14472

WiSe 21/22: Translating Difference: Travel Narratives from and about the Middle East (18th to 20th centuries)

Mahmoud Al Zayed; Johannes Stephan

Information for students

The course starts on Oct 28! The course may be conducted online!

Comments

The human enterprises of both traveling and writing travel narratives are practices of bridging, defining or questioning differences between humans, habits, languages, countries, and communities. By producing texts during or after their actual or imagined experiences, travelers construct imaginaries of time, space, and belonging, as they attempt to familiarize, de-familiarize or intellectually appropriate both distant places and communities. The study of travelogues from different periods offers the space to pose the anthropological question of how difference has been and is still constructed and translated and how such constructions and translations of difference are mediated in literary and documentary texts. Such historically contingent constructions of difference across time and space challenge and further problematize the present prevailing understandings of culture and society. In more concrete terms, in this course, travelogues serve as examples for rethinking the East-West construction and power dynamics in East-West relations; they further provide a space for engaging with core concepts of the humanities around the emergence of academic orientalism, translation, colonialism, and decolonial positions. As much as travel writers conceptualize difference, shall our course offer a dialogue between researchers and students from different academic backgrounds invested in various transdisciplinary research questions as attempts to continuously translate difference. The class will in the first half study travelogues from the pre- and the early colonial period from Europe to the Middle East and the reverse, around the topics of the woundrous and exotic, the emerging Turquerie, Enlightenment encyclopedism, conceptual history, and the problem of representation. And in the second part, tackling the colonial period, we will focus on territoriality, national identities, colonial subjectivity, translatability, and comparativism. The extracts from travel texts we shall read together will be based on French, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and German sources, among others, but provided in English translations. The mandatory secondary readings will be all in English. close