Within a ‘white’ affective space: racialization in Iceland and development discourses

Abstract

Racialization does not always take place through discourses of blackness as emphasized in American research, or exclusively in relation to immigration, as emphasized in the European context. As an affective process, racialization is entangled with particular views of nation-states and a sense of belonging in a wider community of nations where humanitarianism can play a large role. By looking at international development in Iceland, the paper emphasizes that racialization takes place in different spheres of society where Icelandic racial subjectivities are shaped by global ideas of humanitarianism and international development that intersect with older Icelandic anxieties of belonging with sovereign northern European nations. The article emphasizes whiteness as being embedded in local Icelandic conversions of nationhood and belonging, entangled in global international development discourses that involve mobilizations of the idea of ‘humanity’.