Migrant bodies and the materialization of belonging in Sweden

Abstract

Immigration and transnational adoption are both manifestations of the pervasive dislocations that characterize the contemporary era. Each illuminates as well the double movement of assimilation and internal exclusion through which racisms that are a heritage of colonialism are expanded and reactivated in the metropolitan centers of western Europe and North America. In this process, race is spatialized, different forms of migrant bodies are produced, and familiar logics of belonging that link person to place are transformed. The differential politics of adoption and immigration in late twentieth-century Sweden shed light on this process of racialization and the affective economies through which it is realized, as that nation pursues a multicultural project in which ‘Swedishness’ becomes ‘the measure of everything.’