Special Session

German / World Literatures and Comparative Studies

Verena Hutter (University of Portland)
vjhu@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel examines how Germans have claimed, imagined, and narrated the Pacific from the nineteenth century to the present. German engagements with the Pacific — from colonial administration in Samoa, New Guinea, and Micronesia to missionary encounters, ethnographic expeditions, settler migration along the Pacific coast, and contemporary literary reckonings — raise questions about imperial ambition, cultural fantasy, and the politics of memory. Situated on the Pacific Rim, Seattle offers a fitting location to consider the Pacific not merely as a site of German colonial rule but as a broader imaginative and material space shaped by transpacific networks of power, migration, and exchange.

This panel examines how Germans have claimed, imagined, and narrated the Pacific from the nineteenth century to the present. From the colonial administration of Samoa, New Guinea, and Micronesia to missionary encounters, ethnographic expeditions, settler migration along the Pacific coast, and contemporary literary reckonings with colonial pasts, German engagements with the Pacific raise questions about imperial ambition, cultural fantasy, and the politics of memory.

Situated on the Pacific Rim, Seattle offers a fitting location to consider the Pacific not merely as a site of German colonial rule but as a broader imaginative and material space shaped by transpacific networks of power, migration, and exchange. Papers might address, but are not limited to: German colonial literature and administrative discourse; missionary writing and its cultural afterlives; the "Südsee" as fantasy and commodity; ethnographic collection and repatriation debates; German settler histories on the Pacific coast(s); contemporary literature, film, or art engaging German-Pacific entanglements; or Pacific Islander responses to German colonial legacies.