ABSTRACT
I flipped through photocopied pages of the old Icelandic schoolbooks piled in front of me. When conducting my research in Niger, I often wondered what I had learned as a child about Africa – this diversified continent that Niger is a part of. When analyzing the books in the mid-2000s, I saw again some of the images and the texts from my own childhood in the 1970s. And, to my disbelief, I saw them as well in books originally published as early as 1915, realizing that often the same books had been republished for decades. I had as a child read the different racial classifications in the old geography books and that Icelanders were courageous but difficult to rule, as phrased in one history book from 1915 (Jónsson 1915). Another kind of familiarity was, however, even more surprising: These old schoolbooks, produced at the height of Iceland’s fight for independence from Denmark, seemed in a way similar to the current celebration around the Icelandic businessmen and bankers. Colonialism has been my interest for years, and while it started with projects focusing on Africa, I had almost unintentionally moved closer and closer toward nationalism and whiteness in my own society, understanding both as deeply shaped by colonialism. I started in 2005 and 2006 more and more – as it felt at that time – to steal time from my ‘real’ research by focusing on Icelandic nationalism. It is like a puzzle, the old schoolbooks, the celebration of Icelandic success abroad, the bankers, Iceland’s various globalization – it all seems connected somehow and also to my research that I started in Niger. In a strange way, all of this when put together seemed to hint at the desire to reclaim Iceland’s position in a globalized world, engaging ultimately with coloniality and racist ideas embedded in the present.
