Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- 1. Introduction
- Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin and Matthijs Lok
- Part I. History & Historiography
- 2. The Past and Present of European Historiography
- Between Marginalization and Functionalization?
- 3. The Fragmented Continent
- The Invention of European Pluralism in History Writing from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century
- 4. Eurocentrism in Research on Mass Violence
- 5. Muslim EuRossocentrism
- Ismail Gasprinskii’s ‘Russian Islam’ (1881)
- Part II. Literature & Art
- 6. David’s Member, or Eurocentrism and Its Paintings in the Late Twentieth Century
- 7. Women Walking, Women Dancing
- Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism
- 8. Shakespeare, England, Europe and Eurocentrism
- 9. Being Eurocentric within Europe
- Nineteenth-century English and Dutch Literary Historiography and Oriental Spain
- 10. The Elephant on the Doorstep?
- East European Perspectives on Eurocentrism
- Part III. EU & Memory
- 11. A Guided Tour into the Question of Europe
- 12. Constructing the European Cultural Space
- A Matter of Eurocentrism?
- Index
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1 Maître Leherb, Europe (1981/1982). Foyer of the former Vienna University of Economics (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien), Vienna
- Figure 2 Left: The Gradiva relief, plaster cast; original in the Chiaramonti Museum, Vatican. Right: Dancing Maenad; original in Palazzo Massimo Museum, Rome
- Figure 3 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of St John the Baptist (1486-1490). Santa Maria Novella, Florence
- Figure 4 Panel no. 6 of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas
- Figure 5 Publicity photograph for La bayadère (Nationale Opera en Ballet, 2006)
- Figure 6 Panel from Hergé, Coke en stock
- Figure 7 Mata Hari performing (1905). Note the Orientalist trappings: headdress, veils, statue of Shiva Natajara
- Figure 8 Debra Paget in Das indische Grabmal (1959)
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