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Borealism is a form of exoticism in which stereotypes are imposed on the Earth's northern regions and cultures (particularly the Nordic and Arctic regions).
The term was inspired by the similar concept of Orientalism, first coined by Edward Said. Christopher B. Krebs, " Borealism. Caesar, Seneca, Tacitus and the Roman discourse about the Germanic North," in Gruen, E.S. (2010), Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, Berkeley: 202-221, esp. 202-3. Kristinn Schram, 'Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011), p. 8.Kristinn Schram, ' Banking on Borealism: Eating, Smelling, and Performing the North', in Iceland and Images of the North, ed. by Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson (Québec: Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2011), pp. 305-27 (p. 310). An early form of Borealism can be identified in antiquity, especially Roman writings; but, like Orientalism, Borealism came to flourish in eighteenth-century European Romanticism and Romantics' fantasies about distant regions. Borealism can include the paradoxical ideas that the North is uniquely savage, inhospitable, or barbaric, and that it is uniquely sublime, pure, or enlightened.Philip V. Bohlman, 'Musical Borealism: Nordic Music and European History', in The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, ed. by Fabian Holt and Antti-Ville Kärjä (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 33-57 (pp. 39-42). .
A further form of borealism is the explicit invocation of the boreal by white-supremacist far-right politicians.
Boreal is not synonymous with northern, the latter qualifying what is north; the first indicates an position, while the second indicates a position.
Borealism was a prominent phenomenon in the reception of Nordic literature in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. The so-called modern breakthrough movement, Scandinavian symbolism, impressionism, naturalism, decadence and new-romanticism reached most of the European countries (just as it was the case with Slavic literatures), which had a huge impact on the region's theatre, prose fiction and lyric. It was also the period, when the first professional translators (Hugo Kosterka, Henrik Hajdu, Margit G. Beke) from Swedish, Norwegian and Danish appeared on the literary scene. The translations, reviews and articles were marked by a mythical reading of the cultures of Northern Europe. Literary borealism can be best understood as an unwritten set of rhetoric and poetic rules. Through this filter the peoples, territories and literatures of the Nordic countries are anthropologically, geographically and culturally distinctive from other nations. But most often it was the natural phenomena (ice, snow, mountains, seas, lakes, fjords, flora and fauna, volcanos etc.) that had a major effect on the individuals, according to the early 20th century borealists.
In twenty-first-century politics, the term boreal is used by politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Thierry Baudet in The Netherlands to refer to Northern Europe and its ethnic groups, culture and languages. The term is used as a euphemism for white people, and is framed as being opposite migrating minorities, in an attempt to avoid openly racism connotations. Le Pen's statements about a "boreal Europe" and "white world" contributed to him being expelled by Marine Le Pen in 2015 as a member of the Front National. Race blanche" : pour Jean-Marie Le Pen, Nadine Morano a "énoncé une évidence historique
The term has also been used by Russian-nationalist movements since the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin wall as an indication of ethnic Russians.
In the Netherlands, Forum for Democracy (FvD) leader Thierry Baudet introduced the word in a political context. Hoe Thierry Baudet aan de lippen hing van Jean-Marie Le Pen At the first party congress of the FvD in 2017, he spoke about "our boreal Europe"; in the victory speech he gave to his followers after the 2019 Dutch provincial elections, about "our boreal world". On owls, women and the boreal world: 10 things Thierry Baudet has said Meet Thierry Baudet, the suave new face of Dutch rightwing populism The New Face of the Dutch Far-Right - Thierry Baudet once called politicians brain-dead. Now his upstart white nationalist movement has eclipsed Geert Wilders and won more Senate seats than the prime minister's party Following criticism of his speech, he stated in an interview that he was referring to "a beautiful, poetic designation" of Europe, the western world or western civilization. According to Baudet, the boreal is also the part of the world that is illuminated by the aurora borealis or the northern lights. These are mainly Western countries in Europe and North America.
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