The Postcolonial Low Countries

Literature, Colonialism, and Multiculturalism

Elleke Boehmer, Sarah De Mul

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780739164303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Postcolonial Low Countries is the first book to bring together critical and comparative approaches to the emergent field of neerlandophone postcolonial studies. The collection of essays ranges across the cultures and literatures of the Netherlands and Belgium and establishes an encounter between postcolonial theoretical discourses from both within and without the region. Each one of the contributions puts under pressure the definitive concepts of postcolonial studies in its more conventional anglophone or francophone formation, as well as perceptions of the Low Countries, Belgium and the Netherlands, as lying outside or to the side of the postcolonial domain.

In the Low Countries, local and regional issues concerning multiculturalism and colonial belatedness have raised important questions about the possible grounds on which postcolonial critical concepts might be not only translated but also generated afresh, to suit these paradoxically new contexts. As The Postcolonial Low Countries incisively demonstrates, the Low Countries demand a careful rearticulation of such postcolonial 'readymades' as hybridity, accommodation and creolization.

Gathering together contributions from both internationally renowned scholars and newly established researchers in the field, The Postcolonial Low Countries maps previously underexplored national and transnational literary critical trajectories. The book challenges in boundary shifting ways current readings of the so-described multicultural and postcolonial Netherlands and Belgium.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Section I: Towards a Neerlandophone Postcolonial Studies
• Chapter 2: Postcolonial Studies in the Context of the “Diasporic” Netherlands
• Chapter 3: Polderpoko
• Chapter 4: The “Ends” of Postcolonialism
• Chapter 5: “Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?”
• Section II: Postcolonial Memory
• Chapter 6: (Un)happy Endings
• Chapter 7: Transnational Contact-Narratives
• Chapter 8: Representing Post-Apartheid South Africa
• Chapter 9: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities
• Section III: Literature and Multiculturalism
• Chapter 10: Dutch Homonationalism and Intersectionality
• Chapter 11: Becoming UnDutch: “Wil je dat? Kun je dat?”
• Chapter 12: Unlike(ly) Home(s)
• Chapter 13: “Games of Deception” in Hafid Bouazza’s Literary No Man’s Land
• About the Contributors