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BEYOND CULTURE-CONTACT AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE: “GERMANISM” IN COLONIAL BENGAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2007

ANDREW SARTORI
Affiliation:
Harper Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, University of Chicago

Abstract

This essay will explore the presence of Germany as a key trope of Bengali nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. It will problematize the exhaustiveness of a conventional spectrum of interpretation in the analysis of colonial intellectual history that has been defined at one extreme by the cultural violence of colonial interpellation and at the other by a hermeneutic conception of authentic intercultural encounter across the limits of great traditions. When Bengalis actually began to interact directly with Germans and German thought, it was an encounter whose parameters had already been deeply determined in the course of the preceding forty or fifty years. But I shall also argue that this appeal to the trope of Germany emerged from within a more complex, multilateral configuration in which “Germany” was itself a key figure of Victorian discourses in Britain itself.

Type
Articles
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper was originally presented at (and indeed emerged as a response to the basic themes motivating) a conference organized by Kris Manjapra on the Exchange of Ideas and Culture between South Asia and Central Europe, held at Harvard University, 28–9 October 2005.