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

By seizing the settlers’ letters and holding them back until the crimes had been solved and minds put at ease, he temporarily suspended a negative line of argument, the complaints, in order to maintain the colony’s positive reputation in the German papers—and, thereby, to keep new settlers coming. Pérez Rosales arbitrarily altered the quantitative distribution of certain undesired discourses that were in circulation and contained their negative impact on the image of the colony as it was being disseminated in writing. In doing so, Pérez Rosales encouraged certain lines of action over others: the responsiveness or nonresponsiveness of prospective German emigrants to Chilean recruitment.

The Host of Writings

The image of the colony at Lake Llanquihue in the German imagination was created in a host of writings consisting of letters, reports, maps, scientific literature, pamphlets, and myriad other texts that were circulated in Germany and, subsequently, generated more texts. I use the term “host” to refer to a colonialist body of texts that is self-referential and auto-generative, composed of divergent components yet united by complementary agendas, swept up in the centrifugal force of concerted discourses, and subtly engaged in shaping political realities. It is, above all, a critical term to describe systematic, self-serving, discursive action. I base my use of the term “host” on the multiple meanings of the Latin hostis, -is: the enemy, stranger or guest, large group, and army. The disparate meanings of the Latin root hostis are reflected in the meanings of “host” compiled in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). According to the OED, the word “host” entered the English language around the year 1290 with the (now archaic) meaning “an armed company or multitude of men; an army” and was used quantitatively from 1440 on as “a great company; a multitude; a large number” (“host, n.¹”). Starting in 1303, it appeared as the correlative of “guest,” that is, “a man who lodges and entertains another in his house,” as well as (almost simultaneously, starting in 1390) with the meaning of “a guest” (“host, n.²”).