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language: Greenlandic (French tr. Inès Jorgensen and Jean-Michel Huctin
country: Denmark/Greenland
year: 1931
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 11.1.24-12.1.24
Augo Lynge’s Trois cents ans après: Grønlandshavn en 2021 (originally written in Greenlandic in 1931, translated from a Danish translation by Inès Jorgensen and Jean-Michel Huctin) is a brisk and engaging read, a science fiction novel set in a utopian (“”) capitalist future Greenland, where the fish trade is booming, many Greenlanders are successful sheep ranchers, you can hear midday radio broadcasts from around the world, and so on.
it is deeply ideologically compromised in many ways. it follows a cast of bourgeois characters on a tour of 21st-century Greenland on the even of the tricentennial celebration of the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede in 1721, with a side plot about a cop and then for some reason his civilian cousin trying to capture two bank robbers.
the fact that the whole book is built around a celebration of missionary colonialism and a cop’s (mis)adventures says a lot. the book is relentlessly assimilationist; it acknowledges, for example, that traditional Greenlandic culture was valuable in its time (“Sans elle, nos ancêtres n’auraient pas survécu”) but repeatedly and explicitly presents a stagist view of “development” such that eventually Greenlanders would “naturally” have to set aside their traditional ways of life in order to become “civilized”.
it calls for Greenlanders to self-actualize and gain their autonomy (note: not independence — in this future Greenland is still part of the Danish kingdom, with Iceland and the Faroes)…by devoting themselves to edifying labor (instead of continuing their traditional subsistence practices and/or falling into “laziness”) and embracing “superior” European culture. only by fully adopting “civilization”, it argues, will Greenlanders be able to “progress”.
is it a good book? eh, it’s fine. but what a fascinating Bad Object.
moods: informative