Liina-Ly Roos

The Not-Quite Child: Rethinking Whiteness and Colonial Histories in Sweden through Images of Childhood

The figure of the child has had a significant role in both the self-image and international reputation of Sweden throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Not-Quite Child analyzes contemporary cultural texts that foreground the Indigenous Sámi, Tornedalian, and Finnish-speaking children in the twentieth-century Swedish welfare state who deviate from and challenge the normative idea of the Swedish childhood. These three groups of people have all at some point been or continue to be colonized and/or racialized in Sweden (and have since 2000 officially been recognized as national minorities). The films and novels studied in this book suggest, however, that this colonial history as well as racialization has throughout the twentieth century been relatively invisible in the dominant culture. The twenty-first century has seen an increase in fictional and other texts that seek to articulate this history. The Not-Quite Child argues that constructing a child figure who is either expected or desires to become Nordic/Swedish/white as they grow up provides these cultural texts an avenue to explore how becoming relates to passing, assimilating, and erasure of cultures among people who are both minoritized and have a privilege to pass and share a long cultural history with/and within the dominant culture. This book theorizes the figure of the not-quite child that functions as a way for these cultural texts to imagine possible or impossible alternatives to growing up (and becoming) on a normative trajectory. It explains the paradox where the ideal Swedish childhood, imagined and performed through figures like Pippi Longstocking or Greta Thunberg, expects children to go against conventions that are oppressive, because children are autonomous, competent, and moral; and looks at how the texts about minority experiences navigate going against norms when that has also become a privileged movement.

Liina-Ly Roos is an Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in Nordic and Baltic film, television, literary and cultural studies, with a specific focus on migration, race and ethnicity, sexual politics, postcolonial, and childhood studies.  Her current book project (forthcoming with The University of Washington Press), The Not-Quite Child: Rethinking Whiteness and Colonial Histories in Sweden through Images of Childhood examines twenty-first century cultural texts that incorporate a child figure who disrupts and rethinks the idealized and normative idea of Swedish childhood, in order to rethink colonial histories and racial hierarchies in Sweden. She has published articles in Journal of Scandinavian Studies, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Journal of Baltic Studies, Methis: Studia humaniora estonica, and Baltic Screen Media Review.