Touring the magical North – Borealism and the indigenous Sámi in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy literature

• Published in: European Journal of Cultural Studies
• Main Author: Lehtonen, Sanna
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2017
• Subjects: Sámi; Lapland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549417722091; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367549417722091; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/1367549417722091

Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the Sámi, are widely circulated in the tourist industry and also surface in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy fiction. In contrast to the ‘self-orientalism’ of discourses of tourism, where places and people are represented as exotic to a tourist gaze, the portrayals of the North and its inhabitants gain different symbolic meanings in fictional texts produced by outsiders who rely on earlier texts – myths, fairy tales and anthropological accounts – rather than on their own lived experience of the North or indigeneity. This article applies the concept of Borealism to examine cross-cultural intertextuality and discourses of the Sámi/Lappishness in English-language children’s fantasy by four contemporary authors. The Sámi and their folklore become recontextualised in fictional texts through a Borealist gaze that associates the indigenous characters with feminist and ecocritical discourses and frames indigenous ethnicity in stereotypical ways.