Afloat and Aflame: Deconstructing the Long 19th Century Port City Gothenburg through Newspaper Archaeology

Abstract

In line with the international historical-archaeological discipline, this study aims to increase knowledge of marginalising processes and disenfranchised groups in the past and to contribute to the recognised Swedish need to augment the know-how of researching people ‘of little note’ in urban environments. The study aspires a theoretically engaged empirical alternative for developing new knowledge about urban places which are not possible to excavate or where archaeological data is insufficient, while evincing how digitized historical newspapers can step in as a multifaceted historical- archaeological source. By merging historical archaeology with digital history, the study has fashioned a newspaper archaeology, encompassing text-cavation and critical discourse analysis, and applied it to the empirical case, and fringe settlements of the port city Gothenburg, through local newspapers during the long 19th century. The suburbs have been hot topics discussed in, and by newspapers, and furthermore floating (signifiers), variously charged with meaning dependent on situation, correspondent, and text genre. By employing the concept of worldmaking, the study has recognised how inclusion and exclusion of people and spaces through text, encompasses international images, local events, notions of space and architecture, as well as actors − including newspapers and newspaper genres. The concepts of counter- voice and counter-narrative have acknowledged opposing perspectives which have shed light on inequal societal structures and grand narratives and displayed how people ‘of little note’ already from the late 1700s, took part in and reacted to what was printed, and negotiated values. Of the empirical chapters, chapter 6 demonstrates how the name Majorna was geographically floating, but the debate from the 1840s about the suburb Majorna’s integration with the city, anchored the name to a designated space, as well as ushered in a new sense of identity and attempts to fill this location with social meaning. Chapter 7 shows how from around the 1830s, newspaper genres and engaged citizens created in-groups and out-groups through the broadcasting of a mix of internationally spread notions of mariners and workers and bourgeois ideals, and how the space of the port district Majorna from the 1840s, intensifying from the 1860s, was intimately associated with deviant behaviour. Chapter 8 establishes how print representations of urban fires in the fringe had their own worldmaking effects on the creation of communities that bridged geographical and social borders and widened the urban landscape. Chapter 9 evinces how the genre of urban travelogues created othering and typecast representations of the suburb’s built environment and populace, by using internationally known tropes, sensual qualities, semiophores, characters, and narrative techniques, but also was complex and played a less-known role in upholding an informal donation culture. Newspapers as source may carry the only remaining information on erased landscapes, materialities, and social practices and newspaper archaeology can present us with voices from those ‘of little note’ and lesser means. The study demonstrates how newspapers are worldmakers and vehicles in the making of social and spatial inclusion and exclusion, with possibilities of steering debates and halting or accelerating urban change. Consequently, newspapers are not only a pertinent historical-archaeological source, but also affected the very society we study through the newspapers’ contents.