“Holding Hands at the Heart of Empire”

In 1905, people from the different corners of the Danish empire held hands at
a colonial exhibition in Tivoli, Copenhagen. The colonial exhibition (Dansk
Koloniudstilling (Grønland og Dansk Vestindien) samt udstilling fra Island og
Færøerne) displayed people and objects from Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), the
Virgin Islands (former Danish West Indies), Iceland and the Faroe Islands to
tighten the connections between Denmark, its colonies and northern dependencies (Bruun 1905). Today, the relations between the colonies and dependencies of Denmark seem largely disconnected and consciousness of colonial entanglements beyond the Danish mainland metropole is limited. As this article will show and counter, intra-imperial connections involving the Faroe Islands are often overlooked in studies of the Danish empire.
The article uncovers colonial relations of the past by analysing photographs
from a scrapbook presumably created by the main organiser of the colonial
exhibition, Emma Gad. The photographs show participants interacting at the
exhibition, and the article asks: What kind of conversations about this forgotten
past are made possible by these photographs? How can these photographs be
used to refl ect upon the ways ideas of race, whiteness, civilization, nationality,
and empire have operated in the colonial encounters facilitated at the Tivoli
exhibition? Throughout the article, the photographs point to histories of shared
experiences between the colonies and dependencies that exhibition participants
were supposed to represent in an orchestrated encounter at the heart of the
Danish empire.