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Colonial labels and the imagined innocence of past times: Debating language and spatial representations of the Danish/Greenlandic relation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

Marie Maegaard Open the ORCID record for Marie Maegaard [Opens in a new window]  and
Kristine Køhler Mortensen
Marie Maegaard*
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Kristine Køhler Mortensen
Affiliation:
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
*
Address for correspondence: Marie Maegaard University of Copenhagen Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics Emil Holms Kanal 2 2300 Copenhagen S Denmark[email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines struggles related to the recasting of the collective memory connected to Danish colonialism, through analyses of exhibitions in, and communication from, the Danish National Museum. By use of multimodal and semiotic landscape analysis, we show how the Danish National Museum works to reformulate the historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark in ways that avoid the colonizer's language and at the same time describe and construct complex relations of past and present. The analysis demonstrates how a temporal ambiguity is present in the museum exhibitions, not offering a conclusive understanding of the colonial period. At the same time, we show how the presence and absence of colonial language in public space is inscribed into temporal frames legitimizing or problematizing their status. (Semiotic landscape, colonialism, language and nation, temporality)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Special Issue 5: Semiotic Timescapes , November 2022 , pp. 775 - 795
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Michelle Lazar for putting together this special issue, and for commenting on earlier versions of our article. We are also indebted to Susan Erlich and Tommaso Milani and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful suggestions and critique. Finally, many thanks also go to Janus Spindler Møller for reading and discussing this article with us.

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