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Its theme is the mental colonization of foreign space through inscription in the organized German settlement of Southern Chile in the early nineteenth century. I propose to study colonial settlement as the reification of colonial desires in writing. In the following chapters, I argue that the conceptual boundaries of colonial settlement are circumscribed by a historically specific, heterogeneous group of texts. Plural, nonfinite, and noncanonical, this body of writings engages in a range of interested inscriptive practices that facilitate the conception of homogenizing superstructures. It is the objective of this essay to isolate texts constitutive of exemplary colonial superstructures—among them the concepts of foundation, authorship, pioneer work, visual innocence, and kinship—and to inquire into their textual performances without abstracting them from their channels of distribution.
The main concept I propose in order to describe the role of writing and print in colonization is that of a host of writings. This concept rests etymologically on the notion of hostile action; a host of writings is conceived as a body of texts in circulation that acts on its audience in a concerted fashion. Hence, I use the term “hostility” in the sense of an orchestrated practice of a host of texts on an audience. The theoretical underpinnings of this model are theories of textuality indebted to the linguistic turn; they rest on the notion that the pervasive alphabetization of European society during the nineteenth century resulted in a significant cognitive shift. In critiquing the writing of the colony, this project situates itself in a deliberately unstable field of inquiry often commented upon by scholars—among them James Clifford, David Spurr, and Nicholas Thomas—who have grappled with the dilemma of writing about colonial discourse. My intention is not to offer a grand explicatory master narrative of the German settlements in Chile but to articulate the specific operations through which particular texts worked on their reader-writers. Yet the predicament of the written text that undertakes a deconstruction of writing is one not easily avoided by a mere disclaimer of self-reflection. As my work presumes to disperse the totalizing movements of writing, it incongruously positions itself at the stable center of inscriptive practice.