Alejandro Leiva Wenger

“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.

The article analyses constructions of outside positions with examples from the literary writing of Alejandro Leiva Wenger and Johannes Anyuru. The analysis is related both to contemporary urban youth cultures and to modernist poetics which both are preoccupied with the role of the rebel and outsider. Other themes that are discussed are: the persona of the immigrant author/constructions of immigrant authors in reception; Orientalism and Othering in Sweden; race and ethnicity as symbols of resistance.

In this article, I will investigate the short story Elixir in Alejandro Leiva Wenger’s debut collection Till vår ära (In Our Honour, 2001), where a magic drink with transformative effects converts dark-skinned characters with foreign background into racially typical Nordic individuals. Since the story relates to both physical and behavioural changes, the transracial metamorphosis becomes a central trope to discuss and contest racial and social stratification in ways that the Swedish predominant colour-blind and antiracist discourse does not allow. Critical attention will be devoted to the reaction developed by the characters against the transformation. The main argument is that Leiva Wenger resorts to a supernatural event to question asymmetrical relations between immigrants and Swedes, where whiteness is the norm and non-whiteness is deviance. Developing Hübinette’s critical thought concerning race and whiteness in “non-white Swedish literature” (2019), this theoretic analysis of Elixir investigates the intersections between race/whiteness from postcolonial and postmigrant perspectives, in the attempt to figure out what is the allegorical meaning of the elixir and how it relates to a folkhem (people’s home) in crisis. This approach aims to highlight the (im)possibility for the postmigrant subject to locate itself in a Third space of identity.

[Alejandro Leiva Wenger; elixir; whiteness; postmigration; mellanförskap]