“I want us to trade skins and experiences”, proposes the bestselling author Jonas Hassen Khemiri to Sweden’s Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask in his open letter. The letter, which challenges the Minister to walk through Stockholm’s...
more“I want us to trade skins and experiences”, proposes the bestselling author Jonas Hassen Khemiri to Sweden’s Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask in his open letter. The letter, which challenges the Minister to walk through Stockholm’s streets in a non-white, non-Swedish, stereotyped body of an “immigrant”, went viral. It was shared 120,000 times on Facebook, reached nearly each Swedish user on Twitter, and was viewed more than 250,000 times on Dagens Nyheter within 24 hours of publication.
This article seeks to explain the letter's particular effect with its complex relation to the concept of Swedish Whiteness. As a performance of immigrant identities Khemiri’s text draws power from the synergy of its socially charged topic, from the iconicity of the writer’s non-white body, and the public discourse on “immigrant literature”. The main claim of the article is to indicate the ways in which perceptions of Swedish whiteness impact the social and cultural fields, and to point out the interaction of the mass media, the “immigrant literature”, and its actors in complex processes of constitution and reproduction of whiteness and non-whiteness. While highlighting the role of the visual appearance, I will analyse mass media ethnicizing representations of Alejandro Leiva Wenger, Johannes Anyuru, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and I will argue that the non-white “immigrant author” serves as a framework for extension of white Swedishness and as a source of attention, power, and authority.