Chapter 2 discusses ways of constructing North Greenland and the Inughuit people by means of the entrenched colonial tropes of idealisation, essentialisation, binary oppositions and exoticisation in Knud Rasmussen’s pioneering account entitled The New People (Nye Mennesker, 1905). The tropes are confronted with the narrative sites of resistance to the dominant representations, which are a testimony to the discursive heteroglossia inherent in Rasmussen’s narrative. Chapter 3 shows the ambivalence of the representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit people in Rasmussen’s My Travel Diary (Min Rejsedagbog, 1915). My argument proceeds in two main stages, each of which focuses on how the representations of North Greenland’s nature and the Inughuit companions of the Danes, Uvdloriaq and Inukitsoq, are linked to constructing the masculinity of heroic polar explorers. The first part examines the practices of constructing the masculinity of polar explorers on the basis of hierarchised and gender-marked binaries, such as safety vs. danger, home vs. away, passivity vs. activity and nature vs. culture. The second part investigates the construction of the masculinity of polar explorers in relation to North Greenland’s nature, which is feminised as an effect of practices labelled as “scientific and aesthetic masculinity.” My reading of Rasmussen’s work proves, however, that it also contains meanings that oppose the colonial masculinist ideology, which results in an ambivalent construction of North Greenland and the Inughuit.
In my concluding Chapter 4, I point out discursive shifts in the image of the North-Greenlandic telluric and cultural Other which took place between 1905 and 1915, i.e. when Rasmussen morphed from a rank-and-file member of an Arctic expedition into one of the major actors, who in the long run contributed to Denmark’s sovereignty over the entire territory of Greenland.
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5.1 Cultural and telluric Other
The distinction between the “cultural” and “telluric” Other as related to North Greenland builds on the notions of “cultural Otherness” and “telluric Otherness” proposed by British literary scholar Lesley Wylie. In her PhD dissertation on colonial and postcolonial tropes in the Spanish American genre of novela de la selva, Wylie uses the two terms to examine descriptions of the tropical regions of South America and their inhabitants. Following her division, I understand the cultural Other as a general term that designates the Inughuit community and their culture as discursivised in the narratives I examine, whereas the telluric Other as referring to the totality of North Greenland with its animate and inanimate nature. A parallel differentiation between the “cultural” Other and the “biological” Other in conjunction with the representations of the Arctic and its inhabitants in Rasmussen’s Fra Grønland til Stillehavet is also employed by Norwegian literary scholar Fredrik Chr. Brøgger, who draws on the views and insights of another Norwegian literature researcher, Johan Schimanski.87
5.2 Inuit, Inughuit, Eskimos and Greenlanders
To refer to the population inhabiting Greenland, I use traditional Greenlandic names which are based on the identification of a community with the region in which it lives.88 When I write about the inhabitants of Greenland in general, I employ the commonly accepted term “Greenlanders,” which is a direct translation of the Greenlandic word kalaallit.89 I mainly apply it to describe the inhabitants of the part of the island which Denmark started to colonise and gradually subordinate in 1721, that is, the area between Upernavik in the north and Cape Farewell in the south. I refer to the community inhabiting the northern part of the island and usually called “Polar Eskimos” by Europeans90 as “Inughuit” ←41 | 42→(sing. “Inughuaq”).91 It is their representations in Rasmussen’s travel writings that I explore in this book. The term “Inuit” (sing. “Inuk”), meaning “people,” is used here in relation to all the communities of the Thule culture, which were formerly labelled “Eskimos,” a name that came to be regarded as pejorative in the wake of the anti-imperialist movements of the 1970s.92 Therefore, in my book the word “Eskimo(s)” appears only in quotations from the texts I analyse.
By representations of North Greenland, I mean representations of the vast area that stretches north of the line between Upernavik on the west coast of Greenland and the Land of Erik the Red at the island’s east coast, a territory whose charting was completed only in the 1930s. This is a huge expanse which was variously defined throughout history93 and is highly differentiated itself.94 Approaching North Greenland as a whole, I do not seek to homogenise these differences; rather, I identify a discursive field that embodies a Foucauldian heterotopia, combining a variety of often incongruent discourses.
5.4 The spelling of local names and words in the Greenlandic language
In my historical-literary and theoretical argument, I spell Greenlandic toponyms following modern Greenlandic spelling rules. In analytical passages, I rely on the ←42 | 43→spelling that Knud Rasmussen used in the first editions of the writings I address. For example, when referring to a North-Greenland island where the participants of the Literary Expedition camped, I write “Agpat,” which is consistent with the spelling of the name in the first edition of Nye Mennesker of 1905. In quotations from the English editions of reports by polar explorers from Scandinavia, I retain the Greenlandic spelling employed in the original editions, and when providing bracketed Danish and Norwegian vocabulary and expressions, I use their original spelling.
My Polish book entitled W sercu Ultima Thule. Reprezentacje Grenlandii Północnej w relacjach z ekspedycji Knuda Rasmussena, which grew out of the PhD project I completed in 2014 and was published in 2017, was based on my study of Knud Rasmussen’s books which appeared in Danish. In this version, I use quotations from English editions of texts by Rasmussen and also by Fridtjof Nansen and Eivind Astrup. Since Rasmussen’s Min Rejsedagbog (My Travel Diary) has not been translated into English yet, quotations from this book and from the chapter “Efter Vildren” in Nye Mennesker were translated from Danish by Professor Jørgen Veisland, based on the first editions of the two works.
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2 The passage was translated