Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang: The Ocean’s Cut: “Fredensborg,” Nordic Racial Innocence, and Archival Violence

On December 1st, 1768, the ship “Fredensborg” (“Freedom Castle”) sank outside a small coastal city, Arendal, in Norway. The shipwreck laid at the bottom of the ocean for more than 200 years, until it was finally discovered and recovered by a crew of divers in 1974-1977. The recovery of objects from the ship and their subsequent cataloguing in the official Danish and Norwegian archives momentarily fractured the Nordic region’s self-image as racially innocent—the ship had carried 265 enslaved Africans from Ghana to be sold in the Danish colony in St. Croix, many of whom died during the trans-Atlantic journey and whose bodies were thrown overboard. The Scandinavian self-image of innocence strongly builds on the assumed absence of the Nordic from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its lack of a colonial past. How could it be that these two countries, often considered to be exceptionally freedom-driven, progressive, and egalitarian, were responsible for a ship which is one of the best-preserved slave ships remaining today?[1]

While the discovery might have initially shook some of the core assumptions about the Nordic region, by asking it to grapple with its historical—and enduring—entanglement with slavery and anti-Blackness, this moment was largely a blip in the region’s discourse, quickly relegated to an asterisk or footnote in the grand narrative of Nordic history. The divers recovered a total of 1179 artifacts/remains from the ship, which is one of just three excavated slave ships worldwide to date.[2] Its existence remains rarely acknowledged and understudied in academia, despite the extensive archives at the museum of Aust-Agder, a traveling and permanent Norwegian Museum exhibition of the 1179 artifacts, two other exhibitions about the ship in St. Croix and Ghana.

Through the generous support of the Europe Center’s Graduate Student Grant Competition, I was able to visit the exhibition on the slave ship at the Museum of Aust-Agder and consult the primary archives which hold the year-long travel journal from the ship’s journey and the captain’s notebook, as well as the associated secondary archives (four archives deposed by Leif Svalesen, the diver, and Hartvig Dannevig, the historian in control of the excavation). I was able to document the representation of the transatlantic slave trade in Norwegian/Nordic history, both in the museal documents and in the exhibition itself in order to ask questions about the racialization of Norwegian history and pubic memory.

The archival and museal research in Aust-Agder will serve as part of the basis for the third chapter of my dissertation, which more generally examines the mediation of race, gender, and sexuality in Norway’s narrativization of its collective history. During the archival and museal research, I not only investigated the historical documents and details regarding the slave ship itself, but also analyzed the archival and discursive structures through which the history of the ship is, or fails to be, communicated to the public. Questions I will trace in my dissertation chapter include: what lines are (not) drawn between the past and the present of anti-Blackness in Norway? How, if at all, do the archives, exhibitions, and public narratives about the ship thematize the absence of the voices of the enslaved Africans who were kept in the ship’s hold, and how might such a thematization trouble certain narratives of historical closure/progress? What does it mean that all the archives held about the ship were written by the Danish captain, the Danish first mate of the ship, the diver who discovered the ship in the 70s, or a coastal historian, Hartvig Dannevig, with a past as an active Nazi and torturer of political prisoners?[3]

This latter figure, Dannevig, co-led the excavation of the ship in 1974-1977, deposited several of the key archives currently held at the Museum of Aust-Agder, and wrote one of the two non-fiction books to date about the ship. Homing in on Dannevig’s role in the archival construction of the ship’s history, I want to investigate how the communal forgetting that haunts the presence/absence of the ship in Norwegian/Nordic collective history also seems to dominate the rehabilitation of Dannevig as an “expert” on Norway’s racial maritime history. Within a few decades, Dannevig went from being a war criminal, convicted for torturing political prisoners during the German occupation as part of the Nazi paramilitary police (“Hirdvaktbataljonen”) in Northern Norway, to becoming a recognized cultural historian who won the Aust-Agder state cultural prize in 1983, in part for his work on the excavation and preservation of “Fredensborg.” During my research stay in Arendal, I also investigated the stakes of this historiography—how does it affect the representation of the ship’s history that it partly comes to us through the rehabilitation of a Nazi torturer as an expert coastal historian? In order to put pressure on this question of archival travels and racial innocence in my research project, I explicitly draw on Black feminist theorizations of the afterlife of slavery (Sharpe, Hartman, Spillers) to interrogate if/how the museum’s own representation of the ship reproduces linear narratives of historical progress that would relegate “Fredensborg” to a “dark past,” footnoted as irrelevant to contemporary Norwegian society. 

On the question of temporality and the (failure of) narration as reparation, I will couple my archival/museal findings with an interrogation of the formal, Black feminist qualities of Serpent Rain, which is a 2016 film about/inspired by “Fredensborg” commissioned for the international art festival “Bergen Assembly” in 2016, and made by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. With the support from the Europe Center, I was able to visit the assembly in Bergen to talk to the organizers about their experience with commissioning and exhibiting the film while accessing their extensive archives from 2016. I was also able to travel to Barcelona to experience a current exhibition of the Elemental Cinema series, of which Serpent Rain is the first instantiation.  In my dissertation chapter, I will use these experiences to investigate how the film uses shots and silences to make the spectators feel haunted, “out of time”; the nation’s history is broken open, whereby the slave ship, and anti-Blackness more generally, refuse to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Rather than trying to make the dead bodies of the past “speak” by filling the gaps in the archive, the film foregrounds their constitutive absence while resisting laying their ghosts to rests once and for all. Coupling this film and its production with the archives at the Museum of Aust-Agder, I investigate what type of temporal structures the spectator/visitor/reader is interpolated into, and how the mediation of the archives affects narratives and structures of nationhood. My dissertation chapter based on the research supported by the Europe Center will contribute to complicating narratives of Norwegian/Nordic racial innocence that dominate both public discourse and strands of academic thought today by making visible an (intentionally) forgotten history for a broader audience. I also aim for my project to take part in current Black feminist theoretical discussions on archival capture and violence from a geographical context rarely investigated in dominant theoretical circles.
 

[1] Lauvland, Selma. Maritime Archaeology and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Danish-Norwegian Slave Ship Fredensborg - An Analysis of The Fredensborg Project, 2019.

[2] Ibid; 6.

[3] Taraldsen, Kristen. “Minneord om Hartvig W. Dannevig” [“The eulogy of Hartvig W. Dannevig”]. Folk og Land, 1998, vol: 5.