Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Foucault’s archaeology is invaluable to the analysis of the host because it allows us to question the host as to its self-evidence, to articulate the conditions of its unity. We might even go so far as to say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that archaeology allows us to make a script of those conditions from which we can proceed to extract the latent patterns of their field of operation. Archaeology, then, recovers the formation of the host historically, allowing us to theorize the host’s mode of existence. From this starting point, the analysis of the host moves beyond archaeology. It emphasizes the actions, operations, and discursive products of the host over the genesis of the host as a discursive product. It investigates the ways texts form communicative networks to produce meanings and the ways in which these meanings inscribe notions of materiality, reality, and truth. This field of action of the host is its hostility—the seemingly disparate yet coordinated inscriptive practices by which a host of writings implants notions in minds, transform desires into action, and reifies colonial fantasies.

Truth and Territory

I borrow the notion of “colonial fantasies” from Susan Zantop, though I lend it a somewhat different valency than that found in her excellent analysis, which links latent sexual desire for an exoticized other with the desire for conquest. I use the term more generally to describe dissimilar discourses that in aggregate acted to, in Zantop’s words, “create an imaginary German colonial history on paper and in the minds of their readers; they were recycled over and over again until they acquired the status of factual ‘reality’ ” (3). This protocolonial “subtext” deployed a range of scientific, legal, literary, representational, and philosophic discourses, to name but a few, that aligned themselves to the Germans’ desire for colonial possessions. The Germans’ colonial appetite was whetted during the restoration years following the Congress of Vienna when a repressed national identity, modeled on the values of the French Revolution, began to form and brought with it a desire for national formation as well as expansion.