Decolonial Sweden exposes the social and political relevance of European colonialism to Sweden and its place in the world. It is a book that points to why and how Sweden is to be included in global decolonial struggles. Sweden is often displayed as an ethnoracially homogenous country without any colonial history: an open and tolerant human rights champion, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and in solidarity with the Global South. For over twenty years, authors Michael McEachrane and Louis Faye have been challenging this account, pointing to Sweden’s involvement in colonial histories and legacies, its racialized nationhood, and embedded colonial structures. This important new book reflects a decolonial turn in research, emphasizing that coloniality is far from over, and that challenging global injustices remains an unfinished and open-ended process. Chapters in the book consider the resistance of the Sámi people to Swedish colonialism, whether Sweden owes the Caribbean reparations for its colonization of Saint Barthélemy and involvement in the transatlantic trade, Sweden’s involvement in a colonial global economy, and how white European identification is embedded in Swedish politics, nation-building, and society. Engaging and insightful, Decolonial Sweden invites readers to reconsider Swedish attitudes toward race, colonialism, and international relations. This book is an essential read for Post- and Decolonial scholars and students of Critical Race Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Africana Studies, International Relations, Global Development, and Political Science, as well as for anyone interested in Sweden’s place in the world.

This book advances critical discussions about what coloniality, decoloniality, and decolonisation mean and imply in the Nordic region. It brings together analysis of complex realities from the perspectives of the Nordic peoples, a region that is often overlooked in current research, and explores the processes of decolonisation that are taking place in this region. The book offers a variety of perspectives that engage with issues such as Islamic feminism and the progressive left; racialisation and agency among Muslim youths; indigenising distance language education for Sami; extractivism and resistance among the Sami; the Nordic international development endeavour through education; Swedish TV reporting on Venezuela; creolizing subjectivities across Roma and non-Roma worlds and hierarchies; and the whitewashing and sanitisation of decoloniality in the Nordic region. As such, this book extends much of the productive dialogue that has recently occurred internationally in decolonial thinking but also in the areas of critical race theory, whiteness studies, and postcolonial studies to concrete and critical problems in the Nordic region. This should make the book of considerable interest to scholars of history of ideas, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, international development studies, legal sociology, and (intercultural) philosophy with an interest in coloniality and decolonial social change.

Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere introduces a new concept to Nordic film studies as well as to other small national, transnational and world cinema traditions. Examining overlooked 'elsewheres', the book presents Nordic cinemas as international, cosmopolitan, diasporic and geographically dispersed, from their beginnings in the early silent period to their present 21st-century dynamics. Exploring both canonical works by directors like Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, as well as a wide range of unknown or overlooked narratives of movement, synthesis and resistance, the book offers a new model of inquiry into a multi-varied Scandinavian cultural lineage, and into small nation and pan-regional world cinemas.

This multidisciplinary volume reflects the shifting experiences and framings of Finnishness and its relation to race and coloniality. The authors centre their investigations on whiteness and unravel the cultural myth of a normative Finnish (white) ethnicity. Rather than presenting a unified definition for whiteness, the book gives space to the different understandings and analyses of its authors. This collection of case-studies illuminates how Indigenous and ethnic minorities have participated in defining notions of Finnishness, how historical and recent processes of migration have challenged the traditional conceptualisations of the nation-state and its population, and how imperial relationships have contributed to a complex set of discourses on Finnish compliance and identity. With an aim to question and problematise what may seem self-evident aspects of Finnish life and Finnishness, expert voices join together to offer (counter) perspectives on how Finnishness is constructed and perceived. Scholars from cultural studies, history, sociology, linguistics, genetics, among others, address four main topics: 1) Imaginations of Finnishness, including perceived physical characteristics of Finnish people; 2) Constructions of whiteness, entailing studies of those who do and do not pass as white; 3) Representations of belonging and exclusion, making up of accounts of perceptions of what it means to be ‘Finnish’; and 4) Imperialism and colonisation, including what might be considered uncomfortable or even surprising accounts of inclusion and exclusion in the Finnish context. This volume takes a first step in opening up a complex set of realities that define Finland’s changing role in the world and as a home to diverse populations.

Contemporary scholarly discourses about decolonising materialities are taking two noticeable trajectories, the first trajectory privileges establishing “connections”, “relationships” and “associations” between human beings and nature. The second trajectory privileges restoration, restitution, reparations for colonial dispossessions, lootings and disinheritance. While the first trajectory presupposes that colonialism was merely about “separation”, “alienation”, and “disconnections” between human beings and nature, the second trajectory stresses the colonialists’ dispossession, disinheritance and privations of Africans. Drawing on contemporary discourses about materialities in relation to semiotics, (non-)representationalism, rhetoric, ecocriticism, territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, translation, animism, science and technology studies, this book teases out the intellectually rutted terrain of African materialities. It argues that in a world of increasing impoverishment, the significance of materialities cannot be overemphasised: more so for the continent of Africa where impoverishment “materialises” in the midst of resource opulence. The book is a pacesetter in no holds barred interrogation of African materialities.

What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. These acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become. (An)Archive will be of particular interest to scholars in a variety of fields, but particularly to artists, educators, historians, social scientists, and others working with memory methodologies that range from collective biography to oral history, (auto)biography, autoethnography, and archives.