ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues the question whether, or in which ways, the explorations of early modern encounters through the paradigm of performativity undertaken in this volume can be made productive for our own historical context. How might concepts of ‘cultures at play’ empower alternative imaginations of cultural exchange also in and for the present? Over the last decade in particular, the contemporary world has seen a renewed focus on – if not obsession with – East–West relations, and specifically Islam. Whereas the modern imperialist order of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries constituted relatively stable structures also of intellectual dominance (if never quite as stable and homogenized as Edward Said's first, encompassing sketch in Orientalism suggested), the processes of decolonization and globalization radically challenged these hierarchies. More recently, September 11 and the subsequent wars seem to have catapulted the world – back? – into a configuration which, in some respects, almost uncannily resembles the premodern one. From a slightly polemical angle, one may wonder whether between terrorism and oil, early twenty-first-century East–West configurations double the ways in which, in Richmond Barbour's words, Europeans ‘saw themselves deeply threatened by the Ottoman Empire’ while craving ‘direct access to the riches of Persia’ in the early modern period. 1
