Walls, Camps, State of Exception, Sweden-Enemies, and Gang-Related Individuals. A Journey into the dystopian Sweden of Johannes Anyuru and Jens Lapidus

In recent decades, the dystopian genre has become increasingly popular in Sweden. In particular, young authors focus on future scenarios where debates on migration, religious tolerance, ethnic diversity, crime and segregation are taken to their extreme. Such aspects are visible in De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar (2017) by Johannes Anyuru, and Paradis City (2021) by Jens Lapidus, where semi-totalitarian governments are reflected in the implementation of drastic measures to prevent the country’s Islamisation and organised crime, in a metaphorically and spatially split society. In the presentation, following elements from the novels will be analysed and compared: how bodies are disciplined in space according to a precise ideological regime of Swedishness, where walls and internment camps respectively are dominant architectures in a dehumanised securocracy; how the novels insert detailed legal frameworks and statutes of citizenship to be analysed as an extremisation of the political debates of the present. Against the backdrop of ‘extrapolative-critical’ dystopia (Sargent 2013; Seeger & Davison-Vecchione 2019), and drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories on surveillance, punishment, and biopolitics (1995, 2003), the aim of this study is to show how both novels fit into a growing cultural critique of Sweden as a “white nation in crisis” (Lundström & Hübinette 2020), afflicted by a nostalgic melancholia for an irretrievable folkhem (Barrling & Garme 2022).