Towards a Decolonial Uncanny: Reconfiguring the Ineffable in Anna Kim's ‘Greenland’ Novel Anatomie einer Nacht (2012)

Abstract

Abstract:This article thinks through the notion of a decolonial uncanny via a reading of Anna Kim's Anatomie einer Nacht [Anatomy of a Night] and a theoretical discussion of the Freudian uncanny as underpinned by the antinomies which structure German Romanticism. I argue that Kim's novel, set in Greenland, shifts away from the Freudian aesthetic uncanny by emphasizing the geopolitical and ontological while questioning the conception of otherness in German Romanticism and Freud's psychoanalytic iteration by reconfiguring the uncanny to trouble the oppositional framework wherein ‘the Greenlander’ might appear as the silenced other. Kim's text negotiates a different moment within the Freudian uncanny which pivots on the aporia of the revelation of concealment, resulting in multifaceted representations of alterity.