Comparativ 28 (2018), 2

Title 
Comparativ 28 (2018), 2
Other title information 

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Frequency 
Erscheint fünfmal jährlich (mit einem Doppelheft) im Umfang von je ~140 Seiten.
ISBN
978-3-96023-137-0
Extent
126 S.
Price
Einzelheft EUR 12,00, Jahresabonnement EUR 60,-

 

Kontakt

Organization name
Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung
Country
Germany
c/o
Comparativ Universität Leipzig Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics IPF 348001 Ritterstrasse 24 04109 Leipzig GERMANY e-mail: comparativ@uni-leipzig.de
By
Matthias Middell

Room for Manoeuvre: (Cultural) Encounters and Concepts of Place
Herausgegeben von Anke Fischer-Kattner, Martina Kopf, Eva Spies, Menja Holtz

Table of contents

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Aufsätze

Anke Fischer-Kattner
Violent Encounters at Ostend, 1601–1604: patiality, Location, and Identity in Early Modern Siege Warfare, S. 22
While the siege of Ostend (1601-4) is not overly prominent in modern historiography, it did raise immense attention across Europe in the early 17th century. The operation, which formed part of the Eighty Years’ War of the rebellious Netherlands against the Spanish Habsburg monarchy, was represented as a bloody encounter of inconceivable length in various published formats. Contemporary sources such as broadsheets and printed siege accounts contributed to Ostend’s becoming one of the iconic places of the formation of a new Dutch identity – in spite of its capture by the Spanish. The story of the siege thus substantiates Michel de Certeau’s metaphorical likening of warfare and story-telling as spatial practices. Yet, it is also a reminder of the physical, existential dimension of war. Practices and representations of violence contributed to the making of a “war landscape” (Kurt Lewin), of places, in which new boundaries of identity and alterity were produced. As the muddy trenches of Ostend call to mind early-20th-century war experiences in Flanders, they invite comparative approaches to the general characteristics of “spaces of violence” (Jörg Baberowski). Yet, as will become clear, this massive siege operation, which mobilized thousands of people, can also be regarded in the light of new conceptions of “place,” which emphasize particularities created in the crossing of individual trajectories. An analysis that unites these different concepts of spatial constructions is able to link the physicality of violent encounters and the daily life of the siege to the emergence of the new Dutch state within early modern Europe.

Franziska Torma
Geographies of Tropical Ecology: Place-Making in William Beebe’s Travel and Writing, S. 42
William Beebe was an American naturalist and travel writer, who is nowadays regarded as a founding figure of the scientific field of tropical ecology. This essay understands his contribution to this field in terms of place-making activities. Starting point is one of Beebe’s observations that representations can never depict the material experiences that made up the essence of a place. Peter Turchi has called this problem “the challenge of representation”. For William Beebe, this challenge opened up a tricky room for maneuver: Various activities can happen in one spot and create different notions of place – as narrated landscape, room for bodily experience and site of research. In framing the scientific approach to nature, Beebe had to deliberately reduce the complexity of the place by silencing its imaginative and sensuous notions. The essay uses the written accounts by Beebe as keys to disentangle the different notions of place, guided by the theoretical approaches of Peter Turchi, Yi-Fu Tuan, and John B. Harley.

Katharina Bauer
From Paradise to a Graveyard: Aleksey N. Tolstoy’s Representations of Places Between Literary and Ideological Discourses, S. 56
The contribution explores the significance of European locations in the writings of Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1883–1945), a neo-realist writer and prominent figure between 1910 and 1945 of Russian respectively Soviet literature. The more the author deals with questions of national identity in his writings, the more important become his encounters with other cultures, as they give him the chance – or force him – to glance at Russia from an outside point of view. Presenting some of the author’s journeys to Germany and France between 1908 and 1935, this contribution demonstrates how his topographies of the visited European cities oscillate between explicitly subjective descriptions, references to literary topoi and an instrumentalisation for geo-cultural purposes in the Soviet context: Over the years, the first, allegedly productive encounter with European cultures changes into an experience of deep estrangement combined with the claim of the Soviet Union’s cultural superiority. Yet, there are other texts that give Aleksey Tolstoy “room for manoeuvre” to express a much more personal view on Europe than in his official writings.
The theoretical framework of the analysis is based on Detlef Ipsen’s definition of places, underlining both the concrete experiential character as well as the meaning-making potential of places. For tracing Tolstoy’s changing interpretation of the visited places, Susanne Frank’s works on geo-kulturologija and its relation to geopoetics gave important impulses.

Martina Kopf
Jorge Amado’s Salvador da Bahia: Transcultural Place-Making and the Search for “Brazilianness”, S. 71
The contribution examines transcultural place-making and the search for Brazilian identity, Brazilianness, in Jorge Amado’s (1912–2001) writings. Amado’s preferred setting is the Brazilian federal state of Bahia, known for its strong cultural ties to Africa and its large Afro-Brazilian population. In Amado’s novel Tenda dos milagres (Tent of Miracles) (1968), Bahia’s capital, Salvador, is portrayed as a place where cultural influences of African, Brazilian indigenous and European origin meet. Amado compares Salvador da Bahia’s historic centre, also known as the Pelourinho, to a kind of Afro-Brazilian “university”. The Pelourinho thus becomes a place where Brazilian culture as transcultural culture, in the form of Mestizo culture, develops, where it is practised and where it can be directly experienced. In describing Salvador da Bahia as the cradle of Brazilian culture, thus locating culture in a specific place, Amado contributes to defining Brazilianness. Transcultural place-making helps to construct Mestizo identity within a national and a cultural framework. Searching for Brazilianness moreover means to reevaluate and emancipate the former colony in attributing to Brazil a pioneering task: Salvador da Bahia is made into as the world’s umbilicus, and “the mulatto”, the result of intercultural encounters there, becomes the “man of the future”. This raises the question how a place takes shape in transcultural processes. The contribution thus connects to Paul Gilroy’s statement that transculturality accentuates not only dynamics and restlessness but above all the creativity of transcultural processes.

Eva Spies
“Winning the Place for Jesus”: A Relational Perspective on Pentecostal Mission Encounters in Madagascar, S 86
In reference to theoretical approaches by Tim Ingold, Doreen Massey and Christopher Powell, the contribution develops a relational perspective on place and missionary practices in Madagascar. The article focuses on current South-South mission contacts and the attempts of a Malagasy pastor to establish a branch of his church in a small town in the central highlands: The pastor works for Winners’ Chapel, a Pentecostal-charismatic church from Nigeria, and is tasked
with “winning the place for Jesus”. After numerous failures, a ritual is supposed to help him finally break connections with territorial spirits, renew the covenant of the inhabitants with God and bind himself to the local web of relationships.
The article understands “place” not as a given entity, but as an emerging and changing product of relational processes. A place is therefore not a pre-set arena for stories, identities and encounters that are bound to it or take place in it. Rather, place constitutes itself as a dynamic meshwork of relationships through different practices of relating. In this way, place comes into being as a taking place of relations. Finally, the article shows that a relational perspective not
only invites us to take a new look at the “objects” of ethnographic research, but also at academic knowledge production itself.

Buchbesprechungen

Stefan Berger / Holger Nehring (eds.): The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective. A Survey (= Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, vol. 14), London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017, 737 p.
by Micha Fiedlschuster, S. 102

Margrit Pernau / Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.): Global Conceptual History. A Reader. London: Bloomsbury 2016, 376 p.
by Christof Dipper, S. 105

Julian Go / George Lawson (eds.): Global Historical Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017, 298 S.
by Matthias Middell, S. 107

Constance Bantman / Bert Altena (eds.): Reassessing the Transnational Turn, Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies, Oakland, CA: PM Press 2017, 235p.
by Pascale Siegrist, S. 110

Georg Fischer: Globalisierte Geologie. Eine Wissensgeschichte des Eisenerzes in Brasilien (1876– 1914), Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2017, 328 S.
by Helge Wendt, S. 112

Rajak Svetozar / Konstantina E. Botsiou / Eirini Karamouzi / Evanthis Hatzivassiliou (eds.): The Balkans in the Cold War (= Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World), London: Palgrave Macmillian 2017, 372 p.
by Nedzad Kuc, S. 116

Tobias Rupprecht: Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, 334 p.
by Constantin Katsakioris, S. 118

Hans-Heinrich Nolte: Kurze Geschichte der Imperien. Mit einem Beitrag von Christiane Nolte, Wien: Böhlau, 2017, 505 S.
by Klemens Kaps, S. 120

Autorinnen und Autoren, S. 125

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Published on
09.02.2019
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