Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Swedish-American Borderlands might not be easy to imagine at first, but the authors in the edited collection of the same name persuasively argue for it as a productive interdisciplinary lens. Swedish-American Borderlands re-examines links and relationships between Sweden and the United States, a topic revisited many times throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but this time through the perspective of borderlands. A collaborative project between scholars in Europe and the United States, the collection aims to reconceptualize Swedish American relations by focusing on physical and conceptual “contacts, crossings, and convergences” (p. 1). The authors expand the focus of Swedish American history beyond the traditional emphases on migration and ethnicity, New Sweden, and the 1840–1920 migrations to America.In their introduction, editors Dag Blanck and Adam Hjorthén provide an extensive literature review of the three main historiographies informing their collection: previous scholarly approaches to Swedish American relations (focusing on Swedish migration, the Americanization of Sweden, and the role of Sweden in colonialism), the history of Swedes in the United States, and borderlands methodology. Blanck and Hjorthén distinguish between two understandings of borderlands—as contested geographic spaces and as a way of studying cultural encounters—and their book is divided accordingly.The first part, “Across Waters and Lands,” engages with borderlands as geographical phenomena and examines the themes of Swedish settlement and Swedish-Indigenous contact (as in Karen V. Hansen's brilliant study of Swedish women homesteading on Native reservation lands) and sojourning (as Blanck shows with Swedish students and academics travelling to the United States). The second part, “Exchanges and Entanglements,” considers the conceptual dimension of borderlands, and traces the circulation of ideas, knowledge, and culture in such diverse topics as cookbooks, design, film, and the concept of political correctness.The chapters cover a vast temporal and thematic area, and both of these factors—and perhaps especially the fact that the book covers four centuries—highlight the broad applicability of the borderlands concept beyond its most frequent application to the US–Mexico border (and physical borders in general), fulfilling the book's aim to “demonstrate how borderland relations have been created by individuals and groups active in a transatlantic nexus” (p. 32). In fact, some of the chapters least reminiscent of a narrow understanding of borderlands theory (as a disputed geographical space) are some of the most impressive: Gunlög Fur's article examines the symbolic borderlands encounter with the whip of the Modoc leader Kintpuash (“Captain Jack”), where the whip (and its museum performance) illustrates borderlands thinking about the circulation of knowledge. She combines detailed newspaper research with an analysis of contemporary remembrance of the Modoc War through museum programming—both defined by a particular form of “Swedish innocence” (p. 204)—and shows that borderlands objects and ideas are both omnipresent and often unexpected. In seemingly very different contexts, Angela Hoffman and Merja Kytö examine linguistic borderlands through language contact and hybridization in Swedish American cookbooks, and Franco Minganti looks at transatlantic contacts in kitchen design trends triangulated among the United States, Sweden, and Italy. These and other articles in the collection show the flexibility and richness of the borderlands concept in studying cultural phenomena, language, memory, and much more in a transnational world.In examining the more established view of borderlands as contested contact zones in the geographical sense, the authors emphasize the roles of settlers, migrants, and sojourners alike in creating borderland creations. Karen V. Hansen focuses on an atypical—and understudied—element of Scandinavian homesteading in the Midwest: first- and second-generation urban dwellers. While reservations themselves have been analyzed as a type of borderland (p. 52), homesteading on them shows the social mobility, opportunity, and freedom (albeit limited) from oppressive gender norms around property and labor that they offered to Scandinavian migrant-settlers, whose opportunities were predicated on the removal of Indigenous peoples. In her chapter, Charlotta Forss highlights the need to consider Swedes engaging in colonial expansion in New Sweden along with their encounters with the Sámi in northern Sweden and the similarities of the Swedish state's treatment of both borderland sites.The multiplicity of borderlands, their nature as both transnational and rooted in a particular place, and the links between borderlands and settler colonialism are among the authors’ most significant points. The collection contributes to the nuance and diversity within borderlands scholarship, and shows new possibilities in studying Swedish American relations and Swedish American history. The authors represent a wide range of disciplines, approaches, and subjects. Perhaps the only weak point of the collection is that it is not always clear why a particular chapter was placed in the first or second part—particularly the chapters on jazz, design, New Sweden, and the Bishop Hill heritage village, which would arguably fit in the other part equally well, if not better.A broad range of audiences will find Swedish-American Borderlands of interest: most immediately, those looking to apply a borderlands methodology to Swedes and Sweden, but also scholars of Swedish American history, Indigenous-settler relations, and transnational history, as well as those interested in remembrance and memory, heritage, contact, and hybridization.

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