Patricia Purtschert

Switzerland and ‘Colonialism without Colonies’: Reflections on the Status of Colonial Outsiders

In this essay the theoretical focus of postcolonial theory has been shifted from the cultures and societies of former formal colonies to those countries that have an explicit self-understanding as an outsider within the European colonial power constellation. Using the example of Switzerland, it analyses the presence and perseverance of colonial structures and power relations in a country that has never been regarded as or understood itself as an official colonial power. In a first step, we compare present debates on colonialism in Switzerland with those in neighbouring countries, i.e. France, Germany, Italy and Austria. In a second step, we trace previous research that postulates a link between Switzerland and colonialism, and apply the concept of ‘colonialism without colonies’, which, in contrast, engages with methods and themes that have emerged from postcolonial studies. Finally, we present a specific case study on ‘Swiss commodity racism’ in order to elucidate the concept ‘colonialism without colonies’.

Colonialism without colonies: examining blank spaces in colonial studies

In 2007, Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue asked in the introduction to their volume on ‘Imperial Formations’ whether one could study European and non-European forms of empire in...

The return of the native: racialised space, colonial debris and the human zoo

This article takes Zurich’s Masoala Halle as an example to show how the spatial redistribution of whiteness, as Sara Ahmed calls it, is tied to a specific use of science and the scientific through two interconnected arguments. First, the difference between the scientific human and the ‘native informant’ is taken up. As Gayatri Spivak’s account of the native informant indicates, the displaying of whiteness relies on the racialised Other who stands in for the premodern ways of life as well as the basic and primitive aspects of human existence. Second, the current return of representations of the native Other to zoo exhibitions, as exemplified by the Zurich Zoo, needs to be seen within the trajectory of the human zoos of the late nineteenth century that were crucial for the popular establishment of a racialised gaze, which drew heavily on the emerging scientific approach to the world and vice versa.