How do we envision our relation to the rest of the world if responsibility and response are predetermined by images of planet earth? While our understanding of translocal relations heavily draws upon the globe to grasp various works of globalization, this article shows how eclipsing the planetary gaze is an essential step toward imagining a radically democratic society of world citizens. It maps out an epistemic kinship of global visions in which feeling and thinking are actually out of joint with what is happening in global modernity. Under scrutiny are wide-ranging topics: early-modern cartography, eighteenth-century ethnography, and contemporary concerns with climate change.

Introduction to the Digital Humanities subsection.

I would like to thank Deniz Göktürk for approaching me with the idea of highlighting several digital humanities projects in this volume of TRANSIT. My collaboration with her and the journal’s various editorial boards over the years has always been rewarding. I am also grateful to Jon Cho-Polizzi whose editorial mediation has had a transformative impact on these essays.

Following the exhibition of Ashanti culture in Vienna's Prater in the summer of 1896, the impressionist writer Peter Altenberg published Ashantee (1897) in remembrance and reenactment of that space in translation. Translation here connotes two parallel processes: trans-lation and trans-lation. The former articulates the hybridization of subjects in transit whereas the latter addresses their relocation and displacement as speakers of different tongues and representatives of distinct cultures commingle at the same time. This article traces the constant and confusing traffic of Europeans and non-Europeans in and out of turn-of-the-century "Völkerschauen" as well as Altenberg's linguistic illustration of those border crossings in Ashantee. By focusing on the relation among languages in this intercultural text primarily written in German, but also containing English, French, and "Odschi," -- the Ashanti language -- I shall investigate how Ashantee puts language to work as a marker of difference and a vehicle for equivalence. Altenberg's poetic interplay of languages explores the negotiation of self with the exotic and gendered Other by way of translation with the result of both sustaining and undermining traditional binaries of colonial power. Against the backdrop of Jacques Derrida's work on translation as a function of love, I will argue that the text reinscribes the colonial and non-colonial, Western and non-Western "contact zone" hidden behind Altenberg's love affair across the color line. My linguistic approach to the textual form is to complement and supplement a postcolonial, ethical reading of Ashantee.