Afro-Sweden by Ryan Thomas Skinner

Author:Ryan Thomas Skinner [Skinner, Ryan Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, SOC056000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global), SOC031000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Toward an Articulated Consciousness

Given this conditional and constrained relationship to “Swedish” identity, one can more readily understand Madina’s exclamation: “I use [the term ‘Afro-Swedish’] about myself, to claim my Swedishness.” And one can more fully appreciate the sense of urgency in Araia’s statement: “What we need to do here, first and foremost, is identify ourselves as African-Swedes.” The two Swedish terms they employ, afrosvensk (Afro-Swedish) and afrikansvensk (African-Swedish), represent powerful sociolinguistic tools, employed to interrogate the everyday struggle lived by those racialized as “Black” and “African” in Sweden. The words encode a lexical critique of the notion that “Blackness” and “Africanness” are somehow essentially opposed to “Swedishness”—the idea that darker pigmentation and foreign cultural heritage may be invoked to deny a stable sense of place to Swedes of African descent. At the outset of this chapter, I noted the way speakers at the panel discussion amplified this verbal interrogation of a monologic, monocultural, and racially homogenous Sweden by fluently code-switching between Swedish and English, a bilingualism that iconically signals, to paraphrase Du Bois, the irreducible “two-ness” of their diasporic subjectivities. What I want to argue here is that the words afrosvensk and afrikansvensk themselves sediment a grammar of such “two-ness,” or what Jason Diakité calls, also riffing on Du Bois, dubbelskap (doubleness). For Jason, the doubleness of words like afrosvensk constitute a vital linguistic affirmation of diasporans’ complex selfhood, an assertation that their Swedish upbringing and diasporic roots are not irreconcilable. “Instead of this constant, ‘I’m half this, half that,’” he tells me, “just that semantic change led to some door-opening up for me.”

Such affirmative doubleness is more apparent in Swedish than in English, at least in their written forms. Translated into English, the hyphenated words “Afro-Swedish” and “African-Swedish” visualize a grammatical disjuncture between the opposing signifiers “Afro” or “African” and “Swedish.” The horizontal mark at the center of such words both binds and separates, indexing a referential gap that requires symbolic mediation to bridge the two sides, though never completely. Much like the words “Afro-American” or “African-American,” the translated terms “Afro-Swedish” and “African-Swedish” give linguistic form to the “peculiar sensation” of racialized difference that Du Bois famously called “double consciousness.” This is the semiotic and social ambivalence of “hyphenated identities.” In Swedish, however, afrosvensk and afrikansvensk embed or, rather, articulate their component lexemes (a structure common to many Germanic languages), producing a morphological unity that encodes and encompasses a component diversity. Words like afrosvensk and afrikansvensk constitute, in other words, what we might call an “articulated consciousness,” transposing a hyphenated twoness onto the embedded sociolinguistic terrain of Swedish. Of course, these words do not transcend or erase the perceived racial difference their component parts signify—they remain referential expressions of “double consciousness”—but the morphology of these words does give semiotic primacy to a paired sense of social identity—not just “half this, half that,” as Jason says, but unequivocally both at the same time, and without contradiction.

As such, the terms afrosvensk and afrikansvensk are usefully capacious, providing an inclusive sociolinguistic space that transcends or at least encompasses ethnic and national difference.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.