A Journey into the Architectures of Dystopian Sweden: The Cases of Avblattefieringsprocessen and Nattavaara

In recent decades, dystopia has become an increasingly popular genre by depicting future scenarios where issues related to climate, crime, migration, and welfare are taken to extremes (Trotta and Sadri 2020. “Welcome to the Beginning of the End of Everything.” In Broken Mirrors. Representations of Apocalypses and Dystopias in Popular Culture, edited by Joe Trotta, Zlatan Filipovic, and Houman Sadri, 1–14. New York: Routledge, 2). Such aspects feature Swedish novels such as Avblattefieringsprocessen (2014) by Zulmir Bečević, and Nattavaara (2020) by Thomas Engström and Margit Richert (first volume of the Nordmark trilogy), where semi-totalitarian governments implement drastic measures to prevent ethno-cultural and political issues in a fragmented, and profoundly transformed Sweden. Focusing on architectures (and the legislative apparatus enabling their existence), this study aims to analyse spaces such as internment camps and militarised cities in order to understand the link established between architecture and power. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1): 22–7) against the backdrop of a theoretical approach to dystopia as an ‘extrapolative’ dimension (Seeger and Davison-Vecchione 2019. “Dystopian Literature and the Sociological Imagination.” Thesis Eleven 1 (155): 45–63), this article sets out to critically frame architectures and laws of a literary Sweden which is increasingly narrated as a dehumanised securocracy.