Gender has a profound impact on the discourse on migration as well as various aspects of integration, social and political life, public debate, and art. This volume focuses on immigration and the concept of diaspora through the experiences of women living in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Through a variety of case studies, the authors approach the multifaceted nature of interactions between these women and their adopted countries, considering both the local and the global. The text examines the “making of the Scandinavian” and the novel ways in which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation state.

This edited volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how identities are negotiated and a sense of belonging established in a world of increasing migration and diversity. Transcending field-specific approaches and differences in foci, the authors investigate how identity is constructed and mediated in face-to-face interactions (in real time and fictional writing), how writers use narratives to express their reorientation and their identity negotiation in a new homeland, and how material objects convey layered meaning to identity and belonging. This engagement with spoken, written and material mediation of identity resonates with recent sociolinguistic investigations on how language is connected to and intersects with embodiment, materiality and time. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of globalisation and migration studies, sociolinguistics and narrative analysis, anthropology and cultural studies.

This dissertation is a study of ethnicity and cultural expression in Sweden since the mid-1990s. In the past two decades, Sweden's migration policy has changed from assimilationist to integrationist, promoting ethnic diversity and multiculturalism. In both the public sphere and everyday life, however, ethnic discrimination is still a pertinent reality. The mid-1990s is also the time when young visual artists and writers such as Jonas Khemiri, Alejandro Wenger, The Latin Kings, and Josef Fares create spaces of resistance to authority in their works. They re-construct the emigre experience in the literary and artistic productions, deconstruct legal and official discourse that emphasize the duality us/them, re-draw the socio-cultural map of Stockholm to focus on marginal "immigrant" areas, take pride in their constructed "immigrant identity", and ultimately protest against the reality of segregation and ethnic discrimination characterizing everyday life in contemporary Sweden.

A contribution to the popular international and interdisciplinary field of collective memory within a Scandinavian context, this reference presents a number of case studies from the Middle Age to the present time that discuss how people look to the past for identity and meaning. Acknowledging that many pasts exist sometimes harmoniously and other times in conflict this resource attempts to negotiate the past by analyzing the tensions that occur when individuals with different interests, understandings, and points of view study history and by exploring the inherent desire to develop a consensus between the past and the present. Examining subject areas such as social and cultural history, literature, cultural studies, archeology, mythology, and anthropology, this study expresses how crucial it is to understand the processes of dealing with the past when trying to chart how and why societies and communities change and evolve.

The cultural agenda during the last decade has in Nordic countries embraced a branding of local identities for a global public. The fact that this has taken place concurrently with attempts to establish domestic safeguards toward globalization has not gone unnoticed by contemporary artists. Many Nordic artists have requested a renegotiation of the frameworks constructing national identity and formative images of nationality in light of new transnational relations. The term "Nordic" that has been constructed historically for pragmatic reasons has likewise been under fire as a common symbolic framework whose geopolitical "place" and community has to be reconsidered. All articles in this book discuss ways in which contemporary Nordic art seeks to redistribute national and cultural identity. Common to the artists examined is a drive to combine cultural images from multiple sources and several media. Thus, the book also explores how works that express new identity formations confront the conventional aesthetic production of meaning and, all in all, it contributes to the examination of how art reinvents itself when dealing with unresolved issues of political, national and cultural belonging.

A contribution to the popular international and interdisciplinary field of collective memory within a Scandinavian context, this reference presents a number of case studies from the Middle Age to the present time that discuss how people look to the past for identity and meaning. Acknowledging that many pasts exist sometimes harmoniously and other times in conflict this resource attempts to negotiate the past by analyzing the tensions that occur when individuals with different interests, understandings, and points of view study history and by exploring the inherent desire to develop a consensus between the past and the present. Examining subject areas such as social and cultural history, literature, cultural studies, archeology, mythology, and anthropology, this study expresses how crucial it is to understand the processes of dealing with the past when trying to chart how and why societies and communities change and evolve.

Preliminary Material -- Tourism, Self-Representation and National Identity in Post-Socialist Hungary /Irén Annus -- Black Magic Women: On the Purported Use of Sorcery by Female Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore /Audrey Verma -- Staying True to England: Representing Patriotism in Sixteenth-Century Drama /Helen Vella Bonavita -- How Australian Muslims Construct Western Fear of the Muslim Other /Lelia Green and Anne Aly -- Fatwa and Foreign Policy: New Models of Citizenship in an Emerging Age of Globalisation /Ron Geaves -- Choosing to Be a Stranger: Romanian Intellectuals in Exile /Oana Elena Strugaru -- Infinite Responsibility for the Other in Emmanuel Levinas and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces /Joshua Getz -- The Breaking Asunder of Fanny Kemble: Trauma and the Discourse of Hygiene in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 /Winter Werner -- Ancient Egypt as Europe's 'Intimate Stranger' /Kevin M. DeLapp -- Fictions of a Creole Nation: (Re)Presenting Portugal's Imperial Past /Elsa Peralta.