Dutch titles on race and decolonisation

Last week’s blog post Black Lives Matter : some ebooks looked at a selection of anti-racism English-language titles.  Today’s post will be the first of a series looking at titles in other languages, with a focus today on Dutch material.

The Netherlands and Belgium share with the UK a history of colonisation and slavery and are addressing uncomfortable issues of ongoing racism.  Dutch ebooks available to Cambridge staff and students are very few, so the suggestions below include translations into English and books published in English by Dutch-language authors.

• Max Havelaar by Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker)
  • A satirical novel written in 1860 by one of the Netherlands’ most important authors in which he came out against the colonialism in the Dutch East Indies. It led to a change in Dutch colonial policy.
  • This German ebook discusses translations of the novel into other languages.
• books by Philomena Essed, professor of Critical Race, Gender and Leadership Studies at Antioch University
  • Understanding everyday racism : an interdisciplinary theory (1991)
    • A revised version of her ground-breaking thesis done at University of Amsterdam in the 1980s in which she compared contemporary racism in the US and the Netherlands through in-depth interviews with 55 black women.
  • Diversity : gender, color, and culture (1996; translated from the Dutch; currently available as an ebook until the end of June 2020)
  • Professor Essed also co-edited Dutch racism (2014; also temporary access) with Isabel Hoving of Leiden University.
• White innocence : paradoxes of colonialism and race by Gloria Wekker, a Dutch writer but this book was published first in English (2016)
• The Dutch Atlantic : slavery, abolition and emancipation by Kwame Nimako and Glenn Willemsen (2011; also published first in English; also temporary access)
• Books (in English) by or with contributions by Karwan Fatah-Black (of Leiden University, specialising in Dutch colonial history).  Dr Fatah-Black is due to give the Keti Koti lecture on June 30th, which takes place annually before July the 1st which marks the date when slavery was abolished in the Dutch Antilles and when the Keti Koti festival takes place.
  • White lies and black markets : evading metropolitan authority in colonial Suriname, 1650-1800 (2015)
  • ‘“For the reputation and respectability of the state”: trade, the imperial state, unfree labor, and empire in the Dutch Atlantic’ co-written with Pepijn Brandon,  in Building the Atlantic empires : unfree labor and imperial states in the political economy of capitalism, circa 1500-1914 (2015) 

Our readers might also be interested in these freely available online resources: 

• https://www.withuiswerk.nl/ resources for white people who want be better informed to engage in the fight against racism 
• https://www.nederlandwordtbeter.nl/ with English translation throughout. Particular focus on the racism around the Zwarte Piet character who accompanies St. Nicholas.
• https://www.ninsee.nl/ The National Institute for Dutch Slavery Past and Legacy; its first director was Glenn Willemsen, the co-author of The Dutch Atlantic (above).

Katharine Dicks