Racism and Media: Seminar

This talk examines the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production. Departing from President Donald Trump’s widely-reported remarks, in 2017, as to ‘what happened last night in Sweden’, it examines the racializing discourses through which Sweden is constructed as a dark future to be averted; a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism symbolised by the ‘no-go zones’ held to be dotted, yet denied, in its major cities. While the symbolic production of ‘problem areas’ is a familiar dimension of the politics of immigration, the article explores the transnational investments in whiteness and gendered crisis that explain why Sweden-as-nation is so insistently and intimately reproduced in the ‘revenge fantasies’ of the far-right. On the basis of this discursive analysis, the talk argues that these modes of representation cannot be understood without examining the value of Sweden as a news commodity in the expansive far-right media environment. The analysis offers the idea of ‘taboo news’ to conceptualise putatively ‘alternative’ news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream, and argues that examining the increasing importance of ‘taboo news’ as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.