Comparing colonial differences: Baltic literary cultures as agencies of Europe’s internal others

Recruited into Danishness? Affective autoethnography of passing as Danish

“…After arriving in Denmark, I became a young, uneducated, female, sexualized, Eastern European love migrant, but even so, I might have been closer to passing as Danish than someone who grew up here. On the one hand, this positioning delineates shades of whiteness and hierarchies of Europeanness (Dzenovska, 2013, 2014) – of ‘Europe’ as a colonial formation that also emerges through the enactment of ‘internal others’ (Kalnačs, 2016). On the other hand, even when positioned as Eastern European, my body carried the potentiality of becoming (almost) ‘normal’, a condition often unavailable to bodies racialized as non-white (Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, 2014).…”

Sexual Harassment or Volunteer Work?

“…The affective circulations that denote relations of power in my encounter with Ole and outlined my body in many other meetings after moving to Denmark, delineate what it might mean to be an 'internal other' (Kalnačs, 2016): 'not-quitebut-still-white' young, feminized love migrant in the Denmark in 2004. I was mobile, free to enter Denmark as a white EU citizen.…”

“…Conceiving whiteness as an affordance shows how this accumulation operates in a serendipitous fashion: imprints left by previous encounters emerge in varying degrees of intensity and (in)activity. This serendipity of how experiences accumulate into affordances offers a possibility for understanding positions like 'Europe's internal others' (Kalnačs, 2016) or 'not quite' European (Dzenovska, 2013) as locations of differentiated whiteness. While one might conceive these positions as shades of hegemonic whiteness (Moore, 2013) or in-between points on a binary scale of 'Europe' and 'not-Europe', my material challenges the stability and solidity that these ways of conceiving whiteness and Europe imply.…”

“…Eastern European, post-Soviet countries and their inhabitants are often seen as not quite European: illiberal, haunted by a Soviet past, at best in the process of becoming European, civilized societies and subjects (Buchowski, 2006;Dzenovska, 2013;2018b;Böröcz and Sarkar, 2017). These tropes rely upon Cold war delineations between capitalism and communism, freedom and authoritarianism, democracy and oppression, but also evoke earlier historical events where political formations in Europe's present core set about to civilize, and dominate, its present peripheries -through medieval Crusades, serfdom and other colonial practices (Kalnačs, 2016). In Western European media, the newer European countries are routinely portrayed as nationalistic, homophobic, racist, corrupt and conservative, some excessively religious.…”

“…Historical processes of colonization, occupations and foreign settlement situate the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) in the crossroads between East and West, as Europe's 'internal others' (Kalnačs, 2016). Trying to overcome the legacies of the Soviet era and claim a position within a European social body, the Baltic countries and societies comprise boundary spaces and figures between East and West.…”