Acknowledgments

This book is based on and made up of conversations. So, my first word of thanks goes to all those who, with patience and generosity, indulged my interest in their lives, perspectives, ideas, experiences, and stories; who walked with me through their neighborhoods and local parks; who sat with me over coffee, during lunch breaks from work, in their offices, around the dinner table, and after hours at local pubs; who fielded my numerous questions, taught me many lessons, and challenged me when I needed it. For these conversations, the warp and woof of this text, I am deeply grateful. Banning Eyre and his colleagues at Afropop Worldwide (afropop.org) made it possible to share some of these dialogues, along with the music culture of an effervescent Afro-Swedish art world. I would invite readers to listen to the radio program A Visit to Afro-Sweden, which first aired in October 2018, as an audible complement to the present text.

Among the several dozen dialogues in which I’ve engaged over the course of this research, three stand out. Long before I had any inkling of writing the present book, I was on my way to grad school in the summer of 2003 with the hints of a dissertation project about the music culture of the African diaspora in Sweden. My friend Matilda set up a meeting with her friend, Lena Sawyer, an anthropologist whose work would, later, become foundational to my project (and the work of many others). I was naïve about what the life and labor of a graduate student entailed, and Lena had some hard but necessary truths to tell me about what to expect. Hearing about my interest in Sweden’s African diaspora, I also discovered how much I didn’t know and needed to learn about global Black studies in particular. I left our meeting with a hard copy of an article (Sawyer 2002) that still sits, well-worn and marked up, in my office.

Ten years later, I had a similarly impactful conversation with Michael McEachrane, a political philosopher, Black studies scholar, and anti-racist activist based at the time in Lund. Michael has been on the front lines of postcolonial scholarship and critical race studies in Sweden since the 1990s. Unsurprisingly, his scholarship is peppered throughout this book. But I have also benefited from Michael’s intellectual outreach and generosity. During my visit to Lund in the summer of 2013, Michael set up a meeting with community elder, Madubuko Diakité, whose story I trace in chapter 1. Two years later, in April 2015, I had the pleasure of hosting Michael at my university, where he shared his deep knowledge of the Swedish hip-hop scene with our scholarly community. Then, in July 2015, right before my departure for a twelve-month stay in Sweden, Michael spoke to me for nearly two hours on a video call, talking through his encyclopedic knowledge of Afro-Swedish history in visual art, film, literature, and especially music, offering essential context for my research at a crucial point in its development.

I would also like to extend special thanks to Kitimbwa Sabuni, current chair (ordförande) of Afrosvenskarnas Riksorganisation (as of June 2021), who was also present at the beginning of my research in the summer of 2013. My conversation with him at Café Panafrika, one of the first formal interviews conducted for this project, strongly shaped my understanding of the discursive politics of Sweden’s Black and African diaspora. Many threads of my analysis of Afro-Swedish public culture begin there. Subsequently, Kitimbwa has been incredibly helpful in connecting me with various members of the Afro-Swedish community (he seems to know just about everyone) during the editorial phase of this project, and he has offered pointed, constructive, and always prompt feedback on my writing when requested. For such generosity, both intellectual and interpersonal, I am very grateful.

I am deeply honored to introduce this book with a foreword by Jason Timbuktu Diakité. I first met Jason during a music festival in January 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where we were both present to support the Swedish cultural organization Selam. Since then, Jason has taken great interest in this project and contributed his time, energy, and intellect on multiple fronts: sitting down with me for several extended interviews; coming to The Ohio State University for a talk, classroom visits, and a workshop (with translator Rachel Willson-Broyles); contributing his music and voice to a public radio program; and sharing his words, wisdom, and worldview on the page, in this book. Tusen tack.

My yearlong sojourn in Sweden (2015–16) was made possible by scholarships from the American Swedish Institute and American Scandinavian Foundation, along with a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Prior and subsequent trips to Sweden (during the summers of 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2018) were supported by grants from the College of Arts and Sciences, Office of International Affairs, and the Migration, Mobility, Immobility Discovery Theme Project at The Ohio State University. For making me and my family feel at home during our residence in Sweden, several people deserve special thanks. Paula Grinde rented out her Uppsala apartment to our family of four and, together with her partner Mats Utas (who is also a colleague in African studies at Uppsala University), helped us navigate the vagaries of the Swedish housing bureaucracy, in addition to being graciously helpful day to day. Professor Sten Hagberg provided me with the official paperwork necessary for my affiliation with the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University but also helped set me up with an office and, more generally, made me feel welcome at the institution. Finally, Margaret Litvin and Ken Garden happened to be on sabbatical in Uppsala at the same time, and our two families became fast friends (with our children ending the year speaking mostly Swedish with each other). Uppsala will always be a second home to us, thanks to all of you.

Several institutions, individuals, and events helped spur along the writing of this book during and after my residency in Sweden. My first attempt to give voice to a few nascent ideas about diasporic “remembering” and “renaissance” in Sweden came during a panel discussion in January 2016 on Afro-Swedish history, hosted by the Forum for Africa Studies at Uppsala University. A publication from my portion of that presentation appeared in a short opinion article written for Upsala Nya Tidning, titled “Afrosvensk Renässans” (Skinner 2016). Thanks to Sten Hagberg and Maria Ripenberg for coordinating that event and inviting me to participate. A year later, in January 2017, I had the opportunity to present material that would be the basis of chapter 3 (“Walking While Black”) at Columbia University. Thanks to Aaron Fox and Ana Maria Ochoa for organizing that talk and welcoming me back to New York. An article based on that material (Skinner 2019b) was later published by African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal. Thanks to Fassil Demissie for helping me bring those ideas to press. In March 2017, I presented the preliminary research for chapter 2 (“A Colder Congo”) at Indiana University, Bloomington, as a guest lecturer for the African studies spring seminar. Heartfelt thanks to Daniel Reed for inviting me to take part and share my thoughts with his colleagues and students.

I presented work that would figure into chapter 4 (“Articulating Afro-Sweden”) on a panel organized for the “Afroeuropeans: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe” conference in Tampere, Finland, in July 2017. Thanks to my co-panelists Monica Miller, Nana Osei-Kofi, Ylva Habel, and Ellen Nyman for making space for this work. In March 2018, I had the honor of presenting a keynote address for a conference organized by graduate students in the Scandinavian department at UC Berkeley. An early version of chapter 6 (“The Art of Renaissance”) emerged from that talk. Thanks to Ida Johnson for the invitation and hospitality, and to Eric Einhorn, Markus Huss, and Sherrill Harbison for helping me tidy the text up for publication. Chapter 1 (“Invisible People”) began with a talk for a symposium, “Images of Race in Swedish Visual Culture, Music, and Literature,” at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, in September 2018. I am deeply grateful to Åsa Bharathi Larsson for inviting me to take part in that gathering. Finally, my thoughts on Afro-Swedish renaissance in the performing and visual arts deepened across six further presentations, for annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (2017), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (2017), the African Studies Association (2017 and 2019), the Society for Ethnomusicology (2019), and the Mande Studies Association (2021)—scholarly organizations that represent the intellectual foundations of this project, at the disciplinary intersection of the performing arts, Africana studies, and Scandinavian studies.

Several colleagues read and responded to early drafts of this work, providing me with essential feedback when I needed it most. Arved Ashby, Michael Barrett, Beth Buggenhagen, Alice Conklin, Brandon County, Simone Drake, Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Tobias Hübinette, Valerie Lee, Tina Mangieri, Monica Miller, Noah Tamarkin, Ben Teitelbaum, and Sarah Van Beurden, thank you all very much. Johanna Sellman deserves special mention in this cohort. She has read, or heard about, all the bits that make up this book, and at various stages in their development. Not only does this signal a deeply rooted intellectual trust, but it testifies to a profound patience with a sometimes-fitful author. Tack så mycket! I also received three anonymous peer readings while my book was under review with the University of Minnesota Press, each of which proved enormously helpful in the latter stages of revision, providing me with targeted and constructive criticism. I am deeply grateful for the time they took to read my work and craft that feedback. Pieter Martin, my editor at Minnesota, is one of the wisest people I know, telling me just what I need to hear (for better or worse) to nudge the work along. Thank you for your patience and skill in shepherding this book toward publication.

I have had the great pleasure and privilege of working with a remarkable cohort of graduate students at The Ohio State University, some of whom worked closely with me on this project as research associates. Erin Allen, Adam Buffington, Robert Dahlberg-Sears, Austin McCabe Juhnke, and Olivia Wikle, thank you for all the behind-the-scenes work you did to make this project possible. A special word of gratitude goes out to Rachel Wishkoski, who wrote a brilliant master’s thesis on the commemorative performance of Japanese diasporic community in Seattle, Washington (2014). Our conversations about “remembering” and “re-membering” through the sonic and choreographic art of Bon Odori, and in dialogue with the work of Edward Casey and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, left a lasting impression on me, and on this book. Thank you. I would also like to thank Alex Harlig, a scholar of dance, social media, and the Black diaspora, who painstakingly formatted and copy edited this manuscript for submission to the press.

To all the members of the varied and vital African and Black community in Sweden today, I humbly dedicate this book to you, in anticipation of the next round of conversation.