Fun for real! dismantling the “cool colonizer” through the decolonial politics of memes from Kalaallit Nunaat

Abstract

In this article, we suggest that memes produced by Kalaallit Inuit (Indigenous people of Greenland), hereafter, Kalaallit, social media actors can be understood as educative decolonial roadmaps, which expose narrative key elements of Danish colonialism as it is experienced in Kalaallit Nunaat—the Indigenous name for Greenland—such as, Nordic exceptionalism, colonial amnesia, discovery tales, the post-colonial imaginary, and the so-called impossibility of Kalaallit sovereignty. Drawing on memes by meme artists: Julie Edel Hardenberg, xoxolilichemnitz, Inunnguaq Reimer, and Jacob Larsen, we ask what forms of humour and playfulness are at play, and how these devices contribute to changing conversations by offering new modes of self-scrutiny in colonial audiences and by introducing decolonial options within the Kalaallit community. Overall, this article sheds light on the anti-colonial work of Kalaallit social media artists and their political decolonizing endeavours in alliance with Indigenous meme-making on a global scale.

Keywords

decolonization humour and playfulness Inuit social media activism Kalaallit Nunaat memes Nordic colonialism

Introduction

In this article, we ask what we can learn about Danish colonialism and coloniality, and how it is experienced and challenged, through the humour of Kalaallit Inuit (Indigenous people of Greenland), hereafter Kalaallit, memes. And we answer the question by engaging with memes created by Kalaallit social media actors, who express and challenge Kalaallit experiences of Danish colonial suppression, racism, and inequitable relations through memes. We see these internet memes as sites of online protests and resistance to colonial structures and practices that still rule in the relationship between Kalaallit Nunaat—the Indigenous name for Greenland, and Denmark, and in the construction of the Danish Commonwealth. We consider the memes to be digital political actions and expressions. Similar to the increased intensity of activism around material colonial heritage relics in cities all over the world since the murder of George Floyd went viral on May 25, 2020, the memes represented here constitute significant decolonial actions.

Our analysis works on three levels: First, we look at memes as a particular form of medium that formally invites citizens to co-create new expressions through mostly re- or upcycled global matrices and icons that present infinite possibilities of localized transformations. Our second focus is on a body of work by four Kalaallit meme artists, which allows us to see how social media actors put decolonization on the agenda—which is a contested issue in Kalaallit Nunaat, and how they critically engage with colonial narratives to rethink many of the implicit and explicit epistemological hegemonies that remain to be dealt with. Third, we analyse the aesthetic tactics of humour and playfulness in the memes and which incongruent affects they foster.

Methodologically, we have selected the memes mainly through Facebook which is the most commonly used social media platform in Kalaallit Nunaat. We have engaged an analysis of the memes’ discursive and narrative elements, paying specific attention to their references to historical and contemporary colonial narratives, as well as affective ambivalence in the memes as a specific mode of hopeful critique. Importantly, the analysis is conducted as a co-production between us, authors, in consultation with the four meme artists whose memes we analyse. Through this method, we hope to create space for multiple authorial speaker positions and give voice—literally—to the memes analysed.

The structure of the article is as follows: We begin by telling the story of colonialism in Kalaallit Nunaat, both historically and in the present. Afterwards, we look at the medium of memes and the various affordances it offers as sites of decolonial resistance for Kalaallit in our particular case, but potentially also for Indigenous and colonized peoples in general. As memes use humour and playfulness as primary forms of expression, we look at the relationship between the political aim of decolonizing colonial relations and structures, and the use of playfulness to achieve this. We ask: What forms of humour and playfulness are at play, and how are these devices changing the conversation and its contestations? A brief conclusion brings everything to a close.

Danish-Kalaallit colonial relations: coloniality and decolonization

The existing narratives that surround Danish colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat are increasingly taken up to revision by Kalaallit scholars, politicians, artists, and civil society actors. These historical revisions insist on telling the forgotten and silenced Kalaallit experiences of Danish colonialism, challenging the sustained Danish narrative about Denmark as an exceptionally benign, sometimes misunderstood, but well-intended colonial power in Kalaallit Nunaat (Boassen et al., 2022; Graugaard, 2009; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012; Lynge, 2006). This has pushed forward new readings of Danish colonial history that pay attention to Denmark’s colonial exploitation and suppression in Kalaallit Nunaat, which has otherwise been omitted in the imperialist cannon and historiography (Graugaard, 2020b; Graugaard & Ambrosius, 2023; Hermann, 2021; Jensen, 2016).

While contemporary Danish–Kalaallit relations are frequently referenced as postcolonial in both popular media and scholarly works, Kalaallit critically point out that the post- in the supposed postcolonial relation ignores the fact that Kalaallit Nunaat is still not decolonized. As Buettner writes: “Having only achieved home rule in 1979 and self-governing status in 2009, Greenland still lacks full sovereign status outside the Danish rubric, thus qualifying—albeit rarely understood—as a case of incomplete decolonization to this day” (Buettner, 2022, p. 30). Kalaallit critics also point to the coloniality of the present, arguing that current relations are still defined by inequitable power asymmetries, and that Kalaallit sovereignty is disregarded in the framework of the Danish Commonwealth.

The tenacity of this narrative [of benignity and post-coloniality] owes much to the fact that it remains in Denmark’s interest to defend the presence in Kalaallit Nunaat. Even if the interest changes over the years, from monopolising whale trade, seal hunting, fishing interests, geopolitical interests—profiteering from the monopoly trade in goods to and from Kalaallit Nunaat, research in the icecap and climate change being channeled through Denmark, job opportunities for Danes in Kalaallit Nunaat, where Danish remains the master language in the higher echelons of society: Danishness accompanied by language privilege, culture privilege, economic privilege and whiteness [as written in original work] privilege. (Boassen et al., 2022, p. 1)

As the quote underlines, contemporary relations are still defined by Danish colonial entitlements in and to Kalaallit Nunaat, which may be described as the “long-standing patterns of power” that emerged as a result of colonialism and survived it (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). As Aníbal Quijano (2007) has argued, the elaboration of European modernity was constituted by coloniality, through which the distribution of labour and resources, the domination of minds and imaginations, and the repression of knowledge systems continue to serve as means of social and cultural control. Recognizing the coloniality of the present, Boassen et al. (2022) suggest that the stronghold of the narrative of Danish colonial benignity also expresses Denmark’s current interest in maintaining and defending its privileges and presence in Kalaallit Nunaat.

Although Danish coloniality in and towards Kalaallit Nunaat, both historically and in the present, has been challenged on various fronts—such as pushing for recognition of Kalaallit Indigenous representation and rights, national independence, and revisions of history books—several colonial narratives remain entrenched in public and political consciousness. In response, Kalaallit artists are producing memes to decolonize these narratives. Thus, our analysis of the memes provides a double insight: into which narratives currently characterize Danish coloniality from the perspectives of the meme artists, and into how the memes challenge the cultural and epistemic legacies of colonialism as part of a decolonization process to decolonize minds and modes of thinking (Andersen, 2018; Mbembe, 2015; Thiong’o, 1986).

Methodological considerations and analytical approach

In this article, we engage with memes created by mainly three Kalaallit meme artists: xoxolilichemnitz, Inunnguaq Reimer, and Jacob Larsen, who perform everyday politics on social media through their meme productions, which are circulated primarily on Facebook and Instagram. We also include a meme series by renowned Kalaaleq Inuk (Indigenous person of Greenland) artist Julie Edel Hardenberg, whose artwork interrogates colonial oppression in Kalaallit Nunaat. The memes included in this article have been produced since 2020, which is a year that seems to mark a rise in Kalaallit meme productions and social media interactions on Kalaallit experiences of Danish colonialism, as world-wide waves of antiracist protests and decolonizing actions took place (Knudsen & Patel, 2023; Knudsen et al., 2022). A localized decolonial action in Nuuk, the capital of Kalaallit Nunaat, was the tagging of the statue of Hans Egede, the first Danish–Norwegian missionary and priest in Kalaallit Nunaat, with red paint and the word “DECOLONIZE” (Gronholt-Pedersen, 2020, “A statue of Hans Egede” images). Same year, Kalaallit who reside in Denmark put public pressure on Danish dairy companies to rename their ice cream Giant Eskimo, which was considered derogatory towards Inuit (Indigenous people of the Arctic), and this caused nation-wide debates and media coverage across the borders (Graugaard, 2020c).

This article builds on a collection of memes from the mentioned Kalaallit meme artists, who create and share memes primarily on their personal Facebook—and, sometimes, Instagram—accounts. Some of the memes are shared through their existing networks of followers and friends, while others are publicly accessible. The memes shared in this article have been selected from a collection of altogether 172 memes. The memes by xoxolilichemnitz, Inunnguaq Reimer, and Jacob Larsen have been the focus of our selection for this article, due to the width and reach of their meme distribution, and their continuity in meme production in the years following 2020. Importantly, their memes place them as three of the most central—but also three of very few—decolonial meme artists in Kalaallit Nunaat. We have not analysed the reception of the memes, such as metrics on likes and shares, as our focus is on the workings of playfulness and memes as decolonial narratives.

In this study of Kalaallit memes, we seek to practice a reflexive approach. This implies acknowledging our differing subjectivities and privileges and paying attention to how our researcher positionalities affect our approach to and perspectives on coloniality, decoloniality, and meme-making in Kalaallit Nunaat. The first author is a mixed Qallunaaq (Dane, European, or White person)-Kalaaleq Inuk scholar from the Kalaallit diaspora in Denmark. She navigates an in-between position of being both and seeks to disturb colonial relations and knowledge regimes from “the borderlands” (Anzaldua, 1999, p. 217), while also being attentive towards her positional privileges and potential blindfolds as a Danish-speaking, middle-class, White-coding researcher. The second author is a White Qallunaaq scholar living in Denmark. Since 2015, she has been engaged in conceptualizing and analysing decolonizing endeavours globally. Acknowledging her own privileges as a subject within a colonizing power and as a critical heritage scholar, she seeks to scrutinize and criticize structural racism in the many forms it is upheld.

Practicing reflexivity towards the topic of study involves close attention to how research and colonization in Kalaallit Nunaat are intimately connected. It requires an acknowledgement that the birth of the discipline of Greenlandic studies emanates from a history of making Inuit racialized objects of research and that this kind of research was central to the colonial process of claiming Kalaallit territory as part of the Danish Kingdom. Moreover, a critical reflexive approach to this history calls for a recognition of the ways in which academia continues to reproduce this coloniality of Arctic and Greenlandic research (Graugaard, 2020a, 2020b; Graugaard et al., 2025; Thuesen et al., 2017).

For these reasons, we aim to move beyond merely objectifying the meme artists and their creations through a White colonial researcher’s gaze. This involves avoiding reducing Kalaallit stories and experiences to mere sources of empirical data for the sake of analysis (Tuck & Yang, 2014). It also involves checking in with the artists, sharing our drafts with them, and responding to their comments, critiques, and edits, as well as practicing care, accountability, and respect for the relations that our research involves, as encouraged in Indigenous research methodologies (Donald, 2012; Smith, 2012; Wilson, 2008). Rather than making Kalaallit meme artists and their productions objects of extensive description and interpretation, we prioritize interrogating the Danish colonial narratives that their work exposes. In this sense, we make Danish colonialism as well as its logics and narratives, as they are represented in the memes, the object of study, and we are interested in endorsing the rich and playful ways that Kalaallit meme artists resist, challenge, and object to the continued experiences of colonial suppression, racism, and inequitable relations. We have used thematic analysis to detect and map the most recurring colonial narratives—five in all, represented in our collection of selected memes, and we have analysed how the narratives are challenged from the perspective of the meme artists. Our analysis gives credit to the meme artists for sketching this roadmap of Danish colonialism. Furthermore, we have identified how humour and playfulness both change the subject positions of those meme-ing and the representations of majority populations as a way to challenge established power relations. The hope is that our text will contribute to a decolonial archive that builds on and brings forth alternative, artistic Kalaallit forms of knowledge and experiences of Danish colonization.

The emergence of a sphere: social media in Kalaallit Nunaat

The emergence of a global public sphere with the technological means to exist independently of political institutions and the mass media was something Manuel Castells (2008) theorized many years ago. The global public sphere, populated by horizontal networks of informal social actors, is now influenced by various groups of civil society actors addressing global challenges, injustices, and inequalities that cannot be solved by the nation states on their own.

Invested in horizontal networks, these civil society actors perform “place-based globalism” (Osterweil, 2005, p. 24), meaning that local grounding and global scope in the political imaginary do not necessarily contradict: “You can have an identity embedded in local circumstances and a role in the global dialogue” (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. xxi). Although local complexity and knowledge are sometimes lost in translation when juxtaposing manifold colonialisms, the solidarity-building among civil society actors involved in decolonial critique of their societies often happens across borders through social media platforms and common cultural matrices.

Young Indigenous peoples around the world are using social media platforms to inform and discuss Indigeneity, ongoing colonial oppressions, and the different ways of decolonising the minds, bodies, institutions, lands, and ways of knowing and living. In Kalaallit Nunaat, the students at [Ilisimatusarfik—The University of Greenland], have taken interest in their country’s colonial history as well as Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies. Outside the university, the younger generation of Kalaallit have become part of the Indigenising and decolonising movement through social media. (Boassen et al., 2022, p. 2)

Contrary to the social movements that are assembling in urban spaces, decolonial internet memes from Kalaallit Nunaat are expressions of everyday politics, using humour to address serious political matters. Instagram and Facebook, in particular, are widely used platforms for connecting and sharing experiences between Kalaallit Inuit, despite the physical distances between towns and settlements, as well as to the Kalaallit diaspora in Denmark and Kalaallit expats. Social media platforms also carry increasing importance as a place for sharing knowledge about colonial history, bringing attention to present day Danish colonialism, and discussing ways to decolonize. As Boassen et al. (2022) suggest, Kalaallit university students are taking an interest in the colonial legacy and beginning to revise colonial knowledge regimes and archives, while young Kalaallit outside of the academic community also take part in decolonial endeavours. Kalaallit connect with other young Indigenous peoples around the world who use social media platforms to talk about Indigenous ways of knowing and living, experiences of oppression and injustice, decolonial activism, and Indigenizing education (Waitoa et al., 2015).

We suggest that social media has become a significant educational tool for the Kalaallit decolonial movement because of its ability to mobilize voices and to challenge and counteract dominant colonial narratives in the formal educational systems, curricula, and public media in both Kalaallit Nunaat and other parts of Denmark. We recognize the political polarization that the digital sphere and interactive social media both foster and mirror (Philips & Milner, 2017; Yarchi et al., 2021). In our work with Kalaallit memes and meme artists, meme-ing arises as a space to respond to and express the experience of being colonized, that is being silenced, invisibilized, or has nowhere else to go. This means that Kalaallit memes are not necessarily produced for Qallunaat (Danish, European, or White people) audiences to educate them. The memes come out of a sense of urgency or necessity to express oneself, and to foster internal solidarity and community-building between those who are critical towards the colonial power imbalances between Kalaallit and Qallunaat. At the same time, memes become a medium to strengthen and form new alliances with Indigenous communities, beyond Kalaallit Nunaat, using memes as a mode of resistance. The memes introduce the decolonial option to young Inuit, offer new, unsubmissive subject positions, and highlight affective ambivalence—such as anger and humour—as a sustainable resistance strategy.

In this process, we propose a framework that looks at memes as mapping tools that outline colonial narratives as they are experienced in everyday life (Zidani, 2021). Like Morrison-Young and de Bres (2023) argue in the context of Māori (Indigenous people of New Zealand) memes in Aotearoa—New Zealand, we hold that Kalaallit memes provide a potential decolonial roadmap in their critique of colonial actions and Qallunaaq behaviour, and in their cultivation of anti-colonial, Indigenous solidarity. In this way, we recognize how the memes appear as decolonial assemblages (Carlson & Frazer, 2016) that make worlds by playing with—humourizing, ridiculing, and so on—existing colonial narratives as a way to invert inequitable power relations.

Why memes?

Which roles do humour and playfulness play as part of decolonial political statements, and why do we laugh at memes? Playfulness and humour employed as decolonial devices contain politically potent emergent forms of sociality (Leddy, 2018; Morrison-Young & de Bres, 2023; Rossing, 2015). Humour and political engagement work together in cultural genres such as memes, comedy shows, stand-up performances, cartoons, and political satire more broadly. We have chosen to work with memes because it is one of the most prominent forms of playful decolonial expression in Kalaallit Nunaat that makes political engagement accessible to non-established artists and civil society actors. Kalaallit memes provide sufficient utterances to carve a roadmap on Danish colonialism and decolonization in Kalaallit Nunaat.

Memes and memeing have become expressions of everyday action and reflection on personal as well as on political and societal issues. The study by Terzimehić et al. (2021) primarily explores how the production of internet memes promotes self-reflection and engagement in daily journaling and also that the emotional expressions of the memes help the meme producers and users to cope with negative events. The last point is likewise valid for our study but we also argue that memes—due to their viral and mutable nature—are political tools that have the power to mobilize internally in communities and to foster new transnational alliances (Mortensen & Neumayer, 2021; Peters & Allan, 2022; Schoon & Bosch, 2023), as well as they provide the possibility to create external visibility due to their relative accessibility. Memes are born digital, made of upcycled and recycled visual imagery; they are co-created and distributed in communities, and they are examples of invented humour as they are staged and labelled as funny (Carroll, 2014; Shifman, 2013). These formal features of memes support some of the genre characteristics of humour, namely that humour is derivative and parasitical (Kjerkegaard, 2017). This means that humour is situational and that it feeds from common knowledge among the intended receivers. Meme humour works only if the receivers are familiar with the contexts and imagery that memes derive from.

In line with Noël Carroll’s theory on humour (2014), incongruity paves the way for the affective ambivalence that is key to the humour of memes for several reasons. Sundén and Paasonen (2019) claim that the levity of laughter and humour may provide a breathing space where anger and sadness become lighter to bear. They also suggest that humour and laughter can be particularly radical when they are perceived as “out of place” (Sundén & Paasonen, 2019, p. 1), especially when they address themes that seemingly extend beyond the boundaries of playfulness, such as colonial and sexual violence, racism, long-term damage to landscapes, livelihoods, and mental domination (Andersen, 2018; Thiong’o, 1986).

In that sense, laughing at those with power erodes power in substantially different ways than opposing those in power. That humour brings ambivalence and uncertainty into situations is something both classical and newer studies of humour agree upon. Berlant and Ngai state that comedy’s propensity to get in trouble reflects its sensitivity to changing contexts and the fact that what is funny flirts with its semiotic opposite: the not funny (Berlant & Ngai, 2017). With an oxymoronic constellation of contrasts in the heart of comedy, we come closer to the excessive qualities and the radicality of humour that undermine systems when it works politically (Bataille, 1943, 1967). The ambivalence of humour produces double-edged effects or even mutually exclusive feelings such as pleasure and pain (Trammell, 2023) and productive discomfort (Primbs & Dawson, 2023)—or memes can be re-assuring and unsettling at one and the same time (Morris, 2017), initiating a whole chain of self-reflexive acts, such as: Oh, am I laughing at this? It is not funny, why am I laughing at this? Is it okay to laugh at this?

Indigenous scholars qualify and elaborate existing theories on humour and play (Leddy, 2018; Lugones, 2003; Morrison-Young & de Bres, 2023; Primbs & Dawson, 2023). Late Sioux scholar and advocate of Native American rights Vine Deloria Jr. (2000) pointed to the central role of humour in the survival of Indigenous communities. Drawing on his work, Métis (an Indigenous people of Canada) scholar Shannon Leddy (2018) argues in her study on the role of humour in Indigenous pedagogy that humour—such as trickster stories, satire, or teasing—has three key impacts: it humanizes human beings in considering them as profoundly flawed, it upholds social order intra-culturally, and it has a soothing effect that can ease tensions. What we find inspiring in her study is her observation on humour as a powerful tool for decolonization due to its ambivalence, serving as sting and balm, poison and remedy at one and the same time (Leddy, 2018). As Deloria wrote (2000),

the more desperate the problem, the more humor is directed to describe it. Satirical remarks often circumscribe problems so that possible solutions are drawn from the circumstances that would not make sense if presented in other than a humorous form. (p. 40)

That humour makes heavy situations lighter to bear in many socio-cultural contexts is already well-established, but to be playful and playing around with stereotypical constructions—such as that of Inuit—ness—requires both insight and confidence, as well as spaces for humorous communication (Lugones, 2003). What qualifies the subject position of the meme maker? A kind of double position of being implied in colonial framings but also capable of working those out at a structural level; being inside and outside at one and the same time. International Relations scholar Alister Wedderburn asks: “What is it about humour that makes it an attractive mode of speech and action in circumstances defined by political urgency?” (Wedderburn, 2021, p. 3). She answers the question by saying that humour is a field of practice that allows actors to position themselves as subjects and to point to the exclusionary mechanisms of systems and orders. This is what we call the double position of the humorous utterance. The memes display that the tactics of playfulness and humour are a powerful tool in decolonization processes, serving as an Indigenous act of resistance, as both “sting and balm” at one and the same time (Leddy, 2018, p. 13). Making fun of the stereotype prevents you from becoming one. Yet another characteristic of decolonial meme-making is the affective take over of a politicized field. When play and playfulness appropriate contexts that are not intended for play (Sicart, 2014) and that normally ignite pain and shame, the take-over and refusal of attributed subject positions—victim, devoid of political initiative, not up to what is needed politically—initiates a possible shift in power balance. Finally, when it comes to the more external communication of the memes, to weaponize humour has the side effects of veiling any direct intentionality and disarming the conflict, or more precisely, the ambivalence of humour protects against direct counter attacks from the colonizing majority while still educating the same majority in self-reflection, positionality awareness, and resistance towards stereotypical framings of Inuit populations.

Decolonial narratives by Kalaallit Inuit meme artists

In our engagement with Kalaallit memes, we have found that the memes disrupt Danish colonialism by attesting to the experienced and lived realities of (neo-)colonization in Kalaallit Nunaat. The memes challenge very specific, dominant Danish colonial narratives that were established in the official colonial period and continue to haunt present-day relations. We have identified that the memes challenge the narratives of: Danish exceptionalism, colonial amnesia, terra nullius, the post-colonial imaginary, and the so-called impossibility of Kalaallit sovereignty. Providing subjective, situated, and lived experiences of Danish colonialism, the memes disrupt the reproduction of historical narratives that continue to legitimize Danish dominance today, while also functioning as a decolonial educational tool for revising imperialist storytellings.

The memes frequently use gestures of juxtapositions and reversals of perspectives as a powerful tactic to illustrate discrepancies in the representation of Danes and Inuit in public discourse. We also see how tactics of diminishing and fictionalizing are used both to tame the colonizer and to produce analogies to well-known popular icons and narratives. Yet another salient feature is the world-making that happens through the incongruity between captions and visual imagery, or between juxtaposed images that represent huge discrepancies in lifeworlds and (self)understandings. These in-between spaces feed the imagination and indicate alternative perspectives.

Importantly, and as is reflected in the full repertoire of memes by Inunnguaq Reimer, Jacob Larsen, xoxolilichemnitz, and Julie Edel Hardenberg, Kalaallit meme artists often operate in one of the three languages: Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), Danish, and English—and sometimes one meme will employ more than one language, as is also exemplified in some of the memes visualized in this article. While the language preference is not always a choice—for example, xoxolilichemnitz represents a large group of Danish-speaking Kalaallit who lost Kalaallisut, the Indigenous language of Kalaallit Nunaat, in their families due to colonial legacies—the language used in a meme arguably also signifies the intended audience and can also work as an in-group and out-group boundary marker.

The “cool colonizer” unhinged

Several Kalaallit memes challenge the exceptionalist idea that Denmark was a benign colonial power that colonized Kalaallit Nunaat with the best of intentions as explained above. These memes challenge the popular belief that Danish colonization, in aggregate terms, helped Kalaallit people and that Kalaallit Nunaat continues to benefit from Denmark through the annual block grant, and Danish know-how. Notably, this colonial narrative eludes any discussion or analysis of how Denmark has benefitted politically, socially, and economically from its colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat, both historically and in the present. In the meme with the text: “I’m not a regular colonizer, I’m a cool colonizer” (Figure 1), Inunnguaq Reimer (2022) ridicules this Danish self-fabricated image of being an exceptionally good colonizer, compared to other colonial powers.

In addition to the intra-textual reference to the teenage movie Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) and the ensuing memes on the legendary line pronounced by the actress Amy Poehler in the role of Regina’s mother: “I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom,” (Netflix, 2023, 0:28). Reimer’s (2022) meme exposes the absurdity of the self-legitimizing claim of being a different, even cool, colonizer through the image of a woman who seemingly enjoys various privileges of Whiteness, status, and so on. Delivered with a knowing wink, the text also relates to the mechanisms of White fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) in Qallunaaq behaviour, and the consequential abdication from taking responsibility for colonial wrongdoings and for how it continues to reproduce Danish White privilege. With the sudden change in the woman’s facial expression from malignant to an exaggerated jovial wink, the meme also associates the Danish exceptionalist narrative with a colonial form of gaslighting. The “cool colonizer” (Inunnguaq Reimer, 2022) is a form of incongruity that produces minor shocks, making me, us, or some laugh and shiver at one and the same time. The knowledge of Danish exceptionalism that some audiences might have is translated here into a palpable ambivalence, marked by a mix of shock and laughter. This is laughable but also shocking.

Similarly, xoxolilichemnitz’s meme in Figure 2 challenges the Danish exceptionalist narrative. The meme portrays Danish colonization through the character of SpongeBob SquarePants, dressed up as a flower, who joyfully sprinkles colonialism as flower petals, accompanied by the text “with the best intention” (xoxolilichemnitz, 2022a). The unimpressed expression of the receiver, Squidward, who portrays Kalaallit, forwards a satirical play on the Danish self-perception as a benevolent colonizer. While the Qallunaaq behaviour that these memes expose is harmful, the colonial characters are portrayed as ridiculous and foolish. In this way, the memes unstick the fear of Danish colonialism, negate the Danish assumption of Kalaallit gratitude, and enjoy the emancipatory power of presenting the colonial power as a self-absorbed celebrity or as a ridiculous small flower.

Outing colonial amnesia

Kalaallit decolonial memes particularly challenge “the blindfolds and colonial amnesia that exceptionalist and explanatory approaches to Danish colonial history tend to produce” (Graugaard & Ambrosius, 2023, p. 162). Colonial amnesia in Danish national historiography, and its contemporary repercussions, has in recent years been critiqued from a number of angles, locations, and geographies (Buettner, 2022; Graugaard, 2009; Hansen & Nielsen, 2006; Jensen, 2016; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012; Lynge, 2006). As Cossette-Laneville (2022) argues in her analysis of autonomy and place-making in Kalaallit Nunaat, history has been used as a tool of representation to maintain colonial authority and domination over Indigenous peoples and their knowledge. Danish colonial amnesia has not only produced the image of Denmark as solely a good-willed welfare state, but it has also served to perpetuate inequitable relations to its former colonies (Graugaard, 2009). While analyses of Danish colonial atrocities in Kalaallit Nunaat have often been ignored in contemporary historical works, there are also popular and scholarly claims to the inappropriateness of directing critiques towards Danish colonists, because their actions were “typical of their time” (Graugaard & Ambrosius, 2023, p. 162). Kalaallit meme artists challenge such claims and confront repressive colonial (de)selective memory (Berisha, 2020; Kølvraa & Knudsen, 2020). This is particularly exemplified in their responses to the public debates in both Kalaallit Nunaat and other parts of Denmark on whether or not the tagging of the statue of the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede—a central colonial figure, marking the beginning of Denmark’s colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat and the Christianization of Kalaallit—in central Nuuk, the capital, with the word “DECOLONIZE” (Gronholdt-Pedersen, 2020, “A statue of Hans Egede” images) in 2020 was appropriate and legitimized. To delegitimize the decolonizing endeavours in this case is double-edged, because some critics of the endeavours deem the removal of colonial heritage relics to be erasing history instead of remembering it (Drayton, 2019; Jenne, 2015), while Danish colonization, in itself, is not acknowledged by all parties in the Danish–Kalaallit relation.

The two memes displayed below represent an array of Kalaallit memes that have problematized the colonial statue. Recognizing their effectful way of resisting the amnesia that surrounds Danish colonial heritage relics, we argue that the memes function as a playful temporal strategy for autonomy: “a struggle against amnesia, of not forgetting a history of dispossession and oppression, and of celebrating the success of past struggles. Archiving and nourishing collective memories of past struggles is a driving force of autonomy” (Cossette-Laneville, 2022, p. 13).

In the meme in Figure 3, Kalaaleq Inuk meme artist Jacob Larsen uses the intra-textual reference to Darth Vader from Star Wars as an alter ego of Hans Egede. With the imagery moving from the Hans Egede statue in a distant profile angle followed by a zoomed-in image of Darth Vader, the meme produces a playful effect of revealing the first missionary in Kalaallit Nunaat as The Dark Lord. Accompanied by the headline: “The power of the dark side, occupying Greenland since 1721” the meme offers a strong critique of the Danish colonial mission and the accompanying amnesiac historiography, as well as serving as a critique of the popular arguments for Egede’s White Innocence (Wekker, 2016) in the public debates on the statue in 2020. Portrayed in a satiric image of the father of death, the meme illustrates the absurdity of condoning the statue as merely a historical relic without harmful contemporary repercussions (Ifversen, 2020; Knudsen & Andersen, 2018).

Kalaaleq Inuk visual artist Julie Edel Hardenberg (2021) has also used social media and the art of meme-making to respond to the statue debate. On the occasion of the tricentennial of Hans Egede’s arrival in Kalaallit Nunaat in 2021, Hardenberg created a series of 29 memes based on a classical portrait of the missionary priest. Providing her own subtitles to each image in the meme series, Hardenberg plays with the colonial rationales and motives behind the Christian mission, as she imagines what Hans Egede could have, or should have, said. In the meme in Figure 4, Egede exclaims “Gudskelov var inuit her allerede da jeg kom [Thank God, Inuit were already here when I arrived]” (Julie Edel Hardenberg, 2021). An exclamation that incorporates various ambivalent and humorous associations, such as: Egede’s failed search for the Norse population in Kalaallit Nunaat, and his dependency on Inuit to give his life a purpose. Moving between different temporalities, from past to present, between the Danish and Kalaallisut languages, and between different subject positions—sometimes the meme texts give the expression that it is Egede speaking, sometimes as if it were a contemporary critic of his colonial practice—Julie Edel Hardenberg (2021) playfully bypasses the stereotypical positions of subjugation and supplication and inverts asymmetrical power relations by taking the word through humorous exclamations, ambivalent statements, and imagined Qallunaaq self-scrutinization.

Indigenizing the Arctic wilderness tales

Kalaallit memes also object to the Eurocentric notions of the Arctic wilderness and the heroic tales of discovery that permeate the European expedition literature, historical accounts, and colonial recordings about Inuit lands across the Arctic. As this colonial discourse continues to dominate contemporary fiction, films, travel accounts, and media (Fienup-Riordan, 1990, 1995; Jensen, 2015), Kalaallit meme-making also addresses the colonial myth of Arctic lands as “terra nullius,” a so-called no-man’s land (Fitzmaurice, 2014, p. 302), by insisting on the Indigenous presence.

This is exemplified in a series of three memes by xoxolilichemnitz that humorously subvert the heroic tale of the Danish polar explorer and his claims to undiscovered Kalaallit lands (Körber et al., 2017). The three memes carry the same title: “Historians be like: A Danish man survived undiscovered Arctic land!” placed above an image from the Netflix film, Against the Ice (Flinth, 2022), about the Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen on his expedition in Kalaallit Nunaat in 1910. In the image, Danish screenwriter and actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is sprawled on the ground with a famished, forlorn yet undaunted expression on his face. In all three memes, the image of the Danish explorer is juxtaposed with the text: “Kalaallit inuit who already lived in the arctic for their whole life:,” followed by an image of Kalaallit responding to the image of the Danish explorer (xoxolilichemnitz, 2022b, 2022c, 2022d). In the meme in Figure 5, there is an image of a Kalaaleq Inuk woman from eastern Kalaallit Nunaat with a baby in her amaut (carrier) with the subtitle: “Ey [hey] . . . kammak [buddy]. Are you okay? Tikilluarit [welcome].” (xoxolilichemnitz, 2022b). The smiling, exuberant expression on the woman’s face turns the explorer’s dramatic survival mode into satirical, almost slapstick, comedy. The two other memes, not illustrated here, feature an image of an Inuk boy who chuckles and rolls his eyes, and an image of an Inuk man with his hands on his waist exclaiming: “Taava? [so what?]” (xoxolilichemnitz, 2022c).

Through the satirical juxtapositions between a caring and resourceful, indifferent and ridiculing welcome of the Danish explorer by Inuit, the memes contest the existing imaginary of first encounters. In this way, xoxolilichemnitz’s memes reverse the dominant White male gaze in Arctic knowledge productions (Graugaard, 2020a) and problematize the connotation of Indigenous Arctic homelands as a wilderness to display White masculine heroism.

The coloniality of the political now

Kalaallit memes often disturb the popular idea of Danish–Kalaallit relations as postcolonial by pointing out the coloniality of the political now. Kalaallit meme artists bring up current political issues, exposing Kalaallit experiences of political repression and unequal power relations. Their memes have intervened in ongoing public discussions on, for example: the lack of opportunity for Kalaallit politicians to speak Kalaallisut in the Danish parliament; the Danish Foreign Ministry’s appointment of a Danish person as the Arctic ambassador instead of a Kalaaleq Inuk; and the overrepresentation of Danish politicians, businesses, and scientists at conferences like Future Greenland. Many memes also portray the Danish Commonwealth—as part of the constitutional monarchy of the Danish Kingdom—as a colonial construction. They often express how the Danish Commonwealth and Kingdom are experienced as obstructing, rather than supporting, Kalaallit sovereignty.

This is exemplified in the meme in Figure 6 by Jacob Larsen. In the background image of Kalaallit landscapes, the meme displays the text in Kalaallisut: “Kalaallit oqaraangamik ‘Nunarput’ [When Kalaallit say ‘our land’]” (Jacob Larsen, 2023). The bottom is an image of Queen Margrethe of Denmark bursting with laughter and a speech bubble with the Danish words: “Hahaha som om [Hahaha as if). . .]” (Jacob Larsen, 2023). Providing a dark satirical twist to the popular story of the Danish queen as a person with a warm and loving relation to Kalaallit Nunaat, the meme points out that Kalaallit sovereignty is still undermined in the Danish Kingdom. In this sense, the meme speaks to the argument that Kalaallit Nunaat, as a case of incomplete decolonization, still lacks full sovereign status (Buettner, 2022).

Kalaallit memes also shed light on the present relations between Kalaallit Nunaat and other parts of Denmark as being marked by Danish exploitation and expropriation. Challenging the naturalized colonial narrative that the colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat has been, and continues to be, a so-called good-willed deficit economic expense for Denmark, Kalaallit meme artists insist on telling the story from a Kalaallit viewpoint. In the meme in Figure 7, xoxolilichemnitz challenges the problematic question: “Hvad får Danmark ud af Grønland? [What does Denmark get out of Greenland?]” (xoxolilichemnitz, 2023). This is, among Kalaallit people, known as a rhetorically mocking question that is often posed by Qallunaaq who believe that current relations are based on Danish good-will, void of any economic interests or political gains. The meme responds with the text: “KALAALLIT BE LIKE:”, followed by an exaggeratedly long smartphone that displays a very long text message indicating that the list of Danish gains is long (xoxolilichemnitz, 2023). By transforming the expected response to the Danish question into a full text on Danish exploitation by Kalaallit respondents, the meme plays with the humour of expectation and surprise, and provides space for and legitimation of Kalaallit experiences.

Incoming call: decolonize Kalaallit Nunaat

Questions pertaining to decolonization and how it is, or should be, conceptualized and employed in the context of Kalaallit Nunaat have been subject to frequent public discussion over the past few years. Particularly the events of 2020 instigated new, heated, and online debates on the need to decolonize, steered by the younger generations of Kalaallit artists and activists (Boassen et al., 2022). These debates also created counter-reactions within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Kalaallit Nunaat, forming local opposition to the newly emerging anti-colonial sentiments and decolonial movement.

While there have been similar Kalaallit anti-colonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s, it is also noteworthy that the formation of postcolonial thought in, and on, Kalaallit Nunaat has largely been defined by Danish scholarship and that this scholarship has generally ignored academic, international perspectives on decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. Noticeably, the postcolonial move regarding Kalaallit Nunaat has for many years been focused on moving on from the colonial past, rather than scrutinizing Danish historical repression of Kalaallit people and its effects on contemporary society and relations. Thus, intellectual reckoning with Danish colonialism in Kalaallit Nunaat, then and now, is arguably still an underdeveloped field of study (Graugaard, 2020b), and we ponder on its role in the public opposition to decolonization. As Kalaaleq social anthropologist Aviaaja Egede Lynge (2006) wrote:

We have always been taught we were one of the best colonies in the world. No slavery, no killings. We learned it through Danish history books, and from Danish teachers. With the books telling us how fantastic a colony we were—books about primitive Eskimos [asa written in original work], books written from Euro-centric, economic, or self-justifying angles—we haven’t really looked beyond this historical oppression. . . We went directly from being a colony into becoming a part of Denmark. We learned to be Danish and we learned to be thankful. Why, then, should we have had a reason to decolonize? And why should we have a reason to ask questions about the 250 years of colonial presence? (p. 1)

Awareness about the need to revise existing curricula and historical educational material, as articulated in the quote by Lynge, has been growing in the past few years, and it is accompanied by young Kalaallit voices who insist on breaking the silences on colonial legacies and articulate the urgency of mental decolonization. In this process, Kalaallit meme artists play a key role. Rather than engaging in discussions on whether or not decolonization is a legitimate and possible ambition for Kalaallit Nunaat, the memes tend to present decolonization as already present, in progress, and unavoidable. As in the meme in Figure 8, xoxolilichemnitz (2022e) presents the movement to “Decolonize Kalaallit Nunaat . . .” as an “incoming call” on the display of a cell phone, and the only way to answer the call is to either “accept” or “accept”.

As another example, Inunnguaq Reimer responds playfully to derogatory comments on his social media platform that accuse Reimer, in Danish, of being an: “inkarneret selvstændighedsfantast [incarnated independence-dreamer]” (Inunnguaq Reimer, 2023). Instead of rejecting or opposing the label, he takes on this attributed identity, signing his social media posts with this new alias, and printing and posting sweatshirts under the same title, transforming it into a meme that can circulate virtually (Inunnguaq Reimer, 2023) (Figure 9). In this way, Reimer reclaims the dream of independence that is otherwise excluded from the ruling political order and challenges the question of who can claim the status of a reasonable political subject and who is capable of drawing the boundaries. Through this humorous intervention, Reimer plays with the ambiguous oscillation between subject and object—excluded other—and reveals exclusionary mechanisms (Wedderburn, 2021).

Conclusion

As this article has demonstrated, Kalaallit social media actors take to online platforms as a way to challenge, dismantle, and reconstruct the existing colonial narratives that continue to haunt Kalaallit-Danish relations. In our analysis, we have argued that Kalaallit memes are not only digital political expressions. They also contribute with significant decolonial actions because they narrate Kalaallit lived experiences of Danish colonial suppression, racism, and inequitable relations; they challenge and disrupt the epistemic legacies of colonialism, and they invert the ensuing inequitable power relations. In this way, Kalaallit memes function as a decolonial educational tool, disrupting the reproduction of historical narratives and imperialist storytellings that continue to legitimize Danish dominance today.

Our analysis points to three primary ways that humour operates in memes from Kalaallit Nunaat: (1) Appropriating the humorous enunciation entails disturbing subject positions inherited from colonialism accorded to Indigenous populations—child, savage, stoic, and victim. Indeed, Indigenous meme-making has the potential to provide decolonial roadmaps in its critique of colonial behaviours and actions, to cultivate Indigenous solidarity and empowerment (Morrison-Young & de Bres, 2023); (2) Ridiculing colonial structures as uncool, using ambiguity and inversions to highlight inequity and exclusion. By converting the roles of colonizer and colonized, the memes demonstrate how colonial systems become absurd, grotesque, and ridiculous—and maybe possible to erode if enough people laugh at them; and (3) Through the aesthetic use of incongruity to produce affective ambivalence—audiences may begin to ponder if the meme is funny or excessive, over the top or accurate. We suggest that this encourages self-scrutiny in the audience as a way for people to discover or reconsider their own positions on these matters both internally and externally.

As decolonial assemblages (Carlson & Frazer, 2016), we suggest that Kalaallit memes participate in making worlds by remembering, challenging, and playing with—humourizing, ridiculing, laughing at—existing colonial narratives, allowing for the preconfiguration of new imaginations, decolonial alternatives, and Indigenous futures.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Julie Edel Hardenberg, Lili F. Chemnitz, Inunnguaq Reimer, and Jacob Larsen for contributing their meme work to this article and for allowing them to share and engage with their memes. They are particularly grateful for their co-creative and co-editorial approach without which this article would not have been the same. Qujanaq.

Authors’ note

Naja Dyrendom Graugaard (PhD) is a Danish-Kalaaleq (Inuk) researcher and associate professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on past and present colonial relations between Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Denmark, Inuit knowledge and stories, and decolonizing and Indigenizing research methodologies in the Arctic.

Britta Timm Knudsen (PhD) is a Danish professor of Culture, Medias and Experience Economy, at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Experience Economy, School of Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Her research focuses on difficult heritage, affect and event studies, tourism and social media. Britta’s recent publications include co-editing a double special issue of the journal Heritage & Society entitled Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces (2020), co-editing the books Decolonizing Colonial Heritage. New Agendas, Actors and Practices In and Beyond Europe (2022) as well as Methodologies of Affective Experimentation (2022) and the article Digital Media revitalizing colonial heritage: the George Floyd video translocalised in Denmark (2023). Between 2018 and 2021 she was a PI of ECHOES (European Colonial Heritage Modalities of Entangled Cities), funded by EU - Horizon 2020 and currently she is PI of Playing with ghosts. Affective ambivalence in decolonial art practices (2021-2025), funded by Aarhus University Research Fund, AUFF.

ORCID iDs

Naja Dyrendom Graugaard

Britta Timm Knudsen

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article: AUFF NOVA Grant (Aarhus University’s Research Foundation, 2.489,900 Danish kroners. Grant no: AUFF-E-2022-9-7.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

Glossary

Kalaallisut language

amaut carrier

ey hey

Ilisimatusarfik The University of Greenland

Inuit Indigenous people of the Arctic

Kalaaleq Inuk Indigenous person of Greenland

Kalaallisut Greenlandic

Kalaallit Inuit; Kalaallit Indigenous people of Greenland

kammak buddy

Qallunaaq Dane, European, or White person

Qallunaat Dane, European, or White people

tikilluarit welcome

Danish language

Gudskelov var Inuit her allerede da jeg kom Thank God Inuit were already here when I arrived

hahaha som om hahaha, as if

hvad får Danmark ud af Grønland? what does Denmark get out of Greenland?

i bedste mening with the best intention

inkarneret selvstændighedsfantast incarnated independence-dreamer

kolonisering colonization

selvstændighedsfantast independence-dreamer

Canadian French language

Métis an Indigenous people of Canada

Māori language

Māori Indigenous people of New Zealand

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