Saqqummersitaq

This paper focuses on historical travel writing by women in order to investigate the construction of gendered geographies in the Far North. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines history, territorial discourses and gender studies, the paper examines travel literature as part of the construction and performance of gendered coloniality in Greenland and Northern Sweden.

The conference paper was presented as part of a special panel "Investigating the Politics of Gender History, Coloniality, Decoloniality and Indigeneity in the Greenlandic Archive (Pre-proposed Panel)" at NORA 2019, Border Regimes, Territorial Discourses and Feminist Politics at the University of Iceland (Programme attached).

It is now available as part of a special issue "Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies", see Höglund, J., & Burnett, L. (2019). Introduction: Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies. Scandinavian Studies, 91(1-2), 1-12. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0001.

Direct link> Reeploeg, S. (2019). Women in the Arctic: Gendering Coloniality in Travel Narratives from the Far North, 1907-1930. Scandinavian Studies, 91(1-2), 182-204. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0182.

This book chapter investigates transnational cultural encounters that cross the established research areas of Northern European, Nordic, and Scandinavian Studies. Using approaches from Scandinavian research on coastal communities and cultural spaces, the article examines cultural transfer between Norway and Scotland through trade and exchange during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The interdisciplinary and transnational approach adopted throughout the paper suggests new perspectives in researching coastal communities in Britain, as part of a wider understanding of cultural encounters between the communities of the North.

Coastal cultures form a complex area of research, offering new opportunities to investigate and understand the history of cultural encounters and transnational “regions of culture” across the Northern peripheries. This article investigates the connected cultures of coastal communities of Norway, Scotland, and Canada after 1700. A shared, diverse, but similarly sea-focused cultural landscape exists across the North that informs the way in which regional cultural identities are formed and maintained. Using new methodologies of cultural transfer such as entangled histories or histoire croisée, this article pays particular attention to the creation of transient cross-cultural networks and regions stimulated by trade and related contacts across the North Sea and the North Atlantic.