German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492-1942

Patricia Anne Simpson, "German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492-1942 "
English | ISBN: 0472057375 | 2025 | 352 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492-1942 investigates the ways German-speaking Europe's cultural narratives reflect histories of entanglement with the colonial world. Drawing from an impressive range of sources, Patricia Anne Simpson decodes the ironclad colonial logic that reproduces and inflects tropes of the conquistador, scientific explorer, and pioneers. She brings them into dialogue with a cast of historical agents who reimagine the cannibal, the enslaved, the conquered, Indigenous interlocutors, and the ungovernable. Throughout, intersectional attributes of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion reconfigure around shades of European whiteness. Individual chapters explore the Hohenzollern legacy in early modernity; debates about sovereignty and enslavement; recruitment literature, prose and fiction about migration and colonization in Africa and the Americas; and colonial memoirs driven by recolonial fantasies after 1918.