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Cultural Crossroads: Revisiting German Orientalism
Abstract
In West-östlicher Divan, Goethe proffers a hybrid poetic enunciation par excellence that merges the compositional principles of Occidental and Oriental poetry. That this new type of poetry could emerge at a time when nationalism was at its inception and theories of German national and cultural heritage and identity circulated with increasing apace and dominance places Goethe in a particular niche with respect to his contemporaries. Against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century zeitgeist, Goethe, in his Divan, conceptualizes an alternative vision to frame the questions of German identity and, indispensably, that of home(land), Heimat—a fraught concept that has come to accrue a polysemy of meaning over its long history. While this notion, during the formative years of the nineteenth century, began to burgeon with narrow, static, and exclusionary connotations, Goethe’s engagement with it manifests different, if not oppositional, dynamics. It proffers new schemata and formats to approach this term, mapping out new (symbolic as well as textual) geographies to explore not only Heimat but also German Orientalism. Heimat, in its poetic renderings in Divan, as I will argue in this paper, not only challenges and refigures, the static articulations of the trope of home in the German context, but it further expands to encompass the imaginary sites of the Islamic Orient. Heimat’s aestheticized renderings, as I argue in this paper, demonstrates that the construction of the idea of home in the nineteenth century is intricately linked with that of Orient. This, I further argue, while demonstrating the extent to which literature may facilitate new conceptualizations of Heimat from its very emergence in the discourse in the nineteenth century, has further implications for the German engagement with the Orient, in that it enacts the condition in which oppositional and taxonomic enactment of East and West, center and periphery, and Self and Other of the Orientalist parlance finds a novel frame of reference via Heimat beyond the reification of simplistic binary orders. I argue that Goethe’s poetology (diverting from the Saidian claim that German Orientalism designates a mere scholarly engagement) in part demonstrates also epistemological alternatives to colonialism through constant acts of learning, unlearning, and relearning many an episteme with respect to such dichotomies.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Iran
Islamic World
Turkey
Sub Area
None