Tropaganda: Art, colonialism and fights about history

Book presentation by Mathias Danbolt.

At this InterGen Lunch meeting, Mathias Danbolt, Professor of Art History at UCPH, will present his latest book Tropaganda: Kunst, kolonialisme og kampe om historien (2025). The book examines how art and visual culture have shaped understandings of Denmark’s colonial history in the Caribbean—from the former colony of the Danish West Indies to today’s U.S. Virgin Islands. Through analyses of portraits of slave owners, nineteenth‑century plantation landscapes, twentieth‑century colonial advertising, and contemporary tourism imagery, the book traces how colonialism has structured visual regimes, historical narratives, and collective memory in Denmark. It also addresses the persistent tendency within Danish art history to marginalize or disavow this colonial past.

This presentation focuses specifically on how artists working from Black feminist and queer perspectives have shaped the public debates on colonial history, including the book’s analytical approach. The work by artists including Jeannette Ehlers, La Vaughn Belle, and Justin F. Kennedy do not merely respond to colonial history; they challenge the white epistemological frameworks through which that history has been told, opening up new ways of thinking about accountability, memory, and the coloniality of the present.

Bio

Mathias Danbolt is Professor of Art History at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Over the last decade his research has focused on the contact zones between art history and colonial history in a Nordic context with an emphasis on memory politics, monuments, and art in public space.

No registration is needed. Bring your own lunch, InterGen provides coffee and cake.