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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 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404354183
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The project focused on German-language utopias of Latin America of the 19th and 20th centuries, which intertwined the “Old” and the “New” World in response to European experiences of crisis. The focus was on the construction of extraterritorial communities, which can now be read as an integral part of a transcultural history of utopia that still represents a research desideratum. In the context of economically and politically induced emigration, repression and censorship during the Vormärz period and the reception of Latin American emancipation efforts in the 19th century, as well as later with the anti-fascist and Jewish exile after 1933, the project compiled and dealt with utopian counter-designs to the social realities in German-speaking countries. It suggested a shift in focus from representations of alterity to configurations of another Europe which mapped out and relate to ‘Latin America’ as an imaginary topos or as a historical site of enunciation. Given its grounding in German Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, the project concentrated on the perspectives of German-language writers, but also took into account Hispanic discourses and con-texts in order to anaylse the entangled history of utopian constructions. A central concern of the project was to analyse the (post-)colonial dimension inscribed in the texts of European writers: It showed how utopian writing helped to create, reflect or even deconstruct the colonial discourse. Although all of the texts analysed, that deal with ‘Latin America’ through utopian set pieces, participate in the colonial discourse in one way or another, the connection between utopia and colonialism had hardly been investigated before in German-speaking countries. However, since the genre’s genesis coincides with the time of the ‘discovery’ of America, this proximity was used as an opportunity to examine the link between utopia and colonialism as it crystallized in ‘Latin America’ and beyond: Fundamental insights were brought together in a Bremen conference organised in October 2022, the results of which were published in 2024. A further line of research emerged from the observation that most of the authors studied were temporarily excluded from the nation or marginalised by the nation - the corpus included Heinrich Heine, B. Traven, Alfred Döblin, Hilde Domin, Anna Seghers and Vilém Flusser, alongside Spanish authors with a transnational background (Max Aub, Máximo José Kahn). The final phase of the project therefore focused on the utopian positions of Jewish diasporic actors between Europe and Latin America, to which the second conference was dedicated in Berlin in January 2024 (publication forthcoming). Overall, the project thus provided insights into literary constructions of Latin America, that signify drafts of a geographically displaced, imaginary other Europe and raise questions of transcultural conviviality. In methodological terms, hermeneutic, discourse-analytical procedures and postcolonial approaches were used to uncover the global dimension of utopian writing and, by demonstrating its interconnectedness, to open up transatlantic points of contact for German Studies.

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