Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870

Students of post-colonialism and German colonialism as well as scholars interested in the formation of German identities will find much of value in this stimulating book, which illustrates the burgeoning interest, evident in a wide range of work across a variety of disciplines, in German colonialism.Considered as a whole, recent work on the German colonial experience demonstrates that the pendulum of scholarly interest has swung away from the more traditional approaches that sought to reveal the ideological, political, and economic roots of colonialism and towards those which seek to illuminate its cultural component.In this case, Susanne Zantap uncovers and analyzes colonial fantasies that "provided Germans an arena for creating an imaginary community and constructing a national identity in opposition to the perceived racial, sexual, ethnic, or national characteristics of others" (p. 7).Edward Said has made the case for excavating the cultural roots of European imperialism in the modern era.His concern has been to show how the processes of imperialism were manifested by the authority of recognizable cultural formations (education, literature, and the visual and