Riemenschnitter
Fakultäten » Philosophische Fakultät » Ostasiatisches Seminar » Sinologie » Prof. Dr. Andrea Riemenschnitter » Riemenschnitter
Completed research project
| Title / Titel | Dual Cross-cultural Publication Project "Strange Encounters" | ||||||
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||||||
| Summary / Zusammenfassung | After the collapse of the imperialistic, Eurocentric world order, cultural encounters are today being enacted in much more modest and self-conscious ways than during the era of European colonialism, when non-European societies and their cultures were being studied and evaluated according to Christian values and the paradigms of Western modernization. More often than not, contemporary projects consist of individual or small-group aesthetic engagements with the “other” – an other that is seen as different yet equal. However, due to an ever-growing burden of painful, repressed, and unworked-through historical experiences, the residuals of a long-term demonization of the other/s still haunt the routes and roots of today's cross-cultural communication. This project engages with the generic representation of otherness by juxtapposing two very different sets of narratives. Nevertheless, both collections of texts focus, in an almost systematic way, on the manifestations of otherness within the self, rather than exploring the notion of alterity through representations of a cultural/national other. Our collection of Swiss Alpine Legends has been translated in the wake of an interdisciplinary seminar on modern urban landscape nostalgia by students of the Institute of East Asian Studies, Zurich. In those folk tales, modern urban dwellers may perceive a spirit of perseverance, awe and resentment towards the hostile environment of the Alps. We can read the various supernatural apparitions represented in those texts as a cultural response to, and a moral economy of, the external as well as internal hardships of countless generations of Swiss mountain dwellers. Moreover, we, in our two introductory essays, offer some reasons why contemporary, popular as well as avant-garde narratives in growing numbers draw on such archaic cultural patterns for their own era’s aesthetic reflections. Our second publication project consists of the German translation of a series of fairytale-style short stories written in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the internationally acclaimed contemporary Chinese avant-garde author Jia Pingwa (b. 1952). In a unique way, the stories reflect the wit, resourcefulness and rich imagination of a community of mountain dwellers in one of China’s poorest regions situated in the southwestern part of Shaanxi province. To a much larger degree than in the Swiss folktale tradition, modern history is the half-hidden monster that, together with the more universally decodeable demons of natural disaster and human deviance, haunts the poor, destitute population of these remote mountain villages. Readers witness deep mountain forests functioning as a sanctuary for some victims of the Cultural Revolution. They also feel the disastrous presence of some greedy party cadres who suck the blood of the poor farmers. The tales are thus a valuable contribution to the subaltern cultural production, which has only recently surfaced in China as an object of serious academic and aesthetic interest. Our project not only crosses the boundaries between Eastern and Western, elite and popular cultures, it also explores the legacy of this literary discourse of otherness in the two different – Swiss and Chinese – contemporary visual cultures. The Hangzhou-based calligrapher, painter and musician Dadong Lu has contributed a series of 12 ink paintings to the German edition. The Berlin-based artist Rémy Markowitsch has designed a set of app. 25 visual comments on the dark sides of our nostalgic taste for Alps, which is derived from the late 19th century British development of Alpine tourism in Switzerland, and thus provides a common denominator with the cultural imaginary of the addressed, modern East Asian audience of the book. The two books thus confront their audiences with an abundance of strange encounters that, under their exotic surface, contain rather familiar narrative structures. |
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| Publications / Publikationen | Leung Ping-kwan, Andrea Riemenschnitter, eds, Ruishi shanlin shenhua gushi / Swiss Alp Legends, Hong Kong: MCCM Creations 2009.Andrea Riemenschnitter, Hg., Jia Pingwa: Geschichten vom Taibai-Berg, Zürich: edition voldemeer 2009. | ||||||
| Keywords / Suchbegriffe | China, Switzerland, popular culture, Swiss Alp legends, modern fairytales, Jia Pingwa, cross-cultural encounters, literature, film, art | ||||||
| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
Other Public Sources (e.g. Federal or Cantonal Agencies), Foundation, Private Sector (e.g. Industry) |
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| In collaboration with / In Zusammenarbeit mit |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | Jul 2004 to Aug 2009 |