Knowledge in Transit: Global Encounters and Transformation in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travelogue

November 6, 2019April 25, 2021 ~ Razak Khan

In spite of all, in spite of all—the time will come when man will reach out his hand to his brother, all over the world.

—Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfield (1868–1935) was a world-renowned pioneer in sexology.¹ Years of his modern scientific knowledge production on sexology were monumentalized with the establishment of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919. On May 10, 1933, the institute became an early target of violent Nazi attacks with its library ransacked and its books burned publicly.² During these turbulent times in Germany, Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour in the Unites States, where he was lauded as a celebrity and his knowledge was embraced enthusiastically by many in the American academy, press, and public. Unable to return home because of the Nazi seizure of power, he decided to embark on a world tour to acquire and share the “treasures of serological knowledge.”³ In transit, he acquired new ideas.

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Structuring Imperial Knowledge about India at the Great Exhibition of 1851

January 18, 2019March 15, 2021 ~ Miguel Ohnesorge

The Great Exhibition of 1851 excited curiosity in nineteenth-century contemporaries and continues to garner interest among scholars today. Attracting some six million visitors and comprising over 100,000 exhibits that filled 76,720 square meters of exhibition space, it entered media, memory, and historiography as an emblem of British industrial capabilities, free-trade ideology, and imperial globalization.[1] Yet it is seldom discussed in relation to the consequential contemporaneous transformation of modern sciences into a set of powerful, highly institutionalized social practices.[2]

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Notes on Colonial-Imperial Knowledge Formation

February 27, 2017February 20, 2019 ~ Editors

Historiographical notes blogged by a PhD student in New Zealand, S.D. Carpenter:

A number of scholars of British India have sought to understand the ways in which British power was exercised through constructing knowledge about Indian societies, including their histories and literatures, languages and geographies. At one end of the spectrum, intellectual followers of Edward Said argue that the British imposed their own knowledge and cultural forms on India. At the other end, some historians argue that the British had necessarily to work with what they found, relied on local informants, and had to tailor any ‘exotic’ ideas from Britain to different Indian contexts so as to make their rule acceptable.

Featured image: “Mission station, Rangihoua, 1830,” The Encylopedia of New Zealand, s.v. “Cultural go-betweens” by Mark Derby.

Update, August 31, 2017: The image is no longer included in the entry at https://teara.govt.nz/en/cultural-go-betweens, although other images are.