Barbara (1938) is a Dano-Faroese novel. The novel is written in Danish, but the story takes place in the Faroe Islands. The author Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (1900-37) is himself descended from a Dano-Faroese family, and he knows how to draw on this heterogenic experience artistically. Barbara is a love story on the relationship between the main character, Barbara, and the Danish priests with whom she is married with one after the other. At the same time this is the epic starting point for the meeting and clash between an pre-modern peasant-culture and the beginning of modernity. Barbara represents the ‘barbaric' and untamable desire, that is released in contact with the outside world.

                 The article analyzes the novel's description of the conflicting reality of place based on Michel Foucaults conception of heterotopia. In the figure of heterotopia the traces crosses each other. The locality therefore gets its dynamic by virtue of the way it acts on the stranger. The lecture will underline three excamples of heterotopia in the novel: 1) the colony/place 2) the ship and 3) the novel ‘itself', e.g. the many Faroese expressions.

The article however consideres heterotopia to be far more than just a Dano-Faroese contact zone. The changing times are being connected to modernity as a crisis for language and metaphysics. The heterotopia is expressed as a dynamic understanding for this crisis in both the interpretive space of art and in the space of action of modernity. The novel is explained as a critical commentary to the Enlightenment era which regarded the illusion and imagination to be a false view on things. In other words Barbara conveys a meaningfull, inhabited modernity that functions as a correction to more rationalistic versions of modernity. Barbara is conceived as a writing-back from the periphery to European metropoles and modernity in order to give an account of the encounter with a world outside the main current of enlightenment. The novel is itself challenged before it challenges the center  and thus it opposes exotism.