Zaal Andronikashvili, Tatjana Petzer, Andreas Pflitsch, Martin Treml (eds.), Die Ordnung pluraler Kulturen. Figurationen europäischer Kulturgeschichte, vom Osten her gesehen

Abstract

This anthology aims to explore the broad cultural-symbolic context, resp. foundations of the recent major geopolitical phenomenon called “the shift of Europe towards the East”. While systematically refraining from a socio-political analysis of this shift, the contributors claim that negotiations around borders and, in general, around the ordering and re-ordering of common spaces finds multifarious expressions in most diverse cultural phenomena, whether literary, vestimentary, visual, affective, legal or supra-(or pre-)legal, and that these acts of ordering are not mere cultural “envelopes”. On the contrary, they fully participate in the permanent (re)distribution of spaces and identities to which a purely political perspective could hardly do justice. On the one hand, the articles reunited in the anthology treat various attempts within Western European cultural history to introduce “order” in the colourful and often frightening plurality of spaces and cultures situated at its southern and eastern margins, be it Arab, Jewish, Slavic, Caucasian or Turkish/Ottoman. On the other hand, they consider attempts within these same eastern, “marginal” cultures aimed at inscribing themselves in or demarcating themselves from the space of whatever may be meant by the highly equivocal term “Europe”. Thus, by providing descriptions of singular cultural facts and artefacts, the contributors of this book present “Europe” and the “European” as something that escapes not only all sorts of filiation to one single, “pure” identity and provenance, but also a facile dualism between Order, i.e. Europe, and Chaos, i.e. its Eastern Other(s). Europe is seen here rather as a simultaneously active and receptive open space of permanent negotiations, a space experimentally approached from the perspective of five (mutually independent) orders – textal orders, visual orders, vestimentary orders, affective orders and ground orders.