Encountering the Other(s)

Studies in Literature, History, and Culture

Edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler

Subjects: Cultural Critique
Paperback : 9780791421604, 378 pages, March 1995
Hardcover : 9780791421598, 378 pages, March 1995

Alternative formats available from:

Read Excerpt View Table of Contents

Request Desk or Examination Copy
Request a Media Review Copy

Table of contents

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Gisela Brinker-Gabler

Part I: The Challenge of the Other/s

1  What of the Others? Whose Subjection?

Stephen David Ross

2  Response to the Other

Bernhard Waldenfels

3  Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and No Place to Rest

Angelika Bammer

4  The Instincts of "Race" and "Text"

Aaron Perkus

5  The Construction of the Other and the Destruction of the Self: The Case of the Convention Hearings

Robert F. Barsky

Part II:  Interrogating Identity and Otherness

6  Maelzel and Me

Frederick Garber

7  Blutschande : From the Incest Taboo to the Nuremberg Racial Laws

Christina von Braun

8  The Jewish Nose: Are Jews White? Or, The History of the Nose Job

Sander L. Gilman

9   It Has, Like You, No Name: Paul Celan and the Question of Address

Jason M. Wirth

10  The Malady of Community

Michael Strysick

11  Andean Waltz

Leo Spitzer

12  The East Indian Presence in Jamaican Literature: with Reference to "The Arrival of the Snake Woman" by Olive Senior

Velma Pollard

13  The "Other's Others": Chicana Identity and Its Textual Expressions

Eliana S. Rivero

14  Poetry

Abena Busia

Part III:  The De/Colonized Other/s

15  Domesticating the Other: European Colonial Fantasies 1770–1830

Susanne Zantop

16  Writing the Other's Language: Modes of Linguistic Representation in German Colonial and Anti-Colonial Literature

Konstanze Streese

17  Isabella Eberhardt Traveling "Other"/wise: The "European" Subject in "Oriental" Identity

Sidonie Smith

Part IV:  Passages to Other/s' Politics

18  Nation as the Concept of 'Democratic Otherness': Christopher Unborn and the Plea for Hybrid Cultures

Ineke Phaf

19  The "Other" as the "Self" under Cultural Dependency: The Impact of the Postcolonial University

Ali A. Mazrui

Contributors

Index

Description

Europe and the United States now confront many of the same unresolved issues of nationalist, religious, racial, and ethnic intolerance. The book addresses the question: How can the humanistic disciplines and social sciences play a role in a political transformation or address cultural difference? This "difference," the other, may be a racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, or colonial Other.

Contributors to this book focus on the serious political questions posed by the problems of strangeness, "the other," in the present climate of accelerating social change and global shifts in political power.

Gisela Brinker-Gabler is Professor of Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Binghamton.

Reviews

"The studies in this book bring to the question of 'otherness' new dimensions, theoretical perspectives, and rich insights that should contribute in significant ways to discussions of literary theory and cultural criticism. The authors approach the question from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the biological to the psychological, cultural, and political implications of 'otherness.' They address the question in its intra-societal as well as inter-societal dimensions. The essays are rich in coverage, theoretically sophisticated, and intricate in analysis." — Arif Dirlik, Duke University