In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country, Ryan Skinner explores the diverse voices and experiences of the African and Black diaspora in Sweden. The book not only shows the pervasive nature of white supremacy in Swedish society but also pays testimony to the richness of Afro-Swedish life, writes Sofie Gregersen.

Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country. Ryan Skinner. University of Minnesota Press. 2022.

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In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country, Ryan Skinner explores Afro-Swedish life in all its diverse forms and expressions: the resistance, the renaissance, the art, the political organising, the community. The book addresses a wide audience: it is at once a coherent introduction to historical and contemporary Afro-Swedish ways of being in the world; a testimony to the richness of the African diaspora in Sweden, Europe and beyond; and a study of how the pervasive nature of white supremacy in Swedish society influences how Black people are met in Sweden.

The book is divided into six chapters, each touching on a different aspect of Afro-Swedish social and organisational life. For his extensive and multifaceted fieldwork, Skinner made use of a plethora of different methods, which contributes to demonstrating the diverse perspectives of the Black and African lifeworld he writes about. He pairs ethnographic inquiry with historical study and archival and textual analysis, illuminating the nuances of Afro-Swedish identity, both past, present and (into a desired) future.

In particular, Skinner uses a ‘deep hanging out’ method that foregrounds the importance of ‘everyday encounters and open dialogue in fostering sustained relationships, trust, and mutual interest between myself and my Afro-Swedish interlocutors’. In refreshingly taking the proper time to reflect on his positionality as a white US author writing about Afro-Swedish life in Scandinavia, Skinner makes no claim to speak for or about the Afro-Swedish community as a whole in the book. Crucially, he observes that this ‘whole’ is ‘plural, diverse, and complex’.

We start with the experiences of selected Afro-Swedish elders in Chapter One, which Skinner describes as a set of local stories that are too rarely told. Despite the long history of Black people living, working and being active in Swedish civil society, the majority of the Swedish public have never been exposed to these stories. This is a huge part of the central tenet of the book: the sheer erasure, silence, omission and ignorance that permeates Swedish society when it comes to its Black population.

The second chapter details the artefactual afterlives of Sweden’s contribution to colonialism. Skinner pays important attention to the Scandinavian fondness for exhibiting and dehumanising Black populations as late as the early 1900s – something I, a white Dane, still find that most of my contemporaries in Scandinavia are either painfully oblivious to or refuse to trace ‘up’ to contemporary anti-Black racism and colonial complicities.

The third chapter, ‘Walking While Black’, attests to the younger generation of Afro-Swedes and the way natural spaces are constituted as archives of Afro-Swedish social life – in particular, racialised and racially segregated spaces and the influences of these on the mobility of Afro-Swedish youth. Sociospatial segregation based on social class (and hence, intimately tied to race), a concept much more commonly accepted in the US, is key to understanding how racialising structures persevere in Sweden and across Scandinavia.

In conversation with Maureen Hoppers – a cultural advocate, community organiser and proud Ugandan Swede – Skinner describes the effect of segregation on Swedish cities, taking the intricacies of Stockholm public infrastructure as a prime example. The book illuminates how people are able to navigate Stockholm in ways that are in line with one’s social class – white people are able to avoid areas that carry racial markers that do not correspond to their own supposedly ‘neutral’ white identity. Drawing on the work of Katrina Hirvonen, a crucial nuance is that ‘for many ethnic and racial minorities in Stockholm, the fear that grows out of sociospatial division is not merely abstract, but existential’: while white Swedes might carry a fear of racial ‘others’, prompting them to move along white(r) lines, Afro-Swedes often carry a fear for their life when they navigate white neighbourhoods.

The fourth chapter describes a rich Afro-Swedish lexicon of expressions, which Skinner calls ‘a renascent verbal art of diaspora, from the vantage of Afro-Sweden’. Through explorations of Afro-Swedish lyrical expression, public discourse and the written word, Skinner pays particular attention to Afro-Swedish efforts ‘to push the boundaries of what the Swedish language can express in voice and writing’.

In the fifth chapter, the ethnographic focus is on the activism of Afro-Swedish civic actors and organisations that began to emerge in the mid-2000s. This chapter provides an introductory yet extensive overview of prominent Afro-Swedish organising as well as the broader politics of diaspora that shape Afro-Swedish political engagement.

In the sixth and final chapter, ‘The Art of Renaissance’, a rich, robust and diverse Afro-Swedish artworld is explored, including dance, theatre, music and literature. Wrapping up the six themes of the book, this chapter is a compelling testimony to the variety of ways in which Afro-Swedish artistic expressions assert and affirm ‘a doubly conscious Afro-diasporic and Swedish being-in the-world’. This is a taking up of space and recognition that has been denied in a normatively white society and particularly in a normatively white Swedish culture sector.

Throughout the book, there is a particular red thread that is brought up on numerous occasions to highlight its importance for Afro-Swedish life and history: namely, Sweden’s first principally Afro-Swedish film, Medan vi lever (While We Live). This 2016 movie is discussed in conjunction with a variety of different topics, including the ignorance of the general (white) Swedish public and media of this incredibly important piece of visual/filmic Afro-Swedish history, nominated in seven categories by the African Movie Academy Awards, as well as its depictions of a modern family’s transnational experience, the workings of postcolonial provincialism and the politics of diaspora. The monumental importance of this film binds the book together and demonstrates that another Afro-Swedish being-in-the-world is possible – and that it is on the horizon.

Note: This review first appeared at our sister site, LSE Review of Books. It gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Linus Mimietz en Unsplash