Two places on the globe that seem far apart may have more in common than previously thought.

Jenna Grace Sciuto, professor of global anglophone literature at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, explores a couple.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is a professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She received her BA from Brown University, MA from Boston University, and PhD from Northeastern University. Her two books—Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures (UP of Mississippi or UPM, 2025) and Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature (UPM, 2021)—focus on colonialism’s lingering impacts on identity, intimacy, and family dynamics across Icelandic, US Southern, and Caribbean literatures, respectively. Her work has also appeared in ARIEL, the Faulkner Journal, the Global South, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, as well as the collections Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas (UPM, 2016), Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South (Louisiana State UP, 2020), and The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022).

Intersecting Colonial Worlds: Iceland and the US South

While they may seem worlds apart, what commonalities might Iceland and the US South share? One answer: both spaces share complex colonial histories. My research examines the lingering impacts of the layered colonial histories common to Iceland and the US South, primarily as depicted in literature. How might conversations about colonialism shift when we include a Far North location like Iceland? How does this inclusion disrupt conventional understandings of space and complicate the geographic inflections of power? We might think of the so-called “Global South,” a framing of countries in the southern hemisphere, as a space of socioeconomic and spatial marginalization, in comparison with the “Global North,” but this is disrupted when we think about the Far North, a marginalized space, often thought of in the popular imagination as an arctic wasteland devoid of people.

My research recalibrates readings of US southern and American writers by resituating them on a global scale through exploring comparable depictions of race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality in Icelandic literature. Zeroing in on these liminal, in-between spaces, can shed light on intersecting northern and southern histories. Iceland and the US South: I incorporate these norths and souths in particular, as opposed to other colonial peripheries, to underscore the challenge to dominant global spatial configurations. If spaces considered to be at disparate ends of the globe have such commonalities, perhaps we need to reevaluate how we think about the global impacts of colonization.

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