Scandinavia through Sunglasses

List of Contributors

Elizaveta Khachaturyan and Álvaro Llosa Sanz

North and South as Spaces of Cultural Exchange

Abstract In recent years the interest toward the varying images of the Other has increased, including particular discussions on the area of European Studies and on the North-South dualism. Several studies show that these images are influenced by different cultural background. Moreover, they are recreated or transformed across time and space and are associated to particular cultural productions. In this chapter we aim to discuss in which directions the new studies of the Other and the self are developing. We also present the main notions relevant for our collective study as they have been used as a common starting point for the entire collection of research works in this volume. Finally, we introduce the following chapters and show how they contribute to offer a wider multidisciplinary perspective to the description of the North-South dualism in Europe that can be explored as a rich combination of spaces of cultural exchange.

Keywords: imagological approach, multidisciplinary approaches, dialogue, culture

1 Introduction

“The dualism of North and South is one of the most long-standing distinctions in European cultural history”, wrote Astrid Arndt in the chapter dedicated to the North and South in the volume Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey (2007: 387). What features are the basis of this dualism? How do they change across time, space, and source? How does each participant see the opposite counterpart? These are the crucial queries that are addressed here. The main purpose of this volume is to explore how images of the North and South are interpreted by different intermediators through different sources in different historical periods and for different audiences.

The studies collected in this volume investigate various cultural relationships between the North and South in the European context. They describe how diverse images of the North and the South have been created, shaped, and interpreted in different temporal, spatial, and sociocultural contexts. Each chapter – part of a collection written by a varied group of scholars with the common ground of a humanities approach but quite different national backgrounds and disciplines – offers the reader a complex mix of images in dialogue and their different appropriations and transformations. The aim of each study is to describe how ←11 | 12→the North is seen from the South, or the South from the North. For doing this, different types of cultural productions delivering diverse images of the North and South are analyzed as spaces for intercultural exchanges.

In recent years, the imagological approach has adopted a wider perspective, as can be seen in the approach taken at a conference held in 2018 at the University of Vienna titled New Perspectives on Imagology (https://imagology2018.univie.ac.at/). Other works have also focused on Nordic imagologies very recently, such as Laura Laurušaitė in her volume Imagology Profiles: The Dynamics of National Imagery in Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018). Her contributors are mostly centered on studying the Baltic region with regard to its Nordic imagology, and the volume exclusively focuses on literary texts and their relation to national identity as the main channel of cultural production to be explored. In contrast, this volume expands its scope to Europe as a whole, integrating the entire North–South axis as a way to engage in dialogue with the diversity of imagologies attached to these discursive and movable spaces.

Several studies have also proposed an interconnection of imagology with other disciplines (e.g., Beller & Leerssen 2007; van Doorslaer, Flynn, & Leerssen 2015; Geybullayeva & Orte 2010) or have reanalyzed imagology as such (e.g., ←12 | 13→Zacharasiewicz 2010). Moreover, the problem of how people see their interlocutor based on their own national identity and cultural background is often discussed in identity and transcultural studies (e.g., Blažević 2014; Hogan & Pursell 2008), in discourse analysis (e.g., Amossy & Anne 2011), and in various approaches to literature (e.g., Laurušaitė 2018). However, Scandinavia as a northern model in relationship to the South has been discussed by only a few scholars (e.g., Stadius & Harvard 2013).