A few years ago, Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle erected I Am Queen Mary, 2018, a towering monument of a Black woman seated in a throne-like chair in front of the West Indian Warehouse in Copenhagen. The sculpture, which was a proposal for a permanent installation at the site, commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Danish West Indies to the United States. The installation’s impact on general awareness of the country’s colonial history in today’s Denmark, dominated as it is by the discourse of liberal nationalism, cannot be underestimated.

It is with the