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Imagining Themselves: National Belongings in Post-Ethnic Nordic Literature.

This work examines Swedish literature published during the 2000s in the context of larger debates about individual and collective belonging in Scandinavia. In each of three chapters, I describe a broad thematic domain in which I situate and compare works of poetry, prose and plays by authors such as Jonas Khemiri, Alejandro Wenger, Johannes Anyuru and Marjaneh Bakhtiari. In the first chapter, I examine the domain of Homogeneity/ Heterogeneity, describing a transition from monolithic to multiple, overlapping belongings. The second chapter concerns the domain of Transparency/ Opacity, and the legibility or opaqueness of bodies, language and clothing as markers of identity. The third and final domain, Center/Periphery, contains articulations of the public sphere at two different extremes of Swedish geography: the historic center city and the post-war suburbs. In my conclusion, I summarize how these literary works have both reflected and refracted discussions of national belonging in a time of global migration and increased cultural diversity in Northern Europe.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CHENGCHI/U0003452758
CreatorsLeonard, Peter S.
PublisherUniversity of Washington.
Source SetsNational Chengchi University Libraries
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
RightsCopyright © nccu library on behalf of the copyright holders

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