Search

This essay examines autobiographical documentary film produced in the northern parts of Scandinavia, a multiethnic region which also belongs to a contending political cartography: Sápmi, the transnational land of the Sámi people. In this way, it is not just being defined by the multicultural ethics precariously maintained in mainstream Scandinavian politics, but also by the Sámi claim to autonomy, embodied in parallel political and cultural institutions. The related inscription of non-Sámi northerners as ‘settlers’ in an ‘Indigenous’ narrative, at once local and transnational, is nourishing a resentment based on a parallel sense of invisibility, misrepresentation and exploitation, assuming a colonial experience common to all northerners regardless of ethnicity. Like settler postcolonial spaces elsewhere, the current cultural moment is thus defined by intense discursive strife concerning the basic moral coordinates of the political drama, and by a narrative predicament where in principle intertwined collective histories remain separate. For a critical view, I apply Jacques Rancière's ideas on the aesthetics of political change to examine ways in which a common northern sensorium is subject to dissensual events and strategies, meaning that powerful ethnic and national distributions of the sensible jointly define our moment, but less in a complementary way than litigiously, competing for narrative and visual space. Peculiar attention is given to the narrative and visual operation of faces, especially in moments when they are to testify to life stories which, in turn, are articulated in terms of ethnic or local narratives of belonging. Displaying what Rey Chow has called ‘being-looked-at-ness’, such faces are trusted to provide subjective testimony to the victimhood of exploitation and its postcolonial overcoming, but also to provide evidence of a history of visual objectification and misrepresentation which they need both to signify and resist, as potential figures of both subjection and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]