The project aims to study race as an aesthetic phenomenon in Swedish-language working-class literature from the interwar period (1918–1939) in order to determine how this literary tradition relates to coloniality. The material consists of a tentative selection of novels written by first- and second-generation proletarian writers in Sweden. The project is conducted against the backdrop of historical research that shows the relevance of racial ideological political currents to the emerging labor movement in Sweden. The project focuses in particular on the ambivalent racial identity attributed to the European working class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The core of the project revolves around the racialization of fictional working bodies through aesthetic literary means such as metaphors and metonymies, and the political orientation and intervention that arises from this.