Memory and the Cultural Reworking of Crisis: Racisms and the Current Moment of Danger in Sweden,or Wanting it like before

Abstract

Amidst a multitude of mutually compounding economic, political, and social crises, amidst the repeated shattering of everyday taken-for-granteds, amidst the repeated invalidation of meaning-memories, identity crises have come to abound in Sweden. For many Swedes perhaps nothing has become more disruptive of taken-for-granted meanings and identity than either the large-scale presence of non-Europeans and Muslims, or the assortment of racisms that have risen to the surface among extremist Others and—less consciously—themselves. The widespread occurrence of cultural racism runs counter to central images of self and nation held by most Swedes. That variety of racism and its attendant identity destabilization is generally denied and culturally reworked in two principal ways. (1) Through people comforting themselves with the belief that the country's racists are somebody else; through convincing themselves that only the physical violence and fascist symbolics of certain others have racist consequences; through blinding themselves to the fact that those same certain others cannot—by the wildest stretch of the imagination—be linked to the employment discrimination, housing segregation and social apartheid that currently pervades the country. (2) Through projecting upon other locations as well as other groups, through adhering to a certain popular geographical imagination, through regarding racism as typical of a limited number of places associated with hideous events, through—in essence—collectively remembering the recently occurred so as to deny or forget the here and now. In order to demonstrate the internal contradictions and collective self-deceptions of this cultural reworking of racism and identity, in order to reveal how the popular geographical imagination in question resonates with the multiple crises confronting Sweden, in order to capture its complexities and show what it silences and turns invisible, I provide a detailed account and critique of one of its central elements.