This volume crucially provides an analytical and comparative approach, investigating the meaning and uses of the concept of exceptionalism, while demonstrating the ways in which it manifests itself in different historical and geographical settings. Exceptionalism offers comparative case studies from different parts of the world, showcasing the way in which exceptionalism has come to occupy an important narrative position in relation to different nation-states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, various European nations and countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. An introduction to and overview of a term that has come to define the past and present identity of many nations, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and politics.

Lars Jensen is Associate Professor of Cultural Encounters in the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. He is the author of Postcolonial Denmark: Nation Narration in a Crisis Ridden Europe and Postcolonial Europe, and co-editor of Crisis in the Nordic Countries and Beyond and Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region.

Kristín Loftsdóttir is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Iceland. She is the author of We Are All African Here: Race, Mobilities and West-Africans in Europe, Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins: Creating Exotic Iceland and the co-editor of Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region, Messy Europe and Teaching ‘Race’ with a Gendered Edge.