Tobias Hübinette

• PhD in Korean Studies and Associate Professor in Intercultural Education
• Lecturer in Intercultural Studies at Karlstads Universitet

Sweden is at the moment grappling with its close to seventy years of transnational adoption that, since the 1950s onwards, has resulted in over sixty thousand adoptions from abroad. In October 2021, the Swedish government decided to initiate a state inquiry. It set up a commission to investigate the widespread problem of illegal and irregular trans...

In 2010, the ethno-nationalist party the Sweden Democrats entered the national parliament. The immediate post-election reactions were largely preoccupied with the issue of how the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament disturbs the exceptionalist image and the privileged position of Sweden both in the West as well as in the non-Wester...

This article consists of a study of how the first wave of Korean adoptees to Sweden were imagined and represented in a political debate that raged throughout the 1960s concerning whether or not Swedes would adopt non-white children from abroad. The study examines how the arrival of the Korean adoptees came to transform Swedes’ attitude to race and...

The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context. The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo i...

The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context. The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo in...

The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context. The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo in...

The deracialization of Sweden is a research anthology that examines issues of race, racism, anti-racism and whiteness in a Swedish post-war and contemporary context. The anthology consists of 13 studies written by authors from different fields that collectively explore how the concept of race was gradually dismantled and eventually became taboo in...

Race in Sweden is an introduction to, and a critical investigation of, the Swedish relationship to race in the post-war and contemporary eras. This relationship is fundamentally shaped by an ideology of colourblindness, with any kind of race talk being taboo in public discourse and everyday language use, and in practice forbidden in official and in...

This is a study of the Swedish debate on statues and monuments to the world-famous Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus that took place during the Black Lives Matter movement breakthrough in the summer of 2020. The purpose is to examine how understandings of race, racism, identity, and history were articulated in the debate. The empirical materi...

Den färgblinda skolan – ras och vithet i svensk utbildning behandlar vad begreppen ras och vithet har att säga om dagens svenska skola. Utgångspunkten för boken är att Sverige numera härbärgerar västvärldens mest heterogena elevsammansättning efter USA, inte minst gäller det den rasliga och etniska mångfalden liksom religiös och språklig mångfald....

This handbook offers a unique decolonial take on the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by re-historicising and re-spatialising the study of bodies and identities in the world system of coloniality. Situating the critical study of whiteness as a core intellectual pillar in a broadly-based project for racial and social justice, the volume understa...

Given the works by Catherine Ceniza Choy, SooJin Pate, Ji-Yeon Yuh, Grace M. Cho, and many others, it might seem that the pre-1965 history of the mass migration to the United States of South Korean children and women has already been told. Susie Woo’s monograph, Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire, proves this is...

This study concerns discursive mobilisations of race and racism in the Swedish debate on equality data, in the case of a controversial statement made by a Swedish Green Party MP. In March 2019, female Muslim MP Leila Ali Elmi argued publicly for introducing equality data in Sweden, in opposition to prevailing colour‐blind and antiracialist norms. H...

Asians in Sweden make up over 200,000 inhabitants. However, compared to the Afro-Swedes, the Latin Americans or the minority inhabitants who have a background in the Middle East, the Swedish Asians are largely absent from the political, cultural and academic spheres in contemporary Sweden. This absence applies in both minority and migrant contexts...

Begreppet vit melankoli är ett sätt att på djupet förstå den konfliktfyllda, paradoxala och nostalgiska situation som råder i vår tid. Detta melankoliska tillstånd har uppstått som en följd av förlusten av både det vita, homogena Sverige och det färgblinda, solidariska Sverige. Forskarna Catrin Lundström och Tobias Hübinette menar i denna bok att...

In this article, we use the results from two studies, one on interracial relationship and the other on transnational adoption, to explore how notions of race and ethnicity shape family policies, family building and everyday life in Sweden. Transnational adoption and interracial marriage in Sweden have previously never been compared in research, eve...

Denna artikel redovisar delar av en studie baserad på samtal med adopterade och adoptivföräldrar rörande deras erfarenheter av diskriminering utifrån ett annorlunda utseende. Materialet visar att de adopterades icke-vita kroppar hela tiden görs signifikanta i vardagen, vilket indikerar att ett icke-vitt utseende fortfarande tillskrivs en stor betyd...

This article deals with the subject of race performativity, and has Sweden as its case study and national context. In 2011, an academic scandal erupted at Lund University when a group of white students in blackface, chained and half-naked, performed a slave auction at a dinner party. In the debate that followed, many of the white Swedish voices tha...

After the election in Sweden in 2010, the racist Sweden Democrats party entered parliament. Post-election reactions and discussions were largely preoccupied with the issue of how the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament disturbs the country's exceptionalist image and privileged position - both in the West and in the non-Western worl...

In a country that prides itself as having accomplished a post-racial utopia, this chapter aims to understand the current situation in Sweden from a critical race and whiteness studies perspective. The chapter considers white melancholia as a form of white exceptionalism dominating national discourses after the last Swedish election in 2010, in whic...

In recent years, a number of heated public debates have taken place in Sweden concerning the on-going use of racially and colonially marked words and expressions in everyday life and public discourse. As Swedish society views itself as, ostensibly, an antiracist and post-racial society, these debates raise uncomfortable questions regarding Swedish...

This article takes at its point of the departure the practice of transracial adoption of children and adults. During the colonial period, it was not only non-white native children or adults who were adopted by white colonisers and settlers; the opposite also occurred. The existence of these ‘inverted’ transracial adoptions is well-documented in lit...

When and how are issues of race and ethnicity articulated in the everyday lives of transnational adoptees in Sweden? Which discursive and practical ambivalences and conflicts do they provoke? What happens with issues of race in a country where antiracist colourblindness is the norm, and where there has been no debate on whether whites should adopt...

The winds of hallyu, which for several years have swept through most of Asia and parts of South America and Africa, have not yet been able to penetrate the part of the world that is usually known as the West. The reasons for the relatively meagre breakthrough and presence of all things hallyu in Western countries are of course many and complex as w...

Det finns rasistiska strukturer i dagens Sverige- Men flertalet av oss blundar gärna för både vithetens privilegier och den diskriminering som icke-vita svenskar utsätts för. Vår fysiska kropp påverkar hur vi blir bemötta, betraktade och behandlade. Därför måste vi börja tala om ras. Först då kan vi förstå de samhällsproblem som handlar om vardagsr...

To transcend race: An introduction to the concept of transraciality seen through transracial experiences and fantasiesThis article introduces the concept of transraciality based on the following questions: Is it possible to transgress race in a similar way as it is possible to transgress sex? How does the transracial experience look like and how do...

This study is based on qualitative interviews with 20 adult international adoptees of colour and eight adoptive parents with internationally adopted children in Sweden regarding their experiences of racialization, ethnic identifications and coping strategies. The findings suggest that the non-white bodies of the adoptees are constantly made signifi...

This study is based on qualitative interviews with 20 adult international adoptees of colour and 8 adoptive parents with internationally adopted children in Sweden regarding their experiences of racialisation, ethnic identifications and coping strategies. The study finds that the non-white bodies of the adoptees are constantly made significant in t...

This study consists of analyses of interviews with 20 adoptees of colour and 8 white adoptive parents in Sweden. The study finds that the non- white bodies of the adoptees are constantly made significant in their everyday lives, and argues that race has to be taken into consideration by the Swedish adoption community and adoption research to be abl...

Truth and reconciliation processes to settle and overcome colonial pasts, Cold War dictatorships, and civil war atrocities have recently proliferated in many different countries around the world, including South Africa, Australia, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda. The Nigerian writer and Nobel literature laureate W...

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 160,000 Korean children have been adopted to fifteen Western countries. The United States has taken in two thirds, while the rest are spread out in northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. During recent years, overseas adopted Koreans have increasingly turned up in various Korean po...

This article is a presentation of a study of representations of adopted Koreans in Korean popular culture. After a background to the history of international adoption from Korea and an introduction to the Korean adoption issue, the article looks at the representations of adopted Koreans in four Korean popular songs and feature films, respectively....

International adoption from Korea constitutes the background to this study. The forced migration of Korean children has by now continued for over half a century, resulting in a diaspora of more than 150,000 adopted Koreans dispersed among 15 main host countries on the continents of Europe, North America and Oceania. Both the demographic scope, the...

Sverige och Korea har länge varit aktörer på det internationella adoptionsfältet vilket innebär att adoption idag tillhör vardagen i dessa länder. Detta har givit avtryck i de båda ländernas barn- och ungdomslitteratur i form av utvecklingen av en adoptionsgenre. I denna artikel jämförs ett antal koreanska och svenska barn- och ungdomsböcker med sy...

Since 1953, 150,000 Korean children have been adopted to 15 main host countries in the West. They constitute the largest international adoptee group worldwide. An adopted Korean movement has existed on an international level since the 1990s and is today trying to formulate an identity and community of its own beyond Western adoption ideology and Ko...

Korea is the country in the world that has sent away the largest number of children for adoption overseas. Since the end of the Korean war, 150,000 children have been adopted to a dozen Western countries. Overseas adoption was for a long time considered a secretive embarrassment by the Korean government, but through media exposure at the end of the...

With 50,000 adoptees from 150 different countries, Sweden has adopted the most in the world in relation to its native population. Moreover, with a history of international adoption going back to Jewish children from Central Europe in the 1930s and Finnish children during WWII, Sweden also pioneered the practice itself. This demographic and historic...

Institutionen för orientaliska språk, Stockholms universitet Paper från ACSIS nationella forskarkonferens för kulturstudier, Norrköping 13–15 juni 2005. Konferensrapport publicerad elektroniskt på www.ep.liu.se/ecp/015/. © Författaren. Abstract Under mer än ett halvt sekel har uppskattningsvis en halv miljon icke-vita barn från den post-koloniala v...

However, from the end of the 1990s, transracial ado ptees have started to be heard of for the first time in the public sphere of Sweden in the for m of memoir works, and recently a new generation of Swedish adoptive parents have also be gan to publish autobiographies. Are these contemporary self-narratives challenging Swedish images of transnationa...

A RECENT TREND in cultural theory is to pay attention to previously neglected and unrecognised groups and individuals transcending antithetical and dichotomous categories of Western/non-Western, male/female, hetero/homo and the like. 1 Cultural and social 'misfits' like bicultural and multiethnic people, transracial and international adoptees, and...

For many years, it was more or less taken for granted that the absolute majority of diasporas had continued to harbour hope of return to their homelands in some distant future. Moreover, it was said that they had maintained their collective group identity and an isolated attitude to-wards and, at best, a polite relationship with their host societie...

This chapter focuses on the concept of trans-racial adoption of children and adults. Despite the recent concentration on the adoption of white families adopting non-white children, we identify how the opposite was a regular occurrence in the classical colonial period. The existence of these inverted trans-racial adoptions is well documented in lite...

The history of Koreans in Europe actually goes back 400 years ago when a Korean man named Antonio Corea came to the continent. Born around 1578, Antonio Corea arrived in Japan in 1597 as one of tens of thousands of Korean prisoners-of-war who were brought to the country in connection with the Japanese invasions of Korea between 1592-98. In Japan, t...

Ethnic stereotyping of East Asians in Western culture has a long tradition going back to the golden days of European imperialism in the 19th century, while its modern version has been heavily influenced by incessant 20th century American warfare in the region. This paper deals with the representations of East Asians in three Swedish popular cultura...

Hur skildras människor från Kina, Japan eller Korea i Sverige? Varför återges östasiater på det sätt som görs i Sverige? Och hur kommer det sig att östasiater fortfarande i bild-, film- och scensammanhang kan framställas på ett sätt som inte längre anses godtagbart när det gäller personer av afrikanskt eller judiskt ursprung? Två forskare på område...