FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
'Everybody Wanna Move Like Us!': Eurovision Songs of Afro-Diasporic Solidarity

The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s largest televised music competition, wherein each participating nation is represented by an original song. Since its first edition in 1956, the Contest has become a geopolitical spectacle in which participants use music to enact soft power, promote national agendae, and shape perceptions of marginalized identities.

Recent editions of the Contest have seen more performances by Black artists and of Black-American genres, often informed by lyrics and visuals suggesting narratives of resistance or perseverance. While existing scholarship demonstrates that folk musics have indeed been valuable tools and signifiers for Europe’s migrant communities, scholars have seldom linked the increasing presence of Black and Afro-diasporic musics in Eurovision to these performances of marginalized subjectivities. This linkage is necessary not only because the number of Black artists who have competed in Eurovision has increased exponentially over the past two decades, but also because Eurovision has steadily emerged as a globalizing entity, targeting and appealing to consumers beyond Europe’s geographical boundaries.

In this paper, I engage two trios of Afro-diasporic representatives to the Contest—France’s entries from 1990 through 1992, and Sweden’s entries from 2019 through 2021. I argue that positioning the Eurovision Song Contest and its actors within Afro-diasporic cultural flows challenges the putative coherence of both individual nation-states and of “Europe” writ large, asking us to consider both what Europeanness can sound like, and who gets to be European.