How can we understand the little things we do during the everyday as acts of resistance or activism? Does resistance have to be active, visible and recognizable to others or can it be measures of self-protection?

Decolonial and intersectional feminist theories inform this study of everyday responses to racism among the African diaspora in Norway. African-Norwegians do not make a homogenous group. Rather, it is multifaceted in people’s different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. However, through my work, I see a group identity being continuously created and negotiated around a common sense of Blackness, Africanness and a form of racialized solidarity. From this starting point, I aim to investigate the politics of Norwegianness at the intersection with Blackness and African heritage. With analytical inspiration from Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought and contemporary studies of Blackness and coloniality in Europe, I seek to unfold how young, black Norwegians navigate their everyday encounters within the white majority Norwegian society. What kinds of identity ‘routes’ do they take (Gilroy 1993, Sawyer 2002), how do they see themselves, and how are they seen by others (Du Bois 1903, Fanon 1967)? Finally, what does this particular kind of marginality mean for African-Norwegians’ creation of belonging?

I work with youth between the age of 18-35, who all have African roots, and who all are ‘technically’ Norwegian in the form of citizenship. Some are actively working against racism and marginalization, whereas others practice different kinds of resistance in their everyday encounters with racialized stigma. These resisting practices can be ways of speaking, using one’s body or placing oneself in a room that impacts the level of friction produced in these specific encounters. Through these personal accounts from young Black African-Norwegians I suggest a nuancing of how we can understand activism with an appeal to pay attention to what racialized, colonial subjects do with their bodies.

Oda-Kange is a PhD Candidate at the Center for Gender Studies at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture. She holds a Master in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, During her Master’s education she took up interest in decolonisation and critical race studies. Her Master’s thesis looked into the intersections of race, particularly Blackness and gender in the context of Denmark and Danish academia as a predominantly white and male-dominated space. Her PhD research focuses similar issues, but with a focus on everyday practices of belonging and resistance to everyday racisms among young Norwegians of African descent. Oda-Kange has taught a course in norm-critical methodologies and has participated in several workshops on decolonisation in the Nordic countries.

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