Colonial Projects and the Creation of National Identity: Friedrich Gerstäcker’s Representations Of Germans in Brazil
von Muench, Sophie A.
2022
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This paper explores national identity creation in Brazil and Germany in the 19th century through the lens of German immigration to Brazil. The works of Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816-1872), particularly his essays on Brazil in Die Gartenlaube and his three-volume novel Die Colonie. Brasilianisches Lebensbild (The Colony. Portrait of Brazilian Life, 1864.) will ground this analysis. Friedrich Gerstäcker ... read morewas a German travel writer whose main focus and interest lay in describing and encouraging German settlement throughout the world – particularly in North and South America, as well as Australia. He was preoccupied with questions of German identity and emigration from his homeland. His writing displays the colonial fantasies circulating throughout Germany before the establishment of official German colonies abroad, the imperialism explicit in German liberalism and the creation of a unified German state, and the importance of German emigrants in constructing German national identity in the 19th century. His fiction and essays reached a large popular audience in Germany, and contain nuance and duality that often takes a critical view on colonialism and settlement while simultaneously strengthening many of its fundamental assumptions. Gerstäcker’s designation of Southern Brazil as the ideal place for German settlements also reflects Brazilian state policies and colonial projects centered on the occupation of land, on labor, and on shaping the population based on race. This paper examines how German immigration to Brazil is indicative of active political projects aiming to create specific visions of national belonging in both Germany and Brazil.
Thesis (B.A.)--Tufts University, 2022.
Submitted to the Dept. of History.
Advisor: Virginia Drachman.
Committee: Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe and Alisha Rankin.read less - ID:
- rb68xs929
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