Catholic Orientalism

Catholic Orientalism
Author: Ângela Barreto Xavier
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199452675

This book explores the process of knowledge production in and about South Asia during the late medieval and early modern periods. Disseminated through the global networks of the early modern Portuguese empire (16th-18th centuries), this process was inextricably connected to the expansion of Catholicism and was geared to perpetuate political ambitions and cultural imaginary of the early modern Catholic protagonists and their communities in South Asia and beyond. As an integral part of the Portuguese imperial 'information order' established in Asia, Catholic Orientalism was responsible for creating an epistemic tool box, in which several significant concepts were first tested and developed: such as "caste," "Brahmanism," "paganism," "the torrid zone," "oriental despotism," and many others. However, from the mid-18th century, the British empire changed the map of knowledge about South Asia and in the process Catholic Orientalism was both assimilated and discarded as tainted by unreasonable Catholicism and too close to equally unreasonable "native" Indian point of view. Through a series of case studies, this book chronicles the rise and the decline of the Catholic knowledge of South Asia which had not been, at any point, only and simply "Portuguese." Multiple sources, polyglot archives and actors moving ever more swiftly through space and time, with divided loyalties, often disregarding "national" divisions and wearing many different hats are at the heart of the narrative which starts at the turn of the 16th century and ends by the end of the 18th.

Orientalism, Aramaic, and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation

Orientalism, Aramaic, and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation
Author: Robert J. Wilkinson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 900416250X

Focusing upon the extraordinary circumstances of the production of the editio princeps of the Syriac New Testament in 1555 and establishing a reliable history of that edition, this book offers a new account of the origin of Syriac studies in Europe and a fresh evaluation of Catholic Orientalism in the sixteenth century. The reception of Syriac into the West is shown to have been characterised, under the influence of Egidio da Viterbo and Postel, by a Christian Kabbalistic world-view which also determined the reception of other Oriental languages. The companion volume The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible exhibits the continuing influence of Christian Kabbalism on later editions.

Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History

Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History
Author: James R. Hodkinson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571135758

Focuses on the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The concept and study of orientalism in Western culture gained a changed understanding from Edward Said's now iconic 1978 book Orientalism. However, recent debate has moved beyond Said's definition of the phenomenon, highlighting the multiple forms of orientalism within the "West," the manifold presence of the "East" in the Western world, indeed the epistemological fragility of the ideas of "Occident" and "Orient" as such. This volume focuses on the deployment -- here the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses -- of "orientalism" in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Its interdisciplinary approach combines distinguished contributions by Indian scholars, who approach the topic of orientalism through the prism of German studies as practiced in Asia, with representative chapters by senior German, Austrian, and English-speaking scholars working at the intersection of German and oriental studies. Contributors: Anil Bhatti, Michael Dusche, Johannes Feichtinger, Johann Heiss, James Hodkinson, Kerstin Jobst, Jon Keune, Todd Kontje, Margit Köves, Sarah Lemmen, Shaswati Mazumdar, Jyoti Sabarwal, Ulrike Stamm, John Walker. James Hodkinson is Associate Professor in German Studies at Warwick University. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in EuropeanCultures and Languages at Birkbeck College, University of London. Shaswati Mazumdar is Professor in German at the University of Delhi. Johannes Feichtinger is a Researcher at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew
Author: Jeffrey S. Librett
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2014-11-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823262936

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late eighteenth to the mid–twentieth centuries, Librett argues that Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled. Librett suggests, further, that the Western assertion of “material” power, in terms of which Orientalism is often read, is overdetermined by a “spiritual” weakness: an anxiety about the absence of absolute foundations and values that coincides with Western modernity itself. The modern West, he shows, posits an Oriental origin as a fetish to fill the absent place of lacking foundations. This fetish is appropriated as Western through a quasi-secularized application of Christian typology. Further, the Western appropriation of the “good” Orient always leaves behind the remainder of the “bad,” inassimilable Orient. The book traces variations on this theme through historicist and idealist texts of the nineteenth century and then shows how high modernists like Buber, Kafka, Mann, and Freud place this historicist narrative in question. The book concludes with the outlines of a cultural historiography that would distance itself from the metaphysics of historicism, confronting instead its underlying anxieties.

Religion and Empire in Portuguese India

Religion and Empire in Portuguese India
Author: Ângela Barreto Xavier
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438489137

How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India, Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges—in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.

Disputed Mission

Disputed Mission
Author: Ines G. Županov
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2001
Genre: Acculturation
ISBN: 9780195658828

Disputed Missions casts a fresh glance at the social and cultural laboratories that were Jesuit missions in pre-colonial South India. By focussing on a dispute between two missionaries in Madurai in the beginning of the seventeenth century, this book chronicles the first efforts at explaining the origin, structure and nature of local religious practices.

Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness

Texts, Traditions, and Sacredness
Author: Annie Rachel Royson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2023-01-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000824721

This book presents a critical reading of Kristapurāṇa, the first South Asian retelling of the Bible. In 1579, Thomas Stephens (1549–1619), a young Jesuit priest, arrived in Goa with the aim of preaching Christianity to the local subjects of the Portuguese colony. Kristapurāṇa (1616), a sweeping narrative with 10,962 verses, is his epic poetic retelling of the Christian Bible in the Marathi language. This fascinating text, which first appeared in Roman script, is also one of the earliest printed works in the subcontinent. Kristapurāṇa translated the entire biblical narrative into Marathi a century before Bible translation into South Asian languages began in earnest in Protestant missions. This book contributes to an understanding of translation as it was practiced in South Asia through its study of genre, landscapes, and cultural translation in Kristapurāṇa, while also retelling a history of sacred texts and biblical narratives in the region. It examines this understudied masterpiece of Christian writing from Goa in the early era of Catholic missions and examines themes such as the complexities of the colonial machinery, religious encounters, textual traditions, and multilingualism, providing insight into Portuguese Goa of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first of its kind, the book makes significant interventions into the current discourse on cultural translation and brings to the fore a hitherto understudied text. It will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation studies, comparative literature, religious studies, biblical studies, English literature, cultural studies, literary history, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies.

A Companion to Comparative Theology

A Companion to Comparative Theology
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 655
Release: 2022-08-22
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9004388397

This Companion to Comparative Theology offers a survey of historical developments, contemporary approaches and future directions in a field of theology that has experienced rapid growth and expansion in the past decades.

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia
Author: Nadine Amsler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-10-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0429671504

Over recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in early modern Catholic missions in Asia as laboratories of cultural contact. This book builds on recent ground-breaking research on early modern Catholic missions, which has shown that missionaries in Asia cooperated with and accommodated the needs of local agents rather than being uncompromising promoters of post-Tridentine doctrine and devotion. Bringing together some of the most renowned and innovative researchers from Anglophone countries and continental Europe, this volume investigates how missionaries’ entanglements with local societies across Asia contributed to processes of localization within the early modern Catholic church. The focus of the volume is on missionaries’ adaptation to four ideal-typical social settings that played an eminent role in early modern Asian missions: (1) the symbolically loaded princely court; (2) the city as a space of especially dense communication; (3) the countryside, where missionary presence was only rarely permanent; (4) and the household – a central arena of conversion in early modern Asian societies. Shining a fresh light onto the history of early modern Catholic missions and the early modern Eurasian cultural exchange, this will be an important book for any scholar of religious history, history of cultural contact/global history and early modern history in Asia. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Jesuits and Globalization

The Jesuits and Globalization
Author: Thomas F. Banchoff
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016
Genre: Globalization
ISBN: 1626162867

The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, is the most successful and enduring global missionary enterprise in history. Founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Jesuit order has preached the Gospel, managed a vast educational network, and shaped the Catholic Church, society, and politics in all corners of the earth. Rather than offering a global history of the Jesuits or a linear narrative of globalization, Thomas Banchoff and Jos Casanova have assembled a multidisciplinary group of leading experts to explore what we can learn from the historical and contemporary experience of the Society of Jesus--what do the Jesuits tell us about globalization and what can globalization tell us about the Jesuits? Contributors include comparative theologian Francis X. Clooney, SJ, historian John W. O'Malley, SJ, Brazilian theologian Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, and ethicist David Hollenbach, SJ. They focus on three critical themes--global mission, education, and justice--to examine the historical legacies and contemporary challenges. Their insights contribute to a more critical and reflexive understanding of both the Jesuits' history and of our contemporary human global condition.