Prelude to a Conversation

On a brisk afternoon in early spring, 2016, members of Stockholm’s Afro-diasporic community gather at a public forum to discuss strategies for organizing and activism. Topping the agenda that day are the politics of representation particular to people of African descent in Swedish civil society. Before an assembled audience of roughly sixty people, a group of four panelists take their seats on the stage. I am one of only a handful a white people in the room. Pushing forty, I am also older than most. Stina, a buoyant millennial and today’s moderator, gets the conversation started: “We want to put Black people on the map in many different ways. We want to claim a space in the public sphere.” She names notable groups, representing Sweden’s Black associational life. “We see the Black Coffee movement. Black Vogue, the [Black] beauty movement. [We see] artists. Entrepreneurs. Everyone.” Switching to English, she adds, “We’re basically in formation, Beyoncé style.”1

The panelists then introduce themselves. Next to Stina sits Araia, a founding member of the aforementioned “coffee break movement” (fikarörelsen), Black Coffee, and a public commentator and art critic. “In the end, we’re all African-Swedes [afrikansvenskar],” he says. “We need separatism. We have a community.” Up next is Madina, active in the local Gambian community and a member of several Black and African study groups. “I think that my activism comes from a lack of representation,” she says. “I have been the so-called token Black girl in all the places I’ve lived [in Sweden].” Finally, there is Jasmine: a proud African woman with roots in Uganda, a prolific writer—“an author of two books, and working on a third!”—and the panel’s elder member. Several terms of identification, variously indexing African descent and Black subjectivity in contemporary Sweden, populate their opening statements. Most are spoken in Swedish, but English is also in the mix. These terms include “Black” (svart), “Afro-Swedish” (afrosvensk), “African-Swedish” (afrikansvensk), “African” (afrikan), and “pan-African” (panafrikan); as well as more particular “ethnic” and “national” markers (these latter categories tend to overlap), such as “Eritrean,” “Gambian,” and “Ugandan.” As the discussion proceeds, I take note of these verbal signifiers, which constitute an emergent lexicon of diasporic identity present among this varied and vocal cohort.

As a prelude to the present chapter, I present, below, a detailed account of this public discussion, the dialogic content of which I will recapitulate and discuss further in the chapter’s concluding sections. My purpose is to highlight the weighty significance of words, language, and speech in the articulation—by which I mean both the active voicing and discursive coupling (Hall 1996)—of Afro-diasporic identities in Sweden today.2 My argument for an “articulated consciousness” at the end of this chapter rests on this double meaning: of the way diasporans “speak” their complex identities into existence, enunciating the unity of “a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities” (38). En route, we will consider words that name and locate the Afro-diasporic experience in Sweden today. This chapter is about the use and significance of such words, how they are employed, and what they might mean, and it is about the people who bring such words to public life, through text and speech. As the opening chapter of an extended meditation on a renaissance of Afro-Swedish public culture in language, politics, and the arts, this chapter may also be read as an exploration of how diaspora is practiced and performed as a verbal art (Bauman 1975). My attention is drawn to the poetry of language, the way word-craft highlights the play of lexical meaning and grammatical structure (Jakobson [1960] 1987), and the resonant voice, through which such play takes phenomenal form as sound to shape the perceived space of a sensory world (Feld et al. 2004). Moreover, phrases like “we’re basically in formation” or “we need separatism” remind us that politics looms large in such language. When spoken out loud or laid down in writing, such a discursive politics claims a space (or tar plats, as they say in Swedish) for new Black and, more broadly, “non-white” social movements in society, as we shall observe further below. This chapter is, thus, about the purposeful, poetic, frequently performative, deeply political, and always socially constitutive work of articulating Afro-Sweden.

Speaking of Identity

One of the core quandaries in today’s Afro-Swedish community is the question of how to cultivate a sense of unity given the diaspora’s apparent diversity, by which people generally mean the presence of “ethnic” and “national” difference, a complex constellation of so many countries and cultures of origin. Addressing this question directly, Stina asks the panelists how “national” and “pan-African” associational life differs in orientation and purpose in Swedish civil society. Madina answers emphatically: “Gambians are Afro-Swedes! [afrosvenskar].” For her, such distinctions (between countries of origin and a shared sense of diasporic community) are arbitrary, and potentially harmful, a manifestation of a divide and conquer mentality in the Swedish public sphere. Jasmine speaks from a mother’s perspective, and as someone who maintains a strong Ugandan identity: “Most of our children are basically Swedes, so we need to offer them African culture. Music, dance, and food.” In her view, ethnic–national associations still have an important role to play, specifically in terms of cultural transmission, to fill the generational gap opened up by transnational migration. Araia speaks in blunt terms about the response triggered by any form of Black or African organization in a majority white society, like Sweden. “You and your fucking multiculturalism” read a message he recently received in his inbox. “White rage is something we often encounter,” he says. “We are black bodies in a white world. Just being is a provocation.”

Araia advocates for “culture” (in Swedish, kultur, broadly referring to the performing and visual arts) as a means to organize and mobilize Black lives in Sweden today. “But we also need to talk about how we feel,” he adds. “Just talking,” he says, switching from Swedish to English, “we Africans need that!” This is the organizational premise of the separatist community he helped found, Black Coffee. To gather, socialize, and interact in society—as Black people—is, in and of itself, a form of activism and protest. “That makes a difference,” he says. Picking up on the question of the arts that Araia raised, a woman in the audience speaks, addressing the struggle Black people face in the Swedish culture sector. “We become multiculture,” she says, using the Swedish noun mångkultur to signify the personification of “cultural diversity,” but also difference. If there is work, she explains, it gets framed as “representation,” adding “We’re only contacted if the work is defined as ‘Black,’ or ‘African,’ and that’s dangerous.” Madina agrees, noting how “diversity” (mångfald) can provoke anxiety in the culture sector. People of African descent become “the black threat” (det svarta hotet), she says, when those defined as “multiculture” vie for roles beyond their ascribed place. “I try to flip it,” she adds, arguing that it’s important to leverage opportunity, turning strategic essentialism into a broader culture critique. This allows for greater agency, “and from there I have a choice,” she says.

Later in the discussion, a woman in her mid-thirties raises her voice from the audience. “I don’t feel part of this movement,” she says, in Swedish, before switching to English. “I’m watching it. I’m happy that young people have it in Sweden today. Because I didn’t have that when I grew up.” She then elaborates a critique, posed as a question to the gathered public:

But I’m very African. My teachers are Cheikh Anta Diop, Kwame Nkrumah, and [Thomas] Sankara. These are the people who have ingrained their thought in my mind. But what happens to this movement, it looks up to America. All respect to what’s happening over there, and to that journey. But, as an African in Sweden, I don’t feel that it tells me anything, or that it does anything for me. Because we, as Afro-Swedes, what we have in common is what we meet when we go out of our houses. So, my question is, why is it that we look to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, when we have our own story of white supremacy from the countries we came from! Where our parents came from! So, what’s going on there?

She suggests that what Afro-Swedes share is less a common culture than a set of experiences (“what we meet when we go out of our houses”). More social and political references derived from their own “African” histories, lives, and struggles are needed, she argues, to supplement arguments that seem to rely heavily on an archive of African American thought and practice. Another woman in the audience echoes this concern—about the provenance and significance of ideas underlying Black and African modes of identification in Sweden today—by gesturing toward a generational history that many in the room share. “There are many people who still identify as ‘African’ in Sweden,” she says, in particular the parents and grandparents of the current generation (echoing Jasmine’s point earlier). She notes an historical shift in public discourse, from speaking about being “African in Sweden” during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, to more recent invocations of terms like “Afro-Swedish.” She reminds us that this shift is not only true of an older generation of migrants, but also of more recently arrived diasporans. “To them,” she says, “we are very Swedish, not ‘Afro-Swedish.’” She then asks, “What kind of strategies do we have to include them as well?”

Responding from the panel, Araia does not mince his words. “To speak of the so-called ethnic associations [etniska föreningar], from an Eritrean perspective, they are bad for us.” He voices the final phrase (“bad for us”) in English, and with added emphasis. Such narrowly national groupings do not account for, in his view, “our material conditions in Sweden.” For him, a critically conscious Black and African identity politics is crucial. “What we need to do here, first and foremost, is identify ourselves as African-Swedes [afrikansvenskar].” This does not mutually exclude his Eritreanness (or, he quips, his identity as a vegan), but it does point to a broader public cultural imperative. “We are in the process of reformulating Blackness [att omforma svarthet],” a concept that has been defined up until the present, he argues, by white Swedes (vita svenskar). “This is happening right now. And, yes, we can always do better, but viewing ourselves as Africans [afrikaner] is essential, in my view.” He then notes yet another debate about the politics of naming within Sweden’s Afro-diasporic community. “Some folks say, ‘Do you have something against [the word] Afro-Swedish?’ I don’t have anything against Afro-Swedish. But we say African-Swedish [afrikansvensk].”

Returning to concerns raised earlier from the audience about the importance of specifically African points of reference and the salience of African identities in Sweden, Madina chimes in: “It’s interesting, because I was also raised by a Pan-Africanist father. So, all of this, Thomas Sankara, [Patrice] Lumumba, I heard that, and, believe me, I’m there! But I also think that for my generation, like Araia said, there is a lack of representation, and the representation we see is American.” Madina captures the two-ness of Araia’s “African-Swedish,” moniker. Her words present both a shared history of continental “African” provenance (Araia’s “we”) and a key articulation to what is perceived to be a culturally kindred and socially proximate “African American” discourse. Madina follows this by adding still another layer of sociolinguistic interest to her broader point about the politics of identity in Sweden. “This has to do, I think, with a lack of representation from the [African] continent,” which is to say, African narratives and conceptual reference points are few and far between in mainstream Swedish discourse. “And then there’s the point about claiming that one is ‘Afro-Swedish.’ I have my own dilemma with that. Even though I’m born here, I use that term [afrosvensk] about myself, to claim my Swedishness.” Like other speakers, Madina ends her statement, emphatically, in English. This code-switching, marked by a clearly articulated inflection in speech, turns the phrase into an accented cadence, as if “claiming her Swedishness” requires a different voice and another perspective—similar, perhaps, to the work the prefixes “Afro” or “African” might be doing when lexically qualifying, or, when spoken, vocally inflecting the word “Swedish.” Afrosvensk. afrikansvensk. Importantly, this is not a perspective from beyond the borders of Sweden. “I’m born here,” Madina says. Rather, this code-switch from Swedish to English—a linguistic response to the verbal call of the compound noun afrosvensk—signals a positionality that lies in purposeful and proximate tension with the unqualified norms of (white) Swedish society.

The Language of Diaspora

Leaving, for the moment, this spirited exchange (we will come back to it later), I turn now to other contexts in which members of the Afro-Swedish (or “Black,” or “African,” or “African-Swedish”) community actively employ, discuss, and debate the terms and status of their identity in Sweden.3 As the discussion above suggests, some of these words register significant ambivalence, even aversion among diasporic Swedes (such as “multiculture” and “diversity”). Others signal distinct varieties of transnational and historical affiliation, indexing bonds of race and culture, but also a more emphatic politics of identity (“Black” and “African”). Still others suggest a particular sense (but also, à la Du Bois, a “peculiar sensation”) of “two-ness” or “double consciousness” for people of African descent in Sweden (“Afro-Swedish” and “African-Swedish”). Also in the mix, though not explicitly present at the panel discussion, are critical engagements with racist pejoratives (like svartskalle, meaning “black skull,” a vulgar epithet for those on the margins of Swedish society), ambivalent claims to insider positionalities (such as Suedi, an Arabic-derived slang term for “Swedish”), and invocations of broader pan-ethnic and cross-cultural solidarities (including icke-vit and rasifierad, meaning “non-white” and “racialized” respectively, and mellanförskap, meaning “in-betweenness”).

In what follows, I present, discuss, further define, and critically analyze these terms over the course of six lexical case studies. The first three examine terms of exoticism, exclusion, and difference (“multiculture,” “outsiderness,” and “in-betweenness”). The fourth explores new forms of norm-critical solidarity, community, and identity formation (“non-white” and “racialized”). Each of these four cases illuminate the varied struggles with, resistance to, and (potential) transcendence of dominant patterns of subjectification affecting a wide range of people of color within a normatively white society. The penultimate case returns us to the lingering questions of being and belonging raised by those present at the panel discussion, emphasizing specifically Afro-diasporic modes of identification (“Black” and “African”). In the final section, I invoke these same voices to make a case for an “articulated” diasporic consciousness, encoded and expressed by the Swedish neologisms afrosvensk and afrikansvensk (“Afro-Swedish” and “African-Swedish”). Taken as a whole, these cases engage a formidable cohort of diasporic interlocutors, for whom “Blackness,” “Africanness,” “non-whiteness,” “outsiderness,” and “in-betweenness” (among other modes of identification) variously inflect, critique, amplify, and extend their sense of Swedishness.

My emphasis throughout is on their words and their efforts verbally and textually to theorize a critically conscious lexicon of diaspora in Sweden today. As such, references to relevant scholarship will, for the most part, appear parenthetically and in the notes to this chapter, allowing my interlocutors to “speak” more freely and, to the extent possible in an ethnographic text such as this, for themselves. My hope is that this centering of language—both spoken and written—will allow us to better appreciate the vitality and, in certain cases, the unmistakable art of their voicings and writings, the way spoken language shapes our sense and feel for words, the vocal materiality of verbal meaning (Fox 2004); and the ways written texts affect and move us, both intellectually and to depths of our emotions (Barthes 1975). Further, as the first chapter on social and cultural “renaissance” in Afro-Sweden, I also want to foreground the importance of language, oral and written, to the public expression of diasporic identity and experience in Sweden today, to the ways African diasporans in Sweden give voice to an Afro-Swedish presence. As the following case studies demonstrate, a range of emergent Black, African, more broadly non-white, and more inclusively Swedish identities are being actively spoken and written into existence. In this chapter, I encourage readers to listen in, closely and carefully, to this renascent verbal art of diaspora, from the vantage of Afro-Sweden.

As the panel discussion makes clear, multilingualism figures prominently when calling on words that signal identity (and difference) in this community—including, as we have noted, a frequent and fluent movement between English and Swedish, but also a creative appropriation of words derived from the many languages spoken among Sweden’s numerous ethnic and national minorities (Källström and Lindberg 2011). A corresponding multilingual consciousness and praxis applies to my own attempts to gather, catalog, render, and analyze this varied lexicon in writing. That is, my ethnographic engagement with this multilingual and multiply rooted community is, itself, a multilingual and multiply routed project. It is the product of documenting and interpreting from varied perspectives and multiple modes of listening and reading, always mindful of my interlocutors’ irreducibly plural and polyvocal lifeworld. As such, my approach to studying these diasporic keywords in their sociolinguistic context requires sensitivity to the complex signifying potential of translation, resonant with Brent Hayes Edwards’s (2003) study of the variously racialized language(s) of Black nationalism in the early twentieth century. “Translations,” he writes, “open ‘race’ to the influence of an exterior, pulling and tugging at that same signified in an interminable practice of difference, through an unclosed field of signifiers (Negro, noir, black, nègre, Afro-American, Aframerican, Africo-American, Afro-Latin, etc.) whose shifts inescapably reshape the possibilities of what black modern culture might be” (116). Among Afro-diasporic Swedes at the outset of the twenty-first century, there is, I argue, a comparable richness of lexicon and subtlety of language choice—as well as potential for misrecognition, or what Edwards calls “a practice of difference”—that returns us, in another time and place within an ever-shifting African diaspora, to the “possibilities of what black modern culture might be.”

Interrogating Multiculture

Teshome Wondimu came to Sweden as a young man in the early 1990s and began working as a musician, a saxophonist, as he had done in his home country, Ethiopia. An artist with conservatory training from Moscow and years of stage experience in Addis Ababa, Teshome wondered why he could only get gigs on the outskirts of Stockholm. “When I came to Sweden as an immigrant . . .” The emphasis is Teshome’s, and you can see it on his face; the word (invandrare) (immigrant) clearly makes him uncomfortable. He continues, “I found myself drawn to the Ethiopian community.”4 Sweden’s immigration policies have long encouraged non-native (or, in the current official nomenclature, “foreign-born”) residents to organize, support, and sustain their unique “ethnic” social life and cultural heritage (Borevi 2004). As discussed in the introduction to this book, such policies appeal to a dated but no less tenacious “complex whole” conception of culture,5 by promoting the practice and preservation of language, music, dance, religion, culinary traditions, and ceremonial life. Organized as distinct state-sponsored social groups, typically defined by national provenance (with overtones of ethnicity), this cultural-political work reflects a “multicultural” (mångkulturellt) societal model designed to curate and (re)present a panoply of distinct migrant communities whose essential difference from mainstream Swedish society is fundamental.

As Teshome explains, such “multiculturalism” has had a profoundly fragmenting effect on the cultural life (kulturliv) of the Swedish art world over the past several decades. “I was a musician, and sought out other musicians, but we would only play for other Ethiopians who lived here. We would think, ‘Why can we only perform here? Why not somewhere else? Why weren’t we performing at the nicer venues in the inner city?’” Teshome quickly realized that this was an institutional problem, in which public arts administrators and producers did not—and perhaps could not—recognize the rich expressive cultures relegated to the peripheries of Swedish society. So, Teshome became an arts administrator himself. Following an EU-funded training program in arts administration, he worked his way into and up the ranks of Sweden’s public art world.

In 2003, Teshome accepted a newly established position as a “multicultural consultant” (mångkulturkonsulent) in Stockholm’s municipality—a position nominally rooted in the reigning distinct (and implicitly separate) but equal model of cultural diversity: “multiculture.” He took on this job fully aware of the social and political challenges it would entail. And he came out swinging. Teshome called Sweden’s arts institutions “ethnically cleansed” and demanded swift institutional redress in the form of greater representation and participation from minority artists and cultural advocates (Anon. 2004). “We need to be engaged in everything—lobbying, policy making, political discussions, and so on—in order to fight for our rights as citizens,” he insisted. This argument was highly—and intentionally—provocative. “Sweden is not used to seeing people like us, with other backgrounds, who have adapted to society [and are] making claims,” he explained. But change did not come quickly enough. Announcing his resignation from the post in 2005, Teshome, once again, spoke candidly and directly: “I have participated in many meetings and gotten the feeling that these questions are not considered important. People speak warmly of diversity [mångfald], and committees are formed, but without concrete action or clear political goals. It seems as if my position has become an alibi” (Nandra 2005). By referring to his position as an “alibi,” Teshome echoes those at the panel discussion who spoke critically of their “token diversity” in the Swedish art world under the moniker of “multiculture.” In this discourse, it is worth noting the way the Swedish terms for “diversity” (mångfald) and “multiculture” (mångkultur) appear to conflate, similar to the way “ethnicity,” “nation,” and “culture” overlap in public discussions surrounding “immigrant” (“non-native” or “foreign-born”) associational life. Nominally distinguished as the apparent variety of social and cultural difference in society (diversity), on the one hand, and a mosaic of individually coherent and necessarily distinct patterns of such difference (multiculture), on the other (Ronström 2004), both terms, mångfald and mångkultur, now seem to point toward highly stereotyped notions (or “tokens”) of sociocultural difference. “Teshome does not use the term ‘diversity’ [mångfald],” one of Teshome’s colleagues tells me. “If you tell him that he works with ‘multiculture’ [mångkultur], he’ll just shake his head.” For Teshome, the arts (kultur) should be a meeting place for all people in society, no matter where they happen to be located (or come from) or how they happen to look. His vision is clear and explicit: a society’s expressive culture—in all its myriad forms, genres, and styles—should be cultivated, curated, and made accessible, to everyone. “All Swedes,” he says, “have the right to partake in the rich and varied cultural expressions of Sweden’s diverse publics.” That means moving beyond the symbolic “alibis” of a superficial multiculturalism and toward a broader and more inclusive politics of culture (about which more in chapter 5).

To its critics in the Swedish public sphere, “multiculture” refers to two essentially related processes. First, it names a set of policies that have systematically reified and hardened social and cultural difference, resulting in a fragmented associational life (föreningsliv) that conflates “culture” with “ethnic” identity and “national” provenance. This is what Araia means when he says that “ethnic associations” (etniska förengingar) “are bad for us.” This is similar to the critique Teshome makes when describing his early professional life in Sweden as constrained by his status and identity as an “Ethiopian” musician, playing for “Ethiopian” audiences in suburban enclaves in which “Ethiopians” find themselves clustered. Second, not only do such policies result in the segmentation and segregation of society, separating the cultural mainstream from a crowded multicultural periphery, they also serve to personify stereotyped subject positions with distinct “ethnic” and “racial” resonances. In this sense, “multiculture” also refers to people who look, sound, and behave differently; whose “culture” is understood to be “exotic,” “ethnic,” and “foreign”; whose lives are always and already “non-Swedish” (or “foreign-born”) and, as such, only conditionally present in the national commons as “tokens” or “alibis.” Put another way, “multiculture” obscures as it reinforces a more persistent condition of cultural exclusion and social marginalization in society, a widely prevalent experience of utanförskap (outsiderness).

A Hip-Hip Flow from the Outside In

“I see myself as a griot, telling the story of the contemporary and passing it on to the next generation” (Roney 2015). These are the words of Ibrahima Banda, a hip-hop artist who raps under his two middle names, Erik Lundin. The artist’s public persona is an inheritance from his Swedish mother, bookended by names derived from his Gambian father’s Muslim and Mandinka backgrounds. The “contemporary” to which Lundin refers is decidedly Swedish, albeit articulated from the socioeconomic margins to reflect the precarious lifeworld he was born into and raised within on the suburban outskirts of Stockholm. (The term förorten, meaning “the suburbs,” indexes highly segregated and geographically removed residential areas where underemployment, poor educational outcomes, and irregular access to public services persist.) The verbal art Lundin lays claim to as a “griot” makes him a modern exponent of the traditional wordsmiths of his paternal culture, but it is a tradition Lundin has filtered through the grammar and lexicon of his marginal Swedish upbringing; and it is an art form he has refashioned through the rhymes, rhythms, and flows of his core genre: hip-hop. Erik Lundin’s breakout single “Suedi,” the title track of his first solo EP released in 2015, narrates the arch of his particular (though certainly not unique) Swedish life, from the extrinsic racism he encountered from an early age to a more self-conscious sense of sociocultural belonging born, ironically, of a persistent sense of “outsiderness” (utanförskap).

“Västerort, where I took my first breath, even so people still called me an immigrant,” raps Lundin in the first verse, rhyming the passive past tense of “to breathe” in Swedish (inandats) with the verb “to immigrate” in the past perfect (invandrat). “I was second generation. I felt the tone, in the classroom, on the bus, on the way to the station.” A politics of difference, in which an “immigrant” status and identity gets passed on from one generation to another, is also a social phenomenology, a tone felt in the commons of everyday life, signaled by volleys of vulgar epithets. “I heard the word [n----] like it was my first name.” Against such pervasive insult and injury, Lundin turns to a culturally intimate and geographically specific sense of place: “Felt better in the ’hood [orten], a bit rowdy, but never boring [aldrig tråkigt], diverse [and] multilingual [mångfald flerspråkigt].” (Orten, meaning “the ’hood,” is an abbreviation of förorten, meaning “the suburbs.”) Lundin kicks a soccer ball with “Taiwan” (a reference to Asian-Swedes), sips “Ayran” (a cold yoghurt beverage popular throughout the Arab world), eats “Thai” food, and tries to dodge the “Haiwan” (Arabic for “animal” or “beast”). To this multilingual and (dare I say) multicultural poetics, Lundin adds meta-poetic reflection, also assembled in rhymed verse: “We distorted the dialect [dialekten], stole a bunch of words from the relatives [släkten]. What was the effect? [effekten]. Suburban slang, it gave us respect [respekten].”

The track pivots on an insistent refrain (“I woke up and was a Suedi”), told as a story. Lundin relates his horror when an African relative presents him as a “Swede” to a friend during a visit to his paternal homeland, Gambia: “I felt at home, Sweden was just a far-away memory. Until the day we were all hanging out and suddenly something terrible happened. For my cousin’s buddy I was introduced as a Swede! I was a Suedi!” The word Suedi, a colloquial term for “Swedish,” is borrowed (or “stolen,” as Lundin provocatively puts it) from Arabic. As an expression of suburban Swedish vernacular speech, Suedi registers the ambivalence of national identity among those, like Ibrahima Erik Lundin Banda, who grew up on the margins of the societal mainstream. In such contexts, Suedi emphatically refers to “them,” not “us”—a slang term for majority, middle-class, inner-city, and almost always white Swedish people. Lundin’s shock (“I woke up and was a Suedi!”) is the disbelief particular to those who are native to the “second generation” (andragenerationen), born and raised as “immigrants” ((invandrare)) in their own country.

“Erik Lundin isn’t an art project,” the rapper says, describing the politics and poetics of his stage persona. “It not a name taken to inspire a debate. . . . It’s a story that says, ‘enough is enough’” (Roney 2015). Lundin fundamentally rejects the binary logic that says, “You are either a foreigner or a Swede,” but he does so playfully, and provocatively. “To some, I’m a svartskalle,” he says, “to others I’m a svenne.” Like Suedi, the word svartskalle (meaning, literally, “black skull”) signals vernacular suburban speech and describes a subaltern subject position—a “foreigner,” “outsider,” or “immigrant.” However, unlike Suedi, a word derived from the “diverse and multilingual” suburbs where people like Lundin grew up, svartskalle first emerged as a pejorative term for ethnic and class difference among white Swedes, an ugly epithet used to slur racialized Others (those with dark hair, or “black skulls”) on the peripheries of Swedish society.6 Yet, “to others,” Lundin is just a “Swede,” or, in his words, a svenne, a diminutive slang word for an ordinary (and usually white) Swede. By reconfiguring an us/them binary with stereotypical argot (svartskalle and svenne), Lundin draws poetic attention to the kinds of work such reductive markers of difference do in everyday life and, by claiming both, performs a critique of the essentialist logics such terms rely on. In that spirit, Lundin proudly calls himself and his growing cohort of fans Suedis, flipping the script (Rollefson 2017) on an otherwise flippant term in a show of subaltern but also emphatically Swedish solidarity (as if to say, “We, too, are Suedis!”), a public display that some, he says, find threatening. “In 2015, you should be able to look like me and be called Erik Lundin . . . and that’s provocative for many.”

Born and Raised in the In-Between

Lundin’s critical appropriation and resignification of the term Suedi, mobilized as a poetic interrogation of “outsiderness” (utanförskap) in contemporary Sweden, may be read in relation to a broader discursive field, one populated by voices that speak to a persistent and seemingly intractable condition of being neither this nor that, neither fully here nor there—to what some have called mellanförskap, or “in-betweenness.” To its purveyors, mellanförskap addresses the identities and experiences of a growing cohort of second generation “immigrant” Swedes (Arbouz 2012, 2015). Some are the children of non-European parents, who feel alienated from their families’ social and cultural heritage and excluded from a majority white Swedish culture. Others are adoptees, who grapple with a persistent feeling of difference despite their Swedish upbringing and socialization. Following Rosi Braidotti (1994), Anna Adeniji (2014) describes her own “mixed racial” experience of “betweenship” in Sweden as a “nomadic” subjectivity. “To identify as a nomadic subject,” she writes, “is a choice to live in, and to cultivate living in, constant transition, circulation, movement, and not take on any racial, ethnic, or national identity as permanently fixed” (159).

Simon Matiwos, the spoken word poet from the Stockholm suburb of Husby (in whose footsteps we followed in chapter 3), describes this “neither/nor” and subjectively untethered condition in sociospatial terms, as a mellanrum, an “in-between space”: “My [Eritrean] parents tell me, ‘You’re too good for us. Go and make friends with the white people. Start working with them.’ But when I come to the white people, they say, ‘What are you doing here? You’re not like us. Go back to your parents!’ So, I end up in a social vacuum. Where should I turn?” Simon diagnoses this psychosocial predicament as a “postcolonial syndrome,” afflicting those, like himself, who find themselves stuck “in the middle”—who can’t get a job because they “look like criminals,” but who are also too Swedish, or, in Simon’s words, “too white” for their parents.7 “You’re too Black to be with the white people, and too white to be with the Black people,” Simon says. Importantly, racial division is not the only symptom of this syndrome; it appears as class struggle, too, manifest in questions of education achievement (or lack thereof) posed from the suburban margins: “No one helps us in the in-between space [mellanrummet], in the gray zone. Either you’re a kid who studies really hard and doesn’t have a connection to [the neighborhood,] or you’re like the guys who sit over there [outside the subway station], like criminals.” Scholarly achievement and a strong suburban identity are made mutually exclusive through the binary logic of this “postcolonial” reasoning, in which apparently distinct populations are fixed in place and bound to prescribed modes of identification. Black people over here, and white people over there. “Criminals” in the suburbs, and “high-achievers” in the city center. The old metropole–colony dichotomy transposed onto the (sub)urban geographies of modern Europe (Molina 1997). “But what happens to all of us in the middle?” Simon asks. “I have been both persons! The studious youth, who loses touch with thy neighborhood, [and] the guy who ends up on the bench next to the subway station.” Simon struggles to claim a middle ground, a mellanrum, between what appear to be mutually exclusive alternatives—a social space not (yet) visible to those beholden to racial and class ideologies of the Swedish postcolony.

Stevie Nii-Adu Mensah doesn’t have time for these neither/nor narratives anymore. Having moved his permanent address from Sweden to Ghana, his parental homeland, in 2014, Stevie now thinks of Sweden as a mellanland—an “in-between country,” or, more specifically, the location of a “layover,” a mellanlandning. Stevie’s in-between experience in Sweden is, thus, delimited and conditional, and intentionally so. “To me, Sweden is a place where you come to chill out,” he tells me. “Where you come to rest. Get your energies up.” Stevie is aware that his perspective on in-betweenness may not be widely shared in the Afro-Swedish community. That is, not everyone can make a life “back home” in Africa the way Stevie has done, but he is also keen to note the cultural richness of his “home-away-from-home” in Sweden. Speaking of his family in relation to the diasporic journeys of other Afro-Swedes, Stevie emphasizes the difference a strongly rooted African upbringing can make.

[My] father [who came to Sweden in the 1950s] was a respected drummer in Ghana. . . . Wherever he went, he went with that state of mind. And my mom, [who] came here in the ’70s, she was the same. She was dancing all kinds of Ghanaian dances, showing the rich culture that Ghana has. That was something she was very proud to showcase in Sweden in the ’70s, traveling around and inspiring people. . . . And, you know, other African households that I went to, they didn’t really have that.

Describing these first-generation African diasporans in Sweden, Stevie says that “their goal was to learn the language quickly and become a part of Sweden.” For many families raised in the 1970s and 1980s, he explains, assimilation was paramount. Others, however, charted a less consistent middle path between cultural conservatism and concerted integration, through which a young generation of emergent Afro-Swedes would struggle to find their way.

“Born and raised in the in-between [mellanförskapet],” raps hip-hop artist Jason Timbuktu Diakité, “maybe my children’s roots will bridge that gap [brygga det gapet].” This line appears in the 2014 single “Misstänkt” (Suspect), Jason’s powerful and poetic critique of racial profiling in Swedish society. For him, mellanförskap indexes a profound ambivalence. “Up until just recently, I felt this hälftenskap, that I was only half of everything.”8 Growing up in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s with a Black American father and a white American mother, Jason felt condemned to what he calls a “no-man’s land” (echoing Simon’s “social vacuum”). At times, his experience strongly resonated with Stevie’s narrative of a firmly grounded “African” (if more broadly Afro-diasporic) upbringing: “My dad has strong ties to Nigeria. He spent six years there as a boy. [Growing up,] there were a lot of Nigerians, then also people from Tunisia, Algeria, from the Congo, South Africa, Senegal, the Caribbean, Trinidad, India, and, of course, African Americans [in our household]. And so I grew up hearing those conversations, and those perspectives on politics and world events, but also on being Black in Sweden.”9 But at certain moments, Jason became painfully aware of his difference from this varied cohort of diasporic elders: “They would often turn to me at points in the conversation and say, ‘Well, Jason, you’re Swedish. What do you think about this?’ And I always felt kind of singled out and not belonging at that point.” At school, racist invectives were all too common. “My first six years of school, I was basically bullied every day,” with white Swedish classmates calling him “different variations of the n-word.” Later, as an adult, the language shifted, but the sentiment—“You’re not one of us”—remained the same. In another verse from the track “Misstänkt,” Jason raps, “And the question I get over and over, again and again, ‘Hey! Where do you really come from?’” These experiences—whether in the privacy of his “American” home or in the public spaces of “Swedish” society—have left Jason with a series of fraught and persistent existential questions, variations of which one may hear among many members of the Afro-Swedish community, born and raised in the in-between: “Who am I? Am I African or American? Am I Swedish or American? Am I Black or white? Who are my people?”

Non-whiteness and Racialized Identity Politics

On March 13, 2013, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, a Swedish author with paternal roots in Tunisia, published a startling editorial essay in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (2013a). The text, titled “Bästa Beatrice Ask” (Dearest Beatrice Ask), is a personal indictment of state-sponsored racism, but also a powerful testimony to the daily struggles of what he calls “non-white” (icke vita) people in Sweden today. (It is also, notably, the inspiration for Timbuktu’s track “Misstänkt.”) The poetry of the text—and, perhaps, the reason it was shared over 180,000 times on social media, translated into a dozen languages, and published a month later in the New York Times (Khemiri 2013b)—lies in the essay’s narrative form. In it, Khemiri intimately addresses Beatrice Ask, then Sweden’s justice minister who had recently defended the use of racial profiling by police in the Stockholm subway. He invites her to “exchange skin and experience” with him for twenty-four hours. Thus, Khemiri would see and feel what it’s like to be an ambitious female politician in patriarchal social order and Ask would inhabit his brown body. In this non-white frame, she would experience all the confusion, fear, anxiety, and past trauma his body bears from a lifetime spent in a structurally racist society: at the passport control, in the classroom, at the movies, a step ahead of the skinheads, surrounded by cops at the mall, and held for twenty minutes by still other cops at the train station because “we matched a description.” Khemiri describes the various ways bodies like his attempt to mitigate their non-whiteness day to day: using a partner’s last name to rent an apartment or writing “BORN AND RAISED IN SWEDEN” on a job application. “Everyone knows,” he writes. “But no one does anything. Instead we focus on persecuting people who have moved here in search of the security that we’re so proud of offering to some of our citizens. And I write ‘we’ because we are a part of this whole, this society, this we. You can go now” (2013b).

In an essay titled “Whiteness Swedish Style,” Swedish media theorist Ylva Habel (2008) interrogates what she calls “the problematic of whiteness” (vithetsproblematiken), in ways that strongly resonate with Khemiri’s critical emphasis on the pronoun “we.” Habel writes, “I think that the specifically Swedish issue of whiteness lies in our concept of democracy, in which equality [jämlikhet] is so strongly coupled with sameness [likhet]. Some white people feel troubled, or even injured when confronted with the issue of racism or racialization” (my emphasis). To speak of the reality of everyday and structural racism, in other words, is to draw discomfiting attention to the way sociopolitical “sameness” (or, in Khemiri’s terms, “this society, this we”) in Sweden quietly assumes a white social actor, whose experiences are deemed common to the Swedish body social—what Swedish cultural critics and theorists call vithetsnormen (white normativity). As I noted in the introduction to this book, it remains difficult to speak openly and critically about the social reality of race in Sweden today. “The uninitiated might wonder why I emphasize [race] so much,” says Jason Diakité, during an interview about his recently published memoir En droppe midnatt (A Drop of Midnight, to which we will return in chapter 6). At first, his tone is diplomatic: “But it’s because [race] has had such a strong impact on my life.” Then, speaking directly to the reporter interviewing him and the imagined community this exponent of the Swedish media represents, Jason calls this normative whiteness to task: “You’ll have to excuse me for saying this, but it’s only white people who have this kind of objection [to talking about race]. They haven’t had to grapple with it every day of their lives” (Nordström 2016).

There is more than a little Langston Hughes in these essays, words, and public voicings. They draw our attention—in terms that are as poetic as they are pointed—to the daily struggles and strife, but also the common strivings and fiery resistance of a self-consciously “non-white” (icke-vit) minority public. These utterances and inscriptions also point to the ever-present and impossibly large “racial mountain,” with its hewn and polished monuments to, in Hughes’s (1926) astonishingly apt words (written nearly a century ago), “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, [and] Nordic art.” “We are a few telling the non-white story,” Jason Diakité says in another interview with the Swedish press, placing himself in the company of “authors like Johannes Anyuru, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Fanna Ndow Norrby, and a handful of others.” Calling this nascent literary field icke vit (non-white), Jason aligns himself with a small but critically conscious and culturally prolific community, whose collective voice has argued—through a variety of media, and from different perspectives, but no less coherently—that race matters. In particular, these voices give narrative form to the way structures and practices of racism shape perceptions of non-white bodies; to the particular meanings that accrue to such bodies and the feelings they elicit; and to the ways these color-coded assumptions and sentiments intersect with gender, class, religion, and sexuality. They reveal as they evidence, in other words, the social and cultural work of “racialization” (rasifiering) in Sweden today.

Indeed, for many, the term “racialized” (rasifierad) has become a powerfully salient mode of identification and activism. An important recent example is the separatist online chat forum Rummet (The Space/Room), established in 2013. The focus of much critical attention following its initial launch, an edited collection of texts derived and inspired by this forum appeared as a hard-copy book available to a general public two years later (Díaz et al. 2015). Curated and edited by four women who self-identify as non-white, queer, anti-racist activists, the published volume is designed as a “collage book.” Reflecting the online origins of the project, the book’s contributors employ “the language of the internet,” including a panoply of images that resemble screenshots, memes, and GIFs. Much of the text is organized around dialogue and appears in the form of social media or text message threads, using profile pics to identify the speakers–writers. These chats are interspersed with short topical essays, much like blog posts. Themes pivot between the everyday (dating, jobs, entertainment) and the academic (race, activism, intersectionality), with many texts addressing deeply personal concerns (adoption, self-care, identity). All tackle the impact of racialization on the lives, work, and worldviews of the various contributors to the volume. Given this thematic variety, the narrative tone of the text shifts frequently among several linguistic registers (intimate, didactic, playful, critical, and provocative), expressed and articulated by as many voices.

Here, I would like to draw attention to the book’s concluding text, presented as a “manifesto” (manifest) about what this racialized “space/room” (rum) represents, for whom it is intended, and why it matters. Five points appear enumerated in bold on the book’s penultimate pages:

1. 1. The Space/Room is separatist for racialized people
2. 2. The Space’s/Room’s “we” always refers to racialized people
3. 3. The Space’s/Room’s participants can set their role as a group representative aside
4. 4. The Space/Room turns its back on the white public
5. 5. The Space/Room is a safe space for all racialized people

Turning the page, these statements are followed by a list of three dozen or so (non-enumerated, plain text) statements, all beginning with “The Space/Room is” (Rummet är . . .), from “The Space/Room is the bodies that don’t pass the turnstiles but get stopped for ID checks” to “The Space/Room remains standing onstage.” Several things strike me as interesting about these proclamations, which appear at once moralistic, confrontational, reassuring, and poetic. For example, while the numbered lines explicitly call on a racialized “we” (nos. 1 and 2)—invoking a separatist “counterpublic,” in Michael Warner’s (2002) terms—their bold appearance in a published book suggests that these words also address a wider audience—specifically, “the white public” on whom The Space’s/Room’s collective back is metaphorically turned (no. 4). We (and here I write as a member of that white public) are intended to listen, mindful and respectful of a “safe space” that appears before us (no. 5), made aware that its members have no obligation to explain themselves to us (no. 3). In an age when the phrase “identity politics” has once again become so hotly contested (championed by some, vilified by others), these are provocative words. More broadly, these statements represent—like the larger multimedia forum of which they are a part—yet another sign of a more public and vocal counter-discourse to white normativity (vithetsnormen) in Sweden today, through which new modes of racialized and diasporic identification have emerged with increasing frequency over the past decade.

Locating Diaspora in Words

Let us return, now, to the panel discussion with which this chapter began. In revisiting this conversation, I would like us to consider how the sociocultural lexicon we have thus far traced—speaking to patterns of exoticism and estrangement (“multiculture” and “outsiderness”), compounded feelings of alienation (“in-betweenness”), and new forms of subaltern (“non-white” and “racialized”) solidarity—nuances, informs, and textures the various identities to which people of African descent in Sweden currently lay claim. How do these words impact and inflect with specifically Afro-diasporic modes of identification in contemporary Sweden? What further ideas and affects accrue to the particular words African diasporans use to name themselves, their community, and social positions in society? What shared meanings emerge? What discrepancies are present? To thicken the description of this sociolinguistic context, I will infuse my (re)reading of the discussion with additional voices and texts that speak to the positions and concerns expressed by panelists and audience members that afternoon. I begin with two distinct, though not mutually exclusive, and ambivalent, though no less apposite, terms that are central to the way Afro-diasporic Swedes qualify and locate their community in Sweden: “Black” (svart) and “African” (afrikan).

“We want to put Black people [svarta] on the map,” Stina, the panel moderator, says. “We want to claim a space in the public sphere.” With these words, the conversation begins with a color-coded sense of racial solidarity, articulated in both English and Swedish: “Black” and svart. This call for a specifically “Black” sense of place (“on the map”) is then articulated to an African American location of culture. “We’re basically in formation, Beyoncé style.” The phrase “claiming a space” (ta plats) recalls the work of Rummet (The Space/Room), specifically the struggle to mobilize new (counter)public forums predicated, to varying degrees, on a separatist ethics. “We see the Black Coffee movement. Black Vogue, the [Black] beauty movement,” Stina observes. Published in 2015, the book Svart Kvinna (Black Woman) may be read as part of this anti-racist, separatist, and emphatically “Black” (svart) social movement (Norrby 2015). Like Rummet, Svart Kvinna began as a forum on social media (Instagram). And like Black Vogue, yet another online community published as a book (Jallow 2016), Svart Kvinna couples an emphasis on Black lives with the particular experience of Black women. As such, the sense of “Blackness” this work addresses points to an increasingly intersectional outlook (Crenshaw 1991), articulating race and gender, but also class, religion, and sexuality to define the complex internal dynamics of Afro-diasporic communities and their no-less-complex relationship to the societies of which they are a part. Such intersectionality infuses the perspectives of participants at the panel discussion, as the image of a Black community led by a proud and powerful cohort of women “in formation” makes clear.

There is also the question of language: the way groups like Black Coffee and Black Vogue use English to designate themselves, while names like Svart Kvinna and Rummet speak to us in Swedish. On the one hand, there is an emphatic gesture toward an anglophone, and more specifically African American, racial politics (i.e., a “Black” identity mobilized “Beyoncé style”); on the other, there is an insistence on the specifically Swedish ways race, racism, and racialization play out. These are, of course, not mutually exclusive positions, but precisely how the specificity of life in Sweden inflects with the broader African diaspora is a point of debate in the community. As Madina claims later in the conversation, “For my generation, there is a lack of representation, and the representation we see is American”—this, in response to a question from a woman in the audience who doesn’t “feel part of this movement” and wonders why it “looks up to America” when so many diasporans in Sweden are only a generation removed from Africa. From the panel, Araia echoes this call to value the community’s continental roots, while also appealing to a bigger sociocultural and political picture. “We are in the process of reformulating Blackness,” wrenching an emergent “Black” identity away from the discursive hegemony of a normatively white society. He then adds that “viewing ourselves as Africans [afrikaner] is essential.” By contrast, another woman in the audience asserts that “there are many people who still identify as ‘African’ in Sweden,” speaking of the parents of many people in the room, as well more recent immigrants to the country. “To them we are very Swedish,” she says. Speaking from this parental vantage, Jasmine affirms this perspective from the panel: “Most of our children are basically Swedes, so we need to offer them African culture.” From these exchanges, we observe the way terms like “Black” and “African” (or svart and afrikan) “slide” and “float,” as Stuart Hall (1993, 111) famously put it, shifting in meaning as they are translated and transposed from one language, social context, and subject position to another.10

The latter statements also remind us that Swedishness remains a potent mode of identification and object of debate within the community. At the panel discussion, adjectives signal the ambivalence that a “Swedish” identity registers among participants. “To them we are very Swedish,” notes an audience member. “Most of our children are basically Swedes,” observes Jasmine from the panel. Yet, there is also a critical limit to just how “very Swedish” members of this community can “basically” be, made apparent by the yet another valence of the “Black” and “African” signifiers. A woman in the audience speaks up: “We’re only contacted if the work is defined as ‘Black,’ or ‘African,’ and that’s dangerous.” She draws attention to the way a politics of multiculture (mångkultur) prescribes appropriate role play and performance practice for non-white artists in the Swedish culture sector. Step outside the boundaries of such “diversity” (mångfald) and you become “the black threat” (det svarta hotet), Madina tells us. “You and your fucking multiculturalism,” reads a recent email in Araia’s inbox, an angry response to the perceived threat his presence poses. The condition of being “very Swedish” while at the same time a “threat” to Swedish society arguably indexes the principal paradox of diasporic life in Sweden today, in which the society one calls “home” routinely excludes racialized bodies as other. “In Norway I’m a Swede, at home I’m a foreigner,” Timbuktu raps. This is particularly apparent to young people, the “second generation” (andragenerationen), those “born and raised in the in-between,” as Jason Diakité puts it. Concepts like mellanförskap (in-betweenness) and critical modes of identification like Suedi are born of this provisional and proscriptive sense of national belonging: “Swedish,” so long as you keep up appearances, and play by the rules; “Black” and “African,” but not too much, and only when appropriate.

Toward an Articulated Consciousness

Given this conditional and constrained relationship to “Swedish” identity, one can more readily understand Madina’s exclamation: “I use [the term ‘Afro-Swedish’] about myself, to claim my Swedishness.” And one can more fully appreciate the sense of urgency in Araia’s statement: “What we need to do here, first and foremost, is identify ourselves as African-Swedes.” The two Swedish terms they employ, afrosvensk (Afro-Swedish) and afrikansvensk (African-Swedish), represent powerful sociolinguistic tools, employed to interrogate the everyday struggle lived by those racialized as “Black” and “African” in Sweden. The words encode a lexical critique of the notion that “Blackness” and “Africanness” are somehow essentially opposed to “Swedishness”—the idea that darker pigmentation and foreign cultural heritage may be invoked to deny a stable sense of place to Swedes of African descent. At the outset of this chapter, I noted the way speakers at the panel discussion amplified this verbal interrogation of a monologic, monocultural, and racially homogenous Sweden by fluently code-switching between Swedish and English, a bilingualism that iconically signals, to paraphrase Du Bois, the irreducible “two-ness” of their diasporic subjectivities. What I want to argue here is that the words afrosvensk and afrikansvensk themselves sediment a grammar of such “two-ness,” or what Jason Diakité calls, also riffing on Du Bois, dubbelskap (doubleness). For Jason, the doubleness of words like afrosvensk constitute a vital linguistic affirmation of diasporans’ complex selfhood, an assertation that their Swedish upbringing and diasporic roots are not irreconcilable. “Instead of this constant, ‘I’m half this, half that,’” he tells me, “just that semantic change led to some door-opening up for me.”

Such affirmative doubleness is more apparent in Swedish than in English, at least in their written forms. Translated into English, the hyphenated words “Afro-Swedish” and “African-Swedish” visualize a grammatical disjuncture between the opposing signifiers “Afro” or “African” and “Swedish.” The horizontal mark at the center of such words both binds and separates, indexing a referential gap that requires symbolic mediation to bridge the two sides, though never completely. Much like the words “Afro-American” or “African-American,” the translated terms “Afro-Swedish” and “African-Swedish” give linguistic form to the “peculiar sensation” of racialized difference that Du Bois famously called “double consciousness.” This is the semiotic and social ambivalence of “hyphenated identities.” In Swedish, however, afrosvensk and afrikansvensk embed or, rather, articulate their component lexemes (a structure common to many Germanic languages), producing a morphological unity that encodes and encompasses a component diversity. Words like afrosvensk and afrikansvensk constitute, in other words, what we might call an “articulated consciousness,” transposing a hyphenated twoness onto the embedded sociolinguistic terrain of Swedish. Of course, these words do not transcend or erase the perceived racial difference their component parts signify—they remain referential expressions of “double consciousness”—but the morphology of these words does give semiotic primacy to a paired sense of social identity—not just “half this, half that,” as Jason says, but unequivocally both at the same time, and without contradiction.

As such, the terms afrosvensk and afrikansvensk are usefully capacious, providing an inclusive sociolinguistic space that transcends or at least encompasses ethnic and national difference. “Gambians are Afro-Swedes! [afrosvenskar],” Madina exclaims from the panel. The terms model a kind of “unity within diversity” necessary, some argue, to fostering and securing a sense of community. Yet, for others, these relatively new terms to the modern Swedish lexicon strain to signify. The nuanced distinction they make vis-à-vis an unqualified—or unarticulated—Swedishness remains, at best, unclear to some. At the panel discussion, a woman reminds us that in the eyes of some diasporic elders and newly arrived African immigrants, “we are very Swedish, not ‘Afro-Swedish.’” At worst, these neologisms are simply illegible, sounding foreign or imported (typically from America) to certain Swedish ears. Though this perspective strikes me as more willful ignorance than a simple failure to comprehend. On a few occasions, when describing my research to those awkwardly identified as “ethnic Swedes” (a politically correct shorthand for “white people” in Sweden), my use of the term afrosvensk elicited confusion, often followed by the polite question: “What does that mean?” Initially, such queries took me aback. “Isn’t the meaning obvious?” I would later realize that their bewilderment lay as much in the word itself as it did with the identity terms like afrosvensk purport to signify. For such people, qualifying an unmarked Swedishness with an explicitly racialized mode of identification (Afro-Swedish) was as culturally inappropriate as it was ungrammatical. As one woman put it to me, inadvertently questioning the discursive legitimacy of my research and the diasporic community it sought to address, “Can one call oneself that?” (Kan man heta så?). Such conversations were infrequent, to be sure, but they revealed much about the very real struggle for social and cultural visibility among minority publics in Sweden today. In the words of poet Mariama Jobe, echoing Audre Lorde (as cited in the epigraph to this chapter), “I am Afro-Swedish. I am all the inflections of a word you didn’t even know existed.”11

In the public and private forums of Black and African associational life in Sweden, there is also some debate about which of the two terms, afrosvensk or afrikansvensk, is most appropriate to designate this heterogeneous social group in the broader public sphere. As Araia observed from the panel, speaking as a spokesperson for the separatist group Black Coffee, “Some folks say, ‘Do you have something against [the word] Afro-Swedish?’ I don’t have anything against Afro-Swedish. But we say African-Swedish [afrikansvensk].” During an interview held prior to the event, I asked Araia about his position on word choice in the community. His response is worth citing at length:

I was part of the development of the term “Afro-Swedish” in 2005 or 2006. The idea was to have a term that we could use about ourselves, [and] we felt that [Afro-Swedish] was the term we had. [But] I’ve never felt comfortable with “Afro-Swedish.” In the United States you say “African American,” or “European American,” or “Asian American.” It’s connected to geography. There’s a sense of biologism with the word “Afro.” You’ve even left that word behind in the United States! But we African-Swedes in Sweden have a much closer connection to the continent of Africa than our brothers and sisters on the other side of the ocean. That’s why it’s even more logical to use the term “African-Swedish.” We come from certain places. We have certain cultures. It’s a matter of pride.

For Araia, a common sense of place (Africa) trumps what he calls the racialist “biologism” indexed by the prefix “Afro”—referring, perhaps, to what Du Bois (1897) once called “the grosser physical differences of color, hair, and bone.” Being African-descended is something to be proud of, Araia argues, something to say out loud: “We say African-Swedish.” For many, however, the term afrosvensk has a certain pedigree in public life. It has been in the name of one of Sweden’s largest and most outwardly visible Afro-diasporic organizations for the past three decades, Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Afro-Swedes, founded in 1990). Moreover, use of the term afrosvensk resonates with naming practices among other Afro-European national communities, such as afrodeutsche (Afro-German), a term that Germans of African descent have employed since the mid-1980s (see, e.g., Oguntoye, Opitz, and Schulz 1986). In Sweden, advocates of the word afrosvensk often point out that the term’s emphasis should be political rather than geographic or cultural. Kitimbwa Sabuni, a spokesperson for the Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund, puts it thus to me: “I use [Afro-Swedish] as a political concept. And that’s how one needs to think about it. . . . An Afro-Swedish politics does not refer to the cultural diversity of Africa and its diaspora. It does refer to a social position engendered by a common socioeconomic and political condition in Sweden; it’s a discursive means to raise awareness of this situation.” The “condition” of which Sabuni speaks is, of course, a pernicious and pervasive anti-black racism in Swedish society. This is what an audience member at the panel discussion meant when she noted, “What we [as Afro-Swedes] have in common is what we meet when we go out of our houses.” Such a situation is shared by all people of African descent in Sweden, she insists, regardless of what term, articulated or otherwise, they use to identify themselves.

Coda: The Conversation Continues

To be clear, my purpose here is not to resolve or even attempt to reconcile this terminological debate. My interest is, rather, in the debate itself—in the fact that people of African descent in Sweden from a variety of walks of life are actively engaged in constructively critical conversations about the words they employ to claim, shape, and secure their modes of identification. Nor do I mean to suggest that the conversation is limited, or somehow inevitably leads to the prefixed poles (“Afro” and “African”) of this particular discussion. As this chapter has hopefully demonstrated, the words African diasporans use to describe themselves in relation (and sometimes opposition) to Swedish society vary widely, addressing forms of exclusion and difference, but also solidarity and community. Further, while most people I have spoken with identify in some way with terms that locate them—culturally, politically, geographically, or racially—within the African diaspora (whether “Black,” “African,” “Afro-Swedish,” or “African-Swedish”), some do not.

For an older generation, terms like afrosvensk, afrikansvensk, or mellanförskap, or re-signified pejoratives like svartskalle or Suedi do not always resonate. Some primarily identify themselves as “Swedish” while maintaining a sense of pride in their African or diasporic roots (see, e.g., Fransesca Quartey’s story in chapter 1). Others express ambivalence about endorsing any terms that appear to emphasize racial or ethnic difference. Raymond Peroti, known to many as the hip-hop artist Blues, holds such a firmly anti-racist position. “I don’t believe in a superficial sense of belonging, whatever that might be,” he explains. “Because that doesn’t say anything about who a person really is.” For Raymond, public discourse should help foster a more inclusive society, not further segment it. Perspectives like his remind us, once again, of the discursive diversity that is inherent to conversations and debates about Black life in Sweden today—a discourse that includes, as we have observed, vocal proponents of an “Afro-Swedish” or “African-Swedish” racial formation, “in-between” orientations toward creolization and hybridity, non-white social movements and activist solidarities, and critical understandings on what a more capacious and just conception of “Swedishness” might look and sound like. Each of these voices contributes something unique and valuable to the broader conversation about the status and identity of people of African descent in Swedish society, and, more generally, about what “Swedishness” can and should mean, as a more open and inclusive signifier, now and in the future.