Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience (Austrian and Habsburg Studies, 17)

Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces. Johannes Feichtinger is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and teaches history at the University of Vienna. His publications include Wissenschaft zwischen den Kulturen. Österreichische Hochschullehrer in der Emigration 1933-1945 (2001) and Wissenschaft als reflexives Projekt. Von Bolzano über Freud zu Kelsen: Österreichische Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1848-1938 (2010). Gary B. Cohen is Professor of Modern Central European history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he has also served as director of the Center for Austrian Studies (2001-2010) and chair of the Department of History (2010-2013). He is the author of The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (1981; second rev. ed., 2006) and Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 (1996). Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces.-- Understanding multiculturalism and the Habsburg Central European experience / Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen -- Heterogeneities and homogeneities : on similarities and diversities / Anil Bhatti -- Mestizaje and hybrid culture : towards a transnational cultural memory of Europe and the development of cultural theories in Latin America / Michael Rössner -- The limits of nationalist activism in imperial Austria : creating frontiers in daily life / Pieter M. Judson -- Multiculturalism, Polish style : glimpses from the interwar period / Patrice M. Dabrowski -- Multiculturalism against the state : lessons from Istria / Pamela Ballinger -- Migration in Austria, an overview, 1920s to 2000s / Michael John -- The slice of desire : intercultural practices versus national loyalties in the peripheral multiethnic society of Central Europe at the beginning of twentieth century / Oto Luthar -- On neighbors and strangers : the literary motif of Central Europe as lieu de memoire / Andrei Corbea Hoisie -- Culture as a space of communication / Moritz Csíky. edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen. Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-231) and index.