Creating Notions of Transculturality: The Work of Fernando Ortiz and his Impact on Europe

Abstract

In the age of globalization, we cannot reflect about Comparative Literary Studies and Languages of Theory without contemplating how cross-liminality and transculturality might be lived in a mobile, medialized and rapidly changing world (Borsò & Brohm 2007; Langenohl, Poole & Weinberg 2015). Art and literature have always mirrored, transmitted and evaluated critically social, moral, and aesthetical values. How, then, can this task be fulfilled on a transnational literary and cultural level in a rapidly growing world community of letters, authors and readers? In this paper, I would like to promote the notion of transculturality, first proposed as a basic model of conviviality by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) in the 1940s and then, from the 1990s onwards, taken up and adapted, both terminologically and conceptually, to Third Millennium culture by the German philosopher and theorist of postmodernity Wolfgang Welsch (b. 1946). I will argue that at this moment in history, in the interest of peacemaking and sustainability and for the sake of humanity, transcultural skills and a shared understanding of transcultural coexistence, both theoretical and practical, are indispensable. From a methodological point of view that is related to the History of Knowledge, I will begin chronologically by introducing the work of Fernando Ortiz and then briefly tracing the reception of his most crucial cultural analysis in order to connect, in a second sub-chapter, its theoretical interests to Wolfgang Welsch’s publications. In a third step, I will briefly demonstrate the potential of the transcultural approach by showing paradigmatically its applicability to a colonial (Italian) novel, reread, as it were, through a transcultural lens, before coming to my conclusions.

This article has been published under the same title in a slightly modified version in Komparatistik. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 2017, Ed. Joachim Harst, Christian Moser and Linda Simonis. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2018, 67-81.