Swedish racial innocence on film: To be young, queer and Black in Swedish documentary filmmaking

Abstract

This article analyses two Swedish documentaries, Broadway Playground (Marklund and Ribbsjö 1977) and Kiki (Jordenö 2016), to interrogate how these ethnographic studies of disinvested Black communities in the United States are presented from the standpoint of Swedish racial innocence, a position that implicitly lays claim to neutrality and objectivity by highlighting an imagined national history of ethnic and cultural homogeneity and promoting a perennial myth of race and colour-blindness. In this context, the visual archiving of Black and Brown bodies in low-income neighbourhoods interpellates people of colour ‐ inscribed by non-Whiteness, economic disenfranchisement and non-heteronormativity ‐ into vulnerable documentary film subjects. The article also explores how White Swedish filmmakers negotiate their positions as ‘objective’ witnesses to Black lives and Black bodies, concluding with a call to decentre Whiteness in (Scandinavian) studies of people of colour.