Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: understanding racial temporalities in Sweden

Abstract

After the election in Sweden in 2010, the racist Sweden Democrats party entered parliament. Post-election reactions and discussions were largely preoccupied with the issue of how the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament disturbs the country's exceptionalist image and privileged position – both in the West and in the non-Western world – as humanity's avant-garde and beacon for antiracism. This article aims to understand the current situation in Sweden from a critical race and whiteness studies perspective. We regard contemporary Sweden as a ‘white nation in crisis’, and diagnose Swedish society as suffering from a ‘white melancholia’. In order to disentangle and shed light upon what is perceived to be mourned and what is seen as being lost for the future, the article offers an historicised account of three principal phases, stages and moments of Swedish nation-building and whiteness; ‘white purity’ (1905–1968); ‘white solidarity’ (1968–2001); and ‘white melancholy’, from 2001 onwards. The analysis also takes into account how these three nation-building projects and hegemonic whiteness and racial grammar regimes are interrelated, and intersect with the different gender and class relations; racial formations; minority discourses; and various political ideologies and affective structures characterising these three periods.