Prelude: Yellow, Blue, and Black

On November 27, 2013, the words “Beat Jimmie yellow and blue, and raise him up on a flagpole” echo throughout Swedish media. The lyrics refer to Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats (SD), a nationalist political party with roots in far-right extremism that, three years prior, shocked the nation’s political establishment by crossing the 4 percent popular vote threshold to enter the Riksdag (Sweden’s national legislature). (Polling averages put SD at around 20 percent of the popular vote as of August 2021.) Many hear the words, rapped over a beat on the track “Svarta Duvor och Vissna Liljor” (Black Doves and Wilted Lilies), as an incitement to violence. The author of the lyrics, hip-hop artist Jason Diakité, better known for his upbeat musical joie de vivre, defends his provocative choice of words on Twitter: “I have always distanced myself from violence. Instead, I express my anger in the form of music. I’m not the one walking around town with metal pipes” (2013). Jason is referring to a scandal involving three prominent SD politicians who were caught on tape hurling xenophobic and misogynist invectives and becoming physically violent, armed with building materials on the streets of Stockholm in June 2010.1 Reflecting on this moment, the rap artist would later describe his lyrical call to arms as a “metaphor for what I think about Jimmie’s and the SD’s attempt to claim the right to decide who and what is Swedish” (Diakité 2016, 11).2

One week following the release of “Svarta Duvor och Vissna Liljor,” and with the lyrical controversy still fresh in people’s minds, Jason Diakité arrives at the Swedish Riksdag to receive the 5i12 movement’s annual humanitarian award. The nonprofit organization 5i12 is dedicated to a “journey against xenophobia and racism and toward equal value of human life.”3 They are there to honor Jason for his long-standing work—on stage as an artist, and through his engagements in civil society—to combat intolerance and promote human rights, in Sweden and throughout the world. But not everyone is happy to see Jason that day. Prominent conservative politician and parliamentary speaker Per Westerberg decides to boycott the ceremony (T T Nyhetsbyrån 2013), forcing the event to move from the prestigious parliamentary chamber to a lesser room on the upper floors of the building. (In addition to the provocative criticism of SD’s political culture, “Svarta Duvor” is also highly critical of the governing center–right Alliance coalition, of which Westerberg’s Moderates are a leading part at this time.) “I don’t remember that I’ve ever felt so unwelcome in what I thought was my homeland,” Jason writes, reflecting on this moment (Diakité 2016, 11). Speaking with me, Jason says that the situation made him feel “very, very nervous. Because all of the sudden, I felt like I was out on deeper waters.”4 He realizes almost immediately that the assembled crowd is not entirely friendly: “When I arrived in the room, a Social Democratic MP told me, ‘The Sweden Democrats have come, too.’” As Jason recalls this moment with me, he is visibly and vocally disturbed: “So, they were also there, and I just felt like, ‘I know everybody does not accept me as Swedish.’”

What began as a celebratory affirmation of global activism has now become a front in the struggle against an intolerant nativism. Jason, doubly conscious of his precarious position—feeling the crosshairs of an emboldened white supremacy as he stands as a public icon of progressive social pluralism—lays a pair of handwritten pages on a small round table in front of a handful of microphones from local media outlets. He then draws from the breast pocket of his jacket his Swedish passport, a “collection of paper,” he says, “that reminds all those places I travel to of where I come from” (Tagesson 2013). The phrase “where I come from” resonates strongly. In his 2014 track “Misstänkt” (Suspect), Jason raps, “And the question I get over and over, again and again / ‘Hey! Where do you really come from?’”5 In his hand, the passport offers an answer, needing no words to make the point: I come from Sweden. But Jason wants to make sure people hear this message, loud and clear: “I took this with me today to say, ‘This is my proof that I am not a foreigner.’ So, the hostility toward me because of my skin color is never really about xenophobia. It is and remains racism.” Jason is no longer speaking for himself. This is no longer just about petty parliamentary posturing in response to controversial lyrics. Jason’s symbolic gesture and pointed words are coalitional. Semiotically, his vocal and embodied presence at the event is iconic of sentiments shared by those racialized or otherwise marginalized as “other” in Swedish society. Again, his lyrical flow makes the case: “I am only one, but I write for thousands.”6 Jason concludes his acceptance speech with a pledge to Sweden and its people, invoking the solemn tone of a national oath but with the content of a passionate and progressive pluralism. In exchange for his safety and security, the ability to secure residence and work, the right to love, pray, and speak freely, and acceptance just as he is, Jason, holding back tears, says, “I will give you my life, Sweden.”

Race, Diaspora, and Politics

I place Jason Diakité’s public act of protest at the vanguard of a resurgent politics of race in Swedish society. As we shall observe in this chapter, Jason’s statement heralds a period of intensified discussion and debate in the Swedish public sphere around questions of race and racism. This is also a period in which Afro-Swedish voices, like Jason’s, have become increasingly prominent and outspoken, drawing attention to a central tension in this field of discourse. Holding up his passport, Jason says, “This is my proof that I am not a foreigner.” In Swedish, “xenophobia” translates as främlingsfientlighet, emphasizing “antipathy” (fientlighet), rather than “fear” (phobia), vis-à-vis the perceived (real or imagined) “foreigner” (främling). Many find this sentiment abhorrent, being contrary to Sweden’s long-standing position as a defender of human rights and social justice, at home and in the world (Hübinette and Lundström 2014). Sweden is a xenophilic nation, they argue, not xenophobic.7 Yet, SD’s seemingly improbable rise has brought anti-immigrant sentiment to the mainstream of Swedish politics, and many now worry about “the end of Swedish exceptionalism” (Rydgren and van der Meiden 2019). Once scorned, “antipathy toward foreigners” is now, for a growing portion of the Swedish electorate, good policy. But for Afro-Swedes like Jason, xenophobic nationalism is just the tip of the iceberg. “So, the hostility toward me because of my skin color is never really about xenophobia,” he explains. Beneath the surface of an increasingly nativist Swedish domestic politics lies the obscured reality of race.

The politics of race seeks, on the one hand, to interrogate the underlying racial structures that, as Michael McEachrane (2014c, 103) has argued, “both in theory and practice privilege the humanity of white people” (see also Mulinari and Neergaard 2017). In Sweden, as elsewhere, this work is exceedingly difficult. As Ylva Habel (2012, 101) observes, “Skin color, often considered a non-issue in the public sphere, is consistently played down or erased in Swedish cultural and political discourse.” To engage in the politics of race, then, one must first confront the presumptive neutrality and perceived innocence born of an endemically color-blind worldview, what Habel calls “the default value of our culture” (102). And, more often than not, the burdens—and risks—of this labor fall on non-white academics and activists, people like Michael McEachrane, Ylva Habel, and Jason Diakité. On the other hand, a racial politics attends and gives voice to the modes of identification that a racialized society produces. For Afro-Swedes to speak publicly about their sense of Blackness is, thus, a political act, and no less challenging (cf. McEachrane 2020). Still, the past decade has witnessed, as we shall observe, a greater willingness and, indeed, urgency to speak out about race, racism, and, for members of the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, their Afro-Swedish identities.

I call this racial politics “resurgent” because, while presently burgeoning, it is certainly not “new.” In this chapter, my ethnographic focus will be on the activism of Afro-Swedish civic actors and organizations that began to emerge in the mid-2000s, but it is important to note the agency and legacy of those who, in many ways, made this contemporary politics possible, evidencing a “renaissance” of Black political culture in Sweden today. As we observed in chapter 1, Jason’s father, Madubuko Diakité, established his career as a filmmaker, activist, and advocate in Sweden by drawing attention to the racism that went hand in hand with a pronounced främlingsfientlighet in the 1960s and 1970s. But a more immediate reference point for a present-day Afro-Swedish politics developed among a generation of activists, scholars, and public intellectuals who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s, a period that, like today, also saw the rise of a populist political movement with strongly anti-immigrant overtones (Pred 2000). Perhaps more than any other writer or public figure at the time, Oivvio Polite set the tone for a racially conscious and emergently Afro-Swedish critique of Swedish society. His numerous publications on race and identity in millennial Sweden are collected in the seminal text White Like Me (Polite 2007). In one of the volume’s earliest essays, titled “Svart i Stockholm och New York” (Black in Stockholm and New York; originally published in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter in 1992), Polite affirms a sense of personhood that is untethered from the binary discourse of what he would later call a “racist society” (126):

I’m letting go of the dominant culture’s understanding of who I am supposed to be. To be conscious of that, together with feminism’s uncomfortable insight that one actually belongs to a socially subordinate group, is probably a good starting point to relinquish my burden and articulate my own definition of who I want to be. To be Oivvio and not a second-generation immigrant, to not let myself be reduced to the “us and them” terms of the immigrant debate, to affirm that I can be part of an historical continuity even if I don’t have a grandfather who sounds like an old [Ingmar] Bergman film. (100; my emphasis)

Like Jason Diakité, one of Oivvio’s Polite’s “historical continuities” is African America. His father, the late writer and artist Allen Polite, settled in Sweden in the 1960s, joining a small but coherent community of Black diasporans in Scandinavia (a portion of which we encountered in chapter 1). This, too, is a prelude to the Afro-Swedish politics of the present: a racially conscious worldview that is also emphatically diasporic.

A distinguishing feature of present-day Afro-Swedish political engagement is its coalitional character, grounded in a common if varied sense of an African and Black community: a politics of diaspora. But this is also what makes this politics emphatically Swedish. In Sweden, political agency is animated and amplified by “associational life” (föreningslivet)—the clubs, groups, associations, organizations, constituencies, and unions that codify as they embody collective modes of being and belonging. Such social formations represent both the foundation and function of modern Swedish civil society (Vogel et al. 2003; see also Westholm, Borevi, and Strömblad 2004). It is quite common for Swedes to be members of multiple groups representing myriad areas of social and cultural interest—including book and sporting clubs, but also political organizations and public interest groups—that extend from local communities to the nation as a whole, and, as we shall observe, further still, to enclaves of Swedish civil society abroad. Following Benedict Anderson (1983), one might say that a sense of national community is significantly imagined in Sweden through participation in the associational life of society at large. While this does entail a degree of “stranger subjectivity” that Michael Warner (2002) attributes to the social production of modern publics, associational life in Sweden is just as often characterized by a sense of civic intimacy (Berlant 2008), engendered by the personal investments that accrue to common participation in the politics of everyday life.

In this chapter, we will observe the way the African and Black community is constituted and mobilized through the associational life of Swedish civil society, what I am calling a politics of diaspora. Notably, while the politics of race often overlaps with the politics of diaspora, they also occasionally diverge. The first pair of cases discussed below highlights the work of two pioneering institutions of Afro-Swedish associational life: the National Union of Afro-Swedes (Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund, henceforth ASR)8 and Selam, a prominent transnational arts organization. Both groups developed in the 1990s and have worked, in different ways, to organize and orient the African diaspora in Sweden. For the ASR, this has meant unifying the African community at home, by bringing disparate “national” communities together under a broad, diasporic, and racially conscious rubric: “Afro-Swedish.” Recent discussions and debates within the organization about what that moniker means, however, reveal that perspectives on and approaches to the politics of race and diaspora in Sweden today remain diverse and dynamic. Selam’s work appears at once more extroverted and more subtle. Over the past twenty years, members of Selam have leveraged their own diasporic (and not only African) human resources to promote diverse global (and particularly African) music in Sweden, working through established structures of the Swedish public arts sector. More recently, Selam has also deployed the resources of Sweden’s robust development aid sector to establish a sustaining institutional presence in Africa. In this way, Selam’s membership institutionally embodies Sweden’s multiply rooted African diaspora, though they do not label their cultural political work in explicitly diasporic terms, nor do they position themselves as overtly “anti-racist.”

The second pair of cases emphasizes the work of two culture brokers and producers whose efforts align the politics of race and diaspora, by mobilizing (though not without a fair amount of struggle and frustration) public resources to illuminate the experiences and creative labor of Black and African Swedes: Cecilia Gärding and Baker Karim. Both Gärding and Karim are professional filmmakers who have worked hard to foster a more diverse and inclusive film culture in Sweden. In particular, they have drawn critical attention to the marginal status of people of color in the Swedish film industry, past and present (see, e.g., Gärding 2016). At the same time, they have sought to establish public forums beyond cinema to foster dialogue and debate among African diasporans in Sweden and within the Swedish public sphere more broadly. As such, their work strongly couples artistic production with an activist, diasporic and racial politics. To invoke a Gramscian lexicon, we might think of Gärding and Karim as “organic intellectuals,” articulating the counter-hegemonic grievances, interests, and desires of minority publics through the associational life of civil society, but also “diasporic intellectuals,” framing and presenting the contested positionalities of racialized “others within” a nominally color-blind European public sphere (Gramsci 1972; Wright 2004; see also El-Tayeb 2011).

As a whole, these four cases bear witness to a robust and dynamic Afro-Swedish associational life, illuminating various aspects (ideological, institutional, curatorial, and creative) of the politics of race and diaspora in Sweden today. In a Gramscian sense, the mobilization of this varied and vital Afro-Swedish civil society may be read as a “war of position,” foregrounding the collective if varied presence of African-descended Swedes in the public sphere. But we might also call it a “war of positionality,” arguing for the ontological legitimacy of a subaltern, racialized, and diasporic identity. I conclude this chapter with a final pair of cases that acknowledges the urgency of such an Afro-Swedish politics and observes the emergence of a new front in the struggle for Black being and belonging, in Swedish political society. The former case interrogates the endemic difficulty Afro-Swedes face to simply “appear” in the public sphere (cf. Arendt [1958] 1998, 198). By considering the contentious response of Afro-Swedish actor Richard Sseruwagi to the truncated release of Sweden’s first principally Afro-Swedish film, Medan vi lever (While We Live), I draw attention to the structural pressures that mitigate against a public Afro-diasporic presence in Sweden, in which the ability to speak and be heard represents more than a civic claim to national belonging; it is also a question of whether or not one has the right to exist as a social being at all. Mindful of the discursive—and, indeed, existential—limits to Black social agency this penultimate case suggests, I end with a reflection on what might be called an Afro-Swedish “war of maneuver” through the governmental interventions of a small (but growing) cohort of Afro-diasporic politicians. Hailing from all walks of Swedish political life, these figures do not (yet) represent a coherent Afro-Swedish constituency in government. Some appeal to extant class- and gender-based communities to advance explicitly anti-racist political platforms; others argue that what is needed is a more concerted politics of integration, targeting the social and cultural estrangement that an increasingly segregated society engenders. And yet, their presence in parliamentary life does raise the profile of the Afro-Swedish community at large and, in so doing, creates the possibility for policies that are not only attentive, but also responsive to the needs, grievances, interests, and desires of Afro-Swedes today.

Afro-Swedish Associational Life, Then and Now

On September 26, 2015, members of the Afro-Swedish community in Stockholm descend on Café Panafrika, the public headquarters and social hub of the National Union of Afro-Swedes (ASR). They have come to celebrate the group’s twenty-fifth anniversary.9 Tucked away in the basement of a quiet city street in the hip Södermalm district, the venue is bustling with activity. Adorning the fire engine red walls, a panoply of African visual art, masks, maps, and images of prominent diasporic figures, signifying a potent mix of pan-African solidarity, Black pride, civil rights struggle, and anti-colonial activism. In the air, the smell of East African cuisine. In our ears, the sounds of Mensahighlife’s Ghanaian Afropop. The mood is celebratory and festive. These are the sights, tastes, and sounds of the Black and African diaspora in Sweden. The meeting is called to order by one of ASR’s elders, founding member Mkyabela Sabuni. We take our seats in front of a small stage at the rear of the room. After a few short words of welcome and thanks to those in attendance, Sabuni begins to tell the story of the organization’s origins.

The group first came together, Sabuni explains, as the National Coalition for African Associations (Riksförbundet för Afrikanska Föreningar) in the late 1980s. Before that, he says, “the African associations were poorly oriented in Swedish society.” At this time, when many communities of African descent had begun to arrive and settle in Sweden (Sabuni’s family came to Sweden as refugees in the early 1980s from Zaire, via Burundi), a kind of “separate but equal” logic reigned. Newly arrived African groups organized by nation of origin, following dominant patterns of state-sponsored multiculturalism in Swedish civil society. Yet, many shared a common set of struggles and concerns in their new host country, including widespread discrimination in the job market and a generalized sense of social exclusion. Though terms like “Afrophobia” (afrofobi) were not yet part of the Afro-diasporic lexicon (Hübinette, Beshir, and Kawesa 2014), the source of such troubles was, to many, crystal clear. People of African descent “weren’t welcome anywhere at the time,” Sabuni says. As a “coalition of African associations,” members of this steadily growing group sought to find common ground in order to address collective issues, both as “Africans” and, significantly, as people racialized as “Black” in Sweden. Two years later, this diverse community gave themselves a new name, “Afro-Swedes” (afrosvenskar), and dubbed their organization Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund—not just a Coalition of African Associations, but a National Union of Afro-Swedes.

Behind the crowd, standing and listening intently, I notice a familiar face, Kitimbwa Sabuni. Kitimbwa is Mkyabela’s nephew and, at the time of the event, serves as the ASR’s public spokesperson. His is a name and face that many Swedes would recognize from the news, both onscreen and in print. For more than a decade, Kitimbwa has spoken out against what he and the ASR perceive to be clear-cut cases of anti-black racism and a persistent colonialist mentality in Swedish society. Prominent public efforts include protesting the display and circulation of Hervé’s Tintin in the Congo in public libraries in 2005 (see chapter 2); criticizing Western sanctions against Zimbabwe and highlighting ongoing neocolonial relations between Europe and Africa in 2008; demanding the resignation of the Minister of Culture following a highly controversial and racially charged performance by artist Makode Linde in 2012 (see chapter 6); filing charges against Stockholm Pride for the parade’s inclusion of blackface in 2013; and interrogating calls for tougher punishments for “honor” crimes, which in Sabuni’s view disproportionately affect communities burdened by histories of European colonialism, in 2017. In 2013, I made my first research trip to Café Panafrika to attend an event (a presentation and public discussion of Baker Karim’s “Black List,” about which more below) and interview the younger Sabuni.

“I have been working with the ASR since I was a teenager,” Kitimbwa, who is now in his forties, tells me.10 “I was raised in the movement, seen it develop.” Like his uncle, Kitimbwa is critical of the way conceptions of “nation” and “culture” have impeded the community’s nascent coalitional politics. “The Afro-Swedish movement is not about culture, like the ‘Senegalese’ or ‘Eritrean’ associations,” he explains. “What an ‘Afro-Swedish’ subject position represents is a political struggle.” Such a position does not exclude “hyphenated” cultural affiliations (like “Senegalese-Swedish”), “but it does,” he insists, “reflect a political position given to those who share a specific social, cultural, and economic condition because of their common background, because of their skin color.” For Kitimbwa, crucially, an Afro-Swedish identity interrogates as it reimagines political subjectivity in Sweden; it is the sign of a racially conscious politics that insists on social justice. “An Afro-Swedish politics does not refer to the cultural diversity of Africa and its diaspora,” he says. “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.” While the ASR does operate in many ways like a traditional “ethnic” (“cultural” or “national”) association, through the organization of social events featuring food, music, and opportunities to socialize, for example, it has also made “a strategic choice” to “be part of public conversations about racism and socioeconomic justice, with particular regard to an Afro-Swedish perspective.” It is an Afro-diasporic organization for which the contemporary politics of race in Sweden is focal.

Back at the ASR’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, a group of younger Afro-Swedes takes the stage following Mkyabela Sabuni’s oral history to discuss the state of African and Black coalitional politics in Sweden today. Fanna Ndow Norrby is a freelance writer and founder of the Instagram account svart Kvinna (Black Woman), which is also the title of a book she has edited (discussed in chapter 4). Araia Ghirmai Sebhatu is cofounder of another social media site for Afro-diasporic Swedes, Black Coffee. And Beatrice Kindembe is a member of the ASR’s board whose public work focuses on perceptions and representations of “Africa” and people of African descent in Swedish society. Their conversation begins with a constructive debate about language and identity. Fanna “didn’t grow up with” terms like “Afro-Swedish” (afrosvensk), preferring the term svart (Black), which she finds usefully provocative in Swedish society. An ASR member, serving as the panel’s moderator, agrees: “When we say ‘Black,’ whiteness becomes more apparent.” Beatrice thinks the term “Afro-Swedish” is well-established and argues for a more inclusive “African” identity in Sweden. Araia argues, as ever, for the term “African-Swedish” (afrikansvensk), which he feels addresses the community’s predominant roots in the African continent. Other modes of language are discussed as well, such as the use and value of apparently “academic” terms like rasifiering (racialization) and intersektionalitet (intersectionality). “We need words to describe our experiences,” Fanna argues. “But,” Beatrice cautions, “some words are inclusive, while others may exclude.”

A particularly heated discussion centers on the nature and scope of coalitional politics in the community and the various modalities of diasporic engagement. “We need safe spaces,” Araia argues, “places where we can organize, where whiteness can’t take over.” “Just having places to talk is very important,” Fanna adds. The panel moderator concurs. “Separate spaces are needed,” but, this person wonders, “do they end up being ‘all talk and no action’?” The emphasis on separatism worries Beatrice, who stresses the need to work through established social resources and networks. “There is a need for allies to achieve real political change,” she argues. From the audience, there is another question about the nature and scope of Afro-diasporic politics in Sweden. “The struggle has become a local question,” this person suggests, “but in the past it was global. How will the ASR contribute to a broader, transnational anti-racist and anti-colonial politics?” Araia is first to respond: “We need to pursue these issues here, in our own context.” “These are local questions,” Fanna adds, “but they have much in common with other countries in Europe.” Beatrice sees a need to “build bridges with Africa” and wonders out loud: “How much do Swedes actually know about countries in Africa?” (As we will observe in the next case, such institutional “bridge-building” between Africa and Europe represents a crucial aspect of diasporic politics in Sweden today.)

The two main narratives present at the ASR’s twenty-fifth anniversary event—Mkyabela’s history of the organization and the community it represents and the younger generation’s panel discussion about identity and politics—highlight both the overarching argument of this book about diasporic practice and this chapter’s particular concern for what such practices have to say about politics in Sweden today. In the voices of those present, we hear both a call to remember and arguments for renaissance. We encounter a history that anchors this diasporic community in the associational life of its recent past, and a debate about what forms that community should take, what its modes of identification should signify, and where and to whom its politics should be addressed, now and in the future. Such efforts to cohere and redistribute diasporic identity are not, as I have suggested, mutually exclusive or discursively opposed; rather, they are indicative of the dialectic and dialogic patterns by which diasporas (re)constitute and mobilize their communities in the present, by recollecting the past as they reimagine the future (Wright 2004). As a politics, such diasporic work suggests two crucial positions among African-descended Swedes today: (1) that the Black and African diaspora is firmly rooted in the associational life (föreningsliv) of Swedish society, with an active coalitional presence that spans generations; and (2) that robust and vigorous dialogue and debate about the contours, expressions, and politics of the community is fundamental to its current practice of diaspora (Edwards 2003). As such, Afro-Swedish politics, as embodied and expressed by organizations like the ASR, is always and already both grounded and generative, or, as Paul Gilroy (1993) has pithily phrased it, “rooted and routed” (see also Sawyer 2002). In the following case, we will consider the roots and routes of another diasporic organization in Sweden, whose work at home and abroad—in Sweden and Africa—suggests a different model for what the associational life of African-descended Swedes might look and sound like—a model that foregoes the sometimes-contentious politics of race in favor of a more robust but also more subtle transnational politics of culture.

A Cultural Politics of Diaspora

Over the past seventeen years, the arts organization Selam has worked—through myriad concerts, workshops, seminars, recordings, festivals, and tours—to advocate for a more diverse, inclusive, and artful civil society. Selam began as a working group within the Swedish Society for Folk Music and Dance (Riksföreningen för Folkmusik och Dans) in 1997 to promote and produce high-quality “global” culture on the best stages in Sweden. In 1999, Selam was established as a nonprofit organization and began operating independently of Sweden’s National Concert Society (Rikskonserter) in 2002.11 By this time, Selam had made a name for itself as a rooted and respected advocate for the multicultural performing arts, particularly the music and dance of Africa and its diasporas, which they showcased at an annual “Africa Festival” in Stockholm from 2000 to 2011. In 2004, Selam began to collaborate with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, or SIDA, to establish partnerships and develop projects within the East African culture sector. In 2005, Selam was registered as a nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia, and in 2008, the group opened a regional office in Addis Ababa. Another African office was opened in Kampala, Uganda, in 2011. Today, Selam is as invested and engaged in cultural production in Sweden as it is in cultural development in Africa. Or, as Selam production manager Johan Egerbladh Eurenius puts it to me, “If someone asks the question of what Selam does, it’s not possible to talk about what we do in Sweden without talking about what we’re doing in Africa as well.”12

We might call Selam’s domestic project, paraphrasing Partha Chatterjee (2004, 76), “a cultural politics of the governed,” in which “the functions of governmentality,” exemplified by Sweden’s domestic public arts sector, “can create conditions not for a contraction but rather an expansion of democratic political participation.” Such a formulation resonates with Selam’s international work as well but does not fully account for the particular sociopolitical context or historical conditions that these cultural interventions abroad entail. That is, in Africa, it is not so much the “functions of governmentality” Selam mobilizes, but those of nongovernmentality, in which NGOs, as historian Gregory Mann and anthropologist Charles Piot have recently argued, assume functions of the state to produce “new forms of governmental rationality” (Mann 2015, 2) in “a world of postnational sovereignty” (Piot 2010, 75). These two modes of institutional agency—the governmental and nongovernmental—implicate distinct stakeholders and areas of intervention (the keywords are “taxpayers” and “diversity” in Sweden, and “rightsholders” and “infrastructure” in Africa), which produce apparently divergent understandings of what public culture is, or should be: present if incompletely “diverse” and “accessible” at home, and potential though endemically “impoverished” and “underdeveloped” abroad. Yet, Selam’s uniquely diasporic and implicitly “Afro-Swedish” ethos and praxis challenge such facile North/South dichotomies and raises important questions about the nature and scope of their cultural labor, at home in Sweden and Africa.

Two principles guide Selam’s approach to cultural politics and production in Sweden: cultural equity and representative public culture. The first principle is neatly summed by Teshome Wondimu, Selam’s founder and executive director (whom we met in the previous chapter): “If you live and work in Sweden and pay taxes, then you should be able to reclaim your culture money in the form of a diverse range of cultural events.”13 “Culture money” (kulturpengar) is a term that comes up a lot when asking Selam’s Stockholm personnel about what it is they do in Sweden. It refers to tax revenues earmarked for the arts (for education, museums, heritage, visual culture, music, theater, and dance), which in 2013 (a representative fiscal period for my work and study with Selam, 2012–15) amounted to 25 billion Swedish kronor (then, about $4 billion). In Sweden, public funding for the arts is allocated at three levels: state, regional, and municipal. In 2013, arts expenditures were 44 percent state, 41 percent regional, and 15 percent municipal, reflecting more general trends toward decentralization over the past quarter century.14 In practice, independent nonprofit organizations like Selam apply for funding at all three levels to finance their operations. In 2013, more than 80 percent of Selam’s budget came from public sources, though only half of that amount derived from the public arts sector. As Selam has learned well in recent years, “culture money” (kulturpengar) must be increasingly supplemented with “development money” (biståndspengar), about which more shortly.

For the second principle (“representative public culture”), one could begin with the following mission statement, taken from Selam’s 2001 annual report: “Today Sweden is characterized by a diversity of culture that should be reflected at all levels and in all areas of society; particularly music and dance, which make up a large part of public cultural offerings.” Add to this a rallying cry from the 2002 annual report, and the point is made clear: “[Sweden’s minority communities] have just as much right to the public sphere as all others; for them to see their own highly valued cultural forms presented at established venues sends a message of acceptance and equality from society.” Johan at Selam’s Stockholm office evocatively captures these two principles of equity and representation with the following anecdote and argument: “Ever since I was young, I have attended events in [Stockholm suburbs] Akala and Husby and seen some awesome acts in public school gymnasiums. But why aren’t they playing at the best venues? What do Swedish taxpayers get back in the form of public culture? [We have a] responsibility to redistribute those cultural funds, to show not just how the world looks, but how Sweden looks.”

As in Sweden, we can identify two main principles that guide Selam’s work in Africa: sustainable development and local advocacy. More implicitly, but no less importantly, one might add a third, diasporic sensibility, that strongly if implicitly informs Selam’s cultural labor in both Sweden and Africa. But it is a consistent emphasis on cultural “infrastructure” that sets the tone for Selam’s work in Africa. According to Teshome Wondimu, material and human resources are broadly lacking in emerging African culture economies, which require, in his words, “new tools, new competencies, functional facilities, strengthened policies, highly trained experts at all levels, not only the state and NGOs, but also in education, special interest groups, [and] the commercial sector [in order to] create the possibility to work and grow together.” Sustainable development is, in other words, a necessarily deferred effect of long-term social and material investment, on which Selam stakes its identity—and legitimacy—as a productive nongovernmental actor in Africa today.

The second principle, advocating for the rights of local actors in African culture economies, strikes a powerful developmentalist chord but is difficult to achieve in practice. One challenge is determining which “rights” to pursue and support within a given community. Selam struggles with what project coordinator Emma Emitslöf calls the “instrumentalization” of nongovernmental work, in which donor agencies like SIDA set the terms of transnational cultural engagement.15 For example, SIDA’s Department of Democracy and Human Rights has sponsored one of Selam’s many recent projects in Africa, “Culture for Democracy.” Working with film, music, and copyright institutions in nine countries, Selam emphasizes the project’s “pan-African” scope and sociocultural significance, supporting and strengthening infrastructures and policies through the arts and throughout the continent, but to its donors the salient themes are “democracy,” “human rights,” and “freedom of speech.” Of course, such goals are not mutually exclusive, but balancing Selam’s commitment to local and regional art worlds and cultural solidarities with the rarified sociopolitical agendas of its backers is challenging. Another struggle is the constant need to justify the arts within the development sector. In 2009, SIDA dissolved its Department of Culture and Media, a move that further intensified the nongovernmental instrumentalization of culture by requiring that the arts address more pressing developmental needs, tethered to politics and the economy.

A more fundamental problem of nongovernmental intervention of any kind is the displacement of previously established domestic social welfare programs onto myriad, mostly foreign and inconsistently present agencies and interest groups (Mann 2015). Confronted with this issue, and conscious of its challenges, Selam’s work suggests a third principle, diasporic solidarity, of which Executive Director Teshome Wondimu is clearly the embodiment. “That was another dream when I founded Selam,” Teshome tells me. “My own background is in Africa, in Ethiopia. I have always wanted to give back to my country. That’s the dream of many, not just me, especially those who arrived as adults. They want to go home. But I have always accepted that Sweden is also my country, and, here too, I want to share my experience.”16 “One of the strengths of Selam working with development funds is clearly Teshome’s background,” Johan adds. “What’s special about our organization is that we have offices both in Sweden and Addis. At our office in Ethiopia, we have seven full-time employees. That’s Selam Ethiopia. We’re also a local actor thanks to Teshome’s background in the country. We’ve got the language. We know the social codes. It gives us another kind of legitimacy.” In this sense, the developmental model Selam proposes is less “Eurafrican,” the idea that postwar European integration and growth should be supported by the material exploitation of its former African colonies (Hansen and Jansson 2015), than it is “Afropean,” emerging from a permanent Black and African presence in contemporary Europe (Pitts 2019).

It is this kind of diasporic art world that Selam envisions through its production of public culture on stages, behind the scenes, and in studios across Africa and Sweden today. But what Selam aspires to is less a radically new mode of transnational sovereignty than an incremental transformation of existing cultural political institutions. “There are two options,” Teshome explains, “adapt to the current political climate, or work for political change, but that is not always easy to accomplish.” Selam remains embedded in and must work through the structures and functions of governmentality and nongovernmentality to pursue and realize its cultural and political agendas. Moreover, Selam’s domestic “culture” and international “development” funds still flow from European (and mostly Swedish) sources to finance the organization’s local and global projects. This may be a progressive politics of “redistribution,” benefiting subaltern communities in Sweden and Africa alike, but it also risks reproducing extant center–periphery dependencies, both within Sweden and vis-à-vis Africa. Nonetheless, the transnational cultural politics for which Selam advocates does signal a shift, however slight, in the geopolitical order of things. Theirs is a politics of culture that actively seeks to bridge the gap between domestic multiculturalism and international development. They do so by claiming their right to public resources as “taxpaying citizens” and by wielding the instruments of the state bureaucracy to radically expand the notion of community that Swedish cultural policy imagines, serving constituencies that blur the boundary between Europe and Africa. For Selam members, it is this nexus of rights and responsibilities that defines their politics of diaspora. Theirs is a doubly conscious model of diasporic engagement that has paved the way for other culture brokers and entrepreneurs in the Afro-Swedish community, as the following two cases demonstrate.

Race and Diaspora through the Looking Glass

Cecilia Gärding’s Afro-Swedish roots run deep. Her parents met in Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the early 1970s. Her Swedish father worked for a Christian mission and taught French in a rural village. Her South African mother was the district nurse on a health and sanitation assignment with Oxfam. He was an idealist, living abroad as a volunteer teacher. She was an activist, living in exile from the apartheid state. “It was not the typical ‘poor Black woman meets a white rich man’ story,” Cecilia tells me. “My father was a hippie in the forest. And my mother had her own driver.”17 Cecilia’s own life story seems to have been shaped in equal parts by her father’s idealism and her mother’s activism. As a young adult, Cecilia pursued a career as a musician, singing in a group with her brother, while studying political science at Umeå University in northern Sweden. “I had one foot in music, and the other in academics,” she explains. “I’ve always had this mishmash of these two worlds.” Later, Cecilia’s music would land her a record contract, while her studies got her a job with the Justice Department in the Swedish government. She found herself at a crossroads: “I nearly said, ‘Okay, no more artistry. Now I’m a grown-up.’” But then other cultural and political vistas came into view. In 2007, Cecilia was invited to a meeting with Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund. “That was the first time I heard the term ‘Afro-Swedish,’” she explains. At the time, the ASR was working on a project to raise awareness about Sweden’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. “That was my first encounter with the majority society’s silencing of the truth.” For Cecilia, the slave trade project was a revelation: “That was also the first time I heard that Sweden participated in the slave trade. And I am a political scientist! I studied Swedish history, Swedish politics. And I had never heard about that at the university. And I was thinking, ‘Now this can’t be true!’ But then I started reading up, and I thought, ‘How can this happen? How can we not teach this to our children?’ And that became part of my passion, to tell the truth.” This felt like an opportunity to bring her interests in the performing arts and social justice together. “I realized that culture and politics go hand in hand,” Cecilia says. When her job at the Justice Department ended after only a year, she decided to strike out on her own. “I realized that I was going to be an entrepreneur, and that I’m not going to look for work anymore. I’m going to find it myself. That’s where my journey started, doing projects.”

As a person of mixed racial heritage growing up in the north of Sweden, Cecilia certainly had her fair share of “truths” to tell about race and racism. A professor of ethnology at the university she attended once told her, “Oh, it’s fine. It doesn’t show!”—the “it” being Cecilia’s “race,” as crudely signified by her hair and skin. Others would say, surprised by her parentage, “Oh! So, you’re not totally Swedish?” “I think it has to do with different factors,” she explains, reflecting on the ingrained assumptions such statements encode: “How we narrate our past. How we talk about colonialism, and the Swedish slave trade. Migration is part of the human experience. It’s not something only third world countries do. They [Swedish people] also go to Africa, but we don’t see ourselves as being immigrants, or part of a diasporic community. And I think that is why they [Swedes] have a problem with you being Swedish, talking very good Swedish, being smart, having a degree, because then you’re a threat.” “Diaspora,” in other words, represents an immediate challenge to normative—that is, unmarked and unqualified—notions of social and cultural belonging. Notice how Cecilia refers to “Swedish people” as both “they” and “we,” or to people of color in the second person (here, both plural and singular) as the indirect object of “they” in the phrase “why they have a problem with you being Swedish” (my emphasis). This is the ambivalent, pronominal grammar of a doubly conscious racial politics. The uncanny presence of other “Swedes”—“You’re not totally Swedish?”—threatens to diminish or dilute national identity in specifically racial terms, and requires either evasive incorporation—“It doesn’t show!”—or extensive exclusion, if “it” shows too much. It is thus unsurprising that Cecilia’s creative and critical projects have woven her Afro-Swedish perspective and experiences together with those of others, employing the first-person plural (“we”) to mobilize a coalitional politics of race and diaspora in Sweden today.

“It started off with the book, doing these creative writing courses together with youth from Umeå and Stockholm.” Building on her work with the ASR, and with funding from Allmänna Arvsfonden (Swedish Public Heritage Fund), Cecilia recruited twenty-five Afro-Swedish high school students to take part in an after-school creative writing program in Umeå. The goal was to write a book about what it means to be a young person of African descent in contemporary Sweden. But the more immediate effect was to create a space in which these young people could give voice to their experiences, concerns, hardships, and aspirations. “It gave them a chance to heal from traumatic experiences,” Cecilia explains. “[Everyone] had at least one story about how they had been racially abused.” For many, it was also the first time that a representative of Swedish civil society had taken the time to listen to them: “It’s totally ingrained, this attitude in Swedish society, that does not accept these young people and their life experiences.” No less important was the opportunity to listen to each other. “They are not used to hearing that their story is correct,” Cecilia observes. “Doing this project made them realize that they could rely on each other. Sharing common stories of racism, they’re not used to that.” As such, the project also provided a lesson in and forum for community development: a collective Afro-Swedishness born of being copresent, sharing, listening, grieving, and dreaming together. “This,” she insists, “is a part of the African diasporic experience.”

The book, Afrosvensk i det nya Sverige (Afro-Swedish in the New Sweden), was published in 2009. Edited by Gärding with short texts from participants in the creative writing program and produced in collaboration with the ASR and assisted by the Public Heritage Fund, the book is an exemplary product of Swedish associational life and a novel expression of a politics of race and diaspora—one of only a handful of texts that document the varied voices of a contemporary Afro-Swedish public (see also Stephens 2009). After its release, Cecilia wondered, “What’s next?” She found herself itching to return to an earlier passion: music. Cecilia approached friends and colleagues in Umeå’s regional arts community and asked, “Why can’t the story about being Afro-Swedish be on the opera stage?” Working with the same group of teens and with further support from the Public Heritage Fund, she organized a new set of courses and workshops to turn her first-time teenage authors into musical composers. “We offered two courses. One was in music production [and] lyric writing. And the second was a course at the Folk Opera.” Faculty from the Royal College of Music met with the local Afro-Swedish community to compare notes on Western art music and hip-hop. The popular (and largely Afro-Swedish) vocal group Panetoz and hip-hop artist Blues (Raymond Peroti) joined the project to contribute new musical material. Cecilia worked on the libretto. From these collaborative dialogues and exchanges, an Afro-Swedish opera emerged. The performance was a unique event. “Elderly ladies with purple hair [sat next] to hip-hop guys in their teens,” Cecilia recalls. Yet, despite its sold-out opening, the show was staged only once. “They were refurbishing the theater. I tried to convince others to pick up the piece, but it was so hard. Nobody wanted it.”

Undeterred, Cecilia reimagined the project yet again, this time as a film. Working with the same cohort of Afro-Swedish youth in Umeå, together with several dozen amateur and professional actors and a skeleton crew, Cecilia began work on Vi är som apelsiner (We Are Like Oranges). “It’s a modern, urban fairytale, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, set in an unknown city during an unknown period of time,” she explains. The film interrogates Sweden’s racial history by following an Afro-Swedish teen’s fantastic and troubling encounter with a high school history curriculum. In class, the young man (played by Jesper Eriksson) is thrust down the rabbit hole of race, racism, and white supremacy in Sweden. “In one scene, you meet Queen Christina, Gustav III, the people behind the Swedish slave trade. . . . [In another you see] former emigrants [from Sweden] meeting new immigrants to Sweden.” The story is didactic and hopeful. “I wanted to show that it is possible to survive,” Cecilia says, again noting the parallels with the Lewis Carroll classic: “For me, Alice is really about her entering a dream world to find herself. And to find her own power to say ‘no’ to being forced into a conservative society. It’s similar in the film. When [the protagonist] finally gets out of this crazy world, he brings a new sense of self [with him] at the other end. He finds his own voice.” Cecilia won the “Women Inspiring Europe” award from the European Institute for Gender Equality in 2014 for her work on Vi är som apelsiner, and the film won the Best Foreign Film award at the LA Femme International Film Festival the same year. But to date it has been screened only twice in Sweden. “What’s going on?” Cecilia wonders. “Here I’m not getting any attention, but there I can win the best foreign film!” Cecilia’s story is one of impressive success—imagining and developing Afro-Swedish stories in print, onstage, and onscreen—but also persistent struggle, revealing the very real obstacles to a racial and diasporic politics in Sweden: a willful disregard for Black and African artists and producers. “I think it has to do with stereotypes,” she says. “I don’t think I can move more mountains here, [and] it’s not like I’ve been hiding. It’s more that they don’t want to write about it. It’s a real shame.”

“I Never Wanted to Be a Swedish Spike Lee”

Baker Karim has devoted a good portion of the past decade to critically addressing these shameful “stereotypes” and pervasive institutional barriers, specifically those that constrain and inhibit the lives and work of Black filmmakers in Sweden. Yet, it took a long time before he would fully own this role. “I never wanted to be a Swedish Spike Lee,” he tells me.18 Since the late 1990s, Baker has made a name for himself as a director, writer, and producer of Swedish film and television. His loosely autobiographical television series Familjen Babajou (The Babajou Family), which tells the story of a Ugandan family’s struggle to settle into a middle-class life in 1980s Sweden, was the first program to feature a principally Afro-Swedish cast. Yet, Baker has long seen himself first and foremost as an artist, not an activist. “Speaking about racism was the last thing I wanted to do,” he explains, reflecting on his early career. “Because, to me, it was like blaming racism for your own mistakes or shortcomings. It was shameful to talk about racism.” Instead, he felt the strong pull of the Protestant ethic, in its current neoliberal guise: “You have to do better. You just have to work harder.” Only later did he realize that such “hard work” served, more often than not, to reproduce entrenched biases by affirming institutional patterns of behavior. “For me, the awakening came fairly late in life, when [members of the Afro-Swedish cultural organization] Tryck asked me, ‘Why didn’t you cast any Black people in [the 2003 television drama Swedenhielms]?’”19 At first, Baker was offended by the question: “To me, it was like, ‘Just because I’m Black doesn’t mean I should cast everything I do in black!’” But this was missing the point: “The question really was, ‘Why can’t you imagine a Black person in that context?’ And, to me, that was a game changer, artistically.”

Tryck (which in Swedish means “Push”) was one of the first arts organizations to bring to the fore issues of non-white representation in Swedish public culture. “These are the codes that we’re being taught. Racist codes. And, basically, if I follow them, I am being as much of a racist as anybody else.” When Baker began working on Familjen Babajou in 2006 he came face to face with those codes and the insidious effects they have on Black lives in Swedish cinema, on and off the screen: “The casting agent made every fucking mistake in the book!” There were roles to fill, including several parts for Black children: “We had small kids. Black kids. And they were trying on wigs, like Afros, and she was like, ‘Oh! The house is full of [n----]bullar!’” (The italicized word refers to popular chocolate cream confections that traditionally bear an anti-black epithet.) To this injury came an additional insult: “She couldn’t name one actress [in Sweden] who was Black. She couldn’t name me one!” Baker’s first meeting with Tryck, on the heels of Babajou’s release in 2009, helped him diagnose the structural issues at play on the set, even as it taught him an important—indeed, humbling—lesson: “I thought I was going to be praised for my work on the first Black TV-series. Instead, they asked me about Swedenhielms, which was set in 1929. I took offence and it took me a while to gather my senses enough to where I finally understood that they weren’t questioning whether or not I had cast a Black cast in a Classic of Swedish Theatre, but why I couldn’t IMAGINE doing it.”20 Tryck gave Baker the discursive tools necessary to recognize racism in both its personal and institutional guises and mobilize an industry-specific response. “Tryck taught me a lot,” he says.

This is when I first catch up to Baker’s story, during a presentation at Café Pan-Afrika in May 2013. He was there to discuss “The Black List,” a publication he produced together with Tryck, compiling the names of Black artists, producers, and culture brokers working in the Swedish art world. The point was simple: “Putting our foot down to say, ‘we exist. These people exist.’” Privately, Baker was concerned about the perception of separatism, about reifying the racial category “Black” in the public sphere, about an explicitly racial politics. “Obviously, nobody wants to be on a blacklist,” he says, laughing. “But,” he adds, “you will never have the perfect solution. . . . It’s all about managing imperfections.” At the time, though, Baker argued that the presence of such a list should not be confusing or contentious. But the pushback came quickly, in the form of ten thousand hate-filled emails from far-right internet trolls. “That was an eye-opener for me, that one can’t say something like that without being punished in Sweden. To say that Black people and other people of color should have the same opportunities is apparently controversial” (Hammar 2013). But it wasn’t the emails that bothered Baker as much as what he calls “the Swedish status quo”—that is, the pervasive illusion of social tolerance, equality, and justice, bound to the naïve notion of a common color-blind anti-racism (Lundström and Teitelbaum 2017). “A few rednecks don’t bother me,” he says. “On the other hand, it does bother me that people think that everything’s fine in Sweden” (Weibull 2013). “The Black List” was “meant to be a wake-up call, a reminder,” Baker tells me. He’s still not sure if anyone is actually listening.

I met up with Baker again in March 2016 at the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), where he was coming to the end of a four-year appointment as a feature film commissioner (långfilmkonsulent)—a position that made him one of the most visible and important culture brokers in Swedish cinema, and the art world more broadly. Yet, right from the start, Baker felt constrained, even typecast: “What happened was I got here, and everybody felt, ‘Well, Baker is Black. Everybody saw my Blackness.’ They said, ‘Baker is Black, so let’s send him a bunch of stuff that has Black people! Do we have anything with Black characters?’” Baker saw a clear pattern in the scripts he received: “There were scripts about people fleeing the country, needing help, starving, corruption. But as I read all of these scripts, which were just pouring over me, I realized that Swedish filmmakers have a myopic view of Black people. Ask the question, ‘Are we, in this country, able to write a script in which Black people are not seen as wanting help?’” For Baker, the question was not rhetorical. It was a call to action. In October 2014, Baker, empowered by his new position as an SFI commissioner, organized a conference and screenplay competition called “Black Is the New Black.” The idea was to bring filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, critics, and audiences together—at the institutional center of Swedish cinema—to discuss issues of racism and representation in Swedish film. Hundreds attended, including many from the Afro-Swedish community. Coming on the heels of “The Black List,” the event drew particular attention to the past and present reality of anti-black racism in the Swedish art world. In SFI’s words, “The goal of ‘Black Is the New Black’ is to foreground stories and perspectives that present a critique of the colonialist dramaturgy about Africa and its diaspora.” The winner of the screenplay competition, Mitt på mörka dan (In the Midst of the Dark Day), exemplified this goal. “An eye-opener for all those who still don’t know that Black people are human beings; that we have both everyday and exceptional lives; that we work, create, love, hate, struggle, study, laugh, crew, and just are,” the jury wrote (filminstitutet.se).

Baker’s politics of race and diaspora echoes and amplifies the work of his peers. Like Selam, Baker has leveraged the power of the public sector to make claims on the institutional spaces of the mainstream Swedish culture sector and mobilize resources therein to create a “norm-critical” (normkritisk) platform for artists on the sociocultural margins of society. Like the ASR, Baker’s work has drawn particular attention to the presence of people of African descent in Sweden, and the specific forms of anti-black racism they face. And, like Cecilia, Baker has been keen to maintain the momentum of this creative and critical work by following up with new state-sponsored initiatives and funding opportunities, with an eye toward a more inclusive intersectionality. In 2015, a second conference, “Beyond the New Black,” was organized, with the explicit goal of expanding the conversation to other modes of expressive culture (including theater, music, literature, visual art, and film) and to other “norm-creative” (normkreativ) voices in the Swedish art world, including those of women of color and queer artists: “It was an attempt to say, ‘Listen, let’s widen the scope. Let’s look at other issues. Not just Black issues.’” Along the same diversified lines, the SFI launched the Fusion group, “a film laboratory for research and development of new cinematic forms” (filmsinstitutet.se). Things were happening. Change seemed palpable. But at our meeting in 2016, Baker’s progressive mood had begun to sour: “We do have an influence, but we can’t do anything without the industry moving along with us, [and] what I’m seeing right now is we’re going the other way.” Again, the trouble of tokenism, in the form of a crude and superficial politics of “diversity” (mångfald), loomed large: “I think the paradox is that two, or three, or four films might seem like change. But the illusion of change needs those films.”

This cultural political sleight of hand suggests an intentional, institutional limit to the progressive, coalitional agendas of an Afro-Swedish and more broadly queer, feminist, and non-white politics. Despite the struggle to foster and promote differences that make a difference, artists and activists operating outside the cultural mainstream remain perpetually confronted by the fact that some people, in Baker’s words, “just want to go back to sleep.” This echoes the institutional headwinds Cecilia has faced in trying to promote her own literary, theatrical, and cinematic productions. In both cases, the sleepy status quo represents the path of least resistance, which the social, political, and economic structures of society powerfully incentivize. At the movies, Baker argues, it’s all about the box office: “Our system is rigged! People are now saying, ‘Listen, diversity was a good idea, but it really is the films with white male characters that bring in the big bucks.’” Baker wonders whether the interventions he has spearheaded to get Sweden to “where we want to be as a film nation” will have a lasting impact, or even matter at all. He is left with questions that are hard to swallow, and even harder to answer: “Is this for real? Did it actually mean something for real? Does it actually change stuff, or is it the appearance of change? What does change even look like? And how are we supposed to know when true change has come?”

The Precarity of Politics in Afro-Sweden

Vi finns inte! (We don’t exist!). These are the words that begin actor and musician Richard Sseruwagi’s public indictment of the contemporary Swedish art world, posted on social media (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) on May 26, 2017. The rest of the post is worth citing at length (translated from Swedish; italics indicate use of English in the original):

The Cannes Film Festival is happening now, TV and radio are talking about it nonstop. [Meanwhile,] a Swedish film—Medan vi lever [While We Live]—with a Black director and Black actors in the main roles has been nominated in seven categories by the African Movie Academy Awards (Africa [is the] second largest continent in the world) but not a word about it in the Swedish media!!!! This is our reality! People talk about building a society in which all are included. Thank you Sweden. YOU ARE DIGGING YOUR OWN GRAVE.

Released in October 2016, Medan vi lever appeared poised to make history. Like Baker Karim’s Familjen Babajou, the film tells a story rooted in Sweden’s African diaspora and features a cast drawn from the country’s Afro-diasporic community, both firsts in Swedish cinema. And it is the product of internationally acclaimed writer and director Dani Kouyaté, a French-trained native of Burkina Faso who lives and works in Sweden. Despite early enthusiasm surrounding the film’s release within the Afro-Swedish community, Medan vi lever was not widely distributed or publicized in Sweden following its premiere. Reviews in the mainstream Swedish press were limited and mixed. Only a handful of theaters screened the film (mostly in Stockholm), and only for a few weeks. When Richard Sseruwagi (who plays the role of Uncle Sekou in the film) posted his online critique—seven months after the film’s premiere—many Swedes I spoke to had yet to see the movie. Some hadn’t even heard of it.21

So, what happened? During his tenure as a feature film commissioner at the Swedish Film Institute, Baker Karim eagerly supported Medan vi lever, providing essential funding to ensure its final production. According to the film’s producers, Maria Guerpillon and Julien Siri, when Dani approached Baker with the script, he was immediately positive. “I think [Dani] had about one and a half sentences to explain the film,” Julien told me. “And then Baker said, ‘Yes!’” “We had never experienced that before,” Maria added.22 Once released, however, Swedish critics were less than enthusiastic. Some found the dialogue stilted and forced, with many of the characters (and the actors who portrayed them) speaking Swedish as a second language—a challenge, perhaps, for a mainstream Swedish audience unused to inflected speech. (My own survey of Afro-diasporic viewers suggests that language was not an issue for their community. In fact, many heard the particular accents of their own families and community in the voices of the actors.) Other critics found the storyline confusing and difficult to follow (kritiker.se). When I asked Maria and Julien about the latter criticism, they noted Dani’s peculiar approach to cinematic storytelling and aesthetics, which can verge on the surreal. “In Sweden we like social realism, so that creates some friction,” Maria explained. “Perhaps,” Julien added, “that is the difficultly when making a film with a different kind of narrative, from another culture, in another country, for a place like Sweden!” Richard Sseruwagi’s appraisal of the film’s critics took a harder line: “I’ve been here. I’ve been working as a professional here, in this country, for many years. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen when they don’t listen. When something is labeled ‘not Swedish,’ it is deemed not important.”23

Arguably, it took a humbling social media critique from an aggrieved actor and a signature victory at the African Movie Academy Awards in Lagos, Nigeria (Best Film by an African Living Abroad), for Medan vi lever to garner the robust critical attention it warrants in the Swedish media. But this is hardly a consolation for those, like Richard, whose lives and work only seem to matter when someone else, outside of Sweden, takes notice.24 “I am a Swedish citizen,” Richard tells me. “All of us, we are Swedish citizens. We belong to Sweden. This is a Swedish film for God’s sake!” I will have more to say about Medan vi lever, its narrative content, cinematic style, and Dani Kouyaté’s diasporic worldview in the next chapter. Here, I note Richard’s critique of what he perceives to be Swedish society’s willful ignorance of the Black arts—like Black lives more generally—as a sign of the ongoing urgency but also precarity of an Afro-Swedish politics of race and diaspora in Sweden today. “It’s a lesson to the Swedish society,” he explains. “That you can’t build a nation without letting the people in the nation be represented! Otherwise, there’s no nation. You can’t build a family if you reject your kids. It’s as simple as that!”

There are echoes, here, of Jason Diakité’s impassioned anti-racist plea before a gaggle of journalists and politicians at the Riksdag in December 2013. Like Jason, Richard felt compelled to speak out publicly, faced with what he perceived to be an existential threat to his being as a Black person in Sweden—or, as he framed it in our conversation, to his ability to be a full-fledged part of the Swedish national “family.” In Jason’s case, the immediate threat appeared clear and present, manifest in the meteoric rise of a far-right nationalist movement, which has actively targeted—vocally and physically—Black and Brown Swedes with its xenophobic animus. For Richard, the threat was more subtle but no less dangerous: “When I said vi finns inte, it wasn’t actually so much about the movie. It was about the [idea of] ‘us and them.’ That’s it. It means, all of us who look different from [the white Swedish norm], we are not here. Nobody sees us.” In his response to the far-right racism that politicized his presence at the Swedish parliament that day, Jason, passport in hand, performed a critique of the interrogative form such invisibilization takes in everyday life: “But where do you really come from?” On social media, Richard called out the dehumanizing effects of such apparently banal but profoundly injurious queries by exclaiming “We don’t exist!” Importantly, both Richard and Jason framed these affronts to their personhood—both as Swedes and human beings—not as personal offenses but as collective assaults. Both, through their gestures and words, made public claims to a politics of race and diaspora: to their right to have rights as people of African descent in Sweden today (Arendt 1951).

A Political Renaissance from the Bottom Up

This chapter began with Jason Diakité’s contentious appearance at the Riksdag but quickly left that rarefied locus of law and governance to consider the civic practices of a varied and vital civil society, and with good reason. As we have observed, the struggle for racial equality and justice in Sweden draws its vitality from grassroots community organization, from which a discernably if diversely constituted Afro-Swedish associational life now emerges, a political expression of what I have termed a “renaissance” of diasporic public culture. The maneuvers of the state are, from this bottom–up point of view, more often viewed as forces of constraint than vectors of possibility. As such, it is tempting, and not altogether inaccurate, to read Jason’s dramatic encounter with Swedish political society in dichotomous, racialized terms: as Black resistance to white supremacy. There he stands, Swedish passport held high, exhorting his audience of politicians and journalists to understand the dehumanizing effects of systemic racial prejudice—a lone Black man in a profoundly white room (Habel 2012; McEachrane 2014c). Indeed, this scene has become iconic of experiences shared by many people of color in Sweden today: of being “visibly different” and alone within any number of public spaces, and across all levels of society (from state agencies, classrooms, and workplaces, to coffee shops, restaurants, and parks), where being a person of color means, de facto, that you are not Swedish (Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2012). That the particular “room” in question is housed in the Swedish Riksdag, the seat of the national government, appears to deepen this divide between, as Richard puts it, “us and them”—that is, between a diverse and underrepresented (non-white) minority public and an “ethnically Swedish” (white) governing elite.

Subsequent case studies—from the organizational work of the ASR and Selam to the public sector cultural labor of Cecilia Gärding and Baker Karim—have examined the presence, projects, and activism of organizations and actors representing an important segment of this non-white public culture: an emergent Afro-Swedish civil society. As we have seen, their institutional and individual efforts to cultivate and showcase Africana culture and identity, raise racial awareness and consciousness, and promote social diversity and pluralism—a politics of race and diaspora—have contributed significantly to the wars of position and positionality that challenge quotidian and structural racisms in Sweden today. Afro-Swedish civil society is at the fore of a renaissance in Swedish politics, from the bottom up. But it’s a hard climb. Throughout this survey, “political society”—composed of policy makers, fiscal managers, administrators, and legal authorities (Gramsci 1972, 12)—has appeared in the abstract, and not infrequently as an antagonist. Simply put, political society is a systemic gatekeeper, comprising the agencies, institutions, and authorities to whom civic actors turn to lobby on behalf of their communities, solicit support for new initiatives, and apply for project funding. All too often, the subjects of Afro-Swedish associational life find this gate only occasionally open to them—or, as in Jason’s case, they are actively threatened at its doorstep. While such encounters do reinforce a sense of “us versus them,” there are signs that “they” are, in small but important ways, becoming more inclusive of minority positions and positionalities, including Swedes of African descent.

Coda: Toward an Afro-Swedish Political Society

As a bookend to the foregoing discussion, I would like to briefly gesture toward a modest but no less significant group of African-descended politicians in the Riksdag, whose place and agency within contemporary Swedish political society suggest another front in the politics of race and diaspora in Sweden today. Theirs is a “struggle against racism” that is not only “a struggle against the state,” as Paul Gilroy ([1987] 1992, 29) observes, but within the state as well, from the same halls and chambers where Jason staged his December 2013 protest. It is a struggle for what Michael McEachrane (2014c) has called an “equality zone” or “a political and civil society framework that could serve to deracialize Nordic and other European states” (88, emphasis in the original) and promote “a social order that honors the equal moral worth of all” (105). Importantly, each of these governmental figures has made significant contributions to the diasporic associational life of Swedish civil society, with many getting their start in grassroots anti-racist campaigns and organizations. Historically, one discerns two distinct waves of Afro-Swedish politicians at the national level, whom I gloss here as the “pioneers” and “innovators.” (An imperfect division to be sure, as pathbreakers challenge the status quo in both camps. However, the moments and movements they represent are distinct enough to warrant particular consideration.) The pioneers arrived in parliament at the outset of the current century, in the wake of robust “anti-racist” campaigns that spread across Swedish civil society in the 1990s, a decade marred by striking episodes of anti–brown and black racial violence (see, e.g., Tamas 2002). The innovators’ careers have taken shape only in the past decade and are characterized by an intersectional approach to politics, combining anti-racist politics with environmentalism, feminism, working-class solidarity, and a more explicitly Afro-diasporic politics of identity. Like their pioneering forebears in the late 1990s, the innovators’ political emergence appears alongside a resurgent white supremacy, which has become increasingly mainstream in Swedish society (Teitelbaum 2017), civil and political alike.

In 2002, three Black politicians made history with their election to parliament—Social Democrats Joe Frans and Mariam Osman Sherifay and Folk Party (now Liberal) politician Nyamko Sabuni—becoming the pioneers of Afro-Swedish political society (McEachrane 2012). Joe Frans came to Sweden as an exchange student in 1980 from Ghana. In the mid-1990s, he played a formative role in launching the organization Ungdom mot Rasism (Youth against Racism), an important nonprofit advocate for social justice and inclusion in Sweden (ungdommotrasism.se). As a parliamentarian, Frans helped establish the Martin Luther King Prize in 2004, bringing communities of faith and secular political organizations together to recognize individuals working for peace, solidarity, tolerance, and social justice in the world (martinlutherking.se). Recipients of the prize have included Jason Diakité (2010) and fellow Social Democratic politician Mariam Osman Sherify (2009). Born in Cairo to Eritrean and Egyptian parents, Sherifay migrated to Sweden when she was twenty-one years old in 1975. As a politician, Sherifay has worked closely with the ASR on questions of socioeconomic discrimination, particularly those affecting communities of North African descent in Sweden. From 2009 to 2013, she served as chair of the Centrum Mot Rasism (Center against Racism), a prominent anti-racist advocacy group (centrummotrasism.nu).

Nyamko Sabuni stands out within this cohort of Afro-Swedish politicians as the sole representative situated on the right of the Swedish political spectrum. Like her pioneering peers, she dates her political awakening to the violent racism and xenophobia of the 1990s, specifically to the 1995 murder of Gerard Gbeyo, an Ivorian asylum seeker stabbed to death by a pair of neo-Nazi assailants (Sabuni 2011; Wigerfelt and Wigerfelt 2001). Like Frans and Sherifay, she also got her start in the anti-racist associational life of Swedish civil society. Together with her uncle, Mkyabela, and younger brother, Kitimbwa, Sabuni helped to establish the ASR in the early 1990s. Unlike her colleagues and relatives, however, Sabuni’s approach to the problem of societal racism suggests more socially conservative instincts. Since entering parliament in 2002, Sabuni has promoted policies that strongly emphasize the “integration” of foreign-born populations. At times, this has meant taking a hard line against practices deemed anathema to “Swedish culture,” in ways that could be construed as Islamophobic. Thus, she has opposed public funding for religious schools, advocated for a ban on the hijab for girls under the age of fifteen, called for mandatory gynecological exams in middle school to combat female genital mutilation, and denounced patriarchal “honor cultures” (Sabuni 2006; for a contemporary critique on these policies, see Lillman 2006). Still, an anti-racism born of Afro-diasporic solidarity remains discernable in her political profile. When a group of Lund University students, adorned in blackface, staged a mock slave auction in 2011, Sabuni published an open letter to African American civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, who had come to Sweden to protest the event. She opens the letter with a gesture of racial solidarity—“I write to you as an Afro-Swede to an Afro-American”—and cautiously notes the pitfalls of Sweden’s color-blind public discourse: “It’s easy to be blind to one’s flaws at home.” Invoking the shared memory of the African American civil rights movement, Sabuni affirms that “racism must be acknowledged, recognized, and contested all the time, by each new generation.” (Sabuni 2011). In 2006, Sabuni made history by becoming the first Afro-Swedish cabinet member, serving as minister of integration (2006–10) and gender equality (2006–13). In July 2019, she was elected party leader of the Liberals, another pathbreaking first, though recent overtures to the Sweden Democrats, appealing to a harder line on immigration, have drawn critical attention to her leadership from within the party itself (Westin and Karlsson 2021).

In September 2014, when the center–right Alliance government (composed of the Moderates, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Center Party) lost power to a center–left Red–Green coalition (a union of the Social Democrats and Green Party)—in no small part, because the far-right Sweden Democrats took nearly 13 percent of the vote—a new cohort of Afro-Swedish politicians emerged, whom I call the “innovators.” Their innovation lies in a new way of speaking about race in Swedish political society, one that is critical of the notion of a post-racial or color-blind society, intersectional in its diagnosis of social injustice, and conscious of an ascendant and increasingly mainstream white supremacy. Alice Bah Kuhnke entered the new cabinet as minister of culture in 2014. Previously, she had been known as a media personality, and as one of the few non-white faces seen on Swedish television in the 1990s. A member of the environmentalist Greens, Kuhnke’s politics are explicitly feminist and adamantly opposed to the xenophobic nationalism of parties like the Sweden Democrats. I first encountered Kuhnke in October 2015, at an event in Malmö commemorating the October 9, 1847, abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in Sweden, where she spoke about the need to formally acknowledge and combat racially motived hate crimes in Sweden (Dumbuya 2015). The event, highlighting the enduring history of anti-black racism in Swedish society, was organized by Afrosvenskarnas Forum för Rättvisa (Pan-African Movement for Justice, henceforth AFR). Similar to the Stockholm-based ASR, the AFR is a non-profit Afro-Swedish community advocacy group, serving diasporic constituencies throughout Sweden (afrosvenskaforum.org). The public face of the AFR is Momodou Malcolm Jallow, an anti-racist activist based in Malmö, who, like Kuhnke, has familial roots in the Gambia. A longtime human rights advocate and community organizer, Jallow entered politics in the wake of the 2011 mock slave auction in neighboring Lund (the same event that prompted Nyamko Sabuni’s open letter), joining the Vänster (Left) party (Darnéus 2014). There, he coupled his campaign against anti-black racism with the Left’s socialist ideals and working-class solidarities. In 2014, Jallow was elected to the Malmö city council. In 2017, he became a member of parliament, replacing an outgoing colleague. Since 2011, Jallow has also served on the board of the European Network against Racism in Sweden. In 2018, he was elected to a four-year term as an MP. That same year, Kuhnke left her cabinet position to successfully stand for the 2019 European parliamentary elections. Both Kuhnke and Jallow remain committed to a diasporic—that is, a non-nativist and socially inclusive—politics grounded in intersectional anti-racist policies, in Sweden and throughout Europe (Thompson 2018; Chander 2019).

Among the innovators, I would like to single out a figure who was omnipresent during the year I spent in Sweden conducting research for this book (2015–16), the Ugandan-Swedish activist, scholar, and politician Victoria Kawesa. I first encountered Kawesa at a public lecture in Stockholm in October 2015. In front of a crowd of roughly 150 people, Kawesa spoke on the subject of afrofobi (Afrophobia), which she defines as “the specific form of discrimination to which Afro-Swedes are subjected.”25 The term’s increasingly widespread use in Swedish discourse about “race” today is due in no small part to Kawesa’s public outreach and activism. Like her peers, Kawesa got her start in civil society, working with both the ASR and Centrum Mot Rasism. Together with Kitimbwa Sabuni, she encouraged the latter group to add “Afrophobia” to its organizational statutes in 2006. In 2007, Kawesa cowrote a report for the Equality Ombudsman (Diskriminerings Ombudsmannen) titled To Be Colored by Sweden: Experiences of Discrimination and Racism among Youth with African Backgrounds in Sweden,26 one of the first texts written from the perspective of African-descended Swedes, addressing their existential concerns (Kalonaityté, Kawesa, and Tedros 2007). Partly as a result of this work, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande Rådet) began collecting data on “Afrophobic hate crimes” in 2008 (bra.se). These statistics would prompt the center–right Alliance government to request a specific report on Afrophobia and its social effects, which Kawesa also coauthored (Hübinette, Beshir, and Kawesa 2014).

To her audience in Stockholm, Kawesa says, “This is not just a lecture, this is a struggle.” For Kawesa, the struggle against Afrophobia is inseparable from the struggle for gender equality (Kawesa 2015). Her work as a public intellectual has consistently drawn attention to the status and identity of gendered and racialized bodies in Swedish society (Bergstedt 2016). In 2014, Kawesa joined the Swedish political party Feminist Initiative (FI), serving as the “anti-racism spokesperson,” while pursuing a doctorate in gender studies at Linköping University. In March 2017, Kawesa was named party leader of FI, together with leftist political stalwart Gudrun Schyman. Kawesa would step down, however, six months later, citing “circumstances in her private life” (Andersson 2017). While Kawesa did not ultimately go on to serve in parliament, she did make history by becoming the first Black leader of a major political party in Sweden. Moreover, her ideas—documented in numerous reports, essays, and editorials—continue to resonate, inspiring others to pursue what she calls “feminist antiracist intersectional analyses.” Alongside fellow innovators Kuhnke and Jallow, and in the footsteps of her pioneering forebears, Kawesa has helped cultivate an emergent Afro-Swedish presence in government, bringing the politics of race and diaspora to the fore of Swedish political society. As she told her audience in Stockholm in October 2015, “Our time is now.”