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

A recent donation of original documents from the Philippi family has greatly enriched the repository at the Museo Mauricio Van der Maele in Valdivia. In addition to institutionalized historiography, two comprehensive works stand out among past research done on the topic: George Young’s Germans in Chile, an insightful account of the German settlements, and Jean-Pierre Blancpain’s exhaustive and extremely detailed Les Allemands au Chili (1816–1945). Both volumes were written in the early seventies and span the entire nineteenth and parts of the twentieth centuries. No equally ambitious work has come out since, with the arguable exception of Gabriel Guarda’s recent Nueva Historia de Valdivia, which contains an authoritative study of the history of the German settlements.

I have adopted a New Historicist stance in selecting the primary materials for this study. The approach has resulted in the inclusion of an eclectic array of genres, disciplines, and formats, among them private and public texts, published and unpublished materials, scientific and nonscientific jargons, representative and nonrepresentative documents, fiction and nonfiction. Among the documents I discuss are emigration pamphlets, letters, journals, travelogues, maps, monographs, field notes, reports, presentations, and biological classifications. In labeling textual categories, traditional disciplinary boundaries strive to delimit, contain, and explain the scope and meaning of the discourses deployed in each. Having chosen to consider a host of colonial inscriptions with regard to their fields of operation, I have, in many cases, found those determining limits obstructive rather than productive. Rather, I concentrate on the imaginary construction of textual boundaries and their permeabilities: the constitutive relationships between the narrative and the dramatic, for example, the fictive and the scientific, the descriptive and the graphic. This approach has allowed me to recover the marginal, to reflect on contextualization, and to foreground the incoherent and fragmentary, and in doing so to blur the line between symbolic and material action, writing and colonization, the copy and the original. What remains, then, are the ways in which texts act on minds and bodies.