Postcolonising the Nordic bases itself on two key axes of examination; a) A historically oriented investigation of Nordic colonialism, and how that was produced during the colonial era, and b) A contemporary oriented investigation of present forms of self-representation, and of the other in the encounter between Nordic people and the non-European migrant, as well as images of the Nordic self in relation to development aid discourses and other kinds of Nordic interventions in the non-European world. The project seeks thus to investigate how memories and practices of the past, continue to inform or are contested in the present, as well as to bring Nordic colonial involvement into the light. In order to do this it is important to explore the situation of the different Nordic countries within imperial and colonial Europe, as well as the relationship between the different Nordic countries, where some were colonies of others. 

 

We have envisaged the workshops within the network as travelling, because this would enable ‘national’ scholars to be involved in the workshops held in particular countries. It is clear from this that the workshops represent a first important but preliminary step in a collaboration that we see as developing further within the Nordic countries, but also eventually linking up with similar research interest in postcolonial national experiences elsewhere in Europe.

 

The people involved in the Postcolonising the Nordic first met during two seminars held at the Nordic Africa Institute in 2006 and 2007, organised by Mai Palmberg within her research programme "Cultural Images in and out of Africa". It was decided at the second seminar to collect articles for a publication which was to be published through Kult at Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University. Then we applied for a grant to hold a series of three workshops, to be held in Roskilde, Reykjavik and Oslo.

 

Postcolonising the Nordic 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. Hence at the EACLALS conference (EACLALS is the most important conference network for postcolonial studies in Europe over the last three decades) in March 2008 in Venice, scholars from all over Italy met for the first time nationally to discuss Postcolonial Italy. In July 2008 Edinburgh University Press published A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires (eds Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen). This comprehensive volume of over 600 pages concentrates on the continental European countries which had empires overseas, and as such deals, among the Nordic countries, only with Denmark as a region, albeit there is also a separate essay on Sweden. The Historical Companion is the first of its kind and will do much to open for a constructive dialogue among scholars working in the respective continental European colonial archives, who have until now worked within the national perimeters. Also the volume has articles on migration to, and in some cases out of, the European countries, historically as well as contemporarily.

 

Postcolonising the Nordic is a project that takes up its cue from A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires. It aims to establish the details of the Nordic colonial experience as well as work with the images of the non-European other in Nordic history, both in the shorter term and the longer term. Postcolonising the Nordic will develop alongside work in other parts of Europe, such as German, Italian and Portuguese colonial experience. However the idea of working inter-nationally which is at the core of Postcolonising the Nordic project, is a next logical step also elsewhere in Europe, and we think that in this respect we are ahead of developments elsewhere in Europe. Over the first two years, we find, therefore, that the most important consideration is to find a common Nordic discussion platform, which will start with centering on the idea of Nordic exceptionalism. Nordic exceptionalism can here mean two quite different things and it is this ambivalence we wish to explore; either Nordic exceptionalism can express an idea about the Nordic countries’ peripheral status in relation to the broader European colonialism, or it can be express the idea that Nordic self-perception is rooted differently from the rest of Europe and that this self-perception generates different kinds of encounters from experiences elsewhere. It will be a particular part of the project to explore the legacy of this idea of Nordic exceptionalism in relation to broader contemporary issues dealing with globalisation, cultural encounters and the experiences drawn from large-scale migration after World War II. The concept of Nordic exceptionalism would function as a starting point to connect the different regional examples, creating a dynamic forum for comparison and discussions.

 

Already in the discussions in Uppsala in 06 and 07, Ph.D. students formed part of the group. We envisage that Ph.D. students and postdocs will continue to participate in the seminars and publications as they unfold in the future. Bringing together scholars from different Nordic countries working in the various fields will facilitate the exchange of students and networking across boundaries between students and more established scholars. We aim to offer to involve people in such a way that it suits their various stages of their academic carriers. We note that a large amount of scholarship is right now being produced by people who are either working on their Ph.D.s, or in various kinds of postdoc research. We would also like to extend invitations to include M.A. students whose research shows great potential. This is also a way of accommodating the new possibilities of Ph.D.’s commencing their work already while they are doing their M.A.

 

The participants in this network belong to a host of different environments within the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Scholars from Anthropology and Ethnology, Communication, History, History of Ideas, Languages, Cultural Studies, Media Studies participate to mention some of the major fields. This means that people draw from quite different theoretical traditions, which creates a more vibrant and interdisciplinary forum for discussions. The different theoretical orientations intersect with postcolonial theory, which as a field holds many different interests and which has a perspective been applied in many different disciplines. Some of the major reference points would be Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983),and Orientalism (1978), Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994), the work of Gayatri Spivak, and a range of books that all refer back to these important theoretical figures, such as Chambers and Curti (eds), The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (1996) Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (1997), Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry (eds), Postcolonial Theory and Criticism (2000), Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies (2000), Loomba, Kaul, Bunzl, Burton and Esty (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005). Other reference points would be the work by Latin American scholars on the decolonial mind project , particularly the work of Walter Mignolo (See Ramon Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemological Decolonial Turn’ in Cultural Studies (2007), Walter Mignolo Local Histories, Global Designs (2000) and The Idea of Latin America (2005), and from an Indian approach, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe (republished 2007) and the important work of redefining European identity historically from within, for example in Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (2007).