The Iconicity of an ‘Immigrant Writer’: Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Yahya Hassan

Abstract | Abstract

What do Jonas Hassen Khemiri from Sweden and Yahya Hassan from Denmark have in common? Apart from the visual commonalities – they both have a non-white physical appearance – they share an outstanding commercial and critical success. Using these young, highly hyped, bestselling authors as examples, this paper aims at discussing the iconic function of the ‘immigrant writer’s’ authentic body in the public discourse on ‘national’ and ‘immigrant’ identities. The emphasis lies on the marketability of an ‘immigrant writer’, which derives its commercial value from the iconicity based on ethnic visibility, recognizability and exemplarity. I want to draw a connection between the existing fixed iconography of an ‘immigrant’ in the mass media and the visual ethnicized representations of Khemiri and Hassan in the daily press and put their literary performance into the socio-political context. This paper considers their popular author-images as objected icons of hegemonic normative discourses on national culture, while it simultaneously understands their subversive literary and extra-textual renegotiations of national self-imagery as iconoclasms of traditional order of ‘Swedishness’ resp. ‘Danishness’. Rather than going into deep textual analysis, I focus on the para-texts such as newspaper articles and book covers as iconic performances of the discourse on the ‘immigrant literature’.