Teivo Teivainen (University of Helsinki, Finland): Construction of Whiteness in Finland vis-à-vis Border with Asia, Natives in the North, and Migrants from the South
The struggles for the independence of Finland took place in a time when racial classification was a relatively respectable endeavor for European elites. In many of these classifications, that since the 19th Century mixed linguistic and racial divides, Finns were initially often considered non-whites or not-fully-whites and connected with “Asian” or “mongol” races. Stories circulated on how the territory of Finland might be colored yellow in schoolbooks of Germany or the United States.
One way for the Finnish elites to claim membership in ethnically white Europe was to highlight the non-whiteness of nearby people. A perhaps more obvious target consisted of the Sámi people in the North. Toward the Sámi, still today recognized as the only indigenous people of the European Union, the Finnish attitudes had a long history of colonial practices, whether or not one classifies it as a case of formal colonialism. Toward Russia, however, the independence struggles implied a more ambivalent mix of fighting a colonial master and at the same time expressing coloniality toward it.
In the Finnish literary and journalistic production of the 1920s and 1930s, Russia was repeatedly portrayed as belonging to “Asia”. The opening lines of a famous poem by Uuno Kailas in 1931 express the idea that the boundary between Russia and Finland and Russia marks a division between the East and the West: “The frontier opens like a lane across the ice but it's broken up/ In front is Asia, the East/ Behind what is the West and Europe”.
The presentation will explore Finland’s role in the racial stratification of the world-system in the past and investigate how it may still influence Finnish practices today. Analysis of the earlier othering of Russia and Sámi will be complemented, compared and contrasted with reflections on the more recent encounters with global migration.
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