Chunjie Zhang. Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 252 pp.

Summary

Zhang's monograph innovatively engages a topic that has long been subject of scholarly debate. Intervening in a line of scholarship that stretches from the work of Edward Said and Mary Louise Pratt to Susanne Zantop, Russell Berman, and Sankar Muthu, among many others, Zhang sensitively rereads seminal texts, asserting that non-European societies play a vital, constitutive role in German culture around 1800. She thereby seeks to move beyond the impasse of binary constructions common in this scholarship such as Enlightenment and empire or self and other, instead attending to non-European agency and “reading from the other side, from outside Europe.” In the book's lucid introduction, Zhang brings our attention to these voices to underscore “the polycentric nature of the global eighteenth century.” Enhancing the “visibility of non-Europeans’ impact on the German discourse” warrants a new appraisal of their role within it. In bringing attention to these overlooked and underheard voices, Zhang argues it is insufficient to view them as passive representations, as foils for European self-criticism, or as fantasies of colonial action and national identity. As she frequently reiterates, non-European cultures “co-construct” a network of knowledge that includes German, European, and global identities.

Each of the book's chapters considers the work of a single writer. The sequence of six chapters also forms three sets of pairs, each of which discusses works from the same genre. In moving from first-person travel accounts to literary works set in and inspired by overseas travel, before concluding with philosophical treatises grounded in the information gathered by travelers and ethnographers, the book traces the chain of textual forms through which non-European cultures become part of European discourse. Each pair of chapters could be read on its own, though one would miss the layered and multiple appearances of specific cultures and regions in the field, on the stage, and in the study.

The first two chapters focus on key encounters in travelogues by Georg Forster and Adelbert von Chamisso. Zhang draws the reader's attention to scenes in Reise um die Welt where Forster's empathic reaction to Tahitian and Maori societies exemplifies the relativism that reshaped his cultural identity.