Ethnicity, Cultural Identity and Bordering: A Tornedalian Negro

This article examines how experiences of internal colonialism may be expressed in literary writing, through an analysis of Bengt Pohjanen’s poem R ttip t (Ragheads). The article discusses the poem and its embedding in a Me nkieli (Tornedalian Finnish) grammar book, Me nkielen kramatiikki (Pohjanen & Kentt 1996). The theme explored is the tensions arising between homogenising modernity in a Swedish nation-building context and the particular situation of the Tornedalian Finnish minority in northern Sweden. Colonial complicity and vernacular cosmopolitanism are key concepts used in describing these tensions. The article proposes that the poem represents a remapping of the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ as allegiances are established between the Swedish national minority of the Tornedalians and migrants in European metropolitan centres. Hence the Tornedalians in the northern borderlands are presented as symbolic citizens in new migrant cartographies. This implies that a new myth of belonging is created, which unifies national minorities with metropolitan migrants.