This presentation consists of a text based study of Asians in Sweden and Swedish anti-Asian racism.The purpose is to account for and examine the incipient emergence of a new Swedish racial minorityin the form of Swedish Asians within the context of how Asians in Sweden are experiencing andresponding to anti-Asian racism as well as how Swedish society at large acknowledges the presence ofAsians in Sweden and the existence of anti-Asian racism within the country and how other minoritiesview and treat Asians.Theoretically, the study conceptualizes the on-going development of the emergence of a Swedish Asianminority as a racial formation and the examined text material is based on published original Swedishlanguage texts in the form of autobiographical books and media articles which Asians in Swedenthemselves have written or which are about the group in the form of for example interviews andreportages. The study argues that it was during the pandemic years of 2020-2021 that the Asians inSweden emerged for the first time as a Swedish racial minority and that this emergence must beunderstood as a result of previous Swedish Asian experiences of and responses to Swedish anti-Asianracism and Asians’ historical and contemporary relations to other minorities. 

This handbook offers a unique decolonial take on the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by rehistoricising and re-spatialising the study of bodies and identities in the world system of coloniality.

Situating the critical study of whiteness as a core intellectual pillar in a broadly based project for racial and social justice, the volume understands whiteness as elaborated in global coloniality through epistemology, ideology and governmentality at the intersections with heteropatriarchy and capitalism. The diverse contributions present Black and other racially diverse scholarship as crucial to the field. The focus of inquiry is expanded beyond Northern Anglophone contexts to challenge centre/margin relations, examining whiteness in the Caribbean, South Africa and the African continent, Asia, the Middle East as well as in the United States and parts of Europe. Providing a transdisciplinary approach and addressing debates about knowledges, black and white subjectivities and newly defensive forms of whiteness, as seen in the rise of the Radical Right, the handbook deepens our understanding of power, place, and culture in coloniality.

This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, advanced students, and scholars in the fields of Education, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Sciences, Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Media Studies, Indigenous Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Diversity Studies, and African, Latin American, Asian, American, British and European Studies.Read less

Asians in Sweden make up over 200,000 inhabitants. However, compared to the Afro-Swedes, the Latin Americans or the minority inhabitants who have a background in the Middle East, the Swedish Asians are largely absent from the political, cultural and academic spheres in contemporary Sweden. This absence applies in both minority and migrant contexts as well as in connection with migration and integration issues. This article consists of a study of literary texts written by minority authors who themselves are not Asians and in whose works Asians appear as characters as well as an analysis of texts written by Swedish Asians who write about how both majority Swedes and minority residents view them. The purpose is to try to understand this relative absence of Asians within both minority Sweden and majority Sweden and why they are so absent in relation to contemporary Swedish race relations.

Jan Myrdal är en av den svenska litteraturens mest mångsidiga och produktiva författare. Han debuterade i offentligheten 1944, och den 14 april 2019 arrangerades seminariet "Den vanartige Jan Myrdal. Ett seminarium kring ett 75-årigt författarskap", där skilda aspekter av denna skriftställargärning behandlades. Det var Myrdals uttryckliga vilja att seminariet skulle vara kritiskt och resonerande. Boken redovisar flertalet inlägg på seminariet, och behandlar bland annat de skönlitterära och dramatiska verken, synen på Indien, bild- och konstsyn samt politiska ställningstaganden.

This chapter presents a study of a debate that raged in 1960s Sweden over the large-scale adoption of non-white children from abroad. This debate is used as a focusing prism for examining how Sweden transitioned from being a race-obsessed nation to a doctrinally antiracist nation, as well as how the relationship between race and Swedishness changed due to the arrival of the country’s first coherent group of non-white immigrants, or, differently put, the “importation” of a permanently settled non-white population. Notably, this adoption debate was to become Sweden’s last explicit debate on race, as race talk was increasingly to become taboo and colourblindness dominant in the Swedish publics. The arrival of these children in 1960s Sweden sparked a discursive battle between “race optimists” and “race pessimists” – two labels that were coined in the debate and employed analytically in this chapter. While the race pessimists feared the supposed risks of a loss of racial purity and homogeneity for white Swedes, the optimists envisioned the adopted children as being unproblematically embraced by a society that no longer cares about race and possibly even as the vanguard of a future in which racial thinking, and thus racism itself, would finally become obsolete.

This article consists of a study of how the first wave of Korean adoptees to Sweden were imagined and represented in a political debate that raged throughout the 1960s concerning whether or not Swedes would adopt non-white children from abroad. The study examines how the arrival of the Korean adoptees came to transform Swedes' attitude to race and the relationship between race and Swedishness, and how they made it possible for Sweden to transition from a country with a racial obsession to an antiracist nation in the 1960s, when Sweden was one of the Western world's whitest and most racially homogeneous countries.