The Scandinavian countries have often been regarded as the proto-typical examples of nation states – homogeneous in terms of languages and populations, located within stable boundaries, and also forming a peaceful Northern regional unity of long standing. Their literatures are therefore truly national literatures. This misconception, if not a plain illusion, has been cultivated at home and to a large extent accepted abroad, but only on the condition that historical realities, past and present, are forgotten or even repressed. First, the major part of Scandinavian history until around 1800 has been a history of fierce fights between Denmark and Sweden regarding the regional hegemony, also extending to neighbouring countries, and at times in a scale to be compared with the post-Yugoslavian disruption. Second, the region has since the late Middle-Ages seen an internal colonization from the two major powers directed against Finns, Sàmis, Inuit, Icelanders and other groups, with lasting effects right onto the present. Third, Denmark was one of the European colonial powers, although a small one, with colonies in India, Africa and the Caribbean until WW1 which made Denmark part of the lucrative triangular cross-Atlantic slave trade in the 18^th century.

The effects of this doubtful representation of the regional history have often lead to a misinterpretation of the homogeneous self-image and its origin in the 19^th century, at least in Denmark. In stead of seeing the ideological, political and practical process of homogenization as an important future oriented and open project to overcome the final dissolution during the Napoleonic wars of the heterogeneous Danish Empire, including a national bankruptcy and a severe bombardment of Copenhagen, it was a seen as a true representation of a given historical reality dating back to the Middle Ages. This invention of tradition and history was also practiced elsewhere in Europe, but in Denmark it was not an attempt to substantiate an already established forceful unity, but a necessary project of transform national rubbles into a nation-building. Art and literature were essential in this process, in producing both the actual unity and the historical forgetfulness that made it possible.

It took travel writers in particular not only to look upon themselves with other eyes, launching harsh criticism of the local self-suffiency, but also to envisage what it means to be looked upon by the uncontrollable eyes of the others without the protection from homogenizing self-projection upon the surrounding world, including the writer him- or herself. The first radical formulations of this possibility are formulated by Georg Brandes toward the end of the 19^th century with Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen as important forerunners, mostly as a criticism of his compatriots. But the self-criticism is more radicall, and also more discretely articulated by Isak Dinesen in her writings based on her African experiences from Kenya. She has often been criticised for adapting a colonial view of Africa, a criticism which, however, is blind to the self-criticism targeting the inescapability of her Europeanized position. In her writings this subtle dialectics is produced by her aesthetic strategies more than by her explicit statements. My paper will exemplify this strategy.