A Note on Orthography

In this book, I have chosen to capitalize the English terms “Black” and “Blackness” throughout. There has been a fair amount of recent critical conversation on this among copy editors, but also within (and beyond) the African American community in the United States (see, e.g., Appiah 2020; Craven 2020; Eligon 2020; Laws 2020). While these discussions and debates do inform my decision to capitalize these terms of Africana being and belonging, I am also appealing to a rationale rooted in Sweden’s contemporary Black and African diaspora. Specifically, I capitalize “Black/ness” in order to (1) signal the sense of social solidarity and political community that is discursively manifest among people of African descent in Sweden today and to (2) indicate a symbolic but no less real articulation between the Afro-Swedish community and the wider African world. I do not, however, capitalize “black” when it refers solely to color, or to color-coded terms of racial prejudice, such as “anti-black racism” or “anti-blackness.” Likewise, apart from a bibliographic reference, I do not reproduce the n-word in writing, in Swedish or English, understanding these terms to be discursive forms of anti-black violence. Readers may note that Swedish terms of Afro-diasporic identification (svart, Black; svarthet, Blackness; afrikansvensk, African-Swedish; afrosvensk, Afro-Swedish) are not capitalized. This is for the simple reason that to do so would be ungrammatical. In the Swedish language, all nouns and adjectives denoting modes of identification—whether racial, ethnic, national, religious, political, or otherwise—are uncapitalized, except when they appear at the outset of a sentence. Moreover, I am currently unaware of any alternate spelling conventions that contravene the rules governing capitalization in standard Swedish with regard to self-consciously racialized identities (e.g., “Afro-Swedish”).

Importantly, I have chosen to not capitalize the English terms “white” and “whiteness” in this book. This decision may strike some readers as discrepant, or even problematic, but my choice is motivated by salient sociolinguistic concerns. In contemporary Sweden, I understand “whiteness” to be primarily a condition of ideological hegemony and socioeconomic privilege rather than a distinct cultural formation or social identity. “Whiteness,” as James Baldwin (2011, 158) once said, “is a metaphor for power.” Of course, many do perceive Swedes to be eminently “white” (vit), and it is certainly true that white supremacists (in Sweden, as elsewhere) understand a “White” identity to be unique and uniquely hegemonic. Yet, beyond the explicitly racialist rhetoric of the far-right, it is also true that “whiteness” (vithet) frequently conflates with national identity in Sweden (McEachrane 2014c; Lundström 2019), as elsewhere in Europe (Wekker 2016; Beaman 2019). Thus, to nominally distinguish an uppercase “White” identity from a “Swedish” subject position does not make much sense. “Whiteness” is implicit to a normatively “Swedish” sense of self. For many in Sweden today to be “Swedish” is to be “white,” and, likewise, to be “non-white” (icke vit) is to be “non-Swedish,” or in common parlance a “foreigner” (främling). This is true of the Nordic world more generally, as Catrin Lundström and Benjamin Teitelbaum observe (2017, 151; see also Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2016). Put differently, whiteness is the ontological condition of national identity in Sweden today (see, e.g., Tesfahuney 2005; Habel 2008; Hübinette and Lundström 2011, 2014; Werner 2014), which is why struggles over inclusion and integration are most often fought on the lexical terrain of “Swedishness” (svenskhet). Given the high stakes of this discursive field, in which the semiotics of naming is a matter of national being and belonging, this book may be read as a robust Afro-Swedish counterpoint to the normative whiteness of a mainstream Swedish identity.