We Carry It Within Us – fragments of a shared colonial past

2017 marks the centennial of the Danish sale of the Caribbean Virgin Islands to the U.S. In the documentary we see and listen to the colonial history told through the memories, experiences and reflections from descendants of former Danish Afro-Caribbeans on the Virgin Islands (an artist, a student, a writer an anthropologist) along with art and cultural historians who tell about Denmark and Europe’s role in the enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade – and how the colonial history is present in today’s words, art, museums, education, racism and wealth as well as in various types of memory and forgetfulness. In Denmark there is a national narrative of being the first country to abolish slave trade in 1792, and that the govenor of the islands, Peter von Scholten gave the slaves their freedom in 1848, but how does this shared past look from the perspective of the US Virgin Islands?