Postcolonial Norway

(Post)Colonial Norway traces Norwegians' entanglement with European and also U.S. colonialism from the 1700s down to the recent present. Through a longue durée approach, the volume presents a selection of historical cases and contexts. The episodes treated in this volume include missionaries trained in Trondheim in the 1700s who contributed to the process sometimes described as the colonization of Sápmi, and Norwegians who participated in the transatlantic slave trade as part of Denmark-Norway. Norwegians were active knowledge producers when it came to presenting themselves as white settlers at the Chicago Fair in 1893, exhibiting colonial subjects at the "Congo Exhibit" in Oslo, and, later, Norwegians were avid collectors of human remains from the Pacific Islands to be stored at the University of Oslo. This longer colonial legacy continues to shape contemporary imaginaries of Norwegianness as white, and remains embedded in urban spaces-for instance in Møhlenpris in Bergen, named after a seventeenth-century merchant whose commercial activities can be tied to transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation economy.(Post)Colonial Norway should be read as a contribution to the historiography of Nordic colonialism and European colonialism "from the margins."<br><br>"In this valuable scholarly work, Grini and Wirth highlight interconnected Nordic colonial histories that have been poorly understood and initiate a much-needed conversation around the ways transimperial ideas of racial hierarchies still resonate in contemporary society."<br>Anders Bo Rasmussen, University of Southern Denmark<br><br>"What happens when you insert the Nordic countries into the history of European colonialism? This book is a much welcome reflection on this question from the horizon of Norway, a nation born out of independence struggles against Danish and Swedish dominance. Yet, as this book shows, deeply shaped and perhaps indeed fortified by its intimate connection to colonial power structures and mindsets.<br>I applaud the extended time frame which pushes the analysis beyond the nation-state itself and allows the collection to connect the postcolonial to the decolonial, exposing the economic, cultural, and epistemological systems of colonial entanglements and oppression.<br>(Post)colonial Norway does a great job of questioning methodological nationalism and challenging the national borders as natural delimitation for analysis and thereby offers a fresh look at Norwegian and Nordic involvement with colonialism of interest to readers in the whole Nordic region and beyond."<br>Gunlög Fur, Linnæus University