%0 Journal Article
%T Touring the magical North ¨C Borealism and the indigenous S¨¢mi in contemporary English
%A Sanna Lehtonen
%J European Journal of Cultural Studies
%@ 1460-3551
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1367549417722091
%X Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the S¨¢mi, 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 ¨C myths, fairy tales and anthropological accounts ¨C 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 S¨¢mi/Lappishness in English-language children¡¯s fantasy by four contemporary authors. The S¨¢mi 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
%K Borealism
%K children¡¯s fantasy literature
%K ethnicity
%K feminist discourse studies
%K Lapland
%K postcolonial studies
%K S¨¢mi
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549417722091