On (Not) Seeing Black Life in Sweden

On July 22, 2019, comedian Trevor Noah devotes an extended segment of The Daily Show to a commentary on Sweden and the trial of rapper A$AP Rocky at Stockholm’s District Court (cc.com). The American hip-hop star’s Swedish saga begins on June 30, two days prior to a scheduled stadium performance in downtown Stockholm.1 Outside a fast-food restaurant in the bustling downtown Hötorget district, the rapper and his entourage get into an altercation with two young men, whom they accuse of following and harassing them. A fight breaks out. One of the young men is thrown to the ground, then punched and kicked by a pair of A$AP Rocky’s bodyguards. The rapper joins the melee, too. There may have been a broken bottle involved. Insults are hurled back and forth. A pair of headphones—apparently used to assault a bodyguard—ends up on a roof, broken. One of the young men is hospitalized with a fractured rib and severe cuts. A$AP Rocky claims self-defense. Cell phone videos of the incident are posted on social media. Celebrity tabloids and the mainstream media go wild. The world is paying attention. A$AP Rocky and two of his companions end up in jail to await trial for aggravated assault (a charge later reduced to common assault). Some wonder about the heavy-handed response from law enforcement. Were A$AP Rocky and his crew being unfairly treated because they are Black? This is where Noah picks up the story.

Following jokes about Volvos (“The sexiest cars on the planet!”), Ikea in Swedish prisons (“They make you assemble all your own furniture!”), and public health care (“Do your worst [bodyguard], I don’t have to pay the doctor bills!”), Noah turns his attention to calls from celebrities advocating for A$AP Rocky’s immediate release. Among them, prominent Trump supporter Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian lobby the American president to intervene personally, which he does, unsurprisingly via a series of impromptu tweets. “This is one of those moments when I genuinely can’t believe we’re living in real life,” Noah tells his audience. “Listen to the story! Donald Trump, who is the president of the United States, got a call from his friend, Kanye West [laughter], to save a rapper from a Swedish prison! [more laughter]. This sounds like the headline was written by a newspaper on LSD! [the laughter continues].” In a pair of tweets about the case, addressed to the “very talented” Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven, Trump promises to “personally vouch for [A$AP Rocky’s] bail.” This, even though Sweden does not have a bail system. In response, Löfven and former prime minister Carl Bildt each take the opportunity (the latter in a prominent Washington Post editorial; see Bildt 2019) to publicly remind the president that Sweden’s judiciary remains independent and does not play favorites. “All are equal under the law,” Löfven notes (Zaveri 2019), a not-so-subtle jab at President Trump’s penchant for judicial interference, as well as a sober retort to right-wing propagandists who proclaim a breakdown in the rule of law and warn of “societal collapse” amid an apparent influx (they say “invasion”) of non-European immigrants—dramatic claims Trump has himself spread and amplified online and at public events.2

Then comes the punchline. “They don’t have bail in Sweden,” says Noah. “They’re not going to let A$AP go, because they say that they consider him a flight risk, which, I’m sorry, I think is crazy.” Staring deadpan into the camera, Noah asks, “You’re afraid he’s going to get out?” And answers, “He’s a Black man in Sweden. [laughter] Even if he tries to escape, how far can he get?” A picture appears beside Noah, showing a crowd of white (and ostensibly Swedish) people—eliciting more laughter. Animated and on a roll, Noah digs in: “Come on Sweden! Let the guy go! Take away his passport and let him live! You wouldn’t even need to put his picture on a wanted poster. You could just write, ‘THE BLACK GUY,’ and he would be found! [raucous laughter].” The joke lands with Noah’s audience, and the show goes on; political satire for dark times—cathartic and necessary. But Noah’s silly story rests on a pair of deeply troubling and intimately related assumptions: that Sweden is an essentially white nation where Black people do not—indeed, cannot—dwell. Perhaps the South African comedian—known for his witty, racially conscious humor and otherwise “woke” commentary—was simply feigning ignorance, indulging a stereotype for the sake of a laugh. Or maybe the idea of being Black in Sweden is, for The Daily Show host and his American public, just that: absurdly unthinkable. Regardless, Noah’s joke comes at the expense of a very real demographic—between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand people, or 4–5 percent of the Swedish population with roots in the African world. (I will return to these figures, their statistical provenance and societal significance, below.) Against a cultural imagination that routinely obscures and diminishes Black lives, this book seeks to illuminate the history, culture, and identity of a very real and clearly present Afro-Swedish community.

But this is not merely an exercise in making otherwise obscured Black lives visible in a place—“Sweden!”—you never thought to look. Rather, Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country is an incitement to pay attention, to bear witness to (paraphrasing the late Alioune Diop) a clearly discernable Black and African presence in Sweden today. What this book observes, in short, is nothing less than a period of pronounced Afro-Swedish effervescence, in which the social and cultural contours of an increasingly self-conscious though diversely populated African-descended community take shape against the grain of a normatively white society. Over the course of six chapters, I trace the emergence of a varied but no less vital—eclectic but no less coherent—Black and African lifeworld on the northern fringes of contemporary Europe. Rooted in Sweden and routed throughout the African world, this diasporic demographic has emerged in the wake of multiple patterns of transnational mobility—including, but not limited to, tourism, adoption, migration, refuge, and asylum—over the past seven decades. Through ethnographic inquiry, historical study, and textual analysis, I examine expressions and understandings of a pronounced Afro-Swedish identity, as manifest in the oral histories of community elders, a fragmented (post)colonial archive, the historical imagination of an emboldened African-descended youth, the language and politics born of new modes of racially conscious identification, and, perhaps most important, the creative labor of a diverse and dynamic Afro-diasporic art world.

In this introductory chapter, I address four topics and issues that will serve to conceptually frame my study and empirically locate it in contemporary Sweden, but also within a broader African world of which the Scandinavian country is, as we shall observe, a part. First, I sketch the contours of the social group whose lives and labors preoccupy the pages that follow: the “Afro-Swedes” (afrosvenskar). Understanding this complex and still quite new demographic and mode of identification is a necessary starting point for a book that seeks to examine and elucidate Sweden’s Black and African diaspora, but this is only an opening gesture. The issues I raise here will continue to unfold, develop, and deepen throughout this text. Second, I introduce, interrogate, and constructively theorize three keywords that will aid me in telling the story of the Afro-Swedes in the world today: “race,” “culture,” and “diaspora.” Thinking with (and sometimes against) these terms provides some of the necessary analytic tools for the interpretive work that follows. But the effort will also help me chart the fraught discursive terrain of this study, set in a modern Swedish context swept up, as I shall suggest, in widespread false consciousness, in which race is denied, culture is reified, and diasporic community simply does not belong. It is a social and cultural landscape that demands careful and thoughtful navigation, to be sure, and I will devote most of the words in this chapter to that end. Third, I turn to the research methods and modes of writing that structure this book, answering the question of how and on what empirical grounds I have chosen to compose this work—and how I situate myself as a white American scholar therein. Finally, fourth, I rehearse the content of the book, sketching the concerns of the six chapters that follow in two parts, on the social history and public culture of the Afro-Swedes, anchored in two theoretical concepts that inform as they structure the content of this book: “remembering” and “renaissance.”

Who Are the Afro-Swedes?

The term “Afro-Swedish” (afrosvensk) is relatively new to the Swedish lexicon. It seems to have entered the public sphere with the founding of the National Union of Afro-Swedes (Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund) in 1990 but has gained currency as a term of identification only in the past decade. (A Google search reveals only a few dozen references to the term through 2009. As of August 2021, “afrosvensk” turns up around sixty thousand hits.) Formal definitions of “Afro-Swedish” are typically broad (see, e.g., McEachrane 2012), referring to any inhabitant of Sweden with some form of African background. This may include recent migrants from the African continent, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular; children born in Sweden with African parentage; people who trace their heritage within the broader African diaspora, including the Caribbean, North and South America, and elsewhere in Europe; and individuals adopted from Africa or its diaspora. Among these various roots in the African world, sub-Saharan Africa looms large, with a large majority of African-descended Swedes hailing from Africa’s horn. Indeed, according to Statistics Sweden (Statistiska Centralbyrån), a government agency that tracks and assembles demographic data (scb.se), there were approximately 325,000 people of sub-Saharan African descent in Sweden as of December 31, 2020, roughly 70 percent of whom hail from just three countries: Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.3

Still, the term “Afro-Swedish” remains broad and capacious, indexing multiple subject positions within a diffuse diasporic community. Thus, alongside geographic, historical, and filial ties to Africa and its diaspora, many Afro-Swedes emphasize an intrinsic sense of racial solidarity, embracing “Black” or “Brown” identities, for example, to signal coalitional modes of identification (Osei-Kofi, Licona, and Chávez 2018). As emergent “racial formations” (Omi and Winant [1986] 2014), such groups are explicitly critical of discourses that cast their visible difference in terms of foreign provenance; that is, these Afro-Swedes refuse the label “immigrant” (invandrare) and insist, rather, on a racially conscious sense of Swedishness: Afro-Swedish. Their emphasis on embedded racial identities—being both “Black” and “Swedish”—may be contrasted with other communities of African descent in Europe, for whom “migrant” subjectivities remain culturally focal and socioeconomically determinative, both at “home” and “abroad” (see, e.g., Kleinman 2019). But, regardless of diasporic provenance or racial consciousness, nearly all Afro-Swedes acknowledge the extrinsic racism that subjects people of African descent to everyday exoticism, exclusion, insult, and injury (cf. McIntosh 2015, 313).4 And yet, not all Afro-Swedes employ the term or self-identify as “Afro-Swedish” (see, e.g., Adeniji 2014).

For some, the term is clearly an important means of giving voice to their doubly conscious, African and Swedish identities. Stockholm-based DJ Justine Balagade (aka Sister Justice) first became aware of the term in 2008 and immediately recognized its value as a sociocultural concept.5 “It’s a way of forming a common identity,” she tells me, “for everybody who feels that they are a part of the African diaspora and living in Swedish society.” Part of living as a person of African descent in Sweden is a common experience of discrimination and abuse. “It’s been hard to put a name to certain discriminations that were based on racism,” she explains, “but specifically due to your Blackness or Africanness.” But there’s also the situational experience of everyday mutual recognition. “When I meet or see other Afro-Swedes, in the streets or whatever, I feel a connection to them. And it’s nice to have a term you can put to that [feeling] . . . that we have this African heritage, and we’re living our Black experiences in a particular Swedish context.”

For others, the term can seem contrived, or at the very least overly general, glossing over the particular nuance inherent to the Afro-diasporic experience in Sweden. “I really don’t have a problem with the term ‘Afro-Swedish,’” hip-hop artist Jason Diakité (aka Timbuktu) tells me.6 “I don’t necessarily call myself that very often. I’d probably go the longer route and say that I’m African American [and] white American but born and raised in Sweden.” Still others take the term “Afro-Swedish” to task, for what they understand to be an undue emphasis on phenotypic difference. “I don’t believe in categorizing based on superficial qualities,” rapper and community organizer Raymond Peroti (aka Blues) insists.7 Without being “blind to difference,” the real social work lies, in Peroti’s view, in “including each other’s differences in the norm”—that is, expanding what it means to be “Swedish” in the world today. Finally, there are those who appeal to the social and cultural specificity of Afro-diasporic life in Sweden today but give voice to their identities with still other terms, like “African-Swedish” (afrikansvensk), simply “African” (afrikan), or, more broadly, “Black” (svart).

I will discuss the wide range of language about Blackness, Africanness, and Afro-diasporic identity in greater detail later in the book (specifically, chapter 4). Here I want to argue for the relevance of the category “Afro-Swedish” to the stories and analyses in the pages that follow but also, and more importantly, to the incipient social formation for which the term stands. I do so not despite but rather because of the diversity of opinion about the meaning and use of “Afro-Swedish” among African-descended Swedes. References to afrosvensk in the public sphere (whether positive, ambivalent, or cautionary) index a wide range of Black, African, and more broadly diasporic experiences, institutions, and subject positions. The term is, in fact, a capacious and open signifier of Africana being and belonging in Sweden today and should, in my view, be understood as such. Thus, I employ “Afro-Swedish” here, among other terms of diasporic affiliation and identification, not to signal a fixed social, cultural, or racial identity, but to register a constellation of transnational and intersubjective relationships between Sweden and the African world. Moreover, I suggest that there is a specific, indeed strategic use and value in being able to locate Swedes of the African diaspora under a common rubric. In a society that struggles to see Black lives, terms like “Afro-Swedish” call a minority public into being, allowing the community to mobilize a broader politics of representation in civil and political society. Afro-Swedish activist Kitimbwa Sabuni puts it succinctly when he says, “All groups that suffer from racism must be able to name themselves [benämna sig själva], in order to organize and stand together against racism. Because we have the term ‘Afro-Swedish,’ Black Swedes can [also take that stand].”8

But there are significant systemic impediments to such a discursive, social, and political stance. Most notably, calculating the size and scope of the Afro-Swedish community remains difficult, perhaps even impossible. A 2014 report on “Afrophobia” in Sweden estimated the Afro-Swedish population to be upwards of 180,000 individuals (Hübinette, Beshir, and Kawesa 2014). More recent governmental data indicates that there are approximately 200,000 Swedish residents who were born in sub-Saharan Africa alone. If one includes children born in Sweden to one or two parents from sub-Saharan Africa this number rises to nearly 325,000 individuals (scb.se). But national statistics do not tell us the size of the next generation of Afro-Swedes—that is, people of African descent whose parents are native-born Swedes. A fixation on “country of birth” (födelseland) obscures their demographic presence entirely. Nor do the current statistics allow us to pinpoint the number of Swedes with roots in the broader African diaspora (from the Americas, Caribbean, or elsewhere in Europe, for example), given the demographic heterogeneity of many of these countries (specifically, in terms of “race,” about which more below). As I noted at the outset of this chapter, the actual number of Afro-Swedes—that is, people of African descent in Sweden, broadly conceived, as of January 2021—may be in the range of nearly half a million people, but that is only an educated guess.9

By only tracking a person’s country of birth or origin, Sweden’s official demography routinely ignores more complex identity formations. For example, a Swede with roots in the Gambia might maintain a Gambian or a more particularly ethnic identity (Mandinka, Wolof, or Jola, for example) at home. That person might also be born in England and hold a British passport but identify as Gambian (and perhaps hold that passport as well). In their community, they might also be emphatically “African,” seeking solidarity within broader pan-African clubs and social groups. In society, their modes of identification might be still more complex, articulating ethnic, national, and transnational belonging with their gender identity, sexual orientation, community of faith, and so on, in various constellations. Moreover, regardless of their place of birth or legal status, they might also identify as, simply, “Swedish.” Better, more socially and culturally grounded statistics on African and other non-European-descended peoples in Sweden would require state and local governments to acknowledge a range of hyphenated, ethnic, regional, and more broadly intersectional identities present within these communities (for an argument supporting such jämlikhetsdata or “equality data” in Sweden, see Hübinette 2015). Further, and perhaps most controversially, recognizing the existence of an inclusive, multi-ethnic, and transnational African-descended population would suggest the demographic relevance of yet another mode of identification: “race” (McEachrane 2018, 482–83).

Race, Racism, and Racialization

Several things come into view when one starts seeing Blackness in places like Sweden. As Trevor Noah’s sketch makes clear, to see Black people in a mainstream Swedish context—whether aberrantly (as exceptional) or absently (as impossible)—is to see “whiteness” as a normative presence, as a demographic and discursive hegemony (Tesfahuney 2005; Hübinette and Lundström 2014; McEachrane 2014c; Werner 2014); it is, in other words, to see the binary (il)logics of “race.” As historian and media theorist Tina Campt has noted, “the impossibility of race” (her emphasis) is “required as both an ever-present threat and the constitutive outside of racial purity” (2012, 67; see also Wright 2004, 74). But there is a sleight of hand to such a doubled vision. For just as soon as race appears as a semiotics of difference—with Blackness in an exceptional, even impossible relationship to whiteness—it disappears as a social discourse. Seeing, in other words, is not always believing! This is because in Sweden, as elsewhere in the Nordic region and throughout Europe, “race” ought not to exist at all (McEachrane 2014c; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2016) and, thus, should not be spoken of at all (Hübinette et al. 2012). Anthropologist Laurie McIntosh (2015, 310), writing about the related experiences of African-descended Norwegians, describes this as “the peculiar space of the ‘visibly-invisible,’” characterized by “a chasm of cultural dissimilarity” that renders racialized others “incomprehensible and unfathomable.” As a concept thoroughly discredited by mainstream science—whether physical anthropology, evolutionary biology, or genetics (Appiah 1992; Gould 1981)—and utterly sullied by history—in the wake of World War II and the long shadow cast by the Holocaust (Goldberg 2006)—there is a powerful taboo surrounding “race” as a term of discourse in places like Sweden today.

On these grounds, the Swedish state has recently sought to remove the word “race” altogether from legislative and juridical documents (Hambraeus 2014).10 Sweden positions itself, thus, as doggedly anti-racist. More profoundly, though, there is a sense in which such initiatives posit Sweden as ante-racist as well, as a polity unscathed by the churlish reality of race: both anti-racist and “color-blind” at the same time (Sawyer 2000; Miller 2017). Scholars have noted, for example, the way explicitly racial discourse disturbs a proudly progressive social history, predicated on decades of anti-colonial advocacy, anti-apartheid struggle, and Third World solidarity (Hübinette 2013; Sawyer 2008, 90). As McEachrane (2014c, 99) forcefully argues, “The widespread post-WWII political rejection of race has led to a bizarre situation where race is said to have no meaning whereas an argument can be made that in Europe few if any social distinctions have more meaning.” Thus, Olof Palme, the twentieth-century wunderkind of Swedish social democracy and champion of “Third World” solidarity and development, could assert in 1965 that “foul racial theories have never gained purchase” (grumliga rasteorier har aldrig funnit fotfäste) in Sweden. This statement was made a mere seven years after the dissolution of the state-sponsored Institute for Race Biology (Rasbiologiska Institutet) in Uppsala, which advanced the theory and practice of eugenics.11 Thus, while race may be visible to the eye, a linguistic gap—a discursive silence—effectively breaks the semiotic circuit; the signifier does not fully register as a signified. Because such “foul” notions “have never gained purchase,” they ought not to exist at all.

What we see, then, when we look for “race” is not so much the thing itself but the effects race produces in society: that is, “racism.” Indeed, when we look for racism in Sweden, our vision becomes clearer, if only a bit. Most apparent are the outward signs of racial insult and injury, what Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992, 13–19) would call “extrinsic” forms and expressions of racism. Such signs are readily apparent to people of color in Sweden. As a host of public testimonies, literary narratives, and sociological studies show, many Swedes who are phenotypically non-European—that is, not white—share the experience of being labeled foreign, even interlopers in their own country, or, in polite company, not “ethnically Swedish” (see, e.g., Adeniji 2014; Diakité 2016; Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Khemiri 2013a; Norrby 2015; Polite 2007). What appears as “xenophobia” (främlingsfientlighet), which in Swedish registers both prejudice against and antagonism toward “foreigners,” betrays a deeper racism. Such observers further note the way terms like “ethnicity” (etnicitet), “culture” (kultur), and even “religion” (religion) frequently stand in for the absented presence of “race” (ras) in the public sphere, giving voice to the otherwise unspoken, albeit obliquely: “racism” without “race” (McEachrane 2014c, 94–99; see also Mills 2007, 103). This is as true of a scholarship that tracks various forms of social prejudice in society as it is for individuals and groups who find in such words acceptable discursive cover for otherwise uncouth sentiments (Hübinette et al. 2012, 14–15)—the kind of “politically correct” racism that often follows the phrase “I’m not a racist, but . . .”12 In this way, the Sweden Democrats, a far-right political party with ideological roots in Nordic neo-Nazi social movements, can eschew accusations of racism while peppering their hardline anti-immigrant stance with commentary about the supposed social and cultural differences inherent to foreign-born (and, generally speaking, non-European) Swedes (Hübinette and Lundström 2011; Kaminsky 2012; Teitelbaum 2017).

Meanwhile, signs of a specifically anti-black and plainly extrinsic racism have multiplied in recent years. Over the past decade, for example, critical attention has been drawn to children’s literature and film that feature pickaninny and gollywog characters (derived from nineteenth-century racist caricatures of Black subjects). There has also been significant argument over the continued use of the Swedish term n----(a vulgar colloquial word for “Black,” similar to the n-word in American English) in the name of a traditional confection and the prose of canonical literature. Further, the combination of such racist imagery and words in the public sphere—as, for example, in a 2011 poster campaign in Malmö portraying a prominent Afro-Swedish political figure as runaway slave, or a 2016 art exhibition in Stockholm that couples racially charged language with blackface iconography derived from the stereotyped costume of nineteenth- and twentieth-century minstrelsy—has inspired lively public debates about the boundary between racial hate crime and freedom of speech. Seen, heard, and read together, these incidents reveal a widespread presence of but also a broad tolerance for racist imagery, terminology, and thought in the Swedish public sphere (Hübinette 2011; Rubin Dranger 2012; Pripp and Öhlander 2012). What is extrinsically racist to some is to others no more than a sign of Swedish “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005)—the public manifestation of indecorous, even embarrassing sentiments, which, for many, are simply conventional and tolerable expressions of the way things “have always been.” Still others argue that any attempt to inhibit even the most bald-faced racial slur constitutes an affront to civil liberty (see, e.g., Lenas 2015) and, thus, to Sweden’s proudly liberal and historically tolerant civil society (Johansson Heinö 2015).

The term that Afro-diasporic activists and advocates have given to the type of racism that specifically targets and affects their lives is “Afrophobia” (afrofobi). A direct translation of this term would be “fear of Blackness,” but its public application suggests a broader meaning. As an analytic and critical term of discourse, Afrophobia not only addresses the apparent (extrinsic) forms anti-black racism takes in everyday life, but also its systemic character, embedded in the structures of Swedish society (McEachrane 2018, 483–86). Thus, a state-sponsored document published in 2014, known as the “Afrophobia Report,” reveals how Black Swedes face disproportionate—indeed, disastrous—discrimination in the housing and labor markets and suffer from poor educational outcomes in public schools (Hübinette, Beshir, and Kawesa 2014; for a more recent study of anti-black discrimination in the Swedish labor market, see Wolgast, Molina, and Gardell 2018). Additionally, there has been a documented rise in specifically “Afrophobic” hate crime in Sweden in the past decade, including violent crime (Wigerfelt and Wigerfelt 2017). A 2016 report from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (a nongovernmental organization that collects, compiles, and analyzes domestic crime statistics) presented two notable and (in my view) deeply troubling findings: (1) there were a total of 1,070 police reports concerning “Afrophobic” hate crimes in 2015, amounting to a quarter of all hate crime reports in Sweden that year; and (2) there was a 34 percent increase of such offenses since 2010 (Axell and Westerberg 2016, 66–72).13 Responding to this mounting evidence (much of it compiled by Afro-diasporic scholars, their academic allies, and civil society advocates), the newly elected Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, singled out Afrophobia as a national concern when naming his government in October 2014, stating that, alongside other forms of prejudice and discrimination, “Afrophobia does not have any place in Sweden” (Afrofobi ska inte ha någon plats i Sverige) (regeringen.se), a statement that many in the Afro-Swedish community applauded (see, e.g., Mark 2015; Bah Kuhnke 2015).

And yet, even here—“even in Sweden,” as the late Alan Pred (2000) once put it—such laudable language remains incomplete, pointing to an existential lacuna that is harder to see, and still harder to speak. Simply put, for a mainstream Swedish politician to acknowledge “Afrophobia” is one thing; to recognize the status, identity, and personhood of “Afro-Swedes” is another entirely. As a host of scholarly observers have noted, the mainstream pursuit of an aggressively anti-racist politics “in a place without race” (Miller 2017) has had the perplexing effect of making it difficult to talk openly about racial identity in the Swedish public sphere (Hübinette et al. 2012; McEachrane 2014c). We are thus confronted with yet another discursive sleight of hand: to draw attention to and critique racism is to uphold the notion that “foul racial theories” are essentially aberrant and foreign to Swedish society. “Afrophobia does not have any place in Sweden,” Löfven said (my emphasis). Racism, while apparent to the senses, is no less anathema to a properly “Swedish” sense of self. As such, to speak of “racialized,” or, in Swedish, rasifierade identities—that is, modes of identification that cohere around common perceptions and experiences of racial difference in society (Molina 1997, 2005)—can seem like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, for some, to qualify national identity (“Swedish”) with a color-coded marker of difference (“Afro”) is to peddle in an imported and illegitimate “identity politics” (see, e.g., Lundberg 2016). Worse still, it is to give voice to, and thus reify, the “foul theory” of “race.” How, then, might one theorize the emergence of “Afro-Swedish” identity in the public sphere? To answer this, we must turn our conversation from the absent presence of “race” to the seemingly more tangible but no less problematic terrain of “culture.”

From Multiculture to Public Culture

To take seriously the notion of an Afro-Swedish presence in Swedish society and interrogate the rise of anti-black racism in recent years is to return to and intervene in earlier debates and discussions concerning the politics of cultural pluralism and social belonging (Ålund 2003, 2014). The return has to do with ongoing questions of how to perceive, accommodate, enable, or (as some would prefer) inhibit ethnic, linguistic, and religious difference within an apparently “multicultural” (mångkulturellt) society. The intervention manifests in the way Afro-Swedish subject positions disturb the “culture concept” on which such multiculturalism rests, specifically by pointing to the social and historical construction of racialized (rasifierade) identities within a societally endemic though seldomly acknowledged racial hierarchy (Mulinari and Neergaard 2017). Simply put, previous models of social and cultural diversity and difference do not account for the presence, societal conditions, and social experiences of Afro-Swedes. As a corrective, it is necessary to look past the narrow yet powerful conceptions of cultural difference to see the social reality and societal effects of race and racism in Sweden today (cf. Mills 2007). Thus, before we can meaningfully talk about Afro-Swedish public culture (a category to which I subscribe and for which I argue below), we must first look beyond culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) as an official discourse in contemporary Sweden.

Over the past five decades, discourses about cultural difference have focused on the conditional presence of immigrant (invandrare) communities in Sweden. Such discourses typically employ one of two sociocultural models: pluralist, promoting ethno-linguistic diversity as part of a broader commitment to the sociopolitical equality of all Swedes, or integrationist, emphasizing the rights and responsibilities of foreign-born (utlandsfödda) residents vis-à-vis Swedish society (Ålund and Schierup 1991). Notably, this trend in domestic politics has produced myriad labor, language, and educational initiatives to variously encourage a more culturally diverse and integrated society (Borevi 2010). These shifts have also inspired lively debate about the nature and value of social belonging and diversity, conversations that have intensified even as state policy has tended to support the recognition and accommodation of minority cultures in Sweden (Teitelbaum 2017, 16). At the center of these arguments and policies is the concept of “culture,” understood in one of two ways. On the one hand, culture is a commonly available but variously expressed resource that, when properly curated, may enrich the life of the general population (as advocates of mångfald, or “diversity” argue). On the other hand, it is the signifier of fundamental patterns of social difference that, as an object of domestic governance, should either be preserved and promoted (as proponents of mångkultur, or “multiculture,” champion) or circumscribed and limited (Lundberg, Malm, and Ronström 2000). What these various strains of “multiculturalism” share in common is a perception of non-native (“immigrant” or “foreign-born”) social groups as distinct culture-bearing communities. As a mode of governance, such mosaic multiculturalism serves to highlight but also harden minority identities; it becomes a means by which non-native communities may be distinguished, codified, assessed, and made available to state intervention, whether in the interest of preserving social difference or fostering national integration. The politics of multiculturalism in Sweden is, in Michel Foucault’s (2003, 255–56) sense of the term, a biopolitics.

Official population statistics reinforce this biopolitics of multiculture. By narrowly tracking the national provenance of foreign-born residents, demographic data implicitly aligns such populations with specific locations of culture. In common parlance, a person’s country of origin (or that of their parents, or even grandparents) and perceived ethnicity conflate. For people of African descent, such ethnic-national associations are further accented by reductive and stereotyped “ideas of Africa” (Mudimbe 1988). As a discursive whole, such everyday semantic snowballing produces a non-native identity that assumes things like a foreign home language and, more generally, a “complex whole” of unique and, because “African,” exotic social, religious, and artistic customs and traditions. Officially, as a matter of state policy, “culture” becomes an administrative mechanism for the targeted dispersal of social welfare programs to foreign-born populations, including home language instruction (hemspråksundervisning) in public schools (sometimes coupled with remedial Swedish lessons, even if the student is a fluent speaker)14 and access to a community’s particular “cultural life” (kulturliv) via state-sponsored ethnic and national associations (for historical and comparative analyses of such policies, see Harding 2008; Borevi 2014). This is the public face of multiculturalism in Swedish society (Sawyer 2008, 99). But “culture” is also, notably, primary among the reasons for withholding such resources and welfare. For far-right political parties like the Sweden Democrats, the commonplace and “commonsense” perception of fundamental cultural differences between “native” and “foreign-born” Swedes is at the center of their populist—openly xenophobic and implicitly racist—politics, signaled by the slogan “keep Sweden Swedish” (bevara Sverige svenskt) (Baas 2014).15

Against the grain of this biopolitics of multiculture, Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country focuses on the elaboration of a dynamic and critical public culture (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988). I suggest that we view such Afro-Swedish public culture—or the outward expressions of Black life in Sweden today—through two interrelated interpretive lenses: as both a politics and a poetics of social life in society (Bauman and Briggs 1990). As a politics, Afro-Swedish public culture is performative, representing “a strategy of survival within compulsory systems” embodied in “dramatic and contingent construction[s] of meaning” (Butler 1990, 139). In this performative and political sense, Afro-Swedish public culture is best understood, to paraphrase Stuart Hall (1981, 237), not as a separate way of life, but as a variable “way of struggle.” As a poetics, the expression of Afro-Swedish identities unfolds within a constellation of the arts—in music, dance, theater, film, visual art, and literature—constituting a “multigeneric lifeworld” (Warner 2002, 63) in which a varied Afro-Swedish subjectivity takes shape on stage, online, on the page, in the gallery, and on the streets. Combining the study of popular politics and expressive culture, I argue that a common sense of political community is frequently performed (Askew 2002) and that popular expressions of the performing, visual, and literary arts represent a crucial means by which disparate publics assert themselves within otherwise intolerant societies (see, e.g., Dueck 2013), critical practices that Fatima El Tayeb (2011, 127) has termed a “poetics of relation” among subaltern communities in Europe.

Such a public politics of Afro-Swedish identity manifests in a burgeoning and varied Afro-diasporic associational life, with the formation and expansion of groups such as Afrosvenskarnas Riksorganisation (National Organization of Afro-Swedes; formerly Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund), Afrosvenksa Forum för Rättvisa (Pan-African Movement for Justice), Afrosvenska Akademin (Afro-Swedish Academy), Black Coffee, Black Vogue, and many others (about which more in chapter 5). It is also manifest in the recent publication of edited volumes that draw explicit attention to the history, struggles, popular culture, and intellectual life of racialized subjects in Sweden, often taking an intersectional approach that critically articulates experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality (see, e.g., McEachrane 2014a; Díaz et al. 2015; Habel 2015; Norrby 2015). Many of these texts highlight the histories of colonialism, slavery, and racial biology that have produced the ideological foundation on which an enduring racial hierarchy rests, in Sweden as elsewhere. Further, against an earlier (and ongoing) politics of multiculturalism, these anti-racist and racially conscious academics, activists, and advocates insist that questions of difference and diversity in society cannot be solely posed in “cultural” terms; rather, they demand that accounts of Swedish pluralism also recognize and address the existence and agency of self-consciously racialized subjects, such as Afro-Swedes.

The public poetics of Black life in Sweden today is no less palpable. Over the past six years, I have observed the emergence of a dynamic and diverse Afro-Swedish art world, documenting the ways in which music, dance, theater, film, visual art, and literature serve to foster, sustain, and animate a growing Afro-diasporic community. Evidence of what I have elsewhere termed an Afro-Swedish cultural “renaissance” (Skinner 2016) is widespread in contemporary Swedish society. Consider the following litany of events produced and performed in 2016 alone. In the dramatic arts, we witnessed the landmark staging of En druva i solen, a Swedish adaptation of Loraine Hansberry’s classic African American Broadway show A Raisin in the Sun, featuring a largely Afro-Swedish cast and production team. In music, we followed the national and international success of Gambian Swede Seinabo Sey, who stunned the Swedish public by inviting 130 Black women to join her “in formation” (with echoes of Beyoncé) during a performance at the Swedish Grammy awards. In film, we anticipated the production of Medan vi lever (While We Live) by acclaimed African filmmaker and Swedish resident Dani Kouyaté, the first feature film in Sweden to highlight Afro-Swedish lives and their diasporic stories. And in literature, we encountered musician-turned-author Jason Diakité’s memoir En droppe midnatt (A Drop of Midnight), a story of race and identity between Sweden and the United States that became a national bestseller and is now a popular stage play. I will discuss these and many other examples of contemporary Afro-Swedish art—past, present, and prospective—in the chapters that follow.

What my research to date makes abundantly clear is the social fact of a vital Afro-Swedish public culture. Such a culture is as complex as it is coherent. Afro-Swedish subjects stand together in their common struggle against endemic expressions of anti-black racism in Swedish society, but they do so from a variety of social positions and through a great diversity of expressive forms that belie generalizing rubrics. Yet, one is nonetheless struck by the way people of African descent in Sweden—from various walks of life, and with varied expressive means at their disposal—confront the complex, doubly conscious reality of being marked by their Blackness in a society that overwhelmingly promotes a color-blind, anti-racist outlook in the public sphere. It is this particular “double-consciousness” (Du Bois [1903] 2007, 7–8) of an Afro-Swedish mode of being—through which one’s sense of self encounters others’ perceptions of difference by variously embracing such alterity, rejecting it, or consciously acknowledging and critically reframing it—that this book seeks to elucidate through sustained attention to the expressions and reception of Afro-diasporic public culture in Sweden today. This cultural work inhabits as it performatively produces the social space in which an incipient Afro-Swedish subjectivity has begun to coalesce as a salient and legitimate—though not uncontested or uncontroversial—mode of identification in Swedish society.

Imagining Afro-Sweden

Thus far, I have observed the variegated sociocultural emergence of an “Afro-Swedish” identity; interrogated the absent presence of “race” in the Swedish public sphere, and the existential consequences of this discursive “sleight of hand” for people of color (including but not limited to Afro-Swedes); and argued for the broad-based study of Afro-Swedish public culture, with particular regard to the politics and poetics of Black life in Sweden. In this section, I turn to the question of “diaspora,” and, in particular, to how we might conceive an African and Black diaspora from a specifically Swedish location of culture. In what sense, in other words, can we imagine a place called “Afro-Sweden”? Of course, noting the specificity of the Afro-Swedish diaspora does not preclude a conversation about diasporic continuity. Indeed, “any truly accurate definition of an African diasporic identity,” argues Michelle Wright (2004, 2), “must somehow simultaneously incorporate the diversity of Black identities in the diaspora yet also link all those identities to show that they indeed constitute a diaspora rather than an unconnected aggregate of different peoples linked only in name.”

Here, and in the chapters that follow, I present an argument that the diasporicty of Afro-Sweden may be discerned via two modes of Africana being-in-the-world: remembering and renaissance. My argument is that part of what makes the African world “diasporic” is the way diversely constituted African-descended populations actively produce a sense of community via historical recollection, in the form of oral history and public testimony but also what Tina Campt (2012, 20) has called an “archival encounter” with the artifactual remainders of the deep and more recent past: remembering. Further, even as diaspora looks back to define and cohere itself, it turns its gaze forward to sustain and reimagine itself. In the African world, diaspora is also, fundamentally, a generative process, always a work in progress, and quite frequently a work of art: renaissance. “Diasporas,” Stuart Hall (2017, 198) writes, “always maintain an open horizon towards the future.” As the case studies that populate this book attest, such temporal openness to the reality of such Afro-futurity is ripe with aesthetic possibility.

Seen from the vantage of a wider African world, it is important to note Afro-Sweden’s most salient kinship within the diaspora: it is a part of “Black Europe” (Hine, Keaton, and Small 2009). And yet, such belonging can be hard to discern, and still harder to claim. As El Tayeb (2011, 78) has argued, the very possibility of an Afro-European community appears “doubly disadvantaged.” Black Europeans, she writes, “often are perceived as marginal with regard to the key memory trope of the Black diaspora in the West, that is, the Middle Passage, while at the same time having in common with other Europeans of color the expulsion from the continent’s remembered past.” To be sure, much work has been done to show how the historical currents of the Black Atlantic swirl along European shores, to produce resonant “counter-cultures” (Gilroy [1987] 1992, 1993) and new social movements born of “creolized” communities in the wake of enslavement and empire (Hall 2017); but it is also true that the “one long memory” of the transatlantic slave trade (Du Bois [1940] 2007, 59) resonates more obliquely in certain corners of the continent (Wright 2004). “On the whole,” writes Michael McEachrane (2020, 171), “Black African Diasporas in Europe are the result of a variety of historical processes and do not share the same confluences of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities as may be found in the New World.” Scholars like Tina Campt (2012, 52) have taken great pains to excavate histories of “diasporic homemaking” in places like Germany, where the long afterlife of imperial conquest and colonial rule on the African continent has left a more keenly felt imprint on domestic history, particularly for those racialized as Black.

Elsewhere, failures to acknowledge the historical legacy of African enslavement and colonial domination seem to result from active and often official practices of “forgetting.” In France, for example, where the Middle Passage clearly constitutes a formative part of the nation’s history, public efforts to recollect and account for this past remain shrouded in the rhetoric of anti-racism and color-blindness. As Crystal Marie Fleming (2017, 41) notes, the “time work” involved in “resurrecting slavery” in places like France “is more difficult to do when racial and colonial histories are minimized and erased.” Likewise, in the Netherlands, “the past forms a massive blind spot” (Wekker 2009, 287), a historical absenting that defers the possibility of postcolonial pluralism in favor of a normative and “structurally superior” whiteness. “As long as the Dutch colonial past does not form part of the ‘common,’ general store of knowledge that society has at its disposal,” Gloria Wekker observes, “as long as general knowledge about the exclusionary processes involved in producing the Dutch nation is not circulating more widely, multiculturalism cannot be realized” (287; see also Wekker 2016).

As several recent studies have shown, Sweden has much in common with both France and the Netherlands in this regard. Standard accounts of Swedish history have long veiled the country’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade by way of “forgetful” narratives of noninvolvement (for historical correctives, see Lindqvist 2015; McEachrane 2018; Ripenberg 2019; Körber 2019). As we shall observe further in chapter 3, the notion that Sweden did not actively participate in or profit from the enslavement of Africans is simply not true. Diasporic remembering of the Swedish slave trade entails a public reckoning with the way national history is told, what it includes, and which voices are empowered to tell it. But, like the twentieth-century Afro-German narratives Campt recollects, other histories of movement and migration within the African world have also contributed to Afro-Sweden’s collective past, histories that lie outside the immediacy of the Middle Passage even as they emerge in its wake (cf. Sharpe 2016). Some of these histories are of a recent vintage, representing “‘New African Diaspora’ experiences of being post-colonial African migrants” (McEachrane 2014b, 7; see, e.g., the testimonies collected in Gärding 2009). Other diasporic histories in Sweden are older, occupying a space between the Middle Passage and the modern era, neither “new” nor neatly qualified by the prefix “post.” Chapter 2 refutes yet another myth in the modern annals of Swedish history: that the country bears no complicity in European colonialism (Vuorela 2009; McEachrane 2018). A fragmented but palpable archive of Swedish missionary and mercenary presence in Africa (and the Congo in particular) dating from the late nineteenth century tells a different story and is the subject of critical Afro-Swedish recollection and appraisal. Following these historical currents still further, chapter 1 tells the stories of an elder cohort of Afro-Swedes whose lives were caught up in the currents of mid-century African decolonization, the Vietnam War, the American civil rights movement, and more recent postcolonial displacements. Their stories, too, constitute Afro-Swedish history, in all its diversity.

“Renaissance” is the term I use to describe the social and cultural florescence of Black life in the world. Specifically, renaissance refers to those generative practices of diaspora (Edwards 2003) that serve to creatively and critically reimagine communities of African descent as dynamic social formations. As I discuss below, and elaborate further in chapter 6, the concept of “renaissance” has a strong pedigree in Africana studies, given its association with historical Black arts and intellectual movements in places like Harlem and Chicago as well as post-apartheid and pan-African politics and culture. I am, thus, also interested in recuperating renaissance from its status as a historical category of western European development and civilizational supremacy. By invoking the notion of an “Afro-Swedish renaissance,” I situate Afro-Swedes within a long history of Afro-diasporic world-making. I do so by elaborating the innovative and socially constitutive agency of Afro-Swedes in the areas of language (chapter 4), politics (chapter 5), and the arts (chapter 6). Of course, the cases of Black and African cultural expression presented in this book are not exhaustive, but they do, I believe, indicate the social contours of an emergent sense of Afro-Swedish place in the world today.

Diasporic renaissance is, importantly, a heterogenous and rhizomatic affair. It produces plurality, not singularity. Imagined through a varied and vital public culture, Afro-Sweden is an irreducibly diverse social and cultural space. Any attempt to represent its past, present, and future must necessarily account for that complex sociocultural reality. “As a multivalent, international, intranational, multilinguistic and multicultural space,” Wright (2004, 133) explains, “diaspora suggests a movement away from homogeneity and exclusion toward diversity and inclusion.” Empirically, what this means is a turn away from questions of “origins,” “roots,” and “authenticity,” in order to better discern the varied permutations of what Campt (2012, 24) has called “diasporic relationality.” “No identities survive the diasporic process intact and unchanged, or maintain their connections with their past undisturbed,” writes Hall (2017, 144). “The diasporic is the moment of the double inscription, of creolization and multiple belongings.” To investigate the African and Black diaspora is, thus, to study an emergent heterogeneity born of common and collective encounters.

Specifically, what remains common to this community are the various ways African diasporans experience and engage with “race” in the world, which, in places like Sweden, requires a critical excavation and foregrounding of this discursively absented but no less powerful social force. Invoking the progressive and increasingly mainstream feminist campaigns against gender prejudice and discrimination in the Nordic region, Michael McEachrane (2014c, 102) observes that “in Nordic and other European societies race relations too are inscribed in relations of power and domination and are in dire need of being politicized even in our personal lives” (my emphasis). Yet such moves to “personalize the political” by heightening racial consciousness in the public sphere, while urgent and necessary, should not lead us to downplay or ignore social difference within diasporic communities (McEachrane 2020, 172). These are not mutually exclusive concerns. In a seminal article on Afro-diasporic place-making and personhood in millennial Sweden, anthropologist Lena Sawyer (2008, 102) urges scholars of the African and Black diaspora to “interrogate the particularities of how ‘race’ is used to engage people in diasporic projects.” And she emphasizes that “such projects are intimately intertwined with specifically gendered, sexualized, class, and generational relations and positionalities in specific national contexts and spaces” (102; see also McEachrane 2014c, 105–6). Diasporas are, in other words, always and already intersectional social formations. As Wright (2004) argues, this clear and present intersectionality recommends a more “dialogic” than “dialectic” approach to diasporic inquiry. The aim is not to pursue a singular, all-encompassing “truth” about what it means to “be Black.” Rather, as Wright pithily puts it, the aim of current Africana studies is to observe, explore, and interpret conditions and practices of “becoming Black” (my emphasis).

In this way, our attention is drawn to the ways Black and African diasporans navigate and negotiate their positionality as racialized subjects in society, to the myriad ways they express, claim, and query their “Blackness” and “Africanness” in the various places they call “home” in the world. This book is, then, a partial attempt to account for this moment of diasporic remembering and renaissance in northern Europe, but it is also a call for further research, in Sweden as elsewhere in the “Afro-Nordic” world (McEachrane 2014a). As Lena Sawyer and Ylva Habel (2014, 4) note, “We are still in the beginnings of documenting and understanding the nuances of how articulations of Africa and blackness have . . . contributed to the identities and cultural productions within the nations and geopolitical space known as the Nordic region.” “Scandinavia’s cultural tensions have flown largely beneath the radar,” notes Laurie McIntosh (2015, 310–11), who further observes “an emergent politics of race in the Nordic region.” As the African and Black diaspora refracts through the Nordic world, I follow scholars like Sawyer, Habel, McEachrane, and McIntosh in the study of its Afro-Swedish shades and nuances, joined by a growing group of academics in and out of Sweden, whose work posits “Afro-Sweden” as a meaningful rubric of inquiry and analysis (see, e.g., Miller 2017; Osei-Kofi, Licona, and Chávez 2018), as a location of culture that is home to an increasingly coherent but no less diverse African and Black community.

Research Methods

This book builds on my sustained engagement with the Afro-Swedish milieu, rooted in over two years of previous residence and work in Sweden (2001–3), two months of preliminary research (2013, 2014), twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork (2015–16), and a further two months of follow-up research trips (2017, 2018). During the primary period of fieldwork for this project (2013–18), I conducted dozens of extended interviews, engaged in many more informal conversations and discussions, took part in numerous cultural events (including public festivals, concerts, workshops, book releases, and exhibitions), and participated in several academic research forums and public seminars throughout Sweden. As such, the research for this project draws principally on qualitative methods. Much of this work could be characterized as “deep hanging out” (Geertz 1998), foregrounding the importance of everyday encounters and open dialogue in fostering sustained relationships, trust, and mutual interest between myself and my Afro-Swedish interlocutors. The resulting ethnographic representations mostly take the form of conversational stories based on myriad moments of co-present sharing that have helped me better understand the varied lifeways, experiences, artistry, and politics of my Black, African, and more broadly diasporic associates in Afro-Sweden.

That said, as a white American man studying the emergence of an Afro-diasporic identity and public culture in Sweden, I am well aware that my motives for conducting and reporting this work may be viewed with skepticism, even suspicion. To be clear, I make no claims to speak for the Afro-Swedish community as a whole in these pages, except to observe that such a “whole” is always irreducibly plural, diverse, and complex. And while I do aspire to the vaunted “thickly descriptive” standard of anthropological representation, I reject the hubris of cultural anthropology’s totalizing ethnographic gaze. As such, I present this text as a humble work of what John L. Jackson Jr. (2013) has termed “thin description,” embracing the ethnographic partiality that has perforce characterized my work in and among Sweden’s African and Black communities. My hope is that the resulting text conveys a broadly representative and fair rendering of Afro-diasporic community in Sweden today.

To ensure informed consent with my interlocutors, I have followed protocols established by my university’s Institutional Review Board. Prior to our recorded conversations, interviewees were informed of the nature of my research and my intent to publish material based on this research, and they were invited to participate. Further, I have shared my research with those I interviewed and reference in writing, soliciting feedback and criticism along the way. While these follow-up exchanges (mostly over email) have drawn out the process of advancing this project toward publication, I believe that such “dialogic editing” (Feld 1987) has made the ethnographic interview a more dynamic, mutually engaging, and, I hope, ethical space of analysis and knowledge production. In addition to words derived from interviews, I also cite statements made by community members in the context of public forums, for which prior consent could not be established with all participants involved. Following these events, I have endeavored to contact those individuals to inform them of my research and, when possible, request editorial commentary on my written reports. When requested, or if contact could not be established, and unless otherwise noted, I have rendered such public speech anonymous.

My ethnographic emphasis on the publicity of Afro-Swedish social life points to an important empirical limit of the present work. This is a study of public culture, that narrow (though no less rich) aspect of human experience to which I have had access as an outside observer. As such, this book does not explore the private worlds of African and Black individuals and families, and it firmly respects boundaries established by separatist social groups, which have labored to create “safe spaces” for dialogue and sociality among people of African descent in Sweden. Stories that emerge from the everyday intimacy of Black life in Sweden are not mine to tell, though I have learned greatly from those who have shared their stories with a broader public (see, e.g., Stephens 2009; Gärding 2009; Glasgow and Arvidson 2014; Ring and Ekman 2014; Norrby 2015; Diakité 2016; Carlsson 2018; Jallow 2020). I encourage my readers to consider these texts a necessary complement to the present volume.

Alongside the ethnography, my interest in the fruits of artistic labor has entailed a fair amount of close listening, viewing, and reading of a variety of cultural objects and performance practices (musical, choreographic, visual, and literary), drawing on the methods of analysis associated with musicology, dance ethnology, art criticism, and literary studies. Such work has been challenging, taking me beyond my disciplinary comfort zone as a musical anthropologist, though my approach to this broader art world is informed by my identity as an amateur performing and visual artist. Growing up as a “theater kid,” playing with bands most of my young adult life, and exploring an early career in children’s book writing and illustration (Skinner 2008), I have developed a keen sensitivity to multiple and interpenetrating disciplines of artistic expression. In many ways, this project emerges from such a multidisciplinary “integrated arts” perspective, ethnographically reinforced by the fact that many of my Afro-Swedish interlocutors are also multimodal artists. For this reason, the processes and products of Afro-Swedish artistic practice are given pride of place in this book.

This is also a work of history, excavating the recent and deeper past of a diverse Afro-Swedish community. Much of this work constitutes the first half of this book. An ethnographer by training, I turn first to a rich and vocal archive of Afro-Swedish oral history, speaking with community elders about their upbringing, settling, and homemaking in Sweden during the second half of the twentieth century. This work is compiled for the most part in chapter 1. I have also toured sites of potent social and personal memory with some of my informants, engaging in a kind of pedestrian oral history that treats the built spaces of lived environments as a historically layered and symbolically significant archive. I present these stories of “walking history” in chapter 3. Between these oral historical cases, chapter 2 digs into a largely artifactual and documentary archive, closely reading and critically examining an Afro-Swedish history that emerges from the traces left by Sweden’s missionary and mercenary adventures in Africa, dating back to the late nineteenth century. In these ways, I hope to present a sufficiently social history of the Afro-Swedish community through its recent past, but readers should note that this is not a comprehensive historical account of the African diaspora in Sweden. There is still much work to be done by social and cultural historians to relate a more complete story of this community’s emergence and growth, from the transatlantic slave trade to the present.

Finally, I have made targeted use of public databases (for example, those compiled by Statistics Sweden and the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention) to gather relevant data points on housing, labor, and education, as well as patterns of racially motivated hate crimes that affect the Afro-Swedish community. Such quantitative data has helped me bring larger, macro-societal realities into focus, adding empirical substance but also nuance to my otherwise qualitative (ethnographic, textual, performative, and historical) representations and analyses. That said, while these perspectives do inform my study, societal statistics are not focal to the stories I tell in this book, which emphasize the voices, experiences, and expressions of my friends, colleagues, collaborators, and interlocutors in Sweden. For a more data-driven account of life and labor in Afro-Sweden, I refer my readers to several recently published reports that have more comprehensively compiled, tracked, and analyzed this emergent and increasingly robust data set (see, e.g., Hübinette, Beshir, and Kawesa 2014; Wigerfelt and Wigerfelt 2017; Wolgast, Molina, and Gardell 2018).

Applied together, the methods employed in this study emphasize a holistic, social scientific, and humanistic perspective on the study of public culture in contemporary Afro-Sweden. Such an approach seeks to live up to the noble if at times naïve ideals of interdisciplinarity, which, I believe, are necessary to any project that purports to study the always interconnected subjects and objects of art, politics, and society in the world today. By compiling a varied and dynamic methodological toolkit, I have been able to deeply observe, closely read, and broadly relate the history, practices, perspectives, expressions, and societal conditions that shape, inform, and produce the lives and work of an expansive and intensely creative Afro-Swedish community.

Writing Afro-Swedish Public Culture

As a piece of writing, Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country is, first and foremost, a thematic assemblage of storied fragments, a collection of ethnographic episodes compiled to illuminate a set of ideas and concerns about history, the archive, social space, language, politics, and art in Afro-Sweden. This “episodic” approach to ethnography highlights the sociocultural variety of the Afro-Swedish experience, composed of multiple voices within a diverse community, while insisting on the interpersonal coherence of each encounter. “Stories,” writes anthropologist Michael Jackson (1989, 17), “cultivate a certain degree of impersonality so that the experiences of the author are made available to others who can discover in them meanings of their own.” Thus, I follow Jackson in this work of ethnographically “dispersing authorship” (8) to capture a community’s varied orientations toward everyday experience—an irreducibly plural intersubjectivity. And I echo the insights of anthropological elders like Steven Feld (2012, 9–10), who emphasize the orality and aurality of the “story” to capture the dynamic and generative multi-vocality of human social life.

These short-form case studies are “storied” to the extent that each piece has been rendered with a coherent narrative arch, an internal logic motivated by a steadfast ethical commitment. Cognizant of the limits to my ability to render the Black experience in Swedish social life, I lean in to my encounters with people, events, and texts, allowing them to tell their own story in dialogue with my own interpretive orientation. Each case study is thus grounded in dialogic analysis, in which arguments and ideas are, at a minimum, always and already “half someone else’s” (Bakhtin 1981, 293). Throughout, I think with my interlocutors, the artifactual evidence, scholarly and popular literature, and the formal and informal performances of everyday life, populating my readings and reasonings with their African and Black presence. My hope is to allow the socially contingent processes of patient observation, exploratory conversation, close listening, and emergent understanding to come through in the textual renderings that follow. By generically representing these intersubjective encounters as “stories,” I am also interested in inviting my reader to partake in the experiential, interpretive, and analytic dimensions of my research. Stories are rarely final, seldomly closed events. They are, more often (and perhaps most usefully), invitations to further thought, to more stories. They are, as the African filmmaker and Swedish resident Dani Kouyaté says, ouvertures, openings onto new horizons of imagination and awareness. In this spirit, I invite my reader to think with me, empathically but no less critically, as my interpretations and analyses unfold in this book, story by story.

But there is another, more fundamental reason for my turn to stories as a mode of writing in this book, pertaining specifically to my approach to authorship and interpretive authority. In short, a steadfast respect for my interlocutors’ words and narratives is not only about writing a more intersubjective, dialogic, and multi-vocal ethnography; that is, it is not merely a matter of mitigating the authorial power vested in “writing culture” (Clifford and Marcus 1986). More immediately, my approach to authorship is responsive to a particular historical moment—our present—in which the gruesome reality of systemic and everyday racism makes the call “Black Lives Matter” once again so urgent and necessary (a point to which I will return, and on which I end in the epilogue to this book). As such, any responsible account of Black life in the world today must, in my view, give narrative precedence to the experiences and voices of Black lives. In this way, my ethnographic writing is animated as much as possible by the intellectual agency of the Afro-Swedish community.

Structurally, I have organized these stories into six chapters, themselves divided into two parts, on the social history and public culture of the Black and African diaspora in Sweden. Each part is guided by an overarching theme with which I think and theoretically elaborate in the component chapters. The social history of part I explores the concept of “remembering,” asserting that the recollection of the past is also and always a socially constitutive practice. As social phenomenologist Edward Casey (2000) argues, to remember is to invoke histories that cohere community, to make the past palpably present to produce, in Hannah Arendt’s ([1958] 1998, 182) terms, “something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together” (emphasis in the original). As a diasporic practice, remembering provides a narrative ground to which displaced subjects can lay claim, name, and call their own, akin to the translational work Brent Hayes Edwards (2003, 13–15) identifies as essential to navigating the décalage of diaspora’s uneven transnational topographies. “The deliberate act of remembering,” the late Toni Morrison (1984, 385) writes, “is a form of willed creation.” As a narrative expression of Black culture, remembering works to “centralize and animate” the knowledge, experience, lifeways, and artistry of “discredited people” (388). Further, Morrison observes, narrative remembrance “must bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past and that which ought to be discarded; it must make it possible to prepare for the present and live it out, and it must do that not by avoiding problems and contradictions but by examining them” (389). For people of African descent in the world today, there is an urgency to this work of critical and creative historical examination. In his postcolonial manifesto Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (2009), Kenyan writer and pan-African cultural theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o confronts the historical “dismembering” of Africa, during and in the wake of colonialism, by arguing for a cultural “re-membering” of continental solidarity. In this book, I echo Morrison’s and wa Thiong’o’s calls to re-member Afro-diasporic community, by interrogating the sociohistorical “problems and contradictions” that impact as they shape Black lives in Sweden.

In this way, each chapter in part I is a meditation on remembering as an Afro-diasporic mode of being, evidenced in the way community is invoked and vitalized through particular recollections of the past. Thus, chapter 1 assembles a set of local stories that are too rarely told, about a segment of Swedish society whose voices are too rarely heard. Specifically, I invite readers to recollect the recent past with a cohort of Afro-Swedish elders, whose narratives take us back to the mid-twentieth century—to a time when Sweden’s economy swelled in the wake of World War II, when the dream of a sustainable social democracy flourished, when many began to see this sparsely populated country on the northern fringes of Europe as a refuge in a world cleaved by the Cold War, but where old demons of racialist prejudice (specters of a shameful but still-present white supremacy) continued to haunt those whose skin color betrayed a perceived foreignness. Chapter 2 examines the artifactual afterlives of another veiled history: Sweden’s contribution to the colonization and racial othering of Africa and its inhabitants. While Sweden was not a dominant colonial power, its mercenaries, functionaries, and missionaries all contributed to Europe’s “civilizing mission” in Africa and beyond (Bharathi Larsson 2016), from the late-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century and, arguably, into the present. This chapter gathers a collection of objects, images, texts, and media that constitute the remainders of this era, and considers the way contemporary curators, artists, scholars, and activists, many from the Afro-Swedish community, have recollected and reappraised this archive, interrogating a specifically Swedish idea of Africa. Chapter 3 attends to the stories told by a younger generation of African-descended Swedes, for whom the built and natural spaces of lived environments constitute another kind of archive of Afro-Swedish social life. As such, this chapter sets oral history in motion, joining my interlocutors on walks through residential neighborhoods, forested paths, historic districts, and urban squares, as they give voice to the vivid material memories of Black life in contemporary Sweden.

Moving from past to present, part II elaborates the recent rise of an Afro-Swedish public culture, arguing that such a burgeoning cultural imagination, mobilization, and production constitutes a renaissance of diasporic social life in Sweden today. Specifically, these chapters explore a renascent Black and African culture in Sweden from the perspective of language, politics, and art. As with the stories of remembering in part I, my approach to renaissance is guided by the particular perspectives and insights of current Africana studies. What is being reborn, I argue, is not merely an Afro-diasporic presence in a contemporary Scandinavian context; rather, I suggest we observe this Afro-Swedish renaissance in light of a long and rich tradition of Black intellectual reinvention and artistic renewal, evident in social and cultural movements that have flourished in the African world over the past century. Relevant points of historical reference include, among others, Harlem, where a self-consciously Black “renaissance” interrogated as it reformulated the content and contours of Euro-American modernism in the 1920s (Baker 1987); the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which blurred the line between aesthetics and politics in the context of an ongoing struggle for civil rights (Neal 1968); the late twentieth-century popular music of the Black Atlantic, whose raucous soundscapes summoned a countercultural critique of late capitalism and the socioeconomic and political order on which it rests (Gilroy 1993; Lipsitz 1994); the post-apartheid nation-building efforts in South Africa that, for many, heralded the dawn of a new “African renaissance” (Vale and Maseko 1998), which wa Thiong’o (2009, 73) views in the broader light of an emergent “Afro-modernity”; and the recent millennial visions of “Afropolitans,” who have critically and creatively charted new paths of continental solidarity and expression beyond the “long night” of postcolonial abuse and oppression (Mbembe 2010; Skinner 2017). Each of these moments of rejuvenated Black and African being-in-the-world has had a profound impact on the social realities, political struggles, and cultural possibilities of their time; such is also the case, I suggest, with diasporic renaissance taking shape in present-day Sweden.

In a time when white supremacy has found a new lease on life in the form of emphatically xenophobic (anti-immigrant) and implicitly racist (white supremacist) far-right political movements (from Brazil to the United States, to countries throughout Europe, and beyond), the generative language, politics, and art of Afro-Swedish public culture serves as yet another timely and necessary intervention in current affairs; as a collective affirmation of diasporic community—a renaissance—that is also a convergent expression of social and cultural resistance. Chapter 4 considers the emergent lexicon of Afro-diasporic subjectivity in Sweden today. Through lyrical expression, public discourse, and the written word, Black and African Swedes articulate and inscribe their varied modes of identification, using repurposed terms and neologisms that push the boundaries of what the Swedish language can express in voice and writing. Public culture is also present in the associational life of civil society. Chapter 5 observes a resurgent politics of race and diaspora in Afro-Sweden. This politics refers, on the one hand, to a more emphatic (though not unprecedented) Afro-Swedish engagement with racism and racial(ized) identities in the public sphere and, on the other, to the coalitional and transnational character of such work. In chapter 6 I turn to the cultural life (kulturliv) of an increasingly coherent and robust Afro-Swedish art world. There, diasporic public culture takes shape in and finds expression through a constellation of the arts, including dance, theater, music, literature, film, and image. Observing these myriad forms of expressive culture—the African-descended artists who produce them and the audiences they address—I argue for an artistically grounded conception of Black and African renaissance in Sweden today.

This book is, ultimately, an account of Afro-Swedish public life observed, analyzed, and interpreted at a particular moment in history. Most of the stories I relate in the pages that follow came to me during a five-year span between 2013 and 2018. I learned a lot from my Afro-Swedish friends, partners, and interlocutors during this time—about Blackness, whiteness, national belonging, diasporic community, and much else—and I have tried to capture the depth and scope of this knowledge in the six chapters that follow. But there are still more stories to tell, and much more knowledge about the Black and African experience in Sweden to share and produce. I hope that this book may serve as an incitement to deepen the conversation, explore new lines of inquiry, and advance these projects on multiple fronts.