The Colonial Gaze and its Critics in Nineteenth-Century German Realism

The Colonial Gaze and its Critics in Nineteenth-Century German Realism

Speaker: Dirk Göttsche, Nottingham

Since American German Studies adapted postcolonial theory in the late 1990s (Lützeler, Berman, Lennox, Zantop), the postcolonial re-reading of C19 German literature has become a particularly productive field of postcolonial literary studies, often premised on Edward Said’s concept of ‘contrapuntal reading’ (see Dunker 2008; Göttsche et al. 2009, 2013, 2017). Initial debate about the ‘colonial fantasies’ (Zantop 1997) linking German literature to wider European colonial discourse and the potentially conflicting, often emphatically cross-cultural interest in German literary engagement with the overseas (Berman 1998) prepared the ground for a more differentiated reassessment of the different strands of colonial and anti-colonial discourse in German culture and literature of the long 19th century. This rereading has shed significant new light on the literature of C19 German Realism, leading to reassessments of canonical works as well as the rediscovery of forgotten sources.