Refracting African and Black diaspora through the Nordic region

Abstract

This introductory essay places the contributions to this special number in a larger context of Nordic debates and research on African and Black diaspora. In particular this essay presents a critical discussion of the Nordic region as a specific kind of geopolitical categorization and branding which allows certain kinds of stories to be told as well as erased and silenced. Rather than ‘case studies’, the articles in this special number should be seen as interventions which complicate and challenge the hegemonic branding of the Nordic region that have posited colonialism, and engagement in the trans-Atlantic slave economy and racist categorizations in particular, as an external, continental European problem and legacy.

Keywords:

• African and Black diaspora
• Nordic region
• whiteness
• exceptionalism
• branding
• Afro-Swedes