Defining Cultural Exchange: Of Gender, the Power of Definition, and the Long Road Home

Summary

IN MANY WAYS, cultural exchange has already been defined as a symbol of modernity and postmodernity. Where the term tends to occur most frequently is literature on globalization, multiculturalism and diversity, identity and “otherness,” and in what I will call, for lack of a better term, the memory boom in scholarship from the 1980s to the present. In what follows, I would like to take a step back both from the term's modernity and from the objective of “defining” it, despite my title. Instead, I would like to ask some fundamental questions about the nature of cultural exchange: What exactly is exchanged? Does cultural exchange imply any kind of reciprocity? Does anything change after the exchange, that is: does exposure to other cultures lead to changes in one's own cultural identity? To what extent is cultural exchange limited, perhaps even pre-empted, by the need for acceptance, recognizability, or familiarity, in the home culture? Who is doing the exchanging: is cultural exchange limited to the cultivated, to the erudite, to the affluent, to men? Equally importantly, who is doing the defining?

In the period from which my examples are taken, the 1730s to the 1930s, cultural exchange took forms roughly corresponding to the main themes of this volume: translations and travel literature; considerations of colonialism and racial alterity; and inter-cultural or -literary influence and cross-fertilization. In what follows, I will use the writing of three women, one from each of the three centuries preceding our own, to show some of the limitations of cultural exchange, thereby arriving, perhaps, at a definition ex negativo.