Mapping Ultima Thule : Representations of North Greenland in the Expedition Accounts of Knud Rasmussen (Studien zur Germanistik, Skandinavistik und Übersetzungskultur 21) (2020. 284 S. 210 mm)

The book demonstrates the ambiguity in representing North Greenland and the Inughuit in Knud Rasmussen's expedition accounts: The New People and My Travel Diary . The reading of both works is founded on postcolonial critical theory including colonial discourse analysis and Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence.
The book addresses the relationship between the literary representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit people in Knud Rasmussen's expedition accounts The New People and My Travel Diary and the historical process of Danish colonization of North Greenland. The aim of reading both works is to demonstrate the ambivalence in representing North Greenland and the Inughuit, and, through this, to prove the existence of common mechanisms and cultural practices connected to mapping of the Other in a situation of asymmetric power relations. Applying a textual approach founded on colonial discourse analysis, the reading proves that literary mappings of geography and identity can never be stable, as they are in the state of constant transformation, perpetually recontextualized and reinvented.
Greenland and Greenlanders in Danish discourse - Knud Rasmussen - Postcolonial studies - Colonial discourse and representation analysis - The split subject and ambivalence - Colonialism and the discourse of polar expeditions - Encounters with the cultural Other - Encounters with the Telluric Other

Agata Lubowicka is a lecturer in Danish Literature and Scandinavian Culture at the University of Gdansk, Poland, and the author of numerous publications on the cultural significance of past and present narratives of Scandinavian polar exploration.