Rikke Andreassen

I can never be normal: A conversation about race, daily life practices, food and power

This article focuses on the doing and undoing of race in daily life practices in Denmark. It takes the form of a dialogue between two women, a heterosexual Muslim woman of colour and a lesbian white woman, who discuss and analyze how their daily life, e.g. interactions with their children’s schools and daycare institutions, shape their racial and gendered experiences. Drawing upon black feminist theory, postcolonial theory, critical race and whiteness studies, the two women illustrate inclusions and exclusions in their society based on gender, race, class and sexuality – and especially pinpoint to how these categories intersect in processes of inclusion and exclusion. The article argues that the lack of a Nordic vocabulary for the term ‘race’ – as ‘race’ is associated with biological racism which dominated in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and hence is viewed as a historical phenomenon left behind – prevents contemporary people from addressing existing patterns of racial discrimination, inclusion and exclusion in their daily lives, as well as from connecting their contemporary struggles to historical struggles and inequalities. Furthermore, they illustrate how food, class and race intersect with an analysis of the so-called New Nordic Kitchen, exemplified by the world famous Copenhagen restaurant NOMA. The article interprets the New Nordic Kitchen, which has become very popular in the Nordic countries in recent years, as a culinary project performing whiteness, and connects the New Nordic Kitchen’s obsession with ‘the authentic Nordic’ with historical race science in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

The search for the white Nordic: analysis of the contemporary New Nordic Kitchen and former race science

The article analyzes the so-called ‘New Nordic Kitchen’ and its award-winning Copenhagen-based restaurant, Noma. Despite the fact that the idea of the New Nordic Kitchen, where only ingredients found naturally in the Nordic territories can be used for cooking, has gained huge popularity among ordinary people and politicians alike, very limited critical research has been done on the phenomenon. This article investigates how the New Nordic Kitchen plays into constructions of race and whiteness. It shows how the New Nordic Kitchen celebrates an ideal of ‘the Nordic’ as ‘pure’, ‘wild’ and isolated from globalization and immigration. Furthermore, it argues that the image of Nordic food, displayed in the New Nordic Kitchen – including the idea of Nordic food as a messenger between a celebrated past and contemporary times – is rather exclusionary towards Nordic racial minorities, e.g. recently arrived immigrants and descendants. The article includes an analysis of Nordic race science from the turn of the twentieth century in order to illustrate how the New Nordic Kitchen draws upon a longer historical tradition of viewing the Nordic, and especially Nordic whiteness, as superior. The historical importance of race science in Denmark is not common knowledge, and very limited research is done in this area. The article therefore also brings new insights to the historical construction of whiteness in the Nordic context. Finally, the article also shows how the New Nordic Kitchen not only draws upon but also continues the colonial power relations between Denmark and former Danish colonies.

Developing Theoretical Perspectives On Racialisation and Migration

* E-mail: suvkes@utu.fi # E-mail: rikkean@ruc.dk The number of studies approaching research on migration from the perspectives of racialisation and postcolonialism has increased considerably in the Nordic countries since the Millennium. These studies have produced important empirical knowledge and theoretically informed analyses of the histories and current processes in the Nordic societies, as well as of different diasporic communities living in the region. However, the theoretical approaches have often been borrowed from Anglo-American literature, while theoretical discussions and elaborations within the Nordic region have been scarcer. This Special Issue Developing Theoretical Perspectives on Racialisation and Migration engages in and develops theories on migration, racialisation and postcolonialism from the Nordic context, bearing in mind that ‘Norden’ is not an isolated region but part of global processes through multiple transnational connections and postcolonial power relations. Moreover, we seek to highlight how concepts and theoretical approaches on migration and racialisation need to be adjusted to and elaborated in a context characterised by welfare state ideologies and institutions, notions of allegedly homogeneous nations and claims of exemplary achievements in gender and socio-economic equality, as well as neoliberal policies. This Special Issue provides insights into how existing theories on racialisation and migration can be developed, revised and revisited – especially in relation to questions on how race and ethnicity intersect with the categories of gender, sexuality, class and age. The articles examine and discuss how the concepts race, racialisation and whiteness can be used for analysing the histories and current trends in the Nordic countries and what are the different ways of understanding and defining these concepts. Moreover, the contributions explore how postcolonial and decolonial theories can shed light on a geographical context that is often considered to be an outsider to colonial processes, since the countries’ role in colonising non-European territories was relatively small – at least in comparison to colonial powers like Great-Britain, France and the Netherlands. Research has, however, shown the ‘colonial complicity’ (Keskinen et al. 2009) of the Nordic countries that has built upon participation in colonial economic and cultural endeavours as well as the embracement of ideologies that place Europe as the cradle of civilisation, thus superior to (what is discussed as) the non-western world. The emphasis on the Nordic countries’ outsider position, has also meant that colonial histories and structures of racism have been, and still are, largely ignored or presented as insignificant in the Nordic public discourse. Along the discussions of migration and racialisation, the articles explore nation-state formations and constructions of national identity in the Nordic region, both as a consequence of migration and as a reaction to migration. The perspectives of racialisation and postcolonialism/ decoloniality are extremely timely today. A number of studies have shown how the Nordic countries were a part of the colonial world order (e.g., McEachrane & Faye 2001; Keskinen et al. 2009; Loftsdottir & Jensen 2012; Rud 2016), participating in slave trade (Larsen 2008; Weiss 2016), development of racial biology (Hübinette & Lundström 2014) and exhibition of the racialised others (Andreassen 2015), as well as benefiting from colonial trade relations and (re)producing colonial representations (Sawyer & Habel 2014). Thus, racialisation and the processes of creating inequalities on the basis of racial categorisations are in no way new phenomena in the Nordic countries. However, such processes have taken new forms and penetrated all arenas of the society following the increased migration from non-western countries since the 1960s. In recent years, the Nordic societies have witnessed the rise of neo-nationalism, right-wing populism and racist movements that today bear considerable effect on governmental policies, political parties, and mainstream and social media (e.g., Hervik 2011; Horsti & Nikunen 2013). Public debates on migration and integration of minorities frequently portray Muslims and non-western minorities in a manner that reproduces colonialist and Orientalist discourses – ranging from the threatening to the exotified (e.g., Bredström 2003; Lundström 2007; Nielsen 2014). Simultaneously, the racialised

New kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via social media sites

Abstract The article investigates how the technology of social media sites facilitates new kinds of intimacy and kinship. It analyses what happens when ‘donor families’ – families with children conceived via sperm donation – connect with each other online. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s understanding of intimacy as a promise of belonging, the article investigates how new kinship relations facilitate belonging and practices of intimacy. While Berlant uses ‘intimacy’ as a general, normative term, this article explores small, individual and everyday negotiations of – and tensions related to – intimacy in order to illustrate how the narrative of intimacy is experienced and negotiated. Through analysis of and interviews with members of a Facebook group that connects donor families, the article describes the experiences of forming new alternative families and argues that new kinship relations can both lead to new intimacies and be perceived as threats to existing intimacy and nuclear family formations. Finally, the article illustrates how users experience emotions more intensely online than offline, and suggests that the terms traditionally used in relation to intimacy are inadequate for understanding intimacy in a digital era.

Muslim women and interracial intimacies

Abstract This article focuses on media debates about interracial and interethnic marriage practices. In 2012, Danish immigrants and descendants, especially Muslim women, were accused of harming the integration processes as they were not marrying ethnically Danish men. Through analysis of newspaper articles and Internet debates the article shows how Muslim women became excluded from the national community in these debates. Drawing upon previous debates about interracial/ethnic relationships, the article illustrates how the contemporary criticism mirrors historical criticism of sexuality. Moreover, the 2012 debate provides new insights and reveals how we need to nuance previous understandings of interracial relations.

Representations of Sexuality and Race at Danish Exhibitions of “Exotic” People at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Denmark hosted a number of exhibitions of “exotic” people between the 1880s and the 1910s, in which people of colour were exhibited as mass entertainment in amusement parks and zoological gardens. This article illustrates how the categories of race, gender, and sexuality were co-constructed in the representations of these exhibitions; it reveals how not only the women but also the men on display were sexualized and constructed as erotic figures. The exhibitions played a role in maintaining contemporary scientific racial hierarchies, but simultaneously they challenged those same hierarchies, as “illegitimate” romantic relationships were allegedly formed between the exhibited men of colour and the white female local audience.

Social imaginaries, sperm and whiteness: Race and reproduction in British media

ABSTRACT This article analyses narratives about so-called Viking babies and Viking sperm. Over the last few years an increasing number of British single women and lesbian couples have been creating families by becoming pregnant with Danish donor sperm, termed ‘Viking sperm’. Through analyses of British media coverage of these new families, this article explores contemporary constructions of race, especially whiteness, and gender, and shows how imaginaries of Vikings, genes and white superiority circulate in British media and among British mothers. The article illustrates how a racial discourse, which often is associated with nineteenth-century racial science, can surface in contemporary times. Yet the article also reveals how colonial and racial legacies of whiteness tend to be erased from narratives of fertility, as the (neoliberal) focus on the individual as consumer frames reproduction as individual (free) choices distant from a colonial past.

Race, Gender, and Researcher Positionality Analysed Through Memory Work

Abstract Drawing upon feminist standpoint theory and memory work, the authors analyse racial privilege by investigating their own racialized and gendered subjectifications as academic researchers. By looking at their own experiences within academia, they show how authority and agency are contingent upon racialization, and how research within gender, migration, and critical race studies is often met by rejection and threats of physical violence. The article illustrates how race is silenced within academia, and furthermore how questions of race, when pointed out, are often interpreted as a call for censorship. The authors conclude that a lack of reflection around the situatedness of knowledge, as well as the evasion of discussions on racial privilege, contribute to maintaining whiteness as a privileged site for scientific knowledge production.