Transculturality and the German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism by Chunjie Zhang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transculturality and the German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism by Chunjie Zhang Christine Winter Transculturality and the German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism. By Chunjie Zhang. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. 252. Cloth $99.95. ISBN 978-0810134782. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810134775. This mature and well-researched book moves from the Pacific to Germany and traces encounters, meetings, and engagement of Germans and Pacific Islanders by analyzing the resulting entangled texts: travel writing, stage plays, and philosophical works. It asks how transculturality shaped discourses, culture, and thought in an evolving Germany. Chunjie Zhang thoroughly contextualizes and theorizes her approach. She analyzes not the making of German imperialism and its impact on a colonized world, but rather the impact of the Pacific on German culture, German nation building, and German ideas about itself and a wider world. She is, as the introduction states, "reading from the other side" (3). Reading this book from the perspective of the Global South is an intellectual delight. It resonates with innovative research on the distinctiveness and contribution of the South to the creation of knowledge, theories about human diversity, and ideas about community and nation building. Since the publication of sociologist Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory (2007) that argued for the appreciation of distinct Southern voices, namely those of the dispossessed non-Europeans, the debate has moved on to include the colonizers. Warwick Anderson, a scholar of race and ethnicity, has argued that the South draws theorists and scientists into engagements and thought that are different from the North, and are characterized by more fluid boundaries and fewer hierarchical constructions of human difference and diversity. Nicholas Thomas has theorized colonialism's culture and the entanglement of objects, and he argues that encounters remain part of dislocated objects though their appreciation changes in their move from the South to the metropol museums of the North and the Southern Settler nations (Entangled Objects, 1991; Colonialism's Culture, 1994). Chunjie Zhang's book extends this analysis to literature understood in a wide sense, and reappraises some core texts of German culture in a new and intellectually fascinating light. Chunjie Zhang problematizes claims that nation states and nationalism engaged with, or rather generated, imperial desires and colonial expansion. She turns this [End Page 145] analysis on its head through her focus on German cultures and discourses. Colonial voyages and the observations they generated informed German culture throughout the long process of nation building. The German case is therefore a case study Zhang employs to reexamine the connections of colonialism and the nation. Her analysis focuses on the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, a "period of tremendous transformation in German and European conceptions of identity and difference, of self and others" (3–4). The volume deals in six chapters with three different genres that, according to the author, represent three prominent cultural practices of this period with regard to cultural and geographic difference and diversity: observing and reporting; entertaining and educating; and philosophizing and shaping intellectual and public discourse. The first two chapters deal with the two great voyage accounts written by travelers of German heritage. George Foster, naturalist, Enlightenment scholar, and journalist, traveled with his father to the South Pacific on Captain James Cook's second voyage (1772–1775), and published his accounts in English and German. Adalbert von Chamisso, poet and botanist, published on his voyage around the world, undertaken with a Russian expedition aboard the Rurik (1815–1818). Zhang opts to focus on these voyages due to their impact on German culture and their occurrence before the onset of European imperialism, although European interests and staging ports were already encroaching on the South Pacific. More importantly, both Foster and Chamisso were border crossers within Europe before and after their respective voyages. Their life-long experiences with otherness and willingness to engage make them ideal case studies for Zhang's analysis. Chapters 3 and 4 engage with the work of two writers who drew upon Foster's travel writings in imaginative ways, namely Joachim Heinrich Campe's adaptation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in Robinson der Jüngere (1779–1780), and some of the plays and...