Nordic colonialism

The article discusses an unknown painting which was commissioned by a wealthy merchant family in Bergen, around the beginning of the 19 th century. The painting is more precisely a representation of the unhappy love story between a merchant's son and a beautiful black woman from the Danish-Norwegian colony, St.Croix. It thus also presents itself as an entrance to a history which for a very long time has been absent-both in history writing and in the way museums are presenting the past: the history of local colonial engagement. The painting's original context is researched through a number of different sources: old trading archives, family stories, literary accounts and recent scholarly text on colonial culture. But the article also emphasises how the image of and the story about the unhappy couple may be seen as something more than a passive source of knowledge about the past. It is also demonstrated how the painting also has the potential of regaining, loading or negotiating history. As a source to an underlying stream of repressed memories, it actively and repeatedly projects past into future.

Published in Nordic Journal of Migration Research Vol. 7, No. 2, 2017: DOI: 10.1515/njmr-2017-0013

Abstract: Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called 'racist liquorice', the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how 'epistemologies of ignorance' of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

https://journal-njmr.org/articles/abstract/10.1515/njmr-2017-0013/

At the 2009 Nordic Culture Forum summit in Berlin that centered on the profiling and branding of the Nordic region in a globalized world, one presenter stood out from the crowd. The lobbyist Annika Sigurdardottir delivered a speech that called for the establishment of ‘‘The United Nations of Norden’’: A Nordic union that would gather the nations and restore Norden’s role as the ‘‘moral superpower of the world.’’ Sigurdardottir’s presentation generated such a heated debate that the organizers had to intervene and reveal that the speech was a performance made by the artists Jeuno JE Kim and Ewa Einhorn. This article takes Kim and Einhorn’s intervention as a starting point for a critical discussion of the history and politics of Nordic image-building. The article suggests that the reason Kim and Einhorn’s speech passed as a serious proposal was due to its meticulous mimicking of two discursive formations that have been central to the debates on the branding of Nordicity over the last decades: on the one hand, the discourse of ‘‘Nordic exceptionalism,’’ that since the 1960s has been central to the promotion of a Nordic political, socio- economic, and internationalist ‘‘third way’’ model, and, on the other hand, the discourse on the ‘‘New Nordic,’’ that emerged out of the New Nordic Food-movement in the early 2000s, and which has given art and culture a privileged role in the international re-fashioning of the Nordic brand. Through an analysis of Kim and Einhorn’s United Nations of Norden (UNN)-performance, the article examines the his- torical development and ideological underpinnings of the image of Nordic unity at play in the discourses of Nordic exceptionalism and the New Nordic. By focusing on how the UNN-project puts pressure on the role of utopian imaginaries in the construction of Nordic self-images, the article describes the emergence of a discursive framework of New Nordic Exceptionalism.

This chapter explores how the fascination with  Sámi peoples unfolded in the broader visual culture in Norway, as well as elsewhere in Europe. Yet, while arguing that Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence is still highly relevant for the understanding of visually represented ‘Sáminess’, it also proposes that in these images there is simultaneously something more atplay than tensions related to Norwegian internal colonialism. The popularity of the Laila character may also be understood as a response to the social and bodily restraints put on Norwegian middle-class women at the turn of the nineteenth century. For this gendered audience, the romanticised photographic visualisations
of Sáminess worked as nothing less than a trope for freedom.

Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called ‘racist liquorice’, the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

'Depressing, magnificent... beautiful': Nordic Noir and the " Postcolonial " North The aim of this paper is to situate the colonial history of the Nordic region amongst discussions about the parameters and definitions of Nordic Noir. The rising success of Nordic Noir in the last twenty years has without a doubt impacted the way the Nordic region is imagined, and the international circulation of works such as Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1992) and the 2010 television drama Borgen (from which the title quote is taken), which engage critically with imperialism in the Nordic region, have begun to challenge the image of Denmark as a benign colonial power. Furthermore, recent publications such as The Postcolonial North Atlantic: Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands (2014) and Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities (2012), indicate a burgeoning scholarly interest in the political, social and cultural legacies of Danish imperialism, which previously received little critical attention. It seems timely therefore, to explore the ways in which Nordic Noir engages with colonialism in the region. Exploring the representation of colonial history and independence in literary works by authors such Halldór Laxness and William Heinesen, alongside contemporary examples of Nordic Noir, this paper will engage with ideas of Noir from a postcolonial perspective. As well as contributing to current attempts to map out colonial power relations in the Nordic region, this paper will challenge the cultural, geographical and linguistic parameters of both postcolonial studies and traditional notions of noir.