CDCS Colloquium: Tina Askanius, Malmö University

“’Cradle of White Purity,’ ‘Multicultural Hellhole’ and ‘Paradise-Lost’: The Invocation of Sweden in Far-Right Discourse in the U.S.”

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About the Talk

Sweden occupies an uneasy and, at first sight, paradoxical space in contemporary far-right discourse around the world, but perhaps most notably in the United States.

Here, ideas about Sweden have long served as a central trope in the media discourse of far-right movements, but today more than ever it seems to work as a particularly powerful "repository of myths, fantasies and projections."

However, there is a peculiar duality at the heart of the discourses through which Sweden is currently being recruited for far-right political agendas in the U.S. On one hand, the country is constructed as a “cradle of white purity," and during the pandemic as a stronghold of individual liberty to venerate and ally with, and on the other, as a European bastion of failed multiculturalism, totalitarian feminism and anti-white ideology to resist and dismantle. 

In this sense, Sweden works as a powerful multivalent signifier that can be molded for different ideological purposes. How do we make sense of this contradictory invocation of Sweden in far-right discourse in the U.S.? And what can we learn more generally about the directions of far-right movements - about what ideas feed and fuel them - from understanding how Sweden-as-nation is imagined and weaponized at this critical juncture in the U.S.?

About the Speaker

Tina Askanius is associate professor of Media and Communication Studies at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, and an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. Her work on far-right extremism and online media sits at the intersection of Media and Cultural Studies and Social Movement Studies. She has written extensively on issues related to the changing media practices of the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden, the role of social media in the normalization of far-right discourse in Scandinavia, and online articulations of white supremacism and its links to anti-feminism, and new forms of violent misogyny. In the spring of 2023, she is a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the American University in Washington D.C.