Music as a Third Space?–African musics as a field of collaboration in Finland

Abstract

The history of African musics in Finland has specific characteristics because the African diaspora communities in Finland are relatively young and small. Many African professional musicians living in Finland moved there because of their personal connections with Finns rather than because of broader flows of migration. Despite the minimal numbers of Africans living in Finland, a lively scene of African musics began to develop from the 1980s, and this scene has continued to be characterised by collaborations between Africans and white Finns. This article discusses the early history of African musics in Finland, with a focus on these collaborations that have created cultural spaces where ideas of ‘Africanness’ are central but not strictly tied to Blackness or Otherness, thereby resembling Homi Bhabha’s idea of a postcolonial ‘Third Space’ that opens conventional meanings to negotiation and redefinition.