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

The following inquiry must therefore oscillate between the self-effacement of authorship and a wary acknowledgment of its master functions—it must, in other words, accomplish the paradox of a totalizing practice bent on its own continuous disruption.

To my knowledge, no critical analysis has been undertaken on the emergence of the German settlements in Chile. My work is indebted to the insightful and innovative critical approaches taken by scholars across disciplines. In German studies, Susan Zantop has written compellingly on colonial fantasy; John Noyes has developed a model of territorial inscription. Tzvetan Todorov has taken a semiotic approach to colonization. Stephen Greenblatt has studied the modes and effects of colonial representation. Mary Louise Pratt has written a wonderfully interdisciplinary study of the colonialist gaze. Homi Bhabha’s studies of postcoloniality have rendered provocative readings of subversion. Starting from anthropological investigations, Clifford Geertz, Renato Rosaldo, and James Clifford have elaborated models of cultural criticism out of their reflections on ethnographic methodologies. I have borrowed insights and key concepts from all these authors to describe the formation of German settlements in Chile. Moreover, this study could not have been completed without the historiographic endeavors of prior researchers whose work has preserved a wealth of historical fact and detail about the creation of the German settlements in Chile. Without the life work of the late Emilio Held, the history of German immigration to Chile would not be the accessible field of inquiry that it is today. It is his merit to have retrieved, transcribed, copied, and sometimes published thousands of records that pertain to the history of the German settlements and that, in countless cases, have come to us today in the form of Held’s transcriptions alone. Two public archives in Santiago and Osorno house his research today. Over the course of more than half a century, the late Georg Schwarzenberg and his daughter Ingeborg Schmalz have likewise recovered and preserved countless documents in the form of two invaluable serial publications; their significance for the current German-Chilean historiography is in no small measure due to the fact that they have been collected by the Biblioteca Nacional, where they are accessible to the general public.