Something is Happening in and to the margins: Black and Brown cultural interventions changing a multiple Northern periphery

The narrative of ethnic and racial homogeneity, monolithic Northern whiteness, has for a long while been constructed as the hegemonic truth of the Nordic countries. In Finland this narrative has been coupled with the story of being located in the periphery of Europe, both geographically and mentally. Recent cultural initiatives have, however, complicated these normative and societally stagnating narratives. This chapter focuses on the cultural activities of young Black and Brown women in Finland, and the productive interventions they have managed to make into the media discourses on racialization and ethnicity. The analyses discuss the media platform Brown Girls, and music videos by the female rapper Yeboyah. Reading their cultural production through theoretical reference points of anti-racist, decolonial, intersectionally feminist and queer discussions, the writer addresses the difference these agents of colour have made in the Finnish culture. They have not only changed the possibilities and terms of representation for those earlier assumed to be situated in a minority periphery, but they have also, by connecting their own agency to international anti-racist discourses, unhinged the notion of Finnish periphery discursively, visually, and corporeally.