My Danish passport is like many other passports held by citizens of the European Union: beetroot-coloured and pocket-sized. Flipping the first page of my passport, however, reveals a picture unique to passports of Danish citizens. It is a picture of Jesus Christ crucified – stretching his arms rigidly to the sides of the cross, though the cross is missing and instead the figure is surrounded by and wrapped in swirling patterns. It is a reproduction of a detail from one of the oldest runic stones in Denmark raised by King Harald Bluetooth around the year 1000 CE in memory of his parents, and his self-proclaimed accomplishment of converting the Danes to Christianity. The runic stone can be seen to signal the beginning of the end of the Viking era in Danish history. However, pictured on the flipside of my beetroot-coloured booklet of nationality, it signals moreover a Christian national origin as well as calling upon Nordic cultural memory, historical belonging and identification. This case study focuses on the mediated insistence on Scandinavian ‘white’ identity and its connection to ‘western’ ‘globalised’ (re)production and sustainment of this identity.
Before I embark on the analysis I want to dwell on the context of the Scandinavian106 cultural non-memories of the colonial past because of its often unknown status and because of its complexities relating to ‘race’, gender and ‘whiteness’.
The myth of origin in my passport is twofold: it speaks of the conception of (Danish) man through Christian genesis. It is a story of becoming European and eventually
‘enlightened’ and ‘civilised’ along with the rest of Europe. This narrative re-surfaces today in European debates about wearing of the Moslem niqab and hijab and it figured prominently in the discourses surrounding the publication of twelve cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2005, which developed within a dynamic relationship between the regionally specific cultural memory and the ideological narrative of the European Enlightenment. I address the cartoons controversy in the last case study of this dissertation. The myth of origin also speaks of what came before ‘European civilisation’: the Viking age, overseen by the gods Odin and Thor, and Valhalla
106 I am using ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘Nordic’ interchangeably although Scandinavia often only connotes Denmark, Sweden and Norway – and sometimes Finland and Iceland. The Nordic countries encompass Denmark, the Danish territories, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the Finnish territories and Iceland. The boundaries for the cultural production of common memories are fluid throughout the Nordic region.
awaiting the Vikings who died in battle (for which there were plenty of opportunities).
It speaks of the era in which the Vikings were raiding, plundering and taking colonial possessions. Both origins are contained within my beetroot-coloured booklet of citizenship as a Danish citizen of the European Union. It is not explicitly about biological origin but rather about cultural and historical origin, and it categorises me in terms of belonging to the nation-state and a certain historically marked territory.
‘Territory and indeed nature itself are being engaged as a means to define citizenship and the forms of rootedness that compose national solidarity and cohesion’ (Gilroy 2004a: 111). The picture on the flipside of my passport represents a gendered, racialised and Christian rendition of my Viking origin. Christ chiselled in stone and surrounded by runic patterns sustains a ready conflation of mythology (the Viking who crafted the stone) and divinity (the depicted crucified Christ) in a uniquely Scandinavian mode.
The tropes linked to Viking ‘whiteness’ are constructed in opposition to those linked, for example, to African-Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans.
Conferences and projects on the Caribbean colonial past have been realised in Scandinavia recently following the commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved Africans in the Danish colonies and the journalistic endeavours on the human legacy of the former Danish colonies and practices of slavery in the Caribbean (Larsen 2005). However, in case study 1 I showed that despite anti-racist intentions the Nordic discourse on ‘race’ and ethnic minorities is challenged by the impenetrable silence surrounding the history of Danish colonialism – in the North as well as in the Caribbean, Africa and East India.107 The connections and interactions between the categories of ‘white’ and ‘blackened’ identities are played out differently in Scandinavian colonial history as large parts of the Nordic region were under Danish colonial rule for centuries. One of the oldest and longest lasting colonial possessions of Denmark is Iceland, which ‘whitened’ itself despite its colonised position by constructing a journalistic discursive identification with the continental European colonisers in Africa in the nineteenth century (Loftsdottír forthcoming). In this way the Icelanders dispatched of their own ‘blackened’ identities as colonised subjects of
107 In case study 1 I dealt only with the Caribbean colonies, the present-day US Virgin Islands, and their historical and human connection to Denmark and Danish history.
Denmark. The Icelandic emancipation from Danish colonial rule108 was moreover symbolically gendered. Icelandic nationalists identified the particular Icelandishness to be founded in the nature of the country’s ‘maternal’ body, which was distinctly different from the Danes, represented by the Danish king who was referred to as the
‘father’ (Bjørnsdottír 1998). By turning the colonised and feminised identity into an empowerment of the national imaginary, the Icelandic discourse on ‘race’ was intermixed with the discourse on colonisation and gender. Journalistic and public discourses today rarely touch upon issues which bring attention to the Nordic
‘whiteness’ such as those mentioned above and also Nordic phrenology and racial hygiene in Lapland109, displacements of Greenlandic children away from their parents to foster care in Denmark110111, or the connection of Viking imaginary and iconography to Nazi Germany (Dyer 1997). While the scholarship of critical
‘whiteness’ introduced in chapter 1 is limited and scarcely visible in Nordic academic writing, the field of postcolonial theory, taking the Nordic colonial history as its object of analysis, has slowly emerged as of the beginning of this century (Hauge 2001, Jóhannsson 2001). The question of ‘whiteness’ within the field which calls for analyses of symbolic ‘blackening’ and ‘whitening’ of peoples as briefly sketched out above is even less explored (Loftsdottír 2002, and forthcoming). Both Loftsdottír (forthcoming) and Jóhannsson (2001) respectively within the anthropological and literary field of studies talk of the Icelandic-Danish connection as bearing resemblance to the Orientalism of which Said (1979) spoke, though the colour-coding of the Icelandic people is symbolic rather than visual.
The academic fields mentioned above in which these investigations do take place are modelled mainly on US and UK scholarly frameworks in literature and anthropology.
Yet, early attempts at building a new awareness through interdisciplinary studies and projects such as Denmark and the Black Atlantic (2006)112, The Nordic Colonial Mind (2006)113 and Rethinking Nordic Colonialism (2006)114 have proven very productive.
108 Iceland was granted home rule in 1904 and gained full independence from Denmark 1944.
109 Simma 1999, Katarina Pirak Sikku’s artistic installation 2006 featured as part of the art project Rethinking Nordic Colonialism (Nifca 2005) www.rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org
110 Broberg and Bryld’s 2005 film featured as part of the art project Rethinking Nordic Colonialism (Nifca 2005) www.rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org
111 For more on these projects, see rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org. (Accessed 1. Nov. 2008)
112 http://blackatlantic.engerom.ku.dk/. (Accessed 1. Nov. 2008)
113 http://www.nai.uu.se/research/areas/cultural_images_in_and_of/colonial_mind/.
114 Rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org. See notes 109-111
Rethinking Nordic Colonialism brought together photography, film, installation- and performance-artists and academics from all over the world in ‘a first attempt at shedding light over this forgotten past [of Nordic colonialism] and writing a comprehensive history of Nordic colonialism’.115 The project aimed at finding a relation between the common Nordic past and the current xenophobia sweeping the Scandinavian countries. Through art exhibitions, film screenings, public talks and discussions, and essays and papers the project sought to challenge the cultural non-memory of the colonial past. Crucial in the structure of the project was also that the events and exhibitions took place in the former Nordic colonies of Greenland, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands and in the territories of indigenous peoples in northern Finland, Norway and Sweden. The periphery became the centre – though mobility in the
‘globalised’ world proved intricate, when directing the attention of the media to far-away places such as Nuuk, Greenland, Rovaniemi, Sapmi, and Reykjavik, Iceland challenged the curators of the project.
While leading academics and curators presenting an alternative picture of Scandinavian cultural history and identity are struggling for academic, public and media attention, the representation of ‘white’ Scandinavia in the non-Scandinavian media is forcefully implementing a stereotypical social imaginary of Scandinavian
‘whiteness’. Rethinking Nordic Colonialism confronted the Scandinavian ‘white’
identity sustained through cultural memories, as I discussed in connection with the Caribbean former Danish colonies in the preceding case study. Moreover, the Scandinavian ‘white’ and homogeneous identity is supported by the social genetic imaginary (Franklin 2000). Genetics are being used as a new way of seeing life, identity and social practices spurred on by new bio-technologies. This remakes nature as a technique in parallel to earlier times’ remake of nature into historical determinism and identity. In this case study I focus on genetic aspects of the social imaginary which in chapter 2 and 3 I defined as made up and sustained through journalistic cultural memories. The social genetic imaginary is widely communicated through journalistic practices. In this case study I discuss in which way this social genetic imaginary is sustained and sustains the notion of the ‘white’, homogeneous and masculine identity of the Nordic countries. Following that I will discuss the notion
115 http://rethinking-nordic-colonialism.org/files/index.htm
engaging with feminist, postcolonial and ‘race’ theories in order to suggest another positioning of journalistic subjectivity in relation to Nordic, ‘white’ hegemony and social imaginary.
With the developments in the field of biotechnological research and its results, a strand of genetically-based narratives or cultural memories about origin has gained ground. It is the representation of IVF and sperm banking which readily lends itself to a biological rendition of a particular historical, territorial and cultural heritage. It is closer to cultural determinism than to biological determinism (Goldberg 2006) though the two are often hard to separate. Women’s place in this mediated narrative of origins is a presence defined by omission and circumscription. In this case study I argue that Christian origin is connected to the Son and the Father; the Viking origin is connected to masculine warriors and predominantly male gods; and the reproduction of man through the world’s largest sperm bank, Cryos International, is likewise set in the masculine. However paradoxically, following the construction of the nation as culturally defined, but in an almost ‘natural’ way, the representations of women as the bearers of national identity (Griffin and Braidotti 2002), as bodily degenerates (Gilman 1985, Schiebinger 2004), and as symbols of the nation-state (McClintock 1995) are readily attached. The question of reproduction and of controlling reproduction – and thereby the question of female representation and the control of female bodies – is always already interlinked with narratives of origin. Cultural and reproductive control additionally raises questions concerning heteronormativity and deals with issues of the nation-state, racial categorisations, and exclusions and inclusions of ethnic diversities, able bodies, religious communities and sexual minorities etc. In a historical perspective it, moreover, raises the issue of the split between the categories of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’.