Saqqummersitaq

Recognising the diverse roles that women have played in the history of the Arctic, both as colonisers and colonised, this article uses travel writing or Arctic biographies by women writers to explore female colonisation strategies within the context of Scandinavian colonialism. Inspired by Maria Lugone’s use of the concept of “coloniality of gender” (2008) the article investigates how gendered coloniality is produced and mediated through travel writing by women in the Arctic. While Lugones’ critique primarily addresses the racism and violence inherent in modern/colonial gender systems, the analysis uses her understanding of coloniality as a lived experience of Eurocentric domination in order to illuminate the gendered nature of complicity by white, elite women. Using the work of Emilie Demantt (1873-1958), later Demantt-Hatt, and Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982) the article analyses both ‘Nordic’ and ‘transnational’ female strategies of colonisation as they are performed and articulated through biographical writing. Both in form and content, these texts demonstrate the many ways in which global and imperial power intersected with local hierarchies and systems of knowledge as part of multiple and concurring representations of reality over time.

Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands have in common their history as Danish dependencies within a historically and geographically coherent region. The complex aftermaths of Denmark’s sovereignty over its North Atlantic territories and their ongoing nation building processes lie at the core of this book. Today, we are witnessing region building processes beyond bilateral links to Denmark. How do the countries position themselves, individually and collectively, vis-à-vis the European metropolitan centres, a larger transcontinental North Atlantic region, the 'hot' Arctic, and global histories of colonialism and decolonisation? By examining the region from cultural, literary, historical, political, anthropological and linguistic perspectives, the articles in this book shed light on Nordic colonialism and its understanding as 'exceptional', and challenge and modify established notions of postcolonialism. Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands are shown to be both the (former) subjects as well as the producers of cultural hierarchisations in an entangled world.