Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the German Settlement of Lake Llanquihue

No rigorous critical analysis has been undertaken on the emergence of the German settlements in Chile. The historiography of the German settlements in Southern Chile has converged on a father figure and a founding moment: on August 18, 1842, Bernhard Eunom Philippi (1811-1852) submitted to Ramón Luis Irarrázabal, minister of the interior of the Republic of Chile-through the intendant of Valdivia, Colonel José Ignacio García-a first plan for settling the interior of the province of Valdivia with German immigrants. The settlement came to pass in 1852 and eventually prospered, having survived an initial period of starvation and administrative difficulties. To this day, the area's German heritage is preserved in its cultural institutions and significant bilingualism. In this book, the author has adopted a New Historicist stance in selecting the primary materials for this study. The approach has resulted in the inclusion of an eclectic array of genres, disciplines, and formats, among them private and public texts, published and unpublished materials, scientific and nonscientific jargons, representative and nonrepresentative documents, and fiction and nonfiction. Among the documents the book discusses are emigration pamphlets, letters, journals, travelogues, maps, monographs, field notes, reports, presentations, and biological classifications. In labeling textual categories, customary disciplinary boundaries strive to delimit, contain, and explain the scope and meaning of the discourses deployed in each. Having chosen to consider a host of colonial inscriptions with regard to their fields of operation, the author has found those determining limits to be obstructionist rather than productive. Rather, the author concentrates on the imaginary construction of textual boundaries and their permeabilities: the constitutive relationships between the narrative and the dramatic, for example, the fictive and the scientific, and the descriptive and the graphic. This approach has allowed the author to recover the marginal, to reflect on contextualization, and to foreground the incoherent and fragmentary, and in doing so to blur the line between symbolic and material action, writing and colonization, and the copy and the original. What remains, then, is the practice of texts on minds and bodies. This is an important book for collections in anthropology, history, as well as ethnic and immigrant studies.