Rural multiculturalism? Migrants, antiracism, and convivial cultures in provincial Sweden

Abstract

Migrant solidarity movements are significant political manifestations that stretch beyond Europe's urban centres. Yet, their wider antiracist potential requires further examination. Starting with ethnographic insights in community activist groups that aim to create “welcoming” places outside the larger cities of Sweden, this article argues that conceptualizations of convivial cultures help to bridge perspectives on multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and antiracism. Community activists across racialized categories of natives and migrants aim to redefine their small towns towards greater local solidarity. They introduce multiculturalist ideals and recalibrate notions of race through everyday activism, while they also reproduce, or fail to address, dominant racism in domains of gender equality and neoliberal integration regimes. A focus on convivial cultures, which contrast to melancholic cultures where the past of the nation is represented as always more solidaric than that of the (migrant) present, contributes to a scholarship of hope for underexplored antiracism in rural regions.