Approaching Texts of Not-Quiteness: Reading Race, Whiteness, and In/Visibility in Nordic Culture^.

Scandinavian literature; Immigrants; Race; Cosmopolitanism; Shame; Cross-cultural studies; People of color; Social attitudes; Gender inequality; Identity (Psychology); Ethnicity

These are songs in Finnish that were originally produced in 1974 on the album I Siirtolaisen tie i - I Ruotsinsuomalaisten lauluja i (The Migrant's Way - Songs of Sweden Finns) but were recorded for this film by the new generation of Sweden Finnish musicians. 8 See, for example, Stellan Beckman's MA thesis ([5]) that argues, based on eight interviews with Sweden Finns, that during the 2010s, the Sweden Finnish minority has increasingly been seen as an obvious part of the Swedish nation (more so than the other national minorities), and that he sees them belonging to the margin of Swedish whiteness. Alakoski does not use the word "race" in her essay, instead wondering about the different attitudes regarding ethnicity, even though she implies that the non-white Swede from Afghanistan is somehow "more migrant" than the other two groups of white people, Swedes with a Finnish background, and Swedes with a Polish background, in Sweden. Even though Finnish-speakers in Sweden have throughout history been imagined as less civilized and racialized, and Finland has only recently been fully included in the "Nordic Countries", the history of Finland belonging to Sweden, their long shared cultural history as neighboring countries, and Finland's trajectory toward Nordic whiteness all allow for an easier passing. In her attempts to articulate the struggles of Finnish-speakers in Sweden that tend to be unnoticed in contemporary awareness and studies of migration, as a white author in Sweden, Alakoski herself is haunted by the specters of race. [Extracted from the article]