Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Abstract

The study of Swedish migration, Swedish-American relations, and Scandinavian American identity underwent a seismic shift following the 2014 publication of the special issue “Scandinavians and Others” in the Journal of American Ethnic History (volume 33, issue 3). There, Jørn Brøndal, Dag Blanck, and Gunlög Fur asked scholars to reconceptualize prior understandings of where Scandinavians fit into an imagined racial hierarchy and their interactions—and conflicts—with other ethnic and racial groups in America. Historians of migration previously focused their attention on patterns of settlement but had not fully considered the importance of whiteness as a category of analysis. These articles revolutionized the study of Nordic whiteness and the ideological borders that separated the so-called “white races” and produced a spate of literature intent on re-examining Scandinavians as racially privileged. Swedish-American Borderlands provides a new and innovative approach to a field that saw a decades-long fixation on Scandinavian ethnicity and migration to America between 1840 and 1930. Blanck and Hjorthén do not wish to retread old territory by illustrating Swedish-American relations as a one-way process. Instead, Swedish-American Borderlands presents essays that examine the interactions, entanglements, and movement of people, goods, and ideas using the classic study of borderlands as a framework to highlight the vast history of transatlantic relations between Sweden and America.The anthology offers a timely collection of succinct, multidisciplinary essays written by established researchers and some newcomers to the field. Each essay provides a nod to the historiography of Swedish-American borderlands and its various iterations from its filiopietistic beginnings, through the Uppsala Project's quantitative focus of the 1960s, to the 1980s scholarship inspired by the cultural turn that “discovered” the importance of diversity. The field's reassessment at the beginning of the twenty-first century plays a vital role in each of the essays when considering Swedes in western lands, within a global context, and as a “preferred” immigrant and racial group. A second theoretical emphasis takes into consideration the influence of US borderlands and Chicano/a and Latinx studies first established by Herbert E. Bolton (The Spanish Borderlands, 1921). Blanck and Hjorthén use the concept of borderlands to explore geographic movement and cultural conflict, and as a point of ideological adoption and adaptation. Prior histories of Scandinavian migration overlooked the distinct categories of individuals involved in movement beyond the emigrant/immigrant dichotomy, whereas this volume emphasizes the “significance of different kinds of individual mobility” through three categories of movements: settlers, migrants, and sojourners (p. 10). Settlements like New Sweden in 1638 came about as a product of settler-colonial logic where land was both free and abundant. Migration, by comparison, brought large numbers of single men and women to American industrial centers for the purpose of economic opportunity rather than land-grabbing. Sojourners traveled to both America and Sweden and provided vital narratives of their interactions with settlers, migrants, and native-born individuals in both countries. The uniqueness of the collection originates from its chapters that address sojourning by examining the individuals and the processes of globalization that brought uniquely American concepts (jazz, political correctness) to Sweden and Swedishness (mid-century modern design, “the Swedish way”) to America.The first set of essays analyze movement and circulation from the perspectives of America and Sweden to explore visions of the past. Each chapter identifies a specific type of ideological borderland or border of interest. Karen Hansen's study of land taken from Native nations and given to Swedish-born homesteaders in North Dakota highlights the domestic colonialism of the US government during the nineteenth century. Here, entanglements of property and cultural disagreement marginalized individuals on the basis of race and gender. Borderlands involve a liminal experience of transition, as Philip Anderson explains in his essay, involving both geophysical and non-geographic space for Swedish immigrants who chose to make America their home. From the perspective of the folklorist, Jennifer Eastman Attebery writes, borders involve multiple frameworks of experience and provide a crucial component of culture in the American Midwest and West. Legends shared by Swedish settlers in strange lands became historical truth among individuals who imparted stories of vulnerability in rich legend texts. Ulf Jonas Björk's essay on the domestication of jazz in Sweden illustrates the process by which a “dangerous” American cultural trend of the 1920s became an essential component of Swedish popular music by the 1960s. In this musical borderland, both American and Swedish journalists built racist assumptions into critiques of the African American art form as sexually deviant. What journalists did not recognize was that American and Swedish influences blended existing jazz into a new type of music altogether. Björk suggests further expansion into this topic to focus on the perspective of African American jazz artists who migrated to Sweden for the purpose of expanding appreciation of their art. Hjorthén and Blanck place both countries in perspective by focusing on the ancestral connections of Sweden and America, and the “intellectual borderland” for Swedes who studied at American universities and brought their ideas back to Sweden.The second part of the anthology studies the convergences and cross-cultural contacts of settlers, migrants, and sojourners. Both Charlotta Forss and Gunlög Fur investigate settler colonialism and the intentions of individuals who wished to parlay a Swedish cultural presence into political power and landholding in America. The people who ventured to settle the short-lived colony of New Sweden, writes Forss, imagined a vast and continuously changing borderland built on the promise of discovery. Historicizing physical objects within the context of nineteenth-century American ideologies of manifest destiny provided a unique challenge, according to Fur. The archival gift of a riding whip owned by the Modoc leader Captain Jack invites questions of both intent and memory across borders. Likewise, Thomas J. Brown and Svea Larson's essay explores cross-cultural exchange and differing perspectives in biographies of engineer John Ericsson as a sojourner in America. Like other essays in the collection, Brown and Larson analyze the legacy and memorialization of heroic figures to show the shared cultural values of ingenuity and entrepreneurship among Swedes and Americans. The next two essays employ contemporary food history methods to look at cookbooks and kitchens as cultural artifacts. Angela Hoffman and Merja Kytö approach ideological borderlands through the language of culinary practice in Swedish American cookbooks from the 1930s to the 1990s from a gendered perspective. Swedish American women were integral in the maintenance of real and imagined Swedish cultural values in American communities. Franco Minganti's essay offers a triangulation of borders between Italy, Sweden, and America, and the Marshall Plan-era centrality of the kitchen as a modern domestic space.The last four essays approach borderlands as imagined, conceptual, and representative of a shared past. Maaret Koskinen uses transnational studies of the films of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni to illustrate the intersection of provocative themes across varied cultural borders. Magnus Ullén's essay on political correctness in Sweden offers a unique perspective on the influence of PC (politically correct) culture and Swedish perspectives on how modern liberalism had gone awry. As in America, a nationalist, alt-right fringe in Sweden appropriated PC phrases as backlash against the left and furthered the political divide. With its more contemporary focus, Ullén's essay offers a fresh perspective on intellectual and linguistic borders with its focus on political correctness as a phenomenon borne out of early 1990s American cultural debates. Margaret Farrar and Adam Kaul's essay looks at representation of the Swedish American landmark of Bishop Hill for American tourists unfamiliar with its fraught history. Negotiation of the past also occurs for Swedish re-enactors of the American Civil War, writes Marie Bennedahl. Of the Swedish re-enactments, she observed that “serving” on the side of the Confederacy was a more popular endeavor for female re-enactors and allowed space through martial masculinity of the Lost Cause.Combined, these essays pose innumerable opportunities for new directions within an increasingly multidisciplinary and expansive field. The editors show the value of expanding scholarship of Swedish migration to America beyond 1930. A significant number of emigrants arrived in America during the 1950s and 1960s with vastly different motivations and cultural ties than the settlers and migrants who came before them. This anthology aims to move away from classic studies of migration and ethnicity. Further study could include conceptual or spatial borders that divide racially disparate communities, which would deepen our understanding of Swedish-American interactions with the “other.” Blanck and Hjorthén point out that nearly 20 percent of Swedish migrants to America returned home, which poses the question of why. Did they intend to stay, but economic depression, cultural difference, or a general lack of opportunity changed their outcome? Altogether, Swedish-American Borderlands provides a groundbreaking next step in the study of borders, both geographic and metaphoric. Contemporary sociological and cultural studies of food pathways, secularism, music, globalization, environmentalism, and race relations might provide the topic of a complementary volume focused on American-Swedish borderlands for scholars who wish to expand this volume's framework.