Being “The Damned Foreigner”: <i>Affective National Sentiments and Racialization of Lithuanians in Iceland</i>

Abstract

The discussion draws from recent writing on the meaning of 'whiteness' in the Nordic countries, emphasizing the importance to understand racialization in different localities. Racism is entangled with affective meanings related to discourse of the nation, furthermore, as shaped by global discourses and class. The discussion exemplifies this in the context of migrants from Lithuania in Iceland, demonstrating how they become racialized in Iceland during the boom period in the early 2000s.

Sexual Harassment or Volunteer Work?

“…Eastern European whiteness can manifest into position of a racialized, classed outsider, as Loftsdóttir (2017) shows in her analysis of the situation of Lithuanian migrants in Iceland. Journeying towards whiteness might involve a focus on employability, as well as modifying accents, names and appearance, as Krivonos (2019) discusses in her analysis of Russian speaking migrants' strategies in Helsinki.…”

“…I analyse how whiteness emerges as an affordance, intersectionally constituted, affectively experienced and laboured, unfolding through mattering of intersecting markers of difference in situated, spatialized encounters. I draw on the emerging field of research that explores the interplay of affect and intersecting markers of difference, with a particular focus on whiteness (Ahlstedt, 2015;Myong and Bissenbakker, 2016;Loftsdóttir, 2017) and its role in delineating Europe and European bodies (Keinz and Lewicki, 2019). While I could have foregrounded other markers, such as femininity, in my analysis of the two encounters, it is whiteness, modulated by other intersecting markers of difference, including gender, class, language and sexuality, that affords my passing as Danish (Lapiņa, 2018).…”

Narrations of homogeneity, waning welfare states, and the politics of solidarity

“…The colonisation of Sápmi, the land of the Sámi people, crosses the national borders of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. While Iceland was not in possession of colonies, it has strongly identified with European history and modernity (Loftsdóttir 2017). Compared to the British, French, or Dutch empires, the Nordic countries may have been "small time actors" (Naum and Nordin 2013) in overseas colonialism, but they actively participated in and benefited from the unequal economic, political, and cultural relations developed during European colonialism-a position that has been described as "colonial complicity" (Vuorela 2009;Keskinen et al 2009).…”

“…Migrants and racialised minorities have increasingly become scapegoats for economic problems and crimes in the Nordic countries. This is reflected in public debates, in which the connection is made between migration and criminality, and the ethnic, racial, or religious background of the perpetrator functions as an explanation of crime (Keskinen, 2014;Loftsdóttir 2017).…”

Welfare chauvinism at the margins of whiteness

“…The politics of whiteness are deeply implicated in the politics of domination, which establish hierarchies of whiteness. Rather than being a white/non-white binary, whiteness is theorised as a geographically contextual phenomenon, a contingent social hierarchy granting differential access to economic and cultural capital, intersecting with, and overlaying, class and ethnicity (Garner 2012;Loftsdóttir 2017). Whiteness has been historically constructed in relation to non-whiteness, which in turn has excluded non-European forms of whiteness (Bonnett 2008).…”