Holding Hands at the Heart of Empire

In 1905, people from the different corners of the Danish empire held hands at the colonial exhibition (Dansk Koloniudstilling (Grønland og Dansk Vestindien) samt udstilling fra Island og Færøerne) in Tivoli, Copenhagen. This article uncovers colonial relations of the past by analysing photographs from a scrapbook presumably created by the main organ- iser of the exhibition, Emma Gad. The photographs show participants interacting at the exhibition, and the article asks: What kind of conversations about this forgotten past are made possible by these photographs? How can these photographs be used to reflect upon the ways ideas of race, whiteness, civilization, nationality, and empire have operated in the colonial encounters facilitated at the Tivoli exhibition? The article seeks to answer these questions with a particular attention to the role of the Faroe Islands in order to counter the fact that the country is routinely relegated to the margins of discussions on colonialism. At first glance, the scrapbook photographs visualise unlikely community and friendships between participants. Yet placing the participants’ intimate contact within their geopoliti- cal context revealed these photographs’ imbrication within colonial divisions of space and the racialised hierarchies at the foundation of the colonial exhibition and indeed of the Dan- ish imperial project at large.