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This project examines how ”race” and racism is debated in Danish news media. Through analyzing eight selected articles concerning two different contemporary cases and by using a Cultural Studies perspective it is investigated how Danish media debates on ”race” are influenced by the ideologies of colorblindness and racial exceptionalism. These ideologies lead to the creation of various different narratives that frame the opposition as being over-sensitive, dramatic and racist themselves. In this way, the medias framing naturalizes how “race” and racism is perceived as something “of the past” in Denmark. The narratives are entangled in a rigid national self-understanding of the Danes as being a post-racist nation which obstructs the ways in which more recent and scientific perspectives on ”race” can be acknowledged. The debates maintain a focus on the intentions behind racist actions and proceeds to understand racism as a purely social and physical act that must be motivated by hate in order to be categorized as racism. This blocks the potential for racism as being understood as a structural and discursive phenomenon.

Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called ‘racist liquorice’, the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

Studiet af racisme og racialisering i Danmark er komplekst og behæftet med stærke moralske og politiske interesser og følelser. Ofte omtales racisme og race uden reference til den foreliggende litteratur og betydningsfulde historiske erfaringer og uden inddragelse af de oplevelser, som især synlige minoriteter og danske statsborgere med ikke-vestlig oprindelse har med racistisk tænkning. I denne artikel fører jeg centrale aspekter ved racisme ind i en nutidig faglig diskussion. Jeg stiller en række vigtige spørgsmål og leverer robuste redskaber til at undersøge, hvornår en begivenhed, en trend eller rutine udgør racisme i en akademisk funderet analyse. I artiklen argumenterer jeg for, at analysen i hvert enkelt tilfælde må hvile på en analyse af den specifikke handling. Artiklen er skrevet på baggrund af min forskning i Danmark i de sidste to årtier og diskuterer begreberne race, ”race”, racialisering, racisme og nyracisme. Den fremlægger desuden litteratur og historiske erfaringer, som jeg mener bør inddrages i en sund, kritisk dialog om racisme i Danmark baseret på et sociologisk og antropologisk fundament. ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Peter Hervik: Race, ”Race”, Racialization, Racism and Neo-Racism The study of racism and racialization in Denmark is a complex affair encumbered with strong moral and political interests. Often the concepts of racism and race are used without reference to the relevant academic literature or significant historical experiences. Much of the writing does not include the experiences of visible minorities and Danish citizens with a non-Western origin. In this article, I deal with a number of important issues of racism and provide enduring tools for investigating whether an incident, a trend or routine constitutes racism in a research based analysis. One of the arguments of this article is that each case in question must be analyzed as a specific historical act. The article is based on two decades of research in Denmark and employs this research to discuss the concepts of race, ”race”, racialization, racism and neo-racism. It also presents literary and historical experiences that, in my opinion, must be included for a healthy, critical dialogue about racism in Denmark based on a sociological and anthropological foundation. Keywords: racialisation, neoracism, racism, neonationalism, cultural war, incompatibility.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of literary works dealing with corporal experiences of racialization within contemporary Danish literature. This article argues that the increasingly growing field of affect theory can function as a constructive interlocutor when trying to grasp the emotional nerve permeating this trend. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi, Frederik Tygstrup, and Mayra Rivera, it demonstrates a sensitive reading strategy through charting the dominant affective components of the corporal lives presented in Yahya Hassan’s Yahya Hassan (2013), Eva Tind’s Han (2014), and Maja Lee Langvad’s Hun er vred (2014). By developing a notion of “homelessness”, these readings seek to capture a specific affective dynamic between flesh, identity, and (re)action that according to these works are produced when non-white bodies encounter the white spaces of Danish society. Furthermore, they show how this state of homelessness forms a consistently beating pulse, on top of which a variation of affective tones of irritation, uncanniness, and frustration may be played out, thus constituting what the article terms a two-layered “affective composition”. The ambition is first of all to map a central part of an almost uncovered breakthrough in Danish literary history and secondly to contribute to the development of an affectively tuned reading of the literary body required when engaging such a trend.