Tobias Hübinette

To be non-white in a colour-blind society : Conversations with adoptees and adoptive parents in Sweden on everyday racism

This study is based on qualitative interviews with 20 adult international adoptees of colour and 8 adoptive parents with internationally adopted children in Sweden regarding their experiences of racialisation, ethnic identifications and coping strategies. The study finds that the non-white bodies of the adoptees are constantly made significant in their everyday lives in interactions with the white Swedish majority population, whether expressed as ‘curious questions’ concerning the ethnic origin of the adoptees or as outright aggressive racialisation. The study argues that race has to be taken into consideration by Swedish adoption research and the Swedish adoption community, in order to fully grasp the high occurrence of mental illness among adult adoptees as found by quantitative adoption research.

Adopted Koreans and the Development of Identity in the ‘Third Space’

Since 1953, 150,000 Korean children have been adopted to 15 main host countries in the West. They constitute the largest international adoptee group worldwide. An adopted Korean movement has existed on an international level since the 1990s and is today trying to formulate an identity and community of its own beyond Western adoption ideology and Korean nationalism. Tobias Hübinette outlines the history of international adoption from Korea, Western and Korean perspectives on international adoption and adopted Koreans, and the emergence of an adopted Korean identity transcending race, citizenship, culture, religion and language in what he terms as the ‘third space’.

Adoption with complications: Conversations with adoptees and adoptive parents on everyday racism and ethnic identity

This study is based on qualitative interviews with 20 adult international adoptees of colour and eight adoptive parents with internationally adopted children in Sweden regarding their experiences of racialization, ethnic identifications and coping strategies. The findings suggest that the non-white bodies of the adoptees are constantly made significant in their everyday lives in interactions with the white Swedish majority population, whether expressed as ‘curious questions’ concerning the ethnic origin of the adoptees or as outright aggressive racialization. The study argues that race has to be taken into consideration by Swedish adoption research and the Swedish adoption community, to be able to fully grasp the high preponderance of psychic ill health among adult adoptees as found by quantitative adoption research.

Three phases of hegemonic whiteness: understanding racial temporalities in Sweden

After the election in Sweden in 2010, the racist Sweden Democrats party entered parliament. Post-election reactions and discussions were largely preoccupied with the issue of how the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament disturbs the countrys exceptionalist image and privileged position – both in the West and in the non-Western world – as humanitys avant-garde and beacon for antiracism. This article aims to understand the current situation in Sweden from a critical race and whiteness studies perspective. We regard contemporary Sweden as a ‘white nation in crisis’, and diagnose Swedish society as suffering from a ‘white melancholia’. In order to disentangle and shed light upon what is perceived to be mourned and what is seen as being lost for the future, the article offers an historicised account of three principal phases, stages and moments of Swedish nation-building and whiteness; ‘white purity’ (1905–1968); ‘white solidarity’ (1968–2001); and ‘white melancholy’, from 2001 onwards. The analysis also takes into account how these three nation-building projects and hegemonic whiteness and racial grammar regimes are interrelated, and intersect with the different gender and class relations; racial formations; minority discourses; and various political ideologies and affective structures characterising these three periods.

Between colourblindness and ethnicisation : Transnational adoptees and race in a Swedish context

When and how are issues of race and ethnicity articulated in the everyday lives of transnational adoptees in Sweden? Which discursive and practical ambivalences and conflicts do they provoke? What happens with issues of race in a country where antiracist colourblindness is the norm, and where there has been no debate on whether whites should adopt children of colour? Based on an analysis of interviews with transnational adoptees and adoption-related documents, Tobias Hübinette and Malinda Andersson examine how discursive conditions regarding race and ethnicity are negotiated in their daily lives.

Nationalism, Subalternity, and the Adopted Koreans

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 160,000 Korean children have been adopted to fifteen Western countries. The United States has taken in two thirds, while the rest are spread out in northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. During recent years, overseas adopted Koreans have increasingly turned up in various Korean popular cultural works including musicals, comics, pop songs, television dramas, and feature films. This article looks specifically at representations of female overseas adoptees in four Korean feature films: Chang Kil-su’s Susanne Brink’s Arirang (1991), Park Kwang-su’s Berlin Report (1991), Kim Ki-duk’s Wild Animals (1997), and Lee Jang-soo’s Love (1999). At the end, the adopted Koreans are conceptualized as subaltern bodies, once commodified and disposable and now deprived of their voices and turned into mute artifacts of patriarchal nationalist ideology.

Transracial adoption, white cosmopolitanism and the fantasy of the global family

This article takes at its point of the departure the practice of transracial adoption of children and adults. During the colonial period, it was not only non-white native children or adults who were adopted by white colonisers and settlers; the opposite also occurred. The existence of these ‘inverted’ transracial adoptions is well-documented in literary and autobiographical texts and historical documents, as well as in art and visual culture. At that time, the white transracial adoptee who had been transformed into the Other was stigmatised and even demonised as something of an ethno-racial monster transgressing the boundaries between Europeans and non-Europeans. This article aims to re-conceptualise transracial adoption within the framework of the fundamental inability of Europeans to attach to the lands and peoples outside Europe by making use of the concepts of indigenisation and autochtonisation.

Race, performativity and melancholic whiteness in contemporary Sweden

This article deals with the subject of race performativity, and has Sweden as its case study and national context. In 2011, an academic scandal erupted at Lund University when a group of white students in blackface, chained and half-naked, performed a slave auction at a dinner party. In the debate that followed, many of the white Swedish voices that were raised defended the scandal as an expression of an apolitical and liberated humour, while on the other hand several non-white Swedes pointed out that such an event can only take place in a country which is deeply segregated and which refuses to see itself as racist. With this event as the point of departure and with other contemporary cases of race performativity as empirical examples such as a blackface performance with the artist Makode Linde, this article tries to understand and analyse the needs and desires behind this phenomenon. Race performativity is here limited to when whites temporarily perform as non-whites by the way of, for example, make-up, clothes, body language and facial expression on stage, on television, in photography, in film and at various cultural and social events. Why do whites want to dress up and perform as non-whites? And what are the needs and desires behind this social and cultural phenomenon?

Reconciling the past/Imagining the future : The Korean adoption issue and representations of adopted Koreans in Korean popular culture

International adoption from Korea constitutes the background to this paper. This forced migration of Korean children has by now continued for over half a century, resulting in a diaspora of more than 150,000 adopted Koreans dispersed among 15 host countries on the continents of Europe, North America and Oceania. Both the demographic scope, the time span and the geographic spread are unique in the history of child migration, and still over 2,000 children leave Korea annually. This paper deals with the Korean adoption issue and representations of adopted Koreans in Korean popular culture. With the background of Korean nationalism with its notion of the nation as family and its strong emphasis on homogeneity, the point of departure is the very existence of the adopted Koreans as a delicate threat to nationalist ideology, causing anxieties of disrupting a supposedly fixed national identity, and calling in question what it means to be Korean. After a background to international adoption from Korea and a theoretical framing of the Korean adoption issue, the paper analyses the representations of adopted Koreans in four feature films and popular songs respectively; Chang Kil-su’s Susanne Brink’s Arirang (1991), Pak Kwang-su’s Berlin Report (1991), Kim Ki-duk’s Wild Animals (1997), and Lee Jang-soo Love (1999), and Sinawe’s Motherland (1997), Clon’s Abandoned Child (1999), Sky’s Eternity (1999), and Moon Hee Jun’s Alone (2001). In the popular cultural representations, the adopted Koreans are subjected to an ambiguous position as both tragic and shameful symbols of the nation’s historical suffering and as essentialised overseas compatriots in the construction of a global Korean community.