Focus I: Contact Zones

This research group investigates cultural encounters and focuses on processes of exchange, interaction, translation, and interweaving of cultural rules and practices. It cannot be denied that the meeting of different cultures gives rise to boundaries, and that historically the nature of cultural encounters has created the dichotomy between self and other. Yet, we assume that these boundaries never were and still are not clear, given, or fixed. Instead of referring to it as a boundary, we can speak of a dynamic interaction and reciprocal relation to describe the relationship between self and other. With reference to texts, images, films, museums, and rituals we are currently examining how meaning is created along historically specific actualizations of the relationship between self and other. The following questions seem particularly relevant in terms of the performativity of cultural encounters: What forms of representation of self and other are generated? What are their functions and what techniques of truth generation are linked to them? What modes of interpretation determine cultural encounters and how are they construed? How does this creation of meaning circulate via different media? What modes of reception of cultural contact emerge and to what extent do they refer to regulative and standardizing parameters? The following aspects are of particular interest to us in terms of representations of concrete, individual moments of cultural encounter: evidence of their authenticity, questions of testimony and recognition, the frequently genderized mediation of culture, the problem of asymmetry, and questions of regulating and differentiating zones of cultural contact. What moments intervene in the process of determination, fragment scripts and regulating systems, and destabilize and disturb the dichotomy between self and other? To approach these questions, we will study concrete examples to review the term contact zones as it was coined by Marie Louise Pratt, and the "moment of wonder" concept in Stephen Greenblatt's sense. It is our goal to also release those terms from their purely postcolonial discursive contexts and expand them, as well as to pinpoint and apply them to material analyses.

At our 2008 annual conference of the SfB we will present a paper on the meaning of gestures in cultural encounters and are planning the publication of a joint volume in 2010.

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