LIT3000 Fordypningsemne med bacheloroppgave: Det litterære Arktis (med Janicke S. Kaasa, høsten 2016)
Bakgrunn
1963 født Stockholm
-1981 skolegang i England, Botswana, Zambia og Norge
1990 Magistergrad i allmenn litteraturvitenskap, Universitetet i Oslo
1993 School of Criticism & Theory, Dartmouth College, USA
1994 gjesteforsker ved Universitetet i Aberystwyth
1995, 1997 førsteamanuensisvikar, Universitetet i Oslo
1997 Dr. art., Universitetet i Oslo
1998-2014 Førsteamanuensis i allmenn litteraturvitenskap, Universitetet i Tromsø/UiT Norges arktiske universitet
2006 Gjesteprofessor i grensestudier, Centre for Border Studies, Universitetet i Glamorgan
2011 Gjesteforsker ved Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis
2013 Gjesteforsker ved Høgskulen i Sogn og Fjordane
2014-2016 Professor II i allmenn litteraturvitenskap, UiT Norges arktiske universitet
2014- Professor i allmenn litteraturvitenskap, Universitetet i Oslo
2016-2019 Professor II i kulturmøter, University of Eastern Finland
2017 Gjesteforsker ved Universität Wien
2017-2020 Forskningsleder, ILOS, Universitetet i Oslo
Verv
Medleder forskningsprosjektet "TRAUM - Transforming Author Museums", Høgskulen i Sogn og Fjordane i samarbeid med Universitetet i Oslo (Norges forskningsråd, FRIPRO-programmet, 2016-2019)
Leder workshop-serien “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing: Contemporary Public Migration Narratives in Europe”, Universitetet i Oslo i samarbeid med University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyväskäla og Dalarna University (NOS-HS, 2019-2020)
Red. Johan Schimanski, Cathrine Theodorsen og Henning Howlid Wærp, red. Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis. Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk, 2011.
Anka Ryall, Johan Schimanski og Henning Howlid Wærp, red. Arctic Discourses. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Post-traumatic conditions are the result of wounds crossing bodily or psychic borders. At the same time, crossing territorial borders can cause traumas. How do migration narratives figure the traumatic effects of border-crossings? To answer this question, I apply a border aesthetics approach, arguing that the borderings of what may be sensed (cf. Jacques Rancière’s concept of the partage de sensible, the “distribution of the sensible”) in the borderscapes of migration narratives are often regulated by the epistemological borderings that take place in the fixations, substitutions and blind spots of trauma. I suggest that migration literature can combine different styles of presentation—for example, images and narrative—in order to create new forms of political aesthetics and counteract the desensitizing logic of media spectacle.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archive’s Others, In Susi K. Frank & Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen (ed.),
Arctic Archives: Ice, Memory and Entropy.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3837646566.
Kapittel.
s 49
- 68
Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Introduction, In Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Schimanski (ed.),
Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9.
Introduksjon.
s 9
- 20
The deportation of unregistered migrant Maria Amelie after the publication of her book Ulovlig norsk (2010) was a major media event in Norway. In her following book, Takk (2014), she constantly refers to windows, mirrors and camera lenses. Glass becomes a symbol of traumatic experience and configures the in/visibility of the deportation borderscape, creating a political aesthetics of the border.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Reading the Future North, In Janike Kampevold Larsen & Peter Hemmersam (ed.),
Future North : The Changing Arctic Landscapes.
Routledge.
ISBN 978-1-4724-8125-2.
2.
s 16
- 25
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). XÉNITEIA/Xeniteia, In Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Schimanski (ed.),
Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9.
Kapittel.
s 313
- 322
Vis sammendrag
Translation of Xéniteia/Utlendighet. Hvordan leve sammen: Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet. Ed. Christian Refsum, Johan Schimanski & Knut Stene-Johanssen. Oslo: Spartacus, 2016.
Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Sovereignty, In Johan Henrik Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe (ed.),
Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections.
Berghahn Books.
ISBN 9781785334641.
Kapittel 5.
s 111
- 128
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Reading from the Border, In Jakob Lothe (ed.),
The Future of Literary Studies.
Novus Forlag.
ISBN 978-82-7099-900-2.
Kapittel.
s 61
- 71
Fulltekst i vitenarkiv.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Wolfe, Stephen (2017). Intersections: A Conclusion in the Form of a Glossary, In Johan Henrik Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe (ed.),
Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections.
Berghahn Books.
ISBN 9781785334641.
Conclusion/Glossary.
s 155
- 177
Fulltekst i vitenarkiv.
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 Althusser's 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 Miéville's 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.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). XÉNITEIA/Utlendighet, I: Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Henrik Schimanski (red.),
Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISBN 978-82-304-01781.
Kapittel.
s 402
- 416
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 definitions of the aesthetic to trace forms of “distance” or “distancing” as they appear in conceptualizations of the borderscape, through the aesthetic categories of the sublime, the postmodern and the defamiliarized. 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.
Borders are traces, that is to say, they are a form of writing – and thus they are also texts to be read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. I will here be examining some literary and cinematic narratives in which national borders are crossed for elements of an epistemology of the border. Such narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself – the reader crossing over into the text. If border crossings are movements of bodies in space, what do these narratives tell us of the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text? What can these narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity? Can national affiliation be seen as an act of reading borders? I suggest that narratives of border crossing, like border crossings themselves, are structured around a double vector, sometimes transformed into a swirling confusion of directions, constituting the border zone and its associated identities.
What is the discursive genealogy of an ecological approach to the Arctic? Building on distinctions suggested by Francis Spufford and Gísli Pálsson, 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.
Schimanski, Johan (2013). Pronouncing it the Porder: Ascribing Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National Borders in Frank A. Jenssen’s The Salt Bin, In Hein Viljoen (ed.),
Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries.
Rodopi.
ISBN 978-90-420-3638-3.
Chapter.
s 181
- 198
Schimanski, Johan (2013). Tilbake til grenserommet, I: Lars Ivar Widerøe & Cathinka Hambro (red.),
Lochlann. Festskrift til Jan Erik Rekdal på 60-årsdagen. Aistí in ómós do Jan Erik Rekdal ar a 60ú lá breithe.
Hermes Academic Publishing and Bookshop A/S.
ISBN 978-82-8034-202-7.
Kapittel.
s 165
- 177
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (2013). The Aesthetics of Borders, In Kjerstin Aukrust (ed.),
Assigning Cultural Values.
Peter Lang Publishing Group.
ISBN 9783631632987.
Chapter.
s 235
- 250
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Oppdagelsesreise blir til litteratur: Skrivestrategier i mottakelsen av den østerriksk-ungarske nordpolsekspedisjonen (1872-1874), I: Johan Schimanski; Cathrine Theodorsen & Henning Howlid Wærp (red.),
Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis.
Tapir Akademisk Forlag.
ISBN 978-82-519-2781-9.
Kapittel.
s 57
- 90
Schimanski, Johan; Theodorsen, Cathrine & Wærp, Henning Howlid (2011). Arktis som litterært prosjekt, I: Johan Schimanski; Cathrine Theodorsen & Henning Howlid Wærp (red.),
Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis.
Tapir Akademisk Forlag.
ISBN 978-82-519-2781-9.
Innledende kapittel.
s 9
- 28
Ryall, Anka; Schimanski, Johan & Wærp, Henning Howlid (2010). Arctic Discourses: An Introduction, In Anka Ryall; Johan Schimanski & Henning Howlid Wærp (ed.),
Arctic Discourses.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISBN 978-1443819596.
An Introduction.
s ix
- xxviii
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Reading Gender in Border-Crossing Narratives, In Jane Aaron; Henrice Altink & Chris Weedon (ed.),
Gendering Border Studies.
University of Wales Press.
ISBN 9780708321706.
Chapter.
s 105
- 126
Schimanski, Johan & Lang, Birgit (2010). Das Subjekt am Grenzübergang: Terézia Moras „STILLE. mich. NACHT“ und Yoko Tawadas „Das Leipzig des Lichts und der Gelatine“. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.
ISSN 0044-2496.
129(Sonderheft), s 161- 179
Vis sammendrag
Der Artikel untersucht, welche Rolle historisch spezifische Grenzkonzepte am Grenzübergang spielen und wieweit sie nicht nur die Repräsentation der Grenzstation, sondern auch jene der Grenzgänger und deren körperliche Grenzen beeinflussen. Die Erzählungen „STILLE. mich. NACHT“ von Terézia Mora und „Das Leipzig des Lichts und der Gelatine“ von Yoko Tawada thematisieren beide die Öffnung des Eisernen Vorhangs im Jahr 1989. Diese Geschichten von in Deutschland lebenden Autorinnen, die ursprünglich aus Ungarn bzw. Japan stammen, werden im Kanon der ‚Literatur nach der Wende‘ normalerweise nicht berücksichtigt. Beide Texte sind durch eine spezifisch unfeste Beziehung zu historischen Ereignissen gekennzeichnet, welche die Grenze selbst beständig relativiert und die Grenzstation zum Grenzgebiet werden lässt. Der Umgang der unterschiedlichen homodiegetischen Erzähler mit der Grenze ist grundverschieden: Mora lässt einen männlichen Grenzwächter auf der ungarisch-österreichischen Grenze erzählen, Tawada eine Grenzgängerin auf ihrem Weg nach Leipzig; ihre Reise beginnt am Zollamt in Berlin. Diese Differenz lässt sich – in Kombination mit den unterschiedlichen Schreibweisen der Autorinnen, die mit den Schlagworten modernistisch-symbolistisch und surrealistisch beschrieben werden können – auf unterschiedliche geschlechtsspezifische Subjektpositionen zurückführen, die den Erzähler zum Gefangenen der Grenze werden lassen, während die Erzählerin der eigenen Entsubjektivierung kreative Produktivität abgewinnen kann. In einem letzten Schritt zeigt der Artikel, wie die den beiden Erzählungen zugrunde liegenden Grenzkonzepte nicht nur die Darstellung von Grenzstation, nationaler Identität, Subjektivität und Körperlichkeit, sondern auch das Schreiben selbst beeinflussen.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2010). A Black Rectangle Labelled “Polar Night”: Imagining the Arctic after the Austro-Hungarian Expedition of 1872-1874, In Anka Ryall; Johan Schimanski & Henning Howlid Wærp (ed.),
Arctic Discourses.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISBN 978-1443819596.
Chapter Two.
s 19
- 42
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.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2009). Polarwissenschaft und Kolonialismus in Österreich-Ungarn: Zur Rezeption der österreichisch-ungarischen Polarexpedition (1872-1874). Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit.
ISSN 1681-7001.
9(2), s 53- 71
Vis sammendrag
As the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition returned to Europe in September 1874, it set of a wide-ranging media reception in which science had a central role to play as significator which could be inscribed with many different ideological meanings. The competition to reach the ”farthest north” and to the question of whether the expedition’s main discovery, Franz Josef Land, had any economic or territorial value competed with and inflected upon the scientific value of the expedition. As the concept of science as a common good became nuanced into concepts of science as both a measure of modernity and as a means to enlightenment, the Viennese press connected the scientific worth of the expedition with fantasies of a colonial presence outside Austro-Hungary and a logic of internal imperial development. Increasingly, the expedition and the partly emptied signifier ”science” were used as projection screens for the internal political and social conflicts and potentials of the double monarchy. This article contributes to an ongoing discussion on postcolonial approaches to Austro-Hungary and a new recontextualization of history of polar exploration within the frame of European and other discourse histories. It also addresses the statuses of science, popular science and geography in the 1870s, against a background of bourgeois ascendancy and its conservative opponents.
Schimanski, Johan (2008). Grensen - litterært faktum med romlig form, I: Clas Zilliacus; Heidi Grönstad & Ulrika Gustafsson (red.),
Gränser i nordisk litteratur / Borders in Nordic Literature.
Åbo Akademis Förlag.
ISBN 978-951-765-418-0.
kapittel.
s 19
- 37
Schimanski, Johan (2007). The Postcolonial Border: Bessie Head’s “The Wind and a Boy”, In Anne Holden Rønning & Lene Johannessen (ed.),
Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational.
Rodopi.
ISBN 9789042021631.
Kapittel.
s 71
- 91
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.
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (2007). Entry Points: An Introduction, In Johan Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe (ed.),
Border Poetics De-limited.
Wehrhahn Verlag.
ISBN 3865250335.
Introduction.
s 9
- 26
Fulltekst i vitenarkiv.
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (2007). Imperial Tides: A Border Poetic Reading of Heart of Darkness, In Johan Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe (ed.),
Border Poetics De-limited.
Wehrhahn Verlag.
ISBN 3865250335.
Kapittel.
s 217
- 234
Fulltekst i vitenarkiv.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Drums of the Babongo and the Ironies of Celtic Postcolonialism, In Charlie I. Armstrong & Øyunn Hestetun (ed.),
Postcolonial Dislocations: Travel, History, and the Ironies of Narrative.
Novus Forlag.
ISBN 9788270994304.
artikkel.
s 201
- 214
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Hamsuns koloniale nonsens, I: Even Arntzen & Henning Howlid Wærp (red.),
Tid og rom i Hamsuns prosa (II).
Hamsun-selskapet.
ISBN 82-91002-38-X.
kapittel.
s 81
- 116
Schimanski, Johan (2003). Genre Borders in a Border Novel - Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story, In Beata Agrell & Ingela Nilsson (ed.),
Genrer och genreproblem: teoretiska och historiska perspektiv / Genres and Their Problems: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives.
Daidalos.
ISBN 91-7173-185-7.
Artikkel.
s 505
- 513
Schimanski, Johan (2002). En vending på elva Dyfi, I: Trond Haugen (red.),
Hilsen: En bok til Arne Melberg i anledning 60-årsdagen.
Gyldendal.
ISBN 82-05-31316-4.
artikkel.
s 273
- 297
Schimanski, Johan (2001). Jean Genet og den europeiske grensen, I: Ragnhild E. Reinton & Irene Iversen (red.),
Litteratur og erfaring.
Spartacus.
ISBN 82-430-0169-7.
artikkel.
s 149
- 166
Schimanski, Johan (2001). The Deperiodicized Patient: Ondaatje and the Contemporary, In Jakob Lothe; Anne Holden Rønning & Robert Young (ed.),
Identities and Masks: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.
Cappelen Damm Høyskoleforlaget.
ISBN 82-7634-294-9.
artikkel.
s 125
- 141
Schimanski, Johan (2000). Singing ‘Che Gelida Manina’ in Welsh: Internal and External Cultural Translation in the Future Wales of Islwyn Ffowc Elis. Interlitteraria.
ISSN 1406-0701.
(5), s 365- 374
Schimanski, Johan (1996). Cultural and Political Nationalism in Wales, In Øystein Sørensen (ed.),
Nationalism in Small European Nations.
The Research Council of Norway.
ISBN 82-12-00642-5.
artikkel.
s 89
- 99
Schimanski, Johan (1995). Arnold Böcklin døde i Italia. SKRIFT (Skriftserie for litteraturvitenskap ved Universitetet i Oslo.
ISSN 0806-9298.
(15), s 98- 121
Schimanski, Johan (1995). Subaltern Science Fiction: A Short Walk in Samuel R. Delany’s Garden of Semiotics, In Johan-Martijn Flaton & Kees van Toorn (ed.),
Intersection [Souvenir Book].
Intersection World Science Fiction Convention 1995.
ISBN 0000000000.
Kapittel.
s 19
- 22
Schimanski, Johan (1995). The Future on Repeat. SKRIFT (Skriftserie for litteraturvitenskap ved Universitetet i Oslo.
ISSN 0806-9298.
(143), s 40- 48
Vis sammendrag
trans. as “Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd - unwaith eto”, Taliesin 88 (1995): 24-30
Oversettelse av “The ‘Lyric Pastoral’: A Natural Genre? (With an Introduction to a Debate between Genette and Derrida)”, Skrift: Skriftserie for litteraturvitenskap ved Universitetet i Oslo.9 (1993): 74-84. Overs. Simon Brooks
Transl. as “‘Y Fugeilgerdd Delynegol’: Genre Naturiol? gan gynnwys cyflwyniad i ddadl rhwng Genette a Derrida”, trans. Simon Brooks, Y Traethodydd CXLIX.630 (1994): 38-49
Schimanski, Johan (1993). Genre a chenedl. Tu Chwith.
ISSN 1350-4053.
s 39- 42
Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan (ed.) (2018). Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community.
Transcript Verlag.
ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9.
400 s.
Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.
Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (red.) (2016). Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISBN 978-82-304-01781.
444 s.
Die österreichisch-ungarische Nordpolexpedition (1872-1874) entdeckte nicht nur das Franz-Joseph-Land, sie setzte auch kurzfristig Österreich-Ungarn als Staat mit polaren Interessen auf die europäische Karte des späten 19. Jahrhun- derts. Die Rückkehr der Polarfahrer von Vardø in Norwegen über Hamburg nach Wien im September 1874 war von einer umfassenden europaweiten medialen Aufmerksamkeit begleitet. Insbesondere in Wien sollte in den folgenden Wochen die Expedition zu einem Mikrokosmos der Monarchie stilisiert und zum Mittelpunkt aktueller sozialer, politischer und kultureller Diskurse werden. Die vorliegende Monographie ist die erste ausführliche kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeit über die Expedition. Sie unterscheidet sich von vorangegangen Arbeiten durch ihren Fokus auf den Empfang sowie die europäische Rezeption der Expedition.
I denne antologien undersøker forfatterne hvordan ulike forestillinger om Arktis og det nordlige har oppstått, og hvordan de formidles i reiselitteratur og ekspedisjonsrapporter, i film og skjønnlitteratur, i aviser og vitenskapelige tekster i tiden fra romantikken og fram til vår tid. Samlet utgjør disse forestillingene en arktisk diskurs preget av motsetninger – mellom lys og mørke, mellom det rene og sunne og det farlige og demoniske. Språkbruken formes og utvikles i skjæringspunktet mellom faktiske erfaringer og ulike konvensjoner.
Ryall, Anka; Schimanski, Johan & Wærp, Henning Howlid (ed.) (2010). Arctic Discourses.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISBN 978-1443819596.
369 s.
Vis sammendrag
Both fictional and non-fictional accounts of the Arctic have long been a major source of powerful images of the region, and have thus had a crucial part to play in the history of human activities there. This volume provides a wide-reaching investigation into the discourses involved in such accounts, above all into the consolidation of a discourse of “Arcticism” (modelled on Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism”), but also into the many intersecting discourses of imperialism, nationalism, masculinity, modernity, geography, science, race, ecology, indigeneity, aesthetics, etc. Perspectives originating from inside and outside the Arctic, along with hybrid positions, are examined, with special attention being given to the textual genres, narratives and figures which they mobilize, together with to the close relationship between the Arctic as an unknown place and the literary imagination. The different chapters address a wide geographical range of texts, providing a necessary supplement to most previous work in the field, and also address the wide variety of genres which flourish under the aegis of Arctic discourse, ranging from exploration accounts, travel-writing, political texts and journalism through diaries and historical documents to novels and novelizations, and including also other media, such as music and opera.
Ryall, Anka; Schimanski, Johan & Wærp, Henning Howlid (ed.) (2008). Artic Discourses 2008.
Universitetet i Tromsø.
ISBN 978-82-90423-79-2.
440 s.
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (ed.) (2007). Border Poetics De-limited.
Wehrhahn Verlag.
ISBN 3865250335.
256 s.
Border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings, and it can often seem that those who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. But the (il)logic of ex/internal borders may also apply to larger territories, such as those of Europe, with its historical divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Here we will be looking at Julya Rabinowichs debut novel Spaltkopf (2011) to see how it – both as a text in the outside world and as a representation of the world inside the text – uses rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations order to negotiate memories of historically changing ex/internal European borders.
In 1873, the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition discovered Franz Josef Land. Viennese journalists fantasized rhetorically about extending imperial borders into the Arctic, commenting on social and political tensions within the dual monarchy rather than desiring to colonize a useless Arctic. Their images however built on 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic as a (possibly open) polar sea hidden by impenetrable barriers of ice. Ice limits shifted topographically with year and season, defined the structure of heroic exploration narratives, and functioned as epistemological barriers. Trying out new techniques and debunking the open sea theory, the expedition helped move exploration from the oceanosphere to the cryosphere. Today, discourse on ice limits signifies the melting of the Arctic, economic opportunities and climate change. For some, a navigatable “open sea” gives liquidity to capital; for others, receding ice destroys a natural environment and becomes a catastrophic global tipping point. Analyzing texts and images from the 19th and 21st centuries, we show that Arctic, Danube and Alpine ice is not only a question of physical topographies, but also a changing rhetorical figuring of borders, lines, zones and thresholds, and that genealogical understanding of these discourses will enable action.
Siden 1800-tallet har vi hedret skjønnlitterære forfattere gjennom utstillinger og museer. Men hva skjer når det kommer fram at noen sider ved forfatteren ikke er så beundringsverdige? I dag avsløres kjente historiske forfattere for deres holdninger. Noen passer ikke inn i lokale og nasjonale fortellinger eller blir rett og slett ikke lenger lest. Hvordan skal vi utstille de «vanskelige» forfatterne? Alvhild Dvergsdal fra Hamsunsenteret, Marianne A. Olsen fra Perspektivet Museum, Ulrike Spring fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet/Universitetet i Oslo og Narve Fulsås fra Universitetet i Tromsø innleder til debatt. Ordstyrer: Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). (Un)folding European Borders in Narratives of Ex/internal Migration.
Vis sammendrag
Because so many border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings – one can never be sure when the border has actually been crossed – it can often seem that travellers and migrants who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. It is as if they have taken the border with them, and still exist in bubble-like extension of the territory they come from. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. In both cases, the external border has been moved into the territory and become an internal border, either to the territory or the border-crosser’s self. In his “DissemiNation” essay, Homi K. Bhabha shows how the external borders of the nation always are intimately connected to its internal borders in an uncanny way. The (il)logic of ext/internal borders may also apply to larger territories: Europe is a case in point. But multinational continental spaces pose their own challenges, since the folding of external territorial borders onto internal spaces through travel and migration overlays a space which is already divided, into nations and, in the European case, the divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Imperial, colonial and cold war histories have placed the borders of Europe (and Western Europe) at radically different places on the globe, so a border far away from todays’ present external European border may in memory have been an outer border of Europe (or Western Europe). Memories of in/external borders on both national and continental scales are publically negotiated in the two published, book length narratives I will be citing in this paper: Spaltkopf (first published in German, 2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, born in 1970 in Moscow and emigrating with her family to Austria in 1977; and Seperator (first published in Norwegian translation, 2011, published in Swedish, 2012) by Enel Melberg, born in Tallinn in 1943 and fleeing with her family to Sweden in 1944. In this paper I will be arguing that these narratives – both as texts in the outside world and as representations of the world inside texts – use rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations order to negotiate memories of historically changing ex/internal European borders.
In her Seasonal Quartet, Scottish author Ali Smith has set out to describe the aftermath of the Brexit referendum close after the event, defying the tendency of literature to tackle historical events and experience in a long-term and retrospective temporality. The novels, currently being published in sequence according to the seasons described in each book - so far Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2018) have appeared, with Summer planned - both allows readers to identify with the sense of outrage and despair channeled through the main protagonists of the books and to respond to simplified populist images of migration and British identity. The books provide a counterpoint to their own synchrony with contemporary events by evoking the embodied memories of historical migration to Britain and the histories of marginalized female British artists. Borders are both a major explicit motif and theme in the books, and (as in principal in all literary texts) omnipresent in many other ways. This paper approaches the controversial concept of “populism” through the double lens of borders and migration, showing how Smith’s books formulate a border analysis of contemporary populism not only as focused on perceived threats to national borders (migration and the EU), but also as divisive form of internal bordering in communities. A discursive approach to competing definitions of “populism” (right-wing/left-wing, anti-elitist/democratic) will make possible a critical appraisal of Smiths literary negotiation of populism, community, diversity and democracy.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Border Aesthetics, In Elio Franzini; Tonino Griffero; Giovanni Matteucci & Andrea Gatti (ed.),
International Lexicon of Aesthetics.
Mimesis edizioni.
ISBN 9788857559926.
lexicon entry.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Fixing Images of Movement: The Border Aesthetics of Photographs in Narratives of Trans-Mediterranean Migration.
Vis sammendrag
This lecture presents published narratives in Norwegian and Swedish about Trans-Mediterrean migration by authors such as Roda Ahmed, Johannes Anyuru and Jonas Hassan Khemiri in order to investigate the representation of migration as media spectacle, as trauma, as memory, and as border object. The lecture prepares for a focused discussion on migration, representation, narratives/images, border aesthetics and border poetics.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Scaling between Border Poetics and Border Studies.
Vis sammendrag
Any wider conception of borders will have a correspondingly broad applicability. Borders can come into play between cultures, nations, regions and continents, but also on on a much smaller scale, for example on the level of bodies and texts. The discursive construction of borders in political, historical or everday life, will move between borders on different scales simply because discourse is the way we negotiate large-scale questions on the level of language. In this paper I will be using the opening of the semi-autobiographical novel Spaltkopf (2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, in order to show how borders move between different levels of scale and mobilities of border-crossing. In doing so I will trace an archaeology of the theoretical concerns, concepts and interdisciplinary engagements which connect Border Poetics and the broader field of Border Studies, along with other research fields such as Border Theory, Border Aesthetics and Border Textures. What may such an archaeology tell us about possible future developments in the study of borders and culture in a world in which borders have become globalized?
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2019). Das trans/nationale Dichterheim.
Vis sammendrag
SchriftstellerInnenmuseen oder DichterInnenheime zeichnen sich gerne durch einen hagiographischen Zugang aus, in dem die SchriftstellerInnen in einem spezifischen nationalen Kontext verortet werden. Literatur, Kultur und Territorium werden in dieser Ausstellungspraxis zu einer Einheit; die gelebte Realität der Autorin als Reisende und die übernationale Popularität ihrer Literatur wird hingegen vernachlässigt. Der Vortrag wird Ausgangspunkt in verschiedensten musealen Repräsentationen von Autor und Literatur nehmen, diese auf ihr transnationales Potenzial untersuchen und dadurch neue Sichtweisen auf die Darstellung nationaler SchriftstellerInnen eröffnen. Als Beispiele dienen ungarische sowie andere europäische Museen.
Author museums have long been associated with national narratives, yet with the increased awareness of the transnational mobility of authors, readers, visitors, literature and objects, museums have begun to focus more on international, transnational and cosmopolitan dimensions in their exhibitions. Indeed, author mobility has resulted in a number of old and new author museums situated outside the authors’ countries of origin. Within the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, financed by the Research Council of Norway, we (a historian with curatorial experience and a researcher in comparative literature) have developed an approach to literary exhibitions based around the idea that such exhibitions always involve (at least) a double act of communication. Literary exhibitions are messages sent from their curators to their visitors about messages sent from authors to readers. Using this simple model, we can understand better how author museums – for example the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm, or the Strindberg Museum in Saxen in Upper Austria – exhibit transnational mobilities on many different levels and concerning many different actors, texts, objects and spaces. At the same time this rather reductive model of communication – as contemporary exhibitionary strategies make us aware – can be a key to understanding its own distorting limitations and productive paradoxes. Who is the Strindberg Museum in Saxen for – tourists cycling along the Danube and literary pilgrims, Swedish or Austrian or other? Or for local school students doing projects on Strindberg? Does the enlarged photograph of the local stone formations that inspired Strindberg’s visions in Inferno lead to the marked path near the museum, in the local and Austrian landscape, or to the book by the Swedish and cosmopolitan author on his time in both Paris and Saxen?
Hvorfor besøker vi utstillinger om forfattere og litteratur? Det finnes flere og flere forfattermuseer og forfattersentre i Norge, og bibliotekene lager regelmessig litteraturutstillinger. Er vi først og fremst opptatt av forfatterens liv eller forfatterens tekster når vi besøker slike utstillinger? Kan slike utstillinger brukes som møtesteder og bidra til et demokratisk samfunn? Hvilke strategier bruker museer, sentre og biblioteker når de stiller ut litteratur og forfattere, og hvorfor? Lesning av forfatter Elizabeth Beanca Halvorsen, innlegg av Ulrike Spring fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet/Universitetet i Oslo, Arthur Tennøe fra Nasjonalbiblioteket, Inger Undheim fra Garborgsenteret, Thea Aarbakke fra Høgskulen på Vestlandet, og panelsamtale (ordstyrer: Arthur Tennøe) med Thea Aarbakke, Inger Undheim, Ulrike Spring, Anka Ryall fra Universitetet i Tromsø Norges arktiske universitet, og Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo.
In border poetics, thresholds are border figurations which configure the border as a place of overlap and disjuncture between different versions of the border in different dimension (the topographical, the symbolic, the temporal, the epistemological, the textual). Even the most concrete topographical threshold dividing between the inside and the outside of the house complicates the unambiguous image of the border as a line on a single surface: thresholds are often symbolic divisions between the public and the private, spaces in which we can allow the other in over our epistemological border; crossing them or standing on them involves temporalities; and they are the borders of the house seen as a material medium. Because of their similarity with another figuration of the border, the fold, the threshold can suggest doubling, ambiguity and reflexivity; they are in-betweens in which we are in one space but partake in an other. Standing on the threshold, we can cross the epistemological boundary without crossing the topographical boundary. Perhaps by this very token, the fold of the threshold can imply a power hierarchy. As a border figuration, the threshold is what Rancière calls a ‘partage du sensible', a division or a sharing of the seeable and the hearable and thus, as Rancière would argue, an political aesthetic. I will be exploring the political aesthetic of threshold figurations and different conceptions of liminality using examples from fictions and testimonials of migration, arguing that the threshold is not only a typical aesthetic figuration, but intimately connected to (most conceptions of) the process of aesthesis, sensing or perception. Along the way I will suggest ways of connecting border poetics and border aesthetics with the parallel and connected tradition of liminality studies in literature and art.
Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature and Head of Research at the Department of Literature, European Languages and Area Studies at the University of Oslo, and part-time research Professor of Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include border poetics, Arctic discourses, postcolonialism, national identity, science fiction, literary museums. Recent publications include (with Ulrike Spring) an interdisciplinary monograph on images of the Arctic in 1870s Central Europe, Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskurse 1874 (2015) and (edited with Stephen Wolfe) a collaboration on key concepts within border aesthetics, Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (2017).
Schimanski, Johan (2018). Raum und Grenze: Theoretischer Impuls.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Arktiske diskurser og fortellinger.
Post-traumatic conditions are the result of the wounding of bodily or psychic borders. As trauma studies has shown, they are framed and often propogated culturally. Crossing territorial borders can cause traumas: the crossing of the border by migrants and others often involves the crossing of their own bodily or psychic borders. This article will examine autobiographies and novels published in Swedish and Norwegian for the way in which they figure the traumatic effects of migrant border crossings. It will apply a border aesthetics approach, bringing the status of aesthetic narratives as borderings of the sensible (cf. Rancière’s concept of the “partage de sensible”) together with the bordering of the sensible which takes place in the fixations, substitutions and blindspots of trauma. It will argue that published narratives of migrant border-crossing introduce a longer, despectacularizing temporality to the border traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts.
Building on previous work tracing the narrative and rhetorical production of border concepts in novels and autobiographical texts which address the Somali diaspora experience in Norway, this paper assesses the impact of such narratives on bordering and borderscaping processes in the public sphere. By situating book publications by Amal Aden and Roda Ahmed in a broader field of public discourse including book reviews, social media, immigration debates and research dissemination, the paper compares the borderscape produced in the texts themselves with the borderscapes resulting from their publication. Novels and published autobiographies can be seen as media events subject to mediation and remediation processes, involving specific horizons of expectation and genre protocols. The paper addresses books by Roda Ahmed and Amal Aden, both were born in Somalia, but grew up in Norway. Both involve various kinds of topographical border crossings between Somalia and Norway or between different parts of the Somali diaspora, along with various symbolic, temporal, medial and epistemological border crossings. Along with major narrative border configurations concerning liberation and captivity, both present a repertoire of different border metaphors, each implying different conceptions of the border. Here the focus will lie on how this repertoire compares with that found in the public reception of each book. Both books have been followed by newspaper reviews, book blog entries, social media discussions, library recommendations, public debates, and mass media interviews in which the metaphorical border landscapes in the texts themselves are remediated and negotiated. Discourse analyses with a focus on border concepts in the form of rhetorical figures (e.g. metaphors) and narrative configurations as ”nodal points” thus allow for comparisons which reveal and suggest ways in which literary and biographical narratives affect public attitudes to borders and also border policies.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Crossing and Gendering Borders.
Vis sammendrag
Can crossings of borders be gendered? We know that women and men have been ascribed different roles in historical discourses of national identity (Sommer 1990; Yuval-Davis 1997), but what about discourses of bordering and border-crossing? In this lecture I will be using a border poetics approach to analyse both theoretical concepts and narratives, focusing especially on topographical, symbolic and epistemological borders. I will be identifying narrative figures and configurations of space and time which can be connected to established border concepts such as the umbilical border object (Castillo 2007) and the matricial borderspace (Lichtenberg-Ettinger 1994), both of which call on bodily borders perceived as gendered. In order to establish these concepts, I will first use examples from previous readings (Lang and Schimanski 2010; Schimanski 2010, 2013) of literary texts by e.g. Jean Genet (1961), Veza Canetti (1994), Dannie Abse (1992), Terézia Mora (1999) and Yoko Tawada (1991). From these departure points I will address in more detail passages in two published migration narratives written by 1.5-generation Somalian-born migrants to Norway, Roda Ahmed’s novel Forberedelsen (2008, “The Preparation”) and Amal Aden’s testimonial Min Drøm Om Frihet (2009, “My Dream of Freedom”). Finally, I will be asking whether certain central concepts within feminist discourse and feminist theory – such as gender roles, the glass ceiling, situated knowledge, double vision, écriture féminine, corporeal feminism, intersectionality, nomadic subjects and queerness – might be seen as border concepts, and how they may be applied to migration literature.
Border Theory, Border Poetics and Border Aesthetics are theoretical formations which inhabit the interstices between Literary, Cultural and Border Studies in the wake of poststructuralism, postcolonialism and Chicana/o studies. In this lecture I will be tracing an archaeology of the theoretical concerns, concepts and interdisciplinary engagements which have developed in these approaches to borders. What may such an archaeology tell us about possible future developments in the study of borders and culture in a world in which borders have become globalized, such as the recent formation of the Border Textures concept?
Because so many border-crossings take the form of extended border-crossings – one can never be sure when the border has actually been crossed – it can often seem that travellers and migrants who have crossed a national border have not really crossed the border at all. It is as if they have taken the border with them, and still exist in bubble-like extension of the territory they come from. They visit or live in another country, but are bordered off from their surroundings by the symbolic boundaries of culture and language, a border which can follow the topographical contours of a diasporic or touristic community or their own bodies. Or they live on these borders they have nominally crossed, in hybrid cultures and ambivalent spaces: they have both crossed and not crossed the border. In both cases, the external border has been moved into the territory and become an internal border, either to the territory or the border-crosser’s self. In his “DissemiNation” essay, Homi K. Bhabha shows how the external borders of the nation always are intimately connected to its internal borders in an uncanny way. The (il)logic of ext/internal borders may also apply to larger territories: Europe is a case in point. But multinational continental spaces pose their own challenges, since the folding of external territorial borders onto internal spaces through travel and migration overlays a space which is already divided, into nations and, in the European case, the divides between “real Europes” and “other Europes”. The location of the outer border of Europe is unsure: it may only be an outer border in one conception of Europe, and at the same time be an inner European border in another conception of Europe. Imperial, colonial and cold war histories have placed the borders of Europe at radically different places on the globe, so a border far away from todays’ present external European border may in memory have been an outer border of Europe. In the workshop we will be using parts of the border poetics toolbox to show how published texts can function as public engagements with geopolitical transformations. We will be examining together passages from two books which contain memory narratives of in/external borders and migrations on both national and continental scales: Spaltkopf (first published in German, 2008, translated as Splithead, 2011) by Julya Rabinowich, born in 1970 in Moscow and emigrating with her family to Austria in 1977; and Seperator (first published in Norwegian translation, 2011, published in Swedish, 2012) by Enel Melberg, born in Tallinn in 1943 and fleeing with her family to Sweden in 1944. We will be asking how these narratives – both as texts and as representations of the world inside texts – use rhetorical and narrative (con-)figurations as aesthetic and epistemological engagements in order to negotiate memories of ex/internal European borders.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Visitors through Time: Homes, Heritage and Hospitality.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). What is the North Like? Questions and Answers While Crossing Borders.
Vis sammendrag
Research on images of the North has established a repertoire of images based mainly on travel writing, mythologies, policy documents and literary fictions featuring local or metropolitan viewpoints. Such topoi often combine an imagology of Northerness with discourses of arcticity, winterliness, Nordicity etc. This paper sets out to map images of northernness in postcolonial migrant literature featuring viewpoints originating from the global ”South”, examining a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written by migrants to Norway arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including books by Amal Aden, Maria Amelie, Romeo Gill, and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Tying in to research on changing border concepts in migrant narratives which took place within within the EU FP7 EUBORDERSCAPES project, the paper asks to what degree various topoi of northerness contribute to bordering processes in the texts, and whether these processes in turn produce new images of northernness. Are North and South purely framed in terms of difference in these texts? Is Northernness in migration narratives ascribed to specific cultural values? Are the extended and repeated border crossings these narratives figure connected to specifically Northern territories, as suggested by the title of the collection, Neste stopp Nordpolen: Nye nordmenn – nye stemmer (Next Stop the North Pole: New Norwegians – New Voices, 2005)? Or do images in migration discourse challenge methodological nationalism and eurocentricism? Furthermore I will be asking whether migrants function not only as border crossers and writers, but also as cultural analysts and ethnographers engaged in “research”, “interpretation” and “asking questions about” their new homes? Research, travelling or otherwise, is a form of border-crossing. Like migrants, people who ask questions are subject to typical border-phenomena such as disorientation and liminality, sometimes accompanied by the desire to fix images of others (and the self).
Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Refsum, Christian; Stene-Johansen, Knut & Blasy, Stefanie (2018). How to Live Together. Und. Heft für Alternativen, Widersprüche und Konkretes.
(5), s 25- 27
We will be presenting the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums, and taking our departure point in various examples, discussing 1. how author museums can be both read as historical sources to authors’ intentions and themselves be read as intended texts, 2. how Author museums can focus on the contemporary and historical intentions of the Authors and exhibition producers, and 3. how author museums can give authority to specific authors and texts in canonization processes.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2018). Arctic Southerners: Ethnonyms, Languages and Qualities in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in the 1870s and Today.
Vis sammendrag
While the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition of 1872-1874 has often been eclipsed by the expeditions of Franklin, Nansen, Amundsen and Scott within the global imagination, it was widely reported in the newspapers and popular press of the time and has later been the subject of numerous accounts, polar histories, scientific publications, paintings, novels etc. The expedition thus constitutes a major discursive event, lying at the epicentre of an extended media complex spreading out across history and through different forms, genres and planes of discourse. Scenes, characters and narratives have been repeated in different contexts and are thus subject to what Foucault has called “material repeatability”: the ability of the same material signifier to appear in different discourses, often signifying quite different things in each case. The negotiation of cultural identities is an important element in the discourse of Arctic expeditions, as it is in many other types of discourse. The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition media complex involves very many cultural identities, along with identities of class, gender, etc. This mirrors the multicultural make-up of both the expedition and of the producers of discourse on the expedition. Here we concentrate on aspects of one part of the complicated structure of cultural identities, namely that involving the seamen, who are various described as coming mostly from a geographical space stretching over part of the NE coast of the Adriatic, including Trieste, the Istrian peninsula, the islands of Kvarner Bay, and the Dalmatian coast and islands. On the return of the expedition in 1874, their identities were articulated through ethnonyms, languages and the ascription of specific qualities; we argue that the medial discourse of the time can be related to negotiations of national identity and changes in language policies within the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy. In the latter half of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, quite disparate notions of the seamen’s identities have developed in representations of the expedition in book and web media, again within the context of transformed perceptions of national identity.
When we visit an author museum, especially an author’s home, the objects and rooms suggest to us the author who has lived there. The author will have seen, touched or used many of the objects, but the author’s body is itself not present. It is as if the author haunts the house of the author museum, yet we do not feel afraid or uncomfortable. In this paper we will take as our departure point two ghost stories in Selma Lagerlöf’s Löwensköldska ringen, and discuss the many-layered narratives, intentions, heritages, identities, temporalities and presentation strategies which author’s home museums, like the ghost stories, involve. Using Selma Lagerlöf’s Mårbacka and other examples of authors’ homes and literary museums, we will ask how the author’s home uses such multi-layering to create authority, how such multilayering may allow the museum to open itself to transformation, and whether a focus on the spectral is a way of counteracting tendencies to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? We will also be be arguing for the potential to understand the author’s home through the author’s texts: in Selma Lagerlöf’s case especially in the way she describes care, inheritance, hospitality and hauntings in the many houses which figure in her fictions.
When we visit an author museum, especially an author’s home, the objects and rooms suggest to us the author who has lived there. The author will have seen, touched or used many of the objects, but the author’s body is itself not present. It is as if the author haunts the house of the author museum, yet we do not feel afraid or uncomfortable. In this lecture we will take as our departure point two ghost stories in Selma Lagerlöf’s Löwensköldska ringen, and discuss the many-layered narratives, intentions, heritages, identities, temporalities and presentation strategies which author’s home museums, like the ghost stories, involve. Using Mårbacka and other examples of authors’ homes and literary museums, we will ask how the author’s home uses such multi-layering to create authority, how such multilayering may allow the museum to open itself to transformation, and whether a focus on the spectral is a way of counteracting tendencies to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? We will also be be arguing for the potential to understand the author’s home through the author’s texts: in Selma Lagerlöf’s case especially in the way she describes care, inheritance, hospitality and hauntings in the many houses which figure in her fictions.
Buset, Pål; Riley, Jon Erik; Mathisen, Werner Christie; Herrman, Bjørn Alex; Auklend, Morten; Haug, Hallvard & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Vår fagre nye verden: To gamle framtidsskildringer minner mistenkelig om vår samtid. Kan science fiction påvirke historiens gang?. Vårt land.
ISSN 0805-5424.
s 17- 19
BOOK LAUNCH AT NORDNORSK KUNSTMUSEUM Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, eds. Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Welcoming remarks by JÉRÉMIE MICHAEL MCGOWAN (Director of the Nordnorsk kunstmuseum) and LINDA NESBY (Scandinavian literature, UiT) Talk by JOPI NYMAN (Professor of English Literature, University of Eastern Finland): “Borders and Narratives of Im/Mobility” Short presentations of the Border Aesthetics project and book by Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe
Johannes Anyuru’s 2012 novel En Storm kom från paradiset (A Storm Blew in From Paradise/ Ein Sturm wehte vom Paradiese her) describes the labyrinthical journey from Uganda to Sweden undertaken by the author’s father. Using this biographical fiction as a departure point, I will be examining how a short scenic description placed at the very beginning of the novel encapsulates a whole border landscape or borderscape. The scene can be analyzed as a border crossing on different scales (Tanzania-Kenya, Uganda-Sweden, Africa-Europe) and surfaces (topographical, symbolic, epistemological, temporal and textual), using the methods of border poetics. The analysis can then be used to isolate a series of central rhetorical and narrative figurations of the border. These analyses around a single example shed light on the ongoing border turn in literary and cultural studies, and how humanities-orientated border theory and social science-orientated border studies can learn from each other. Border figurations in fiction and in autobiographical narratives about migration and cultural crossings are keys to understanding how different conceptions of the border enter into exchange across discourses. My reading of Anyuru’s text takes place against the background of research on border figurations in selected migration narratives published in Norwegian (Nasim Karim, Romeo Gill, Roda Ahmed, Maria Amelie, Amal Aden og Sara Azmeh Rasmussen) together with novels by Swedish authors such as Johannes Anyuru og Jonas Hassan Khemiri. The specific figurations shed light on the role of literacy and Bildung in the journeys of both migrants and readers.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Border Ob-scene, Border Non-Scene, Border Scene.
Post-traumatic conditions are the result of the wounding of bodily or psychic borders. As trauma studies has shown, they are framed and often propogated culturally. Crossing territorial borders can cause traumas: the crossing of the border by migrants and others often involves the crossing of their own bodily or psychic borders. This article will examine autobiographies and novels published in Swedish and Norwegian for the way in which they figure the traumatic effects of migrant border crossings. It will apply a border aesthetics approach, bringing the status of aesthetic narratives as political borderings of the sensible (cf. Rancière’s concept of the “partage de sensible”) together with the bordering of the sensible which takes place in the fixations, substitutions and blindspots of trauma. It will argue that published narratives of migrant border-crossing introduce a longer, despectacularizing temporality to the traumas they involve, necessitating investigation of cultural memory in diasporic and multi-generational contexts. Taking as its departure point the use of photography and photographs in Roda Ahmed’s Norwegian tale of coming of age in the Somali diaspora, Forberedelsen (2008; The Preparation), Johannes Anyuru’s Swedish lyrical retelling of a father’s story of migration from Uganda in En Storm kom från paradiset (2013; A Storm Blew in From Paradise, 2015), and Jonas Hasan Khemiri’s complex metafiction about a Tunisian father in Montecore: En unik tiger (2006; Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, 2011), the lecture argues that these constitute both umbilical border objects and traumatic borderings of the in/visible and the non-visible. Reference is made to theories of the temporalities of photography and trauma, asking how the novels make their way around the neurotic fixity of the traumatic image as a symptom of the unnarratable, along with related affective states such as nostalgia, melancholy and hysteria. Inspired by the allusion in Anyuru’s title, the use of photographs in these novels is compared to Walter Benjamin’s traumatized use of images in “Theses on a Philosophy of History” (1968 [1950]).
Current political narratives of ‘no borders’ and a ‘big, beautiful wall’ present us with opposed visions (an ‘axiology’) of future border regimes, utopian or dystopian according to the context. How do literary narratives of migration configure the risks and appeals of different future conceptions of bordering? If utopias are, as has been argued, bordered places or enclaves, how can they cater for the mobilities involved in migration? Besides examples of how utopian borders are evoked in fables and poems of migration and utopia (Ahmed, Le Guin, Bachmann) and in science fiction novels (Le Guin), a reading is given of Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West (2017) as an contemporary example of a global migrant utopia involving utopian borders in a science-fictional fashion. The argument connects theories of utopia/dystopia (Jameson) and borders in national identity theory (Anderson, Bhabha), as well as the concept of the science fictional ‘novum’ (Suvin), in order to in argue that literature can provide a corrective balance to the current spectacularizing discourse of a ‘migration crisis’.
Current political narratives of ‘no borders’ and a ‘big, beautiful wall’ present us with opposed visions (an ‘axiology’) of future border regimes, utopian or dystopian according to the context. How do literary narratives of migration configure the risks and appeals of different future conceptions of bordering? If utopias are, as has been argued, bordered places or enclaves, how can they cater for the mobilities involved in migration? Besides examples of how utopian borders are evoked in fables and poems of migration and utopia (Ahmed, Le Guin, Bachmann) and in science fiction novels (Le Guin), a reading is given of Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel Exit West (2017) as an contemporary example of a global migrant utopia involving utopian borders in a science-fictional fashion. The argument connects theories of utopia/dystopia (Jameson) and borders in national identity theory (Anderson, Bhabha), as well as the concept of the science fictional ‘novum’ (Suvin), in order to in argue that literature can provide a corrective balance to the current spectacularizing discourse of a ‘migration crisis’.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). Grenzen, Arktis, Schriftstellermuseen.
UEF’s long-standing and internationally recognised research expertise in the field of border studies attracts many leading scholars to the university, also from outside Finland's borders. One of them is Professor of Comparative Literature Johan Schimanski from the University of Oslo.
Using the same text as the lecture, Johannes Anyuru’s 2012 novel En Storm kom från paradiset (A Storm Blew in From Paradise/Ein Sturm wehte vom Paradiese her), as its departure point, the seminar will explore the traumatic aspects of bordering and border-crossing and investigate conceptions of trauma and memory as borders. Processes of trauma (the piercing and thus crossing of physical or psychical borders to the self) and traumatization (the inability to cross epistemological boundaries to the traumatic event) bear formal similarities to border-crossing narratives, especially where the status of the event of trauma/border-crossing and repetition/dissemination over time are concerned. Moreover, recent work on ‘in/visibility’ (and ‘in/audibility’) in migrant borderscapes, inspired by Arendt and Rancière, suggest that border trauma will have a central role to play figuring the ‘sense-ability’ of various others in many narratives, parallell with other figurations such as border spectacle and border surveillance. In interpreting the novel, emphasis will be placed on the interplay of narrative (the audible) and image (the visible) in the tracing of trauma, inspired by Unni Langås’ readings of photography, phototextuality and ekphrasis in trauma literature.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2017). The Museum of Transnational Literature.
Internetfortællingen 'Homestuck' er blevet kaldt både grænsesprængende og eksperimenterende - og så er den helt utrolig lang. Det sidste har blandt ført til sammenligninger med Homers berømte historie om Odysseus. Vi har set nærmere på fænomenet.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Arctic Literature – Creating the Arctic Story.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Arktisk science fiction.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Border Figurations in Migration Literature.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Crossing the Borders between Languages: Narrative Uses of Multilingualism in Swedish and Norwegian Migration Literature.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Crossing the Borders between Languages: Narrative Uses of Multilingualism in Swedish and Norwegian Migration Literature.
Vis sammendrag
Jonas Hassan Khemiri’s 2003 breakthrough as a novelist, Ett öga rött, was admired for its use of creolized Swedish dialect used by suburban youth with various migrant backgrounds. In his metafictional second novel, Montecore: En unik tiger, the author-narrator receives e-mails from a friend of his Tunisian father written in rhetorically colourful, grammatically incorrect Swedish. In Johannes Anyuru’s En storm kom från paradiset, multilingualism is a central motif in the story of his father’s convoluted journey from Uganda to Sweden, rather than a stylistic strategy. While novelistic discourse in creolized suburban youth dialect also exists in Norwegian (Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner), most novels and fictionalized autobiographies by second and 1.5 generation migrants in Norway isolate multilingualism in the textual discourse to highly symbolic uses expressing cultural difference. However, in these texts multilingualism both appears as a motif and underlies the wider performative act of border-crossing culminating in writing texts in Norwegian. Using examples from this material, I will be using theoretical developments in transdisciplinary border studies to argue that multilingualism, code-switching, creolization, language-learning, translation and ”rudimentariness” (Mireille Rosello) as motifs and as discursive strategies in migration literature can be positioned as figurations of extended and labyrinthal border crossings on the entangled planes – topographical, epistemological, temporal, symbolic and textual – of the various ”borderscapes” (Chiara Brambilla and others) involved. I will be asking why different texts chose to limit multilingualism to the level of story, or to isolated cases of code-switching, while others use it as a stylistic strategy on the level of textual discourse; seeking reasons not only in personal histories and authorial creativity, but also in the ways in which migration literature is ascribed value in specific contexts.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Figuration in Migration Narratives: Despectacularizing the Border Crisis.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Forbudt kjærlighet. Grenseoverskridelser i Romeo Gill og Roda Ahmed.
Professor Johan Schimanski fra Universitetet i Oslo holder foredrag om grensens betydning og hvordan humanioras border theory og samfunnsvitenskapens border studies kan lære av hverandre. Han tar utgangspunkt i den svenske forfatteren Johannes Anyurus roman En storm kom från paradiset (2012). Romanen handler om en labyrintisk reise fra Uganda til Sverige, med grensepasseringer i flere dimensjoner og på flere nivåer. Med utgangspunkt i såkalt grensepoetikk, isoleres retoriske og narrative framstillinger av grensen. Schimanski berører også norske eksempler som Nasim Karim, Romeo Gill, Roda Ahmed, Marie Amalie, Amal Aden og Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Ut fra disse inviterer han til samtale om rollen til literacy i forståelsen av migrasjonsreiser og leserreiser.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Innlegg på sluttpanel, "Är litteraturvetenskapen gränsöverskridande?".
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Reading and Writing: Working inside/outside the Literary Field.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Seasons of Migration to the North: Northern Discourses in Published Migrant Narratives in Norwegian.
Vis sammendrag
Research on images of the North has established a repertoire of images based mainly on travel writing, mythologies, policy documents and literary fictions featuring local or metropolitan viewpoints. Such topoi often combine northern discourses with discourses of arcticity, winterliness, Nordicity etc. This paper sets out to map images of northernness in postcolonial migrant literature featuring viewpoints originating from the global ”South”, examining a number of fictional or autobiographical public narratives written by migrants to Norway arriving in Norway as children or young adults, including books by Amal Aden, Maria Amelie, Romeo Gill, and Sara Azmeh Rasmussen. Tying in to ongoing research on changing border concepts in migrant narratives within the EU FP7 EUBORDERSCAPES project, the paper asks to what degree various topoi of northerness contribute to bordering processes in the texts, and whether these processes in turn produce new images of northernness. Are North and South purely framed in terms of difference? Is Northernness ascribed to specific cultural values? Are the extended and repeated border crossings these narratives figure connected to specifically Northern territories, as suggested by the title of the collection, Neste stopp Nordpolen: Nye nordmenn – nye stemmer (Next Stop the North Pole: New Norwegians – New Voices, 2005)?
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Visibility and Invisibility in Recent Published Migrant Narratives in Norwegian.
Vis sammendrag
Contemporary published migrant narratives in Norwegian are narratives of migrant experience which have been introduced into the public sphere and are both adapted to and adapt hegemonic borderscapes. Such narratives help to counter the focus on crisis in bordering policy and spectacle. They often present the process of entering into a public sphere whose aesthetic regime is both literary and political as part of a border-crossing extending through the borderscape from the original topographical border-crossing into Norway to the point of writing. Coming to Norway is also coming to writing or at least coming to a new form of writing. This paper examines two recent (2015) books by already established migrant writers in Norway, both positioned more as witnesses, polemicists and documentarists writing under pseudonyms than as literary authors. Amal Aden’s Jacayl er kjærlighet på Somali: En fortelling (”Jacayl is love in Somali: A story”) is a step into the world of fiction, written together with a literary author, Håvard Syvertsen. As in earlier books, this novel focuses on repressive family structures in Somali society in Somalia or in the diaspora. However, it also subtly makes visible the fate of boat migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Marie Amelie’s Takk (”Thank you”) is a sequel to her story of her stay as an illegal migrant in Norway, Ulovlig norsk (”Illegally Norwegian”, 2010). The previous book led to her arrest and deportation, which are described here along with public protests, a change in immigration law (known as ”lex amelie”) and the granting of a legal stay permit. The sequel attempts to negotiate her sense of unease at being a spectacular representative of a large number of unknown illegals, partly by making visible other deportees met at the Trandum deportation prison (a ”camp”) situated by Oslo airport. The paper argues that in both books, migrant authors with an access to the Norwegian public sphere attempt to make visible other, invisible migrants, revealing at the same time different strategies of negotiating the hegemonic borderscape.
This working paper gives some of the interpretations and working hypotheses reached at this stage of my contribution to research within the EUBORDERSCAPES project Working Package 10, Research Task 3: ”Cultural Borders of Europe ‘Bordering’ and ‘Re-bordering’ Europe through Fictional Narratives: The Case of Immigrant ‘Others’”. The paper examines migration literature written and published in Norwegian by the children of migrants or migrants born elsewhere but growing up partly in Norway, for rhetorical and narrative figurations of borders and border-crossings which can provide keys to changing conceptions of borders and to the values these are ascribed. The paper argues for the close connection between border concepts in the corpus and the status of the books as performative acts crossing from private experience to public discourse. This process is often explicitly addressed in the texts themselves and is part of an extended borderscape. I intend later to address further texts, the negotiation of border concepts in the reception of texts, the social context and research literature on migration in Norway, and research literature on migration literature in general.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). Å vandre inn i (og ut av) litteraturen.
Vis sammendrag
Parallelt med den romlige vendingen i kultur- og litteraturvitenskapene har vi sett en økende interesse for det som skjer på kantene, på grensene, på de steder der symbolske, topografiske og tekstuelle enheter både defineres og forstyrres. Periferien har blitt til sentrum, og særlig innenfor postkoloniale og andre kulturpoetiske tilnærminger til litteratur har personer som lever på eller krysser grenser blitt til hovedpersoner og fokuset har vært på mellomrom, hybride rom og tredje rom. Grenseorienterte analyser av litteraturen har florert. Utfordringene kommer nå fra to kanter. På den ene siden har fokuset på rom og identitet gjort at grenselesninger ofte har falt tilbake på de motiviske bestanddelene i teksten: altså på setting og personer, og på topografiske og symbolske grenser. Dette betyr at det ofte gjenstår å spørre hvordan grensene til de presentasjonsformer som brukes i litterære tekster – tekstens kanter og overganger mellom fortellerformer, sjangre, stiler, virkelighet/fiksjon osv. – innvirker på forståelsen av grenser og av teksten det gjelder. På den andre siden skjer det en rask teoretiske utviklingen innenfor mer samfunnsvitenskapelige grensestudier. Hvordan kan forskningen på litterære grenser, både i tekstenes verdener og i deres stilistiske former, ta innover seg nye begrep fra dette feltet, som f.eks. b/ordering og borderscapes? Jeg skal innom to forskningsområder for å undersøke disse utfordringer videre: migrasjonslitteratur og arktiske diskurser. Begge kan vanskelig tenkes uten tverrvitenskapelige innslag: de krysser grensene både ut av og inn i litteraturen, og dermed tekstuelle grenser. Arbeid med migrasjonslitteratur kan kartlegge grensefigurer (altså ”figurer” i retorisk betydning) i litterære tekster som nøkler for å forstå historiske endringer i grensebegreper på mer allmenne kulturelle, sosiale og politiske plan. Arbeid med historiske arktiske diskurser kan undersøke overgangene mellom aktiviteter i Arktis, det medialiserte Arktis og det litterariserte Arktis – også i motsatt retning. Jeg argumenterer her for at grensene som utgjøres av litteraturen som presentasjonsform i seg selv må være gjenstand for historiske forandringer og for forstyrrelser. Samtidig gir borderscape-begrepet en antydning om at litteraturens formelle grenser virker inn i et metaforisk landskap sammen med andre typer grenser. Innvandringsfortellinger kommer gjerne til et punkt der selve skriften blir til en del av de territoriale og kulturelle grensepasseringene tekstene tematiserer. Litterære grenselesninger må ta innover seg at grenseflater vikles inn i hverandre og selve skillet mellom grenser i det motiviske og i presentasjonsformen åpner for gråsoner og mellomrom.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Crowley, Cornelius & Smith, Matthew (2016). Table ronde/Roundtable.
Meet film-maker and researcher, Keina Espiñeira, along with three literary scholars working with borders, fiction and migration, to discuss borders in literature and film. The Color of the Sea: A Filmic Border Experience in Ceuta, directed by Keina Espiñeira, will be shown and afterwards there will be a debate. See trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgCTlQiwMMc - How do novels and films present borders in this age of global contact and migration? - Where is the border between reality and fiction when migrants and others cross borders? - How do we represent migrant experience in an ethical way? The movie has been nominated for the 2016 European Short Film Awards and is made within the framework of a major EU research project on borders, EUBORDERSCAPES. Participants: Keina Espiñeira (Spain) is a scholar and filmmaker. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork from a multidisciplinary approach. Borders have a pivotal role in her work. Lill-Ann Körber (Oslo/Berlin) is a scholar of Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Oslo and Bergen with a primary interest in the colonial history of the Nordic countries and their postcolonial relationships with Africa, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic. Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) is a scholar of comparative literature with a particular interest in the constant negotiation of the boundaries between literature and life, as stories captivate the imagination of their readers. Johan Schimanski (Oslo) is scholar of comparative literature at the Universities of Oslo and of Eastern Finland, researching on borders in literature, Arctic literature and literary exhibitions.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik; Kvistad, Erika Johanna & Wiedlocha, Julia (2016). Feminisme og Fantastikk. En samtale om Angela Carter og Helen Oyeyemi.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2016). About the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik & Spring, Ulrike (2016). Litteraturmuseum i Europa i eit kritisk-teoretisk perspektiv.
Stene-Johansen, Knut; Refsum, Christian & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2016). "Hvordan leve sammen. Roland Barthes og fantasien om et idiorytmisk liv", I: Knut Stene-Johansen; Christian Refsum & Johan Henrik Schimanski (red.),
Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet.
Spartacus.
ISBN 978-82-304-01781.
Innledning.
s 11
- 22
Building on previous work tracing the narrative and rhetorical production of border concepts in novels and autobiographical texts which address the Somali diaspora experience in Norway, this paper assesses the impact of such narratives on bordering and borderscaping processes in the public sphere. By situating book publications by Amal Aden and Roda Ahmed in a broader field of public discourse including book reviews, social media, immigration debates and research dissemination, the paper compares the borderscape produced in the texts themselves with the borderscapes resulting from their publication. Novels and published autobiographies can be seen as media events subject to mediation and remediation processes, or in an previous paradigm as texts with receptions involving specific horizons of expectation and genre protocolls. The two books which the paper takes as examples are both by women who were born in Somalia, but grew up in Norway. Roda Ahmed’s novel Forberedelsen (The Preparation, 2008) and the autobiography of the pseudonymous Amal Aden Mitt drøm om frihet (My Dream of Freedom, 2009). Both involve various kinds of topographical border crossings between Somalia and Norway or between Norwegian and British parts of the Somali diaspora, along with various symbolic, temporal, medial and epistemological border crossings. Along with major narrative border configurations concerning liberation and captivity, both present a repertoire of different border metaphors, each implying different conceptions of the border.In this paper, the focus will lie on how this repertoire compares with that found in the public reception of each book. Both books have been followed by newspaper reviews, book blog entries, social media discussions, library recommendations, public debates, and mass media interviews in which the metaphorical border landscapes in the texts themselves are remediated and negotiated. Both must be read against a background of public debate on immigration and the production of research-based documentary books, academic studies and teaching materials on immigrant cultures and the Somali diaspora in Norway. Aden has been an important voice in the public sphere, publishing books on questions related to immigration, writing newspaper columns, giving talks, etc. The paper will use discourse analyse with a focus on border concepts in the form of rhetorical figures (e.g. metaphors) and narrative configurations as ”nodal points” thus allow for comparisons which reveal and suggest ways in which literary and biographical narratives affect public attitudes to borders and also border policies.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Changing Borders in Public Immigrant and Diaspora Narratives in Norwegian.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Current research on borders and on the Arctic; introduction to a documentary with Nadine Gordimer.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Disrupting Nordic Borders: Postcolonial Border Concepts in Contemporary Swedish Migrant Fiction.
Vis sammendrag
Descriptions of territorial and symbolic borders in migrant fiction presumably provide keys to understanding shifting border concepts in the current global situation. This paper will examine border tropes and narratives of border-crossing in a selection of well-received Swedish novels of migration and diasporic identities: Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore: en unik tiger, 2006 (translated as Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, 2011), Johannes Anyuru’s En storm kom från paradiset (2012) and Sami Said’s Väldigt sällan fin (2012). All three novels articulate an African-European borderscape, interrupting their Swedish frameworks by circling around a temporal border, the post- in postcolonial, and performing acts of diasporic memory. A short analysis of border concepts within postcolonialist discourse is followed by a closer examination of border tropes and narratives of territorial border-crossings in the three novels, with a focus on these contemporary Swedish negotiations of postcolonial borderings and the way in which they can be connected to aesthetic and affective values.
På 1990-tallet virket ikke grenser relevante mer. Berlinmuren hadde fallt, en trengte ikke lenger å vise pass når en reiste på kontinentet, og vi var på vei inn i globaliseringstidsalder der alt skulle handle om flyt. I dag virker denne tiden som en fremmed verden: farlige og dødsbringende grenser er gjenstand for mediaoppmerksomheten, det bygges murer og gjerder på grenser som aldri før, grensekontrollen har spredt seg inn i urbane rom og den digitale sfæren, grenser virker allestedsnærværende. Samtidig presenteres vi for en stigende antall litterære og filmatiske skildringer av grenser. Hvilken betydning har grensens litteratur og grensens estetikk? Kan litteratur, film og andre kunstarter bidra til å endre våre grensebegrep?
Arktis har i lang tid vært et utilgjengelig sted, som en annen planet, eller et sted som ville bare kunne utforskes i framtiden, et sted for forestillinger og begjær, fremmed og skremmende, eller hvem vet? — kanskje et utopisk sted. Det er ikke rart at mye sf bruker Arktis som setting eller som inspirasjon. Det er nok å nevne Frankenstein, Jules Verne, The Left Hand of Darkness, eller Superman, men i tillegg kommer teorier om paradisiske øyer, åpne hav, eller en hul jordklode, samt de senere årenes CliFi. Hva kan sf fortelle oss om Arktis? Hva kan Arktis fortelle oss om sf?
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). The Arctic Imagination.
Zu diesem etwas anderen Literarischen Salon kommen die Historikerin Ulrike Spring von der Hochschule Sogn og Fjordane und der Literaturwissenschaftler Johan Schimanski von der Universität Oslo und präsentieren ihr Buch Passagiere des Eises, Polarhelden und arktische Dis- kurse 1874. Das Buch hat die österreichisch-ungarische Nordpolexpedition (1872-1874) zum Thema und betrachtet diese unter einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Blickpunkt. Die Polarfahrer erregten europaweit beträchtliche mediale Aufmerksamkeit, und nicht zuletzt warf die Expedition we- sentliche soziale, politische und kulturelle Fragen auf.
Im Sommer des Jahres 1872 brach die "Admiral Tegetthoff", ein Expeditionsschiff unter der Leitung der von Carl Weyprecht und Julius Payer ins nördliche Eismeer auf, um die Durchfahrt der bislang unbekannten Nordostpassage, der Strecke von Europa nach Ostasien, zu erkunden. Wenige Tage nach der Abfahrt blieb das Schiff westlich von Nowaja Semlja im Packeis stecken und wurde nach Nordwesten in bis dato unbekannte Polarregionen abgetrieben. Man stieß auf Land, erkundete und kartierte es und benannte es mit Verweis auf die Herkunft des österreich-ungarischen Entdeckertruppe "Franz-Josef-Land". Im Frühjahr 1874 entschloss sich die Expeditionsleitung schließlich, das Schiff im Eis zurückzulassen: Auf abenteuerlichem Weg gelang die Rückkehr nach Europa: Die 24-köpfige Mannschaft hatte nur einen Todesfall zu beklagen. Die Rückfahrt von der norwegischen Küste über Hamburg nach Wien wurde zum Medienereignis, die Ankunft in Wien blieb wochenlang im Mittelpunkt sozialer, politischer und kultureller Aufmerksamkeit. Die Rezeption dieses Ereignisses im nationalen und internationalen Diskurs erschließt ein Stück europäischer Kulturgeschichte.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2015). Borders between the Arctic and Central Europe.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Border Culture: Aesthetics/Poetics/Literatures.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Changing Border Concepts in Published Immigrant Narratives in Norway and Sweden.
Vis sammendrag
This paper will provide a comparative and contrapuntual analysis of border concepts in cultural production, using Norwegian and Swedish published immigrant narratives as examples. A new generation of immigrant community writers who have spent parts or the whole of their childhoods in Norway have acquired a competence in Norwegian public debate and literary culture. Novels, short stories, published anonymized letters, fictionalized, autobiographies, fictionalized life-stories constitute a corpus of publically visible representations of migrant cultures which cross the symbolic border from private experience to the public sphere. The paper will ask why these narratives address transnational mobility and emphasize territorial border crossings in a more explicit way than in earlier immigrant literature in the English-speaking sphere. Grounding interpretations of bordering in the cultural sphere involves correlating the performative force of aesthetic works in a social context to an analysis of content and form. In narrative texts, border concepts are performed through various rhetorical figures and narratives. Close border poetics readings result in a repertoire of border figures, keys to the text's negotiation of border concepts. The paper will compare novels and fictionalized autobiographies by with Somali (Amal Aden, Roda Ahmed), Subcontinental (Nasim Karim, Romeo Gill) and Caucasian (Marie Amalie) backgrounds. While such narratives in Norway cater to disparate desires for knowledge, identification, debate, and aesthetic experience, this paper will ask why none apply the postmodernist, metafictional and magical realist strategies typical of the international migrant literature canon, refering contrapuntually to Swedish examples (Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Enel Melberg).
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Constructing imagery, mythologies of the Arctic.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Korleis arbeide fram ein god EU-søknad? Korleis gå fram og kva er dei viktigast suksessfaktorane? Korleis kan fleire frå IKL nå opp med slike søknader?.
Schimanski, Johan (2014). Liminal spaces of migration and writing: Marie Amelie’s Ulovlig norsk.
Vis sammendrag
This paper is based on research on border concepts in migrant literature within a work package on ”Border Crossing and Cultural Production” in the research project EUBORDERSCAPES. The paper explores the possibility of using different concepts of liminality to identify operative border concepts in a migrant narratives published in Norwegian, both on the plane of the territorial border crossings described in these narrative, and on the border-crossings from private to public, from experience to literature, constituted by this publication. Maria Amelie’s Ulovlig norsk (”Illegally Norwegian”, 2010) tells the temporally clearly delimited story of the pseudonymous Russian (North-Ossetian) author while living without papers in Norway, from 2003 to the publication of the book. On publication, the author became a cause célèbre: She was arrested outside a public speaking engagement, underwent trials, became the focus of controversy and public demonstrations, was deported and then readmitted to Norway after a change of rules known as ”Lex Amelie”. A reading of border figures in the book, a testimonial, raises questions on the function of liminal and liminoid spaces, individual and societal transitions, and published literature as a liminal or liminoid space.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2014). Grensefigurer i publisette innvandrerfortellinger på norsk. En litteraturviter snakker til samfunnsvitere.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2014). “Nordpolstilen”: Wien i Arktis, 1874.
Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2014). Playing the Arctic: Modernity and Gender in Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday.
Vis sammendrag
Arthur Ransome, an author and journalist who covered and who had close ties to Bohemian London before WWI and then to the Russian Revolution, is most famous for his series of twelve much-read children’s books known as the ”Swallows and Amazons” series (1930-1947). Unlike the rest of the books, Winter Holiday (1933) does not take place on moving, but on frozen water. Himself inspired by Nansen’s accounts of the crossing of Greenland and the Fram expedition, Ransome allows his children protagonists to transform the Lake District lake on which they spend their holidays into the scene of an Arctic expedition. Ransome’s book invites contextual readings connecting the book to the discursive and political developments which accompanied his own career as a writer, along the line of Heidi Hansson’s analysis (2011) of A. A. Milne’s story of Winnie-the-Pooh’s ‘expotition’ to the North Pole as a productive model. Where Ransome is concerned, it seems natural to place emphasis on the ambivalent handling of imperial discourses in discovery narratives, but also (as Catherine M. Lynch has suggested) on post-WWI transformations in gender roles. Girl protagonists are main agents where both imagining and physical action are involved in Ransome’s books, and Winter Holiday is no exception. The paper poses questions of changing imperial and gendered discourses between the wars as they are negotiated in Arthur Ransome’s fiction about/for children, and how these negotiations can be seen as negotiations of the modern. It examines the motif of fantasy play within fiction – in a sense, fictions within fictions – a recurring motif in Ransome’s books. To what degree does play help create a utopian or heterotopian Arctic modernity in which age and gender hierarchies are barred? Is the play motif/mode in itself a typically modern (ironic? defamiliarizing?) way of dealing with exotic geographies?
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2014). Steam & Furs.
Vis sammendrag
Austro-Hungarians in the Arctic 1874: proto-steampunk Jules Verne is one of the most-read authors in Europe and news reaches Vienna of the return of the Austro- Hungarian Arctic expedition after two years in the Arctic. Their triumphant journey through Norway, Sweden, Germany, Vienna and onwards to the farthest reaches of the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy is made possible by the reality of steam power, involving even the opening of a railway line from Pålsboda to Finspång. Journalists, authors, illustrators and caricaturists compete to produce the most fantastic imaginative images of their journey, including a novel-length satire in Hungarian – inspired by Jules Verne. Is the Arctic a place in which fur-costumed imperial heroes enter a primitive world, or is it the future? Ulrike Spring and Johan Schimanski’s book on the expedition and its reception will appear later this year.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan Henrik (2014). Nordpolen i Wien: Den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen (1872-1874) i karikaturtegninger.
Schimanski, Johan (2013). Aktuelle perspektiver på Goethes Faust.
Schimanski, Johan (2013). Ellisif Wessel som grensefigur. Litterære og biografiske resepsjoner.
Schimanski, Johan (2013). Humaniora, samfunnsvitenskap og grenser.
Schimanski, Johan (2013). Reading Changing Border Concepts in Published Immigrant Narratives: Nasim Karim and Romeo Gill.
Vis sammendrag
This paper aims to contribute to the formulation of a comparative framework for the analysis of border concepts in cultural production, using immigrant narratives as examples. Grounding interpretations of bordering in the cultural sphere involves correlating the performative force of aesthetic works in a social context to an analysis of content and form. In narrative texts, border concepts are performed through the use of various rhetorical figures for the border, along with the narrative and formal structures of border-crossings. Close border poetics readings result in a repertoire of border figures, keys to the text’s negotiation of border concepts. But what presuppositions about the border concept do such readings imply? Literary postcolonial immigrant narratives in Norway cater to disparate desires for knowledge, identification, debate, and aesthetic experience. A new generation of immigrant community authors who have spent parts or the whole of their childhoods in Norway have acquired a competence in Norwegian literary culture. Novels and autobiographies address transnational mobility and emphasize territorial border crossings. My examples here are novels by the children of subcontinental immigrants: Nasim Karim’s Izzat – For ærens skyld (1996), and Romeo Gill’s Harjeet (2008) and Ung mann i nytt land (2011).
This paper aims to contribute to the formulation of a comparative framework for the analysis of border concepts in cultural production, using as examples two immigrant narratives. To ground interpretations of bordering in the cultural sphere one must correlate an investigation of social actants ¬– i.e. of the performative force of aesthetic works in a social context and their meaning for users and producers – to an analysis of content and form. In narrative texts, border concepts are performed through rhetorical means, i.e. the use of various figures (metaphors, synecdoches etc) for the border, along with narrative and formal structure of border-crossings, in themselves implying border figures. Close border poetics readings result in a repertoire of border figures, keys to the text’s negotiation of border concepts. Literary postcolonial immigrant narratives in Norway can be traced back to the publication of Khalid Hussain’s novel Pakkis in 1986. The publication category expresses disparate desires for knowledge, identification, debate, and aesthetic experience. A new generation of immigrant community authors who have spent parts or the whole of their childhoods in Norway have acquired a competence in Norwegian literary culture. Later books also address transnational mobility and emphasize territorial border crossings. My examples are written by women born in Somalia but growing up partly in Norway, the 2008 novel by Roda Ahmed, Forberedelsen, and the 2009 autobiography by war orphan Amal Aden, Min drøm om frihet. In addition to immanent analysis, extended medial receptions make possible appraisals of the social actants involved.
Refering to specific literary negotiations of Eastern European border zones and arguing for the need for investigation of imagined borderlands in cultural production, this paper reexamines the theoretical framework of border poetics from the point of view of Jacques Rancière’s exposition of politics and aesthetics. Border poetics is an analytical formation which asks us to be aware of not only of the various effects in the micronarratives of individual border crossings, but also the way in which the work of representation, narrativization, figuration, and aestheticization is integral to both border crossings and to bordering processes in general. It challenges us to connect the political and aesthetic, and this paper examines its theoretical underpinnings by relating it to Rancière’s formulation of the relationship between politics and aesthetics and especially to his conception of the “distribution of the sensible”. A recent negotiation of the Norwegian-Russian borderlands is Cecilie Enger’s novel Himmelstormeren (2007), based on the life of the historical woman Ellisif Wessel (1866-1949), social activist and photographer. The Kafkaesque novel The City & The City (2009), by London author and scholar of international law China Miéville, is a theoretically sophisticated crime noir set in the fictional Central/Eastern European twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, presided over by the mysterious executive force the “Breach”. The paper focuses on the sensible in both cases as it relates to their handling of borders, in Enger through the motif of the photograph and in Miéville through the practice of “unseeing” the other city.
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (2013). Border | Aesthetics: REPORT: The final conference of the Border Aesthetics research project University of Tromsø, Tromsø. 5‐8 September 2012. La Frontera: Association for Borderlands Studies Newsletter.
33(2), s 7- 9
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2013). Fra et hav av is til et hav av mennesker: Mottakelsen av den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen 1872-1874.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2013). The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archives' Others.
Vis sammendrag
The Arctic is today posed on the cusp of two discourses: one of enviromental conservationism, in which one wishes to keep the Arctic ice in its present state, the other of economic exploitation, producing scenarios of access to trade routes and petrochemical resources. Both come together in the image of the melting ice. The environmental discourse of the Arctic sees the Arctic as an archive of climate change history, of ways of life, and of genetic codes. Its more ecoactivist enunciators use strong images in order to sell their message, thereby giving global access to their symbolic resources and reproducing an economic logic of liquidity, signs as negotiable assets. Economic interests see the opening of the Arctic sea as a way of liquidizing assets in the face of climate change. In our paper we will examine the archaeology of the crisis of Arctic modernity, using connections between the first great modern economic depression beginning in the Panic of 1873, and the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition of 1872-1874. We will trace the origins of modernity within Arctic discourse to three fields, the scientific, the journalistic, and the aesthetic. This will form the basis for our argument concerning the constitutive connections between archival conservation and the liquid modernity, its other which seems to threaten it with destruction.
Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan (2012). Reading Kafka’s ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ as a Text about Sovereignty, Aesthetics and Borders.
Vis sammendrag
This paper reads Kafka’s short text ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ (‘The Cares of a Family Man’) as a partly allegorical text about sovereignty, aesthetics and borders. We use Kafka’s text as an entry point, opening up the field of reflection by examining its main motifs. The main figures of the text are the fairly anonymous “Hausvater” (the family man, literally the “House-Father”) and a mysterious toy-like figure, “Odradek”. The Hausvater is by implication the sovereign of the family and the house, a bordered space, where every thing has its place and its meaning. The text tries to positions Odradek through its name which may have Slavic as well as German origins. But as uncertain as these etymologies of its name is its origin in general. For the Hausvater Odradek is a denizen of in-between spaces. It lives in the margins and on the thresholds, moving freely between the inside and the outside, disappears and reappears again. Is it like a migrant crossing the borders of the nation- house? Its interdeterminacy resist the sovereignty of the Hausvater. If the Odradek is a “Sorge” (worry, concern, care) of the Hausvater, does the Hausvater want to get rid of it or look after it? Is it an undeterminable threat? It is even uncertain if it dies. The very form of the Odradek has unclear borders, a “flat star-shaped spool for thread” with some broken threads hanging on to it, a small wooden crossbar and a right-angled rod. Its uselessness it reminds us of the Kantian definition of beauty as being disinterested, but its melancholic aesthetic as a fragment makes sovereign have “Sorge” about it. The Odradek is uncannily similar to the sovereign as being outside the law. What marks off the border and relationship between the sovereign – with its violent phantasm of omnipotence – and the aesthetic? Or is the aesthetic that which mockingly resists such bordering and reveals the sovereign’s fear of death? Who is the Hausvater? Is he the narrator “I” or the generalized “one” or the text? Why these sliding subject positions in relationship to the sovereignity of the narrator and the literary fragment as a performative act? This is not a case study of a Kafka text, but a dialogue with the text asking it what it has to contribute to a discussion of sovereignty, aesthetics and borders.
Görling, Reinhold & Schimanski, Johan (2012). Sovereignty.
Melodiøs folkemusikk og poetisk diskusjon stod på programmet under litteraturfestivalens første poesisalong
Schimanski, Johan (2012). Disorientation, Unorientation, Post-Orientation.
Vis sammendrag
When orientation comes from the outside it becomes a symbolic system, imposed by the ”Father”. Rebelling against it, we may suspect that it is inauthentic, a pseudo-orientation. False orientations can be predicated on orientation, and disorientation itself may be part of the same economy. When one discovers that one’s orientation was a pseudo-orientation, one is disorientated, and one feels a need to become reorientated. What can break this economy? Is there an alternative to either reorientation or a repressive ”deorientation”? One such alternative may be a utopian unorientation, where one feels no need for orientation. Another is acceptation of hybrid and ambiguous orientations, a post-orientation. The economy of orientation is part of the formation of our selves as sovereign subjects. Yet the self comes into being, as Althusser’s famous example makes clear, in a moment of disorientation, which he visualizes as a scene where one is hailed by a policeman on the street. Althusser is quick to brush over the theatricality of this scene; we already have established our identities, through the workings of ideology. But what if we acknowledge this moment of disorientation and allow for self-reflexivity from the outset? The fictional cities of China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) are set in an imaginary Eastern or Central Europe, in a fragmented and multilayered space characterized by displacement and disorientation. Appropriately, it is a theoretically informed novel about police work, and emphasizes the element of disorientation through the generic form of the detective story (false leads, conspiracies behind conspiraceis, etc.). It also sets up a theatre of genre through its clearly constructed disorientation of the reader’s generic expectations with the help of fantasy and science fictional elements. Most strikingly, The City & the City reifies our everyday practices of ignoring certain things which are around us through a science fictional motif or novum, an institutionalized practice of “unseeing” the other cities around one. Paradoxically, it is the seeing which lurks behind unseeing which creates disorientation in the novel, which in turn suggests various ways of glimpsing the possibility of ambigous post-orientations.
Schimanski, Johan (2012). En drømmedag med en forsker.
Schimanski, Johan (2012). Grensebegreper og begrepsgrenser.
Grenser er på vei tilbake i den internasjonale arenaen med full fart. Det kan virke som om globaliseringsprofetenes spådommer om en grenseløs verden har mistet all betydning. Fra Tijuana på grensen tilUSAtil Kirkenes på grensen til Russland, fra det dødsbringende havet mellom Libya og Italia til den lovlige lovløsheten på Guantanamo-basen, fra de fjernstyrte dronenes jaktmerker i det nordvestlige Pakistan til den økonomiske krisen i Hellas, fra murbyggingen på Vestbanken til forstedene i Paris: grenser forbindes med mange slags problemstillinger. Samtidig som verden forandrer seg, forandrer våre begrep om grenser seg. Kan nye ideer om hvordan grenser er hjelpe oss i å finne alternative løsninger når det gjelder innvandring, sikkerhet, suverenitet og andre grenserelaterte spørsmål? Kan forskning, kunst og litteratur være måter å forhandle fram nye, mer levelige grensebegrep på? Det viser seg at en måte å skape alternative grensebegrep er å lytte til hva en liten tekst som Franz Kafka skrev under første verdenskrig, ”Husfarens bekymringer”, kan ha å si til oss. Det anbefales å lese denne før samtalen.
Schimanski, Johan (2012). Grensens nett.
Schimanski, Johan (2012). Hva skal en litteraturviter med tegneserier, og hva sier det oss om tegneserier?.
Schimanski, Johan (2012). Liminality and Borders in Literary Aesthetics.
Vis sammendrag
Writing poetics is often an exercise in distinguishing between different categories: elements in the text, parts of the text. The differences between these sometimes explicitly figured as borders and transitions (such as beginnings, plot turns and revelations). In traditional poetics, literary categories are often territorialized in a conceptual landscape and works are subjected to unities. Distinctions are also made between a range of phenomena and their others: good literature and bad literature, originals and imitations, affect and decorum, literature and history, reality and fiction, plausibility and fantasy, poetic language and prosaic language, readers/audiences and texts, the text and its outside, etc. Again, such otherings may be figured as borders of various kinds: absolute divisions, mixings, magnetisms, dialectics, etc. Within these processes of distinctions and borderings, various subject positions are being constructed: authors and their readers, critics, characters, and not least poeticians and their readers. The purpose of this presentation is to examine, in a wide range of writings in traditional and modern poetics, possible border narratives, border figures and liminalities brought into play in such writing. The approach is broadly one taken from border poetics: the acknowledgement of border processes taking place on different surfaces which sometimes join in telling ways. In some poetics for example, relations of power surface between categories and subject positions, especially apparent in the various otherings going on in these texts. Certain categories, including literature itself, are made sovereign over others, authors exercise freedoms (e.g. deus ex machina), etc. In some, such relations are explicitly made into topographical borders, including Plato’s famous admonition to exile all practicioners of literary and aesthetic imitation from his ideal state, or Boileau’s scepticism to rhymesters ”on the other side of the Pyrenees” who in their works break with the unity of time. The question raised – in such cases most clearly – is whether a poetics can be evaluated from its confirm or challenge territorializing and ”container” concepts of borders; whether it allows for liminal states, categories and subject positions.
Schimanski, Johan (2012). The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition and Expedition Doctor Gyula Kepes.
Die Rückkehr der österreichisch-ungarischen Polarexpedition im September 1874 entwickelte sich in der bürgerlichen Zeitungswelt und Festkultur rasch zu einem Medienereignis, über das Bilder der Arktis ebenso wie nationale und lokale Identitäten verhandelt wurden. Die Empfänge und die Medienberichterstattung in Bergen, Hamburg und Wien bilden den Ausgangspunkt für eine Analyse der politischen, medialen und ästhetischen Kulturen der 1870er Jahre.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2012). Nordpolen som mediebegivenhet i Sentraleuropa.
Øistad, Beate Sletvold; Mortensen, Ellen; Bolsø, Agnes; Rogg, Elisabet & Schimanski, Johan (2012, 23. mars). Forstå samfunnet - studer kjønn!. [Internett].
Kilden: Informasjonssenteret for kjønnsforskning.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Border Aesthetics and Postmodernist Negotiations in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Border Aesthetics and Postmodernist Negotiations in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape.
Vis sammendrag
This paper examines the aesthetic dimension in the remaking of borders and border concepts. It explores scenes from two postmodernist novels - so-called historiographic metafictions - which negotiate the Norwegian-Russian(-Sámi-Finnish) borderscape, Fowles’ The Magus (1966) and Fløgstad’s Grense Jakobselv (2009). In doing so to changing conceptions of borders and aesthetics, the complex layering of historical memory in the Pasvik region, and the specific border figures brought into play. How does aesthetics map into internal and external borderscapes? Which aesthetic judgments about the border do these novels make possible? Can aesthetic distancing and its shifting of the visible/invisible create new, perhaps enabling conceptions of the border? Do bordering processes help create new aesthetical concepts?
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Border Aesthetics and Postmodernist Negotiations in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape.
Vis sammendrag
This paper examines the aesthetic dimension in the remaking of borders and border concepts. In which way do aesthetic works and aestheticization processes become part of the borderscape? To ask such questions is not only to interrogate different historical conceptions of the border, but also different meanings of the word “aesthetic”. The aesthetic can be about the senses: that which connects the spatial and symbolic aspects of every border is precisely the sensual perception of the border. The aesthetic can be about beauty, etc: the border allows for emotional responses (like/dislike etc) and for aesthetic judgements (beautiful, sublime, grotesque, etc). The aesthetic be about art: The border can be connected to artistic cultural production and be subjected to everyday aestheticization. All these aspects of the border create the possibility of ascribing various aesthetic (and ethical) values to the border; however, the border not only elicits aesthetic responses, but is also renegotiated in those responses. The paper explores scenes from two “postmodernist” novels which negotiate the Norwegian-Russian(-Sámi-Finnish-Kven) borderscape, Fowles’ The Magus (1966) and Fløgstad’s Grense Jakobselv (2009), attending to the changing conceptions of borders, the complex layering of historical memory in the Pasvik region, and the specific border metaphors they bring into play. Which aesthetic judgments about the border do these novels make possible? Can aesthetic distancing and its shifting of the visible/invisible create new, perhaps enabling conceptions of the border?
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Border Reading Double Vector: The Epistemology of Border-Crossings.
Vis sammendrag
Borders are traces, that is to say, they are a form of writing--and thus they are also texts to be read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. I will here be examining some literary and cinematic narratives in which national borders are crossed for elements of an epistemology of the border. Such narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself--the reader crossing over into the border text. If border crossings are movements of bodies in space, what do these narratives tell us of the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text? What can these narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity--national affiliation as an act of reading borders? I suggest that narratives of border crossing, like border crossings themselves, are structured spatial around a double vector, sometimes transformed into a swirling confusion of direction, constituting the border zone and its associated identities.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Disorientating Borders.
Vis sammendrag
At the border, disorientation may appear. I will here be examining some literary/cinematic narratives featuring national borders, developing on work on the epistemology of borders. Such narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself – the reader crossing over into the text or the viewer into the screen. If border crossings are movements of bodies in space, what do these narratives tell us of the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text? In many of these narratives, the unknowability of the border and its other side is figured through an intrusion of the imaginary and a disorientation, with my focus here being on the latter. But to answer questions about what such narratives can tell us about community and identity – national affiliation and global interpellation as acts of reading borders – we must also ask who or what is disorientated and who does the disorientation: national, migrant or border subjects, protagonists or readers/viewers, the text/film or the border itself?
Schimanski, Johan (2011). How National Borders are Created and Negotiated in Interaction with Narrativity, Aesthetics, and Interpretation.
Vis sammendrag
This lecture begins by presenting the borderscape as a concept which allows us to take into account aestheticization processes when addressing borders. It takes as its departure point various literary narratives which negotiate national borders, with the specific questions such borders raise about identification, history and transformation in a world of flows, joins, resistances and exclusions. The lecture aims to create a juncture in which we may pose the question of the performative force of literary borderings and of reading. Which aesthetic judgments about the border do literary texts make possible? What would it mean to deal with the aesthetic as a border phenomenon? How do aesthetical negotiations of the border relate to other fields of evaluation, such as the ontological, epistemological, emotional, ethical, political etc? In order to answer these questions the lecture handles both the border and the aesthetic as contingent concepts suggesting new possibilities, and interrogates the various ascriptions which connect borders, aesthetics, style, affect etc.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Introduction: Le Cerf-Volant.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Presentasjon av boken Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Pronouncing it the Porder: The Ascription of Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National Borders in Frank A. Jenssen, The Salt Pit.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Pronouncing it the Porder: The Ascription of Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National Borders in Frank A. Jenssen, The Salt Bin.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Reading for Borders.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Reading for Borders and Aesthetics.
Vis sammendrag
In the workshop we will be reading short texts by Dannie Abse and Yoko Tawada with border themes, looking for different ways in which they involve borders, connect different kinds of borders (national, textual etc) and create different conceptions of borders. What makes a taken border interesting in reading a text? What border crossings are involved in the reading process itself? Can aesthetical concepts help us understand the connection between the borders described in the text and the borders of the text itself? Returns to central theoretical texts by Jacques Derrida, Benedict Anderson and Franco Moretti provide points of access. Participants will be asked to relate to use of border concepts and aesthetics in their own work. Discussion can be in English or Scandinavian, depending on the wishes of the participants.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). The Disorientating Epistemology of the Border.
Schimanski, Johan (2011). Victor Turner and the Border Fantastic.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Elling Carlsen og katolikkene på Nordpolen – eller Frans Josefs Land før Nansen.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Gendered Discourses of Celebration and the Formation of Arctic Heroes.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Habsburg Colonialism and the Remedialization of Franz Joseph Land.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Oscar II’s Lands: Receiving Austro-Hungarian Polar Explorers in Norway and Sweden in 1874.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Presentasjon av artikkelen "A Black Rectangle Labelled 'Polar Night': Imagining the Arctic after the Austro-Hungarian Expedition of 1872-1874".
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Setting the Borders of the Arctic in the Discourse of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition 1872-1874.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2011). Welcome on German Soil:: Using an Arctic Expedition to Negotiate National Identities.
Sojtaric, Maja & Schimanski, Johan (2011). Science fiction er død. Labyrint.
ISSN 1890-565X.
(3), s 18- 19
Lindstad, Siri; Schimanski, Johan; Spring, Ulrike; Wærp, Henning Howlid & Gaupseth, Silje (2010). Feltrapport: Til Arktis for å finne seg selv. Forskerforum.
ISSN 0800-1715.
42(10), s 24- 26
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Erfaringer med bruk av Twitter i undervisning.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Grensens estetikk.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Grenser: identitet, estetikk, verdier.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Introduction to Fatih Akin, "Im Juli" (2000).
Vis sammendrag
Fatih Akin's In July (original title Im Juli) is a light summer romantic comedy and road movie about the coming-of-age of Daniel, a young maths teacher from Hamburg, played by the indispensable Moritz Bleibtrau. Daniel sets off to find his true love at the Bosporus in Istanbul, crossing national and personal borders on every step of the way through a sun-baked Europe. Scenes in this film on German and Turkish, Western and Eastern identities prove that illegal border crossings can be funny and romantic - in spite of the threat of state violence. How can border crossings be comic? Do we today need border-crossing comedy? Are comedies always about some form of border-crossing? Included in the introduction are comparisons with earlier comic treatments of border-crossing - a 1938 novel by Erich Kästner (filmed in 1943), a phrase in a 1964 poem by Ingeborg Bachmann - and with Akin's main source of inspiration, Shakespeare’s comedies. In July won the audience award at the Tromsø International Film Festival in 2001.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Om grenser.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Pronouncing it the porder: The ascription of aesthetic values to external and internal national borders in Frank A. Jenssen, Saltbingen.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Pronouncing it the porder: The ascription of aesthetic values to external and internal national borders in Frank A. Jenssen, Saltbingen.
Vis sammendrag
Frank A. Jenssen’s Saltbingen (1981; translated as The Salt Pit, 1998), winner of the Vesaas prize, is a piece of often grotesque realism describing events in the life of the Tysfjord Sámi. It deals with many kinds of symbolic borders, first and foremost the social, linguistic and cultural borders between indigenous hunter-gatherer-fisher-farmers and various representatives of state and economic power, between the Tysfjord Sámi and on the one hand Lofoten fishermen and on the other reindeer-herding Sámi. As such it addresses various questions of identity, articulation and representation central to postcolonial theory; a historical novel set from 1955 onwards, it also covers two generations and follows the traces of trauma across temporal boundaries. This paper discusses how the novel loads specifically topographical borders – the border to Sweden and to the East, the borders dividing the world of daily life from submarine or subterraneous underworlds or from the more aetheric world of the mountain tops – with the aesthetics of the gothic and the idyll, and how these aesthetic values overlap with the social and cultural issues mentioned above.
Schimanski, Johan (2010). Truth and beauty (or not) of borders.
Vis sammendrag
While borders may seem erased by globalization, they tend to reappear, often in unexpected places. Borders are multiple traces, a form of writing we have to read. We often think of that which is on the other side of the border as something unknown, and the border itself is also in some sense unknowable, inviting interpretation. The border helps define meaning and truth, and border crossing narratives often transform crossings into readings, suggesting that these crossings are allegories of the reading of the narrative itself--the reader crossing over into the text. Border crossings are movements of bodies in space and the relationship between the reader’s body and the space of the text shares this sense of spatiality. In analysing literary and cinematic (or perhaps any) narratives for elements of an epistemology of the border we are also faced however with an aesthetics of the border. Borders are often aestheticized not only as spaces of narrative conflict, but also as fantastic, romantic, comic, sublime, absurd, or grotesque. Such ascriptions of aesthetic values can help us understand what border crossing narratives tell us about the figurality of community and identity – national affiliation as an act of reading borders. The beauty and ugliness of borders are crucial elements in the politics of some of the most contentious border issues in the world today. Here I will be examining narratives of border crossing which are structured spatially around a double vector, which is transformed into a swirling confusion of direction, constituting a border zone with its epistemology, aesthetics and associated identities.
Schimanski, Johan; Määttä, Jerry & Dahl, Thomas (2010). Samtale om science fiction-fankultur: Skap din egen fremtid nå! Om science fiction-fans og hvordan kulturforbruk kan være kreativt.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2010). Julius Payer.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2010). The Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition in Hamburg, 1874.
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2010). En polarekspedisjon vender hjem: Den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen 1872-1874.
Wolfe, Stephen; Schimanski, Johan; Otte, Martha & Høtvedt, Martin (2010, 08. september). TIFF og universitetet samarbeider om filmhøst: Inviterer til film og grensedebatt.
Nordlys.
Lindholm, Audun & Schimanski, Johan (2009). Fra Algernon til Aardvark: Norske science fiction-fanziner på 1970- og 80-tallet. Vagant.
ISSN 0802-0736.
(3), s 8- 17
Schimanski, Johan (2009). Litteratur er viktig. Nordlys.
ISSN 0805-5440.
108(215), s 3- 3
Schimanski, Johan (2009). Sverige tvetydig overfor science fiction [anmeldelse av Jerry Määttä, Raketsommar. Science Fiction i Sverige 1950–1968, Lund: elleströms förlag 2006]. Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning.
ISSN 0013-0818.
96(2), s 191- 195
Schimanski, Johan (2009). The Theoretical Basis of Border Poetics.
Schimanski, Johan (2009). Å krysse grenser, å forhandle mannlighet.
Schimanski, Johan; Leikvoll, Jan Roar; Gabrielsen, Gøhril & Kollbotn, Kjersti (2009). Nye stemmer: Tre ferske forfattere snakker om motivasjonen for å skrive, og valg av vold som tema (paneldiskusjon).
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (2009). The ABS-Europe Biennale Kirkenes Conference Report: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders. La Frontera: Association for Borderlands Studies Newsletter.
29(2), s 10- 14
Schimanski, Johan; Wolfe, Stephen & Niemi, Einar a (2009). Introduction: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Northern Borders. Journal of Northern Studies.
ISSN 1654-5915.
(1), s 7- 11
Per, Næss; Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008, 08. april). Polare helter fra det sentrale Europa.
Nordlys.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008). Exploration becoming Literature: Writing Strategies in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008). Exploration becoming Literature: Writing Strategies in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008). Explorers’ Bodies in Arctic Mediascapes: Celebrating the Return of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in 1874.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008). Narrative Borders in Arctic Exploration Discourse: The Austro-Hungarian Arctic Expedition 1872-1874.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008). Popular Images and Imaginings of the Arctic in Central Europe.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2008). Russell A. Potter, Arctic Spectacles. The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875, Seattle & London: University of Washington Press 2007, ISBN 9780773533325, ix + 258 pp. Journal of Northern Studies.
ISSN 1654-5915.
(2), s 93- 97
Spring, Ulrike & Schimanski, Johan (2008). Kulturmøter: matrosene.
Wærp, Henning Howlid; Ryall, Anka & Schimanski, Johan (2008). Leder for Nordlit 23: Arctic Discourses 2008. Nordlit.
ISSN 0809-1668.
s 9- 9 Fulltekst i vitenarkiv.
Wærp, Henning Howlid & Schimanski, Johan (2008, 20. februar). Intervju om konferansen Arctic Discourses 2008, Universitetet i Tromsø, 21.-23. februar. [Radio].
NRK P1, Troms og Finnmark.
Wærp, Henning Howlid; Schimanski, Johan & Ryall, Anka (2008, 20. februar). "Sammen om arktisk litteratur". Intervju om konferansen Arctic discourses 2008, Universitetet i Tromsø, 21.-23. februar, med 65 foredragsholdere fra 15 land. (Journalist: Lasse Jangås.).
Nordlys.
Schimanski, Johan (2007). Border-crossing as Translation, Translation as Border-crossing.
Schimanski, Johan (2007). Can Scandinavian Borders be Mapped? Can Literature Map Borders?.
Schimanski, Johan (2007). Grensens kultur og kulturens grenser.
Schimanski, Johan (2007). Kjønn i filmen Fight Club.
Schimanski, Johan (2007). No Borders Without Fiction.
Schimanski, Johan & Lachnit, Peter (2007, 12. februar). Dimensionen - Die Welt der Wissenschaft. [Radio].
ORF - Radio Ö1.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2007). Arctic Southerners.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2007). "Die Quarneroli am Nordpol.” Österreichisch-ungarische Identitäten und arktische Fähigkeiten.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2007). Kvinnen—moralens vokter i isødet?.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2007). Prosjektet arktiske diskurser/Mottakelse og Mottakelse.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2007). Tromsø—Bergen—Wien: En polarekspedisjon på veien hjem.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Ingen litteratur uten grenser, ingen grenser uten litteratur.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Introduction on Borders and Literature: Possibilities and Implications.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). No Borders Without Fiction.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). The Return to the Matrixial Borderspace: Dannie Abse’s ‘The Pencil Box’.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Grensen – litterært faktum med romlig form.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Ingen grenser uten litteratur, ingen litteratur uten grenser.
Schimanski, Johan (2006). Prinser og havfruer i nordområdene. Nordlys.
ISSN 0805-5440.
s 3- 3
Schimanski, Johan & Lachnit, Peter (2006, 09. desember). Diagonal. Zum Thema: Licht. [Radio].
ORF - Radio Ö1.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2006). Reception and Reception: The Returns of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition, 1872–1874.
Schimanski, Johan (2005). Drums of the Babongo and the Ironies of Celtic Postcolonialism.
Schimanski, Johan (2005). Fantastic Borderings.
Schimanski, Johan (2005). Panel Discussion Contribution on Teaching Gender in Border Studies.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2005). Representasjon og resepsjon i arktisk diskurs: Den østerriksk-ungarske polarekspedisjonen, 1872-1874.
Schimanski, Johan & Spring, Ulrike (2005). Wien - Tromsø - Franz Josefs Land 1872-1874 og etterpå, i vitenskap, populærkultur, kunst og litteratur.
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (ed.) (2005). ENG-3105: Border Crossing Narrative og “Grensepoetikk”.
Schimanski, Johan & Wolfe, Stephen (2005). Introduction to Round Table Discussion: Borders Differences Distances.
