University of Heidelberg

Third Issue of the E-Journal "Transcultural Studies"

14. Jan. 2012

The new issue of the E-Journal "Transcultural Studies" is now available online. It is the second issue in 2011 and contains articles by Michael Falser, Vladimir Tikhonov, and Franziska Koch. It also features a themed section called "The Transcultural Travels of Trends".    

The first article of issue 2/2011, "Krishna and the Plaster Cast. Translating the Cambodian Temple of Angkor Wat in the French Colonial Period" by Michael Falser, analyses the ambivalent role that plaster casts of oriental monuments played in Western museums. They document imperial control, highlight the respect for other cultures, inform the foreign public, and provide scholars with hands-on objects to study and even to experiment. In his article "The Korean Images of Tibet and Sirhak Scholars: the Plurality of Truths? In Relation to the Issue of the Epistemological Shift in Eighteenth-Century Korea", Vladimir Tikhonov discusses the processes and agents through which speakers of Tibetan and Korean developed their knowledge of each other in the contact zone that was the Chinese capital in pre-modern times.

Franziska Koch’s article "China on Display for European Audiences? The Making of an Early Travelling Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art: China Avantgarde (Berlin/1993)" is a contribution to the series on "Multi-Centred Modernisms". Koch investigates the process, agents, and institutions that devised "modern Chinese art" as a globally recognized frame for a relatively consistent group of artists.

The issue also features the first of two themed sections with studies on the dynamics of "trends". The contributions to this section show that trends spread with a high formal similarity while being inserted into often disparate cultural, political, or scholarly environments that substantially changed their meaning. The trends investigated range from the ways in which anime films deal with their own transculturality (Sandra Annett) to the adoption of Maoist policies, slogans, and imagery among West German leftists (Sebastian Gehrig), to the ways in which young urbanites in Nanjing reenacted the romantic encounter depicted in a Taiwanese on-line novel in locations and through the consumption that mirrored that of the novel's protagonists (Lena Henningsen).

First launched in 2010, Transcultural Studies is published by the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" at Heidelberg University. This peer-reviewed, open-access journal is committed to promoting the knowledge and research of "transculturality" in all disciplines. The journal's editor is Rudolf G. Wagner, Director of the Cluster "Asia and Europe", and its managing editor is Andrea Hacker.
 
Transcultural Studies can be found at www.transculturalstudies.org