Call for Papers: Exploring Scandinavian Colonialism

We invite proposals for papers to be included in a Special Issue on Scandinavian Colonialism to be published by the international and peer-reviewed journal Scandinavian Studies. This special issue builds on the important work on Scandinavia’s colonial history begun by Sigbert Axelsson, Gunlög Fur, and Magnus Mörner in the 1980s and 1990s, and developed in a number of texts published after the millennium, including Fur’s Colonialism in the Margins (2006); Keskinen et al’s Complying with Colonialism (2009); Loftsdóttir and Jensen’s Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region (2012); Naum and Nordin’s Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity (2013); Körber and Volquardsen’s The Postcolonial North Atlantic (2014), and Svalastog and Fur’s Visions of Sápmi (2015).

The issue will be interdisciplinary and discuss a wide range of topics. Questions that the issue will address include, but are not limited to, the following:       What are the differences and similarities in the colonial histories among the different Nordic Countries? To what extent did the Nordic nations participate in the pan-European colonial project? How did they imagine this participation? How was their participation similar to, or different from, the colonial projects of other European nations? How should the past and present colonisation of northern Scandinavia be understood? With Scandinavia's peculiar colonial history in mind, and in view of the current migration from the Middle East and other non-Nordic areas into Scandinavia, to what extent is present day Scandinavia colonial or postcolonial? How does contemporary literature, cinema, and popular music understand and represent Scandinavia's colonial past and present? Proposals of no more than 600 words and a short CV should be sent to johan.hoglund@lnu.se and linda.anderssonburnett@lnu.se and are due January 31, 2017. Participants will be notified of inclusion in the issue on or before March 1, 2017. First drafts will be due late summer of 2017 and contributors will be invited to participate in a fully funded workshop at LNUC Concurrences at Linnaeus University, Sweden in the Autumn of 2017. Full revised papers (5000-8000 words) will be due at the end of 2017. The guest editors of this special issue are Associate Professor Johan Höglund, director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and Assisting Professor Linda Andersson Burnett who convenes the cluster for Nordic Colonialism at LNUC Concurrences.