Colonial media ecologies

In this mixed-media essay I document a field trip to Ghana where I, so to say, travel in the footsteps of the Danish colonizers to the Gold Coast in a bid to dialogically challenge the genre of the monologizing colonial traveloguei. My methodological retracing of the slave route is inspired by Danish author Thorkild Hansen’s book trilogy Coast of Slaves, Ships of Slaves and Islands of Slaves from the 1960s in which he visits the former Danish West Indies and the Gold Coast (in the, at the time of his visit, still very young Ghanaian nation, which had gained its independence from Great Britain in 1957). Hansen was one of the first Danish authors to voice a strong critique of the Danish colonial past and of a neglectful historiography through his docu-fiction. I was curious to explore in a parallel movement to Hansen’s the landscape as prism and archive today. Hence, the ‘reenactment’ of the travelogue in this essay functions as an attempt to recast and refracture colonial narratives of past and present. My own documentary audio recordings from the field trip are presented here along with methodological reflections on how to voice dialogical narratives about colonialism in new digital media.

Landscapes of the African American Diaspora in Denmark

This imaginary exhibition is based on the archive of items collected to write the book manuscript for Searching for Utopia: African Americans in 20th Century Denmark. Professor Ethelene Whitmire used the method of curatorial dreaming to design this exhibition and was influenced by African American expatriate Walter Williams’s landscape paintings that reflect the themes in the book.

For Love alone

FOR LOVE ALONE is a 6 hours performative intervention, originally titled Into the Dark, created for Culture Night at the Royal Cast Collection/West Indian Warehouse in Copenhagen, 12 October 2018.

Archives that Matter

Introduction

African Diasporic Choices

The year 2017 marked the centennial transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. In light of this commemoration, topics related to representations of the past, and the preservation of heritage in the present -- entangled with the residuum of Danish colonialism and the lasting impact of U.S. neo-imperial rule -- are at the forefront of public dialogue on both sides of the Atlantic. Archaeological and archival research adds historical depth to these conversations, providing new insights into the lived experiences of Afro-Crucians from enslavement through post-emancipation. However, these two sources of primary historical data (i.e., material culture and documentary evidence) are not without their limitations. This article draws on Black feminist and post-colonial theoretical frameworks to interrogate the historicity of archaeological and archival records. Preliminary archaeological and archival work ongoing at the Estate Little Princess, an 18th-century former Danish sugar plantation on the island of St. Croix, provides the backdrop through which the potentiality of archaeological and documentary data are explored. Research questions centered on exploring sartorial practices of self-making engaged by Afro-Crucians from slavery through freedom are used to illuminate spaces of tension as well as productive encounters between the archaeological and archival records.

Hvid[mə] Archive

This essay describes how the artistic research project Hvid[mə] Archive started as a critical comment on the Danish Royal Cast Collection’s exhibition in the colonial West Indian Warehouse at the harbour front in Copenhagen. The essay situates the project as a response to the lack of verbalization about the warehouse’s colonial past, as well as to the lack of a verbalization about the context and history that the plaster cast collection is a product of. Furthermore, the essay clarifies the use and re-conceptualization of the Danish noun hvidme, and how it created an entry point for a contemporary critical whiteness discourse in a specific Danish art context. The essay also describes how the project developed into the artistic research project and collaboration that it is today. A decolonial and intersectional artist collaboration, that seeks to facilitate exhibitions, encourage artistic workshops and networks, host events with visual artists, cultural producers, writers and theorists working within a decolonial and critical frame. The essay showcases some of our defining activities, as well as aspects of our working methods, practices, reflections, doubts and questions for further discussions.

Lowering the Gaze

This article is written by one of the co-creators of the monumental public sculpture entitled I Am Queen Mary that was done in collaboration with Jeannette Ehlers. Inaugurated on March 31, 2018 the project is the first collaborative sculpture to memorialize Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and those who fought against it. The essay traces the beginning of the collaboration as a transatlantic conversation that prompted the development of two separate ideas and articulates how the monument represents a point of convergence of the artistic practices of both Belle and Ehlers. Moreover, the essay highlights how the conjoining of the original monument projects created various conversations and tensions around colonial structures and visibility. By entering the work through its coral stone base, it uses the acropodia as a conceptual framework to discuss the hidden infrastructures of coloniality and how - through lowering the gaze and other sensorial shifts - a new kind of embodied knowledge can be gained. The article employs Kevin Quashie’s ideas around the aesthetics of quiet as a way to not only think differently about resistance and blackness as only exterior phenomena, but to consider the power and complexity of interiority. By extension, offering up a similar lense to view the inner life of coloniality, the article discusses how through the acropodia in I Am Queen Mary the invisible structures and labor of not only colonial systems, but the monument itself, can be made transparent.

Marronage is Resistance Against the Colonizer’s Construction of History

The contribution is an intervention into the book Kolonierne i Vestindien [The Colonies in the West Indies] (1980) by Danish historian Ove Hornby. Pointing to the limitations and biases of Hornby's account of the St. Croix Fireburn labor revolt of 1878, the contribution is an implicit critique of the way archival sources have been put to use within the discipline of history writing in attempts to delegitimise anti-colonial resistance. It is with some ambivalence that we have chosen to also include an English translation of the Hornby text as well as our annotations, and thereby reproduce the very language we are critiquing. However, these translations have been important in order to ensure greater accessibility to a USVI readership.

Ancestral Queendom

This article is written in what can be described as the “post-centennial” era, post 2017, the year marked by the 100th anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. 2017 marked a shift in the conversation around and between Denmark and its former colonies in the Caribbean, most notably the increasing access of Virgin Islanders to the millions of archival records that remain stored in Denmark as they began to emerge in online databases and temporarily in exhibitions. That year the Virgin Islands Studies Collective, a group of four women (La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer and Tiphanie Yanique) from the Virgin Islands and from various disciplinary backgrounds, also emerged with an intention to center not only the archive, but also archival access and the nuances of archival interpretation and intervention. This collaborative essay, Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly the Danish West Indies), is a direct engagement with the archives and archival production. Each member responds to one of the prison records of the four women taken to Denmark for their participation in the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. Their reflections combine elements of speculation, fiction, black feminitist theory and critique as modes of responding to the gaps and silences in the archive, as well as finding new questions to be asked.