This paper discusses the reception of a Barbary Coast Captivity Narrative by Robert Adams, published in 1816. The text has often been mentioned in studies of the Barbary Coast narrative but not as a document of a transatlantic discourse about African exploration, ethnography, and colonial development. The creation of Adams text and the creation of the Adams archive will be the subject of the paper as seen by contemporary sources on both sides of the Atlantic. The creation of the Adams narration in the city of London is played off again in the reception of the Adams narrative in Boston. Each set of textual “editors” and reviewers attempt to use the text to intervene in a debate about Timbuctoo, the future of African exploration, and the ways a literary “curiosity” is placed within the aesthetic and ideological needs of emerging discourses of African exploration and racial representation in the first decades of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic.
This article investigates public architecture in Sápmi from the 1970s until today, with particular emphasis on building materials and their discourse. Although the materials chosen for clothing or for revealed construction follow Nordic and inter¬national architectonic trends, the wood, stone, concrete and glass are ascribed a set of meanings to fit the Sami context. The question is to what degree these materials mediate conventional and even stereotypical understandings of Saminess, or produce awareness of new Sami architecture and identity.
Knutsen, Nils Magne(Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2012)
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Abstract:
In his book from 1865 Johan Kulstad tells the story of a hunting expedition to Spitzbergen in 1853. The mother ship disappears, and in desperation Kulstad and his six men starts rowing their small hunting boat back to Norway. After six days of incredible suffering, they are rescued by a Danish ship a few miles off the coast of Finnmark.
After outlining the main sides of this story, the article comments briefly on the way Kulstad tells his story: There is a mixture of pre-realistic and naturalistic narrative, there is a mixture of genres, and the text is without the heroism which is so prevalent in later Arctic narrative. Interesting detail: The way a Sami member of the
expedition is portrayed.
The Life of Others (2006) has been a successful film, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Feature in 2007. It is a film about surveillance, but also about the lives of artists and writers in East Berlin in the middle of the 1980s, and about what role literature and art played in the GDR and in the events of autumn 1989. The article focuses on the way the film portrays Wiesler’s transformation from hard-boiled Stasi officer into the guardian angel of his target, and shows how art – both literature and music – plays an important role in this process.
The Arctic has often been regarded (its various indigenous groups notwithstanding) as a desolate and silent void to be explored and defined by Euro-westerners, usuallyin terms of a masculine competitive ethos and an ethnocentric rhetoric of WesternEnlightenment and progress. Surprisingly, even many Norwegian arctic expeditionsof our own time tend to embody similar narratives of conquest and athletic prowess.Among contemporary North-American writers, however, this kind of discourse isprofoundly questioned, particularly by focusing on the problematic function oflanguage itself in our constructions of the Arctic. This article focuses on three North-American books in which the issue of the Euro-western linguistic appropriation ofthe Arctic, its natural environment as well as its peoples, is a major concern; they areall reflections on the issues of writing and silence with reference to the far north. Thethree books are: Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a NorthernLandscape (1987), Aritha van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere (1990), and JohnMoss' Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (1996). Central in allof them is the following issue: how to make the wordless landscape or the alienculture speak from under, as it were, the enormous compilation of centuries of Eurowesterntext. The article discusses four major strategies by which these three booksattempt to counteract and subvert earlier Euro-western ethnocentric and monologicnarratives of the Arctic: by the inclusion of feminine and indigenous voices; by thelegitimation of the sensuous life-world of the Arctic itself; by the self-reflexivesubversion of the authority of the language of their own texts; and by the use of astyle of paradox and contradiction. By way of such techniques, the books above try to create more open, dialogic and pluralistic readings of the Arctic.