111 R E V I E W S Jana Sverdljuk, Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger, Erika K. Jackson, and Peter Kivisto, eds., Nordic Whiteness and Migration to the USA: A Historical Exploration of Identity London and New York: Routledge, 2020. Pages vii– xv + 192. Mike Hill Nordic Whiteness, the first “systemic study of whiteness . . . from the historical perspective of Nordic immigration to the USA” (2), adds new complexity to scholarly consensus on the temporal, geographical, and categorical specificity of a once presumedly ubiquitous racial default setting. In particular the book focuses on the hundred- year period between the agricultural era of the late eighteenth century and the industrialization of the United States by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following recent developments within American migration history, and what is recognized, controversially, as the ethnographic subfield of “whiteness studies,” its authors “proceed from the poststructuralist view of identity as a ‘creative and chaotic space of existence’” (5). The book’s introduction and several of its chapters give due recognition to David Roediger’s influential Marxist critique of whiteness as a “symbolic wage” (4). According to this thesis, whiteness has historically prevented European migrants from achieving “strong [class- based] alliances with African- American workers” (7). But there is no sign of class- reductionism in Nordic Whiteness, nor are its references to non- whiteness confounded by a simple white- black binary, as the prefix non-might imply (182). “Whiteness was not a monolithic notion and could be challenged and/or nuanced by other forms of identity” (1). Sometimes 112 reviews in their encounters with whiteness Nordic peoples (Danes, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians , and Sámi) were made into “marginalized figures” (1); other times Nordics were opposed against African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese, so as to make their affiliation with white identity “as advantageous as possible” (182). The overall emphasis on “fluidity,” and such similar terms as “complexity ” (xiii; 1; 9; 146), “fluctuation” (xiii; 38), “contradiction” (1), “division” (1; 146), “destabilization” (1), “ambivalence” (10, 38), and so on, should not be taken as too strongly “poststructuralist.” The Nordic pluralization of whiteness does not bespeak some vaguely identifiable “chaos” beyond human ken. Rather, one of the great strengths of Nordic Whiteness is not just to redivide whiteness once again, but also to add it up in a newly complete way: the divisions its authors identify within the supposed uniformity of the dominant American race (see here the legal equation in 1790 between U.S. “citizenship” and “free white persons” [5]) lead to a more expansive understanding of humanity on the move than either the terms “America” or “race” have allowed. The volume is carefully organized to debunk six discretely named “color- blind myths about Nordic immigration” (2): myths of “empty lands”; “ethnic homogeneity”; “attachment to egalitarian values”; “harmony with other ethnic groups”; “easy assimilation”; and “political and ideological consensus between Nordics and the white Anglo- Saxon elite.” Six corresponding sections comprised one or more chapters uniquely aimed to “expose each previously mentioned myth” (6). In the first section, “Whiteness as Epistemological Ignorance,” Bergland examines “land policy in Wisconsin in the aftermath of the Dakota war in 1863, and Norwegian centennial celebrations of 1914 and 1925” (6). In section two, “Not Quite White,” Jensen examines “the racialization of Norway’s indigenous people” (38), the Sámi population. In section three, “White Immigrants and the Failure of Class Solidarity,” Rasmussen tests Roediger’s theory of whiteness as the obstruction of multiracial class solidarity, showing how antislavery endorsements could devolve into “Old World racial ideology” by adhering to “American ideals of land ownership” (56). A fourth section is called “Nordic Superiority and 113 reviews the Derogatory Representation of Others.” Two chapters, one by Brøndal on the “construction of the Nordic self in relation to Southern and Eastern Europeans, Chinese immigrants,” and others (8), and one by Grav on Norwegian resistance to “becoming white” (99), serve as counterpoints to the way whiteness was variously affirmed or rejected by different kinds of Nordic identities at their more granu lar levels. Section five, “Challenging Intersections of Whiteness and Ethnicity,” contains chapters by Joranger and Lovoll challenging the centrality of “economic inclusion” to the pressures of white assimilation (10...
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Dec 25, 2023
Joshua Snell 
