Walking, talking, remembering: an Afro-Swedish critique of being-in-the-world

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the existential grounds and experiential limits of an embodied and intersubjective being-in-the-world, in walking dialogue with the remembrances of Afro-Swedish subjects. To walk, wander, and roam in Sweden, particularly through the abundant green spaces that intrude upon and surround nearly every town and city, is a socially constitutive practice of everyday life. It is a sign of personal vitality, healthfulness, and a kind of being-with others predicated on a regular, vigorous, and widespread being-toward nature. Yet, for many Swedes of African descent (as for non-white Swedes more generally), such an imagined community of salubrious walkers is largely just that, a socially constructed fiction that perforce excludes them; an abstraction of urban planning that encumbers their movements, creating anomalous spaces of stasis and immobility; a caesura in the biopolitical field that indexes their black lives as matter out of place, beyond both culture and nature.