Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country by Ryan Thomas Skinner (review)

Sweden, like the rest of the Nordic region, is in the international imaginary often cast as a bastion of socially progressive policy and egalitarianism. Sweden is also widely imagined as color-blind, anti-racist, and homogeneously white. Yet even prior to the recent political gains of the Sweden Democrats, scholars, activists, and cultural producers have long worked to dismantle the "myth of Nordic exceptionalism" and to expose the "white normativity" that underlies hegemonic notions of Swedishness.¹ The US ethnomusicologist Ryan Thomas Skinner's Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country seeks to contribute to these efforts by "[illuminating] the history, culture, and identity of a very real and clearly present Afro-Swedish community" (p. 3). A primarily ethnographic work grounded in conversations with Skinner's Afro-Swedish interlocutors along with analyses of public events and expressive culture, Skinner sets out to trace the contours of Afro-Swedish public culture.

The book is organized into two sections based on the themes of remembering and renaissance, which Skinner proposes be understood as "two modes of Africana being-in-the-world" (p. 20). Skinner defines remembering as the way "African-descended populations actively produce a sense of community via historical recollection," while the term "renaissance" is "used to describe the social and cultural florescence of Black life in the world" (p. 22). The first three chapters of the book offer examples of Afro-Swedish practices of diasporic remembering, while the last three chapters offer case studies of varied elements of Afro-Swedish public culture. Taken together, the book observes a "period of pronounced Afro-Swedish effervescence," (p. 3) a development that Skinner argues constitutes a distinctly Afro-Swedish renaissance, a process of "becoming Black in a color-blind country," as the book's subtitle suggests. Across the book's six substantive chapters, the reader meets a cadre of Afro-Swedish cultural actors whose perspectives and experiences Skinner strives to understand and amplify. These noteworthy public figures, including musical artists, actors, filmmakers, and cultural critics provide valuable insights into and significant viewpoints of contemporary Afro-Swedish life and culture. The focus on Afro-Swedish communities makes a necessary intervention into the field of Scandinavian Studies, which has largely disengaged from questions of racialization and racism in the Nordic region. Yet as a scholarly work situated in the field of Africana and Black studies, the book also raises some questions concerning the ethics and politics of scholarship, including positionality, citational politics, and methodology.

As Skinner recounts in the concluding chapter, he initially began his research in Sweden with the intention of studying and playing with West African musicians, an extension of his work as an Africanist ethnomusicologist. Once in the field, Skinner discovered a broader array of African diasporic cultural actors whose significant public engagement compelled him to change the course of his research. While the accomplished Afro-Swedish cultural actors featured in this work undoubtedly deserve to have their work as the core subject matter of a book, Skinner's approach to Afro-Sweden as a site of personal discovery uncomfortably resounds throughout the book. Although the introductory chapter includes a disclaimer as to Skinner's positionality as "a white American man," the book fails to adequately engage with how his positionality has structured his methodological and analytical approaches. Glaringly absent is any serious reflection about what it means to be a white US scholar speaking for, and theorizing the meaning of, Afro-Sweden.

This recurring dynamic has previously been critiqued by (predominantly, although not exclusively) Black scholars of both Africa and its diaspora, including Black European scholars. Indeed, the dominance of white scholars of Africa and its diaspora has long been debated in the field of African studies.² Scholars have similarly called attention to the problematics of white scholars uncritically and unreflexively taking on the study of Black life and culture in the United States.³ Black European scholars have critiqued the appropriation of the field...