Postcolonial Studies in the Context of the ‘Diasporic’ Netherlands

Abstract

In his recent and much-discussed bestseller Het land van aankomst [the country of arrival], the sociologist Paul Scheffer insists that in contemporary public discussions about the ‘multicultural drama’ generated by the integration of new immigrants, the history of Dutch colonial governance in South East Asia and the Caribbean should play a constitutive role. He writes: ‘If we don’t reconsider our image of the past and if we don’t grant our colonial history a definite space in our collective memory, we violate the truth and distort the historical record’ (Scheffer 2007: 183).1 The long-anticipated publication of Het land van aankomst generated an outpouring of critical review and debate in the printed media and television. However, none of the commentators seriously engaged with the irony of Scheffer’s title, which alludes to a modernist classic in Dutch literature published in 1935, written by the Indo-Dutch Eduard du Perron, entitled Het land van herkomst [the country of origin]. As this suggests, the publication of Scheffer’s book potentially might have — yet in the event did not — generated an exploration of the ways in which the Netherlands’ history of colonization in South East Asia and the Caribbean is intertwined with the present day.