Revenge of the Trolls

Abstract

Recent studies by Naum and Nordin, Fur, and Keskinen et al. suggest that the Nordic nations participated in the pan-European colonial project of the nineteenth century and that they also pursued an internal colonial project through the invasion of Sápmi. This realisation constitutes a vantage point from which Nordic culture can be revisited and re-examined as (post)colonial. With this in mind, the article examines how the Norwegian films Troll Hunter (2010) and Thale (2012) engage with the repressed history of Nordic colonialism. Like many other Gothic films that discuss colonial matters, they are ambivalent, concurrently supporting and disturbing the imperial notions that they bring to the surface. Particular attention is devoted to how the films situate modernity in relation to a metaphorical indigeneity that they imagine as both attractive and abject, and to how they visualize categories of gender and race in relation to this indigeneity.

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