This book adopts a global approach to analysing Danish nationhood in the current context of a Europe paralysed by crises. Focusing on the global strands which have produced understandings of national selfhood as a consequence of a series of historical and contemporary global encounters, it calls for the production of narratives which better capture how European nations, including Denmark, are shaped by narratives that cannot be understood in (national) isolation, but are contingent on ideas about the nation’s globality. In historical terms, this entails examining how colonialism shaped national self-perceptions; in a contemporary context, it requires looking at colonialism’s unfinished business. The first chapters revisits colonialism throughout the Danish empire. In the second section, the book revisits Danish (post-1945) attempts to restage global interventions and military intervention since 2000, and considers how migration since 1965 has led to a profound questioning of relationships with the non-European world – and increasingly with Europe itself. Postcolonial Denmark situates Denmark at the centre of a number of current and ever more urgent challenges facing Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and cultural studies with interests in Europe, the Nordic region through a postcolonial, a whiteness and a decolonial inspired approach.

The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G

This book explores how the Danish authorities governed the colonized population in Greenland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two competing narratives of colonialism dominate in Greenland as well as Denmark. One narrative portrays the Danish colonial project as ruthless and brutal extraction of a vulnerable indigenousness people; the other narrative emphasizes almost exclusively the benevolent aspects of Danish rule in Greenland. Rather than siding with one of these narratives, this book investigates actual practices of colonial governance in Greenland with an outlook to the extensive international scholarship on colonialism and post-colonialism. The chapters address the intimate connections between the establishment of an ethnographic discourse and the colonial techniques of governance in Greenland. Thereby the book provides important nuances to the understanding of the historical relationship between Denmark and Greenland and links this historical trajectory to the present negotiations of Greenlandic identity.

This book examines the influence of imperialism and colonialism on the formation of national identities in the Nordic countries, exploring the manner in which contemporary discourses in Nordic society are rendered meaningful or obscured by references to past events and tropes related to the practices and ideologies of colonialism. Against the background of Nordic 'exceptionalism', it explores the manner in which the interwoven racial, gendered and nationalistic ideologies associated with the colonial project form part of contemporary Nordic identities. An important challenge to national identities that can become increasingly inward looking, Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region sheds light on the ways in which certain notions and structural inequalities, understood as residue from the colonial period, become recreated or projected onto different groups. Presenting a variety of case studies drawn from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Greenland, Denmark and Iceland, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities conducting research in the fields of race and ethnicity, identity and belonging, media representations of 'the other' and colonialism and postcolonialism.

This volume investigates sociolinguistic discourses, identity choices and their representations in postcolonial national and social life, and traces them to the impact of colonial contact. The chapters stitch together current voices and identities emerging within both ex-colonized and ex-colonizer communities as each copes with the social, lingual, cultural, and religious mixes triggered by colonialism. These mixes, reflected in the five thematic parts of the book - 'postcolonial identities', 'nationhood discourses', 'translating the postcolonial', 'living the postcolonial', and 'colonizing the colonizer' - call for deeper investigations of postcolonial communities using emic approaches.

Greenland views itself as being on the way to sovereignty. This image – and the tensions involved in it – structure the triangular relation between the EU, Greenland and Denmark. The central Other of Greenland has for a couple of centuries been Denmark, the colonial overlord. The national identity discourses of Greenland and Denmark both idealize national homogeneity. A central condition for a continuation of Rigsfællesskabet, the 'community of the realm' including Greenland and Denmark, is the idea that Greenland still needs external assistance in its development towards independence - and that this idea can be formulated in a way which does not infantilize Greenland metaphorically. As part of the postcolonial diversification of Greenland's dependency, the bilateral relation between Denmark and Greenland has gradually been opened up to involve 'other others'. Meanwhile, a discourse prognosticates that climate change is opening up the Arctic to minerals extraction and commerce. In these circumstances, the triangular relation with the EU is played out as a series of rhetorical and practical 'sovereignty games', in Nuuk, Copenhagen and Brussels. Particularly, a number of strategies are employed to minimize the apparent role of Denmark for the Greenlandic relations to the EU. The book approaches these changes in national identity discourse and practical foreign policy in five analytical steps: The core concepts organizing Danish and Greenlandic identity are identified in discourse analyses. Political debates are read as political identity negotiations. The practical diplomatic management of clashing identity discourses is uncovered via qualitative interviews with key actors (politicians, diplomats, and civil servants from Greenland, Denmark and the EU). Legal texts are approached as the 'frozen' outcome of rhetorical and practical sovereignty games. Finally, the book develops scenarios for the future and concludes by pointing out how the continuation of the community of the realm may have a better chance if conceived as an 'ever looser union'. One way for Denmark of facilitating this image would be to employ its diplomacy in the service of diversifying Greenland's dependence - following the example set in relation to the EU.

Is the notion of postcolonial Europe an oxymoron? How do colonial pasts inform the emergence of new subjectivities and political frontiers in contemporary Europe? Postcolonial Transitions in Europe explores these questions from different theoretical, geopolitical and media perspectives. Drawing from the interdisciplinary tools of postcolonial critique, this book contests the idea that Europe developed within clear-cut geographical boundaries. It examines how experiences of colonialism and imperialism continue to be constitutive of the European space and of the very idea of Europe. By approaching Europe as a complex political space, the chapters investigate topical concerns around its politics of inclusion and exclusion towards migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, as well as its take on internal conflicts, transitions and cosmopolitan imaginaries. With a foreword by Paul Gilroy

​ ​In Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians present case studies that focus on the scope and impact of Scandinavian colonial expansion in the North, Africa, Asia and America as well as within Scandinavia itsself. They discuss early modern thinking and theories made valid and developed in early modern Scandinavia that justified and propagated participation in colonial expansion. The volume demonstrates a broad and comprehensive spectrum of archaeological, anthropological and historical research, which engages with a variation of themes relevant for the understanding of Danish and Swedish colonial history from the early 17th century until today. The aim is to add to the on-going global debates on the context of the rise of the modern society and to revitalize the field of early modern studies in Scandinavia, where methodological nationalism still determines many archaeological and historical studies. Through their theoretical commitment, critical outlook and application of postcolonial theories the contributors to this book shed a new light on the processes of establishing and maintaining colonial rule, hybridization and creolization in the sphere of material culture, politics of resistance, and responses to the colonial claims. This volume is a fantastic resource for graduate students and researchers in historical archaeology, Scandinavia, early modern history and anthropology of colonialism

In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine—and defend—multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security." This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.

The Future of Postcolonial Studies celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. When The Empire Writes Back first appeared in 1989, it put postcolonial cultures and their post-invasion narratives on the map. This vibrant collection of fifteen chapters by both established and emerging scholars taps into this early mapping while merging these concerns with present trends which have been grouped as: comparing, converting, greening, post-queering and utopia. The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume reasserts the notion that postcolonial is an "anticipatory discourse" and bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.