[H-verkko] CFP: Nordic Historical Review - Language and Border

[agricola at utu.fi]

Agricolan artikkelipyyntöihin on lähetetty uusi ilmoitus:
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Nordic Historical Review - Language and Border
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Call for papers for a special issue of the Nordic Historical Review

Language and Border: Negotiation of Meanings on and around Russian-Scandinavian
Borders

 

Year 2050. Everything is calm on the Finnish-Chinese border.

A Soviet joke 

What is the difference between Sweden and Finland? Sweden has much better
neighbours.

A Finnish joke

 

The concept of border has firmly established itself in the academic vocabulary
of social sciences and humanities. Whether imagined or physical, borders play a
key role in symbolic operations of inclusion and exclusion, thus organizing
social, political and cultural space; hence their increasing role as an
important analytical category. Like everywhere else, borders between
Scandinavian countries and Russia have been key elements in shaping cultures,
societies and regimes on both sides. During the early modern age, the border
with Sweden became constitutive for the very Russian statehood; symbolically,
the Russian Empire as a political entity emerged in the aftermath of the Great
Northern War against Sweden. The Russo-Swedish confrontation was similarly
constitutive for Sweden and Finland: the Grand Duchy of Finland appeared as its
result in the place of eastern Swedish provinces, and the Finnish national idea
was essentially based on efforts of Finnish intellectuals to include Finland
into European space and exclude it from Russian space. For Norway, its Russian
border, though less significant, was still historically very important,
especially in North Norway where it became instrumental in the formation of
North Norwegian regionalism.

The re-negotiation of the national borders that actively undergoes now in the
European Union, but also between Scandinavian states and Russia (in particular,
as part of the Euroregion Karelia and Barents Euro-Arctic Region), occurs
vis-à-vis historical meanings and practices that became rooted in Russian,
Finnish, Swedish or Norwegian political cultures and languages.  Moreover, this
“de-bordering” can be interpreted as a symptom of the final stage in the
development of the nation state as a specific phenomenon which emerged in the
Early Modern Era. In particular, contemporary political debates and cultural
ways of speaking about the Russian-Finnish borders have their histories and,
directly or implicitly, appeal to historical discourses about the
Russian-Scandinavian borders and borderlands. It is these historical meanings
and practices that are currently at stake in the current cultural, political and
economic negotiation of national borders.

All these historical changes were negotiated on the level of language. Political
concepts, rhetorical techniques, narrative strategies — these discursive
elements of political writing not simply reflected actual changes occurring in
the political, social and cultural landscape of Northern Europe, but also
informed and influenced these changes. This symbolic, conceptual and linguistic
negotiation of Russian-Scandinavian borders has been so far addressed only in
passing in scholarly research — a gap that we propose to fill with a special
issue of the Nordic Historical Review.

For the special issue, we will invite proposals of articles dealing with
conceptual, symbolic and linguistic construction, negotiation or interpretation
of Scandinavia’s eastern and Russia’s northwestern borders and borderlands.
The approaches that we aim to combine in the special issue will include
intellectual history, conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), historical
semantics, or historical contextualism, but also more general discussions that
would address history of the Russian-Scandinavian borders, which will be the
focus of the special issue. In this way, we expect that an emphasis on concepts,
symbols, metaphors, arguments and other discursive elements will work as a new
perspective on historical sources which will help reveal a wealth of information
about values, norms and meanings through their accounts of historical actions
and events.

The Nordic Historical Review (Revue d'Histoire Nordique in French) is a
bilingual French-English history journal specializing in the history of
Scandinavia and the Baltic states. It was established in 2005 and is published
biannually by the University of Toulouse II – Le Mirail.

Deadlines

10 February 2014: submission of applications, including a title of the proposed
paper, a 300-word abstract and a one-page CV.

28 February 2014: notification of admission.

31 July 2014: submission of full papers by the authors.

30 September 2014: completion of the review process; authors are notified if any
revisions are required.

15 December 2014: submission of revised articles by the authors. 

The special issue is supposed to be published in the second issue of 2015.

Submissions

Submitted articles may be written either in English or French. They can be up to
50,000 characters (not counting spaces), or 9,000 words, including footnotes.
All submitted articles will undergo an anonymous peer review process.

Contacts 

The guest editors of the special issue are Alexey Golubev (University of British
Columbia, Canada), Antti Räihä (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) and
Alexander Tolstikov (Petrozavodsk State University, Russia). Inquiries,
applications and full papers should be sent to nhr.languageandborder at gmail.com.

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Ilmoituksen lähetti: Antti Räihä <antti.raiha at jyu.fi>
Ilmoitus vanhentuu: 11.2.2014