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,...
moreThis 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.
