Latin America as European Utopia. Communities and Unstable Orders

• Applicant: Dr. Linda Maeding
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404354183

The project deals with alternative communities based on the topos "Latin America" in German texts of the 19th and 20th century. These texts reoccupy the subcontinent in an imaginary way in the context of European experiences of crisis. So far, reconstructions of the Western discourse on Latin America focused on the representation of alterity, the idea „Europe“ being formed in contrast to America since the Conquest. However, it is still to be analyzed in what way constructions of Latin America are not only counterpoints but also spaces which contain the outlines of an imaginary other Europe, or rather Utopias of alternative communities. Throughout history, a specific sensibility for the relation between colonialism and the European present can be detected in authors excluded from their national communities. Their representations of the other often conceal fantasies of political (dis-)order. Shortly after the Conquest, America already became a target for European projections and, as investigation has shown, also for specifically German fantasies and representations. Moreover, the subcontinent emerged as a place of outlaws and refugees of any kind, while Latin American intellectuals converted it more and more into a space of cultural and social alternatives.In view of the significance of America as imagined place, discursive nodes should be identified in a number of exemplary texts, where "Old" and "New" World break through established attributions of colonizers and colonized and bear new concepts of community and co-existence. The analysis of fictional and non-fictional texts links to postcolonial theories, which are based on the assumption of mutual intertwinings in the process of cultural appropriation, even though these might go against perpetuated colonial discourses. America is not only subject of the European imaginary, but also an agent in its formation. The selected texts are to be analyzed within the scope of a diachronic process as well as in their respective discursive context to determine the horizon of historical imagination beyond the nation: While Heinrich Heine puts to the test an enlightened concept of History through the inversion of Old and New World, B. Traven inscribes the condition of the Western stateless into the image of the indigenous and Stefan Zweig defines hybrid Brazilian society as "land of the future". Alfred Döblin experiments with an Utopian form of colonialism in the metaphor of the Indian Canaan, and Vilém Flusser relates the transition from exile to migration in Brazil as a conscious self-situating in homelessness. In analyzing prose, essays and poems written by the mentioned authors, transnational approaches in German Philology will be further developed and the category of the imagined community, until now widely focused on the idea of the nation, will be explored in view of its productivity for Literary Studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants