My fundamental objective in this book is to analyse the literary construction of North Greenland and the Inughuit in Knud Rasmussen’s first two expedition accounts: The New People and My Travel Diary. This is supposed to help me explore the complicated network of relationships between these literary texts and the historical process of the Danish colonization of North Greenland. My analysis starts from an a priori assumption that travel writing is intrinsically ambivalent due to the inevitable positionality and contextuality of the literary subject. Consequently, in my argument I will follow two parallel paths. Specifically, I will focus on the relationships between colonial discourse and the representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit in Rasmussen’s narratives; and, at the same time, I will explore how these very narratives articulate an opposition to the dominant representations. It is only through constantly “being at the frontiers,” through “analyzing and reflecting upon limits” that we stand a chance of moving “beyond the outside-inside alternative,” which Michel Foucault’s “philosophical ethos” calls for.85 The ultimate goal of my reflection on popular polar literature of the early 20th century is thus to conduct a “historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment into the possibility of going beyond them” in order to demonstrate that there indeed are common mechanisms and cultural practices which transcend the colonial moment I am analysing.86
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Before exploring Rasmussen’s texts, I briefly address Postcolonial Studies in a separate, likewise entitled chapter, in which I attend first of all to the links between travel narratives and colonial ideologies. Further, I discuss the tools provided by postcolonial theory that promote postcolonial re-readings of the Western ways of “mapping” the Other. One such tool is the colonial discourse analysis developed by Edward W. Said, with its key notions of “representation” and “colonial tropes.” The Saidian discourse analysis is augmented by Homi Bhabha’s nuancing framework of the split subject, which produces possibilities for resistance to oppressive representation practices in every colonial text. Bhabha’s theories and the idea of ambivalence inherent in the representations of the Other provide the basis for my analytical approach later in this book.
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.
