Participants
Joep Leerssen, University f Amsterdam
The Past is a Foreign Country; the Past is Ourselves: Auto-image and Exoticism
This paper forms part of the exploration of my hypothesis that we can usefully define nationalism as the political instrumentalization of an ethnic auto-image. This raises, among other things, the question as to possible specific modalities of auto-images (as opposed [a] to hetero-images and [b] to the generic qualities of images in general).
Following some preliminary observations on the complexities inherent in the notion of an auto-image, I want to suggest that auto-images tend to activate a particular diachronic emphasis. They are often implicitly historicist, invoking such notions as “roots”, “traditions”, “historical patterns”, and “ingrained habits” – as distinguished from the more anthropological discursive register of a historically invariant “character”. Or, to phrase this differently, if ethnotypes argue from perceived “national characters”, these characteristics tend, in hetero-images, to be registered as invariant typologies, and in auto-images as established historical manifestations. This would account for the historicism often deployed in nationalist discourse.
However, the auto-ethnotypical (and indeed any romantic-historicist) invocation of the past tends to vacillate between two contradictory registers: an exoticist fascination with couleur locale (the difference of the past) and an identitarian emphasis on recognition (the continuity with the past). These two aspects combine in what I call “auto-exoticism”, which, I argue, constitutes a specific modality of auto-images. My arguments range from Walter Scott and Irish cultural nationalism to Jacob Grimm and from France Preseren’s Krst pri Savici and the Sacre du Printemps.
