CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
"Post/Colonial" Approaches to Central
Europe: Power, Ethnicity, and Culture 1848-1918
Organisers: Clemens Ruthner and Wolfgang
Müller-Funk
Ruthner, Clemens (University of Antwerp,
Belgium) CENTRAL EUROPE GOES POSTCOLONIAL: NEW CULTURAL STUDIES
APPROACHES TO THE LATE HABSBURG EMPIRE (1848-1918)
The Post/Colonial Studies of Said, Bhabha, Spivak and others could provide an
intriguing new basis for cultural studies dealing with the past and present of
Central Europe. My paper will examine the following questions: 1) Is there such
a thing as an internal colonialism in Central and Southeastern Europe around
1900 (regarding the Austrian-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia, Habsburg rule in
the Western Ukraine etc.) 2) Is it only the cultural repercussions of imperial
rule in Austria-Hungary that show certain similarities to symbolic forms, as we
know them from colonial empires? 3) What are the advantages of a
"postcolonial" view on Central European history?
Millner, Alexandra (Literary scholar,
Vienna, Austria) ETHNICITY, CLASS AND GENDER: A FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES
APPROACH TO AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN CULTURE (1867-1918)
In Austro-Hungarian female writing around 1900, we confront many literary texts
and essays with a definitely feminist impact: Privileged women campaign for
"equal rights" for those women they see as oppressed (e.g.
prostitutes). The paper will discuss various feminist cultural studies theories
(by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Teresa de Lauretis etc.) adequate to approach
both the subject and the object of investigation and differentiate between them.
Tracking the female subaltern that is neither the producer nor the recipient of
these texts, the paper will examine the notions of ethnicity, class and gender.
Müller-Funk, Wolfgang (University of
Birmingham, United Kingdom) POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES: THE AUSTRIAN ROOTS OF ZIONISM
This lecture analyses the roots of the Zionistic discourse in the multi-ethnic
Habsburg Empire not at least as a reaction to a growing anti-Semitism in all
parts of the Monarchy. It presents a close reading of the utopian novel
"Altneuland" by Theodor Herzl, who for a long time was a writer and
cultural critic in the context of Viennese Culture. Carl Schmitt's terminology
"Land" (territory) and "Meer" (sea) will be used to
differentiate between two forms of domination and ruling power: a territorial
and inner-European and a maritime and global. The Austrian Monarchy represents
the conservative type of continental domination against the concept of the
nation state. Zionism, however, confronts us with the "grand recit"
(Lyotard) of progress, civilisation and (post-) colonialism in a very specific
way. In Herzl's novel, the colonist represents, on the one hand, the type of a
coloniser, but on the other, a continental type who goes back to his territorial
roots.
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