Negotiations of Ethnifying Distinctions and Cultural Capital in the Swedish Literary Field

Abstract

The goal of this article is to investigate how authors in the Swedish literary field respond to predominant public discourses related to migration and how a shift has occurred from the 1970s to the present regarding the ascription of ethnicity to authors and their works. Earlier categorizations such as “immigrant author” and “immigrant literature” have become obsolete. Instead, the concept of racialization is in the process of being established. This discursive shift is viewed as one response to a postmigrant condition. The concept of postmigration is introduced as a societal condition in which migrants and their descendants gain visibility in the cultural field in general and influence the literary field specifically by negotiating ascriptions of ethnicity and cultural capital. Bourdieu’s field theory captures negotiations of cultural capital, but in a Swedish context negotiations of aesthetic value also have to be acknowledged. The framework of migration requires that Bourdieu’s field theory is complemented with how ethnifying distinctions may be strategically used for political reasons and transformed to cultural capital. The empirical interest is directed at how individual authors and a cultural journalist respond to migration policies, racism, and the ascription of a migrant identity. Their personal stories on professional establishment, recognition, and gaining positions in the literary field were collected through face-to-face open-ended interviews. How these actors negotiate cultural capital and the question of class in relation to a migrant identity is discussed. These individual responses to ethnifying ascriptions and boundaries in the literary field, as well as the contemporary awareness of structural inequalities, are signs of a postmigrant condition in the field, where demarcation lines are being made public, negotiated, and transformed.