Cosmos and Colonialism. Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism

Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse (1799–1804). He is the most significant German travel writer and the most important mediator between Europe and the Americas of the nineteenth century. His works integrated knowledge from two dozen domains. Today, he is at the center of debates on imperial discourse, postcolonialism, and globalization. This collection of fifty essays brings together a range of responses, many presented here for the first time in English. Authors from Schiller, Chateaubriand, Sarmiento, and Nietzsche, to Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Bloch, and Alejo Carpentier paint the historical background. Essays by contemporary travel writers and recent critics outline the current controversies on Humboldt. The source materials collected here will be indispensable to scholars of German, French, and Latin and North American literature as well as cultural and postcolonial studies, history, art history, and the history of science.

The Power of Tolerance. A Debate

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

Contact, Mobility and Authenticity: Language Ideologies in Koineisation and Creolisation

Part II - Christoph Neuenschwander: Language ideologies in the legitimisation of Tok Pisin as a lingua franca Pidgins and Creoles all over the world seem to share common aspects in the historical circumstances of their genesis and evolution. They all emerged in the context of colonialism, in which not only colonisers and colonised, but also the various groups of the colonised population spoke different languages. Pidgins and Creoles, quite simply, resulted from the need to communicate.¬¬ Yet, the degree to which they became accepted as a lingua franca or in fact even as a linguistic variety in its own right, strikingly differs from variety to variety. The current research project focuses on two Pacific Creoles: Tok Pisin, spoken on Papua New Guinea, and Hawai'i Creole English (HCE). Whereas Tok Pisin is a highly stabilised and legitimised variety, used as a lingua franca in one of the most linguistically diverse countries on Earth, HCE seems to be regarded as nothing more than broken English by a vast majority of the Hawai'ian population. The aim of this project is to examine the metalinguistic comments about both varieties and to analyse the public discourses, in which the status of Tok Pisin and HCE were and still are negotiated. More precisely, language ideologies shall be identified and compared in the two contexts. Ultimately, this might help us understand the mechanisms that underlie the processes of legitimisation or stigmatisation. As Laura Tresch will run a parallel research project on language ideologies on new dialects (New Zealand English and Estuary English), a comparison between the findings of both projects may produce even more insights into those mechanisms. The next months of the project will be dedicated to investigating the metalinguistic discourse in Papua New Guinea. In order to collect a wide range of manifestations of language ideologies, i.e. instances of (lay and academic) commentary on Tok Pisin, it makes sense to look at a relatively large period of time and to single out events that are likely to have stimulated such manifestations. In the history of Papua New Guinea - and in the history of Tok Pisin, in particular - several important social and political events concerning the use and the status of the language can be detected. One example might be public debates on education policy. The presentation at the CSLS Winter School 2014 will provide a brief introduction to the history of Tok Pisin and raise the methodological question of how to spot potential sites of language-ideological production.