Slavery in the Cultural Imagination
Debates, Silences, and Dissent in the Neerlandophone Space
9789463728799
372 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 from the early modern period to the present day, revealing the deep roots of the colonial ‘cultural archive’. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines 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 historical sources. They discuss different aesthetic, poetic, and storytelling practices, including literature, archival and legal documents, performance, architecture, photography, and philosophy, formed both in the metropolis and by enslaved and indentured peoples in the colonies.
Author Bio
Marrigje Paijmans is Assistant Professor in Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She was awarded the KNAW Early Career Award 2023 for investigating early modern literature from a critical perspective, thus recovering marginalised voices and balancing our understanding of the past. She has published widely on neerlandophone literature regarding, for example, Spinozist settlerism in North America, blackface in seventeenth-century theatre, and Afro-Surinamese resistance in plantation poetry.
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. In partnership with museums and heritage institutions, he is working on creating new narratives about the colonial past and postcolonial futures.
