"Trött på vithet". Intersektionalitet i Dan Anderssons Kolarhistorier och Chi-mo-ka-ma

Abstract

Although Dan Andersson (1888-1920) is considered perhaps the most important of the early Swedish workingclass authors, there has not been much research on his work. Through a perspective based on critical whiteness studies, intersectionality and existential phenomenology, this thesis performs a close reading of Andersson’s Kolarhistorier (1914) and Chi-mo-ka-ma (1920) in order to map the discursive formations of whiteness and blackness in the texts, as well as to expose how these formations interrelate with that of humanhood. Since an underprivileged situation of oppression and poverty is the point from which the fictional world unfolds in both Kolarhistorier and Chi-mo-ka-ma, whiteness is not an existential style within close reach for the characters. In Kolarhistorier the charcoal-burners claim themselves as ‘weary of whiteness’ and accordingly the text establishes what the thesis reads as a realm of blackness where the black, male body becomes a locus of pleasure instead of despair. In Chi-mo-ka-ma some of the characters turn white through colonial practices of which the most important is the ownership of land. In the end they lose the land and accordingly their whiteness. While the bodies in Kolarhistorier are being filled with meaning within a discourse of blackness, the bodies in Chi-mo-ka-ma are being filled with ambiguous meaning within a discourse of white trash. The reading of the texts points to the fact that whiteness, as well as blackness, should be understood as intersectionally constructed discursive formations through which it is possible to map the multiple and simultaneous relations of power that a single life is entangled in. Since the discourse of white masculinity is identical with that of humanity in the modern world, it simultaneously functions as both the site of humanhood in the texts and as an obstacle to the humanification of those lives that can’t be filled with meaning within that discourse.