It’s partly a way for Minnesota to secede from

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It’s partly a way for Minnesota to secede from the Midwest

https://www.fastcompany.com/40525311/super-bo...e=02032018


Super Bowl LII Is Minnesota’s Chance To Secede From The Midwest

The state is embracing the cold and rebranding itself as “The North.” But does this new identity represent everyone who lives in this historically Scandinavian region?





February 3, 2018

Good morning!

I might be a writer because I grew up in Minnesota. On January days when school was cancelled because the wind chill was 30 below zero—or colder!—it was far too frigid for hours-long frolics in the backyard. On days like that, instead of sledding, I spent my winter afternoons reading books and writing short stories. Creativity, as they say, loves constraint.

For the last few years my state has been trying to make a hip virtue of its cold weather experiences, as you’ll learn in our feature story about rebranding Minnesota as “The North.”

It’s partly a way for Minnesota to secede from the Midwest—and certainly helps capitalize on this weekend’s Super Bowl in Minneapolis. The rebrand also raises some important questions about who is really represented (or not represented) by the campaign’s culturally Scandinavian focus.

While a great many Minnesotans are descended from Scandinavian and German pioneers, the state is also home to the largest Somali population in the country, and the second largest Hmong population. As much as I identify as a Minnesotan, I also felt, at times, growing up there, a little left out of "Minnesotan" culture, which does dominantly identify, pretty aggressively, as Scandinavian.

I deeply love the state—I’m writing a collection of short stories right now which clearly demonstrate that Minnesota is a realm of my personal mythology. Yet I sometimes fleetingly think of myself as an ex-pat who grew up in Minnesota. An ex-pat from where, I'm not entirely sure.
—Anjali Khosla

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