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Identity Politics and Construction of 'Minor' Literatures

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Identity Politics and Construction of 'Minor' Literatures multiethnica 21 Identity Politics and Construction of ‘Minor’ Literatures Multicultural Swedish Literature at the Turn of the Millennium SATU GRÖNDAHL The participation of immigrants and minorities in the labour Of interest is also in which way the minority policy market is one example of the challenges when dealing with interacts with immigrants’ and minorities’ attempts to different aspects of the multicultural society.1 While there are preserve and develop their own culture and literature. In studies on cultural pluralism and labour-market policy in Swe- a wider perspective, one can say that the construction of den and the issue is relatively well presented in the media, the these literatures as well as the construction of ‘immigrant’ topics that concern immigrant and minority culture and litera- and ‘minority culture’ is a constituting part of the discourse ture do not normally reach media with a nation-wide coverage. where Sweden, ‘Swedishness’, the national identity and the However, ‘culture’, ‘language’ and ‘ethnicity’ have been more po- national heritage are negotiated. liticised in Sweden during the last decade and the ideas of them are rapidly changing. In this article I will focus on the develop- The multicultural Sweden: Some numbers ment and construction of immigrant and minority literatures in Sweden.2 A starting point is to outline what impact the recent A radical change in Swedish demography occurred after minority policy and the renewed offi cial concept of ‘minority’ World War II when an infl ux of refugees and labour im- has had on identity politics and the politics of representation.3 migrants took place. Immigration, especially from Finland, grew due to the agreement on free Nordic mobility 1954. Even though it is widely argued that multiculturalism – and In the 1960s the largest labour force immigrant movement even multilingualism – are enriching elements in the coun- ever to Sweden started when many Finns began to look for try, the shift from homogeneity to diversity seem to be dif- jobs in their neighbouring country, mainly within industry, fi cult to deal with when creating functioning practices for the healthcare sector and service occupations. The infl ux of pluralism. As de los Reyes, Molina and Mulinari (2003:23– immigrants and asylum seekers has mirrored the world po- 25) have emphasised, the power relations are constructed litical situation, for instance during the 1980s, there were in a changeable, multidimensional process where race/eth- large groups of Kurds and Iranians who came to Sweden nicity, sex/gender and class are constituting and fundamen- due to the Gulf War. tal principles. Wielding of power and subordination are al- An overview of Sweden’s multicultural population of ways embedded in a complex network of structural rela- today can be done in various ways. At the end of 2002, tions, institutional rooms and human actions as well as the 11.8 percent of the total population of Sweden were born intersections between time and space (de los Reyes & Muli- abroad. When using the term ‘foreign background’ when nari 2005:18). The intersectionalistic approach is, in this describing multiculturalism, the picture is more complex. article, used especially when analysing the description of Individuals born abroad as well as those born in Sweden to immigrant and minority literatures. As postcolonial stud- two foreign-born parents will give us the number 15.2 per- ies are today understood as an epistemological approach cent of the total population. If using a concept that includes that refers to power structures and nationalistic practices, foreign-born individuals and those born in Sweden to one rather than studies exclusively concerned with ‘colonised’ foreign-born parent, the number is 21.4 percent. (Camauër or ‘post-colonised’ literatures, postcolonial studies can also 2005:152–153.) One has also to bear in mind that his- offer new conceptualisations of Swedish literature. It has torical minorities (with the exception of Sweden-Finns) been emphasised that even though Sweden was not direct- and third-generation immigrants are not included in any ly involved in the colonisation process, the attempts to de- of these fi gures. The largest immigrant groups in Sweden fi ne and set up borders for ‘Swedishness’ as well as the way today are Iranians (70,000), Bosnians (70,000) and Syrians of perceiving other cultures have to be analysed in rela- (45,000). The estimated number of Kurds varies between tion to this global process (Eriksson, Eriksson Baaz & Thörn 20,000 and 50,000. Sweden-Finns (who are since 1999 1999:17). The policy applied in Nordic countries towards considered a national minority) form the largest minority the indigenous Sami people has, however, several similari- group in Sweden and the estimated number is 450,000. ties with general defi nitions of the colonization processes Of the other national minorities, Samis range from about (cf. Mudimbe 1999:129–130). 15,000 to 20,000 individuals and the estimated number nr 30 (2007) 22 multiethnica of Tornedalians varies between 50,000 and 80,000. While immigrants, is in a way intertwined. The large amount of the Romas are about 20,000,4 the number of Jews is about immigrants and refugees who arrived after World War II 20,000. started defi nitively to question the self-image of Sweden as Since the Swedish government does not register mother a monolingual and ethnically homogenous country. It has tongue it is diffi cult to get exact information about the often been pointed out that the growth of immigrant com- number the speakers of different languages in the coun- munities in fact gave the historical minorities and minority try. This practice of ‘institutional memory loss’ concerning languages in Sweden visibility. The rise of the ethnic move- immigrant and minority languages says a lot about the ten- ments among historical minorities, Sami and Tornedalians, dency to defi ne Sweden as a monolingual country, despite during the 1970s and the 1980s overlaps indeed in terms the fact that it makes it diffi cult to estimate the target of time with the development of newer immigrant cultures groups for home-language instruction, public service in the in Sweden, but it was also infl uenced by the world-wide national minorities’ languages in the municipalities where ethnic movements among indigenous people and other these languages have a legal status etc. minorities which started during the 1960s. Even though Some Swedish politicians have opposed even voluntary there has been literature in the historical languages Sami, registration of mother tongue, as did the Minister for Inte- Finnish and Tornedalian Finnish (today called Meänkieli) gration Jens Orback as late as January 2005 in his state- since the Reformation in Sweden, the amount of this lit- ments in the media. Generally speaking, it often seems erature was quite small before these minorities organised diffi cult both for laymen and for politicians in Sweden to themselves and formulated minority political programmes. tell the difference between language registration and the The situation of historical minorities had also improved registration of ethnic affi liation. While these are often con- after a comprehensive and pronounced immigrant policy fused with each other – as was the case in Orback’s initial was launched during the 1970s. The historical minority lan- statements – it seems to be human and ‘natural’ to oppose guages were, for instance, included in the home-language even the registration of speakers of minority languages. The reform when immigrant children were afforded instruction understanding of ‘language’ and ‘ethnicity’ as equivalent in their mother tongues. categories is based on the intersections between these cate- At the turn of the millennium there are various kinds gories, but it also says something about the increased politi- of regional, national or ethnic literatures or literary subcul- cising of ‘language’ in Sweden and the fact that ‘minority tures in Sweden. While, for instance, Sami literature and language’ often stands for issues connected to discrimina- Tornedalian literature can be characterised by distinctive tion, otherness and ethnicity. These images constitute a na tional or regional features, Kurdish, Persian and Somali part of discourses where minorities, minority politics and literature can be seen as diasporic literatures. Sweden- linguistic rights are treated. Finnish literature has for the most part been analysed and clas sifi ed as an immigrant literature. The classifi cations of these varying literatures are nonetheless bound to identity Situating immigrant and minority literatures politics and politics of representation that primarily locate Founding an immigrant, exile or minority literature is of- literary subcultures in the margin. These literary subcultures ten seen as a part of an ideological or ethno-cultural pro- have often their own thematic and stylistic characteristics gramme. Nevertheless, one has to bear in mind that the def- but most of all, they are in various ways signifi ed by their initions and descriptions are always restricted to a certain ‘other’ languages, the presence of a language other than context. European literary theories emerge from particular the majority language or the use of hybrid varieties of the cultural traditions and the theories of style and genre, epis- majority language. Thus immigrant or minority literatures temologies and value systems can be radically questioned are seldom understood as monolingual and homogeneous within cross-cultural studies (Ashcroft, Griffi ths & Tiffi n literatures, as is the case more often than not for ‘majority’ 1989:11). While the host society or the majority society literatures. tends to defi ne immigrant and minority literatures as sepa- rate literary sub-cultures which, most of all, give expression Multiculturalism and multilingualism in focus to the group’s identity, the majority society at the same time claims that literature written by majority members gives Since the 1970s, the Swedish government has given fi nan- expression to universal values and a universal conception cial support to literature written in immigrant and minority of the world.
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