Mapping Ultima Thule. Agata Lubowicka

thought

      that no human beings could settle and live.

      They travelled and travelled

      and when they arrived they found people

      who did not know anything else

      about human beings than themselves.

      They travelled and travelled

      and the hospitality was big

      the curiosity without limits

      but the guests could not be satisfied.

      They travelled and travelled

      and everywhere they came

      people were examined

      their clothes, sledges, and equipments were brought up.

Aqqaluk Lynge (1982)¹⁹⁷

      ←64 | 65→

95 Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism. History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 9.

96 Michał Paweł Markowski, “Postkolonializm,” in: Anna Burzyńska and Michał Paweł Markowski, Teorie literatury XX wieku. Podręcznik (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2006), p. 551.

97 Discursive process or formation is thereby defined as both linguistic and extra-linguistic communication or production of meaning pertaining to a given issue (Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in: Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall [London: Sage Publications, 1997], p. 41), which is a dispersed and latent conglomerate of power – “the violence which we do to things.” Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in: Untying the Text: A Post-Structural Anthology, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 67.

98 For theorisations of colonial discourse, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London & New York: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Slemon, “Monuments of Empire: Allegory, Counter-Discourse, Post-Colonial Writing,” Kunapipi, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1987).

99 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 2.

100 Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Power,” in: Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 126.

101 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” in: Europe and Its Others, Vol. 2, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), p. 132. Johannes Fabian, who introduced the notion of othering to anthropology, defines othering as practices in which the category of the Other is produced by creating divisions and emphasising the distance between the knower and the known. Johannes Fabian, “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing,” Critical Inquiry 1990, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1990), p. 755.

102 Slemon, “Monuments of Empire,” p. 6.

103 Margaret E. Turner, Imagining Culture. New World Narrative and the Writing of Canada (Montreal, Kingston, London & Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), p. 8.

104 Diana Brydon and Helen M. Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993), p. 105. The immense impact that the discursive technique exerts in constructing the New World is also demonstrated by literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt and theoretician of literature, critic and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who show, in their different ways, that it was pivotal to the conquest of America. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

105 Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 13.

106 Jacques Derrida labels this process a “symbolic conquest.” Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origins, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 39.

107 Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, “The Textuality of Empire,” in: De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London & New York: Routledge), 1994, p. 3.

108 Peter Hulme, “Polytropic Man: Tropes of Sexuality and Mobility in Early Colonial Discourse,” in: Europe and Its Others, Vol. 2, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), p. 23. Hulme understands narrating the world as a meaning-making process which involves “reduction” – not only reduction in terms of content, but also reduction of the chaos with which new worlds were identified.

109 Edward W. Said, Culture & Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xiii.

110 Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. XIII.

111 Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 14.

112 Arne Melberg, Å reise og skrive. Et essay om moderne reiselitteratur, trans. T. Haugen (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag, 2005), p. 26. Postcolonial critic and geographer Richard Phillips also believes that literary texts should be viewed as maps which contribute to the shaping of our geographical imaginaries. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 45.

113 Melberg, Å reise og skrive, p. 27.

114 Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, p. 9. According to Harrison, the discipline of postcolonial studies has no conceptual founding fathers, and its career in academia is bound up chiefly with literary research. Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism, p. 9.

115 Stephen Slemon, “Post-Colonial Critical Theories,” in: Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 101.

116 Gregory Castle, “Editor’s Introduction: Resistance and Complicity in Postcolonial Studies,” in: Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. xiv.