(POST)COLONIAL INTERFERENCES: ETHNICITY, GENDER, AND CLASS IN CONTEMPORARY DANISH LITERATURE ABOUT GREENLAND

During the last two decades, Greenland has progressively become a hot topic within the international public debate, and this same interest has characterized Danish literature – in a variety of forms ranging from autofictional and historical texts to genre-fiction. Kim Leine, Iben Mondrup, and Lotte Inuk stand out as three significant representatives of this wave, also due to their peculiar experience as migrants in Greenland. The present work is concerned with the narratives that have characterized Danish literature and discourses about Greenland since the cultural encounter between former colonizer and colonized and investigates whether the three authors’ ‘internal’ viewpoint has led to literary understandings of Danish-Greenlandic relations that do not necessarily rely on stereotypical stances or on a binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Two discourses – both central to postcolonial studies pertaining to the Danish-Greenlandic context – are at the core of my inquiry: 1) the ‘othering’ dynamics that fall under the name of «Arctic orientalism», concept theorized by Kirsten Thisted in the 1990s and 2) the so-called «exceptionalism», i.e., the rhetoric of self-absolution promoted on Danish side with regard to colonial presence and responsibility in Greenland. The (possible) deconstruction of these narratives in a selection of novels by Leine, Mondrup, and Inuk has been analyzed by taking into consideration three different categories of social difference: ethnicity, gender, and class. The joint attention for these aspects – all deeply intertwined with understandings of identity – presupposes an ‘intersectional’ viewpoint on Greenlandic society and how it is represented in these literary works. Although in the course of my research I also refer to the notion of «intersectionality» – first employed by the jurist Kimberlé Crenshaw in an attempt to «contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences» (Crenshaw 1989: 139) – I rather tend to employ Ingunn Moser’s adjoining term, «interference». ‘Interference’ points to the fact that «the different processes that construct gender, class and dis/ability not only mechanically sustain and reinforce each other (as the metaphor of intersections suggests), but may also clash, come into conflict and neutralize each other» (Lykke 2010: 84). Moser’s expression, suggesting a certain degree of ‘fuzziness’, thus seems to leave more room for possible inconsistencies. The ‘intersectional’ nature of my work unfolds through the creation of a ‘cumulative’ structure for the last three chapters – preceded by chapter 1, conceived as a historical introduction to the context and genre here scrutinized. While chapter 2 solely revolves around the ethnic dimension, chapter 3 and 4 – respectively focusing on gender and class – are essentially ‘multidimensional’, as they build on concepts and observations made in the previous sections of the dissertation. Thus, the category of ethnicity constantly dialogues with those of gender and class; gender-related matters are also discussed in chapters 2 and 4, although they are perhaps less pervasive than discourses on ‘Danishness’ and ‘Greenlandicness’, at the center of dansk grønlandslitteratur.