Panel: Who Owns Afro-Nordic History?

Who decides what stories from the Black Nordic experience are worth preserving? Who has the authority to collect, interpret and narrate Black Nordic history? And what does it mean to build archives that centre Black voices, perspectives and epistemologies rather than simply adding them to existing structures? This panel brings together Black archivists, scholars and community organisers from Sweden and Norway who are actively constructing new infrastructures for Black Nordic memory. They are: Rosel Jackson Stern, co-editor of Black Archives Sweden’s publication The Family Archives; Yacouba Cisse, founder of the Afrikanere i Norge (AFRIN) archive and Dr Michelle Tisdel, Research Librarian at the National Library of Norway. Their work challenges the institutional logics that have historically excluded, marginalised or misrepresented Black lives in the Nordic region. They are not asking for inclusion in archives that were never built for them—they are building their own. Setting the stage for the panel, curator Savannah Wood present her work on Afro Archives, a project documenting over 130 years of Black Afro-American visual history and walks us through the politics, labour and ethics of building an archive of this scale - what gets preserved, what gets left out, and who gets to decide. After the panel, artist Xaviera Simmons unpacks her artistic approaches to working with archival material and the questions that emerge when historical documents enter contemporary discourse. Her talk considers the risks and rewards of creating anew in the present.