Engaging the Archival Record of Danish Colonial Rule: A Conversation
The year 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the sale and transfer of the islands now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. That year, the Danish government began digitizing a number of archival records from its colonial history. Now, two years on, our guests will discuss the significance of this project, including questions related to access and translation, as well as the nature of what can be traced, remembered, and imagined through these archives. Each of our guests will bring questions from their own work in creative and scholarly archival practices, and addressing structural inequalities in the archives. This conversation will highlight national projects to digitize archives of historic, and often enduring, state violence.
About the Speakers
La Vaughn Belle is a BCRW Artist-in-Residence best known for working with the coloniality of the Virgin Islands, both in its past relationship to Denmark and its present one with the United States. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Christiansborg Palace (DK). Her art is in the collections of the National Photography Museum and the Vestsjælland Museum in Denmark. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commision with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She is the co-creator of “I Am Queen Mary”, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. The project was featured in over 100 media outlets around the world including the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, the BBC, and Le Monde.
Helle Stenum, PhD, researcher, educator, has for many years worked on issues such as migration, culture, collective memory, ethnic relations, transnational connections, race and gender constructs at universities and as independent researcher and consultant. ‘We Carry It Within Us’ is her first documentary, which builds upon her profound knowledge on the colonial connection and her wide international network.
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014. She is also the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5Under35. Her writing has also won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize.
Tami Navarro, BCRW Associate Director, holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Anthropological Association, and the Ford Foundation. She has held a fellowship in Anthropology at Rutgers University and taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. Before coming to Barnard, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands.
Events are free and open to the public. RSVP is preferred but not required. Seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis.