Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir

What Television Series Tell Us about World Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID10736723
AuthorsRosemary Erickson Johnsen (0000-0001-6074-3648, University of Minnesota Crookston, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume94
Issue4
Pages546-548
Publication date2022-10-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueScandinavian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0036-5637 • E-ISSN: 2163-8195
PublisherUniversity of Wisconsin Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/21638195.94.4.07
OpenAlexW4308938203
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Robert A. Saunders's book, part of the Routledge series on Popular Culture and World Politics, aims to harness the power of Nordic noir to illuminate international relations. Saunders is a professor in the Department of History, Politics, and Geography at Farmingdale State University, in New York. The book's primary source material is post-2010 television series, and Saunders draws on a multi-disciplinary array of theoretical and critical sources. The book is organized into seven chapters: chapters 1 through 3, offering multi-staged introductory material, are followed by three chapters representing Saunders's empirical analysis of key television series, and the final chapter brings the book's argument to a close in “Beyond Norden: The Global Geopolitics of a Genre.” As noted in its preface, the book brings together a considerable amount of previously published work with new research and writing; chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, and 7 draw substantially on previously published work. Occasionally, the work shows signs of its assembly, with material being repeated nearly verbatim and the “boxes” duplicating substance presented in the main chapters.In the opening chapter, Saunders identifies three different types of contributions the book aims to make: normative, theoretical, and empirical. The theoretical argument, that “television matters more than film” (p. 9; emphasis in original), is a difficult one to demonstrate, and it is not clear how the interpretative work of the study benefits from this unnecessarily adversarial framing of the relation between the two. The normative contribution about such television productions as “a realm of contestation” shaping ideas about the Self and Other(s) is borne out in the empirical sections of the book, which are accessible and well-supported.Saunders's range of secondary material is extensive, and the book's notes and references reflect an informed, sustained research process across multiple disciplines. The case studies offered in chapters 4–6, with their accurate, detailed descriptions of series trajectories, character development, and use of landscape, offer useful information to readers whether or not they are familiar with the series in question. “In/Out/In-between: (B)orders, liminality, and us/them,” the chapter on The Bridge (Bron/Broen) and Bordertown (Sorjonen), offers a comparative analysis of the geopolitical pairings brought together at the borders of each series. It is fitting, given Saunders's citing of Bron/Broen as the catalyst for his pivot into research on televised instances of Nordic noir, that this particular series provides the site for the most compelling work in the volume; not only the empirical discussion of The Bridge in chapter 5 but also its use in chapter 7 to pull together concluding thoughts on global geopolitics stand out for their interest and value.The book seems aimed at a student readership and is perhaps geared toward use as a course text. The “boxes” with simplified presentation of such topics as “The Cold War,” “The Environment,” and “Nationalism” create this impression, as does the very basic historical overview of Norden from the Viking Age (dated as 793–1066) to the present, subtitled “a geopolitical foregrounding,” of chapter 2. Directly addressing the question of audience, and how to use such features of the text, would have been helpful. Other features of the text also support classroom use. In addition to the titles of subject television series, for example, the index usefully cites various themes and topics, along with cities, regions, and countries. The Appendix listing titles, country of origin, network, and airing dates of the referenced television series is also a useful reference tool.The book's foundational conception of popular culture can seem reductive, limiting the depth of insight offered by readings of the primary source material. Saunders writes that he aims “to push . . . beyond the restrictive categorisation of popular culture as propaganda and towards a more nuanced framework” (p. 7). Scholars who work in popular culture are well aware of its potential to do far more than simply be propaganda for the masses; it is unclear to whom this claim is addressed. There are many distracting errors throughout the text, with words missing (often prepositions or verbs) or misused (e.g., obtuse; gaff for gaffe); these are minor but unfortunate, as they draw attention away from the argument and examples.At the end of the study, Saunders picks up on Sara Kärrholm's 2011 use of the term “faction” to refer to fact-based fictions and speculates about what its opposite would be—“What are real events that seem to be based on fiction?” (p. 183)—before going on to cite two examples of what he sees as life imitating art rather than the other way around: two murders of women in Norden that received extensive media coverage. Rather than claiming that these examples demonstrate that life imitates art, or that Nordic noir television serials might be “agentic, i.e. [make] us do things” (p. 183), Saunders's argument stands more securely on simply recognizing the power of narrative to shape understanding and the ability of Nordic noir to provide shared frames of reference within and beyond Norden. The implications of these observations for individual engagement with—and understanding of—what Saunders calls “our everyday geopolitical visions, codes, and orders” (p. 184) are explored in informed, thought-provoking examples throughout his book

Argument (complex analysis) · Discipline · Framing (construction) · Geopolitics · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Realm · Social science · Sociology · European and International Law Studies · European Union Policy and Governance · History · Law

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