Abstract
This chapter advocates a critical confrontation between postcolonial studies and imagology, two areas of academic inquiry that have so far largely ignored each other. Providing an overview of the development of imagology, including its applications to children’s literature, it explains why Edward Said is the elephant in the imagologist’s room. It then proceeds to argue how postcolonial and imagological perspectives can mutually enrich each other. Postcolonialism may gain a greater degree of empirical specificity by allowing itself to be contaminated, as it were, by imagology, while imagology may gain a greater level of theoretical sophistication if it would stop politely ignoring postcolonialism, a step that could help imagologists move beyond methodological nationalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Last consulted: August 28, 2018.
- 2.
“In the post-positivist climate of epistemological relativism, there has arisen something one might call the hermeneutics of moralism: one way in which a given piece of scholarship may acquire scholarly value is on ethical grounds. The thrust of historical and literary study has increasingly become to register and bring to light the obfuscated or occult ideological flaws or blind-spots of one’s subject-matter, to expose and denounce logocentrism, cultural chauvinism or masculine exclusiveness” (Leerssen 1998, 165).
- 3.
“De Nederlander bestaat niet,” speech of princess Maxima on the occasion of the presentation of the report of the Scientific Council for Government Policy Identificatie met Nederland (Identification with the Netherlands) on September 24, 2007. See https://www.koninklijkhuis.nl/documenten/toespraken/2007/09/24/toespraak-van-prinses-maxima-24-september-2007; last consulted on August 28, 2018.
- 4.
“The scope of this volume is primarily European. […] The editors can only point out this fact, and cannot undo it: we see it as our task to identify and expose stereotypes, rather than to contradict or ‘correct’ them. It is hoped that the wealth of recent critical sources and postcolonial studies will guide modern scholarship in transcending the ethnocentrism and eurocentrism which is the subject-matter of this volume and of imagology in general” (Beller/Leerssen 2007, xiv).
- 5.
See, for instance, Dyserinck (1988), who coined these terms.
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Wesseling, E. (2019). Imagology and Children’s Literature: Beyond Intellectual Parochialism. In: Dettmar, U., Roeder, C., Tomkowiak, I. (eds) Schnittstellen der Kinder- und Jugendmedienforschung. Studien zu Kinder- und Jugendliteratur und -medien, vol 1. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04850-9_11
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