Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the changing subjectivities of two Croatian late 19th/early 20th century travellers and explorers and their writings about and negotiations of encounters with indigenous and settler communities within colonial projects in Africa and South America. It draws critical engagement with South Slav colonial history and discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Even though the Habsburg Monarchy did not acquire overseas colonial territories, recent scholarship has revisited its colonial involvements, projects and policies (cf. Sauer 2012). While Vienna by the late 19th and early 20th century pursued a policy of internal colonisation, informal empire-building, and multilateralism, its subjects pursued projects of settler colonialism, emigrated en masse, and/or participated as agents in colonial projects of other European states.

The paper looks at the contemporary discourse and narratives around and by the brothers Mirko Seljan and Stjepan Seljan, two fin-de-siecle Croatian travellers, idealized as world-renown explorers of Africa and South America and pioneers of Croatian non-European ethnography in recent, both scholarly and popular sanitized representations. After their employment in the Ethiopian Empire as provincial governors (1898-1902), the brothers worked as state-contracted land-prospectors and surveyors in Brazil, Peru and Chile (1903-1913), before finally settling in Brazil. The brothers reported and published their tales of entrepreneurial (non-)conquest in newspapers, books and manuscripts, documenting their subjectivities, changing in conjunction with both structural factors and biographic events. By focusing on their own and others’s contemporary writings (and selected later representations of their legacy), the paper attempts to trace the complexities of (the representations of) their encounters with indigenous and settler communities, and colonial projects in Africa and South America in general. The paper thus aims to highlight the epistemic uncertainties and ambiguities arising in/between the archival space and academic discourse when discussing the colonial history of South Slavs.