This chapter focuses its interest on the position adult descendants of migrants hold within translocal families and their attachment to various places. Based on an ethnographic analysis of 31 in-depth interviews with descendants of Polish migrants who grew up and reached adulthood in Sweden, the aim is to explore how they create translocal ties and attachment to place. The chapter explores the processes by which place attachment is shaped: place attachment in relation to mobility, to multiple locations and to locations on different scales. Using a critical theoretical perspective on place, as well as the lens of critical race and whiteness studies, it also situates place attachment in a larger socio-political landscape and shows how the descendants’ place attachment was created in relation to, among other things, their whiteness positions and their parents’ status as one-time migrants. The bonds constructed reached across multiple locations on different scales, with the various locations in the descendants’ lives linked together, although different emotions were attached to these places and dissimilar significance and meaning ascribed.

This article analyses interviews with descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden using the lens of postmemory. The aim is to show how they narrated growing up with parents and grandparents who recalled traumatic experiences of the occupation of Poland during World War II and of the communist era, and to explore the transgenerational imprints of this recall. A number of less-explored aspects of postmemory are elucidated: postmemory related to less extreme abuse and violence than that experienced by Holocaust survivors; postmemory in both second and third generation; postmemory as narrated by those who grew up in a different country to that in which the trauma of their relatives is rooted; and the lived after-effects of trauma.

This article focuses on the hierarchies inherent in the Swedish version of whiteness and shows how these hierarchical structures are challenged by subjects placed within the category white. Passing as white is often presumed to be something sought after. The aim of this article is however to empirically explore the other side of the coin, that is, negative experiences and undesired effects of passing as white. With theoretical inspiration drawn from critical race- and whiteness studies, interview narratives from 31 women and men in the rarely researched area of descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden, are examined. The analysis shows that the descendants in various ways contested racialized ascriptions of whiteness, Swedishness and sameness. They furthermore voiced a dissonance between the sameness they were attributed and their own perceptions of otherness, thereby illustrating that betweenship can also be experienced by descendants that pass as white.

Den här artikeln intresserar sig för de hierarkier som finns invävda i den svenska versionen av vithet och synliggör hur dessa utmanas av subjekt som passerar som vita. Att passera som vit antas ofta vara något eftersträvansvärt. Syftet här är dock att empiriskt undersöka den andra sidan av myntet, nämligen negativa erfarenheter och oönskade effekter av att passera som vit. Med teoretisk inspiration från kritiska ras- och vithetstudier analyseras djupintervjuer med 31 kvinnor och män i den underutforskade kategorin vuxna barn till polska migranter i Sverige. Analysen visar att de intervjuade på olika sätt utmanade rasifierande tillskrivningar av vithet, svenskhet och likhet. De gav vidare uttryckt för erfarenheter av dissonans mellan den likhet de tillskrevs och de egna upplevelserna av olikhet. Artikeln visar därmed att mellanförskap kan erfaras även av vuxna barn till migranter som passerar som vita. 

The article takes interest in the under-researched category of descendants of migrants in Sweden and their specific experiences of racialization. While studies have shown that descendants of migrants from non-European countries tend to be racialized as non-white and non-Swedish in Sweden, descendants of European migrants are less explored. Nevertheless, they are sometimes assumed to be unproblematically integrated into Swedish whiteness. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article contributes with an empirically based analysis of how the so far almost non-researched case of descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden navigate the racialized social landscape in Sweden. Inspired by critical race- and whiteness studies, the article shows that skin colour, phenotypes, speech and body schemes intersect in the racialization of the descendants. While the descendants often were in possession of materialized Swedish whiteness and also seemed able to perform embodied Swedish whiteness, they nevertheless sometimes became visible and their full inclusion into Swedish whiteness became questioned. 

Based on an analysis of interviews with women and men who grew up in Sweden with one or two polish parents this article argues that ethnologists can and should contribute to the research on class by using constructivist theory and illuminating processes in which class is done. Leaning on Beverly Skeggs poststructuralist writing on class it analyses how the interviewees make class with help of the capital they possessed and in relation to class as a system of classification and of judgement. Most positioned themselves as middleclass by using socially upgrading criteria’s in the system of classification, such as higher education and dedication. While most lacked economic capital, these was the types of capital many of them had within reach and used. The whiteness the interviewees where ascribed in turn proved to upgraded them socially. It furthermore functioned as a cultural capital as it ensured their passing as majority members ant thereby the use value of education as well as the ability to convert other forms of capital. It made their making of middleclass positions possible.