Colonised Citizens

Colonized Citizens is a subproject in the research programme Literary Knowledge (1890-1950): Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe. The project focuses on colonial literature in Belgium and Germany, both ‘late participants’ in the European colonial endeavour. These countries' expansion of national sovereignty to overseas territories was permeated by the many life-management discourses that drew on the insights of genetics and eugenics. It comes as no surprise that these discourses were laced with racism. However, the focus of this project is on the way in which dominant theories of man, building on genetics and eugenics and ranging from social Darwinism to Neo-Malthusianism, also influenced the construction of the colonial subject. In other words, how did the literary stagings of the African ‘other’ and the projection of population theories contribute to the debate on nationhood and citizenship related to other, non-European, peoples? In order to flesh out this debate, the project draws on novels and travel stories of writers along the entire literary, intellectual and political spectrum in Germany and Belgium, including, among others, Hans Grimm, Frieda von Bülow, Karl May, Norbert Jacques, Gustav Frenssen, Léopold Courouble, Joseph-Marie Jadot, Henri Kerels, Gaston-Denis Périer and Edmond Picard. In so doing, this project addresses a corpus of German and Belgian literary texts that has not been investigated systematically or comparatively from a postcolonial perspective.