De strijd om het koloniale verleden

Abstract

Abstract Contesting the colonial past. Trauma, collective memory, and the Dutch ‘Imperial History Wars’ This review article discusses three recent books on Dutch colonialism. In De brandende kampongs van generaal Spoor, Rémy Limpach demonstrates how systemic mass violence was part of the Dutch effort against Indonesian decolonization 1945-1949, and thereby questions words like ‘exces’ that are still commonly used to describe these events. In White innocence, Gloria Wekker shows how colonial categories of mind still operate in the Netherlands. Europe after empire, a vast comparative study into five former imperial metropoles by Elizabeth Buettner, makes a claim similar to Wekker’s, but across empires, leading her to conclude that Europe has not come to terms with its colonial past. In this review I argue that these books have more in common than their nominal themes suggest, and point to a future research agenda centered on the formation colonial mentalities across space and time.