Sustaining Settler Logic: Transatlantic Narratives in the 19th Century

• In Event: Settler Colonialism and Scalable Scholarship: Studying Up on The Technopolitics of Indigenous Displacement and Dispossession - I

Abstract

While settler colonial theory focuses on the colonizing processes happening in and on the land of a particular place (Byrd, Veracini, Wolfe), it is important to think about the conceptual and ideological narratives that sustain them. The symbolic attachments between the land that is now the United States with the notions of “new” and “free” happened through a circuit of communication, science production, business connections, family correspondence across the Atlantic. Further, by thinking through settler colonialism as both distinct from a metropole (Veracini 2010) and as a technology that travels through transatlantic frameworks we are better equipped to engage with the networks and alliances that sustain white supremacy in the West.
As a method of “studying up” this paper analyzes settler colonial logic through a collection of letters by a Norwegian journalist and newspaper editor Elise Wærenskjold who moved to Four Mile Praire, Texas in 1847. Wærenskjold was an integral part in documenting the Norwegian settlements in the United States and assisted scholars who promoted the Nordic Sagas as proof of a prehistoric connection between Northmen and North America. Further, scholars have argued how Nordic sagas influenced scientific formulations of race in the 19th century (Kolodny 2012) and how the narrative of the “origin story” offered an outside justification for the colonization of the United States.

Author

• Solveig Asta Sigurdardottir, English