Left: SPEAKING BACK, Detail Maadtegen vuelie (Song of the Root / Der Gesang der Wurzel), 2019 by Sissel M. Bergh, Kunsthaus Hamburg, photo: Hayo Heye | right: Anne Heith
Anne Heith: Decolonization in Sámi Literature, Art, and Music
Thursday, 22 June 2023, 7 pm
Kunsthaus Hamburg
Free admission.
Curator Katja Schroeder guides through the exhibition at 6 pm.
The lecture will be held in English.
Literature specialist Anne Heith will give examples of how anticolonial resistance connected with the International Movement of Indigenous Peoples and Postcolonial currents influences contemporary Sámi writers and artists in processes of decolonization.
The title of Sámi artist Sofia Jannok’s album from 2016, ORDA – This is My Land, for example,reflects present day Sámi resistance to colonialism which has deprived the Sámi of their traditional land. This kind of resistance has become increasingly visible in Sámi culture during the last decades. It can also be found in the poetry and photo book The Sun, My Father by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (Áillohaš) that was published 1988 in Sámi and explicitly addresses how colonialism has affected Sámi people. In his role as a poet, yoik artist, musician, painter, Sámi politician and activist he also got influenced by the Alta dispute* in Norway in 1979-1981, which is of major importance for Sámi anticolonial struggle.
Anne Heith is associate professor in Comparative Literature. Her latest books are Laestadius and Laestadianism in the Contested Field of Cultural Heritage: A Study of Sámi and Tornedalian Texts (2018), Experienced Geographies and Alternative Realities: Representing Sápmi and Meänmaa (2020), and Indigeneity, Ecocriticism, and Critical Literacy(2022). Research interests include migration and literature, postcolonial studies, Sámi and Tornedalian literature, indigenous studies, critical race and whiteness studies, and place-making.
* The Alta conflict unfolded between 1968 and 1982. The Sámi stood together with environmental activists and protested against the extension plans for hydropower in Finnmark, northern Norway. Even if they did not succeed to stop the hydropower plants, their protests had a huge impact on Sámi politics in Norway. (Source in German: Wikipedia)
The project is funded by:
