Dans le cadre de l’atelier de recherche de la Section SLAS, Mme Enit K. Steiner, UNIL (MER 1, section d’anglais) présentera sa conférence.
This talk discusses The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, Europe, during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803, written originally in Persian, and translated into English by Charles Stewart, professor of Arabic and Persian languages at the East India College at Haileybury, in 1810. Among the multitude of Abu Taleb’s commentaries, I focus on a group of interrelated remarks that create a specific brand of world-openness which imagines the local in India, Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere with an eye on the inception and dissemination of worldwide knowledge. Abu Taleb’s version of cosmopolitanism, while largely refusing isolationism, evinces a principle of selection, and therefore exclusion, based on the universal primacy of knowledge over linguistic, national or religious borders. Put differently, in his travels otherness is appraised, valorized or critiqued, on the basis of its contribution to this universal imperative that assumes the valence of a shared human constitution.
La conférence est publique et toute personne intéressée est la bienvenue