In this innovative and original study, Lenny Ureña Valerio analyzes the history of Prussian Poland, German Africa, and Polish colonies in southern Brazil and shows how their histories are intertwined, how German and Polish colonial agents and their colonial fantasies are interwoven. In Colonial Fantasies, Ureña Valerio chooses the perspective of medicine, using the work and testimonials of medical professionals, experts of health who mix medicine, hygiene, ethnography, and anthropology making the claim that medicine and imperialism are connected. Medical knowledge enabled Germans to live in tropical climates and to deal with tropical diseases such as malaria. Ureña Valerio also argues that medical knowledge was mixed with racism and eugenics. Disease treatments were used to restrain Indigenous populations and to stress their “otherness,” both in Prussian Poland and the German colonies in Africa.
Colonialism is not a one-way street. Ureña Valerio argues that approaching the German borderlands only from...
