David Jansson

Racialization and “Southern” identities of resistance : A psychogeography of internal orientalism in the U.S.

This article examines the “voices of the Others” of internal orientalism in the United States. Internal orientalism creates a binary of the imagined spaces of “America” and “the South,” simultaneously racializing both spaces as white spaces. The article explores the extent to which this discourse informs a “Southern” resistance identity among members of the white “Southern” nationalist organization the League of the South, and African American residents of Lynchburg, Virginia. An analysis of interviews shows that for the League members, internal orientalism produces a psychogeography wherein “Southerners” feel that they are considered an inferior part of the “American” nation, which they might experience as hatred and demonization. To combat a colonial mentality, the League advances a positive notion of “Southern” identity that emphasizes the theme of resistance. The essentialist version of “Southern” identity they espouse is ultimately a derivative discourse in that it does not unsettle the internal orientalist assumption that “the South” is fundamentally different from “the North” and “America.” Those African Americans in the study who embrace “Southern” identity resist the internal orientalist racialization of “Southern” as referring to white people, although to the extent they associate “Southern” identity with racism and segregation they partly reinforce the discourse. Some who do not embrace “Southern” identity cannot overcome its negative connotations. The study shows that articulations of “the South” and “Southern” identity are best understood from an interscalar perspective and not by considering “Southernness” as something produced solely in “the South.”

The Haunting of the South: American Geopolitical Identity and the Burden of Southern History

The evocative figure of a South haunted by its troubled past is a staple of representations of the region, and such representations not only create a problematic identity for the region but simultaneously produce a privileged national identity through the process of internal orientalism. This article connects internal orientalism with the notion of the double Janus to explain the similarities between Americas attitude toward Southern history and its assertion that Japan and Germany bear historical burdens of their own. The inward-looking face of the double Janus is informed by the discourse of internal orientalism and gives Americans an opportunity to judge an internal spatial Other (the South), particularly with regard to the regions history (as a result American geopolitical identity is cleansed from the historical burdens that are construed as Southern). This practice as a righteous judge of the Other serves the US hegemon and its outward-looking face of the double Janus in that the rhetorical practices deployed to discuss Japanese and German history have been honed through the assessment of the burdens of Southern history.

Nationalism in Geography Classrooms: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract This set of essays is based on a panel session convened at the 2009 meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which sought to explore the many challenges and pitfalls involved with teaching nationalism as a topic in geography classrooms. The authors offer different but complementary insights into the practical difficulties and potential strategies for covering an innately difficult topic. The discussion of nationalism in the essays is also an effective venue with which to further engage discussions of critical pedagogy.

Reaching a State of Hope: Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000. Edited by Mikael Byström and Pär Frohnert. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2013. 368 pages. US

With desperate migrants willing to take huge risks to seek refugee status in the European Union (and with many continuing to pay with their lives), a historical study of the refugee policies of Sweden and a handful of other European countries is timely. This book is divided into five sections addressing World War II-era refugee policy, agents and reception of refugee policy during and after the war, refugee policy and the labor shortage during the Cold War period, immigration discourses and practices from 1960 to 2000, and international perspectives. Almost all contributors work in history departments, and their methodologies and writing styles are clearly influenced by this fact. The writing is also uneven, perhaps reflective of the fact that most contributors are not writing in their native language. Several authors deal with anti-Semitism and Jewish refugee and immigration policy. Klas Amark’s chapter explores the question of how widespread and influential anti-Semitism was in the Swedish policy context during WWII and notes that in the 1930s, anti-Semitic thinking was quite mainstream in Sweden. Highlighting the Swedish government’s move from a very restrictive Jewish refugee policy to a much more generous one, Amark suggests that anti-Semitism and racism were “less important” in Sweden by the end of the war (50). The use of “important” is unfortunate here, as it is not clear what Amark means to say, and another word might have clarified his stance on this sensitive issue. Just how sensitive it should be considered is highlighted in Karin Kvist Geverts’s rather damning comparison of Sweden’s Jewish refugee policy with those of Switzerland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States. None of the countries come off particularly well, but the parallels and resonances between Swedish policy and Nazi practice are disturbing (though perhaps not surprising, given the contemporary problem of anti-Semitism in Malm€o and other Swedish cities). Geverts notes the hypocrisy of refugee policy and shows that policy changes during the war’s progress reflected more of a public relations gambit than real and substantial change in the underlying perspectives and ideologies. Many chapters indicate that official Swedish government policy concerning immigration was motivated primarily by self-interest, in contrast to Sweden’s nowcommon image as a “moral superpower.” Mikael Bystr€om’s chapter reviews the development of the Swedish welfare state and its relation to refugees and other immigrants, finding that postwar labor shortages and labor unions’ efforts to expand the umbrella of social welfare policies to cover foreign citizens in Sweden played central roles in determining the reach of the welfare state. Similarly, Paul Levine’s chapter on Raoul Wallenberg pokes holes in the many myths surrounding Wallenberg’s actions in saving many Jews in Hungary from the Nazi Holocaust. He argues that there is no evidence that Wallenberg was disturbed by what was going on in Nazi Germany and points out that his family, a famous Swedish business dynasty, had considerable dealings with German companies under the Nazi regime. This makes Wallenberg’s undeniably heroic actions in 1944 even more fascinating. Levine identifies a continuity in the Swedish Embassy in Hungary’s activities before and after Wallenberg’s arrival there, suggesting that Wallenberg was strongly influenced by that local environment. One of the most powerful chapters is Christina Johansson’s deconstruction of the