The Starlings

Late one afternoon in October
I hear them for the first time:
loud-voiced palavering, whistles, murmurs,
quarrels, bickering and warbling, croaking and chatter
in the high plane trees of the street.
The leaves are all turning yellow this time of year,
causing huge yellow sunlit rooms
to appear at the level of the fifth and sixth floors
opposite the barracks, where the tram turns off
from the Via delle Milizie.
Solid branches, twigs, and perches:
every bit of space is taken up in this parliament of starlings!
They are tightly bunched together there among the leaves;
and the hundreds of thousands of starlings
that perform their flying exercises
against the backdrop of the evening’s mass of motionless cloud
will surely soon have lost their places:
there are myriads of swarming punctuation marks out there,
starlings flying in formation,
sudden sharp turns, steep ascents,
swarm on delightful swarm
against a rosy cloud bank in the east.
The October evening is cool.
The shop windows of the Via Ottaviano are shining.
And the starlings are chattering, quarreling and laughing,
whispering and quietly enjoying themselves, when suddenly 
a blustering as of ten thousand pairs of sharp-edged scissors
passes through the republic of the plains--
it is as though an alarm had sounded,
heard as an echo over the muffled traffic.
Soon the darkness of night will fall.
But the starlings up there won’t stop talking,
they move together, push one another, chatter and flit.
Virgil must have had them in mind when somewhere he likens
the souls of the deceased to flights of birds
which toward sundown 
abandon the mountains and gather in high trees.
I seem to be standing in an Underworld
in the midst of a swarm of birds.
The block is Virgilian; the street is crossed
by the Viale Giulio Cesare,
where you lived
for some time before you died.
That’s why I am stopping here.
The souls of the dead have gathered in the trees.
Their number is incredible, suddenly it seems ghastly;
is this what it will be like?
For a moment I am a prisoner
of the poem I am writing.
There must be an exit.
The soldier coming up to me
has noticed that I have been standing
for quite some time looking up into the foliage--
into the darkness of feathers, bird’s eyes, and beaks.
The peasant boy inside him apprises me
of the fact that starlings come in vast migrations
“from Poland and Russia”
to spend the winter in the south:
“And things go very well for them!
In the daytime they fly out to the countryside
and spend the night in here,"
he explains with great amusement, turning his gaze
up toward the swarm of birds. Their anxiety seems to have ceased;
in just a moment they all seem to have fallen asleep.
Only single chirps and clucks are heard
from starlings talking in their sleep.
What are they dreaming of? Ten thousand starlings are dreaming in the 
darkness
about the sunlight over the fields.
As for myself, I am thinking of the tranquility
in certain restaurants in the countryside,
in the Albano Mountains and on the Campagna--
the tranquility at noon on a sunny day in October.
I am filled with the clarity of the fall day.
And am touched by something immeasurable, transparent,
which I cannot describe at first 
but must be everything we never said to each other.
There are so many things I’d like to say.
How shall I be able to speak?
Today you are not shade, you are light.
And in the poem I am writing you will be my guest.
We are going to talk about Digenís Akrítas,
the Byzantine heroic poem
with the strangely compelling rhythm;
and since the manuscript of the poem
is preserved in the monastery at Grottaferrata
I shall order wine from Grottaferrata,
golden and shimmering in its carafe;
we shall talk about the miraculously translucent autumn poem by Petronius
which appears first in Ekelöf’s Elective Affinities;
and about Ekelöf’s poems, to which you devoted such attention.
Did Ekelöf ever come to Grottaferrata?
I seem to detect your lively gaze.
And we shall see how the starlings come flying
across the fields in teeming swarms.
They will come from Rome and spend the day out here 
where they will eat snails, worms, and seeds
and suddenly they will fly up from a field
as at a given signal
and make us look into the sun.

In Memoriam Ludovica Koch (1941-93)

Jesper Svenbro

Rocking Bull

Jan Järlehed for BRIO "Rocking Bull", 1967

Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen

A country tries to banish gender.

By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women. It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. Standard parental leave runs at 480 days, and 60 of those days are reserved exclusively for dads, causing some to credit the country with forging the way for a new kind of nurturing masculinity. In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world.
But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don't identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.
Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa. A Swedish children's clothes company has removed the "boys" and "girls" sections in its stores, and the idea of dressing children in a gender-neutral manner has been widely discussed on parenting blogs. This Swedish toy catalog recently decided to switch things around, showing a boy in a Spider-Man costume pushing a pink pram, while a girl in denim rides a yellow tractor.



The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral. Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils' genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as "buddies." So, a teacher would say "good morning, buddies" or "good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack" rather than, "good morning, boys and girls." They believe this fulfills the national curriculum's guideline that preschools should "counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles" and give girls and boys "the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles."
Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a "proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon]."The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites. It was sparked by the publication of Sweden's first ever gender-neutral children's book, Kivi och Monsterhund (Kivi and Monsterdog). It tells the story of Kivi, who wants a dog for "hen's" birthday. The male author, Jesper Lundqvist, introduces several gender-neutral words in the book. For instance the words mammor and pappor (moms and dads) are replaced with mappor and pammor.
The free lifestyle magazine, Nöjesguiden, which is distributed in major Swedish cities and is similar to the Village Voice, recently released an issue using hen throughout. In his column, writer Kawa Zolfagari says, "It can be hard to handle the male ego sometimes. I myself tend to get a stinging feeling when a female friend has had it with sexism or has got hurt because of some guy and desperately blurts out some generalisation about men. Sometimes I think 'Hen knows me, hen knows I am not an idiot, why does hen speak that way of all men?' Nöjesguiden's editor, Margret Atladottir, said hen ought to be included in the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in literature.
Hen was first mentioned by Swedish linguists in the mid-1960s, and then in 1994 the late linguist Hans Karlgren suggested adding hen as a new personal pronoun, mostly for practical reasons. Karlgren was trying to avoid the awkward he/she that gums up writing, and invent a single word "that enables us to speak of a person without specifying their gender. He argued that it could improve the Swedish language and make it more nuanced.
Today's hen champions, however, have a distinctly political agenda. For instance, Lundqvist's book is published by a house named Olika, which means “different or diverse.” Olika only publishes books that "challenge stereotypes and obsolete norms and traditions in the world of literature." Its titles include 100 möjligheter Istället för 2! (“100 possibilities instead of 2!”), a book for adults who "want to give children more opportunities in gender-stereotyped everyday life"; and Det var en gång … en ritbok! (“Once upon a time there was … a drawing book!”), the first "gender-scrutinizing" drawing book for children that "challenges traditional and diminishing conceptions of girls and boys, men and women."
But not everyone is keen on this political meddling with the Swedish language. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
Claeson might have a point. The Swedish school system has wholeheartedly, and probably too quickly and eagerly, embraced this new agenda. Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid "traditional gender patterns" in schools. At Egalia, one model Stockholm preschool, everything from the decoration to the books and toys are carefully selected to promote a gender-equal perspective and to avoid traditional presentations of gender and parenting roles. The teachers try to expose the pupils to as few "gendered expressions" as possible. At Christmastime, the Egalia staff rewrote a traditional song as "hen bakes cakes all day long." When pupils play house, they are encouraged to include "mommy, daddy, child" in their imaginary families, as well as "daddy, daddy, child"; "mommy, mommy, child"; "daddy, daddy, sister, aunty, child"; or any other modern combination.

To those who feel gender equality or gender neutrality ought to be intrinsic to a modern society, it probably makes sense to argue for instilling such values at an early age. The Green Party has even suggested placing "gender pedagogues" in every preschool in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, who can act as watchdogs. But of course toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do.
Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children's interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying." And so every detail of children's interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

Text by Nathalie Rothschild
Posted April 11, 2012
Source www.slate.com

Living Revolution : How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the '1 Percent'

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”


A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbo will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

Text By George Lakey, January 25, 2012
Source : http://wagingnonviolence.org.

Proposal for a Monument ready to Collapse

Proposal for a Monument ready to Collapse (Welfare State) , 2011
Wood, plywood, acrylic
30 cm x 24 x 20 cm

White melancholia, Mourning the loss of "Good old Sweden"

Sweden's post-war image as frontrunner of egalitarianism and antiracism contains more than a trace of national and racial chauvinism, argue two whiteness studies scholars. As myths of the better Sweden fade, both Right and Left are consumed by "white melancholy".

Sweden's 2010 election brought the racist Sweden Democrats into the national parliament for this first time. Post-election discussions and analyses have tended to explain the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament as a reflection of dissatisfaction among certain voter segments, without taking into account any analysis of issues of race and whiteness. At the same time, there has been an eruption of official antiracism among the elites and within the Swedish establishment.

However, a critical analysis of post-election Sweden in terms of race and whiteness has not been heard. Why not? How are we to understand the fact that whiteness and white privileges are maintained in a country ruled by progressive social policies, democratisation projects, gender equality and official antiracism?

We argue that Sweden is currently undergoing a double crisis of Swedish whiteness. "old Sweden", i.e. Sweden as a homogeneous society, and "good Sweden", i.e. Sweden as a progressive society, are both perceived to be threatened by the presence of non-white migrants and their descendants. Both the reactionary and racist camp and the progressive and antiracist camp are mourning the loss of this double-edged Swedish whiteness.

We also argue that our analysis of Swedish whiteness is also applicable to the situations in neighbouring Scandinavian countries, particularly to Norway after the Utøya massacre, which has prompted similar reactions to those in Sweden after the 2010 election.

The foundations of Swedish whiteness
In contemporary Sweden, the idea of being white constitutes the central core and master signifier of Swedishness, and thus of being Swedish. A Swede is a white person and a non-white person is not a Swede. In other words, within the Swedish national imaginary the difference between the genetic concept of race and the cultural concept of ethnicity has collapsed completely: whiteness is Swedishness and Swedishness is whiteness.

The conflation of race and ethnicity and the equivalence of Swedishness with whiteness is not only encountered by non-white migrants and their descendants, but also by adopted and mixed Swedes of colour with South American, African or Asian backgrounds. In spite of being more or less fully embedded within Swedishness on an ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural level, these people experience racializing practices as a result of their "non-Swedish" bodies.[1]

The historical construction of Swedishness can be traced to the pre-eminence of the Swedes, along with the Norwegians and Danes, in the construction of the white race as the elite of homo sapiens. In a scientific discourse hegemonic for almost 200 years, the Swedes and other Scandinavians were considered the most physically and aesthetically perfect people on earth.[2]

The nation's scholars excelled in and contributed substantially to racial science: Carl Linnaeus created the first modern scientific system for race classification in the mid-1700s; Anders Retzius invented the skull or cephalic index – which became the principal method for racial science itself – in the 1850s; and the Swedish government founded the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1922.[3] In the mid 1930s, Sweden also installed one of the most effective sterilization programs ever, a eugenicist project that was both racialized, heteronormative, gendered and classed, and that affected more than 60 000 Swedes before being dissolved in the mid-1970s.[4]

However from the 1960s and 1970s, Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries arguably became the leading (western) voice and (white) supporter of decolonisation and anti-colonial, anti-segregation and anti-apartheid movements. In the process, the world's most radical proponent of social justice and gender equality transformed racism into a non-Swedish issue.

In a feat of national branding, "good Sweden" was promoted as more tolerant and liberal than any other (western) country and (white) people in the world. One result was, for example, that Swedes have adopted proportionally the most children of colour from former colonies than any other western country; or that Swedes have entered into interracial marriages and relationships more frequently than other western nations. Sweden imagined itself as a non-racist and post-racial utopia with no colonial past.

Swedish concepts of whiteness have developed since Sweden became a country of immigration. In everyday life, in the public sphere and in political discourse, people belonging to the 8 per cent of the total population with origins in a non-European, postcolonial or "Third World" country in Asia, Africa or South America are categorized as "immigrants", "foreigners" and "non-Swedes", and often as non-Christian or at least non-Lutheran.

Immigrants from non-western countries began to arrive in Sweden and Scandinavia in small numbers in the 1950s, and then in larger numbers in the second half of the 1970s and particularly the 1980s and onwards, when refugee immigration took over from labour immigration. Not coincidentally, this is also when integration started to be described as a "failed" project. Since the 1990s, non-white and non-Christian immigrants have dominated immigration to Sweden.

When it comes to the discrimination of migrants and their descendants, particularly non-white and non-European groups, Sweden barely differs from any other western country today. Particularly when it comes to housing, Sweden stands out for its highly racialized patterns of residential segregation.

Against this historical background, notions of Swedish whiteness evolved alongside the image of Sweden developed during the Cold War, decolonization and the social revolution of 1968: that of Sweden as paradise on earth and utopia for human rights, democracy, gender equality and antiracism, where race as concept and as category has been rendered irrelevant and obsolete.
The expanding boundaries of whiteness
Whiteness is a pivotal concept for analysing the recent Swedish election. Swedish whiteness includes racists as well as antiracists, and ultimately all Swedes, regardless of political views. Swedish whiteness is similar to the hegemonic whiteness that Matthew Hughey analyses in his interviews with white antiracists and white racists in the US, which reveal, beyond ideological statements, many similarities in terms of white perspectives and privileges.[5]

When it comes to the construction and maintenance of Swedish whiteness, complicity exists on all sides, even that of migrants who believe in the image of Sweden as the most egalitarian and antiracist country in the world. Then there are the numerous non-Swedes who desire and seek (white) Swedes as partners and friends, purely because they are (white) Swedes and therefore the most beautiful and genetically valuable people on earth – according to the Nordic racial myth.

Third World solidarity and antiracism has, in other words, gone hand in hand with white superiority and white homogeneity. It is this dual image of Sweden as an homogenous and white society that the Sweden Democrats mourn the loss of, and their response is to produce hatred towards migrants of colour. Meanwhile, it is the passing of the image of Sweden as an egalitarian and progressive society so dear to white antiracists that has provoked such a strong reaction among the Swedish elites after the election.

Central to this analysis is an understanding of whiteness as a category that constantly expands.[6] The boundaries of whiteness have always been reconstructed to include new members: for example Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans in the US. In the recent Swedish election, the expansion of the boundaries of whiteness blurred class differences, enabling the inclusion of white people from a range of class and cultural backgrounds to congregate around the notion of Swedish whiteness regardless of national origin. David Roediger has called this process "the wages of whiteness", referring to "compensation" of white US workers for their economic subordination with the public and psychological wage of being considered white and therefore "American".[7]

This means that race and racism are not merely the effect of class inequality, something that would necessarily disappear in a classless society. The expansion of the boundaries of whiteness helps explain the class-crossing practices found among the Sweden Democrats' voters, as well as among far-right voters in the other Scandinavian countries. Many Sweden Democrats are migrants or descendants of migrants from white, western, Christian countries, or of non-white mixed and adopted Swedes, who also may identify with being Swedish in order to be able to gain "the wages of whiteness".
Gender equality and whiteness
A central aspect of the construction of "good Sweden" has to do with the generous welfare state and achievements in gender equality. Along with other Scandinavian countries, Sweden has been regarded as exceptionally "woman-friendly" and ranked among the most gender-equal societies in the world. This ideal has been exported to other (Third World) countries through international development aid. However, the institutionalised gender equality discourse carries with it a sense of national identity that is intimately intertwined with whiteness and racial hierarchies, and that excludes migrants as Others.[8]

In order to maintain the supposedly uniquely Swedish construct of gender equality, non-whites are depicted as the "gender non-equal", in conjunction with a discourse of the "oppression of the Other". For Swedish white gender equality to exist, some-body is needed that is not Swedish, gender-equal and white.[9] This might explain why two of Scandinavia's far-rightwing leaders are women, and why the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik was obsessed by gender and sexual issues.

Gender equality, in its ideal form, is represented by the white heterosexual family. In Patricia Hill Collins' analysis, the white family model is a site where notions of first- and second-class citizenship, territory, "home", blood-ties, race, and nation are naturalized.[10] The white heterosexual family ideal is upheld by segregation, discrimination, racialized nationalism and anti-immigration policies. This implies that feminists should remain sceptical towards the Swedish ideal associated with the construction of the gender equal family, since it builds upon and reproduces the social, discursive and geographical relegation of the "Others", often acted out as racialized integration through subordinating practices.
White mourning and melancholia
The normalized and naturalized hierarchies surrounding Swedishness and the double-binding power of Swedish whiteness through the mourning of the loss of "old Sweden" and "good Sweden" may explain the hysterical post-election anger among "progressives" about the "reactionaries'" electoral success. During the election campaign, the Sweden Democrats rallied under the slogan Ge oss Sverige tillbaka ("Give us Sweden back"), a slogan that appealed to both sides. It may also explain why the antiracist movement in Sweden and Scandinavia is so heavily dominated by white Swedes, in contrast to North America and the UK, where the antiracist movement is to a large degree composed of representatives of the minorities themselves. It may also explain why white Swedish feminists who identify with what has been called hegemonic feminism sometimes ally themselves with racist ideologies.[11]

The Sweden Democrats' longing for "old Sweden" is expressed as a wish to return to a time when there were no ethno-racial conflicts and no non-western "patriarchal excesses". For white antiracists, on the other hand, what is under threat is the image of Sweden as an antiracist and feminist country. Ultimately, these self-images are felt to be threatened by the presence of non-western migrants.

The fact of having held the title of the world's most progressive and left-liberal country, combined with Sweden's perception of itself as the most racially homogenous and pure of all white nations, forms a double bind that makes it almost impossible to transform Swedishness into something that will also accept people of colour. When the object of love – i.e. antiracist Sweden and ethnically homogenous Sweden – is besieged or threatened with distnction, there is nothing left but an unspeakable melancholia filled with limitless pain.

The notion of "lost Sweden" also excludes people who did not live in the country during the period being mourned, or people without biological ties to the "founders" of the ethos of solidarity. Thus, directly and indirectly, the image of left-liberal, antiracist and egalitarian Sweden is constructed around the image of a past in which diversity did not exist. In other words, the recent election took place at a time when Sweden is wracked by white mourning and melancholia. Nostalgia for a white past constructed around the welfare state and the longing for a homogenous future in which hybridity has been erased is the common feature of white melancholia, which has also made itself heard in the debate following the Utøya massacre in Norway.

White melancholia, so painful to bear yet unspeakable, is a psychic state, a structure of connection to the nation, common to Swedes as well as to the image of Sweden in the world. It is as much about the humiliating decline of Sweden as frontrunner of egalitarianism, humanitarianism and antiracism as about the mourning of the passing of the Swedish population as the whitest of all white peoples.

Any future attempt to disentangle Swedishness and whiteness will have to be able to deconstruct a Swedishness that bars non-whites and traps white Swedes through the double-edged images of "old Sweden" and "good Sweden". The hope is that a transformative moment will come about that allows the mourning for "old Sweden" and "good Sweden" to project itself towards a more constructive understanding of Swedishness.

However in order to be able to accomplish this transformation, it is necessary to acknowledge the fact that the object of love is irretrievably and irrevocably lost, how painful that may be.


Text by Tobias Hübinette, Catrin Lundström

[1] Tobias Hübinette and Carina Tigervall, "To Be Non-White in a Colour-Blind Society: Conversations with Adoptees and Adoptive Parents in Sweden on Everyday Racism", Journal of Intercultural Studies 30 (2009); Catrin Lundström, "'Concrete Bodies': Young Latina Women Transgressing the Boundaries of Race and Class in White Inner-City Stockholm", Gender, Place and Culture 17 (2010); Lena Sawyer, "Routings: Race, African Diasporas, and Swedish Belonging", Transforming Anthropology 11 (2002).
[2] Maja Hagerman, Det rena landet. Om konsten att uppfinna sina förfäder [The Pure Country. On the Art of Inventing Ancestors] (Stockholm: Prisma, 2006); Katarina Schough, Hyberboré. Föreställningen om Sveriges plats i världen [Hyperbole. The Image of Sweden's Place in the World] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2008).
[3] Gunnar Broberg, Statlig rasforskning. En historik över Rasbiologiska institutet [State-Run Race Science. A History of the Institute for Race Biology] (Stockholm: Natur & kultur, 1995).
[4] Mattias Tydén, Från politik till praktik. De svenska steriliseringslagarna 1935-1975 [From Policy to Practice. The Swedish Sterilization Laws 1935-1975] (Stockholm: Fritzes, 2000).
[5] Matthew W. Hughey, "The (Dis)similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of 'Hegemonic Whiteness'", Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (2010).
[6] France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, "The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the 'Third Wave'", Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2009); Jonathan Warren and France Winddance Twine, "White Americans, the New Minority? Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness", Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997).
[7] David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
[8] Suvi Keskinen, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni, and Diana Mulinari, eds., Complying with Colonialism. Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Paulina de los Reyes and Diana Mulinari, Intersektionalitet. Kritiska reflektioner över (o)jämlikhetens landskap [Intersectionality. Critical Reflections on the Landscape of (In)equality] (Malmö: Liber, 2005).
[9] Sarah Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2004).
[10] Patricia Hill Collins, "It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation", Hypatia 13 (1998).
[11] Mia Liinasson, "Institutionalized Knowledge: Notes on the Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in Gender Studies in Sweden", NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18 (2010); de los Reyes and Mulinari, Intersektionalitet. Kritiska reflektioner över (o)jämlikhetens landskap [Intersectionality. Critical Reflections on the Landscape of (In)equality].

Source:www.eurozine.com

Who Want's a Bologna Sandwich? Pippi Longstocking

Who Want's a Bologna Sandwich? Pippi Longstocking

The Promise of Happiness

There is something promising, something desirable about the Swedish model, especially in times of global economic crisis when the swedish economy seems to stand as unaffected and well rooted as a pine tree in the deep forests. This is of course not entirely true, but the cliché image is striking. The project of modernisation with technology, social engineering and the promise of a better life propelled the emergence of the swedish success story. However, a more nuanced analysis of the Swedish welfare state entails the complex understanding of its achievements and its drawbacks.

In The Promise of Happiness Kostis Velonis engages with the mutual relationship between social welfare and cultural modernity based on the belief that architecture and design will improve society, and that behind formal and aesthetic applications there is a plan for the production of happiness. With equal amount enthusiasm and critical investigation, he embraces the two contradictory interpretations of the welfare state – from one perspective it is understood as a democratic structure which is liberating on the individual level; from another the individual is understood as controlled and repressed by the state. Sometimes adapting the skillful language of the carpenter or the furniture designer and sometimes splurging into the amateur do it yourself-attitude Velonis' sculptural work both salute and satirize the principles of democratic design that combine politics with domesticity.

”Individual and mass... The personal or the general? Quality or quantity? - an insoluble question, because we cannot escape the fact of collectivity, just as little as we can disregard the individual's demand for autonomous life. The contemporary problem is: quantity and quality, mass and individual. It is necessary to solve this problem also in architecture and the crafts.” From the Swedish functionalist manifesto acceptera (1931).

25 November 2011 - 19 February 2012
Opening Friday 25 November at 7-9pm

Kostis Velonis holds a three month residency at Iaspis in Malmö with Signal as the host institution.

Source: www.signalsignal.org

Folkets Hus in Malmo

The People's House (Folkets Hus) in Malmo, 40's-50's
(See also my post "Folkets Hus -Local Labour Centers", 11 Oct.)

Source: famgus.se

Home under Construction (The Project of Happiness)

Home under Construction (The Project of Happiness), 2011
Slide projection, Lindh family collection.

Sports Cottage built with masonite

Sports Cottage biult with masonite, 1946, Sweden.

Outdoor Furniture

In the heart of the expanding "docklands" of Malmo's harbour i had to deal with a remarkable number of public design. Winter 2011.

Swedish exhibition of Modern Homes

..at Malmo 7-28 September, 1939 and illustrated by Anders Beckman, a very active artist of his time. I found this poster from the Annual "Svensk Reklam" publication, P.A Norstedt &Soner, Stockholm, 1939.

En svensk utopist

Nils Herman Quiding wrote a "rational" vision of a Swedish utopia based on the principle of equality and solidarity which in turn would constitute the basis of a society of prosperity. Here is a presentation of his oeuvre by Gustaf Henriksson. En svensk "utopist" : Nils Herman Quiding ("Nils Nilsson, arbetskarl") i belysning af hans egna skrifter bearbetade och i sammandrag populärt framstälda Holmberg, Gustaf Henriksson (författare) Björck & Börjesson och Tiden (Två utgåvor samma år med olika omslag men samma inlaga), 235 s.

"Folkets Hus" - Local Labour Centers

..Known as "Folkets Hus" in Sweden, they have been built by the labour organisations to provide meeting halls. In this publication that i found today, there is the presentation of the local labour center of Kristianstad, 1964.
They vary in size, but the emphasis is at the modernization of the building with the help of co-operative building societies and the welfare state.