Book

Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The second and final volume of this co-authored study has just been published by J.B. Metzler. This second monograph explores the history of the concept of barbarism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Author: Co-authored by: Markus Winkler and Maria Boletsi (project leaders), in collaboration with Josephina Bierl, Guillaume Broillet, Jens Herlth, Laura Lonsdale, Christian Moser, Stefan Niklas, Julian Reidy, Melanie Rohner, and Neil Stewart.
Date: 31 July 2023

This is the second of a two-volume co-authored monograph that explores the history of the concept of barbarism from the eighteenth century to the present and highlights its foundational role in modern European and Western identity. The study constitutes an original comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of the ‘barbarian’s’ modern history and combines overviews with detailed analyses of representative works of literature, art, film, philosophy, and political and cultural theory. Volume 2 broaches figurations of barbarism and mobilizations of the barbarian across diverse contexts, media, and fields from the early twentieth century to the present: from avant-garde manifestoes to contemporary multilingual literature and adaptations of the Medea myth; from anticolonial to eco-socialist texts; from political philosophy and ethno-anthropology to contemporary pop culture; from Russian poetry to Latin American literature; from post-Cold War political rhetoric to mobilizations of the ‘barbarian' in post-truth politics and in debates on terrorism, securitization, and migration; from cinema to art biennials; and from (neo-)Marxists to the Alt-Right and eco-fascism.

Political instrumentalizations of the barbarian today, mainly for the demonization and exclusion of others, show no signs of waning—the rhetoric used in the Russian-Ukraine war is a sad case in point. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to historicize and interrogate the discourses in which the barbarian is still enmeshed, and to offer resources, insights, and tools for a better understanding of our present and for countering the violence involved in persisting uses of ‘barbarism.’

This study concludes a 10-year collaborative research project on the modern history of the ‘barbarian’ led by Maria Boletsi and Markus Winkler and conducted by scholars from universities in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and the UK. The project’s first part was funded by the NWO (Internationalization in the Humanities Grant; PI: M. Boletsi) and the SNF (Swiss Science Foundation grant; PI: M. Winkler). The first volume on the 18th and 19th centuries was published in 2018.

For more information, visit the publisher’s webpage: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-476-04611-6