Postcolonial Denmark: Nation Narration in a Crisis-Ridden Europe

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.