Fishing for Modernity: How Material Relationships can Mediate Tensions in an Immigrant Community, The Case of the Icelandic Emigration to Canada in the late Nineteenth Century

In the late nineteenth century, a high percentage of the Icelandic population emigrated to North America. In this article I bring to the fore two interrelated sites of tension in the emigrants?? lives centered on the concepts of ethnicity and modernity. I will suggest that an analysis on how these tensions were mediated through material practices may be a fruitful way to provide a new understanding of the processes of emigration and cultural change, which aids movement away from dichotomous categories that have dominated previous research into the period.     

“GREEN FIX” AS CRISIS MANAGEMENT. OR,IN WHICH WORLD IS MALMÖ THE WORLD'S GREENEST CITY?

As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtues. Through outlining the history of Malmö in general and the Western Harbour in particular, we identify how the municipality and local capital in concert increasingly used “green” strategies in the urban policies that started as crisis management in the 1990s. Today Malmö is reckoned to be among the world's greenest cities, and we reflect on the importance of this international recognition for the city. Finally, we develop a critique of the green fix as concealing crucial factors of scale, and hence running the risk of myopia.     

Can the Subaltern Woman Run? Gender,race and agency in colonial missionary texts

This article challenges the contention that it is not feasible to trace the agency of subaltern female subjects in colonial documents without at the same time distorting and even violating that very agency. Taking as its prism a letter written by a male Danish missionary chronicling a young Pariah woman’s escape from missionary control in early 20th-century South India, it argues that while a search for authentic, autonomous agency is a highly dubious endeavour, relinquishing attempts to recover the acts and interventions of persons at the bottom of social hierarchies is equally problematic. Suggesting a reading ‘along as well as against the grain’, the article tracks the ways in which the subaltern woman’s agency has been simultaneously recorded and denied, and argues for the necessity of probing both the possibilities and impossibilities presented by this type of a source.