ON PRAGMATISM AND PC

• Main Author: Hemer, Oscar
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Malmö universitet, Master program in Communication for Development 2007
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Iceland
• Online Access: https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/glocaltimes/article/view/138

What do you associate with the initials PC? Personal Computer? Too trivial. Political Correctness? More likely. Post-Colonialism? Most probably not…Colonialism has determined the life experience of the vast majority of the people living in the world today. Yet, in Scandinavia, as in most countries that were not formally part of the European colonial system, the common attitude is that it is none of our business, since we didn’t have any colonies. Interestingly enough, in the Scandinavian case that is not even true. The present Virgin Islands were the Danish West Indies from 1754 to 1917, and constituted a key link in the transatlantic slave trade. Wonderful Copenhagen was to a large extent literally built with earnings from the lucrative business of the ‘black gold’ [1]. And the Scandinavian state authorities’ treatment of the indigenous populations of the Arctic rim are exemplary colonial power relationships. Nevertheless, the modern myth of Scandinavian innocence and excellence keeps on thriving and makes it difficult for postcolonial theories and perspectives to enter into the Nordic public debate. Several parallel recent events do however indicate that a change may be underway. The art project Rethinking Nordic Colonialism. A postcolonial exhibition project in five acts, initiated by the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA), was carried out in 2006 with exhibitions, seminars and other public events in Iceland, Greenland, The Faroe Island and Finnish Sápmi (the fifth act was virtual and consists of the project’s DVD documentation and website www.rethinking-nordiccolonialism. org/). A simultaneous tour of museums and locations was made by the exhibition Traces of Congo, a more conventional attempt at shedding light on the Scandinavian participation in the plundering of the Congo and of Congo’s presence in the Scandinavian imaginary. 2006 also saw the birth of a new Nordic researcher network on the theme The Nordic Colonial Mind, initiated and coordinated by the Nordic Africa Institute based in ...