This paper takes a novel approach to studying the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that emerged in the summer of 2020. Drawing on multimodal qualitative visual analysis methods, we study acts of deliberate altering and erasure of statues that represent heroes of colonialism in Greenland and Denmark. The paper conceptualises these actions as ‘visibility acts of citizenship’ in which racialised minorities claim their symbolic space in the public sphere and criticise racialized and gendered structures of oppression. We then provide a detailed visual and textual analysis of conservative Danish media representations of the protest. This allows us to show how the media (mis)represented protesters’ actions, and its response to accusations of racism and calls for change. Thus, we extend the literature on visual analysis of protest by including not only activists’ visual acts but also the visual responses of mainstream conservative media to the movement.

In a world that is ever more based on visual communications, studying the aesthetic intervention of social movements is a key, and so far underutilised, aspect of social movements studies (Doerr et al., 2012; Doerr & Milman, 2014; Doerr & Teune, 2012; Milman & Doerr, 2022). Like noted in the Introduction and Epilogue to this Special Issue, post-colonial and social movements scholars have called for research to include cultural expressions of protest that enhance public visibility and challenge racialised representations of belonging in public debate (Beaman, 2017; Tyler & Marciniak, 2013). This is especially true for the wave of protests of Black Lives Matter (BLM) that emerged globally in the summer of 2020. These protest events were ripe with symbolic gestures and performative actions which activists shared, spread and translated from one cultural context to another, each time adapting collective action tactics to unique local cultural and political contexts. One particular visual performative action that BLM activists spread from the United States to European societies involved standing or kneeling in silence to commemorate the violent killing of George Floyd. Others involved collectively raising a fist, marching to and from the local US embassy, and removing, brutalising or altering statues reminiscent of the colonialist or racist order (Milman & Doerr, 2022).

Our point of departure is direct action by anonymous activists, who altered a historic monument of Danish-Norwegian priest and missionary Hans Egede in the city of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, during the 2020 wave of BLM mass mobilisation. This protest action was later copied in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, where activists altered another statue of Egede in similar ways. In this article, we analyse the visual, cultural and political meaning of these actions of altering statues in Denmark and Greenland, conceptualising them as what we call visibility acts of citizenship (Milman & Doerr, 2022). Additionally, we analyse the visual dimension of mainstream conservative media reactions to these protest events, which manifested several counter-mobilisation strategies.

Drawing on cultural approaches to citizenship, we study how BLM activists used historic monuments in Nuuk and Copenhagen to publicly make visible, memorialise and criticise European treatment of racialised and post-colonial minorities (El Tayeb, 2016) through visibility acts of citizenship. This is our central concept – visibility acts of citizenship, as the collective, performative ‘acts of citizenship’ conducted by artists and activists – which is inspired by Isin’s work (Isin, 2008). Isin, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt among others, assumes that researchers studying acts of citizenship must ‘focus on those moments when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens – or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due’ (Isin, 2008, p. 18). Isin underlines the visual aesthetic dimension of acts of citizenship, by which he means public, transformative moments of political protest like the Montgomery bus boycott organised by civil rights activists in the US. Our visual, sociological reading of Isin leads us to focus our analysis on public moments of protest or collective action in which repressed groups collectively ‘stand up’, and do so ‘courageously’, sometimes at the risk of anticipated violent repercussions, in order to ‘break with habitus’ (Isin, 2008, p. 18) and challenge unequal power relations. Thinking from a sociological perspective about the breaking of habitus (Isin, 2008, p. 18), what makes the visibility acts of citizenship so relevant is that racialised minorities in our case studies not only appear in public for an ephemeral performative moment, but attempt to leave a long-lasting mark on the public sphere of appearance by removing offensive statues and potentially erecting new statues that will make repressed histories and communities visible.

We treat ‘citizenship’ as encompassing a broader meaning than its strict legal definition. Our analysis is concerned with the symbolic meaning of citizenship to include the normative and symbolic national and civic belonging of racialised minorities. We suggest that the altering of statues in Nuuk and Copenhagen should be interpreted as symbolic actions that echo critical political moments in history when racialised minorities expressed their protest in acts of citizenship and demanded to be included fully in the legal as well as symbolic boundaries of the nation. Visibility acts of citizenship are risky performative speech acts because they challenge the very space of appearance and the culturally institutionalised - hierarchies of race, class, and gendered norms that restrict who can legitimately speak as a citizen in a public space without risking punishment (Arendt, 1958; Butler, 2015; Doerr, 2014; Isin, 2008; Schober, 2019).

Because we conceptualise public debate more broadly than a critical historical perspective of discourse, to include visual and performative practices (Wodak, 2015), we are interested in visibility acts of citizenship as part of a constellation of erasure and creation within public discourse that aims to remember Europe’s haunting past (El Tayeb, 2011; Milman & Doerr, 2022; Wodak, 2015) and comment on its presence. By focusing on collective acts of civic resistance to racism (Beaman, 2017; El Tayeb, 2016), our cultural approach brings into dialogue emerging research fields such as visual sociology, critical citizenship studies, and visual approaches to social movements.

Of course, movements do not operate in a vacuum. They translate their performative actions to fit local cultural repertoires (Roggeband, 2007) and dynamic cultural opportunity structures (Phelps et al., 2021), and are met with contentious representations of their protest that is unique to a particular political context (Dal Cortivo & Oursler, 2021; Tarrow, 2005). Studying mainstream media responses to the visual actions of movements provides scholars with a fuller understanding of the interplay between the actions and demands of movements and the public discourse that surrounds them. Thus, in the second step of the analysis we study representation of protests in mainstream conservative media. In so doing, we extend the analysis of visibility acts of citizenship to include mainstream conservative understanding, representation, and reaction to activists’ public expressions of protest. We show that even highly visible, public performative actions are filtered by place-specific institutionalised media (counter-)frames of visual representation of protest (cf. Dal Cortivo & Oursler, 2021; Safaian & Teune, 2021) and of racialised post-colonial relations (cf. Blaagaard, 2010; Danbolt, 2017; Jensen, 2018). Given that movements wish to shape mainstream discourses, the interplay between activists’ actions and mainstream reactions is of great theoretical significance. By studying conservative mainstream media, we are able to simultaneously study counter-mobilisation strategies as well as overall reaction to the movement.

Based on these theoretical reflections, we restrict our empirical research question to asking what are the visual strategies that activists in situated, place-specific contexts of post-colonial European societies employ in protesting against racism? Our analysis reveals the multifaceted nature of activists’ visual acts of protest, highlighting the intertwining of erasure and creation in their visual strategies. Additionally, the paper studies how place-specific protest actions are visually represented and reinterpreted in conservative mainstream media. Our focus is on the creative visual claims-making contest that BLM protests have ignited in Denmark and Greenland with regard to Danish colonialism of Greenland. The broader question we explore is how highly contested visibility acts of citizenship become moments in which racialised minorities can assert their political agency and how are they being visually received by conservative mainstream actors.

The case study reviewed in this paper is taken from broader empirical research on anti-racist movements and public debates on the BLM mobilisation across Europe (Milman et al., 2021). Through a multimodal method of interviews, discourse analysis and visual analysis, we focus on Denmark and Greenland to answer these research questions empirically.

In search of the most accurate and analytically productive terminology for analysing our case study, we heed the advice of other sociologists who warn against repeating media language or official authority discourse ascribed to public protest and collective action (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). We avoid using media language that described the direct action as an act of ‘vandalizing’, ‘desecrating’ or ‘brutalizing’ of the statue of Hans Egede. Instead, we prefer the term ‘altering’, which is both more accurate in describing the action and in capturing its multiple layers of meaning. We are aware that this terminology may not be accurate for describing the broad variety of direct actions targeting public monuments that occurred during BLM protests in 2020 across Europe (cf. Milman et al., 2021), but it is the most useful language to discuss our particular case study scientifically.

In the following, we analyse the protest actions and their representation and reinterpretation in conservative mainstream media. We conceptualise the visual strategies and ideological framing of the activists and the media in the context of the post-colonial dynamic between Denmark and Greenland. We then contextualise the actions as part of a global wave of protest, rooted in it and transforming its meaning to fit activists’ local contexts. Following the theoretical discussion, we describe our methodology of visual analysis and present our findings. The analysis of the findings is divided into two parts. First, we describe and analyse activists’ visibility acts of citizenship during the 2020 BLM protest wave in our case study. We then analyse mainstream conservative media representation and reactions to these protest actions. Our discourse analysis includes text-based analysis as well as visual analysis of media debates. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and social significance of our findings.

As visual sociologists interested in the connection between art and protest, we seek to investigate the transnational connections and particular place-specific meanings of the alteration of statues of colonisers in Greenland and Denmark. By ‘transnational connections’ we mean the entangled public statements and responses involving BLM activists and media audiences in the two countries debating the impact of colonialism and racism in today’s Europe.

Notwithstanding the protests’ international ties and resonance, the action in Nuuk and the subsequent action in Copenhagen are critically tied to a particular racial dynamic rooted in the post-colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The two states remain in a close relationship of centre and periphery. Whereas Greenland, formerly a Danish colony, remains part of the kingdom of Denmark, it is an autonomous province of Denmark with extensive – yet not full – self-governance privileges, and sends two elected representatives to the Danish parliament. To analyse the meanings behind the protest actions and the reactions to them in conservative media, we draw here on the critical post-colonial literature that focuses on the Nordic states. The idea of ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ is of particular importance here. The term conveys a notion of diversity in colonialist practices and argues that, to the extent that Nordic nations were involved in colonialism, they practised a benevolent form of colonial rule: in contrast to the cruelty and blatant racism that characterised colonialist practices of other European nations, Nordic practice was far more moderate and ultimately well intentioned. Similarly, post-colonial relationships are cast as equally benign and beneficial for post-colonial subjects. The economic interests, power inequality, systemic violence, and racist ideologies that underpinned Danish colonial enterprise in Greenland are wilfully ignored (Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012; Jensen, 2012, 2022; Petterson, 2012). This narrative, which dominates Danish self-understanding, contributes directly to cultural amnesia and repression of the history of colonialism and enslavement in Danish memory (Jensen, 2018, 2019). Consequently, there are hardly any public commemorations of colonialism, little knowledge of the role Denmark played in the trading of humans for enslavement, and no mention of the wealth that colonialism and enslavement brought to Denmark and contributed to the construction of its renowned welfare state (Blaagaard, 2010). This leads to what Keskinen et al. (2009) call ‘colonial complicity’, in which racist and post-colonial imageries and practices are defended as both natural and neutral cultural practices, and as carrying a unique and harmless meaning in the Nordic context. Therefore, the argument goes, no soul-searching is required, and no change of practice is warranted (see Danbolt, 2017).

To the extent that memorialisation of the racist and colonial past does take place, it often belittles the active role that the nations under colonial rule played in their liberation. Instead, it casts the Danes as the main characters who acted generously, heroically even, to grant the colonised nations their independence (Blaagaard, 2010; Jensen, 2012, 2019, 2022). When the subalterns do speak defiantly (Spivak, 1988) and demand memorialisation, their protest actions are mostly rendered incomprehensible. For example, when Adelbert Bryan, a politician from the Virgin Islands, which were previously colonised by Denmark, protested against the silencing of the role of Caribbean people in securing their liberation from slavery, Danish media portrayed him as an irrational, wild and aggressive man, whose actions were presented as chaotic, inexplicable and thus politically meaningless (Blaagaard, 2010). Indeed, challenges to ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ in race relations often come with a risk of backlash and symbolic violence directed towards those who demand a re-evaluation of race relations in Denmark (Andreassen & Myong, 2017; Sawyer & Habel, 2014). As we show in this paper, muting protest by portraying its agents as aggressive and senseless was a common strategy in conservative media reaction to the BLM protest in Denmark.

Finally, when incidents of cruelty in colonialism and enslavement are impossible to ignore or repress, the mainstream narrative constructs them first as aberrations of the norm, and second as embedded in a particular historical moment and unique social and economic circumstances that we cannot wholly comprehend or rightfully judge from the present (Jensen, 2018). Justifying colonial practices and their relics as harmless, inevitable – or, at least, as being embedded in a historical context that renders them beyond judgment by present-day moral metrics – was indeed a central argument in the conservative media response to BLM protests, as we show below.

Against this cultural backdrop, the collective action of racialised minority populations attempting to unsettle the firm colonial amnesia is an important shift in the power asymmetry and a critical step for the potential re-evaluation of the (post)-colonial relationship in Denmark. This paper, thus, aims to evaluate both the protest action taken by BLM activists in Greenland and Denmark, and the conservative responses to the challenging acts as they are found in a mainstream conservative Danish news outlet. We do so by focusing on the visual aspects of the protest and its resonance in the media.

In our discussion of BLM protesters in Denmark and Greenland, we use the term ‘racialized minorities’ to underlie the socially constructive and dynamic process of assigning racial meaning to minority groups. Racialisation can be tied to presumptions about biology (and as Petterson (2012) demonstrates, it has been an aspect in the racialisation of the Inuit people in Greenland), but it can also be based on ideas of genealogy and cultural difference. Most importantly, the process of racialisation is designed to justify and enable power relations of domination and exploitation. Following Mahmud (1999), we understand modern-day racialisation as tightly connected to Europe’s history of colonisation, which continues to shape contemporary migration policies and race politics (Crawley, 2022).

The toppling of statues by BLM protesters was a performative protest practice that started in the United States, and was then diffused and culturally translated to the United Kingdom, Denmark and other European countries, where activists toppled statues they saw as celebrating Europe’s history of colonialism and enslavement (Milman et al., 2021). In the US context, protesters tended to topple confederate monuments, which were seen as cherishing and glorifying the memory of slavery and slaveholders as model citizens and as normalising racism (cf. Alexander, 2010). In the UK, BLM protesters in Bristol attacked, removed, and pushed into Bristol Harbour the statue of slave trader Edward Colston on 7 June 2020 (Russell, 2020). While considerable public debate and initial research have focused on these acts of toppling and destruction of statues, our empirical contribution is distinct in exploring the complexity and multidimensionality of cultural repertoires of visual art and protest against racism in their place-specific contexts (cf. Beaman, 2017). Across European countries, these protesters attacked what they viewed as traditional monuments standing for citizenship embodying racism, sexism and colonialism. We propose that a visual analysis perspective can provide insights into understanding political participation and reinvention of new forms of participation and new ideas about citizenship (Tyler & Marciniak, 2013). We also demonstrate the place-specific cultural repertoires that activists used to encapsulate their specific cultural critique.

From a cultural sociological perspective, protest challenges traditional visual representation of citizenship and power in the public sphere (Schober, 2019). In the birth of modern forms of political participation, French revolutionaries toppled publicly displayed statues of the king; they also demolished and erased the notorious prison building of the Bastille, creating a public sphere that symbolised citizens – a new actor entitled to speak politically in public (Schober, 2019). Since the French Revolution, groups officially excluded from civic rights (such as working-class people, women, LGBT, or racialised minorities) have used visual performance and iconoclastic acts of protest to attack or remove old structures representing power in public, and to make room and actively create broader representations of citizenship (Butler, 2015; Schober, 2019). Thus, in Denmark and Greenland today, BLM protesters intervene as performative speakers whose collective performance acts ‘as if’ they were recognised as fully belonging to and equally valued in the nation (Isin, 2008). Visibility acts of citizenship, from a performative perspective of citizenship, challenge and subvert the very space of appearance and the culturally institutionalised racialising hierarchies (and gendered) norms that define how a citizen must look in order to speak in public (Arendt, 1958; Butler, 2015; Schober, 2019). We understand the direct actions around statues in the context of BLM protests as part of that tradition of contentious repertoires that challenge hegemonic representations of belonging, citizenship and power in public space (Tilly, 1993).

Rather than writing about iconoclasm, social movements scholars and decolonial theorists urge us to study activists’ new creations – of civic statues, monuments, names and spaces for remembering the repressed history of enslaved and colonised people in Western Europe (El Tayeb, 2011; Odumosu, 2019). As we show below, protesters in Nuuk and Copenhagen symbolically erased the memorialisation of a hero of colonialism, but they also were involved in acts of creation: they marked Hans Egede statues with drawings, and added objects to the statues, which together created multiple novel meanings and connotations. Thus, in addition to erasure, activists created new meanings and memorialisation of indigenous culture and history.

The actions of altering Hans Egede statues in Nuuk and in Copenhagen challenged the active forgetting of Denmark’s colonialism in public space. It also added another – related – dimension of erasure: by altering the Egede statue, the activists seemed to erase the unreflective commemoration of figures involved in colonialism. In the next section, we describe our methodological approach in greater detail, and follow it with an in-depth visual analysis of the altering of statues and the conservative media’s visual response.

There is lively scholarly debate asking what constitutes visual data. Some visual media scholars argue for the inclusion only of strictly defined ‘visual images’. Their definition includes mostly photographs, posters or other visual materials found in print or online (Müller, 2007). Other analysts, coming from the field of discourse analysis and multimodal analysis, take a broader approach, proposing the addition of mentally constructed images that are expressed in different discursive forms (Richardson & Wodak, 2009). In our multimodal approach, we study both types of image: we study visual acts of protest, including mentally constructed images of protest actions (Doerr & Milman, 2014). In addition, we study images that meet the narrower definition of images – that is, political illustrations and cartoons published in printed newspapers. While these images originate in print, they also appear in the newspaper’s online platform and are reprinted in its social media account, where they are subsequently shared by other users. Consequently, these images have a broad reach and impact in public discourse.

Drawing on insights from visual sociologist Gillian Rose, we assume that we cannot understand an image independently from its social context, and we ourselves, as viewers, are part of the social context in which an image exists (Rose, 2016). Therefore, we have developed a method of visual analysis based on three steps of (i) visual content analysis, (ii) visual iconography, and (iii) contextualisation, in order to analyse images in their historical context of creation, diffusion and re-contextualisation, as well as the decoding by audiences (Doerr & Milman, 2014). Given the limits of space, we focus uniquely on steps (i) and (iii) of the analysis; that is, we analyse the content of visual acts of protest and political illustrations and cartoons, their representation of gender and racialised minorities, as well as the applied visual and memory technologies (Doerr, 2014).

We also contextualise the protest by looking at its counter-mobilisation in the context of the conservative media debate on BLM. We wished to analyse the visual commentary on the movement as it is reflected in opinion pieces in order to analyse the ideological components of the counter-mobilisation in conservative media. For that aim, we centred the visual analysis on political cartoons. These included both the daily cartoons that stand on their own in the op-ed section of the newspaper, as well as drawings that illustrate an opinion article. We chose to focus on these cartoons because of their explicit political commentary function; this makes them a rich site for visual analysis which studies not just representation but also interpretation of activists’ political claims and actions.

We complemented the visual analysis with textual discourse analysis of the conservative newspaper’s debate. We systematically looked at the relationship between each image and the article that it accompanied or which was adjacent to the image, bearing in mind that textual elements may support an image, or might contrast it (Richardson & Wodak, 2009, p. 69).

Data

In order to conduct an in-depth multimodal analysis of texts and political drawings on BLM protests in 2020, we looked at content that was published in Jyllands-Posten, a newspaper known for its unique and often provocative graphic line, having stirred international public attention on race and ethnicity in Denmark in the past (Blaagaard, 2010; Olesen, 2020). We chose Jyllands-Posten for this study because of this famous graphic history, and because it is a mainstream newspaper that leans politically to the right, thus providing a rich outlet for collecting counter-mobilisation visuals and discursive strategies.

The selection of images for analysis came from a broader sample of 71 newspaper articles and 32 accompanying images published in Jyllands-Posten. These items discussed or depicted BLM protests and the issue of racism in Denmark (removing articles that were not directly concerned with Denmark). To identify the relevant articles and their accompanying images, we used the search phrase ((racisme* OR racist*) OR koloni* OR ‘Black Lives Matter’) AND (‘danmark’ OR dansk*), using the Infomedia database. We collected all articles published from 26 May to 13 July 2020 in order to capture the bulk of media coverage of the issue. We then manually collected the images that accompanied these articles in the printed version of the newspaper. Eight images were caricatures, which we analysed in depth. The rest were photographs, which we did not analyse for this paper.

After we established our corpus of visual and textual data, we systematically coded it using NVivo. We analysed the results using the theoretical tools of the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies (DHA) (Richardson & Wodak, 2009). We complemented our image analysis with in-depth textual analysis of adjacent articles, which we conducted systematically using a similar codebook on NVivo. We did this in addition to a systemic content analysis of the entire textual corpus in our sample.

The final step of analysis is further contextualising through in-depth interviews. We conducted seven interviews and a few follow-up interviews with key players in the BLM mobilisation in Denmark and Greenland, and in the Greenlandic cultural revival movement. The interviews each lasted for about one hour, and were conducted in English, either in person (2) or via Zoom (5). We transcribed each interview in full and systematically analysed them. The interviews provided a crucial additional element to our analysis, as they allowed us to further contextualise our image analysis (see Doerr and Milman (2014) for a discussion of the role of interviews in visual analysis).

1. Inuit symbols temporarily altering colonialist statues in Nuuk and Copenhagen

Anonymous activists undertook the first highly visible public act in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. They aimed to draw attention to the history of the colonialisation of Inuits in Greenland and the ongoing post-colonial relations between Denmark and Greenland. Their political action was to temporarily alter a colonialist statue by painting it in red and drawing text and symbols on it. They did so in late June 2020, at the peak of the 2020 BLM protest wave. It was also the eve of Greenland’s National Day (20 June 2020). The following week (30 June 2020) another statue of Egede, in Denmark’s capital city, Copenhagen, was sprayed with red paint and inscribed with the word ‘DECOLONIZE’ in red.1 Danish-Norwegian priest Hans Egede (1686–1758) was a missionary who participated in the colonisation of Greenland and the forced conversion of its Inuit local population. Egede was the founder of Nuuk, and a large statue of him – the same which was altered – stands on a hill overlooking the city. The activists issued a statement in English on the morning following the first protest action, explaining their motive and rationale:

It’s about time that we stop celebrating colonizers and that we start taking back what is rightfully ours. It’s time to decolonize our minds and our country. No colonizer deserves to be on top of a mountain like that. We need to learn the truth of our history. (Hansen, 2020)2

This was not the first time that the statue of Hans Egede had been altered in Greenland; previous incidents occurred in 1977, 2012 and 2015 (Jyllands-Posten, 2020). What was new in June 2020 was the extent and content of the altering. First, activists sprayed the Egede statue in Nuuk with red paint, and on one side of the plinth wrote the text ‘DECOLONIZE’ in white paint. Additionally, they drew Inuit-inspired patterned symbols on the plinth and attached a whip to the statue (Figure 1).
Figure 1.

The altered Hans Egede statue in Nuuk. The image is a screenshot of the image taken by the anonymous activists.

Figure 1.

The altered Hans Egede statue in Nuuk. The image is a screenshot of the image taken by the anonymous activists.

Close modal

It is significant that the anonymous activists did not simply destroy the statue. Rather, they used Inuit-inspired symbolism and red paint to engage in a complex and imaginative act of simultaneous erasure and creation. The name ‘Hans Egede’, at the front of the plinth, was completely drenched in red paint; other parts of the statue were partially covered in red. The red paint, according to one Inuit activist, Aka Niviana, symbolises the blood that was shed in the process of colonialism in Greenland specifically (Hovalt, 2020). The red paint was intended to condemn Egede and the colonialist past he represents. The covering of the name on the plinth was a powerful act of symbolic erasure of the man’s memorialisation as a national hero. Still, as we demonstrate below, the protesters’ other actions created a new alternative for remembering the past.

The activists also used white colour to draw diagonal and vertical lines, dots and triangles on the plinth in the shape of the letter ‘Y’. These markings were drawn symmetrically, almost equally distanced from each other, in a way that forms a unique and aesthetic pattern. As the symbols were painted upside down, the pattern draws on – but does not directly copy – symbols that traditionally were tattooed on the bodies of Inuit women as amulets for successful seal hunting and protection of the woman’s family and tribe (Milman & Doerr, 2022). Some in the Greenlandic community, including one of our informants, perceived the protest action as an offensive misrepresentation of Inuit sacred cultural practices. However, another informant explained to us in interview that the drawings were intended to symbolise Inuit culture, not to recreate it. According to several of our informants, anonymous activists in this action reclaimed their cultural heritage and displayed it in the public sphere. They created a new cultural artefact on top of the prominent representation of the rejected colonialist legacy and, by that, offered a vision for future remembrance. As Informant 4 said: ‘The protesters take the Inuit tattoos as markers of taking back their Inuit culture’. Doing this over the statue of a Christian missionary, whose task was to replace indigenous with Christian culture, is a particularly poignant action.

In addition to the painting of symbols and the text stating ‘Decolonize’, activists in Nuuk attached a whip to the hand of the Egede statue. Adding a whip significantly altered the representation of the statue holding a shepherd’s crook in his hand. This visibility action is significant as it temporarily took the symbol of priesthood and leadership from Egede’s hand, and highlighted instead the historically coercive and brutal nature of missionary work. In terms of transnational iconographic references, note that the whip intertextually refers to Black feminist Danish artists’ representation of colonialism. Black Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers used the whip to represent the brutal and violent force that Danes used in their project of conversion, colonialisation and control of their enslaved workers in the Caribbean islands (Ring Petersen, 2018). In the place-specific context of the Egede statue, the whip visualised colonialism’s tight relationship with missionary work and with the conversion of indigenous populations to Christianity; it also draws transnational connections between different colonised populations, both in the US and in Europe (Ring Petersen, 2018; cf. Tate, 2015).

Adding the whip to the hand further challenged Danish self-image as a benevolent past and present ruler. Interestingly, most images of the statue that appeared in newspapers depicted the altered statue without the added whip (Milman & Doerr, 2022). It is possible that by the time newspaper photographers arrived at the scene, the city had already removed the whip. Still, given that newspapers chose to use images that did not include the altered statue with the whip, media portrayals symbolically rejected – even erased – the whip as part of the activists’ critique. It is therefore interesting that in our systematic media analysis we found one caricature from Jyllands-Posten that included an illustration of the altered statue with a whip in the hand, which we discuss in detail in the following section. Moreover, attaching a whip to the statue is an act of creative representation of the past, in which the brutal and violent nature of colonialism is memorialised. This is an important finding which runs counter to popular discourse that focused on the destructive aspect of altering statues, and ignored, or missed completely, the creative, innovative and visionary aspects of these acts of protest.

Our interviews with activists in Nuuk and Copenhagen indicate that the act of altering the statue of Hans Egede in Greenland intended to raise awareness of Danish–Greenland post-colonial relations, push the public and politicians to debate the topic, and take concrete actions. As one activist, commenting on the action, said:

We basically just wanted to start conversations about decolonization, because we feel like [Denmark’s colonial past], it’s kind of a taboo, it’s like a subject that people want to stay away from in Greenland and Denmark, because there’s so much tension whenever you speak about the colonial history between them and Denmark … We want to focus on the Greenlandic people, but decolonization is not just about the people who have been colonized, the colonization is as much for the colonizer, right? So we want to take the discussion, not just within our, internally, Greenlandic people, but also in a broader Danish society. (Informant 4)

Importantly, this quote illustrates a broader tendency in our findings, which is BLM activists’ awareness of the intertwined, entangled and transnational history of colonialism, wherein public statues symbolically connect Danish colonisers and colonial subjects (cf. Ring Petersen, 2018). Similarly, another Greenlandic BLM activist, Aka Niviana, said in a newspaper article: ‘The action is about taking back our own identity. It sends a signal that we must decolonize … Now we want to be allowed to define ourselves and tell our own story’ (Hovalt, 2020).3

The direct action on a visible statue of a priest and missionary critically redirected public attention and highlighted the entangled relationship between the missionary Christian church and the imperial exploits of colonial states. As an example, following the direct action of altering the Egede statue, another Greenlandic anti-racist activist wrote in a Facebook post:

Inuit breaking Christian rules would be put in a pillory and flogged (whipped) and publicly humiliated, and if unmarried women had children they would have their topknots (hair), which was a symbol of their womanhood, cut off. See the pictures I took from the Danish National Museum. Physical and psychological violence was part of Danish colonization of Greenland, though the general Danish discourse portrays Denmark as a gentle and benevolent colonial power.4

This post, and the lively public debate it elicited around the visual symbol of the whip and the other artefacts attached to the post, stress the role of religion and missionary work in colonialist endeavours, and the coercive nature of missionising indigenous populations under Danish colonial rule. The post quickly became viral, receiving 1200 ‘likes’ and being shared over 1000 times.

Following the anonymous action in Nuuk, the city conducted a survey among the province’s residents regarding the fate of the statue, and the majority voted to keep the statue in place (Jensen, 2020). This setback to the movement notwithstanding, the protest action in Greenland did bear some fruit. At the beginning of 2021, the municipality in which Nuuk is located announced that it will not celebrate the anniversary of Egede’s landing on the island, and instead will spend the money on urban renovations in preparation for the forthcoming 300th anniversary of the city’s founding.

By attracting media attention to the action and following it with Facebook posts and statements to the media, BLM activists wanted to start a critical conversation on the issue of racism and colonialism in Denmark and Greenland. They did so with some success, as we also demonstrate below. However, when accounting for the conservative counter-mobilisation, as we show in the following section, much of the activists’ critical intention to start a meaningful dialogue about colonialism and racism was filtered out and rejected in mainstream conservative media.

2. Representation, reinterpretation and counter-mobilisation: Conservative media responses

Visual representations of citizenship are particularly important in our case study given the lack of schoolbooks that acknowledge the role of racialised minorities in the history of political participation in Denmark (Blaagaard, 2018). At the same time, sociologists and social movement scholars point to the limitations of symbolic politics, arguing that the change of visual symbols and statues of citizenship is not enough, and that the same symbols themselves can also be used by counter-movements (Doerr & Teune, 2012). Thus, we see how alternative public representations of citizenship are contested, obtain multiple and changing meanings, and can be carried out by those making opposing claims, acquiring contradictory meanings in the process (Dal Cortivo & Oursler, 2021; Doerr, 2014; Schudson, 2012). By focusing on the changes of meaning in media reporting on the altering of statues, we deepen our contextual analysis of the politicised and polarised environment in which visual acts of citizenship and street protests interacted – challenging, or at least symbolically threatening, dominant representations of citizenship and belonging in Denmark. Below, we analyse the Jyllands-Posten textual discussion of BLM protests and the issues the protest raised. Following the text-based discursive analysis, we present our visual analysis of the newspaper’s discourse, and focus our in-depth analysis on one political cartoon commenting on the action of altering statues.

Text-based media discourse analysis

BLM protests and the acts of altering statues generated considerable media attention in Denmark Yet, in discussing the movement, media reactions varied. While there was increased visibility for activists’ claims and visual performative protest actions, there was also significant coverage of the opposing perspective, which contended with the movement or tried to belittle it (for an analysis of overall media representation of the protest, see Milman and Doerr (2022); Milman et al. (2021)). As is to be expected, coverage by the more conservative and right-leaning newspaper Jyllands-Posten was particularly negative: 54% of its articles included a negative representation of the movement’s claims or style. The main arguments against the activists’ claims were that they infringe Danish citizens’ freedom of speech (14% of all articles), and their anti-racist arguments amount to a form of reverse racism (14% of all articles); 35% of all the articles denied the existence of racism in Denmark. A central strand in the denial of racism in Jyllands-Posten posited that racism is essentially a US issue, and that Danish minorities have nothing to complain about in comparison with fellow African-Americans (11% of the articles). Ironically, this media framing denied the persistence of racism in Europe, which was the key issue that BLM activists aimed to address. However, the movement did make headway, even in the conservative media. Notably, 46% of the articles grappled with racism, acknowledged its existence, and advocated for change.

Despite the broad visibility of the spectacular altering of statues, the media visibility of the activists’ claims on the issue of racism and citizenship became ‘lost’ in a contentious translation process in which journalists expressed outrage at the actions against Hans Egede statues in Nuuk and Copenhagen. While amplification of this message by Jyllands-Posten has the effect of discrediting the movement and its claims, the newspaper nevertheless echoed some of the arguments and sentiments that movement leaders made in interviews – with us and with the media – and in the movement’s published materials.

The activists also sparked a broad and lively media discussion of Denmark’s legacy of colonialism: 21% of the articles in our sample addressed Denmark’s history of colonialism (Milman & Doerr, 2022). Still, 40% of the articles that discussed colonialism argued that the former colonial subjects should be grateful for Western or Danish colonisation (8% of all the Jyllands-Posten articles in total). Indeed, when discussing colonialism, several articles claimed that the protest against Danish colonialism is inappropriate as it was gentle and accommodating in comparison with other colonialist forces. Moreover, Danish colonialising helped to ‘liberate’ Inuit people from their own oppressive culture and usher them into modernity. A Jyllands-Posten article makes these two points by saying:

[W]e know that the Greenlandic ‘ideal society’ before Hans Egede’s arrival in 1721 was hardly particularly idyllic. I wonder how the women felt in the tribal society of that time before the spread of Christianity? Hans Egede may not have respected the rights of homosexuals, but unlike [in the Americas], the Inuits were not decimated. On the contrary, the Danish presence enabled the Greenlanders to survive and led to the Greenlandic welfare society we know today. Greenlandic politicians should be happy that it was Hans Egede, and not Hernán Cortés or Francisco Pizarro, who missionized in Greenland. Just ask Aztecs, Incas and North American Indians. … And the [Danish] mistakes pale in comparison to the main point: that the Danish colonization followed by home rule and self-government has relatively gently led the Greenlanders into modern times. (Jalving, 2020)

Another line of critique in the media argued that removing statues of historical figures is akin to erasing the past, censorship, and infringing freedom of speech. Advocates of this argument were not necessarily denying the atrocities of slavery and colonialism (although some certainly did), but insisted that removing statues would be wrong.

The bifurcated discussion of colonialism notwithstanding, we argue that in a social context where the spectre of colonialism is largely absent from public discourse, directing so much attention to the issue of racism, colonialism and their present-day legacies is a major achievement of the movement in shaping public discourse and consciousness (cf. Odumosu, 2019; Olesen, 2020).

Visual analysis of conservative media debates

In this section, we turn our attention to visual media representations and responses to the act of altering Egede’s statue in political caricatures. We study each image as a standalone object, as well as studying it in relation to other images in the newspaper and to the text that surrounds the image. In this way, we can look at the broader discursive context and construction of the visuals.

In all of the caricatures we analysed we find a dual representation of white Danish citizens – and, by extension, the nation – under attack by racialised minority actors. The caricatures representing Danes and the Danish nation evoke compassion and empathy for ‘victimized Danes’. One caricature that exemplifies this line of visual representation was published on 5 July 2020. The caricature illustrates an elderly man holding the national flag in his hand. The man’s shirt also echoes the Danish flag, with its white colour and crossing red lines of the suspenders he wears. His hairline receding, his clothing simple and old-fashioned, his palms closed in fists of discomfort, he stands with his face to the wall in the ‘shame corner’ (or skammehjørnet, as it is called in Danish), which symbolises the place where misbehaving schoolchildren were made to stand in punishment. The empathetic visual representation of an elderly, white Danish man so harshly punished evokes a heart-rending ‘ordinary man’ character representing the Danish nation under attack, punished and humiliated. The fact that we cannot see his face has the double effect of increasing his humiliation in the ‘shame corner’, and making him less concrete, thus better able to represent the nation at large.

On the other hand, caricatures of BLM activists and racialised minorities evoke ridicule and antagonism. For example, a caricature published on 17 June 2020 depicts a grotesque caricature of an angry and evidently irrational Black woman with a raven nose, large lips and teeth, and frizzy hair, who shouts against a traffic light: ‘Why does it have to always be a GREEN or RED MAN?’ (capitalised in the original). The ironic message of the cartoon evokes a woman who sees injustice where there is none, and crazily demands to change basic functions in society for the sake of an imagined need for a more just representation.

Another caricature, which we focus on in this section, provides a clear illustration of this duality of representation. The caricature, published on 9 July 2020, juxtaposes two characters from two different locations involved in an imaginary dialogue. On the left side of the frame stands Hans Egede statue in Nuuk (holding the whip, which was not part of the action in Copenhagen). On the right side of the frame stands the famous bronze statue of the Little Mermaid, a popular tourist attraction and landmark in Copenhagen. The cartoon portrays both statues after they have been painted and altered by political protesters (the Little Mermaid statue was marked with the words ‘Racist Fish’ on 3 July 2020). It uses pastel colours and many shades of grey, which highlight the red paint on the altered Egede statue. Written in Danish, the Little Mermaid statue ‘tells’ the statue of Egede: ‘It is dangerous to be a statue these days’.

The drawing of the Little Mermaid statue is positioned at an angle which makes it seem more distant and much smaller in size. Egede’s figure, in contrast, is positioned at the forefront of the caricature, which makes it the ‘central figure’ on which the caricature comments. Portrayed with a broken nose and red paint drooping from it, Egede’s statue seems miserable and worthy of viewers’ sympathy. The anonymous activists are thus implicitly constructed as brutal agents. Thereby, the cartoon operates to discredit BLM activists and their demands to remove colonialist-era statues and relics.

Note that in public debates there was no immediate clarity on the exact relationship of the Little Mermaid with issues of racism, colonialism or police brutality. The Little Mermaid fairy tale, as far as we can tell, does not represent a racist or colonialist history. Hence, we assume that the act of spraying this statue in July 2020 could have been either an attempt by counter protesters to demonstrate the alleged absurdity of the BLM protest, or as a way to connect the BLM protest to a long history of graffiti painting on the Little Mermaid statue. Whatever the intention behind the spraying of the Little Mermaid, the choice of the cartoonist to place the two ‘injured’ statues facing each other and in dialogue about the ‘dangers of being a statue these days’ portrayed both acts of spraying as equal in seriousness and identical in their meaning. By placing them at the same level in one caricature, they become equally senseless, juvenile and irrational acts of protest. Thus, the altering of the Egede statue becomes a crazy act of brutal vandalising. Evoking emotions such as irony and sympathy for the damaged statues, the cartoon has the indirect effect of discrediting BLM activists and their demands by constructing them as irrational and even brutal invisible agents.

Moreover, reading the cartoon in context strengthens the analysis that the cartoonist used the Little Mermaid statue for the purpose of making a political commentary against the altering of colonialist-era statues. The cartoon accompanied a text entitled: ‘Hans Egede did not enslave the Greenlanders. On the contrary, he released them’ (Kjærgaard, 2020). In the article, the writer makes the point that Egede was not an oppressive coloniser but rather a peaceful liberator:

Hans Egede, … . neither whipped nor tortured their ancestors, but on the contrary, it offered them something they could not resist: a more peaceful, safer, and more cheerful life than that which a violent clan society could deliver.

He goes on to say:

The statue is not the colonial master’s monument smashed in the face of a subdued native population; on the contrary, it is the grateful thanks of thousands of ordinary Greenlanders to their liberator from a dark, brutal, eerie and icy society where hunger was a recurring event.

He then concludes that removing the statue in Nuuk will be a great loss for the city’s aesthetics, equal in magnitude to the loss Manhattan would suffer if it were to remove the Statue of Liberty, or Rio De Janeiro would suffer if it were to remove the monumental statue of Jesus from its landscape. Thus, both the cartoon and the text portrayed the demand to remove Egede’s statue from the city as irrational and misguided.

Summing up, we could see that the conservative media texts and visuals grappled with the BLM activists’ claims on similar terms. The visuals that we studied were almost always ideologically aligned with the texts immediately surrounding them (in seven out of eight cartoons); thus each element serves to amplify the same antagonistic narrative. Still, there was a difference between the overall discursive representation of the movement in text and image. While the textual analysis in the section above revealed an ambiguous reception of activists’ claims – forcefully criticising their tactics and demands, but also genuinely engaging with the call to rethink Denmark’s colonialism and racism – the images we analysed unanimously rejected the activists’ claims and style, portraying them as brutal and irrational. Thus, the visual response to these visibility acts of citizenship was a forceful rejection of their assertion, and a constructed reversal of roles, in which racialised minorities represent an aggressive threat to a vulnerable white majority.

In this paper we have introduced a visual perspective of BLM protests in the context of citizenship struggles led by racialised minorities who wish to address the issue of structural racism in European societies. We contribute to the literature on social movements in general, and Black Lives Matter in particular, by introducing an interconnected theoretical perspective based on visual sociology and critical media discourse analysis. Drawing on Isin’s work (2008), we applied this analytical perspective to study an empirical case of ‘acts of citizenship’ as courageous, publicly visible moments of protest, enacted by subjects who intentionally ‘break with habitus’ and challenge enduring structures of repression and inequality (Isin, 2008, p. 18). The visibility acts of citizenship we studied were conducted by anonymous activists, who altered statues representing the Danish colonial legacy in the capitals of Greenland and Denmark in the summer of 2020. Inspired by critical theories of race, gender, and citizenship, we traced activists’ creative responses to racialising exclusion through visibility acts of citizenship that include both erasure and creation, and analysed counter-mobilisation as seen in the conservative media textual and visual repertoire. We showed how conservative media reacted to the altering of filtered and reframed anti-racist protest actions in a way that portrayed protesters as a threatening, vandalising Other. This combination allows us to show not only the activists’ contestation of power, but also the response of traditional hegemonic power-bearers to this challenge. Ultimately, we show the dual and polarised visual dynamic around protest actions of racialised minorities.

Taking a transnational perspective, we are able to show the process of translating the movement’s repertoire to place-specific culture, history and post-colonial realities. Local protesters in Nuuk and Copenhagen self-consciously translated a global BLM protest repertoire into a distinct visual language by altering statues with red paint and adding to them culturally specific symbols such as the Inuit-inspired markings and the whip. Thus, activists symbolically drew on local cultural codes and transnational Black feminist symbolism to challenge a traditionalist cultural self-understanding of white Danishness as neutral, benevolent and anti-racist.

Despite extensive coverage of the movement and its messages, media actors did not simply repeat the claims of the protesters. Instead, in many instances they silenced and rejected the key argument that the spectacular altering of statues aimed to highlight. Our discourse analysis shows that texts that were published on BLM in Denmark were characterised by ambivalence. While the majority of articles rejected the protest’s claims and portrayed the protest in a negative light, still close to half of all the articles (46%) addressed and grappled with the issue of racism in Denmark. For a country that holds firm a view of itself as benevolent and beyond racism (Danbolt, 2017), and which would rather not discuss issues of racism and post-colonialism (Jensen, 2018; Keskinen et al., 2009; Petterson, 2012), this level of engagement with activists’ claims is noteworthy. However, when examining the visual representation of the protest, a different picture emerges. In grappling with Danish identity under pressure from the BLM protest wave, the conservative Danish media resoundingly rejected the claims and engaged in a discourse of victimhood, casting the ‘old order’ of traditional Danish culture as being under attack by a newly emerging order epitomised by BLM protesters. In their caricatures, the conservative media sympathised with symbols of the traditional order, and portrayed activists as aggressive and irrational.

The caricature that painted the statue of Hans Egede as pitiful and heart-wrenching, attacked by unreasonable activists, illustrates how dominant media framing and culturally institutionalised filters of news reporting limited the broader public impact of the activists’ visibility acts of citizenship: the intended meaning of the performative actions towards Hans Egede statues, as communicated by BLM activists on Facebook and in interviews, became lost in a contentious translation process where journalists scandalised and denounced the protest. Thus, the visual representation of the protest by mainstream conservative media attempted to neutralise the movement’s call for action through various framing strategies that belittled and rejected the activists’ claims and tactics (Dal Cortivo & Oursler, 2021). Our findings contribute to the work of cultural and political sociologists and social movement scholars who point to the limitations of symbolic politics, arguing that the change of visual symbols and statues of citizenship is not enough, and that the same symbols themselves can also be used by counter-movements (Doerr & Teune, 2012; Doerr et al., 2012). In that respect we show that both textually and especially visually, the conservative media reframed the protest actions to deny the persistence of issues of racism and post-colonialism in Denmark, which was the key issue that BLM visibility acts wished to address.

This study also highlights the importance of triangulation when studying movements’ actions. By studying movements’ actions, movement actors’ intention and interpretation, as well as media reframing and counter-mobilisation, we are able to analyse the complex and contentious wave of meaning that surrounded the protest. We hope that more studies in cultural sociology and visual analysis will engage in this form of triangulation of data.

1

‘Statue af missionæren Egede udsat for hærværk i København’, DR, 30 June 2020, https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/statue-af-missionaeren-egede-udsat-haervaerk-i-kobenhavn

2

This was published through a Greenlandic artist, Aqqalu Berthelsen, who conveyed the activists’ message on their behalf; see Berthelsen’s original Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160627759603868&set=a.10150434785343868&type=3&theater

3

This and all newspaper texts in this article are translated from Danish by the authors.

The authors wish to thank Josefine Dahl Hansen, Frederikke Møller Helvad and Stella Kristine Faal for their excellent research assistance.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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