Mathias Danbolt

Racial Turns and Returns: Recalibrations of Racial Exceptionalism in Danish Public Debates on Racism

In recent years, the Danish public has been embroiled in different debates on racism and whiteness. While these debates instigate a break with historic and color-blind silencing of racism in Denmark, they have also given rise to multiple reproductions of racist logics. Our analysis concentrates on a debate that took off in early 2013 following the publication of the book Are Danes Racist? The Problems of Immigration Research [Er danskerne racister? Indvandrerforskningens problemer] by Henning Bech and Mehmet Umit Necef. The debate centered around the question of whether or not so-called anti-racist research met scientific standards. We argue that this debate can be seen as a turning point in how both individual researchers in particular and racism research in general have been positioned as unscientific and as productive of social division and racism in Denmark. The chapter suggests that these racial turns can be seen as a recalibration of the tradition of Danish racial exceptionalism, where racism in Denmark is presented as containable and marginal, and where anti-racist research in itself constitutes a new form of racism.

New Nordic Exceptionalism: Jeuno JE Kim and Ewa Einhorn’s The United Nations of Norden and other realist utopias

At the 2009 Nordic Culture Forum summit in Berlin that centered on the profiling and branding of the Nordic region in a globalized world, one presenter stood out from the crowd. The lobbyist Annika Sigurdardottir delivered a speech that called for the establishment of “The United Nations of Norden”: A Nordic union that would gather the nations and restore Nordens role as the “moral superpower of the world.” Sigurdardottirs presentation generated such a heated debate that the organizers had to intervene and reveal that the speech was a performance made by the artists Jeuno JE Kim and Ewa Einhorn. This article takes Kim and Einhorns intervention as a starting point for a critical discussion of the history and politics of Nordic image-building. The article suggests that the reason Kim and Einhorns speech passed as a serious proposal was due to its meticulous mimicking of two discursive formations that have been central to the debates on the branding of Nordicity over the last decades: on the one hand, the discourse of “Nordic exceptionalism,” that since the 1960s has been central to the promotion of a Nordic political, socio-economic, and internationalist “third way” model, and, on the other hand, the discourse on the “New Nordic,” that emerged out of the New Nordic Food-movement in the early 2000s, and which has given art and culture a privileged role in the international re-fashioning of the Nordic brand. Through an analysis of Kim and Einhorns United Nations of Norden (UNN)-performance, the article examines the historical development and ideological underpinnings of the image of Nordic unity at play in the discourses of Nordic exceptionalism and the New Nordic. By focusing on how the UNN-project puts pressure on the role of utopian imaginaries in the construction of Nordic self-images, the article describes the emergence of a discursive framework of New Nordic Exceptionalism.