Breaking or Remaking Colonial Stereotypes? Female Figures in Contemporary Germanophone Literature: Urs Widmer, Alex Capus and Lukas Bärfuss

In the last 20 years, germanophone literature has displayed an increasing postcolonial sensibility regarding the representation of European colonial past and the literary creation of the colonized Other as well as the general representation of cultural foreigness. Contemporary germanophone literature is, it seems, more and more interested in breaking and productively dealing with colonial stereotypes such as the figure of the natural, barbaric, irrational, passive colonized Other as opposed to the one of the civilized and civilizing, rational, active and colonizing European. Binary categories between the Other and the Self are increasingly challenged and replaced by more balanced representations of cultural and intracultural diversities and hybridities. Irony, figures of inversion and polyphony take an important part in this postcolonial remapping of European colonial entanglement. At the same time postcolonial germanophone literature displays a growing preoccupation with the question of how to represent voices of the Other and how to insert other perspectives into the texts; with all the problems of legitimization that come along with it.
Nevertheless it seems as if all this postcolonial sensibility fails utterly when it comes to the representation of European and non-European women in colonial and postcolonial contexts who are represented in rather conventional ways. Clichés such as the voluptuous, oversexualized and dangerous African woman as opposed to the pure and motherly white woman who guarantees European progeny and prevents male going native are still recurrent in otherwise subversive
texts. But, at first sight, both European and non-European female figures remain conspicuously silent. The talk focuses on three contemporary germanophone novels, Urs Widmers "Im Kongo" (1996), Alex Capus’ "Eine Frage der Zeit" (2007) and Lukas Bärfuss’ "Hundert Tage" (2008), and examine the breaking and remaking of colonial stereotypes regarding the representation of their female figures.