Kristín Loftsdóttir - Crisis and Coloniality at Europes Margins

Crisis and Coloniality at Europes Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland provides a fresh look at the current politics of identity in Europe, using a crisis at the margins of Europe to shed light on the continued embeddedness of coloniality in everyday aspirations and identities. Examining Icelands response to its collapse into bankruptcy in 2008, the author explores the way in which the country sought to brand itself as an exotic tourist destination. With attention to the nations aspirations, rooted in the late 19th century, of belonging as part of Europe, rather than being classified with colonized countries, the book examines the engagement with ideas of otherness across and within Europe, as European discourses continue to be based on racialized ideas of civilized people. With its focus on coloniality at a time of crisis, this volume contributes to our understanding of how racism endures in the present and the significance of nationalistic sentiments in a world of precariousness. Anchored in part in personal narrative, this critical analysis of coloniality, racism, whiteness and national identities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in national identity-making, European politics and race in a world characterized by crisis.

Kristn Loftsdttir is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland. She is the co-editor of Messy Europe: Crisis, Race and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World; Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region; Crisis in the Nordic Nations and Beyond; Teaching Race with a Gendered Edge; and Topographies of Globalization.

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Crisis and Coloniality at Europes Margins

Creating Exotic Iceland

Kristn Loftsdttir

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Kristn Loftsdttir

First published 2019

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2019 Kristn Loftsdttir

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ISBN: 978-1-138-49760-3 (hbk)

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Part I
Before the crash

Part II
After the crash

There are many people who assisted me in different ways with compiling this book and with conducting the research it is based upon. The project Icelandic Identity in Crisis was generously funded by the University of Iceland Research Fund (20102013) and by RANNS The Icelandic Centre for Research (20132015). When finalizing the research, I have done so in the framework of the project Mobility and Transnationalism in Iceland, a project of excellence funded by RANNS (20162018). I am grateful to have received this support for the project, which made it possible to embark on different kinds of data collections which hopefully enriches the analysis.

I took a great deal of interviews that play an important role in the book, involving people who had or still do work in banks or other financial institutions, as well as individuals with migrant backgrounds living in Iceland. I am extremely grateful to these people for sharing their stories with me and their willingness to take time from their busy lives to meet me.

Special thanks to Ashley Shelby and James G. Rice for the wonderful editorial comments that really helped to make the manuscript more polished and clear. I am grateful as well for how encouraging your comments have been, simultaneously, as they have pushed me to do better. Sigurjn B. Hafsteinsson, Auur Arna Arnardttir, Unnur Ds Skaptadttir, lf Gararsdttir, Katrn Lund, Gunnar r Jhannesson, Pamela Innes, Steven Sampson and Jn Karl Helgason all read over parts of the manuscript during its different stages. They gave extremely valuable criticism and comments on the text and its ideas. This list includes as well lafur Rastrick, who actually first suggested to me to write this book, and thus to compile my work on the Icelandic Identity in Crisis project and on postcolonialism in Iceland.

I want to thank Brigitte Hipfl and Andrea Smith, who worked with me on a part of the Icelandic Identity in Crisis project, where I sought to place the concepts crisis and racialization into a wider international context. I also want to mention Patricia Purtschert, Dace Dzenovska, Jyl Josephson, Lars Jensen and Margaret Wilson who I have had many wonderful and inspirational conversations with over the years on matters relating to this book. My students have assisted with data gathering at different stages and with the various things that needed to be solved in terms of references and other issues that came up. I want to thank especially Sigrn Valsdttir, Gubjrt Gujnsdttir, Inga Hrnn Hasler, ra Lilja Sigurardttir, Sanna M. Mrtudttir and Karl Fannar Svarsson, but also Jen Hughes and Alix Johnson whose dissertation work I was engaged with. My former PhD student and now co-worker, Helga Bjrnsdttir, has worked with me on various parts of the project at different times.

I am also thankful to Routledge for publishing this manuscript and its anonymous reviewers, and also Neil Jordan and Alice Salt at Routledge for excellent correspondence in relation to the manuscript. Part of this book also involves work in archives in Denmark. There I met exceptional kindness and want specially to thank the following individuals: Ellen Dahl, Tivoli; Mona Rasmussen and Vibe Edinger, The National Museum of Denmark. I am also grateful to the archives at Landsbkasafni (National and University Library of Iceland) and the National Museum of Iceland. Parts of the manuscripts were written during a sabbatical in Austria in 2015 where I enjoyed the hospitality of the Austrian Academy of Science in Vienna and the Department of Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz. The proofs were then worked on in Tucson Arizona, where I enjoyed the hospitality and friendship of my mentors, Richard Henderson and Thomas K. Park, at the University of Arizona. I am also very grateful to the individuals and institutions that allowed me to use their images in the book.