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  • Afro-Swedish Artistic Practices and Discourses in and out of Sweden:A Conversation with Ethnomusicologist Ryan T. Skinner
  • Beth Buggenhagen (bio) and Ryan Thomas Skinner (bio)

Sweden has long been known for its tolerance and openness. During the twentieth century, Swedish missionaries paved the way for Africans to migrate to Sweden, Swedish political figures campaigned for decolonization, and by the 1970s, Sweden was attracting people fleeing war-torn areas such as the Horn of Africa (Kubai 2016; Kushkush 2016). Yet recently, Sweden has had to contend with a sharp increase in the numbers of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Once a nation with one of the most progressive stances on migration, it reversed its immigration policy in 2015, in part responding to the unprecedented numbers of families migrating to Europe from Syria, West Africa, and elsewhere. Sweden began to control its borders with Denmark and to admit only the minimum number of refugees required by its EU membership (Russo 2017). This contemporary conjuncture has fueled debates in Sweden over race, racial identity, and national belonging.

These debates are especially pertinent to young people who were born in Sweden and whose parents were born in Africa and who increasingly identify as Afro-Swedes (afrosvensk). This generation faces the conundrum of having been born in Sweden, yet often assumed to be not Swedish (Miller 2017; Skinner 2017). Members of this community also include recent migrants from Africa, individuals who trace their heritage to the diaspora, and those who claim affiliations to Africa.

This new generation has taken an increasingly public stance as an ethnic and racial minority. A flashpoint in the debate over racial identity and racial politics in Sweden has been Sweden's involvement in the slave trade. Sweden played a marginal role in the European colonization of Africa. The Swedish Africa Company controlled a small colony, Cabo Corso, in the Gulf of Guinea, from 1650 to 1663, which was not economically important to Sweden. This colony was incorporated into the British Gold Coast, and by 1663 Sweden had lost control of it to the Dutch. Of more debate is the [End Page 92] role that Sweden played as a transfer point in the transatlantic trade in slaves from Africa to the New World until 1847, when it abolished the slave trade. Sweden had a more indirect, but no less significant, contribution to the trade: the export of high-quality iron ore, some of which was forged into shackles.1

The presence of people of African descent has changed dramatically in Sweden, as have the ways members of this community discuss race, identity, and racial politics. Ryan Skinner, an ethnomusicologist in the School of Music and the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University, has been tracing the presence of Africa in Sweden. His research focuses on discourses of identity making among artists and arts groups in Sweden, focusing on artists who claim Afro-Swedish identity. Skinner's work focuses on the local and global music cultures of contemporary Africa and its European and American diasporas. Skinner is the author of Bamako Sounds: The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), an ethnographic study of the popular music and culture of Bamako, Mali. He is an accomplished kora player.2

During a year of fieldwork in Sweden in 2015, Skinner tracked modes of expression, identification, and political engagement among the artists that make up Sweden's emergent Afro-Swedish community. Afro-Swedes are part of a growing African and diasporic presence in contemporary Europe. In the past six decades, African nationals claiming African descent have gone to Sweden through tourism, travel, adoption, and migration, seeking refuge and asylum. Through ethnographic inquiry, textual analysis, and historical study, Skinner studies the sociopolitical processes through which Afro-Swedes claim to belong in Sweden. He is working on a book in which he examines understandings and expressions of Afro-Swedish identity in music, dance, theater, film, and verbal art. He aims to draw "critical attention to the lives and works of artists who perform a sense of community while confronting endemic racism; who celebrate social pluralism against assumptions of cultural difference; and who, in performance, captivate Swedish...

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