Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues and the fascination of cross-cultural experience in contemporary German historical novels about colonialism

Göttsche, Dirk

Abstract

This article maps four different types of cross-cultural experience in contemporary historical novels about colonial Africa (colonialist, exoticist, intercultural, and transcultural) before focusing on Buch’s Sansibar Blues (2008) as a case study in German postcolonial memory and the literary use of transcultural voices. Together with Ilja Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (2006) Sansibar Blues marks a new departure in the history of writing cross-cultural experience and representing the Other, but unlike Trojanow Buch uses partially authentic non-European voices that draw on the autobiographies of two prominent nineteenth-century figures in the linked histories of Zanzibar and Germany, Emily Ruete alias Princess Sayyida Salme of Oman and Zanzibar and ivory dealer Tippu Tip alias Hamed bin Mohammed. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of Buch’s adaptation of these sources.

Citation

Göttsche, D. (2012). Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues and the fascination of cross-cultural experience in contemporary German historical novels about colonialism. German Life and Letters, 65(1), doi:10.1111/j.1468-0483.2011.01563.x

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 16, 2012
• Deposit Date: Nov 10, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 10, 2015
• Journal: German Life and Letters
• Print ISSN: 0016-8777
• Electronic ISSN: 1468-0483
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 65
• Issue: 1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0483.2011.01563.x
• Public URL: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/30683
• Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0483.2011.01563.x/abstract
• Copyright Statement: Copyright information regarding this work can be found at the following address: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf
• Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Göttsche, D. (2012), Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues and the fascination of cross-cultural experience in contemporary German historical novels about colonialism. German Life and Letters, 65: 127-146, which has been published in final form at doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0483.2011.01563.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.