Speaker: Lars Jensen, Roskilde Universitet
This lecture aims to situate Denmark historically and contemporarily
beyond its current discursively naturalised territorial enclosure. The
lecture will discuss this in relation to three temporal and spatial
levels - the global, the European and the national.
The global level
refers to the Denmark’s participation in the colonial project and the
lecture will discuss how the different colonies are placed in relation
to Denmark and to each other. I will argue here that the segregation of
colonial histories (Greenland, Iceland, coastal Ghana,
Tranquebar/Serampore/Nicobar Islands, Faroe Islands and the US Virgin
Islands) in both Danish public discourse and in academia has contributed
to a failure in Denmark in coming to terms with its past as colonial
master and enslavement nation. I will also link the “global then” to a
“global now” and ask how we may understand the continuities and breaks
between a colonial past and postcolonial present. Bearing in mind that
many scholars in particular with affinity in the global south speak of
colonialism as an unbroken continuity, preferring the term “coloniality”
that signals a condition, rather than a historical period with a
continued aftermath.
The European level refers to my reading of
current European scholarship brimming over with research that may
broadly, following for example Gurminder Bhambra, be labelled as
Postcolonial Europe. This section of the lecture will touch upon some of
the differences and overlaps between Postcolonial Denmark and
postcolonial elsewheres.
Finally, the lecture will look specifically
at the consequences for nation narration (Bhabha 1990, 2004) given the
conclusions I have drawn from the above. This narration can be
understood as the global “domesticated” by the nation and it can be
understood as Denmark closing ranks with Europe over Europe's
externalised and internalised others. But it can also be understood as a
call for a renewed conceptualisation of the nation that speaks more
adequately to our times, not merely as a utopian hope pitted against the
rise of populism, but also as an actual indispensable and irrevocable
belated adjustment to an inevitably postcolonised Europe.