West Indian women in Danish popular fiction

This paper examines nationalist nostalgia for Denmark's colonial period in the Caribbean through the lens of popular women's fiction. Empirical accounts of this period written by Danish historians have, to a limited extent, undergone such contrapuntal examinations. But these accounts assume so little discursive space in Danish history books that it seems unlikely that they are Danes' primary source of knowledge about the Danish West Indies (1672–1917). More compelling sources are the popular culture narratives that have circulated since Denmark's thwarted attempt to sell the islands to the USA in 1902. Because popular women's fiction tends to depict women's subjective experience rather than posit an empirical reality, its role in reproducing knowledge about Denmark's colonial history, and in constructing its national identity, has never been examined. Such a reading reveals Denmark's continuing struggle with symbolic miscegenation nearly a century after she was forced to give up her Caribbean colonies.