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Eurocentrism in European History and Memory

Marjet Brolsma Robin de Bruin Matthijs Lok Stefan Berger Alex Drace-Francis Ton Hoenselaars Jan Ifversen Michael Kemper Joep Leerssen Jolanda Rodriguez Perez

9789463725521
248 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe’s terms and through European eyes. This may not be unreasonable for Europeans, but there are unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that a scientific modernity has diffused out from Europe to benefit the rest of the world, through colonies and development aid. It involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. In Eurocentrism in European History and Memory, well-known scholars explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past from different disciplines — history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy — as well as from different geographical perspectives. The book investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.
Author Bio
Marjet Brolsma is Assistant Professor in European Cultural History at the European Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. She has been a research assistant at the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN), and published on intellectuals and the Great War, national identity discourses and ideas of Europe. Robin de Bruin is Assistant Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, with a current research focus on the relationship between decolonization and European integration. He lectures on Modern European History, including European integration. Matthijs Lok is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Amsterdam