174 According to Elleke Boehmer, colonial literature can generally be described as writing “reflecting a colonial ethos,” and more specifically as “writing concerned with colonial perceptions and experience, written mainly by metropolitans, but also by creoles and indigenes, during colonial times.” Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 2. With such a generalised and generalising definition, all literary production generated across the Danish state throughout the colonial period can be classified as colonial literature since it spread imperialism as the regular order of things. “Colonialist literature” is described by Boehmer as writing particularly involved in colonial expansion, “written by and for colonizing Europeans about non-European lands dominated by them. […] informed by theories concerning the superiority of European culture and the rightness of empire.” Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, p. 3.
175 Melberg, Å reise og skrive, p. 12.
176 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p. XI; Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, “Introduction,” in: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tom Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 6.
177 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, p. IX.
178 Brydon and Tiffin, Decolonising Fictions, p. 12. For example, Karen Langgård stresses that the colonial and postcolonial situation of Geenlanders differed from that of the inhabitants of other colonies as there was no colonial or colonialist literature that depicted the former as an embodiment of evil; neither did European settlers write literature about Greenland inspired by their sense of displacement. Karen Langgård, “An Examination of Greenlandic Awareness of Ethnicity and National Self-Consciousness through Texts Produced by Greenlanders 1860s–1920s,” Etudes Inuit Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1998), p. 99.
179 Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks, p. 5.
180 Castle, “Editor’s Introduction,” p. xiv. Greenblatt also emphasises that European practices of representation vary, despite their copious common features, and points to discrepancies between respective nations, religions, social classes and professions. Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, p. 8.
181 Porter, Haunted Journeys, p. 14.
182 Porter, Haunted Journeys, p. 13, footnote 17; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 88.
183 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 46.
184 Said, Orientalism, p. 21; Barnes and Duncan, “Introduction: Writing Worlds,” p. 9.
185 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 135–136.
186 Islam, The Ethics of Travel, p. vii.
187 Stadius, Reseberättelsen, p. 293.
188 Said, Orientalism, pp. 20–21.
189 The author’s self-staging is discussed by Swedish literary scholar Arne Melberg, who explains that the literary “self” can be constructed in a variety of ways, which fosters the fictionalisation of both the subject and the reality the subject presents. In her study of autobiographical literature, with which travel writing is affiliated, Leigh Gilmore states that at the centre of travel texts lies the only ostensibly “ ‘unifying’ I,” which is in fact intrinsically split by its locatedness in different discourses. Arne Melberg, Selvskrevet: Om selvframstilling i litteraturen (Oslo: Spartacus, 2007), pp. 9–12; Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory and Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 45.
190 Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 109.
191 Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 84. This approach does not mean that referentiality and fictionality are dichotomous and mutually exclusive; in fact, they affect each other. Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 84.
192 Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, p. 38. In her PhD dissertation, Karlsen explores in detail the fictionality of travel writing and “self-writing” practised by travel writers. See Karlsen, Triumf, lojalitet, avstand, pp. 27–38, 41–44.
193 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 22.
194 David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 18.
195 Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha, p. 19.
196 Joseph Conrad, “Karain: a Memory,” in: Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1898), p. 40.
197 Inge Kleivan, “Poetry, Politics, and Archeology in Greenland,” in: Fifty Years of Arctic Research Anthropological Studies from Greenland to Siberia, Vol. 18, eds. Rolf Gilberg and Hans Christian Gulløv (Copenhagen: Department of Ethnography, The National Museum of Denmark, 1997), p. 187.
III Encounters with the Cultural Other in the Land of the New People
1 The Literary Expedition to Greenland, 1902–1904
The New People is an account of the Literary Expedition to Greenland, which took place between 1902 and 1904. Among the travellers were the leader of the venture, writer and Politiken journalist Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen (1872–1907), lieutenant Harald Count Moltke (1871–1960) (draughtsman and painter), physician Alfred Berthelsen (1877–1950), Greenlandic catechist and translator Jørgen Brønlund (1877–1907) and twenty-two-year-old Knud Rasmussen, whose responsibilities involved putting down the tales told by the Inughuit. The expedition set off on 1st June 1902, when the travellers went by sea from Godthåb [Greenlandic: Nuuk] to Jakobshavn [Greenlandic: Ilulissat], stayed there till January 1903 and then moved on by dogsleds to Upernavik. On 27th March 1903, they departed from Tasiusaq, the northernmost settlement in Greenland’s colonised part, and crossed Melville Bay for the first time in centuries, reaching Cape York. Their chief aim was to conduct observations among the indigenous Inughuit population which lived in the region in isolation from Danish Greenland and had been spotted earlier by whalers and