In Memory of the Good Colony: Contemporary Danish Literature and Its Engagement with Kalaallit Nunaat

PhD defence by Emilie Dybdal.

 

This dissertation examines how contemporary Danish literature participates in the ongoing renegotiation of Denmark’s colonial past in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Focusing on the trilogies of Kim Leine and Iben Mondrup, it explores how literary narratives challenge the longstanding image of Kalaallit Nunaat as Denmark’s “good colony” and foreground more troubling histories of colonialism, assimilation, and inequality.

Through four articles, the thesis identifies a range of narrative and aesthetic strategies through which literature unsettles dominant narratives and invites reflection on questions of historical implication and responsibility. It argues that these works mobilise a form of reparative remembering that complicates inherited understandings of the colonial past without resolving its tensions or contradictions.

 

Assessment committee

  • Associate Professor Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, UCPH (chairperson)
  • Professor Lill-Ann Körber, Universität Göttingen Skandinavisches Seminar
  • Associate Professor Jon Helt Harder, Department of Culture and Language, SDU

Supervisors

  • Associate Professor Kirsten Thisted, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, UCPH
  • Professor Anne-Marie Mai, Professor Anne-Marie Mai, Department of Culture and Language, SDU

Email address to gain access to the thesis: emilie.dybdal@hum.ku.dk.

You will either receive a copy of the thesis or be informed where you can read a physical copy. Recipients of copies of the thesis are not allowed to share or distribute it due to copyright compliance.