Slavery in the Cultural Imagination

Debates, Silences, and Dissent in the Neerlandophone Space

Marrigje Paijmans, Karwan Fatah-Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040784495
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Here Are Lions
• Literary Imaginations
• 2. Enslaved to the Passions: Slavery, Emotions, and Trade in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Comedy
• 3. ‘Pleasant and Useful Reading for Dutch Youth’: Attitudes on Slavery in A. E. van Noothoorn’s Fictional Travel Accounts for Children (1843–1851)
• 4. Convict Labour and Concubinage in the Dutch East Indies: Historical and Literary Reappropriations of Martha Christina Tiahahu’s Anti-Colonial Revolt
• Intersecting Imaginations
• 5. The Elephant and Slavery: Thinking about Slavery through the Animal in the Early Modern Dutch Empire
• 6. Law as a Sociocultural Imaginary: Legal Arguments, Social Hierarchy and Pro-Slavery in the Dutch Republic, c. 1760–1780
• 7. Januari’s Ghost: A Tale of Slavery, Sexuality, and Boyhood on Board a VOC Vessel
• 8. Transformative Work: An Antislavery Petition at the National Exhibition of Women’s Labour, 1898
• Visual and Spatial Imaginations
• 9. Not Absent, But Not Seen: Narrating the History of Slavery at the Cape
• 10. (Re)Visualising Slavery: An Outlook on the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago
• 11. Making an Embodied Absence Present: Tourism and the Cultural Imaginary of Slavery and Colonial Heritage in the Netherlands
• 12. Reframing History: The Artistic Reclamation of Colonial Photography and the Quest for De-Victimisation
• 13. Imagining Dutch Slavery Legacies Through the Rural-Urban Divide in the TV Show Grenslanders
• Philosophical Imaginations
• 14. Born in Bondage: Slavery, Freedom, and Enlightenment in Spinoza
• 15. Coordinates of a Slave’s Body in a Philosopher’s Dream
• 16. Human-ing Out Loud: Ontologies of Disorder in a Musically Exemplified Trans-Caribbean Option
• 17. Epilogue: Histories of Imagination and the Making of Cultural Archives
• Index