But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests.
DONNA HARAWAY, “Situated Knowledges” (1988, 584)
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1 Partial and Admittedly Subjective, Not Complete and Purportedly Objective: What We Mean by New Perspectives
“Literary Knowledge within the Medical Humanities.” “Labels of Contemporary World Women’s Literature.” “Germany and German History in African American Literature.” “The Regional Crime Novel.” “Photographs and Their Narrative Modes in the Biographies of Women Writers.” The research projects that we—the three editors, Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco, as well as our colleagues Andrea Kreuter and Sophie Mayr—were working on back in the summer of 2017 hardly qualify as imagological in the traditional sense of this “undeniably Western European” (Flynn, Leerssen, and Doorslaer 2015, 2) specialism in comparative literature, which typically studies questions such as the representation of the German nation in French literature. Given this original difference of perspectives and interests it was quite surprising that our discussion about common research fields and possibilities of collaboration—a discussion we had on the rooftop terrace of our university building on a hot afternoon that summer—brought us to imagology. Initially, it was Gianna who mentioned that she sometimes wondered if she was actually practicing some form of “undeclared imagology” as she had hitherto preferred to posit her study of the literary images of Germany and German history in African American literature in topical theoretical contexts such as Black diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, and a “multidirectional memory” framework. Was she perhaps missing some important connections or fruitful perspectives if she chose to completely ignore this seemingly outdated
Based on her experiences as a tutor of an interdisciplinary course at the Medical University of Vienna, Katharina was already convinced that literary theory could be applied to other disciplines—and vice versa (e.g. stereotyping in relation to mental processes which occur outside of conscious awareness, or the concept of otherness as opposed to social identification). Sandra pointed out that intersectional theory—the critical analysis of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination (e.g. gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, age, religion, etc.)—had a lot in common with the critical analysis of cultural stereotypes. She therefore regarded it as very likely that the two fields could mutually benefit from each other. In her research on regional crime novels, Andrea analyses how this particular genre negotiates questions of identity. The insight that identity construction in regional crime novels is largely based on auto- and hetero-images led to the more general question of genre-affinities beyond imagology’s traditional engagement with genres such as travel literature. Theoretical approaches that bring together imagology and genre theory were also of great interest to Sophie, who analyses the narrative modes of photographs in the biographies of women writers, and, accordingly, added an intermedial dimension to our discussion.
When we—much later than anticipated, the sun had already set—left the rooftop terrace to go home, we had not only found out that we all shared an interest in what Joep Leerssen proposed as a contemporary and wide definition of imagology: “the critical analysis of cultural stereotypes” and thus the study of “intercultural relations in terms of mutual perceptions, images and self-images” (2018a). We were also amazed that what we had initially considered a weak spot for any common research projects—the very difference of our backgrounds within comparative literature—had proved surprisingly fruitful and provoked a number of wide-ranging questions. How do other disciplines such as the cognitive sciences, philosophy, or media studies define imagological key terms (e.g. image, stereotype)—and what insights can be gained for literary studies from paying closer attention to these possibly differing and conflicting
2 Renewed, Not New: From Imagology’s Archaeology to Its Present Resurgence
Inspired by these intriguing questions we agreed to use the remaining months of the summer to delve deeper into imagology, this supposedly “cornerstone of comparative literature” (Leerssen 2016, 16) that “may seem to be outdated and critiqued as being bound to the outmoded national essentialist paradigm which it set out to analyse” (ibid., 29). That the critical reflection of collective auto- and hetero-images is a matter of actual topicality is demonstrated by the central role it occupies (in the manner of undeclared imagology) in the defence against “retrotopias,” as the late Zygmunt Bauman has called the current “global epidemic of nostalgia” (2017, 4). Bauman’s observations about the growing and alarming tendency of replacing the task of building a better future by “visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past” (ibid., 5) address how these visions are often connected to national and nationalist revivals, as the images of “the good old days” typically picture a period of time when the European Union, “globalization,” or another supranational agent did not yet impinge on national sovereignty. In the spirit of Bauman’s endeavour of understanding the present by looking at its (“real” and “imagined”) relations to the past, it seemed important to us not to fall into the trap of presentism, mistaking “the emergence of the new for the obsolescence of everything else,” and isolating “the contemporary avant-garde in art and cultural theory from its own historical antecedents and rootedness” (Leerssen 2016, 29).
However, the alleged division in the field of comparative literature “between ‘intrinsic’ textual analysis and ‘extrinsic’ contextualization” (Leerssen 2016, 23)
Pageaux’s more structuralist works on comparative imagology have also contributed significantly to the field’s theorization and systematization. While he urged scholars of comparative literature to pay close attention to the particular and complex nature of literary works, he considered it equally important to understand the specific image within an individual text (l’image) as part of a larger complex of collective imaginations, which he called “the imaginary” (l’imaginaire): “The imaginary that we investigate is the theatre, the place where, in a pictorial way […], with the help of images, performances, those manifestations (literature, among others), in which a society sees itself, defines itself, dreams itself, are expressed” (Pageaux 1989, 135–136).4 According
Efforts such as Dyserinck’s and Pageaux’s, but also those of scholars working in the national philologies such as the Austrian Anglicist Franz Karl Stanzel (cf. 1974), introduced a clearly anti-essentialist approach to imagology, which has since become central to the field’s self-definition. It is such an understanding that is the basis of the renewed interest in and relevance of imagology, which—in the face of (re)emerging nationalism, populism, and xenophobia—has attracted numerous scholars in recent years. Manfred Beller’s and Joep Leerssen’s critical survey on Imagology (2007a), edited volumes such as Imagology Today (Dukić 2012a), the Balkan/Southeastern European oriented encounter of imagology and history (Blažević, Brković, and Dukić 2014), the interconnection of translation studies and imagology (Doorslaer, Flynn, and Leerssen 2015), the imagological survey of children’s literature from the Enlightenment to the present day (O’Sullivan and Immel 2017), the ambitious two-volume Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (Leerssen 2018b), and, most recently, the East-Baltic intervention Imagology Profiles (Laurušaitė 2018a), among numerous monographs, most notably those in Brill’s Studia Imagologica series and in Frank & Timme’s Studien zur komparatistischen Imagologie series, and a large number of regularly published articles all account for imagology’s renewed popularity in European or Western academia.5
3 Ambivalent, Not Agreed Upon: Imagology’s Actuality and Controversiality
While twenty-first-century imagology has developed into a fairly visible scholarly field, a certain “ambivalence of imagology” (Ruthner 2012, 137) can be observed in many academic contributions: Ruth Florack, for example, argues
These were the most serious points of criticism we encountered when we—returning from our journey to the history and traditional methodology of imagology as well as from various actual journeys we had undertaken in the course of the summer—met again in a rather rainy week in September. This time, however, we were no longer sitting on the rooftop terrace of our university building. Instead we found ourselves in the less spectacular, windowless meeting room of our department, where we were exchanging printed excerpts of research papers, marking paragraphs arguing for the need to reconceptualize imagology as well as others addressing the inevitable deficits of the field, and—as our meeting proceeded—critically consulting our calendars. What had begun toward the end of the previous semester as a loose working group of colleagues with an overlapping research interest in cultural stereotyping now became increasingly concrete: we were planning to organize an event on the current and future challenges of imagology. An international conference where long-established and prospective imagologists, traditional and unorthodox practitioners, advocates and critics alike would be able to exchange their views and share the individual perspectives that motivated their interests in imagology presented itself as an appropriate framework to deal with a field that is as actual as it is controversial.
As we discovered in our first attempts to put our thoughts into writing, in the case of imagology the controversies already begin with the naming. Not only has the reputation of imagology as an outdated, Eurocentric, and theoretically defective field led to a flourishing number of “undeclared” imagological studies, with many scholars preferring to associate their works with related areas such as postcolonialism, diaspora studies, intersectionality, migration studies, mobility studies, and so forth. But also, while working on our call for papers, we came across the ambivalent use of imagology’s nomenclature regarding both the field’s self-designation as imagology and its key concepts. Although we decided to stay with imagology—the term used in most descriptions of the
Although by using the term imagology we deliberately want to avoid a conceptual confusion with both visual image studies and the more general study of intercultural interpretation, our decision is admittedly also predefined by the institutional affiliation we shared for many years: the discipline of comparative literature as practiced at the University of Vienna. We find it important to be transparent about the fact that imagology itself, however postnational its claim and practice, is not completely independent of its national and institutional anchorings. More generally speaking, what we introduce here as “new perspectives” has not developed from a scholarly position equivalent to that of the omniscient narrator in a novel but is much connected to the subjective interests and social and institutional backgrounds of ourselves as white, female, aspiring scholars, who—though originally from rural Upper Austria,
Although the rivalling terms used to designate imagological research and their different institutional anchorings were the first case where we came across the field’s ambivalent nomenclature, it was not the only one. This is because imagology’s key terms and concepts are not exclusively used in comparative literature and its closest neighbouring fields but, more generally, share the fate of “travelling concepts” in the sense of Mieke Bal ([2002] 2012). This means that scholars from disciplines as different as literary/cultural studies, psychology, (intercultural) philosophy, communication studies, and cognitive sciences sometimes use them “as if their meanings were as clear-cut and common as those of any word in any given language” (ibid., 25), although “their meaning, reach, and operational value differ” (ibid., 24) according to the disciplinary background of a particular scholar and the cultural genre of the object studied. While the multiple meanings ascribed to terms such as “stereotype,” “image,” or “cliché” tend to complicate interdisciplinary exchange, a growing imagological interest in the integration of knowledge from other disciplines, for example regarding the underlying cognitive processes of social thinking and categorization, can be observed. As Leerssen puts it: “The cognitive-psychological model of ‘frames’ and ‘triggers’ has deepened our understanding of ethnotyping, and of stereotyping in general” (2016, 24).
In the attempt to encourage a direct interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of “traditional imagology” and those of related fields, we originally planned to dedicate one (of four) conference sections to this topic and, accordingly, conceptualized a section called “Rethinking Images: Imagology and Cognitive Sciences.” The particular aim was to explore the cultural dynamics connected to imagological key terms and, thus, to reflect on the terminology
Although imagology is firmly established within the discipline of comparative literature, its main topics point to complex questions about how we make sense of the world—a theme that concerns various disciplines with different emphases. There is a growing awareness that interdisciplinary collaborations could bring new momentum to such classical research questions in the future. Engaging in a dialogue with scholars from other disciplines, however, is just another case in which the need for “situated knowledges” and critical self-reflection is paramount. Wouldn’t it be great if imagologists, with their expertise in auto- and hetero-images in literature, could be among the pioneers of such a self-critical engagement, which—after all—was already called for when Dyserinck observed a “predominantly disturbing presence [of images] in literary studies and criticism itself” ([1966] 2015, 57)?9
Considering that many countries currently face a wake of ethnopopulist thinking, in which images and stereotypes are used to discredit and dehumanize people on account of their supposedly inherent otherness, critical self-reflection is imperative—especially for a field that studies verbally, and increasingly (also) visually, constructed images. “The revival of national attitudes,” as Joep Leerssen convincingly argues, “is not so much a re-appearance of something that had disappeared, as rather a new upsurge” (2007, 25) or—in psychoanalytical jargon—the return of the repressed. Accordingly, in times when European politicians refer to refugees from outside Europe in conjunction with “waves” or a “crisis” on a daily basis, whereas the more uncomfortable analysis of the complex causes of this crisis—among them the former colonial conditions as well as today’s neocolonial and neoliberal practices—fades into the background, it does not come as a surprise that “imagology is quickly regaining the urgency it had in the post-1945 years” (Leerssen 2016, 14).
That the “new political virulence” (ibid., 29) of ethnic stereotyping was something we could not only read about in recent academic publications, but also observe in our daily lives, became apparent well in advance. Already in 2016, in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis,” the former Austrian minister of the interior Johanna Mikl-Leitner claimed that Europe has to become “a fortress”10 (ORF 2016)—a demand that Austria’s right-wing government (2017–2019) was making great efforts to implement, for example by running its EU presidency in 2018 with the primary objective to stop “illegal” migration under the motto “a Europe that protects”11 (BMI 2018). It is also noteworthy that Austria’s former chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, of the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP), presented the program of his second government—no longer in coalition with the right-wing extremist Freedom Party (FPÖ), but with the left-wing eco-party Die Grünen (The Greens)—under the slogan “It is possible to
The former Italian minister of the interior Matteo Salvini’s motto “Prima gli italiani” (Italians First, 2018) and prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán’s public remark that “we do not want our own colour, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others” (2018), moreover, show the increasing appeal of “the fortress” as a national auto-image. With Jair Bolsonaro, who referred to the Black descendants of rebel African enslaved people (quilombolas) as loafers, not “even good for procreation anymore” (2017),14 becoming president of Brazil, and Donald Trump, then president of the United States of America, asking “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” (Dawsey 2018), it seems legitimate to speak of an increasing social
Since one of the most effective tools for fomenting this hatred are romanticized images of the past or “retrotopias” (Bauman 2017)—cf. Trump’s battle cry “Make America great again!”—it is important to keep in mind that stereotypes “can be comforting as well as denigrating,” and that going beyond set images—for example, by taking responsibility for the less heroic, infamous, or wrongful moments of one’s nation’s past—“can be painful” (Christian [1975] 1985, 28). To repeatedly take on this pain and the strenuous self-reflections and discussions that go along with it—which is an (at least seemingly) endless task, much like Sisyphus’s—is, however, unavoidable in order to prevent the proliferation of a single and one-sided story which always creates stereotypes. And “the problem with stereotypes,” as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wisely states, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (2009, 13:00–13:18 min).
We felt further confirmed about the urgent need of an informed imagological discussion when Joep Leerssen, whose call for a number of “recent and emerging perspectives” (2016, 21) in imagology provided a major inspiration for our engagement with the field, accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker at such an event. We were thrilled to learn that he planned to supplement our conference program—at that point primarily dedicated to imagology in relation to terminological matters, intersectional approaches, transnational literary phenomena, and generic issues—by focusing on imagology’s relevance and applicability to the study of the political history of nationalism.15
With a keynote speaker, numerous promising submissions from all over the world, and an outline of our conference concept at hand, we still faced two major challenges. How could we make sure that our conference would not be restricted to the ivory tower of academia but integrate a broader public in a discussion about ethnopopulism, migration, and xenophobia? And in terms of venue, where could we most effectively bring together people with various—academic as well as not primarily academic—backgrounds to engage in such a dialogue?
Directly after spring break, the conference we were busy organizing for almost a year, took place from 3 to 5 April 2018.16 In addition to twenty-five papers, arranged in four thematic sections with a total of ten panels, the keynote speech by Joep Leerssen, and the final roundtable discussion, we also held a poster session. With this more dialogic format we aimed to offer a low-threshold access to an academic conference—a chance that was particularly, though not exclusively, taken by undergraduates. As an additional attempt to include a broader public, we organized a reading. For this, we are very grateful to our colleague Sophie Mayr, who drew our attention to the rather simple fact that talking about imagology usually begins with reading literature. Reading is not necessarily a purely academic or solitary occupation but, on the contrary, one that may bring together various people.
Thanks to Sophie’s commitment we persuaded the Israeli-Austrian writer Doron Rabinovici to read from Die Außerirdischen (2017, The Extraterrestrials). The as yet untranslated novel discusses the imagological question of self and other referring not to the relation between different nations but between humans and aliens. It depicts the blurring of boundaries such as good and evil, familiar and unfamiliar, against the backdrop of a supposedly extraterrestrial invasion of Earth, which—according to the media (in the novel)—promises to bring peace and economic success in exchange for “voluntary” human sacrifices. The “games,” whose losers are sacrificed for the benefit of the many, seem like a neoliberal, twenty-first-century take on Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948). Sol, the main character, and one of the few remaining critics of this unusual agreement, asks: “What […] if we are not the victims? […] What if we are the Nazis?” His counterpart replies: “Yes. Possible. But maybe we are in fact the extraterrestrials?” (Rabinovici 2017, 140).17 In the end, it comes down to the same thing. Nobody can be sure that the aliens ever existed and it does not even seem to matter because humanity itself proves intimidatingly capable of being “alien” and “that alone can be scary enough” (ibid., 255).18
Like the conference itself the public reading took place at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art or, in German, Volkskundemuseum (VKM).
Herbert Justnik, the head of the museum’s photo collection and its academic spokesperson, was willing to participate in the final roundtable discussion,20 in which he provided insights into the role of photographs as political tools in the
After all participants of the roundtable had summarized their relationship to imagology, the panel returned to the most challenging questions of two and a half days of stimulating exchange, leading up to a negotiation of the present state of the field. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz started by reflecting on the crucial moment when certain stereotypes or generalizations about a nation change dramatically. To illustrate what Joep Leerssen calls a “tipping point process”—“when a long-standing ethnotype suddenly gives way to (or is overlaid by) its opposing counterpart” (2016, 18)—Zacharasiewicz used the hetero-image of “the Germans” which changed from a nation of poets and thinkers in the early nineteenth century to the counterimage of the military Prussian state. Picking up on this point, the participants discussed the latency of printed texts, which are not only imagology’s primary objects of investigation but also preserve national stereotypes over long periods of time.
A perspective that does not so much focus on the preservation of collective images of self and other through different points of history but rather looks at their ways of traveling to and being transformed in different geographical spaces was brought in by Federico Italiano. Italiano, who does not explicitly use imagology as a theoretical framework in his current research project, is interested in the question of how literary texts—via translation
Consequently, Davor Dukić proposed to define the image as a cluster of attributes linked to a cultural rather than a national space—be it fictional or real (he further elaborates on this in his contribution to this volume: part 1, chapter 2). Drawing on this issue, questions about the relation between imagology as an academic field dedicated to the study of images as discursive and thus unfalsifiable objects, and the role of imagology in the “real world” were raised among the discussants—correspondingly, many contributions in this publication reflect on this complex and timely aspect.
6 The Publication: New Perspectives on Imagology Put between Book Covers
In order to preserve and at the same time further develop some of the new perspectives on imagology discussed during this intense three-day event, the idea to draft a conference volume quickly took shape. We originally invited all speakers to publish with us. The resonance was great, yet we decided to contact a few scholars who did not participate in the conference but whose research in imagology or neighbouring fields we considered relevant to our
Many of the new perspectives gathered here come from white, female researchers who live and work in Austria and Germany (and have a background in comparative literature or neighbouring fields). However, several contributors are connected to countries further east (Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, Turkey, and China), north (Sweden), south (Italy and Spain), and west (Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and the US); and to disciplines such as media studies, musicology, gender studies, and so forth—resulting in the numerous intra-, inter-, and transcultural comparisons and interdisciplinary approaches gathered in the five sections of this volume. Although based on the conference and many of the papers presented there, the volume does not duplicate the conference program in its organizational and thematic structure. While some conference panels like the one on intersectional approaches to imagology (part 4) could be easily converted into book chapters, others required more reorganization. Our aim was to let the material speak for itself, namely, to extrapolate from the content of the papers to the new perspectives that structure this volume and not the other way around. Thus, a completely new section on intermedial imagology (part 5) that focuses on visual narratives and music took shape.
Furthermore, it was important to us to avoid any form of misguided presentism, which our title “New Perspectives on Imagology” could possibly evoke, and to take the recent call for historicity seriously. In order to better understand the representational patterns of recent nationalist upsurges, it seems inevitable to time and again return to “the political/ideological starting point” of imagology: “the negative fascination with (the) nation(al/ism), which depreciated the concept of the verisimilitude of the image” (Dukić 2012c, 121). Although this volume’s aim is to offer new perspectives on imagology, we take into account “that the synchronous instantaneous view offered by globalization can obscure sets of diachronous developments occurring over various lengths of time that coincide with it” (Flynn, Leerssen, and Doorslaer 2015, 6). In this sense, new perspectives on imagology do not necessarily or exclusively mean the introduction and imagological analysis of new and possibly fashionable topics or materials—though this is undoubtedly a fruitful and enriching approach realized by some of our contributions (e.g. those considering
For our readers to make the most of the insights into historically diachronous developments as well as of the transnational, methodological, interdisciplinary, or intermedial new perspectives offered by this volume, it seems worthy to note that the connections between the articles are not limited to the five sections described below, which—though they certainly relate to the major new perspectives represented here—are only one way the twenty-one articles could have been grouped. While we hope that the index at the end of this volume facilitates and encourages the identification of such cross-connections, we wish to name a few significant ones at this point. Different forms of travelogues are studied in the articles by Köhler (part 1), Vlasta (part 1), Zhu (part 3), and Wagner (part 3); the imagological analysis of nonfictional genres is of relevance to Leerssen (part 1), Dukić (part 1), Horz (part 5), and Krahn (part 5); various types of visual representations from an eighteenth-century copper engraving to a caricature from 2016 are analysed by Dukić (part 1), Zhu (part 3), Hermann (part 5), Krahn (part 5), and Brandlechner (part 5); transnationality and transnational comparison is not restricted to articles in part 2 but feature in the contributions by Vlasta (part 1), Andersson (part 4), Drmić (part 4), and Krahn (part 5); an analysis of non-European, external perspectives on Europe or individual European countries can be found in the contributions by Zocco (part 2), Chovanec (part 3), Casalin (part 3), Zhu (part 3), and Drmić (part 4). Finally, the fact that the intersection of national images and stereotypes with other social categories—the main focus of part 4—is also addressed by Vlasta, Kállay, and Wagner, and touched upon by effectively all other articles, proves once again Leerssen’s observation that “ethnotypes never function by themselves; they always work in conjunction with other frames, especially gender, age and class” (2016, 26).
This definitely incomplete list of possible cross-connections hopefully illustrates our attempt to strike a balance between old and new, global and local, inter- or even transdisciplinary and decidedly comparatist approaches. What follows is a description of the five sections that structure this volume
6.1 Part 1—Reconsidering the European Conception of Imagology and Its Peripheries: Methods, Genres, Theoretical Frames
“In the haste to be abreast of current developments, we may ignore on-going historical processes of image construction, negotiation and transfer if we were to adopt the tandem wholesale and abandon the nation (state) as a significant entity or factor in our inquiries” (Flynn, Leerssen, and Doorslaer 2015, 6). What the editors of Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology say in their introductory chapter about the study of the nation-state, is—in a more general sense—also valid for the role that we see the traditional conception of imagology taking in the context of our search for new perspectives to the field. Despite “the attraction of the newer and more flexible ways of framing offered by globalization” (ibid.), our volume starts with contributions that shed new light on imagology’s “oldest” topic and its best-established theoretical frames: the European nation-state as represented in European literature. Since its consolidation by scholars such as Jean-Marie Carré and Marius-François Guyard in the years after World War II, imagology has often been considered a European field of research, primarily practiced by European scholars who—aiming to bridge the destructive inner-European divisions and prejudices in the sense of “Völkerverständigung” (Dyserinck [1966] 2015, 46)—focused on the literary depictions of European nations and peoples in fictional writing of European descent.
An important step in the development of imagology as a—in contrast to the national philologies—decidedly Europe-oriented field of study was Hugo Dyserinck’s Aachen program,22 established in 1967 and also called “Europaforschung” by its founder. Dyserinck not only advocated the so-called esprit européen, which is already present in Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813), as a leading concept for comparative research striving to overcome national boundaries, but he also shaped imagology’s methodology through the inclusion of concepts such as the radical relativity of images and the opposition between auto-image and hetero-image, as well as the overall aim of connecting intrinsic textual and extrinsic contextual analysis. While—according to Dyserinck’s disciple Leerssen—it is due to the “theoretical coherence” of Dyserinck’s concept
Although we find it paramount to be cautious whenever it comes to drawing any “worldwide” or universally valid conclusions based on exclusively Europe-centred research, we feel that there is much to gain for our project on new perspectives on imagology if we—aware of the geographical, historical, and disciplinary anchorings of this field of research—remain open to the fact that fruitful new perspectives can also be found in the near vicinity of the traditional conceptualization of imagology; meaning that peripheric, bordering, or previously not visible aspects close to the field’s best-established objects, methods, and theoretical frames may deserve particular attention. While European peripheries in the geographical sense of the term are of major interest to several contributions placed throughout this volume (consider Josip Kešić’s and Ivana Drmić’s imagological perspectives on the South Slavic region, Kristína Kállay’s on Slovakia, and Johanna Chovanec’s on Turkey), the articles in this section relate to the notion of the periphery in a more theoretical or methodological sense. They are dedicated to both reconsidering and updating the European conception of imagology as most famously represented by the Aachen program, and hence—to phrase it as ambitiously as possible—might be said to provide a twenty-first-century conception of imagology that seeks to incorporate into this particular branch of comparative literature some of the major shifts that the discipline of comparative literature has recently faced as a whole; among them the growing interdisciplinarity, the study of genres beyond the three classic forms, the metatheoretical orientation, and the new interest in literary multilingualism. In this sense, the four articles collected in this
Although he already argued elsewhere that “narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, are a privileged discursive genre for the imagologist, since narrative is very fundamentally concerned with motivation (describing acts and behaviour as motivated by character)” (2016, 18), Joep Leerssen’s article enters imagologically uncharted territory in that he exhibits an imagological analysis of political discourse, more concretely the discourse of international antagonistic and national self-positioning in European government circles in the decades around 1900. Arguing that historians often paid only passing attention to the intertextual aspects and the rhetorical or narrative techniques of such discourse due to a reductionist view of these texts as mere sources for uncovering “the facts behind the rhetoric” (see Leerssen in this volume, p. 55), he locates rich source material for imagology in diplomatic reports, national propaganda, and other “peripheric” genres of literary analysis.24 He concludes that an adequate understanding of such sources requires techniques and knowledge from history and imagology alike, profiting from both the historian’s insights into the political function and the imagologist’s sensibility to the textual, intertextual, and contextual workings of such material.
Whereas Leerssen thus widens imagology’s scope and sources while remaining faithful to a definition of imagology as “Europaforschung,” Davor Dukić focuses his attention on one of the key notions of imagology, the term of the “image,” which—as already criticized by Neumann and Blažević (see introduction, p. 10)—lacks a clear and consistent definition within the field. Dukić pushes this point even further as he—referring to axiology, the philosophical theory of value—invites us to reflect on how images, or—in his terms—representations of geocultural spaces, are by nature value-charged through the attributes ascribed to them, and how this is also true for imagology itself with its understanding of national images as essentially negative phenomena. For the exemplification of this point, which approaches the challenging terrain of “meta-imagology” (cf. our comments concerning
Unusual as well as traditional genres of imagological study—in her case connected through both their historic belonging to the period of English Romanticism and their thematic relation to the topic of Englishness—are also the focus of Ulrike Kristina Köhler’s contribution, which investigates the political essay, the travelogue, the Gothic novel, and the ballad. Arguing that traditional conceptions of imagology are often limited to the analysis of explicit representations of nations and national characters, which leads them to neglect that generic elements without a national connotation can also contribute to generating a national image, Köhler outlines a production-oriented imagology that provides some of the missing theoretical framework and equips the imagological toolkit with concepts and terminology from cultural memory studies, reception theory, narratology, rhetoric, and text linguistics.
Whereas Köhler’s article considers the travelogue as one of four genres in which a genre-specific image of Englishness is studied, Sandra Vlasta takes a fresh look at this “favourite genre” of imagology that further enriches imagology’s toolkit with theoretical insights brought in from multilingualism, intertextuality, and the field of travel writing studies. Focusing on Charles Dickens and Karl Philipp Moritz as two examples of European travel writing, she pays particular attention to the processes of collective and individual identity formation, and—like Köhler—finds it paramount to link the analysis of such matters to the study of the “grammar” (Leerssen 2000, 271) or structural features of their articulation. Analysing how Dickens uses multilingualism and Moritz intertextuality for the negotiation of identity of self and other, Vlasta’s contribution thus sheds new light on a genre whose extreme popularity in Europe of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was linked to both the formation of a social middle class and the formation of European national states and identities.
6.2 Part 2—Imagology beyond and across the European Nation-State: Trans-/Postnational, Migratory, and Marginalized Perspectives
While the articles in part 1 all pay tribute to imagology’s traditional linkage to the European nation-state and nationalism at different points of history—be it the representation of European peoples in an oil painting preceding the
Moreover, contemporary factors such as an enormous rise in global mobility, new possibilities of telecommunication, and what Leerssen describes as “the tribalization of society, both in terms of lifestyle groups and in terms of the multiculturalization of immigration societies” (2016, 28) have led to many people perceiving their countries of residence and/or origin as less important to their sense of cultural belonging. Although it can of course be argued that the category of the nation always required people to invent “an imagined political community” (Anderson [1983] 2016, 6)26 based on some form of communion between oneself and one’s mostly unknown fellow members, the heterogeneity
In the humanities, the literature of or about such “unhomely” lives of “extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” (Bhabha 1994, 9) currently receives much attention. Bhabha’s suggestion that “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of world literature” (ibid., 12) is only one relatively early example of a new interest in world literature that—as Elke Sturm-Trigonakis puts it in Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur27—intends to study postethnic, transnational literary writing produced “under conditions of globalization” (2013, 11). Undoubtedly, such transnational literature, which frequently uses forms of “global comparison” (Walkowitz 2009, 536) or “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009) as formal or thematic devices, is of major interest to the field of imagology. In this sense, Zrinka Blažević claims that—given the “integration of globalization processes into localized systems” (2014, 356)—“it is more than obvious that imagology is nowadays faced with the,
Inspired by Vladušić’s and Leerssen’s claim for an “urban imagology” (Vladušić 2012, 176) interested in the transnational, multiethnic character of the global metropolis, Gianna Zocco takes a literary look at Berlin at the time of German reunification. While the fall of the Berlin Wall and its literary representations have often been characterized as a (white) German affair connected to questions of German identity, Zocco analyses the literary depiction of this historic event in two novels written from a non-German and/or migratory perspective. She studies the Turkish-German writer Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin (2003) and the African American Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008), two works which—despite their different contexts—share an interest in comparing Berlin’s division into East and West with their protagonists’ respective experiences as a Turkish-German struggling with his hybrid identity and an African American living behind the “colour line.”
Questions of hybrid identity in the context of literature produced by authors with migratory, bi-/transnational backgrounds—Turkish-German, Syrian-German, Franco-Moroccan, Italian-Algerian, Italian-Somali, and German-Japanese—are also considered in Manfred Beller’s contribution, which investigates the role of nationalist discourse in so-called “migration literature.” Analysing literary images and metaphors shared by his literary examples from the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, Beller finds nationalist arguments and keywords such as “nation” or “people” occupying a relatively marginal role, whereas images and metaphors of the migrant’s everyday life largely prevail. Referring to theoretical insights from Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Salman Rushdie, Beller concludes by distinguishing two perspectives central to most of the literary texts: that of an “in-between” and that of a “Third Space.”
Whereas Zocco’s and Beller’s contributions consider the perspectives of writers (and their literary protagonists) marginalized due to their not-(exclusively)-European, migratory, and/or racial/ethnic backgrounds, Josip Kešić takes us to two cases of intra-European marginalization and othering.
6.3 Part 3—Of Orient/Occident and Other Geopolitical Dichotomies: Imagology and Its Systems of Cultural Mappings
What Kešić in the concluding article of the previous section describes as the “periphery problem” (p. 163 in this volume), namely the structural similarities in the Western European depiction of Europe’s southwestern (e.g. Spain) and southeastern (e.g. the South Slavic region) peripheries,28 is a transnational dynamics that can be found both within Europe (or even within a single nation; think of Italy’s division between Italia settentrionale and Italia meridionale, the German West/East dichotomy, or Austria’s “Kanton übrig”29 Vorarlberg), as well as in transcontinental or global contexts. While the study of inner-European dichotomies has been the core subject of post-World War II imagology, postcolonial studies as initiated and developed by Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and—more recently—Aamir Mufti has increased our attention to the global “system of cultural mapping” (Mufti 2016, 20) called Orientalism and its invention of the “Orient” as “one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (Said [1978] 2003, 1).
While Müller-Funk proposes to conceive stereotypes informed by theoretical insights from cultural studies, thereby understanding them “as symbolic structures, as Freudian slips between unconsciousness and intention” (2012, 163),32 Ruthner redefines stereotypes in a way consistent with Said’s conception of the repressive and Bhabha’s notion of the subversive power of this concept (2012, 153). More recently, Ruthner (2014, 2018) continued his efforts to link imagology and postcolonial studies by using postcolonial concepts such
Informed by methodological insights from both imagology and postcolonial theory, the articles in this section share an interest in how the opposition of Self and Other produces an “imaginative geography of the ‘our land-barbarian land’ variety” (Said [1978] 2003, 54) that—in different times and contexts—tends to be articulated by geopolitical dichotomies as different as West/East, North/South, centre/periphery, empire/colony, or even human/nonhuman.34 They look at national/ethnic/territorial auto- and hetero-images as literary devices related to different systems of (post)colonial power, as well as to complex processes of identity formation and othering. Consistent with Said’s endeavour to expand his argument in Orientalism, which was limited to the Middle East, “to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories” (1993, xi) in Culture and Imperialism, they analyse Western writing on further continents and nations “as part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples” (ibid.); investigate the systems of cultural mapping in literary texts of non-European origin; and—similar to Ruthner’s interest in Habsburg’s “dark continent”—share a particular sensibility to what Kristína Kállay calls the “gray area” (p. 243 in this volume) of colonial relationships, namely those complex constellations of Western European power and influence in countries as different as China or
Part 3 starts with Johanna Chovanec’s article on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a Turkish writer who uses images of the European Other in his search for a Turkish identity. What makes this writer and his novel Huzur (1948; trans. A Mind at Peace, 2007) particularly interesting is Tanpınar’s way of challenging the rhetoric of early Turkish nationalism by proposing a synthesis that links his Turkish present both with the melancholically evoked Ottoman past and with European cultures.
From these often contradicting conceptions of Self and Other at the traditional East-West crossroads Federica Casalin takes us to the Far East with an article that uses archival material to investigate how interlingual and intralingual transfers contributed to changing China’s conviction of being “Everything under Heaven” in the course of the nineteenth century. Whereas China traditionally considered the outside world as populated by “barbarians,” the civilized/barbarian dichotomy was gradually replaced by that of self/foreigners. A crucial role in China’s awareness of a new globality has to be ascribed to the World Geography (1844) published by the Protestant missionary Karl F.A. Gützlaff, through which ethnotypes about European peoples were transmitted to China, where they were perceived, altered, or perpetuated.
While Casalin’s article covers sources up until 1849, Zhu Wenjun takes a look at the premodern Cantonese painter Li Danlin, who—after traveling around the world in the years around 1900—composed two volumes of The Travel Journal and Pictures, a travelogue that sheds further light on the system of cultural mapping from a Sinocentric perspective. Referring to theories by Daniel-Henri Pageaux and Jean-Marc Moura, Zhu understands Li’s depiction of exoticism and alterity as following the tradition entailed from the ancient Chinese painting book The Classic of Mountains and Seas. Noting a dual way of relating to cultural otherness—the detailed and stereotyped description of people in undeveloped areas contrasts with the brief and fallacious depiction of the Western world—she reads Li’s travelogue as a nostalgic example of the Sinocentric pattern of stereotyping that needs to be viewed in the context of a semicolonized China.
That cultural otherness as a form of difference within our species is sometimes articulated by way of animalizing other humans (Borkfelt 2011, 138) is an insight of relevance to the subsequent article by Kristína Kállay. She invites us to take a look at Jozef Cíger-Hronský’s classic Smelý Zajko v Afrike (1931, The Brave Rabbit in Africa), a colonial-themed classic of Slovak children’s literature. Although Slovakia has never been part of a colonial enterprise, the
The final article of this section by Walter Wagner takes us from the Africa journeys of two Slovakian rabbits to the journeys of a French and an Austrian writer to Egypt and thus also back to a geographic space located within the more traditional Orient/Occident dichotomy of European literature. In his comparison of Gustave Flaubert’s Voyage en Égypte and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Das Buch Franza, Wagner shows that the same area, Egypt, is utilized in different ways. Whereas Flaubert resorts to stereotypical representations of the colonial Orient to posit white superiority, Bachmann—writing in the age of postcolonialism—inverts the traditional Orient/Occident dichotomy. According to Wagner, however, the insistence of her characters on white and male inferiority causes just another stereotypization of race and gender.
6.4 Part 4—Intersectional Approaches to Imagology: The Multiple Entanglements of Ethnotypes
The Frenchman Gustave Flaubert’s unreflected position of “white superiority” in his sexist as well as racist narrative of Egypt (cf. Wagner in this volume) is rooted in the consolidation of nation-states in nineteenth-century Europe. This process necessitated a common national identity, embodied by the ideal citizen who was perceived as “a white heterosexual man, symbolized by such figures as the soldier, the worker, the independent public figure (politician or writer)” (Verstraete 2007, 330). However, the Völkertafel illustrates that “white superiority,” although more purposefully instrumentalized by nationalists, was by no means their invention. Depicting ten elegantly dressed white men as representatives of their European peoples, it can be regarded as an early prenational example for the perception of ethnic identity as gendered, racialized, and classed.
These identity markers are sometimes referred to as the trinity of intersectionality, a concept deeply rooted in Black feminism that helps to understand and to analyse overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination like gender, race, and class, but also ethnicity, sex, age, religion, and so forth (cf. Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, 2). Although the term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, its origins can be traced back to African American activists like Sojourner Truth or Anna Julia Cooper who had pointed out long before that women of colour
More recently, however, imagologists have also referred directly to intersectional theory.35 After Franz K. Stanzel (cf. 21998, 99–103) had already supplemented his imagological essay on Europeans with a brief but noteworthy digression on the national character of women, Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (2007a) included categories such as gender and race in their critical survey on imagology. In her entry on gender, Ginette Verstraete claims that “[s]tudying national images from the perspective of gender, while regarding gender also in relation to colour, religion, sexual orientation and so on, enables us to complicate stereotypes and see alliances where many prefer to see simplistic oppositions” (2007, 331). In a similar way, although preferring to speak of interdisciplinary research on stereotypes rather than of imagology, Perner argues that “[l]iterary research can only profit from tearing down artificial divides and considering national and cultural stereotypes side-by-side with stereotypes of class, gender, and age” (2013, 41). Accordingly, it was only consequent for Leerssen to explicitly designate these “new, ‘intersectional’ notions of identity formation” (2016, 13) as a major future challenge for imagology a few years later. Similarly, Blažević advocates examining images as “manifestations of Otherness alongside social, cultural, religious, confessional, civilizational, generational, and gender lines” (2018, 31).
It is surprising that despite these repeated efforts to encourage an intersectional approach to imagology, only few scholars36 have implemented frames
Part 4 starts with this theoretical strand of intersectional imagology, namely with Martina Thiele who explores the relationship between elementary social cognitive processes such as categorization and stereotyping. She shows that the existing variety of categories and stereotypes can be better understood by studying their multifarious interlinkages. These insights from an intercultural communication perspective prove highly relevant to imagology because images in the imagological sense of the word, as Verstraete (2007), Perner (2013), Leerssen (2016), and Blažević (2018) argued, are usually composed of one or more stereotypes intersecting with each other.
Maria Weilandt considers nationality, the most traditional analytical category of imagology, itself as an interdependent construct that is always already
In her comparison of a classic English bildungsroman and an US-American plantation novel, Karin Andersson expands the hitherto European frame of intersectional imagology. She claims that the “mad woman in the attic” trope, which most prominently features in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), is—almost in the style of a traveling image—adapted by the proslavery writer Caroline Lee Hentz. In her novel The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) the Italian character Claudia bears similarities with Brontë’s Caribbean “mad woman” Bertha as well as with a Jezebel, both female stereotypes at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race.
Ivana Drmić’s contribution is also concerned with a transatlantic comparison, namely between two rather different films—one a Bosnian, the other a Hollywood production—which both deal with acts of sexual violence in the Bosnian War (1992–1995). By comparing Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica (2006) with Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), Drmić shows that both directors, albeit with the best of—feminist—intentions, fell into the trap of stereotyping and victimizing Bosnian women and, moreover, Bosnia and “the Balkans.”
6.5 Part 5—Imagology Intermedial: Beyond the Literary Text
As Drmić’s contribution in the preceding section shows, literary texts—imagology’s primary source of investigation—are not the only medium where imagotypical representations can be found. Narrative forms, “both fictional and nonfictional, are a privileged discursive genre for the imagologist” (Leerssen 2016, 18), and are “nowadays […] no longer exclusively located in genres like the novel, but also in film, TV serials, graphic novels and other such media” (ibid., 23). Nevertheless, those “extraliterary” genres “in spite of the cultural turn, have been considerably less in the focus of attention” (Dukić 2012b, 14). Going “beyond the literary text” can thus lead to a richer understanding of national images thereby mirroring the aspiration “to carefully consider the material, semiotic, and corporeal aspects of cultural imagery generated through various media of the contemporary information society” (Blažević 2014, 361). Birgit Neumann explains that genre- and media-specific processes allow for a distinctive and effective production of auto- and hetero-images (cf. 2009, 11). Comparing national images/stereotypes across the borders of genre
The first medium represented in this section are comics as a form of visual narratives37 which are “closely related to cinema, a parallel and equally old (or young) medium” (Hölter 2007, 306). Comics are composed of picture and text, which makes them a valuable source of visual representations of ethnotypes. As Achim Hölter notes, “their visual technique is often one of simplification, so that ethnic attributes […] are predominantly exposed by the means of drawing and colour” (2007, 307). Whereas literature “produces” certain images in the reader’s imagination, the immediacy of visual narratives can be classified as a unique feature of comics and an ideal basis for imagological research.
The second medium this section focuses on is music, which has already been recognized as important “for the expression and dissemination of nationalist ideals” (Leerssen 2014, 606). The illuminating and diverse exchange between literature and music is traditionally analysed with regard to their intermedial adaptation, intertextual references, and historical impact. Johann Gottfried Herder with his Volkslieder (1778/1779) is known as one of the earliest anthologists of folk songs—although his definition of Volkslied is not congruent with its contemporary notion. Another example dates back to the early nineteenth century when Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim presented a seminal collection of German folk songs titled Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–1808) that Leerssen describes as “foundational text for the Heidelberg Romantic school” (2018b). Both anthologies can be seen as revealing sources of traditional and patriotic images transmitted by music—especially from an intermedial imagological point of view. Leerssen, who has already done a significant amount of research on the intersection between musical romanticism and romantic nationalism (Leerssen 2014, 2018b), emphasizes the imagological relevance of music—a fact which needs to be seen in contrast to “music stereotypically enjoy[ing] the proverbial status of being the most abstract, least significance-anchored form of art” (2014, 606).
Taking this into consideration, this fifth section pursues two forms of intermedial imagology which have turned out as media-specific: imagological representations as fundamental and—in a literal sense—visible parts of visual
This last section starts with Christine Hermann’s article which is based on the observation that Flemish comics have largely been ignored as subjects of detailed studies regarding the stereotypes they convey (in contrast to e.g. Franco-Belgian comics). Her contribution focuses on three albums of the Flemish comic series Suske en Wiske, whose heroes travel to a fictitious Eastern Bloc country, Japan, and China. She examines how both the auto- and hetero-images are presented—visually, textually, and as significant part of the plot—which leads to an important insight: in the early album (1945) ethnotypes are perpetuated, whereas in the later ones (1984, 2008) they are rather undermined. As a whole this opening article of part 5 demonstrates how the reproduction of stereotypes and clichés can change over time—and even within a single comic series.
Moving on from visual narratives to music, Renée Vulto considers songs as effective instruments to strengthen the formation of collective identities. Her article focuses on eighteenth-century Dutch songwriters who in their striving for national unity were willing to emphasize nationalist ideas through their art. Political songs from that period employ several tropes, and the music often reinforces nationalistic images through musical imagery and intertextual references. Taking into account cognitive theories and making use of their specific vocabulary to describe the effects of singing, Vulto expands the imagological approach to musical imagery and shows how the imagined identities voiced in the songs become embodied in this performative act.
Following this interdisciplinary approach, Andrea Horz focuses on operatic debates in Germany during the 1770s and, more specifically, on one of the key figures in these debates, the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, who aimed to reform French and Italian opera. Notions of nationality were not only a controversial issue but present at all levels of this multimedia genre: music and text as well as composers and actors. Based on the observation that aesthetic discussions were generally linked to the concept of nationality—in this case particularly national taste in music—Horz investigates various connections between nation and music while highlighting the specific functions of national categories within the German operatic discourse at the end of the eighteenth century.
We hope that it has become clear how the twenty-one articles collected in this volume relate to some of the blind spots, promising connections, uncharted territories, and—to once again be deliberately blunt about it—our initially subjective but collaboratively widened perspectives outlined in the earlier and more general parts of this introduction. Obviously, none of what is said here—neither in the introduction nor in the following contributions—is final. Imagology, in both its theoretical conceptualization and practical implementation, is in need of, and at the same time shows high potential for, further change, adaptation, reconceptualization, and application. If this introduction—and this volume as a whole—has been able to identify and commence some of the most promising routes of a possibly “global,” interdisciplinary, intersectional, and intermedial future imagology, and if some of our readers will feel inspired to follow these traces or identify new ones, the aims we initially had on that summer afternoon on the rooftop terrace in Vienna would not just be fulfilled but definitely surpassed.
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For a historical overview of the development of imagology, which goes beyond the stages only roughly sketched here, see Leerssen’s article “Imagology: History and Method” (in Beller and Leerssen 2007). Readers of German can find a comprehensive and critical overview of imagology, which focuses on its “claim, method, fallacies” and is particularly informed by both the French and the German scholarly contexts, in Ruth Florack’s monograph on the role of national stereotypes in literature (cf. 2007, 7–32). In most recent introductions to the discipline of comparative literature, the field of imagology and its history is not covered in much detail. Two exceptions are Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann’s subchapter on “Das Eigene und das Fremde: Komparatistische Imagologie” in Einführung in die Komparatistik (cf. 2013, 187–202) and Bernard Franco’s La littérature comparée—Histoire, domaine, méthodes, which dedicates a whole chapter to “Les études d’images” (cf. 2016, 179–190).
Our translation. Original and complete quote (German): “Die Untersuchung des literarischen ‘Bildes vom andern Land’ (sowohl durch Konfrontation mit der Wirklichkeit als durch Aufspüren der geistesgeschichtlichen Prozesse, in denen das betreffende Bild wurzelt, usw.) könnte überhaupt in hohem Maße zur weiteren Entideologisierung der Methoden der Literaturwissenschaft beitragen.”
Our translation. Original and complete quote (German): “Für die weitere Beschäftigung mit den ‘images’ und ‘mirages’ spricht jedenfalls dreierlei: ihr Vorhandensein in gewissen literarischen Werken; die Rolle, die sie bei der Verbreitung von Übersetzungen oder auch Originalwerken außerhalb deren jeweiligen nationalliterarischen Entstehungsbereichs spielen; ihre vorwiegend störende Anwesenheit in der Literaturwissenschaft und -kritik selbst.”
Our translation. Original and complete quote (French): “L’imaginaire que nous étudions est le théâtre, le lieu où s’expriment, de manière imagée (assumons le jeu de mots), c’est-à-dire à l’aide d’images, de représentations, les façons (la littérature, entre autres) dont une société se voit, se définit, se rêve.”
A well-known and current example may demonstrate that this is also relevant to comparative literature practiced in non-Western countries. Recently, Chinese comparative literature scholar Shunqing Cao has linked the first plane of comparison of his “variation theory”—“cross-national variation” (Cao and Han 2017, 3–4)—to imagological concepts, from which he proceeds to further, more specific (i.e. interlingual), but also larger (i.e. intercultural, cross-civilizational) levels of East-West comparisons or, in his terminology, variations. See also Cao (2013).
This statement echoes a footnote by Hugo Dyserinck (cf. [1982] 2015, 134), in which he, despite finding the term imagology, due to its half-Latin, half-Greek etymology, not exactly pleasant, already recommended its use to designate the specialism within comparative literature dedicated to the study of literary images of the other country. According to Dyserinck, in German literary scholarship the term imagology—originally borrowed from French ethno-psychology—was first used under the Aachen program in this sense.
A more recent intervention that addresses the topic of positionality in academia in a convincing and illuminating way is a volume on diversity in the humanities in Germany. In their introduction, the editors Mahmoud Arghavan, Nicole Hirschfelder, and Katharina Motyl pose the rhetorical question: “But is it not more ethical […] to explicitly reflect one’s own positionality and to make one’s political commitments (and potential blindspots) transparent […] rather than to pretend one does not have any?” (2019, 16).
Although we could not realize the section as originally conceptualized, the topic was present throughout the conference and was again addressed during the final roundtable discussion. Davor Dukić, one of the participants, argued for a more thorough examination of imagology’s terminology. He further elaborates on this issue in his contribution “Axiological Foundations of Imagology” (part 1, chapter 2) to this volume. Another contribution that thematizes concepts frequently used in imagological research is Martina Thiele’s “Categories, Stereotypes, Images, and Intersectionality” (part 4, chapter 13), in which she analyses the relationship between categorization and stereotyping from an intercultural communication perspective taking into account social cognitive processes.
Our translation. Original quote (German): “ihre [der Bilder] vorwiegend störende Anwesenheit in der Literaturwissenschaft und -kritik selbst.”
In his book LTI (= Lingua Tertii Imperii) on the language of National Socialism, Victor Klemperer demonstrates that the metaphor of the “Fortress Europe” (Festung Europa ([1947] 121993, 173)) was already central in the Third Reich: “[…] the ‘blockade-proof’, the ‘self-sufficient Europe’ became a buzzword; the ‘venerable continent’ that, as it was said, was betrayed by England, surrounded by the Americans and Russians, and destined for enslavement and de-spiritualization” (ibid.; our translation). Original and complete quote (German): “[…] und nun wurde das ‘blockadefeste’, das ‘autarke Europa’ zum Schlagwort, der, wie man sagte, von England verratene, von den Amerikanern und Russen umlauerte, zur Versklavung und Entgeistigung bestimmte ‘ehrwürdige Kontinent’.”
Our translation. Original quote (German): “Ein Europa[,] das schützt.”
Our translation. Original quote (German): “Es ist möglich Grenzen und das Klima zu schützen.”
The COVID-19 pandemic that we have all been struggling with since the beginning of 2020 is another factor that adds to the new urgency of imagology. On the one hand, the different ways in which nations and their governments have reacted to the crisis may alter or confirm existing national auto- and hetero-images. (For an example, see John Kampfner’s bestselling book Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes from a Grown Up Country (2020), which starts with comparing German and British ways of dealing with the first wave of the pandemic.) On the other hand, the experience of the pandemic affects our ways of thinking about some of the theoretical assumptions of imagology. It complicates our perceptions of borders and the protection they provide from supposedly threatening “others.” Whereas the permeability of national (in some cases also regional or urban) borders has been reduced in order to curb the spread of this novel virus, the risk of getting infected does not primarily emanate from national or ethnic “others” (though Donald Trump persistently spoke of the “China virus”) but seems to be particularly high at family gatherings and private parties typically celebrated by members of the same “in-group.” Measures to protect oneself and others have led to new forms of separation between “the self” and “the other” (through face masks, social distancing, etc.). Although the virus does not—in theory—care about social, economic, or ethnic differences between people, the actual risks of getting infected and receiving late or insufficient treatment are distributed unequally, as are the risks of having to suffer from the economic or social consequences of national lockdowns and similar measures. At this stage in the preparation of this volume, it is not possible to add a detailed outlook on potential new perspectives regarding imagological questions. However, we want to highlight that the social impacts of this current global crisis may alter, reinforce, and question some perceptions about nationality, solidarity, and collective belonging, and will therefore most certainly bring new momentum to imagological research.—the editors, October 2020.
Our translation. Original and complete quote (Brazilian Portuguese): “Eu fui num quilombo. O afrodescendente mais leve lá pesava sete arrobas. Não fazem nada. Eu acho que nem para procriador ele serve mais.”
For a short excerpt of the keynote speech “Nationalism and National-Self-Images: Character into Ideology into Doxa,” in which Leerssen reflected on the overlap between imagology and nationalism studies, see the conference podcast by Julia Grillmayr (cf. 2018, 11:35–13:35 min). In his contribution to this volume “Enmity, Identity, Discourse: Imagology and the State” (part 1, chapter 1), Leerssen deals with a related area and shows how imagological analysis can be fruitfully applied to political discourse.
You can find the call for papers and posters as well as the conference program at https://imagology2018.univie.ac.at. You can either read about or listen to the three-day conference in the conference report (cf. Seidler 2019) or in the podcast (cf. Grillmayr 2018).
Our translation. Original quote (German): “Was, wenn wir die Nazis sind?” […] “Ja. Möglich. Aber vielleicht sind wir in Wirklichkeit die Außerirdischen.”
Our translation. Original quote (German): “Und das allein kann unheimlich genug sein.”
We were very happy when the museum’s director Matthias Beitl agreed to give a brief opening speech, in which he addressed the eventful history of the house. Built in the early eighteenth century for the imperial vice-chancellor Friedrich Karl Graf Schönborn, it was sold to the city of Vienna in 1862 and served, among other things, as a theatre, an inn, a beer hall, a secondary school, a coffin joinery, a barrel binder workshop, a court, a municipal street cleaning facility, and a university building, until it was finally left to the Association for Folklore in 1917. Only three years later the museum opened its doors.
You can listen to excerpts from the roundtable discussion in the conference podcast (cf. Grillmayr 2018, from min. 39:30).
The formation of a geographical imagination that Federico Italiano mentioned in the discussion is also an important component in the third—“geo-imagological” (Laurušaitė 2018b, 3)—section of the edited volume Imagology Profiles and in Daniel Brandlechner’s contribution “#JeSuisAmatrice: Identity Through a Landscape of Wounds; Toward a Geo-imagology” to this volume (part 5, chapter 18).
The history of the Aachen program is documented in Horst Schmidt’s book Das “Aachener Programm” der Komparatistik (2018). The approaches formulated in the program have been further developed within European studies as practiced at the University of Amsterdam (Leerssen 2007, 25).
Our translation. Original and complete quote (German): “So dürfen wir diesen esprit européen gleichzeitig als eine—im wesentlichen—Überwindung des nationalen Denkens (in allen seinen Dimensionen und Konsequenzen) verstehen; was zugleich auch bedeutet, daß wir zwar—mit Nachdruck—unsere Arbeit an innereuropäisch internationalen Erscheinungen und Problemen als eine auf Europa ausgerichtete Forschung betrachten, von der wir denken, dass ihre Ergebnisse letztlich für die ganze Menschheit von Nutzen sein können.”
An intriguing parallel reading to Leerssen’s contribution in this volume is offered by Gitana Vanagaitė (2018) in her article about another genre of this kind, namely the correspondence between the representatives of the Holy See at the Apostolic Nunciature in Lithuania and the Vatican (1922–1939).
For a (re)conceptualization of imagology as “Europaforschung” in the context of a world order that has become increasingly “multipolar,” we think that the notion of a European identity as well as the study of the internal and external perceptions of Europe in a world that has seen attempts of “Provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) deserves particular attention. Such research has been recently promoted by the newly founded “European Cultures in a Multipolar World” research centre based at the University of Konstanz. For further information, see https://www.litwiss.uni-konstanz.de/kulturen-europas/ [January 15, 2020].
Anderson explains his definition of the nation as an imagined community as follows: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion” ([1983] 2016, 6). Imagologists repeatedly refer to this concept, e.g. Franz K. Stanzel in Europäer (cf. 21998, 9–12), Manfred Beller in Eingebildete Nationalcharaktere (cf. 2006, 46), or Kata Gyuris in her talk on “Imagined Communities and National Stereotypes in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah” at our conference (cf. the conference podcast: Grillmayr 2018, 24:10–25:50 min).
Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur is the revised and translated version of the German Global playing in der Literatur. Ein Versuch über die neue Weltliteratur (2007). In this acclaimed book, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis proposes to study “transnational literature” as a form of “New Weltliteratur.” With this concept, she seeks to avoid the marginalization inherent in terms such as “minority literature,” “(im)migration literature,” or “commonwealth literature,” which continue to refer to the category of the nation as standard and, therefore, are not able to fully address the complexity of such texts. As Sturm-Trigonakis puts it in the introduction to the English version: “The inter- and multicultural and multilingual complexity of such texts is not taken into account, because they are measured against a monocultural and monolingual system. Such literary texts are differentiated, specified, and divided, and what is missing is the comparative synthesis on both the levels of the text and the metalevel” (2013, 10).
For an imagological analysis of Europe’s northwestern (e.g. Scotland) and northeastern (e.g. Lithuania) parts that resonates with the “periphery problem,” see Okulicz-Kozaryn (2018).
The term “Kanton übrig” implies that Vorarlberg, the westernmost province of Austria, is the “leftover” or “unwanted” canton of Switzerland. In 1919 an absolute majority of the inhabitants (> 80 percent) of Vorarlberg voted in a referendum to join Switzerland (see Abplanalp 2019). Although this separation was never implemented, to this day there is not only a geographical (the mountain “Arlberg”) and linguistic border (the Alemannic as opposed to the Bavarian language area) between the far west and the rest of Austria, but also a cultural one.
Our translation. Original quote (German): “Die exotistische, die koloniale und, mit Umkehrung der Perspektive, die postkoloniale Literatur bilden die erweiterten Arbeitsgebiete der Imagologie.”
Already in 1992, Moura published his book L’Image du tiers-monde dans le roman français contemporain (1992), followed by (among others) La Littérature des lointains (1998) and Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (1999).
Our translation. Original and complete quote (German): “Bhabha und Ruthner folgend, möchte ich vorschlagen, Stereotype nicht so sehr als Fehlbeschreibungen des Fremden oder auch als Selbstbeschreibungen zu begreifen, sondern sie vielmehr als symbolische Formatierungen, als Fehlleistungen im Zwischenbereich von Unbewusstheit und Intention zu verstehen, die, verdeckt und oft auch nicht bewusst, das jeweilige Verhältnis zu einer anderen fremden Kultur beschreiben.”
Our translation. Original and complete quote (German): “Aber ist nicht seine letzte territoriale Erweiterung nach Südosten hin (Bosnien-Herzegowina 1878/1908) nicht auch als Ersatzhandlung für jenes Zukurz- bzw. Zuspätkommen im internationalen Wettlauf des europäischen Kolonialismus zu verstehen […]?”
This last dichotomy, although relegated to the background in this volume, was a prominent theme at the “New Perspectives on Imagology” conference. The tension between human/nonhuman was not only addressed in the literary reading by Doron Rabinovici (Die Außerirdischen, 2017) but also in the last two lectures by Christine Ivanovic and Aleksandr Sautkin/Elena Philippova. While Ivanovic, in her talk on “The Image of the Animal in Beast Fables,” showed how imagological approaches can contribute to an analysis of the distinction between human and nonhuman animals, Sautkin and Philippova discussed the “superhuman” development of the characters in late Soviet science fiction. For further information see the abstracts of the speakers on the conference website: https://web.archive.org/web/20201017094151/https://imagology2018.univie.ac.at/abstracts/ [October 17, 2020].
This increased interest in intersectional theory also applies to other areas of literary studies, such as narratology (cf. Bach 2014; Klein and Schnicke 2014) or world literary studies (cf. Folie 2019).
While researching possible overlaps between imagology and intersectional theory, we came across the following notable case studies: Ruth Florack’s “‘Weiber sind wie Franzosen geborene Weltleute.’ Zur Verschränkung von Geschlechter-Klischees und nationalen Wahrnehmungsmustern” (2000, “Women like Frenchmen are Born Sophisticates”: On the Linkage Between Gender Clichés and National Patterns of Perception), Gudrun Loster-Schneider’s “‘Die Ordnung der Dinge ist inzwischen durch keine übergeschäftige Hand gestört worden.’ Zur Interaktion von National- und Geschlechterstereotypen in Theodor Fontanes Kriegsgefangen” (2000, “Meanwhile the Order of Things Has Not Been Disturbed by an Overly Busy Hand”: On the Interaction of National and Gender Stereotypes in Theodor Fontane’s Experiences as a Prisoner of War), and Claudia Seeling’s Zur Interdependenz von Gender- und Nationaldiskurs bei Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (2008, On the Interdependence of Gender and National Discourse in the Works of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach). Furthermore, in 2013, two book-length imagological studies with an intersectional orientation were published. Helena Miguélez-Carballeira examines in Galicia, a Sentimental Nation how national discourses in Galicia have been affected by questions of gender and sexual orientation, whereas Stefanie Bock presents Grundzüge einer gender-orientierten Imagologie (Outlines of a Gender-Oriented Imagology) by an exemplary analysis of German stereotypes in selected works of Anglophone women writers between 1890 and 1918.
The edited volumes Imagology Today (Dukić 2012) and History as a Foreign Country (Blažević, Brković, and Dukić 2014) already include imagological case studies which are dedicated to the research of visual materials (painting, photography, and/or film). Furthermore, the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism (Leerssen 2018b) takes various media like music, visual arts, or monuments into account.
Analysing premodern Cantonese painter Li Danlin’s travelogue The Travel Journal and Pictures, Zhu Wenjun’s article in this volume (part 3, chapter 10) also deals with intermedial aspects of imagological research. Next to her analysis of the literary text, Zhu closely investigates the clichés and stereotypes that are depicted in the accompanying drawings and maps. She ultimately links the explicitly Chinese form of line drawing and landscape painting, which show no traces of Western influence, to the Sinocentric content of Li’s travelogue.
One particularly promising—and to our knowledge not yet imagologically researched—medium is video games. They (re)produce “social, political and cultural meanings” (Ensslin 2012, 35) and “still frequently resort to simplistic, ideologized and stereotypical portrayals of characters as well as virtual environments” (Trattner 2016, 24). Accordingly, they are “far from neutral” (Everett 2005, 323) with regard to culture, ethnicity, gender, race, or religious beliefs. In Blizzard’s real-time strategy game Starcraft, to name just one very obvious example, the player can pick one of three “races”: Terrans (human-like), Protoss (alien-like), or Zergs (insect-like), who, though none of them is better or easier to learn than the other, have inherently different characters. Since this volume does not cover video games, we want to at least refer to two recent and very inspiring studies that also cover imagological topics: While Kathrin Trattner in “Religion, Games, and Otherings: An Intersectional Approach” (2016) analyses representations of Islam and the Middle East in contemporary military shoot-‘em-ups, Martin Roth in Thought-Provoking Play: Political Philosophies in Science Fictional Videogame Spaces from Japan (2018) touches upon the implicit and explicit nationalism in Japanese video games.
The hashtag already refers to a medium that might be of increasing interest to imagologists: the microblogging platform Twitter. Snefjella, Schmidtke, and Kuperman (2008), for example, analysed forty million tweets in order to prove that the linguistic behaviour of Canadians and Americans mirrors national character stereotypes. More recently, there has been a growing scholarly debate about Twitter as a medium and so-called “Twitterature” as a genre of special interest to literary scholars. See, for example, Groß and Hamel (2020); Kreuzmair and Pflock (2020); Schulze (2020).