Black and Swedish: Racialization and the
Cultural Politics of
Belonging in Stockholm
March 2000
Lena S. Sawyer, B.A., MONTCLAIR STATE
UNIVERSITY
M.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
Directed by: Professor Carolyn Martin Shaw
This dissertation looks at how racial discourses are used in contemporary Swedes'practices of belonging, their sense of their incorporation into Swedish
society. I analyze verbal accounts and narratives of people "of African
ancestry" living in Stockholm and those positioned in the normative and
racially-unmarked category, "Swede." I study concepts of blackness and the
uses to which black bodies are put in Swedish debates. Hegemonic ideas
about race, nation, and belonging are investigated through attention to how
dichotomous categorizations of "black" and "white" and "Swede" and "African"
are produced, contested, undermined, and reproduced by individuals of
various classes and generations living in Sweden.
Research for this dissertation was based on participant observation and interviews with people in Stockholm, Sweden from March 1995 to May 1996. The theoretical approach used relied on an understanding of individuals as active agents in shaping
the discourses and narratives through which they give meanings to their
lives while, at the same time, having their lives shaped by popular and
governmental discourses and practices.
Governmental classificatory schemas, especially those which address immigrants and citizens, are potent sites where individuals and groups come to be thought of as and treated as particular kinds of citizens and subjects. I found that one area where these debates are most salient is in people's "re-memberings" of the
national past. This is wherethe national past. This is where people
strategically invoke specific narratives of time and space (chronotopes)
about race to bridge or expand the ideological distance between Sweden and
acknowledged spaces of race, such as the United States, South Africa, and
World War II Germany. Swedes of African ancestry differently negotiate, and
chronotopically "route" calls for community based on the terms "black"
(svart) and "African" (Afrikan), invoking ties to Africa, to diasporic black
culture (heavily tinged with Black American icons and practices), and to
Swedish language and traditions. African dance classes are also a space
where hegemonic notions of belonging are negotiated and sometimes inverted.
lassifications obscure race as a category, in everyday practices, race is
recognized, used, and fiercely debated as a criteria of belonging in Swedish
society.