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

In addition, censorship and repression together with economic factors pushed about 200,000 Germans into emigration between 1830–1840,³⁵ well before the failed revolution and the ensuing onset of the emigration wave in 1848.³⁶ Large-scale emigration lent a new urgency to latent desires for colonial conquest and, frequently motivated by the hopelessness and last-chance sentiments of those who saw themselves compelled to leave Germany, incited a fervent brand of appropriative discourses concerning territories overseas. Speculators were quick to fan desires for the promised land with promotional literature. Discourses of nationalism, democracy, expansionism, exoticism, and interventionism interacted in concert towards the proposition of German overseas possessions: to measure, map, describe, interpret, appropriate, and ultimately settle colonial territory.

I submit that hostility is singularly engaged in appropriating colonial territory both intellectually and materially. As I have argued up to this point, the host reifies truth. It is Willi Goetschel’s merit to have shown in his cogent article “ ‘Land of Truth—Enchanting Name!’ Kant’s Journey at Home” that truth, as legacy of the Enlightenment, is, in turn, intrinsically caught up in a colonization project. His argument brings us full circle back to the conception of a German national colony in the Republic of Chile. In discussing Immanuel Kant’s use of an extended metaphor of truth in the Critique of Pure Reason, Goetschel argues that Kant’s truth takes on overtly territorial qualities and concludes that Kant proposes colonization as “what necessarily takes place where knowledge is produced. Colonization of space and time, in one of the innovative insights of his Critique, is the precondition for the possibility of knowledge” (322). At the beginning of Kant’s passage on the transcendental doctrine of judgment, the reader is abruptly positioned on the Island of Truth. This island is, according to Kant, of finite extent and delineated by an amorphous other, the Ocean of Illusion. To describe knowledge on the Island of Truth, Kant employs a complex exploration and settlement imagery: