A magic potion in present-day Sweden
Elixir by Alejandro Leiva Wenger
Abstract
In this article, I will investigate the short story Elixir in Alejandro Leiva Wenger’s debut collection Till vår ära (In Our Honour, 2001), where a magic drink with transformative effects converts dark-skinned characters with foreign background into racially typical Nordic individuals. Since the story relates to both physical and behavioural changes, the transracial metamorphosis becomes a central trope to discuss and contest racial and social stratification in ways that the Swedish predominant colour-blind and antiracist discourse does not allow. Critical attention will be devoted to the reaction developed by the characters against the transformation. The main argument is that Leiva Wenger resorts to a supernatural event to question asymmetrical relations between immigrants and Swedes, where whiteness is the norm and non-whiteness is deviance. Developing Hübinette’s critical thought concerning race and whiteness in “non-white Swedish literature” (2019), this theoretic analysis of Elixir investigates the intersections between race/whiteness from postcolonial and postmigrant perspectives, in the attempt to figure out what is the allegorical meaning of the elixir and how it relates to a folkhem (people’s home) in crisis. This approach aims to highlight the (im)possibility for the postmigrant subject to locate itself in a Third space of identity.
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