1.1 SITUATING THE US VIRGIN ISLANDS-DENMARK RELATIONS
68 The differences between the two concepts will be laid out in case study 3.
This case study is based in a (post)colonial relationship which has been overlooked by scholars and journalists alike for quite some time. It is the relationship between Denmark and the USVI. Denmark colonised the three Caribbean islands of St Thomas, St Croix and St John for more than two hundred years, though this common cultural and political history and colonial relationship neither features prominently in Danish schoolbooks nor in the media. In the USVI the historical relationship is part of the curriculum. This skewed emphasis on the importance of the common history generates an extreme lack of acknowledgement of Danish complicity in colonialism, slavery and slave trade in the Danish general public. In addition this lack of acknowledgement breeds general blindness and ignorance towards covert racialised hierarchies and categorisations based on nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century biological racial ideology, as one of this case study’s foci exemplifies. It is not uncommon to find young Danes in their late teens who do not know that Denmark took part in slavery69 and nothing points to the possibility that the older generation is better informed. The discourses and terminology of otherness often show traces of what media and cultural theorist Randi Marselis calls ‘national self-conceptions of the Nordic countries as not having the “burden of guilt”’ (Marselis forthcoming: 13).
Engaging with journalist-subject positions and relations to what I have called journalistic cultural memories (see chapter 2), in this case study I analyse a Danish TV documentary and Danish and USVI newspaper articles. I want to show the social and cultural constructions of cultural memories, of genealogical relations and of cultural implications in common (post)colonial history. As argued in chapter 2, cultural memories form a coherent representation of a common culture and identity which need to be repeated in order to continue having an effect. Paraphrasing van Dijck (2007) I extrapolated the term ‘journalistic cultural memory’ to emphasis the journalistic role in the creation and maintenance of cultural memories. However, these memories are further sustained through silencing other memories and stories in the social imaginary. The cultural non-memory in Denmark is prevalent on the topic of the USVI, and Denmark’s responsibility for its diasporic population. My approach in this case study develops through the phenomenological accounts of the subject which I gave in chapters 1 and 2. Foregrounding the concept of journalistic cultural memory
69 Alex Frank Larsen: Slavernes Spor (Traces of Slaves) (Medialex Film & TV 2005), television documentary in four episodes.
and stressing the importance of the politics of perception, in terms of sensory and embodied experience of an other that is structurally and ethically necessary to the self, I am arguing for an embodied and embedded journalistic cultural memory. Moreover, in the case of Denmark and the USVI, cultural relations and memories, issues of not remembering and not mentioning are also foregrounded. Using the concept of journalistic cultural memories – memory being a concept for which moral responsibility is attached, as I argued in chapter 2 – also allows me to call attention to the ethical demands within historical accounts and socially and culturally re-enacted political relations to others.
The case study aims at exploring how covert racist notions of difference in the general public are carried through journalistic discursive and practice-based lack of acknowledged complicity. I offer a reading of journalistic practice and politics of positioning the journalist-subject as a way of explaining the persistence of racial stereotypes in Denmark and Danish journalism. I apply a phenomenologically inspired discourse analysis that aims at understanding journalistic discourse as an integral – and therefore dynamic and (re)constituting – part of the society in which it operates. The cultural, religious and political discourses are woven into the fabric of personal identities as well as notions of national and cultural belongings – that is, they are embodied and embedded. I engage with a broadly defined critical discourse analysis which I think is enriching to cultural studies (Threadgold 2003). That is, I emphasise the interrelation of ‘text and practices’ with ‘the institutional and wider social and cultural context of media practices, including relations of power and ideologies’ (Fairclough 1995: 33). I recognise hybrid intertextuality and mixture of genres and discourses within texts and understand these mediated representations as multifunctional and ‘oriented towards representation and constitution of relations and identities as simultaneous processes’ (Fairclough 1995: 33). This case study moreover draws on classic semiotic analysis as well as qualitative content analysis. However, my theoretical and methodological framework departs from, for instance, Fairclough’s structurally comparative approach. The analysis I seek to conduct sees the mediated news as deferral of ethical demands evoking responses according to their journalistic practices and discourses (Chouliaraki 2006). Moreover this analysis questions the underlying assumptions in order to deconstruct journalistic practices and argue for a new history and journalism operationalised on the basis of phenomenological
approaches informed by ‘race’ and gender scholars’ interventions. The analysis recognises that research that sets out to shed light on racist notions in journalism discourse is always political (Downing and Husband 2005). Simultaneously I argue that journalism on the issue of self-other relations is also always political and it is that politico-cultural undercurrent I want to catch and follow in this case study. I therefore find inspiration in Gloria Wekker’s (2006) radical argument against objectivity which suggests that ‘methodology provides information about the various ways in which one locates oneself – psychologically, socially, linguistically, geographically, epistemologically, and sexually – to be exposed to experience in a culture’ (Wekker 2006:4). I am moreover inspired by a ‘nomadic methodology’ (Braidotti 2006) tracing through affects and intensities and ‘[a]ccounting backwards for the affective impact of various items and data upon oneself [which] is the process of remembering’ (Braidotti 2006: 173). Pivotal in this Deleuzian/Braidottian notion of nomadic methodology of using memory as positive and productive capacity is that it is embedded and embodied and thus not comparative layers of texts and genres alone. In the following I take inspiration from these accounts when dealing with the journalistic representation and reproduction of history and historical memory. I will argue that both archival and culturally informed and sustained representations of history in different ways are embedded and embodied. Journalistic narratives about cultural hybridisation, homogeneity and heterogeneity throw into relief journalistic (co)production of
‘identities’ and belonging. As a former colony of Denmark, a present territory of the United States and a member of the Caribbean island basin, the question of cultural
‘identity’ and belonging are continuously debated in the USVI – most recently in connection with the islands’ fifth attempt at constructing a constitution. These circumstances foreground the multilayeredness and multiplicity in the USVI community and cultural ‘identities’.