Prelude: Navigating the Racial City

On an afternoon in late June 2017, I am caught up in a rich conversation with cultural advocate, community organizer, and proud Ugandan Swede Maureen Hoppers.1 So far, we have been discussing the challenges that advocates for more diverse cultural representation (people like Maureen) face in the Swedish public sphere; the relative lack of private-sector funding opportunities for arts initiatives, even as public-sector resources are cut; debates within the Afro-Swedish community about how to acknowledge and accommodate differences among African-descended individuals and groups; and the need for Afro-Swedes to contribute their own stories and perspectives to public discourse, beyond the narrative refrains of African poverty, war, and disease, and beyond the “crisis” of immigration that so often objectifies African-descended peoples as “foreign”—or even a threat—to Swedish society. Then, the conversation shifts to the topic of segregation and the suburban neighborhood Älvsjö, where Maureen and her family now live, in southern Stockholm.

Like many suburban townships in the city, Älvsjö is divided between sectors zoned for lower- and middle-income apartments and residential or “villa” areas (villaomåden) zoned for single-family houses. In Älvsjö, Maureen explains to me, the two areas are adjacent to each other, but almost entirely separate socially. To safely access the latter from the former, there is a single pedestrian crossing at a lone traffic light. (Though not engineered quite as restrictively, this sociospatial design resonates with Gavin Steingo’s [2015] lucid description of peri-urban transit in Soweto, South Africa, particularly the “obdurate” divisions between spaces conceived as ethnic enclaves under apartheid.) Maureen calls the division “socioeconomic,” but of course it’s sociocultural, too, and racial. I mention the Stockholm neighborhood where I am currently staying, also in the southern suburbs, next to the Sandsborg metro station. Maureen asks, “Which side are you on?” “Exactly,” I say. On one side of the Sandsborg station (where I am staying), there is a welfare state–era planned community, with a half dozen or so large apartment complexes, each with a common open-air courtyard in the middle. On the other side you enter another world altogether, one made up of well-appointed early twentieth-century homes, expensive restaurants, and a fancy landmark bakery (Enskede Bageriet).2

Maureen talks about the social consequences of such pervasive spatial divisions: from the schools one’s children attend to the soccer teams they play for (and against); from the playgrounds and beaches where kids meet their friends, to the way they take (or don’t) public transportation. Reflecting on the mobility of young people from the Älvsjö villas, Maureen says, “If they take the subway into the city, with the routes they choose, they end up meeting their own socioeconomic group all the way into town. They experience the Central Station by Plattan [lit. ‘The Slab’; a busy, concrete commons in downtown Stockholm] as a shock, so they might get off a station earlier, or later.” One can, in other words, navigate the city in a way that confirms socioeconomic status and identity, at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class. For the upper-middle-class and predominantly white traveler, apparently “rowdy” (stökig) spaces like Plattan are carefully avoided, while target destinations become marked by the visible and audible signs of privilege that accrue to them: fashionable clothing, a class-inflected accent, and the color of one’s skin. “So, we’re raising groups of children in socioeconomic cliques such that they never meet other kids. And it goes both ways.”

For Maureen, the effects of this condition become palpable when fear sets in. “That’s the key when we talk about ‘rowdy kids in the suburbs,’” she explains. “I would say that the problem is even worse among the ‘well-established’ [välförankrade] families. Because, for them, the fear of others [de andra] is stronger. The result is that one holds on tighter to one’s own.” This recalls a popular Swedish aphorism, lika barn leker bäst, which is a bit like “birds of a feather flock together,” but with an explicit reference to “children” (barn) and, implicitly, to race and class. But it is Maureen’s reflection on the affect of segregation, of the way people become primed to feel certain ways in relation to each other in socially divided societies, that gets my attention, prompting me to think out loud about themes and cases from an earlier version of this chapter (Skinner 2019b). Certainly, the widespread xenophobia Maureen describes is real and well-documented (for a case study from Swedish schools, see Hällgren 2006). But fear of “others” is one thing; fear for one’s life is another. For many ethnic and racial minorities in Stockholm, the fear that grows out of sociospatial division is not merely abstract, but existential (Hirvonen 2013). I describe to Maureen the disconnect I frequently encountered between my experience of the city—particularly the pleasantness of Stockholm’s abundant green spaces and the functionality of its public infrastructure—and my Afro-Swedish interlocutors’ memories of many of those same places and transit points growing up. “Skinheads,” Maureen says, finishing my thought before I can fully formulate it.

In the late 1990s, Maureen lived in the western suburban neighborhood of Mälarhöjden, or “Lake Mälar Heights.” The bucolic lakeside topography is beautiful there, but at the time the social divisions were ugly and, if your skin wasn’t white, dangerous. “It was closer for me to take Mälaren’s subway to school. It was only one stop. But the evenings were so scary because there were so many skinheads who lived in Mälarhöjden’s villa area [villaområde].” Maureen walked home instead, around two park forests, giving the racists a wide berth, “but it was still so frightening.” Maureen’s story makes me think of yet another theme central to this chapter’s development, the historical cultural significance of “walking in the forest” (vandra i skogen) in Sweden. Again, Maureen can relate: “My parents used to say, ‘Go for a walk in the forest? Why would you ever do that?’” This makes us laugh. “When kids grow up with parents who have never picked blueberries or lingonberries,” she says, “and then they come back to school from [summer vacation] and [ask their friends what they did] and are like, ‘You picked berries?’” The relative strangeness and, for some, outright silliness of Swedish forest habits are tied to a particular and no less peculiar relationship to “the country” (landet) again inflected by the intersection of race and class. Maureen’s schoolmates used to share stories about their trips to landet, which she initially found very confusing. “Landet?” Maureen asked them. “But which country did you go to?” Then she realized: “Oh! You mean ‘the countryside?’ Wait. You have a second house?” And, of course, there were all those camping trips with the scouts (another Swedish forest tradition). “Jesus Christ!” Maureen exclaims. “Trauma like no other!”

Of Race and Space

In this chapter, I reflect on what it means to move through and dwell in the urban and natural spaces of contemporary Sweden while Black. In particular, I am interested in the particular cartographies, discourses, and histories that manifest in the sociocultural field of Swedish society when we follow the paths, listen to the words, and linger on the memories of African-descended peoples in Sweden today. Building on themes embedded in my conversation with Maureen above (urban segregation, racial violence, and the social practices associated with the idea of “nature”), I first introduce a theoretical approach to the biopolitics of walking in Swedish society, following Michel Foucault’s (2003, 255–56) and Achille Mbembe’s (2003) observations of the way modern states manage and maintain social and political life for some at the deathly expense of others. As manifest in pedestrian acts of leisure and recreation, walking in Sweden represents, I argue, a powerful and privileged signifier of sociospatial belonging and exclusion, demarcating the biopolitical field along racialized lines. This conceptual excursion is followed by four ethnographic cases studies, framed as distinct walking tours of urban and suburban locations in the municipalities of Stockholm and neighboring Uppsala, in which reflections on and critiques of anti-black racism are immanent to my interlocutors’ memories of these spaces and their movement through them.

These cases may be read as a third mode of historical reflection on an Afro-Swedish contemporary, as another variation on the theme of remembering diaspora in Afro-Sweden. The stories collected in this chapter follow as they build on the oral history of “first-generation” Afro-Swedes presented in chapter 1 and the archival critique of Sweden’s colonial imbrication with Africa elaborated in chapter 2. Here, the emphasis is on the way a younger generation of city-dwelling Afro-Swedes narrate their sense of history in dialogue with the built space of the places they call, at least in part, home. Their remembering draws our attention to a palpable sense of place that is inseparable from everyday sociospatial encounters with “race,” in which the situated immediacy of the racial encounter is also and always historically layered. “Socially spaces interpenetrate one another,” Henri Lefebvre (1991, 86) writes, “and/or superimpose themselves upon one another.” For my Afro-Swedish interlocutors, practices of remembering frequently dwell on the way urban infrastructure accumulates the lived experience of race over time. Memories of anti-black racism (such as Maureen’s memory of navigating around skinheads on her way home from school), as well as reminiscences of diasporic solidarity and support within one’s community (as we shall observe), adhere and accrue to their urban environs, producing a uniquely Afro-Swedish social space. As Brooke Neely and Michelle Samura have argued, “racial interactions and processes (e.g., identities, inequalities, conflicts, and so on) are also about how we collectively make and remake, over time and through ongoing contestation, the spaces we inhabit” (2011, 1934; emphasis added). That such memorial acts of racialized place-making frequently occur on foot—walking from one remembered location to another—is something I wish to ethnographically and theoretically thematize in this chapter: of remembering as an ambulatory practice of being-in-the-world.

I conclude with a reflection on what it would mean for social thought and theory, in its existential and phenomenological guises, to properly account for such an active and mobile African and Black presence in a place like Sweden, where normative notions of being and belonging tend to obscure the histories and practices of anti-blackness that underlie and sustain them. On the one hand, this means taking seriously the relevant theoretical insights of current Black and critical race studies, which, by emphasizing the lives and labors of racialized communities worldwide, offers a racially conscious corrective to otherwise color-blind intellectual paradigms (see, e.g., Bonilla-Silva [2003] 2018). On the other hand, this means actively listening to the social histories, arguments, and interpretations that diasporic communities cultivate and develop outside the academy, through public outreach, activism, advocacy, and, as this chapter and others assert, the performing and visual arts. In the context of this book, such reading, listening, and viewing beyond “the literature” may also be read as a methodological—indeed, ethical—imperative within current anthropology to more emphatically and, as John L. Jackson Jr. (2005) might put it, more sincerely “think with” local actors and communities, whose perspectives on positionality, subjectivity, power, and performance within racialized societies should remain primary in the anthropological study of global Black cultures. Thus, while this chapter does indulge in a certain amount of theoretical and disciplinary musing, it leans heavily on the words and experiences of my Afro-Swedish interlocutors. Specifically, I follow them in affirming the paramount importance of vocal and embodied acts of remembering when confronted with the stigmatizing and injurious condition of anti-blackness in Sweden today.

Pedestrian Existentialism in Modern Sweden

In Sweden, walking is not a culturally neutral act; it is not merely a functional or pragmatic means of getting from “here” to “there.” It is, rather, a socially constitutive praxis. To walk in Sweden, particularly through the abundant green spaces that intrude on and surround nearly every town and city, is a locally salient mode of being-in-the-world. It is a sign of personal vitality, healthfulness, and a kind of being-with others predicated on a regular, self-conscious, and often-solitary being-toward nature.3 In these all-encompassing natural spaces, one does not just walk: one hikes, roams, and wanders through well-tread forests, fields, and groves, from which the memory of getting lost has been mostly banished, though not entirely.

The adverb vilse (lost) has its roots in the Old Norse villr, a cognate with vild, meaning “wild.”4 As a verb phrase, one “gets lost” by “walking into the wild” (att gå vilse), beyond the known world of what Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1998, 2) calls the “human artifice”—the “lived space,” as Lefebvre (1991, 39) termed it, of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “cultural world” ([1962] 2002, 405). By contrast, to hike or wander (vandra) suggests a purposeful pedestrian journey through the natural world. Such walking is an active and incorporative production of space—what anthropologists Jo Lee and Tim Ingold (2006) identify as a “fundamental” mode of place-making and everyday sociality in human life. With every successive footfall that tramples down the earth and shapes the contours of a path, a new cartography is produced that claims this space as a “practiced place” (de Certeau 1984, 117), binding each individual walker to the next, producing an essentially ambulant sense of being-in-the-world in Sweden today.

To walk the city in Sweden calls on a different lexicon, of a more modern and French vintage, emphasizing the spaces and practices of the urban stroll (promenera) and the pleasure of the aimless gallivant (flanera). In the city, nature has been (mostly) tamed and the world (largely) made, allowing the urban walk to be less productive and more performative—a striding presentation of the self in everyday life (Goffman 1959). Though, here too, the act of walking as a “spatial practice” (de Certeau 1984, 91–110) returns in the “guided tour” (stadsvandring), through which the city may be re-discovered and re-produced by purposefully walking along the paths of past life-worlds, of social spaces long since gone but not forgotten—re-membered through regular returns to those places where footfalls and stories coincide.

To “get lost” (gå vilse) is to be radically estranged from these worlds—urban or otherwise—made of storied paths. Though such estrangement does make for good stories, as told by those who have kept to the trail. Walking into the wild is the subject of many old and new fairy tales that speak of a hidden, mischievous, and frequently dangerous life on the shadowy margins of humanity, of trolls that play tricks and monsters that steal away children into the opacity of the unknown (Frykman and Löfgren 1987, 47–50; see also Häll 2013).5 It is also the subject of a more contemporary Scandinavian existentialism, famously rendered in prose through the brooding genres of the detective novel and crime thriller, in which the solitary and deathly angst (ångest) of life on the edge of a massive wilderness—both figurative and literal—takes narrative shape (Forshaw 2012). This sense of “getting lost” as alienation suggests two existentially precarious terms of walking in (and out of) Swedish space, with profound implications for the present moment of widespread human displacement across the globe: utvandring (emigration) and invandring (immigration).

The idea of “emigration” in Sweden—to leave home or “wander out” (vandra ut) into the world—maintains strong associations with the transatlantic journey of roughly 1.5 million Swedes to the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing through the 1920s. The Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg immortalized this history in his 1949 novel Utvandrarna (The Emigrants), creating iconic characterizations of the mostly poor and provincial farmers who, in the face of failed crops and oppressive authorities, left home in search of a livelihood and, beyond necessity, greater civic and religious freedoms. The American half of Moberg’s book plays out in Minnesota, my home state. Such is the connotative strength of this historical association with emigration that when I travel to Sweden and introduce myself as a Minnesotan, in Swedish (and, I might add, with my pale complexion and blond hair), I am often welcomed “home.”6

The idea of “wandering in” (invandring), or “immigration,” also maintains strong social and historical connotations in contemporary Swedish society, but with strikingly different implications and consequences, which is the empirical focus of the remainder of this chapter. To speak of “immigrants” ((invandrare)) in Sweden today does not suggest a purposeful and productive movement through the world; rather, it returns us to the condition of being “lost,” of walking into the wild, of a radical rupture with the human world. To be an immigrant in Sweden is both a legal status and identity and a profound social stigma (Eastmond 2011), a pejorative term for those who do not belong and, as will be become clear in what follows, are not white (Pred 2000; Hübinette et al. 2012). The history invoked by this term is that of the past sixty years and counting, when growing numbers of southern and eastern Europeans, North and sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Easterners, Asians, and Latin Americans began migrating to Sweden with greater and greater frequency, looking for work, refuge, asylum, love, and security—some by choice, others by necessity, still others through marriage or adoption (Borevi 2012). Their presence is the basis of what some now call “the new Sweden” (det nya Sverige), connoting, positively and negatively, the perceived novelty of an increasingly heterogeneous—diverse (mångfaldigt) and multicultural (mångkulturellt)—Swedish society (Gärding 2009).

I turn now to four stories of walking, talking, and remembering in this “new” Sweden, which, as we shall observe, remains intimately bound up with (conditioned by and frequently judged against) the “old” Sweden. My ethnographic focus will be on the ambulant and vocal lives, works, and worldviews of Swedes of African descent. As discussed in the introduction to this book, Afro-Swedes are at the fore of current debates about the value (or burden) of social diversity and multiculturalism, the nature and scope (or limits) of “Swedishness” (svenskhet), as well as a growing critical interest in the history, ideology, and practice of race and racism in Swedish society. Several observers have noted the growing public presence and activism of a younger generation of Swedes with roots in the African diaspora (see, e.g., Svanberg 2016). This cohort of “second-generationers” (andragenerationare) has taken an increasingly vocal and frequently creative stance in asserting the terms of their status and identity and confronting the structural and everyday hindrances to their agency and well-being as a racialized minority (see, e.g., Tensta 2016). The following case studies testify to the creativity and critical agency of Afro-Swedes in the public sphere. Read together, the claim these stories make is as pragmatic as it is urgent: to walk along paths tread by Afro-Swedish feet, through stories told by Afro-Swedish voices, is to critically remember the racialized social space of contemporary Sweden. Following the lead of our Afro-Swedish guides, we recall the struggles and achievements of those who “wandered in” but refused to “get lost.”

“You Are Not Swedish:” Growing Up Black in Blackeberg

I arrive in Blackeberg in the late morning on September 22. It is the time of year when one notices the days growing shorter—and colder—as the once-lofty summer sun begins its seasonal retreat back toward the horizon, casting long shadows that, with a shiver, send you back inside to fetch a jacket before venturing out again. I arrive on the subway, alighting onto a platform designed in the early 1950s by industrious urban planners to service Stockholm’s growing suburban workforce, conveying them—through the regular and predictable rhythms of railway arrivals and departures—from their newly built residences on the city’s forested fringe to the urban offices, factories, stores, and warehouses of a booming postwar economy. This was the infrastructure, and these were the subjects of a burgeoning welfare modernity. Today, six decades later, I arrive after the morning rush, to a mostly empty station. There is an elderly couple scanning the screens displaying arrival times, checking their watches; a pair of teenagers, glued to their smartphones, likely playing hooky from school; a subway attendant, reading the free daily newspaper in her cramped booth; and me, ascending the stairs to exit onto the square above. At this moment, nothing here would suggest the vital and productive mobility this location was originally designed to manage and direct.

I have come to Blackeberg to meet Stevie Nii-Adu Mensah, a musician, producer, and educator who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. Stevie is back in Sweden for several months to develop and promote his new solo project, Retrorik, an album-length musical meditation on his Swedish upbringing in the 1980s and 1990s. Blackeberg is Stevie’s hometown, where he spent most of his childhood and young adult life. (Though he would insist that it is Ghana, his parents’ country of origin, that is really “home.”) We are scheduled to meet outside the subway station, which lies on the northern edge of an expansive plaza, another mid-century social construct. The local historical society describes this open-air space in sparse and practical terms: in addition to an assortment of retail shops, of which Johans Skridsko is the most notable (serving devoted ice skaters “for more than thirty years”), the society notes that “there is also a post office, bank, pharmacy, and the local library” (brommahembygd.se). These are the façades, presented with purpose but without much fanfare, of what Merleau-Ponty would call the “cultural world” of late-modern Swedish society, still bound by the functional idealism of the recent past.

Stevie arrives on foot, and we greet each other with a handshake. I have asked him to show me around his old neighborhood, to visit the places that animate his current, retrospective compositional work. “Let’s go to my old school,” he says, leading me a short distance down a curving road behind the subway station toward a group of modest, three-story brownstone buildings.7 “Blackebergskolan is one of my first memories,” he begins. “This is where I started dancing, started writing music, singing, rapping.” All around us, young children are playing, enjoying the ample recess time that is typical of Swedish elementary schools. But Stevie holds his gaze to the school building, as if looking through it. “I mean, the breaking was always there,” he says, nodding as the memory thickens, gathering detail. “[In the mid-1980s] there was a TV show called Bagen, with a [dance] segment called ‘Freak Out,’ which got me interested in [hip-hop culture] from a young age.” He recalls the names of the show’s stars—“Eva Williams, Karl Dayal, Ayondele Shekoni, Quincy Jones III”—all Afro-Swedish artists who looked like him and were on TV, sampling beats, breaking, locking, and popping. “They were like heroes. Like Superman and Batman,” he says.

“In the cultural object,” Merleau-Ponty ([1962] 2002, 405–6) writes, “I feel the close presence of others beneath the veil of anonymity.” Stevie’s memory is such an absently present object of cultural constitution, born of a walking encounter with a brick edifice, pregnant with history—his story—and fashioned, “beneath the veil of anonymity,” in sound, movement, and names. Memories, Edward Casey (2000, 309–10) argues, “are in the world . . . in the things that belong to the world such as lived bodies, places, and other people. . . . They take us continually outside ourselves; and they do so in the very midst of the enactment of their own distinctive in-gathering action.” Memories are, in Arendtian terms, “something which inter-est, which [lie] between people and therefore can relate and bind them together” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 182). For a whole generation of “new Swedes” born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the first wave of a burgeoning Swedish “multiculture” (mångkultur), this is precisely what the television show Bagen and the “Freak Out” street dance segment represents: an artifact of an increasingly plural and popular social world, transforming cultural life, then as now (to paraphrase Stuart Hall [1993, 106]), by the voicing, dancing, and mixing of the margins.8

The subcultural significance of Stevie’s memory becomes apparent, by way of contrast, as we continue our dialogic walk; for if there are parts of Blackeberg that recall the superheroes of one’s youth, there are others that harbor memories of monsters. Du är inte svensk. “You are not Swedish.” This is another recollected “object” that materializes in Stevie’s voice as we walk the grounds of Blackebergskolan. “People were always pointing out that I wasn’t [Swedish] due to my darker skin. . . . Even though I’ve lived the same life that most of the blond-haired, blue-eyed kids have. Sang the same songs in school. . . . Played the same games. . . . Still, there’s something that set me apart.” That “something”—race—signals the “peculiar sensation” that W. E. B. Du Bois famously dubbed “double consciousness”—a very different “something” from the materially mediated intersubjectivity identified by Merleau-Ponty and Arendt. It is the nagging feeling that, as a Black person in Sweden, you do not belong, that you are “lost” (vilse). Du är inte svensk rings the schoolyard refrain, a reminder that Stevie’s black skin marks him, then as now, as a perennial outsider, an “immigrant”: one who wanders in but can never settle down, and one who must, at some point, leave. “But the thing is,” Stevie countered, as if arguing yet again with this disturbing and recurrent thought, “at home I have a strong cultural, Ghanaian background.” Speaking Ga in a home full of his father’s highlife and his mother’s traditional dance kept young Stevie grounded, even as the world around him “look[ed] on with amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois [1903] 2007, 7–8).

“So where are we heading now?” I ask. “Blackebergskogen,” Stevie replies. Through a pedestrian tunnel under a roadway (the township is planned to keep foot and motor traffic separate) we emerge onto a gravel path in the middle of lush ravine, surrounded by tall trees, filtering light through a still abundant canopy to reveal the first signs of fall color. “What a beautiful place this is,” I think to myself, but this is not what Stevie is thinking. “Um, I don’t have the fondest memories from here,” he says in a muted voice. “Because this is where a lot of the stuff went down.” While I see a thriving forest in a carefully planned suburban community, Stevie sees more demons from his past. I give voice to my visceral response to the landscape: the feeling of an intimate, proximate, and physical connection to nature and a sense of respect for the society that has kept its green spaces so close.9 “Those are definitely some of the memories,” he acknowledges. “We used to go sledding [here]. On both of these sides, there were really steep trails. And that was just, so fun. . . . But then, there is obviously the other side, the dark side.” Stevie hesitates as he speaks, as if trying to avoid words that will open old wounds, but to no avail. “I mean you were conscious. Because you knew that there was something lurking.”

For many Swedes, this was a time of lurking threats, as notably rendered in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In). Set in Blackeberg in the early 1980s, the book stages the gruesome and tragic hauntings of a vampire (another one who “wanders in” and does not belong) at a time when Soviet nuclear submarines were being spotted in the Stockholm archipelago and the once robust welfare state was showing signs of significant strain in the midst of a persistent economic crisis (Berggren 2014, 612–18). It was a time of widespread anxiety, engendering heightened awareness. “You were conscious,” Stevie said. But, for people like him, the multicultural vanguard of a “new Sweden,” that consciousness was always double. In the dark tunnels and along the shadowy paths of suburban forests, Stevie did not fear Russian spies or an economic downturn. Stevie was conscious of skinnskallar (skinheads), the exponents of a resurgent racism in the 1990s, who roamed the forested environs of his neighborhood; who played their nationalist rock music on boom boxes by the waterfront; who forced his best friend Lelle’s family to move, if they wanted to live; who, on New Year’s Day, 1993, assaulted and killed Stevie’s older brother, Frasse, only fourteen years old. It is this history of violence that preoccupies Stevie’s creative mind in Sweden these days. It is the subject of his latest track, “Du Blöder” (You’re Bleeding), dedicated to his brother but addressed to this Brave New Sweden, where vampires still lurk, bloodthirsty as ever.

“Between Me and the Other World:” The Afterlife of Abstract Space

Three weeks prior, I am standing on the artificial turf of an outdoor soccer field in the township of Husby, northwest of Stockholm. In front of me, there is a chain-link fence from which a series of white banners are hung. Most of the banners bear names, written in black spray paint. ABDIRAHIM. REMAN. HENOK. “This is the first guy that passed away, Romário,” my friend Simon tells me.10 “He was a big icon here, probably one of the biggest icons in Husby! His personality was great. His football skills were even greater. He was murdered in 2008.”11 The locals here call this field trean (number three), a reference to a popular community center (fritidsgård) where Husby youth would come to hang out, do homework, or play sports. The center is now closed—“fallen into disrepair,” Simon says—but young people still come to the field, with the real players arriving at 6:00 p.m. “The field is known for the motto trean klockan sex [number three and six o’clock],” Simon explains. “Some of the soccer players [who have gone pro] even have the number thirty-six on their jerseys!”12 But pride is mixed with pain in this place. Vila i frid mina bröder (Rest in peace my brothers) reads the first banner. As a Husby landmark, the soccer field is both a celebration of life—of local tradition, community, youth, and sport—and a deathly memorial: a makeshift monument beside a boarded-up rec center, dedicated to small cohort of local heroes, who inspired others with their talent but never realized their potential. It is a somber but appropriate place to begin a suburban walk in Stockholm.

My guide on this day is Simon Matiwos, another local icon in Husby, and a living reminder that not everyone here dies young. Simon is a spoken wordsmith, a cultural practice that, like soccer, he also associates with his hometown. “Everything here is about your tongue. It’s a big muscle here in Husby,” Simon says, turning a question about his verbal artistry back to the collective pride he feels for this place. “We are the best at making fun of each other. We are the best rappers, [and] the best writers.” In May 2015, Simon won a national championship in spoken word poetry (estradpoesi), performing with the art collective Förenade Förorter (United Suburbs). I first saw him onstage with this group of twentysomething slam poets at a community fair in Alby, a suburb in the south of Stockholm that resembles Husby socially, economically, and culturally. Simon makes these connections between place and personhood on the sociospatial margins of Swedish society through a vital and vocal poetics, here in a text called “Systemets Vänterum” (The System’s Waiting Room):

In Simon’s verse, one hears, once again, echoes of Du Bois ([1903] 2007, 7–8): “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question. . . . How does it feel to be a problem?” In Husby, as in suburbs surrounding just about any Swedish city, gestures of good faith toward this “other world” are all too often misrecognized as threats; mainstream Swedish society is “preoccupied,” as Simon puts it, with the assumed criminality of “brown hands.” This endemic suspicion is a symptom of what Henri Lefebvre would call the abstraction of social spaces like Husby, of communities systemically transformed into “waiting rooms,” of a racialized and divided underclass confined to “the other side of Swedish space” (Molina 1997). “So long as everyday life remains in thrall to abstract space, with its very concrete constraints,” writes Lefebvre (1991, 59–60), “so long must the project of ‘changing life’ remain no more than a political rallying-cry to be taken up or abandoned according to the mood of the moment.”

“Because this is where we live,” sings the hip-hop artist Jacco in his track “Vår Betong” (Our Concrete), “in the middle of Sweden’s Million Program.” Undertaken during the postwar boom years of the 1960s, the miljonprogrammet was an ambitious state-sponsored initiative to provide modern and affordable housing to a growing urban population. The Million Program built on earlier efforts to expand urban housing, such as the 1950s public works that produced Stevie’s hometown, Blackeberg, but on a different scale, deriving its name from the stated goal of building one million residential units in ten years. By this numeric measure, the program was a success, but by the mid-1970s a depressed economy and declining population left many of these units, most located far from the city center, vacant (Lundevall 2006, 153). For some, the efficiently built, prefabricated concrete structures have become a sign of socioeconomic stigma; functional but unattractive and, in some cases, of poor quality (Hägg 2007, 214–17); and, with an increase in immigration from outside of Europe during this time, the principal site of an increasingly segregated society, along ethnic and racial lines.14 In the Fanonian words of Afro-Swedish activist Kitimbwa Sabuni (2016), “The Million Program, the pride of the Swedish welfare state in the 1960s, was turned into a catchment area [uppsamlingsplats] for us, the wretched of the earth, and transformed into what we today call ‘the suburb,’ with all the negative connotations that term implies.”

As such, a walking tour of a Million Program suburb like Husby would seem to be a contradiction in terms—a vital activity, to paraphrase Arendt via Mary Douglas, out of place. There, in the waiting rooms and catchment areas on the other side of Swedish space, place appears more culturally alienating than socially constitutive. As Lefebvre (1991, 50) argues, abstract space “leaves only the narrowest leeway to . . . works, images and memories whose content . . . is so far displaced that it barely achieves symbolic force.” But spatial abstraction is not absolute, and that is what Simon wants to show me as we walk along the concrete paths and past the façades of his hometown. “I’m going to show you this one,” he says, as we approach a long stretch of scaffolding beside a walkway behind the town center. “We started with this wall a month ago. We’re almost done. Do you recognize this guy?” On the panel of an unfinished mural, a silhouette of Simon stands, reciting one of his poems into the mouthpiece of a megaphone. The text reads, “As flowers fall, so naturally texts arose, and awakened a public.”15 It is a visual representation of Simon’s poetic and vocal response to the premature passing of his friends and neighbors, an artistic intervention that testifies to the “symbolic force” of local “works, images, and memories,” and a creative and critical callout to those who oppose, even as they live with the abstract logics of the suburb.

Stretching along the length of a city block, one must walk to view this mural, moving along the panels that announce the many joys and struggles of everyday life in Husby. And, as one walks and looks, one listens, hearing voices in the visual field. In panel after panel, symbolic and mute images suggest real and live utterances. There is Simon with his megaphone, reading a commemorative poem; a group of veiled women, voicing a petition to end Islamophobic violence; graffiti that reads, in letters that leap off the wall, Dröm Stort Vi Kan Också (We Can Also Dream Big), behind a woman inscribing the pavement with an emblem of her feminism; and signs of local signs, interpellating a Husby public with familiar expressions of neighborhood solidarity: “Husby is open to everybody,” playing on the advertisement slogan of a local grocer; and “3:an Kl.6,” the cue (described above) for footballers to meet at the old rec center, number three at six o’clock. There are also signs of a more mundane sociability, of people talking and hanging out. And there are shout-outs to some of Husby’s stars: Farhiya Abdi, a basketball player who made it to the WNBA, and Robin Quaison, who helped lead Sweden’s U21 soccer team to a European championship in 2015, both Afro-Swedes. But amid these audiovisual signals of Husby social life there is one striking image of noise, rendering the violence and destruction of riots that broke out here in May 2013 and the police response that added fuel to the fire.

“The riot was the last straw,” Simon explains. “There was so much that had already happened.” On our walking tour of Husby, Simon makes a point of taking me to all of the places where youth centers had stood, once open to the public but now closed, many torn down entirely. He shows me residential areas once run by the city but now under private management, with skyrocketing rents. He points out groups of young people, friends and neighbors hanging out in the town center, who once frequented the youth center but are now left to wait, most of them unemployed, some selling drugs. So much has already happened. “I can’t blame them!” Simon says. “They’ve been ripped off.” On the other side of Swedish society, outside the waiting room, some have interpreted the noise of the riots differently. On May 31, 2016, the leaders of four center–right political parties arrive in Husby for their own walking tour, but they are not here to listen to local residents. They have come with a message of law and order. “We cannot accept people throwing stones at police just because they’re unemployed,” one of them announces (TT Nyhetsbyrån 2016). An entourage of armed city police accompanies the politicians on their suburban stroll. A more evocative image of the political, economic, and cultural distance between communities like Husby and the rest of Sweden is scarcely imaginable.

Remembering the Transatlantic Slave Trade

“Imagine that the year is 1822,” Faaid tells his audience:

The climate is tropical. And the place is one of Sweden’s biggest cities. A Black boy, that we unfortunately cannot name, walks down a cobblestone road, leading a horse. Nearby, the boy notices a refined group of Swedes, sitting on a porch. A member of this group asks the boy, “Whose horse is this?” But before he can respond, a man leaps from the porch, grabs the boy, and slams his head to the ground. Another older man joins in to assist [the punishment] with his cane. The place was the city of Gustavia, capital of the Swedish colony Saint Barthélemy. The man with the cane was Sweden’s governor on the [Caribbean] island, Johan Norderling, (Rosén 2016)

With these words, Faaid Ali-Nuur begins a walking tour of Gamla Stan, the picturesque and touristic Old Town in central Stockholm, from the halls of the Swedish Economic History Museum. Today, he is asking us to follow in the footsteps of the Swedish transatlantic slave trade. “This is a part of history that has been hidden for many in our country,” Faaid explains, during a panel discussion early in the year (2016) on Afro-Swedish histories and the legacy of the slave trade at Uppsala University.16 “The city tour offers a clear picture of ‘Afrophobia,’ racism against Black people [in Sweden], tracing its development and history,” he adds.

While interrogations and criticisms of such Afrophobia have become more commonplace in the Swedish public sphere, histories of anti-blackness in Sweden remain murky and “hidden,” as Faaid says. In a society that proudly views itself as tolerant and humane, even anti-racist and color-blind, national history remains, in the eyes of many, normatively white. “The city tour proceeds from the perspective of those most affected and victimized by the transatlantic slave trade,” Faaid explains, “from Black people’s perspective,” whose lives are still bound to the burdensome legacy of this history. “Otherwise,” he continues, “it is more common to hear about kings, buyers and sellers, and other rich and powerful persons when telling these stories.” This is the narrative and existential challenge of the city tour. The European world through which we walk, both old and new, has scarcely left a trace of—or allowed a space for—an African presence. Instead, we encounter what Arendt would call the reified and public works of Old Town Stockholm’s “human artifice;” its buildings, squares, and monuments, along with the official memory of Sweden’s history they inscribe (commemorating “kings, buyers and sellers, and other rich and powerful persons”). What we do not see, on the worldly surface of these humanly produced things (Arendt [1958] 1998, 96), is the historically ephemeral and, in Arendtian terms, “private” (physically subjugated and socially alienated) labor of those who contributed to the manufacture of this artifice, the materiality of the human condition.

Our first stop is the docks along Skeppsbron in Gamla Stan. There, on the cobblestone walkway that abuts the brackish waters of the Baltic, Faaid tells us the story of Louis de Geer. This enterprising Belgian industrialist introduced the triangle trade to his adopted country, Sweden, in the late seventeenth century, transporting West African captives to Caribbean colonies and returning with sugar cane and other commodities for sale in European markets. To encourage this lucrative business, de Geer had four “product specimens” brought to Sweden: an African boy and three girls, presented as exotica and a tantalizing promise of wealth to the Swedish court (Lindqvist 2015, 93–96). We proceed south to observe the towering Katerina Hiss, an elevator to a pedestrian platform above the Slussen interchange on the neighboring island of Södermalm. There, between the islands, where the fresh water of Lake Mälaren drains into the sea, once stood an iron weighing station (järnvågen). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sweden was among the world’s largest producers of high-quality iron ore, much of it sent to steel mills in places like Birmingham to make parts for ships, tools, weapons, and shackles, literally binding the trade in iron with colonial conquest and the enslavement of human beings (Evans and Rydén 2007, 51). Along the southern perimeter of Old Town, we approach a building with a small plaque, featuring the bust of Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, whose eighteenth-century scientific categorizations of the plant and animal worlds are still used today. The memorial is to the Uppsala native’s Stockholm medical practice, but it is also a reminder on this day of Linné’s pioneering work in racial biology (McEachrane 2018, 475). Linné was among the first to divide up humankind into color-coded races: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians, and, just above a fifth category of “wild humans,” black Africans, whom Linné described as “phlegmatic,” “relaxed,” and “ruled by caprice” (Gould 1994).

If, as Arendt ([1958] 1998, 52) claims, “to live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common” and if “the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men [sic] at the same time,” then to walk in the footsteps of the transatlantic slave trade in Sweden is to stake a claim on this material commons for those long excluded from the historical title to these worldly things. It is to insist, in other words, on a deeply rooted African presence in the history of modern Sweden, and, through the world-making footfalls of a guided tour, to relate that history to an Afro-Swedish contemporary. It is to remember the Africans brought to Stockholm as product specimens, shackled by Swedish iron, and enslaved—physically and mentally—by a dehumanizing racial ideology. Furthermore, it is to re-member an Afro-Swedish community that lives every day with the dismembering legacy of these historical practices, thoughts, and behaviors (wa Thiong’o 2009). In this chapter’s fourth and final case, I turn to the way movement, both physical and social, produces spaces in which those lost to this enduring history of violence may be mourned, new possibilities for anti-racist solidarities may be imagined, and where the forward march of anti-blackness may be, for a moment at least, halted by standing one’s ground.

Walking in Remembrance, Standing in Resistance

On March 20, 2016, a procession of around one hundred protesters marches along the forest-lined streets of Gottsunda, a working-class suburb of Uppsala (located forty miles north of Stockholm) known for its large foreign-born population. Organized by the group Tillsammans för Uppsala (Together for Uppsala), the march seeks to make a statement against racially motivated hate crimes and for a more tolerant and inclusive community. Among the walking demonstrators is Uppsala politician Alexander Bengtsson. Just twenty-one years old, with a keen sense of fashion and a disarming smile, Bengtsson is an up-and-coming member of the right-wing Moderata Samlingspartiet (Moderate Party), with a growing national profile, though his politics are hard to locate on a standard spectrum. Bengtsson can be as outspoken about the dangers of “left-wing radicalism” as he is about the virtues of multiculturalism. And he is wary of recent populist shifts in the discourse of the Swedish right. In particular, Bengtsson finds repellent the recent resurgence of xenophobic nationalism with its narrow, racially coded and heteronormative definitions of Swedish belonging. On his blog, Bengtsson proudly identifies as “gay, Black, adopted, and liberal.” To those “haters” who take offense to these varied facets of his person, he says, “Deal with it” (alexanderbengtsson.wordpress.com). But that has not muted the animus he has encountered of late.

Two weeks earlier, on March 9, 2016, an assailant attacks Bengtsson with a knife in his home, an apparent hate crime (Korbutiak 2016). Since 2013, when Bengtsson’s political career began as a member of the Moderaternas Ungdomsförbund (Moderate Youth League), the Uppsala resident has received countless hate messages via text and email, some threatening violence, even death. On January 22, Bengtsson receives an email describing how he would be shot, stabbed, and blown up (Blomqvist 2016). These events make Bengtsson think twice about pursuing a career in politics, but, as he marches with his fellows through Gottsunda that day, he is not ready to concede. “I am not going to let the Nazis win,” Bengtsson tells a Swedish television reporter covering the event (Apelthun 2016). More than anything, Bengtsson is passionate about his hometown, Uppsala, which he lauds for its commitment to diversity and inclusivity. In a blog post from 18 December 2015, he writes, “Uppsala is a city where everyone is and will be welcome. In Uppsala, we distance ourselves from all forms of xenophobia and racism, we are one big family!” It is as a member of this urban Swedish family that Bengtsson marches in protest on a cold day in early spring.

Four days later, on March 24, Bengtsson is found dead in a burned-out car outside the small town of Ödeshög. Though the circumstances of this tragic incident remain unclear, a police investigation finds no evidence of foul play (Wiman 2016). Nonetheless, Bengtsson’s passing has a chilling effect on the Uppsala community. A spirit of resistance and solidarity turns abruptly to a sense of shock and grief. On April 23, I join a group of local activists, gathering at Slottsparken in central Uppsala. Braving the afternoon cold and rain, with umbrellas out and jackets pulled up, roughly one hundred of us are there to mourn the loss of an ally and to march, once again, against the forms for social division, fear, and violence that racism engenders. As the assembly grows, a convocation to remember Bengtsson’s life becomes simultaneously a re-membering of the inclusive, multicultural, anti-racist community for which he fought. Then we march, mostly in silence, with placards aloft declaring an end to hat och hot (hatred and threat). Small, makeshift signs read, “Rest in Power, Alexander.” We walk slowly around the park and through the narrow streets and open markets of the city. It is a solemn procession, as much a funerary march as a public protest. Our path ends in Olof Palme Place, a square outside the Uppsala central train station. Event organizers Jeannette Escanilla, Mattias Beruk Järvi, Martin Piano, and Tess Asplund lay roses on the ground, in a half circle. And we all observe a moment of silence in Alexander Bengtsson’s memory.

A “tactic,” Michel de Certeau (1984, 37) tells us, occupies “the space of the other.” It manifests as “a guileful ruse” and “an art of the weak,” performed “on and with a terrain imposed on it.” As social practices, tactics are never neutral acts; they necessarily entail some form of existential risk. For people of color in Sweden, anti-racist activism is a tactical practice. It is an intentional display of social critique and personal vulnerability that highlights the collective consequences and individual stakes of “everyday racism” (Essed 1991; Mattsson and Tesfahuney 2002) and exposes its exponents to the potential for recriminatory violence. The same is not true, I would argue, for most white anti-racist activists, whose participation in public protest does not, generally speaking, register the same kind of embodied danger. Such protesters are, more often than not, “allies” rather than victims. As such, white anti-racist agency is more “strategic,” in de Certeau’s terms, an expression of privilege, which can be leveraged to support those whose lives are more apparently at risk. These are my thoughts as I consider my own place and role at the memorial protest that day, and as I listen to Afro-Swedish activist Tess Asplund give a speech to the gathered assembly outside the Uppsala train station.17

“I need to go back, to when I was young, at home in Stockholm, at the beginning of the ’90s.” Asplund speaks into an amplified bullhorn, her voice broken into short, rhythmic, and emphatic phrases. “We were so engaged in the struggle against racism. But evil was on the move. There were fights more or less every weekend. Anti-racists and skinheads.” Through the handheld speaker, Asplund’s voice sounds weary and battle-worn, but with a volume that exudes passion and energy. She remembers, “There were fights in Kungsträdgården [a public square in central Stockholm]. Refugee camps burned.” And she affirms, “Those of us who are actively working against racism and right-wing extremism are still at risk. Many of my friends live under protective custody, under threat.” Here, she turns from past to present, as if to say plus ça change, but also “the struggle continues.” “I came home to Sweden in 2009, and there was a vote. We know what happened in that election [in 2010]. [The Sweden Democrats] entered parliament. For me, it was a shock. I fought them [in the 1990s]. Down in Kungsträdgården and Gamla Stan. Skinheads. Today, they are in the corridors of power with suits and ties.” Asplund’s remembrance is also a warning, revealing how the racial violence of the recent past lives on, having shifted onto other platforms, particularly social media. “I have always been threatened by Nazis, but now they’re on the Internet. I will die. I will be violated. They know where I live. But I will never be scared into silence. I will never give up my struggle.”

Adopted from Colombia as an infant, Asplund grew up in the Swedish countryside but moved to Stockholm as a teenager in the early 1990s (sv.wikipedia.org), when her anti-racist activism began in earnest. Remembering is a central and crucial feature of her tactical, activist agency—recollecting the past to provide social and historical context for present-day struggles, but also to build and sustain communities of resistance, both among cohorts of racialized minorities and across the color-coded lines of “risk” and “privilege.” One week after her participation in the memorial march in Uppsala, such activist remembrance was once again on full display, this time in the late-industrial town of Borlänge in central Sweden. Asplund had come to this middling city to join a group of activists protesting a march of three hundred neo-Nazis from the Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen (Nordic Resistance Movement) on May 1. Watching the crowd of white supremacists approach, Asplund felt compelled to act. “I was thinking, ‘hell no, they can’t march here!’ I had this adrenaline. ‘No Nazi is going to march here, it’s not okay’” (Crouch 2016). What followed has become an iconic gesture of contemporary anti-racist and Afro-diasporic activism. Asplund, her face steeled with angry intent, went out into the street, crossing police lines to directly confront the forward ranks of men dressed in white, one hand holding a beige handbag to her side, the other raised with a clenched fist. In that moment, Swedish photojournalist David Lagerlöf snapped a picture. Within days, the image had gone viral, with several thousand likes and shares on Twitter (Anon. 2016b). A few months later, the captured gesture landed Asplund on the BBC’s list of the one hundred most “inspirational and influential women for 2016” (Anon. 2016a). In 2017, the photograph was declared “the image of the year” in Sweden (sv.wikipedia.org).18

In their essay “From Afro-Sweden with Defiance,” Nana Osei-Kofi, Adela C. Licona, and Karma R. Chávez (2018, 148) describe Asplund’s public gesture as both “confrontational and coalitional.” Focusing on the symbolic power of Asplund’s clenched fist, with its palpable resonances with both American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid struggles, they note the way her identity as an Afro-Swede intersects with her Afro-Colombian heritage to register multiple diasporic affinities among as many publics. “She became not just a symbol of Black Power,” they write, “but of a particular kind of Black Power: Afro-Latinx” (144). At the same time, they observe the way Asplund’s gesture easily slips into comfortable notions of color-blindness in the Swedish public sphere, in which the marching neo-Nazis are no more than a minor and aberrant exception to the mainstream “post-racial” rule (147). There is a tension, the authors note, between Asplund’s affirmative transnational Blackness—as an Afro-Swedish, Afro-European, and Afro-Lantinx woman—and Sweden’s provincializing reception of her activism, preserving the country’s status “as white, and at the same time, as unmarked by race” (141). This does not diminish, however, the enduring power of seemingly isolated but no less interconnected gestures like Asplund’s, in which “each fist is solitary in the moment of its manifestation, but not singular in its reach and implication” (142). As a coalitional tactic of diasporic solidarity, Asplund’s iconic pose stands out, as it stands strong in defiant remembrance of what Nelson Mandela (whom Asplund greatly admires) famously called “the long walk to freedom.”19

Coda: Remembering Afro-Sweden, One Step at a Time

In a cautionary comment about the perils of privileging the world of the mind over “the physical and social world” when encountering others, Merleau-Ponty writes, “The other’s gaze transforms me into an object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s” ([1962] 2002, 420, my emphasis). He calls this condition “unbearable,” and thus aberrant, insofar as it negates a materially mediated, mutually embodied, dialogic, and otherwise common humanity. Yet, this inhuman stance is a condition that scholars of the African diaspora have long recognized, not as a phenomenological exception but as an existential rule, wherever the logics of colonialism and enslavement persist. “Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man,” Aimé Césaire ([1950] 2000, 41) writes in his still relevant Discourse on Colonialism. “The colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal” (emphasis in the original).

Some might hear, in Césaire’s words, echoes of Arendt’s “laboring animal” (animal laborans), deprived of human sociality, or the anonymous subject of Lefebvre’s abstract space, “with its very concrete constraints.” Surely, there are many insights to be gleaned from such seminal theorists of the human condition, as I myself have asserted by referring to their scholarship throughout this chapter. Be that as it may, it is no less remarkable to observe the way a conventional and canonical social phenomenology struggles to account for the experiences and perspectives of those subjected to the very real and by no means exceptional effects of a colonial and thoroughly racialized worldview (but see Ahmed 2006, 2007). How, then, to paraphrase Sartre ([1956] 2020), does one recognize and respond to this “nothingness” woven into the worldly fabric of “being”? And, more specific to the concerns of a current Black studies, how do we effectively conceive, critique, and contest the pervasive anti-blackness that continues to objectify, alienate, and assault peoples of the African diaspora, in Sweden as elsewhere?

I would assert that there are important lessons to be learned from the foregoing stories of walking, talking, and remembering in Sweden, lessons critical to a more inclusive and incisive existential and phenomenological anthropology—lessons that might help us to better understand our wandering species in a time when so many now find themselves lost to the world. Let us remember the creative, spatially productive, and often outspoken work of people like Stevie, Simon, Faaid, Alexander, and Tess, mobilizing the memory of those who repurpose cultural objects by publicly voicing their popular history; who resist the abstraction of space by writing, rapping, and visualizing the stories of their communities; who acknowledge the nearly forgotten presence of their ancestors, by regularly and vociferously retracing their footsteps; whose struggle for solidarity, tolerance, and love we honor, even in their absence; and whose stand against the dark forces of dehumanization demands vigilant support. Their vocal and embodied work does not only call on those who identify as “Afro-Swedish,” nor is it merely addressed to a subaltern demographic of “immigrants,” though these communities are necessarily central to their concerns and efforts. Rather, their art, advocacy, and activism speak to all those who are willing to listen, acknowledge, and advocate. By inviting us to walk with them and re-member Afro-Sweden, these tour guides for troubled times encourage us to embrace the possibility of transcendence toward a common world, where “wandering in” does not signify “getting lost” but rather a vital and essential human project; where ideas of “Africa” and “Europe” are not ontologically opposed but mutually constitutive; and where it is possible to be both Black and Swedish, without fear of violence, confinement, or loss of memory.

The foregoing chapters have presented “remembering” as a salient and significant modality of diasporic being and belonging in Afro-Sweden today. As a dialogic, artifactual, and spatial practice, remembering tells stories, assembles archives, and produces spaces that cohere community around a sense of shared history. In the next part of this book, I turn to the concept of “renaissance” to understand the socially constitutive and culturally generative dimensions of diaspora. From the vantage of the recent past (2013–20), the cases that follow pay close attention to the new ways of speaking, doing politics, and making art that have emerged from the Afro-Swedish community. I begin with the way a self-consciously African and Black diaspora in Sweden has influenced language use, at the level of both lexicon and syntax, through the written and spoken word.