Surveying in the Dutch Colonial Archive

Abstract

Thirty-three years after Indonesia's declaration of independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1945, an ambitious archive project was launched as part of the bilateral cultural agreement between the Indonesian Republic and the Netherlands. The reproduction of historical photographs in the Dutch archive collections in 1979 and 1980 can be read as an Indonesian gesture of political self-empowerment against the former colonizer nation. In the end, both the Dutch colonial state and the postcolonial Indonesian government allowed the expression of ethnicity only at a cultural and never at a political or economic level—an observation that applies to the entire selection process of the Historical Photo Archive. The apolitical attitude toward the colonial past in the 1960s and 1970s further reflects a broader disinterest of postcolonial Dutch society. In the end, enforcing silence about Dutch colonial occupation allowed the photographs to be included in the postcolonial Indonesian archive.