Postkolonialism och poetik

Alejandro Leiva Wengers Till vår ära

Abstract

Alejandro Leiva Wenger was born in Chile in 1976. When he was nine years old his mother emigrated to Sweden with Alejandro and his younger brother. Their father remained in Chile. The family settled in a multicultural suburb south of Stockholm. In 2001 Alejandro Leiva Wenger's first collection of short stories entitled In our honour was published. The stories provide a combination of poetological features of an experimental literary tradition and postcolonial themes. The stories are examples of contemporary realist prose portraying life in multicultural Sweden. In some of the stories this is reflected by the use of multiethnic youth language. Twentyfirst-century Sweden is portrayed as a society where the vision of the Swedish welfare state has collapsed. In this contemporary world ethnic, class, gender and age differences are at work in processes of segregation and marginalization.