Natives and Aliens in the national landscape

Discourses concerning the threat of alien species to national landscapes have a curious tendency to bleed into discourses concerning the threat of alien races and cultures to the native people and culture of these same nations. An explanation for these parallels, it will be argued, lies in a common point of departure in a particular post-Renaissance concept of landscape, space and nature, which ultimately derives from what is here termed “the cartographic-pictographic episteme.” This article will first trace the epistemic history of these ideas in a series of steps. It begins with a concrete case from Denmark and goes on to show how this case relates to larger European discourses dating back to the Renaissance. Keywords: Alien species, nationalism, cultural eugenics, xenophobia