KULT Thorkild Hansen and The Non-White - A Critical Reading of the Slave Trilogy This manuscript is an edited version of an MA Thesis from Roskilde University, and has not been submitted through the usual peer review process. It has however been edited by Kult. Online Edition 2016 © KULT and Björn Hakon Lingner 2016 ISSN: 1904-1594 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 4 1. Theororising the Danish Black Atlantic ............................................................ 8 Postcolonial Studies .............................................................................................................. 9 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies .................................................................................... 12 Language, power and narrative ............................................................................................ 14 Discourse, text and knowledge............................................................................................. 16 2. Historicising Danish Whiteness ...................................................................... 20 Roots of whiteness ............................................................................................................... 21 Who counts as white? ........................................................................................................... 24 White European thinking ..................................................................................................... 29 The transformation of whiteness after 1945 ......................................................................... 31 Whiteness defined broadly ................................................................................................... 33 Danish whiteness .................................................................................................................. 35 The analysis of whiteness in The Slave Trilogy ................................................................... 38 3. Analysis ........................................................................................................... 40 Thorkild Hansen’s Epistemology and Method ..................................................................... 40 II. ...................................................................................................................................... 43 III. ..................................................................................................................................... 46 Representation of Non-Whiteness in The Slave Trilogy ...................................................... 47 I. ........................................................................................................................................ 47 II. ...................................................................................................................................... 51 III. ..................................................................................................................................... 55 IV. ..................................................................................................................................... 58 Violence ............................................................................................................................... 62 I. ........................................................................................................................................ 62 II. ...................................................................................................................................... 67 III. ..................................................................................................................................... 70 Colonialism and the Facilitation of Progress ....................................................................... 74 I. ........................................................................................................................................ 74 II. ...................................................................................................................................... 78 III. ..................................................................................................................................... 81 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 87 Works cited: ........................................................................................................ 90 3 Introduction This text concerns itself with the Danish author Thorkild Hansen and, more specifically, with his three-volume project, The Slave Trilogy, which deals with the history of the Danish slave trade. My reading of Hansen is inspired by insights from Postcolonial Studies and Critical Race and Whiteness Studies. I have chosen this angle for a number of interlinked reasons, which may briefly be described as follows: First and foremost, Thorkild Hansen wrote The Slave Trilogy with a clear, and in my opinion authentic, critical and anti-imperialist intention, and his work seems to have been celebrated and understood in this way by most critics. My analysis does not emerge from a desire to question the sincerity of Hansen’s critical intentions, nor to diminish his importance in challenging the self-congratulatory views on the Danish (and more general European) colonial past that were common during his time. Instead, I intend to show how his vision has been partly shaped by colonialist and racialised discourses despite the author’s clearly evidenced intention of doing the opposite. Seen from this critical perspective a re- reading of the critique provided by Hansen in the Slave Trilogy represents both a re-assessment of a landmark in Danish literature, and serves as a basis for a more general discussion of the development of colonial and racialised discourses and some of the critiques attempting to challenge them over time. I consider the discussion of Thorkild Hansen’s work from a critical, anti-imperialist and anti- racist perspective to be relevant because of Hansen’s position in Danish literary production. Thorkild Hansen was (in Denmark) one of the most widely read authors of his time, and The Slave Trilogy was a best seller, reviewed and revered by some leading Danish critics. The Slave Trilogy won the literary prize of the Nordic Council (Frederiksen 2012: 17, 117, 139). Others found his work more contestable. Hansen wrote in an era of worldwide political upheaval and class conflict: Anti-colonial struggles such as the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements in the US, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the emergence of the New Left all contributed to a highly politicised literary climate, which usually (in Scandinavia at least) took an outspokenly leftist stance (Stecher-Hansen 1997: 16-18). Hansen, who besides being a writer of fiction often worked as an international correspondent, reflected these topics in his work, especially in The Slave Trilogy. His choice of topics mirrored, amongst other things, the strong interest in imperialism in his time. His engagement with the past was a way of commenting on the present. Hence The Slave Trilogy used the Danish slave trade to point to the exploitation and subjugation of poor countries in Hansen’s own era (Stecher-Hansen 1997: 4 10, 16; Frederiksen 2012: 80, 83, 152, 168-169). The Slave Trilogy also challenged popular Danish perceptions of the imperial past, most notably the commonly held understanding that Denmark was the first Western country to abolish slavery, something that was thought to prove the exceptionally humane and charitable character of the Danish nation (Stecher-Hansen 1997: 80, 90-93; Frederiksen 2012: 129). Critics and historians were divided over how to categorise The Slave Trilogy, not least concerning what its truth value as historiography might be. While some read – and celebrated – the three volumes as an anti-capitalist critique, others criticised Hansen for his idealist philosophy of history, rooted in his existentialist outlook (Stecher- Hansen 1997: 18-19, 25-26; Frederiksen 2012: 128, 146). Yet all these debates, which underline the importance of Thorkild Hansen as a Danish writer, miss the question about Hansen’s own possible internalised racial thinking. What I intend to pursue in this work is to make visible the ways in which racialised, colonial discourses did manifest themselves in The Slave Trilogy despite Hansen’s critical intentions, reflecting underlying, naturalised and internalised assumptions about the relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans, that the author’s critique was not able to recognise, let alone transgress. It is my contention, then, that while Hansen attacks slavery, sometimes fervently, and speaks of it as clearly marked by racist attitudes, racism itself and its connection to whiteness remains understudied in Hansen’s trilogy and in the work of his critics. My work aims at making these manifestations of whiteness visible. A postcolonial approach provides a perspective that reads works like The Slave Trilogy as embedded in the cultural context of continued economic, cultural and political Western dominance over its colonies, also after formal decolonisation. As Edward Said’s work has shown, whether imperial relations are obscured in a text or not, they will be present at a deep level, as power, identity and knowledge are to be understood