Читать книгу Mapping Ultima Thule - Agata Lubowicka - Страница 13

I Introduction

Let us not be discouraged if they fail once,

Let us not be discouraged if they fail again,

They will not lose!

They will win!

For themselves! And for us!

We fellow countrymen will defend them,

They will win²

In a New Year address delivered on 1st January 2016, the Prime Minister of Greenland [Greenlandic: Kalaallit Nunaat] availed himself of this passage from Greenland’s bard Augo Lynge (1899–1959) to appeal to his compatriots for social solidarity and sustained effort for the sake of the island’s economic independence despite all the odds and adversities. The political leaders of Greenland, which has enjoyed substantial autonomy within the Danish Commonwealth since 2009, realise that the complete independence they seek will stand a chance of success only if Greenland stops being dependent on funding from Denmark, which currently accounts for more than half of Greenland’s overall budgetary spending. Given that the narrative of Denmark as a land of universal felicity, social prosperity and an exceptionally humanitarian colonial past is widespread indeed, we should enquire why Greenlanders have actually been so consistent and vocal in their efforts not only to manifest their national distinctiveness but also to win complete independence from Denmark.

Although research into Danish colonialism has long been part and parcel of Danish academia, the fact that public debates and controversies erupt time and again over artists’ attempts to address this multifaceted issue suggests that colonialism is, in fact, partly or fully suppressed in the general public self-consciousness.³ This suppression readily translates into a growing incongruity between the perceptions of Denmark within and without its borders. While Danes are only too eager to embrace the idea of Denmark as a humanitarian nation and a leader in developmental aid for underprivileged countries, this flattering self-perception ←15 | 16→is increasingly being undermined by counter-narratives that proliferate in the world media as the migration crisis sweeps across Europe.⁴ Admittedly, the gist and validity of some interpretations of Denmark’s current political situation can be disputed, yet the cracks in Denmark’s image as a “small country in the North of Europe” that rushes to help the vulnerable and the threatened cannot be doubted.

Denmark’s colonisation of Greenland should be studied in a comprehensive socio-historical context, for the processes unfolding at the northernmost periphery of Europe cannot be adequately explored without considering the political, economic and ideological developments that determined the course of events at the centre of Northern Europe. Missionary Hans Egede would not have set off for Greenland in 1721 had the absolute monarchy in Denmark not acquired overseas territories in quite different parts of the world in the 17th century. Denmark’s imperial past, which has only recently been retrieved from the murkiness of the nation’s collective oblivion by Danish historians, comprises the colonisation of the West Indies (the present-day Virgin Islands), the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and Tranquebar (present-day Tharangambadi) as well as a robust Danish slave trade, which ranked seventh-biggest among all the colonial powers.⁵ With Greenland’s west coast colonised up to Upernavik in the north of the island, 18th-century Denmark was an empire that extended over the overseas territories, Norway, Schleswig, Holstein, Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

However, the Danish colonisation of Greenland hardly resembled the manner in which colonies were administered in hotter parts of the world. As the geographical conditions were challenging in the extreme and revenues depended heavily on the raw materials which could only be delivered by the indigenous population of the colonised areas, Danish colonial rule of Greenland did not involve a ruthless exploitation of its people and natural resources. Rather, it was founded on holding a monopoly on Greenland’s trade throughout the 19th century and on keeping Greenland’s traditional, hunting-based economy in place ←16 | 17→at all costs, while at the same time Denmark itself was gradually disposing of its other colonies, the monopoly on trade with Iceland and the Faroe Islands was being abolished, liberalism and the market economy were on the rise in Europe, and the world superpowers were asserting their imperial ascendancy in the non-western parts of the world. Moreover, the Royal Greenland Trading Company, which was charged with administering Greenland, came to prioritise self-maintenance rather than financial revenues, with potential profits redirected to improve the education and living standards of Greenlanders.⁶

A distinctive feature of the colonisation of West Greenland was that it was non-violent and did not meet a lot of resistance from Greenlanders themselves.⁷ Importantly, the Christianisation of Greenland proved effective largely because the new religion was preached in the language of the indigenous population. It was in the interest of the Trading Company to make Greenlanders stick to hunting and to keep them from adopting the European ways, yet changes precipitated by the colonial system could not be stopped. As a result, Greenland’s society faced considerable impoverishment in the 19th century, the population grew more and more dependent on European commodities, the sedentary mode of life spread, and social stratification increased significantly.⁸

The 19th century saw Denmark suffer two military losses. One of them was related to an enforced alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France and resulted in the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, which stripped Denmark of Norway, handing it over to Sweden. The other took place in 1864, when Denmark, overpowered by the Prussian-Austrian coalition, lost Schleswig and Holstein. In the long run, these defeats were not only to determine the current topography of the Kingdom of Denmark but also to permanently transform the self-perception of Danes, who came to think of themselves as citizens of “a small country threatened by the powerful German neighbour from the south.”⁹ The society of what had once been an ←17 | 18→empire (and which still possessed the West Indies and Atlantic territories) came to focus on domestic development, following the popular slogan that “what was lost on the outside must be won on the inside” [Danish: hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes].¹⁰ The catchphrase did not affect Denmark’s actions vis-à-vis Greenland, a fact that has gone unmentioned or ignored for decades in line with the narrative of Denmark’s history as a small and poor country. Towards the end of the 19th century, an interest in East and North Greenland, areas that had remained outside the Danish colonial system till then, emerged and grew in Denmark. This was closely linked to an increasing preoccupation on the part of the world’s powers, as well as of neighbouring Sweden and Norway (which worked hard to manifest its national separateness), with those territories, which had until then escaped Western colonisation. Denmark made its first important move in this regard when the so-called Danish Umiaq Expedition [Danish: Konebådsekspeditionen] was dispatched to East Greenland in 1883. Led by Danish naval officer Gustav Holm (1849–1940), the expedition resulted in the founding of a Danish trading station at Ammassalik on the east coast in 1894, which fell under the trade monopoly covering the entirety of West Greenland. Denmark’s slightly later interest in North Greenland was associated with the world-famous feats of American polar explorer Robert Edwin Peary (1856–1920), who chose the surroundings of present-day Thule as a base for his expeditions to the North Pole.¹¹ In 1909, Greenland-born Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen set up a mission station and, a year later, a Cape York Thule Trading Station [Danish: Kap York Handelsstation Thule], whose establishment should be construed as a strategic step of on the part of the Danish state, which had no intention of engaging in any explicit attempts at expanding its sovereignty over the entire territory of Greenland before selling the West Indies to the US in 1916. Only after the US government had officially declared that it would not object if Denmark extended its political and economic influence to include the whole of Greenland did other ←18 | 19→countries accept Denmark’s rule of Greenland, which was formally announced by Denmark’s Minister of Interior on 12th May 1921.¹²

Denmark’s actions towards validating its political sovereignty over the entirety of Greenland clashed with the aspirations of Norway, which – independent since 1905 – laid claim to Erik the Red’s Land, a part of its former colony on the east coast of the island. The dispute between Denmark and Norway, an unprecedented development in 20th-century intra-Scandinavian relationships, escalated throughout the 1920s, culminating in Norway’s occupation of East Greenland in the early 1930s. The contention was settled by the Permanent Court of Justice in the Hague, whose verdict of 5th April 1933 ultimately granted Denmark sovereignty over the entire area of Greenland. The territorial expansion of a country whose official motto espoused domestic development became a reality.

Danish policy vis-à-vis Greenland changed after a period of isolation caused by the outbreak of the Second World War and the American occupation of the island. Both Danish state officials and the Greenlandic elite demanded the abolition of the trade monopoly, opening the country to external influences and implementing a process of modernisation. As Denmark’s constitution was amended in 1953, the status of Greenland as a Danish colony was lifted and the island became an integral part of Denmark. However, the accelerated modernisation of Greenland, which involved the development of the infrastructure, industry, housing, health care, courts of law and education and was effected mainly through the efforts of a mass workforce from Denmark, did not bring about equality between the “South Danes” and the “North Danes” [Danish: norddanskere], as Greenlanders came to be referred to in official Danish discourse. Consequently, Greenlandic society grew more and more frustrated, the disgruntlement combining with the increasing population and better means of mass-communication to spark the rise of the first organisations that advocated the urgent need for any further development to follow guidelines and priorities set by the Greenlanders themselves.

Despite the efforts of Danish reporters and film directors,¹³ general public opinion in Denmark is still inclined to pass over some of the post-war decisions ←19 | 20→which Danish cabinets made without consulting or seeking consent from the representatives of Greenland. The building of an American air base in Thule, in the wake of which local residents were forcefully displaced 130 kilometres north of Qaanaaq, and the seizing of twenty-two Greenlandic children, who were separated from their families, brought to Denmark and then placed for many years in an orphanage in Nuuk as a social experiment in transplanting Danish customs and culture to Greenland, still count as highly symbolic to Greenlanders as evidence of the wrongs committed by the Danish authorities in less than good faith.

The debates and protests which Greenlanders started to organise in the 1960s and 1970s were dominated by the voices of young Greenlandic politicians educated at Danish universities, who began to champion a Faroe-like model of autonomy for Greenland. This time, Denmark’s administration did not protest, and a commission was set up to collaboratively develop a future Act of Autonomy. The Act came into effect on 1st May 1979, giving Greenland the status of an overseas territory as well as a local government.¹⁴ However, some contentious issues, such as rights to Greenland’s raw materials and independent foreign politics in matters directly pertaining Greenland, were not resolved. As a result of calls for the expansion of the existing autonomy, further negotiations were held until solutions were put in place for Greenland to remain part of the Danish Commonwealth as long as it deemed it necessary itself.

Commencing on 28th June 2009, this expanded autonomy opened a new chapter in the history of Greenland and propelled the processes of nation-building. The development was marked by establishing national institutions of culture (e.g. the National Theatre, founded in 2011), vigorous debates on the shape of Greenland’s future constitution and, importantly, enhanced Danish and Greenlandic media attention to Denmark’s prospective relations with its former colony and ways of interpreting their shared past. One answer to the opening question of this Introduction is the rejection by consecutive ←20 | 21→Danish cabinets of the proposal made by Greenland’s Naalakkersuisut (Local Government) that representatives of both countries should work together within the Reconciliation Commission. Despite formal proclamations of partnership, mutual respect and the equality of the two parties involved, Greenland is still denied the right to define its own history. Denmark’s doubts about Greenlanders’ capacity to make pronouncements on blame or blamelessness in the context of colonial ramifications, which have directly affected a lot of Greenland’s citizens, exemplifies the asymmetrical nature of the mutual relations between the countries, a problem which is continuing despite the passage of time. Given these complications, it should hardly be considered surprising that the recognition of Greenland’s complete independence by their former coloniser is the Greenlanders’ supreme goal.

***

1 Greenland and Greenlanders in Danish Discourse

In our age of Anthropocene, when no place on earth can any longer be called “virgin” and untouched by the human hand, historical narratives about both imaginary and real places which are secluded or practically inaccessible to travellers and, as such, resist the practices of direct representation, kindle more nostalgia than ever before. Although the Arctic and, in particular, North Greenland with its indigenous Inughuit population are certainly natural locations that anybody can reach with relative ease today, they are also cultural phenomena which have long been a predominantly discursive construction in the Western discourse. This is aptly grasped by Canadian author John Moss, who insists in his Enduring Dreams that “[t];he Arctic of outsiders is a landscape of the mind, shaped more in the imagination by reading than by experience and perception,”¹⁵ which highlights the prevalence of outsider views in representations of Arctic regions. The construct was fuelled by two entirely dissonant ways of perceiving the North.¹⁶ Namely, associations with ←21 | 22→its brightness produced representations of its virginal nature, purity and innocence, while associations with its darkness bred visions in which it was marked with peril, menace and devilishness.¹⁷ As noticed by Norwegian scholars Johan Schimanski, Cathrine Theodorsen and Henning Howlid Wærp, such representations of the North generated stereotypically ambivalent perceptions of the dwellers of northern areas as “the epitomes of purity, authenticity and naturalness,” on the one hand, and agents of “dark powers, dangerous and defying any control,” on the other.¹⁸ Alternately – or, for that matter, simultaneously – a paradise and a dystopia, the Far North has attracted and fascinated, but has also evoked fear and awe as the non-Western Other,¹⁹ serving ←22 | 23→as an antithesis to the familiar Western world. American anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan likens Western attitudes to the Arctic to Edward W. Said’s (1935–2003) definition of Orientalism and calls them “Eskimo Orientalism,”²⁰ while Danish researcher Kirsten Thisted refers to them as “Arctic Orientalism.”²¹ Similarly to the Orient that was constructed as the antithesis of the West, the Arctic was imagined and represented as the opposite of the Occident which in the Nordic context denoted the Scandinavian countries.²²

Within the European world-image, Greenland was first invested with meanings by old-Icelandic settlers. Eiríkr Þorvaldsson, called Erik the Red, called the newly found territory a “green land,” whereby he imposed meaning-producing expectations on the area and laid the imaginary foundation for its “discovery” by land-hungry Icelandic settlers, who arrived there time and again, starting in 985. They referred to themselves as Greenlanders – dwellers of that “green land.” This intellectual or metaphorical “reinvention”²³ of Greenland by Erik the Red survived and thrived even when the island became known across Europe. Greenland remained a “green land” while Iceland, despite its more southerly location, remained a “land of ice.” The Inuit that “Greenlanders” encountered ←23 | 24→came to be called skrælingar, which can be translated either as “weaklings” or as “people wearing animal skins.”²⁴

Over the following centuries, a variety of texts about the remote island and its inhabitants contributed to the production of a coherent discourse on Greenland. The development of such discourse was fostered by increasingly closer relationships, which intensified with the onset of colonisation initiated by the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede (1696–1758) and the continued Danish presence on the western coast that it brought about. As a result, several tropes appeared and became entrenched, reducing things Greenlandic to a kind of “tropological commodity”²⁵ which, repeatedly used by writers of travel reports, made the texts similar in vocabulary and imagery.²⁶ As convincingly shown by historian Hanne Thomsen, the dominant representations of Greenland and Greenlanders were linked to colonial policies of the Danish state,²⁷ which is consistent with Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) theory of the power-knowledge nexus, in which, as Foucault claims, “the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.”²⁸ In the 18th century, the describing and interpreting of Inuit culture became the sole monopoly of professional missionaries, whose narratives painted the (largely baptised) Greenlanders as living proof of the progress and success of Danish missionary and colonial pursuits, while Greenland was primarily depicted in scientific terms within the frameworks of geography ←24 | 25→and natural history, aligned with the classifying and cataloguing spirit of the Enlightenment.²⁹

In the 19th century, texts about Greenland authored by travellers, educated officials and scientists started to appear side by side with the accounts of missionaries. The prevalent representations of Greenlanders resulted chiefly from the locally anchored critique of absolute power in Denmark, a related criticism of the colonial governance of the Royal Greenland Trading Company in Greenland and the Zeitgeist-coloured European belief that traditional societies were doomed to perish in a clash with Western civilisation.³⁰ The staple images of Greenlanders included, on the one hand, “a noble savage” embodied in a hunter pursuing the traditional, independent lifestyle and, on the other, “partly civilised” colony dwellers in need of support from others as they were too indolent and spoilt by too much contact with the West.³¹ Greenland was further discursivised in systematic geographical depictions and in the writings by officials and travellers affiliated with the colonial apparatus, which devoted a lot ←25 | 26→of attention to the potential industrial uses of the Danish “dependent territory” [Danish: Biland], about which Danish public opinion still did not know much.³²

Eskimologist Erik Gant encapsulates the Danish “reinvention” of Greenland and Greenlanders in an apt commentary: “Strikingly, the scale is meagre indeed: virtuous Hyperboreans got themselves their own Hyperboreans, a harmless addendum to the monstrous history of European colonialism.”³³ Representations, as an ideological process resulting both from expectations and imaginings concerning the unknown Other and from real cultural encounters with that unknown Other, contributed thus to the construction and subordination of the northern peripheries by the economically and discursively stronger centre. Paradoxically enough, that centre itself remained (and to a degree still remains) a periphery in the perception of dominant Western countries.

Nonetheless, the 18th- and 19th-century representations of Greenland and Greenlanders of the island’s west coast had little of the one-sidedness that Said suggests in his Orientalism. As Hans Egede and later missionaries were actually steeped in Greenlandic culture and felt at home in the Arctic, their descriptions of the realities they experienced were highly heterogeneous³⁴: despite their negative traits, which were particularly underscored in early accounts, the Inuit were portrayed as independent and individual human beings, while their culture was depicted in its own right through scientific discourse.³⁵ Brought forth from the realm of myth and anonymity, Greenlanders were recognised by the writers as humans who, endowed with a certain morality, understanding and reason, could ←26 | 27→abandon the state of savagery and, through the mediation of Danes, become converted inhabitants of a European colony. Even those early accounts characteristically disrupt colonial univocality through regular recourse to indigenous knowledge (e.g. in animal descriptions), reliance on Greenlandic terminology and/or the incorporation of letters written by literate and baptised Greenlanders into European texts.³⁶ Later accounts put ever more stress on the contribution that Greenlandic catechists made to the work of European missions and ever more vocally expressed an understanding of and sympathy for the people of Greenland and its culture.³⁷ Some writers communicated authentic admiration for and amazement at Greenland’s nature and wondered at the abundance of its resources, which defied the sternness of its natural conditions.³⁸ The writers of 18th-century accounts largely headed to Greenland with strong intentions of settling down for lengthy stints, considered the island their home and devoted considerable periods of their lives, if not their entire lifetimes, to this engagement.³⁹ For this reason, although the images of Greenland and its inhabitants they produced were embroiled in the colonising project, they are hardly one-dimensional, diverging quite considerably from the first European representations of the American New World. The reports of missionaries imply that Greenland, rather than being “new” to the Danish settlers, was reinvented by them and integrated with their Enlightenment-inflected image of the world.

In the mid-19th century, attitudes to the yet-unexplored areas of Greenland changed: while in the first half of the 19th century they were shrouded in silence, in the second half attention was turned to the interior of Greenland ←27 | 28→and the regions situated north and east of the borders of the Danish colony.⁴⁰ This shift resulted from the increased interest of the world’s superpowers in the last uncharted territories of the globe. Such preoccupations spurred scientific expeditions into the polar regions and fuelled the rise of a new discipline, which came to be referred to as “polar studies” and garnered prominence in Denmark as a source of the country’s international prestige.⁴¹ As a matter of fact, polar explorers and their accounts were primarily responsible for the discursivisation of the previously unknown regions of the Arctic and their inhabitants, a process which also effected a shift in the perceptions of Greenlanders and Greenland in general.⁴² As Western expeditions took on indigenous techniques of travelling by land in winter and their supplies grew dependent on hunting, the nomadic people that called themselves Inughuit became indispensable helpers of European leaders on the road. The two hundred or so members of this nomadic people were greatly admired, especially for their coping capacity amidst the extremities of the Arctic climate, which led to their idealisation as heroic superhumans.⁴³ In keeping with the principles of 19th-century Darwinism, people who were ideally adapted to their environment came across as remarkable and easily lent themselves to idealisation.⁴⁴ In stark contrast to the representations of Greenlanders from the colonised areas of West Greenland as verging on extinction, it became common practice to represent the Inughuit, called polar Eskimos, as “noble savages” – natural, unspoilt, primaeval people who had a symbiotic connection to nature and needed no help from others; people who enjoyed true freedom and independence and, as the evolutionist world-perception had it, stood at the very origin of humankind, representing Europe’s remote past.⁴⁵ Moreover, ←28 | 29→successive accounts produced by polar explorers portrayed the Inughuit as if they had never met white people before; each encounter entailed a new beginning, with the Inughuit being discovered anew time and again.⁴⁶ Reports from North Greenland stressed that although they were purportedly uncivilised, those “free children of nature” were immensely intelligent and resolutely indefatigable in coping with the unfriendly environment (their home as it were), which was later fixed as a staple element of their image.⁴⁷ The emphasis that well-known polar explorers put in their narratives on the harshness of the natural conditions in North Greenland amplified the heroic stature awarded to its indigenous population as well as aggrandising the accomplishments of the Europeans whose pursuits were part of a broader national project aimed at augmenting the international glory and prestige of their homelands.⁴⁸ It was precisely in the last decades of the 19th century that Greenlanders acquired an indisputably favourable image which has survived into our times, a romanticised image of “nature people” [Danish: Naturfolk],⁴⁹ perpetuated as the Other for the outsiders who described them.⁵⁰ This effect was produced, to a large degree, ←29 | 30→by the enormous popularity of Knud Rasmussen and his vivid expedition accounts.⁵¹

2 Knud Rasmussen

The life and work of Knud Rasmussen, one of Denmark’s most celebrated national heroes, stretched over the last two decades of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century.⁵² Born on 7 July 1879 in Ilulissat [Danish: Jakobshavn], Greenland, to a Danish pastor and a half-Greenlander mother,⁵³ Rasmussen grew up in a relatively privileged family as for the modest life standards of the Danish colony. With Greenlanders as his playmates in childhood, he naturally mastered the difficult Greenlandic language and the technique of driving a dogsled, skills which he later emphasised on a number of occasions to prove the edge he boasted over other polar explorers in the study of Inuit culture.⁵⁴ As later researchers of Rasmussen’s life and work observe, his ethnic background and social status when ←30 | 31→growing up in Greenland were Danish, which is attested by the fact that at twelve years old he was sent to Denmark for schooling.⁵⁵ He completed his education in 1900, when he passed his final high-school exams with considerable difficulty and started travelling as a reporter for the Danish dailies Kristeligt Dagblad and Illustreret Tidende. First he went to Iceland, where he met Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen (1872–1907), a future leader of the Literary Expedition, and then to Sweden and Sápmi, a region on Sweden’s northernmost extremities. During his first journey, he worked with Mylius-Erichsen on a plan to reach the uncolonised area of North Greenland⁵⁶. The plan was accomplished in 1902, when the Literary Expedition was launched. In its aftermath, Rasmussen successfully debuted as a writer with The New People.

In 1910, Rasmussen collaborated with engineer Marius Ib Nyeboe (1867–1946) to establish the Cape York Thule trading station in North Star Bay. Colloquially dubbed just the “Thule trading station,” it provided the economic backup and served as a base camp for seven scientific trips known as the “Thule expeditions.”⁵⁷ The expeditions, which spanned from 1912 to 1933, brought Rasmussen international fame and recognition, while the travel narratives and collections of Inuit myths and legends he compiled in their wake proved a considerable readership success, shaping the way in which the Inuit and in particular Greenlanders have been perceived by Danes till this day.⁵⁸ The longest and most spectacular Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924), during which Rasmussen and his two Inughuit ←31 | 32→companions from Thule: Qaavigarsuaq Miteq (later Kristiansen, 1900–1978) and Arnarulunnguak (1896–1933) used dogsleds, is regarded as his crowning achievement.⁵⁹ They travelled about 18,000 kilometres from the north-western part of Hudson Bay, across the Northwest Passage and Alaska, up to Chukotka on the western side of the Bering Strait. During the journey, Rasmussen visited all the Inuit communities along the northern coast of America and in the interior, wrote down their myths and beliefs and collected ethnographic items (nearly 20,000 pieces) for the National Museum in Copenhagen. Authored both by Rasmussen and by the other travellers, the accounts of the journey still serve as the basis of international Inuit research.⁶⁰ The expedition elevated Rasmussen into a national hero and cemented his reputation as a researcher and a writer – an awardee of honorary doctorates from the University of Copenhagen in 1924 and the University of Edinburgh in 1927. When he died unexpectedly on 21st December 1933 of a stomach infection he contracted on his last expedition, he enjoyed the status of an indisputable national hero and an authority on Greenland.

For my argument in this book, Rasmussen’s biography is particularly relevant in that he was “a product of the contact zone”⁶¹ between the Danish and the Greenlandic, his management of the trading station and his travels across the Arctic involved mediating between Inuit and European cultures, and he adopted the dual role of a Greenlander and a European – a native and a coloniser. When I refer to Rasmussen as “a product of the contact zone,” I mean not only his experience of growing up in West Greenland but also his method of exploring the Arctic and associating with Inuit communities which resulted from his childhood experiences and personal predispositions. Anthropologist Erik Gant states that Rasmussen “was born into his research field”⁶² and took over the mode of moving across the polar zones from his predecessors.⁶³ Because he defined his ←32 | 33→goal as doing ethnographic research and locating the cradle of Inuit culture, the indigenous travelling techniques served him not only as a means to an end, but also as a prerequisite of cultural encounters that followed the rules of the communities he visited.⁶⁴ Pedersen calls the method used by Rasmussen during the Fifth Expedition “prerevolutionary” – in relation to Bronisław Malinowski’s (1884–1942) “anthropological revolution” – since Rasmussen’s travels at that time largely aimed to collect ethnographic exhibits and accumulate knowledge about the spiritual culture of the communities he visited. But, as Hastrup observes, Rasmussen’s early field research during the Literary Expedition was a form of participant observation that he practiced several years before Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands for the first time.⁶⁵ As Rasmussen had spent long years amidst the Inughuit, he was largely treated by them as one of their kind who, like them, lived as a nomad, driven by a desire to see new lands and new people.⁶⁶ His extraordinary literary talent helped him compose an exceptionally captivating story of a slowly perishing world of hunters and shamans, in which he also inscribed himself, contributing to his own image as a hero and a mediator between the two cultures.⁶⁷

Rasmussen’s biographer, Kurt L. Frederiksen, emphasises that the famous polar explorer “could live as Eskimos did, speak their language and become one of them although, at the same time, when he stayed in Denmark, he behaved like a European both in mindset and in culture.”⁶⁸ This complexity of Rasmussen’s personality is also mirrored in his activities and ventures in North Greenland. He did not commit himself only to romantic travelling from one Inughuit community to another, sharing the daily routine with the natives and salvaging their spiritual culture from oblivion. He also co-founded the Cape York Thule trading station, the first private company in Greenland ←33 | 34→since the establishment of the Royal Greenland Trading Department in 1776.⁶⁹ As such, Rasmussen was a pioneering capitalist entrepreneur in the North-Greenland peripheries, engaged in skin and fur trading, which not only financially supported his polar explorations but also gave him his livelihood.⁷⁰ For many years, the trading station funded Rasmussen’s Thule expeditions, multiplied the invested capital and provided salaries to Rasmussen himself and his employees.⁷¹ Scholars who study the links between Rasmussen’s pursuits and Danish colonialism argue that the establishment of his trading station made it possible to extend Denmark’s influence over the “no man’s land” that North Greenland had been⁷² and, after Rasmussen’s death, to incorporate it fully into the Danish Crown on 1st August 1937.⁷³

Particularly relevant to my goals in this book is Rasmussen’s “indeterminability” [Danish: ubestemmelighed] as recognised by the researchers of his life and work,⁷⁴ or, in terms of Homi Bhabha’s theories, his hybrid identity as simultaneously a Dane and a Greenlander, capable of negotiating between the two positions.⁷⁵ This duality is especially interesting because it proves what Mary ←34 | 35→Louise Pratt observes in her reading of travel writings composed in the age of European colonialism; namely, that the movement of people and ideas took place not only from the European centre to the colonial periphery, but also in the opposite direction.⁷⁶ I believe that this impossibility to define Rasmussen’s ambivalent role in colonialism is reflected in his literary texts, in particular in their representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit, which are equally ambivalent, complex and dynamic.

3 Research on Knud Rasmussen’s Literary Work

Postcolonial critique in Poland and Denmark has developed robustly over recent years but still remains a somewhat niche research framework. While in Denmark studies on Danish-Greenlandic relationships are already well entrenched and appreciated, the theme is still only occasionally addressed in Polish academia. One reason for this paucity is a lack of Polish translations, which makes such research practicable only for a narrow group of scholars with a good command of one of the three Scandinavian languages, who are as a rule affiliated with Scandinavian Studies Departments at the universities of Gdańsk, Poznań, Cracow and Warsaw.⁷⁷

←35 | 36→

Given that publications devoted to the life and work of polar explorer Knud Rasmussen still enjoy unvarying popularity in Denmark,⁷⁸ it can come as a surprise that, as Scandinavian studies scholars Henk van der Liet and Astrid Surmatz observe in their article on re-readings of Danish colonial literature: “One of the most renowned names within this literary tradition – which one may describe as ‘sledge romance’ – is of course Knud Rasmussen. He is a very productive and most interesting figure within the history of Danish literature, and his authorship has – as far as we are aware – never been the subject of profound literary analyses based on postcolonial theories.”⁷⁹

Though the observation was made in 2004, it is still valid as literary analyses of Rasmussen’s texts are few and far between amidst the wealth of publications about him. One of the notable examples is Thule i hjertet by Danish literary scholar Knud Wentzel (1990), in which the author offers a psychological reading ←36 | 37→of passages from Rasmussen’s travel accounts. Rasmussen’s life and views have also been repeatedly analysed by Kirsten Hastrup, an eminent anthropologist of the University of Copenhagen. In her articles “Menneskesyn: kultur, race og Knud Rasmussen” and “Den anden sandhed. Et essay om Knud Rasmussen,” Hastrup uses Rasmussen’s literary texts and journalism to offer a Said-inspired, anthropological critique of his Eurocentric views of Greenlanders, including the Inughuit. Hastrup has also authored a very comprehensive study entitled Vinterens hjerte. Knud Rasmussen og hans tid (2010), in which she provides rich biographical details and interpretations of Rasmussen’s diaries and fragments of his popular expedition reports. Still, because the methodology she uses is geared primarily to showing how the dominant ideologies and discourses of the age shaped Rasmussen as an individual, she devotes only scarce attention to rhetorical devices used in his writings and the techniques of presenting the Other.⁸⁰

The literary qualities of Rasmussen’s narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition were more directly addressed by Norwegian literary scholar Fredrik Chr. Brøgger of the University of Tromsø, who interpreted the original Danish edition of Fra Grønland til Stillehavet (the book appeared in English in a slightly revised version entitled Across Arctic America in 1927) in two papers discussing Rasmussen’s views of the nature of the American Arctic and the Inuit communities inhabiting the region, respectively.⁸¹ The texts look into the ways in which Rasmussen’s “hybrid identity” is reflected in the representations of Arctic flora and fauna or of its population. Brøgger’s approach is largely consistent with the idea of Rasmussen as a person and writer which was outlined by the most prominent Danish postcolonial scholar, Kirsten Thisted of the University of Copenhagen, in her article inspired by Homi Bhabha’s theories, entitled “Over deres egen races lig. Om Knud Rasmussens syn på kulturmødet og slægtskabet mellem grønlændere og danskere” (2006). Thisted comprehensively analyses Fra Grønland til Stillehavet and the abridged version of this account entitled Den store slæderejse (1932) in two articles published in Danish and English, respectively: “Knud Rasmussen” (2009) and “Voicing the Arctic: Knud Rasmussen and the Ambivalence of Cultural Translation” (2010). In both publications, the starting point for the textual analysis of representations of cultural encounters ←37 | 38→with the Canadian and American Inuit is provided by Rasmussen’s hybrid identity, his capacity to negotiate between different positions and his skill at navigating cultural allegiances associated with them. Although Thisted’s approach clearly differs from those adopted by other Danish scholars, she follows her predecessors in reading Rasmussen’s texts as a record of real events which happened during the expedition and is less interested in their literary quality.⁸² Rasmussen’s identity and cultural belonging are also addressed by Karen Langgård, a Danish literary scholar of the Ilisimatusarfik (University of Greenland), who comparatively analyses the Danish and Greenlandic texts of The New People to conclude, like Thisted and Brøgger, that Rasmussen’s identity was a hybrid one.⁸³

Although these studies by Danish scholars rely on postcolonial theory, they exemplify the biographical approach to the study of Rasmussen’s works, which continues the prevalent tendency registered by Van der Liet and Surmatz in 2004. Only in recent years have the accounts of polar expeditions started to invite more literary-minded readings. Important studies in this respect include Den svenske Ikaros. Berättelserna om Andrée (2003), in which Per Rydén of the University of Lund focuses on discursive representations of the balloon expeditions of Swedish polar explorer Salomon August Andrée (1854–1897), and the PhD project completed by Silje Solheim Karlsen at the University of Tromsø in 2011. Her dissertation, entitled Triumf, lojalitet, avstand: Fridtjof Nansens Fram-ekspedisjon [1893–1896] – og bøker i dens kjølvann (2011), examined accounts of Fridtjof Nansen’s expedition to the Arctic Sea.

As a result of an increased interest in the North Pole rivalry involving the countries that possess Arctic territories and in the role of Greenland in the context of global warming, polar themes are climbing their way out of the obscurity of the northern peripheries. It is likely only a matter of time before the humanities, including literary studies, develop a vigorous interest in the Arctic regions and their inhabitants.

←38 | 39→

So-far, Knud Rasmussen’s literary writings have only rarely and selectively been examined specifically as literature, within a framework informed by postcolonial theories. The literary quality typical of Rasmussen’s works and the role of this literariness in constructing representations of the world have also remained grievously underexamined. It is my ambition and goal to fill in this gap by exploring the literary aspects of Rasmussen’s texts in order to establish how and how far they construct and subordinate North Greenland and its inhabitants at a particular colonial moment, yet also give voice to the Other, not only as a participant in the cultural encounter but also as a part of the narrator’s “self.”⁸⁴

4 The Structure of the Book

My fundamental objective in this book is to analyse the literary construction of North Greenland and the Inughuit in Knud Rasmussen’s first two expedition accounts: The New People and My Travel Diary. This is supposed to help me explore the complicated network of relationships between these literary texts and the historical process of the Danish colonization of North Greenland. My analysis starts from an a priori assumption that travel writing is intrinsically ambivalent due to the inevitable positionality and contextuality of the literary subject. Consequently, in my argument I will follow two parallel paths. Specifically, I will focus on the relationships between colonial discourse and the representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit in Rasmussen’s narratives; and, at the same time, I will explore how these very narratives articulate an opposition to the dominant representations. It is only through constantly “being at the frontiers,” through “analyzing and reflecting upon limits” that we stand a chance of moving “beyond the outside-inside alternative,” which Michel Foucault’s “philosophical ethos” calls for.⁸⁵ The ultimate goal of my reflection on popular polar literature of the early 20th century is thus to conduct a “historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment into the possibility of going beyond them” in order to demonstrate that there indeed are common mechanisms and cultural practices which transcend the colonial moment I am analysing.⁸⁶

←39 | 40→

Before exploring Rasmussen’s texts, I briefly address Postcolonial Studies in a separate, likewise entitled chapter, in which I attend first of all to the links between travel narratives and colonial ideologies. Further, I discuss the tools provided by postcolonial theory that promote postcolonial re-readings of the Western ways of “mapping” the Other. One such tool is the colonial discourse analysis developed by Edward W. Said, with its key notions of “representation” and “colonial tropes.” The Saidian discourse analysis is augmented by Homi Bhabha’s nuancing framework of the split subject, which produces possibilities for resistance to oppressive representation practices in every colonial text. Bhabha’s theories and the idea of ambivalence inherent in the representations of the Other provide the basis for my analytical approach later in this book.

Chapter 2 discusses ways of constructing North Greenland and the Inughuit people by means of the entrenched colonial tropes of idealisation, essentialisation, binary oppositions and exoticisation in Knud Rasmussen’s pioneering account entitled The New People (Nye Mennesker, 1905). The tropes are confronted with the narrative sites of resistance to the dominant representations, which are a testimony to the discursive heteroglossia inherent in Rasmussen’s narrative. Chapter 3 shows the ambivalence of the representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit people in Rasmussen’s My Travel Diary (Min Rejsedagbog, 1915). My argument proceeds in two main stages, each of which focuses on how the representations of North Greenland’s nature and the Inughuit companions of the Danes, Uvdloriaq and Inukitsoq, are linked to constructing the masculinity of heroic polar explorers. The first part examines the practices of constructing the masculinity of polar explorers on the basis of hierarchised and gender-marked binaries, such as safety vs. danger, home vs. away, passivity vs. activity and nature vs. culture. The second part investigates the construction of the masculinity of polar explorers in relation to North Greenland’s nature, which is feminised as an effect of practices labelled as “scientific and aesthetic masculinity.” My reading of Rasmussen’s work proves, however, that it also contains meanings that oppose the colonial masculinist ideology, which results in an ambivalent construction of North Greenland and the Inughuit.

In my concluding Chapter 4, I point out discursive shifts in the image of the North-Greenlandic telluric and cultural Other which took place between 1905 and 1915, i.e. when Rasmussen morphed from a rank-and-file member of an Arctic expedition into one of the major actors, who in the long run contributed to Denmark’s sovereignty over the entire territory of Greenland.

←40 | 41→

5 Terminology

5.1 Cultural and telluric Other

The distinction between the “cultural” and “telluric” Other as related to North Greenland builds on the notions of “cultural Otherness” and “telluric Otherness” proposed by British literary scholar Lesley Wylie. In her PhD dissertation on colonial and postcolonial tropes in the Spanish American genre of novela de la selva, Wylie uses the two terms to examine descriptions of the tropical regions of South America and their inhabitants. Following her division, I understand the cultural Other as a general term that designates the Inughuit community and their culture as discursivised in the narratives I examine, whereas the telluric Other as referring to the totality of North Greenland with its animate and inanimate nature. A parallel differentiation between the “cultural” Other and the “biological” Other in conjunction with the representations of the Arctic and its inhabitants in Rasmussen’s Fra Grønland til Stillehavet is also employed by Norwegian literary scholar Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, who draws on the views and insights of another Norwegian literature researcher, Johan Schimanski.⁸⁷

5.2 Inuit, Inughuit, Eskimos and Greenlanders

To refer to the population inhabiting Greenland, I use traditional Greenlandic names which are based on the identification of a community with the region in which it lives.⁸⁸ When I write about the inhabitants of Greenland in general, I employ the commonly accepted term “Greenlanders,” which is a direct translation of the Greenlandic word kalaallit.⁸⁹ I mainly apply it to describe the inhabitants of the part of the island which Denmark started to colonise and gradually subordinate in 1721, that is, the area between Upernavik in the north and Cape Farewell in the south. I refer to the community inhabiting the northern part of the island and usually called “Polar Eskimos” by Europeans⁹⁰ as “Inughuit” ←41 | 42→(sing. “Inughuaq”).⁹¹ It is their representations in Rasmussen’s travel writings that I explore in this book. The term “Inuit” (sing. “Inuk”), meaning “people,” is used here in relation to all the communities of the Thule culture, which were formerly labelled “Eskimos,” a name that came to be regarded as pejorative in the wake of the anti-imperialist movements of the 1970s.⁹² Therefore, in my book the word “Eskimo(s)” appears only in quotations from the texts I analyse.

5.3 North Greenland

By representations of North Greenland, I mean representations of the vast area that stretches north of the line between Upernavik on the west coast of Greenland and the Land of Erik the Red at the island’s east coast, a territory whose charting was completed only in the 1930s. This is a huge expanse which was variously defined throughout history⁹³ and is highly differentiated itself.⁹⁴ Approaching North Greenland as a whole, I do not seek to homogenise these differences; rather, I identify a discursive field that embodies a Foucauldian heterotopia, combining a variety of often incongruent discourses.

5.4 The spelling of local names and words in the Greenlandic language

In my historical-literary and theoretical argument, I spell Greenlandic toponyms following modern Greenlandic spelling rules. In analytical passages, I rely on the ←42 | 43→spelling that Knud Rasmussen used in the first editions of the writings I address. For example, when referring to a North-Greenland island where the participants of the Literary Expedition camped, I write “Agpat,” which is consistent with the spelling of the name in the first edition of Nye Mennesker of 1905. In quotations from the English editions of reports by polar explorers from Scandinavia, I retain the Greenlandic spelling employed in the original editions, and when providing bracketed Danish and Norwegian vocabulary and expressions, I use their original spelling.

5.5 The primary literature

My Polish book entitled W sercu Ultima Thule. Reprezentacje Grenlandii Północnej w relacjach z ekspedycji Knuda Rasmussena, which grew out of the PhD project I completed in 2014 and was published in 2017, was based on my study of Knud Rasmussen’s books which appeared in Danish. In this version, I use quotations from English editions of texts by Rasmussen and also by Fridtjof Nansen and Eivind Astrup. Since Rasmussen’s Min Rejsedagbog (My Travel Diary) has not been translated into English yet, quotations from this book and from the chapter “Efter Vildren” in Nye Mennesker were translated from Danish by Professor Jørgen Veisland, based on the first editions of the two works.

←43 | 44→←44 | 45→

2 The passage was translated from Danish by Jørgen Veisland. See http://naalakkersuisut.gl/~/media/Nanoq/Files/Attached%20Files/Naalakkersuisut/DK/Taler/Nytårstale%202016%20DK_endelig.pdf (Accessed 7 Feb. 2016).

3 See Sylwia Izabela Schab, “Zmowa (prze)milczenia,” Czas Kultury, Vol. 169, No 4 (2012), pp. 46–51.

4 This found what was probably its most vivid expression in a satirical cartoon which appeared in The Guardian on 26th January 2016. The cartoon showed Denmark’s PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen wearing a Nazi uniform, with a caption that parodied the slogan of an internationally known commercial for Carlsberg, a Danish beer brand: “Probably the stupidest political party in the world.” See http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2016/jan/26/steve-bell-on-denmark-seizing-refugees-assets-cartoon (Accessed 7 Feb. 2016).

5 Søren Flott and Thomas Laursen, Danske tropekolonier: I kølvandet på Galathea (København: Jylland-Postens Forlag, 2007), p. 71.

6 Henning Bro, Kilder til en dansk kolonihistorie (København: Det Grønlandske Selskab, 1993), p. 99.

7 Bro, Kilder til en dansk kolonihistorie, p. 60.

8 Bro, Kilder til en dansk kolonihistorie, pp. 94–95.

9 This can be blamed on Danish historians, who since the 1970s have almost exclusively described the past of Denmark as a state confined within its current borders and have only rarely addressed its former territories. Consequently, studies of Danish history have not covered the numerous, vast areas that had formed part of the Empire over centuries. The past has been comprehended as leading directly to the modern Danish nation-state with the frontiers as known today. Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen, Det danske imperium – storhed og fald (København: Aschehoug, 2004), p. 8.

10 The entire sentence, reading “For hvert et Tab igjen Erstatning findes, hvad udad tabes, det maa indad vindes,” was coined by author Hans Peter Holst (1811–1893). Whenever there are no official English translations of the Nordic-language terminology I use, I add the original word in brackets the way it was spelled when a given text was published. For example, nouns were as a rule capitalised in Danish when Knud Rasmussen’s texts on which I focus in this book appeared. All quotations from Danish and Norwegian literary texts as yet unpublished in English were translated by Jørgen Veisland.

11 Klaus Petersen, “Handselsstationen i Thule,” Tidsskriftet Grønland, Vol. 44, No 6 (1996), p. 224.

12 Petersen, “Handselsstationen i Thule,” p. 228; Gert Müntzberg and Peter Simonsen, “Knud Rasmussen og handelsstationen Thule 1910–37,” Historie/Jyske Samlinger, No. 2 (1996), pp. 220–221. Knud Michelesen presents a different viewpoint, claiming that Denmark’s lack of interest in expanding its sovereignty over North Greenland was due solely to the fact that the government regarded such an expansion as financially unviable. Knud Michelsen, Vejen til Thule: Knud Rasmussen belyst gennem breve og andre kilder 1902–1910 (København: Forlaget Falcon, 2014), pp. 60–61.

13 Such attempts included, for example, Poul Brink’s (1953–2002) journalistic investigation into the crash of a US B-52 bomber in the vicinity of the US Thule air-base. Brink’s findings were published in Thule-sagen – løgnens univers (1997, The Thule Affair: A Universe of Lies), a book adapted to the screen by Christina Rosendahl as The Idealist (Idealisten, 2015). Another notable effort was a book-length reportage entitled I den bedste mening (1998, With the Best Intentions) by Danish journalist Tine Bryld (1939–2011), who revealed the experiences of the twenty-two Greenlandic children that were first sent to Denmark and then consigned to an orphanage in Nuuk. The book was used by Louise Friedberg for her film The Experiment (Eksperimentet, 2010).

14 Tomasz Brańka, “Geopolityczny status Królestwa Danii – mit państwa unitarnego,” Przegląd Politologiczny No. 4 (2012), p. 22.

15 Moss, Enduring Dreams, p. 28.

16 This is consistent with Hanna-Mari Ikonen and Samu Pehkonen’s position that humans tend to perceive the world in a dualistic manner. Hanna-Mari Ikonen, Samu Pehkonen, “Explorers in the Arctic: Doing Feminine Nature in a Masculine Way,” in: Encountering the North: Cultural Geography, International Relations and Northern Landscape, eds. Frank Möller and Samu Pehkonen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 129. On the construction of the North in the discourse of the South, see James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 157–158; Hieronim Chojnacki, Polska “poezja Północy”: Maria, Irydion, Lilla Weneda (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 1998), pp. 9–30; Peter Stadius, “The Gothic Tradition and the North: The Image of Gustavus Adolphus and His Men in 17th-Century Spain,” in: Northbound: Travels, Images, Encounters 1700–1830, ed. Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Århus: Århus University Press, 2007), p. 64; Jesper Hede, “Northern Time Travel in the Eighteenth Century: European Invention of Nordic Literature,” in: Northbound: Travels, Images, Encounters 1700–1830, ed. Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Århus: Århus University Press, 2007), p. 29; Hendriette Kliemann-Geisinger, “Mapping the North – Spatial Dimensions and Geographical Concepts in Northern Europe,” in: Northbound: Travels, Images, Encounters 1700–1830, ed. Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Århus: Århus University Press, 2007), p. 83.

17 Johan Schimanski et al., “Arktis som litterært projekt,” in: Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis, eds. Johan Schimanski et al. (Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk Forlag, 2011), p. 9.

18 Schimanski et al., “Arktis som litterært projekt,” p. 9.

19 Explored by thinkers as different as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), the notion of the Other is understood here comprehensively as whatever is “unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined.” Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 21. When using the notions of the Other and the Same throughout this book, I rely primarily on Lévinas’s metaphysics as outlined in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), which was first published in the English translation of Alphonso Lingis by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers in 1969. For interpretations of the Other in the context of travel literature, see Syed Manzurul Islam, The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 78–115.

20 Ann Fienup-Riordan, Freeze Frame – Alaska Eskimos in the Movies (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. XI.

21 Kirsten Thisted, “The Power to Represent: Intertextuality and Discourse in Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” in: Narrating the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices, eds. Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin (Canton: Science History Publications, 2002), p. 313; Kirsten Thisted, “Danske grønlandsfiktioner: Om billedet af Grønland i dansk litteratur,” Kosmorama, Vol. 49, No. 232 (2003), p. 63.

22 Drawing on Said’s concept of Orientalism, Danish literary scholar Hans Hauge has coined the notion of “Northientalism” or “Northism” [Danish: nordientalisme/nordisme], which he defines as the othering by Scandinavians of the peoples of Asian origin (i.e. Finns, Sami and Greenlanders) in order to produce an opposite against which to define their own identity. Hans Hauge, Post-Danmark. Politik og æstetik hinsides det nationale (København: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2003), p. 146. For a discussion of the Other as opposed to the peoples living in Nordic countries, see Kirsten Hastrup, “Nordboerne og de andre,” in: Den nordiske verden, ed. Kirsten Hastrup (København: Gyldendal, 1992), pp. 205–231.

23 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 111.

24 Saga o Grenlandczykach i Saga o Eryku Rudym, ed. Anna Waśko (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2006), p. 33; Hans Christian Gulløv, “Kulturmøder i Nord,” in: Grønlands forhistorie, eds. Hans Christian Gulløv et al. (København: Gyldendal, 2004), p. 211. The term “Greenlanders” was adopted in the 18th century by missionary Hans Egede to refer to the Inuit he encountered, which implies that he might not have realised they were a people of Eskimo origin and not the descendants of the Old Norse settlers. Mads Fægteborg, “Hans Egede,” in: Grønland – en refleksiv udfordring. Mission, kolonisation og udforskning, ed. Ole Høiris (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 2009), p. 53.

25 Lesley Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the Novela de la Selva (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 96.

26 A similar mechanism is also at work in Western literature on the Sami, as noticed by Maria Sibińska. Maria Sibińska, Marginalitet og myte i moderne nordnorsk lyrikk (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2002), pp. 15–16, footnote 14.

27 Hanne Thomsen, “Ægte grønlændere og nye grønlændere – om forskellige opfattelser af grønlandskhed,” Den Jyske Historiker, No. 81 (1998), pp. 28–30.

28 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 29.

29 The best known of such depictions include accounts authored by Hans Egede: Omstændelig og Udførlig Relation ang. den grønlandske Missions Begyndelse og Fortsættelse (1738) and Det gamle Grønlands nye Perlustration eller Naturel-Historie, og Beskrivelse over det gamle Grønlands Situation, Luft, Temperament og Beskaffenhed (1741), and the writings of his son Poul (1708–1789): Continuation af Relationerne betreffende den grønlandske Missions Tilstand og Beskaffenhed forfattet i Form af en Journal fra anno 1734 til 1740 (1741) and Efterretninger om Grønland, uddragne af en Journal holden fra 1721 til 1788. These descriptions concerned the known areas of the Danish colony, while the territories situated north of the remotest colony (i.e. Uummannaq in 1763, and after the founding of Upernavik, the Tasiusaq trading station) still formed a terra incognita, and despite an interest in them which these texts express, the language in which the areas are referred to is conjectural and speculative. Poul Egede, “Efterretninger om Grønland uddragne af en journal holden fra 1721 til 1788,” ed. Mads Lidegaard, Det Grønlandske Selskabs Skrifter, No. 29 (1988), p. 64; Henrik Christopher Glahn, “Glahns anmærkninger. 1700-tallets grønlændere – et nærbillede,” ed. Mads Lidegaard, Det Grønlandske Selskabs Skrifter, No. 30 (1991), pp. 19, 35.

30 Such critiques were voiced primarily by the educated Danish elite, who knew about the conditions of life in Greenland. Criticism of colonial rule, instances of which appeared as early as in the diaries of Henrik Christopher Glahn (1738–1804) and accounts of other missionaries in the first half of the 19th century, such as Johan Christian Wilhelm Funch (1802–1867), was thus in fact no novelty at that time.

31 Thomsen, “Ægte grønlændere og nye grønlændere,” p. 30.

32 Johan Christian Wilhelm Funch, Syv Aar i Nordgrønland (Viborg 1840), Preface (n.p.).

33 Erik Gant, “Den excentriske eskimo,” Tidsskriftet Grønland, Vol. 44, No. 5 (1996), p. 177.

34 Besides the accounts by Hans and Poul Egede, notable examples include first and foremost Historie von Grönland (1765) by David Crantz, Anmærkninger over de tre første bøger af Hr. David Crantzes Historie om Grønland (1771) by Henrik Christopher Glahn and Tredie Continuation af Relationerne betreffende den grønlandske Missions Tilstand og Beskaffenhed forfattet i Form af en Journal fra Anno 1739 til 1743 (1744) by Niels Rasch Egede.

35 In the introduction to his Efterretninger om Grønland, Poul Egede describes Greenlanders as “fellow humans” of Europeans. Egede, “Efterretninger om Grønland,” p. 12. Danish literary scholar Karen Langgård argues that in the texts by Egede and his sons (as well as by Moravian missionaries), Greenlanders exhibit a considerable subjective agency in cultural encounters with missionaries. Karen Langgård, “John Ross and Fr. Blackley: European Discourses about Inuit and Danes in Greenland 1700–1850,” in: Northbound: Travels, Images, Encounters 1700–1830, ed. Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Århus: Århus University Press, 2007), p. 309.

36 “Efterretninger om Grønland” by Poul Egede and Historie von Grönland by David Crantz also contain such letters. Dated in 1756, a letter included in Egede’s account, attributed to Poul the Greenlander and re-printed by Fridtjof Nansen in his book on Greenlanders entitled Eskimoliv (English edition: Eskimo Life, 1893), is now believed to have been written by Poul Egede himself, following the popular European convention of producing imitations of travel literature in which European authors used non-European narrators to criticise the developments in their own countries. Inge Kleivan, “Poul Egede,” in: Grønland – en refleksiv udfordring. Mission, kolonisation og udforskning, ed. Ole Høiris (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 2009) pp. 104, 122.

37 In this respect, Hans and Poul Egede’s first accounts are far more ambivalent about, for example, eating foods made by Greenlanders, their standards of hygiene and the smells in their homes.

38 For example, Glahn compares the pleasure of looking at icebergs to that of contemplating the monuments of antiquity in Italy. Glahn, “Glahns anmærkninger,” p. 37.

39 Fægteborg, “Hans Egede,” p. 42; Kleivan, “Poul Egede,” pp. 105–107.

40 Hinrich Johannes Rink, Om Grønlands Indland og Muligheden af at berejse Samme (København: G.E.C. Gad 1875), pp. 1–2, 9.

41 Kennet Pedersen, “Is-interferenser: København som verdenshovedstad for den etnografiske eskimoforskning i perioden 1900–1940,” in: Videnskabernes København, eds. Thomas Söderquist et al. (Roskilde: Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 1998), pp. 156–158.

42 In her master’s dissertation En anden verden – forestillinger om Inuit. Repræsentation og selvrepræsentation af Inuit i nyere tid (2006) Lill Rastad Bjørst presents the mechanisms of discourse formation regarding Greenland and Greenlanders in 19th and 20th century. Lill Rastad Bjørst, En anden verden – forestillinger om Inuit. Repræsentation og selvrepræsentation af Inuit i nyere tid (Odense: Syddansk Universitet, 2005), pp. 14–28.

43 Kirsten Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte: Knud Rasmussen og hans tid (København: Gad, 2010), p. 44.

44 Fienup-Riordan, Freeze Frame, p. 15.

45 In the light of the universal concept of man, this also meant that Greenlanders could become civilised over the course of time as Europeans had before them. Ole Høiris, Antropologien i Danmark. Museal etnografi og etnologi 1860–1960 (København: Nationalmuseets Forlag, 1986), p. 167.

46 Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 52.

47 Bjørst, En anden verden, pp. 24–28. This is to be found, for example, in accounts by the American Robert Peary and in Blandt nordpolens naboer (1895, English edition: With Peary near the Pole, 1898) by Norwegian Eivind Astrup, a member of Peary’s expeditions in 1891–1892 and in 1893, a book which first ushered the Inughuit onto the Nordic literary scene.

48 Chauncey C. Loomis, “The Arctic Sublime,” in: Nature and the Victorian Imagination, eds. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: California Press, 1977), p. 95.

49 This English rendering of the term is offered by Frederik Brøgger, who remarks at the same time that the notion “primitive races” was widely used in the English-speaking world. The term Naturfolk was commonly applied in Danish anthropology at the turn of the 19th century. This concept triggered further divisions of the peoples, which hinged on their stage of civilisational development. Within this framework, the Inuit were described as representing “higher hunting culture” [Danish: højere jægerfolk]. Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, “The Culture of Nature: The View of the Arctic Environment in Knud Rasmussen’s Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition,” in: Arctic Discourses, eds. Anka Ryall et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), p. 85.

50 Kirsten Thisted argues that this romanticised image is also consolidated by Greenlanders, whom it helps obtain distinction and respect as well as lobby successfully for advantageous decisions in several international contexts. Thisted, “Danske grønlandsfiktioner,” p. 33. For a discussion of the stereotypical and romantic image of Greenlanders in Denmark, see also Niels Højlund, Krise uden alternativ. En analyse af dansk Grønlandsdebat (København: Gyldendal, 1972); Susanne Dybbroe, “Danske horisonter – og grønlandske: Advokater, eksperter, og den ‘indfødte’ befolkning efter hjemmestyret,” in: Dansk mental geografi. Danskernes syn på verden – og på sig selv, ed. Ole Høiris (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 1989), pp. 149–161.

51 Thisted, “Danske grønlandsfiktioner,” p. 33; Ole Høiris, “Dansk antropologis vilde og eksotiske folk,” in: Dansk mental geografi. Danskernes syn på verden – og på sig selv, ed. Ole Høiris (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 1989), p. 61; Kirsten Hastrup, Menneskesyn: kultur, race og Knud Rasmussen, 2000, p. 3, at www.hum.au.dk/ckulturf/pages/publications/kh/mkr.pdf (Accessed 2 Mar. 2012).

52 As Olof Lagercrantz observes in his reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, all boys wanted to be discoverers in those days, and natural scientists were hailed as heroes of their times. Olof Lagercrantz, Rejse med mørkets hjerte: en bog om Joseph Conrads roman, trans. Karsten Sand Iversen (København: Nansensgade Antikvariat, 1989), p. 19. For young Knud Rasmussen, Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen was such a hero. Kirsten Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen,” in: Grønland – en refleksiv udfordring. Mission, kolonisation og udforskning, ed. Ole Høiris (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 2009), p. 247.

53 Rasmussen’s maternal grandfather was a Greenland-born Norwegian and his grandmother was a Greenlander.

54 In Across Arctic America (Danish: Fra Grønland til Stillehavet, 1925), the dual origin of Knud Rasmussen is cited as an salient factor behind the success of his Arctic expeditions: “From the very nature of things, I was endowed with attributes for Polar work which outlanders have to acquire through painful experience. My playmates were native Greenlanders; from the earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so that even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me.” Knud Rasmussen, Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (New York & London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), p. vi.

55 Karen Langgård, “Hvad skrev Knud Rasmussen når han skrev på grønlandsk?,” Grønlandsk kultur- og samfundsforskning (2008), p. 132; Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen,” p. 247.

56 According to Rasmussen’s great-nephew Knud Michelsen, the plan to cross Melville Bay and to reach North Greenland originated with Knud Rasmussen’s father, Christian, who already in 1900 discussed with the representatives of the Church of Denmark the issue of establishing a mission post in the territory. Knud Michelsen, Den unge Knud Rasmussen belyst gennem breve og andre kilder 1893–1902 (København: Forlaget Falcon, 2011), p. 126.

57 I discuss the founding of a trading station at Thule and the colonisation of North Greenland in detail in my article “Duńska ekspansja na terytorium Grenlandii Północnej jako następstwo zjawiska ‘imperializmu małych państw’ – postkolonialne odczytanie ‘Wstępu’ do Grenlandii nad Oceanem Arktycznym autorstwa polarnika Knuda Rasmussena,” in: Nowocześni i postępowi? Cywilizacyjny wymiar Skandynawii z polskiej perspektywy. Studia Północnoeuropejskie, eds. Kazimierz Musiał and Maja Chacińska, Vol. 3 (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2013), pp. 81–97.

58 Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen,” p. 243.

59 Anthropologist Kennet Pedersen calls this expedition a “culmination of Danish polar enterprise.” Pedersen, “Is-interferenser,” p. 149.

60 Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 15.

61 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 90.

62 Erik Gant, Eskimotid. Analyser af filmiske fremstillinger af eskimoer med udgangspunkt i postkolonialistisk teori og med særlig vægtning af danske grønlandsfilm (Århus: Århus Universitet, 2004), p. 128.

63 In this regard, his predecessors included, for example, marine officers Wilhelm August Graah (1793–1863) and Gustav Holm, who separately travelled to the east coast of Greenland by Greenlandic umiaqs, and the American Robert Edwin Peary, who used dogsleds in his attempts to reach the North Pole.

64 Pedersen, “Is-interferenser,” pp. 152–153; Gant, Eskimotid, p. 142.

65 Pedersen, “Is-interferenser,” pp. 149–156; Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 243.

66 Perceptions of Rasmussen in North Greenland are discussed, for example, by Danish Eskimo researcher Erik Holtved (1899–1981) in a story of his stay in the Cape York region between 1935 and 1937. Holtved recalls that he hardly heard the local people speak of Rasmussen and explains this by concluding that as the Inuit never mention the names of their dead, they must remember Rasmussen as one of their own folk. Erik Holtved, Polareskimoer (København: Carl Allers Bogforlag, 1942), p. 18.

67 Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, pp. 608, 653. Kirsten Thisted, “Over deres egen races lig. Om Knud Rasmussens syn på kulturmødet og slægtskabet mellem grønlændere og danskere,” Tidsskriftet Antropologi, Vol. 50, No. 6 (2006), p. 139.

68 Kurt L. Frederiksen, Kongen af Thule (København: Borgen, 2009), p. 54.

69 Müntzberg and Simonsen, “Knud Rasmussen og handelsstationen Thule 1910–37,” p. 209.

70 According to Michelsen, Rasmussen had no education beyond secondary school and his journalism did not ensure an adequate livelihood. To provide for himself and his growing family, he needed a regular, dependable income, which was supposed to be secured by the operations of the trading station. Knud Michelsen, “Handelsstationen ved verdens ende,” Kristeligt Dagblad, 16.08.2010, p. 5.

71 Petersen, “Handselsstationen i Thule,” p. 229.

72 Officially, the Danish government did not interfere with the trading station. Yet both its establishment by subjects of the Danish monarch and its exploration activities bolstered the cabinet’s position in negotiations in case Denmark were to seek to assert its sovereignty over the whole of Greenland. The strategy was successful, considering that in 1920 several powerful states accepted Denmark’s dominion over Greenland and the Permanent Court of Justice in the Hague later endorsed Denmark’s claim to the area.

73 Until Rasmussen’s death in 1933, North Greenland remained his private colony even though, legally speaking, the Thule region belonged to Denmark. The status of Rasmussen as a great national hero and the fact that the trading station funded his expeditions stopped the Danish state from taking Thule over as early as in 1920. Petersen, “Handselsstationen i Thule,” p. 228.

74 Gant, Eskimotid, p. 159.

75 Thisted, “Over deres egen races lig,” pp. 143-144. Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen,” p. 242. Rasmussen’s hybrid identity and his capability to negotiate his various identities are also highlighted by Kirsten Hastrup, “Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933). The Anthropologist as Explorer, Hunter and Narrator,” FOLK. Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society, Vol. 46/47 (2005), p. 162; Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, pp. 652–653; Niels Barfoed, Manden bag helten: Knud Rasmussen på nært hold (København: Gyldendal, 2011), p. 404; Brøgger, “The Culture of Nature,” p. 90; Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, “Mellom tradisjon og modernitet: Knud Rasmussens femte Thule-ekspedisjon (1921–1924) og møtet med urfolkene i Arktis,” in: Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis, eds. Johan Schimanski et al. (Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk Forlag, 2011), pp. 192–198. Thisted observes additionally that Rasmussen himself discursivised his own dual background as a privileged position which enabled him both to look at the Arctic as an outsider, the way common Europeans did, and to see it as an insider, through Inuit eyes. Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen,” p. 242.

76 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 90.

77 The first book-length study of Scandinavian literature within the postcolonial framework in Poland was the PhD project developed by Maria Sibińska, a literary scholar of the University of Gdansk’s Department of Scandinavian Studies. Her dissertation, entitled Marginalitet og myte i moderne nordnorsk lyrikk (2002), explored myth and marginality in North-Norwegian poetry. My own interpretation of the two best-known Polish young adult novels about Greenland and its inhabitants, authored by Alina and Czesław Centkiewicz, was the axis of my article “Anaruk og Odarpi – ædle vilde børn i et eskimoisk frilandsmuseum. En behandling af eskimoeksotisme i polsk litteratur,” Aktuel forskning. Litteratur, kultur og medier (2014), Syddansk Universitet: http://www.sdu.dk/Om_SDU/Institutter_centre/Ikv/Videnskabelige+tidsskrifter/AktuelForskning/2014AF (15 Feb. 2015).

78 Rasmussen’s first biography was published in Denmark in 1934, barely one year after his death. See Peter Freuchen, Knud Rasmussen som jeg husker ham: fortalt for ungdommen (København: Gyldendal, 1934). This book and following biographies interpreted Rasmussen’s life and work through the lens of his status as a popular national hero. Kaj Birket-Smith, Knud Rasmussens Saga (København: C. Erichsen, 1936); Bogen om Knud skrevet af hans venner, eds. Johannes V. Jensen et al. (København: Westermanns Forlag, 1943); Niels Fenger, Knud Rasmussen – Grønlands Aladdin (København: Wøldike, 1979). In the 1990s, a new wave of Rasmussen’s biographies appeared, revealing previously unknown details of both his life and the historical conjuncture in which he lived: Knud Wentzel, Thule i hjertet: nærbillede af Knud Rasmussen (København: Munksgaard, 1990); Frederiksen, Kongen af Thule; Ebbe Kløvedal Reich, Den fremmede fortryller (København: Vindrose, 1995); Knud Michelsen, Jeg vil ikke dø for et skuldertræk. Knud Rasmussen skæbneår (København: Rosinante, 1999). Recently, an interest in the events of Rasmussen’s life has surged again, triggering a new series of publications: Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte; Michelsen, Den unge Knud Rasmussen; Barfoed, Manden bag helten; Michelsen, Vejen til Thule; Knud Michelsen, En værkende tand. Striden om 2. Thuleekspedition (København: Rosinante, 2017); Knud Michelsen, I videnskabens navn: Knud Rasmussen belyst gennem breve og andre kilder 1910–1921 (København: Forlaget Falcon, 2018).

79 Henk Van der Liet and Astrid Surmatz, “Postkolonialisme og nordisk litteratur – en orientering,” TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek, No 2 (2004), p. 13.

80 For example, Kirsten Hastrup observes that the author is always present in the texts both as a hunter and as a scientist. Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 703. Anthropologist Kennet Pedersen also approaches The New People in a biographical fashion in his article “At finde og opfinde sin niche: Omkring Nye Mennesker,” Grønlandsk kultur- og samfundsforskning (2004/2005), pp. 79–92.

81 Brøgger, “The Culture of Nature;” Brøgger, “Mellom tradisjon og modernitet.”

82 It should be noted that Thisted brilliantly demonstrates how contemporary Danish authors still draw on Rasmussen’s representations of North Greenland in her essay “The Power to Represent: Intertextuality and Discourse in ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow’”(2002).

83 Langgård, “Hvad skrev Knud Rasmussen når han skrev på grønlandsk?,” pp. 131–145. Issues related to Knud Rasmussen’s identity were also explored by Claus Oreskov, “Den skære hvide nysne. Et forsvar for Knud Rasmussen,” Tidsskriftet Grønland, Vol. 8 (2001), pp. 293–300; and by Michelsen, “Jeg vil ikke dø for et skuldertræk.”

84 My first insights into the thematic concerns of this book lay at the core of my 2013 article: Agata Lubowicka, “The Presence of the Other in Knud Rasmussen’s The New People,” Forum for World Literature Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2013a, pp. 257–268.

85 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in: The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 45.

86 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” p. 50.

87 Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, pp. 49, 136; Brøgger, “The Culture of Nature,” p. 98.

88 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8.

89 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8.

90 Rasmussen never uses the term “Inughuit” in his numerous texts; instead, he consistently abides by “Polar Eskimos”, his own coinage. Thisted argues that when writing in Danish, Rasmussen employed the name “Eskimos”, yet when writing in Greenlandic, he opted for “kalaallit” or “inuit.” Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen”, p. 240, footnote 4.

91 “Inughuit” appears as a direct translation of the term “Polar Eskimos” in the latest edition of the Danish-Greenlandic dictionary compiled by Robert Petersen, Professor of Eskimo Studies at the University of Copenhagen (Ordbogen dansk-grønlandsk, Nuuk 2003), and in phonetically recorded myths and tales of the inhabitants of North Greenland. Erik Holtved, “The Polar Eskimos: Language and Folklore,” Meddelelser om Grønland, Vol. 152, No. 2 (1951). Anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup in her 2015 book based on fieldwork in North-West Greenland also states that today’s population of the former Thule region “call themselves inughuit at present.” Kirsten Hastrup, Thule – på tidens rand (København: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2015), p. 8.

92 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8. At the Inuit Circumpolar Conference held in Barrow, Alaska, in 1977, the term “Inuit” was adopted as the common designation for all peoples which had been called “Eskimos” over the previous centuries. Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8.

93 This is shown by Kirsten Hastrup in her monumental study Thule – på tidens rand.

94 This is consistent with Barbara Johnson’s insight into a “repression of differences within entities” which are perceived as homogeneous wholes while in fact they differ from themselves. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x–xi.