Gold Coast (2015) and Danish economies of colonial guilt

Lill-Ann Körber

doi:10.1080/20004214.2018.1438734

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article discusses Daniel Dencik’s feature film Gold Coast (2015), about the last phase of Danish colonialism in today’s Ghana, as an example for recent representations of Danish colonial history. Combining historian of ideas Astrid Nonbo Andersen’s exploration of Danish narratives of “innocent colonialism”, Gloria Wekker’s concept of “White Innocence”, and film historian Thomas Elsaesser’s model of “guilt economies” as a feature of the legacy of perpetrator nations (2014), the article provides a framework within which to examine figurations of colonial guilt and innocence in Gold Coast. The main argument is that the film’s treatment of colonial guilt primarily takes the form of maintenance of innocence. It thereby contradicts the challenges currently being pitted elsewhere against the narrative of innocent colonialism.

Highlights

The article discusses Daniel Dencik’s feature film Gold Coast (2015), about the last phase of Danish colonialism in today’s Ghana, as an example for recent representations of Danish colonial history
Daniel Dencik’s Gold Coast (Guldkysten, 2015) is one of the first feature films to thematize Danish colonial history,1 and the first to focus on the former Danish possessions in West Africa, the Danish Gold Coast, part of today’s Ghana
Gold Coast belongs to a recent wave of Nordic cinema addressing Scandinavian colonialism and race ideology

Summary

A Danish dream of innocent colonialism

The film’s subtitle on the Danish official website and poster is “A Danish dream.” The dream theme— intertwining plot, focalization, imagery and aesthetics—can be read as a key to understand the film’s treatment of guilt and innocence. To set Gold Coast in the 1830s enables the film to separate abolitionists from slavers among the Danish characters, and to shape the main character as bearer of the idea of innocent colonialism (Figure 4). The choice of a botanist and agriculturalist as the main character of Gold Coast has implications for the film’s negotiation of Danish colonial guilt and the maintenance of innocence. Roger Matthisen told me that when he read the final version of the script he realized that the character had only very limited agency, and that instead of representing the complex Afro-Danish history, he would, by participating, support a narrative based on white national majority perspectives He was replaced, at the last minute, by Ghanaian actor and director Wakefield Ackuaku. The reactions, I conclude, point to the ethics involved in the endeavor to represent past and present relations to a former colony; an ethics that, if disregarded, makes impossible an assessment of the film solely on the basis of the assumption of artistic freedom

Some of the most important exhibitions have been “Blinde vinkler

Notes on contributor