New Publication: History and Public Debates about Racial Slavery in Denmark
IN THE SAME SEA’s PI Gunvor Simonsen has just published the essay “History and Public Debates about Racial Slavery in Denmark” in S. Cornerman et al. (ed) Cultural Heritage and Slavery: Perspectives from Europe (DeGruyter, 2023). In the essay, she discusses how the history of racial slavery has figured in Danish public debates concerning Denmark’s involvement in Atlantic racial slavery and the slave trade over the past few decades. Simonsen argues that professional history, framed as a field that attempts to confront various problems and ask new questions in order to expand our knowledge of the past, seldom emerges in public debates. Instead, the history of racial slavery tends to become a question of Danes' (lack of) factual knowledge of history, and at times is a deeply emotional fight about how these facts should be represented.
You can read the chapter here.