Introduction: Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies

Scholarship on Nordic Colonialisms

In this issue, we make use of the concept of Nordic rather than Scandinavian. The former term is arguably more inclusive than the latter and makes it easier for us to consider territories in the North Atlantic such as Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and to include Finland, a nation-state at times excluded from Scandinavian Studies but with an important history both as a former colony of Sweden and of Russia, and as a colonizer of the region that is today referred to as Sápmi. Furthermore, this issue recognizes the presence of many different forms of colonialism practiced within, and emanating from, the Nordic region. The colonization of the West Indies by Denmark in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was different from the early colonization of Sápmi by Sweden in the thirteenth century, or in the nineteenth century. To avoid obliterating these differences, we discuss colonialism in the Nordic region as a plethora of related yet separate practices and ideas. It is to recognize this range that we have decided to use the term “Nordic colonialisms.”

Nordic colonialisms have a long and complex history as well as similarly problematic presents, and this issue thus explores both the beginnings and the current legacies of these colonialisms. To focus first on the long history of Nordic colonialisms, previous research has described this region as participating in the European colonial enterprise in two interrelated ways. The various Nordic nation-states, and Denmark and Sweden in particular, practiced very traditional overseas colonialism, where territories in America, Asia, Africa, and the North Atlantic were invaded and occupied for political and commercial reasons. To mention some of the most crucial developments, Sweden had a colony in North America, New Sweden, between 1638–1655; it was in possession of the Caribbean island of Saint Bartheĺemy between 1784–1878, and it controlled a trading fort, Cabo Corso, in what is today Ghana between 1650–1658 and 1660–1663. Denmark (and before 1814, Denmark-Norway) had, in addition to several trading forts along the Gold Coast in West Africa, possessions and trading forts in India including for example, Serampore (1755–1845) and Tranquebar (1620–1845), and in the West Indies the colony of the Danish West Indies (1672–1917) which consisted of the islands of St. Thomas, St. Jan, and St. Croix. Denmark’s most substantial colonial empire was nearer to home, however, and comprised a number of colonies in the North Atlantic, including Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. Of these, Iceland became independent in 1944, but Greenland and the Faroe Islands, despite having home rule, are still considered part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

The historical writing on this process stretches back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it was common to see Nordic colonialism as a “natural” consequence of, in particular, Denmark’s and Sweden’s global aspirations. As described by Fur (2013), the view of Nordic colonialisms as essentially benevolent and masculine projects survived in Nordic historiography well into the twentieth century. It was not until the middle of the century, when the world wars, decolonization, and publications such as Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial text Peau noire, masques blancs (1952; Black Skin, White Masks [1967]) made colonialism appear in a much harsher light, that Nordic colonial histories were subjected either to a wide-ranging myopia or to a whitewashing that made it seem a much more benevolent and temporary project than it in fact was. In the years that followed, only a few Nordic scholars such as Jan Arvid Hellström (1987) and György Nováky (1990) shed light on the overseas colonial histories of the Nordic region.5 It was first in the beginning of the twenty-first century that this history begun to be widely and critically mapped. Important work here includes Lill-Ann Körber’s “‘Whiteness’ in Fredrika Bremers Hemmen i den nya världen” (2004); Lars Olsson’s “Svenska exploatörer i 1800-talets Sydafrika” (2007); Eddie Donaghue’s Black Women/White Men: The Sexual Exploitation of Female Slaves in the Danish West Indies (2006); and Lars Jensen’s extensive work on the Danish empire in publications such as “Grønland og aboriginalt Australien i et postkolonialt perspektiv” (2004) and “Denmark and Its Colonies” (2008).

The revision of the history of Nordic colonialisms begins not only in the excavation of the pasts of the overseas dominions of the Nordic nation-states. The other and equally prominent focus is what has, controversially, been termed “internal colonization” and refers to the annexation of Sápmi, the land of the Sámi that once stretched as far south as the middle of Sweden.6 This long and complex history, primarily tied to the nation-states Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, but also Denmark because of the Danish-Norwegian union that ended in 1814, was first explored by Lennart Lundmark in Koloni i norr: Om 650 års utsugning av Norrbotten (1971; Colony in the North: About 650 Years of Depletion of Norrbotten); Gutorm Gjessing in Norge i Sameland (1972); Magnus Mörner in “Sami and Indian Land Rights” (1980); Birgitta Jahreskog in The Sami National Minority in Sweden (1982); and by Gunlög Fur in her dissertation “Cultural Confrontation on Two Fronts: Swedes Meet Lenapes and Saamis in the Seventeenth Century” (1993). These voices from within Nordic universities have been joined by an increasing number of Indigenous scholars, including a great number of works by Veli-Pekka Lehtola and by Rauna Kuokkanen in Finland, Harald Gaski in Norway,7 and May-Britt Öhman, Katarina Pirak Sikku, and Anders Sunna in Sweden.

There has been an increase in texts on Nordic colonialism since 2009, including a special issue of the journal Itinerario (vol. 33, no. 2) on “Scandinavian Colonialism,” edited by Niels Brimnes, Pernille Ipsen, and Gunvor Simonsen (2009); Kristin Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen’s Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region (2012); Magda Naum and Jonas M. Nordin’s Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena (2013); Lill-Ann Körber and Ebbe Volquardsen’s The Postcolonial North Atlantic (2014); Anna Lydia Svalastog and Gunlög Fur’s Visions of Sápmi (2015); and several contributions to Diana Brydon, Peter Forsgren, and Gunlög Fur’s Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds: Toward Revised Histories (2017). Much of this recent work has been sociological or historical, laying down the framework for further study, but there have also been interventions such as Johan Höglund’s “Revenge of the Trolls: Norwegian (Post) Colonial Gothic” (2017) and Ebbe Volquardsen’s “Pathological Escapists, Passing, and the Perpetual Ice: Old and New Trends in Danish-Greenlandic Migration Literature” (2014), which focus, like much early postcolonial scholarship, on how literature and other media have negotiated this history and its legacy.

This issue continues to write the history of Nordic colonialisms by building on this seminal work. However, the issue also considers the ways in which Nordic scientists, entrepreneurs, state agents, and intellectuals supported (or in some cases critiqued) colonialism conducted by powerful states such as Britain or France outside the Nordic region. As Suvi Keskinen et al. importantly observe in Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region (2009), the Nordic nations were complicit in colonial projects by providing important material, economic, and intellectual support to the pan-European colonial project, which got started in the sixteenth century and which had divided most of the Global East and South into European possessions by the end of the nineteenth century. Generations of scientists from the Nordic nations—from Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) to Sven Nilsson—helped to build and maintain the intellectual and ideological foundations on which colonialism across the globe came to depend as the works of, for example, Johan Hegardt (1996) and Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan (2018) have charted. In addition to this, Scandinavian entrepreneurs invested heavily in colonial industry and trade, and it is arguably impossible to understand the rise of Scandinavian capitalism as separate from the simultaneous expansion of colonial territory by the big European nation-states.

A final focus of contemporary scholarship on Nordic colonialisms has been its legacy in the present moment. Thus, one important reason for producing this special issue is the fact that Nordic colonial history continues into the present. As Keskinen et al. (2009) note, current ethnic and economic divides, global migration streams, and the resurgence of ideologies and discourses such as racism in the Nordic region are arguably impossible to comprehend properly without an understanding of this region’s own colonial history and of its intimate connection to the larger pan-European colonial project of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is today, as Mai Palmberg has argued, still a “Nordic colonial mind” (2009, 35). Thus, an important aspect of this issue is to also consider the ways in which Nordic colonialisms still influence policies and practices related to migration, gender, and ethnicity, as well as private and public conversations.

Postcolonial Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Nordic Colonialisms

The reader who turns to this special issue from the postcolonial field may be intimately familiar with the terminology and methodologies used in the articles that follow. However, for those who have not engaged with postcolonial studies before, a short introduction to terms and methods common to this field, and a discussion of how they can be used in engagements with Nordic colonialisms, may be useful. Today, the term “postcolonial” takes on many different meanings in scholarship, but when postcolonial studies emerged within departments of English and History in the 1980s as an academic discipline, the term was most often used to refer to the attempt within newly formed nation-states in the Global South and East to come to terms with a long history of occupation, violence, and indoctrination. Thus, post-colonial history was understood as history rewritten after these nations had freed themselves from the European colonizer, and postcolonial literature included the stories written by members of the Indigenous population in an effort to deal with this past. However, even the first contributors to the field, such as Edward Said, recognized the shortcomings of the term “postcolonial.” Indeed, the notion that the world was past colonialism was belied by the situation of many Indigenous groups in Asia, Africa, Australia, and America and by the continued global economic and military dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq by the United States prompted scholars central to the field to declare that it now was “more absurd than ever to speak of ours as a postcolonial world” (Loomba et al. 2005, 1). Thus, the concept postcolonial is today rarely used to designate simply the history and literature that followed in the wake of the end of European colonialism, or to indicate that colonialism is in the past. Instead, the term describes the critical engagement with any colonial history or literature.

The term “postcolonial” has also been accompanied, and sometimes challenged by, the concepts “coloniality” and “decoloniality.” Emerging out of South American rather than anglophone European scholarship, this term seeks to direct attention to the way that many parts of the non-Western world have long been, and continue to be, involved in a colonial and decolonial struggle. This concept facilitates the intellectual engagement with histories and literatures that are clearly affected by colonialism, even when these are not obviously connected to late nineteenth-century colonization of the world.

Early academic postcolonial studies were fraught with a number of problems that the field still struggles with. Despite good intentions, the field in itself at times appeared to become a way to categorize and manage the non-Western subject within Western academia. As in nineteenth-century anthropology, the postcolonial scholar became the agent who produced the subaltern through his or her scholarship. Similarly, as observed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe (2000), Western historiography as a paradigm often refused to recognize subaltern agency. By understanding history as the written-down record of Western agents, oral, pre-colonized, and non-capitalist societies existed only when noted by these Western historians, and this existence could only take forms recognized by this discipline. This is still often the case, and Western academic disciplines remain problematic tools for those who seek to undo the power relations inscribed by colonial discourses. Indeed, there has been a call to decolonize the very epistemological foundation of the university.8

As a response to this call, fields such as indigenous studies, ethnohis-tory, and historical anthropology have emerged. Now also practiced by Indigenous scholars, postcolonial studies recognizes oral Indigenous methodologies that make possible a very long historical record of time neglected or ignored by traditional Western historiography.9 Within the Nordic region, Sámi scholars, often working alongside Indigenous scholars from North America or Australia, have introduced new methodologies that help unravel the dichotomies arguably inherent also in Western postcolonial studies.

Even when not using Indigenous methodologies, this special issue aims to demonstrate the necessity to understand the past and present of the Nordic region as importantly colonial and, in certain spaces, postcolonial. In this issue, we have collected a number of scholars central to the ongoing conversation on Nordic colonialisms, and their investigations demand a postcolonial toolbox that make visible power relations that have often gone unnoticed in past explorations of Scandinavia.

The issue is interdisciplinary in its nature and includes contributions that often combine historical, literary, and sociological paradigms. However, to help the reader locate material of particular interest to certain disciplines, it has been divided into two sections where the first, “History, Heritage, and Commemoration,” contains articles that perform historical and sociological investigations of past and present Nordic colonialisms. In “Commemoration, Nation Narration, and Colonial Historiography in Postcolonial Denmark,” Lars Jensen discusses the problems that pertain to conventional historiographical understandings of Nordic colonialism. Jensen demonstrates that, to properly understand Denmark’s colonial past and present, it is necessary to commit to a wider disciplinary approach. In “Dualistic Colonial Experiences and the Ruins of Coloniality,” Kristín Loftsdóttir explores how Iceland has negotiated a liminal and dualistic relationship to colonialism. As a former Danish colony, and as a nation that has at times cast itself as a white, European representative of re-energized modernity, Iceland constitutes a particular case in the understanding of Nordic colonialisms. Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson’s “‘Icelandic Putridity’: Colonial Thought and Icelandic Architectural Heritage” also explores colonialism in Iceland. Through a discussion of Icelandic architect Sigurður Guðmundsson, Hafsteinsson’s contribution focuses in particular on how cultural authority influenced the understanding of, and the relationship to, Danish colonialism in Iceland.

Lill-Ann Körber’s “Sweden and St. Barthélemy: Exceptionalisms, Whiteness, and the Disappearance of Slavery from Colonial History” moves from the Danish Empire to the Swedish Empire, and to the island of St. Bartheĺemy in the Caribbean. Körber’s study shows how both the current island administration and Swedish media seek to elide slavery from the narrative of the island history. “Mapping Land and People in the North: Early Modern Colonial Expansion, Exploitation, and Knowledge” by Carl-Gösta Ojala and Jonas M. Nordin also discusses Swedish colonialism, but the focus here is the exploration, mapping, and exploitation of Sámi lands during the early colonial period. The colonial attempts to map and describe land inhabited by the Sámi for a pan-national European audience is also the subject of Linda Andersson Burnett’s “Translating Swedish Colonialism: Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia in Britain c. 1674–1800.” Through a case study of the British translations of Lapponia, Andersson Burnett discusses the colonial implications of constructing and translating the Sámi as curious and “savage” objects. The final contribution of this section is Suvi Keskinen’s “Nordic Differences, Colonial/Racial Histories, and National Narratives: Rewriting Finnish History.” Much like Iceland, Finland has a fraught national history: at times, a Swedish or a Russian colony, and, at times, an eager participant in settler colonialism in North America and this contribution records how these histories have informed the writing of Finnish history.

The second section, “Narrating Colonial Encounters,” traverses the same historical and intellectual territory as the first section, but with a focus on literature, nonfiction writing, and other forms of narrative. In “Women in the Arctic: Gendering Coloniality in Travel Narratives from the Far North, 1907–1930,” Silke Reeploeg investigates biographical travel writing by women explorers in the Arctic during the beginning of the twentieth century. Her article contributes to the understanding of how European travelers produced a certain conception of the Arctic and its peoples through travel writing, and also to how this production connected with the concurrent negotiation of gender in and beyond Europe. In “(In)visibility and the Danish Body in Sultekunstnerinde (2004), a Novel on Postcolonial Greenland,” Rozemarijn Vervoort discusses how the Danish novel Sultekunstnerinde, by Lotte Inuk, negotiates the complex issue of Greenlandic independence and the Danish body politic through the image of self-starvation.

Peter Forsgren’s “Globalization as ‘The White Man’s Burden’: Modernity and Colonialism in a Swedish Travelogue” turns the attention to Sweden. His article shows how travel writing by journalist Ludvig Nordström mapped Sweden’s relationship to global imperial practice and to European writing on these practices. Johan Höglund’s “Christina Larsdotter and the Swedish Postcolonial Novel” examines how Mattias Hagberg’s novel Rekviem för en vanskapt (2012) discusses the Swedish colonization of Sápmi. Höglund notes that Hagberg is careful to align European phrenological and race-obsessed (pseudo)science with the Swedish equivalent. Finally, Sámi scholar Harald Gaski’s “Indigenous Elders’ Perspective and Position” employs indigenous methodology such as storytelling in an essay that highlights the centrality of the Elders. His contribution stresses the importance of trying to understand Nordic colonialisms through perspectives other than those provided by the established academic paradigms.

The aim of these articles is to participate in a historical and literary investigation of the Nordic region as a colonial arena where agents of heterogenous forms of empire operate and where stories of colonialism emerge. We hope the reader who has previously not considered the Nordic region as a deeply diverse colonial or postcolonial space will be open to this theoretical paradigm shift even if it means abandoning some of the more comforting, and comfortable, ways of understanding Scandinavia.