Norwegians and Swedes in the United States: Friends and Neighbors

Foreword

❖ vii Foreword Donna R. Gabaccia Twenty years ago, Rudolph J. Vecoli made a powerful appeal to scholars to begin writing from “an inter-ethnic perspective on American immigration history.” And as he did so, Swedes, at least, were very much on his mind. Vecoli discussed this “inter-ethnic perspective” and its development as a new direction for scholars at the 1991 Symposium on Swedes in America. The event was held in Sweden, in Växjö, and sponsored by the Swedish Emigrant Institute (sei). Vecoli’s paper subsequently was published in 1993 both in MidAmerica, the journal of Michigan State University’s Center for the Study of Midwestern Literature and Culture, and as part of a volume of conference proceedings published by the sei.1 Much has changed in the scholarly field of immigration and ethnic studies since 1991, but Vecoli’s plea is still relevant. The field of immigration and ethnic studies has become even more international in its personnel and in its perspectives . It has also become less U.S.-centered. In Växjö in 1991, a single scholar from Norway and four from Denmark joined an international group which also included two from Germany and twenty-eight from Sweden. But the largest group of participants was made up of thirty-one scholars, including Vecoli, who lived and taught in the United States. Clearly the American paradigm of scholarship , with its emphasis on immigration and on the life of immigrants in North America, still predominated in 1991 in a way that it no longer does. Americans also led this field of study. Both scholars delivering introductory keynote lectures in Växjö taught in North America (Vecoli at the University of Minnesota and Werner Sollors at Harvard). Both the keynoters emphasized, in differing ways, the importance of finding analytical frameworks that include immigrants from multiple backgrounds. Sollors, for example, talked about researching the literature produced by what he called “undistinguished” immigrants of diverse origins. In publishing the proceedings from the meeting, Ulf Beijbom nodded more vigorously toward the new North American directions that Vecoli had introduced, using the words “interethnic” and “intercultural” in subtitling the book. I am quite sure that both Vecoli and Sollors anticipated making their respective pleas to an audience—no matter how international—that was still overwhelmingly engaged in writing the histories of single immigrant groups and mainly, also, of course, to an audience interested in studies of Swedes. Indeed, most of the papers at the conference focused on Swedish emigration and the lives of Swedish immigrants in America. Still, the 1991 sei symposium was nevertheless pioneering viii ❖ Donna R. Gabaccia in bringing together those interested in encouraging not only a “multiethnic perspective ” on Swedish emigration and immigrant life but by doing so with input from scholars in several affiliated disciplines (from literature and art history to bibliography, ethnology, geography, linguistics, and theater). A beginning had been made.2 Twenty years later, we can assess the results: the beginning did not become a dead end. Nevertheless, much remains to be done to answer Vecoli’s charge, for the power of the single-group paradigm of study remains quite strong. Few individual researchers even today master more than two or three immigrant languages; while multilingual collaborations are more common than they were thirty years ago, they too remain the exception, as are comparative studies of multiple groups or studies of interactions of one or more immigrant groups. Transnational and diasporic studies have widened the spatial purview of immigration studies without undermining the power of national languages to confine studies of how immigrants from a single origin remained connected to friends and relatives in several countries or how they organized lives they experienced and lived in more than one place. The study of single ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups continues to hold the center of the field of immigration and ethnic studies, whether in history or in other disciplines. Even in this collection of essays, quite explicitly focused on comparing and connecting the histories of two groups—Swedes and Norwegians—the knowledgeable reader will quickly see the lasting power of professional networks that continue to form around the study of single groups. Contributors to this volume who have a Swedish education, who have completed early studies of Swedish migrations and of Swedes in America, or who work at institutions either in Sweden or historically associated with Swedes in America significantly outnumber their Norwegian and Danish counterparts, although perhaps not to the extreme degree as in Växjö in...