Working Paper 12: Changing Borders in Published Migration Narratives in Norwegian

Source at http://www.euborderscapes.eu/This working paper gives some of the interpretations and working hypotheses reached at this stage of my contribution to research within the EUBORDERSCAPES project Working Package 10, Research Task 3: ”Cultural Borders of Europe ‘Bordering’ and ‘Re-bordering’ Europe through Fictional Narratives: The Case of Immigrant ‘Others’”. The paper examines migration literature written and published in Norwegian by the children of migrants or migrants born elsewhere but growing up partly in Norway, for rhetorical and narrative figurations of borders and border-crossings which can provide keys to changing conceptions of borders and to the values these are ascribed. The paper argues for the close connection between border concepts in the corpus and the status of the books as performative acts crossing from private experience to public discourse. This process is often explicitly addressed in the texts themselves and is part of an extended borderscape. I intend later to address further texts, the negotiation of border concepts in the reception of texts, the social context and research literature on migration in Norway, and research literature on migration literature in general

The Useless Arctic: Exploiting Nature in the Arctic in the 1870s

What is the discursive genealogy of an ecological approach to the Arctic? Building on distinctions suggested by Francis Spufford and Gísli Pálsson, this article examines a specific juncture in the history of European–Arctic interaction – the reception of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition in 1874 – and traces the potential for ecological and relational understandings in what seems to be an orientalist and exploitative material. Examining the medial reception in Austria and in Norway, along with certain key texts in which Arctic wildlife is described, we find that the Norwegian reception of the expedition emphasizes practical issues connected with resource exploitation in the Arctic, while the Austrian reception mostly sees the Arctic as a symbolic resource with which to negotiate issues of identity and modernity. The Austrian discourse revolves around a set of paradoxical contradictions, the most central being those between materialism and idealism and emptiness and fullness; we argue it is the instability of such ambiguities which produces the possibility of a future ecological discourse

Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and a Method

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Mottakelse/mottakelse; Tilbakekomstene til den østerrikskungarske nordpolekspedisjonen, 1872-1874

This article investigates the welcoming receptions held on the return of the Austro- Hungarian Polar Expedition (1872-1874) as part of a Scandinavian and Central European discourse of the Arctic and of Arctic exploration. Also called the Payer-Weyprecht or Tegetthoff Expedition, it was subjected to a long series of such public celebrations on its way home to Austria-Hungary via Norway, Sweden and Germany. While our access to these celebrations is through written sources such as newspaper reports, the celebrations themselves are here seen as constituting a discourse primarily made up of performative and material elements. This discourse is formed by values such as heroism, national identities, local identities, class and gender. The article focuses on welcoming receptions in Bergen and in Vienna, exploring the central role of the explorers’ bodies and traces/recreations of the Arctic. It also follows connections between these celebratory receptions and the literary reception of the expedition in Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (1984). Parts of the argument have been developed further in ”Explorers’ Bodies in Arctic Mediascapes: Celebrating the Return of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in 1874”, Acta Borealia, 26.1 (2009), pp. 50-76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08003830902951532.&nbsp

Introduction: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders

The essays in this issue of Nordlit focus on how historical and contemporary border discourses, expressive and aesthetic representations, are generated, circulated, and interpreted in both local and global contexts

The Useless Arctic: Exploiting Nature in the Arctic in the 1870s

What is the discursive genealogy of an ecological approach to the Arctic? Building on distinctions suggested by Francis Spufford and Gísli Pálsson, this article examines a specific juncture in the history of European–Arctic interaction – the reception of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition in 1874 – and traces the potential for ecological and relational understandings in what seems to be an orientalist and exploitative material. Examining the medial reception in Austria and in Norway, along with certain key texts in which Arctic wildlife is described, we find that the Norwegian reception of the expedition emphasizes practical issues connected with resource exploitation in the Arctic, while the Austrian reception mostly sees the Arctic as a symbolic resource with which to negotiate issues of identity and modernity. The Austrian discourse revolves around a set of paradoxical contradictions, the most central being those between materialism and idealism and emptiness and fullness; we argue it is the instability of such ambiguities which produces the possibility of a future ecological discourse