Session 3: Reconstructions of the Past and the Making of Identities
1st Global Conference
Tuesday 22nd September – Thursday 24th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Ancient Egypt as Europe’s ‘Intimate Stranger’
Kevin DeLapp
Harold E. Fleming Chair of Philosophy at Converse College in South Carolina
Analyses of the ways in which cultural differences are expressed have tended to focus on instances in which one culture responds to an object culture with which it is contemporary. Although this model of cross-cultural dialogue is fraught with hermeneutic challenges, the object culture may at least in principle check and balance mischaracterizations of itself because it inhabits the same time and is able therefore to “talk back.” However useful this model is for understanding synchronous cultural conversations, it is inapplicable to asynchronous encounters in which the object culture is from another era. The goal of this paper is to explore certain limitations of two prominent models of cross-cultural hermeneutics that arise when they are applied to asynchronous cultural differences. Using Western Europe’s encounter with dynastic Egypt during Napoleon’s campaign as an example, I argue that the frameworks of John Rawls’ reflective equilibrium and Edward Said’s Orientalism both fail to adequately represent the unique dimensions of such an asynchronous encounter. Instead, I adopt and expand Thomas Kasulis’ recent account of cross-cultural differences. I argue that Kasulis’ understanding of cultural “intimacy” versus “integrity” can better make sense of asynchronous encounters by furnishing a more plausible motivation for Europe’s appropriation of ancient Egypt.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Fictions of a Creole Nation: Public Representations of Portugal’s Colonial Past
Elsa Peralta
Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa
Portugal had, for more than five centuries, large colonial dependencies. Being the first and the more enduring of European colonial empires, its end, with the concomitant democratization of the country, didn’t erase the image of Portugal as an imperial nation. The Empire still stands as a prominent symbolic touchstone through which the national narrative was and still is built upon and sustained. This collective representation of Portugal as an imperial maritime nation was ideologically fostered throughout centuries, slowly nurturing a representation of the Portuguese as peaceful, non-racist, softer colonialists, and of their culture as universal, hybrid and somehow Creole, enriched by centuries of colonial contact. This representation was raised as much by the Portuguese as it was by the “colonial subject”, being the main example of this the case of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freire who emphasized the peculiar way the Portuguese brought the West to the tropics: not through industry but instead through culture.
This is a fiction that has the ability of making both the stranger familiar to “ourselves” and “ourselves” strangers of our own. This paper will be drawn upon several examples taken from Portuguese cultural discourses (literary discourses and poetry, marketing campaigns, artists and musicians, museum narratives, and as well historical tails) which give evidence that Portugal still represents its own culture and history in a universalistic and dialogic way. It is argued that these representations aesthetize culture, blurring both the historical responsibilities Portuguese have over their previous colonies and, most importantly, the profound asymmetries that exist in the multicultural and multiracial contemporary Portugal. It is to be asked about the necessity of a critical debate over Portuguese colonial experience in its cultural, social, economic and politic consequences both to Portugal and to its previous former colonies.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
‘The breaking asunder’ of Fanny Kemble: Figuring Trauma and the Discourse of Hygiene in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839
Winter Werner
Northwestern University
“The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device,” muses the British actress Fanny Kemble in a letter written three months after first stepping foot on American soil. To Kemble, “the event,” as she wryly referred to her U.S. arrival, represented a horrifically traumatic break from her home country. The alienation she felt in the “strangest of countries” provoked in her a deep anxiety over how to maintain and articulate her old self in the foreignness of the New World. Yet, rather than submit to that anxiety, Kemble commits herself to placing the “bits” of her old, “broken” life into a new, coherent form—hence, new experiences are articulated through the lens of the already familiar, giving her a means to linguistically and mentally cope with the alien. This cognitive framework became especially necessary for the abolitionist Kemble when she found herself a slave-owner upon marrying the American Pierce Butler. If the institution of slavery was for Kemble “incomprehensible” previous to her marriage, even more inconceivable must have been the revelation of her own participation in the system.
Throughout her autobiographical Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, Kemble, traumatized and paralyzed by the authority given to her as “missis” of the master, utilizes familiar British discourses of hygiene (best exemplified in the works of her close and well-known friends, the brothers Dr. Andrew and Dr. George Combe) to describe and make sense of her paradoxical position as abolitionist slaveholder. Engaging with Ellie Ragland’s discussions of Lacanian trauma, this essay examines how the reduction of unendurable differences in power to a matter of dirt and hygiene enables Kemble to linguistically domesticate the unacceptably foreign, bringing a British aesthetics to an intolerable, strange American reality.
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