Ola Larsmo’s fictional Swede Hollow (2016) maps a time of Swedish late 19th century and early 20th century immigration into the United States. Extensively researched and based on authentic, contemporary sources, he highlights their toil and hardships in the new country, but he also shows their paths to becoming established U.S. citizens. With this as a backdrop, my aim for this paper is to draw parallels to more current literary images of immigration into Sweden as shown in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s One Eye Red (2003) and Golnaz Hashemzadeh’s She Is Not Me (2015), particularly with regard to agency, the acceptance or resistance to adaptation to the majority culture and the negotiation of power.

My study is a literary analysis of the three novels. The two latter are written by authors who themselves are well acquainted with contemporary migration and integration issues and processes in Sweden. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s mother is Swedish and his father is Tunisian and in his novel he portrays immigrant life in a Swedish multi-ethnic suburb of Stockholm with a 15-year-old boy as its main character. Golnaz Hashemzadeh and her family’s country of origin is Iran and she arrived in Sweden at the age of three. Her semi-autobiographical novel She Is Not Me portrays her own journey growing up in Swedish almost exclusively white and middle-class Gustavsberg, a small city with roughly 40.000 inhabitants situated south of Stockholm, and her ambition as she was accepted at the most prestigious universities in Sweden as well as in the U.S. but also the costs for her personally.

The use of Gilles Deleuze’s and Felìx Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space will help me map the structures and shifts in power, agency and societal hierarchies. My paper addresses the costs as well as the benefits of  migration and adapting to the majority culture in fín de siècle United States and contemporary Sweden respectively, how the characters (attempts to) build a bridge between the old culture and the new and how they carve out new identities and create possibilities for themselves while navigating more or less visible new structures and social hierarchies.