Decolonial Sweden: (Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora)

Decolonial Sweden exposes the social and political relevance of European colonialism to Sweden and its place in the world. It is a book that points to why and how Sweden is to be included in global decolonial struggles. Sweden is often displayed as an ethnoracially homogenous country without any colonial history: an open and tolerant human rights champion, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and in solidarity with the Global South. For over twenty years, authors Michael McEachrane and Louis Faye have been challenging this account, pointing to Sweden’s involvement in colonial histories and legacies, its racialized nationhood, and embedded colonial structures. This important new book reflects a decolonial turn in research, emphasizing that coloniality is far from over, and that challenging global injustices remains an unfinished and open-ended process. Chapters in the book consider the resistance of the Sámi people to Swedish colonialism, whether Sweden owes the Caribbean reparations for its colonization of Saint Barthélemy and involvement in the transatlantic trade, Sweden’s involvement in a colonial global economy, and how white European identification is embedded in Swedish politics, nation-building, and society. Engaging and insightful, Decolonial Sweden invites readers to reconsider Swedish attitudes toward race, colonialism, and international relations. This book is an essential read for Post- and Decolonial scholars and students of Critical Race Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Africana Studies, International Relations, Global Development, and Political Science, as well as for anyone interested in Sweden’s place in the world.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: Swedish Colonialism 1. Decolonizing Nature in the North: The (Post-)Apocalyptic Environmentalism of the Swedish Sámi 1950–2020 2. A Decolonial Understanding of Sámi Landscapes and Human-Nature Relations in Sweden 3. What, If Anything, Does Sweden Owe the Caribbean? 4. Decolonial Blackness and Indigeneity in Sweden: An Email Conversation Part II: The Welfare State 5. Racial Social Democracy and the Swedish Welfare State: Part I 6. Racial Social Democracy and the Swedish Welfare State: Part II 7. The Power of Silence: Variations in the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism Among White Male-dominated Trade Unions in Sweden 8. Decolonizing Swedish Health Care: Challenges and Ways Forward 9. Coloniality, Whiteness and Systemic Racism in Sweden: An Email Conversation Part III: Global Entanglements 10. Swedish Capital and the Coloniality of the Global Economy: Industrial Relations at LAMCO in the 1960s 11. Progress as Neo-colonialism: Why Decoloniality Must Imply a Farewell to Development 12. Decoloniality and Structural Racism in Swedish Development Assistance 13. Toward a Green Transition: A Post- and Decolonial Analysis of the Green State of Sweden 14. (De)Colonial Sweden in the World: An Email Conversation

About the Author :
Michael McEachrane is a Member and the Rapporteur of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. He is also a 2024–2025 Racial Justice Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, a 2024 Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, an External Affiliate of the Sarah Remond Parker Centre for the Study of Racism at University College London and was previously a Visiting Researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights in Sweden 2017–2024. His research is in the areas of Postcolonial/Decolonial Studies, Black European Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights, and the Philosophy of Psychology. Louis Faye is a cultural entrepreneur, writer and photographer. Born in Berlin and raised in Senegal and Morocco, he is the founding Director of the cultural association Diggante—which during the 1990s and 2000s helped introduce a postcolonial and diasporic consciousness to Sweden through cultural events, tours, and bringing such postcolonial luminaries to Sweden as V.Y. Mudimbe, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Angela Davis.

Review :
"Foregrounding how Sweden has directly and indirectly benefited from colonial subjugation, both as a settler colonial state and as a member of the larger white-European polity, the chapters of Decolonial Sweden gather a compelling and well-researched much-needed account of how the colonial and racial conditions of global capital reach all and every corner of the planet." Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of Unpayable Debt (2022), New York University, USA "Decolonial Sweden offers a much-needed reminder that coloniality is both unexceptional and specific, situated; that our scholarship and politics have to engage this tension and that we have to do this collectively, using various registers and languages. This volume is a welcome tool in the struggle against colonial amnesia and disavowal." Olivia U. Rutazibwa, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK "An incredibly important and groundbreaking seminal work that fills many gaps left out of Sweden’s colonial history and national imaginary. This book offers sharp, clear-eyed discourse, which should open minds, educate, and stoke much-needed flames of change." Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström, international bestselling author of In Every Mirror She’s Black