Re:possession. Settling and selling mountains in postcolonial literature.

International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, University of Giessen, Germany My project wants to examine a range of postcolonial fiction and mountain literature, with a view to understanding how they engage with the discourse of tourism as it pertains to mountain people and places. I plan to uncover what happens to mountain culture and landscape under the pressure of tourism and explore how literature engages with the discourse of tourism, as it applies to and transforms mountain places. I will hereby study the dynamics at stake in the commodification and commercialisation of mountains, the independence of these dynamics from national and geographical topoi and the role literature plays in taking possession of mountain places by triggering tourist flows on the one hand and claiming repossession by criticising the use and abuse of the mountain on the other. My thesis cares to investigate a body of contemporary texts for their representation of mountain tourism. Some of the fictional texts with which this study engages are Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1995), Angie Abdou’s The Canterbury Trail (2011), Elfriede Jelinek’s In den Alpen (2002) and Felix Mitterer’s Die Piefke Saga (1991). In my methodology I draw from three separate disciplinary archives; two of them are considerably well-developed and indeed advanced, one of them is only just taking shape. My emphasis on the conceptual emptying of and orientalising projections on mountainous landscapes, the Othering of mountains and mountain people, the silencing of native histories and the discourse on home and identity signals my primary departure from postcolonial theory. Drawing from existing scholarship on postcolonial landscapes as being shaped by a history of hegemonies, I extend and adapt this discourse to regions not originally included in debate: landscapes of cold climates, high altitudes and intra-European regions. This is in the first place to show that through an investigation of mountains the geographical binarism of north and south and east and west clearly predominant in postcolonial studies can be resolved and its discourse can be relocated from its favoured object the hot and peripheral spaces. I hereby wish to contribute to recent developments of making postcolonial critique applicable also to new geographies and literatures – even such located outside what is conventionally perceived as postcolonial terrain. By including study samples of Austrian literature I plan to show that commercial acts taking place within Europe also lend themselves to an interpretation as intrinsically colonial interventions. I am putting this against the discipline of tourism studies, which is concerned with the tropes of identity and exoticisation, representation and commodification, mass tourism and ecofriendly travelling. Holiday destinations are frequently produced for external consumption in such a way as to meet the visitors’ preconceived notions of a place and its people. This is not unlike the routine construction of colonies whose settlement depended strongly on their promotion as exotic and sublime places. It is striking that mountains have largely been ignored in both tourism and postcolonial studies. Therefore, in a third instance, I draw from the emerging field of interdisciplinary mountain studies which understands mountains as landscapes material and concrete on the one hand and immaterial and conceptual on the other. In contributing to this novel interdisciplinary approach, this project aims to uncover what is at stake in the representation of mountains and mountain tourism in literature and wants to examine how mountain knowledges can repossess and transform the mountain as an iconic image, and mountains themselves as landscapes both natural and inhabited, real and imagined.