Agents of Transculturation: Border-Crossers, Mediators, Go-Betweens

/ Termine

Agents of Transculturation: Border-Crossers, Mediators, Go-Betweens

Veranstalter
Graduiertenkolleg "Kulturkontakt und Wissenschaftsdiskurs"
Veranstaltungsort
Ort
Rostock
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
29.09.2011 - 01.10.2011
Website
http://gk-kulturkontakt.uni-rostock.de
Von
Prof. Dr. Gesa Mackenthun

The conference will bring together experts from diverse disciplines and places around the globe whose work is concerned with the lives and works of people who acted as agents between cultures. Ever since antiquity, but increasingly since the global transformation of the world order in the early modern period, communication between members of different cultural groups depended on translators, diplomats, traders, and other specialists with a knowledge of both cultures. Successful communication and traffic depended on the mediation of persons who had been exposed, often in their childhood or through captivities, to the customs and languages of both cultures involved in the contact. Other border-crossers and go-betweens acted as missionaries, traders, political refugees, beachcombers, pirates, anthropologists, actors in zoos, runaway slaves, itinerant doctors and many more. Because of their frequently precarious lives, the written traces left by these figures are often thin. While some of their lives have to be carefully reconstructed through critical readings of the documents left by others (frequently by their enemies), others have left autobiographical texts which allow for a richer assessment of their function as cultural border-crossers and mediators.

Besides discussing the function of cultural go-betweens in general, the symposium also wants to address the problem of individual agency and the limits imposed on it by systemic forces, as well as the discursive rules of scholarship which guide our perspective on the lives and work of cultural mediators – moving between the extremes of pure biographism on the one hand and the effacement of agency by the over-accentuation of structural forces on the other. How do people living between cultures and constantly having to juggle their lives between different cultural codes carve out a space of agency that is also potentially a source of change? Which role do aspects of gender, social estate, professional identity, racial, religious, and generational identity (among others) play in this regard? Which options – next to the mastery of various languages – did cultural go-between have to make themselves at home in two (or more) cultures at once? How did they gain access to self-representation and cultural authority – a “voice”? How is their search for identity affected by the practical necessity of camouflage, masquerade, and trickery? How were/are these figures functionalized and mythologized in scholarly and popular discourses of collective (esp. national) identity? How can our knowledge of these cross-cultural lives influence our perspective on the world (past and present) in a global age? These are only some of the questions to be explored at this symposium.

Programm

Thursday, September 29

18:00 (Hörsaal, Schwaansche Straße 3)
Opening remarks
Wolfgang Schareck, President of Rostock University
Klaus Hock, Chair of the Graduate School “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship”
Gesa Mackenthun, American Studies

Keynote Address
Peter Hulme (Essex)
Across the Tropic Line: Journalists and Spies in Cuba

Friday, September 30 (Internationales Begegnungszentrum, Bergstr. 7a)

I Agents of Transculturation in the Early Modern Mediterranean and Atlantic
Chair: Judith Gelke

9:00 - 9:30
Henk Driessen (Nijmegen)
Mediterranean Divides and Connections: Cultural Brokerage Past and Present

9:40 - 10:10
Peter Burschel (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Yuhanna al-Asad, Or the Language of Exile

Chair: Andrea Zittlau
11:10 -11:40
Alexandra Ganser (Erlangen)
The Coastal Figuration of the Pirate in Late Seventeenth Century Transatlantic Narratives

11:50 – 12:20
Felix Konrad (Kiel)
Religion and Political Loyalties of French State Servants
in the Middle East: The Case of Süleyman Pasha Sève (1788–1860)

Chair: Regine Elhs
14:30 – 15:00
Dagmar Freist (Oldenburg)
Uneasy Trust Relations and Cross-Cultural Encounters on Trial: Migrants and their Networks in Early Modern Europe

II Transcultural Hunters of Fortune
Chair: Katrin Brösicke

15:20-15:50
Charles Esdaile (Liverpool)
The Adventurer as Intermediary: the Strange History of John Downie

16:00 – 16:30
Olaf Günther (Leipzig)
Cairos Hunters in the Central Asian Borderlands. On the Typology of a Special Economy of Luck

Saturday, October 1 (Internationales Begegnungszentrum, Bergstr. 7a)

III Colonial Go-Betweens, Subjugated Knowledge, and the Politics of Memory

Chair: Silke Hoklas
9:00 – 9:30
Anja Schwarz (Potsdam)
Taríadyaou “I made a mistake in speaking”: The Politics of Remembering the William Dawes-Patgegarang Encounter

9:40 – 10:10
Sebastian Jobs (Rostock)
“Loose Talk” at the Margins. The Role of Black Informants in Nineteenth Century Slave Revolts

Chair: Nadine Söll
10:50 – 11:20
Alasdair Pettinger (Glasgow)
“The Greatest Genius that I Had Met in Europe”: The Strange Case of Joseph Jenkins

11:30 – 12:00
Ryan Kashanipour (Tucson)
t.b.a.

IV Missionaries and Mediators: Religious Encounters Past and Present

Chair: Maren Jütz
14:00 – 14:30
Paul Jenkins (Basel)
Between Church and Traditional State. Reverend Kofi Theophilus Opoku's Reports from Early Colonial Akropong, Ghana

14:40 – 15:10
Richard Friedli (Fribourg)
Transforming Conflicts with Religious Dimensions: Mediators as Transcultural Go-betweens

V Indigenous Agents of Modern Knowledge Production

Chair: Jaqueline Hoffmann
16:00 – 16:30
Lorenz Gonschor (Hawai’i)
Ka Hoku O Osiania: The Hawaiian Kingdom as a Model of Political Transformation Through the Agency of Native Leaders in Nineteenth-Century Oceania

16:40 – 17:10
Luciana Martins (London)
A Tropical Papageno: Claude Levi-Strauss and Roberto Ipureu in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Discussant: Susanne Lachenicht, Bayreuth

Contact/Registration:
Andrea Zittlau
andrea.zittlau@uni-rostock.de

Website of the Graduate School: http://www.gk-kulturkontakt.uni-rostock.de/

Organizer:
Prof. Dr. Gesa Mackenthun
Nordamerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
Graduiertenkolleg "Kulturkontakt und Wissenschaftsdiskurs"
Universität Rostock
August-Bebel-Str. 28
18055 Rostock

Kontakt

Andrea Zittlau

Universität Rostock
GK "Kulturkontakt und Wissenschaftsdiskurs"

andrea.zittlau@uni-rostock.de

http://gk-kulturkontakt.uni-rostock.de
Redaktion
Veröffentlicht am
Autor(en)
Beiträger
Zitation ⇓
Klassifikation
Epoche(n)
Region(en)
Thema
Weitere Informationen
Typ
Land Veranstaltung
Sprach(en) der Veranstaltung
Englisch
Sprache der Ankündigung