Slavery in the Cultural Imagination

Debates, Silences, and Dissent in the Neerlandophone Space
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-94-6372-879-9
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, 372 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 771 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Paijmans, Marrigje

Fatah-Black, Karwan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Sklaverei
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction – Marrigje Paijmans

Literary Imaginations

2. Enslaved to the Passions: Slavery, Emotions, and Trade in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Comedy – Marrigje Paijmans

3. ‘Pleasant and Useful Reading for Dutch Youth’: Attitudes on Slavery in A. E. van Noothoorn’s Fictional Travel Accounts for Children (1843-1851) – Claudia Zeller

4. Convict Labour and Concubinage in the Dutch East Indies: Historical and Literary Reappropriations of Martha Christina Tiahahu’s Anti-Colonial Revolt – Gerlov van Engelenhoven

Intersecting Imaginations

5. The Elephant and Slavery: Thinking about Slavery through the Animal in the Early Modern Dutch Empire (1650-1800) – Pichayapat Naisupap

6. Law as a Sociocultural Imaginary: Legal Arguments, Social Hierarchy and Pro-Slavery in the Dutch Republic, ca. 1760-1780 – Gertjan Schutte

7. Januari’s Ghost: A Tale of Slavery, Sexuality, and Boyhood on Board of a VOC Vessel – Alicia Schrikker

8. Transformative Work: An Antislavery Petition at the National Exhibition of Women’s Labour, 1898 – Sophie van den Elzen

Visual and Spatial Imaginations

9. Not Absent, But Not Seen: Narrating the History of Slavery at the Cape – Carine Zaayman

10. (Re)Visualising Slavery: An Outlook on the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago – Nancy Jouwe

11. Making an Embodied Absence Present: Tourism and the Cultural Imaginary of Slavery and Colonial Heritage in the Netherlands – Emmanuel Akwasi Adu-Ampong

12. Reframing History: The Artistic Reclamation of Colonial Photography and the Quest for De-victimisation – Brenda Bikoko

13. Imagining Dutch Slavery Legacies Through the Rural-Urban Divide in the TV-show Grenslanders – Anke Bosma

Philosophical Imaginations

14. Born in Bondage: Slavery, Freedom, and Enlightenment in Spinoza – Hasana Sharp

15. Coordinates of a Slave’s Body in a Philosopher’s Dream – Thomas van Binsbergen

16. Human-ing Out Loud: Ontologies of Disorder in a Musically Exemplified Trans-Caribbean Option – Charissa Granger and Francio Guadeloupe

17. Epilogue: Histories of Imagination and the Making of Cultural Archives – Susan Legêne

Über Autor(innen)

Fatah-Black, Karwan
Karwan Fatah-Black (b. 1981) is lecturer in social and economic history at Leiden University and senior researcher at the Royal Dutch Institute of South-East Asia and Caribbean Studies. He is a scholar of Dutch colonial history specialized in the Atlantic world and slavery. He is a prolific author and participant in public debates on the future of the colonial past.

Paijmans, Marrigje
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.