CONCLUSION

Consider this scene from Sami Blood: After having left her home in Sápmi, where she was forced into a life segregated from Swedish society, and trying to fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher by pretending not to be Sámi in the 1930s, Elle-Marja has been able to enroll at a girls’ school in Uppsala and is entering a room to attend her first gymnastics class. The class has already started, and the girls are lined up in straight rows, the metronome is ticking, and the teacher gestures at Elle-Marja to find a spot among her peers. The camera follows her as she cautiously makes her way, and we see the teacher set the metronome to a slightly slower pace. Once the girls start moving in nearly perfect synchrony, Elle-Marja is not able to keep up with the movements. She misses most of them, and each of her motions that is off the beat or behind the rhythm emphasizes her difference from others (fig. 4). Wearing the same clothes as the girls in the class, Elle-Marja looks like them, but as the film audience knows, she has had to burn her gákti and adopt a new identity in order to be allowed to enter the classroom at all. As the scene goes on, she is able to imitate many of the movements but is still lagging a bit behind the rhythm of the metronome. In Sami Blood this scene visualizes the experiences of many Indigenous Sámi people in Sweden (and other Nordic countries) during the twentieth century: While able to pass as white Swedes, the only way for many of them to not be excluded from Swedish society was to erase their Indigenous heritage and line up with white Swedishness, and this alignment often happened in one’s youth or childhood. It is also telling that the film uses the girls’ gymnastics class to visualize Elle-Marja’s failed attempts at passing and moving in synchrony—as Johannes Westberg has already demonstrated in analyzing the educationalization of gymnastics in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the purpose of gymnastics was to “foster national citizens that could support a strong Swedish nation” and women/girls were then seen as “fundamental to the nationalist project.”¹ Throughout the scene, Elle-Marja is shown being unable to keep up with the movements that were so instrumental in the fostering of Swedish citizens.

This scene is emblematic of the argument I have made in The Not-Quite Child, that a recurring figure in several twenty-first-century cultural texts from Sweden is a child who disrupts, rethinks, and reembodies the expected trajectory of growing up as the Swedish child and in doing so makes visible the implications of historical racialization and colonial histories in Sweden. Elle-Marja navigates the position of a not-quite child. The twenty-first-century films and novels I have analyzed in this book navigate what it means to visualize historical racialization, becoming, feelings of lagging behind, passing, assimilation, and erasure of cultures. They imagine possible or impossible alternatives to growing up (and becoming) or sideways on a normative trajectory. As they do so, these texts incorporate the figure of what I have called the not-quite child: a child who is legible as a white Swede but at the same time, because of racialization and colonial histories, is made to feel they are not quite Swedish/white. My analyses have demonstrated how different films and novels use formal elements from a variety of genres and modes, such as melodrama, magical realism, or parody, to challenge the expectations for not only the idealized child figure in Swedish culture but also for its representational power in cinematic and literary works.

One of the main contributions of The Not-Quite Child to postcolonial and minority studies is that it has identified and analyzed such not-quite child figures in a variety of cinematic and literary narratives that articulate the experiences of three national minority groups in Sweden: the Indigenous Sámi people, Tornedalians, and Sweden Finns. The Not-Quite Child has been mindful of the crucial differences between these groups—for example, that the Indigenous Sámi people have and continue to be colonized by the Swedish (as well as Norwegian and Finnish) state and that the large wave of Finnish-speakers coming to Sweden in the twentieth century were labor migrants in search of better job opportunities. This book has shown, however, that as all these groups of people share a long cultural and (semi-)colonial history with Sweden and to varying extents have historically been categorized as inferior race or as not quite white, even though they are typically legible as white, there are productive points of comparison in how films and novels imagine these histories in the changing Swedish welfare state of the twentieth century.

I have argued that it is particularly important to understand the prominence of childhood and the figure of the child in Swedish culture and society to fully comprehend how these novels and films imagine colonial histories and racialized hierarchies. Engaging with the history of how the image of the ideal child—a white, healthy, middle-class child who is autonomous, competent, and moral—came to signify the citizen of the Swedish welfare state, The Not-Quite Child has shown that the normative idea of the Swedish child is paradoxical. It expects the child to resist injustice and societal norms that are oppressive, just like Pippi Longstocking—the most famous iteration—but this resistance is celebrated only if the child lines up with “good Swedishness.” Thus, resisting social norms has become both normative and exclusive. In hashing out the frameworks that show us child figures who do not quite move in synchrony with the ideal Swedish child (as they experience themselves always lagging a bit behind), I have paid close attention to how Pippi Longstocking, whose image some of the texts analyzed in this book directly engage with, herself a non-normative figure, has come to represent Swedish exceptionalism. While Pippi has been read as someone who crosses boundaries between categories like child and adult, human and more-than-human, masculine and feminine, she is often celebrated as a strong, independent girl, symbolizing not only the citizen of the Swedish welfare state but also becoming a role model for girls everywhere. Writing about the history of the progress in gender equality in Sweden and the Nordic region, Elina Oinas and Anna Collander argue that pippifeminism (realization of gender equality through the metaphorical use of Pippi Longstocking) can be understood as an emancipatory strategy that “places the responsibility on the individual girl to make sure that she becomes, effortlessly, a gender equal woman.”² Much of this symbolism and rhetoric, however, does not pay attention to systemic reasons for why some girls and children are not able to “become like Pippi,” thus also not paying attention to those who continue to lag behind the performance of the ideal Swedish child/girl.

Though I have not situated this project in the field of girlhood studies, all but one of the main characters in the films and novels analyzed in this book identify as girls, and the two male protagonists in Popular Music from Vittula are both depicted as resisting rigid boundaries of gender/sexuality. In my selection of texts for this book, I did not set out to look for examples that would feature only girl protagonists, but the overwhelming majority of narratives dealing with the histories that this book focuses on construct their child figures as girls. As the analyses in The Not-Quite Child have demonstrated, although the gender of the child protagonists is not typically a focus in these texts, gendered expectations, regarding both the need to perform the ideas associated with Pippi Longstocking and growing up, are featured in all of them. The protagonists in works as dissimilar as Sami Blood, Ingenbarnsland, and Vårt värde experience exclusion from Swedish society because they are expected to take on stereotypical traits associated with women from their respective minority communities when they grow up and, most importantly, to reproduce their not-quiteness in future generations.

My reading has further implications for analyzing the increasing archive of texts dealing with various kinds of not-quiteness and childhood in Sweden. While I have narrowed my analysis to texts that articulate the histories of the three minority groups in Sweden who are white but have historically been categorized as not quite as white and who share a long cultural/colonial history with Sweden, my theorization of the not-quite child figure in Sweden/the Nordic region contributes to a better understanding of and analyses of the articulations of other minoritized groups in Sweden. I have sought to open avenues for further research on the expanding archive of texts that articulate minoritized experiences in Sweden (or the Nordic region more broadly) and that incorporate a child figure to do that. This includes the transnational adoptees of color who, as Tobias Hübinette has demonstrated in his analysis of Swedish media discourse during the post–World War II era, were accepted in society more easily because they were children who would be growing up in white Swedish families, therefore becoming almost (but not quite) Swedes because they look visibly different.³

Another future research direction could be to look at how the child figures continue to show up in texts that describe the experiences of minorities that this book talks about but that take place in the twenty-first century. More specifically, the recent decades have seen an increase in texts, particularly in Sámi culture, that engage with childhood and growing up in contemporary Sweden. These cultural texts often depict one of the following: The protagonist has nearly no linguistic or other knowledge of their Sámi heritage because of the politics of erasure and assimilation that have fully taken effect on the new generations, and they work through their (and sometimes their parents’) childhoods to understand this history.⁴ Or the protagonist is a child figure who is certainly impacted by the heritage of not-quiteness but performs what Jill Locke has called “unashamed citizenship.”⁵ This child figure—for example, the one often recurring in Ann-Helen Laestadius’s novels—already is or is learning to be completely unashamed of the history and heritage of not-quiteness.⁶ The Not-Quite Child has provided a better understanding of how the child figure has been used to navigate the history of the twentieth century, and with that, its aim is also to help the reader understand what comes next—how the child continues to transform.

In addition, The Not-Quite Child has questioned what refusing or failing becoming and adulthood might mean in the contexts where the anarchy of childhood (which Halberstam proposes as a space to refuse normative adulthood) or “sideways growth” (Stockton’s term for fictional child figures who do not grow “up” according to the cultural norms and expectations and instead delay or wander off the linear trajectory) are experienced as normative. This book has thus contributed to the methodologies of childhood studies by reading closely how novels and films not only construct child figures who deviate from the normative but also how they imagine moments (sometimes extended and prolonged moments) of impossibility, pause, delay, and hesitance to grow up or sideways. Imagining possible alternatives to these trajectories, these texts are not as invested in repeating well-known narratives of collective and cultural memories but rather aim to unleash new forms of memory that would encompass the fluidity and complexity of identities forced to exist within binaries and hierarchies.

Looking once more at the scene in the gymnastics class where Elle-Marja’s movements are lagging behind the metronome, we might take note of the emphasis on the physical discomfort that Elle-Marja feels because her body is delayed. All she wants to do is move in complete synchrony with the white Swedish girls, and it is the settler colonial politics that have made it almost impossible to do that; most importantly, they have made lining up with white Swedishness the only possible trajectory to become a fully accepted citizen. All texts discussed in this book have imagined the not-quite child experiencing some kind of delay as something that the child tries to escape as quickly as possible or that she finds empowering, though usually only for a short time. The figure of the not-quite child expands these moments of pause in order to disrupt and reorient normative temporalities of growing up and of growing sideways. With that, the not-quite child also reorients the common ways of reading the child as a story of inspiration, overcoming injustice, and standing up against norms, and it directs our attention to the oppressive spaces, lines, and borders around her.