Colonial Entanglements: Crossroads, Contact Zones, and Flows in Scandinavian Global History

Magdalena Naum, Jonas Monié Nordin
2019 Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction  
This special issue of Itinerario focuses on seventeenth-through nineteenth-century Danish and Swedish colonies and trading posts in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Arctic and explores their cultural complexities. The work originates from a series of interdisciplinary workshops on Danish and Swedish colonialism organised in 2014 and 2015 by the network GlobArch, funded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Colonialism and colonial entanglements have been among the great subjects of
more » ... lectual debate and political struggle in this and the previous century, a major field of study in the humanities and the social sciences inspired by pivotal intellectual efforts of Erik Williams, Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and many others. Despite this, and despite the palpable colonial history and legacy of the Nordic countries, little interest was directed to the regions' own colonial past, but more to colonialism and postcolonialism as perspectives, decoupled from historic experience. As expressed by Pernille Ipsen and Gunlög Fur, the Nordic countries went postcolonial without going through the process of decolonisation. 1 The 2009 Itinerario issue devoted to Scandinavian colonialism edited by Niels Brimnes, Pernille Ipsen, and Gunlög Fur was an early critical engagement with the subject informed by postcolonial theories. In the ten years since its publication, studies of Swedish and Danish colonialism have evolved considerably. Museum exhibitions, research projects, academic publications, and newspaper debates have addressed a wide set of colonial imprints, domestic as well as international, directed towards specific colonies and colonial locales. One of these efforts was our anthology Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity (2013), bringing together scholars from several academic disciplines and countries to grapple with issues of colonialism. 2 The present special issue is a development and expansion of several of the themes discussed in the book and the 2009 Itinerario special issue, but also an expansion of the conceptual and scientific envelope. The ideas uniting this group of articles are concepts of entanglement, intersection, and interconnectivity. The authors analyse the nature of colonial entanglements and their
doi:10.1017/s0165115319000226 fatcat:ojnktnigindddhkky36iq7fxjm