Prelude: Performing Africa

During my first lengthy stay in Sweden, from 2001 to 2003, I got to know many African diasporans; most were recent migrants from western Africa (Gambia, Senegal, Guinea, and Mali), and many were musicians, as I was. Some of us made music together. For our Swedish audiences, we offered what Stuart Hall (1993, 105) once called “a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic”: African music. I played the kora, a twenty-one-stringed Mande harp (Skinner 2015a), at times alongside other West African harpists. For a while, I had a steady gig with a local Senegalese storyteller, sharing our sounds and words with schoolchildren and library patrons throughout Stockholm. But, most often, I performed with one or more exponents of a sizeable community of West African percussionists, who played a mix of sabar (hand and stick drum), jembe (hand drum), dundun (bass drum), and tama (pitched pressure or “talking” drum). Our principal role was to accompany local dance troupes: African dance. If I was the white American exception to a West African rule among the musicians, the dancers in these troupes were almost uniformly white, Swedish, and women, many with extensive training in a variety of African and Afro-diasporic dance forms. By contrast, the accompanying musicians were mostly men, masters of their art to be sure, but also emphatically “African,” seen and heard through telltale sonic and visual signifiers: percussive, colorful, muscular, and lightly clothed. Offstage, the lives of these musicians ebbed and flowed in private spaces on the outskirts of cities like Stockholm, and mostly on the margins of the Swedish public sphere; onstage, they made their living by “performing Africa” (Ebron 2002).

When I arrived at Columbia University in the fall of 2003 to pursue a master’s and a doctorate in ethnomusicology, I initially proposed a research project that would investigate the ambivalence of this musical and choreographic “idea of Africa” in northern Europe, exploring themes of cultural appropriation and artistic exchange, and perceptions of exoticism and the pragmatics of immigration among African performing artists and their European interlocutors in Sweden. My advisor, however, had other ideas for me, which he framed as a “hard truth” about my chosen field of study. “You need to go back to Africa first,” he told me, “if you want to get a job in ethnomusicology.” He was being both brutally honest about the academic job market (even then, not very good) and pointedly critical of current ethnomusicology. The scholarly study of “music in/as culture” was (and in many ways still is) complicit in the exoticizing gaze that serves to displace African-descended artists in places like Sweden as other, as “African” (Agawu 2003). My work wouldn’t be taken seriously if I didn’t address the field from a sufficiently non-Western vantage. “Return to the Swedish project later,” my advisor counseled. So, I went to Mali, West Africa, and embarked on research that would lead to my first scholarly monograph, Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music (Skinner 2015b). Some years later, I began a tenure-track job at a large public university in the United States. My advisor’s cynical but pragmatic assessment about my home discipline, it seems, proved correct. I had become an “Africanist ethnomusicologist.” Then, in 2013, I heeded his advice again, and returned to Sweden and the questions about the migrant African arts I had left behind.

Much had changed. Looking for “Africa,” I found a diasporic community and art world in the midst of a profound sociocultural transformation that can only be described as “generational”—the sociolinguistic and political dimensions of which I have sketched in chapters 4 and 5. To be sure, the “African” arts live on and continue to thrive in many ways in Sweden, much as I had observed these expressive cultures ten years prior. Indeed, my current research began with and among many of the artists, groups, and associations I had known during my previous sojourn in Sweden. (Here, I would encourage readers to set this book aside for a moment and listen to the music of one such group, Sousou and Maher Cissoko. Their sounds and story may be heard on the radio program I coproduced with Afropop Worldwide, A Visit to Afro-Sweden, archived at afropop.org.) I imagined that my work would entail a significant amount of participant observation as a musician, playing my kora with dance troupes and instrumental ensembles. But I quickly became aware of other currents at the intersection of Africa and Sweden in the performing and visual arts. A new generation of African-descended Swedes were actively and significantly transforming what it means—how it looks, sounds, and feels—to make art and cultivate community, in ways no longer reducible to the adjective “African”—and they were not looking for a white American kora player.

The Art of Afro-Sweden

In the wake—or, rather, in the midst—of this generational change, this chapter traces the contours and explores the substance of an effervescent Afro-Swedish public culture, as manifest in the performing, literary, and visual arts. My discussion focuses on the lives and labors of several prominent Afro-diasporic artists working in (and sometimes against) the institutions and markets of Sweden’s public and private culture sector. In most cases, these artists, their audiences, and the communities of which they are a part significantly contribute to Sweden’s cultural life (kulturliv) while confronting endemic racism; actively promote social pluralism against the hardening boundaries of cultural difference; and increasingly captivate the public imagination while resisting assumptions of exoticism and foreignness. As a whole, their work takes multiple forms, their methods vary, and their modes of identification are not uniform, but, together, they evidence, I argue, a complex but no less coherent Afro-diasporic arts community in Sweden today. By examining the diversity and vitality of this diasporic art world and building on observations about public discourse and politics in chapters 4 and 5, I claim that what we are witnessing is nothing short of an Afro-Swedish renaissance—a conjunctural moment of diasporic consciousness, creativity, and critique, manifest in a florescence of artistic production, commentary, and interpretation.

To support this claim, this chapter will present a series of six case studies, relating recent examples of Africana creative practice and giving empirical substance to the notion of a varied and vital Afro-Swedish public culture. Following the structural logic employed in previous chapters, these cases may be read as distinct ethnographic vignettes, which aim to accomplish two things: (1) survey exemplary public artists and their interlocutors, whose works and ideas contribute to an emergent Afro-Swedish arts and culture sector through a variety of expressive forms, including dance, literature, theater, film, music, and visual art; and (2) make individually unique but cumulatively compelling arguments for the idea of a cultural “renaissance” taking shape within Sweden’s African diaspora today.

Throughout, my attention is drawn to the way these artists—coming from various walks of life, with varied generational backgrounds and cultural heritages, and with wide-ranging expressive means at their disposal—critically and creatively address the reality of being racialized as “black” in a society that overwhelmingly promotes a color-blind and anti-racist outlook; and who—sometimes pridefully, sometimes provocatively—perform their Blackness as a mode of being in a world suffused in whiteness. I conclude with a reflection on the conceptual implications of qualifying this art world and the community it constitutes with the term “renaissance,” implications relevant to the development of new modes of speaking and civic engagement in Sweden’s Afro-diasporic community elaborated in the two preceding chapters. In brief, my argument is that a specifically Afro-diasporic concept of renaissance usefully illuminates and clarifies the conjuncture of these modes of expression and identification. I begin where I myself began two decades ago, with a story about what it means to “perform Africa” in contemporary Sweden.

Decolonizing “African Dance”

Lansana Camara is a dancer: a choreographer, teacher, and performer. His artistic career began in Guinea, West Africa, first as an apprentice, then as lead choreographer of the prestigious Ballet Wassasso, directed by Sorel Conté, an artistic elder (Camara calls him his “uncle”) and mentor in Conakry.1 Seeking new opportunities and greater fortunes, Camara moved on to Senegal, where he established his own dance group in the southern Casamance region. There, he made a living performing in beachside hotels, dancing for European tourists. But the work was tenuous and the competition fierce. When Camara met a Danish woman in the coastal town of Saly, Senegal, he eagerly took up her offer to form a dance company and travel to Denmark. The group was called Africa Faré, or “African Dance” in Camara’s native Susu. While in Europe, Camara and the Danish woman became romantically involved, but this made for an unsustainable mix of the personal and professional. Their relationship and the dance group fell apart after only six months. At this point, Camara was ready to return to Africa when a traveling troupe of Guinean comrades convinced him to visit Sweden. “There is good work for dancers in Sweden,” they told him. In Stockholm, Camara met Klara Berggren, a Swedish dancer, teacher, and museum curator with expertise in several African dance techniques and styles. (Berggren is present at my interview with Camara, and he is keen to acknowledge and honor her presence.) Camara calls Berggren, with a sense of humor, respect, and personal affection, la grande dame. “Thanks to her,” he says, “I have been able to establish myself in Sweden.”

When speaking about the presence and significance of African dance in Sweden, Camara describes a particular kind of diasporic double consciousness in which an emergent “Swedishness” and an ingrained, if undervalued, “Africanness” hang in the balance. “You need to show people what you can do,” he says. “This is not our country, but in time [au fil du temps] we will become Swedish. But, before that, one needs to show the Swedes that ‘I am from Africa, and this is the little that I can show you, the little I have learned in my country to show you in Europe.’ That is where your value lies. If you forget that, you’ll be forgotten, left behind.” For Camara, “performing Africa” is a matter of dignity and self-respect, which he contrasts to hasty and superficial efforts to assimilate to European society. As he sees it, traditional African dance, performed with a sense of humility and sincerity, has much to offer his adopted host country. “For the Swedes,” he tells me, “they think that dance can help them a lot”: “When they are dancing behind me, following my movements, they feel something in their heads, in their bodies. Here, you see, people have many concerns, many sicknesses in their heads; for them, the dance gives them energy, and helps them forget the many bad things they encountered before.”

As anthropologist Lena Sawyer (2006, 208) has observed, in a seminal essay on the African arts in neoliberal Sweden, “African dance emerges [in Stockholm] as a marketed, consumable product of leisure; a product that promises not only sensory and bodily pleasure, but also a shift in the self.” Sawyer’s study emphasizes the way white Swedish women, in particular, have been drawn to “African dance,” with studios popping up in cities and towns throughout the country with increasing frequency since the early 1990s. For these women, Sawyer explains, “African dance” represents a welcome physical diversion from the stilted pressures of home and the workplace; but it is also a potent object of racial interest, fascination, and desire, described by Sawyer’s interlocutors as “natural,” “organic,” and personally “transformative” (209). From Camara’s perspective, as an instructor and practitioner, the transformative potential of “African dance” in Sweden goes both ways. He may be the object of a curious, even desirous gaze, but Camara is loath to call this “racism”; rather he views the attention his work garners as an affirmation of his art. “[People] tell me about racism in Sweden,” he explains, “but I have not yet encountered it. Because of the work I do, those who come to see me, they all like me. So, it’s not easy for me to encounter racism.” Confident in the virtue of his work as a migrant artist and unwilling to pass quick judgment on the dance community of which he is a part, Camara conceives his labor in Sweden in ethical terms—as the “right thing to do.” “So, I’m here [in Sweden]. I’ve started something. And I want to finish it. The work that I’ve done with the Swedes, the dance that I’ve done with the Swedes, they appreciate it. I want to see this through to the end. Because I know if I say today that I will stop dancing, many people will be disappointed.” To teach and perform “African dance” for a Swedish public represents, for Camara, a mutually transformative and salutary “ethical aesthetics” (Skinner 2015b). It is in this sense that he belongs to this moment of diasporic cultural renaissance, as “African” as it is “Swedish.”

But there is a coda to this opening ethnographic anecdote and the story it tells about Afro-diasporic renaissance in Sweden today. Two and a half years after my conversation with Camara, and a decade following the publication of Sawyer’s critical essay, the term “African dance” becomes, once again, a point of significant diasporic concern and public debate. On social media, a member of Stockholm’s African diaspora posts a comment on a public advertisement for an African dance class for young children, hosted by a local arts center. The post reads as follows: “I would be interested in knowing what country/ies music or dance style will be taught. It is still very strange and disappointing for me to see a class or session advertised as ‘African dance.’ Perhaps the teacher can clarify where her focus will be, perhaps the west african style as mentioned??” The commenter goes on to note the “degrading” emphasis on “animal sounds and animal movements” presented at a prior African dance class they attended in Sweden. They then tag the course’s instructor (who is white and Swedish, but also an experienced practitioner and teacher of many African dance forms), asking for clarification, “as this kind of description . . . leaves me confused and defensive.” Two hours later, the instructor posts the following response to the commenter’s query: “[This dance class] includes movements derived from West and East Africa. Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. My playlist [for the class] includes Vieux Diop from Senegal, Kilema from Madagascar, Salif Keita from Mali, Nahawa Doumbia from Mali, Manu Dibango from Cameroun, and Percussion Discussion Africa from Uganda, among others. Please come and dance on Thursday, at ten o’clock!” The commenter thanks the instructor for their clarification, before noting that the course is “still not for us.” They explain their decision at length by observing the way the term “African” obfuscates regional and cultural difference, of style, technique, and pedagogy, and concludes by saying “I know many from the African diaspora feel the same.” Indeed. Dozens of comments from Afro-diasporic voices active on social media populate the thread. Many reiterate the commenter’s concerns about the cultural essentialism the term “African dance” entails; others accuse the course, and others like it, of cultural appropriation; some satirically muse about what a “European dance” class might look like. This eventually prompts the arts center hosting the class to weigh in, welcoming “critical examination” of its programs while defending the instructor’s experience and methods as a dance pedagogue. Still, the comments and criticisms continue that day, and the next, unabated.

And there is a postscript to this story, too. Coincident with the “African dance” social media thread, Mia Annerwall publishes an open letter to the Djembe Nytt (Djembe News) listserv, an online “newsletter for African drums and dance in Sweden” (djembe.se). Annerwall is a cultural producer and project leader based in Stockholm, and a long-standing and active member of the Swedish “African dance” community. The title of Annerwall’s editorial is “Afrikansk dans finns inte” (African Dance Does Not Exist). It is a topic that “has been with me for many years,” Annerwall writes, emerging from nearly two decades of discussions in dance classes and among colleagues about postcolonial theory, anti-racism, and the “idea of Africa.” Annerwall’s essay opens with a set of assumptions and an underlying concern. “I assume that no one in this community is an outspoken racist,” she writes. “I assume that we think all human beings have the same worth. I assume that all those who are present here have both love and respect for dance and music and culture from the African continent and that it is an important part of your life. That is why it is important that we have perspective and knowledge about history, ongoing processes, and cultural forms.” Annerwall then elaborates a blunt critique of the ways in which racism and imperialism have conspired to objectify and exploit the African continent and its people, and she implicates the idea of “African dance” in such histories, structures, and practices. Further, she addresses the anti-blackness on which “the idea of Africa” rests, too often reproduced through what she calls the “benevolent racism,” in which notions of “nature,” “authenticity,” “physicality,” “sensuousness,” and “strong sexuality” accrue to black bodies. Indirectly responding to the diasporic critiques unfolding elsewhere on social media, Annerwall acknowledges her privileged position as a white Swedish member of the “African dance” community, but eschews accusations of appropriation, affirming that “culture is for everyone.” She insists, though, on a more precise, culturally sensitive, and historically conscious language to describe her community’s praxis, “so that we may find new words and expressions and new paths to follow.”

Annerwall’s plea and the critical perspectives voiced by Afro-Swedes on social media are, I argue, signs of diasporic renaissance in Sweden today. And there is renaissance too, I suggest, in the efforts of many Swedish dance instructors, people like Klara Berggren and Mia Annerwall, who have dedicated their careers to showcasing and promoting Africa’s rich and diverse choreographic heritage. Together, these points of view, interventions, and practices constitute a varied but no less urgent call to speak of, engage with, and relate to the African continent and its people anew, voicing and embodying a moral critique that complements Lansana Camara’s ethical sense of purpose. Through both agency and ideas—through moving bodies and attentive dialogue—“African dance” gives way to something more diffuse, a constellation of culture that reflects the choreographic variety that “Africa” and its diaspora, in fact, encompass. This is an Afro-Swedish renaissance in the mode of sociocultural and aesthetic decolonization—which is necessarily a work in progress.

A Variation on the Theme of Diaspora

It is 2003 and I am standing in Stortorget, a large public square in downtown Malmö. Joining me amid the lingering light of a late afternoon in early summer are a few thousand others, all waiting to hear a hip-hop artist named Timbuktu. When the stage lights come on and the beat drops to the tune of “The Botten Is Nådd,” the crowd erupts with a cheer. I lift my wife’s ten-year-old cousin onto my shoulders so that she can see the show better. Jason Timbuktu Diakité is a family favorite and a local hero. Eleven years later, I am standing on a grassy field at the Uppsala Botanical Gardens, once again waiting in a large crowd for Timbuktu to take the stage. It is a generationally mixed group, but most of those around me are in their early twenties, college students in this university town. A few songs into the show, I turn my gaze from the performance to the audience. Everyone around me is rapping and singing along. They know every word. At that moment, I realize that an entire generation of Swedish youth has grown up with Jason’s music. And as I dance, sing, and rap with this throng of fans, I think, “What could be more ‘Swedish’ than Timbuktu?”

The question is rhetorical, but the answer, once the lights go off and the crowd goes home, is complicated. The name “Timbuktu” is a tribute to Jason’s paternal heritage. A reference to the storied urban center of Islamic thought on the Saharan frontier, it is a name Jason shares with his great, great grandmother, Myla Miller, an enslaved woman with origins in what is today Mali in West Africa, where the modern city of Timbuktu still lies (Diakité 2016, 163). Jason grew up in the small city of Lund in the south of Sweden, another historic university town. There, as a person of color in a place where pale complexions predominate, Jason’s father, Madubuko Diakité, would always remind his son that he is Black and a son of Harlem, though his mother is a white woman from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Published in the fall of 2016, En droppe midnatt is Jason’s soulful and frequently poetic reflection on his complex cultural heritage. (An English translation was published in 2020, under the title A Drop of Midnight.) The book tells the story of his remarkable upbringing, growing up in southern Sweden as an African American boy with a Scanian accent and an ear for hip-hop. More broadly, it relates the nuances of a particular but by no means unique diasporic experience, bearing witness to an increasingly diverse but still provincial Sweden that Diakité calls “home”; and a distant but ever-present America, Jason’s “home away from home,” where burdens born of slavery and Jim Crow endure and echo across the Atlantic.

I suggest that we situate A Drop of Midnight within what Jason himself has termed a “cultural awakening” of a “non-white” (icke vit) but no less Swedish civil society (chapter 5)—a doubly conscious community of Swedes with non-European roots, “born and raised,” as Jason puts it, “in the in-between.” Indeed, Jason’s life story and work as an artist and activist help clarify the cultural substance and historical trajectory of this new social movement. Here, I want to think with the hip-hop artist and author about how his work invokes the spirit and substance of Afro-diasporic renaissance to thoughtfully and creatively critique the structures and practices of what he calls den svenska rasismen (Swedish racism). As a potent symbol of an anti-racist social, political, and artistic movement, the term “renaissance” remains strongly associated with Harlem and twenty-century Black America more broadly. That time and place, and the people, activities, and activism they encompass, are central cultural references for Jason, whose paternal heritage is rooted in African America, and Harlem in particular, but the renaissance his work portends is part of a broader tradition of art and activism in the African world.

For Jason, A Drop of Midnight is less an “autobiography,” than it is an identitetsresa, a tour of identity (Nordström 2016). The distinction is significant. While the book does tell Jason’s story—tracing his family’s complex cultural heritage from contemporary Sweden to antebellum America—it gives substance to a set of experiences shared by many. “I’m only one,” he raps in the track “Misstänkt” (Suspect), “but I write for thousands.” Jason’s words reach out to an entire generation of Swedes who have experienced the stigma and abuse of social exclusion (utanförskapet) and everyday racism (vardagsrasism), those he hails in the book’s epigraph, a stark and proud verse by the late African American poet Maya Angelou:

Following Jason’s lead, A Drop of Midnight takes its readers on a tour of det nya Sverige (the new Sweden). This is the sociospatial locus of diasporic renaissance in Sweden today. “There is a huge awakening going on,” Jason tells me. “The generation that was born from these earlier immigrants to Sweden are now growing up, [the] second and third generation.” Importantly, this “new Swedish” awakening coincides historically with the rise of right-wing populist politics in Sweden, and a growing awareness of the far-right’s outwardly xenophobic and fundamentally racist politics. Jason put it to me like this:

It kind of dawned on a lot of people and it became indisputable that racism exists in Sweden, because for many years I think the Swedish self-awareness and self-identity was that Sweden was such a successful society, that we had moved beyond poverty, beyond racism, that Swedish social democracy and the welfare state had kind of saved Sweden from the ills of other European countries, but when a quote–unquote racist party [the Sweden Democrats] entered parliament in 2010, it became kind of a fact that, well, okay, racism exists.2

This awakening also coincides culturally with the flourishing of social media, creating new and increasingly accessible publics “where people of color are speaking out both through music and the arts, but also academically, claiming more of the public space and discussion.” Humbly, Jason adds, “I’d like to [think] that my book is in line with that.”

In our conversation, Jason captures the creative, affirmative, and critical valences of this new social movement, qualifying this “awakening” with the words “cultural” and “racial”—though he hesitates on the latter term. “I don’t know if that’s a good word,” he says, before turning to the more neutral term, “identity.”3 This moment of critical reflection is indicative of just how difficult it is to talk about “race” in Sweden today, where the term registers, for many, long-discredited notions of racial biology. Jason shares these lexical worries about “race,” perhaps instinctively, but qualifies his “typically Swedish” hesitation by insisting on a language that captures the currency of everyday racism. In Sweden, he says, “it’s either (svensk) [Swedish] or utlänning [foreigner]. Or blatte [a slang term for non-white people]. Or (invandrare) [immigrant].” That, he observes, “is what gives rise to the term rasifierad [racialized].” He adds, “Well, that’s why the necessity for such a word arises.” Such necessity demands, in turn, a sense of—if not “racial,” then “racialized”—solidarity. “We need to connect as ‘non-whites,’” Jason argues, with programmatic bravado, “to push forward for rights for non-whites.”

Coalitional solidarity across racialized lines does not preclude, however, an awareness of the specific social stigmas and burdens of anti-blackness, a condition Jason indexes with the Swedish term afrofobi (Afrophobia). He recalls the moment when Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven, during the announcement of his new center–left government in 2014, mentioned “Afrophobia” as a focal policy concern. For Jason, the politician’s statement struck a powerful chord. After the speech, Jason made sure to call his dad. “For my father, that was huge,” he says. “His whole life [in Sweden] has been about fighting racism directed toward Blacks.” Jason’s parental hat tip makes an intergenerational connection to contemporary campaigns for racial justice in Sweden, historicizing the present notion of “Afro-Swedish renaissance.” Indeed, one reason for calling this moment a “renaissance” of Afro-diasporic public culture is to properly recognize and account for such history. A Drop of Midnight, a titular reference to the “one drop rule” of American racialism, is Jason Diakité’s personal tribute to this historical struggle for equal rights in the United States. Composed from a European vantage, it is also an affirmation of the depth, variety, and value of Black life in Sweden today.

By taking his readers “back home,” to his family’s roots in Black America, Jason’s book traces a diasporic pilgrimage that is as exceptional as it is exemplary. Indeed, and this point is worth emphasizing, A Drop of Midnight is as much Jason Diakité’s story as it is Afro-Swedish history, which is why Jason rebuffs the notion that the book is an “autobiography.” As a “journey through identity” (identitetsresa), we encounter the people and places who populate Jason’s patrimony—from the cotton plantations in Allendale, South Carolina, to the Trump-supporting Uncle Obi in Baltimore, and all the family ghosts (and their progeny) who haunt the streets of Harlem—not as an incomparable “origin story,” but as a variation on the theme of Black diaspora. This point was made palpably clear to me in the fall of 2017, when Jason debuted a theatrical version of En Droppe Midnatt in Stockholm, combining the narrative and aesthetic features of a monologue and musical. As Jason narrates his encounter with the American South, we hear the mournful anthem “Strange Fruit”—a song once sung by Billie Holiday in 1939 from the mortal depths of Jim Crow, reinterpreted by Nina Simone as a clarion call for civil rights in 1965, and now performed on stage in Sweden by the late Afro-Norwegian vocalist (and Jason’s longtime collaborator) Beldina—cast against the twenty-first-century backdrop of an ascendant white supremacy as if to say, “This sorrow song belongs to us, too.” These are the sounds and words of historically rooted and globally routed Afro-Swedish renaissance, fashioned, onstage and on the page, as a collective call to arms.

The Revolution Will Be Staged

When speaking with Josette Bushell-Mingo, sparks fly. The actor, director, teacher, cultural advocate, and social activist is a person whose charisma, intellect, and passion refracts in all directions. Like lightning bolts, words and gestures chart circuitous paths through topics that are also emotions and relationships—topics that are also the subjects of art. In the presence of this British-born, Caribbean-rooted, and Swedish-resident renaissance woman, the boundary between art and life disappears. At the same time, the African diaspora comes into sharp focus. On- or offstage, she embodies and exudes her creative practice, which cannot be divorced from her concerns for and engagement with social justice, and the struggle to support and sustain Black lives in particular. She embodies—through her art and life (as if these can be separated)—an expression of Afro-Swedish renaissance that insists on an emphatically Black presence in the Swedish public sphere, with no apologies. “It’s woke!” she tells me. “It’s renaissance that’s happening.”4

On 18 April 2016, Josette and I meet at hole-in-the-wall sushi shop in the trendy Hornstull neighborhood in Stockholm, where she lives. Accompanied by cups of miso soup and hot green tea, we are there to talk about her current theatrical project, En druva i solen, a Swedish adaption of a Loraine Hansberry’s classic African American Broadway show A Raisin in the Sun. Under Josette’s direction, the critically acclaimed play has been on tour in Sweden for the past three months with the National Theater Company (Riksteatern) and has just wrapped up a series of encore performances at Södra Teatern in Stockholm, one of which I was able to attend. Remarkably, Hansberry’s landmark play has never been staged in Sweden. Further, its predominantly Black cast and crew represents another first for a culture sector that has long struggled to acknowledge and remediate an endemic lack of social and cultural diversity, onstage and behind the scenes. “Why the play has not been done before is the question,” Josette tells a reporter from the New York Times. “Every day we rehearse, it becomes more important.” David Lenneman, a Gambian Swedish actor who plays the role of Walter Younger in the Swedish production, explains that the Swedish art world’s insensible “color-blindness” is part of a broader, societal problem: “You are told, ‘you are not black, you are Swedish,’ but when you try to be Swedish, you are not allowed in” (Kushkush 2016).

And yet, for Josette, En druva i solen is not primarily about the apparent failings of a normatively white Swedish culture sector. “This is not about the education of whites,” she explains, “this is about the education of Blacks.”5 As she sees it, En druva i solen, like A Raisin in the Sun before it, is first and foremost about the Black experience, and, more specifically, how a story rooted in African American history might translate and signify to a contemporary Afro-Swedish audience. “I’m interested to know what happens when the diaspora meets and they share their experiences,” she says. “Not because I want to observe, but because I want to be part of it. I want to create a room where people can talk like this.” Josette’s intent is not to exclude white audiences, still by far the majority public for this and other national productions in Sweden, but she is interested in, as she puts it, “creating a room” for diasporic encounters. In her view, “the process of [staging] A Raisin in the Sun was historic not just because the play was being here for the first time, but [because] you were watching actors transform, claiming a space as Black people.” Speaking of the cast members’ collective journey in staging En druva i solen, Josette describes the experience as transformational, revelatory, and anxious: “You can see their soul shifting inside, some revelation, some understanding, and also an element of fear.” This, too, is renaissance: to reimagine the present against the grain of an oppressive past can be both exhilarating and terrifying; to claim a space as a Black person against the grain of white supremacy is both bold and forbidding.

This has meant making space for dialogue and debate among Black performers, audiences, and culture brokers, allowing them to constructively and critically explore their identities together around stories told from the Afro-diasporic archive. In this way, Josette invited members of the African-Swedish (afrikansvensk) separatist group Black Coffee to attend a preview of En druva i solen and insisted that the post-show conversation privilege their voices. This caused some private consternation among white audience members in attendance, who cringed at this manifestation of apparent racial exclusivity in what they consider a free and open (i.e., color-blind and anti-racist) society. In the face of such critiques, Josette is undeterred: “Our Afro-Swedish community does not have a home!” Her initial efforts at “diasporic homemaking” (Campt 2012, 52) have focused more on repertoire, telling stories that foreground Black lives, told from Black perspectives. “En druva i solen is not going to change racism,” she says, “but it [does] give us a place to rest. It gives us a place to gain courage and it gives us the insight into argument, and what is possible if we lose” (see also Kronlund 2017). But Josette does not dwell on defeat. Daydreaming about future productions, she indulges in diasporic vision: “The first [work] will be an African play, which has gods in it. I think it’s time the gods came home, and that we see that. The second will be a reimagining of a classic, like, let’s say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in Carnival.”

Still, in diaspora, such dreams are often accompanied by waking nightmares. For Josette, the very real prospect of still more loss in the Black community (of status, integrity, dignity, and, indeed, life) demands a rigorous and often onerous curatorial method. She calls this, invoking one of her mother’s household refrains, “staying in the valley.”6 Speaking of her Afro-diasporic audiences, she says, “I know you want to get to the top, but you need to stay in this bit. . . . Stay in the darkness. Stay in the shit. Stay in the difficult stuff. Face it. Call it out.” In her view, it is no less important for her white audiences to “go down” and cohabit these spaces, too, but their presence demands a particular ethics of listening, with a deference that goes against the grain of privilege. On the one hand, she stresses the learning that is possible from simply bearing witness, and, on the other, the growth that is possible from simply being present. “You go through that experience together, and you walk out of the theater together, and you say ‘I have seen, I have learned, I have witnessed. I understand something else about myself’” and, one might infer, about each other. In this sense, Afro-Swedish renaissance is also—and, arguably, always and already—about Swedish renaissance, about the “otherwise possibility” (Crawley 2016) that Sweden may be if space is made for its diasporic subjects to settle in, be present, and ta plats (claim a place)—of what could be if Sweden’s endemically intransigent public sphere catches up to the urgent pace of diasporic change.7

But that’s easier said than done. “It is [Sweden’s] biggest Achilles’ heel,” Josette explains. “It will unhook this country.” There is a profound knowledge deficit about the African world, she argues, and that must be filled if Sweden is to acknowledge and accept a permanent Black presence in its midst: “And then you’ve got a minority Black [public], who are woke, we’re talking a sped-up version, we’re talking augmented woke.” This is, simply put, a diasporic community that is tired of waiting, and the societal tension, as impatience meets intransigence, is palpable. This is how theater can make a difference. “We can’t stop the revolution when it comes,” she says, “but we can slow it down.” Importantly, “slowing things down” does not mean “bringing to a halt.” Diasporic change, from Josette’s point of view, is as inevitable as it is necessary. “Slowing down” is, however, a conscious effort to critically reflect, creatively experiment, and, perhaps, shift the stakes of social conflict before reaching a point of inflection. Theater “can give you breath,” Josette insists. “It can literally slow things down.”

This is the purpose of the National Black Theatre of Sweden, which officially launched in November 2018 and began staging shows in the fall of 2019. By presenting a repertoire derived exclusively from the African world—including Afro-Sweden—the National Black Theatre seeks to fill the diasporic knowledge gap in Sweden. “It’s a theater company that produces some of the greatest and most important classics . . . from the African continent and [its] diaspora,” Josette explains. “That’s it. There isn’t anything else.” By producing a public space where people from all walks of life can encounter each other through the performing arts, the National Black Theatre aims to “slow things down”—to promote a sustaining and salutary dialogue, on- and offstage, across otherwise entrenched positions of difference. “What I’m interested in is this tension that’s happening, as woke is meeting resistance. This intersection,” she says. “The National Black Theatre can’t change things, but it can slow things down.” What happens next can’t be predicted. Art, like politics, as Stuart Hall (1997a) once reminded us, unfolds with no guarantees. But “when you program the fucking work,” Josette insists, “then the discussion happens,” and hopefully, “the art does what you hope it will, and that is to live and to grow.”

Sweden’s Cinematic Griot

On December 11, 2016, I sit down with writer and director Dani Kouyaté in a cozy French pastry shop on New York’s Upper West Side to discuss his fifth feature film, Medan vi lever (While We Live), which had just debuted in the United States at the African Diaspora International Film Festival. As discussed previously in this book (chapters 1 and 5), Medan vi lever stages a modern family’s transnational experience, in which geographic and generational distances spanning two societies—Swedish and Gambian—shape the divergent, though not irreconcilable worldviews of a single mother and her adolescent son. By following the lives of this pair, from the Swedish city of Malmö to the Gambian capital Banjul, the film offers an intimate portrayal of the gendered, generational, and socioeconomic identities inhabited and expressed by those who live at the transnational interstices of modern-day Africa and Europe. It is an intersectional Afro-European life the filmmaker knows well.

Raised in a renowned family of griots (Mande bards and storytellers) in Burkina Faso, trained in the cinematic arts in France, and currently settled with his family in Sweden, Dani Kouyaté embodies the existential tensions of living with multiple roots along expansive though at times restrictive routes. In his films, as in everyday life, the questions “Who am I?” “Where do I come from?” “Where am I going?” and “Where do I belong?” are frequently posed, though the answers the itinerant filmmaker offers remain ambiguous, and intentionally so. In particular, Dani is ambivalent about his status as an “Afro-Swede.” Like many first-generation immigrants to Sweden, he gestures toward his children and their peers when discussing this hybrid identity—those who are born and raised “here,” with parents from myriad African elsewheres. Rather, Dani sees himself as an “African filmmaker” who happens to live in Sweden. As such, Dani’s contribution to an emergent “Afro-Swedish renaissance” is less autochthonous than it is supplemental, offering stories of African worldliness that deprovincialize reductive “us versus them” discourses. Further, Dani’s life and work remind us that African diasporans not only possess varied roots in the African world but also maintain myriad, cross-cultural connections that articulate this world with multiple diasporic locations of culture. In this way, Dani Kouyaté is, perhaps, less “Afro-Swedish” than he is “Afropolitan” (Skinner 2017), an African of the world.

“In my soul,” Dani says, “I am a griot.”8 In Dani’s native Mande society, griots are verbal artists, oral historians, and social mediators. Griots preserve the memory of individuals and families, perform for the delight of audiences, and mediate disputes among rivals (Hale 2007). It is a status that runs deep in his family. The Kouyaté clan traces its roots back to the favored companion and bard of Emperor Sunjata Keita, Balla Faséké, in thirteenth-century Mali (Niane 1960). Like generations before him, Dani learned the art of the griot alongside his father, the late Sotigi Kouyaté. “I had the great fortune to be trained in the company of my father,” he explains. “I often say that my first school was my father.” Yet Dani rejects the notion that he is a “traditionalist.” It is innovation, not blind conservatism, that is central to the griot’s art, he insists. “The griot has always belonged to his time. They have never been traditionalists, in the negative sense of the term.” Dani traces his own lineage as case in point. His grandfather, Mamadou, was the first to introduce the amplifier and accordion to the late-colonial music culture of Upper Volta; his father, Sotigi, helped establish theater as a cultural institution in an independent Burkina Faso; and Dani himself has been instrumental in creating a vibrant postcolonial West African film culture. “I am bringing the struggle of the griot as far as possible,” he tells me. “And I have this opportunity through cinema.”

Medan vi lever is, in many ways, the story of these modern griots in the world, relating their struggles, tracing their evolution, and singing their praises. A central plotline follows the story of an aspiring hip-hop artist named Ibrahim Göransson, or “Ibbe” for short. Our first encounter with Ibbe reveals a young man caught up in his immediate world, preoccupied by his artistic aspirations, and deeply frustrated by everyday life in southern Sweden. Ibbe feels scorned by his mother, Kandia, who would have him apply his talents to “real work,” and a local music producer, who suggests altering his lyrics to make them more “positive” and relatable. Stifled by an acute depression born of these pressures and criticisms, Ibbe leaves Sweden to visit his mother’s family in the Gambia. There, he finds his voice. The discovery comes at a moment of shared music-making. On a night out in Banjul, Ibbe meets Ismael, a young Gambian griot and popular musician who is engaged to Ibbe’s cousin, Soukeina—a partnership that cuts across rigid lines of class and caste in this traditional society. In a lamp-lit courtyard, surrounded by family and friends, Ibbe’s Swedish hip-hop meets Ismael’s Mande Afropop. In that moment, these two young men, both confronting the critiques of their families and the norms of their societies, create a vivid—though perhaps ephemeral—sonic space of intersubjective possibility. Their new music suggests new forms of communication, dialogue, and exchange. “Ibbe is initiated by his encounter with Africa,” Dani explains. “It is in that way he becomes a griot.”

If Dani Kouyaté is a griot by birthright, he is also a child of African independence, part of a generation born and raised in the wake of decolonization. “My struggle is postcolonial. It is a struggle for openings,” Dani tells me, emphasizing the term ouvertures (openings), a word he frequently employs when elaborating on the philosophy that animates his life and work. For Dani, to open up is to resist closure, a challenge that is, for him, both generational and geographic—that is, “postcolonial.” “Our elders, like [the late Senegalese filmmaker] Sembène Ousmane, developed African cinema as a means of anti-colonial struggle,” he says. “But for those of us born after independence, we have a different history. We must take up their struggle and advance it further.” In a world increasingly “opened up by the force of things” (la force des choses), this is a struggle against rigid nationalisms and the ideological essentialisms, institutions, and ideas that fix the otherwise “floating signifiers of culture, identity, and race” (Hall 1997a). Dani’s critical approach emphasizes the particular experiences, knowledge, and potential of postcolonial artists and intellectuals. “As a griot, I have something to tell you. And, I have an advantage over you, because I know you better than you know me,” Dani explains. “I am a griot from Africa. But I understand Italian. I understand Swedish. I understand English. I understand French. And I understand my own language [Jula], too. I can explain quite clearly who you are, from my point of view, and who I am, because I have lived among you. But you do not know me. All you have are prejudices against me.” Dani’s indictment is also a plea, a call for recognition from an insufficiently decolonized Europe, still caught up in the colonial myths of cultural—and racial—superiority.

In Medan vi lever, the character of Uncle Sekou embodies the decolonizing spirit of Kouyaté’s challenge to postcolonial provincialism. Sekou is Ibbe’s adoptive uncle in Sweden. Like his nephew, Sekou is passionate about music, which he expresses by playing recordings of his own music for clients in the taxi he drives. In one such scene, Sekou asks Ibbe to join him for a cab ride. A white, middle-aged, Swedish man sits in back. When Ibbe tells his uncle about a promising meeting with a record producer, Sekou is overjoyed: “I’m so proud of you, young man!” The client looks confused and dismayed by Sekou’s vocal outburst, and says, loudly, in English, “Hey! The road!” Sekou’s response to what appears to be a racist microaggression is swift and subtle. He plays one of his Afropop tracks, loudly, with a guitar-driven refrain that repeats, “Say! Say, say, say. Today, I’ll enjoy my life!” He then asks the client, in Swedish, “What do you think?” Sekou’s charm, calm demeanor, and the upbeat rhythm and positive message of his song prove, in this case, transformative. “It’s actually, pretty damn good!” the client exclaims, this time in Swedish.

Like his characters, there is a fugitive quality to Dani’s sense of self and place. It is simultaneously both in the world and out of place, at once cosmopolitan and deterritorialized, and always and already diasporic. Or, as Dani himself puts it, “Chez moi, in the proper sense of the term, has become a complicated thing!” In Dani’s life, “home” is the confluent result of fate, serendipity, opportunity, and often difficult negotiation. Parentage rooted him Burkina Faso. Studies took him to France. Love brought him to Sweden. And work has taken him to the coffee shop where I sit with him in New York on a cold December morning. The night Ismael and Ibbe musically connect in the Banjul courtyard, the young griot performs a classic piece from the Mande repertoire, “Miniyamba,” which relates the mythical origins of the tenth-century kingdom of Ghana. The song is also one of Dani’s personal favorites. In it, we hear the refrain Tunga ma lambe lon (Exile knows no dignity). I ask Dani about this notion of tunga, the Mande concept of travel abroad, migration, and (at times) exile, and its resonances with his life and work. “Tunga, for me, is a way of life,” he explains. “I have the feeling of belonging to all places. When I try to position myself as a traveler, I ask myself, in what sense? Am I an African traveler who has arrived in Europe and must return to Africa? Or am I a European traveler who must return to Africa and then come back to Europe?” For Dani, tunga is as much a migratory practice as it is an ontological condition and way of knowing the world en route, from place to place; it is a mode of diasporic being-in-the-world that values perspective from multiple vantages, an epistemology that is as humanistic as it is cinematic. In his films, as in his life, Dani Kouyaté bears witness to the irreducible multiplicity of human experience and identity, even as he insists that the world has much to learn from the travels and stories of African diasporans, like himself. Such an “Afropolitan ethics” (Skinner 2015b) is, then, Kouyaté’s artful and philosophical gift to an emergent Afro-Swedish renaissance.

The Swedish Soul of Black Feminism

At one o’clock on Saturday, August 2015, I turn on the radio and tune in to P1, Sweden’s national station. A familiar orchestral waltz announces the “summer chat” (sommarprat), hosted this week by singer Seinabo Sey.9 It is a much-anticipated edition of this popular program. Following the chart-topping success of her single “Younger” in 2014, Seinabo is now a household name in Sweden. Critics rave about her distinctive “soul pop” style,10 comprising a mix of the young singer’s studious attention to the vocal currents of the Black Atlantic and the remarkable pop alchemy perfected by Swedish musicophiles like Magnus Lidehäll (Johansson 2020), who produced and cowrote the tracks on Sey’s first LP. More subtly, one might hear the influences of her late father, Maudo Sey, a Gambian bandleader, who performed an eclectic mix of mbalax, reggae, and West African funk until his untimely death in 2013. For the younger Sey, this diverse sonic pastiche achieves a generative consonance, both musical and social; that is, her hybrid, genre-defying “soul pop” resonates to the tune of her multiply conscious personhood, as a Gambian, a Swede, an artist, and a woman. It has also earned her many accolades. In February 2015, many watched as Seinabo won a Swedish Grammy for Best New Artist. And on this weekend afternoon in late summer, many turn up their radios to hear the artist tell her story, addressed to an imagined community of Swedish listeners, who, for the time being, share in the unaccompanied sounds and sentiments of Seinabo Sey’s soft-spoken voice.

She begins her program with a caveat: “The idea was to talk about music, my friends, philosophy, and those things that I think make my life worth living, but I can’t continue my summer chat without naming this.” Seinabo pauses, takes a breath, and then says: “Everywhere, all across the world, Black people are suffering, [from] poverty, segregation, marginalization, war, starvation, and murder.” She repeats word “everywhere” (överallt) multiple times, reminding her audience that the global scope of this gruesome reality encompasses their society—Sweden—as well. “Everywhere on earth,” she continues, “people whose skin is darker than white continue to be oppressed.” She concludes this preface with a question: “Why is this so?” In lieu of a direct answer, she plays the track “Super Magic” by Mos Def (which opens with a call to arms echoing from the voice of Malcolm X: “You’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, and I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”)

Born to a Gambian father and a Swedish mother, Seinabo Sey grew up in two distinct locations of culture: the quiet middle-class town of Halmstad, on Sweden’s western coast, and the bustling capital of the Gambia, Banjul, on Africa’s western coast. “Gambia is mine, just like Sweden is mine,” she tells her Swedish radio audience. In a later conversation with me, in preparation for another public radio program, this time for an American audience (afropop.org), Seinabo elaborates on the social and cultural differences she learned to negotiate, moving back and forth between Sweden and the Gambia. “We are culturally polar opposites,” she says:

But I often hate talking about it, because it kind of emphasizes the differences. I would like to emphasize what connects everyone. But then, Gambia is a very loud place. You have to speak up to be heard, generally. And, in Sweden, [the] culture is to be quiet and know your place. So, I think I’ve juggled that quite a lot. Trying to learn the different parts of each culture has been preoccupying my mind for basically all my life, but I feel like I can be myself in both places, whatever that results in.11

Still, the “results” of this cultural balancing act have not always been even. If Sweden is, in some fundamental sense, undeniably “hers,” it has not always been clear that the opposite is true—that Seinabo Sey belongs to Sweden. On the one hand, urban Africa taught her the virtues of what Kwame Anthony Appiah (1997) has termed a “rooted cosmopolitanism,” that she could be a child of the Gambia and a citizen of the world at the same time. On the other hand, small-town Sweden put her in contact with a distinctively European and specifically Swedish provinciality. “We have this thing is Sweden, it’s called vardagsrasism, which is ‘everyday racism,’” Seinabo tells me. “[The word ‘everyday’] kind of takes the edge away a bit. [But] we talk about that a lot in Sweden. My dad used to talk about that. So, it’s always been like that.” In particular, growing up in Sweden as a girl with African parentage made Seinabo aware of the fact that her black body signals difference, setting her apart from her peers, and, in the eyes of some, poses a problem, of being ugly and unwelcome.

Moving from the complexity of her bicultural background to the discomfiting issue of “race,” Seinabo’s summer chat turns to a sustained interrogation of the (il)logic of racial difference, paying particular attention to its impact on Black women. Her verbal narrative is as didactic and critical as it is supportive and caring, with a notable awareness of her anonymous but no less heterogeneous and stratified audience. Addressing the women of color among her listeners, Seinabo offers what she calls a “guide for a solitary Black girl in Sweden,” providing self-care tips about beauty products and advice on how to negotiate and confront everyday racism.12 During this segment of the program, she asks the rest of us to get a cup of coffee or just listen respectfully. Then, turning back to her general audience, cuing us with a pregnant pause, Seinabo voices a Black feminist critique of Sweden’s provincial racialism in deeply personal terms: “I have never felt beautiful in Sweden. I have seen so few images of people who look like me here that I often wonder if I am simply someone’s fetish.” She punctuates this statement with more music, carefully chosen to amplify her argument: a strident hip-hop track from Swedish rapper Jaqe and DJ Marcus Price, titled “Malcolm”—invoking, once again, the memory of the martyred African American icon Malcolm X.

The program culminates with an emphatic thesis statement: because black bodies are so rarely encountered in Swedish media, they are necessarily made to seem, in Seinabo’s words, “more exotic,” more “unusual and different from the norm,” “something obscure, vulgar, and bizarre.”13 She compares this condition to the violent objectification of Saartje (Sara) Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from the South African cape whose voluptuous body was made into a spectacle of sexualized exoticism in early nineteenth-century Europe (Hall 1997b). In search of a Black feminist response, Seinabo turns back to her playlist, invoking the voice of Nina Simone to imagine a place beyond the terror and confinement of this (white male) gaze. “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear! I mean, really, no fear.” And then, the program ends, leaving me (like many others, I imagine) silent and pensive for a long moment in its wake. During our interview, three years later, I ask Seinabo about this striking public critique of racialized representation. “I can count on my hand the times I’ve seen Black women in the public eye,” she begins: “I started googling covers of magazines and I realized that for every twenty-fifth cover, there might have been one very light-skinned person that might have been Black. [Afro-Swedish models] Victoria and Elizabeth [Lejonhjärta] had been in Vogue beforehand, or in a Drake video, and they might get a cover in Sweden.14 And it’s so pathetic. And then [the publishers] want an applause after that!” Speaking directly to these influential culture brokers of the Swedish art world, Sey adds, “You guys don’t ever take risks when it comes to our art. Never, ever, ever take a risk. And that made me so sad.”

Six months after her summer chat aired on the radio, Seinabo Sey was back onstage at the 2016 Swedish Grammy Awards. She had just taken home the prize for the year’s Best Pop Artist, and now it is time for her to perform.15 She opens with the track “Easy,” another hit single off her 2015 album Pretend. She sings a cappella in a loosely metered legato, expertly shaping vowel sounds through extended cadences with melismatic flourish. “Shoulder to shoulder, I know it could be easy, yeah.” She ends this phrase by dropping her contralto voice into the depths of its range, her right hand tracing the descending melodic movement—a doubly embodied gesture that elicits a lone “Yes!” and a solitary whoop from the audience. “Now keep your head up and walk with me”—she pauses—“I know it could be easy,” the last word bouncing gingerly on two sustained voicings of “ee.” In this phrase, Seinabo switches the lyrics from the original, replacing “talk with me” with “walk with me.” The meaning of this rhymed wordplay is soon made apparent. As the song continues, people from the wings begin to populate the stage, entering the audience and filling up the auditorium. They are all women of African descent, dressed from head to toe in black. They surround and envelop Seinabo, standing stoic, looking straight ahead. “Easy” then gives way to the track “Hard Time,” Sey’s anthem to personal struggle and resilience, sung here on live television for a national audience and accompanied in silent solidarity by 130 Afro-Swedish women.

“I basically just want[ed] to show that we exist,” Seinabo says. “That’s why I put that many people on stage because, okay, if you don’t show our diversity, I will in the only way I know how.” This bold act of vocal and visual defiance is Seinabo’s intersectional—Black, African, Swedish, and resolutely feminist—take on Afro-Swedish renaissance.

Sweden in Blackface

On January 30, 2016, I attend the opening of visual artist Makode Linde’s eponymous exhibit at Kulturhuset, a vast arts complex located in downtown Stockholm. The exhibit has for months been the subject of much controversy in the Swedish media, social and otherwise, with discussions and debates revolving around the exhibit’s original (and, for the artist, preferred) title, which in Swedish reads [N----]kungens Återkomst. We might translate this as “The Return of the Negro King,” though the n-word in Swedish indexes the more vulgar variant in English as well. This explains Kulturhuset’s decision to change the title of the exhibit, against the artist’s wishes and to the horror of “freedom of speech” proponents, citing their nondiscriminatory responsibility as a public cultural institution (Gindt and Potvin 2020). Linde’s designation refers to Astrid Lindgren’s term for Pippi Longstocking’s estranged father, whom Pippi describes as a [n----]kung, or “Negro king” (rendered as “king of the natives” in current English translations).16 Lindgren’s (and Linde’s) word choice is part of a broader lexicon of racial difference in modern Swedish popular culture in which the n-word figures prominently, appearing in the name of a popular confection, lyrics of children’s songs and nursery rhymes, content of primary school textbooks, narratives of cartoons and comic strips, and the common tongue of an everyday vernacular.

The “king” in question is also a reference to Makode Linde himself. “Under all these layers,” he says, “my art always points back to me” (Pérez Borjas 2016). Linde gained international notoriety for his 2012 work of performance art Painful Cake. Presented at a social gathering of Swedish cultural elites, the cake takes the shape of the Venus of Willendorf, colored in black. Makode Linde, whose body is hidden from view beneath the serving table, appears as the Venus’s head, painted in blackface. As guests cut into the figure’s flesh-colored marzipan body, Linde howls in pain (convincingly, according to those in attendance). In a now infamous gesture, the minister of culture at the time, Lena Adehlsohn-Liljeroth, feeds the Venus a bite of its own body to quiet the screams—eliciting a cheerful response from the gathered crowd, all of them white save for Linde. This scene resulted in an iconic image of modern racialized spectacle—capturing the delight of a white gaze on a mutilated black body—which rapidly spread on social media and around the world. The “cake incident” led the National Federation of Afro-Swedes to call for Liljeroth’s resignation and created a firestorm of debate about Linde’s artistic intentions and the consequences of reproducing caustic racial stereotypes in the public sphere.17 Four years later, Linde has returned, with controversy following closely in his wake.

The current exhibit is composed of old and new works, most of which belong to a series Linde calls “Afromantics,” in which keepsakes, knickknacks, ornaments, portraits, dolls, and other everyday objects are transformed into gollywogs—painted jet black, with bloated red lips, disjointed teeth, and big white eyes. Many of the figures have limbs cut off, represented with a circle of red flesh surrounding a white bone—evoking, much like Painful Cake, an aesthetic that is at once cartoonish and gory, a visual mix of minstrelsy, kitsch, Looney Tunes, and slasher films. The exhibit carefully stages these playful if horrifying and grossly stereotyped figures in scenes that evoke traditional fairytale environments: a magical underwater world, a cabin in the woods, an exotic jungle, a pirate’s ship, a throne room, and a graveyard. In the latter, a stone reads “RIP Lilla Hjärtat.” It is a reference to popular Swedish children’s book author Stina Wirsén’s character Lilla Hjärtat (Little Heart), whose pickaninny-inspired image—with a black face, white-rimmed red mouth, vacant eyes, and braided pigtails sticking straight up—elicited a firestorm of controversy in the Swedish press (Jofs 2013), leading eventually to the character’s removal from Wirsén’s books (Hellekant 2012). In an interview with Vice magazine, Linde explains that “from the beginning I’ve wanted to do a show that is related to the world of fairytales,” which he strongly associates with the children’s books, plays, and films he read and watched at Kulturhuset while growing up. With the exhibit now occupying one of the building’s principal exhibition halls, one can read Linde’s “return” as a nostalgic, satirical, and, in its own way, critical appraisal of the storied sights and sounds of his Swedish youth, populated by stereotypes that loom large for those, like Linde, who are racialized as Black.18

But Linde is also, in the eyes of many, a shameless provocateur. If his works suggest an autobiographical reading, rooted in a deeply personal response to racism in Swedish society, for some critics they are also, first and foremost, ugly and offensive. Thus, observers have accused Linde of willfully and irresponsibly reproducing anti-black iconography and language, showing more concern for those—civil libertarians and outright racists alike—who affirm their right to use the n-word in public, decrying the apparent excesses of “political correctness” in Sweden today, than for people of African descent who are the unwilling recipients of such anti-black insult and injury (see, e.g., Järvi 2016; Kyeyune Backström 2016). “I’m just doing what I am expected to do,” Linde tells Vice. “It’s quite surprising that it’s such a shock to everyone.” Maybe. What is clear is that Linde excels at amplifying an already polarized public discourse. This is why Kulturhuset’s decision to change the name of his exhibit from [N----]kungens Återkomst to Makode Linde still worked, despite the institution’s “good” (though perhaps also face-saving) intentions and the artist’s own public protests on social media.19 Ultimately, the name “Makode Linde” has become synonymous with controversy and polemic.

Back at the exhibit on January 30, Linde asks his audience, before entering the gallery, to wear paper bags on their heads (with circular holes cut for the mouth and eyes), or, better yet, black balaclavas with red-rimmed mouths (though these are in short supply). Notably, the artist’s exhibit dress code applies to everyone except people of color. Linde apparently wants to make whiteness visible in the gallery space, by turning “non-racialized” (icke rasifierade) attendees into blackface art objects. Though, during my visit, many seem to treat the cheap costume as a playful dress-up game. (I am disturbed by this performative exhibit etiquette and choose to not wear a bag or face mask, and I am not alone, but a majority—perhaps a little more than half—of attendees that afternoon do cover theirs heads as requested.) There are also several families in attendance during my visit, many, at least initially, dressed in Linde’s makeshift blackface attire. A friend of mine at the show overhears one parent ask their child, “Are you having fun?” On Facebook later that evening, I write, “If this exhibit is, in part, about confronting a (majority white) Swedish public with the brutal fantasies of their racialist and racist childhood—that, as in so many fairy tales, never seem to grown [sic] up—then I am forced to wonder: Is this what [Linde’s] audience sees? Will this kind of reflexivity enter into the debate and discussion surrounding Linde’s art?” Today, these questions seem moot. One can buy printed copies of Linde’s provocative “Negro King” exhibit poster, as well as sundry hand-crafted blackface figurines, for between $300 and $500 apiece.20 “Was this all just a publicity stunt?” I wonder aloud in my field notes.

When I leave the exhibit at Kulturhuset on January 30, I connect to social media to scan the day’s news and threads. Two events appear at the top of my feed, further complicating my reading of the exhibit. Earlier in the day, members of the far-right Sweden Democrats political party had staged a demonstration in the Stockholm city center, proclaiming their xenophobic populism. The night before, a group of right-wing terrorists went on a violent rampage in downtown Stockholm, targeting people of “dark complexion” (Lindberg 2016). In the wake of these events, I post a hasty analysis (again on Facebook): “Linde’s exhibit became, in the midst and wake of these events, a parody, an absurd and shallow mimicry of a very real and violent form of social injustice and repression. Inside, immersed in blackface, we discuss the aesthetic and political value of provocative art. Outside, surrounded by a lynch mob, racialized subjects are brutalized.” So why include Linde’s work, and this exhibition in particular, as a case study—indeed, the culminating case study—in a chapter on “Afro-Swedish renaissance”? My response is admittedly imperfect, rooted as it is in my own opinion, and will likely strike some readers as flawed, even problematic. But, like the heated discussion about “African dance” with which this chapter began, it would be a mistake, in my view, to ignore the significant public debate Linde’s art elicits, especially the response from Afro-Swedish civil society. Regardless of whether one agrees with his message (whatever that might be), Linde’s stereotyped, carnivalesque caricatures have brought everyday racism, as manifest in routinized forms of anti-blackness, to the fore of contemporary Swedish discourse. Moreover, Linde is arguably Sweden’s most prominent contemporary Black visual artist. To ignore his work would be to tell a partial and, I believe, inadequate story of the Afro-Swedish contemporary and the accompanying “renaissance” of the diasporic arts in Sweden today.

The Art of Afro-Swedish Renaissance

In sum, a dancer who proudly and purposefully “performs Africa,” even as debates rage about how one should speak of, represent, and enact diasporic culture in Sweden; a book that relates the burdens of prejudice and champions the virtue of dignity to make an existential case for the possibility of “doubleness” (dubbelskap) in the world today; a play, at once foreign and familiar, translated and staged to make space for Sweden’s Black community, so that its members might confront their societal demons and affirm their collective presence; a film that tells a story intimate to those whose lives have been shaped by movement and migration, and a filmmaker for whom multiple homelands exist alongside myriad elsewheres, each constitutive of a life lived at home in the world; a song, sung in the company of dozens, standing before hundreds, and broadcast to an audience of many thousands, that says, in words that need no lyrics to carry them, “We’re here. We’re strong. We’re Black. And we’re beautiful”; and an art exhibit that shocks and gives pause, transmuting commonplace artifacts of everyday life into a spectacle of cruel and macabre fantasy that, for many, is all too real.

These creative projects and works, seen, heard, and read in relation to the artists who make them and the communities they call on, illuminate, embody, and resound a varied and contested but no less vital and concerted Afro-Swedish life-world—privileging as they foreground the manifold lives and labors of people of African descent in Sweden today. This collection of choreographic, literary, dramatic, cinematic, musical, and visual culture also testifies to an increasingly salient though stylistically irreducible Afro-Swedish art world, born of a growing community of artists, aficionados, activists, scholars, and culture brokers; exemplified by a range of expressive, interpretative, curatorial, and interventionist practices; attentive to variously African, Afro-diasporic, Black, Brown, and “in-between” modes of identification; and critically focused on “race” as an ontological, epistemological, and always intersectional category of interest, debate, and concern. Afro-Swedish artists are demonstrating—with increasing frequency, and in some of the most prominent cultural venues in Sweden—how their complex identities may be artfully, thoughtfully, respectfully, and provocatively represented, performed, embodied, and engendered, through both creation and critique. It is precisely at the interface of these worlds of Black lives and Black art that the idea of “renaissance” appears salient as a heuristic of an Afro-Swedish contemporary.

If we center the concept on its Africana genealogy (Mitchell 2010),21 and not on the Europeanist historical, philosophical, and aesthetic discourse to which it is more commonly applied, renaissance refers to moments of effervescent conjuncture in the modern African world—to moments when the diaspora becomes constructively and critically conscious of itself, for which cultural production in the literary, performing, and visual arts is both focal and fundamental to the making of diasporic meaning. Though, as Brent Hayes Edwards reminds us, diasporic meaning elusively shifts as it changes tongues and migrates from place to place. As Edwards’s work has brilliantly demonstrated, “diaspora” is necessarily transformed and refracted through processes of translation to engender a multi-linguistic plurality. Writing about the discursive migrations of “black renaissance” in the 1920s, for example, Edwards (2001, 308) observes, “The discourse of diaspora that emerges in the print culture of the period is practiced through the complex and diverse attempts to understand the race problem as a world problem, to carry blackness over the boundaries that would contain it. In this sense, in the Renaissance, diaspora is translation.”

But while diasporic renaissance speaks to us in multiple languages, and through multiple genres of expression, this does not imply incoherence. As the late Stuart Hall (2006, 3) observed in a genealogical analysis of postwar Afro-diasporic art in Britain: “Thinking conjuncturally involves ‘clustering’ or assembling elements into a formation.” In this vein, the purpose of this chapter—and, indeed, the book of which this chapter is a culminating part—has been to perform such an analytic and, following Edwards, translational assemblage—manifest, here, as an ethnographic “clustering” of creative social practice excerpted from a presently flourishing Afro-Swedish public culture. Thinking conjuncturally and in translation, we can locate such instances of irreducible Afro-diasporic awareness, criticism, and cultural florescence elsewhere in the African world: in metonymic placenames like “Harlem” and “Chicago”; literary traditions like négritude and negrismo; cultural and political imperatives like “Pan-Africanism” and “Black Power”; and so many arts movements throughout the diaspora qualified as “Black” and “African.” Renaissance is understood, within these various Afro-diasporic contexts and configurations, not as a literal “rebirth” of culture and society but rather as a periodic instantiation of what Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1998) termed “natality”—that is, the capacity of human populations to form and fashion themselves anew, to recalibrate human life according to shifting environmental, social, economic, and political conditions. Thus, I read the art and artists we have observed in this chapter as evidence of Afro-Swedish natality; of a critical, creative, and generative self-awareness that emphatically locates Sweden within various Afro-diasporic cartographies and histories and thereby challenges normative notions of what it means—how it looks, sounds, and feels—to be “Swedish” in the world today.

“However,” Hall (2006, 3) cautions, “there is no simple unity, no single ‘movement’ here, evolving teleologically, to which, say, all the artists of any moment can be said to belong.” Indeed, as the case studies in this chapter and throughout this book demonstrate, the category “Afro-Swedish” refuses to be reduced. There is “no single” Afro-Swedish community, mode of expression, or way of being-in-the-world. As I suggested in the introduction to this book, “Afro-Sweden” is better understood as a dynamic “structure of feeling” than a fixed “location of culture”; it is a sense of place born of multiple perspectives, and as many stories, even as it encompasses a common set of concerns. And, as I have shown in this and other chapters, such concerns strongly gravitate around the endemic problem of being “not-white” (icke vit), and more specifically “Black” (svart) or “African” (afrikan) in a nominally color-blind, but no less racist, and, for some, shamelessly white supremacist society. If Du Bois ([1940] 2007) could locate African American diasporic solidarity in the “one long memory” of the transatlantic slave trade, and if Gilroy (1993) could chart a course through the cultural ebbs and flows—the “changing same”—of the Black Atlantic, Afro-Swedes would seem to find common cause in the shared experience of an inveterate anti-blackness obscured by the rhetoric of “normative colorblindness” (Habel 2008, 2012), manifest, as we have observed, in what public intellectuals within the community have termed “Afrophobia” (afrofobi). Yet theirs is not a diaspora defined by negation alone; it is also unquestionably, and, as I hope to have shown, artfully affirmative.

In this way, the “Afro-Swedish renaissance” I have sketched in the foregoing pages marks a significant shift in the terms of debate about how to qualify—and thereby understand—Sweden’s increasingly diverse population, and its community of African descent in particular. In no uncertain terms, Afro-Swedes are explicitly refusing to be marked as foreign others in their own society, as illegitimate outcasts and unwanted “immigrants” ((invandrare)) or “foreigners” ((främlingar)). If their modes of identification are always and already plural, their message is no less clear: ‘We can be simultaneously, and without contradiction, Black, African, and Swedish!’ At the same time, Afro-Swedish public works shed critical light on broader patterns of racialization in Sweden, by drawing attention to the ways Blackness operates, discursively and symbolically, as both a capacious sign of difference and an urgent locus of solidarity—in which a common experience of anti-black prejudice and abuse and collective affirmations of Afro-diasporic history and culture appear in tandem. In so doing, Afro-Swedes resist the politics of erasure that normative color-blindness prescribes, by affirming a doubly conscious Afro-diasporic and Swedish being-in-the-world. This is an Afro-Swedish renaissance that insists that it is Sweden that can—and must—be reborn.