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Chunjie Zhang

Bio: Chunjie Zhang is an academic researcher from University of California, Davis. The author has contributed to research in topics: German & German studies. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 9 publications receiving 72 citations.

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Book
15 May 2017
TL;DR: Herder as discussed by the authors pointed out that the colonized regions cry for revenge because European colonialism continuously devastates their living conditions, and pointed out the need for a global justice and human dignity that defies the protean nature of time.
Abstract: idea that intercultural encounters enhance culture and civility, he highlights violence and death. Moving swiftly through the Romans, the Christian crusade, and other ancient examples, Herder scathingly criticizes contemporary European colonial practice of the Germans in the Baltic regions and that of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and Holland in Africa and the East and West Indies. Although in Ideen Herder had praised European openmindedness and the spirit of world trade, here he comments that the colonized regions cry for revenge because European colonialism continuously devastates their living conditions.170 Travel writings inform Herder about the European slave trade— for him, the greatest misery in the history of humanity.171 Europe and the colonized part of the world are juxtaposed through contrasting qualities, such as good and evil, injustice and candor, war and vulnerability, oppression and suffering. In Herder’s eyes, slavery is the greatest crime of European colonialism. In letter 114, Herder presents disturbing stories of colonial slavery in the form of idyllic poems titled NegerIdyllen.172 York Gothart Mix and Gerhard Sauder accurately point out that Herder intentionally and ironically deploys the genre of idyllic poetry, conventionally associated with the beautiful nature and the peaceful life of a shepherd in primeval times, to demonstrate the deep rupture between utopia and reality.173 Herder injects a heavy dose of colonial truth into the world of idyllic poetry to ironically comment on the Rousseauian idea of noble savage, which compares numerous nonEuropean cultures to Europe’s past and Arcadian peace and innocence. To some extent, this is also Herder’s ironic response to his own philosophy of history.174 “Die Frucht am Baume” (“Fruit on the Tree”) powerfully condemns the excess and cruelty of a white master who takes away the bride of a black slave and imprisons him in a cage hanging on a tree. “Die rechte Hand” (“The Right Hand”) and “Die Brüder” (“The Brothers”) tragically eulogize the noble characteristics of the black slaves because they sacrifice their bodies and their lives to follow the dictate of their hearts and the principle of justice. As a matter of fact, these poems portray nothing idyllic. What the poems evoke is a strong abhorrence for the white colonizers and a moral indictment of colonial atrocity. Yet it is precisely this detestation that prompts an even stronger desire for an idyllic state, one where white and black people live together following noble moral principles. Herder endeavors to elaborate this dream with his vision of perpetual peace and his concepts of historical revenge and equal authenticity of cultures. The Iroquois’ story of peacemaking shapes Herder’s idea of perpetual peace, which contrasts with Immanuel Kant’s vision of the same topic based on a priori principles and pure reason. Herder conceives of Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, to call for a global justice and human dignity that defies the protean nature of time. While Herder’s early concept of cultural relativism stresses the aspect of individuality, now he places more weight on the notion of equal authenticity in the context of his colonial critique. Herder Johann Gottfried Herder 155 also predicts Europe’s crisis and decadence based on the continuation of slavery and cruel colonialism. Reading Herder’s Humanitätsbriefe, I am not merely concerned with showing Herder as a German philosopher with a good conscience; more importantly, I aim to demonstrate that nonEuropean knowledge and reality significantly challenge Eurocentrism and coconstruct the ethical dimension of Herder’s philosophy of history. In letters 118 and 119, Herder illustrates his vision of perpetual peace with a story of the Iroquois, a Native American tribe documented in the travel narrative Missionsgeschichte in Nordamerika (History of the Missions in North America). As many critics point out, his vision of perpetual peace is situated in the European intellectual project of perpetual peace initiated by Abbé Saint Pierre in 1713 and further discussed by JeanJacques Rousseau and others.175 The most famous treatise is certainly Immanuel Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace, 1795). Pheng Cheah comments that Kant’s cosmopolitanism marks a turning point of political theory from intrastate to interstate concerns, a point “at which the ‘political’ becomes, by moral necessity, ‘cosmopolitical.’ ”176 Cheah is also aware, however, that Kant’s vision was formulated prior to the rise of nationalism as a political movement in Europe. Therefore “it is more a philosophical republicanism and federalism designed to reform the absolutist dynastic state than a theory of opposing the modern theory of nationality.”177 Unlike Kant’s project, Herder’s discussion of perpetual peace does not prove a merely philosophical project. Herder’s vision is richly informed by colonial realities and discloses the enormous impact of nonEuropean culture and knowledge on his thinking through the Iroquois story. Moreover, Herder’s project of perpetual peace endeavors to reach beyond the geographical borders of Europe and incorporate the entire world. Its primary interest is not only a European peace, as Kant’s intended to be, but also peaceful relations between Europe and the nonEuropean world, between the colonizers and the colonized. The Iroquois story goes like this: As the result of constant intertribe conflicts caused by a strong tribe (the Delaware), a weak tribe (the Iroquois) suggests how to keep peace with the stronger tribes: one tribe should be the woman, around whom the warring tribes live as men. No one should harm and attack the woman. If one tribe does so, then all other tribes together should punish the lawbreaker. The woman should not get involved in war, however, but should endeavor to maintain peace. If the male tribes fight against each other, the female tribe should warn them that their women and children may be killed and in the end the whole tribe will be extinguished. The Delaware agrees to be the woman tribe. The Iroquois thus perform a ceremony and hang oil and medicine on the arm of the woman. Oil symbolizes that the woman of peace should tell good things to all the tribes. Medicine symbolizes that the woman of peace should persuade warring tribes to maintain peace

36 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tschina (as they call it).
Abstract: I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated [...] in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tschina (as they call it) [...]. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life. (45)

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Goethe is central to the theorization of world literature in the age of postmodern globalization as mentioned in this paper, and the linkage between Goethe and world literature is so robust in current criticism that it may well foreclose alternative perspectives on the writer, other worlds, and heterogeneous literatures.
Abstract: Arguably the most prominent national writer of German literature, Johann Wolfgang Goethe is central to the theorization of world literature in the age of postmodern globalization. The linkage between Goethe and world literature is so robust in current criticism that it may well foreclose alternative perspectives on the writer, other worlds, and heterogeneous literatures. This special issue therefore seeks to complicate and to rethink the ties between a multiplicity of literary and cultural worlds and the imposing figure of a writer who has been used to shape our understanding of these categories. Our contributors enrich the argument around these key terms for post-national literary and cultural studies without routinizing their conjunction. We aim to recapture the present moment of world literature and reorient existing assumptions toward multiple pasts, multiple worlds, multiple literatures, and multiple Goethes. It is remarkable that observations made in the provincial Weimar of the 1820s still inspire global theorizing in the present. This collection understands Goethe as a literary, intellectual, and historical persona that inflects a broad set of continuing debates. Indeed, the effort of connecting Goethe to world literature also belongs to the longue durée of the making of different Goethes from the early 1800s to date. In the ensuing pages, we will first offer an overview of Goethe’s relationship to world literature from the early nineteenth to the twentieth century. Then, we will briefly discuss the reception or the making of Goethe in the nineteenth century, the Nazi period, and the postwar era. These two parts supplement each other in that they allow us to see how the entanglements between Goethe and world literature are part of the reception and the making of Goethe in the last two centuries and, at the same time, how the making of Goethe has transformed the discourse of Goethe and world literature. The mutuality between these two areas multiplies worlds and literatures, only a small fraction of which we can address in this issue.

8 citations


Cited by
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Book Chapter
01 Jan 1996
TL;DR: In this article, Jacobi describes the production of space poetry in the form of a poetry collection, called Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated and unedited.
Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

7,238 citations

01 Oct 2006

1,866 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: For example, the authors notes that although the country acceded to the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol in 1999, incorporation of these obligations into national legislation and normative acts has been slow and to date Kazakhstan has failed to comply with its obligation to give full effect to the Covenant in the domestic legal order.
Abstract: 4. UNHCR notes with concern that although the country acceded to the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol in 1999, incorporation of the 1951 Convention obligations into national legislation and normative acts has been slow and to date Kazakhstan has failed to comply with its obligation to give full effect to the Covenant in the domestic legal order, inter alia providing for effective judicial and other remedies for violations of these rights

1,302 citations