Black European & Afro-Swedish Studies

Monica’s book-in-progress organizes and explores a series of cultural events and happenings that took place between roughly 2010 and 2018 in Sweden that are forming the contours of Blackness in Sweden. These events range across time, space, and artistic media, reflecting, in many ways, the rhizomatic nature of blackness that is becoming there. Monica analyzes these events against a contextual landscape that is also emerging and in flux, both within Sweden and in Europe. Important touchpoints include, among others long-awaited investigations into Swedish involvement in slavery, colonialism, imperialism and the development of global anti-Blackness; feminist and antiracist analysis of a Swedish “exceptionalism,” that comes out of a denial of these histories; the presence of an overwhelming norm of whiteness and colorblindness that complicates anti-racist political and cultural work; and finally, critiques of the inevitability of an “impossible multiculturalism” and perpetual “otherness” of Black and racialized people in majority white European places. All of this is necessary to chart a change in the perception of Blackness in Sweden from an indelible Otherness to a political Black otherwise-ness to a diasporic sense of rhizomatic Black being.