Crisis and Coloniality at Europe's Margins

Creating Exotic Iceland

Kristín Loftsdóttir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367582043
• eBook ISBN: 9781351018241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Crisis and Coloniality at Europe's Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland provides a fresh look at the current politics of identity in Europe, using a crisis at the margins of Europe to shed light on the continued embeddedness of coloniality in everyday aspirations and identities. Examining Iceland's response to its collapse into bankruptcy in 2008, the author explores the way in which the country sought to brand itself as an exotic tourist destination. With attention to the nation's aspirations, rooted in the late 19 th century, of belonging as part of Europe, rather than being classified with colonized countries, the book examines the engagement with ideas of otherness across and within Europe, as European discourses continue to be based on racialized ideas of 'civilized' people. With its focus on coloniality at a time of crisis, this volume contributes to our understanding of how racism endures in the present and the significance of nationalistic sentiments in a world of precariousness. Anchored in part in personal narrative, this critical analysis of coloniality, racism, whiteness and national identities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in national identity-making, European politics and race in a world characterised by crisis.

Part I
Before the crash

When I moved back to Iceland after doing my research in Niger, many of the questions about colonialism, whiteness and the relationship between the global north and global south continued to haunt me, leading me toward wanting to understand better my own country, Iceland. Upon my arrival, my grandmother gave me an old yellow tablecloth. She explained that I should have it because of my interest in the past – probably referring to my endless questions trying to understand everything as an anthropologist. She explained that the cloth had been produced to commemorate a significant event in the history of Iceland and had been given to her by her mother-in-law, my great-grandmother. It was bright yellow with an Icelandic coat of arms woven into the fabric, framed within a banner marking the year 1930. This gift was deeply meaningful to me because I had not seen many items from past generations of my family.

I folded the delicate tablecloth and put it into a closet in my bedroom and eventually forgot about it. But it became a kind of emblem of my slowly building interest in Icelandic history – primarily in relation to my research in Africa. What, I wondered, would Africa have meant to people in a far away, obscure place like Iceland? What do representations of colonized people in colonized places like Niger mean in a part of the world that was struggling to become a sovereign state itself? In what ways do colonial images exist in another world of poverty and subordination?

1 The trickster in the north

In the world of colonizers and colonized

DOI: 10.4324/9781351018265-3

In 1906, most members of Iceland’s Parliament visited the Danish Kingdom at the invitation of the Danish king. The goal of this visit was to strengthen the connection between the countries after harsh disputes arising from Iceland’s attempts to seek independence from Denmark. The king’s invitation was debated over by the Icelandic Parliament and many members were suspicious that the king simply wanted to flatter the lawmakers to make them more submissive and thereby weaken their desire for independence (Bjarnason 2012, 35).

Nevertheless, a group of 33 men left Iceland on the 13th of July and arrived in Copenhagen a few days later. The delegation was met by large crowds of people curious about this remote part of the Danish Kingdom. The Icelandic parliamentarians were shown different parts of Denmark along with main official buildings and museums in Copenhagen, and were treated generously in every way. The Danish media also covered the visit extensively (Bjarnason 2012), but the visit was not without its Danish detractors. Some questioned the king’s lavish treatment of the Icelanders – in a cartoon published in a Danish newspaper that I found in the one of the archives, an Icelander, drawn as the rest of the Icelandic Parliamentary members to look dull and old fashioned, is dragged toward a fancy table loaded with spectacular food.¹

The visit is particularly interesting here for the way it revealed to some of the Icelandic legislators just how the Danes perceived Iceland and its people. One Dane, Sigurður in Vigor, wrote about the surprise they felt at how handsome the Icelandic Parliamentary members were and how similar they were to Danes. “It would probably have evoked less surprise … if the Icelanders were dressed in animal fur with hoods and shoes made of fur”² (Bjarnason 2012, 38). As Sigurður’s words indicate, the Icelanders in Demark were to some extent seen as distant and exotic, reflecting popular representations of Icelandic people in Europe. The historian Gunnar Þór Bjarnason (2012) points out that some of the Icelanders were shocked when they encountered these ideas. As Bjarnason suggests, the visit did probably not have any real effect on the negotiations regarding Iceland’s independence nor did it significantly change Danish views of Icelanders (2012, 41). Perhaps the practical outcome of the visit was symbolic: the evolving legitimacy of Icelanders as political subjects.

In discussing how the Icelandic subject was shaped from discourses of modernization and coloniality, it is important to stress that despite its geographical position as an island in the Atlantic, Iceland has always been a part of wide transnational networks. The commonwealth period after Iceland’s settlement in the ninth century ended when Iceland became a part of the Norwegian Kingdom in 1262 and then part of the Kalmar Union in the late 13th century in a union of the crowns of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Iceland, along with other North Atlantic areas, became then a part of the Danish crown in 1536 when the Kalmar Union ended. Denmark was at that time about to become a powerful global empire from 17th until the 19th century, with colonial possessions in the North Atlantic, India, Gold Coast and islands in the Caribbean (see Figure 1.1). When we position the Nordic countries in relation to coloniality, it becomes clearer how transnational the Nordic countries already were prior to modern times, participating in different ways in empire building in various parts of the world (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012b; Keskinen et al. 2009; Naum and Nordin 2013).

This perspective also draws attention to the way in which ideas of the nation were shaped not in isolation (Tuori 2009, 63), but in complex relationships of power beyond the North Atlantic and within complex European dynamics and relations with the wider world. The Danish East India Company had trading posts on the eastern coast of India and the Bay of Bengal, in Tranquebar (1620–1845), Serampore (1755–1845) and Nicobar Islands (1756–1868), exporting spices, cotton and textile made from silk. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean Islands, St. Thomas (1665–1917), St. John (1675–1917) and St. Croix (1733–1917) exported sugar to the Nordic countries and the Baltics (Naum and Nordin 2013, 6). The workforce on these plantations were slaves, often coming from the Danish trading posts that also sent gold and ivory to Denmark (ibid., 6–7). Denmark also attempted to strengthen its hold on its interests in the North Atlantic, such as through limiting the access of foreigners to the fishing and whaling grounds in the north (Naum and Nordin 2013, 8). As a part of the Danish Kingdom, Iceland became in multiple senses a part of a vast transnational space. Some Icelandic individuals even became a part of these transnational spaces more intimately by traveling to distant parts of the world, such as Jón Ólafsson, who visited Africa and India while working for the Danish East India Company in early 1600. He wrote about his experiences and the people he encountered and his writing was widely read in Iceland (Durrenberger and Pálsson 1989, xiii). Another Icelander, the parish minister Ólafur Egilsson, was one of hundreds of other Icelanders captured in 1627 by Algerian pirates who sailed to Iceland to kidnap people to sell in slavery. Egilsson also wrote about his experiences that were as well widely read in Iceland (see discussion in Loftsdóttir and Pálsson 2013; see also Helgason 2018).

Figure 1.1 “Greeting from St Croix.” The drawing shows the interwoven gendered and racial aspects of the colonial imagination

Source: The National Museum of Denmark

Figure 1.2 A stamp from 1916. The text says “Vote against the sale of the Danish West Indies”

Source: The National Museum of Denmark

Political organization in Iceland was, furthermore, shaped by ideological changes in wider Europe, including Enlightenment ideas and religious disputes (Agnarsdóttir 2013). Even though Danish officials generally did not stay in Iceland until the end of the 19th century (Folke Ax 2009, 14), Iceland was visited by Danish officials, as well as German, English, Spanish and French merchants and fishermen (Sigurjónsdóttir 2000). While these individuals did not settle in the country, in different ways they were still a part of the social landscape in Iceland at the time.

In the 15th century, a German observer from Nurnberg, Martin Behaim, famous for his Erdapfel, the oldest surviving globe in the world, wrote that the inhabitants of Iceland were white and Christian but sold their dogs for a high price and gave their children away to traveling merchants (Bjarnason and Jónsson 2013, 20; Thoroddsen 1892–96, 96). This somewhat undignified image of the country’s inhabitants was to some extent in line with the portrayal of the north as place of barbarians and fit well with subsequent characterization for centuries to come (Ísleifsson 2011). The images of Iceland’s population as semi-savages that circulated through the centuries reflects to some extent Iceland’s weak global position. Such images were of great concern to Icelandic intellectuals at different times (Durrenberger and Pálsson 1989), and even in early medieval times Icelandic writers, such as the author of Landnámabók, which was written in the 12th century, wrote their own correctives to the prevailing narratives of the Icelandic settlement (Hastrup 2009, 125). In one version of Landnámabók, for example, Melabók, the writer, openly explains the importance of telling foreigners the right version of ‘our’ history and ancestry (Hastrup 2009, 122).

In the 16th century and later, descriptions of Iceland appeared with increasing frequency (Ísleifsson 2011), with Iceland routinely described in European geographical literature at the time as “the home of a most exotic and primitive people” (Karlsson 1995, 49). A merchant from Hamburg, Göries Peerse, who made several trips to Iceland in the mid-16th century, wrote sensationally about Iceland, even repeating the idea of Icelanders giving away their young children (see Bjarnason and Jónsson 2013, 237). His work was published several times, much to the dismay of Icelanders who had economic ties with Hamburg at the time (Eggertsdóttir 2006, 189). The English traveler and physician, Andrew Boorde, writing in 1547, describes Icelanders as “animal-like beasts” dressing in the furs of wild animals (Thoroddsen 1892–96, 96, 127). Some writers also remarked on Icelanders’ animal-like nature by discussing their presumed bodily form and savage sexuality (Ísleifsson 2011, 47). This image of the country can be seen positioned as a part of hegemonic discourses in Europe that for a long time situated the ‘north’ as wild and as inhabited by ‘barbarians’ (Lagerspetz 2003, 50; Ísleifsson 2011). The wildness associated with Iceland was also presented in the portrayal of Icelandic nature, which was often associated with Hell (Oslund 2002, 318) with the volcano Hekla described as its gateway.

Brevis Commentarius de Islandia by Arngrímur Jónsson was published in 1593, followed five years later by Oddur Einarsson’s description of Iceland in 1597. These texts aimed to defend Iceland against such presentations of the country and its inhabitants (Benediktsson 1971; Eggertsdóttir 2006, 189). Arngrímur followed up with Crymogæa, published in Hamburg 1609, in which he glorifies Iceland’s past and language, celebrating the Icelandic commonwealth period and its heroes during that period. Despite not succeeding in changing the perception of Iceland, his writing was influential in introducing ancient Saga literature and history to the wider Scandinavian community (Eggertsdóttir 2006, 189–190). As Gunnar Karlsson (1995) observes, his writing must also have given Icelanders a higher sense of “self-esteem,” as people with their own language (p. 49), who could later be mobilized within a new political and ideological environment in Europe emphasizing nations as the ‘natural’ building blocks o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of figures
• Introduction
• Part I Before the crash
• Part II After the crash
• References
• Index