Black Imaginaries, Scandinavian Diasporas: Imagining Race in Scandinavia

Featuring Jeannette Ehlers, Ellen Nyman, and La Vaughn Belle,
Moderated by Monica L. Miller
Recorded on March 5, 2019

Jeannette Ehlers (Denmark/Trinidad), Ellen Nyman (Sweden), and La Vaughn Belle (St. Croix) discuss how their art practices across different media are designed to provoke conversation about colonial legacies and contemporary racial politics on the ground in Sweden, Denmark, and St. Croix.

In recent years, artists/activists in Denmark, Sweden, and St. Croix have been at the forefront of movements to acknowledge and reckon with Scandinavia’s colonial history and the relation of this history to racial imaginaries and modes of national belonging in Europe and the Caribbean. The year 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the end of Danish rule in the Danish West Indies, which then became known as the US Virgin Islands; the occasion was marked in both Denmark and across the US Virgin Islands through commemorations and celebrations–as well as attendant critique–on both sides of this divide. Since 2010, there has been what some scholars are calling an “AfroSwedish Movement” or “AfroSwedish Renaissance” in which Swedes of African descent are demanding that Sweden abandon its mythology of exceptionality when it comes to the European perpetration of the slave trade and imperialism and acknowledge its own role in the slave trade and its aftermath (Swedes built the Cape Coast “slave” castle in Ghana, owned St, Barthélemy (St. Barts) in the Caribbean for nearly 100 years, participated in the savage exploitation of the Belgian Congo). AfroSwedes are doing this even though they do not hail directly from this colonial intervention; instead, they understand that the way black people and black cultures are apprehended in contemporary Sweden results, in a large part, from the lack of acknowledgement of this colonial imaginary of race and blackness in Sweden. These conversations are important parts of a larger reckoning across the Nordic countries with race and their racialized pasts, as Iceland is currently in the midst of re-evaluating their engagement with its “first black citizen,” Hans Jonathan, an enslaved man who escaped his owners in St. Croix and fled to Iceland in the early 1800s. In their artistic and scholarly work, Ehlers, Nyman, and Belle have been creating vital conversations about the necessity of creative confrontation of these histories and the aesthetics of freedom and domination.

These events are organized by Monica L. Miller, Associate Professor, Departments of English and Africana Studies, and Tami Navarro, Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, with generous support from the Weiss Fellowship for Visiting International Fellows, co-sponsored by BCRW.