That I refer to The New People and My Travel Diary as colonial literature results from my belief that relationships between Denmark and Greenland can be examined within the framework of postcolonial critical theory, at the same time asserting the distinctiveness of the history of the Arctic regions. Since every colonial and postcolonial conjuncture, as emphasised for example by Diana Byrdon and Helen Tiffin, is different,178 some critics decry the practice of explaining local conditions by means of imported theoretical models.179 For this reason, specific geographical, social and historical factors must be taken into account in every case.180 Danish postcolonial scholars who study the complex Danish-Greenlandic relationships in literature, notably Karen Langgård and Kirsten Thisted, argue that, if applied self-critically, postcolonial theories do not have to “absorb” local traditions. Rather, such theories can contribute to augmenting these traditions with a new dimension. As this idea is one of the cornerstones of my book, I analyse the representations of North Greenland by drawing on the canonical theoretical texts of postcolonial studies (Homi Bhabha, Edward W. Said and Johannes Fabian) and critical studies, in particular on analyses of colonial travel literature (Mary Louise Pratt, Syed Manzurul Islam, Peter Hulme, Lesley Wylie and Richard Phillips), but I also rely on the ←60 | 61→contributions which attend specifically to polar expedition accounts with their distinctive features (Kirsten Thisted, Silje Gaupseth, Silje Solheim Karlsen, Johan Schimanski, Ulrike Spring, Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, Hanna-Mari Ikonen and Samu Pehkonen).
My analyses below are powerfully informed by Brian Porter’s observation that travel writings markedly embody “the fundamental ambiguity of representation.”181 This ambiguity results from the fact that every representation, which is a construct in itself, inevitably contains a subject position which is neither stable nor ultimately given.182 This means that, as Bhabha insists, the subject is always split and it is impossible to trace back the subject’s source (just as it is impossible to find “an origin for the Other”).183 Therefore, the subject that speaks about reality is not just Said’s Orientalist, who is positioned “outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact” and as a “self-authorised ‘authority’ ” that represents the Other.184 Rather, as Pratt insists, as the traveller interacts with the local travelees, his/her travel narrative grows polyphonic, a quality Pratt calls “heteroglossia,” including the presence of the Other as well.185
These discordant positions vis-à-vis the Other are expressed in two modes of travelling and their related strategies of representations, which are investigated by literary researcher Syed Manzurul Islam. One of the modes involves demarcating a rigid boundary between the (European) subject and the (non-European) Other, which immobilises the former in the space it occupies. The other mode entails a genuine interaction with the Other, which affords the subject mobility and promotes either going beyond or completely eliminating the prior boundary. Islam calls these two models of travelling, respectively, sedentary travel and nomadic travel186 and associates them, accordingly, with imperialist ideology and with transcending it. In this book, I argue that it is possible for one subject to practice both these modes of travelling and to take the different positions they entail. This translates into the ambivalent construction of North Greenland in Rasmussen’s writings.
Emphasising the constructionist nature of literary representations, my argument focuses on what Swedish literary scholar Peter Stadius calls “travel ←61 | 62→depiction” [Swedish: skildring av en resa],187 that is, on the texts of Rasmussen’s accounts, on their exteriority in relation to the objects they depict,188 whereby I do not attempt to assess the fictionality or referentiality of his works. This also concerns the autobiographical “I,” which I construe to be not Knud Rasmussen himself but his self-staging persona,189 a kind of metonymic extension, which reverberates with Carl Thompson’s insight that travel literature is not only “a form of writing about the self” but also “a writing of the self.”190 The writer’s “self” is thus viewed as delimited by textuality and constructed through certain language discourses, while its existence hinges upon the system of representation in which it develops and through which it expresses itself.191 The system also includes the fashioning of the narrator, which is one of the most important strategies expedition accounts contrive to win popularity with the readership.192
The approach outlined above dovetails with the method of reading literature as a process which Bhabha postulates:
The “true” is always marked and informed by the ambivalence of the process of emergence itself, the productivity of meanings that construct counter-knowledges in medias res, in the very act of agonism, within the terms of a negotiation (rather than a negation) of oppositional and antagonistic elements.193
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The English researcher of postcolonial literature David Huddart argues that the critical reading proposed by Bhabha is as ambivalent as colonial discourse, which is the primary object of study of the postcolonial author.194 The position of a critic (also of a literary critic) always and inevitably involves being in medias res; consequently a critic must be prepared to work on a project without any ultimate guarantees, certainty or the sense that his/her object is fixed, which Huddart labels as “a lack of finality.”195 Given this, my reading of The New People and My Travel Diary lays no claim to discovering the complete meaning of the two works, since such a project would be a sheer impossibility. My aim in this book is different: I seek to demonstrate that the representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit in these texts are multifaceted and counterpoised despite but also by virtue of their entanglement in the Danish colonial project in the Arctic.
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There are those who say that a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests – words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks – another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life. (Joseph Conrad, “Karain: a Memory”)196
They travelled