...since industrial revolution. (United Nations 3)

**********

THE STATEMENT above comprises the second paragraph of Sweden's I996 report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The statement reflects the Swedish official view that immigration has fundamentally changed Sweden on all levels of civic life from the general level of "society" to "everyday" practices. Paramount changes to the nation and individual municipalities, the quotation implies, are imposed from the outside in a model of simplistic causality. The official description thus affirms a view common in contemporary Swedish popular culture, namely that this small, peaceful country has been forcefully transformed by foreigners. The "immigrant aspect" is (negatively) compared with its (positive) correlate, the remarkable and accelerated industrialization process that transformed a once provincial and impoverished Sweden into Europe's primary example of a prosperous Western welfare state in less than half a century. The official description nevertheless accurately reflects the significant changes in the ethnic make-up of Sweden. In I995, more than 10 percent of the population was born abroad and first or second generation immigrants comprised nearly 20 percent of the population (United Nations 3). (1) This rapid transition process was uneasily received during the 1990s when attitudes in media, official policy, and by a broad range of members of the population were expressed in largely negative and racist terms toward immigration and those construed as "immigrants" (namely those of non-western European or non-North-American descent), as Allan Pred shows in Even in Sweden.

The rapid transformation of Sweden, as described in the United Nations report, has only become visible and integrated into aspects of popular culture since about the year 2000, reflecting the slow pace of Swedish reconciliation with an unrelenting globalization process that it can no longer pretend to ignore. High-grossing productions by director Josef Fares (Jalla! Jalla!, 2000) and the popular TV-series Det nya landet (2000), written by Peter Birro and Lukas Moodysson, as well as successful novels by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Ett oga rott [2003; An Eye Red]) and Marjaneh Bakhtiaris (Kalla det vad fan du vill [2005; Call It Whatever the Hell You Want]) straightforwardly and unsentimentally represent "the immigrant aspect" of Swedish "everyday life" to recall again the UN report. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, popular representation of an already multi-ethnic Sweden was tentative and hesitant. Several well-received films flirted with nostalgic views of a Sweden untainted by racism and lionized as the savior of Jews persecuted during World War II; Kjell Grede's God afton, Herr Wallenberg (1990; Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg, 1990) exemplifies this stance. Others showed an increasing awareness of the return of a repressed racist past and the rise of neo-fascism, which Suzanne Osten investigates in a montage/documentary-inspired film about a neo-Nazi and his Jewish therapist who is also a Holocaust survivor--Tala! Det ar sa morkt (1993; Speak Up! It's So Dark, 1993).

Henning Mankell's first detective novel about Inspector Wallander, Mordare utan ansikte (1991; Faceless Killers, 1997), hit the Swedish market around the same time as Grede's and Osten's films. The early 1990s was a period of profound social changes for the Swedish welfare state, exemplified by rising unemployment and increasing ethnic and racial segregation. In contrast to Grede and Osten, whose cinematic sophistication and art-film orientation arguably lessened the reach and impact of their respective political messages, Mankell's detective story became a runaway, popular, and critical success. Mordare utan ansikte resonated so strongly with the cultural imaginary of Sweden, I argue, because the story alludes to--but neither endorses nor challenges--the many problematic aspects of contemporary Swedish immigration policy and smoldering racist ideology that public rhetoric and popular culture had resisted engaging with at a time when Swedish immigration policy had come under increasing scrutiny. Couching these pressing issues in a convoluted yet formulaic detective story, Mordare utan ansikte posits itself as a tantalizing contradiction in terms, as a popular novel of philosophical detection that draws on the literary conventions of the "police procedural" to give the appearance of a critical and intellectual investigation into the complexity of the social present. (For a brief introduction to the genre of police procedural and its relation to social commentary, see Scaggs 85-104.)

The plot structure of Mordare utan ansikte depends on two interrelated crimes that illustrate the novel's thematic contradictions about ideologies of immigration and nation. In the first crime, the elderly farming couple Lovgren is brutally slaughtered on their remote farm; the murderer(s), Mrs. Lovgren whispers before dying, is/are "utlandsk" (48) ["foreign" (41)]. In the second murder, an anonymous and unnamed asylum-seeker from Somalia is shot in broad daylight by what turns out to be members of a neo-Nazi group (I will return to the narratological ironies of the diametrically opposed murders in the second part of the article.) Mordare utan ansikte also introduces the character of Inspector Kurt Wallander as an overworked, loyal, and stoic detective, uncomfortable with the implications of the two racially charged crimes he solves, yet appearing to probe deeper and deeper into their philosophical significance for contemporary Sweden. Although presented as the epitome of the praiseworthy detective always ready to do his duty, an everyman facing up to almost inconceivable difficulties, dangers, and complexities on the job, Wallander in his sleep is intriguingly prone to recurring graphic erotic dreams, whose ideological conventionality appear absurdly exaggerated in light of the racially charged crimes he will be instrumental in solving. His dreams, explicit sexual fantasies, frame the detective story's seemingly realist depiction of contemporary Sweden. These dreams dislocate the representation of the everyday into a fantasy realm while simultaneously insisting on its materiality.

A phone call from the police station about the Lovgren murder abruptly awakens Wallander from "en haftig erotisk drom" (11) ["an intense, erotic dream" (7)]. Feeling the emptiness in his own bed, Wallander recollects "den fargade kvinna som han just varit inbegripen i ett valdsamt samlag med" (11) ["the black woman with whom he had just been making fierce love in his dream" (7)]. The dreamt desire for violent intercourse ("valdsamt samlag") with an exoticized Other, a fargad ("colored," rather than the translation's "black") woman, introduces the figure of the ethnic and gendered Other as a figment of a racialized and sexualized imagination--the ultimate colonial fantasy. The woman of Wallander's dreams becomes a heavy-handed complement to Wallander's and, by implication, Sweden's, loneliness and sterility. The novel thus begins with a reference to an exoticized body in the realm of an explicit fantasy world, which correlates inversely to the text's interest in exploring the fantasy of nation, of portraying Sweden, with its past of ethnic homogeneity, as on the cusp of the threatening unknown represented by present-day racial heterogeneity. Seemingly signaling an interest in exploring a continuum of race, ethnicity, and racial ideology, the novel quickly retreats from its fantasy world, however, to more familiar territory--the rural province of Skane in southern Sweden.

Set in the recognizable environment of rural Skane--its windswept plains contrasted with the small-town boredom of Ystad and Trelleborg--Mordare Utah ansikte grapples on an apparently realistic level with what Slavoj Zizek in "Henning Mankell, The Artist of the Parallax View" argues to be the main merits of the Wallander series. According to Zizek, the "main effect of globalization on detective fiction is discernible in its dialectical counterpart: the powerful re-emergence of a specific locale as the story's setting--a particular provincial environment" Zizek, however, mistakes what is in effect an evasive stance about the locale of Skane for a face value realistic depiction and neglects the fact that this province is a particularly problematic location for Sweden's self-understanding in a globalized perspective. Skane in fact encapsulates two opposing views of Swedish immigration. On the one hand, the province is an emblematic location of immigrant reception in its geographical proximity to the European continent and the Baltic seashore (e.g., where Jewish boat refugees landed during World War II). On the other hand, Skane is the home base of many Swedish xenophobic groups, including mid-century Nazis and recent Neo-Nazis (Loow 16-19, Pred 195-6, and Hammar 198).

Mordare utan ansikte portrays Skane as uneasily straddling precisely this opposition, an aspect of geographical specificity neglected by Zizek in his gushing...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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