Andrew Christensen and Dr. Christopher Oscarson, Scandinavian Studies
Europe needs a new political identity. Politicians, political scientists, and philosophers are all clamoring for a change in the definition of European community. Without an emotional glue to bind them together, many fear the noble purpose of the EU’s supranational project will stagnate in a past puddle called the nation-state. My purpose in this project has been to find a new ethos for European identity.
Ironically, my path to find a new European identity led me to the origin of nationality. I learned from luminaries like Benedict Anderson, Timothy Garton Ash, George Orwell, Thomas More, and Søren Kierkegaard that the nation is Europe’s double-edged contribution to world history. I learned from Benedict Anderson that the novel was pivotal to the birth of nationalism. In time and space, the novel first narrated nation to the minds and hearts of a rising middle-class. Literature inspired readers to imagine a solid community moving through calendrical time. In short, literature was the medium that broke ground for a new form of imagined community. For the 19th and 20th centuries, this imagined community was the nation.
Learning this, I decided to turned my attention to an unique category of contemporary literature. Migrant literature (indvanderlitteratur), or what I prefer to call multicultural literature, provides a rich field for harvesting new frames of identity formation.
Before I began reading some of the literature, I did quite a bit of background research. First, I studied how Denmark begin to think itself a nation through the historian’s craft. I researched patterns in 19th century Danish historiography to get a feel for how the Danish nation was invented. I concluded that poet-historian N.F.S. Grundtvig best embodies the nation-building project in early 19th century Danish historiography.
After completing this phase of research, I attended the annual Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) conference in Iowa. Several presentations on indvandrerliteratur exposed me to the some of the latest challenges and developments in this research field. These scholars demonstrated a strength in theoretical analysis and literary application, but I came away from the conference somehow unsatisfied. They seemed more concerned about problematizing the human condition than bettering it. I would later read and agree Edward Said’s caution to literary critics in The World, the Text, and the Critic. He warned against making the human subject second to transhuman theories (20).
With a new resolve to make my research more relevant to human affairs than theoretical disputes, I worked and studied in Europe for four months. Here, I worked for an ultra-nationalist Danish Member of the European Parliament, Mogens Camre. His opinions shook my belief that patriotism could be benign. Mr. Camre’s nationalist vigor convinced me that speech causes world conflict (Said, 48).
After working with Mr. Camre, I decided to evaluate his claim that Danish national identity conflicted with rising Muslim immigration. I travelled through Morocco, Turkey, and interviewed an imam in a suburb of Copenhagen. This was a unique opportunity to personally consider the claim to retain a Europe of nation-states. In the end, I concluded that nationalist claims were more hyperbolic than historic, and relied more on a politics of fear than a politics of fact.
I then took a philosophy course at Copenhagen University on Søren Kierkegaard. I learned how nationalism is an abstract sentiment in which humans participate inhumanly (3, Sygdommen til Døden). While in Copenhagen, I made a concerted effort to explore immigrant ghettos and become familiar with the general milieux. Here, I concluded my background research and began to read two collections of multicultural literature.
The first was a literary anthology by multiple non-native authors, titled Nye Stemmer (New Voices). In these works I saw themes of exile and estrangement, desire and despair. The second piece I read was a book by a non-native author in Sweden titled, Under morbærtræets skygge: historien om min mor (Under the shade of the mulberry tree: the story of my mother). This non-fiction piece was a sentimental narrative centered around the death of Mustafa Can’s mother. It reflected a self-conscious search for personal meaning and identity. In profound prose, Can relates his reader to a nation-less time and space. His narrative forges a new sense of belonging and community. I was able to analyze his piece through the theoretical lense of Benedict Anderson’s seminal work, Imagined Communities.
After reading this book, I became optimistic about Europe’s opportunity to find a new identity. In short, I found that literature offers this new identity because it functions as it did in the 19th century novel. Literature, irrespective of time period, creates counter-statements to reigning conventions. It changes the way we think and leads us to answers we might not have considered. National belonging has shed its novel shell and become the reigning convention du jour. For over a century, we have thought of ourselves as nation-states and the result has been global factionalism and worldwide war. Thinking nation may have been a remedy for certain wrongs in the ancien regime, but it has not harnessed the volatility inherent in identity. We need a new identity that can transcend the logic of the nation-state; a new ethos of identity that can dodge the adolescent nature of national abstraction, and step beyond its narrow scope. Multicultural literature has the potential of offering us a broader conception of belonging and a more human form of abstraction. It provides a prototype for post-national identity because it gives a broader conception of belonging. Mustafa Can’s Under morbærtræets skygge provides a prototype for post-national identity because of the way it regards space and considers time.
I will present my research in this field at the 2008 SASS Conference in Fairbanks, Alaska March 13-15.