Activists' visibility acts of citizenship and media (mis)representation of BLM

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a novel approach to studying the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that emerged in the summer of 2020. Drawing on multimodal qualitative visual analysis methods, we study acts of deliberate altering and erasure of statues that represent heroes of colonialism in Greenland and Denmark. The paper conceptualises these actions as ‘visibility acts of citizenship’ in which racialised minorities claim their symbolic space in the public sphere and criticise racialized and gendered structures of oppression. We then provide a detailed visual and textual analysis of conservative Danish media representations of the protest. This allows us to show how the media (mis)represented protesters’ actions, and its response to accusations of racism and calls for change. Thus, we extend the literature on visual analysis of protest by including not only activists’ visual acts but also the visual responses of mainstream conservative media to the movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual analysis
• media
• statues
• Black Lives Matter
• colonialism
• race

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Josefine Dahl Hansen, Frederikke Møller Helvad and Stella Kristine Faal for their excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Statue af missionæren Egede udsat for hærværk i København’, DR, 30 June 2020, https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/statue-af-missionaeren-egede-udsat-haervaerk-i-kobenhavn

2 This was published through a Greenlandic artist, Aqqalu Berthelsen, who conveyed the activists' message on their behalf; see Berthelsen’s original Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160627759603868&set=a.10150434785343868&type=3&theater

3 This and all newspaper texts in this article are translated from Danish by the authors.

4 22 June 2020, English in the original, https://www.facebook.com/JunoBerthelsen/posts/2715958428676386.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was funded in part by a grant from the German Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), grant number 3921405RAM.