Tales of the 'land of stories' settlers and anti-modernity in German colonial discourses on German South West Africa, 1884-1914

Abstract

No abstract provided. The following is taken from the author's Introduction:

Chapter II provides an overview of colonialism and imperialism among the Germanic states from the late feudal era, through the Germanic industrial revolution of the mid-19th century, unification in 1871, up to the colonial acquisitions in Africa in the mid-1880's. Chapter III provides some background to the institutional past of German colonial discourses by following the formation and effects of various pro-colonial voluntary associations on other social institutions such as the state and the academy. Nonetheless, even chapters as weighted in favour of contextual 'history' as these two introduce elements of textual discourse analysis, particularly in relation to colonial discourses. Conversely, other chapters emphasising textual 'history' must rely on contextual 'histories' on several levels, not the least of which is having a contextual 'history' available to inform a textual 'history' as the latter deconstructs it. The question of context, then, cannot be reduced to pure text, but context, in turn, cannot be reduced to the [emphasis] context without reverting to organicist hypostatisations and other determinisms (Bennett 1987, La Capra 1983)

Although any signification can be treated as 'text' in a deconstructive sense, this is not an indication that any meaning or option chosen is as 'good' as another, that no absolute access to the Real is a denial of access altogether (La Capra 1983, Young 1990). Of the many contextual 'histories' of South West Africa - Babing and Brauer (1981), Bley (1971), Goldblatt (1971), Mbuende (1983), Moleah (1986) to name just a few - it cannot be said that they are equivalent or that one is closer to 'historical' Truth than another. Preference for one analysis or weave of analyses over another is a negotiation of overlapping rhetorics, politics, ethics, and morals. Nor is this simply a war of words diverting us from more pressing issues since we need those very words to articulate the issues, and why and how these issues are pressing. Textuality is not a rejection of contextuality so much as a coming to terms with the "implications" that "in the final analysis all problems are linguistic problems" (Arendt 1968: 49); that 'historical' texts not only convey, but also constitute, the Real, past and present (Kramer 1989, Montrose 1989, Steedman 1992). Nearly half a century ago Hannah Arendt (1979 [1948]) chastised 'historians' who claimed access to theories that could fully explain entire trends or events as doing little more than evading responsibilities. The notion of 'history' as text is a metaphor without doubt, as is 'history' as class struggle or structure, but with the advantage of drawing attention to its narrative composition (White 1989)

Colonisers certainly can be, and are, differentiated through discourses of class, gender, and race, among others, in this and many other recent anthropological studies of colonialism, and also by colonisers themselves. Should these differentiations be sublated into a homogenous conception of 'history' we lose the sense of struggles for hegemony and dominance among, as well as between, class discourses, gender discourses, and race discourses. Throughout the modern period more than one class discourse, more than one gender discourse, and more than one race discourse has been available (to stay with the conceptual 'big three') for export to, and import from, colonies at any given time (Cooper and Stoler 1989). In that sense we should not be speaking of colonial discourse in the singular. In the modem German colonial context, the contest between pro-modern, forward-looking, liberal class discourses, and anti-modern, retrospective, physiocratic class discourses are addressed in parts of chapters II, IX, and XII

Similarly, the conflict between feudal-patriarchal and bourgeois-patriarchal gender discourses are given attention in chapters VI, IX, XI, and XII, and the struggle between reworked cultural conceptions of race from the ancien regime and modern biological formulations are pursued in chapters III, IV, VIII, IX, and XI. My contention is that these different discourses appeal to different discourses of 'history', but insofar as these different 'histories' share certain epistemological and ontological assumptions about how to represent the past they can be subsumed under a single discourse of 'history'. Moreover, indices of these similarities and differences are to be found within as well as between discourses

The colonial publications analysed in this study, and the discourses situating them, are considered more in a metonymic than metaphoric relation to the social totality. All this is to say that the meaning of 'history', and the 'history' of meaning are tightly interwoven; that no 'history' is ever identical with itself, for to do so would spell the end of 'history' in all its apocalyptic horror (Laclau and Mouffe 1990, Montrose 1989, Ryan 1982, Yates 1990, Young 1990). If the 'present' does not coincide with itself, if Here and Now need the 'time-lag' of There and Then to define and constitute themselves, then there is no simple introduction, but a labyrinth of ducts, a series of intro-ductions from which to choose from any given 'present' starting point. Let us begin, then, with an initial disaggregation of 'history' into History and (hi) story