VISCO

Virgin Islands Studies Collective

“Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the 1878 Fireburn on St. Croix, USVI (formerly Danish West Indies)”

Published in NTIK, February 2020.

This article is written in what can be described as the “post-centennial” era, post 2017, the year marked by the 100th anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. 2017 marked a shift in the conversation around and between Denmark and its former colonies in the Caribbean, most notably the increasing access of Virgin Islanders to the millions of archival records that remain stored in Denmark as they began to emerge in online databases and temporarily in exhibitions. This collaborative essay is a direct engagement with the archives and archival production. Each member responded to one of the prison records of the four women taken to Denmark for their participation in the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. The reflections combine elements of speculation, fiction, black feminist theory and critique as modes of responding to the gaps and silences in the archive, as well as finding new questions to be asked.

"Background image: Storm (how to imagine the tropicalia as monumental-as in a set of collisions) Photo credit courtesy of the artist (La Vaughn Belle) and Pentimenti gallery"