‘Renaissance’, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Baroque’ in the Orient: phenomena of autochthony and diffusion within N.I. Conrad's concept of world sociocultural development

Abstract

The article is devoted to a critical analysis of the concept of world sociocultural development proposed by the outstanding Soviet orientalist N.I. Conrad. The focus is on his innovative thesis about the existence of epochs of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Baroque style not only in Western European but also in Eastern (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian) cultural traditions. The research is based on the works of Conrad himself, as well as on the studies of E. Said, Sh.I. Nutsibidze, V.K. Chaloyan, and M.L. Reissner, which allow reconstructing the intellectual context of the formation of his ideas. The aim of the article is to identify the dialectics of autochthonous (original) and diffusion (borrowed) factors in the genesis of these epochs in the East within the framework of Conrad's paradigm of a unified historical and cultural process. The introduction reveals the problem of the binary opposition "West-East", inherited from Orientalist discourse, the overcoming of which was one of Conrad's tasks. The main part details his arguments regarding Eastern Renaissances (Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Chinese), the Enlightenment (in Japan during the Edo period), and the Baroque (in Chinese literature), and analyzes his understanding of the meaning of history as the progressive movement of mankind towards humanism. The conclusion assesses Conrad's contribution to the decolonization of historical knowledge and the relevance of his concept for the modern globalized world.