Johan Schimanski

Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders: Introduction to the Dossier

Abstract The cultural production of borders can be as read as referring to part of the economy, as an aesthetic site of creativity and border negotiation, and a cultural factor in the bordering process. The need to understand these cultural dimensions of borders and borderlands has lead to interdisciplinary interest in narratives, aesthetic forms, and cultural memory. Border poetics and related forms of spatial poetics can provide fruitful approaches to specific literary texts, films and other artworks, as well as to bordering in general. This special dossier for the Journal of Borderlands Studies presents papers from the 2008 ABS European conference in Kirkenes, which had “Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders” as its theme and which brought together a wide range of researchers from both the social sciences and the humanities, raising questions about the role of culture in borderlands and also focusing on borders in Sub‐Arctic Europe. The following selection of papers addresses films, poetry, novels and cultural heritage connected to specific topographical borderlands.

Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape

The borderscape is a flexible entity that goes beyond the space of the border and the borderland. This article argues that art and literature can be constitutive elements in the borderscape, along with other kinds of bordering and demarcation. Art and literature can help create resistance through performative acts of “borderscaping”, taking place in different locations and involving different perspectives. The article uses the aesthetic categories of the sublime, the postmodern, and the defamiliarised to trace forms of “distance” or “distancing” as they appear in conceptualisations of the borderscape. Artistic practices in the Norwegian-Russian borderscape are examined in an evaluation of their geopolitical significance, with particular attention given to descriptions of the Norwegian-Russian border in novels by John Fowles and Kjartan Fløgstad.

Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and a Method

Here I wish to propose a theoretical basis for a border poetics by thinking through the border not in its static and mapped configurations, but from the processual and embodied perspective of the border-crossing narrative. I will be suggesting a set of seven processes involved in the act of crossing a border, implicating in turn a model of five border planes with which to organize a border reading. I will also be discussing the implications of these processes and planes for reading such crossings in literature and other narrative. The numbers seven and five must be taken as tentative; I have yet to find any secure argument justifying these divisions beyond that of experience with different border readings. Indeed, what follows takes as its premise that the border and thus the border crossing can only be seen from particular, embodied viewpoints and are ultimately unmappable. Crossing over into the realm of border theory is like any other border crossing: marked by the crossing, we both enter a new realm and cut ourselves off from it by bringing the border with us. In our negotiations, the border is liable to shift and change; and entering into border theory, we must allow for the possibility that our conception of the border may be transformed and that any particular theory or principle of the border may lose its meaning. It has been argued that all border studies are implicated at some point in a politics of power, and it seems to me imperative not to lock such efforts into a formation not open to revision. These proposals and reflections take as their departure point a minimal narrative of the border which may be formulated as follows: The crossing of the border involves the passage of the border-crosser from one territory to another, and the passage is marked by the border. For example, the novel Cysgod y Cryman (1953; trans. as The Shadow of the Sickle) by

Explorers’ Bodies in Arctic Mediascapes: Celebrating the Return of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in 1874

Abstract 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, and is regulated by the mediascape of the time, which gives a central role to the explorers’ bodies. The article focuses on welcoming receptions in Bergen and in Vienna. Differences between dominant topoi such as those of science and gendered attraction in Bergen and those of spectacular simulacra and exhaustion in Vienna can be ascribed to a combination of factors, but especially to the differences in the development of mass culture in the two contexts.

Seeing Disorientation: China Miéville's The City & the City

Abstract Orientations revealed as false presumably lead to the need for reorientation. Outside this economy, can there be utopian unorientation or ambiguous post-orientation? The self comes into being in a moment of disorientation, as Althussers famous scene of being hailed by a policeman on the street makes clear. Althusser represses this moment, but what if we allow for its accompanying self-reflexivity? The fictional cities of China Miévilles The City & the City (2009) are set in a fragmented and multi-layered space characterised by displacement and disorientation. This theoretically informed police procedural emphasises disorientation through the form of the detective story and plays with genre orientations through its fantastic/science fictional elements. Most strikingly, it reifies our everyday practices of ignoring certain things around us, using a science fictional novum: the institutionalised practice of ‘unseeing’. The novel suggests that the seeing that paradoxically lurks behind unseeing creates disorientation, giving momentary glimpses of ambiguous post-orientations.

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 Gisli Palsson, 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.

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.

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 .