Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 (Re)translating the West: Humboldt, Habermas, and Intercultural Dialogue
- 2 Friedrich Schlegel's Writings on India: Reimagining Germany as Europe's True Oriental Self
- 3 Germany's Local Orientalisms
- 4 Tales from the Oriental Borderlands: On the Making and Uses of Colonial Algiers in Germanophone Travel Writing from the Maghreb around 1840
- 5 The Jew, the Turk, and the Indian: Figurations of the Oriental in the German-Speaking World
- 6 M. C. Sprengel's Writings on India: A Disenchanted and Forgotten Orientalism of the Late Eighteenth Century
- 7 Occident and Orient in Narratives of Exile: The Case of Willy Haas's Indian Exile Writings
- 8 Distant Neighbors: Uses of Orientalism in the Late Nineteenth-Century Austro-Hungarian Empire
- 9 Modes of Orientalism in Hungarian Letters and Learning of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 10 Where the Orient Ends? Orientalism and Its Function for Imperial Rule in the Russian Empire
- 11 Noncolonial Orientalism? Czech Travel Writing on Africa and Asia around 1918
- 12 Oriental Sexuality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
1 - (Re)translating the West: Humboldt, Habermas, and Intercultural Dialogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 (Re)translating the West: Humboldt, Habermas, and Intercultural Dialogue
- 2 Friedrich Schlegel's Writings on India: Reimagining Germany as Europe's True Oriental Self
- 3 Germany's Local Orientalisms
- 4 Tales from the Oriental Borderlands: On the Making and Uses of Colonial Algiers in Germanophone Travel Writing from the Maghreb around 1840
- 5 The Jew, the Turk, and the Indian: Figurations of the Oriental in the German-Speaking World
- 6 M. C. Sprengel's Writings on India: A Disenchanted and Forgotten Orientalism of the Late Eighteenth Century
- 7 Occident and Orient in Narratives of Exile: The Case of Willy Haas's Indian Exile Writings
- 8 Distant Neighbors: Uses of Orientalism in the Late Nineteenth-Century Austro-Hungarian Empire
- 9 Modes of Orientalism in Hungarian Letters and Learning of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 10 Where the Orient Ends? Orientalism and Its Function for Imperial Rule in the Russian Empire
- 11 Noncolonial Orientalism? Czech Travel Writing on Africa and Asia around 1918
- 12 Oriental Sexuality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
There are no two words in contemporary discourse more current, or more elastic and therefore potentially more misunderstood, than “difference” and “otherness.” Both terms are constantly present in discussions of intercultural communication and therefore of the practice of orientalism, which is our theme. This chapter will interrogate this discourse in light of contemporary debates about communication between cultures and the linguistic thought of the German Enlightenment, especially the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the reprise of some key Humboldtian themes in the most recent work of Jürgen Habermas on intercultural dialogue.
Von Humboldt and a New Paradigm for Orientalism
In her seminal book Der andere Orientalismus (2005), Andrea Polaschegg shows that our constant concern to deconstruct false ideas of the other can make sameness and difference the controlling and even exclusive categories of intercultural study, so preventing us from understanding what might be really other no less than what is really part of ourselves. In other words, a concern to overcome one kind of use of orientalism—the Eurocentric construction of an artificial oriental other—can sometimes license a different kind of instrumentalism in oriental studies. Our concern to deconstruct a false other might prevent us from communicating with real others: those actual other people with whom we must speak if any true intercultural dialogue is to begin.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deploying Orientalism in Culture and HistoryFrom Germany to Central and Eastern Europe, pp. 15 - 30Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013