Lena Sawyer

ROUTINGS: "RACE," AFRICAN DIASPORAS, AND SWEDISH

BELONGING
This paper discusses the fissures and disjunctions in calls for African diasporic community in Stockholm, Sweden and
shows how the "local" (which in this case is formulated as national) is tinged with a particular Swedish moral discourse
in relationship to racism. A disjuncture expresses itself in stories of the national past and people. This is a past de-
scribed as homogeneous and which strategically "routes" racism to specific transnational spaces and time periods that
are outside of the Swedish community. Following the work of anthropologist Jacqueline Nassy Brown (1998,2000), I
suggest that such "routings" push us to consider the specific manners in which "the global" is used to negotiate "local"
power relations. The relevance of "routings" emerges in two manners in this paper: in how informants' narratives of the
Swedish past are used strategically to comment upon and debate the historically tabooed topic of racism in Sweden,
and in how a variety of African diasporic meanings get created and negotiated by Swedes of African ancestry when they
discuss belonging and racism.
KEYWORDS: African Diasporas, identity, racism, self-making and being-made, Sweden

"Cultural identities come from somewhere, have
histories. But, like everything which is historical, they
undergo a constant transformation. Far from being
eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are
subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and
power. Far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery'
of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which
when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into
eternity, identities are the names we give to the different
ways we are positioned by and position ourselves within
the narratives of the past."
—Stuart Hall (1990:225)
Slavery and the "three nodes" of the Atlantic triangle
are a constituting historical moment for definitions of,
and research upon, African Diasporas. Indeed, so central
is the Atlantic slave trade and the violence of the forced
"scattering" of African peoples around the world, that
Africans with different routes of migration are often
overlooked. Compared to the other points on the Atlantic
triangle, the specificities of African people's lives and
experiences in Europe have just started to be written.
For example, in the 1990s there has been a growing
body of fascinating published work on the specificities
of African diasporic communities and cultural practices
in European contexts (for example Optiz et al 1991;
Lena Sawyer received her Ph.D. in 2000 from the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation
is entitled "Black and Swedish: Racialization and the
Cultural Politics of Belonging in Stockholm." She
works as an applied anthropologist in an intercultural
and international social work program in Northern
Sweden, and is conducting research on Gambian
women's transnational networks in and outside of
Sweden.
Transforming Anthropology 11(1)13-35 Copyright©2002 by the Association of Black Anthropologists; American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved.
Gilroy 1987, 1993; Brown 1998, 2000; Carter 1997;
Campt 1993; Cole 1997). Yet, so far, this research has
generally followed the pattern of research on
"immigrants" in Europe and focused on the experiences
of "post-colonial" migrations "home" to "Empire"
(Miles 1993). Research on African Diasporas has
focused mainly on the particularities of peoples of
African ancestry in the Americas and Africa; those
studies on Africans in Europe, in former colonial
powers. Hence it is possible to say that the African
Diaspora has both "margins" and "centers" and Europe
is a "forgotten node of the Atlantic triangle" (Brown
2000:341; 1998:297).
If the Black Atlantic is a social space formed in the
first instance by the "hemispheric—not national—racial
order inaugurated by slavery" (Brown 2000:295), then
more research is needed on the specificities of those
communities that lie outside of the three "nodes" of this
Atlantic triangle, not just the relationship of Europe's
African Diasporas to the United States and Africa, but
to one another. For example, to many of the Swedes I
interviewed in Stockholm, Sweden during 1995-1996,
African Diasporas in European cities like London, Paris,
Barcelona, and Rome were important places of African
community to compare with their own. Indeed, African
Diasporas are not without evaluation and hierarchy; one
person's periphery can be someone else's center. For
example, that Sweden is today the third largest producer
and global exporter of "soul" music (after the United
States and England) suggests that Sweden and Swedes
may well also be a "center." Hence, center and
peripheries on a hegemonic map of African Diaspora
shift—for people in locales (nations, regions, cities,
towns) like Helsinki (Finland), Bergen (Norway), and
even the northern Swedish city of Kiruna; it is possible
SAWYER 13
that Stockholm is an important "center" of African
Diasporas.
This paper is based on interviews conducted during
1995. j 996 in Stockholm, Sweden, as part of doctoral
fieldwork for the dissertation Black and Swedish:
Racialization and the Cultural Politics of Belonging in
Sweden. In this project 1 analyze how "local" cultural
politics of belonging inform Swedes' discussions of
racialization and national and diasporic community. I
also discuss how an imagined Africa and Africans have
been employed as a salient cultural and racial "other"
during Swedish nation building and modernization.
Such imaginings, of "far away" places and peoples
(Tsing 1993), suggest that "localities" are tinged with
transnational meaning. For this essay I first discuss the
methods and theories employed to frame the research.
Second, I delineate the contours of Swedish racial
discourse and point to how the transnational is a part of
how Swedish racism is discussed. Third, I show how
the transnational is a part of how Swedes of African
ancestry discuss their own racialization and imagine
belonging in disparate African diasporic communities.
Finally I map some of the specific transnational places,
time periods, and objects that are used to "route" (Gilroy
1993; Clifford 1997) informants descriptions of
themselves and their belonging. Their descriptions show
how stories of "race" and belonging are both
transnationally tinged as well as in deep conversation
with specific "local" cultural politics.
The methods used for this research project
consisted of both interviews and participation in public
"spaces of Africa" in Stockholm (such as African
discotheques, dance and drum courses, and cultural
organizations). Forty-eightsemistructured, open-ended
tape-recorded interviews were conducted with Swedes
living in Stockholm.1 Twenty of these interviews were
with Swedes I call "of African ancestry," through using
primarily a "snowball" method". That most of my
contacts were made in this manner means that
interviewees with Swedes of African ancestry were
overwhelmingly with people of West, Southern, and
Central African decent. At that time these were the
groups that had been longest in Sweden, had
comparatively higher rates of intermarriage with
Swedes, and were most visible in the "public African
scene" than the more recent (and larger numbers) of
East Africans who came as refugees in the early 1990s.
The other 28 interviews were conducted with (white)
Swedes who worked within state organizations on
questions of multiculturalism, migration, antiracism,
and/or circulated in the dance courses, discotheques,
and solidarity and cultural organizations that then
constituted "the public African scene."
To analyze the interviews I used techniques that
14 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
Steinar Kvale (1997) calls "meaning categorization" and
"meaning analysis." Interviews were analyzed by
locating recurrent themes and placing them in relation
to the particular interview question posed and the
theoretical frame used. This is a theoretical frame that
understands racial identity as a historically specific
shifting process of boundary drawing that has been, and
continues to be, related to the reproduction of power
(Dominguez 1986; Ong 1996). The criterion used to
"place" people in one racial category, and not another
is a process that is also marked by individual's strategic,
albeit limited, negotiation of their own "placement"
(Dominguez 1986). This possibility for negotiation is
most succinctly described by Aihwa Ong's description
of identification as an ongoing "process of self-making
and being-made within webs of power" (Ong 1996:4).
For example, many of the informants responded to my
questions about the presence of Swedish racism by
invoking themes of the national past, stories of the first
time they saw a neger (a black person—today a
derogatory term), as well as framed their responses by
comparatively referring to "other spaces of 'race.'" A
second thematic area that emerged in the interviews were
the criterion for Swedish and/or African belonging.
Here, informants described how racialization, as non-
white, is used to question their Swedish belonging and
pushed them to re-imagine community by accessing
specific "routes" to connect with disparate diasporic
African communities.
It is impossible to give a statistical number of
exactly how many people "of African ancestry" are in
Sweden because Swedish governmental bodies use
categorizations of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, and
country of birth to group people. Yet one could
comfortably assume, using dominant ascriptions of
territory and "race," that most of the people categorized
by Swedish governmental discourses as "bom in an
African country" were classified in the Swedish
everyday with the term svart (black). However, I am
also aware that in using racial classifications to
"identify" interview subjects I am also, and not totally
unproblematically so, contributing to the reproduction
of racial meanings.' I use the category "of African
ancestry" as a starting point, and listened to how people
spoke about, around, and within this categorization as
they classified themselves and others. It is my hope that
through highlighting my own categorizations as
constructed and "indexical" in my Swedish informants'
allusions to territory and "race" that their varied, and
specific contestations, negotiations, and reproductions
will become apparent.
I make myself visible in this text to suggest that
ethnographic encounters are practices of situated
knowledge production (Harrison 1986; Haraway 1988),
and to point out that knowledge is not neutral.4 My own
background and experiences of challenging people's
conceptions of community and belonging, as a honey-
colored, blue-eyed, blond/brown curly haired woman
who identifies as African American and Swedish, surely
played a part in my research interest in people whose
assertions of belonging are also seen to challenge and
defy hegemonic conceptions of belonging. My blurred
"situatedness" in relation to my research topic and
interviewees made me acutely aware of the
categorizations through which people attempt to create
commonality and community. As I was trying to "place"
interview subjects and figure out how they negotiated
Swedish politics of racialization and color, they were
doing the same to me, sometimes with disconcerting
results. My own claims to black (and Swedish)
belonging were sometimes not met with the sense of
community and acceptance I expected. Instead I was
taught about the criterion for inclusion and/or exclusion
to Swedish and African diasporic community.
ROOTS AND ROUTES
Paul Gilroy's (1993) and James Clifford's (1997)
theorization of diasporic identification, as a process of
"roots" and "routes," is particularly useful to
understanding how "the local" and "the global" are
historical and contextually specific malleable meanings
that shrink, expand, and intersect depending on the
context, historical moment, and motivations of the
speaker. The experiences described by the Swedes cited
in this paper stress how the "local," in this case national
Swedish discourses of people and belonging, should not
be overlooked at the expense of celebrations of the
"global" and transnational. While African peoples may
desire to create community transnationally, their desire
for belonging is activated by specific local debates about
the criterion for national and African diasporic
belonging. Hence, diasporic belonging should be
understood as both a practice of both "rooting" and
"routing." These terms allow for a close exploration of
the role of desire, agency, and imagination in the creation
of diasporic community. For example, the term "roots"
invokes the territorial ("local") politics of place that
actors reside and act against. These are often national
contexts, as discourses of citizenship can greatly
influence and structure the everyday within which
individuals act (Ong 1996). Local politics of place can
also encompass even spatially smaller areas such as
regions, cities, towns, and villages.
Yet, if "rooting" suggests 'local" cultural politics,
"routing" points to the role of the trans- and multi-local
in the creation of community. "Routes" push diaspora
scholars to consider the particular historical and
geographical trajectories that communities imagine
themselves as part of to create belonging. Attention to
the "routes" invoked by diasporic communities asks that
we consider the specific conduits through which
meanings flow and the localized politics they are used
to negotiate.
"Diaspora" is a term traditionally used to refer to
communities based on shared memories and/or actual
experience of forced migration from a "homeland," as
well as the continued economic, social, political, and
cultural ties maintained with those "homelands"
(TSlolyan 1996). Jacqueline Nassy Brown (2000:293)
offers an important critique of diaspora theorists such
as Clifford (1994), Lavie and Swedenburg (1996),
Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc (1994), and
their focus on diasporics scattering from, and longing
for, a "homeland." Instead of focusing on the longings
of diasporics for geographically distant "homelands,"
she builds upon the work of Paul Gilroy (1987, 1993),
by suggesting that scholars re-consider the relevance
that place and practice have for Diaspora. Speaking of
the study of Diasporas, Brown states that:
Transnational formations of community are best
understood by studying at least two phenomena:
first, the locally-specific social relations and
associated subjectivities about locality that produce
a group's desire to appropriate diasporic resources,
and second, the processes through which certain
geographies attain a hegemonic position at the
center of a group's diasporic consciousness
(emphasis in original, 1998:317).
Like the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing (1993),
Brown's work (1998, 2000) suggests that the "local"
and "global" are not only indelibly interconnected, but
are given meaning (and reach) through practices that
are in conversation with particular power relations.
Hence, the "local" is a polluted category; its boundaries
shift, overlap, and are in conversation with, and shaped
by, "global" meaning. Significant for the theorization
of African Diasporas, and my work in particular, is this
idea that "locality" is important not just for how and
why people desire diasporic consciousness, but also to
understanding what Brown calls the "diasporic
resources" used to imagine belonging. 5 Diasporic
resources are important in that they are the "tools" actors
use to inscribe themselves into an imagined map of
diasporic community. Brown eloquently describes these
resources as:
[N]ot just cultural productions such as music, but
also people and places, as well as iconography,
ideas, and ideologies associated with them. "Place"
is an especially important resource, for the practice
SAWYER 15
 and politics of travel serve to map diasporic space,
helping to define its margins and centers
(1998:298).
Place here becomes one of the diasporic "tools"
strategically used to create diasporic community. Some
places, such as Africa and the Americas, are well-worn
"tools" and a kind of hegemonic "center" in stories and
studies of the African Diasporas, while other places,
such as Europe and Asia, lie on the "periphery" of
mappings of the African Diasporas. As I will show later
in this essay, Swedes ofAfrican ancestry create and refer
to, a kind of diasporic "map" in their descriptions of
belonging. Yet, this is also a flexible "map" that has
different "centers" and "margins" depending on when,
why, and whom is doing the imagining.
THE NATIONAL PAST AND THE MAPPING OF
SWEDISH MORALITY
It was in the 1980s when, during one of my Christmas
visits "home," my own loving grandfather told me that
in Sweden "race did not matter." With a serious look in
his face, he suddenly reached for my hand across the
dinner table and looked deep into my eyes and said the
words I had longed to hear as a teenager negotiating
high school racial politics in New Jersey. He told me
that in Sweden, "race" didn't matter and told a story of
heroic workers like himself (he worked for the national
train company for more than thirty years) who had built
a social democratic Utopia in the world where equality,
solidarity, and compassion reigned supreme. "Here" he
said with pride, "no one need go without a roof over
their head, no one need go hungry, and no one need be
discriminated against due to their race."6 1 know now
that not only did he believe, and work hard, to make
this story true, but also perhaps, when looking at me,
knew that his words could possibly inspire and comfort.
Fifteen years later as an anthropology doctoral student
in Stockholm to conduct fieldwork, I heard my
grandfather's story of nation and people repeated to me
again and again by informants. This story was tinged
with words such as "social democracy." solidarity,
conscientious welfare, and told of The People's Home7
that had during the last century strove to create a
classless, raceless, "model" society that was, above all,
modern.
National and transnational stories of Sweden and
Swedes are often imbued with a particular righteous
morality. And though Swedish informants generally did
not discuss, or even name, the Atlantic slave trade I
would argue that Sweden's absence from this past subtly
imbues this (national) locality and people with a
particular moral character in relation to discussions of
racism. Brown (2000) theorizes about how morality is
16 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
mapped onto geography. According to her, slavery
connected the economies and cultures of "Old World"
with "New," North with South. It also inscribed and
delineated the world into spheres of racial, national, and
even moral geographies in debates about slavery. She
asserts that slavery, and the circulation of slave
narratives, were an important moment where morality
was mapped onto regional, national and hemispheric
localities (2000:360, 354).8 Within this perspective,
Sweden's absence, or at least peripheral participation,
in Atlantic slave trade history imbue Sweden with a
particular morality, and subtly legitimize dismissals of
racism in contemporary Sweden.
If Swedish morality is achieved, in part, through
exclusion from hegemonic histographies of the Atlantic
slave trade, Swede's often built upon narratives of
peripherality and marginality to continental European
history when discussing racism. They told stories of a
Swedish past and people that were until recently "a
homogeneous community," a country of "mostly
peasants" who had lived "on the periphery of Europe
and the world," and a place where the "harsh climate
had created a closed and suspicious people." In these
stories Sweden was described as occupying a peripheral
place on a world map; seemingly isolated from the rest
of the world. Yet, such descriptions were abruptly
amended with the period of World War II; a time
described as the marker of "before" and "after"
immigration to Sweden. This periodization is significant,
as World War II is an important European historical
moment and connected to racial genocide, and
afterwards, to the official erasure of the term "race" and
explicit racial categorization in many European
countries (Stolke 1995:2). With memories of World War
II violence, the "vulgarity" of biological understandings
of racialization have been replaced by the category of
culture and ethnicity in many European nations (Stolke
1995:2)."
Descriptions of the Swedish historical past as
"homogeneous" serve to posit Sweden as a place absent
of racial meanings, and as a people who came to learn
about "race" only with the World War II migration of
southern guest workers, students, and asylum seekers.
A middle-aged, phenotypically white, Swedish woman
who worked for the Swedish Immigration Board stressed
the importance of the past to my question of racism in
Sweden when she said, "You must understand that
Sweden has been a very homogeneous country. It is only
after World War II that have we have had any
immigrants." And perhaps, to stress one more time how
isolated they had been, informants would tell a story I
was to hear time-and time-again, about the first time
they "saw a neger" (Sawyer 2001 ).10
A second general tendency in informants' responses
to questions about Swedish racism was to describe the
racism of other national spaces: South Africa, United
States, and Nazi Germany. Swedish racism was
described in comparison to someplace else, "over there,"
outside of Sweden. Sweden was presented as "more"
or "less" racist than these other places and people. If at
all, in Sweden racism was most often described as the
violent behaviors of deviant, confused, unemployed
boys and men who lived in small rural communities."
Their stories all seemed to quietly say "racism is
something foreign to the Swedish society" as they
metaphorically pointed their fingers outward, away from
themselves, and sought to locate the "real" racists.
In analyzing the responses of interviews with
Swedes working with questions of immigration, multi-
culturalism, and Africans in particular, I concluded that
these responses served a specific social function in
relation to questions of Swedish racism. They were
stories of the past pieced together to meet the present
need to explain Swedish racism. I came to understand
their stories, of shifting the discussion to the racism of
spaces outside of Sweden, as a strategy to protect the
national story of Sweden and Swedes as moral and
antiracist. These images were in direct conversation with
1990s debates that Sweden was "under attack," that The
People's Home was crumbling, charges of racism by an
increasingly vocal group of Swedes categorized as
"immigrant," and media reports that Sweden and
Swedes had a more complicated relationship to World
War II, Nazism, and racial biology, than previously
thought.'2
Their stories drew a map that preserved Sweden as
a moral geography, a place and space of moral "purity,"
and as an ahistorical homogeneous island situated on
the margins of a Europe polluted by its participation in
the Atlantic slave trade. Sweden was portrayed as a
previously "healthy" nation where racism, like a disease,
had spread into the nation along with the post-World
War II travels of "immigrants" (Tesfahuny 1998).
Furthermore, their stories provided a subtle explanation
to recent charges of racism. They presented a delicate
logic that said, "Given our homogeneous past, it is not
surprising that we are so naive when encountering
people from such far-away places. We knew nothing
about them or their ways until they arrived." In the
following section, I counter stories of Swedish historical
exceptionalism in relation to racial meaning, and show
that knowledge about Africa and Africans was produced
through alternative, though no less potent, "routes."
BLACKNESS AND THE SWEDISH SOCIAL
IMAGINARY
"It is just a joke," Lund University friends and instructors
explained when asked about the Swedes I had observed
dressed up as "Africans" at the Lund University student
carnival in May of 1994. This was where "dirty"
blackened bodies with the word "unacceptable" written
on signs that hung on their backs entered the blue and
yellow border-control booth that had been built onto
one side of an oversized Ariel washing detergent box.
These "black" figures were shown with hot dog and
chicken phalluses hanging between their legs and
carrying a variety of signifiers of blackness: oversized
afro-wigs, large stereos held to one ear, stereo
headphones, basketballs, grass skirts and leis. After
entering the one side of the "border-control" booth these
racially "dirty" figures emerged on the other side
"clean." Now their bodies were dressed and painted
"white," and they had signs that read "acceptable"
hanging on their backs. These now "acceptable" bodies
were marked by not just white suits, top hats, and canes,
but white painted skin.
"It is just for fun," they said later, when I asked
them about the "blackened" people I saw in Lund at
student parties, and later heard of similar practices, in
other town/cities such as Stockholm and Ostersund. This
is where guests came to "jungle theme" student parties
dressed as "Africans and Indians" and painted their pale
bodies brown and black with shoe polish and wore grass
skirts, afro-wigs, and carried spears, bows, and arrows.
This "play" pushed me to explore the historical origins
of a Swedish curiosity with blackness and to consider
its repercussions for Swedes of African ancestry. I
viewed such practices as evidence of a particular
Swedish fascination with, and negotiation of, meanings
of blackness. I concluded that through embodying a
specific understanding of blackness, these students were
not only producing and negotiating the imagined culture
and ways of black people, but using this image as a
vehicle through which to comment upon, critique, and
construct Swedishness. Finally, given the tiny number
of people of African ancestry living in Sweden, their
portrayals pointed to a particular potent dichotomy
between Swedishness and Africanness in Swedish
society.
Embodied racial "play" employs a heady historical
European racial logic that posits "Nordics" and
"Africans" as in an hierarchical racial, class, and cultural
opposition to each other. The origins of this racial
classificatory discourse, where Europeans and Africans
were placed and ranked hierarchically in opposition to
each other with the former sitting at the top of the list
and Africans at the bottom, can be seen in the work of
Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1997[ 1735]) and HI
Johann Friedrieh Blumenbach's (1969[ 1776]) groupings
of people into "four races" (see Gossett: 1997 [1963:37];
Eze 1997:10-14). Swedes in particular were to have a
particular "place" in such early hierarchies. For example.
SAWYER 17
German social anthropologist Hans F. K. GUnther (1925)
argued in the early twentieth century that Scandinavians/
Nordics, and Swedes, in particular, were particularly
representative of the "white Caucasian/Aryan race."
So persuasive was this dichotomy between "The
Negro" and "The Nordic." that even those arguing
against racism in the early twentieth century reproduced
this dichotomy. For example, African American writer
George S. Schuy ler wrote in 1927 an essay entitled "Our
White Folks" about the dichotomy between "Nordics"
and "Blacks" (see Roediger 1999:43). and in 1928
anthropologist Franz Boas' wrote,
When we speak of racial characteristics we mean
those traits that are determined by heredity in each
race and in which all members of the race
participate. Comparing the color of skin, eyes and
hair of Swedes and Negroes, slight pigmentation is
a hereditary racial characteristic of the Swede, deep
pigmentation of the Negro. The straight or wavy
hair of the Swede, the frizzly [sic] hair of the Negro,
the narrowness and elevation of the nose among
the Swedes, its width and flatness among the
Negroes, all these are hereditary racial traits
because practically all the Swedes have the one
group of characteristics, all the Negroes the other
(1986 [1928]:20).
These are examples of how understandings of
nation, people, and phenotype were tightly linked in the
early twentieth century; indeed, attempts to critique
biological meanings of "race" often borrowed, and
hence reproduced racial logic.13 This was the case even
of Boas, for as he sought to critique the idea of racial
differences, he in fact reproduced them in his reliance
upon phenotypically differentiated "types." Such
discourses of "race," that closely bind territory,
population, and the spatial distance between peoples,
is one that is a subtle part of contemporary Swedes'
discourses of belonging.
For example, in contemporary Swedish popular
images and slogans one can see blackness as symbol of
that which is not Swedish (and European). For example,
this dichotomy can be seen in international
"development" posters of clasping black and white
hands, in the black and white zebra stripes of "the Zelg's"
animal-like body; a sculpture touted as representing
"multicultural" Sweden, in the Post Office's 1996
National Day image of a brown-skinned and brown-
haired girl and pale-skinned blond boy sharing a football
jersey, and even in antiracist slogans that proclaim,
"Black, White, Same, but Different." For these images
to be understood requires that Swedes invoke racial logic
that couples whiteness (as Swedishness) and blackness
18 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
(as outsider i.e. 'immigrant/ svartskalle'Y* in "natural"
opposition to one another. And I assume that most
people do not have difficulty making sense of these
popular images and the pregnant racial dichotomies they
rely upon.
I argue that informant stories of "the first time I a
neger" are a part of this racial logic. While those who
tell this story aim to stress how unaware they were of a
racial discourse, by stressing "first encounter" with just
Africans (as opposed to numerically larger number of
Iranians, Chileans, or Bosnians) they also conjure up a
historical racial opposition between "Blacks" and
"Whites." Further, this "first time" story also reiterates
dominant understandings of racism as singularly a part
of those societies involved in the triangular slave trade.
Hence, their stories build upon an assumption that
Sweden was not a part of this history, and thus, contact
with racial meaning could only have occurred when they
first actually saw "a neger" (Sawyer 2001).
TRACKING THE "ROUTES" OF SWEDISH RA-
CIAL DISCOURSE
Participation in the slave trade is one of the defining
moments for researchers understandings of the "routes"
taken in the circulation of racial meanings and racialized
bodies across the globe. It has also influenced research
on racism in Europe in that it stresses the migrations of
formerly colonized peoples to "Empire" and overshad-
ows the multitude of alternative "routes" taken. Miles
(1993) critiques this framework, calling it "a colonial
paradigm of racism," by saying that it,
... asserts that colonialism was legitimated by rac-
ism, with the result that European images of colo-
nized populations had a racist content. Thus, when
colonized people migrated after 1945 to their re-
spective "Mother Countries" in Europe (including
Britain, the Netherlands and France) to provide
labour power, this racist imagery was reproduced
and reworked to comprehend this supposedly novel
presence within the nation states of Europe (44).
While later in this work, he argues that this colo-
nial paradigm of racism, as well as the closely related
labor migration paradigm, can partially explain racism
in Europe, some cases do not fall under such dominant
paradigms. For example, it does not fully capture the
diversity of the pre-World War II "routes" taken by black
Liverpudlians (Brown 1998) or how Sweden's "ab-
sence" in the slave trade created an alternative pathway
in the travel of racial meanings into Sweden. Sweden's
history suggests the tracking of other pathways. Indeed,
the racial imagery of Africans in Sweden, as shown by
the "unacceptable" black bodies in the Lund student
carnival, cannot be directly linked to a Swedish colo-
nial past in Africa. Sweden's history of colonialism sug-
gests other "routes" than those tracked by continental
European nations.
Sweden's colonial links to Africa are weak in com-
parison to those of other European nations. And while
Sweden had long and complicated colonial relationships
with neighboring countries and its own population, it is
often left out of histories of the African slave trade. In-
formation on Sweden's presence in Africa is sparse. A
blue and yellow flag today waving atop an old slave
fort in Cape Coast, Ghana attests to the short lived, and
comparatively "unsuccessful" colonial presence in the
area then called Cabo Cabo (Scott 1977:193-4). In con-
trast to England and France, Sweden had few colonies
in the United States and Caribbean (for example, a few
towns in Delaware, New Jersey and for a hundred years
in St. Barth).ls Yet, where Sweden's ambitions of im-
perialism and colonization in Africa in the 1600s are
often seen as "failing," missionary and "civilizing" ef-
forts carried out in the 19th century more successfully
linked Sweden to the African continent. In particular,
three missionary societies active in Africa in the 19th
century provided important information about Africa
and Africans.
For example, missionary travel and trade reports,
and other writings about Africa and Africans provided
a potent "route" of encounter for Swedes (Berg 1997).
In early Swedish print, people are referred to with ra-
cial categories not long after the 1667 publication of
the first Swedish report from Africa (Berg 1997:11).
Further, when consulting the Dictionary of the Swedish
Language, racial terms such as neger and mulatt are
fairly common in seventeenth century texts. Other evi-
dence of the Swedish circulation of meanings of
Africanness include the mass circulation of stories as-
sociated with Badin, a black child from Saint Croix who
at the age often was "given" as a gift to Queen Lovisa
Ulrika in 1757. Badin appeared as a figure in many
novels written during 1SA century, in paintings, and in
objects (such as a popular bookmark in the 1880s),
which attests to how the mythology surrounding Badin
sparked many writers' and artists' imaginations (see
Matz 1996). Today Badin is again resurrected, and is a
prominent literary figure in a handful of recent Swed-
ish novels (for example, Ola Larsmo 1996). Badin is a
continued symbolic figure of the unsettling of hegemonic
meanings of people (race) and place (nation) and as
such, I interpret both older and more recent novels about
Badin as commentary on the criterion of belonging in
Swedish society.
Badin was not the only African to travel to Sweden
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like in much
of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, stories of Africans and their exotic difference were
in circulation, and in the late 1800s exhibitions of "live"
(and sometimes dead) bodies of people from "far away"
places toured through Sweden. Posters from the turn of
the twentieth century market a show in the town of Gavle
(Gefle) as one where a person defined as "belonging to
the lowest human race," "Austral-Negrerna" could be
observed for a fee." Around the same time, the disem-
bodied penis of an African man was displayed at the
Stockholm Museum (Allan Pred 2000).
Images of "wild" and "primitive" people called
"negrer" could also be seen in popular representations
in children's books during the twentieth century in Swe-
den. With titles like Blodstaden (Blood City) (1908),
Tre Sma Negerpojkar (Three Small Negro Boys) (1947),
and Bland negrer i urskogen (Among the Negro in the
Jungle) (1933), many of these books were originally
written by English and Dutch authors and translated into
Swedish and provided a potent "route" in the
transnational travel of racial meanings. Even in widely
loved and read Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren (1948)
the reader is introduced to a fanciful "Negerkungen"
(the Negro king). What is systematically seen in these
books is a stereotypical image of "negrer" as danger-
ous and desirable, childlike and playful and/or wild and
dangerous.
Sweden has been economically involved in the in-
dustrialization and "development" efforts of a variety
of postindependence countries since the 1960s; in Af-
rica most notably, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.
Working at both a state and NGO level in collaboration
with specific countries and regions, a professional Swed-
ish organizational culture has developed around bistand
(development), with a large number of (often Swedish)
employees and volunteers who administer the financial
"aid" abroad. The ways that these practices and dis-
courses produce colonial and neocolonial images of
Africa, Africans, and Swedes have only recently begun
to be critically analyzed (see Eriksson Baaz 2001).
Cultural meanings produced by Swedish "development
aid" agencies are an important, and powerful, "route"
to Swedish meanings of "race" and racial identities.
Such evidence suggests that Swedish nation-build-
ing efforts must be situated in a context that is not her-
metically sealed from European racialization, but rather
where ideas of "race" were in circulation and negotia-
tion. Hence, if a "colonial paradigm" of racism does
not adequately describe the historical context of
racialization in Sweden, the link of racism to European
nation-building efforts in the eighteenth century is more
useful. This is a perspective that relates events in the
colonies with the creation of a European self, as the
racial difference of colonized peoples can be observed
in European discourses of national boundaries, civility
SAWYER 19
and similarity (Goldberg 1993). Categories such as "The
French, The English, The German, and The Swedish"
gained racial aspects as particular discourses, spaces,
practices, and peoples were nationalized.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Sweden was
not an "island" sealed off from ideas of racial hierarchy
circulating in much of Europe during the seventeenth
through twentieth century. The literary evidence cited
above points to a twentieth century Swedish context
where ideas of African "negrer" were imagined as primi-
tive, childlike/unintelligent, wild, undeveloped, and
unmodern in the popular social imagination. There are
only a few studies on how the racial images of seem-
ingly "remote" "Others" (which is not limited to Afri-
cans) were a subtext in a variety of Swedish national
and cultural projects. Some fascinating studies already
exist, and discuss the racialization of the Swedish work-
ing classes (Frykman and Lofgren 1985, 1987[1979];
Pred 1995, 2000), deviants (Zaremba 1997a, 1997b),
Tinkers (Svensson 1993), Sami" (Storfjell 1998), and
working class "immigrant" housing areas (Ristilammi
1994; Molina 1997). These studies suggest that Euro-
pean racial ideologies freckled Swedish discourse about
national belonging and exclusion, and challenged in-
formant narratives of pre-World War II homogeneity.
For example, how else to understand the
racialization of working-class Swedes as living in
"negerbyar"V Here ideas about the imagined inferior
"lifestyle" and culture of Africans were, in the 1930-
40s, used to classify working-class Swedes and their
cramped "primitive" housing conditions as "negerbyar."
Shared understandings of class, culture, and "race" were
combined in this Swedish classificatory term to mark
and "blacken" those who did not adhere to middle-class
standards of "Swedishness." It is within this wider his-
torical Swedish context of racialization that contempo-
rary usages of the term svartskalle should also be con-
sidered. From my informants I learned that like
"negerbyar," "svartskalle" is a derogative term that is
today used to mark certain Swedes as marginally be-
longing to the Swedish community and as members of
"inferior" economic, cultural, and racial groups. In both
instances, colonial meanings of blackness function as a
code for all that does not meet Swedish middle-class,
white standards of cultural normalcy. Here racial mean-
ings are accessed to "blacken" certain Swedes and to
mark their peripheral belonging to the national com-
munity.
Scholars have only recently begun to analyze the
influence of racial meanings in missionary and travel
reports, popular culture, novels, literature, and
schoolbooks on the Swedish imaginary.20 Yet, there are
also the "routes" of racial meanings tracked by more
recent and everyday images of Africans and Africa. For
20 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
example, many Swedes have seen the "thankfully"
bobbing head of a young male African money collection
statue in the entrance of churches, paintings of
"Africans" portrayed naked and with oversized red lips,
televised images of swollen stomachs, fly encrusted
faces, and outstretched hands of hungry Africans on
Swedish "development aid" programs; they also have
seen stoic uplifted Black Panther fists at the Olympics,
and few cannot recognize the face and rhetoric of men
like Mandela, Martin, Malcolm and Marley. And then,
of course, there is music—jazz, blues, rap, soul, drums,
and music video images of dance, sexuality, and rhythm.
These are only some of the "routes" of racial
meanings associated with Africans that have tracked
through Sweden during the last 400 years. And though
they possibly are alternative "routes" than those taken
via the three "nodes" of the Atlantic slave trade, I would
argue that they are no less significant. These images of
Africans and their imagined culture and sensibility,
constitute a Swedish archive of knowledge about Africa
and Africans. So, rather than enter a society absent from
meanings of "race," I would instead propose that the
Africans who migrated to Sweden in the last 30 years
entered a truly European neocolonial context. Yet this
was a context that strived to portray itself as moral and
exceptional through particular versions of the historical
past. In the last section of the essay, I discuss how this
context can present a particular dilemma for Swedes of
African ancestry when asserting Swedish belonging.
DIASPORIC IDENTIFICATIONS
Cultural identity.. .is a matter of "becoming."
—Stuart Hall (1990:225)
The "local" Swedish context I have described is one
where a particular anti-racist morality is braided into
dominant stories of the Swedish nation and people, and
where broaching the topic of racism is often perceived
as a deep challenge to cherished ideas of nation and
self. This is a context where explicit usage of the word
"race" is taboo, and aligned with the language and
violence of extreme neo-Nazi and Skinhead groups. It
is a context where the Swedish state categorizes people
in population statistics through the terms of ethnicity
and nationality, gender and citizenship status, the
ambiguous term "immigrant," and where groups like
Sami, Finnish Swedes, and Jews are classified as ethnic
minorities. It is a context where it is rare that one hears
people referred to as White or Black in the media;
instead the term "colored" (fargad) is used to refer to
people of African ancestry, and racially pregnant terms
of "immigrant" and "Swede" to all others.
Explicit naming of people with racial categories
is generally perceived to be antithetical to shared
understandings of the nation and people. This is a "local"
context that has always been transnational^ tinged and
is the context within which Swedes of African ancestry
enact and imagine belonging. Below I look more closely
at the specificities of their diasporic imagining
highlighting the "routes" they invoke.
Some general figures may be useful for those not
familiar with Sweden. According to the Statistiska
Centralbyran (SCB) (Statistics Sweden 1996, 1997),
in 1996 the total population was approximately 8.5
million and the number of people born in African
countries was 50,000.21 This number does not include
peoples of African ancestry who have migrated to
Sweden from North America, South and Central
America, the Caribbean, and all of the other
geographical places where African peoples reside. The
majority of Africans who migrated during the last 10
years came from primarily two countries: in 1996,
11,131 were from Somalia, and in 1996, 13,390 were
from Ethiopia as a direct result of the wars in Somalia
and Ethiopia (Statistics Sweden 1996). According to
Bawa Yamba (1983), in the 1980s the African 'scene"
consisted of a diverse, primarily male population who
migrated to Sweden during the 1970s and 80s. Each
"group" had its own specific history; for example, in
the 1970s, East Africans (mostly Kenyans and
Tanzanians) arrived in Sweden as a result of the financial
development support that Sweden had with these
countries, and many of these migrants had state stipends
or were part of educational programs within private
industries (Yamba 1983:30). Yet there were also male
African-American war resisters and jazz musicians,
South African and Namibian activists, and Liberian
students. Yamba characterizes the general opinion held
by Swedes toward Africans in the 1970s as tolerant:
They were a small amount of people and therefore
had an overlapping network that often also included
many Swedes. They meant that they were here to
get a certain education and kept that etiquette even
when they pursued activities other than their studies
(1983:30).
However, the Swedish political and social climate
that greeted the Eritrean and Gambian migrants in the
1980s differed significantly (Yamba 1983:30-31). Ifthe
attitude was, according to Yamba, "friendly" and the
Africans "studious" in the 1970s, in the 1980s, Sweden
was in a recession and the Eritreans who came were
political refugees, and the young Gambian boys saw
Sweden as their "El Dorado" (Wagner and Yamba
1986:202). According to Yamba (1983), this made for
markedly different encounters with the Swedish society
for the two groups; Eritreans, classified as "political
refugees," received a variety of resources and economic
support by the Swedish state, whereas the Gambians,
as holders of three-month visas, received no assistance
(Yamba 1983:30-31).22 In this context, Gambians'high
rate of intermarriage with Swedish citizens should be
understood. For many of the men, marriage was one of
the only ways for them to stay and gain citizenship in
Sweden.
The movements of Africans to Sweden (and Swedes
to African countries) are an indelible part of economic
globalization and the treaties, policies, and education
and development programs made between regions and
nations. However, rather than a homogeneous group,
migrants are an extremely heterogeneous group of
people with differing sexual and gendered subjectivities,
class backgrounds, reasons and experiences of
migration, education, goals, and dreams. Yet
unfortunately, their diversity and rich experience are
often erased through the migratory process whereupon
they are confronted and classified by discourses
connected to the movements of persons from
economically poorer world regions to Europe.
Upon entry into the Swedish society, Africans
confront a multitude of discourses that (attempt to)
homogenize them into disempowering and marginal
subjectivities vis-a-vis the Swedish society.
Categorizations such as "immigrant," "refugee," and
"African" are in the Swedish context culturalized
terminology that are often used to rationalize Africans
(as well as other racialized immigrants) economic and
social segregation. For example, Africans, along with
Arabic-speaking "immigrants" have the highest
unemployment rate of any non-European "immigrant"
group and non-European "immigrants" have in turn a
higher unemployment rate than "Swedes." Such statistics
attest to a racialized Swedish employment market.21
Intermarriage patterns among Africans and Swedes
are influenced by this diverse history of migration.
Intermarriage is generally much higher for those (mostly
male) West, South, and Central Africans who migrated
to Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost
nonexistent for the much larger number of East Africans
who have come with their families in the last decade.
In addition, African men generally claim to
experience a higher level of discrimination in the
Swedish public realm (employment, restaurants, and
discotheques) than do African women. Highly
publicized violent attacks against and murders of
African men by neo-Nazi's and skinhead groups suggest
gendered aspects of racism (Essed 1991). Yet, women
of African ancestry also experience a specifically
gendered form of discrimination. Like other migrant
women in Swedish society, African migrant women are
particularly vulnerable in Swedish society; many come
SAWYER 21
to Sweden as part of family re-unification policies and
are thus in vulnerable positions vis-a-vis their partners
since their citizenship status is explicitly linked to their
legal status as wives. Further, young girls and women
of African ancestry are confronted with a different set
of sexualized stereotypes associated with their bodies
moreso than men. The public image of Africans, as seen
on Swedish television programs, in clothing
advertisements, and even anti-racist campaigns, suggests
that women of African ancestry are a more palatable
image of Swedish multiculturalism (see Sawyer 2000).
Heteronormative images of African women, as exotic
femininity, present in comparison with the image of
African men, a nonchallenging image of integrated
blackness (see Sawyer 2000). Although smiling
attractive girls and young women of African ancestry
can be seen on advertising billboards and posters around
Stockholm marketing shoes, clothes, and objects
associated with life in urban industrial cities around the
world—women and men of African ancestry are visibly
absent in the middle to higher wage labour positions
that would allow them to fully participate in the
consumption of this lifestyle. Instead, though the
majority of African men have both a high school
education and some college, they are overwhelmingly
represented in low-paid, low-status employment
positions in the service industry; men work as cleaners,
bus and subway train drivers, while women work
primarily with elderly care (Sabune and Sawyer 2001 b).
While the inviting faces seen in poster board, television,
and magazine advertisements speak of integration and
mobility in the Swedish society for people of African
ancestry, many, if not most, of the men and women I
interviewed during 1995-1996 expressed concern over
everyday racism (Essed 1991). They told of their own
and other's encounters with racism and described how
racism was a part of their everyday life pathways in
Stockholm. This was racism met in the familiar, non-
spectacular settings that constituted their everyday social
space—in the workplace, housing, and even, public
arena.24
The following ethnographic vignetts seek to
describe how racism, and its attempted displacement
and rejection of people from Swedish belonging,
catapults some Swedes of African ancestry to insert and
weave themselves into a map of African Diasporas.
These are individuals who are actively "self-making"
and negotiating how they are "made" by Swedish society
(Ong 1996:4), and whose behavior should be understood
as a strategic praxis (deCerteau 1984:xiii-xiv). I listened
closely to the personal accounts of belonging that
informants produced, and analyzed them as narrative
practices that challenge, construct, and negotiate the
racialized criteria of Swedish belonging and its
22 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
relevance to racialization in Sweden. Calls of
community based on "race" were negotiated in
surprisingly different ways; the disjuncture and fissures
that emerge in their stories point to the importance of
paying attention to the variety of "routes" within the
African Diaspora.
MONIQUE AND EVAN
Monique, a woman in her late 20s who had migrated
with her family to Sweden from Zaire as a teenager,
met with me one day in August of 1995 for an interview.
Self-identified as svart Svensk (black Swede), Monique
was active in 1995-1996 in the Pan-African organization
where I volunteered. Petite, with dark-brown skin, and
her hair stylishly cut in a close-cropped afro, Monique
was direct, outspoken, and a little angry during our
interview. She was beginning to make a political career
for herself, speaking at various conferences and
organizations on the topic of Africans and integration,
and was frustrated at the limited employment
opportunities available for Africans. During the
interview she stressed the importance of Swedish
cultural politics to identity. To her these cultural politics
are informed by racialization wherein Africans and
Blacks were forced to create alternative community. She
said,
OK, but back to the question of [what it means] to
be African or black, and Swedish; I think that in
most cases ... that maybe you are forced, to put
your identity and soul in your roots. Even if you
are adopted and have been brought up in this
country, you are forced, due to pure self-
preservation and defence mechanism, to seek out
the power in your roots. Because you will come to
be offended sooner or later by this racism and
prejudice, which makes it so you can't really feel,
and have the courage to go out and say "I am
Swedish." Because then you risk to be offended
by people who point their finger and say "but you
are not Swedish at all. You, you are black." And
that is why I think that the majority of the blacks,
they identify themselves and build their energy from
their African roots, and are often hanging with
African friends and identify themselves with that
group.
The redemptive powers of "African roots" was also
stressed by Evan, a Ghanaian professor in his mid-
thirties, who had been studying and teaching in Sweden
for over seven years when 1 spoke with him in 1995. A
friend of mine had taken a course of his and suggested
that I contact him for an interview. Like Monique, Evan
was active in African cultural organizations in
Stockholm, and was a well-respected member of the
local Ghanaian organization. After speaking on the
telephone a few times, and finding out that we both lived
in the community of Rinkeby, he came to my house for
tea. Tall, dark-brown skinned, and with a stunning smile,
Evan and I ended up talking into the wee hours of the
night about his experiences in Sweden.
He also linked the importance of African cultural
organizations to racial discrimination towards Africans
by "Swedes." According to Evan, these are spaces
where there is power; indeed, people can be empowered
though participating in the activities and community
created in these spaces. It is through such participation
that Swede's can encounter their "roots" to African
community and belonging. Cultural organizations are
described as important spaces for not just Africans, but
for the young people Evan referred to as "half-castes."
He said,
They would find it easier to find opportunities in
this society than full-blooded Africans ... In
broader terms, I think there is no community for
them here to relate and to learn something about
either their Africanness or whatever. The half-castes
are just there [in the organizations] as individuals,
they don't know themselves; they meet very briefly
for a few hours when we have functions and [the]
families are together. They could see, maybe
various individual families know each other, and
they could get together and play. But that is all. I
would think that ifthere were an African community
these kids would grow up knowing that they belong
to a wider community in this society. They would
build up their confidence, they would know and
see role models who could inspire them and so on.
But I think there is nothing like that.
Like many of the African migrants I interviewed
who are active in cultural organizations, particularly the
"half-castes," Evan worried about the absence of African
youth in organization activities. Employing the Ghanaian
term "half-caste," he made an important distinction
between Africans and those individuals who have one
Swedish and one African parent. According to him, the
'"blood" mixture of "half-castes" afforded both privilege
and exclusion; "half-castes" had more "opportunities"
in Swedish society, yet were also excluded in that they
were not part of an African community and unable to
"learn something about ... their Africanness."
For both Evan and Monique, African community
is an important response to racism; redemption and self-
confidence can be found through contact with one's
"African roots" and, as Evan put it, "Africanness." The
estimated 30 African "immigrant" cultural organizations
extant in Stockholm during 1995-1996 are among the
most obvious spaces of African community; they are
places where people congregate with others who have
migrated from a particular African nation or ethnic
group. These organizations are subsidized through
Swedish multicultural policies and directives, and hence
the state mediates "immigrants" organizational strategies
(see Alund and Schierup 1991 ). :5 Cultural organizations
have names such as "The Ghanaian Union" and "The
Gambian Organization," and invoke connection to
Africa through a variety of activities. These consist of
celebrations in honor of specific national and ethnic/
kin group holidays and occasions, dance and music
courses, lectures, and workshops. Topics discussed in
workshops during 1995-1996 focused on both issues
specific to Africans in Sweden as well as on the
continent. For example, HIV in Africa, War in Central
Africa, drug usage in Sweden, women's roles in Africa,
African unemployment in Sweden, and African youth
"at risk." Through maintaining economic ties with
family and kin groups "back at home," in Africa,
organization members are also actively creating specific
kinds of African "roots" that allow them to negotiate
Swedish cultural politics of belonging. These are
"roots" that have specific "routes" to Africa; physical
and imaginary "routes" through which money, goods,
ideas, and I would also argue identities, travel back and
forth between Sweden and Africa.
Yet terms differentiating the experiences of
"migrant Africans" and those "born and raised in
Sweden" were prevalent among interviewees within
African cultural organizations. According to Monique
and Evan, not everyone had equal access to their African
"roots." Folded into their discourse of difference were
not just "race," but also culture and class. Racialization
emerged in their narratives as a potent metaphor for
difference of opportunity and experience in Sweden;
the infusion of white "blood" affords increased access
to Swedish society. Monique introduced another term
for "half-castes,"—"mulattos"—and described more
closely why these people are not very active in the
African cultural organizations and the "roots" they could
encounter there. She said.
Yes, they are called mulatter (mulattos), but most
of them feel Swedish, 1 think. Then there are those
who are interested to find their roots in Africa, and
meet their relatives and like that, but in general they
want to ... they wish that they were Swedish in
color. Because that is how they feel. They feel very
attached to their Swedish mother most often. The
father has left them. The other relatives they interact
with are Swedes, so that they are Swedes in their
SAWYER 23
 soul. The only thing that differentiates them is the
color, the brown color.
Monique used the mediary category of mulatt to
differentiate Africans in Sweden. Here color was
challenged as a marker of community, as she invoked
personal choice, experience, and what lies inside a
person's soul. Furthermore, she repeated what I by then
understood to be a dominant narrative about people
called mulatt and half-castes as people whose
understanding of themselves is the primacy of the
Swedish mother, family, and culture, and the absence
of an African father, kin, and culture. Few seek out
family in Africa or within African cultural organizations,
which Monique linked to the fact that they "feel
Swedish," are "Swedes in their souls," and "wish they
were Swedish in color." These are people who also serve
as a source of lively debate for many of the migrant
Swedes active within African cultural organizations.21"
It is important to note that the activities within these
cultural organizations work to plant "roots" within a
Swedish context, where hegemonic meanings of"race"
and "nation" place Africans as precariously belonging.
Identifying with the redemptive powers of one's own
"African roots" is a strategy of "self-making" that re-
articulates racialized exclusion and makes "race" a
marker of inclusion to a specific African national/ethnic
community. Yet, so far, attempts at creating a pan-
African organization, where all African nationalities feel
represented and are active, have been fraught with
internal regional, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural
divisions.
The "roots" that Evan and Monique use to weave
themselves into a community in Stockholm are "routed"
in specific ways. Their "routes" prioritize, among other
things, experiences garnered in specific African
countries; indeed many people 1 spoke to in these
organizations nostalgically referred to parties and
practices they had participated in "back home." Africa,
and African communities in London, Rome, and Paris,
were sites of "authenticity" to compare with their own
in Sweden.
African "immigrant" organizations' calls for
community are often filled with metaphors of blood
quantum, lineage, culture and ancestry. These calls for
diasporic community also re-articulate and reproduce
the centrality of "race" as a criterion of belonging
(Appiah 1993). As such, this discourse marginalizes
"mediary" individuals for whom Monique and Evan say
an African diasporic community is perhaps most
important. Hence, calls of community based on "African
ancestry" in Stockholm are fraught with fissures and
difference of experience. One way that fissures are
described is through racial discourses of lineage and of
24 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
dilution or purity of "blood."
HENRIKA
If Monique and Evan created "roots" and a sense of
belonging through participation in African cultural
organizations, for Henrika, phenotype, birthplace and
lineage were ambivalent criteria of community. Adopted
from Ethiopia as a child, Henrika, in her early 20s when
I spoke with her, was petite, brown skinned, and had
(then) long, black, straight hair. She responded to an
advertisement I put out in a national adoption magazine
soliciting interviewees and in 1995 we met in her home
in one of the upper-middle class areas of Stockholm.
Her experiences were particularly interesting as she
stressed the importance of class and culture over
racialization. For example, she described the fissures
within calls for community based upon racialization in
one experience she recounted. An aspiring actress,
Henrika was hired for "a background shot" for a popular
Swedish television program. She was hired to stand in
the background as in her words "a black woman" who
was with a group of "black men" for a segment shot in
an immigrant suburb. While this group may have
appeared homogeneous to the program viewers, Henrika
told of some disjunctures within this grouping. She said,
We should be in the background together with a
whole lot of others who were black. And then when
there was a pause in between, when they didn't film,
we sat and talked. So we couldn't... yes, I didn't
know what I should talk to them about. I have a
very easy time having contact with Swedes, normal
... with Swedish guys from the middle class and
working class.... I was totally lost this time. I didn't
understand. My codes didn't work. One of them
discussed if I was Swedish or African [and] one of
the guys began to poke at my hair. He was going to
check if I was African or Swedish. I said "what are
you doing! Leave me alone!" And then he did it
again, and I said "No but, please, leave me alone; I
don't think this is OK.. Stop!" He did it again and
again. Fuck, he was violating my integrity Arrhhh!!
Like that! There were a whole lot of people there.
"Swedish then" he said after sometime, "you are
Swedish, because if you were African you would
have reacted positively because I was supporting
you or you also could have given me a box in the
ears. But you said so weakly (mocking voice)
"stop." "Swedish" he said. And it is interesting and
it is correct. I didn't have the codes he was out after.
So our communication didn't function. Arid I think
that is very typical. The words have been so wrong
when I have met African men. We speak a whole
different language.

In this gendered story, phenotype (her hair) is
evaluated as a criterion of community, and Henrika
describes how class and culture are a potent fissure in
such calls for community. In particular, she differentiates
herself from the African men and their social position
in Sweden. This can be seen in how she described them
by comparing them with people she terms "Swedes,
normal ... Swedish guys from the middle and working
class." In this description black men are positioned as
"not normal," and Henrika perceives them as lacking
middle- or working-class "Swedish" cultural codes. In
the end, both Henrika and the men reject phenotype and
ancestry as criteria of communality; she rejects the men
as Swedish, and they reject her as African and once
again the dichotomous relationship between these two
categorizations is maintained.
Culture and class present a deep disjuncture to calls
for community that are either/or (i.e. you are either
Swedish or African), and that are based solely on
phenotype. Henrika's example describes heterogeneity
among the people that I, like the television program,
have grouped as "of African ancestry." Powerful
experiences of migration, memories of an African
national belonging, lineage, and phenotype, as well as
economic and cultural discrimination, inform many of
the migrant Africans' calls for diasporic community in
Stockholm. Yet, as Henrika made clear, these
experiences are "foreign" to many of the Swedes "of
African ancestry" bom in Sweden (especially those who
have little contact with their African parent), and those
who are adopted.
Adoptees, as well as those people born and/or raised
in Sweden, have particular stakes in identifying with
popular definitions of Swedishness. Both of these groups
typically have the "cultural capital" (Bourdieu 1991)
associated with Swedish normalcy as they are often:
fluent in one ofthe recognized Swedish "dialects," raised
in "Swedish" middle class communities and families,
and thus have access to extended Swedish family
networks and traditions that are useful when seeking
employment.
Finally, while migrant Swedes like Monique and
Evan often spoke of the discrimination and social,
economic, and cultural marginality of Africans in
Sweden, as well as the importance of maintaining ties
with kin in Africa elsewhere, Henrika instead expressed
ambivalence about being included in the African
community. Instead, for Henrika, encounters with
Africans in Stockholm were charged meetings where
evaluation of the boundaries and criteria of community
persisted.
In the next example, Henrika accentuated the
gendered tensions of her own "self-making and being-
made," and describes how inclusion within the African
community also comes with demands. She described
an encounter with a black subway ticket controller who
sought to include her in an African community in
Stockholm:
He said like this [in English] "ah, what are you
reading?" and I said "Roots" He said "Ah that is
good, I'll come back later." Then he disappeared
and when he came back I waved my hundred
[kronor] bill like I was going to pay. So then he
said, "no, no, no" like that. Sometimes when there
is a black ticket controller in the subway he says
like "go pass." It is a little like, we are black, we
should hold together. Like, "I understand you, you
understand me, you and I are friends." ... It is good
not to have to pay. No, but it is both good and bad.
Those times it is fun, it is nice that someone will
embrace you with their worth like. I can think it is
a fine gesture, in a sense. But then there can come
other demands in the bargain that are not so easy to
deal with, this with (mocking English voice) "You
have to leam, you have to learn to speak African,
you know. Ah woman, you have got to find yourself
an African man. "Excuse me! But I feel Swedish."
(In mocking English voice) "No that cannot be!
Oh no, you have to bring your roots to the next
generation." There is so much that is double
[contradictory].
If Henrika's previous story told of her rejection by
African men she encountered on the film set in
Stockholm, this story tells instead of being embraced
as "African." Here both the constraints and benefits of
belonging within African community are compared. On
the one hand, she expresses pleasure at the gesture of
inclusion and some of the "entitlements" (in this case,
not having to pay on the subway); on the other hand,
she is uncomfortable with the gendered "demands" that
accompany belonging. These were demands that she
described through a male voice that she mimicked in
"broken" English.
This male African voice pressured her to become
an African woman: to conform to particular cultural
norms, learn an African language, marry an African man,
and pass on "her roots" to the next generation. In
particular, his statement of passing on her "roots to the
next generation" had folded into them specific gendered
understandings of reproduction, purity, and the
transmission of bodily fluids. Blood, culture, sexuality,
and "race" all lay veiled within the "roots" she was
encouraged to embrace. Resisting his coupling of
phenotype and culture, Henrika exclaimed "But I feel
Swedish!" and rejected his "placing" of her as African
SAWYER 25
to mean that she was not Swedish. Once again a discrete
dichotomy between "African" and "Swedish" belonging
is invoked, this time with specific, and hierarchical,
meanings of gender and sexuality.
As Henrika asserted that she is Swedish and rejected
phenotype, lineage, and birthplace as a criterion of
belonging in an African community. I asked her how
she saw herself. Like Monique and Evan she invoked
racial discourse in her discussion of Swedish belonging.
She said,
Because I myself feel so Swedish I think it is
absolutely dumb to go after skin color. I feel white.
When I look in the mirror, I don't see that I am
brown. And on those days that I have gotten a little
color in my face 1 usually react when I see my face
in the mirror. Oh! How brown I have become.
Here Henrika both dismissed the usage of
phenotype as a relevant criterion of Swedish belonging
and linked Swedishness with whiteness. It is significant
that she chooses to use the word brown (brun) instead
of the more politicized, and possibly more obviously
racialized term, of Black (svart). Yet in identifying
herself as Swedish and White, Henrika aligned herself
with a position of power. While 1 am not questioning
adoptees' claims to Swedishness, I find it particularly
interesting that this group was much more likely (than
migrants and those persons of African ancestry bom in
Sweden), to do so through identifying themselves with
whiteness.
Yet given the contours of racial discourse in
Sweden, as well as the historical propensity to "blacken"
those groups thought to be marginal to middle-class
ideas of Swedish belonging, Henrika's strategy of "self-
making" is not so surprising. If marginal class belonging
has been historically linked with phenotypic brownness
or darkness, it makes sense that Henrika asserts her
Swedish belonging through not recognizing her own
phenotypic "brownness" as a potential marker of
identification and community. Her decision to reject
calls of African community based on phenotype, lineage
and birthplace reproduce historical dichotomous
meanings that employed Africa as the opposite of
Swedishness. What "routes" to African community did
Henrika draw?
In the next passage she invokes alternative "routes"
to African diasporic belonging. Responding to my
question about Ethiopia, her birthplace, she answers.
When I see a picture of Ethiopia on TV it is not so
that I feel like my heart is bleeding for Africa. It
doesn't do that. But on the contrary I can feel that
my heart bleeds with injustice ... I hurt for those
26 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
children who don't get nutrition, of course. But I
also hurt with those fourteen-year-old pimply girls
in Swedish schools who no one listens to, who no
one sees and who, like myself, think everything is
so awful and I am pained for them too. I think there
are different types of pain, but you can't compare
pain. I mean people are people. I would never trade
[my place] for everything in the world. I wouldn't
in the whole world want to carry a water jug for
two miles everyday. No thank you, I have it good
here (laughter). I can have an incredible bad
conscience. I can buy a nice apartment in
Ostermalm [moneyed section of central Stockholm]
and my brothers and sisters are starving. Then I
can feel a real angst and think 'I will sell everything
and move out on the street.' But then I think, 'I'll
do that tomorrow!' (laughter).
In this statement birthplace, lineage, and phenotype
are rejected as criteria of African diasporic identification
as Henrika instead questions racially-based kinship (i.e.
with African 'brothers and sisters') by introducing
gender-based kinship with the suffering, inequality, and
pain experienced by Swedish teenager girls. Ethiopia,
and Africa, emerge as a dystopic place of starvation
and poverty, where she would have had to "walk for
miles" with a jug of water on her head and is glad to
have left. Ethiopia, and Africa, materializes through
Henrika's "routings" as an unsavory place of gender
oppression, poverty, the 'Third World," and a place of
"underdevelopment." In the end, Henrika seems to imply
that through her adoption to Sweden she is "saved" from
a difficult, if not joyless, life.
Given the trite picture of Africa and African culture
in Sweden, it is not surprising that Henrika aligns herself
with modernity, civility, and privilege. Her rejection of
phenotype, lineage, and birthplace as a basis for
identification as Black is due, in part at least, to how
she "routes" African Diaspora. Her routing strategies
distend to create a community of economically and
culturally marginal Swedish "immigrants; a place where
people speak "broken" English instead of the fluent
upper-class Swedish she does, and work in the bowels
of the subway, rather than as television actresses. Her
"routes" to Africa envelop popular televised images and
sounds of Africa as a dystopic cultural and geographical
space. These are images that teach Swedes not only
about the "place" of Africa in an economic and cultural
hierarchy of nations, but also about the marginality of
"black" and "African" peoples in the world.
SIPHO
1 met Sipho in 1995 through a white Swedish journalist
who wrote about Africans in one of the national
newspapers. Then in his early twenties and a university
student, Sipho is the son of a white Swedish mother and
black South African father. Articulate, tall, brown
skinned, and handsome, he and I continued to meet
informally after out first tape-recorded interview at his
family home. I found him to be an impassioned
interlocutor and we debated and discussed the relevance
of racialization in Swedish and U.S. belonging.
Sipho's "self-making" strategies point to the
creation of alternate "routes" to African Diasporic
community. Like Monique and Evan he invoked the
tensions that racialization presents for "immigrants" and
people of African ancestry in particular. For example,
he described how the dominant racial logic used to mark
"immigrants" is complicated by people who are born in
Sweden. He told of one experience at a party:
They don't really know what to think about me ...
[Once] at a party there was a real fight. I mean, not
a physical fight, but people were arguing. [They
were] all Swedish white guys [arguing] about my
identity. ... First the people were drunk so they
made racist remarks. One guy said "I'm not a racist,
but I hate darkies." And he started screaming. And
then he said "excuse me," and I said "don't worry,
you're absolutely normal." And then he, he kept
on arguing that he doesn't like foreigners who kick
him down on the street. And then another guy said
"I don't like spies and svartskallar, [Then he said
to me] Well, excuse me that I use the expression"
... "because I don't like them." ... And we were
looking at each other in the same way, like we were
being nice to each other, but we didn't try to kill
each other [both smiling but angry inside]. But on
the other hand, what I felt was very stubborn, that
'I'm Swedish. I'm just as Swedish as you, 100
percent." And then he started arguing "No, you
can't be because your father is from Africa" and so
on. But then everybody else wanted to be in this
argument, and said "Wait a minute; on the other
hand, he is very Swedish. He's been born and raised
here. He's of our culture." But this other guy who
was sitting next to me, he just kept saying "No,
he's not Swedish." So everybody started butting
in. And I walked away ...
Here Sipho describes how his Swedish belonging
was a source of lively public debate. Questions such
as, "Was he Swedish?" and "Why not?" seemed to
electrify the young adults at the party. At stake was not
just Sipho's authenticity as a Swede, but I would also
argue, the "place" of "race" in belonging in Sweden.
As the group of men voiced their dislike of "darkies,"
"foreigners," "spies" and "svartskallar" Sipho's
phenotypic darkness and one non-Swedish parent
threatened to shift him to a position of Swedish
marginality. He said later in the interview that he felt
he was questionable "because I wasn't white and 1 don't
have two Swedish parents."
Sipho's story is useful because it provides a closer
view of how one group of Swedes' defined and debated
the criterion of Swedish belonging. Arguments used to
exclude him from Swedish belonging were made using
the evidence of his color (phenotype) and that his father
is a non-Swede, an "immigrant," and in particular, an
African. Yet others included him in Swedish community
by arguing with evidence of birthplace, soil and culture,
and stating; "He is born and raised here. He's of our
culture." That both men and women argued, grappled
with, and negotiated the criterion of Swedish belonging
illustrates, once again, how this criterion is contested
domain and is a source of prickly, and heated, debate.
Sipho described himself as 100 percent Swedish
and as Black, and so bridges dichotomous meanings of
Swedish and African belonging. The diasporic
community he invoked creates "routings" to African
communities and peoples outside of Sweden, and
bypassed both the "public spaces of Africa" that
Monique and Evan were involved in as well as the
dystopic Africa painted by Henrika. Sipho did not
attend African organizations, and told me that he instead
liked to go to the "Swedish" discotheques, where there
is often hip-hop and rap music, rather than reggae, zouk,
or soukous. As for friends, Sipho said he did not have
many migrant African friends, but instead hung out with
both "immigrants" and "Swedes," reproducing popular
racially (in)visible categories of belonging. The "routes"
that he took to imagine community are those that are
also being taken by other "immigrant" youth born in
Sweden and who are, for example, of Iranian, Kurdish,
Polish, Latin American, and Russian ancestry. In these
"routings" the criterion of blood quantum, ancestry,
lineage, and personal contact with Africa are of little
importance; instead, their shared experiences of
racialized marginality push these second- generation
"immigrant" youth to seek commonality and community
within African Diasporas.
When I met with Sipho I saw evidence of how his
diasporic "routings" stretched to envelop the
experiences of not just peoples of African ancestry, but
also racialized minorities, around the world. On his
desk were books about Afro-Brazilians, South Africans,
Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, and the Holocaust. His
dresser held a collection of "gangsta rap" CDs, and he
told of how he had begun a few years ago to listen to
the English lyrics of "gangsta rap" music as a "safe way"
to "cope" and "harden" himself to the taunts of his
schoolmates who called him a neger (which Sipho told
SAWYER 27
me meant the same thing as "nigger" in the United
States). Listening to these songs repeatedly before going
to school was a way to keep him from "exploding."
Through our discussions it became clear that African
American experiences and strategies of negotiating U.S.
racism were an important influence in Sipho's "self-
making." He described his self-identification as Black
as follows:
I consider myself to be Black; there is nothing to
it. And especially after my father got attacked by
the police, he always ... I've always called myself
Black even before that, but especially then he told
me ... "your identity is very important." ... You
[should] always consider yourself to be Black. So
I at that time 1 really started feeling a bit African
even. Because he taught me some words in Zulu, a
little bit of African history. And it was during the
same time that I, when I was about 12 or 13 years
old that I started thinking about my father and
started longing for him, and wanting to know about
Africa. ... And so I always have been going down
to the library so then I opened a book. I don't know
if it was a change in my life but 1 just... I wanted
to know anything about Black people, so I was just
walking along the library and then I found a book,
and it was called Harlem, Harlem ... It's a Swedish
guy who is making a book. He was writing about
Black Harlem during the 70s. So I opened it up
and I looked around, and then I saw a Black man, a
Black scholar, who said things about Black identity,
that made me catch up, "oh. so there's an
explanation." ... He was saying that, being Black
is being faceless. And he was only talking to
America, but it was my words, it was my thoughts.
This being faceless and everybody has got to have
an identity. But it was stolen from us during slavery.
That's what he told. And then I looked at some other
pages and read about the Black Panther party. One
of the leaders said that there were people living in
exile. And it just hit me. Me? Living in exile? I
always think about myself being Swedish, bom here
and raised here, but then I also started thinking
about "Wait a minute, I might be living in exile, in
some sort of way. Psychologically, culturally."...
So I started thinking about how racism works, as a
system. And I started reading just like a madman.
His father's experience of police brutality
politicizes Sipho to "always consider myself to be
Black" and pushes him to see self identification as
political. Black is negative only when using a majority
"Swedish" perspective, and Sipho's readings push him
to see the possibility and importance of self definition.
28 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
He begins to "feel African" and offers evidence of this
belonging through his learning of some "Zulu words"
and African history. Less explicit, however, is how his
father's return to South Africa propels the teenaged
Sipho to identify him as Black. It is likely that through
this "self-making," Sipho was also strengthening his ties
to his father.
Black America is clearly an important "route" taken
by some Swedes of African ancestry. Through reading
books about Africa, South Africa, and the United States,
Sipho widened and shifted the boundaries of community,
as phenotypic blackness and a sense of marginality in
Sweden became potent bases for entry into a large
diasporic Black community. In particular, the words of
a Black scholar writing about the experience of Black
Americans provide Sipho with an "explanation" for his
own experiences of marginality in Sweden. It is
significant that though this scholar's words were
"rooted" in the specificities of U.S. history, Sipho
translated them into his own, saying "And he was only
talking to America, but it was my words, it was my
thoughts." This statement signals once again of the
importance of books in the creation of African
Diasporas, perhaps most significantly for those persons
positioned on the "margins" of the diasporic map. For
example, though Henrika earlier stressed ambivalence
towards the African community she encountered in
Stockholm, she was also reading Alex Haley's "Roots"
on the subway train. It is possible that books such as
"Roots" present her with alternative "routes" to an
African belonging than those she encounters among
Africans living in Stockholm.
Stories of African Americans as an exiled people,
African American slavery, emancipation, and eventually
Black Power, all became a part of the shared past into
which Sipho inscribes himself. Inscription into this
history propels him from "always thinking of myself as
Swedish," to thinking of himself as "living in exile, in
some sort of way." Here an important shift in Sipho's
sense of self and community occurs. If seeing himself
as Swedish meant that his phenotype, as well as one
immigrant parent, can be used to threaten his belonging
as "authentically" Swedish (see Sipho's story above),
than re-articulating his "brownness" into "blackness"
offers inclusion within a transnational community
populated by both Africans and other racially
discriminated peoples around the world.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Monique, Evan, Henrika, and Sipho describe how
Swedish locality and criterion of belonging are created
through invocations and imaginings of people, places,
and cultures elsewhere. The strategic shrinking and/or
expansion of geographical and cartographic spaces are
all crucial to studies of diasporic community and these
communities' map making. In this paper I highlight some
of the fissures and disjunctions in calls for African
Diasporic community and argue that underpinning the
narratives of Monique, Evan, Henrika and Sipho are
the cultural politics of belonging in Stockholm, Sweden.
This is a cultural politics that has had, and continues
to have, a particular moral and historical relationship to
discourses of "race" and racism. For example, in Sweden
the word "race," and the explicit naming of people with
racial categories, is generally perceived to challenge
cherished stories of the Swedish nation and people as
moral, solidaristic, and as isolated from the racism of
"Other" places. Further, strategies of invoking the
Swedish national past and the racism of "Other" local
and transnational places suggest the continued
importance and coupling of geography and "race." It is
within this "local" context that Swedes of African
ancestry encounter and negotiate the criterion of
community. In their "self-making" disparate
transnational "routes" come into view.
For example, many of the informants distinguished
between categories of "brownness" and "blackness,"
however, these racial signifiers had braided into them
differences of experience, social status, birthplace, class,
culture, lineage, and authenticity. For example, Henrika
reproduced dominant Swedish meanings of belonging
by delicately linking Swedishness with whiteness and
rejecting more unequivocal calls for community based
on phenotype.
Monique and Evan on the other hand, sought to re-
articulate the negative meanings associated with
phenotypic blackness into more positive ones through
spreading knowledge of "African roots." These were
"roots" cultivated in African cultural organizational
activities and were often in collaboration with, or at least
shaped by, Swedish state social agencies and
institutional protocol and regulations. The redemptive
powers found in these "African roots" privileged
personal experience of community in an African country
and blood quantum.
Finally, Sipho's identification as both Black and
Swedish imagines commonality with the experiences
of oppressed peoples in the United States and South
Africa. The community he summons is foremost with
other "immigrant" youth bom in Sweden, than African
migrant communities in Stockholm. For Sipho
belonging is enacted through the consumption of
specific media, music, and clothing styles.
"Routings" pushes us to consider that there can also
be a hierarchy of "African" identification. Dystopic
television images of Africa, as well as limited contact
with African "immigrant" communities in Sweden,
inform both Sipho's and Henrika's rejection of "African"
identification. For example, for Henrika calls for African
community are clearly gendered and fraught with the
dangers of a strange "immigrant" culture and an
economic and social marginality to which she does not
relate. Instead, flashy, shiny, easily consumable TV and
media images of specific African American figures,
communities, and historical periods easily dominate in
the relative absence of positive images and figures from
"Africa." These North American images are most visibly
seen in the strategies adopted by Henrika and Sipho as
they read about American slavery and the "roots" of
Alex Haley. For Sipho, media images and texts are an
important medium in his "self-making" as Black; this
inscribes him within a community peopled by resistant
historical figures and struggles located in the United
States and South Africa. These "routes" are alternative
to the ones Monique and Evan chart in the African
"immigrant" cultural organizations.
Clearly, a discontinuity exists between supposedly
"race-free" state categorizations of "immigrants" by
ethnicity and nationality, and the fierce debate over the
place of racialization in Swedish society I observed
occurring in the everyday. Claims to Swedish belonging,
and Black African diasporic belonging, were splintered
by experiences and privileging of ethnicity, gender,
religion, phenotype, nationality, class, birthplace, and
culture. These differences in turn influence the itinerary
charted by Blacks to imagine and create belonging.
Where, when, and how their diasporic paths overlap,
waits to be seen.
NOTES
This article is dedicated to my mentor, anthropologist
Carolyn Martin Shaw, who deserves warm thanks for
being an inspiring, supportive, and intellectually de-
manding adviser. I also want to acknowledge the inter-
est and support of dissertation committee members Don
Brenneis and Barbro Klein, as well as Isar Godreau,
Michelle Rosenthal, Ulrika Dahl, Ann Kingsolver, and
Kamari Clarke. I thank the National Science Founda-
tion for funding my doctoral studies, and the Fulbright
Foundation for funding my 1995-1996 fieldwork. Fi-
nally, I thank all of the people in Stockholm who shared
their time and lives with me. All errors are mine alone.
1. Some of the interviews were conducted in En-
glish and others in Swedish or a mix of the two. I used
a broad method of transcription, prioritizing actual
words over sighs, silences and syntax, all of which are
also important in analyses of verbal accounts (Klein
1990). In the text, I have kept the informal (and what is
seen by many as 'incorrect') Swedish grammar. I have
also included my own informal, and occasionally fum-
SAWYER 29
bling "incorrect" grammar, used during those tape-re-
corded interviews. 1 have done this to give the reader a
sense of the Swedish language, personality of the
speaker, as well as to point out that there are many dif-
ferent ways of speaking the Swedish language. Words
included to give context, and to help understand the
sentences meaning, are bracketed.
2. Baker (1994 [1988]) describes this method of
locating informants saying "In snowball sampling you
first find a few subjects who are characterized by the
qualities you seek; you interview them; and then you
ask them for names of other people they know who have
the same qualities" (165). I sought out informants who
were phenotypically black and/or who were involved
in the public Africa scene in Stockholm (and circulated
in African discotheques, organizations, and dance and/
or drum courses).
3. These are meanings that reflect this particular
North American academic's life experiences and
academic training and have been shaped by U.S.
meanings of racialization that combine ideas of lineage,
blood, and specific phenotypic combinations (such as
skin color, hair texture, and facial features) to group
people as "of African ancestry."
4. There is a rich body of literature discussing the
politics and poetics of "native" and/or "insider"
anthropology by feminists and anthropologists of color.
See, for example, Harrison (1986,1997); Nader (1982);
Kondo (1990); Abu-Lughod (1992); Narayan (1992);
Visweswaran (1994); Dahl (1995), and Ifekwunigwe
(1999) to name only a few. My own placement in the
text is to signal that researchers need to consider how
this distinction, between "natives/non-natives" and
"insiders/outsiders" is complicated, situational, and in
my own case, extremely blurred.
5. Brown describes her research as follows: "For
the purposes of exploring the power-laden symbiosis
between the 'within' and 'across' of diaspora, 1 analyze
those practices in which black people in Liverpool make
use of any of the vast resources of what they construct
as the black world, yet within the political economy of
what has been available to them" (1998:298).
6. All translations, from Swedish to English, are
my own. Further, the names of all informants are
pseudonyms.
7. Folkhemmel translates as The People's Home
and is most closely associated with the near century-
long domination of the Social Democratic Party
(sometimes in coalition) in Swedish politics. However
the term also conjures up familial images of social
welfare, the common good, democracy, and of a "middle
way" between socialism and capitalism.
8. Brown (2000) theorizes how contemporary
British debates and histories about Liverpool and the
30 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 11 (1)
slave trade are really also about the struggle over the
meaning of whiteness and the presence of racism in
Britain. Encoded within these debates are also
discussions about the morality of specific localities (in
her research, Britain and Liverpool).
9. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization's 1950 criticism of the term "race"
also played a pivotal role in the disappearance of the
term from Swedish public and governmental discourse
(Zaremba 1997b:5).
10. "Neger" sounds in Swedish very similar to the
English word "nigger" and has been in use for at least
300 years. However, with the arrival of African
American and South Africans in the 1960s and 1970s
the word was perceived to have negative connotations.
Today most of the Swedes of African ancestry prefer
terms like svart (black), fargad (colored), and Afrihm
(African), and describe "neger" as a racist and
derogative term. However, many older white Swedes
continue to use the term asserting, sometimes angrily,
that the word has no negative connotations.
11. See the work of Alsmark (1992) and Pred
(1997) for a discussion of the spacialization of racism
in the southern Swedish town of Sjobo. In the 1990s,
this small rural town wanted to hold a referendum to
reject the state's placement of a group of refugees in
their community. This resulted in a huge national debate
about racism and how unlike the rest of Sweden this
town had historically been, and continued to be, in
relation to racism and Nazism.
12. These recent media reports and debates should
also be seen as in conversation with, and as a re-writing
of, the national past. See, for example, the work of
Ruth 1984, 1997; Broberg 1987; L68w 1998; Runcis
1997a, 1997b; Roll-Hansen 1989; Svanberg and Tyden
992; Alund and Schierup 1991.
13. This paradox can also be seen in other contexts,
for example, Mexico after revolution. For example,
Alan Knight (1990:85-87) argues that while
postrevolutionary Mexican nationalist discourse
introduced the ideas of mestizaje and the cosmic race
in an effort to escape Eurocentric biological
understandings of race and nation, the basic racial
schema remained intact.
14. Svartskalle translates literally as "black skull"
and invokes racial discourses of skulls and heads. It is a
derogatory term used to mark particular "immigrant"
Swedes as a cultural, racial, class, and national "Other."
See ethnographic video "Meanings of Svartskalle"
(Sawyer 1997).
15. While some contemporary scholars have
pointed to Sweden's absence in the African slave trade
as exemplary of a national trait of solidarity, Scott (1977)
suggests that Sweden's absence in colonialism and the
slave trade are based upon a failure to sufficiently protect
the forts from other European nations. Yet though
colonial efforts in Africa failed, Sweden's economic
wealth and power grew during the early 1600s as the
nation carved out an important, albeit semi-peripheral,
role in mercantilist trade. It became the world's leading
producer of copper and later a strong producer of iron
ore (Wallerstein 1980:205,208). One could well wonder
to what extent the iron and copper sold abroad were
used on the slave ships (in the form of iron cookery,
goods and shackles) to bind African men and women to
a fate of slavery, bondage, death and perseverance in
the New World.
16. They were 1) Swedish Evangelical Mission
(Evangeliska fosterlandsstiftelsen) in Ethiopia and
Eritrea in 1856; 2) the Church of Sweden Mission
(Svenska kyrkans mission), in Zululand in 1876; and 3)
the Swedish Missionary Association (Svenska
missionsjorbundet) in the Congo (Debrunner 1979:330-
31)
17. This poster was observed in 1995 hanging in
an archivist's office at the Stockholm Museum.
18. Sami are the peoples indigenous to Sapmi, a
geographical area that extends across what is today
Sweden, Norway. Finland and Russia.
19. My translation of this word would be "Negro
villages" or "Nigger villages."
20. Two studies are noteworthy: Lena Olsson's
1986 study about the portrayal of different "world
cultures" in Swedish geography textbooks and teaching
aids over the past 100 year shows an evaluation and
higher value given to what are seen as "high" cultures,
i.e., those with fixed domiciles rather than hunting and
nomadic ones, a written language, constitutional
democratic political organization, and technological
advancement (Olsson 1986). With regards to "race" she
concludes that "the white 'race' emerges as superior to
others. The Teutons, among whom the textbook authors
include linguistically Scandinavians, Englishmen,
Germans, Dutchmen and Flemyngs, are presented most
favorably in the textbooks" (201-202). Mai Palmberg's
1987 study of school textbooks also suggest that books
have been important in the creation of ideas about
Africans. Like Olsson, she concludes that many of the
images in the 1980s schoolbooks build upon older
stereotypes of Africa and Africans from European
colonialism.
21. This number, for the entire continent of Africa,
should be compared with the number of "immigrants"
to Sweden who were born in the following individual
countries during the same time period: 203,371 in
Finland; 69,903 in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia;
49,203 in Iran; 46,764 in Bosnia-Herzegovina; 43,833
in Norway; 39,792 in Denmark; 39,522 in Poland;
35,936 in Germany; 30,173 in Turkey; 28,978 in Iraq;
and 26,808 in Chile (Swedish Institute 1997:1). Though
images of blackness and Africans are an integrated part
of the Swedish visual landscape and imaginary, Africans
are in fact a small percentage of the total number of
"immigrants" in Sweden.
22. For Gambians, one of the only ways to stay in
Sweden was to quickly "get attached" to a Swedish
woman (Wagner and Yamba 1986). Gambians as a group
continue to be a visible part of the public Africa scene
in Stockholm's discotheques and generally have a low
status among both Africans and Swedes. Their low status
is in part due to their being perceived as explicitly (and
one could say strategically) using racial and sexual
stereotypes about African men to attract white women
in the discotheques (see my dissertation Chapter 5: Steps
of "Tradition" and Change: Invoking Africa in African
Dance Classes).
23. For example, a 1999 report describes that over
90 percent of Somali men are unemployed (Orrenius
1999:C9).
24. Philomena Essed's (1990) term "everyday"
racism is a particularly important contribution to
understanding Swedish debates about racism that have
focused on the violent acts of individual and
"exceptional" Swedes. The concept of everyday racism
theorizes racism as a social system that is part of all
levels of society. Everyday racism allows researchers
to understand how racism is part of taken-for-granted
meanings and behaviors of people that find their
expression in non-spectacular everyday situations (47).
25. Immigrant cultural organizations often receive
state subsidy. However this is not without a cost;
Swedish state regulations for "immigrant organizations"
in turn affect how Africans organize, and the kinds of
"cultural programs." activities and conferences they
produce. A dilemma facing many NGOs is that
"immigrant organizations" often spend a considerable
amount of time preparing funding applications and
indeed, even sometimes must reformulate their own
project ideas, to qualify for state funding.
26. It is worth pointing out that Monique and Evan
employ mediary (that is, half cast and mulatto) racial
categorizations that were in usage in their varied
countries of origin (i.e. Zaire and Ghana) suggesting
the travel of terminology (Clifford 1997). Have these
racial categorizations traveled into Sweden along with
the transnational migration of people? Or, is it possible
that these categories have emerged within the Stockholm
context to differentiate experiences of belonging? So
far the "routes" of these terms are unclear, however, it
is clear that the terms of half-caste, mulatt, and blandade
are an integral part of the ways that diasporic "roots"
are being cultivated in Stockholm.
SAWYER 31
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