Archivieren und Erzählen gelten als zentrale historiografische Praktiken. Sie ermöglichen die Konstruktion, aber auch die Dekonstruktion jener Geschichten, die „Geschichte“ darstellen. Es ist dieses Machen von Geschichte, dem die Autorinnen und Autoren des Bandes aus postkolonialen Perspektiven nachgehen. Damit erkunden sie zugleich die Grenzen eurozentrischer Sichtweisen.
Since antiquity, and increasingly during the early modern period, communication between different cultural groups has relied on translators, diplomats, traders, and specialists knowledgeable in both cultures. Successful interactions depended on individuals who had often been exposed to both cultures in their childhood or through captivities. Various border crossers acted as missionaries, traders, political refugees, beachcombers, pirates, anthropologists, zoo performers, runaway slaves, and itinerant doctors. Due to their precarious circumstances, the written records of these figures are often sparse. Some lives must be reconstructed through critical readings of documents left by others, often adversaries, while others provide autobiographical texts that enrich our understanding of their roles as cultural mediators. Covering historical periods from the early modern era to the present and regions such as the Mediterranean, Africa, the Americas, Hawaii, New Zealand, and northern Europe, scholars from diverse disciplines—including history, religious studies, literary studies, and ethnology—explore the complexities of in-betweenness and the significant impact of "agents of transculturation" in cultural, social, and political encounters.
Militärische Siegesparaden sind politische Inszenierungen, in denen abstrakte Ideen wie Staat oder Nation verkörpert werden. Am Beispiel amerikanischer Paraden in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts nimmt Sebastian Jobs die beteiligten Akteure und deren Rollen in den Blick. So analysiert er das von zivilen und militärischen Organisatoren vorgesehene Protokoll, aber auch, wie Soldaten und Zuschauer diese Regeln durch undiszipliniertes Winken oder Lachen durchbrachen und sich die Straße aneigneten. Paraden waren eben nicht nur staatstragende Rituale, sondern auch emotionale Spektakel und damit populärkulturelle Unterhaltung.
The meeting of members of different cultures, frequently conceptualized in abstract terms, always involves the meeting of human bodies. This volume brings together contributions by scholars of various disciplines that address physical aspects and effects of cultural encounters in historical and present-day Settings. Bodies were and are not only markers of cultural identity and difference, endlessly inscribed and represented as the ‘body politic’ or ‘the exotic other’; as battlegrounds of cross-cultural signification and identification bodies are also potential agents of change. While some essays address the elusiveness of the ‘real’ or material body, forever lost behind a veil of textual and visual representation, others analyze the performative effect of such representations – their function of disciplining colonized bodies and Subjects by integrating them into Western systems of cultural signification and scientific classification. Yet, as the volume also shows, formerly colonized people, far from Subjecting themselves completely to Western discourses of physical discipline, retain traditional body practices – whether in food culture, religious ritual, or musical performances. Such local reinscriptions escape the grip of Western culture and transform the global semantics of the body.