“Putting the Body on the Line”: Ghosts, Racialized Activists and Anti-Racist Mobilization in Sweden
In the recently published open access volume “A New Wave of Anti-Racism in Europe? Racialized Minorities at the Centre” edited by Ilke Adam, Jean Beaman & Mariska Jung, Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard contribute a chapter reflecting on the continuities in counter-hegemonic struggles for racial justice in Sweden . They focus on the continuity of different forms of silencing subaltern anti-racist struggles. Mulinari and Neergaard point to the presence of racialized minorities as not belonging to the Swedish nation in three critical events of Swedish anti-racism, and highlight how their presence and anti-racist frames were silenced in media and scholarly research or by mainstream anti-racist organizations in all three instances. They moreover illustrate the important highlighting of powerful forces “the magic”, seemingly beyond rationality, that supported, inspired and protected them in their engagement in the anti-racist struggles. The authors use the concepts of “ghosts”, by Avery Gordon (2008), referring to the ancestors in the anti-racist struggles to illustrate and better understand this form of continuity in anti-racist activism.