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

In her essay “Språkrör mellan olika världar” (2011), Swedish author Susanna Alakoski writes about the history of Finnish migration to Sweden and about feeling both shame and pride concerning her Finnish heritage. The essay was republished in a collection Finnjävlar (2016),3 which compiles texts by various Swedish authors with Finnish heritage. Most of the authors, similarly to Alakoski, articulate an experience of being invisible in Sweden. By invisible, they mean that due to shared somatic features and a long cultural history, they can often pass as white Swedes, while they still experience derogatory attitudes and discrimination based on their Finnish background. Although the majority of Finnish-speakers have been identified as white, in the pseudoscientific race biology of the early twentieth century in Sweden, they were categorized as an inferior race, the “Eastern Baltic race,” which contributed to their representations in the Swedish cultural imaginary as inferior and less civilized. Thus, while invisible in their ability to pass as Swedes, the Finnish-speakers have also been made visible throughout history as being slightly different than Swedes. What Alakoski seems to be most concerned about in her essay is articulating a different kind of invisibility, namely, that of the troubling experiences of the Finnish migrants to Sweden in the second half of the twentieth century. She refers to scholarship and public debates regarding migration that are often misinformed in using the word “invandrare” “immigrant” as only non-white and that have, as she sees it, forgotten the history of Finnish migration (Alakoski 2011).4 In order to address that concern, she describes what looks like a hierarchy of visibility of different migrants in Sweden. 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. The question of whether her Polish friends were treated similarly to her remains hanging in the air—as does the question of race and whiteness—and she does not return to it in the essay.Alakoski's essay is ultimately about how the experiences of Finnish-speakers in Sweden have changed over the years. Her incorporation of the person of color in Sweden to express concern about how both the historically racialized white migrants and their racialization have not been fully acknowledged in the dominant culture, however, raises some questions. Why separate these three groups of migrants? What does it ultimately mean that she would like to receive the question about where she comes from? Alakoski's rhetorical move is indicative of a similar move in a variety of literary and cinematic texts about intra-Nordic migration/minorities, some of which I analyze in this article, primarily focusing on examples regarding Finnish and Tornedalian speakers in Sweden. Often, these accounts grapple with traumatic and complicated memories of (semi-)colonial history (Sweden has in different ways been the colonizer of Finland and continues to colonize the Sápmi lands) and racialization, but they also include moments that contribute to racialized hierarchies. These are multidirectional hierarchies in that the intra-Nordic migrants/minorities see themselves as having less visibility and, therefore, agency within the dominant society than migrants of color, but at the same time, distance themselves from them as well as from other white migrants/minorities who have historically been seen as not quite as white either.This article argues that several Nordic authors and filmmakers of the early twenty-first century depict and incorporate racialized hierarchies in their attempts to make visible the experiences of not quite belonging caused by colonial and racial history. In doing that, I draw on scholarship that intersects postcolonial and critical race theories in the European and Nordic context. In her analysis on Russian-speaking migrants’ efforts to pass as white in Finland, Daria Krivonos (2020), for example, argues that Finland represents for Russian-speakers (who have throughout history been othered in the eyes of Western Europeans) Europeanness that “must be understood as a postcolonial formation of whiteness, with internal hierarchies and symbolic geographies that distinguish between Western Europe as Europe proper, and Europe's ‘incomplete self,’ Eastern Europe” (389). Like other scholarly discussions on the representations of Eastern Europeans as not quite as white as Western Europeans, Krivonos brings out the crucial impact that postcolonial Europe also has on its peripheral countries and people. It is during the colonial history that Western-ness became intertwined with whiteness, which meant that anyone not aligning with those categories was perceived as not white or not quite as white. The implications of this worldview have not disappeared, and they continue to linger in the postcolonial world, “as an ideal, often latently, sometimes not,” as Alfred Lopez (2005, 1) explains. While often taken-for-granted and invisible in the Nordic region, according to Suvi Keskinen (2014), “the ideas of Western-ness and whiteness are fundamental for Nordic national identities” (472).5 This explains, at least on one level, why people of color in the Nordic countries continue to face racism and are often not accepted as citizens of the Nordic states even when they were born there. It also explains the desire of people on the peripheries of Western-ness or Nordic-ness to identify and be accepted as fully Western, Nordic, and, white.6My focus on the literary and cinematic stories of intra-Nordic migrants/minorities—primarily about Finns and Tornedalians in Sweden—is in dialogue with these discussions, but it looks at crucial nuances, namely, the proximity and colonial history of these groups of people, which add complexity to the dynamics that already include a postcolonial formation of whiteness as a global phenomenon. This article discusses primarily how cultural and artistic texts (films, literature, essays) of the early twenty-first century in Sweden articulate and imagine the experiences of what I call Nordic not-quiteness—being seen and represented as almost but not quite white, Swedish, and, therefore, Nordic. Analyzing this phenomenon helps us to further understand how a variety of literary and cinematic articulations in the Nordic region approach the implications of racial hierarchies. Equally important in my analyses is a closer look at the role that privilege has in these iterations. As the extensive studies on the history of Finnish migration to Sweden in the twentieth century show, Finns did not generally want to be categorized as labor migrants, something that the establishment of Finnish-speakers as one of the five national minorities in Sweden in 2000 also sought to avoid (in addition to other benefits).7 So, while many examples in Sweden Finnish culture and ethnographies suggest that the racialization experienced in the twentieth century is, for the most part, in the past,8 I am curious about the continued artistic engagement that depicts this history of racialization as still somewhat invisible, and the impact of that invisibility as something that contributes to the experience of Nordic not-quiteness both in the past and in the present.In the following, I will first demonstrate how the theoretical framework of Nordic not-quiteness that draws from studies of race and colonialism can help us address the questions that Alakoski's essay provokes. I will also analyze a selection of literary and cinematic texts that in the first two decades of the twenty-first century articulate the memories and experiences of Sweden Finnish and Tornedalian minorities in Sweden during the twentieth century. As I discuss further below, the accounts and depictions of being not quite Nordic/not quite white that this article analyzes come from people who are legible as white (even if, throughout history, they have been categorized as not quite white). Thus, the article also argues that privilege that exists alongside feelings of shame, erasure of identity, or newly found pride has a significant role in understanding and discussing this material, intra-Nordic racialized hierarchies, and Nordic not-quiteness.This article follows scholars writing about race and racialization in the Nordic region in understanding “race” as a social and cultural construction that has real impact on people's lives (Keskinen and Andreassen 2017) and “racialization” as processes that differentiate people and constitute racial privileges and discrimination (Habel 2008; Keskinen and Andreassen 2017) based on “alleged biological differences, skin color or cultural differences, often combining elements of these” (Keskinen and Andreassen 2017, 65). Understanding the constructed-ness of race is important, as Anna Rastas (2019) brings out, in drawing attention to both the consistent racism toward people of color in the Nordic countries and historically toward the internal others who have at various points of history been seen as not quite white either. This understanding has also been significant for increasing scholarly work that discusses the ways in which race as a concept has in Sweden, for example, been replaced by ethnicity or culture that does not sufficiently express the experiences of racialization and racism. Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström (2014) observe this, as they argue that the legacy of the second period of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden (1968–2001) isThe reluctance to discuss race in the Nordic countries has been similar to the broader trends in Europe where dealing with the memory of the Holocaust has created an illusion that race is in the past, although in the Nordic region, this illusion is complemented with the commonly held beliefs that the Nordic countries are inclusive, ethically/morally superior, and post-racial.9 David Theo Goldberg (2006), for example, argues that “European racial denial concerns wanting race in the wake of World War II categorically to implode, to erase itself. . . . A desire at once frustrated and displaced, racist implications always lingering and diffuse, silenced but assumed, always already returned and haunting, buried but alive” (334).In Sweden, this mind-set has impacted the reception and expectations regarding literature that deals with experiences of migration to Sweden. As Natia Gokieli argues, the term “multiethnic immigrant literature” that was long anticipated in Sweden has functioned as a euphemism for non-white literature, and “the immigrant writer's voice of color is inextricably attached to his or her non-white body” (2017, 269). This is problematic on various levels, including the categorization of non-white Swedes as migrants even if they were born in Sweden, and it contributes further to the prevalent understanding mentioned above that Swedish-ness equals whiteness.10 Also, authors like Alakoski who pass as white Swedes would not fit in this particular paradigm of “immigrant literature” (that problematically intimates literature written by non-white Swedes), even though they are also addressing experiences of non-belonging and derogatory attitudes toward migrants who at various points in history have also been regarded as not quite white. This does not mean that Alakoski's writing has not been approached as a text about migration history or Sweden Finnish culture.11 In claiming that migration should deal with problems and that Swedes don't remember Finns’ problems (2011), Alakoski is not talking about the rich archive of scholarship on Sweden Finnish culture, but is gesturing instead toward the significance of race in talking about migration during the early 2000s in Sweden.In her analysis of race as a social category in Northern Europe, Rastas argues that the discrimination and derogatory attitudes experienced by Finns in Sweden or by Russians in Finland could also be called racism, while the ways in which these white minorities deal with racist attitudes differ from their impact on the non-white communities. While this is a controversial perspective, in Rastas's discussion, racism refers to the historical racialization and categorization of these two ethnicities (along with others) as lower races. As is revealed in the texts that I analyze in this article, along with the stereotypes and attitudes originating in this history, ethnicity (Finnish or Polish) is sometimes experienced as a potentially visible difference that functions as immutable and transgenerational, even though there are many ways to hide that difference. Lönn (2018) writes, for example, how Russian-speaking migrants in Sweden report various learned techniques of passing (practicing their language to not have any trace of a Russian accent and dressing differently from the stereotypical images of Russians), which are available to most Russian-speakers who are legible as white. This is not to suggest that there is an essential difference between non-white passing as white and white passing as white, as Sara Ahmed (1999) puts it, but rather a “structural difference that demonstrates that passing involves the re-opening or re-staging of a fractured history of identifications that constitutes the limits to a given subject's mobility” (Ahmed 1999, 93). It is crucial to note that in postcolonial Europe, where whiteness is still connected to “Western-ness,” it is easier for a white Russian-speaking migrant to pass from appearing to be a racialized not quite white Eastern European to a white Western European. As Krivonos brings out from her interviews with Russian-speakers, in doing that, they often distance themselves from people of color, contributing to the Western = White paradigm. The desire to pass as Western European in the first place lies in the colonial project that has othered and racialized Eastern Europe.12Rosi Braidotti's (2010) discussion of Eastern Europeans as “not quite white” in the imagination of Western Europe is a helpful paradigm for exploring experiences and representations of Nordic not-quiteness. Braidotti adapts Homi Bhabha's much-cited formulation of the colonial non-white subject who, in their knowledge and mimicry of the colonizer, is “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 1984, 126). Arguing for the importance of analyzing race and whiteness in postcolonial studies, Alfred J. Lopez writes that the essence of Bhabha's “not quite/not white” is “the colonial sham on the individual level” that results in “a subject who simultaneously identifies with the white ideal and is radically alienated from it” (2005, 18). Braidotti focuses her discussion on the racialized hierarchy in the European Union that has manifested itself in imagining Eastern Europeans as not quite white. She uses the Balkans as an example of those who, in the eyes of the European Union (EU), “in so far as they are not yet ‘good Europeans,’ . . . are also not quite as ‘white’ as others” (2010, 34). By putting “good Europeans” in quotation marks, Braidotti refers to the legacy of semi-colonial and communist history of Eastern European countries as well as their significantly lower gross domestic product (GDP). Anca Parvulescu observes similar examples of Eastern Europeans represented in European media as neither white nor Black, emphasizing the impact of multiple colonial and postcolonial hierarchies within Europe. She writes that it is not unusual for an Eastern European locale to both have a colonial history with its neighboring country and “to find itself in a postcolonial relation to the Ottoman Empire or Russia (sometimes both) and, following different postcolonial temporalities, in a semi-colonial relation to parts of West Europe and, today, the European Union” (2015, 28). The geographical proximity of these countries, as well as the fact that most people in these countries are white, produces a different version from Bhabha's “almost the same but not quite”: here, the difference is not always or immediately visible (it might be audible), but is nevertheless present, along with the proximity, possibility, and privilege to move toward becoming fully white, as Braidotti intimates with the “not yet.”This trajectory of “becoming white” reminds us that whiteness, of course, is also a construction and that its meaning changes over time, as the expanding field of whiteness studies has brought out.13 I am not in any way interested in divesting whiteness of the consequences of its privilege and power, as I agree with scholars like Robyn Wiegman (1999) and Matthew Frye Jacobson (1999), who argue for the importance of understanding how whiteness has been maintained and constructed in the United States, which famously has many groups of people who have been seen as less white throughout history. Wiegman, for example, brings out that when comparing marginality and trying to retrieve pre-white ethnicity, one might come to a false conclusion that a white identity formation has “no compensatory racial debt to pay” (1999, 147). In order to better theorize whiteness in the Nordic region, it is important to both acknowledge the structural privilege that people who are legible as white have when passing and moving through spaces, but also to examine, as Alfred Lopez puts it, “whitenesses ‘marginalized’ by virtue of geography and/or relative cultural distance from dominant colonial histories” (2005, 9). When discussing the accounts of intra-Nordic migrants and minorities in the eastern half of the Nordic region, the proximity to dominant histories and to whiteness is crucial in understanding both the experiences of being seen/categorized as not quite white and the constructions of racialized hierarchies. In doing that, my analyses contribute to the expanding scholarly studies on whiteness in the Nordic region that include work on the dominance of whiteness in the articulations of the self-image of the Nordic counties as well as analyses of different kinds of non-hegemonic whiteness.14We can see the manifestations of hierarchies that are informed by proximity, in/visibility, and semi-colonial history in the Nordic region in recent scholarship that looks more closely at the intra-Nordic colonial and racial histories. Suvi Keskinen's (2019) and Johanna Leinonen's (2017) articles on Finland's position in the Nordic region are two examples of work that articulates how Nordic racialized hierarchies are multidirectional and mutually constitutive of each other. Keskinen provides an extensive analysis on how Finns were placed on the lower levels of racial hierarchies in the racial biology developed in Sweden, and how the racial categorizations of them shifted in the twentieth century. She also suggests that the relationship between Finland and Sweden could be called postcolonial or at least semi-postcolonial, while the colonial relationship between Finland and the Sápmi lands or that between Sweden and the Sápmi lands is still ongoing. The history of Sweden as the empire over both Finland and Sápmi produced stereotypes and images of Finns and Sámi people as less civilized and inferior to Swedes (and by extension until the end of the twentieth century, also not quite Nordic). This was enforced by various trends in anthropology and race biology. In the nineteenth century, Finns were presented as being of Mongolian descent, as one of the Finno-Ugric people. This classification meant that “Finns were placed outside the White race and connected with the Asian or ‘yellow race’” (Keskinen 2019, 172). Later race biology theories of the 1920s to the 1940s in Sweden contested this notion and instead developed a theory of the “East Baltic” races inferior to the Nordic race, that were found in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (Keskinen 2019, 172).15 The official subscription to these ideas came to an end with World War II. Sweden distanced itself from the politics of Nazi Germany, and, following a somewhat problematic neutrality during World War II, Sweden positioned itself in the late twentieth century alongside other Western European countries in attempting to acknowledge their (even if implicit) part in the Holocaust. The gesture of apology helped the collective affect to shift from guilt to pride. It also produced a collective silence regarding race and racism in Sweden that, as contemporary scholarship brings out, largely persists today.16As Finland took part in colonizing parts of the Sápmi land after its independence, developing its nation-state, and officially disregarding racial biology, “Finns gradually became ‘whiter,’ resulting in an inclusion—albeit an ambiguous one—into a Europeanness that was coded as White” (Keskinen 2019, 173). Johanna Leinonen argues that Finland's position was still insecure in white Western modernity during the Cold War. While the reputation of Finland as a not quite Western, not quite white, and, therefore, not quite Nordic country still continued in the 1980s, this was partly caused by its geographical location next to Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe (Leinonen 2017). This caused further racial stereotypes regarding Russians and Eastern Europeans in Finland and other Nordic countries, along with stereotypes regarding non-white migrants.The texts about intra-Nordic migrants and minorities in Sweden often describe an experience of Nordic not-quiteness as a remnant of historical racialization that was unspoken in the 2000s because of the color-blind rhetoric of the Nordic welfare states. I propose Nordic not-quiteness, a term that refers both to mimicry in a postcolonial context and to whiteness as a construction that is constantly transforming, to be a helpful framework to discuss cultural texts that articulate racialized histories within Northern Europe. While these iterations share similarities with the more extensive studies on the representations and experiences of Eastern Europeans in Nordic media and societies, what is unique to the cultural texts analyzed in this article are the implications of the temporal and spatial proximity of Finns and Tornedalians to the dominant Swedish culture. While making visible these histories of not-quiteness, there is a desire to not necessarily pass as a Swede, but to be acknowledged and recognized as a Finnish-speaker/Tornedalian-speaker who is just as “white,” “Western,” and “Nordic” as the Swedish-speakers. This includes a distantiation from people who are not white or who are associated with the not quite whiteness of Eastern Europeans who are seen as spatially and temporally further away.17 At the same time, it also often includes an attempt to claim marginalized identity akin to communities of color in order to gain visibility and distance from the implications of white privilege. What motivates Alakoski's writing, then, is the dissonance between the mainstream idea of homogenous whiteness and the experiences of not-quite whiteness in the Nordic region. In order to address the paradox of invisibility where the potential to pass and become white/Nordic/invisible functions both as a privilege and an erasure of traumatic memories, Alakoski's essay incorporates a racialized hierarchy that seeks to make visible previously unseen dynamics, but it also contributes to further racialization. This paradox of invisibility needs further study.18 Nordic not-quiteness as a concept helps us to understand the histories of proximate migrants and minorities as informed by multidirectional hierarchies, privileges, and traumatic histories, which allows for a more complex understanding of the transcultural and heterogenous region that Northern Europe is.Throughout the twentieth century, Finns were often depicted in Swedish cinema and media as primitive, poor, and less civilized. For example, such images were common in Swedish rural melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, as film scholar Rochelle Wright (1998) has argued. In her extensive study on ethnic outsiders in Swedish film, she concludes, however, that “Finns in Swedish film may sometimes be depicted as ‘foreign’ and Other, but collectively they are also a fellow Nordic people with whom the Swedish audience feels a historical and cultural tie” (1998, 177). Wright does not elaborate further on this statement, thus leaving out the complexities regarding the hierarchies of whiteness and not-quiteness in the Nordic region. In that, her conclusion functions as another example of the ways in which the structures of migration that is proximate to whiteness and privilege remain invisible while the not quite white people are at times depicted as visibly foreign and othered. Studies on Sweden Finnish literature and culture have addressed the representations of the complicated identity of Sweden Finns, focusing both on narratives of migration written during the large waves of labor migration in the 1960s and 1970s, and on crossing the boundary between migrants to an officially recognized national minority in Sweden in 2000 (Gröndahl 2002; 2018; Liimatainen 2019). Tuire Liimatainen (2019) argues in her analysis on the reception of two novels written by Finnish-speaking authors in Sweden that the representation of Finnish migrants in Sweden has changed from the experience of in-betweenness to invisibility because, as mentioned above, the migrants from Nordic countries have increasingly not been categorized as migrants in Sweden. Various ethnographic studies have also investigated the ways in which Sweden Finns express feelings of inferiority and shame (Ågren 2006) that are caused by stereotyping in the Swedish culture and, at the same time, they feel like they are unseen by the dominant culture (Weckström 2011).19These articulations of not being seen also figure in Alakoski's essay, as she rightly points out the misconceived notion of Swedes of color as forever migrants. One of the reasons for her feeling unseen is most likely that in contemporary Sweden, Finnish-speakers do easily pass as Swedes because they are predominantly white (and if they are not, they might face racist questions from both white Swedes and Finns), and because the large migration waves from Finland are now primarily a topic of the past. However, as Kristian Borg brings out in his essay (2016), for example, stereotypes about Finns as inferior and “less civilized” persist in Swedish media. An example that he writes about is Kjell Sundvall's film Jägarna 2 (2011), which features a villain Jari Lipponen (Eero Milonoff) who is violent and loud, has long and greasy hair, and speaks with a strong Finnish accent.20 Many of the Sweden Finnish viewers were frustrated with this character who reinforces stereotypes about Finnish-speakers, to which Sundvall replied that he had actually drawn inspiration from a Roma person, but that including them in the film would have been racist.21 This is a problematic standpoint on many levels, not least because Sundvall's original quote uses a derogatory term for Roma. It also illustrates how Finnish-speakers in Sweden have become assimilated to a point where to use them as stereotypical figures does not seem like a problem. This, however, as Alakoski and other writers point out, means that the history of racialization, stereotypes, and the resulting Finnish shame have not been fully addressed, nor have they fully disappeared.Mika Ronkainen's documentary Laulu koti-ikävästä/Ingen Riktig Finne (2013; Finnish Blood Swedish Heart [2013]) deals with these topics through the eyes of Kai Latvalehto, who grew up in Sweden but now lives in Finland. The premise of the film is his road trip to Sweden with his father to better understand his childhood and the persistent feeling of not being quite Finnish nor quite Swedish. In the sequences of intimate conversations between Kai and different people in Sweden who have Finnish heritage, they share similar memories of stereotypes about alcoholism and poverty that were often immediately associated with anyone who was Finnish, and of being treated somewhat differently as Finnish-speaking children in Sweden. While Ronkainen's film is ultimately about a therapeutic and cathartic reconciliation of one's past, and as Anu Koivunen (2017) argues, it portrays the new generations of people with Finnish heritage as prouder and as coming to terms with the memories of Finnish shame, it also seeks to articulate the experience of Nordic not-quiteness. It does that particularly in two sequences that include a musical number. These are songs in Finnish that were originally produced in 1974 on the album Siirtolaisen tie—Ruotsinsuomalaisten lauluja (The Migrant's Way—Songs of Sweden Finns) but were recorded for this film by the new generation of Sweden Finnish musicians. The first sequence takes place in Kai's friend's apartment where they are sharing their memories of the stereotypes that all Finnish-speakers are alcoholics. The conversation is preceded by them looking for a taxi, and when a taxi driver sees them but does not stop, the friend tells Kai half-jokingly that the taxi driver probably saw that they were Finns. The conversation transitions to the performance of a song “Valkoinen uni” (White Dream) performed by Mirella Hautala: “Siirtolaisyhteiskunnan valkoisten värillisten onni / on kuin huurun valkoinen huntu / Sulava harha, muoviin pakattua paljoutta / oopiumia kielipuolille siirtolaisille” (Laulu koti-ikävästä 2013) [“Happiness for the white immigrants in society / is just like a veil of deluded mist / Sweet hallucination, plastic-wrapped plenitude / Pure opium for the language crippled migrants” (Finnish Blood Swedish Heart 2013)]. While the dialogues in the film do not explicitly talk about whiteness or race, the comment made about the taxi driver as well as the lyrics of this song seek to