Slavery in the Cultural Imagination
Debates, Silences and Dissent in the Neerlandophone Space
9789463728799
362 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
With the rising tide of scholarly and societal interest in the history and legacy of colonialism and slavery, this collection offers a much needed diachronic analysis of the cultural representations of the lives and afterlives of those subjected to slavery and indenture. It focuses on the history of the ‘neerlandophone’ space, defined as the complex linguistic space spanning former Dutch colonies. This collection gives a longue durée overview, with cases encompassing the period from the early modern period to the present-day, revealing the deep roots of the colonial ‘cultural archive’.A wide variety of scholars demonstrate how attention to the layered and polyphonic qualities of narratives can reveal silent and disruptive voices in colonial discourse, as well as collective emotions and imaginations that have hitherto remained unrecorded in most historical sources. They discuss different aesthetic, poetical, and storytelling practices, including literature, photography, performance, philosophy, and other forms of knowledge production that were formed both in the metropolis and by enslaved and indentured peoples in the colonies.
Author Bio
Marrigje Paijmans works as Assistant Professor in Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She studies early modern literature from a critical analysis perspective to recover marginalised voices, thus balancing our understanding of the past. Her current project ‘Literary Unsettlements’ analyses voices of dissent in seventeenth-century colonial discourse. She has published on early modern theatre in Cultural Studies, on Spinozism and slavery in the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and on the ethics of affect in Foucault Studies. Karwan Fatah-Black is lecturer in social and economic history at Leiden University. He is a prominent voice in the academic and societal debates on colonial history and its legacies.Karwan Fatah-Black is senior researcher at the Royal Dutch Institute for Caribbean and Southeast Asia Studies (KITLV-KNAW) and university lecturer at Leiden University. Since completing his PhD (2013) he has studied the history of the Atlantic world, enslavement, and emancipation strategies. With museums and heritage institutions he works on creating new narratives about the colonial past and post-colonial futures.
