Listen to this podcast if you want to hear more about:
Join the editor of nordics.info, Nicola Witcombe on her fifth virtual visit around the Nordic countries in the podcast series The Nordics Uncovered: Critical Voices from the Region. The sixth in the series is with Cathie Jo Martin, Professor in Political Science at the Boston University.
More information about the podcast can be found on nordics.info.
Sound credits : freesound.org, including Lapping Waves.wav by Benboncan, and Short dance by szegvari.
Listen to this podcast if you want to hear more about:
Join the editor of nordics.info, Nicola Witcombe on her fifth virtual visit around the Nordic countries in the podcast series The Nordics Uncovered: Critical Voices from the Region. The sixth in the series is with Cathie Jo Martin, Professor in Political Science at the Boston University.
More information about the podcast can be found on nordics.info.
Sound credits : freesound.org, including Lapping Waves.wav by Benboncan, and Short dance by szegvari.
The cover image is a still from the video of Icelandic singer Björk and her song, Declare Independence. Björk wears a camouflage jacket with a Faroese and Greenlandic flag on her arm. It's the arguably most famous Icelander encouraging Faroe Islanders and Greenlanders to declare independence.
Nicola Witcombe:Here Professor Lill-Ann Körber takes an example from contemporary society, and analyzes it from different perspectives. For example, in terms of history, power relations, identity and cultural messaging. Her background in Scandinavian art, history and literature, and her research into the Scandinavian countries, as colonial powers provides an interesting perspective on modern day Nordic society. She is my fifth guest in the nordics.info podcast series, the
Nordics Uncovered:Critical Voices from the Region. My name is Nicola Witcombe, and I'm the editor of nordics.info. And a normal part of my job is to travel to universities and conferences, to meet researchers and to encourage them to spread the word about their research to a wider audience. In these COVID times, I'm virtually visiting 12 researchers based in six different countries to try to find the answer to questions like "what is the state of the Nordics today?" and "how do researchers investigate Nordic society and concepts?" So Lill-Ann Körber thanks very much for being here. You are a professor of Nordic literature, media and culture at Aarhus University and you grew up in Germany, I understand. But you had family links to Scandinavia, and you speak Swedish and Danish. And you can also get by in Norwegian. It would be nice to have a personal context, could you give us an idea of your personal background, as in some ways it's relevant to what you went on to research.
Lill-Ann Körber:Of course, my grandmother was Swedish. But she grew up in Norway, the family moved to Navik in Northern Norway, because her father had job job opportunity at the harbor. You know, at the time, Navik was the major harbor for iron ore from the Kiruna region in Northern Sweden. And my grandfather was forced to be a soldier during the World War. My German grandfather and he came to Norway. He was an engineer, and he was sent there to, at least that's the story that's in the family, to build bridges and roads. And this is how they met and where they met. And they got married in Oslo, in 1942, when at the Stortinget building, the parliament building with which at the time was a Nazi head office. Yeah, and they moved to Germany, which probably was a better idea at the time, because now we know how Norwegian women were treated, and their children after the war, if they had had affairs or relationships with German, the occupying power.
Nicola Witcombe:And could you just give me a sort of brief summary of what areas that you focused on within research?
Lill-Ann Körber:Yeah, sure. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is where I have my master's degree from and also my PhD. And in my dissertation, I combined my interests of art and Nordic cultural history and gender and sexuality. So I combined art history and Scandinavian studies.
Nicola Witcombe:Yes, your PhD which was called 'Bathing men in Nordic photography and painting at the beginning of the 20th century' combine those things and what have you focused on since then?
Lill-Ann Körber:My main area or areas of interest have been Nordic colonialism. And there I have mostly two geographical focus areas, which is the North Atlantic, primarily Greenland, and also the traces of the transatlantic slave trade, and Scandinavian involvement in it. Or perhaps to put it more general. My research is about relations between the Nordic Region and other places in the world, especially Africa and the Caribbean, and also how these relations are represented in literature, film, and art.
Nicola Witcombe:Can you give us a little bit of an idea of what you actually do in practice?
Lill-Ann Körber:So what I do, I often get fascinated by a phenomenon of an artifact. And then I develop my methods underways and I use theory and research literature from a large variety of disciplines and contexts. My research is inspired by and indebted to the cultural studies tradition. And this also perhaps explains the kind of political dimension of it. So an interdisciplinary study of cultural phenomena to understand how identities are shaped in a given time and space and influenced by power relations of many kinds. So in this tradition, is embedded a questioning of traditional academic disciplines. And perhaps also the distinction between high and low.
Nicola Witcombe:Yes, and I believe you have a specific example ready that you can give us to illustrate how you bring some of these strands together. And it's taken from a chapter that you wrote in a book that was edited by you and Ebbe Volquardsen called 'The Postcolonial North Atlantic: Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands'.
Lill-Ann Körber:Of course. So some of the questions I asked myself and try to work with in this article is, why does the Greenlandic flag look the way it does? It is the only one without the Nordic cross in the region, if we want to count, we lend to the region. So how did it come about the flag? How is it used? So pretty much the way the Danish flag is used in Denmark as a sign for celebration, you know that you put the flag on the birthday cake, for example, or that you wave with when you meet somebody at the airport. But also, by the youngest generations, they use the Greenlandic flag as a sign for proud identification with a country for example, in the very, very popular local fashion design. So very often you see together with Inuits symbols, it's again, you know, reclaiming the land and the territory and the culture. Greenlandic writers, they have protested Danish colonialism by mocking the legend of the Danish flag, Dannebrog, and also the way it has been used in Danish literature to emphasize national glory. And then Greenland to contemporary artists, usually Julie Edel Hardenberg for instance, uses the flags as symbols for the complex relationship between Denmark and Greenland. And I have interpreted such practices as critical or artistic cartography, so these are approaches that you would find in social geography, for instance. So how artists and activists turn the colonial practices of naming and mapping and putting the flag down somewhere to claim a territory, so they use it to, you know, to turn these practices upside down, to reclaim and decolonize their land.
Nicola Witcombe:That was a very visual, illustrative example. So could you tell me a little bit more about the book, where that chapter comes from? The postcolonial North Atlantic, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands I believe it was first published in 2014. And you've just done a second edition.
Lill-Ann Körber:At the time, conceptualizing the Nordic region, as a post colonial region was still new, or fairly new. And also the revision of the North Atlantic islands are the West Nordic region, as it is often called, are increasingly called as an entity in its own right. So what these North Atlantic islands have in common is their former dependence on Denmark. But the question is, if there is a coherent and collaborative future independent of Denmark, or in a reformed version of of cooperation in West Northern, and also in the Danish realm, or the Danish kingdom, the Rigsfællesskab which still consists of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. So these were the questions that we embarked upon. The cover image is a still from the video of Icelandic singer Björk and her song, Declare Independence, and the lyrics do not specify any location, but the video does, interestingly. So Björk wears a camouflage jacket with a Faraoese and Greenlandic flag on her arms. It's the arguably most famous Icelander encouraging Faroe Islanders and Greenlanders to declare independence. And indeed, Iceland, which is independent, since 1944, is very often perceived as a role model in the region. So the others are not independent yet. But definitely, we're in a process where the relationship towards Denmark and also within the North Atlantic region is being re negotiated.
Nicola Witcombe:I know it's difficult to summarize a whole book, but perhaps you could tease out some of the main findings or zoom in on a chapter that perhaps you were specifically interested in?
Lill-Ann Körber:I think one of the most important aspect is how we can rewrite history or tell history in another way than the traditional one, which in this context means to perhaps change our ideas of centers and peripheries. One interesting contribution in the book by William Frost, at the time from the Nordic Studies Department at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland. They had started to re imagine the region as North Atlantic rim. So they start embarked on North Atlantic rim studies connecting the North Atlantic islands with coastal areas in Norway, North America. but also the British now we can perceive of them as British islands. And this shift from a continental land based idea of a region to a maritime idea opens up for a very different mapping of the Nordic Region. And then I also want to mention the contributions in the Iceland section. There are famous sources that show how Iceland this then distanced itself from being put in one category with the Danish colonies, especially Greenland and the Danish West Indies now the US Virgin Islands and with that distanced itself from being perceived as primitive. If we look at that region from a post colonial lens, it's not only about you know, colonizers and the colonized are perpetrators and victims. But it's much more complex.
Nicola Witcombe:So we've been talking about many overarching themes. It will be useful now, if you could provide some concrete examples, maybe books that people can read, if they are interested in some of these issues.
Lill-Ann Körber:There's too little, for example, Sami and Greenlandic literature widely available in English so far. So I allowed myself to recommend literature and film. So my first recommendation would be Karen Blixen or Isak Dinesen to not only read Out of Africa (Den afrikanske Farm), but also the responses to it by some of today's most important African writers. So Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who is always mentioned as one of the nominees for the Nobel Prize in literature, has been so forever. The Sensi Bari, British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah and Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. They all mentioned Blixen and Out of Africa in their writing, which I find fascinating. And then I would like to mention or recommend two films. The first is Sámi Blood. This feature film from 2016 by Sami Swedish director, Amanda Kernell, is not only a fantastic and very moving film, but tells a very comprehensive story about the colonization of Sápmi, which is the area in the northern Scandinavian Peninsula. That is, has been or is still inhabited by the indigenous Sámi people, and also the impact of colonization or colonialism on the Sámi people up to the present day. And the second example would be a documentary film, which is called Sumé, The Sound of a Revolution by Inuk Silis Høegh, a Greenlandic artist and filmmaker from 2014. And watch this film to not only hear some really great Greenlandic rock music in Greenlandic, but also to learn more about the complicated relationship between Greenland and Denmark and to understand the still ongoing decolonization movements. So the film is about primarily the 1970s. But last year, in 2020, kind of the decolonization movement gained, again really increased. So I think one can also learn by by the film a lot of the history behind it. So in order to understand better what is going on, at the moment, this is an easy and very entertaining and very moving opportunity to learn more.
Nicola Witcombe:Thank you very much for those examples. And we can write all the names and everything else on the web page. But what what strikes me in what you're saying is a lot of it is actually very, very political. In your work, do you have to sort of take a view? Do you have to say that you agree with Greenlandic independence, for example? Well, how do you how do you approach the politics of it all?
Lill-Ann Körber:I think I don't hide my sympathies. But what I do when I teach, of course, I present a wide array of perspectives and opinions. And I think this has a wide pectrum of sources. Because this is not about opinions, it's about knowledge, and about learning the background and I really want my students to know with this and also inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, you know, that use our toppling to in Scandinavia, and I want my students to understand the histories behind these actions. And so it's not necessarily about being opinionated. But it's about you know, that if you read a little article in the paper that you know that it's perhaps a continuum of actions of this kind, and to really increase the knowledge.
Nicola Witcombe:So the currents of the Black Lives Matter movement was felt in the Nordic countries in the summer of 2020. And potentially also since then. There have, of course, been anti racism movements and waves and different sort of ramifications with different names and titles over the decades. Are you able to give us an overview of some of these movements in the Nordic countries?
Lill-Ann Körber:I would like to focus on one point in time when anti racist movements perhaps formed most distinctly. And that was in the post world war 2 decades, roughly the 1960s to 1980s, when Scandinavian governments, NGOs and grassroots groups formed a very broad coalition to support liberation movements in southern Africa, and also Latin America. But I'm more familiar with the African context. Among other other things, Sweden, especially during Olof Palme's time, as Prime Minister during the 70s and 80s, took the most explicit stance in the West against apartheid in South Africa. And among representatives from the cultural sphere, I could mention well known writers, Per Wästberg and Sara Lidman. So this is also the time when large scale aid, for example, in Tanzania became an important pillar of Nordic foreign politics. And the interesting thing, for me is not only what was done, the aid, the support of CO operative movements, and also liberation or even guerrilla movements, but also the simultaneous development of distinct Nordic as self images, as representing a third way during the cold war between communism and capitalism, but also as being good or being innocent. If we compare today to the 60s to 80s, a main difference might be that the anti racist movements then mostly consisted of members of the white majorities, and we're about conflicts elsewhere. And today, the action is mostly led by members of minoritized groups, who then relate racism and the legacy of colonialism in the Nordic Region to global injustices and also the form international alliances. There might be a concern, a continuation, but also differences in who takes the action?
Nicola Witcombe:Yeah, I guess there is a big difference there in that the previous time period, you mentioned that was about activism that was something at a distance and there was perhaps more of an image that the Scandinavian countries were progressive, whereas today, the experience of racism and anti racist movements are perhaps more on the doorstep about everyday experiences.
Lill-Ann Körber:Definitely, many scholars, people of color in general in the Nordic Region from this or speak of Scandinavian color colorblindness are colorblind anti racism as part of this self image and self presentation. And the problem with you know, claiming to not see race is that it might turn out to not acknowledge experiences for as you were saying firsthand experiences of racism. So sometimes scholars of racism and race relations in Scandinavia, they are accused of racism when they try to advocate for investigations into race based discrimination, because they use the word and because they want to, you know, to really look at also statistics of, for example, Afro folk crime, and you can't do that, if you claim that racism doesn't exist or that we'd we as Scandinavians do not see race, but of course, this perhaps liberal self image of we are all anti racist. This is perhaps also unfortunately changing, I don't know, because now we have this, these occurrences again, of blatant racism, without and within Scandinavian Parliament's with parties, such as the Swedish Democrats, the Norwegian Progress Party or the Danish People's Party advocating more or less explicitly for white supremacy, again. Some would say this clashes with Scandinavian values or the self representations, but there might always have been an undercurrent of it.
Nicola Witcombe:Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, because you've got sort of two opposing images, you've got, on the one side, the Scandinavian colorblindness thing going on. And on the other side, you've got this undercurrent of racism, which sort of bubbles up in legitimate political parties on a regular basis. I mean, when I moved to Denmark, about 10 years ago, I certainly noticed that the rhetoric of, for example, the Danish People's Party, was more openly racist than at least most of the public discourse that I'd experienced in the UK. This is going back a while before before Brexit. And I appreciate the situation is slightly different in Norway and Sweden. And indeed, there are strong anti immigrant voices in the UK too. But the discourse, at least at that time seemed markedly different.
Lill-Ann Körber:Perhaps what is particular with this Scandinavian post colonial self image is that it has been uncontested to a larger degree then if we compare it to, for example, the UK or also the United States. So this critical mass of people critiquing these self representations, it's only growing, it's forming, as we speak. So many would agree that they've been left alone with cultivating at such self images for quite a long time. So this is, and this is where you can see them in some instances, when these debates, you know, flame up, that sometimes it's the first time that these self images are questioned and critiqued.
Nicola Witcombe:Am I right in saying then that quite a lot of the literature in the UK maybe sort of post colonial literature, Scandinavia came to that later? Is that is that sort of what you're saying? And we're still going through that process that perhaps happened in more serious or larger colonial powers? Several decades ago?
Lill-Ann Körber:I think we couldn't we could say that. It's always sometimes it's a difficult argument, that being that relatedness argument, but I think it's it has to do with there are several factors, and among them, is the relationship to the former colonies. There has never been a large scale Arema any migration at all, for example, from the Danish West Indies, to Denmark. And this is of course, one major difference if compared to Britain. Of course, there are critical voices from the Virgin Islands, for example, but it's only quite recently that they are kind of invited to the discussion in Denmark. And we're only talking about few people who are, you know, also taking this discussion also in the Virgin Islands and who are engaged in the relationship to Denmark. So I think also because the, you know, this, when I'm talking about the transatlantic slave trade, and these so called, in a Danish context, a tropical colonies, they sold them all, the possessions in India and in Africa, to Britain in the mid 19th century, 1850s. And the last ones sold were the Danish West Indies to the United States in 1917. So this is a fairly long time ago, so it's not. So if we compare it to the North Atlantic again, this is very much ongoing. You know, this chapter of Nordic colonialism is very recent. And it's very topical, you know, it's in the news all of the time. So this is why the two areas have tended to be separates, it's very often, you know, the so called tropical colonies, and the North Atlantic dependencies, or colonialism in the North Atlantic, from a Danish perspective.
Nicola Witcombe:I believe that you're looking at this in a new book, with the working title of Scandinavia and the black Atlantic?
Lill-Ann Körber:It's a book that will combine new versions of articles that I've published during the past years. And the book will be about memories and legacies of Scandinavian participation in colonialism and slavery in West Africa, today's Ghana and in the Caribbean, from literature, art and film to tourism, museum exhibitions and monuments.
Nicola Witcombe:Yeah, that's a good example of how you bring many different voices to your work. Can you perhaps explain some of the ways that you do this, and that book project, and generally?
Lill-Ann Körber:It very often boils down to the, at the same time, it's a simple but also complex question of which sources I choose, and who I listen to and talk to, whose perspective I choose to include. For example, when I study the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, I cannot rely on Danish sources only. Danish sources are only are Danish scholarship only. In my opinion, it should be completely self evident to listen to descendants of enslaved Africans to read their scholarship, and read their fiction and exhibit their art. And the same is true for the representation of Greenland or Sápmi. Of course, we can all ask academics to contribute to the shift, or at least a better balance from, you know, outside to self representation. And we need to understand and I think that's really at the bottom of this question that academia has has never been neutral. That academia has also privileged a selection of voices and sources. So this would be my both academic but I think also practical answer. That it may seem simple, but it's a complex process, because it means and I think what this entails for me is a constant, you know, de-learning of some assumptions are also the learning some of the ways I have been trained in my academic training sessions, for example, about objectivity, or striving for objectivity. Or the source question that academia in the, at least in the European Western model has always privileged written sources. And we have to change these assumptions. Because very often it happens, but we can't really, you know, study, get the Ghanaian history of the slave trade because of the lack of sources. But then perhaps we have to change our methods. If we can, it's not that they don't exist, that knowledge doesn't exist, but it comes in a different form, then we who are trained at Western universities are used to.
Nicola Witcombe:While we're talking about academia, I believe you're part of a relatively new research network, which has the title of new geographies of Scandinavian
Lill-Ann Körber:So this network consists of a wonderful group of studies. colleagues from Denmark, Berlin, Vilnius in Lithuania, Poland, two universities in Gdansk in Poznan, the Czech Republic, Prague and Hungary, Budapest. And what we study are interactions between European history especially since the so called 'fall of the wall', and the field of Scandinavian studies. And so how has our fields evolved in this period of time? And how do we still perceive the field very differently, depending on where we are in Europe, where we are located. And we study also images of Scandinavia. And also cultural diplomacy, for example, of the Scandinavian countries in this post 1989 period, especially perhaps the past 15 years of the expansion of the EU.
Nicola Witcombe:I mean, you've mentioned a little bit about why you see it as important to teach and study in your subject area. And I guess, because there are so many links to contemporary society, it's kind of easy to guess why it is. But is there anything else you'd like to add to that question?
Lill-Ann Körber:Yeah, I would like to add that, from my Scandinavian studies perspective, these micro histories, they matter to grasp collectively the bigger picture of global colonialism. And this is what colleagues in Africa or the Caribbean often have told me that these small colonial powers are often overlooked. But we need to understand Danish and Swedish contributions to fully understand, for instance, Caribbean history. Or we need to know about Sami literature to get a fuller picture of Nordic literature, or better, maybe not Nordic literature, but literature in the Nordic Region. So this would be one aspect. And I also think that it's important to add both the subject area but also this mid high layer to the field of Scandinavian studies. So what is Scandinavia? What is Northern and not just assume that we know what it is. So what I want with my research and what I teach, I want to contribute to this question too.
Nicola Witcombe:As you know, the previous participant in this podcast series Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir has put a question to you. She is professor of comparative literature at the University of Iceland. And she has asked,"what are some of the difficulties in talking about Nordic culture or Nordic literature? are we including all national languages?". She refers to, for example, historically, Iceland and Finland have very often been left out of this kind of discussion. What are the challenges of approaching culture as Nordic rather than as particular nations or languages?
Lill-Ann Körber:Thank you very much for an excellent question. So one difficulty is that the definition of the Nordic Region often is being based on its elite kinship, its linguistic and literary and cultural historical kinship. And what we miss if we follow this tradition is that it has led to the privileging or centering of what we could call core Scandinavia, whose languages are mutually understandable, although I'm not sure about that anymore. And as Gunnþórunn is saying, the marginalization or even exclusion of Finland and Iceland, and not to speak of the Faroe Islands, Greenland or Sápmi, with all their different and complex histories and relationships within and without the Nordic Region. So this could be reason enough to drop the idea of a Nordic family or a Nordic region altogether. But I would like to make the case for it anyways, simply because I think it is better for our shared world if our horizons reach beyond the next border, and that we create alliances. But it is time then to redefine what Nordic is, and means. And this entails to drop the idea of homogeneity. So that would mean you know, replacing the nation with the next bigger container and to acknowledge and encourage diversity, plurality, and also mutual curiosity. So this means that we need to encourage the wish to know and learn more about the neighbors, and especially perhaps in this privileged center. So there are many more students, for instance, learning Finnish or Icelandic outside the region than in Sweden or Denmark. And Faroese and Greenlandic literature and culture are not part of the school curriculum in Denmark. So one could start there. I know I'm being perhaps overly optimistic that this would be you know, so I want to see northern explored as the heterogeneous, diverse and dynamic and perhaps contradictory region it is today, and got to see a clear focus and entanglements and they can be very messy, doesn't matter, both within and beyond the region. So how can we reimagine Northern, beyond the nation states and beyond the privileging of national majorities, and also beyond the branding of individual countries and the region as a whole, because this process very often tends to reduce, you know, a nation or a region to know easily recognizable features, and they tend to leave out all the messy are contradictory contestants, aspects or dimensions of it, and I would like to invite them back. That would be my answer.
Nicola Witcombe:So the last question is, I will be speaking to Cathie Jo Martin, who's professor in political science at Boston University in a couple of weeks time. And I would like you to put a question to her.
Lill-Ann Körber:Cathie, I could see from your profile that you are specializing in comparison aspects of political science. So my question to you would be, what do we gain from comparison? From your professional or personal point of view? What are some of the most fascinating comparative moments you have come across in your research, or professional life, for instance, between Denmark and the United States? And how do you meet the common criticism directed at comparative studies? That comparison as a method is problematic insofar as it is based on the assumption of distinct or fixed entities?
Nicola Witcombe:Great, she would like that question. Well, Lill-Ann, we've had a very wide ranging and interesting discussion covering lots of different topics today. Thanks very much for being here.
Lill-Ann Körber:Thank you very much for inviting me, it's been a pleasure.
Nicola Witcombe:So study in culture, high or low, images or text written or otherwise and in all sorts of manifestations can sometimes reveal things which other more formal sources cannot. But balancing narrative stories where to put the emphasis, whose perspective you're looking at, is complex and overwhelming and raises a plethora of different questions that echoed down the ages into contemporary debates, and very real issues to do with race, identity and power. It can also mean questioning fundamental assumptions about how knowledge is gained and reproduced in academia. But on the other hand, is it really that complicated? Taking contemporary cultural case studies and tracing their meaning both in today's world and back in history, to uncover important narratives, and listening to people that often go unheard. Put in that way, it is perhaps not as complicated as it first appears. You have been listening to nordics.info podcast. Thanks, go to Lill-Ann, to our research hub, Reimagining Norden in Evolving World and our funders Nordforsk. If you would like to find out more, please visit nordics.info