Notes
Introduction
The Swedish daily newspaper, Expressen has compiled a collection of reporting on the A$AP Rocky case (expressen.se). See Malm (2019) for a summative report, in English.
At a February 2017 political rally in Florida, Donald Trump rhetorically asked his audience, “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” The president was referring to a specious report on Fox News that sought to couple an apparent rise in violent crime with recent patterns of immigration. Trump used this rallying cry to amplify his general anti-immigrant message (Chan 2017), but also arguably as a dog whistle to white supremacists for whom the Nordic region retains an aura of racial superiority (Skinner 2019a).
Other significant populations of “foreign-born” and “second generation” sub-Saharan Africans in Sweden are Nigerians and Gambians, with populations (as of December 31, 2020) of eleven thousand or more individuals, followed by communities hailing from Sudan, Uganda, Congo (DRC), Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Burundi, with populations of five thousand or more individuals. I have not listed people of North African descent in these population figures because such communities are generally not included in racialized constructions of Black and African identities in Sweden, whether as a mode of self-identification or through the perceptions of others, though I do understand that there are exceptions that necessarily trouble this otherwise arbitrary geographic division of “African” community in diaspora. These figures are also notably bound by the constraints imposed by Statistics Sweden’s mode of demographic categorization, which are limited to people born abroad (utrikesfödda) and children of parents born in a foreign country, with separate categories for parents that have the same country of birth (födelseland), fathers and mothers born in different foreign countries, and fathers and mothers whose partners are born in Sweden.
For an anthropological account of the varied “routes” that have informed the representation and construction of an earlier generation of Black and African Swedes, see Sawyer (2002). And for a related ethnographic review of various modes of diasporic identification among African-descended communities in millennial Sweden, see Sawyer (2008). My reference to “intrinsic” modes of racial identification and identities shaped by “extrinsically” racist practices is informed by ideas and arguments proposed in Appiah (1992), elaborated further in this introduction and in chapter 1.
Interview with the author, October 13, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, May 30, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, August 28, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
See the online video “Om begreppet afrosvenk” (on the term “Afro-Swedish”) posted on the UR Tänk Till Facebook page on November 30, 2016 (last accessed November 6, 2019).
Afro-Swedish political philosopher and Black studies scholar Michael McEachrane has also wrestled with SCB’s dataset, together with those of other Nordic countries in 2011–12, and came to similarly frustrated conclusions. “Giving an estimate of how many people of African descent in the Nordic countries is difficult as they do not keep racial or ethnic statistics, but only statistics of country of origin,” he writes (2014b, 6). He adds in a note, “The statistics on African descendants are merely preliminary estimates based on country of origin” (11n12). Indeed, such results remain stubbornly “preliminary” in 2020–21 as well.
In a related discussion, McEachrane (2014c) has critically examined the removal of the term “race” (ras) from the 2009 Discrimination Act in Sweden. “The basic argument in the Bill,” he writes, “is that since there are no human races in a biological sense there really is no reason for using the term” (95). For a broader historical perspective on the concept of “race” in Sweden, see Brännström (2016).
To be sure, Palme’s vocal disavowal of racism in Sweden appears in the context of a nuanced speech, delivered in response to an increasingly public xenophobia in a rapidly diversifying post–World War II Swedish society. The full text and audio of this speech is available online on various platforms. I will return to this history and Palme’s 1965 speech in chapter 1. On the history of the Institute of Race Biology and the practice of eugenics in Sweden and the Nordic region more broadly, see Broberg and Roll-Hansen (2005).
There is now an institution at Uppsala University (the same university that once housed the state-sponsored Institute for Race Biology) dedicated to the critical study of racism in Sweden, the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (cemfor.uu.se).
The 2019 hate crime report from the National Council for Crime Prevention (Forselius and Westerberg 2019) shows that after a modest decline in Afrophobic hate crimes in 2016 (908 total reports) the numbers have remained fairly consistent, with 915 reports filed in 2018.
I observed this practice—of placing “immigrant” children in remedial Swedish language classes—firsthand as a middle school English and French teacher in suburban Stockholm in 2002–3, even when a student’s Swedish was, in fact, native and fluent. At the same school, I was told by a colleague that a foreign-born student, though raised from a young age in Sweden, could not attain the same fluency in the Swedish language as her “ethnically Swedish” peers because “it didn’t come through their mother’s milk.”
Some far-right thinkers have cast their nativism in “multicultural” terms, arguing for “ethnic or cultural separatism as a means of preserving nonhierarchical human diversity” (Teitelbaum 2017, 22). As Benjamin Teitelbaum explains, “Multiculturalism offers the claim of oppression to whites who want it: they can label their unmarkedness as an instance of nonrecognition and a violation of the universal right to difference” (22).
1. Invisible People
A remarkable archive of documents pertaining to the Golden City Dixies’ 1959 tour and the subsequent lives and careers of its members in Sweden can be found on a Facebook page dedicated to their memory, “Golden City Dixies Friends and Families” (last accessed May 14, 2021).
Hammarskjöld’s phrase “African renaissance” appears in a transcript of extemporaneous remarks delivered at the inauguration of the Congress for International Cooperation in Africa at the University Institute of Somalia on January 14, 1960 (as cited in Foote 1962, 232).
An excellent archive of the visual culture of anti-black stereotypes in mid-century Sweden can be found on the website bildersmakt.se (last accessed October 10, 2020). Developed by Swedish visual culture scholars Joanna Rubin Dranger and Moa Matthis, the site combines archival images with historical and critical essays to interrogate the “power of images” (in Swedish, bilders makt) across multiple forms of racism and ethnic prejudice manifest in Swedish popular culture—and the global contexts of which such “culture” was a part—over the past century.
Audio, lyrics, and images associated with Kjellberg’s 1955 recording of “Hottentotvisa” are readily available online. It is noteworthy, and not surprising, that many of the sites that feature and memorialize this song support far-right political movements in Sweden. For an analysis of this song, the anti-black stereotypes it employs, and its place within a broader context of Swedish popular music—and jazz, in particular—see Fornäs (2004). For a broader conversation about the historical transformation of jazz in the Nordic world from an object of anti-black derision and hate to generic icon of a modern, cosmopolitan culture, see McEachrane et al. (2014b).
A collection of three of Madubuko Diakité’s films are currently archived and publicly available on Vimeo (last accessed October 10, 2020). These films include the 1969 documentary For Personal Reasons, which examines the civil rights movement in Harlem, New York, during a tumultuous period of intensifying racial violence and a more assertive anti-racist activism; Det osynliga folket (The Invisible People), a 1972 documentary cast as “a case study of the discrimination of foreign students and immigrants in Lund,” with a particular emphasis on anti-black racism (discussed at length later in this chapter); and the impressionistic short film En dag på Mårtenstorget i Lund (A Day in Mårten’s Square in Lund), which portrays the bustle and business of an open air market in the filmmaker’s hometown in southern Sweden in 1981.
This information appears on a Wikipedia page titled “Amerikaner i Sverige” (Americans in Sweden), with links to the SCB’s data chart for population size by country of origin (folkmängd efter födelseland), 1900–2019 (sv.wikipedia.org; last accessed October 10, 2020).
I trace the discursive absenting of “race” within the Swedish public sphere in the introduction. For an overview of the recent emergence of a critical “whiteness studies” in the Nordic world, see Catrin Lundström’s and Benjamin Teitelbaum’s essay “Nordic Whiteness: An Introduction,” published in a special issue of the journal Scandinavian Studies (2017).
On the complex and frequently troubled relationship between American deserters in Sweden and their host society, see Carl-Gustaf Scott’s essay “‘Sweden Might Be a Haven, but It’s Not Heaven’: American War Resisters in Sweden during the Vietnam War” (2015).
The story of African Americans in Sweden is briefly recounted in Molefi Kete Asante’s The African American People: A Global History (2012; see also Robinson Diakité 2005).
The term “immigrant” ((invandrare)) replaced the word “foreigner” (utlänning) in the jargon of Swedish governance by the end of the 1960s (Ronström 1989) and would remain standard in public discourse for the next three decades. A related category employed in official statistics during this time is “second-generation immigrants” (andragenerationsinvandrare, also invandrarbarn), referring to children with at least one foreign-born parent. A governmental report submitted by the Department of Culture (Kulturdepartementet) in 2000 recommended that the term “immigrant” be replaced with the category “people with foreign background” (personer med utländsk bakgrund), referring to those who are either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, calling the former term “grossly generalizing” (Regeringskansliet 2000, 22). This nominal shift became institutionalized when the Invandrarverket (Swedish Immigrant Agency) changed its name to Migrationsverket (Swedish Migration Agency), also in 2000. Under the current discursive regime, those with native-born (Swedish) parents are represented under the rubric “people with Swedish background” (personer med svensk bakgrund).
Interview with the author, February 15, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Though Astrid Assefa does not (and would not) use the term, the pejorative Swedish term she and her mother likely encountered was zigenare, meaning “gypsy.”
Interview with the author, June 1, 2016 (Skellefteå, Sweden).
Descriptions of Hot n’ Tot and its advertisement slogans can be found archived on the China Theater (China Teatern) website, chinateatern.se (last accessed October 10, 2020).
Interview with the author, June 27, 2017 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, June 29, 2017 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Personal communication with the author, May 6, 2021.
2. A Colder Congo
In Norwegian as in Swedish, the term n----- may be translated as “Negro,” but it also invokes the more vulgar variant of the word.
Norway’s constitution was ratified on May 17, 1814, but a war and subsequent union with Sweden the following summer foreclosed Norwegian hopes for self-governance until 1905. The Oslo Jubilee Exhibition in 1914 may be seen, thus, as a timely centennial celebration, reasserting Norway’s constitutional monarchy under the banner of an independent state.
For a summative history of Sweden’s robust involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism, see McEachrane (2018, 474–79). For an early twentieth-century account of Sweden’s live and mediated encounter with Black Atlantic popular culture (e.g., Josephine Baker), see Habel (2005).
It is worth noting, given the topics and locations addressed in this chapter, that Muirhead Bone completed an etching of Stockholm, Sweden, also in 1923. The portrait of Conrad can be viewed at collections.dma.org (last accessed May 31, 2019).
Taking his inspiration from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the late Sven Lindkvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1996; first published in Swedish in 1992 under the title Utrota varenda jävel) follows in the footsteps of Kurtz (and his nonfictional kin) to trace the roots of modern genocide to Europe’s colonizing encounter with Africa. The Holocaust, Lindkvist argues, is not so much an aberration of history as it is the culmination of a genocidal project initiated on the African continent.
I refer here to the “morose” Swedish captain Marlow encounters in Boma, at the mouth of the Congo River, who, after criticizing the unscrupulous “government chaps” in the territorial capital, ominously relates the story of a fellow Swede who hanged himself on a journey “up country” (Conrad [1899] 2008, 50).
Christian Nyampeta’s 2018 film Det var vackert ibland (It Was Sometimes Beautiful) critically and poetically engages with, as it interrogates Sven Nykvist’s I fetischmannens spår. In a review for the Swedish film journal FLM, Ylva Habel (2020) describes Nyampeta’s work as a “decolonizing essay film” that “makes many connections to contemporary Afro-diasporic criticism.” Habel considers an extended sequence in which (a fictional) Sven Nykvist speaks to a panel of (also fictional) critics that includes Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, South African activist Winnie Mandela, and Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, along with Guatemalan indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchu and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The scene dramatically portrays, Habel observes, the privileged whiteness of the cinematographer (Nykvist) and the dispossessed Blackness of his African interlocutors. In Habel’s words, “What is experienced [during the conversation] as an instructive and challenging, exciting, and especially difficult discussion for the white creator . . . is for his African discussants a tedious and painful exercise in holding back critical argument, exhaustion, [and] anger in the face of the tone deafness that [Nykvist] time and again shows.”
In his book Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (2008), Larkin coins and employs the term “colonial sublime” somewhat differently than my use of the term in this passage. For Larkin, the colonial sublime appears as an effect of twentieth-century British colonial rule in northern Nigeria (38–39). Specifically, it is the affective power the spectacle of new media and technology (e.g., mobile cinemas, railways, and electric lighting) produces to reinscribe the ontological distinction between colonizer and colonized. Here, I draw on the term to suggest that the colonial sublime also performs comparable work among audiences in colonial metropoles. In this case, Sven Nykvist’s Congo films starkly contrast the “primitive” life of Congolese “natives” with the “civilized” methods, practices, and materials of the Swedish missionaries. Distributed and shown in Sweden, not Africa, audiences would have been unsettled by the apparent savagery of “traditional” African life and marveled at the transformative work their compatriots abroad had undertaken. The “sublime” sentiment produced is thus twofold: a nostalgia for those times when a clear division between “the West and the rest” could be drawn (Hall 1992), and a concomitant desire to, “God willing,” see the “mission to civilize” achieved.
This is the titular quote provided by the Nobel Prize in Literature committee (nobelprize.org).
These poems were recently republished as part of a commemorative volume celebrating Tranströmer’s life and work (Tranströmer 2012).
This short autobiographical text was also republished in the 2012 edition of Tranströmer’s collected works.
See, for example, the opening minutes of Behrang Miri’s interview with TV4, a private Swedish television station (TV4 2013).
A useful collection and discursive analysis of articles and blog entries published with reference to this debate is found in Maria Simonsson’s bachelor’s thesis at Borås College, “‘Biblioteken kan inte hålla på at rensa ut’: En diskursanalys av Tintindebatten,” published in 2013.
See the online commentary and criticism by Serieteket librarian and staff member Olaf Hellsten and Anders Lundgren (2012) defending Serieteket’s decision to keep the Tintin collection on their shelves.
The racist and colonialist contents of Tintin in the Congo, which Hergé himself would lament later in life, are well-known and thoroughly documented, so I will not dwell on them here. For a robust account of the book’s indulgence in racialist primitivism, see Phillippe Met’s essay “Of Men and Animals: Hergé’s Tintin au Congo, a Study in Primitivism” (1996). For a more critical reading of the book, from a specifically Swedish perspective, see Maria Ripenberg’s editorial for Upsala Nya Tidning (2016), “Därför att Tintin i Kongo är rasistisk.”
Monya’s legal filing came in the wake of a similar case filed by a Congolese student in Belgium and echoes similar attempts to enforce restrictions on access to Tintin in the Congo in the United Kingdom and the United States (for reporting on the event, see Kalmteg 2007). An interview with the Swedish plaintiff, Jean-Dadou Monya, was reported in the English language online Swedish newspaper The Local on August 23, 2007, and in the French online magazine L’Obs on August 25, 2007.
The 1907 Nordenskiöld exhibit was preceded by several similar displays of Sweden’s emergent Congo collection, going back at least twenty years to the late nineteenth century. As Swedish anthropologist and museum curator Michael Barrett explained to me on January 14, 2019 (in a personal communication with the author worth citing at length):
[Objects] amassed by the soldiers, sailors and colonial administrators in the Free State had already been shown numerous times in the major cities, since at least 1886, often in conjunction with extremely well attended lectures. The most prominent example was “Sv Sällskapets för Antropologi och Geografi Afrikanska utställning” [the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography’s African exhibit, henceforth SSAG] at Palmeska huset, [in] Blasieholmen [Stockholm], [which took place in] October and November 1886. This exhibition consisted exclusively of objects “collected” (in all its forms) by Free State officers like Möller, Pagels, Gleerup, Vester, Posse and Krusenstjerna. The close and cosy relationships between the developing museum, SSAG, the scholarly disciplines of anthropology and geography, colonial agents, the Swedish royalty, nobility, and state agents was very similar to the situation in Germany and Britain, although with less real political and territorial success.
Axelsson (2009, 213) reports that these “jungle sounds” were part of the exhibit in Copenhagen. Michael Barrett states that the soundtrack might have been presented in Oslo, but likely not in the other locations (personal communication with the author, January 14, 2019). Museologist Sara Craig Ayres (2011, 269) notes the presence of colonial-era silent films in her study of the exhibit.
Personal communication with the author, January 14, 2019. While Michael Barrett did collaborate on the production of the “Traces of the Congo” exhibition in 2005, as a newly hired curator at Stockholm’s Etnografiska Museet, he is keen to note that he laments having come to the project late in its development, after many of the curatorial decisions had been made.
On references to the 1960–64 United Nations mission in the Congo and Tarzan at the “Traces of the Congo” exhibit, see Axelsson (2009), 215, 217–18, 229. On Tarzan as the prototypical “superhero” of the (post)colonial world, see Bady (2011).
Alexander Skarsgård was not the first Swede to play the role of Tarzan. In fact, the very first actor to do so on-screen was the Swedish American Stellan Windrow (his parents immigrated to the United States from Sweden at the turn of the century). Early in the filming of Tarzan of the Apes, Windrow was replaced by Elmo Lincoln after being drafted to serve in World War I (Nilssen 2016).
Rolf Rembe and Anders Hellberg (2011) provide an excellent journalistic history of the Congo crisis, emphasizing the murky circumstances surrounding Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on September 18, 1961, outside of Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (see also Gibbs 1993). On Hammarskjöld’s efforts to safeguard human rights in the Union of South Africa in 1961, see Sellström (2011).
In fact, Nykvist and Södergren attended the same boarding school in Lindingö, a pastoral island northeast of Stockholm, while their parents served as missionaries in the Congo (Belgian and French, respectively) and became lifelong friends (Nykvist 2000).
As Michael Barrett (2016a, 2016b) has observed, the image of the “niombo” has figured prominently in several modernist representations of Africa, including Södergren’s mural.
See PMU’s 2015 annual activity report for these funding details (PMU 2015).
This video, “Jag har också en dröm—Timbuktu besöker Panzisjukhuset i DR Kongo,” can be viewed on YouTube (last accessed May 2, 2017).
Interview with the author, May 30, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
3. Walking While Black
Interview with the author, June 27, 2017 (Stockholm, Sweden).
The neighborhood of Gamla Enskede in southern Stockholm was developed in 1908 as the municipality’s first “garden city” (trädgårdsstad), building on late nineteenth-century development models in the United Kingdom (Rådberg 1994). According to Johan Rådberg, a scholar of architecture and urban planning, this area was originally intended to house Stockholm’s working class, not its residential elites (120).
A national report published in 2008, studying the nature, scope, and significance of “outdoor recreation” (friluftsliv) in Sweden, shows that nearly 90 percent of the 1,792 respondents associate hikes in the forest and mountains (vandring i skog och fjällvandring) with the idea of “being outdoors.” Moreover, the report describes such recreational contact with nature as “a central part of our [Swedish] cultural tradition and national identity. It is for many people a very important element of their quality of life and health” (Fredman et al. 2008, 7). Swedish ethnologists Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren (1987) describe this notion of a typically Swedish appeal to what they call the “recreational landscape” as rooted in the emergence of a middle-class, bourgeois conception of and engagement with nature in the nineteenth century. This national appeal to nature, and more specifically access to nature, has been established in Swedish law as allemansrätten, or the “right of public access,” which gives residents of and visitors to Sweden broad rights to camp, hike, pick berries, flowers, et cetera, on any land, public and private, with certain limitations to, for example, duration of stay and proximity to private residences.
See the entry for vill (a dated term in Swedish, meaning “lost”) in Elof Hellquist’s Svensk etymologisk ordbok (1922, 1123–24) for an etymology that links this term to vild (wild), from the Old Norse villr.
Stories of children getting lost in the strange, scary, and creaturely world of the forest appear frequently in contemporary Swedish children’s literature. See, for example, Kristina Westerlund’s Vilse (2012) and Pija Lindenbaum’s Gittan och gråvargarna (2001). Adult media, too, relishes in this theme. See, for example, director Ali Abbasi’s stunning 2018 film Gräns (Border).
Ola Larsmo, in a recently published fictionalized history of Swede Hollow (2016), offers a fascinating counterpoint to the romanticized narrative of Swedish migration to the United States, and Minnesota in particular. Swede Hollow was a slum on the outskirts of St. Paul, Minnesota, where more than a thousand migrant Swedes lived at the turn of the twentieth century. Larsmo’s novel is also timely in relation to the recent influx of non-European immigrants in Sweden, showing how Swedes have also felt the pressures of migration, sought asylum and refuge in a faraway land, and faced discrimination and abuse as “foreigners.”
Interview with the author, September 22, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
As Swedish DJ, public intellectual, and culture critic Nathan Hamelberg notes (in a Facebook post on December 1, 2016), “The program was a potpourri of contemporary pop culture, all in one place . . . everything from Twisted Sister to Culture Club, or Limahl [of NeverEnding Story fame], and, deeper still, Cabaret Voltaire.” Turning to the dance segment, “Freak Out,” Hamelberg notes that “much of what epitomized the [cultural] style of Plattan and Kungsan [two bustling public squares in downtown Stockholm] was covered in a few minutes: the leg warmer, robot dance, boom box, head band, sound from drum machines and synths, pastel colors matched with black.”
It is worth noting the commentary on the Bromma municipality website regarding the relationship between Blackeberg township’s urban infrastructure and its forested environs: “Development in Blackeberg is skillfully and thoughtfully adapted to the natural environment. Rock faces and large forested regions have been maintained—one has built WITH nature and not AGAINST it” (brommahembygd.se; last accessed October 21, 2020).
Interview with the author, September 1, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden)
Ahmed Ibrahim Ali (aka Romário) was a Swedish soccer player of Somali descent. “Ali had played with the men’s national soccer team in Djibouti, studied on a scholarship at West Hills College (USA), and been hired as gym teacher. He had even been active in the opening of a youth center in Husby.” He was killed following an altercation at a nightclub near Fridhemsplan on October 18, 2008 (sv.wikipedia.org).
A short online article (Anon. 2012) describes the efforts of Swedish soccer player and Husby native Henok Goitom to have artificial turf installed at the “number three” soccer field in Husby. The article begins by noting Goitom’s jersey number with the AIK soccer club: 36.
Text of “Systemets Vänterum” in Swedish: “Vi fastnade i systemets väntetrum / Tjugo vänner utanför svenska rum / Utomhus / Vi kallar det ‘centrum’ / Skumt / [Här] utanförskap centraliseras / Samtidigt som politiken marginaliserar / Håller vi på att bli enade? / Jag ser adeln göra det / Men när ska arbetarklassen bli förenade? / Hälften kastar stenar / Resten är förstenade / Jag pekar på problemen / Men ni är allt för upptagna att titta på min bruna hand / Har han blod på sin hand? / Har han snattat med sin hand? / Får man ens skaka hand med han?”
By contrast, Erik Stenberg (2016, 123) observes the “well-built, flexible, and stable” character of Million Program buildings and argues for their rehabilitation to address Sweden’s contemporary housing needs. Similarly, Jennifer Mack (2014) has studied what she terms “urban design from below” in the Million Program town of Geneta in Södertälje, Sweden, looking specifically at the way Syriac residents have organized to reimagine and repurpose suburban social space.
In Swedish: “Som blommor falla / så naturliga texter växte / och väckte en publik.”
The panel discussion, in which I also participated as a guest speaker, can be viewed in its entirety at urskola.se (last accessed October 22, 2020).
Tess Asplund’s speech on April 23, 2016, was delivered to a general audience in the context of a public remembrance of Alexander Bengtsson’s life and work, held in a public square in central Uppsala. I did not have the privilege to speak with Asplund about her presence at the rally that day, but given the publicity of the event (which was documented by many in attendance), and with deference to Asplund’s position as a prominent anti-racist activist as well as the poignancy of her words in this context, I have chosen to cite her by name.
As Nana Osei-Kofi, Adela C. Licona, and Karma R. Chávez (2018, 137) note in their analytic account of the viral spread and transnational reception of Lagerlöf’s photograph, “The image of Asplund was quickly compared to another Swedish photograph known as ‘the lady with the bag’ taken by Hans Runesson more than thirty years earlier, of Danuta Danielsson, a then-recent Polish immigrant to Sweden, hitting a skinhead demonstrator from the Nordic Reich Party with her purse.”
Asplund cites Mandela as the inspiration for her defiant, coalitional gesture at the anti-fascist protest in Borlänge: “I ran towards them and raised my fist in the air like Nelson Mandela. He is my hero and I believe he loves compassion and humanity, so that is why I raised my fist” (Osei-Kofi, Licona, and Chávez 2018, 142). As Osei-Kofi, Licona, and Chávez observe, “Her action is here framed in terms of the singular individual, and the analog of Mandela, referring of course to Mandela and the African National Congress’ (ANC) fist of defiance,” iconically enacted on Mandela’s release from a South African prison in 1990 (142).
4. Articulating Afro-Sweden
My account of this community gathering has been largely anonymized. “Stina,” “Madina,” and “Jasmine” are pseudonyms. One of these panelists requested anonymity after reviewing a draft of my report. Another panelist did not respond to my request for feedback, and I was unable to contact the third. Araia Ghirmai Sebhatu was my community contact prior to the public forum and has reviewed and approved subsequent drafts of my report and analysis of the event. As such, I cite him by name in the text.
The signifying content of this discussion—amply populated with terms of diasporic identification—may be characterized by what sociologist Crystal Marie Fleming terms “ethnoracial cascading.” As Fleming (2017, 105) explains, such discourse “occurs when speakers’ references to ethnoracial categories build on one another,” snowballing as pointed discussions of diasporic identity thicken.
My understanding of the plurality of “roots and routes” suggested by such diasporic terms of identification, as well as the language used to respond to anti-black racist discourse among African-descended communities in Sweden, is deeply indebted to the pioneering work of anthropologist Lena Sawyer (2000, 2002).
Interview with the author, May 24, 2013 (Stockholm, Sweden).
I refer, of course, to E. B. Tylor’s (1874) (in)famous anthropological definition of the “culture” concept: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Diana Mulinari and Anders Neegaard (2005, 55) have argued for what they term a contemporary “black skull consciousness,” evoking a racialized sense of working-class solidarity from Sweden’s socioeconomic margins, “in which the stereotype and insult of passivity have been turned on their heads.”
Simon’s use of the English word “criminals” suggests two related Swedish terms, both vulgar expressions of ethnic, racial, and class difference in Sweden: svartskalle, signifying dark-haired youths from “the suburbs” (förorten); and blatte, a word directed toward a wide variety of ethnically marked socioeconomic outcasts. Such words are part of the discursive fabric of suburban life in Sweden, particularly in schools with pronounced multi-ethnic populations, which are social spaces where normative and nonnormative subjectivities become codified, established, and maintained (Jonsson 2007). Notably, both terms are also employed in suburban hip-hop and other modes of popular culture, both as a form of critically conscious self-identification and in critical response to the injurious language of everyday racism (Lacatus 2007).
Interview with the author, May 30, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, September 30, 2018 (Stockholm, Sweden).
In Stuart Hall’s (1993, 111–12) words, “It is to the diversity, not the homogeneity, of Black experience that we must now give our undivided creative attention. This is not simply to appreciate the historical and experiential differences within and between communities, regions, country and city, across national cultures, between diasporas, but also to recognize the other kinds of difference that place, position, and locate Black people.”
“Jag är afrosvensk. Jag är alla böjningar av ett ord du visste inte fanns.” Excerpt from the poem “Jag är svensk” (I Am Swedish), read aloud during a public gathering of the Black and African diaspora in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 24, 2016.
5. The Politics of Race and Diaspora
A detailed summary of the “metal pipe scandal” (järnrörskandalen) can be found on wikipedia.org (last accessed April 28, 2017).
The video for “Svarta Duvor och Vissna Liljor” can be viewed on YouTube (last accessed April 28, 2017).
“5i12” indexes the Swedish phrase fem i tolv, meaning “five to midnight,” a reference to a rally protesting xenophobia and cultural intolerance that took place in the Swedish town of Härnösand on December 5, 1993, at 11:55 p.m. For more on the history of the social movement this rally started, see 5i12.com (last accessed May 14, 2021).
Interview with the author, May 30, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
In Swedish, the lyric reads, “O frågan jag möts av om och om igen igen / ‘Hej! Var kommer du ifrån egentiligen?’”
In the wake of this event, the hashtag #JagArJason (I Am Jason) signaled such iconicity explicitly on social media, coupled with a viral video in which Swedish artists from all walks of life read the transcript of his speech word for word, one line at a time (badtasteempire.com).
A recent example the strong xenophilic current in Swedish society is the “Vi gilar olika” (We like difference) campaign, started by the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet. Created in response to the Sweden Democrats successful parliamentary run in 2010, the campaign now boasts nearly half a million followers on Facebook.
In 2018, the ASR formally changed its name from Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund, the National “Union” (förbund) of Afro-Swedes, to Afrosvenskarnas Riksorganisation, the National “Organization” (organisation) of Afro-Swedes (afrosvenskarna.se).
Kitimbwa Sabuni was my community contact prior to the event at Café Panafrika and has reviewed and approved subsequent drafts of my report and analysis of the event. I have also shared this material with the participating panelists at the event for review. All except for Mkyabela Sabuni responded to my request and consented to be cited by name. Given the elder Sabuni’s status with the community and the ASR specifically, and noting his relation to Kitimbwa, I have chosen to cite him by name as well.
Interview with the author, May 24, 2013 (Stockholm, Sweden).
It is worth noting that Selam collaborated with the ASR to produce the first Stockholm “Africa Festival” in 2000, capping a period in which the two groups worked in tandem to promote and foster Afro-diasporic public culture in Sweden. This partnership ended the following year, however, with Selam citing “artistic differences” with ASR.
Interview with the author, September 24, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, September 21, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Figures pertaining to public allocations of funding for culture may be found in the Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy (Myndigheten för Kulturanalys) annual reports (kulturanalys.se). Statistics for the 2012–13 fiscal period appear in the 2014 report Samhällets utgifter för kultur, 2012–2013.
Interview with the author, November 16, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, May 24, 2013 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, May 24, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, March 9, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Baker Karim’s 2003 television series Swedenhielms is an adaptation of Hjalmar Bergman’s 1923 stage drama of the same name, considered to be a classic piece of modern Swedish theater.
Personal communication with the author, December 6, 2019.
Swedish Television (SVT) broadcast Medan Vi Lever for the first time on April 27, 2019, two and half years after its original theatrical release.
Interview with the author, June 20, 2017 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, July 3, 2017 (Malmö, Sweden).
Cecilia Gärding, tired of waiting for the Swedish media to acknowledge her own award-winning film, has recently posted Vi är som apelsiner in its entirety to YouTube.
Victoria Kawesa, public lecture, October 19, 2015 (Stockholm, Sweden).
The title in Swedish reads Att färgas av Sverige: Upplevelser av diskriminering och rasism bland ungdommar med afrikansk bakgrund i Sverige.
6. The Art of Renaissance
Interview with the author, May 30, 2013 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, November 27, 2017 (Columbus, Ohio).
Interview with the author, May 30, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, June 22, 2017 (Stockholm, Sweden). For an intimate, incisive, Black feminist, and thoroughly dialogic reading (viewing, listening, and feeling) of/with Josette Bushell-Mingo’s 2018 stage production Nina: A Story about Me and Nina Simone, see Adeniji et al. (2020). Of Bushell-Mingo’s artistic persona(e), coauthor Monica Miller writes, “If there is one word that would describe Nina Simone, the person, Nina the performance, and Josette Bushell-Mingo as a performer, it would be dynamic—the performance slips and slides between personas, directs their words at some audience members and not at others, changes the pitch and timbre of their voices, the postures of their bodies to create other literacies and send particular messages” (13).
Interview with the author, April 18, 2016 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Interview with the author, June 22, 2017 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Ashon Crawley, in his seminal Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2017), defines “otherwise” as “the subjectivity in the commons, an asubjectivity that is not about the enclosed self but the open, vulnerable, available, enfleshed organism.” For Crawley, “otherwise possibility” is a theoretical and methodological means “for thinking blackness and flesh, for thinking blackness and performance, as gathering and extending that which otherwise is discarded and discardable, those two modalities as modes of being and existence” (24–25).
Interview with the author, December 11, 2016 (New York, New York).
Seinabo Sey’s sommarprat program can be heard in its entirety on the website for Sweden’s public radio station (sverigesradio.se).
See, for example, Seinabo Sey’s artist bio on the “Scandinavian Soul” website (scandinaviansoul.com).
Interview with the author, September 27, 2018 (Stockholm, Sweden).
Sey’s tips on life, fashion, and beauty as a Black woman in a normatively white Sweden are echoed and elaborated in Jallow (2016).
For a critical reflection on “racialized desire” in the Swedish context, see Lundström (2012). For a broader historical and theoretical account of the representation of black bodies as “primitive,” “sexualized,” and uniquely “athletic” in European public culture, see Hall (1997b).
Elizabeth and Victoria Lejonhjärta are Afro-Swedish fashion models, bloggers, and social media influencers. They are also identical twins. Born in the traditional homeland of the indigenous Sami people (Sápmi) in northern Scandinavia, Elizabeth and Victoria grew up at the confluence of multiple worlds. Their mother has roots both in Sápmi and the traditionally Finnish-speaking Tornedal region of northern Sweden. Their father’s roots are in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. All of these modes of identification are considered minority identities in Sweden (some officially, Sami and Tornedal Swedish; others implicitly, Senegambian, and Sierra Leonean), and have been the historical targets of discrimination and abuse in the country’s northern regions more specifically.
I urge the reader to look up the video of Seinabo Sey’s 2016 Swedish Grammy Awards performance (youtube.com). Let Nina Simone’s words of fearless defiance ring in your ears. Recall Sey’s angry indictment of Swedish visual culture. Then, watch and listen to her performance.
Since 2015, the term Söderhavskung (king of the South Seas) has been used in Swedish editions.
For a multi-vocal, anti-racist, and intersectional account of this public spectacle and the criticism that followed in its wake, see McEachrane et al. (2014a).
As Swedish culture critic and blogger Johan Palme (2016) notes, in a review of Linde’s exhibition, “Those who look are forced into Makode Linde’s own position, constantly observed and judged; into the clown costume forced upon him; inside his feelings of betrayal and wavering self-image, his anger at society’s racism and homophobia.”
See the Facebook event page hosted by Makode Linde, titled [N----]kungens återkomst—VERNISSAGE!
These prices are taken from a sampling of prints and sculptures by Makode Linde for sale at Galleri Agardh & Tornvall as of December 2019 (agardh-tornvall.se).
In a survey of the idea of “Black Renaissance” in America, Ernest Julius Mitchell (2010, 650), invokes the thought and spirit of African American philosopher Alain Locke to describe what he calls a “long-term, trans-generational, and interracial cultural shift,” outlining a creative, critical, stylized, and syncretic tradition in the African-descended world. I draw on the spirit of this argument in mobilizing the idea of “renaissance” in Afro-Sweden.
Epilogue
The Facebook page for the event indicates that forty-eight thousand people attended, with another twenty-three thousand listed as “interested” (last accessed June 17, 2020).
On May 31, 2020, the New York Times published a multimedia reconstruction of George Floyd’s final moments (nytimes.com), using “security footage, witness videos, and official documents [to] show how a series of actions by [Minneapolis Police Department] officers turned fatal” (last accessed June 17, 2020).
As journalist Luke Mogelson (2020) reports in a feature article on the “uprising in Minneapolis,” while protests were largely peaceful there were also notable acts of violence. The days following George Floyd’s death witnessed dramatic riots and looting in South and North Minneapolis (historically Black neighborhoods in the city), though it is important to note (as Mogelson does) that the casualties of this “violence” were not human, but material. Retail stores, a bank, and, most notably, a police station bore the brunt of people’s anger, as protesters took aim at the social and economic infrastructure of what they view to be an endemically racist society.
Wikipedia has compiled a comprehensive page tracking the content and global scope of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death on May 25 (wikipedia.org; last accessed June 17, 2020).
For a lucid, nuanced, and critical perspective on Sweden’s public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, see Angner and Arrhenius (2020).
On April 2, Ebba Busch, party leader of the Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna), published an opinion piece in Aftonbladet, in which she argued that “culturally specific causes” (including closer family relations and a general lack of trust in institutions, as well as illiteracy and “different traditions of written communication and medicine”) may play a role in the spread of Covid-19 among Somali Swedish communities (Busch 2020).
A recording of the livestream accompanying the June 2, 2020, protest is archived on YouTube, under the title “Black Lives Matter Sweden #blackouttuesday” (last accessed June 18, 2020). I used this recording to prepare my report of the event. It should be noted that the June 2 protest was not the only event held in Sweden to contest police violence and support the value and dignity of Black lives in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Demonstrations and rallies were held in towns and cities throughout the country: in Stockholm on June 3, Gothenburg on June 7, Malmö on June 9, Uppsala on June 11, and so on. However, the June 2 protest does seem to be unique as an online event, notable for its stated sensitivity to the Covid-19 pandemic. Large, in-person gatherings have done much to raise the profile of the Black Lives Matter movement in Sweden, but they have also raised concerns and drawn criticism from Swedish authorities, who worry about the heightened risk of infection in such crowded spaces (Svahn 2020a).
I came across this citation in Philip A. Ewell’s excellent and important essay “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” (2020).