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.
