Saqqummersitaq

This article uses historical travel writing by Anglo-European Women to investigate the construction of gendered geographies in the Far North. Applying an interdisciplinary approach that combines history, literary analysis and gender studies, the paper examines the gendered aspects of travel, and the intersectionality of gender, class and race. Using examples from two published travel accounts and personal archives, the paper will demonstrate the historical processes of gender differences and representations, as well as capture the intersectionality of literature and the construction of place in real, imaginary and symbolic terms.

This week’s blog comes from Silke Reeploeg, a lecturer with the University of the Highlands and Islands based in the Shetland Islands. She has taught history and literature on a s200_silke.reeploegvariety of programmes including Orkney and Shetland Studies, Island Studies and Highlands and Islands Culture, and has recently completed a PhD thesis on the historical and cultural links between Scotland and Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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.