Queering Race: Transraciality in Non-White Contemporary Nordic Literature

This article examines how race and whiteness are negotiated and performed in contemporary Nordic literature written by non-white authors, with particular attention to the queering of race. In a Nordic context, race is often understood primarily as a social construction, yet it may simultaneously be experienced as embodied and irreducible. This tension between race as an epistemological category and as a phenomenological reality becomes visible through narratives that queer race and employ different expressions of transraciality. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s (2016) distinction between three types of transraciality—trans of migration, trans of between, and trans of beyond—and through thematic readings of contemporary Nordic works that engage with the refusal of fixed categorizations, such as experiences of transracial adoption, mixedness, or attempts and possibilities of passing as white, the article highlights how whiteness can be internalized and performed by non-white subjects. At the same time, the article shows that practices of transraciality often remain confined to movements between different essentialized racial positions rather than moving beyond them. Nevertheless, the works discussed carry a potential to exceed such dichotomizing categories. Through literary devices such as carnivalesque parody, allegory, and magical realism, transraciality becomes not only a theme but a performative act that deconstructs the very logic underlying the idea of race. In this way, literature emerges as a site where racial categories and their boundaries can be defamiliarized, unsettled, and temporarily deconstructed. It thus constitutes both an aesthetic and a political practice that queers race within a Nordic colorblind context.