Abstract
This article argues that theorists of black/African diasporas should interrogate the specific ways in which ‘race’ is used to engage people in diasporic projects, and that such projects are intimately intertwined with specifically gendered, sexualized, and generational class relations and positionalities in specific national contexts and spaces. Attention to these intersections can help us better understand hierarchies of power between and among diasporic individuals and communities. This article focuses on historically specific Swedish meanings of racialized femininities and the different forms of agency women use to negotiate the gendered processes of racialization they encounter in a variety of settings and sources. It draws on interviews and fieldnotes conducted between 1994 and 2007, together with analysis of popular culture (music and radio programmes) and ethnographic material collected by Swedish ethnologist Viveca Motsieloa, and maps out some of the complexities utilized by different generations of Swedish women of African heritage in a changing Swedish landscape of racial formations. Their negotiations show how tensions and differences between ‘second-generation’ migrants and those of the ‘first generation’ are expressed through gender, sexuality, and differing understandings of ‘race’ (and the place of ‘racial mixture’).
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Notes
The People's Home is a central concept tied to the Social Democratic Party's history, which emerged in the mid-1900s and describes political goals of, among other things, a welfare society.
In 1922, Sweden became the first country in the world to establish such an institute. It was supported by all major political parties.
Biological meanings of ‘race’ were an integral part of Swedish colonial history and the establishment of hierarchies of ‘civility’ and ‘incivility’. In particular, the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology focused the majority of their resources on studying the indigenous Sami (as well as Finns) living in the northern region of the country by measuring and comparing skulls with those from ‘Swedes.’
The most well-known person is Adolph Ludvig Gustaf Albrecht Couschi, otherwise known as ‘Badin’. Born on the island of St Croix in 1747, a then Danish colony, he was ‘given’ to the Swedish Queen Lovisa at the age of eight and grew up in the Swedish royal palace (Wikström, 1971). Many stories as well as songs circulated about ‘Badin’ during the 1800s, whose given name Badin derives from the word joker and fool (Pred, 2004: 7). Alex Frank Larsens’ 2005 documentary Relatives of Slaves (Slavarnas släkt), described Denmark's slave history and asks the question of what happened to the hundreds and possibly thousands of slaves brought to Denmark. Denmark was up until 1848 one of the world's largest slave nations and little is known of the experiences of those individuals and their descendants. One exception are members of the Zamore family, who are found in Sweden and Denmark (Skåne) and who have traced their ancestry from Karl XIII's hovman, a former Danish slave (Larsmo, 2005).
There are no official statistics on how many people are included in this category. This is because Statistics Sweden does not register people by ethnicity or ‘race’ but instead does so by the categories of nationality and birthplace. Since 1998 there are statistics on parents’ nationality and birthplace; however, it is problematic to map meanings of ‘race’ onto these terms.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Tina Campt and the anonymous reviewers from Feminist Review for their engagement and constructive feedback on the article.
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Sawyer, L. engendering ‘race’ in calls for diasporic community in Sweden. Fem Rev 90, 87–105 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.26