Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

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СКАЧАТЬ comparison between Tahitians and Poles when writing about a trip he made in 1784 to Vilnius, where he was offered a position at the University of Vilnius. In his memoirs he lamented that he went to encounter not the “soft” people from Otaheitie (Tahiti), but the “hardheaded” and “stupid” Poles.²⁰ The moment he reached Cracow, he complained about the “dirtiness,” the “swinishness,” and the swarming of Jews and “Polacks” (Polacken) everywhere.²¹ He considered his trip to Vilnius a punishment after the travel he had once made around the world. Rather than opening himself to a new set of cultural experiences, he described his appointment in the commonwealth as a cultural exile. He likened youth, beauty, and joy with his stay in Tahiti and attached images of total decay and backwardness to his trip through the Polish-Lithuanian lands. He also had great difficulty learning Polish, which in a letter to his fiancée, Therese Heyne, he described as a hard, “barbaric” language because of the multiple consonants it employed.²² He immediately followed this anti-Polish statement with the remark that Tahitian language had few consonants. Moreover, he sometimes referred to Polish peasants as the “Polish Pecherais” (polnische Pescherähs).²³ In his expedition to the Pacific, the Pecherais of Tierra del Fuego were the “most wretched beings” that Forster had encountered. They were the indigenous people of an archipelago in South America who, according to the explorer, could never be uplifted and become like Europeans. While Forster’s views on the Polynesian peoples inspired anticolonial and utopian sentiment regarding this part of the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, his opinions about Poles served to validate the partitions and infuse German colonial feelings about the Polish lands.²⁴

      The main difference between Forster and other intellectuals regarding debates about race in the Enlightenment period was that, by traveling around the world and becoming a recognized scientist, he could claim the expertise others in Germany lacked in the art of classifying peoples.²⁵ In addition to this, he was born in a Polish territory, where he spent most of his childhood before he moved to England in 1766. After returning from his voyage around the world he became a professor of natural history in Kassel, from 1778 to 1784, and then in Vilnius from 1784 to 1787. The Polish Commission on National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), created in 1773, offered him an academic appointment for eight years to help reform the university and lead the plans to establish a botanical garden, a library, and a natural history collection (Naturalienkabinet).²⁶ Forster contemplated the idea of staying in Vilnius for sixteen years, but left after only three years.

      In his famous essay, “Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen” (“Something More about the Human Races”), published in 1786, Forster criticized Immanuel Kant’s philosophical views of racial unity in favor of the plurality of races.²⁷ The scientific explorer believed that climatic conditions were the most important factor determining a person’s race. He claimed that he had seen how black babies shared almost the same color as European babies at birth and then due to atmospheric effects on the skin acquired the skin color of the parents.²⁸ The relationship he posed between race and climate was so strong that he considered a black person born in Europe to be a modified creature, lighter in color and different from what he would become in the native land. He observed that even if the unity of mankind were proven to be true, and black men were shown to be “our brothers,” the system of slavery would never disappear as long as “the cruelty of white people made them act despotically over their white fellows.”²⁹ Although the essay did not directly engage Polish subjectivity, his experiences in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth helped him understand that human oppression went beyond racial difference and skin color.³⁰ Moreover, the images he used in other texts against serfdom in the Polish lands were similar to those he employed when criticizing slavery. He defined both systems as the power of white men ruling despotically over their weaker fellows. For people reading Forster’s essay on the plurality of human races, it was easy to see the parallels between blacks in colonial settings and Poles in central eastern Europe.

      Despite their intellectual differences, Kant’s opinion of Poles was no more favorable than Forster’s. For the German philosopher, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a land of lords in which “every citizen wants to be a lord but none of these lords, except him who is not a citizen, wants to be a subject.”³¹ This lack of Polish identification with bourgeois values made Kant dismiss Poles from his description of (West) European nations in his anthropological lectures, which he gave annually from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. In his depiction of civilized nations, he excluded Poland, Russia, and Turkey, claiming that “since Russia has not yet developed what is necessary for a definite concept of natural predispositions which lie ready in it [national character]; since Poland is no longer at this stage; and since the nationals of European Turkey never have attained and never will attain what is necessary for the acquisition of a definite national character, the sketch of them may rightly be passed over here.”³² Poland’s political decline rendered it closer to other “backward” territories in the east. While Kant placed Russians and Turks outside of Europe due to their Asiatic ancestry and despotic governments, his omission of Poles from the civilized world ended up portraying them as fallen Europeans.

      On the other hand, Kant described Germans as having a good character and a reputation for honesty and domesticity. Of all the “civilized” peoples, they were the ones who could coexist peacefully with other peoples, without challenging the established order. In his view, a German was “a man of all countries and climates; he emigrates easily and is not passionately bound to his fatherland. But when he goes to a foreign country as a colonist, he soon contracts with his compatriots a kind of civil union that, by unity of language and, in part, also religion, settles him as part of a little clan, which under the higher authority distinguishes itself in a peaceful, moral condition, through industry, cleanliness, and thrift, from settlements of all other peoples.”³³ In other words, Germans were a group of industrious colonists who could adapt easily to any environment. The capacity of traveling and interacting with other cultures as “citizens of the world” was, according to Kant, the condition that favorably separated Germans, British, and French from other Europeans. In fact, the very same category of “European” came to be identified in his lectures with the ability to travel in order to learn about people and their national character.³⁴ For the philosopher, Europeans were the only ones interested in exploring and obtaining knowledge from other cultures.

      Kant believed that people did not need to leave their place of residence in order to pursue the knowledge of others. They could do it at home by reading the travel literature produced by others and by turning their gaze to local townspeople. With this proposal, Kant was validating himself as world citizen, given that he never went abroad to study populations. Unlike Forster, he was not a traveler, but he was an avid consumer of travel accounts. Moreover, Königsberg was located in a privileged geographical location that could bring the world to Kant.

      A large city such as a Königsberg on the river Pregel, which is the center of a kingdom, in which the provincial councils of the government are located, which has a university (for cultivation of the sciences) and which has also the right location for maritime commerce—a city which, by way of rivers, has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighboring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without even traveling.³⁵

      Thus, notions about German identity and citizenship were being associated in Kant’s works with the capacity of knowing the world through exploring other territories or the formation of cosmopolitan, multiethnic enclaves where the individual could experience different types of cultural interactions. Following this point of view, the Polish partitions could be justified in the sense that they brought different peoples under German oversight. Moreover, Germans, as “good colonists,” could bring into the Polish territories the bourgeois values of order and cosmopolitanism that Poles seemed to lack.³⁶

      Kant did not believe in the racial differentiation of whites but divided СКАЧАТЬ