Unashamed Citizenship: Activist Voices in Scandinavia

The Scandinavian countries have a reputation of being happy, egalitarian, and progressive. They have topped the United Nations’ world-happiness rankings since they were first compiled and published in 2012¹; they are among the most gender equal countries in the world²; they are also among the most democratic nations in the world.³ Measures of well-functioning democracies include politically engaged citizens who vote and “play fair” as well as “an emphasis on preserving civil liberties and personal freedoms of both the majority and minorities” (ibid.) However, despite the countries’ good reputation and high international rankings, minoritized people in Scandinavia continually have to fight against racism⁴ as well as gender-based prejudice. An article on institutional racism in the Nordic countries in the Harvard Political Review recently maintained that the Nordic countries are the happiest and the most racist in the EU, with Finland in particular scoring high on discrimination based on “ethnic or immigrant background” (Kataja, 2020).⁵ The illusion of Nordic exceptionalism must be broken, and “those who do not have to experience racism themselves must try to consider how others experience it,” Finnish politician Vesa Puuronen urges.⁶

There are various ways of communicating the experience of racism, oppression, exclusion, and minoritization. This Special Issue on Unashamed Citizenship: Activist Voices in Scandinavia explores contemporary Scandinavian feminists raising their voices against racism as they experience harassment and exclusion due to immigrant or indigenous Sámi backgrounds. These are counter-narratives and alternative scripts negating the official story of the countries being just, democratic, and non-racist.⁷ They seek to change both majority and minority opinion, attitudes, and behaviour, whether they be written from the position of diaspora groups such as the Norwegian Pakistanis or by and about indigenous groups such as the Sámi. The material in focus in this special issue is first and foremost literature considered in various ways as literary activism. This literature constitutes a particularly salient form of communication, allowing for in-depth reflection and emotional involvement on the part of the author as well as the reader, with genres ranging from non-fictional autobiographies, testimonials, memoirs and essays, to fictionalized forms such as the novel. The texts can furthermore be more or less poetic, including conceptual poetry.

While expressing the voice of an individual author at a particular time and place, they always function in a greater context of collective voices, from a contemporary, historic, intermedial, and transmedial point of view. In terms of history, they build on previous texts, often through intertextual quotations used directly in the texts or paratextually in titles, epigraphs, epilogs, etc. They can also link to previous texts through direct mention of inspirational works or, conversely, through critical reflection on formative readings (see articles by Malmio and Vold). Or they can reflect on earlier reading through remedialization of texts, communicating, and leading to, new framings of these texts and the people and events they depict (see articles by Allouche and Malmio). Intertextual relations illustrate how the individual relies on previous discourses and storytelling to understand and recount her own life story. At the same time, the ambition of joining a choir of voices is to add a new voice that may not just strengthen a claim, but also further nuance it. This often occurs in an intersectional manner, as in the case of the Sámi fighting against Scandinavian majority populations for recognition and rights as an indigenous group while also battling internal gender discrimination and homophobia (see articles by Bakken, Bjerknes, and Brovold). Younger feminist activists, especially, tend to use several media, not least internet-based media, which has notably become one of the characteristics of what some refer to as fourth-wave feminism (Munro, 2013). They may also tell their stories through several media, such as film and literature (see article by Dancus). Hence, literary activism has to be regarded within a greater media landscape (see article by Locke).

Unashamed Citizenship

In her seminal work Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance from 2016, political scientist and feminist Jill Locke depicts two major media of communication that serve democratizing processes. One is the personal confession that “shamelessly” exposes the authentic human being; the other is the demonstration that requires that many people unite in a battle for a common cause or for the recognition of a particular group of people. The personal account allows for the understanding of another human being but renders the individual vulnerable. Yet, as Locke points out, there is a direct relationship between the exposure of personal vulnerabilities and community building for a democratizing cause: “A life without the vulnerabilities that develop through negative emotions would be bereft of human connection. These vulnerabilities animate friendships, commitments, and politics and ought not to be ignored or willed away” (Locke, 2016, 39).

Democracy and the Death of Shame illustrates how shame, activism, and democracy have interacted over several millennia, from Socrates to the time of desegregation in the US in the 1950s. Whether the “shameless” individual exposes him- or herself publicly by masturbating and urinating in the agora, like Diogenes the Cynic (49), or by writing memoirs such as Rousseau’s Confessions from 1782 (76), Locke defines “unashamed citizenship” in the following manner:

Unashamed citizenship is the work of courageous and unapologetic people who may or may not have the status of formal citizen. The unashamed citizens interrogate and denaturalize the terms of shame and shaming, dethrone the arbiters of what counts as officially political, claim space for themselves in the world by whatever means available, and fight for a reconstituted social order that gives real meaning to democratic commitments. (12)

Hence, Locke delineates a direct relationship between feelings of shame, “shameless” behaviour and democratizing activism, which can also be regarded in terms of pride. Previously shamed people stand up for who they are and in doing so potentially change the perspective on shame among their past and present oppressors, who are usually regarded as the majority. In our particular case in which we focus on the intersection between feminism and racism, this furthermore pertains to members of the activist’s own diaspora or indigenous culture. Analysis of “unashamed citizens” thus involves close examination of the communicative acts of activists as well as their reception in terms of criticism, remedialization, and ability to touch, inspire, and affect social and political change.

Literary Activism in Scandinavia

As Locke has noted,⁸ her work immediately struck a chord in Scandinavia where it has figured prominently in teaching and research on literature, affect, and democratizing processes, including the research project behind this special issue: “Unashamed Citizenship. Minority Literary Voices in Scandinavia.”⁹ One reason it resonates so well with the development of Scandinavian, and especially Norwegian, literature around the time of its publication in 2016, is the emergence of anti-racist activist literature advocating for the recognition of Scandinavians with immigrant backgrounds, revolving precisely around notions of shame and shamelessness.

In Norway, a salient case of contemporary Scandinavian literary feminist activism is that of the so-called “Shameless Muslim/Arabic girls,” consisting of Amina Bile, Sofia Srour and Nancy Herz who are Norwegians with Somali and Lebanese backgrounds. For these young women, the experience of social control through shaming has been the main impetus behind their feminist activism. Bravely, they defy both the shaming that they are normally exposed to because of their hybrid status, and the shaming that arises from the political battle that renders them vulnerable as they call attention to themselves in public. Their movement gained momentum in 2016 through national media debates, which resulted in the publication Skamløs (Shameless) in 2017, an illustrated collection of non-fiction texts aimed at young adults.

What makes Skamløs a pregnant example of feminist activism in Scandinavia today is not only the way it thematizes and discusses shame, racism, islamophobia, and intersectional feminism, but also the way it balances its presentations of individual and collective experiences, stressing that while young Muslim women share many experiences, they are also different. In addition, it is a multimodal text, communicating visually as well as verbally, relating more clearly to the textual logic of social media than a purely verbal text. Subsequently, the “shameless Muslim/Arabic girls” have launched their activism across several media, including opinion pieces in national newspapers, social media, and a TV-series.

In 2018, the Norwegian publisher Samlaget launched the series “Norsk røyndom” (Norwegian Reality) with Norwegian women writing from similar minority positions in a pamphlet format of 50–80 pages. The initial publications consisted of Sumaya Jirde Ali’s Ikkje ver redd sånne som meg (Don’t be afraid of people like me), Kristin Fridtun’s Homoflokar (Homo tangles), and Camara Lundestad Joof’s Eg snakkar om det heile tida (I talk about it all the time). Each author stands forth as an individual sharing her story (about islamophobia, queerness, and racism); yet at the same time the serial format underscores that this is a collective project and part of a greater political movement, voicing the viewpoints of minoritized Norwegian women, opposing those of white, ethnocentric, heteronormative majority Norwegians. Eventually, the series has also included male authors writing from minoritized positions. The anti-racist texts in particular have attained a significant readership, not least during and after the Black Lives Matter protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Joof’s book, for instance, is now in its seventh printing and in the process of being translated into English for publication in the US. Ali’s has also been printed in several runs with a new printing planned in 2023.¹⁰

In Denmark and Sweden similar examples of literary activism include Lone Aburas’ Det er et jeg der taler (Regnskabets time) (It is an I who speaks [The hour of reckoning]) from 2017 and Athena Farrokhzad’s Vitsvit from 2013 (White Blight, 2016). Published as “agitprop” (agitation propaganda), Aburas’ book is comparable to Joof’s in style, intensity, and topic. In collaboration with illustrator Mo Maja Moesgaard, Aburas launches a rant against those who since her childhood have alienated and minoritized her, and especially her father, due to his Egyptian background and darker skin colour. She writes ironically and humorously, communicating a sense of being overwhelmed and worn out by the magnitude of racism and oppression, and the effort required to stand up against it. Farrokhzad’s style, on the other hand, is minimalistic and is often analysed as an example of political poetry. Capturing the voices of her family members, she gives her reader a sense of cross-generational experiences, attitudes, and ideologies shaping her (and her brother) as they grow up as Iranian immigrants in Sweden. Athena Farrokhzad’s work appears to have received the greatest amount of attention across Scandinavian academia and has been the topic of several articles and dissertations (e.g. Andersen, 2016; Iversen, 2018; Skiveren, 2016; Stenbeck, 2017). It has also been staged as a play.

Migration and Politics in Scandinavia

Scandinavian anti-racist counternarratives and counter-scripts, such as that of Athena Farrokhzad, tend to emerge first in Sweden due to the country’s history of immigration. In the Nordic countries, the largest number of immigrants go to Sweden (Statistics Norway, 2022). In fact, Sweden has more newcomers per capita than any other European country (Einhorn et al., 2022, 3). Compared to other Western European nations (such as major colonial powers like France and Britain), the Scandinavian countries experienced relatively little migration from other countries until the 1960s. After waves of labour migration in the 1970s, the 1980s saw an increase of refugees and asylum seekers from countries such as Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Chile, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam (Eriksen, 2019). Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had similar immigration policies and histories until the 1990s. Since 1995, however, immigration has been one of the policy areas where the countries have differed the most, with Denmark being among the most restrictive countries in Western Europe, Sweden the most liberal, and Norway somewhere in-between, now leaning more towards the Danish than the Swedish model (Simonsen, 2019). Differences between the Scandinavian countries are attributed, among other things, to conceptions of national identity (individual choice vs. historical determination) and party competition dynamics (ibid.). In the 2000s, immigrants have tended to arrive from war-torn Muslim countries. According to a recent study, “Middle Eastern and Northern African refugees are challenging Europeans in an entirely different way compared to migrants in earlier periods,” as they are “traumatized individuals wanting to escape war” (Besier & Stoklosa, 2018, p. xix). Such immigrants often want to preserve their own cultural and religious values, which can make integration more difficult (ibid.). Contemporary literature written by young (descendants of) immigrants shows that this becomes a feminist issue. At the same time, the populist far-right wants to align Scandinavia as closely as possible to a narrow, ethnically and culturally homogenous image by limiting immigration, and during the last decade, the Danish People’s Party, Norway’s Progress Party, and the Sweden Democrats have risen to political prominence based on their anti-immigration nationalism. The same goes for The Finns’ Party (a.k.a. the True Finns) in Finland. On a more directly life-threatening level, Scandinavia has witnessed extreme right-wing terrorism, most forcefully the 2011 attacks in Norway in which 77 people were killed. Islamophobia has further increased as a reaction against Scandinavian foreign fighters and so-called brides of The Islamic State. At the same time, Scandinavians have traditionally prided themselves on “Nordic exceptionalism,” as referred to by Vesa Puuronen above, a humanitarian ideal pertaining to social democratic egalitarianism, as well as generous development aid policies and “benign” forms of international intervention, past and present (Jensen & Loftsdóttir, 2016). This ideal encompasses tolerance towards other people and cultures and is not compatible with racism, islamophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression of minoritized groups.

The Sámi and Politics in the Nordic Countries

Indigenous groups are clearly becoming more visible and gaining a stronger activist voice, in part because of the intersecting interests of indigenous peoples and environmentalists. A recent example of this was Greta Thunberg’s arrival in Norway in March 2023 where she joined indigenous and environmental protestors against wind farms built on Sámi reindeer grazing grounds. It is important to consider indigenous perspectives both because national minorities and indigenous people have been underrepresented in research studies on contemporary ethnic discrimination (which tend to focus on immigrants) (Gjerstad, 2015), and because national minorities and indigenous groups complicate elementary us-them conceptions and allow for a more nuanced perspective on Scandinavian national identities. Within the literary field, as well as the cultural field at large, we find a new generation of Sámi and Greenlanders dealing with the stigma of their cultural heritage through various media and genres, including literary activism in the shape of autobiographical genres, such as testimonials, memoirs, and debate books, as well as fictionalized stories, as they embrace traditional Sámi and Greenlandic identity markers in new, urban ways (Gaup, 2006; Thisted & Gremaud, 2020).

This Special Issue is a result of the research group “Unashamed Citizenship: Minority Literary Voices in Contemporary Scandinavia,” centred at the University of Oslo, having arranged a workshop with the aim of exploring the topic of literary activism from a cross-disciplinary perspective including primarily literary and social studies, but also turning to film studies, and educational studies. From the onset, three concepts guided our inquiry, namely gender, generation, and genre. How does women’s feminist and antiracist literary activism relate and compare to literary male activism among racialized and minoritized men? (see articles by Allouche, Bakken, and Vold) How is it inflected by LGBT+ positions? (see Bjerknes’s article) How do current generations relate to, and position themselves, vis-à-vis earlier generations on an individual and/or collective level? (see articles by Allouche, Bakken, Dancus, Malmio, and Vold) To what extent do contemporary activists present themselves as part of a network transcending generational and geographical barriers? (see articles by Brovold, Locke, and Vold). Overall, our exploration pertains to minoritized groups within Scandinavia claiming recognition and social citizenship. It is the first in a series of three publications, with the planned second publication focusing on literary activism as world literature, and the planned third publication focusing on literary activist texts used in the Norwegian educational system. We invited Jill Locke to join us as she was working on her new project: School Girls: Heroism and Innocence from Little Rock to the Climate Strike.

Presentation of Articles

In “Beyond Heroes and Hostility: Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and the Transnational Politics of Girl Power,” Jill Locke focuses on Scandinavia’s most renowned girl activist, Greta Thunberg. Building on her analysis of “the rise of political children” in Democracy and the Death of Shame, she examines the reception of Greta in order to show not only how the media tends to present her as a lonely, vulnerable, single, heroic individual rather than a as a member of a world-wide network of female climate activists, but also how they favour her as a front-figure over Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate based on her European origins and whiteness. Locke then turns to Nakate’s memoir A Bigger Picture in order to discuss Nakate’s own insights into the ways in which her climate struggle intersects with other struggles against oppression. The article is written at the intersections of feminist theory, democratic theory, and girlhood studies and seeks to deepen understanding of the youth climate struggle while also developing the field of political theory away from the fetishization of individuals.

In “From Polarizing to Shared Shame: Multicultural Daughters, Pakistani Mothers, and Norwegian Child Welfare Services in What Will People Say,” Adriana Margareta Dancus explores cinematographic shaming in the feature film What Will People Say (2017) by the Norwegian-Pakistani director Iram Haq. The film is about a young woman growing up in Norway with her parents closely tied to the Pakistani diaspora. When she gets a Norwegian boyfriend her father fights to maintain the family honour by forcefully sending her to Pakistan. Dancus notes that in the reception of the film, audiences tend to single out the mother as the shameful figure, a monstrous mother. Dancus’ point, however, is that the film demonstrates Norwegian institutional failure as the Child Welfare Services helplessly seek to intervene. Focusing on the child welfare services scene and the father’s final gaze directed at the audience as the screen turns black, Dancus sees the film as involving the audience in the nation’s failure in becoming a multicultural society. Herein lies the film’s transformative potential, a lesson that is particularly important to bring out as the film is often used in Norwegian schools to teach students about multicultural society. Hence, the film must be read as seeking to transform not only Pakistani honour culture, but also Norwegian society, in order to protect the rights of young Pakistani women.

Like Dancus, Lea Allouche focuses on the limited agency of a Scandinavian woman of immigrant background in “An Evasive Aesthetics: Appropriation, Witnessing and War in Shadi Angelina Bazeghi’s Flowmatic (2020).” Danish-Iranian Bazeghi’s long poem Flowmatic shows how the poet anticipates a reductive reading of her work based on her status as an immigrant poet in Denmark. In addition, she seeks to transcend gender-based generic boundaries preventing her from expressing her sense of engagement in the Iran-Iraq War. Hence, her poem can be considered performative and activist in terms of both antiracism and feminism. Allouche focuses on Bazeghi’s appropriation of an Iranian soldier-engineer’s witness account published in The Guardian, arguing that the poet ends up writing what can be considered conceptual witness poetry (Moberley Luger). It furthermore constitutes an example of woman’s war poetry, in which the experience of war is feminized, especially through olfactory sensoria. Ideally, Flowmatic allows Bazeghi to occupy space within the Danish literary institution—on par with majoritized Danish poets—and to occupy space within masculinized genres related to the experience and witnessing of war.

Kristina Malmio also focuses on a book of conceptual poetry relating to, reflecting on, and appropriating newspaper discourse in “‘Women Became Free!’ Activism, Feminism, Race, and Political Poetry of the Second Degree in Henrika Ringbom’s Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974 (Events from Nya Pressen [New Press] 1968–1974).” Ringbom’s collection of political prose poetry is from 2009 and depicts a mature woman revisiting and re-evaluating the leftist newspapers she read as a girl in the 1960s and 70s. Using Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström’s categorization of Swedish hegemonic whiteness into three historical periods of “white purity,” “white solidarity,” and “white nostalgia,” Malmio shows how Ringbom’s poetry is antiracist and feminist as the post-1968 period of white solidarity is questioned. Ringbom, she shows, rewrites history on an individual and collective level in a gesture of criticism rather than nostalgia. In addition, Ringbom writes this from the position of a linguistic minority in Finland which is nevertheless majoritized as white, with the main political purpose of involving her readers and making them acknowledge their complicity in Western colonialist attitudes and convictions.

Tonje Vold’s “Companion Texts and Spaces of Encounter: Reading experiences in Shazia Majid, Ivo de Figueiredo and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s life writing” similarly highlights contemporary autobiographical works written by minoritized Norwegians who were formed, and continue to be formed, by earlier readings. Rather than newspaper reading, Vold analyzes how Shazia Majid, Ivo de Figueiredo, and Yohan Shanmugaratnam use literature, especially novels, to understand their hybrid identities and, furthermore, build political communities by carefully selecting books for citation (Sara Ahmed). Majid clearly uses literary references from Norwegian and world literary canons to strengthen both national, diasporic, and feminist identities. De Figueiredo demonstrates how, through the reading of imperialist literature, his perspective on his own Goan roots start out racist and colonialist, but eventually he adapts a more postcolonial framework enabling him to identify as Goan. Shanmugaratnam, in turn, sees himself as a member of an unofficial book-club for bastards and uses these experiences to understand himself. All three authors furthermore invite their readers into their literary spaces of encounter hoping to gain recognition (Rita Felski) and inspire action (Sara Ahmed).

Building on Jill Locke’s notion of “unashamed citizenship,” Jonas Bakken compares two Sámi political debate books written half a century apart in “Rhetorical Strategies of Unashamed Sámi Citizens.” The first book is poet, musician, artist, and political activist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s Greetings from Sápmi, originally published in Finnish in 1971 and subsequently translated, revised, expanded and published in Norwegian in 1979. Bakken shows how Valkeapää uses irony and humour to describe and fight for recognition and protection of indigenous Sámi culture. In the second book, That Is Why You Must Know That I Am Sámi from 2021, musician and activist Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen takes on the role of ambassador for her generation of Sámi. Aware of the struggle fought for indigenous rights by earlier generations, Isaksen adds feminist perspectives, speaking up against gender inequality and sexualized violence in her own community. Compared to Valkeapää’s, Isaksen’s book is more personal, building, in a sense, on the feminist rallying slogan that the personal is political.

In”Sámi Feminism and Activism in Ann-Helén Laestadius’ Novel Stöld,” Madelen Brovold examines a novel based on true events and its depiction of a young woman developing into an activist for Sámi rights. She shows how the protagonist courageously stands up locally for Sámi rights in the media, how she confronts the police, how she uses social media, but also how she is reliant on other woman activists and friends who advocate Sámi rights in Stockholm state institutions, including the legal system. As Brovold shows, her protagonist is furthermore part of a generation feeling the need to speak up against gender inequality in Sámi culture. Ultimately, in depicting indigenous, feminist activist efforts, the novel serves as political, activist literature as it educates its reader about activism and inspires her to fight for the real-life issues depicted.

In “Queer Narratives in Nordic Sámi Literature: Coming-Out Narratives and Final Exposures in Savior of the Lost Children (2008) and Himlabrand (2021),” Cathrine Bjerknes analyzes two contemporary Sámi coming-out narratives that challenge traditional interdictions against homosexuality. Reading them alongside extant research on queer narrative traditions, including that of Judith Roof, Bjerknes finds that place attachment and commitment to Sámi community building are such strong indicators of Sámi identity that the protagonists cannot simply follow previous narrative patterns of either moving away, of dying once they have found love, and/or of coming out on an individual basis without involving the entire community. The books call for democratic acceptance of homosexuality by providing stories that other gay Sámi can identify with, that majoritized Sámi (and other Scandinavian) readers can learn through, and in the case of Skåden’s literary performance art piece, that all can feel haunted by as they are called upon to fulfill the protagonist’s dream of a Sámi revolution.

Eight articles cannot cover the topic of Unashamed Citizenship. Activist Voices in Scandinavia comprehensively but they indicate how contemporary activism and literature intersect as individuals seek understanding, recognition, and a sense of unashamed citizenship through storytelling. The article authors have not been given a set definition of “literary activism,” but have explored their selected material through this lens, referring along the way to political poetry, political debate books, “companion texts,” personal confessions, memoirs, life writing, and educational novels (and films). As Sigbjørn Skåden puts it in Ihpil (see article by Bjerknes), the aim for many of the writers examined in this issue is to write a visionary manifesto, “waking up the world with words.” Their works gain impact by being read, taken to heart, analysed, discussed, and studied, in relation to particular individuals and issues, but also in relation to each other and with an eye to the ways in which they situate themselves in relation to other activist voices, near and far, past and present.

Notes

1. (United Nations Development Programme, 2023b)

2. (United Nations Development Programme, 2023a)

3. See World Population Review (2023).

4. See European Agency for Human Rights (2018).

5. Finland is followed closely by Denmark, then Sweden. Norway was not part of the study since it is not a member of the EU.

6. The article is based on a summary of the second EU Minorities and Discrimination Survey (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2018).

7. The notion of alternative scripts is borrowed from social-science research on how critical events lead to new self-perceptions and political engagement among Norwegian minority youth (Andersson et al., 2012). For an analysis of how the process of raised self-awareness can lead to literary activism and collective mobilization, see Oxfeldt (2022).

8. See https://gustavus.edu/profiles/jlocke.

9. The research project is supported by The Research Council of Norway and the University of Oslo; for more information, see https://prosjektbanken.forskningsradet.no/project/FORISS/315360. Locke’s work also figured prominently in a special issue of K&K (Kultur og Klasse) which featured a translation into Danish of one of her chapters, cf. Skyld og skam i Skandinavien, edited by Elisabeth Oxfeldt and Devika Sharma. K&K no. 125, 2018.

10. For a more in-depth presentation and analysis of these books, see Oxfeldt (2021). See also Vold (2019).