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Abstract:The role played by Denmark in the triangular slave trade and colonial chattel slavery is rarely part of the tale told about Danish literature. This article investigates the reflections of this history in Denmark and discusses how this particular colonial history and its relationship to literature can be understood on the basis of readings of three texts from Denmark and its former colony St. Thomas. The central thesis is that exactly because of the peripheral and precarious nature of the Danish colonial endeavour in relation to larger colonial systems, it may actually be possible to reflect on sides of the colonial history that is often left out of sight. In a Danish context this silence is, however, more problematic. Denmark may have played a smaller part than other countries, but Danish colonial history is in no way anecdotal. Denmark may not compare to the major colonial powers, but it was the seventhlargest slave-trading nation and more than 100,000 slaves crossed the Atlantic on ships outfitted in Copenhagen. St. Thomas' main city and port, Charlotte Amalie, was the secondlargest city in the Danish kingdom in the 19 th century, and a significant part of the Danish wealth accrued during this the period was generated through colonial trade dependent upon slave labour.Next year, however, the end of this part of colonial history has its centennial. What once was the Danish colony Dansk Vestindien (The Danish West Indies) has now been the US Virgin Islands for 100 years, after having been sold for $25 million and transferred to the USA on March 31, 1917. As a result the common history between the two places has to a certain extent been wiped out, written out of the national history or perhaps simply forgotten. No formal relation exists between the two places and an important question on this occasion is of course how we should understand this neglected relationship, and how and to what extent the colonial past influences the understanding of the position of Danish literature in relation to a larger world. Few would question that the colonial trajectories of the British, French and Spanish empires have a real and still existing impact on the position of literature written in these languages on a global scene. This impact is of course the general question addressed by postcolonial literature studies. But the same link is a lot more difficult to establish when talking about the impact of colonial history on the literatures of smaller colonial powers like the Denmark, Germany and Sweden. This does not mean that these stories are not significant. On the contrary, this article claims that the study of smaller colonial powers and their literatures does in fact add important aspects to our understanding of the
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