Loving others, othering love : on a few tropes and emotions that shape the image of the stranger

Loving Others, Othering Love is a multi-modal lyric essay that investigates the interdependence of love and racism. It is a text that mines the multitude of ways that each requires the other in efforts to normalize or mask white privilege. Here, Lee marshals her analyses out of such material as Swedish newspaper reporting on racist hate crimes, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Princess Bari, Ovid, and the manifesto of mass shooter Elliot Rodger. Startling in its elegant incisions into the literary, the popular, the public, and the mythological, Loving Others, Othering Love enacts a critical poetics of assemblage in order to reveal the racist duplicity of love. Mara Lee is one of Sweden’s most prominent contemporary writers, as well as a translator and scholar. She is the author of several novels and volumes of poetry, including the internationally recognized Ladies from 2007 and award ­winning Love and Hate from 2018. Lee’s work mobilizes the paradoxes and confluences that emerge when the physical and linguistic realities of sexuality, gender, and race manifest themselves against the backdrop of Swedish welfare state whiteness, its quotidian power and purported racelessness. She is professor of art, art theory, and art history at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and guest professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.