Mapping Ultima Thule. Agata Lubowicka

representations of North Greenland in her essay “The Power to Represent: Intertextuality and Discourse in ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow’”(2002).

83 Langgård, “Hvad skrev Knud Rasmussen når han skrev på grønlandsk?,” pp. 131–145. Issues related to Knud Rasmussen’s identity were also explored by Claus Oreskov, “Den skære hvide nysne. Et forsvar for Knud Rasmussen,” Tidsskriftet Grønland, Vol. 8 (2001), pp. 293–300; and by Michelsen, “Jeg vil ikke dø for et skuldertræk.”

84 My first insights into the thematic concerns of this book lay at the core of my 2013 article: Agata Lubowicka, “The Presence of the Other in Knud Rasmussen’s The New People,” Forum for World Literature Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2013a, pp. 257–268.

85 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” in: The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 45.

86 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” p. 50.

87 Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, pp. 49, 136; Brøgger, “The Culture of Nature,” p. 98.

88 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8.

89 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8.

90 Rasmussen never uses the term “Inughuit” in his numerous texts; instead, he consistently abides by “Polar Eskimos”, his own coinage. Thisted argues that when writing in Danish, Rasmussen employed the name “Eskimos”, yet when writing in Greenlandic, he opted for “kalaallit” or “inuit.” Thisted, “Knud Rasmussen”, p. 240, footnote 4.

91 “Inughuit” appears as a direct translation of the term “Polar Eskimos” in the latest edition of the Danish-Greenlandic dictionary compiled by Robert Petersen, Professor of Eskimo Studies at the University of Copenhagen (Ordbogen dansk-grønlandsk, Nuuk 2003), and in phonetically recorded myths and tales of the inhabitants of North Greenland. Erik Holtved, “The Polar Eskimos: Language and Folklore,” Meddelelser om Grønland, Vol. 152, No. 2 (1951). Anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup in her 2015 book based on fieldwork in North-West Greenland also states that today’s population of the former Thule region “call themselves inughuit at present.” Kirsten Hastrup, Thule – på tidens rand (København: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2015), p. 8.

92 Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8. At the Inuit Circumpolar Conference held in Barrow, Alaska, in 1977, the term “Inuit” was adopted as the common designation for all peoples which had been called “Eskimos” over the previous centuries. Bjørst, En anden verden, p. 8.

93 This is shown by Kirsten Hastrup in her monumental study Thule – på tidens rand.

94 This is consistent with Barbara Johnson’s insight into a “repression of differences within entities” which are perceived as homogeneous wholes while in fact they differ from themselves. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x–xi.

II Postcolonial Studies

This book is part of a robust field of postcolonial studies defined concisely by British literary critic Nicholas Harrison as “an attention to the history of colonialism/imperialism and its aftermath.”⁹⁵ According to Polish literary scholar Michał Paweł Markowski postcolonial studies as a discipline focuses “on exploring representations of the world as constructed from the imperial (and thus politically and culturally dominant) point of view.”⁹⁶ Drawing on the concepts of Michel Foucault,⁹⁷ postcolonial scholars rely on the notion of “colonial discourse” or “discourse of colonialism”⁹⁸ comprehended as a system of signifying practices. The aim of such practices is to produce and naturalise hierarchical structures of power within the imperial enterprise and to use them to shape colonial and neo-colonial relations.⁹⁹ Postcolonial researchers are thus preoccupied with the ways colonisers “interpret” the subjugated areas and people in order to take possession of them, whereby they “subject the individuals to themselves” through the imposition of knowlegde.¹⁰⁰ Referred to as “othering” by Gayatri Spivak,¹⁰¹ this ideological ←45 | 46→process that forms a system of representation involves the projection of the systemic codes of the imperial “self” onto the “empty” or “unwritten” territory of the Other. Within this system of projection, the Other undergoes an inscription mediated by textualisation networks which perpetuate the reduction of the Other’s values and meanings, while the imperial self is accorded an exclusive right to be a natural whole.¹⁰² Consequently, the world crafted by this discursive strategy does not reflect any physical or cultural reality, being instead a product of “European systems of perception, conceptualisation and representation.”¹⁰³

By having entrapped the Other by and within European inscriptions, the reality has been constructed or produced anew only to be later presented as axiomatic or “universal.”¹⁰⁴ Textuality played a prominent role in the construction of the colonial Other as an outsider that posed a threat to Europeans, by employing an array of written forms that served as “a vehicle of imperial authority.”¹⁰⁵ Postcolonial critics unanimously agree that seizing control of an area did not only entail exercising economic power, but that it also involved “imaginative command,”¹⁰⁶ ←46 | 47→and that imperial relations were sustained largely through textuality, both in institutional and in less formal ways.¹⁰⁷

Literary fictions and the vast corpus of texts referred to as travel writing were considerably complicit in this process of interpreting the new in the light of the old (i.e. of one’s own cultural preconceptions). As British postcolonial critic Peter Hulme argues, “only a narrative can provide proper authority,”¹⁰⁸ and Edward Said concurs, insisting on the role of narrative in disseminating and consolidating imperialism: “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future – these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.”