Description
Within the field of International Relations, and postcolonial theory more broadly, the role of Scandinavian colonialism remains neglected. Greenland, a Danish colony from 1721 to 1953, is no exception. Paradoxically, following the official decolonisation of Greenland in the 1950s, when Greenland became an equal part of Denmark, the Danish government imposed its most intensive imperial policies in Greenland. This paper sets out to question how Danish historical productions of Greenland originating from anthropological Polar explorations in the early twentieth century, where Greenland was constituted as ‘empty’ nature and Greenlandic Inuit as ‘nature people’, came to inscribe colonial rationalities of scientific racism to political debates on the ‘politics of Greenland’, subsequently characterising the de(re)colonisation of Greenland. Furthermore, this project intends to explore how this type of decolonisation, as a violent phenomenon of recolonisation, can contribute to an epistemic broadening of postcolonial theory through a rethinking of decolonisation (Getachew 2019). Through such broadenings, this project sets out to deepen and complexify our understanding of smaller empires within postcolonial theory. This will be done by focusing on two moments in Danish-Greenlandic relations: in the lead-up to 1933 (PCIJ, Denmark vs Norway) and during the 1950s following the UN’s pushes for decolonisation. This will be done through archival research in the colonial archives in Nuuk (Greenland), Copenhagen (Denmark), and the UN (New York/online).
