ABSTRACT
The chapter develops an analysis of the phenomenon of white melancholia in Sweden after the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. White melancholia denotes how the loss of the old homogeneous and the good anti-racist Sweden produces contradictory and complex feelings among both ‘racists’ and ‘anti-racists’. Whereas Sweden has perceived itself having accomplished something of a post-racial utopia since the 1970s, the country is now facing a new reality of superdiversity, which marks the end of two different, but interrelated, hegemonic whiteness regimes. Yet, colour-blindness is still hegemonic and issues of race and whiteness are taboo subjects. The authors regard contemporary Sweden as a white nation in crisis and diagnose Swedish whiteness as suffering from what can be conceptualised as a white melancholic state.
