Hvítleiki og sýnileiki│Making Whiteness Visible

In this presentation, I talk about the concept white supremacy and its utility in the context of the Nordic countries and Iceland. Scholars focusing on racism and inequalities in general have called for more engagement with the concept white supremacy as an analytical tool (for example Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2020). My discussion gives some insights into basic components of the concepts, and how it has been seen as drawing better attention to structural inequalities (Bond and Inwood 2016). The Nordic countries have benefitted from notions of Nordic exceptionalism that often positions them as existing outside normative colonial history (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2014), while the North is associated  with purity and whiteness (Hübinette and Lundström 2011). Following Harrison (2002) and others, the discussion furthermore stresses the need to understand ideas of whiteness as historically contextual and shifting.

Drawing upon Paul Gilroy´s seminal Black Atlantic (1995), numerous scholars of early modern race have rightly linked the development of phenotype-based racial thought to the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Yet the early modern Mediterranean also merits attention from researchers investigating the history of phenotype-based race-making and its relation to slavery.  In the case of early modern France, considering the Middle Sea is particularly vital, for well into the 1600s, Frenchmen mainly saw slavery as an Ottoman peril befalling their compatriots in the Mediterranean.  This talk, then, will provide a Mediterranean complement to the current Atlantic-focused work on early modern phenotype-based race-making.  Drawing upon Tyler Stovall´s White Freedom (2021), I will examine emergent white racial dynamics in a soaring paean to global mobility paradoxically located in Emanuel d´Aranda´s 1657 captivity narrative Relation de la Captivité & Liberté du Sieur Emanuel d´Aranda, Jadis Esclave à Alger.  A close reading of d´Aranda´s passage, reinforced with comparisons to Nikolaus Rugendas the Elder´s Figure Clock with an African Man (ca. 1620), will reveal that just as slavery was being coupled to blackness in the Atlantic, global mobility, and thus freedom, was gradually becoming associated with nascent ideas of whiteness in the Mediterranean.  By examining the dynamics of phenotype-based race-making from a comparative Mediterranean-Atlantic perspective, I hope to see early modern race in a broad, global context.

White womanhood has been used and weaponized throughout American history to different ends and ills. The figure of the passive white woman whose virtue and purity are under attack is as much a myth as it is a social construct devised for a specific purpose, usually to sanction and perpetrate violence and racism against people of colour. This talk looks at depictions of white women in two late-twentieth-century works, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, to explore how both employ the image of the wounded white woman, casting her as hurt and threatened by sexism and by her surroundings, while overlooking her privilege and power. Challenging the notion that the protagonist in Plath’s narrative and Kaysen in her memoir are simply victims, this presentation seeks to interrupt traditional representations of whiteness by adopting an intersectional approach and by disrupting the notion of whiteness as immaterial or invisible.

Decolonization within academia is the process of interrogating curricula and pedagogy for underlying influences and ideologies arising from a global history of colonization and imperialism. It involves a moving away from Euro-colonial concepts and categories that have been naturalised as ‘universal’. In universities and higher education, this concerns knowledge that is inherited from colonial contexts and regarded as ‘natural’ (Menon, 2022). Colonial and imperial practices that have long determined how disciplines are formulated, understood, and taught in universities and schools, have been the subject of more recent work by postcolonial and decolonial scholars such as Asher (2017), Jain (2015), Viswanathan (1996), and Mbembe (2016). These foundational assumptions impact who and what we teach as well as how and to whom curricula are taught.

A good deal of work is already being done on the place of higher education and its responsibility to teach histories of colonialism in general and Iceland’s own position as a postcolonial nation as well as on its relationship with Greenland in particular, (Loftsdóttir 2012, 2015, 2016; Halldórsdóttir & Kjaran 2020; Halldórsdóttir & Gollifer, 2018). The debate on decolonisation of higher education is slowly emerging in the Nordic countries, but as has been pointed out, “decolonization requires more – a genuine overturn of existing hierarchies” (Junka-Aikio, 2014).

This presentation will focus on our experiences and findings as PI and post-doc on a project that has been deeply engaged with faculty and students at the University of Iceland in order to understand the state of decoloniality of curricula at the schools of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education. Our own positionalities have been interestingly multi-faceted in the initiation and carrying out of an exercise such as this one in a predominantly homogenous, Icelandic, context. The paper will think through the academic, political, cultural, and human aspects of this exercise which is the first of its kind in the Nordic region.