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II Postcolonial Studies

This book is part of a robust field of postcolonial studies defined concisely by British literary critic Nicholas Harrison as “an attention to the history of colonialism/imperialism and its aftermath.”⁹⁵ According to Polish literary scholar Michał Paweł Markowski postcolonial studies as a discipline focuses “on exploring representations of the world as constructed from the imperial (and thus politically and culturally dominant) point of view.”⁹⁶ Drawing on the concepts of Michel Foucault,⁹⁷ postcolonial scholars rely on the notion of “colonial discourse” or “discourse of colonialism”⁹⁸ comprehended as a system of signifying practices. The aim of such practices is to produce and naturalise hierarchical structures of power within the imperial enterprise and to use them to shape colonial and neo-colonial relations.⁹⁹ Postcolonial researchers are thus preoccupied with the ways colonisers “interpret” the subjugated areas and people in order to take possession of them, whereby they “subject the individuals to themselves” through the imposition of knowlegde.¹⁰⁰ Referred to as “othering” by Gayatri Spivak,¹⁰¹ this ideological ←45 | 46→process that forms a system of representation involves the projection of the systemic codes of the imperial “self” onto the “empty” or “unwritten” territory of the Other. Within this system of projection, the Other undergoes an inscription mediated by textualisation networks which perpetuate the reduction of the Other’s values and meanings, while the imperial self is accorded an exclusive right to be a natural whole.¹⁰² Consequently, the world crafted by this discursive strategy does not reflect any physical or cultural reality, being instead a product of “European systems of perception, conceptualisation and representation.”¹⁰³

By having entrapped the Other by and within European inscriptions, the reality has been constructed or produced anew only to be later presented as axiomatic or “universal.”¹⁰⁴ Textuality played a prominent role in the construction of the colonial Other as an outsider that posed a threat to Europeans, by employing an array of written forms that served as “a vehicle of imperial authority.”¹⁰⁵ Postcolonial critics unanimously agree that seizing control of an area did not only entail exercising economic power, but that it also involved “imaginative command,”¹⁰⁶ ←46 | 47→and that imperial relations were sustained largely through textuality, both in institutional and in less formal ways.¹⁰⁷

Literary fictions and the vast corpus of texts referred to as travel writing were considerably complicit in this process of interpreting the new in the light of the old (i.e. of one’s own cultural preconceptions). As British postcolonial critic Peter Hulme argues, “only a narrative can provide proper authority,”¹⁰⁸ and Edward Said concurs, insisting on the role of narrative in disseminating and consolidating imperialism: “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future – these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.”¹⁰⁹

The links between textuality and imperialism in relation to travel writing are also highlighted by critics of English literature Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, who denounce travel literature as an imperialist discourse endorsed by dominant cultures (white, male, Euro-American, middle-class), which as a rule happens at the expense of others.¹¹⁰ British travel literature researcher Dennis Porter observes that even the most patently apolitical travel account bears certain features of political intervention.¹¹¹

The Swedish critic of travel literature Arne Melberg observes that what writers of travel accounts do is “mapping,” which he understands as practices of cultural geography aimed at producing comprehensive, explanatory narratives about the world and people who inhabit it.¹¹² Melberg ←47 | 48→argues that in its broader sense “mapping” corresponds to what travel writing scholar Mary Louise Pratt calls “imperial gaze”, i.e. a mode of subjecting a “foreign” reality through distinctively Western frameworks of perception and description which travellers used to make this reality understandable to their readers back home.¹¹³ Western travel writings can thus be understood as enactments of “imaginative geographies,” where representations of people and places not only express the cultural and ideological entanglements of their authors, but are also involved in the conquest of the non-Western world.

1 Colonial Discourse and Representation Analysis

Nicholas Harrison in his comprehensive Postcolonial Criticism (2003) describes the postcolonial field as “eclectic,” explaining that postcolonial theory cannot be defined in the same (reductive) way as, for example, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism, i.e. the theories on which postcolonialism tends to draw.¹¹⁴ Moreover, as there are several different critical postcolonial theories, rather than a single one, no critic can aspire to represent or speak on behalf of the entire postcolonial field.¹¹⁵ This multiplicity of varied postcolonial projects implies that there is not one, shared research object and, furthermore, that there is not one, universally upheld theoretical and critical methodology. Colonial discourse analysis, whose concepts and tools I employ in this book, is thus just one among other methods which are used within this critical framework.

It has moved to the forefront of postcolonial studies “by establishing the historical context in which a colonial position or condition can make sense” and by emphatically recognising the “pre-eminence of location.”¹¹⁶ With its theoretical context transcending regional boundaries, colonial discourse analysis focuses on issues which are prompted by these very boundaries and, at the same time, articulate specific local problems.

←48 | 49→

Because colonial discourse claims to be objective, constructing itself as axiomatic and universal, analysis of this discourse aims to expose it cultural embeddedness and the biases that inform its practices. In this context, Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin talk of the dismantling of colonial authority which has been supported by multifarious systems of imperial control, for example by the written word.¹¹⁷ A first step to exposing the mechanisms of confining the colonial object within European textuality is to analyse colonial tropes, forms, themes and the ways they function – with one set of cognitive codes being privileged over others – as a mode of cultural control.¹¹⁸

In his Orientalism (1978), the founding text of colonial discourse analysis, Said argues that although a populated space which Europe refers to as the “Orient” has indeed existed and still does, it was actually fashioned as an imaginary conceptual entity by the European “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ ”¹¹⁹ Said calls this “style of thought” “Orientalism” and examines in detail the discursive practices that reduced the Orient to a well-established repertoire of characteristics forged from superficial and simplified information in order, basically, “to raise Europe or a European race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind.”¹²⁰ Helping Westeners deal with the foreign, non-Western world by constructing it as the ultimate Other in literature and culture, Orientalism, in fact, helped them to exert control over it and maintain their hegemonic power.

Said called for analysing discourse itself, focusing on its “internal consistency” and “its ideas about the Orient,” while largely disregarding the reality outside it.¹²¹ Postcolonial critics were supposed to dissect the imperial strategy of textual control of conquered lands and people exerted in particular time and place. This approach involved viewing the colonial situation as produced by colonial discourse and contributing to the production of it. In such explorations, the concept of “representation” serves thus as the major analytical tool.

Addressing “representation” as the “production of the meanings of the concepts in our minds through language,”¹²² Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014) ←49 | 50→developed a tripartite concept of human world-perception which involves really existing things; concepts we use; and signs referring to our assemblage of mental concepts. Hall labels what enables us to correlate the three components as “systems of representation,” which are responsible for the process of meaning production and consist of various ways of organizing and classifying concepts and establishing relations between them, as well as communicating these concepts through a given system of signs. Representation is thus a practice which involves material elements, such as writing or literature, which represent concepts that can function as signs and carry or bestow meanings.¹²³

The meanings of things thus do not reside in themselves, but they are rather constructed though representing (signifying) practices, which confer meaning on things.¹²⁴ This meaning is never ultimately given but depends on the cultural and historical context, on a specific time and place. Similarly, literature as a system of representation cannot be attributed any conclusive, final meaning and, given its constructionist nature, takes part in “shaping social subjects and historical events”¹²⁵.

Said argues that literary representations of the Orient have served colonialism as vital tools for exerting domination and maintaining power over the non-European Other by using effective “vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures.”¹²⁶ This means that every study of the Orient is linked to other studies of it.¹²⁷ British geographers Trevor Barnes and James Duncan define this phenomenon as intertextuality, that is, a process in which meaning is produced from text to text rather than between a text and the world: new worlds come into being based on old texts only to become old worlds serving to produce new texts.¹²⁸ This ←50 | 51→development is discussed in relation to travel literature by Peter Stadius, who studies constructions of the North in European writings. Stadius argues that prior travel literature becomes “a source of conscious or unconscious intertextuality” [Swedish: en källa för medveten eller omedveten intertextualitet]¹²⁹ in works of later writers. As systems of representation, literary texts are works written by individual people whose choice is, to a degree, pre-determined by what Sherrill Grace, the author of Canada and the Ide of North, calls “tools, codes, signs”¹³⁰ – ready-made and ready-to-be-reused elements, rhetorical devices designed to produce meanings and persuade readers. In colonial literary texts, they are important components of representations which impose European cognitive codes on the Other, through which the Other is “read” on the basis of a pre-existing matrix of understandings and, consequently, subjected to colonial appropriation.¹³¹

Postcolonial critics take different positions on how these fixed, recurrent literary elements instrumental in coding the ideology of imperial discourse should be named.¹³² Drawing on the approaches of scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, Peter Hulme and Lesley Wylie,¹³³ in this book I employ the term “colonial tropes,” ←51 | 52→defined as “repertoires of devices and conventions”¹³⁴ of colonial travel writing, and focus on their role in exerting discursive power over literary texts.¹³⁵

2 The Split Subject and Ambivalence

Said has invited ample criticism for, among others, overlooking fissures, and that which is forcefully excluded from the text of colonial discourse.¹³⁶ This issue is addressed by Indian postcolonial theoretician and critic Homi K. Bhabha (born in 1949), whose theories of the split subject and the ambivalence of colonial articulation I also use in this book.

In his essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Bhabha quotes Said’s distinction between latent Orientalism, which is “an unconscious positivity,” and manifest Orientalism, which is “the stated knowledges and views about the Orient.”¹³⁷ Bhabha develops this theory by examining the changeability and ambivalence of Orientalist discourse and attending to cracks in articulations of colonial power. By claiming that colonial discourse is ambivalent in and by itself, he means not only that at any moment of colonial articulation there must be a resistance to power, but also that there always must be an agency of colonial resistance, not because the colonised display an intention of oppositional action, but because colonial representations are always overdetermined and ambivalent.¹³⁸

This crack within the unilateral working of colonial discourse and the ambivalence which results from it entail – inevitably, according to Bhabha – a split within the subject. Bhabha insists that it is impossible to pinpoint the source of ←52 | 53→both the coloniser and the colonised “within a tradition of representation that conceives of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plentitudinous object of vision,”¹³⁹ and for this reason, the construction of subjectivity within colonial relations must always recur “as a persisting questioning of the frame, the space of representation.”¹⁴⁰ This space of interrogation, which Bhabha calls “the space of the adversarial,”¹⁴¹ is grounded in a fundamental difference which disrupts or topples dominant representations. The difference surfaces even in the most conventional colonial texts, without ever being “entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional.”¹⁴² As Stephen Slemon observes in his interpretation of Bhabhas theory, it is in this antagonistic space that the colonised become “agents of resistance and change.”¹⁴³

Bhabha’s theories have provoked criticism from other postcolonial theorists. One reason for this criticism is their refusal to locate the Other’s resistance within the contradictions of the colonial text, which purportedly obfuscates proper anti-colonial actions.¹⁴⁴ Another important objection is Bhabha’s disregard for any specific colonial conditions.¹⁴⁵ According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, Bhabha promotes a misguided belief that the native in a way possesses colonial power and, consequently, that colonial discourse is a discourse of both the coloniser and the colonised.¹⁴⁶

←53 | 54→

Despite such critiques, Bhabha’s theoretical thought has fostered a growingly common view among postcolonial researchers that clear connections between literature on the one hand and imperialism and colonialism on the other are by no means a testimony to the absolute authority of colonial writing.¹⁴⁷ Namely, colonial texts are never exclusively “imperialist” or, for that matter, “anti-imperialist”; rather, they are always to some extent hybrid and ambivalent as a result of the encounter of the coloniser and the colonised.¹⁴⁸ Therefore, postcolonial re-readings of colonial literary texts are supposed not only to demonstrate the writers’ links to imperialism, but also to identify the “counter-colonial properties”¹⁴⁹ of these texts through what has come to be called “motivated acts of reading.”¹⁵⁰

3 Colonialism and the Discourse of Polar Expeditions: Polar Literature as a Product of Their Liaisons

In the 19th century, the Arctic areas of Greenland attracted the attention of several world powers, in particular the US and the UK, for whom the exploration of remote and trackless Arctic territories – the last “uncharted parts” of the Western world – was a matter of re-asserting their prestige and position in the international power structure.¹⁵¹ The enhanced interest in successive expeditions and their profound discursivisation fostered a dynamic, coherent discourse on the exploration of polar zones.¹⁵² The fact that the Scandinavian countries joined the rivalry for the last “undiscovered” areas in the second half of the 19th century was associated with the rise of nationalism in these countries, which was expressed in what Swedish scholar Inger Nilsson calls “small state imperialism” [Swedish: småstatsimperialism].¹⁵³ Small state imperialism manifested itself in an ←54 | 55→increased preoccupation with the Far North, its scientific conquest and, importantly, territorial expansion.¹⁵⁴ As in Said’s Orientalism, science and conquest went hand in hand.¹⁵⁵

Kirsten Hastrup observes that the self-reflectivity of polar explorers and their motivations to act were associated with nationalism, patriotism and national pride.¹⁵⁶ Polar research boosted scientific careers and, at the same time, made participants of the expeditions into national heroes, if they only managed to make it back home.¹⁵⁷ Scandinavian polar explorers took part in the international race for new political, geographical and scientific feats, and their achievements were not only relevant to their own careers and hero status, but also had political implications and an immense impact on their national cultures.¹⁵⁸ While Swedish and Norwegian polar explorers were committed first and foremost to exploring uninhabited areas of Greenland (the first crossing of the icesheet over the island’s interior, attempts at explaining the circulation of sea currents around Greenland, efforts to reach the North Pole), Denmark – which was the last Scandinavian country to join the race for glory and prestige – dispatched scientific expeditions to the yet-unexamined areas of Greenland in order to study their indigenous ←55 | 56→populations as well.¹⁵⁹ A separate scientific discipline referred to as polar studies evolved and received institutional validation in 1878, when the Committee for the Management of Scientific Research in Greenland [Danish: Kommissionen for Ledelse af Videnskabelige Undersøgelser i Grønland] was founded.¹⁶⁰ Operating until 1931, the Committee was the force behind sending fifty early scientific expeditions to Greenland.¹⁶¹ The knowledge produced by the discourse of polar studies was legitmised by the discipline’s alliance with colonial state institutions, which also supported the expeditions with funding. Consequently, polar studies became an extraordinarily important scientific field in Denmark and a source of international prestige as one of the few branches in which Danish researchers had a decisive edge over other scholars internationally.¹⁶² As with natural history described by Pratt, polar studies produced a discourse of expeditions and themselves became their product, so to speak.¹⁶³

Voyages into the Arctic regions turned into a literary vogue, fashioning what came to be called “polar literature,” which had a wide readership in American and British metropolises and, in the second half of the 19th century, in Scandinavian countries as well.¹⁶⁴ Among the polar genres, accounts from ←56 | 57→expeditions described as journeys of discovery and science enjoyed particular popularity.¹⁶⁵ Wherever their writers came from, a common feature of such texts was that they tended to inscribe themselves in their respective contemporaneous national discourses and to frame their authors as fulfilling a special mission in the Arctic peripheries for the sake of the worldwide progress of Western knowledge. In this respect, the role of the Royal Geographical Society as “the greatest promoter of travel and exploration” must be mentioned. In spite of its president’s, Sir Clements Markham’s official pronouncements that exploration should preserve the model of “disinterested science plus brave endeavor,” in reality it was most eager to promote the heroism of the explorers who triumphed against an extremely harsh and threatening nature¹⁶⁶. As a result, the expedition accounts produced well into 20th century retained their anachronistic character in spite of the new tendencies in Western travel writing that followed and reflected the developments on the international arena¹⁶⁷.

American historian Beau Riffenburgh points, however, to a distinctive way in which the Arctic and expeditions were discursivised by the Scandinavian polar explorers and highlights their different understanding of their environment, respect for human life and freedom from constraints of nationalist supremacy.¹⁶⁸ These features add up to what can be called a specifically Nordic matrix for representing the Arctic and its inhabitants. In this book, three narratives of such journeys are particularly relevant as important points of reference in examining Rasmussen’s representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit. These depictions include, chronologically, an account of the Umiaq Expedition to Ammassalik on the east coast authored by Danes Gustav Holm and Thomas Vilhelm Garde, entitled Den danske Konebaads-Expedition til Grønlands Østkyst. Populært beskreven (1887, The Danish Umiaq Expedition to the East Coast of Greenland. A popular description); Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen’s ←57 | 58→report from the first successful crossing of Greenland’s icesheet, entitled Paa ski over Grønland. En skildring af den norske Grønlandsekspedition 1888–1889 (1890, the first English edition: The First Crossing of Greenland, 1890); and Norwegian Eivind Astrup’s account of the expedition under the command of Robert Peary and his stay among the Inughuit in the area of Smith Sound, entitled Blandt nordpolens naboer (1895, English edition: With Peary near the Pole, 1898). To keep my argument lucid, I address Rasmussen’s intertextual references to these works in footnotes.

Although each of the three texts is anchored in another national context,¹⁶⁹ they were all authored by Scandinavian writers, and they all revolved around pioneering expeditions into as-yet unexplored areas of Greenland (East Greenland, the icesheet, North Greenland) which were launched in the last decades of the 19th century¹⁷⁰. As popular editions based on original travel diaries rather than official expedition reports, all three texts exemplify a hybrid genre which interweaves depictions of the journey, elements of a scientific report, a mapping narrative, hunting tales and ethnographic data about the indigenous population encountered along the way. When published, these works won immense popularity, which was largely linked to their affinity with fiction.¹⁷¹ Rasmussen’s direct predecessors, their authors established a particular model of the discursivisation of the Greenlandic Other at the end of the 19th century. According to the principles of so-called “salvage anthropology,”¹⁷² Greenlanders from the east coast ←58 | 59→and the Inughuit from North-West Greenland, who lived outside the European system, were perpetuated as “noble savages” and a true “nature people” – symbiotically attached to nature, unparalleled in their knowledge of Arctic conditions and perfectly adjusted to living in the polar zones. At the same time, the uninhabited icesheet and North-East Greenland came to be represented as a predominantly delightful and compelling unique site of male adventure. This image stood in stark contrast to the earlier representations of the area as a terrifyingly perilous environment.

Since the authors of these expedition accounts hailed from countries which cultivated expansionist aspirations¹⁷³ and their ventures in Greenland were associated with the rivalry of Western countries in and for the exploration of the Arctic, which spiralled in the late 19th century, I believe that their texts should be regarded as a species of colonial or colonialist literature, as discussed by postcolonial scholar Elleke Boehmer.¹⁷⁴ The Scandinavian reports also sought to legitimise Western presence in the areas under exploration and their subordination to the Western system of knowledge, which was sometimes followed by physical territorial expansion, as was the case with East and North Greenland. As a variety of colonial travel literature, the writings about polar expeditions are, to use Arne Melberg’s expression, an “ecumenical” genre¹⁷⁵ which mediates between facts and fiction, and autobiography and ethnography as well as interlacing various discourses, literary categories and social codes.¹⁷⁶ Given the ←59 | 60→complicated meaning-making processes resulting from the discursivisation of the Other which I presupposed, polar expedition literature should at the same time be comprehended as an “interference,” despite its obvious connections to imperialism. What I mean is, as Holland and Huggan observe, that such literature nurtured expansionist aspirations on the one hand and challenged commonly upheld preconceptions about the Other on the other.¹⁷⁷

That I refer to The New People and My Travel Diary as colonial literature results from my belief that relationships between Denmark and Greenland can be examined within the framework of postcolonial critical theory, at the same time asserting the distinctiveness of the history of the Arctic regions. Since every colonial and postcolonial conjuncture, as emphasised for example by Diana Byrdon and Helen Tiffin, is different,¹⁷⁸ some critics decry the practice of explaining local conditions by means of imported theoretical models.¹⁷⁹ For this reason, specific geographical, social and historical factors must be taken into account in every case.¹⁸⁰ Danish postcolonial scholars who study the complex Danish-Greenlandic relationships in literature, notably Karen Langgård and Kirsten Thisted, argue that, if applied self-critically, postcolonial theories do not have to “absorb” local traditions. Rather, such theories can contribute to augmenting these traditions with a new dimension. As this idea is one of the cornerstones of my book, I analyse the representations of North Greenland by drawing on the canonical theoretical texts of postcolonial studies (Homi Bhabha, Edward W. Said and Johannes Fabian) and critical studies, in particular on analyses of colonial travel literature (Mary Louise Pratt, Syed Manzurul Islam, Peter Hulme, Lesley Wylie and Richard Phillips), but I also rely on the ←60 | 61→contributions which attend specifically to polar expedition accounts with their distinctive features (Kirsten Thisted, Silje Gaupseth, Silje Solheim Karlsen, Johan Schimanski, Ulrike Spring, Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, Hanna-Mari Ikonen and Samu Pehkonen).

My analyses below are powerfully informed by Brian Porter’s observation that travel writings markedly embody “the fundamental ambiguity of representation.”¹⁸¹ This ambiguity results from the fact that every representation, which is a construct in itself, inevitably contains a subject position which is neither stable nor ultimately given.¹⁸² This means that, as Bhabha insists, the subject is always split and it is impossible to trace back the subject’s source (just as it is impossible to find “an origin for the Other”).¹⁸³ Therefore, the subject that speaks about reality is not just Said’s Orientalist, who is positioned “outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact” and as a “self-authorised ‘authority’ ” that represents the Other.¹⁸⁴ Rather, as Pratt insists, as the traveller interacts with the local travelees, his/her travel narrative grows polyphonic, a quality Pratt calls “heteroglossia,” including the presence of the Other as well.¹⁸⁵

These discordant positions vis-à-vis the Other are expressed in two modes of travelling and their related strategies of representations, which are investigated by literary researcher Syed Manzurul Islam. One of the modes involves demarcating a rigid boundary between the (European) subject and the (non-European) Other, which immobilises the former in the space it occupies. The other mode entails a genuine interaction with the Other, which affords the subject mobility and promotes either going beyond or completely eliminating the prior boundary. Islam calls these two models of travelling, respectively, sedentary travel and nomadic travel¹⁸⁶ and associates them, accordingly, with imperialist ideology and with transcending it. In this book, I argue that it is possible for one subject to practice both these modes of travelling and to take the different positions they entail. This translates into the ambivalent construction of North Greenland in Rasmussen’s writings.

Emphasising the constructionist nature of literary representations, my argument focuses on what Swedish literary scholar Peter Stadius calls “travel ←61 | 62→depiction” [Swedish: skildring av en resa],¹⁸⁷ that is, on the texts of Rasmussen’s accounts, on their exteriority in relation to the objects they depict,¹⁸⁸ whereby I do not attempt to assess the fictionality or referentiality of his works. This also concerns the autobiographical “I,” which I construe to be not Knud Rasmussen himself but his self-staging persona,¹⁸⁹ a kind of metonymic extension, which reverberates with Carl Thompson’s insight that travel literature is not only “a form of writing about the self” but also “a writing of the self.”¹⁹⁰ The writer’s “self” is thus viewed as delimited by textuality and constructed through certain language discourses, while its existence hinges upon the system of representation in which it develops and through which it expresses itself.¹⁹¹ The system also includes the fashioning of the narrator, which is one of the most important strategies expedition accounts contrive to win popularity with the readership.¹⁹²

The approach outlined above dovetails with the method of reading literature as a process which Bhabha postulates:

The “true” is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself, the productivity of meanings that construct counter-knowledges in medias res, in the very act of agonism, within the terms of a negotiation (rather than a negation) of oppositional and antagonistic elements.¹⁹³

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The English researcher of postcolonial literature David Huddart argues that the critical reading proposed by Bhabha is as ambivalent as colonial discourse, which is the primary object of study of the postcolonial author.¹⁹⁴ The position of a critic (also of a literary critic) always and inevitably involves being in medias res; consequently a critic must be prepared to work on a project without any ultimate guarantees, certainty or the sense that his/her object is fixed, which Huddart labels as “a lack of finality.”¹⁹⁵ Given this, my reading of The New People and My Travel Diary lays no claim to discovering the complete meaning of the two works, since such a project would be a sheer impossibility. My aim in this book is different: I seek to demonstrate that the representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit in these texts are multifaceted and counterpoised despite but also by virtue of their entanglement in the Danish colonial project in the Arctic.

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There are those who say that a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests – words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks – another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life. (Joseph Conrad, “Karain: a Memory”)¹⁹⁶

They travelled and travelled

in a country where they thought

that no human beings could settle and live.

They travelled and travelled

and when they arrived they found people

who did not know anything else

about human beings than themselves.

They travelled and travelled

and the hospitality was big

the curiosity without limits

but the guests could not be satisfied.

They travelled and travelled

and everywhere they came

people were examined

their clothes, sledges, and equipments were brought up.

Aqqaluk Lynge (1982)¹⁹⁷

←64 | 65→

95 Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism. History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 9.

96 Michał Paweł Markowski, “Postkolonializm,” in: Anna Burzyńska and Michał Paweł Markowski, Teorie literatury XX wieku. Podręcznik (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2006), p. 551.

97 Discursive process or formation is thereby defined as both linguistic and extra-linguistic communication or production of meaning pertaining to a given issue (Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in: Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall [London: Sage Publications, 1997], p. 41), which is a dispersed and latent conglomerate of power – “the violence which we do to things.” Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in: Untying the Text: A Post-Structural Anthology, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 67.

98 For theorisations of colonial discourse, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London & New York: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Slemon, “Monuments of Empire: Allegory, Counter-Discourse, Post-Colonial Writing,” Kunapipi, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1987).

99 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 2.

100 Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Power,” in: Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 126.

101 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” in: Europe and Its Others, Vol. 2, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), p. 132. Johannes Fabian, who introduced the notion of othering to anthropology, defines othering as practices in which the category of the Other is produced by creating divisions and emphasising the distance between the knower and the known. Johannes Fabian, “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing,” Critical Inquiry 1990, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1990), p. 755.

102 Slemon, “Monuments of Empire,” p. 6.

103 Margaret E. Turner, Imagining Culture. New World Narrative and the Writing of Canada (Montreal, Kingston, London & Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), p. 8.

104 Diana Brydon and Helen M. Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993), p. 105. The immense impact that the discursive technique exerts in constructing the New World is also demonstrated by literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt and theoretician of literature, critic and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who show, in their different ways, that it was pivotal to the conquest of America. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

105 Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 13.

106 Jacques Derrida labels this process a “symbolic conquest.” Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origins, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 39.

107 Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, “The Textuality of Empire,” in: De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London & New York: Routledge), 1994, p. 3.

108 Peter Hulme, “Polytropic Man: Tropes of Sexuality and Mobility in Early Colonial Discourse,” in: Europe and Its Others, Vol. 2, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), p. 23. Hulme understands narrating the world as a meaning-making process which involves “reduction” – not only reduction in terms of content, but also reduction of the chaos with which new worlds were identified.

109 Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xiii.

110 Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. XIII.

111 Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 14.

112 Arne Melberg, Å reise og skrive. Et essay om moderne reiselitteratur, trans. T. Haugen (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag, 2005), p. 26. Postcolonial critic and geographer Richard Phillips also believes that literary texts should be viewed as maps which contribute to the shaping of our geographical imaginaries. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 45.

113 Melberg, Å reise og skrive, p. 27.

114 Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, p. 9. According to Harrison, the discipline of postcolonial studies has no conceptual founding fathers, and its career in academia is bound up chiefly with literary research. Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, p. 9.

115 Stephen Slemon, “Post-Colonial Critical Theories,” in: Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 101.

116 Gregory Castle, “Editor’s Introduction: Resistance and Complicity in Postcolonial Studies,” in: Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. xiv.

117 Brydon and Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions, p. 81.

118 Brydon and Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions, p. 81.

119 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books), 1979, p. 2.

120 Said, Orientalism, p. 232.

121 Said, Orientalism, p. 5.

122 Hall, “The Work of Representation,” p. 17.

123 Hall, “The Work of Representation,” pp. 25–26.

124 Hall, “The Work of Representation,” p. 24.

125 Hall, “The Work of Representation,” pp. 5–6, Stephen Greenblatt emphasises additionally that representations affect the discourse that brought them forth and stresses that they “are not only products but producers.” Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, p. 6.

126 Said, Orientalism, p. 41.

127 Said, Orientalism, p. 20.

128 Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan, “Introduction: Writing Worlds,” in: Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, eds. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.

129 Peter Stadius, “Reseberättelsen som kulturhistoriskt forskningsobjekt,” Historisk Tidsskrift för Finland, Vol. 87, No. 3 (2002), p. 312.

130 Sherill E. Grace. Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal, Kingston, London & Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 24.

131 Slemon, “Monuments of Empire,” pp. 5, 9. Peter Hulme also discusses tropes in a similar vein in the context of recurring anxiety which is triggered by the inconsistencies of colonial discourse. It is colonial tropes that this discourse falls back on to cope with this anxiety. Hulme, “Polytropic Man,” p. 25.

132 Marta Dvořák and W. H. New, “Introduction: Troping the Territory,” in: Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, eds. Marta Dvořák and W. H. New (Montreal, Kingston, London & Ithaca: McGill-Queens University, 2007), p. 4; Christine Lorre, “The Tropes and Territory of Childhood in ‘The Lagoon and Other Stories’ by Janet Frame,” in: Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, eds. Marta Dvořák and W. H. New (Montreal, Kingston, London & Ithaca: McGill-Queens University, 2007), p. 249.

133 Hulme, “Polytropic Man”; Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks; Pratt, Imperial Eyes. As an example of another terminology for these rhetorical devices, Anna Cichoń in her postcolonial reading of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s In Desert and Wilderness (W pustyni i w puszczy, 1911) analyses what the scholars listed above call “tropes” as the colonial “codes and conventions” of the novel. Anna Cichoń, “W kręgu zagadnień literatury kolonialnej – W pustyni i w puszczy Henryka Sienkiewicza,” Er(r)go, Vol. 1, No. 8 (2004) p. 93.

134 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 11.

135 Hulme, “Polytropic Man,” p. 28, footnote 14.

136 Benita Parry. “Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: Edward Said’s Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,” in: Edward Said A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London & New York: Routledge, 1990). For critical views of Bhabha’s theory, see e.g.: J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1988); Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London & New York: Routledge, 1992).

137 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 71.

138 Stephen Slemon, “The Scramble for Post-Colonialism,” in: De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London & New York: Routledge), 1994, pp. 23–24.

139 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 46.

140 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 46.

141 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 109.

142 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 109. Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 21.

143 Slemon, “The Scramble for Post-Colonialism,” p. 24.

144 Tiffin and Lawson, “The Textuality of Empire,” p. 8. A similar critique was levelled at Bhabha by Ania Loomba; see Ania Loomba, “Overworlding the ‘Third World’,” Oxford Literary Review, No. 13 (1991), p. 180. Stephen Slemon also observes that according to Bhabha the discourse of the Empire overshadows practices unfolding within wide-raging postcolonial literary production. Slemon, “Monuments of Empire,” pp. 13–14.

145 Benita Parry, “Signs of Our Times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture,” Third Text, No. 28/29 (1994), pp. 5–24.

146 Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry, ed. Louis Henry Gates Jr., Vol. 12, No. 1 (1985), p. 79. JanMohamed contends that Bhabha’s strategy serves the same ideological function as humanistic explorations of old, i.e. it suppresses the history of colonialism. Another point of JanMohamed’s criticism of Bhabha is that discourse, on which Bhabha focuses, seems to linger as if in a vacuum.

147 Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 4.

148 Hans Hauge, “Introduktion,” in: Postkolonialisme, ed. Hans Hauge (Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 2007), p. 23.

149 John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 158. A similar stance is advocated by Leela Gandhi, who calls on postcolonial critics to show the ambivalence of the Oriental stereotype and to refuse “the pleasures of an Occidental stereotype.” Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 79.

150 Tiffin and Lawson, “The Textuality of Empire,” p. 10.

151 Loomis, “The Arctic Sublime,” p. 95.

152 Bjørst, En anden verden, 17–18.

153 Inger Nilsson, “Grönlandsfrågan 1929–1933: en studie i småstatsimperialism,” Umeå Studies in the Humanities, No. 17 (1978). Admittedly, though, none of the Scandinavian countries, their capacities severely limited as they were, aspired to an imperial status comparable with the British Empire. Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 140.

154 Emphatically, Scandinavian explorations of the polar zones varied profoundly between various states in terms of the time-frame of their respective concerted efforts, the territories on which the exploration focused and the nature of their pursuits. Ikonen and Pehkonen, “Explorers in the Arctic,” p. 129.

155 Norwegian scholar Urban Wråkberg, who studies the social, political and scientific aspects of the Arctic, observes that the vast majority of scientific polar explorations commenced in the 19th century explicitly aimed to facilitate taking possession of the area under exploration. Urban Wråkberg, “Polarområdenes gåter,” in: Norsk polarhistorie. I Ekspedisjonene, eds. Einar-Arne Drivenes and Harald Dag Jølle (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2004), p. 22.

156 Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 139.

157 Wråkberg, “Polarområdenes gåter,” p. 22. According to Wråkberg, this hero status was connected to an interest in descriptions of and information about polar expeditions which arose in the 19th century. Wråkberg, “Polarområdenes gåter,” p. 22.

158 Silje Solheim Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand: Fridtjof Nansens Fram-ekspedisjon (1893–1896) – og bøker i dens kjølvann, a PhD dissertation completed at the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciencies and Education, Department of Language and Culture (Tromsø: University of Tromsø , 2011), http://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/3796/thesis.pdf?sequence=3 (Accessed 15 Sept. 2011), p. 11.

159 Beau Riffenburgh views the rise of polar studies as bound up with Scandinavia, specifically with Sweden, and at first strictly scientific expeditions, such as the expedition to Sptisbergen undertaken by Swede Otto Martin Torell (1828–1900) in 1861, and with the pursuits of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, who contributed to the commercialisation of polar explorations. Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism and Geographical Discovery (London & New York: Belhaven Press, 1993), p. 37.

160 Hastrup states that one reason why the Committee was founded was that a heated debate broke out in the Danish scholarly community after Nordenskiöld had found meteoritic iron in the island of Disko in 1870. The national rhetoric was marshalled to insist that as Greenland belonged to the Danish Crown, its exploration could not be left to chance and the will of “foreign researchers.” Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, p. 246.

161 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 18.

162 Bjørst, En anden verden, pp. 24–25.

163 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 57.

164 “Polar literature” is a term used by literary scholar Nils Magne Knutsen to refer to a broad and heterogeneous body of texts, including besides Arctic expedition accounts writings such as biographies, memoirs and literary fictions about the Arctic. Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, p. 25. In 2017, an anthology edited by Norwegian literature researcher Henning Howlid Wærp was published, which featured the term “Arctic literature.” Henning Howlid Wærp, Arktisk litteratur: fra Fridtjof Nansen til Anne B. Ragde (Oslo: Orkana Forlag, 2017).

165 Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, p. 2. Expedition accounts, which were written for a broad readership, contributed considerably to elevating polar explorers into heroes. Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, p. 69; Wråkberg, “Polarområdenes gåter,” p. 23.

166 Roy Bridges, “Exploration and Travel outside Europe (1720–1914),” in: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tom Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 60–61.

167 Brigdes, “Exploration and Travel outside Europe,” pp. 66–67.

168 According to Riffenburgh, this showed in the Scandinavians’ eagerness to acquire Inuit knowledge and skills for survival in the Arctic. Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, pp. 114, 142–143.

169 Accounts of Norwegian polar expeditions were distinctively associated with national discourse, which thrived with particular robustness at the turn of the 19th century, when Norway became an independent nation. Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, p. 11.

170 Whereas Astrup died shortly after the English edition of his account was published, Rasmussen, for most of his life, remained in close contact with both Nansen and commander Holm: he met with them on many occasions, exchanged letters, asked for their advice or for letters of recommendation. They were all part of the great circle of Scandinavian polar explorers vividly described by Hastrup in her comprehensive work Vinterens hjerte. Michelsen, Vejen til Thule, p. 218; Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte, pp. 41–53; 184–200.

171 As observed by Riffenburgh, writing skills were a highly relevant factor in promoting polar explorers’ fame. Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, p. 164.

172 “Salvage travel writing” denotes a tendency which was particularly common among ethnographers towards depicting non-European peoples as subjects who will soon disappear from the globe and therefore need to be preserved for posterity. Helen Carr, “Modernism and Travel (1880–1940),” in: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tom Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 82.

173 This is argued by Inger Nilsson in his study of small state imperialism. Nilsson, “Grönlandsfrågan.”

174 According to Elleke Boehmer, colonial literature can generally be described as writing “reflecting a colonial ethos,” and more specifically as “writing concerned with colonial perceptions and experience, written mainly by metropolitans, but also by creoles and indigenes, during colonial times.” Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 2. With such a generalised and generalising definition, all literary production generated across the Danish state throughout the colonial period can be classified as colonial literature since it spread imperialism as the regular order of things. “Colonialist literature” is described by Boehmer as writing particularly involved in colonial expansion, “written by and for colonizing Europeans about non-European lands dominated by them. […] informed by theories concerning the superiority of European culture and the rightness of empire.” Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 3.

175 Melberg, Å reise og skrive, p. 12.

176 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p. XI; Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, “Introduction,” in: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tom Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 6.

177 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p. IX.

178 Brydon and Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions, p. 12. For example, Karen Langgård stresses that the colonial and postcolonial situation of Geenlanders differed from that of the inhabitants of other colonies as there was no colonial or colonialist literature that depicted the former as an embodiment of evil; neither did European settlers write literature about Greenland inspired by their sense of displacement. Karen Langgård, “An Examination of Greenlandic Awareness of Ethnicity and National Self-Consciousness through Texts Produced by Greenlanders 1860s–1920s,” Etudes Inuit Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1998), p. 99.

179 Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, p. 5.

180 Castle, “Editor’s Introduction,” p. xiv. Greenblatt also emphasises that European practices of representation vary, despite their copious common features, and points to discrepancies between respective nations, religions, social classes and professions. Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, p. 8.

181 Porter, Haunted Journeys, p. 14.

182 Porter, Haunted Journeys, p. 13, footnote 17; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 88.

183 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 46.

184 Said, Orientalism, p. 21; Barnes and Duncan, “Introduction: Writing Worlds,” p. 9.

185 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 135–136.

186 Islam, The Ethics of Travel, p. vii.

187 Stadius, Reseberättelsen, p. 293.

188 Said, Orientalism, pp. 20–21.

189 The author’s self-staging is discussed by Swedish literary scholar Arne Melberg, who explains that the literary “self” can be constructed in a variety of ways, which fosters the fictionalisation of both the subject and the reality the subject presents. In her study of autobiographical literature, with which travel writing is affiliated, Leigh Gilmore states that at the centre of travel texts lies the only ostensibly “ ‘unifying’ I,” which is in fact intrinsically split by its locatedness in different discourses. Arne Melberg, Selvskrevet: Om selvframstilling i litteraturen (Oslo: Spartacus, 2007), pp. 9–12; Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory and Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 45.

190 Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 109.

191 Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 84. This approach does not mean that referentiality and fictionality are dichotomous and mutually exclusive; in fact, they affect each other. Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 84.

192 Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, p. 38. In her PhD dissertation, Karlsen explores in detail the fictionality of travel writing and “self-writing” practised by travel writers. See Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, pp. 27–38, 41–44.

193 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 22.

194 David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 18.

195 Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha, p. 19.

196 Joseph Conrad, “Karain: a Memory,” in: Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1898), p. 40.

197 Inge Kleivan, “Poetry, Politics, and Archeology in Greenland,” in: Fifty Years of Arctic Research Anthropological Studies from Greenland to Siberia, Vol. 18, eds. Rolf Gilberg and Hans Christian Gulløv (Copenhagen: Department of Ethnography, The National Museum of Denmark, 1997), p. 187.