lemon, to court for spreading blasphemous texts. Lemon was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment on probation and to a fine of £1,000. After a public campaign against this verdict, the prison sentence was dropped. In the end, the trial costs and the fines amounted to nearly £10,000. Muslims in England wanted to build on this case to take Salman Rushdie and the publisher of his novel The Satanic Verses to court for blasphemous utterances. On 13 March 1989, Abdal Choudhury, a British Muslim, applied to a London court to open a criminal trial.43 The refusal was lapidary: “The application was dismissed on the basis that the offence of blasphemy relates only to Christianity.” The plaintiff appealed to Strasbourg, but here too his application was refused. There were very few convictions for blasphemy in Great Britain in the twentieth century – apart from the lawsuit against Gay News, there was only one other conviction, in 1922 – and a government commission had recommended in 1985 that blasphemy should no longer be a punishable offense. The Court could not see any compelling link between the exercise of religious rights and a demand of Muslims that the state should protect them against the publication of defamatory utterances. It dismissed the lawsuit on 5 March 1991. But in another case the Court recognized the English blasphemy law. The object of Wingrove v. UK was a nineteen-minute film made in 1989 that had been refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. This film depicted Saint Teresa of Avila becoming sexually excited as she embraced the body of the Lord. The European Court held the Board’s decision to refuse a certificate to be

43 Excerpts from texts are taken from the records of the trial before the European Court for Human Rights, which recapitulated the course of the previous trial before then refusing to open a trial. ( [ac­ cessed: 14 November 2014])



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legitimate. In the justification of its verdict on 26 October 1995, the Court also said something about the legitimacy of the blasphemy law: The Commission considered that the English law of blasphemy is intended to suppress behavior directed against objects of religious veneration that is likely to cause justified indignation amongst believing Christians. It follows that the application of this law in the present case was intended to protect the right of citizens not to be insulted in their religious feelings (§ 47).44

The Court issued a similar verdict in the case of Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria. Here too, it acknowledged that Catholics had a right to be protected from films with hurtful blasphemous contents. Since more and more non-Christian faith communities, which were not protected by the blasphemy law, had come into existence in Great Britain, various official commissions from 1985 onwards took up the question of its future position in English law. The legal situation was regarded as generally unsatisfactory. There was no clear guideline about the penalties to be inflicted; only the publication was punished, not the offensive statement itself; and only the English church enjoyed protection. (House of Lords 2003, 10) Accordingly, the government decided to change the law. The old Act was replaced by a Racial and Religious Hatred Act that prohibited “incitement to religious hatred.” General dogmatic statements (for example, the damnation of unbelievers in the Bible or the Quran) could not be chargeable, but only public speech that stoked hatred of those who held different beliefs. After the new law came into force, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 proceeded to the “abolition of common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.” The law of blasphemy lost its context in state church law, but it did not disappear without a replacement. Jean-Pierre Wils has construed the history of blasphemy as the reshaping of a metaphysical crime, feared and persecuted by rulers and by society, first, into a protection of Christian churches from insults, and finally, into a protection of personal religious identities. (Wils 2007, 18) The prohibition of blasphemy comes from an epoch in which the state power employed the law to protect ecclesiastical Christianity from defamation, but times have changed. Even England, with its state church, could not avoid seeing how adherents of non-Christian religions – Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Buddhists – demanded the right to manifest their religion in the public arena without hindrance. Sociologists had assumed for a time that religions would lose their protection by the state in modern society; they would be dislodged from the public arena and would continue to exist primarily in the private sphere. But 44  [accessed: 14 November 2014].

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this hard thesis of secularization has been disproved by the de facto history of religions in the modern age – with the result that religions can certainly still be observed in the public arena, in social forms that have been given labels such as “public religion” and “deprivatization of religion” (José Casanova) or “vicarious religion” (Grace Davie). In general, the communities referred to by these terms no longer derive their legal claims from state church law; rather, the relationship of the state to the faith communities is mediated via the basic rights of the citizens and by international law. (Walter 2006, 358 f.) Hence in the case of Germany, the legal scholars Hans Michael Heinig and Christian Walter have brought a new legal concept into play: “‘Religious constitutional law’ pleads for a definition of the relationship between the states and the faith communities in civil society that takes basic rights as its guideline.” (Heinig/Walter 2007, 3) The conflicts about the old offense of blasphemy in state church law, which called for a judgment in the sphere of international human rights law, became the starting point for a new legal offense that define anew the rules that govern Europe’s religious diversity. It is incumbent on the organs of the state to ensure that this respect becomes a reality in the public sphere. (Evans 2009, 26–30)

6 Universal Value – International Law – 6 National Rights The human right to freedom of religions and beliefs has been shaped through different categories. The UDHR Article 18 adopted a transmitted notion of freedom of religion from the end of the eighteenth century. It envisioned a community of citizens free from monarchy, aristocracy, and clerics. Two centuries later the UDHR directed the right against tyrannical powers of one’s own age (Bolshevism, National Socialism). Religious freedom is given a place within democracy, where the state is defined as a community under the rule of law. The right covers a public manifestation of religion in terms of teaching, practice, worship, and observance. When UN Covenants turned Human Rights Declarations into legal norms recognized by the Member States of the UN, a new legal dimension emerged: people claiming their basic rights violated. The initial Declarations of Human Rights in France and the emerging Unites States had their roots in European philosophy and church history. The claims people are advancing today are to a much greater extent independent of the specifics of the socio-cultural context. Here the observations by Dame Rosalyn Higgins, former President of the International Court of Justice in Den Haag, are revealing.



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Individuals everywhere want the same essential things: to have sufficient food and shelter; to be able to speak freely; to practice their own religion or to abstain from religious belief; to feel that their person is not threatened by the state; to know that they will not be tortured, or detained without charge, and that, if charged, they will have a fair trial. I believe there is nothing in these aspirations that is dependent upon culture or religion or stage of development. They are as keenly felt by the African tribesman as by the European city-dweller, by the inhabitant of a Latin American shanty-town as by the resident of a Manhattan apartment. (cit. in Harris 2010, 657)

One of the best experts in this field, Jack Donnelly, does not hesitate to ascribe a universal validity to the concept though it arose in the West. (Donnelly 2002, Ch. 2, criticism by Goodhart 2008, response by Donnelly 2008) He argues that other cultures or religions likewise know the obligation to recognize human dignity. Nevertheless, an appeal to this obligation does not always and everywhere guarantee the same substantial rights, and this means that human rights are both universal – as an empowerment to make demands, and particular – as their substance differs from one epoch and culture to another. Human rights empower those individuals and groups who will bear the consequences to decide, within certain limits, how they will lead their lives. Therefore differences in implementing international human rights are not only justifiable, they are to be expected. (Donnell 1999, 121)

When due to international treaties nation states are responsible for the protection of Human Rights a third category emerges. The claim of a right has to stand three tests, otherwise it is invalid: it may not violate existing laws, it may not damage the well-being of the community, and it may not obstruct the rights of others. The European legal controversies and procedure allow us to observe the emergence of diverse types of religious communities that have their rights recognized by democratic societies. (Kippenberg 2013, 143–174) The global right to a public manifestation of religion shows the fundamental problem of the concept of human rights, to be universal and yet knowing only specific national rights. English translation by Brian McNeil

References Ahmed, Leila. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2011. Amstutz, Mark. Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Anthony, Gordon. “Public Law, Pluralism, and Religion in Europe: Accommodating the Challenge of Globalization.” Revue Européenne de Droit Public 17 (2005): 43–73. Bakker, Janel Kragt. Sister Churches: American Congregations and their Partners Abroad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Bauer, Thomas. Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams. Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011. Benvenisti, Eyal. “Margin of Appreciation, Consensus, and Universal Standards.” New York Journal of International Law and Politics 31 (1999): 843–854. Bowring, Bill. “Review of Evans, Malcolm D. Manual of the Wearing of Symbols in Public Areas.” Security and Human Rights 21/2 (2010): 142–146. Brems, Eva. “The Margin of Appreciation Doctrine.” Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 56 (1996): 240–314. Brower, Steve, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose. Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism. New York/London: Routledge, 1996. Brumlik, Michael, and Hauke Brunkhorst, eds. Gemeinschaft und Gerechtigkeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer 1993. Carter, William M. Jr. “The Mote in Thy Brother’s Eye: A Review of Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 20 (2002): 496–511. Cmiel, Kenneth. “The Recent History of Human Rights.” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 129–131. Donnell, Jack. “Human Rights and Asian Values: A Defence of ‘Western’ Universalism.” The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Eds. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 60–87. Donnell, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 2003. Donnell, Jack. “Human Rights: Both Universal and Relative (A Reply to Michael Goodhart).” Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008): 194–204. Durham, W. Cole, Rik Torfs, David M. Kirkham, and Christine Scott, eds. Islam, Europe and Emerging Legal Issues. Farnham UK: Ashgate, 2012. European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). [accessed: 15 January 2016]. Evans, Carolyn. Freedom of Religion under the European Convention on Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Evans, Carolyn. “The ‘Islamic Scarf’ in the European Court of Human Rights.” Melbourne Journal of International Law 7 (2006): 52–74. Available at [accessed: 15 January 2016]. Evans, Malcolm D. Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Evans, Malcolm D. Manual on the Wearing of Religious Symbols in Public Areas. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2009. Flanigan, Shawn Teresa. For the Love of God. NGO’s and Religious Identity in a Violent World. Sterling (VA): Kumarian Press, 2010. Forsythe, David P. Human Rights in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Frantz, Christiane, and Kerstin Martens. Nichtregierungsorganisationen (NGOs). Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006.



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Garlicki, Lech. “Judicial Deliberations: The Strasbourg Perspective.” The Legitimacy of Highest Courts’ Rulings: Judicial Deliberations and Beyond. Eds. Nick Huls, Jacco Bomhoff, and Mauric Adams. The Hagues: Asser Press, 2009. 389–397. Gerards, Janneke. “Judicial Deliberations in the European Court of Human Rights.” In Huls/ Bomhoff/Adams 2009, 407–436. Glendon, Mary Ann. A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Random, 2002. Goodhart, Michael. “Neither Relative nor Universal: A Response to Donnelly.” Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008): 183–193. Habermas, Jürgen. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. Hafez, Sherine. An Islam of Her Own: Considering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements. New York: NYU Press 2011. Harris, David. Cases and Materials on International Law. 7th ed. London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2010. Heinig, Hans Michael, and Christian Walter, eds. Staatskirchenrecht oder Religionsverfassungsrecht? Ein begriffspolitischer Grundsatzstreit. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007. Hertzke, Allen D. Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. Lanham (Maryland): Rowman, 2004. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ed. Moralpolitik: Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. House of Lords, Select Committee. Religious Offences in England and Wales. Report. Vol. 1. 2003.

[accessed: 16 January 2016]. Huls, Nick, Jacco Bomhoff, and Mauric Adams, eds. The Legitimacy of Highest Courts’ Rulings: Judicial Deliberations and Beyond. The Hagues: Asser Press, 2009. Ignatieff, Michael et al. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001a. Ignatieff, Michael. “The Attack on Human Rights.” Foreign Affairs 80, No. 6 (2001b): 102–116. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). 1966. [accessed: 16 January 2016]. International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA). 1998. [accessed: 16 January 2016]. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Kippenberg, Hans G. “Außenpolitik auf heilsgeschichtlichem Schauplatz: Die USA im Nahostkonflikt.” Apokalyptik und kein Ende? Eds. Bernd Schipper and Georg Plasger. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. Kippenberg, Hans G. “Die Kontroverse um Salman Rushdies Satanische Verse und der aktuelle Rechtsdiskurs über Blasphemie.” Religionskonflikte im Verfassungsstaat. Eds. Astrid Reuter and Hans G. Kippenberg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. 259–289. Kippenberg, Hans G. “‘Phoenix from the Ashes’: Religious Communities Arising from Globalization.” Journal of Religion in Europe 6 (2013): 143–174. Krishnaswani, Arcot. Study of Discrimination in the Matter of Religious Rights and Practices. New York: United Nations, 1960.

[accessed: 16 January 2016]. Lerner, Natan. Religion, Beliefs, and International Human Rights. New York: Orbis, 2000.

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Levy, Leonard W. Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Lindholm, Tore. “The Strasbourg Court Dealing with Turkey and the Human Right to Freedom of Religion or Belief: An Assessment of Leyla Sahin v. Turkey.” In Durham et al. 2012, 147–168. Mahoney, Paul. “Marvelous Richness of Diversity or Invidious Cultural Relativism?” Human Rights Law Journal 19 (1998): 1–6. Marshall, Jill. “Condition for Freedom? European Human Rights Law and the Islamic Headscarf Debate.” Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008): 631–654. Martinez-Torrón, Javier. “Islam in Strasbourg: Can Politics Substitute for Law?” In Durham et al. 2012, 19–61. Michalski, Krzystof, ed. Religion in the New Europe. Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2006. Moe, Christian. “‘Refah’ Revisited. Strasbourg’s Construction of Islam.” In Durham et al. 2012, 235–271. Morsink, Johannes. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Neier, Aryeh. The International Human Rights Movement: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Nigro, Raffaella. “The Margin of Appreciation Doctrine and the Case-Law on the Islamic Veil.” Human Rights Review 11 (2010): 531–564. Reuter, Astrid. Religion in der verrechtlichten Gesellschaft: Rechtskonflikte und öffentliche Kontroversen um Religion als Grenzarbeiten am religiösen Feld. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Sikkink, Kathryn. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. New York/London: Norton & Company, 2011. Sullivan, Donna J. “Advancing the Freedom of Religion or Belief through the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Religious Intolerance and Discrimination.” American Society of International Law 82 (1988): 487–520. Tulkens, Françoise. “The European Convention on Human Rights and Church-State Relations: Pluralism vs. Pluralism.” Cardozo Law Review 30/6 (2009): 2575–2592. United Nations. Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. 1981. [accessed: 16 January 2016]. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (HDHR). 1948. [accessed: 16 January 2016]. Van Dijk, Pieter, and Godefridus J.H. van Hoof, eds. Theory and Practice of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Hague: Kluwer Law, 1998. Walter, Christian. Religionsverfassungsrecht in vergleichender und internationaler Perspektive. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. Weber, Anne. Manual on Hate Speech. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2009. Weller, Paul. “‘Human Right’, ‘Religion’ and the ‘Secular’: Variant Constructions of Religion(s), State(s) and Society(ies).” Does God Believe in Human Rights? Essays on Religion and Human Rights. Eds. Nazila Ghanea, Alan Stephens, and Raphael Walden. Leiden: Nijhoff, 2007. 147–179. Wils, Jean-Pierre. Gotteslästerung. Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2007.

Part 4: Peroration

Birgit Mersmann and Hans G. Kippenberg

Devolvement: From Modern Humanities towards Global Humanities At the threshold of modernization and globalization, the sciences of the human have undergone substantial changes. The multidisciplinary studies on the reconfiguration of the humanities and social sciences, compiled in this volume, have proven that the current reorientation is not detached from historical developments, structures, and discourses, but that it is rather entangled with the legacy of modern humanistic studies. The embedding of the humanities into a global research context happens with and against the periodization and conceptualization of modernity, including the science system and disposition of the modern humanities. In this respect, the humanities appear to stand at the epochal threshold of a global modernity which, as observed by Dirlik (Dirlik 2007), involves the parallelism and interdependency of unifying and fragmenting tendencies. Anticipating their future well into the twenty-first century, the humanities might move on to a condition of globality emancipated from the discourse of historical, conceptual, and institutional modernity, thus exceeding the threshold from modern to global humanities. The surmounting of the global challenges that lie ahead for the humanities implies a transgression of the historical framework of the modern humanities, their nation- and language-anchored constitution and colonial burden of Euro- and West-centrism. In a kind of anthropophagic move, global humanities might even devour the well-established traditions, structures and discourses of the modern humanities. One particular feature of globalization is its integrative, incorporating force. Appropriation and capitalization allow for unlimited inclusion. Under this condition, global humanities are capable of infinitely reappropriating and remediating variegations of modernity, be it a first, second, reflexive, divergent, alter- or hypermodernity. They can even completely engulf modernity and the modern condition, letting the premodern resurface as a constituent agency of the contemporary. The threat that processes of global integration within the field and institutional structure of the sciences might dissolve and finally destroy the very nature and system of the modern humanities is ubiquitously present in the crisis discourse on the humanities. Given the factual account of the current situation of the humanities, what are the signs of evidence that point to a major shift from modern to global humanities? First and foremost, the global restructuring of the humanities becomes manifest in the performance of a fourfold dynamic reconfiguration: a transdisciplinary, translational, digital and public rebinding. In the domain of the humanities, the effects of globalization are experienced as a dialectics of de- and reter-

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ritorialization of disciplinary fields and study areas. The humanities themselves are subjected to the generic double-helix of global integration and cultural diversification. To a significant degree, this double-bind process is driven by the capitalist globalization of the science system itself in its fierce contest for funding of research and resources. The global economization irrevocably penetrating the education and science system has had the most dramatic and destructive effects on the humanities. Enforcing usability, practical instrumentation, and profit-orientation, it has moved the liberal-arts tradition of the humanities “at the brink” of collapse (cf. Farrell 2011) and oriented it toward corporate humanities. As purely intellectualistic and aesthetic studies enshrined in the ivory tower of the philosophical tradition of Geisteswissenschaften, they were marginalized and therefore provoked to fight for their survival. Under the pressure of academic capitalization, social sciences and natural sciences are claiming culture as their field, ignoring the potential of a study not done “for profit alone.” (Nussbaum 2010) The disorientation and devaluation of the modern humanities is most salient in new inter-, trans- and even postdisciplinary constellations. In an unprecedented unorthodox manner, rediscovered and remodeled universalist approaches are confronted with regional and local studies on cultural difference and particularism. Genealogical and geological perspectives join: the spatial turn evoked by the need to globally remap the world and the world body of scientific knowledge has led to a synergetic coupling of the historical sciences with the geographical sciences. Culture as a form of life and social practice has become a central category and leading paradigm for the reorientation of the humanities.1 By revaluating and reinterpreting culture as an anthropological category and social life form, the humanities grow closer to the social sciences. At the same time, academic practices and standards in the humanities and sciences increasingly converge under the impact of digital technology and research methods, this way instigating an interactive integration of what has, rightly or unjustly, been theorized as the “two cultures” of science. The consequence of this convergence is a diversification of the liberal-arts-oriented science culture of the humanities. Digital humanities, environmental/ecological humanities, and medical humanities are the most recent examples for these science-crossing conjunctions within the redefining field of the humanities. On the other side, the power mechanism of global integration force the humanities to grow larger, widen their research scope in terms of historical and geographical dimensions and set on a path of unlimited expansion. The enlargement and augmentation of the modern nucleus and core business of the humanities is reflected in recent formations of Big Humanities 1 Doris Bachmann-Medick’s book Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture (2016) has provided evidence of the manifold cultural reorientations of the humanities.



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that combine humanities research with big data analysis in order to gain new insights in the history of the globe and of mankind.2 Big history as an emerging academic sub- (or trans-)discipline of history is the most prominent, albeit not uncontested example for this globe-integrating blow-up strategy in academia.3 By investigating history from the Big Bang to the present with primarily natural scientific methods such as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis, it bursts open fixed temporal models of analysis in history and reshuffles conventionalized disciplinary constellations. “Big” conceptual and methodological reconfigurations in the small, through continuous fragmentation partially diminishing field of the humanities suggest that the discourse on the translational turn, headed by cultural studies and integrated into global studies and theory, should be made mobile and productive in order to explore and understand the translations between different science cultures that happen to shape the making of global humanities and other newly emerging academic fields. In response to the translational turn in cultural studies, the cultural theorist Doris Bachmann-Medick has claimed that the humanities should operate as translation studies in order to contribute to a “critical globalization of the humanities.” (Bachmann-Medick 2009, 13) Taking this into account, global humanities as a future-oriented translation project of the twenty-first century should also involve a transnationalization of the humanities, their academic frameworks, concepts, theories, and methods. By consistently applying a transnational as translational research perspective, the categories, concepts, and models of the humanities, including their formation as modern disciplines – which are historically established, theoretically conventionalized and follow a Euro-centric and Western orientation – can be challenged and revisited. To this end, a transnational cultural approach to the study of the humanities is the most appropriate and desired instrument of investigation. (Bachmann-Medick 2014, especially 1–52) The three distinct levels to which the cultural theorist Imre Szeman (2007, 202 f.) assigns the transnational functions of cultural studies are equally relevant for the study of the scholarly tradition(s) in the humanities. Transferred to the humanities, the following three areas of research emerge as key questions, if we are to build transnational humanities in a global perspective: How did and do the humanities spread transnationally? Through which transnational contexts, issues, and sites is humanistic research defined? What are the political and epistemological challenges involved in the transfer of modern Western humanities to other scientific cultures and contexts? One point of access paving the way for global humanities is to explore how the historically established Western tradi2 See [accessed: 16 January 2016]. 3 Cf. Stokes Brown 2007; Christian 2011, 2013; Spiers 2011.

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tion in the humanities, including its institutional system, is transformed through cross-cultural translation processes. What are the differences in scholarship between the way European, North American, Latin American, Asian, African, Middle Eastern humanities are set up with respect to both their historical traditions and their present situation? How is the universal modern condition of the humanities diversified by their transnational spread and transcultural translation? Where can we see trends towards a global integration of the humanities? Are these trends noticeable in the academic translation and conceptual transformation of the humanities into transnational cultural studies? Or even in its translation into distant research contexts and disciplines, thereby transcending if not completely abandoning the classical modern confinement of the humanities? Are the humanities globally integrated and unified by their techno-analytical and media-cultural reshaping as digital humanities? Or does the digitization of the humanities catalyze further diversifications? Is the research area and agenda of the digital humanities in the Anglophone academic context identical to that of the Digitale Geisteswissenschaften in their German scholarly setting? As the example of ‘big history’ discussed earlier reveals, it is essential not to restrict the humanities as translation studies to mere translation within and between different humanities disciplines, traditions, and concepts. Seen in a broader global science perspective, time is ripe for expanding the translational humanities approach across all disciplines, i.e. not only to cultural studies but also to the social and natural sciences, to include cross-methodological and cross-categorical translations between different cultures of scholarship and knowledge systems conceived both locally and universally. The passage from modern to global humanities is facilitated by the digital. According to the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, “Traditional Humanities is balkanized by nation, language, method, and media. Digital Humanities is about convergence: Not only between humanities disciplines and media forms, but also between the arts, sciences, and technologies.” (The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, 2009, 8) One central element jointly responsible for the global transdisciplinary integration and science-cultural diversification of the humanities can be seen in the increased use of digital technologies and methods throughout all disciplines in the scientific landscape. It has promoted the blending of very diverse scientific methods from the human, social, natural, and technical sciences, and in particular helped the humanities to keep pace with the analysis of large-scale data and complex systems. This is exemplarily proven by the development of Cultural Analytics by Lev Manovich (starting in 2005) which uses computational and visualization methods for the investigation of massive cultural data sets and flows.



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The digital impact factor on the humanities is reflected in the flourishing digital humanities study programs and research initiatives. In this enormously productive field, first diversifications begin to stand out. According to Tara McPherson who suggested a typology of digital humanities (McPherson 2009), distinctions between the computing humanities, blogging humanities and multimodal humanities can be discerned. In its entirety, digital humanities take into account that written texts and printed books are no longer the exclusive and normative medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. The iconic and sonic/acoustic turn, followed by a multimodal turn in the humanities, cultural and media studies were first indicators of this paradigm shift caused by multimedia digitization. Through the internet we have access to almost infinite amounts of information, among them texts, images, videos, and audios which reflect and represent the world, and which constitute a potential richness of research never experienced before. Besides the subject matter of research, the production and spreading of knowledge in the humanities has also changed fundamentally. Multi-purposing, multi-channeling and co-creation are the driving forces of digital humanities research. “Large scale, distributed models of scholarship represent one of the transformative features of the Digital Humanities.” (The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, 2009, 4) This does not only imply a transdisciplinary reorientation, but also an institutional de-disciplining of the humanities. The authors of the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 condemn “disciplinary finitude.” They envisage “a new topography: not just disciplinary, but one involving alternative configurations for producing knowledge – open-ended, global in scope, designed to attract new audiences and to establish novel institutional models. Perhaps ‘Digital Humanities’ itself becomes a distributed virtual department overlaid by current departments, weaving together shifting archipelagos of research from intellectually and geographically diverse disciplines on the basis of overlapping research networks.” (The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, 2009, 11–12) The making of global humanities is unthinkable without these cooperative forms of digital humanities. Applied as a form of cultural analytics, digital humanities could be used as a self-reflective instrument to make the processes of global integration and cultural diversity within the field of the humanities visible. A public reorientation of the humanities is another consequence of the digital reset as one important driving force of (science-)cultural globalization. (Ricci/ Gottfried 2002; Nussbaum 2010; Bate 2011; Brooks 2014; Cooper 2014; Sommer 2014) Whole areas of human cultural production and representation have gone public; they populate the real world of urban spaces and the virtual world of mediascapes. The new politicized engagement in public discourse happens in a productive dialectics and mediatic tension between street and online activism. The emerging movements of public art and public religion are the most visible

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examples of this new trend. As a response to the public turn, the humanities search for new alliances with the social sciences, political sciences, law studies and public management. Recently founded research initiatives for establishing Global Urban Humanities and Public Humanities as new fields of specialization suggest that the humanities are expanding and branching out into the public domain. This change of orientation is mostly due to the high pressure on the humanities to break out of the ivory tower, be(come) socially relevant and assume political responsibilities. It has led to conflicting developments – the formation of globally-critical analytical and activist Humanities, but also the production of system-conformist, (in)corporate(d) humanities in the service of the state, the economy, and industry, depending on how the new role of the humanities within the public political, economical, academic, and educational sphere is defined. The publication of the Humanities World Report (Holm/Jarrick/Scott 2015), the first of its kind, highlights the new public and institutional engagement of and interest in the humanities on a global scale.4 Funded by the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO Humanities), it provides publicly available survey information on the global condition of Humanities research, including its changing institutional contexts. One main point in the 2015 report on the state of humanistic research is concerned with the translation of the humanities. This translational criterion is not only related to the dissemination of humanistic knowledge and practice to other disciplines, especially the sciences, but also to how the humanities communicate via the media, engage with business, influence policy makers, or engage through public institutions. It is this new institutional threshold, the translation of academically profiled Humanities into publicly mediating Humanities that seems to pose a main challenge in shaping the future of global humanities. The field of global humanities is not confined to individualistic or cooperative research in the humanities globally clustered for innovative purposes. Enabled by the transition from analogue to digital humanities, global humanities entail the vision and potential of a communitarian project involved in establishing open and diverse systems of knowledge production and dissemination. The integrative power of convergence of transnationally and transdiciplinarily operating global humanities can help to better understand the humanistic function of the Humanities in a global world and even build new frameworks for a civil society centered on the nature, culture, and value of the human condition. Relational diversity as a translational concept of

4 First results of the Humanities World Report were discussed at the Symposium “Global Humanities” in Hannover Herrenhausen in 2014.



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both concrete and symbolic transactions in and between social and institutional spaces will definitely play a crucial role in reconfiguring global humanities.

References Bachmann-Medick, Doris. “Introduction: The Translational Turn.” Translation Studies 2:1 (2009): 2–16. Bachmann-Medick, Doris, ed. The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Bate, Jonathan, ed. The Public Value of the Humanities. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Brooks, Peter, ed. The Humanities and Public Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Christian, David, and William H. McNeill. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw Hill, 2013. Cooper, David D. Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. 2009 ‹http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/ Manifesto_V2.pdf› [accessed: 16 January 2016]. Dirlik, Arif. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007. Farrell, Victor E. Liberal Arts at the Brink. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Humanities World Report 2015. Eds. Poul Holm, Arne Jarrick and Dominic Scott. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Manovich, Lev. Cultural Analytics. ‹http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/cultural-analytics.html› [accessed: 16 January 2016]. McPherson, Tara. “Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities.” Cinema Journal 48:2 (Winter 2009): 119–123. Münch, Richard. Globale Eliten, lokale Autoritäten: Bildung und Wissenschaft unter dem Regime von PISA, McKinsey & Co. Frankfurt a.M: edition suhrkamp, 2009. Nussbaum, Martha. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Ricci, Gabriel R., and Paul Gottfried. Humanities & Civic Life: Religion & Public Life. London: Transactions, 2002. Sommer, Doris. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Spiers, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Stokes Brown, Cynthia. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. New York/London: The New Press, 2007.

List of Illustrations

List of Illustrations

Burcu Dogramaci, Migrant, Nomad, Traveler – Towards a Transnational Art History Fig. 1: Francesco Clemente, Perseverance, 1981, oil on canvas, 198,1 x 236,2 cm, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Partial and promised gift of UBS. © 2015 Francesco Clemente    53 Fig. 2: Robert Filliou, La Valise. Research in Dynamics and Comparative Statics, 1973. Private  59 Collection   Fig. 3: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Escape Vehicle Owned and Customized by Dean Valentine, 1996; shell: steel, insulation, wood, and glass; interior: metal, wood, glass, paint, television, wiring, and various objects, 60 x 40 x 84 inches (152 x 102 x213 cm), ARG #: ZA1996007, Collection of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson, Los Angeles. © Andrea Zittel. Image courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York    60 Fig. 4: Candida Höfer, Hauptbahnhof Düsseldorf 1975, From the slide projection Türken in Deutschland, 1979, © Candida Höfer/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016    63 Fig. 5: Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (Untitled, Hotel Hessischer Hof), 1996, Mixed media on hotel stationery, 30 x 21 cm, Collection of David Nolan, New York, © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne    64 Fig. 6: Roman Ondák, Casting Antinomads, 2000, Series of 120 photographs, Each 22 x 32,5 cm, Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; gb agency, Paris; Johnen Gallery, Berlin; kurimanzutto, Mexiko City    66 Rainer Tetzlaff, ‘African Renaissance’ – Between Pan-African Rhetoric and the Reality of National Identity Politics Fig. 1: Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, 2010, Dakar. © dpa Picture-Alliance GmbH    97 Isabel Wünsche, Western Modernism at and beyond the Margins. František Kupka and Margaret Preston Fig. 1: František Kupka, cover, 1904–05 and “Science and Religion,” 1905–08, for Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (Mankind and Earth), 6 vols, (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–08, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015    144 Fig. 2: František Kupka, A Tale of Pistels and Stamen, 1918–19, oil on canvas, Wilhelm-HackMuseum, Ludwigshafen, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015    146 Fig. 3: Margaret Preston, Implement Blue, 1927, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of New South Wales, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015    149 Fig. 4: Margaret Preston, Australia, 1875–1963, Aboriginal landscape, 1941, Sydney, oil on canvas, 40.0 x 52.0 cm, D. & J.T. Mortlock Bequest Fund 1982, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015    150 Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, Relational Diversity: Religious Pluralization and Politics of Cohesion Fig. 1: Model for the varieties of pluralization in modern immigration societies. Designed by the author    231

About the Authors

About the Authors

Doris Bachmann-Medick is Senior Research Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of the University of Gießen. She held numerous appointments as a visiting professor, recently at the universities of Graz, Göttingen, Cincinnati and UC Irvine. Her recent book publications include: Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2014 [2006]; revised English edition Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016; Transnational und translational: Zur Übersetzungsfunktion der Area Studies. CAS-Center for Area Studies, FU Working Paper Serie No.1/2015; her edited volumes are: Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1997; Kultur als Text: Die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissenschaft. Tübingen: Francke, 2004 [1996]; the special issue “The Translational Turn” of the journal Translation Studies (2009); The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. She serves on the editorial board of Translation Studies (since 2008). Burcu Dogramaci, born 1971 in Ankara, is Professor of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art at the University of Munich. Together with Birgit Mersmann she co-founded the research network “Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration.” In 2011–12 she was a fellow of the Senior Research in Residence Program at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich. Before coming to Munich she held lectureships at the University of Hamburg, the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Jacobs University in Bremen and at the Hamburg Academy of Fashion and Design (AMD). In 2007, she completed her habilitation at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on the work and influence of German-speaking architects, city planners and sculptors in Turkey after 1927. She has been in receipt of research scholarships from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Aby M. Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg and was awarded the Kurt-Hartwig-Siemers Research Prize by the Hamburg Scientific Foundation (HWS). In 2000, she was awarded her doctorate under Martin Warnke with a thesis on graphic art in the print media and fashion of the Weimar Republic. Her research focuses on the following areas: modern and contemporary art, exile, transfer of culture and migration, urbanity and artistic practice, history and theory of photography and the photobook, fashion history and theory. Her main publications include: Kulturtransfer und nationale Identität: Deutschsprachige Architekten, Stadtplaner und Bildhauer in der Türkei nach 1927. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2008; Fotografieren und Forschen: Wissenschaftliche Expeditionen mit der Kamera im türkischen Exil nach 1933. Marburg: Jonas, 2013; Heimat: Eine künstlerische Spurensuche. Köln: Böhlau, 2015; her edited volumes are: (with Karin Wimmer) Netzwerke des Exils: Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2011; Migration und künstlerische Produktion: Aktuelle Perspektiven. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013. Elahe Haschemi Yekani is Junior Professor of English Literature at the University of Flensburg. Previously she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Konstanz and Assistant Professor at the Department of English at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In 2012, she acted as substitute Junior Professor in British Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam and was a Guest Professor of Modern English Literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2011. Currently, she works on her second book, in which she traces a literary history of canonical

280 

 About the Authors

bourgeois novels of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century entangled with the earliest written testimonies of Black British writers. Her research interests include the Anglophone novel, queer theory, postcolonial and gender studies. Recent publications: The Privilege of Crisis: Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film. Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus, 2011 (won the Britcult Award 2009); Ed. (with Beatrice Michaelis and Gabriele Dietze) Special Issue of Feministische Studien: “The Queerness of Things Not Queer: Entgrenzungen, Materialitäten, Interventionen” (2/2012); Ed. (with Eveline Kilian and Beatrice Michaelis) Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Hans G. Kippenberg is Wisdom Professor emeritus of Comparative Religious Studies at Jacobs University in Bremen (2008–2014). His fields of teaching and research are ancient and modern history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the emergence of modern religious studies, the role of religious communities in the globalized world and their relation to violence. He taught Theory and History of Religions at the University of Groningen from 1977 to 1989 and at the University of Bremen from 1989 to 2004. In 1987 he was Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, in 1991/92 at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, in 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and from 1998 to 2009 at the Max-Weber Collegium, Erfurt. He was Editor of NUMEN. International Review for the History of Religions from 1989 to 2000. Selected English publications: Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002; “Religious Communities and the Path to Disenchantment: The Origins, Sources, and Theoretical Core of the Religion Section.” Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion. Eds. Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005; (with Tilman Seidensticker) The 9/11 Handbook: Annotated Translation and Interpretation of the Attackers’ Spiritual Manual. London: Equinox, 2006; “The Desecularization of the Middle East Conflict: From a Conflict between States to a Conflict between Religious Communities.” Secularization and the World Religions. Eds. Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009; “The Social Capital of Religious Communities in the Age of Globalization.” Chasing Down Religion: In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Sciences. Essays in Honour of Luther Martin. Eds. Panayotis Pachis and Donbald Wiebe. Sheffield: Equinox, 2014; Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011; “‘Phoenix from the Ashes’: Religious Communities Arising from Globalisation.” Journal of Religion in Europe 6 (2013). Klaus Kornwachs studied Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy. He was lecturer at the universities of Freiburg and Stuttgart and Senior Research Fellow at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart from 1979 to 1992. From 1990 onwards Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University Ulm; from 1992 to 2011 Chair of Philosophy of Technology at the Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus. 1991 SEL Award for Communication Technologies. Guest Professor at Technical Universities in Budapest, Vienna, Dalian (China); Fellowship at the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung (IZKT) in Stuttgart. From 2004 Full Member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering, corresponding member of the Frege Society, Jena and other scientific and engineering societies. From November 2013 Honorary Professor at the Intelligent Urbanization Co-Creation Center for High Density Region at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai. Main research fields:



About the Authors 

 281

analytical philosophy, philosophy of pure and applied sciences, general system theory, technology assessment, theoretical philosophy, ethics. Recent publications: Logik der Zeit – Zeit der Logik. Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2001; Zuviel des Guten – von Boni und falschen Belohnungssystemen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009; Strukturen technologischen Wissens: Analytische Studien zu einer Wissenschaftstheorie der Technik. Berlin: Sigma, 2012; Philosophie der Technik: Eine Einführung. München: H. Beck, 2013; Philosophie für Ingenieure. München: Hanser, 2014. For more see www.kornwachs.de (in German). Bettina Lindorfer is Guest Professor of French and Italian Linguistics at the Humboldt University in Berlin and Research Coordinator of the Wilhelm von Humboldt Edition at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Before coming to Humboldt University, she taught as Guest Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Rostock. Her fields of interest include linguistics of migration, youth language in film, language and aging, medieval language theory. Recent publications: “Das Konzept des ‘gelebten Raumes’: Perspektiven raumbezogener Linguistik und der kulturwissenschaftliche Spatial turn.” Der Spatial Turn in der Romanistik. Eds. Uta Helfrich and Verena Dolle. München: Meidenbauer, 2009; “Language as a Mirror of the Soul: Guilt and Punishment in Dante’s Concept of Language.” Dante’s Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity. Eds. Manuele Gragnolati, Sara Fortuna, and Jürgen Trabant. Oxford: Legenda, 2010; “Zur europäischen Geschichte höflichen Sprechens: Von der mittelalterlichen Didaxe zur Stilisierung höflichen Umgangs in der Renaissance.” Sprachliche Höflichkeit in interkultureller Kommunikation und im DaF-Unterricht. Eds. Claus Ehrhardt and Eva Neuland. Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Lang, 2010; Ed. (with Solveig Malatrait) Alter(n) in der Stadt: Viellir en ville: Sprachund literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge aus Romanistik und Germanistik. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012; “Codeswitching, Stilmischung oder das Ende der Sprache? Jugendsprache in den Filmen La Journée de la Jupe, L’Esquive und Entre les Murs.” Mehrsprachigkeit im Kino: Formen der Sprachenvielfalt in aktuellen Filmen und Berichte aus der Filmproduktion. Eds. Andras Blum and Eva Erdmann. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2015. Peter Ludes is Professor emeritus of Mass Communication at Jacobs University Bremen (2002–2014). Studies in sociology and political science at Trier University, Germany (Dr. phil. 1978) and, as Fulbright and Wien scholar, at Brandeis, USA (MA 1975, PhD 1983). Visiting positions at the University of Newfoundland, Canada, 1981/82, Amsterdam, 1987, Harvard, 1989, and Konstanz, 2001. He was Associate Professor for Culture and Media at the University of Siegen (1992–2002), for Media and Communication at Mannheim (1994–1996), and ViceChair of the collaborative research center on screen media at Siegen University, 1995–2000. Member of the core group and head of team 3 of the European Science Foundation program on “Changing Media – Changing Europe: Media Technology and the European Information Society” (2001–2004); co-chair of the Research Network “Sociology of Communications and Media Research” of the European Sociological Association (2008–2011). Since November 2014 member of the “Center for the Study of China and Globalization: Global China” and since March 2015 member of the Bremen Institute for Transmedial Textuality Research. The book series “The World Language of Key Visuals” by the LIT Publishing House, edited by Professors Ludes and Herzog, documents results of the cooperation between the computer sciences, humanities, and social sciences: The first volume, also translated into Chinese and Portuguese, was published in 2005, the second and third volumes were published in 2010 and 2011 (http://www.

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 About the Authors

keyvisuals.org). Main research interests: digital media; multiple modernizations, globalizations, and civilizing processes; intercultural comparisons; global multimodal communication; classical and modern social theories; digital social sciences. Selected recent books: Elemente internationaler Medienwissenschaften: Eine Einführung in innovative Konzepte. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011; Ed. Algorithms of Power – Key Invisibles. Vol. 3 of “The World Language of Key Visuals.” Berlin: LIT, 2011. Birgit Mersmann is Visiting Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art/Aesthetic Theory at the University of Cologne, Germany, and associated research professor at the NCCR Eikones at the University of Basel, Switzerland. From 2008 to 2015, she held a professorship of Non-Western and European Art at the international Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. She is the co-founder of the research network “Art Production and Art Theory in the Age of Global Migration.” In 2014 she was Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium of Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, and in 2013 Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (ANU), where she analysed the emergence of new urban museumscapes in Asian global cities. As senior researcher of the National Centre of Competence in Research “Iconic Criticism – The Power and Meaning of Images” at the University of Basel, Switzerland (2005–2008), she investigated “iconoscriptures” as hybrid symbolic forms and inter-media expressions between image and writing. From 1998 to 2002 she taught as DAAD Visiting Professor at Seoul National University in South Korea. Research foci include image and media theory, visuality and representation, contemporary East Asian and Western art, global art and art history, the history of Asian biennials, new museums in Asia, visual translation, interrelations between script and image. Selected publications: Ed. (with Alexandra Schneider) Transmission Image: Visual Translation and Cultural Agency. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009; Ed. (with Antonio Loprieno and Carsten Knigge Salis) Schrift Macht Bild: Schriftkulturen in bildkritischer Perspektive. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2011; “Global Dawning: The Gwangju Biennial Factor in the Making and Marketing of Contemporary Asian Art.” The Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art & Culture. Thematic Issue “Art, Criticism and the Forces of Globalization”, edited by Jonathan Harris, 2013; “D/Rifts between Visual Culture and Image Culture: Relocations of the Transnational Study of the Visual.” The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective (Concepts for the Study of Culture 4). Ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014; “Embracing the Modern World: Art History’s Universal History and the Making of Image Studies.” The Making of the Humanities. Vol. 3. Eds. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014; Schriftikonik: Bildphänomene der Schrift in kultur- und medienkomparativer Perspektive. München: Fink, 2015. Alexander-Kenneth Nagel is Professor for Religious Studies at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. From 2009 to 2015, he was Professor of Social Scientific Study of Religion at the Ruhr University in Bochum where he led the junior research group “Networking Religion: Civic Potentials of Religious Communities.” From 2005 to 2009, he worked as a research associate at the public University of Bremen. His research interests include the civic potentials of religious migrant communities, religious pluralization and institutionalized forms of interreligious encounter, and the governance of religious diversity in modern immigration societies. Recent publications: Politiknetzwerke und Politische Steuerung. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009;



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 283

Diesseits der Parallelgesellschaft: Neuere Studien zu religiösen Migrantengemeinden in Deutschland. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012; Religiöse Netzwerke: Die zivilgesellschaftlichen Potentiale religiöser Migrantengemeinden. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015. Rainer Tetzlaff is Wisdom Professor emeritus of African and Development Studies at the international Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. As a historian and political scientist he teaches “International Relations of the Twentieth Century” and has taught several courses on Africa in the past and present since 2006. During his time at Jacobs University Bremen he published various articles on Pan-Africanism, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and contributed to a larger research project on regional integration (in the world), directed and organized by Cord Jakobeit and Andreas Grimmel from the University of Hamburg. Before coming to Jacobs University in 2006, he was Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Economy and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg. Among his latest research periods abroad (since 2003) were projects in Ghana (DFG project: An evaluation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper approach by the World Bank), Ethiopia and Eritrea (DFG project: The survival and development of ‘peace zones’ in post-conflict societies), and Malawi (EU- and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ)-funded project in the political context of democratization assistance by the European Union: NICE ( National Initiative for Civic Education). Recent publications include: “Wachsende Religiosität als Antwort auf Globalisierung: Zur Konstruktion von kultureller Identität als Erlebnis von Differenz.” Religiöse Differenz als Chance? Eds. Wolfram Weiße and Hans-Martin Gutmann. Münster et al.: LIT, 2010; “Die kulturelle Dimension der Globalisierung: Kulturen in der Weltgesellschaft.” Politische Bildung in der Weltgesellschaft: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung. Eds. Wolfgang Sander and Annette Scheunpflug. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012; “Zur Friedensfähigkeit von Diktaturen und autoritären Regimen.” Handbuch Friedensethik. Eds. Ines-J. Werkner and Klaus Ebeling. Heidelberg: FEST, 2015. Göran Therborn is Professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Affiliated Professor at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Before Cambridge he was Co-Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. He has worked on several fields of empirical and theoretical social science and has taught in several countries, in Europe, the Americas, and in Asia. Among his recent books are: Between Sex and Power. Family in the World, l900–2000. London/New York: Routledge, 2004; Les Sociétés d’Europe du XXe au XXIe Siècle. Paris: Armand Colin, 2009; Ed. (with Simon Bekker) Capital Cities in Africa: Power and Powerlessness. Dakar/ Cape Town: Codesria, 2011; The World: A Beginner’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity, 2012; The Killing Fields of Inequality. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Currently, he is writing a global study of Cities of Power. Jürgen Trabant is Professor emeritus of Romance Linguistics, Freie Universität Berlin and Professor emeritus of European Plurilingualism, Jacobs University Bremen (2008–2013). He taught at the Universities of Tübingen, Bari, Rome, Hamburg, Freie Universität Berlin and was Visiting Professor at Stanford University (1988/89, 1991), Leipzig (1992), University of California Davis (1997), EHESS Paris (1998, 2003), Limoges (2003), Naples (2005, 2007), Bologna (2008), Brasília (2013), Milan (2013). Currently, he co-directs a research project on “Symbolic articulation” at the Humboldt University (2014–2017). He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg

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 About the Authors

Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Fields of interest include: French and Italian linguistics, semiotics, especially literary semiotics, history of European linguistic thought, philosophy of language, historical anthropology, language politics, language and image. Among his most important books are: Zur Semiologie des literarischen Kunstwerks (1970; Spanish transl. 1976); Elemente der Semiotik (1976, 31996; Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, Korean transl.); Apeliotes oder Der Sinn der Sprache: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprach-Bild (1986; French transl. 1992); Traditionen Humboldts (1990; Korean transl. 1998, French transl. 1999); Neue Wissenschaft von alten Zeichen: Vicos Sematologie (1994; Italian transl. 1996, English transl. 2004); Artikulationen: Historische Anthropologie der Sprache (1998); Der Gallische Herkules: Über Sprache und Politik in Frankreich und Deutschland (2002); Mithridates im Paradies: Kleine Geschichte des Sprachdenkens (2003); Europäisches Sprachdenken: Von Platon bis Wittgenstein (2006); Cenni e Voci: Saggi di Sematologia Vichiana (2007); Was ist Sprache? (2008); Die Sprache (2009); Weltansichten: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachprojekt (2012); Globalesisch oder was? Ein Plädoyer für Europas Sprachen (2014). Corinna R. Unger is Professor of Global and Colonial History (19th and 20th centuries) at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She previously taught Modern European History at Jacobs University Bremen. Her research focuses on the history of development in the context of decolonization and the Cold War, on the history of international organizations, and on the history of knowledge. Her publications include: Entwicklungspfade in Indien: Eine internationale Geschichte. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015; Ed. (with Heinrich Hartmann) A World of Populations: Transnational Perspectives on Demography in the Twentieth Century. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014; Ed. (with Marc Frey and Sönke Kunkel) International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Isabel Wünsche is Professor of Art and Art History at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany (since 2001). Previously, she taught at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Scripps College, Claremont, and the University of California, Los Angeles and worked on museum projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. She studied Art History and Classical and Christian Archaeology in Berlin, Moscow, Heidelberg, and Los Angeles and was awarded her PhD from Heidelberg University. Her research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, specifically European modernism and the historic avantgarde movements; she has undertaken original research on organic ideas and biocentrism in modernism, abstract art, and émigré artist networks, and held numerous fellowships (at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino; the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University; the National Humanities Center, North Carolina; and the Collegium Budapest). Her book publications include: Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence 1924–1945 (German and English editions). Bern: Benteli, 2006; (with Ada Raev) Kursschwankungen: Russische Kunst im Wertesystem der europäischen Moderne. Berlin: Lukas, 2007; Harmonie und Synthese: Die russische Moderne zwischen universellem Anspruch und nationaler kultureller Identität. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008; (with Oliver A. I. Botar) Biocentrism and Modernism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011; Kunst & Leben: Michail Matjuschin und die russische Avantgarde in St. Petersburg. Köln: Böhlau, 2012; Ed. (with Paul Crowther) Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory. London: Routledge, 2012; The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde: Nature’s Creative Principles. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Index

Index

abolition 121, 131 – abolitionist 129, 130 – abolitionist campaign 122, 123, 131 academia 20, 35, 273 – academic debate 7, 76, 112, 228, 277 – academic practices 34, 74 Adwa, battle of 99 aesthetics 182, 183, 272 Afeworki, Isayas 102 affect 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 127, 183, 184, 217 African Development (NEPAD) 98, 105, 110 African National Congress (ANC) 101, 103, 104, 109 African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) 105, 113, 114 African Union (AU) 99, 101, 106, 111, 113 agency 34, 37, 99, 122, 123, 125, 126, 206, 271 Almes, Guy 160 Al-Qaeda 100, 114 anthropology 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 272 art 70 – media 75, 185 – philosophical 172, 180, 181, 182, 183 Aquinas, St. Thomas 156 area studies. See  regional studies art history 70 Asserate, Asaf-Wossen 110 automation 164, 165 Ayittey, George 105, 110 Bachmann-Medick, Doris 7, 273 Bacon, Francis 85, 139 Baha’i 233, 234 Barber, Benjamin R. 3 Baziotes, William 55, 56 Belting, Hans 75 Bhabha, Homi K. 29, 35, 36, 120 big data 273 big history 273, 274 Bildwissenschaften 76 bilingualiism 224 Black Atlantic 120, 122, 130

Bod, Rens 5, 6 brotherhood 246 Bühler, Karl 137 Casanova, José 261, 264 Castells, Manuel 197 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 37, 40, 44, 118 Christianity 83, 92, 263 – Christians 231, 239, 246, 258, 259, 263 citizenship 103, 106, 110, 113, 122, 243, 250 civilization 79, 80, 84, 87, 98, 177 – civilizing processes 203 – shift of civilization 200 Clemente, Francesco 54 Cold War 19, 23 colonialism 34, 41, 73, 81, 99, 119, 130 – anti-colonial 86, 100 – anti-colonialism 89, 91 – colonial 39, 81, 83, 85, 90, 93, 108, 120, 126 colonial zone 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93 communication 31, 38, 43, 136, 157, 158, 197, 198, 248 – global communication 138, 212 – global vocabulary 31 – hate speech 253, 261 – public communication 197 – translational vocabulary 32 consciousness 180, 181 – linguistic 215 – self-consciousness 156, 159 corruption 98, 104, 109, 204 cosmopolitanism 36, 192 – cosmopolitan 103 Cronin, Michael 36 Crucifix (in schools) 259 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 182, 183 cultural history 23 cultural studies 29, 72, 73, 273, 274 cultural turn 33 Culture 189, 272 – culture of work 158 – digital culture 189 – national culture 205

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 Index

Danto, Arthur 73 Debray, Régis 75 Defoe, Daniel 124 Deleuze, Gilles 59, 67, 176, 184 democracy 41, 110, 113 democratization 97, 194 Deng Xiaoping 202 Descartes, René 85 Dickens, Charles 117, 131 differences 29, 31, 32, 35, 37, 40, 42, 44, 52, 75, 83, 84, 87, 100, 175, 176, 213, 218, 272, 274 Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 274, 275 digitization 1, 155, 163, 272, 274, 275 Dirlik, Arif 2, 271 discrimination 100, 107, 246, 262 Dissanayake, Ellen 176, 183 diversification/diversity 95, 138, 139, 275 – cultural 2, 73, 79, 80, 87, 169, 174, 193, 206, 272, 275 – internal 71 – linguistic 139 – relational 276 – religious 252, 264 Dogramaci, Burcu 8 Du Bois, W.E.B. 124 Duchamp, Marcel 57 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 189 Ekici, Nezaket 65, 66 Elkins, James 71, 72 Engels, Friedrich 158 equality 34, 87, 129, 261 – inequality 87, 104, 108, 204, 260 Equiano, Olaudah 117, 120, 126, 131 Evans, Carolyn 255, 260 Evans, Malcom D. 253, 254, 255 exclusion 52, 119, 138, 183, 193, 203, 205, 206 existence 160 experiences 172, 173, 176, 177, 191, 204, 205, 212, 215, 223 expression 137, 138 Facebook 163, 165 family system 79, 80, 83, 87, 172 Featherstone, Mike 2

Filliou, Robert 59, 60 flexibility 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 178, 211 Flusser, Vilém 51 Fluxus 58 fragmentation 1, 5, 37, 113, 271 freedom 34, 165, 244 – religious 264 Frege, Gottlob 139 Freud, Sigmund 154 Friedman, Thomas 2 fundamentalism 100, 249 Garvey, Marcus 99 Geertz, Clifford 174, 175 Geisteswissenschaften 6, 272, 274 German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) 30, 31 Giddens, Anthony 2 Gilroy, Paul 122, 123 global art history 70 global humanities 1, 3, 6, 12, 277 globality 72, 181, 271 – global integration 3, 4, 6, 12, 79 – global markets 106 globalization 17, 19, 21, 24, 31, 32, 36, 44, 67, 71, 75, 79, 81, 82, 96, 100, 135, 136, 155, 156, 169, 177, 197, 211, 271, 272, 273, 275 – globalization of art 70 – waves of globalization 82, 83, 87 Gorbachev, Mikhail 202 Guattari, Félix 59, 176 Habermas, Jürgen 33, 154, 160, 252 Hall, Stuart 43 Haschemi Yekani, Elahe 9 Havelock, Eric A. 183 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 122, 159, 162, 180 Herder, Johann Gottfried 139 heritage 109, 112, 114, 128, 131 – colonial 8, 72, 73 Höfer, Candida 62 homogeneity 90 – homogenization 1 Human Development Report 197, 203 humanities 32, 277 – digital humanities 10



Humanities World Report 276 human labor 156, 159, 160, 161, 164 human rights 34, 35, 38, 41, 98, 103, 110, 171, 234, 239, 265 – Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination (1981) 242, 252 – European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) 264 – European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 264 – Helsinki Accords (1975) 248, 249 – International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 246, 251, 261 – International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) 249 – Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 265 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 135, 137, 139 iconic turn 275 identity 1, 3, 9, 10, 31, 36, 37, 52, 73, 86, 95, 99, 103, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 154, 155, 156, 159, 160, 162, 165, 174, 175, 195, 212 – identification 117 Ignatieff, Michael 250 image studies 76 imperialism 81, 119, 130 in-between 37, 173, 174, 175 inclusion 52, 119, 120, 127, 205, 271 Indigenous art 56 Innis, Harold 183 institutional degeneration 182 integration 203, 214, 271, 272 – global 272, 274, 275 internationalism 22, 25 – critical internationalism 29 Internet 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 275 Islam 83, 92, 257, 260 – Muslims 231, 239, 246, 263 Islamist 100, 114 ivoirité 106 Jacobs University Bremen V, 111, 112, 193, 207

Index 

 287

Kagame, Paul 102 Kenyatta, Jomo 101 Kippenberger, Martin 65, 66 Kippenberg, Hans G. 12 Kornwachs, Klaus 10 Krishnaswami, Arcot 246, 247 Kulturwissenschaften 6, 35, 42, 43 langage 135, 137 language 88, 90, 206, 224 – accent 219 – code-mixing/code-switching/verbal-slip 220 – colonial language 89 – death 135, 136 – first language. See  mother tongue – global language 31, 36, 136, 139 – historical language 88 – indigenous language 104 – minority language 88, 211 – national language 32, 90, 136, 137 – public language 179 – religious language 33, 34, 38 – second language 224 – secular language 33 – status/ausbau 136 – vernacular language 136 Latour, Bruno 176 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 139 Leroi-Gourhan, André 182, 183, 184 liberation 163 Lindorfer, Bettina 11 lingual worldview 212, 213 linguisticity 135, 137, 139 linguistic turn 26 localization 36, 38, 162 location 50, 52, 61, 65, 66, 93 – local 173, 176 Ludes, Peter 11 Mandela, Nelson 101, 102, 104 Manovich, Lev 274 Marxism 19, 87 Marx, Karl 93, 156, 158, 177, 198 Matta, Roberto 54, 55, 56, 57 Mbeki, Moeletsi 104, 105, 109, 110 Mbeki, Thabo 100, 103, 104, 105, 110

288 

 Index

McLuhan, Marshall 183 Mead, George Herbert 154, 162 media 23, 135, 137 – functional equivalences 169 – new media 137 – rituals 175 – specificity 169, 170 – TV annual reviews 195 – TV centennial reviews 192 – western media 98 media studies 11, 206 mediation 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 159 medieval diglossia 136 memory 159, 160, 198, 204 Mersmann, Birgit 8 Mignolo, Walter 37 migration 8, 24, 37, 41, 51, 120, 224 – emigration 54, 57, 67 – immigrants 93, 106, 108, 113 – immigration 54, 62, 88, 93 – migrants 50, 203, 262, 278 – migration studies 33 – transmigrants 214 Millar, John 85 Mitchell, J.W.T. 76 mobility 51, 52, 58, 61, 67, 172, 211, 214 modern 2, 3, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 98, 117, 118, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 139, 156, 169, 242 – modern art 10, 70 modernism – anti-modernism 91 modernity 1, 4, 39, 52, 82, 83, 84, 86, 91, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 131, 132, 184, 205, 271 – anti-modernity 84, 85 – global modernity 2, 271 – multiple modernity 37 – pathways/roads to modernity 79, 82, 83, 84, 87, 89, 94 – western 72 modernization 9, 31, 82, 90, 95, 135, 155, 177, 271 – divergent 2, 4 – multiple 188 – reactive 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94 mother tongue 211, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224

Motherwell, Robert 55, 56 Mugabe, Robert 110 multilingualism 51, 89, 224 Museveni, Yoweri 101, 103 Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth 11 nation 84, 87, 90, 94, 101, 102, 108 – national 88, 90, 92, 99, 118, 126, 205 nationalism 86, 90, 91, 106, 107, 108, 113, 261 – nationalist 17, 89, 91, 107, 108 nation-building 108 nation state 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 85, 100, 193, 242, 250 nativism 104, 108, 113 natural sciences 3, 5, 6, 32, 35, 272, 274 – neurobiology 176 network 30, 161, 162, 165, 198, 203 – net union 161 – networking 204 New World 86, 95 Nkrumah, Kwame 100, 101, 109, 111, 113 nomadism 50, 278 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) 248 novel 173, 185 Nyerere, Julius 103 Nyong’o, Peter Anyang’ 110 Obasanjo, Olusegun 100, 105 Ondák, Roman 66 Organization of African Unity (OAU) 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 111 Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History 20, 21, 25 participation 106, 156, 158, 160, 161, 183, 216, 218, 246, 250, 257 patriarchy 80, 83, 94 Pevsner, Nikolaus 50, 52 Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig 10 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 2 Plato 139, 162, 174, 175 pluralization 1, 30, 44 – religion 240, 257 plurilingualism 11, 224 Polanyi, Karl 177, 178 Pollock, Jackson 55, 56, 57



postcolonialism 36 – postcolonial 39, 73, 90, 93, 94, 98, 105, 106, 109, 114, 119, 126, 130 postcolonial studies 120 postmodernism 2, 17, 85 power presentation – power shift 194 Precht, Richard David 158 public 126, 129, 130, 194, 204, 232, 235, 236, 265, 271 – communication 197 – ideology 178 – language 179 – manifestation 265 – participation 232 – religion 251, 261, 275 racism 104, 122, 127 Reactive Modernization. See  modernization, reactive regionalization 74 – critical regionalism 29 regional studies 31, 49, 74, 272 religion 31, 80, 83, 87, 92, 265 – blasphemy 264 – interreligious 240 Renaissance Africaine. See  African Renaissance representation 137 revolution 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 190, 191 – cultural 204 – industrial 95 – media 6, 137 Rieger, Stefan 170, 176 rights 84, 87, 92, 94, 95, 156, 163 – religious 245, 246, 247, 249, 262 – Women’s rights 94, 95, 261 Robertson, Roland 2, 3 Robinson Crusoe 119, 124 Rushdie, Salman 262 Said, Edward 118, 119 Sakai, Naoki 34, 41, 43 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 154 Seacole, Mary 117, 120 Second World War 50, 58

Index 

 289

secularism 252, 261 – secular 92, 259, 260 – secularity 261 – secularization 242, 264, 280 self-perception 217, 222 Sennett, Richard 160, 164 Sepoy Mutiny 130, 131 Sikkink, Kathryn 248, 249 slavery 80, 93, 117 Smith, Adam 85 Snow, Charles Percy 5 socialization 25, 54, 72, 75, 206, 217 social sciences 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 33, 113, 271, 272, 274, 276 – cultural sociology 178 society 58, 63, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 106, 125, 172, 195, 197, 204, 214, 228, 229, 230, 243, 248 – civil society 98, 112, 233 – commercial society 85 – democratic society 243, 251, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261 – ethnic minority 106, 230, 262 – global society 19, 36, 44, 205 – modern society 137, 138, 172, 177, 200, 205, 263 – multicultural society 32, 200 – network society 1, 10, 203 – postcolonial society 98 – religious communities 230, 252, 257, 265 Socrates 163 Somerset Case 122 Somerset, James 123 Spivak, Gayatri 7, 29 studies of culture. See  cultural studies Surrealism 56 taboo words 217 technology 165 Tetzlaff, Rainer 9 Therborn, Göran 8, 188, 198, 203 third space/third idiom 34, 35, 38 Trabant, Jürgen 9 tradition 30, 35, 36, 74, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 104, 164, 173, 189, 236, 239, 274 – traditional 83, 84, 86, 90

290 

 Index

transculturation 42, 76 – transcultural 29, 40, 41, 76, 119, 175, 176, 274 transdisciplinarity 41, 70, 271, 274, 275 transformation 35, 36, 39, 63, 66, 113, 137, 138, 178, 193, 197, 256, 274 translation 29, 42, 72, 219, 273, 274, 276 – non-translatability 219 – translation studies 30, 33, 34, 40, 75, 273, 274 translational turn 31, 39, 41, 273 transnational art history 50, 278 transnational history 26 transnationalization 8, 44 – transnational 54, 58, 65, 129, 130, 212, 250, 274 traveler 50, 129, 157, 278 travelling concept 32, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44 Tyrrell, Ian 21, 25 Unger, Corinna 7 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 265 – article 18 243, 244, 246, 250, 264 – article 29 243, 246, 251 universality 40, 71, 171, 182, 183, 228, 274 universalization 37, 38, 71 – universal 169, 176, 179, 183, 252 – universalizing 38, 39, 171 – universal machines 160

vagueness 138, 139 violence 106, 107, 114, 122, 200, 202, 204 visual art 70, 75 Wade, Abdoulaye 96, 100, 105 web. See   Internet Weber, Anne 253, 261 Weber, Max 80, 92, 171, 177, 201, 212 Western 20, 35, 38, 39, 41, 43, 76, 104, 105, 113, 171, 175, 176, 178, 196, 271, 273 – western art 70, 74, 184 Western sciences 72, 73 – methods 72, 74 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey 171, 172 work 165 – exploitation 157 – freelancer 157, 158 – home office 157, 158 – teleworking 157 world art studies 70 world power 191 Wünsche, Isabel 10 xenophobia 106, 107, 108, 113, 261 Zenavi, Meles 102 Zittel, Andrea 61 Zuma, Jacob 104

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