ABSTRACT

This volume explores the complex and contradictory ways in which the cultural, scientific and political myth of whiteness has influenced identities, self-perceptions and the process of integration of Nordic immigrants into multicultural and racially segregated American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In deploying central insights from whiteness studies, postcolonial feminist and intersectionality theories, it shows that Nordic immigrants - Danes, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians and Sámi - contributed to and challenged American racism and white identity. A diverse group of immigrants, they could proclaim themselves ‘hyper-white’ and ‘better citizens than anybody else’, including Anglo-Saxons, thus taking for granted the racial bias of American citizenship and ownership rights, yet there were also various, unexpected intersections of whiteness with ethnicity, regional belonging, gender, sexuality, and political views. ‘Nordic whiteness’, then, was not a monolithic notion in the USA and could be challenged by other identities, which could even turn white Nordic immigrants into marginalised figures. A fascinating study of whiteness and identity among white migrants in the USA, Nordic Whiteness will appeal to scholars of sociology, history and anthropology with interests in Scandinavian studies, migration and diaspora studies and American studies.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Whiteness in Nordic immigrants’ identity formation

part I|20 pages

Whiteness as epistemological ignorance

chapter 1|18 pages

Norwegian migration and displaced indigenous peoples

Toward an understanding of Nordic whiteness in the land-taking

part II|18 pages

Not quite white

chapter 2|16 pages

Racialization of the Sámi in early twentieth-century migration processes

Trans-atlantic continuities and divergences

part III|20 pages

White immigrants and the failure of class solidarity

chapter 3|18 pages

“On liberty and equality”

Race and Reconstruction among Scandinavian immigrants, 1864–1868

part IV|44 pages

Nordic superiority and the derogatory representations of others

chapter 4|23 pages

Atop a hierarchy of whiteness

Danish Americans as portrayed by Danish travel writers in the second half of the nineteenth century

chapter 5|19 pages

Good Americans “born of a good people”

Race, whiteness, and nationalism among Norwegian Americans in the Pacific Northwest

part V|26 pages

Challenging intersections of whiteness and ethnicity

chapter 7|9 pages

In the American matrix

Norwegians in Chicago in the nineteenth century

part VI|42 pages

Nonconformity and resistance to white norms

chapter 8|17 pages

Claiming roots

Politics of racial ancestry in the Finnish-American press during the 1938 New Sweden Tercentenary

chapter 9|19 pages

The Nordic mystique

Swedish women as sexualized “other” in postwar America

chapter 10|4 pages

Conclusion

Nordic slotting into the American ethno-racial hierarchy