Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination

Allan Pred writes compellingly about the reawakening of racism throughout Europe at the end of the twentieth century―even in Sweden, a country widely regarded as the very model of social justice and equality. Many thousands of non-European and Muslim immigrants and refugees who took advantage of Sweden's generous immigration policies now find themselves the object of discrimination and worse.

Through the cascading juxtaposition of many voices, including his own, Pred describes the intensifying cultural racism of the 1990s, the proliferation of negative ethnic stereotypes, and the spatial segregation of the non-Swedish. He quotes the newspaper Dagens Nyheter: "It is high time that Sweden reconsider its self-image as the stronghold of tolerance" (July 21, 1998), and analyzes the strategies that allow people to maintain that self-image. Perhaps the greatest strength of Even in Sweden is that Pred gives to the social consequences of global economic restructuring some very specific faces and places and a multitude of expressions of human will, both ill and good.

Allan Pred is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent among his many books are Recognizing European Modernities (1995) and Reworking Modernity (with Michael J. Watts, 1992).