Nostalgia for empire: ‘Tempo doeloe’ in contemporary Dutch literature

Mul, Sarah De

doi:10.1177/1750698010374928

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Specific historical circumstances aside, the mythologization of Portuguese colonialism is not very different from other European nationstates that held significant colonial empires. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch East Indies tends to be represented as a ''paradise lost'' in postcolonial memory (De Mul, 2010;Pattynama, 2012). The memory of colonial violence is systematically occluded by an image of Dutch colonialism as a well-tempered enterprise based on trade and the management of native tensions.…”

Section: The Portuguese Late Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

Coelho

2019

Journal of Social Archaeology

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The fall of the European empires over the course of the 20th century forced massive migratory flows from the former colonies to the old metropolis and between colonized regions. The experiences that came with the loss of colonies were traumatic for the erstwhile colonials, who carried their imperial nostalgia to the old metropolises. The social and political consequences of these longings are still unfolding in former colonizing societies. This article critically engages the materialization of lusotropical sensibilities, focusing on contemporary Portuguese decolonization as it is experienced in Lisbon’s urban landscape. I argue that cafés, restaurants, and pastry shops frequented by retornados are not only places of memory but spaces where imperial longings are ingested and internalized.

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Section: The Portuguese Late Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

Coelho

2019

Journal of Social Archaeology

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“…Amnesia has long been recognized as a necessary component of collective memory (Ho Tai, 2001; Ozouf and Ozouf, 1984; Renan, 1992 [1882]). Postcolonial theory draws attention to collective forgetting as a cultural process (Bhabha, 1994; De Mul, 2010; Gandhi, 1998). In order to construct a cohesive idea of itself, the post-imperial metropolis proclaims that it exists independently of its former colonies (Nicolaïdis et al, 2015; Tinsley, 2019).…”

Section: National Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory and melancholia in the garden of tropical agronomy

Tinsley

2019

Memory Studies

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This article traces the processes of celebrating, forgetting, and reimagining the French Empire at the garden of tropical agronomy in Nogent-sur-Marne. Drawing from archival research, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, and site observation, I consider why ruination has endured despite ongoing attempts to restore the site, and what is at stake in remembering the garden anew. Drawing from theories of national memory and postcolonial theory, I conceptualize the garden as a site of melancholia. Its ruination continues as a consequence of state bureaucracy, the role of the military, and its physical form. Sites of melancholia, I argue, present contested, multivocal, palimpsestic narratives that challenge national memory in two ways: first, by disrupting the relationship between past and present, and second, by foregrounding the racialized violence of the imperial project that gave rise to the contemporary nation. By unsettling the temporal and spatial idea of the nation, sites of melancholia pose a fundamental challenge to any cohesive narrative of national identity.

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“…Allofs et al, 2011;Beekman, 1996;Salverda, 2011a;Van Zonneveld, 1995. In this period, an estimated 300,000 people decided or were forced to 'repatriate' to the Netherlands: for many members of the colonial élite, however, this meant leaving their childhood homeland for what often was a 'distant', 'foreign' land (De Mul, 2010: 416, 2011 Writing helped many younger repatriatees cope with such a 'collective trauma' and with their controversial, socio-historical position: the generation born in the colony before its independence spent their childhood as part of the privileged colonial élite; however, they use literature to come to terms with issues of involvement in the colonial oppression as children of colonisers and the difficult definition of personal identities. In their works, they question the traditional 'colonial vs postcolonial' dichotomy with their experience of spatial and temporal displacement, as their land of birth no longer exists (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices and/of Places

Peligra

2024

EIRJ

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After Indonesia’s independence was officially recognised by the Netherlands in 1949, several former members of the colonial élite repatriated. Many among the Indies-born repatriatees’ generation used writing to come to terms with their own controversial, multifaceted identity. While they belonged to the colonial élite, they can be studied as writers geographically and temporally displaced as their colonial land of birth no longer exists. Their desire for belonging is arguably exemplified in the way their novels’ protagonists’ linguistic identity is depicted. While these authors write in Dutch, their characters are embedded in local cultures, languages, traditions, questioning fixed labels and dichotomies. Taking as example Helga Ruebsamen’s 1997 novel Het lied en de waarheid [The song and the truth], this article explores how linguistic identity is represented in Dutch literature of repatriation and how this is tackled in translation into English. This novel is chosen not only because it allows to explore plurality in literature and translation in the selected context, but also because it takes the issues of linguistic plurality in literature and translation a step further: the five-year-old Dutch protagonist leaves the tropical (colonial) environment with its enchanting nature behind and arrives with her family in the Netherlands in 1939 as the daughter of a Jewish doctor, unveiling a third identity layer beyond the Dutch-East Indian dichotomy. After positioning this novel within Dutch literature of repatriation by means of a close reading analysis, this article discusses why and how it can be studied as a heterolingual, diasporic (in this specific case, neither colonial, nor postcolonial) text. The translation strategies used to tackle representations of cultural and linguistic hybridity into English are then analysed by means of a comparative textual analysis. Looking for recurring trends, the results are finally briefly related to the findings of a doctoral project about the English and Italian translations of Dutch-East Indian novels by Hella S. Haasse, which suggest that shared tendencies to generalisation may risk distorting images of linguistic hybridity.

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Nostalgia for empire: ‘Tempo doeloe’ in contemporary Dutch literature

Cited by 6 publications

References 6 publications

An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

Memory and melancholia in the garden of tropical agronomy

Voices and/of Places

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