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Institute
Mobilität ist eine der Schlüsselerfahrungen unserer Zeit. Sie scheint im Gefolge technisch-ökonomischer und politisch-sozialer Veränderungen allumfassend geworden zu sein. Dabei verändern die Erfahrungen, die Menschen in und mit Mobilität machen, auch die Funktion und den Stellenwert ihrer Kulturen. Durch die anhaltende Mobilität werden Kulturen aus ihren traditionellen nationalen Verankerungen gelöst (werden also selbst mobil), die mobiler gewordenen Menschen sind aber mehr als zuvor darauf angewiesen, zur Bewältigung ihrer Erfahrungen auf ihre kulturellen Ressourcen zurückzugreifen (sie zu mobilisieren). Diese Ambivalenz von Kulturen in/der Mobilität ist für die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes erkenntnisleitend. Im Kontext der zahlreichen Publikationen zu den Themen Globalisierung, Migration und Kultur stellt das Potsdamer Forschungsprojekt insofern eine Besonderheit dar, als es linguistische und literaturwissenschaftliche, historische und systematische, empirische und theoretische Zugriffsweisen auf innovative Weise verbindet. Das besondere des hier leitenden Ansatzes besteht darin, dass hier nicht einfach Kulturen als geschlossene Systeme vergleichend gegenüberstellt werden, sondern Formen und Szenarien der interkulturellen Begegnung im Mittelpunkt der Betrachtung stehen werden. Diese Szenarien sind von ihrem Wesen bzw. ihrer Verfasstheit solcherart, dass sie mit Bezug auf eine nationale Kultur nicht mehr angemessen zu beschreiben wären. Sie stellen vielmehr Momente des Aushandelns nicht konvertierbarer kultureller Andersartigkeit dar, die zur Reflexion und Vermittlung mit der Eigenkultur zwingen.
Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism takes stock of developments in the scholarship of seventeenth-century English republicanism by looking at the movements and schools of thought that have shaped the field over the decades: the linguistic turn, the cultural turn and the religious turn. While scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism share their enthusiasm for their field, they have approached their subject in diverse ways. The contributors to the present volume have taken the opportunity to bring these approaches together in a number of case studies covering republican language, republican literary and political culture, and republican religion, to paint a lively picture of the state of the art in republican scholarship.
The volume begins with three chapters influenced by the theory and methodology of the linguistic turn, before moving on to address cultural history approaches to English republicanism, including both literary culture and (practical) political culture. The final section of the volume looks at how religion intersected with ideas of republican thought. Taken together the essays demonstrate the vitality and diversity of what was once regarded as a narrow topic of political research.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
Layer after Layer
(2021)
When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.
Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how ‘the village’ resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban.
