Saqqummersitaq

The study of memory cultures often foregrounds the recovery of denied historical truths, with the recognition that social and cultural norms not only shape canonical versions of the past, but continue to be complicit in legitimised forms of forgetting and erasure. This article investigates the intersections between personal archives and other forms of cultural expression in acts of collective memoralization and forgetting. Using the personal archives of Josephine Diebitsch-Peary, the research introduces the concept of coloniality to studying Arctic memory cultures by examining the role of gender in the context of Arctic exploration. The article concludes that an understanding of the coloniality of knowledge and its connections to epistemic violence is crucial to the study of memory and historical legacy in the Arctic.

This article is dedicated to the complex web of gender and colonial relationships in biographical writing. The author's main focus is on publications by two women of high society who traveled through the colonial North in the early 20th century, Danish Emilie Demant-Hatt (1873-1958) and Scottish Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889-1982). An analysis of these textual and visual works allows us to see how they made a contribution to the colonial project, while undermining it at the same time, and how colonial femininity combines obedience and disobedience.