Pre-defence seminar with Anne Mette Jørgensen

Moving archives: Remembering industrialization in Greenland

External examiner: Professor Ton Otto, Aarhus University

Abstract:  

The post-colonial nation of Greenland is in these decades re-orienting its history writings by the agency of historians, a reconciliation committee, professional culture agents as authors, filmmakers, artists and others. Images of the past impact on our possible futures (Connerton) and as Greenland aims for increasing independence in the Unity of the Realm with Denmark and the Faroe Islands memory gains increased pertinence and the question of local agency in history becomes central.

The decades of intense industrialization in Greenland have hitherto mainly been described in negative terms, as abrupt social and cultural changes that destroyed traditional life styles. Dominant narratives have focused on rupture, trauma, ‘loss of identity’ and alienation in a new, modern world, indicating a continuity with today’s heavy social challenges. These narratives tend to obliterate nuances, efface variation and ignore local agency.

I will argue that when engaging through visuals with people’s memory narratives of these transitional years alternative scenarios emerge. Only certain memories have been shared in public as mediated narratives in museums, on stages, on social or broadcast media, whereas others remain in the private sphere, perhaps in a photo-album, on the phone or in a frame on the wall. In my fieldwork in Greenlandic museum contexts I have in particular observed how archival visuals move people, facilitate and elicit memories and I will contribute to a sub-field of visual memory studies, arguing that visuals may appeal strongly to emotions and thereby qualify memory works. I examine how processes of segregation, affirmation, forgetting and mediating take place, just as I look to the other side of a dialectic inherent in the relation: Sometimes mediated narratives also make an impact on the memory processes of the individual.