SASS 2022 : Postcolonial Entanglements

Chairs: Tiffany Nicole White (University of California, Berkeley)

In conversation with the turn towards intersectional and pluralistic approaches within the humanities and social sciences, several movements have surfaced in the study of the medieval North Atlantic raising new questions and bringing new insights to the field. Recent years have seen a push to expand the traditional geographical focus on Old Norse studies in Iceland and Norway to encompass East Norse studies, as well as a drive towards the focus on theoretical approaches to medieval Scandinavian textual and material sources. Manuscript studies have flourished with the emergence of new studies of textual production and transmission on both macro- and micro-levels. Similarly, studies on deviance and ontological borders, cultural and religious pluralism, the impact of the natural world, spaces and places as well as the materiality of texts and objects have made significant contributions. This stream seeks contributions to represent and showcase new and exciting results and approaches made within the field of Nordic medievalist scholarship, including but not limited to:

• Reception
• Ecocriticism
• Philological Studies
• Gender Studies
• Race and Colonialism
• Manuscripts and texts
• Materiality
• Space and Place

Chair: Olivia Noble Gunn (University of Washington)

This year’s theme for the Ibsen Society of America panels at SASS is “Ibsen and Empire,” which is intended to complement the conference’s overarching theme of “Postcolonial Entanglements.” Proposals might consider a range of possible approaches to the question of empire in Ibsen studies, from close readings of characters’ authoritative and dominating desires, to sociohistorical considerations of the “legacies of colonization, imperialism and slavery” in theatrical practices, to contemporary adaptations that re-envision Ibsen with issues of power and politics in mind. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Bio-historical approaches to empire in Ibsen’s life and literary-historical world
• Characters’ fantasies of empire-building in dramas such as Peer Gynt and John Gabriel Borkman
• Concepts of authority and political power in Ibsen
• New perspectives on Emperor and Galilean
• Echoes, persistences, and critiques of imperialism in contemporary adaptations and stagings
• The relationship between ‘peripheral’ literatures and modes of empire
• Ibsen and postcoloniality

Chair: Adrián Maldonado (National Museums Scotland, UK)

The Viking Age has arguably never been more popular, judging by the amount of major touring exhibitions and high-profile gallery redisplays mounted over the last decade. Some places in the ‘Viking diaspora’ (for instance in the Northern Isles of Scotland and parts of northern England) self-identify strongly with a Viking heritage alongside other forms of ancestral belonging, as shown by a growing number of studies of genetic signals of ‘Vikings’ in contemporary populations. To pass this off as mere commodification of the past fuelled by pop culture and tourism would be to ignore the direct connection between the transnational phenomenon we call ‘the Viking Age’, and the invasion and subsequent colonisation of lands beyond Scandinavia. Traditional narratives of the Viking Age still rely on a vision of Scandinavian people and practices expanding outward from a homeland, and take less account of the effect of these expanded horizons on Scandinavian identities. Colonisation and migration are never one-way movements, and papers should focus on the entanglements created by increased contact, exchange and interaction in both directions. Question to consider include:

• To what extent is the material culture of the Viking Age specifically relating to practices we would recognize today as colonial?
• How might we refocus the study of the 9^th to 11^th centuries AD to incorporate the indigenous, the migrant, the ‘creole’ and other discrepant experience of the material record?
• How can we de-colonize the language of ‘adventuring’, ‘exploration’, ‘raids’ and ‘land-taking’?
• How has the advent of genetic ancestry testing affected public discourse around the ‘Viking age’?
• What role might museum displays (permanent or otherwise) play in setting rather than reacting to ongoing academic debates?

This stream invites proposals for sessions and individual papers. The main focus should be on material aspects of the 9^thto 11^th centuries AD with particular focus on the formation of ‘Scandinavianness’ through entanglements across Europe and beyond. The aim is to challenge the ways in which material is presented to the public, particularly within but not limited to the museum environment.

Chairs: Ellen Rees (University of Oslo) and Elisabeth Oxfeldt (University of Oslo)

Scandinavia is often imagined as culturally homogenous and even in certain political contexts invoked as a locus of racial purity, despite the fact that this trope has never actually been true, historically speaking. In this stream we explore how minoritized groups are represented in Scandinavian literature, film and other media and art forms. While race and ethnicity remain pressing issues, we also welcome considerations of other minoritized groups, including (but not limited to) discourses relating to gender, sexual orientation, ablebodiedness, religion, language, and class. Our overarching aim is to build on recent scholarship that seeks to question and complicate our understanding of Scandinavian Studies as a field of (mono-) cultural inquiry. We are interested in internal (self-) representation as well as external representation by those who are not part of (or do not identify with) a given minoritized group within the Scandinavian context. What are the dynamics, complexities, and stereotypes of such (self-) representation? How are questions of inclusion or autonomy on local, national, regional, and global levels negotiated? What kinds of discourses, rhetoric, affects, and media are activated in these representations? How do minoritized groups in Scandinavia challenge or reproduce extant hegemonic discourses? For this stream we invite papers that explore discourses relating to processes of minoritization in any form, genre, or medium of representation, from any relevant theoretical approach, and from historical as well as contemporary perspectives.

Chairs: Dag Blanck (Uppsala University & Augustana College) and Adam Hjorthén (Free University of Berlin & Stockholm University)

This stream offers a new approach to the study of Swedish-American relations. Empirically, it seeks to broaden the field of study, which is still strongly associated with studies of immigration and ethnicity. Analytically, we want to move away from a focus on one-way processes, and instead seek to analyze the flows of goods, ideas, and persons back and forth across the Atlantic beyond national frameworks of interpretation. We suggest that the concept of borderlands, with a long past of its own in American Studies and North American history, is highly useful in this pursuit and has the potential to advance our understanding of Swedish-American relations.

To talk about Swedish-American borderlands might sound like a contradiction in terms. Sweden and the United States are, of course, geographically remote, located in different parts of the world. They do not share common borders, and the countries’ different size and global power make the relationships inherently asymmetrical. Despite the geographical distance, there have been significant patterns of contacts and movements. Some interactions share a geographical space, but many are of a non-geographical nature. They have been shaped by colonization, large-scale migration, tourism, commerce, and ideological, religious, cultural, academic, and technological interchanges.

The stream “Swedish-American Borderlands” seeks to investigate these contacts and movements. We invite scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who work on any topic relating to Swedish-American relations. By placing scholars and scholarship who previously have followed separate trajectories in conversation with one another, this stream is an attempt at bridging disciplinary divides. We hope that the result of these conversations, centering around the analytical concept of borderlands, will result in new understandings of the history and culture of Swedish-American relations.

Chairs: Mathias Danbolt (University of Copenhagen), Sigrid Lien (University of Bergen) and Hilde Wallem Nielssen (NLA University College)

After having been relegated to a dark corner of national history, Nordic colonialism has recently become a topic of increasing debate. The 2017 centennial of Denmark’s sale of its Caribbean colony, the Danish West Indies, to the US in 1917; the 100-year celebration of the first pan-Sámi political mobilization against Norwegian colonialization of indigenous land in 1917; and additionally, the recognition of Nordic participation in the wider processes of  European colonialism (as traders, missionaries, through maritime endeavors, colonial administration and military forces); as well as of Nordic immigrants’ active role in the processes of US-settler colonialism, have highlighted the persistent relevance of these histories to the present. Despite the fact that historians have long established the importance of Nordic colonialism to networks of trade, political conflict, and cultural exchange, the uses and circulations of the visual culture of Nordic colonialism still need further exploration.

Visual representations were deeply embedded in Nordic imperialist projects since the 17th century as dynamic and constitutive entities. Images have circulated in colonial expeditionary and travelling culture as instruments of power and objects of desire. Moving across space and time, colonial representations have also been challenged, renegotiated and re-appropriated. They have thus been significant in processes of resistance, postcolonial identity formation and decolonization. This stream invites papers addressing visual culture, art, photography, archives, museum collections, exhibitions, etc. related to Nordic colonial projects in the Caribbean, India, West Africa, Greenland, Iceland, Sápmi, USA, and elsewhere. In dialogue with fields such as global art history, postcolonial and indigenous studies, the panel seeks to discuss conceptual and methodological approaches for exploring colonial visual culture and the processes of contemporary self-reflection, self-representation and self-determination. 

Chairs: Tom DuBois (University of Wisconsin) and Troy Storfjell (Pacific Lutheran University)

The 2019 special issue of Scandinavian Studies “Nordic Colonialisms” (ed. Johan Höglund and Linda Andersson Burnett) documents and analyzes the workings of Scandinavian settler colonialism in places like Sápmi, Greenland, continental North America, and the Caribbean. Building on perspectives raised in that special issue and in recent scholarship in Indigenous Studies, Sámi Studies, Inuit Studies, and other fields, and in keeping with the SASS 2022 theme of “Postcolonial Entanglements,” we invite paper proposals for a stream of linked panels on “Unsettling Scandinavian Studies.” 

By “unsettling” we understand de-centering settler perspectives and ideologies to make room for Indigenous voices and epistemes. With this stream we hope to facilitate conversation and collaboration between scholars working in various branches of Indigenous studies that can or ought to intersect with Scandinavian studies, aiming to counter tendencies in the field of Scandinavian studies that have centered and reproduced settler colonial ideologies of the state, while also sanctioning epistemic ignorance of Indigenous epistemes and ways of knowing. In an era of world climate crisis and pandemic, we seek to contribute to a rethinking of the field of Scandinavian studies that will acknowledge, embrace, and empower Indigenous perspectives within our field as frameworks for examining the past and as springboards for moving forward into a more sustainable future. We welcome papers from scholars of all backgrounds that treat such topics as Sámi, Greenlandic and American Indian Studies, critical settler studies, and Indigenizing Scandinavian studies. We especially seek papers engaging perspective and contexts of the Taíno, our Indigenous hosts for SASS 2022.