The discussion draws from recent writing on the meaning of ‘whiteness’ in the Nordic countries, emphasizing the importance to understand racialization in different localities. Racism is entangled with affective meanings related to discourse of the nation, furthermore, as shaped by global discourses and class. The discussion exemplifies this in the context of migrants from Lithuania in Iceland, demonstrating how they become racialized in Iceland during the boom period in the early 2000s.

This discussion stresses that looking at countries on the margins of European colonial rule can be useful when considering the wider dynamics of the present, reflecting the persistence of colonial discourses and how racism “endures”. Iceland’s colonial experience was characterized by duality, in which the country was an object of colonialism, while actively participating in the racist discourses predominant in Europe at that time. This paper demonstrates how Iceland’s long association with the exotic and its gendered manifestations is currently being perpetuated by the tourist and state industries, under the influence of neo-liberal ideas about nation branding. When contextualized within the larger geopolitical environment, Iceland as an “exotic” destination unravels the racist and colonized narratives still at play within a wider geopolitical context.

Scholars have for some time emphasised destabilising the boundaries between colonised and colonisers, in addition to calling for more nuanced analyses of colonialism. I focus here on the politics of difference on a global scale and how the internal logic dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘other’ is still significant, using two cases revolving around an Icelandic struggle with ‘otherness’ at different times in history: one in 1905 and the other in 2008. I claim that the analysis of those at the margins of the dualistic divide of colonised and coloniser clearly brings out the oppositions at play within historical and contemporary global relationships of power and how participation in colonial ideologies involved multiple politics of identity and selfhood within Europe. Both cases show Icelandic anxieties about being classified with the ‘wrong’ people and their attempt to situate themselves within the ‘civilised’ part of the world.

Tourism to Iceland has and continues to benefit from its geographic position as a stopover between the North American and Eurasian continents and as an extension of the exoticised Arctic North. In that context, we argue that Iceland as a destination functions as a gateway, which should be used as a way of recognising the wider network responsible for the multiple interpretations of destination image. Accordingly, this article argues that despite the relationality of Iceland’s destination image, it has been represented as a tourism gateway by those with power to do so, producing a destination between centre and periphery as a gateway to an exoticised and commodified elsewhere. A recent advertising campaign from Iceland’s leading airline, Icelandair, was semiologically analysed as an example of travel representations that inform and shape destination image. A postcolonial lens was applied recognising that these representations are produced within a dichotomy of centre–periphery that has implications to Iceland’s present image as a travel destination.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis that hit Iceland in October 2008, increased numbers of Icelanders migrated to Norway to seek employment due to difficult economic circumstances in Iceland. Using critical perspectives from postcolonial studies and critical whiteness studies, the paper explores how these Icelandic migrants in Norway make sense of their new position as economic migrants within a global economy characterised by a growing sense of precariousness, while past inequalities and racism continue to matter. We also examine how these migrants are perceived in Norwegian media, and how social discourses of Icelandic migrants reflect larger Norwegian debates on racism, desirability and cultural belonging. Media discourses in Norway and interviews with Icelandic migrants reveal a hierarchy of acceptability of migrants. Icelanders are positioned as highly desirable compared to other migrant groups due to the intersection of perceived racial belonging, nationality and class. Our discussion contributes, furthermore, towards a critical analysis of the category migrant, by exploring how the term immigrant (innvandrer/innflytjandi) is used in narratives of Icelandic migrants in Norway and in Norwegian media discussions, showing the negative and racialised connotations of the term immigrant and how its understanding is linked with vulnerable positions and discrimination.