“The Loving Conquest and Embrace”: On Peaceful Heterotopias and Utopias in Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Asian and African Travel Writings

Until now, the travel writings of the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–42) have been read as modern topographies of displacement, alienation, and conflict. However, in her work we also encounter a large variety of positive, peaceful heterotopias and utopias. In this essay I argue that the textual construction of these places is linked to the discursive concept of the “loving conquest and embrace,” which Schwarzenbach’s protagonists exploit in their traveling and writing praxis. Three variations of this concept are developed in Schwarzenbach’s texts, depending on how discourses regarding intercultural coexistence and gender roles are negotiated and combined. I will also critically engage with the strategy of the “loving conquest and embrace” by discussing its various problematic aspects, and I will draw attention to an important and surprising discursive shift in Schwarzenbach’s later travel writings: a tendency to construct more mystical and more traditional peaceful, positive places.