De-)constructing cultural colonialisms: A narratological investigation of Austria-Hungary's inner and extra-European discourses of identity and differ

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In multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary, colonialism manifested itself less as socio-economic exploitation overseas than as internal power structures, reflected and enforced by cultural discourses. Despite the early-established paradigm that these cultural narratives were the primary manifestation of colonialism in Austria-Hungary (Ruthner 2002: 99), my research is one of the first projects investigating how narrative form in Germanophone writing shaped Habsburg's cultural colonialisms. Exploring how colonialist power structures in Central Europe were expressed or challenged by aesthetic forms (Olson and Copland 2016: 207), I will answer three research questions: RQ1: Which narrative patterns shaped Austria-Hungary's cultural colonialisms? RQ2: What was the potential of narrative form in undermining colonialist discourses within Habsburg's Germanophone culture? RQ3: Can explorations of non-hegemonic aesthetics of sameness in Habsburg literature serve as a paradigm extension for postcolonial narrative studies? Project plan:Using Germanophone prose fiction alongside newspaper articles, I will investigate how narrative form in Habsburg culture shaped inner-European colonialisms and co-present narratives of colonialism overseas. My research will also explore in how far formal means were capable of undermining prevalent cultural colonialisms. In this context, less canonical works of multi-ethnic Germanophone Austro-Hungarian writers testify to an intersectional complexity that is only beginning to be explored (Bach 2016, Ruthner 2017: 305-9). Taking Deleuze and Guattari's conception of a 'minor practice of major language' (1986: 18) as a point of departure, I will analyse in how far formal 'minor' practices destabilised dominant colonialist discourses. Close reading constitutes the main methodological approach for the literary analyses; complemented by a quantitative newspaper analysis to identify larger patterns in the formal shaping of Habsburg's colonialist discourses. Capturing diachronic developments from 1850 to the 1930s, I will firstly compare realist writing preceding and following Austria-Hungary's 'Compromise' of 1867, with markers of ethnic difference gaining significance after this event. I will then analyse how modernist writers used narrative techniques to reflect and, to some extent, counter colonialist ideas underpinning growing ethno-national tensions until 1914. Lastly, my DPhil will explore colonialist discourses in retrospective post-war Habsburg novels, often seen to depict all-too peaceful (Spreicer 2021: 368) notions of the empire's multiculturality. Project aims and contributions:Austria-Hungary's unique context of multiple overlapping colonialist discourses (Stachel 2003: 260-61) will enable me to develop a nuanced methodology for narratologically oriented postcolonial studies. Almost exclusively focused on writing based on British extra-continental colonialism and its highly asymmetric power structures, such research has so far hardly modified existing narratological concepts (Heinen 2021: 22). My attention to narrative techniques emerging from the varied intermediary positions of multi-ethnic writers in Austria-Hungary promises to deliver new analytical categories to advance postcolonial narratology, providing a basis for investigating a colonialist politics of form that was central to European colonialist practices more widely. With recent warnings that the field's current fixation on cultural representations of difference inadvertently perpetuates colonialist binaries of identity and difference (Heinen 2021: 23-25), and as yet sceptical references to similarity as a potential concept for advancing Habsburg Studies (Ruthner 2017: 337), my DPhil will investigate whether formal structures within Habsburg literatures convey notions of sameness and community, exploring whether these concepts constitute productive extensions to analytical frameworks in postcolonial narrative research