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Figure 1. Blacked-out passage in Rudolf Philippi’s letter to Luis Montt, 1902.
Source. Held (“Oficios” IV:686).
Despite my resignation, the episode caused me some disquiet, and it still does. Surely, the dissatisfaction of intercepted historiographic closure, the feeling of having been cheated of a cliffhanger’s promise for resolution, has something to do with it. More crucially, though, I have mulled over the status of the written word in the early history of the German settlement, in which both Simon and R. Philippi were actively engaged. The ownership and custody of historical records, the editing and redacting of documents, the selective preservation and transcription of data carriers, their circulation as so many copies and reprints, and the production of texts on the basis of other texts—these are the constituents of colonial history and, as I argue in the following chapters, the constituents of colonial settlement. Colonial settlement, as has been noted (Noyes 235), is always an erasure of traces and a reinscription of interested knowledge on the newly blank medium of foreign soil. It is also a recycling and disseminating of ideas in which the media of foreign soil and foreign bodies insinuate themselves in the negotiation of new meanings. How does this writing implant specific notions of national colonization in the public mind? Who controls the availability or inaccessibility of the written word? Above all, what is the status of the copy in the making of a national colony, the meaning of transcription and of the original, and where, if anywhere, is their point of intersection with the intertextual? This project is part of a longstanding effort in postcolonial studies to deconstruct colonial epistemologies.