This submission includes two paintings from an ongoing series that re-envisions the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the famous Danish author known for classic stories such as “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling.” These stories form part of the collective imaginary of children and adults worldwide. What is less familar are Andersen’s views on slavery and colonialism as he lived during the height of Denmark’s colonial engagements in the Caribbean. His 1840 play “The Mulatto” expresses his anti-slavery viewpoints, even while his stories are curiously devoid of such mentions. Although Denmark is lesser recognized among the European empires for their role in slavery, the afterlives are still apparent in the former Danish West Indies, currently known as the US Virgin Islands. The past is present in the colonial towns named after Danish royalty and the sugar plantation ruins dotting the landscape like raised scars. Most significantly, the impact is felt in the liminal political status that the sale and transfer of the islands and its people to the United States created in 1917. Having grown up in the Virgin Islands, Belle’s work often centers around issues of coloniality and how possession of one’s imaginary can be a powerful tool to counter the imposed one of the colonial past and present.

This project builds upon an earlier work by Belle, Hideaway (2008), a handmade book of cut outs, employing a technique Andersen himself used while sharing his stories. Belle returns to Andersen because of his deftness and popularity as a creator of fairy tales and the ways nostalgia and fantasy inform coloniality. In this series she intervenes in his classic folktales with narratives from the colonial archives. Belle reimagines The Little Match Girl by merging the visions of the freezing and dying protagonist as she lights a match with an image from an embroidered textile housed in the Danish National Museum. Made by a Danish girl living in the Danish West Indies in 1792, the embroidery depicts the fear and “revenge fantasies” that spread throughout the Caribbean upon the start of the Haitian revolution the year prior. The work highlights how the reverberations of violence are felt in the landscape, the body and the imagination. Similarly, in The Emperor’s New Clothes Belle re-envisions the gender, character and clothing of the emperor. Thinking about the laws during slavery that prohibited Black women in the Danish West Indies from wearing fine fabrics like lace or chitnz, Belle presents an unclothed body constructed of the fragmented landscape and the histories embedded within. Belle signals the Black female body as a site of contested narratives and desires, and a new character that is ownership of this empire.