ABSTRACT
Cultural Plots: From Admiration and Imitation to the Fear of Invasion
Representation has a central role to play for the continuation of cultural exchange processes. Whereas brief cultural contact may work without representation, the deeper and longer-lasting periods of cultural relationship require representation. In my view, representation has several functions: first of all, with its help, an issue such as the continuous relationship between what is perceived to be one’s own culture and alien influences becomes a matter of public debate, it becomes visible to more than the immediate witnesses and the mediators of cultural exchange by being discussed in texts and depicted in images. Secondly, representation is a means of controlling, of ordering, and channelling ways of responding to cultural exchange and cultural transformation. And finally, representation enables those who shape opinions to define more clearly what they perceive to be their own indigenous culture by setting it off against foreign influences. In other words, representations of cultural exchange facilitate self-definition and are an important strategy for the establishment of cultural hegemony. In this context, a discussion of cultural change is necessary: the shaping force of representation can be proved if the forms this representation has taken continue to exist even after its initial moment of creation. This is true of eighteenth-century representations of cultural exchange between England and France which continue to use modes of representation developed in the seventeenth century.1
