Saqqummersitaq

Seit 2009 ist Grönland selbstverwaltete Nation im dänischen Königreich. Die jüngsten Parlamentswahlen standen im Zeichen eines Konflikts zwischen Zentrum und Peripherie.

Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands have in common their history as Danish dependencies within a historically and geographically coherent region. The complex aftermaths of Denmark’s sovereignty over its North Atlantic territories and their ongoing nation building processes lie at the core of this book. Today, we are witnessing region building processes beyond bilateral links to Denmark. How do the countries position themselves, individually and collectively, vis-à-vis the European metropolitan centres, a larger transcontinental North Atlantic region, the 'hot' Arctic, and global histories of colonialism and decolonisation? By examining the region from cultural, literary, historical, political, anthropological and linguistic perspectives, the articles in this book shed light on Nordic colonialism and its understanding as 'exceptional', and challenge and modify established notions of postcolonialism. Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands are shown to be both the (former) subjects as well as the producers of cultural hierarchisations in an entangled world.

In Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, there have been a significant number of musical events in recent years that have been called ‘underground’. These have formed an underground scene that offered a cosmopolitan alternative to established ‘greenlandificated’ popular music. This paper accounts for the building of this underground scene by Nuuk youth, and asks why these young people valued musical change informed by a cosmopolitan outlook, while at the same time holding firmly to the conviction that their activities were a part of the dominant Greenlandic nation-building project. Social agents, which played key roles in building the Nuuk underground scene, described their activities as attempts to come to terms with a history in which Greenland has been perceived as a subaltern nation. This enquiry explains the nationalist logic behind a concern with performing similarity with Western nations in the Nuuk underground scene, as opposed to the more widespread romantic nationalist logic concerned with expressing a distinguishable national character. This further leads to an expansion of a position of cosmopolitan nationalism.