No description available.

This essay focuses on the reception of Yahya Hassan’s debut YAHYA HASSAN in Swedish media, mainly daily newspapers. Following the work of Magnus Nilsson it analyzes the “reading strategy of the politics of identity” in “immigrant literature” and outlines structural racism in the literary scene. By bringing attention to the critics’ use of this reading strategy, it is possible to unveil the “ethnic filter” through which literature by Swedish authors with a “non-Swedish identity” is being read in contemporary Swedish literary criticism. The concept of “immigrant literature” is discussed as a discourse, rather than as an empirical category. This essay aims to show how the Swedish critics read YAHYA HASSAN through the ethnic filter as a work of “immigrant literature”. The Swedish critics read the collection of poems as a political statement, and had difficulties defining Hassans work as poetry. Rather, it was read as an autobiographical novel in a working class tradition. There had been a long discussion in Swedish literary criticism about the autofictional genre, including a moral debate about the line between fact and fiction in autobiographical works. However, this was left almost unmentioned and Hassans poems were read as true and authentic depictions, something that the author himself contributed to in various ways. The essay also outlines the debate in Swedish media where critics discussed the author’s responsibility as an immigrant, a debate where many critics articulated a fear that the experiences depicted in Hassan’s poems could further inspire an already growing racist movement.

This study examines how cultural journalists in Sweden represented the Danish poet Yahya Hassan from when his first collection of poems was published until the year before his death. In 2013 the Danish-Palestinian poet published his first collection of poems which sold over 100 000 copies, which makes him the most sold debutant in Denmark. In conjunction with the debut a debate occurred in both Denmark and Sweden surrounding the poet and his work. Critical voices in Sweden said the poet contributed to a hostile discourse regarding the muslim community while others tributed the poet and his works arguing the literary artefact was of extaordinary excellence. Previous research about cultural journalism suggests the cultural pages contributes to the political discourse in society and that it is an undervalued form of journalism which needs further investigation to clearly untangle the impact cultural journalism possesses. This study uses qualitative content analysis and the studied material contains 18 articles published in the cultural section of four of Sweden's largest newspapers; Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. The purpose of this study was to analyze how cultural journalists represented, and possibly stereotyped, Yahya Hassan. The study also aimed to disentangle the infected debate of work and person, which has arised in the later years, using Yahya Hassan as subject. This was achieved with the theoretical basis of representation theory, stereotyping, mythologising, and Roland Barthes and Michel Foucalts reasoning regarding work and person. The results show that cultural journalists in Sweden represented Yahya Hassan based on three main themes: savage vs talent, the critics' relationship with the literary artifact and the literary artifact is the person. The journalists did not separate the person from the work, these were rather intertwined with each other. The journalists stereotyped the poet as an ‘immigrant from a criminal suburban area’ and also mythologised the poet. The articles where the literary artifact was in somewhat main focus the tone was overall more positive, while in the articles where the person Yahya Hassan was the main focus the tone was more negative.