Dislocating Imagology: And: How Much of It Can (or Should) Be Retrieved?

Abstract

REGARDLESS OF HOW ROUTINELY SCHOLARS COMMENT Oil the sG?sion of the nation-state and the emergence of hybrid and 'translocal' spaces,1 postcolonial studies are among those scholarly fields that continue to bring about research projects with an imagological scope. Research projects on representations of alterity that rely on a framework are likely to pay their dues to the comparative school of literary imagology, in particular if they originate in a German scholarly background.2 In the following, I will relate why it may be advantageous to take exception to such a rule, subjecting the basic assumptions of imagology to a critical re-reading. This, I claim, has been done to an insufficient extent in the past. Indeed, there have been few sustained challenges to the validity of imagology as a theoretical tool.3 Following my evaluation of different imagological approaches, I will indicate the potential that the (national) stereotype continues to hold as an analytical category despite the shortcomings of its uses in imagology.In the present context, it is noteworthy that imagologists have repeatedly declared postcolonial studies a natural sister discipline of their own field. Indeed, some have claimed that postcolonial studies had been 're-inventing' central objectives and insights of imagological research.4 In opposition to such claims, I argue that most basic assumptions of imagology require a fundamental 'makeover' before they can sensibly be employed in the field of postcolonial studies. Indeed, it may be preferable to choose other theoretical tools at hand rather than to chain oneself to a field riddled with conceptual flaws past and present.The understanding of imagology current from the late 1960s onwards put emphasis on the political and sociological contextualization of literary texts - an approach that was quite an innovation and hotly debated in comparative literary studies at the time.5 Hugo Dyserinck has described imagology as a 'concrete form of analysis of the phenomenon of experiencing-the-Other across borders' [grenzuberschreitende Fremderfahrung].6 In reality, imagology has displayed an unfortunate lack of theoretical progress during precisely those decades when research on localities, nationality, and ethnicity was subject to fundamental transformation, imagology, it appears, has been largely immune even to the draw of globalization. While it is true that there have been certain silent shifts in objective and unannounced reformulations of research focus, these shifts occurred whenever insights from other fields became increasingly hard to ignore. Nevertheless, it is striking how imagological studies still routinely cite a small number of 'founding texts' from the 1970s and early 1980s as their theoretical framework. Beyond that, literary imagology has not produced a sustained theoretical discourse. In addition, the inventory character of many imagological case studies has failed to bring about genuinely new theoretical insights.7 As a consequence, imagology today faces the same conceptual problems as forty years ago.1. Scrutinizing ImagologyThe first and possibly most fundamental problem is the imagological reliance on and cultural 'containers' and on the existence of separate 'national literatures'. These 'national literatures' are usually defined by their - supposedly exclusive - use of a distinct language.8 Imagology, as developed by Dyserinck, is an examination of the relation between national entities9 and of mutual perceptions across borders. (This means, for instance, 'The French as seen by the Germans' and 'The Germans as seen by the French.'10). Of course, it is one of the commonplaces of imagological research to stress that such cross-national observations and (literary) descriptions tell us more about the observers than about the group that is being observed.11 As a consequence, imagologists including Dyserinck claim the deconstruction of the concept of 'national character' as one of their prime objectives. …