Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 3/2023

Is it possible to colonize ›time‹, which, unlike territories or people, is not immediately visible and abstract? The article addresses this question in the context of the German-speaking 18th century and through Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s engagement with antiquity. To do so, it first draws on theories from Global Epistemologies by Philippe Descola (on the nature-culture divide) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (especially the ›epistemicide‹) toestablish a theoretical framework for speaking about a ›colonization of the past‹. The article then examines Winckelmann’s construction of a colonial antiquity in his letters and in the History of Art in Antiquity. The rhetoric and metaphors of the letters reveal the idea of an antiquity that can be colonized and that is designed as an ›untouched field‹ or capturable territory. Similarly, in the History of Art, this corresponds to the structuring of the past and the construction of history through epistemicides, which expel the ›other‹ from the colonial space of antiquity.

This essay focusses on Kenah Cusanit’s novel Babel, in which archaeology is both the subject of the plot and made visible asa practice of colonizing the (foreign) past. Cusanit’s writing explores the historical circumstances and forces at the height of European colonialism around 1900, when European archaeology set out to excavate the origins of civilization. Cusanit’s literary project is meta-archaeological: it applies Michel Foucault’s ›archaeological‹ method and metaphor to the research practice of archaeology itself. The essay shows how Cusanit transforms Foucault’s approach – to examine certain historical discourse formations – into a poetics for her archaeological novel. As the ground of archaeological certainty erodes, both scientific theories and colonial narratives are undermined. What remains are not ›objective‹ time-transcending, but radically historical formations of a past that cannot easily be colonized in one’s own interests.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) and H.P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness (1931) imagine the discovery of supposedly extinct or entirely unknown life forms from distant periods of earth history that survived in geographically isolated places: the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica. Drawing on discussions of the notion of weird fiction, I emphasize the ambivalent role of these remnants of the geological past. While both texts transfer the colonial appropriation of isolated spaces onto a temporal axis of earth history, the reappearance of the past unsettles the identity of the Western expeditions. In The Lost World, the juxtaposition of different temporalities irritates the idea of a teleological natural history heading towards Western civilisation. At the Mountains of Madness intensifies this confusion of roles and timescales when the expedition from New England loses its privileged and distanced position towards the past and becomes the object of colonial appropriation.

Analyzing two sources – L’Île de Pâques [Easter Island, 1899] by Pierre Loti and Iskusstvo Ostrova Paskhi [The Art of Easter Island, 1914] by Vladimir Markov – the following article shows how the island Rapa Nui is depicted as a relic of past epochs of a geological deep time. The material culture of the island, and especially the so-called moai, occupy a central role in these depictions. In Loti’s text, they represent the material remnants of a megalithic stage of the early history of humankind. Whereas Loti essentially argues for the great age of the moai through the geographical and cultural-historical context of Rapa Nui, Markov instead bases this claim exclusively on the inherent characteristics of the moai, such as their material and their form. The article will show that the evolving aesthetics of deep time conceived by Markov is grounded in the classification schemes of the ethnographic collections in which Markov encountered these objects.

Who were the original inhabitants of Europe? And how did they relate to contemporary populations on the continent? Such questions immensely fascinated contemporaries during the 19th century. This article argues that the ensuing search for the indigenous peoples of Europe was closely intertwined with colonial discourses and practices. By the 1830s, the ›ethnic interpretation‹ of the results of comparative philology suggested that multiple waves of immigration had replaced indigenous Europeans with ever more advanced peoples. This ›migrationism‹ and an ethnically stratified image of prehistory that had emerged by the 1880s had profound political implications for both intra-European ethnic relations and colonial interactions: Narratives derived from the European past that understood cultural and physical change as the result of clashes between different ›races‹ helped legitimize colonial expansion, painting the conquest, displacement, and annihilation of colonized peoples as a mere continuation of timeless mechanisms of humanity’s cultural and physical evolution.

Since the biblical view of the world and of history lost its role as the (sole) authority on answering the ›ultimate questions‹ in the 19th century, the answers have been sought ›at the beginning of history‹. Prehistory represents this ›beginning‹. Its enormous chronological depth of approx. 2.8 million years is ignored and compressed into a quasi-timeless ›primordial and natural state‹. This serves as a projection surface for a ›social primordial time‹ born from our imagination, which we refer back to, by way of a circular argument, as a point of orientation, legitimation and self-assurance. This presentation of an imagined ›social primordial time‹ and the associated nostrification of the prehistoric people can be viewed as a colonialist practice. The appropriation of the past for actualistic needs is a ›project run by society as a whole‹ which is supported and contributed to by various academic disciplines.