Course description
Is there an overarching point of view from which one can argue interculturally without falling back into one's own cultural perspective? And can marginalized people participate in intercultural communication, something Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak doubts? In such a case, do they have to resort to public forms of protest, as Judith Butler advocates? Or are cultures not closed systems, as Homi K.Bhabha assumes, but rather arise through constant communication and the differences that this opens up. Would this be an opportunity for intercultural communication? Or does colonialism prevent this through its post-colonial after-effects, as Benita Parry assumes?
For Jaspers, one must believe in the effectiveness of communication, which he describes as the all-encompassing, which at the same time implies a religious belief. For Habermas, intercultural and religious communication opens up the universality of reason, which is a product of the European Enlightenment. According to Rawls, one should leave this liberal reason behind, if one wants to reach a point of view that mediates opposites as an overwhelming consensus. In Rorty's sense, one must pragmatically speak different vocabularies, including culturally different ones. For Camus’s Mediterranean thought, this would be possible from a local perspective as it draws connections across the Mediterranean. For Lévinas, the stranger who one will never understand, including the cultural other, calls us to take responsibility for him. Or does the connection between racism and sexism, which was already pointed out by the former slave Sojourner Truth in the 19th century, still prevent responsibility and communication today? For Hannah Arendt, people are different, not the same, differences that can only be overcome through communication. Would that be an easy solution? Is intercultural communication actually not a problem? Or is it simply impossible? An unattainable ideal! Empirically speaking, sometimes yes, but not always!

Learning objectives
The seminar is intended to introduce these approaches and put them up for discussion. The extent to which culturally different answers are given will be exciting.

Teaching Methods
Discourse; statements; lecture of the students taking into account topics from the country of origin; discussions; reading and analyzing texts in the seminar together; possibly intercultural working groups occupied with special themes, presentations or panel discussions; possibly via internet comparisons of television image design in the students' countries of origin: intercultural communication with pictures, paintings.

Evaluation
Presentation, written exam, each 50%

Bibliography
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin Modern Classics 1976
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge 1994
Judith Butler, Letter to the Editor in Response to Terry Eagleton’s ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’. London Review of Books, 21 (13). https://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/terry-eagleton/in-the-gaudy-supermarket
Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Harvard University Press 2015
Albert Camus, The Rebel, Vintage Books, New York 1956
Jeroen Dewulf: Reading Sojourner Truth's Narrative (1850) as a Pioneering Literary Denouncement of Dutch Colonialism. In: Elisabeth Krimmer, Chunjie Zhang (Hrsg.): Gender and German colonialism: intimacies, accountabilities, intersections. Routledge, New York, London 2024 (Routledge research in gender and history; 53)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life for Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave, in Douglass. Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gats Jr., New York Library of America 1994
Terry Eagleton, (1999). In the Gaudy Supermarket. London Review of Books, 21 (10) 1999, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/terry-eagleton/in-the-gaudysupermarket
Jürgen Habermas, The philosophical discourse of modernity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and infinity, Books 1991 (or any other edition)
Colin MacCabe, Foreword. In: G. C. Spivak (Ed.), In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Routledge 1988
Stephen Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge 2003
Benita Parry, Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse. Oxford Literary Review 1987
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York 1993
Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, solidarity, Cambridge University Press 1989
Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson, L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 66–111). Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1988
Spivak, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge 1988
Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge 1990
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1999
Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2012
Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, e-artnow 2018 

Last updated: January 21, 2026