Nordic Colonial Mind Call for papers for the workshop Reconceptualising postcolonial national identities in the Nordic countries – and beyond
The Third Workshop in the Series Decoding the Nordic Colonial Mind
Oslo University College, October 13 – 14, 2010
Conference organizers: Anne Hege Simonsen, Oslo University College, Kristín Loftsdóttir, University of Iceland and Lars Jensen, Roskilde University.
The workshop series Decoding the Nordic Colonial Mind is organized by the network The Nordic Colonial Mind directed by Lars Jensen and Kristín Loftsdóttir and funded by NOS-HS. It is composed of three workshops held during the period 2009-2010. The first workshop was held at Roskilde University, October 19-20, 2009 and the second one at University of Iceland, May 4-5, 2010.
Theme of the third workshop
The theme of the third work is the processes of (re)conceptualising Nordic national identities in the light of transnationalism and the reality of an increasingly global Nordic present. Where the two previous workshops have addressed how discriminatory practices and histories have emerged in the Nordic countries’ ways of dealing with their colonial histories and the presence of migrant others, the third workshop will explore how existing homogeneous conceptualisations of national identities in the Nordic countries will have to give way to more cosmopolitan definitions of Nordic national identities. The issue of the tricky relationship between at times it would seem competing conceptualisations of race and ethnicity will be given a particular focus. Furthermore, it asks what this means with reference to the initial question for the first workshop, whether there is in fact a special Nordic condition – an exceptionalism or unique national settings in an increasingly globalised world order. We want to ask how the history is conceptualised and written, how the postcolonial present emerges from the colonial past. In order to address the wider implications of this question, a number of scholars working on similar issues in other postcolonial European contexts will also be invited.
The deadline for abstracts is August 23, 2010. Please submit your abstract (250 words) to
Anne-Hege.Simonsen@jbi.hio.no. In the abstract, please state your institutional affiliation
and major aspects that you will focus on in your paper. Also, please make very clear the
connection of your paper to the general theme of the workshop.
By September 10, 2010, we will let you know whether the abstract has been accepted. Please state if you wish to get reimbursed for travel and accommodation expenses. We will be able to accommodate a limited number of participants, but we wish to attract as many scholars as possible. Also, depending on the number of participants, we may ask you to present your work in another way than the standard conference presentation form, or act as discussant etc. This is of specific interest to those who have an interest in the forum, but do not presently conduct research in the field.
After the end of the workshop, a series of a selection of papers will be published in a specific volume. This volume will showcase the scholarship to a broader academic audience in the Nordic countries and beyond, and will also through a focus on the comparative seek to elaborate whether the Nordic countries in fact have a common history of self-perception, and a communal way of perceiving a Nordic way in the contemporary world of cultural exchange.
About the workshop series
The workshops will critically engage with the historical past of the Nordic countries,
examining how the Nordic countries participated, contested and participated in colonial and imperialistic projects. Simultaneously, the project brings these historical perspectives into the present, through the overt focus on the relationship between the Nordic colonial past and contemporary processes of globalisation, most notably migration. The workshops will enable the important cross-cultural exploration of related research, and create a formal structure for the future collaboration within fields, from anthropology, ethnology, history, social sciences, literature studies, popular cultural studies and postcolonial studies.
About the Nordic Colonial Mind
The Nordic Colonial Mind constitutes a part of a wider postcolonial critique that has swept
across Europe, questioning the colonial legacy both in a historical and a contemporary sense. The postcolonial critique has been established for a couple of decades in the UK, and more broadly in the Anglophone world, where it has led to the establishment of an important theoretical framework for investigating the legacy of colonialism and more generally sought to provide answers to the troubled history of European non-European relations. Over the last few years the same questions have emerged in continental Europe, leading for example to the publication in 2008 by the Edinburgh University Press A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires (eds, Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen).
The Nordic Colonial Mind was originally initiated at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala
focusing exclusively on Africa and the Nordic, but through preliminary discussions in
connection with the application that secured funding for the workshops it has now been
broadened to establish the details of the Nordic colonial experience in general as well as work with the images of the non-European other in Nordic history, both in the shorter term and the longer term. The Nordic Colonial Mind will develop alongside work in other parts of Europe, such as the German, Italian and Portuguese colonial experiences.
Second Workshop on Decoding the Nordic Colonial Mind University of Iceland, May 4 - 5, 2010
Workshop title:
Nordic Colonial Legacy and Contemporary Immigration
Day one: May 4th, Oddi 206, University of Iceland
9:15 – 9:30 Opening address: Kristín Loftsdóttir
9:30 – 11:00 Colonial histories and presents
Jopi Nyman The Finnish Foreign Legion: Gender, Nation, and Colonial Space in Finnish Memoirs of the French Foreign Legion
Erlend Eidsvik, Pan-Nordic sentiments and the Nordic colonial legacy in South Africa
Linda Lund Pedersen, Translation and recognition of colonial history in the Nordic context
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee
11.30 – 12.30 Representing selves and others I
Ylva Habel, Images of a Raceless Nation? Cinema, Visual Culture and the Black Presence in Sweden
Kimberly Cannady, Global North, Local North: Negotiating Nordic Identities at WOMEX
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-14:30 Representing selves and others II
Mekonnen Tesfahuney, Closet History, Racism and the Swedish National Imagination
Kristín Loftsdóttir, Republishing the Negroboys: Whiteness and Identity in Iceland
14.30 – 15.00 Coffee break
15.00 – 16:00 Media representations
Marianne Stecher-Hansen, 'Danish Cartoons' and Representations of Islam
Anne Hege Simonsen, Sharing space - sharing time? Notes on the political geography of the Norwegian press
16:00—17:15 Reception and introduction of KULT and Kolonitid
19.30 Dinner
Day 2: May 5th, Oddi 206
9:30 – 10:30 Literary representations and mobility
Ebbe Volquardsen, Nuuk – Copenhagen, Copenhagen – Nuuk: Postcolonial Migration in Selected Danish and Greenlandic Novel
Katharina Schieferstein, Peripherical Mimicries, or The Fairy Tale King and his Little Indians
10:30-11:00 coffee
11:00-12:30 Mobility in a Global World I
Anna Rastas, What can we learn from the story of Finland's first Black citizen?
Serena Maurer and Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen, Becoming Citizens: Ambivalent Danishness and the Immigrant Others
Ann-Sofie Gremaud, Where the storms of time never reached
12:30 -13:30 Lunch
13:00 -14:00 Mobility in a Global World II
Joel Kuortti, The Finnish Colonial Exercise: A Missionary Position?
Lene Bull Christiansen, The White Man's Burden: Celebrity narratives in Danish development aid
14:00 – 14:30 Concluding remarks: Lars Jensen, who during the workshop will collect arguments and points from the various sessions, will lead the discussion
14:30 – 15:00 Coffee and concluding discussion
Call for papers for the workshop Nordic Colonial Legacy and Contemporary Immigration
The Second Workshop in the Series Decoding the Nordic Colonial Mind
University of Iceland, May 4-5, 2010
Conference organizers: Kristín Loftsdóttir, University of Iceland, Lars Jensen, Roskilde University, Anne Hege Simonsen, Oslo University College and Mikela Lundahl, University of Gothenburg.
The workshop series Decoding the Nordic Colonial Mind is organized by the network The Nordic Colonial Mind directed by Lars Jensen and Kristín Loftsdóttir and funded by NOS-HS. It is composed of three workshops held during the period 2009-2010. The first workshop was held at Roskilde University, October 19-20, 2009.
Theme of the second workshop
This workshop aims to link together historically oriented research on the Nordic countries’ engagement in the colonial era with research on contemporary immigration. The workshop thus emphasizes various participations in global processes during the colonial era and how these can be brought into play with more contemporary orientated research that seeks to investigate Nordic self-perceptions in the wake of large-scale migration since World War II. How are contemporary forms of globalization derived from, and how do they differ from, earlier forms of colonialism and imperialism in the Nordic countries? In what ways do colonial legacies continue to inform current globalized practices, and how are they contested in the present? How does historical memory inform current patterns of immigration policies and practices in the present? The workshop aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the linking of the past and the present in terms of issues of diversity in the Nordic countries and how the colonial past is dealt with - or not.
The deadline for abstracts is February 10, 2009. Please submit your abstract (250 words) to kristinl@hi.is. In the abstract, please state your institutional affiliation and major aspects that you will focus on in your paper. Also, please make very clear the connection of your paper to the general theme of the workshop. By March 1, we will let you know whether the abstract has been accepted. Please state if you wish to get reimbursed for travel and accommodation expenses. We will be able to accommodate a limited number of participants, but we wish to attract as many scholars as possible. Also, depending on the number of participants, we may
ask you to present your work in another way than the standard conference presentation form, or act as discussant etc. This is of specific interest to those, who have an interest in the forum, but do not presently conduct research in the field.
After the end of the workshop, a series of a selection of papers will be published in a specific volume. This volume will showcase the scholarship to a broader academic audience in the Nordic countries and beyond, and will also through a focus on the comparative seek to elaborate whether the Nordic countries in fact have a common history of self-perception, and a communal way of perceiving a Nordic way in the contemporary world of cultural exchange.
About the workshop series
The workshops will critically engage with the historical past of the Nordic countries, examining how the Nordic countries participated, contested and participated in colonial and imperialistic projects. Simultaneously, the project brings these historical perspectives into the present, through the overt focus on the relationship between the Nordic colonial past and contemporary processes of globalisation, most notably migration.
The workshops will enable the important cross-cultural exploration of related research, and create a formal structure for the future collaboration within fields, from anthropology, ethnology, history, social sciences, literature studies, popular cultural studies and postcolonial studies.
About the Nordic Colonial Mind
The Nordic Colonial Mind constitutes a part of a wider postcolonial critique that has swept across Europe, questioning the colonial legacy both in a historical and a contemporary sense. The postcolonial critique has been established for a couple of decades in the UK, and more broadly in the Anglophone world, where it has led to the establishment of an important theoretical framework for investigating the legacy of colonialism and more generally sought to provide answers to the troubled history of European non-European relations. Over the last few years the same questions have emerged in continental Europe, leading for example to the publication in 2008 by the Edinburgh University Press A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires (eds, Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen).
The Nordic Colonial Mind was originally initiated at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala focusing exclusively on Africa and the Nordic, but through preliminary discussions in connection with the application that secured funding for the workshops. It has now been broadened to establish the details of the Nordic colonial experience in general as well as work with the images of the non-European other in Nordic history, both in the shorter term and the longer term. The Nordic Colonial Mind will develop alongside work in other parts of Europe, such as the German, Italian and Portuguese colonial experiences.
PRESS RELEASE
TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981?2006
With the premature death of Greenlandic?Danish artist Pia Arke (1958?2007), the Nordic region lost one of its few, perhaps primary, postcolonial practitioners. For more than two decades, Arke developed an innovative form of artistic research, with which she examined the Danish?Greenlandic colonial history that she as the daughter of a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father herself was a product of. The Nordic region did not seem ready to confront this history in Arke’s lifetime, for which reason her work did not receive the broad recognition and dissemination it deserves. With the exhibition TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981?2006, the Danish curators’ collective Kuratorisk Aktion seeks to remedy this.
Scrutinizing those who scrutinize Greenland
Arke engaged the Danish?Greenlandic colonial history in a number of ways. In some works she examined Western conceptions of Greenland, thereby scrutinizing those who scrutinize Greenland. In other works she returned to the places in Greenland, where she as a child had lived, and recovered some of the many stories and destinies that have been left out of official history books. And in others still she settled accounts with
European preconceptions of so?called primitive art and Eskimoic originality. While public archives and private keepsakes formed the primary sources of Arke’s research, photography and text made up her main media due to the central role played by both in colonial processes. Mocking the movements of the explorer, the anthropologist, and the cartographer she followed unacknowledged traces and forgotten poles of belonging. In
retrospect, Arke’s artistic production unfolds as a persistent examination of the driving forces behind Denmark’s colonization of Greenland and its contemporary repression and repercussions in both countries.
An alternative retrospective in two venues
The first comprehensive survey of Arke’s work, TUPILAKOSAURUS features more than 70 photographs, paintings, videos, installations, and social projects alongside material from Arke’s extensive archive. In line with her showdowns with art, ethnicity, and colonialism, the works are presented in the institutions of the two disciplines she examined: hence, the greater part of her works are displayed in Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, while a smaller selection of works are curated into the permanent collections of Inuit and
Greenlandic cultural artifacts in the National Museum of Denmark. Following its debut in Copenhagen, the exhibition will travel to Katuaq and Greenland’s National Museum & Archives in Nuuk (March 5 – April 4, 2010) and to BildMuseet in Umeå, Sweden (June 6 – September 26, 2010).
DEN FRIE CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY ART and THE
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK
January 8 – February 14, 2010
Opening January 8, 4?5 pm in The National Museum of Denmark and 5?8 pm in Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art
Press conference January 8, 2?3 pm in Den Frie Centre of
Contemporary Art
Film screening and discussion January 23, 2010, 2?5 pm in The National Museum of Denmark
Seminar February 6 – 7, 2010, 12?5 pm in Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art
Curated by Kuratorisk Aktion (Frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen) in collaboration with the Pia Arke Society
Nine theme sections
Arke’s works are curated into nine theme sections with headings derived from her own production, such as Arctic Hysteria, Ethno?Aesthetics, and Fishing out skulls and bones. With the sections, Kuratorisk Aktion hopes to disseminate Arke’s work in a manner that simultaneously circumscribes her artistic project and keeps her methodology and field of investigation open for others to pick up the threads. One of the theme sections
consists of the film program The Eccentric Eskimo curated by the Society for Ethnographic Film Blunders, a society Arke co?founded in 2000 with Erik Gant and Anders Jørgensen.
Pia Arke’s books republished in trilingual editions
As an essential part of the exhibition, both Arke’s Danish?language books, Ethno?Aesthetics (1995) and Stories from Scoresbysund (2003), are being republished in new trilingual editions (English, Greenlandic and Danish), whereby they have become accessible once more for a Danish readership and for the first time for a Greenlandic and international public.
Exhibition events
The exhibition is accompanied by a number of events. On January 23, from 2?5 pm, the Society for Ethnographic Film Blunders will screen and discuss Leo Hansen’s 1927 film With Dog Sledge Through Alaska in The National Museum of Denmark (free admission). On February 6 – 7, from 12?5 pm, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art hosts the international seminar “An Archive of Affected Anthropology: Locating the Arke?
Typical in the Aesthetic Research of Pia Arke, 1981?2006”, which brings together nine regional and international artists and theorists in order to analyze Arke’s innovative contribution to artistic research, visual thinking, and postcolonial studies and to examine why she nonetheless remained relatively marginalized in the Danish and international art worlds (advance registration no later than February 5 at kl@denfrie.dk, admission:
DKK 45 (adults), DKK 25 (students/pensioners)).
On March 7, from 12?4 pm, Katuaq in Nuuk will host the meeting “Following in Pia Arke’s Footsteps? A Community Meeting about Contemporary Art's Contribution to the New Greenland”, which sets forth to discuss the ways in which contemporary art, and Pia Arke’s works in particular, matter in the context of postcolonial Greenland (free admission). Finally, on March 10, from 6:30?9:30 pm, Kuratorisk Aktion will screen and discuss Leo Hansen’s 1927 film With Dog Sledge Through Alaska in Greenland National Museum & Archives (free admission).
TUPILAKOSAURUS guide and catalogue
A 100?pages long exhibition guide containing curatorial introductions to the theme sections and essays on selected works written by seventeen artists and theorists is offered to the audiences free of charge.
TUPILAKOSAURUS culminates with the publication of a major catalogue in January 2011, containing historical and commissioned essays as well as an illustrated cataloque raisonné on Arke’s oeuvre.
Financial support
The exhibition is realized with financial support from The Augustinus Foundation, BildMuseet, Jarl Borgen, Borgen Publishers, City of Copenhagen’s Council for Visual Arts, The Danish Arts Council Committee for Literature, The Danish Arts Council Committee for Visual Arts, The Danish Council for Independent Research / Humanities, Dansk Veteranbil Udlejning, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Det Kongelige Grønlandsfond, Government of Greenland’s Cultural Grant, Greenland National Museum & Archives, Knud Højgaards Fond, Katuaq, Kulturfonden Danmark?Grønland, The National Museum of Denmark, Nordic Culture Point, The New Carlsberg Foundation, The Novo Nordisk Foundation, Sonning?Fonden, and Svensk?danska kulturfonden.
Information For further info, please contact Kuratorisk Auktion (info@kuratorisk?aktion.org, +45 20 93 50 86), Press coordinator Kit Leunbach (kl@denfrie.dk, +45 33 33 95 03), or Communications Coordinator Jesper Thomas Møller (jesper.thomas.moeller@natmus.dk, +45 33 13 44 11). High?resolution press images can be downloaded from www.denfrie.dk or www.natmus.dk |
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