What happens when cultures meet? How do we write the history of these interactions, and why do we call it inter-cultural history?
This interdisciplinary course explores these questions through a unique historical laboratory: the rich exchanges between China and Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the variety of intercultural creations born from these exchanges.
Rather than seeing these cultures as radically separate or opposed, we will focus on what happened between them. How they met, transformed one another, and became interwoven. The course introduces the Art of In-Betweenness, an approach that places the focus on the ‘inter’ of interaction and intercultural exchange.
In this course, you will:
- Acquire innovative tools for studying intercultural history and creations that build on and further extend methods from various disciplines (e.g., religious studies, comparative literature, history of science and material culture…)
- Explore the circulation of books, objects, images, scientific knowledge, rituals between China and Europe, and beyond in the 17th and 18th centuries
- Work with a wide range of material and immaterial intercultural creations and analyse practices of translation and cultural adaptation by focusing on the collaborative processes and agents involved
- Investigate the formation of new meanings, identities, communities through shared rituals and cultural practices
- Grasp and engage with notions from Eastern and Western philosophies of alterity and the in-between, and reflect on how identities are shaped through encounters with other.
Through this course, learn about the diversity and complexity of intercultural contacts in history and gain the skills and tools crucial for conducting research on your own (historical) case of cultural interaction. Discover a new way of writing intercultural history: the Art of In-Betweenness.
Enroll (for free as auditor) on www.edx.org: Writing Intercultural History
Instructors
Nicolas Standaert (Prof., KU Leuven & Peking Univ.)
Valentina Yang (Postdoc, KU Leuven)
Course modules
MODULE 0: Methodology for writing intercultural history: A laboratory
Introducing the basic/first methodological steps for studying intercultural history on the basis of the case Sino-European interactions in the 17th and 18th centuries
MODULE 1: The gap on the world map
Presenting the different historiographical frameworks to investigate intercultural history and introducing the interaction framework with a world map as a case
MODULE 2: An intercultural book world
Exploring the various types and processes of cultural diffusion and reproduction through the case of intercultural books.
MODULE 3: Travelling images
Analysing the characteristics of intercultural creations through the case of travelling images and iconic circuits emerging between China and Europe.
MODULE 4: Cabinet of curiosities
Investigating how material culture mediated cultural interactions and shaped perceptions of self and other through the cases of Chinese porcelain and European clocks.
MODULE 5: Found in translation
Discovering intercultural translation, including its practice, agents, complexities, and strategies, through cases from Sino-European encounters.
MODULE 6: Interweaving of rituals
Disentangling cultural interweaving through observing ritual practices, communities, and identities emerging from the encounters between Chinese and Christian ritual traditions.
MODULE 7: Anatomy of knowledge
Elucidating the dynamics, conditions, stakes, and networks of intercultural knowledge exchange between Europe and Qing China in the 17th and 18th centuries.
MODULE 8: Stories of the encounter
Tracking how stories and narratives of the other challenged, adapted, and recreated existing stories, concepts, and worldviews through cases emerging from Sino-European encounters.
MODULE 9: The Art of In-Betweenness
Discovering the notion of 間 (jian)/ in-between and its philosophical foundations, and the potential new avenues it opens for thinking about and writing intercultural history.