With the rise of populist movements of various kinds, racism has become one of the key issues debated in the present. This piece stresses the need to recognise racism as a part of the wider social and cultural contexts that populist movements operate within in Nordic countries and beyond. Populist movements’ claims of not being racist gain legitimacy through discourses of race and difference that are generally not recognised as racist but seen as constituting common-sense knowledge that creates an alternative world where racist claims seem to make sense. The article discusses this through three points of emphasis: everyday racism and racist exceptionalism; the idea of prior immobility; and the continued existence of structural racism. Finally, the discussion focuses on this alternative world from the perspective of debates about migration revolving essentially around future anticipation, which become particularly salient during times of crisis.
GingrichA., ‘Scholarship will suffer while national sentiments are stoked: critical engagement with Brexit; Brexit referendum first reactions from anthropology’, Social Anthropology24, no. 4 (2016), pp. 485−86; S. Virdee and B. McGeever, ‘Racism, crisis, Brexit’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 10 (2018), pp. 1802−19.
2.
LoftsdóttirK.SmithA. L.HipflB., ‘Introduction’, in LoftsdóttirK.SmithA. L.HipflB., eds, Messy Europe: crisis, race and nation-state in postcolonial Europe (EASA Series, New York: Berghahn Books, 2018).
3.
BhambraG. K., ‘Brexit, Trump, and “methodological whiteness”: on the misrecognition of race and class’, The British Journal of Sociology68, no. 1 (2017), pp. S214−32.
4.
KeskinenS.NorocelO. C.JørgensenM. B., ‘The politics and policies of welfare chauvinism under the economic crisis’, Critical Social Policy36, no. 3 (2016), pp. 321−29.
5.
BergmanE., ‘Populism in Iceland: has the Progressive Party turned Populist?’, Stjórnmál og Stjórnsýsla11 (2015), pp. 33−54; K. Loftsdóttir, Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins: creating exotic Iceland, (London: Routledge, 2019a), pp. 136−37.
6.
GullestadM., ‘Invisible fences: egalitarianism, nationalism and racism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (2002), pp. 45–63.
7.
MignoloW. D., ‘Introduction: coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking’, Cultural Studies21, nos. 2–3 (2007), pp. 155−67.
8.
Loftsdóttiret al., ‘Introduction’.
9.
ArzheimerK., ‘Explaining electoral support for the radical right’, The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 143−65.
10.
LentinA.TitleyG., The Crises of Multiculturalism: racism in a neoliberal age (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2011).
11.
HarrisonF. V., ‘Unraveling “race” for the twenty-first century’, in MacClancyJ., ed., Exotic No More: anthropology on the front lines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 145–66.
12.
For example, GarnerS., ‘Fairness and entitlement in neoliberal England, 2005–2015’ and S. Cannedy, ‘Debating refugee deservingness in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’, in Loftsdóttiret al., Messy Europe.
13.
LoftsdóttirK., ‘Crisis, migration, and the cancellation of anticipated futures’, in BryantR.KnightD. M., eds, Orientations to the Future (American Ethnologist website, 2019b).
14.
TaşH., ‘The chronopolitics of national populism’, Identities (2020), DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2020.1735160, p 2.
15.
Taş, ‘The chronopolitics of national populism’, p. 5.
16.
KleinA., ‘Slipping racism into the mainstream: a theory of information laundering’, Communication Theory22, no. 4 (2012), p. 431.
17.
Klein, ‘Slipping racism into the mainstream’.
18.
EkmanM., ‘Anti-refugee mobilization in social media: the case of Soldiers of Odin’, Social Media + Society4, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1−11.
19.
HervikP., ‘Out-trumping economic consequences in populist voting’, Economic Anthropology5 (2018), pp. 144–47.
20.
KeskinenS., ‘The “crisis” of white hegemony, neonationalist femininities and antiracist feminism’, Women’s Studies International Forum68 (2018), pp. 157−63; O. C. Norocel, ‘“Give us back Sweden!” A feminist reading of the (re)interpretations of the folkhem conceptual metaphor in Swedish radical right populist discourse’, NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 21, no. 1 (2013), pp. 4−20.
21.
HoK., ‘Markets, myths, and misrecognitions: economic populism in the age of financialization and hyperinequality’, Economic Anthropology5 (2018), pp. 148–50.
22.
NowickaM., ‘“I don’t mean to sound racist but. . .”: transforming racism in transnational Europe’, Ethnic and Racial Studies41, no. 5 (2017).
23.
LoftsdóttirK., Crisis and coloniality at Europe’s margins: creating exotic Iceland (London: Routledge, 2019a).
24.
LentinA., ‘Post-race, post politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies37, no. 8 (2014), pp. 1268–85.
25.
JensenL., ‘Postcolonial Denmark: beyond the rot of colonialism’, Postcolonial Studies18, no. 4 (2015), pp. 440–52; H. Weiss, ‘The Danish Gold Coast as a multinational and entangled space c. 1700–1850’, in M. Naum and J. M. Nordin, eds, Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: small time agents in a global arena (New York: Springer, 2013).
26.
EyþórsdóttirE.LoftsdóttirK., ‘Vikings in Brazil: the Iceland Brazil Association shaping Icelandic heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies22, no. 7 (2016), pp. 543−53; A. Brydon, ‘Dreams and claims: Icelandic-Aboriginal interactions in the Manitoba Interlake’, Journal of Canadian Studies 36, no. 2 (2001), pp. 164−90.
27.
EidsvikE., ‘Colonial discourse and ambivalence: Norwegian participants on the colonial arena of South Africa’, in LoftsdóttirK.JensenL., eds, Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: exceptionalism, migrant others, and national identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 13−28.
28.
PurtschertP., ‘The return of the native: racialised space, colonial debris and the human zoo’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power22 (2015), pp. 508−23.
29.
WekkerG., White Innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
GarnerS., Racism: an introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010), p. 19.
34.
See also Pitcher, Consuming Race.
35.
LundströmC., White Migrations: gender, whiteness and privilege in transnational migration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); L. McIntosh, ‘Impossible presence: race, nation and the cultural politics of “being Norwegian”’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 2 (2015), pp. 309–25; K. Loftsdóttir, ‘The exotic North: gender, nation branding and post-colonialism in Iceland’, NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 23, no. 4 (2015), pp. 246−60.
36.
Pitcher, Consuming Race; T. Hübinette and C. Lundström, ‘Sweden after the recent election: the double-binding power of Swedish whiteness through the mourning of the loss of “old Sweden” and the passing of “good Sweden”’, NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research19, no. 1 (2011), pp. 42−52.
37.
Loftsdóttir, Crisis and Coloniality at Europe’s Margins.
38.
Loftsdóttir, ‘The exotic north’.
39.
RastasA., ‘Racializing categorization among young people in Finland’, Young13, no. 2 (2005), pp. 147−66.
40.
LoftsdóttirK.MörtudóttirS., ‘“Where are you from?” Racism and the normalization of whiteness in Iceland’, under review.
41.
Norocel, ‘“Give us back Sweden!”’.
42.
KeskinenS.et al., eds, Complying with Colonialism: gender, race and ethnicity in the Nordic region (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); K. Loftsdóttir and L. Jensen, eds, Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: exeptionalism, migrant others and national identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
43.
KnightK. M.StewartC., ‘Ethnographies of austerity: temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe’, History and Anthropology27, no. 1 (2016), pp. 1−18.
44.
Taş, ‘The chronopolitics of national populism’.
45.
FoxJ. E.et al. ‘The racialization of the new European migration to the UK’, Sociology46, no. 4 (2012), pp. 680–95; S. Garner, ‘The European Union and the racialization of immigration, 1985–2006’, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 1, no. 1 (2007), pp. 61–87.
46.
Foxet al., ‘The racialization of the new European migration to the UK’, p. 684.
47.
Foxet al. ‘The racialization of the new European migration to the UK’, p. 684.
The Dublin agreement makes those countries within the European Union that asylum seekers first enter responsible for processing their asylum applications. For a country like Iceland, this means that a great number of applications and applicants can be sent away to countries such as Italy where many of those coming from different African countries enter first. See, for example, BrekkeJ. P.BrochmannG., ‘Stuck in transit: secondary migration of asylum seekers in Europe, national differences, and the Dublin Regulation’, Journal of Refugee Studies28, no. 2 (2015), pp. 145−62.
50.
ChaudhuriS., ‘Unpeople: postcolonial reflections on terror, torture and detention in Children Of Men’, in PonzanesiS.WallerM., eds, Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 192.
51.
HageG., ‘État de siege: a dying domisticating colonialism?’, American Ethnologist41, no. 1 (2016), pp. 38−49.
52.
FeketeL., ‘Migrants, borders and the criminalisation of solidarity in the EU’, Race & Class59, no. 4 (2018), pp. 65−83.
53.
StollerP., ‘Resisting the alternate realities of global populism’, Economic Anthropology5 (2018), pp. 138–40.
54.
Stoller, ‘Resisting the alternate realities of global populism’.
55.
PyrhönenN.BauvoisG., ‘Conspiracies beyond fake news: producing reinformation on presidential elections in the transnational hybrid media system’, Sociological Inquiry (2019).
56.
Taş, ‘The chronopolitics of national populism’, p. 5; K. Loftsdóttir, ‘Crisis, migration, and the cancellation of anticipated futures’, in R. Bryant and D. M. Knight, eds, Orientations to the Future (American Ethnologist website, 2019b).
57.
Loftsdóttiret al., ‘Introduction’.
58.
Loftsdóttiret al., ‘Introduction’, p. 22; K. Loftsdóttir, ‘Building on Iceland’s “good reputation”: Icesave, crisis and affective national identities’, Ethnos 81, no. 2 (2016), pp. 338−63.
59.
KlugeH. H. P.JakabZ.BartovicJ.D’AnnaV.SeveroniS., ‘Refugee and migrant health in the COVID-19 response’, The Lancet395, no. 10232 (2020), pp. 1237−39.
60.
Bhambra, ‘Brexit, Trump, and “methodological whiteness”’.
61.
Bhambra, ‘Brexit, Trump, and “methodological whiteness”’.
62.
Norocel, ‘“Give us back Sweden!”’; S. Keskinen, U. D. Skaptadóttir and M. Toivanen, ‘Narrations of homogeneity, waning welfare states, and the politics of solidarity’, Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region: migration, difference and the politics of solidarity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 1−18.
63.
Stoller, ‘Resisting the alternate realities of global populism’.
64.
WolfE. R., Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 4.
65.
Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, p. 7.
66.
FadilN., ‘Not-/unveiling as an ethical practice’, Feminist Review98, no. 1 (2011), pp. 86−87.
