Greenland, my greenland: Accessing greenlandic history, identity and nation-building through its nation-branding strategy, a tourist website and 247 comments

In 2012, Visit Greenland, the Greenlandic national tourist organisation, conducted a survey on Danish prejudices towards Greenland and Greenlanders. The survey, linked to an ambivalent nation-building strategy that pitched Greenland as ‘the pioneering nation’, was aimed both at challenging and reconciling subnational relations within the Danish realm. Central to the Danish representational history of Greenland is a split between viewing Greenland/Greenlanders as lost subjects in a modernising project and holistic subjects in a tradition-bound society. The holistic image caters also to a wider tourist audience more concerned with preserving whales than with accepting the sustainable visions of indigenous modernity that are currently being articulated by Greenlanders. Contemporary Greenlandic nation branding is a response to these internal and external dichotomies.