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This incisive volume brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia. Dutch commentators have frequently claimed that the colonial past and especially the violence associated with it has been 'forgotten' in the Netherlands. Uncovering 'lost' photographs and other documents of violence has thereby become a recurring feature aimed at unmasking a hidden truth.
The author argues that, rather than absent, such images have been consistently present in the Dutch public sphere and have been widely available in print, on television and now on the internet. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance shows that between memory and forgetting there is a haunted zone from which pasts that do not fit the stories nations live by keep on emerging and submerging while retaining their disturbing presence.
List of contents
Introduction: Icons of Memory and Forgetting[-][-]Chapter 1. 1904: Imperial Frames[-][-]Chapter 2. 1904-1942: Epistemic Anxiety and Denial[-][-]Chapter 3. 1942-1966: Compartmentalized and Multidirectional Memory[-][-]Chapter 4. 1966-2010: Emerging Memory[-][-]Conclusion[-][-]Bibliography[-][-]List of Places Where the 1904 Photographs Can Be Found
About the author
Paul Bijl is assistant professor of Dutch language and culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on colonial nostalgia, photography and embodiment, colonial memory in Indonesia, and colonial memory and time. His current research project is 'The Transnational Afterlives of Colonized Voices'.
