Considering Intercultural Literature: A Mature Field of Study

“Indem die Vieldeutigkeit und Ambiguität einer zeitgenössischen Subjektivität, indem deren Bestimmtheit durch verschiedenste Einflüsse und Bezugsgrößen herausgestellt wird, zeigt sich die besondere Affinität von Literatur zu Problemen und Möglichkeiten interkultureller Begegnung—und damit die spezifische Fragestellung der interkulturellen Literaturwissenschaft. Erstens ist gegenüber rationalistischen und eindimensionalen Tendenzen einer (gesellschafts-)wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung interkultureller Konstellationen die Möglichkeit der Literatur zu unterstreichen, multiperspektivische, ambivalente und vieldeutige Texte zu erzeugen und damit der Komplexität einer polyzentrischen Welt gerecht zu werden: ‚Der kulturelle Wert des literarischen Textes […] ergibt sich aus seiner Mehrfachcodierung innerhalb einer plural verstandenen Welt. So bietet der intertextuell geprägte Umgang mit literarischen Texten ein Modell und Trainingsfeld für den Umgang mit mehrfach codierten, komplexen Identitäten […]‘ [from Bronfen & Marius, 1997:7, Hoffman, 2006:13] […] ‚Dabei gewinnt Literatur für die kulturelle Selbstreflexion einen zentralen Stellenwert.‘ [from Gutjahr 2002: 365, ibid.: 14].“

This essay does not presuppose any knowledge of the German language. All German sources noted in this research review are cited primarily as footnotes, and only a few of the more frequently cited seminal sources are included in the references at the end of this article.

For a brief survey of the development of intercultural communication in theory and practice, see Kramsch (2001: 291–206). Kramsch (2001: 202) notes that the field of intercultural communication in Europe had beginnings that were different from those in the USA.

An influence of cognitive anthropology on the ethnography of communication, at the intersection of linguistic-semantic, cultural, and social dimensions, is noted by Schiewer (2015: 381–382).

See Fachinger (1997). There are also comparisons of ethnic autobiography and resistance against monolingualism in the USA and Germany in Seyhan (2001, Chap. III and IV).

Regular surveys of migration patterns can be found in the OECD (2014) International Migration Outlook. By 2013–14, it appears that immigration in Germany has been exceeding that of just about all other OECD countries: Zeit-Online (2014).

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman maintains that in our time “identities cannot but look fragile, temporary and ‘until further notice’ […] The volatility of identities, so to speak, stares the residents of liquid modernity in the face” Bauman (2000: 178). Bauman reaffirms this perception, which has a characteristically negative valorization, in Liquid Life (2005: 8) and in Liquid Times (2007). For that matter, the liquidity metaphor in association with a discussion of the uncomfortable, even destructive transitoriness of identity was already offered by Plutarch in later antiquity (De E apud Delphos). We should note that Uysal-Ünalan (2013) offers an updated discussion of identity constructions in Turkish-German literary works, with an overview of relevant identity concepts.

See Biondi and Schami (1981). Amodeo (1996: 28) also notes the difficulty of translating the term.

CO-cultural theory, for that matter, studies the way meanings associated with the conduct (or articulated conduct) of non-dominant social groups may be different for members of such groups as against meanings attributed by the dominant group. See Orbe and Speller (2005).

From a different cultural perspective, analyzing the “conflicting” dimensions of “national literature and diasporic writing,” Jing Tsu critiques the unquestioning assumption of “linguistic nativity,” which “can no longer be assumed as a once-and-for-all endowment” and privilege (Tsu 2010: 12); language is “a medium of access rather than a right to identity” (ibid.: 13). This argumentation carries the potential for a comparative discussion.

Here again, a reference to co-cultural theory (Orbe, 1997; Orbe & Speller, 2005) is relevant in calling attention to differential ascription of meanings for different socioethnic groups.

Zygmunt Bauman speaks of ethnic self-enclosure in urban spaces as “withdrawal from the frightening, polyphonic space” into a secure niche (2000: 107), of “wilting and waning of the art of dialogue and negotiation” as a “pathology of public space” (ibid.: 109). This is a regression from the earlier, productive notion that alterity is commonly viewed and interpreted from the sign systems of familiarity and the horizon of one’s own culture, a notion that is inseparable from the hypothesis that self-understanding rests on acts of understanding the Other. See for instance Wierlacher (1993: 19–114, here 62–63).

Schmitz (2009: 7–15) cautions that the term intercultural may not be adequate for latent power and subject positions in transcultural and migrant literature, since it tends to imply a notion of cultural symmetry and equivalence. Yet a reductive notion of interculturality is not often found among the theorists considered here. An emphasis on hegemonial conditions that violate migrant identity also appears in Dayioglu-Yücel (2009). Mecklenburg (2008: 90–98) finds that inter- and transculturality are complementary concepts which can both be useful. Herman describes narrative as representing events that “introduce some sort of disruption or disequilibrium into a storyworld” (2009: xvi), “highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses undergoing the disruptive experience at issue” (ibid.:9). The concept is based on Vladimir Propp’s account of disruptive events as the motor of narrative (ibid.: 133 ff.). Lyytikäinen (2012: 75–76) finds transgressions of the expected to be less relevant for mainstream modernist fiction, so that the disruption concept does not apply universally. Violation of migrant identity is, of course, a major disruptive experience, one that invites analysis in terms of storyworld events and narrative method as just described. Importantly, Jing Tsu’s (2010: Chap. I) concept of literary governance yields a reminder that intercultural spaces are likely to be ones of insecurity and deprivation of empowerment, and that the articulations of a minority may not be suited to resist hegemony.

This topography has been used as heuristically valuable by Cornejo (2008). Chiellino’s categories do not distinguish systematically between migrants’ literary works in their native language and in the host country’s language, since these enable fruitful comparisons. Şenocak (2009) is among bilingual writers who explains thematic and stylistic relations between his works in either language. The Sinophone focus on Sinitic-language communities and on Mandarin used by ethnic minorities in China, by contrast, only partly overlaps the intercultural perspective and has a different purpose (Shih, 2013: 11). For Sinophone Chinese American literature, for that matter, an overview of proposed categories (with “a sense of the cultural stakes involved in the name game”) is offered by Sau-ling C. Wong (2009: 91–92), who critiques the genocentric priority often attached to them.

There is no compelling need to distinguish post-colonial from diasporic fictions (as associated with some ethnic Chinese writers from Singapore) rigorously, when one analyzes how they satirically dismantle notions of homing or localities of origin (see Wagner, 2009).

In Chinese diasporic writing, by comparison, there are allusions to Chinese classics for instance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) and various intertextual allusions in Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991).

For a demonstration how, in this context, earlier hermeneutics cannot do justice to intercultural and interliterary dialogue, which rather requires sociological and semiotic aspects, see Zima (1991).

Chapter IV “Bilingual Loyalty“ in Jing Tsu’s Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (2010), by comparison, tends to construct literary bilingualism as process fraught with tensions: “Indeed, writers who venture outside the secure bounds of their mother tongues do so at their own peril. Bilingualism operates in dangerous waters, and Chinese bilingual writers are not uniquely vulnerable in this way” (ibid.: 105). At stake are “issues of loyalty and allegiance in the tussle between multiple centers of Eastern and Western cultures” (ibid.: 110). This paradigm would need further investigation. A problematic case of radical experimentation is a play by Singaporean dramatist Kuo Pao Kun that uses at least seven languages in an attempt to build an “open culture” marked by “diversity and difference,” as “a virtual (cultural) space that advocates the intermingling of cultures as a point of departure for new possibilities and meaning in the production of identity” (Tan 2013: 319, 321). The mutual reference of the languages employed should not be exhausted by diversity, however.

Bi- and multilingualism as a concrete feature of intercultural literature is also highlighted by Schiewer (2015: 362–363). For the usefulness of the concept of dialogicity for comparative literary studies, Schmeling (1999: 209).

Note the intercultural research on the Coordinated Management of Meanings, which investigates changes that occur in stories or their pattern of contextualization during or as a consequence of coordinated actions with others (Pearce, 2005). Relevant is also the intercultural research on communication adaptation: during interaction processes, communicants adjust their speech, their vocal patterns and their gestures to accommodate to their communication partners. The simplest concept in this regard is a convergence and divergence frame (Giles & Ogay, 2007).

Nyman (2009) calls attention to this. He has successfully diagnosed the traditionally bourgeois and somewhat patriarchal notion of home—which is thus associated with dominant discourses– and emphasized the role of community as a major site of belonging and identity. Nyman argues that homing desire involves attempts to reconstruct home in other spaces, and to reinvent and rewrite home as a desire to come to terms with an exile from it. As a result, fictions of diaspora are not mere nostalgic lamentations. Rather, they are texts that actively redefine the migrant’s sense of self and home (ibid.: 24–26). As Bhabha, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s concept of Unheimlich, has pointed out, “To be unhomed is not to be homeless […]” (1992: 141). For recent developments in migration, Cohen shows that the notions of home and host culture are permeable, since permanent settlement is increasingly replaced by “asynchronous, transversal, oscillating flows that involve visiting, studying, seasonal work, temporary contracts, tourism and sojourning” (2008: 123).

See for instance the explanation given in Redder and Rehbein (1987: 15). Claire Kramsch, a professor of German, linguistics, translation and intercultural studies, in a partly parallel move sees culture not so much as membership in a community but rather as “a site of struggle for the recognition and legitimation of meaning,” and more recently as “a mental toolkit of subjective metaphors, affectivities, historical memories, entextualizations and transcontextualizations of experience” (2011: 355). For a similar concept of culture as a battleground where communities of resistance emerge (Kalscheuer 2009: 35). One could compare the argument by Appiah (2005) that notions of cultural belonging have the drawback of involving effects that are homogenizing and essentializing; attempts to group people into cultural entities can become damaging to a person’s individual autonomy.

A construction of personal distinctiveness mainly in terms of difference from others, however, is culturally relative, and should not be confused with a construction in terms of one’s position within social relationships. A differentiation of this kind would be needed for better transcultural relevance of the enactment of symbolic structures. For this context, cf. Vignoles (2000: 345). For an incisive critique of the self-invalidating tokens of distinction offered on the market of liquid modernity, see Bauman (2005: 23).

More fundamentally, Zygmunt Bauman highlights Jacques Derrida’s invitation “to think in travel—or, more exactly, to ‘think travel’. That means to think that unique activity, of departing, going away from chez soi, going far, towards the unknown, risking all the risks, pleasures and dangers that the ‘unknown’ has in store (even the risk of not returning),” which means “[b]uilding a home on cultural crossroads” (Bauman, 2000: 206).

These processes are reflected in Vernon Cronin and Barnett Pearce’s Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory. An overview of concepts of difference is offered by Mecklenburg (2008: 99–111).

Pioneering intercultural scholar Larry Sarbaugh early argued that “the prime discriminator between intercultural and intracultural communication is the heterogeneity of the participants.” In discussing the degree of potentially overlapping or distanced circles, he further notes, “the homogeneity-heterogeneity distinction may lead to classifying communication across generations within the same village or town…[or] where sex roles are quite distinct and clearly defined…between male and female…or age…as highly intercultural communication” (1979/1993: 7–8).

Seyhan (2001: 26–27), however, observes that the host country’s language as used by non-native authors is not deterritorialized in any strict sense. In a very general manner, most works of exile literature appear deterritorialized, but the concept as used by Deleuze and Guattari (2004) would need clarification.

For an analysis of the desire to reconstruct home in other spaces, to reinvent and rewrite home as a desire to come to terms with an exiled condition is Nyman (2009: 24–26) as well as the reflections by Avtar Brah (1996: 192–193). Zygmunt Bauman stresses that “art, like the artists, may have many homelands” (2000: 207) and later explains that “there is a blessing (or at least a chance of a blessing)” in exile, which allows a person “to penetrate deeper into the universal logic and meaning of life in a kind of world (we would say, our liquid modern world) in which everyone, though mostly unknowingly, shares in the condition of being an exile” (2005: 137–138). A Chinese official’s literary reflections on a two-year exile at China’s western frontier in the mid-Qing period show a “de-familiarization of the seemingly familiar” (Altenburger 2009: 135), with “numerous disturbing aspects” (ibid.: 137) owing to the sense of being in “a violent, dangerous and uncivilized region” (ibid.: 138). The writer, Ji Yun, ambivalently tried to reduce the distance from his homeland by “imagining, or fantasizing, the foreign land as a variety of the Chinese world” (ibid.: 140). The situation differentiates the experience from that of foreign exiles in Germany.

An influential philosophy of alienness extending to foreignness can be found in Waldenfels (1997). It is also developed in further publications by Waldenfels, and its categories are used as a guiding paradigm by Leskovec (2011). Here, too, a simple binarism of the familiar against the foreign is rejected. Toming Jun Liu agrees with Julia Kristeva’s widely noted insights in Étrangers à nous-mêmes (1991): “[N]egating the foreigner in effect denies the foreignness that promises growth within oneself; affirming the foreigner affirms one’s foreign (which is the yet-to-be-known) potentials. Familiarizing oneself with the foreign is often the same process as foreignizing the familiar” (Liu 1999: 59). Discussing China Central Television’s highly controversial 1988 miniseries Heshang, for that matter, Toming Jun Liu emphasizes that nationalism cannot be separated from what is foreign; a nation needs to be able to accommodate the foreign into itself: the foreign “can become part of the ‘self,’ and when that happens, the ‘foreign’ is then no longer foreign” (2001: 229). Cohen (2008) as noted above, shows from another perspective that the notions of home and host culture are permeable. Tsu (2010) provocatively demonstrates that a native language, in itself, may be experienced as strange or uncanny. And literature, correspondingly, can be experienced as a radically strange phenomenon, the pinnacle of otherness Leskovec (2011: 64–65).

From another perspective, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman declares that social scientists “ought to come as close as the true poets do to the yet hidden human possibilities” Bauman (2000: 203), with a purpose, as novelist Milan Kandera has put it, “to crush the wall behind which something that ‘was always there’ hides” (cited by Bauman ibid.: 202).

Quite consistently with this, Zygmunt Bauman stresses that “the meeting of strangers is an event without a past” (2000: 95).

For border-crossing cultural and literary relations in earlier periods and in regional literatures, with attention to the transfer of sujets, themes, and motifs, cf. some of the essays offered in Schöning (1999). Esselborn, more emphatically, argues in favor of a hermeneutics of alienness together with supranational approaches to an intercultural study of literature (2009: 285–286). For an overview of the ingredients of such a hermeneutics, which is indispensable for concepts of intercultural literary study, see Mecklenburg (2008: 156–162, 166–185) and Leskovec (2011: 16–18, 86). How mobile literatures can change the cultures of hegemonial centers can be traced in the essays presented in Ette (2003). The concept of mobility is picked up, for instance, in Theilen (2005). Theilen describes how a narrative mode is determined by a structure of movement, so that protagonists seeking an identity always end up in transit between fixed points. Such mobility becomes constitutive for identity, so that shifts between societal discourse structures lead to generating new subject positions. A model of identity on the move becomes enacted in narratives and enables a significant approach to comparative literary study. A comparable experience can be found in the work of Chinese female writer Zhao Shuxia, who lived in Germanophone Switzerland: in “the liminal space between cultures,” a “displaced individual will find opportunities to exert agency and, thus, to establish herself as a diasporic subject” (Ensinger, 2009: 201). For changing the center, it is remarkable to observe Zhao’s “vision and trajectory of a thorough transfiguration of Chinese culture, as set in motion by its diasporic agents rather than by its internal community members” (ibid.: 202). We might compare Tu Wei-Ming’s assertion that “the transformative potential of the periphery is so great that it seems inevitable that it will significantly shape the intellectual discourse of cultural China for years to come” (Tu 2013: 155).

Zygmunt Bauman affirms that “we live in a world of universal flexibility,” of “prospectless Unsicherheit,” as a parameter of cultural identity with a tendency toward formlessness and anxiety (2000:135). For a critique of the antinomial relation between identity and hybridity, see Bauman (2005: 29–30).

On overlap as partial difference in intercultural philosophy, see also Mall (1995: 46).

A similar point is made by Toming Jun Liu concerning the significance of narration for nationalism, since nation “has to be narrated in connection with a version of the nation’s past. Thus, the dynamism of nationalism is mnemonic” (2001: 212). If disquiet is “the feeling of a nation when confronting the ‘foreign’”, Toming continues, “[d]ifferent types of disquiet can be analyzed and understood in terms of how a past is selectively remembered” ((ibid.: 215)). Discussions of German literary forms of intercultural communication, by comparison, also focus on the mnemonic dynamism. A focus on nationhood is less relevant, however. Vancea (2008) studies how narratives in recent decades look carefully at divergent images of the past, such as those revealing hatred of foreignness, so that narratives contribute to pluralizing the mutual historical memories. A singular mnemonic dimension would be insufficient. By relating the experiences of historical traumata to cultural conflicts in the present, narratives can ex negativo mobilize a conjunction of past and present that may give rise to a potential for tolerance. Narratives could almost be considered as lessons in remembering. Klüh (2009: 94 ff.), too, discusses the way individuals participate in a plurality of collective identities, so that collective identity and intercultural identity form a link between research on memory and on foreignness. Literature plays an active role in restructuring memory within a culture when collective identity emerges from interactions with alterity.

Bhabha explains: “[…] the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. […] And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (1994: 38–39). Bachmann-Medick (1996) likewise recommends adapting some concepts from Bhabha. A rebranding would be the minimum form of adjustment. Shaobo (1996) confesses to a strongly specular identification with Bhabha’s concept of a “forever-exiled, ambivalent, subaltern subject of cultural difference.” For a critique of Bhabha’s “too idealistic” concept (Kalscheuer, 2009: 39). Even so, a “poetics of hybridity” is suggested by Mecklenburg (2008: 115–119) In a different approach, and adapting ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Soja (1996) develops a trialectics of spatiality, in which time, space, and society are mutually constitutive but which has not yet become directly relevant to the concepts discussed here. Soja explains that “[t]hirding produces what might best be called a cumulative trialectics that is radically open to additional othernesses, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge” (1996: 61). It “arouses […] a space of resistance and permanent struggle,” so that it becomes “a meeting point, a hybrid place, where one can move beyond the existing borders. It is also a place of the marginal women and men, where old connections can be disturbed and new ones emerge. A Thirdspace consciousness is the precondition to building a community of resistance to all forms of hegemonic power” (ibid.:56). The account remains sketchy (even in the update, Soja 2009) but could be explored further for critical topography.

This assumption is based on Bleicher (1988). For sites of encounter, it would be rewarding to consider fictional depictions by using the category of chronotope: “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin, 1981: 84). The “motif of meeting” (ibid.: 97) is especially important in narrative, and in this motif the temporal marker is inseparable from the spatial marker. In fact, the motif of meeting as in Greek romance enters “a foreign (but not alien) country,” (ibid.: 103) which in this genre is not depicted as a realm of otherness; in the Greek travel novel, by contrast, a homeland organizes the point of view. Bakhtin’s analyses can be adapted for intercultural narratives, in which both temporal and spatial dimensions of sites where characters from different cultural contexts meet become carefully interrelated. Soja points out that Foucauldian “heterotopias are typically linked to slices of time,” forming heterochronies, as “the marvellous incunabula” of a journey into “the geohistories of otherness” (1996: 160) For a brief account of heterochronia as Fourth Principle of heterotopology, see Foucault (1986).

For an understanding of the generation and the functions of images, the mimetic process is fundamental: (Gebauer & Wulf, 1992: 432 ff.). An overview of literary imagology is offered by Mecklenburg (2008: 241–247).