Race, Melancholia, Midsommar

I hardly know where to look, where to rest my gaze, whom to follow, and how to do so in this blinding sunlight. I've been here before; this is like my first midsommar (summer solstice), in what I thought was a fantasy of Sweden but turned out in some ways to be real or at least a curious affekt (affect) of the people and the place. I remember being in a field adjacent to a series of red summerhouses, everyone was dressed in white, their summer finest. We sang and drank and sang again during a lunch of pickled herring, smoked salmon, fresh potatoes, elderflower juice, and Swedish snaps, all served family style on long tables decorated with fresh flowers. The herring and snaps were new to me, the fish both slimy and oily despite the delicious mustard sauce and the snaps so full of alcohol that they combined purification and inebriation. We ran to the maypole and danced, pretending to be, as I learned later, little frogs and pigs. The blinding light softened to a beautiful glow as the sun did not set and we kept dancing, drinking, and eating strawberries and whipped cream. I was far away from home, a stranger in a strange land, celebrating midsommar with my Swedish partner and his friends. It was beautiful and strange. In Ari Aster's film Midsommar when the car carrying Dani, Christian, Josh, Mark, and Pelle drives into the Swedish countryside toward Hårga and the camera's perspective slowly, gently, definitively flips upside down, I feel a sharp pang of (mis)recognition, of having felt on the precipice of a similar summer scene. And yet as I stare at the screen at the beginning of this fictional filmic midsommar celebration, I hardly know where to look because I am (over)identifying with nearly everyone, American and Swede alike.

I don't know where to look when the Americans arrive in Hårga because all I see is white—white people in white clothing, all in blinding sunlight—so I decide to fixate on Josh. Like me, he's African American and a scholar, continually analyzing and taking notes; he's traveled to Sweden to have fun and to do fieldwork for his thesis. His is a scenario that is familiar to me. Though I am not an anthropologist like Josh, I am a literary and cultural historian; more importantly, I've seen enough horror films to know that people like us, Black and too curious, will likely not survive these two and a half hours, even and maybe especially in Sweden. I wonder how he will navigate this situation, where he will end up, what his presence and the manner and timing of his death can or will tell us about how to read race in the fictional place of this film or Sweden, as metaphor. I'm thinking about affekt again and belonging and remembering that at the end of Midsommar during the ritual burning of the nine offerings, the Hårgans are said to purge oheliga affekter (unholy affects) out of their society. I'm thinking also about the fact that Sweden is officially and in public discourse a "place without race" with a strong sense of itself as a color-blind social democracy that is exceptional in Europe because it had little to no colonial enterprise or overseas empire. Historically, the homogeny of the population and the overwhelming nature of whiteness as a sociocultural norm has meant that instead of identifying as "people of color," racialized Swedes have identified as icke-vit (nonwhite) instead of, for example, in the case of people of African descent, Black or Afro-Swedish, terms of self-identification more in use today. I wonder if or how a place for Blackness will or can be made in this film.

When thinking about how to apprehend difference and Black people at midsommar celebrations or in Sweden more generally, I think of my own experiences, lovely long days that became even richer as I learned the language, songs, and traditions over the years. Early on I bonded with the other foreigners...