Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.31820/f.37.2.12
“Living and Going to School in Finland Is Like Winning the Lottery”: Critical Race and Whiteness Narratology, Transnationalism, and “Non-Immigrant Literature” in Moja mačka Jugoslavija by Pajtim Statovci
Eric Bergman
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Filozofski fakultet
Sažetak
This paper critiques ‘immigrant literature’ as a category, proposes ‘transnational literature’ (Lukić 2014) as an alternative, outlines critical race and whiteness narratology, and applies that theoretical frame to Pajtim Statovci’s (2020) novel Moja Mačka Jugoslavija via scholarship on race in the Nordics. The evolution of the literary scene in Finland since 2000 contextualizes how Statovci’s novel was categorized by the publisher: as Finnish rather than as ‘immigrant literature’ (Nissila 2017). This paradigmatic shift notwithstanding, the category ‘immigrant literature’ continues to be used even as its drawbacks are acknowledged (e.g., Gokieli 2017; Loytty 2015; Walkowitz 2010). Transnational literature is presented as an alternative category for texts that include two (or more) national contexts and ‘over-bordering’ (Nissila 2017) more broadly. Transnationalism understood as ‘over-bordering’ takes in aspects of the narrative that may not be linked to multiple nation states overtly, but have different manifestations based on the sociocultural circumstances in different nation-states and their sociocultural norms. This includes languages, cultures, ethnicities, races, and religions, sex/gender, and more. In this way, the transnational turn in literature does not negate the ongoing importance of national frames of reference even as it highlights transnational connections (Pollari et al., 2015). The argument also moves from a framework in which immigrants—and their offspring, etc.—can be positioned as Other to one in which migration is understood as a phenomenon that affects and shapes many aspects of the subject’s lived experiences, as well as the formal characteristics of the text and how it should be read. It is argued that, for some Othered immigrants, all differences vis-a-vis the dominant sociocultural norms can be viewed as coalesced in the subject’s race via doing (Moya and Markus 2010). Race in the Nordic context is viewed against whiteness, which is the invisible backdrop against which that difference is evaluated (Lundstrom et al., 2024).
Ključne riječi
transnational literature; ‘immigrant literature’; critical race and whiteness narratology; post-Yugoslav literature; Pajtim Statovci
Hrčak ID:
342886
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.12.2025.
Posjeta: 354 *