‘Hidden in Plain Sight’: Re-writing a Dutch Colonial Legacy in the Black Heritage Amsterdam Tour.
Student name: James F. Anderson Student number: 10417494
Program: rMA Cultural Analysis
Supervisor: Dr. Daan Wesselman Reader: Dr. Joost de Bloois
Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Research Master of Arts.
Date: 14-06-2017
INTRODUCTION 3
BLACK HERITAGE TOUR AMSTERDAM: A PROFILE 10
CHAPTER 1: BLACK MEMORIES, COLONIAL LEGACIES 14
CHAPTER 2: MAPPING BLACKNESS: COLONIAL SPATIALITIES 28 CHAPTER 3: AESTHETIC DETOURS 43
CONCLUSION 63
WORKS CITED 67
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
I would like to express my thanks to Daan Wesselman for his enthusiasm and support with this project.
Special thanks go to Jennifer Tosch, for her time and encouragement.
The global village1 of Amsterdam stages a complex relationship with its colonial past. Increasing demonstrations on a public stage have brought attention to the dominant role2 of the Netherlands within the global slave-trade, as well as a highly problematic colonial legacy still at work in various facets of Dutch society, embodied by the Dutch government’s reluctance to engage in adequate forms of reparation to slave descendants (Kardux 171). As recently as November 2016, 200 protestors were arrested in Rotterdam3 for challenging the Dutch tradition of Zwarte Piet4 as a racist, colonial stereotype. On a national level, the pervasiveness of such colonial instantiations in the Dutch ‘cultural archive’5 threatens to destabilise a Dutch national identity; one which celebrates its ‘Golden Age’ of artistic and economic hegemony in the seventeenth-century6 (171), whilst neglecting to acknowledge the violent colonial rule that facilitated such ‘greatness’7. In light of such of such tensions, the Dutch government has sought to implement a ‘culture of monumentality’ within the Netherlands – within Amsterdam particularly – (Kardux 171) as an attempt to address the Netherlands’ colonial past through the construction of monuments. In 2002, for example, the
1 By ‘global village’, I am referring to more ‘localised’ metropole – in comparison to other world hubs such as London or Tokyo – which attracts "global flows" (Castells 40) of capital, through social, economic, and cultural mechanisms.
2 The Dutch were one of the most prolific slave-trading nations, trading hundreds of thousands of slaves from the African continent during the seventeenth-century (Slavery Heritage Guide).
3 For more detail, see here: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2016/11/nearly-200-arrested-in-anti-piet-protest-no-trouble-at-sinterklaas-arrival/
4 Zwarte Piet is a fictitious character from a children’s story published in 1850 by Jan Schenkman. ‘Piet’ is an accomplice to Sinterklaas
(Saint Nikolaas), helping to distribute presents to worthy children, whilst capturing less deserving children to be taken with him back to Spain. Essentially, Zwarte Piet represents a racist caricature of a Moor which features enlarged red lips and golden-hooped earrings, who is subservient to Sinterklaas. 5 I borrow this term from Gloria Wekker so as to refer to a composite set of images, narratives, and other Dutch cultural phenomena which underpin a Dutch ‘imaginary’. For a more comprehensive discussion on this term, see White Innocence (2016).
6 The 'Golden Age' is a widely circulated cultural trope within Dutch society. In 2009, the Dutch minister Balkenende made an impassioned appeal for the Dutch to re-embrace the ‘VOC mentaliteit’ (VOC mentality), referring to the aggressive colonial actions undertaken by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth-century. The colonial overtones of such a statement – and the wide support it received – speak to an increasingly exclusionist nationalism at work within the Netherlands. 7 A hegemonic moment facilitated, in part, by the operation of the Dutch slave-trade.
government erected the ‘National Slavery Monument’8 as a means of reparation to the ancestors of those enslaved during the Dutch slave-trade. The opening celebrations of this monument were dampened however, as Afro-Dutch attendees – whose ancestors were purportedly being commemorated – began to protest in light of their perceived exclusion from the event; fences were erected which blocked direct entrance to the site, forcing attendees to watch the ceremony (which included members of the Dutch royal family) on large screens exterior to the monument. As Joanna C. Kardux notes, the anger felt by many in attendance (171) – largely caused by the exclusionary organisational structures in place at the event – speaks to the broader tensions at work within the “state-sponsored” nature of such forms of ‘memorialisation’ within the Dutch context. That is to say, more often than not, such commemorative practice serve to privilege the commemoration of certain ‘memories’ in a hierarchical structure, as a means of bolstering a positive national self-image. As Jeroen Dewulf has outlined, this form of ‘memorialisation’ betrays a shrewd mobilisation of specific national ‘memories’ within the public domain; in this example, the National Slavery Monument was critiqued as a tool for political ends, erected in an attempt to gain the support of the Afro-Dutch community within Amsterdam (Dewulf 240).
However, in light of the failings of such memory-work to adequately commemorate the victims of Dutch colonialism in this context9, a variety of initiatives and committees have emerged from more ‘local, ‘bottom-up’ levels, seeking to addresses issues concerning the
8 The monument, designed by Erwin de Vries, is located in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark; a location which, on the outskirts of the city centre, both speaks to the dense migrant population present in Amsterdam’s Oost, whilst reflecting the marginalising processes through which the Dutch
government addresses slavery. The monument was realised, in part, due to pressure from local protest groups, such as the Nationaal 30 juni/1 juli (National 30 June/1 July Committee).
9 I acknowledge that such ‘state-sponsored’ forms of memory work are reflected in the vernacular memory practices of large majorities of the Dutch population. Indeed, staunch support for the tradition of Zwarte Piet exists on both a ‘local’, ‘bottom-up’ level, as well as a ‘top down’
institutional level. This double-bind is embodied by figures such as the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in relation to the comments he made in 2014 which he explained “Black Piet is Black, and I cannot change that”; a statement which serves to support the continuation of Zwarte Piet as a part of Dutch culture, whilst ignoring its characteristics as racist. For more detail, see here:
Dutch colonial legacy in more inclusive ways. For instance, within Amsterdam specifically, recent exhibitions such as Re[as]sisting Narratives by the Amsterdam art collective Framer Framed10, have aimed to address the continuing ‘trauma’ of a history of violence committed by the Dutch Empire during its colonisation of South Africa during the seventeenth-century. In an academic setting, initiatives such as the ‘University of Color’ based at the University of Amsterdam, have challenged colonial logics at work within the representative structures of the academy, through advocating for a racial representation of academic staff in proportion to the multi-ethnic population of the Netherlands11. Perhaps the most significant initiative to address the legacy of Dutch colonialism however, is that of the institution Nationaal 30 juni/1 juli (National 30 June/1 July Committee); an organisation which represents the Netherlands’ Afro-Dutch population, including those from former Dutch colonies such as Surinam. On June 30th every year, this committee holds a vigil which marks the anniversary of the abolition of Dutch slavery, at Amsterdam’s Surinameplein. On July 1st, the following day, Amsterdam’s Surinamese population celebrates keti koti (the breaking of the chains); a tradition which emerged in the former Dutch colony of Suriname to honour the importance of this date, being exported to the Netherlands along with the influx of Surinamese migrants following their country’s independence in 197512.
These examples are indicative of a wider and more profound shift in the relationships social groups have traditionally enjoyed in relation to memory practices (Nora 437). That is to say, according to French historian Pierre Nora, memory has become the rubric under which political and social developments in relation to issues such identity are manifested. As Nora puts it, “Unlike history, which has always been in the hands of the public authorities of scholars and specialised peer groups, memory has acquired all the new privileges and prestige
10 For more information, see: http://framerframed.nl/en/exposities/expositie-reassisting-narratives/ 11 For more information, see: http://universityofcolour.com
of a popular protest movement. It has come to resemble the revenge of the underdog or injured party, the outcast, the history of those denied the right to History” (440). As Nora sees it, the emergence of this memory-work comes as a result of a “democratization” of history, in which “minority memories” increasingly circulate as the result of broader socio-political developments towards forms of “decolonization”. For Nora, then, this culture of “memorialisation” embodies “a marked emancipatory trend among peoples, ethnic groups, and even certain classes of individual in the world today; in short, the emergence, over a very short period of time, of all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups for whom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming their identity” (439). In relation to the aforementioned examples, I too am inclined to see initiatives which engage with the Netherlands’ colonial past as indicative of this trend in memory-work.
The forms such memory-work takes however, are not just limited to a ‘culture of monumentality’. As Nora outlines, this memory-work is manifested in a variety of practices and forms, including:
“criticism of official versions of history and recovery of areas of history previously repressed; demands for signs of a past that had been confiscated or suppressed; growing interest in ‘roots’ and genealogical research; all kinds of commemorative events and new museums; renewed sensitivity to the holding and opening of archives for public consultation; and growing attachment to what in the English-speaking world is called ‘heritage’” (437). Whilst these forms of memory-work are manifested in a variety of ways, Nora sees such practices as circulating at ‘sites of memory’, or lieux de mémoire. Within national contexts, for example, such ‘sites’ can be understood as “geographical locations, buildings, monuments and works of art as well as historical persons, memorial days, philosophical and scientific texts, or symbolic actions” (Erll 23). In Amsterdam, monuments such as the National Slavery Monument can be considered as lieux de mémoire; a ‘site’ which signifies both with political and symbolic practices of memory within discourses on Dutch colonialism. In this light, the
work of the Black Heritage Amsterdam Tour (BHAT) is particularly singular, given its resonance with Nora’s comments regarding ‘heritage’ as a manifestation of an emergent practice of memory which consolidates “minority memories” (Nora 439).
Founded by American-Dutch scholar Jennifer Tosch in 2013, the BHAT operates in the heart of the Amsterdam, engaging with the legacy of Dutch colonialism through mobilising the ‘touristic form’ as a critical knowledge operation. The tour takes attendees through the centre of the city – both on foot, and by boat – pointing out sites of colonial significance, such as the canal houses of former slave owners, for example, before culminating in a tour of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum so as to examine colonial instantiations present within the paintings of the ‘Golden Age’. In several public talks13 regarding the work of her tour, Tosch has made clear that, what initially began as a genealogical project to understand her family history in the Netherlands, soon developed into a critical practice of ‘writing’ a history of ‘black Amsterdam’ for a public audience. This development was set in motion in light of Tosch’s astonishment at the lack of engagement with the legacy of Dutch colonialism: both from within the Dutch academic context, as well as within contemporary political discourses within the public domain. As I see it, the BHAT can be seen as constitutive of an attempt to examine the lasting implications of the Dutch colonial past, within Amsterdam of the present. Given the questions the tour poses in relation to the operation of memory-work as both a critical and commercial practice, the BHAT merits significant academic consideration.
It is thus the intention of this thesis to understand the operation of the BHAT through analysing the critical tools it mobilises so as to engage with Dutch colonialism. Through viewing the tour as an ‘intervention’ within the city-space of Amsterdam, I will argue that the BHAT produces a ‘counter-narrative’ that brings to light instantiations of Dutch colonialism
13 Tosch gave a TEDx talk in 2014 on this subject. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv-EhVHnwxk
within contemporary contexts. As is suggested by my preliminary description of this object, its operationality within intersecting social, political, and economic structures, calls for a form of analysis cognizant to the breadth of its own critical focus. As such, my aim in this thesis is not to interrogate the content of the tour itself14. Rather, this thesis will focus15 on the operationality of the tour, through the employment of an interdisciplinary theoretical analysis which speaks to the ‘singularity’ of this object. In this sense, this thesis aims to produce a reading that ‘speaks with’ the most engaging instantiations of the tour’s critical practices.
To begin, I will provide a profile of the tour so as to detail its structure as well as its experiential dimensions, whilst also recounting my personal experience of having attended the tour as part of my research for this thesis. Following this description, the first chapter of this thesis will consider the positioning of the BHAT within the touristic circuits of Amsterdam. Through engaging the work of Sabine Marshall here, this chapter will consider competing discourses on heritage and memory in relation to tourism practices. Further, drawing upon the work of Gloria Wekker, as well as black studies scholar Fred Moten, this chapter will argue that ‘blackness’ functions within the tour as guiding concept through which the BHAT is charged critically, in terms of the knowledge operation that it establishes as a ‘heritage’. The second chapter will then extend this discussion through analysing specific sites on the tour, focusing on colonial objects such as Amsterdam’s ‘Moor’ busts. Through employing a critical decolonial lens informed by the work of Walter Mignolo here, I will argue here that the knowledge operation of the tour can be seen to constitute a decolonial practice of “delinking”; that is, a “delinking” from Western epistemologies – and thus Amsterdam as a former centre of Dutch Empire – so as to produce a narrative of ‘blackness’
14 Since the tour itself embodies Jennifer’s own critical aims, my engagement with the content of the tour may run the risk of repeating – albeit it a less exciting manner – the narrative of the BHAT. 15 The mutability of the tour form speaks to the tour’s own narrative being subject to variation from tour to tour. As such, attempting to reproduce such a narrative would be to commit an essentialist reading of BHAT here.
in Amsterdam which opposes a dominant narrative of Amsterdam as ‘Golden Age’ city, in relation to its ‘branded image’.
In the third chapter, I will discuss the operation of the BHAT within the Rijksmuseum. Through the work of Tony Bennett, as well that of Murat Aydemir, this chapter will examine the disciplinary structures of the museum space. Here, the Rijksmuseum’s curatorial methods at work within the gallery space will be highlighted as problematic, given their embodiment of a general reluctance to engage with the Netherlands’ colonial past. Drawing upon the work of Homi K. Bhabha, I will argue that the tour “disseminates” a ‘counter-narrative’ within the Rijksmuseum, as a critical tool which both addresses ongoing colonial logics, whilst also contributing to the ‘writing’ of a narrative of ‘blackness’ within Amsterdam. In my concluding remarks, I will meditate on the tour’s operation as a reparative practice for descendants of the formerly enslaved, as well as those of the African diaspora. Within this discussion, I will also reflect on the BHAT in relation to emergent memory-work in the West, advocating for the implementation of similar approaches towards addressing colonialism as an attempt to decolonise the heart of Western Empire.
BLACK HERITAGE TOUR AMSTERDAM: A PROFILE
A small group composed mainly of students (of which, I am one), has begun to congregate in front of the National World War II Memorial on Dam Square. It is a damp, grey Sunday, not uncommon for Amsterdam in November. Despite a rather sombre pattering of raindrops, tourists swarm through the city, undeterred. Walking towards our congregation, orange tulip in hand, is a familiar face we have previously agreed to meet. Jennifer Tosch, founder and CEO of the Black Heritage Amsterdam Tour (BHAT). Today, she is to be our tour guide. As Jennifer approaches us, a couple of locals and tourists who are also waiting are drawn into her orbit. Introducing herself in warm tones (despite informing us of being somewhat shaken up, due to the arrests of her friends during anti-Zwarte Piet protests the day before), Jennifer commences the start of the tour; a time-travelling adventure back to Amsterdam’s ‘Golden Age’ to uncover a hidden history of ‘black Amsterdam’.
The tour commences with Jennifer pointing out some of the most known sites of the city centre – the Royal Palace on the Dam, de Nieuwe Kerk, the National WWII monument; sites I have seen numerous times, without stopping to appreciate their rich detail or fully consider their historical significance. Jennifer informs us about the world’s first stock exchange which had stood on a site parallel to the Dam during the seventeenth-century; it is now home to a shop selling Amsterdam-related tourist memorabilia and souvenirs. We then gaze upwards at the Royal Palace on Dam Square, listening to Jennifer orate a thesis on the symbolism behind each of the figures featured on its crowning façade. Turning towards a nearby corner of the Dam, Jennifer points to a small motif of Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas), informing the group about the tradition of this character within the Dutch context; both its symbolic value, as well as its surrounding controversies.
Moving on foot through the city centre, the group becomes increasingly alert, attuned to the various symbols and stories the streets of Amsterdam have reserved for the attentive onlooker. We soon arrive at a house which features a gable stone depicting the Bible story of the Ethiopian Eunuch, located down a small, side-street in the Red Light District. At this site, we witness first-hand the ideological legacies of Dutch colonialism; the Ethiopian is depicted wearing a ‘slave collar’ around his neck (despite having been described a free man in the biblical story), as a status symbol for the previous occupants of this house: slave-traders. Opening his front door to greet a visitor, the current owner is taken aback to find an assembled tour analysing the aesthetics of his home. “This is my moor” he laughs sheepishly, and closes the door behind him.
Pressing on through the cobbled streets, between growing crowds of tourists and the ever-present stream of bicycles of Amsterdam, Jennifer leads us onto a slightly sodden boat: our vehicle for the second part of the tour. Setting off through the canals of the city, our prior perspective of the city gradually fades. We are no longer bodies amongst the flocks of people bustling through Amsterdam of the present. Instead, in Jennifer’s words, we have ‘time travelled’. The gentle journeying of the boat along the city’s waterways recalls the city’s maritime trading beginnings; a history which is newly made accessible to us, through this shared, mobile-discursive practice. Yet, careful not to slip too easily into romanticising early-modern Amsterdam, this new perspective also brings to the surface a darker side of the city’s ‘Golden Age’ history. As our boat trawls the canals of the city centre, colonial imagery is everywhere rife: busts of Moors, gapers (yawners), and statuettes of infamous slave traders gaze back at us from either side of the canal. An eerie sense of connection to this historical time washes over us with every site we pass (as does the impinging water lapping the side of our boat), as if we are recreating the daily passages made by Dutch merchants some three hundred years previous. Whilst active in her role as tour guide, Jennifer readily encourages us
to ask questions and to challenge statements or express our opinions towards objects of interest. A dialogue is created which enables a critical conversation to take place, alleviating the potential unease of the topics on discussion.
After some time, having grown somewhat cold yet remaining alert, we dock in front of the esteemed Rijksmuseum. Following Jennifer inside, we embark upon the final section of the tour, entering into the galleries of the Netherlands’ most prestigious art collection. Inside the museum however, our gaze needs some adjusting. Whereas in the city streets colonial imagery was ubiquitous, in the museum space, our task is to now identify instantiations of the Dutch colonial legacy through their ‘absence’. As Jennifer explains, the Rijksmuseum has recently committed to decolonising its ‘Golden Age’ collection, aiming to avoid framing the collection in accordance with the colonial nature of earlier exhibitions. Yet, as part of this attempt at decolonisation, we soon discover that the museum, somewhat paradoxically, has removed any extensive descriptions of the black subjects portrayed from the accompanying wall-mounted information in the gallery space. As we continue to move through the galleries, artworks which depict the slave-trade of this historical period are generally overlooked within the museum’s official literature; those that do draw attention to images of Dutch aristocracy with their human ‘property’, are somewhat marginalised within the gallery space. With a growing feeling of unease, we find ourselves at the final site of the tour: the ‘Gallery of Honours’, home to Rembrandt’s ‘Nightwatch’ (de Nachtwacht).
The crowning feature of the Rijksmuseum’s collection, the militia guardsmen of Rembrandt’s scene are blockaded by swathes of onlookers. Thankfully, so as to avoid competing with this assembled mass, our attention is directed away from the piece, towards a similarly grand work depicting Roelof Bicker’s company of burghers, painted by Bartholomeus van der Helst in 1639. Accustomed to her direction, we gather around Jennifer as she describes the dominant image of Bicker, adorned in the finery of his aristocratic
trappings. At his right hand side however, we notice a small black boy clutching a garish red rope; the boy’s attention fixed to the right of Bicker, beyond the grandeur and pomposity of his company. The centrality of this figure immediately sparks the group’s curiosity: ‘Who was this boy?’ Every other member of the giant canvas can be identified, apart from him. Yet our curiosity is not to be satisfied. The Rijksmuseum makes no mention of the boy in its description of the artwork. Reluctantly, Jennifer declares his identity an object for further research. Fittingly, we end the tour having come face-to-face with structures that serve to keep a history of blackness and colonialism within Amsterdam precisely one of occlusion; a history continues to be ‘hidden in plain sight’.
CHAPTER 1: BLACK MEMORIES, COLONIAL LEGACIES
“A history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist”,
Fred Moten, In The Break
In an online video clip created to promote the BHAT, viewers are introduced to the tour’s organiser, Jennifer Tosch. The clip, available on YouTube, portrays several key sites on the tour, such as Amsterdam’s central canal district, as well as the National Slavery Monument in Oosterpark. Documenting a typical tour, Tosch explains the significance of these lieux de mémoire, whilst facilitating discussions with the tour’s attendees on Amsterdam’s colonial past. Most striking to the viewer however, is the beginning of the clip, in which Tosch gazes upwards at the busts of two ‘Moors’ erected above the entrance to a building on the Herengracht16. As is evident to viewers, Tosch is clearly emotionally moved by her encounter with these colonial objects, telling the camera that “to believe that Europeans speak so little of the humanity of black people, the contribution that we have made to this society […] and the way that it was presented as nothing […] It’s just not right, and I want to make it right” (YouTube BHAT prod.). The pathos with which Tosch addresses the camera in this scene, eyes tearful and voice strained, presents first-hand to the viewer the emotional impact of such colonial artefacts for those who are descended from the enslaved, reflecting the perpetual ‘trauma’ embodied within such sites which continues to haunt the present. Tosch’s rhetorical usage of the collective pronoun ‘we’ in her register is particularly emphatic here. Addressing the camera in this collective sense does more than signal the suffering of those from the African diaspora who are personally tied to the Dutch colonial past; it suggests that this narrative is ‘claimable’, and rightly so, by descendants of the enslaved. Tosch’s emotive 16 The Herengracht (‘Men’s Canal’), is generally considered to be the most expensive location within the centre of Amsterdam. Named because of the wealthy men whom lived there during the
declaration, “I want to make it right” – a statement which serves to underline her aims for the critical potential of her tour – speaks to the political nature of the tour as an attempt to make this colonial past accessible as a form of ‘heritage’. As such, the form through which the BHAT is presented here, speaks to its potentialities as a reparative practice; the tour is presented as an embodiment of Tosch’s attempts at ‘making right’ the injustices that these colonial objects signify for the descendants of the victims of Dutch colonialism.
Resonant with Tosch’s message in this clip is the scholarship of Gloria Wekker17, which explores the pervasive nature of the colonial past within the Dutch context. On the topic of race within her home country, for example, Wekker outlines that “a dominant discourse stubbornly maintains that the Netherlands is and always has been color-blind and antiracist, a place of extraordinary hospitality and tolerance toward the racialized/ethnicized other” (Wekker 1). In contemporary discourses however, notions of “antiracism” are highly contested within the Netherlands, especially in relation to discussions on the Dutch colonial legacy within the public domain; that is to say, given the prevalence of colonial imagery within the centre of Amsterdam, such as the ‘Moor’ busts highlighted by Tosch in the aforementioned clip, claims of ‘antiracism’ are commonly thrown into disrepute. As I see it, the dominance of this narrative of ‘antiracism’ within the Netherlands is problematic in the sense that it forecloses more extensive discussions of race within the Netherlands, deflecting attempts to challenge the dominant – and highly problematic notion – that Dutch history is a predominantly ‘white’ affair (Wekker 12). Emergent scholarship on the decolonial project speaks to many of these issues, through exploring the epistemological processes which inform and reify colonial modes of thinking in contemporary contexts. Scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Boaventura de Souza Santos make clear, for example, that taxonomies of specific racial and ethnic groups are constructed from within Western epistemologies 17 Wekker is considered an important postcolonial scholar, both within the Dutch academic setting, and the broader scholarly community. For an introduction to Wekker’s, see her most recent work, White Innocence (2016).
which continue to privilege the white, Western subject (Mignolo 80). As such, the decolonial project advocates for the emergence of alternative, non-Western epistemologies, so as to oppose the hegemony of Western modes of thinking and the implicit colonial logics at work within such epistemologies.
Thus, this chapter aims to speak with Wekker’s work so as to address the Dutch relationship to its ‘colonial memory’ within contemporary contexts. Through calling into question the problematic nature of overtly deterministic discourses on the ‘racial’ within dominant discourses, I will consider the BHAT as an ‘intervention’ within the Dutch ‘cultural archive’. Within this consideration, I aim to explore tour’s operation at a nexus of both heritage and memory within the touristic circuits of Amsterdam. Moving further, this chapter will then consider the mobilisation of racial discourses as conceptually informing tourism practices, before examining the findings of this discussion in relation to the BHAT. Considering the conceptual underpinnings of the tour’s memory-work, I will argue that the BHAT is charged politically through mobilising ‘blackness’ as a critical concept.
COLONIAL LEGACIES: THE DUTCH CONTEXT
As Ann Laura Stoler accurately observes, “In the case of imperial formations, a ‘legacy’ makes no distinctions between what holds and what lies dormant, between residue and recomposition, between a weak and a tenacious trace” (Stoler 196). In this sense, the implications of this term within critical contexts (as well as its cognates: history, memory and heritage), suggests that its usage pertains to an acknowledgement of the past, without explicitly referencing the effect of past events in present contexts. The common usage of such terms within political discourses in relation to colonialism thereby precludes distinguishing – as a matter of importance – between ongoing and eclipsed instantiations of coloniality at work within contemporary contexts. According to Stoler, appeals to the term
‘legacy’ within discussions on the colonial thus fall short, when used “to account for the contemporary force of imperial remains, what people count as remains, and as importantly what they do with them” (196). In an effort to overcome a similarly vague usage of such terminology, I wish to briefly articulate an understanding of the term ‘heritage’ which will inform my following discussions on tourism practices. ‘Heritage’ will thus serve as the main critical heading under which my use of memory, history, and indeed legacy, will be defined throughout the remainder of this thesis.
The Oxford Living Dictionary helpfully defines the term ‘heritage’ as “Denoting or relating to things of special architectural, historical, or natural value that are preserved for the nation” (OxfordLivingDictionary.com). As is discernable from this definition, ‘heritage’ necessarily affirms the interconnectedness between the concept of the ‘national’, and the function of ‘remembrance’, on the grounds of a ‘preservation” of “value”. The notion of “value” here is seemingly defined by – and in turn refers to – both ‘top-down’ national structures e.g. governmental legislation, as well as economic and/or cultural mechanisms e.g. the preservation of a particular site for use as a tourist attraction. Yet, this definition of the term in relation to a nexus of “preservation” and “value” also betrays the constructed nature of ‘heritage’ – and by association, the ‘heritage industry’ – as a specific branch of commerce which mobilises discourses on the ‘national’, and/or personal “value” so as to encourage consumption. The very definition of ‘heritage’ here, then, seems to foreshadow the problematic tensions of the usage of this term within contemporary contexts, particularly that of the industry which has emerged under this rubric, through “mak[ing] no distinctions between what holds and what lies dormant” (196).
As I see it, the term ‘heritage’ functions as a malleable signifier for a specific act of “remembering” defined in a collective sense. That is to say, a heritage is constructed from segments of historical record – brought together through a central concept such as ‘blackness’
– so as to produce a past narrative which resonates with a particular demographic in the present. Necessarily, this process is indicative of a selective approach to historical engagement, such that a narrative of ‘heritage’ (in its “remembering” of certain historical events and not others), excludes elements considered extraneous to a narrative whole. In this light, I would argue that the heritage industry seemingly profits from the ambiguity of notion of the historical past within the heritage industry, through assembling fragments of history to create a concept under which a heritage narrative can be articulated. Thus, the use of such terms within the context of memory tourism practices thereby pertains to the constructed nature of ‘heritage’ as a form of “remembering”, and thus also a form of memory-work18.
This juncture between the ‘constructedness’ of ‘historical’ narrativising, and a collective “remembering” of the past – two central process at work within the heritage industry – resonates with Aleida Assmann’s conceptualisation of “active” and “passive” forms of cultural memory. Working at the interstices of historical research and memory work within (trans-)national contexts, Assmann provides a theoretical frame through which we can understand the cultural dominance of ‘memory’, as reified and sustained through both institutional, as well as cultural practices. Through employing the categories of “active” and “passive”, Assmann considers the extent to which specific practices engage with memory in a temporal sense. For example, Assmann sees the archive as a “passive” form of engaging memory within the institution, such that it emphasises the preservation of ‘memory objects’ often detrimental to their “remembrance” within public cultural memory. In tandem within this conceptual dichotomy, Assmann subsequently proposes the binary concepts of “remembering” and “forgetting” as additional categories of definition. These additional conceptual frames are used to more explicitly describe the extent to which such an engagement occurs, as well as the effects it has on the longevity of the circulation of this memory within the public sphere.
Within a specifically Dutch context, then, an “active” engagement with Dutch colonial memory could be seen in a museum exhibition which raises discussions about the Netherland’s slave-trading past19. Such “active” memory-work is therefore constituted through the facilitation of continued discussions around such ‘memory objects’ in a public forum, with an emphasis on the necessary political ramifications of such memories constituted by their pressing relationship to the present. Wekker’s work provides a useful example here of “passive remembering” within institutional structures. In White Innocence, Wekker outlines the worrying absence of a curriculum focus on the Dutch slave-trade and its imperialist conquests in Dutch high-school education; a focus that continues to be contingent upon the whims of educational staff to broach this subject with their students (Wekker 8). Regarding this juncture of pedagogy and the colonial, this example is telling, in that it outlines precisely a process of “remembering” that is not actively maintained or engaged with the ethical dimensions that such “remembering” necessarily requires, hence its “passivity”.
For Wekker however, reluctance to engage with the Netherlands’ colonial past – an example of “passive remembering” – serves to highlight an ongoing colonialism still at work within the Netherlands, sustained through an “epistemology of ignorance”. That is to say, drawing upon the work of Sullivan and Tuana, Wekker makes clear that a dominant attitude of ‘tolerance’ towards other cultures and ethnicities functions, in actuality, as a tactic towards ignoring implicit racial hierarchies within the Dutch socio-political context. As Wekker argues, masked under a discourse of ‘tolerance’, a hegemonic mode of thinking has produced an “epistemology of ignorance”, through which the white Dutch subject is implicitly privileged through the form of “racial hierarchies, ontologies and economies” (Sullivan and Tuana 2); in contrast, that is, to the black subjects whom are merely ‘tolerated’ within this epistemology. Wekker notes however, that the emergence of this “epistemology of
19 Such as the 2016 exhibition “Re[as]issting Narratives” from Amsterdam-based art collective Framer Framed.
ignorance” has its beginnings in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust; an event which, in the aftermath of WWII, was seen as the epitome of modern racism in the Netherlands. That is to say, the dominance of this ‘traumatic’ memory in a post-WWII Dutch context thereby functioned to produce an ideology of ‘victimhood’ within the national cultural consciousness. In this sense, Dutch discourses on racial and ethnic ‘tolerance’ narrative stem from the post-WWII narrative that the Netherlands is “a small, but just, ethical nation; color-blind, thus free of racism; as being inherently on the moral and ethical high ground, thus a guiding light to other folks and nations” (2). Following the end of WWII however, the country’s colonial crimes and ruthless history of slave-trading thus seemingly gathered dust within the Dutch collective memory, repressed under the weight of this hegemonic narrative of ‘the Netherlands as victim’. hence complicating “active” discussions on Dutch colonial history within the public sphere.
As I see it, Dutch reluctance to engage with its colonial past seemingly emanates from the opposing imperatives at work at this juncture; namely, the guilt caused by past historical violence has produced an epistemology which displaces such crimes, which in turn clashes with the ethical duty to “actively” remember such atrocities. Such tensions recall Andreas Huyssen’s theorisation in his article “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age”. As Huyssen argues, discourses on memory within national boundaries have become increasingly divisive in contemporary settings, especially when considering memory practices as formative to the construction of national identities. To borrow from Huyssen:
"If the historical past once used to give coherence and legitimacy to family, community, nation, and state [...] then those formerly stable links have weakened today to the extent that national traditions and historical pasts are increasingly deprived of their geographic and political groundings, which are reorganized in the process of cultural globalization" (4). Huyssen's comments here helpfully exemplify the tensions at work within the Dutch context; that is, choosing to displace problematic events from a particular historical epoch so as to
ignore the implications that an acknowledgement of such memories would entail. The memory of Amsterdam’s ‘Golden Age’ clearly embodies this tension. Due to the rooted structuring role of this narrative of Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth-century – which continues to bolster a Dutch national image – the “political grounding” of this discourse has become destabilised, to the extent that the violent colonial actions within this period are masked by a “branded image” (Bhreithiún 257) of ‘Golden Age’ Amsterdam. With these issues in mind, I now wish to explore the ways in which the BHAT seeks to address this problematic history within a touristic framework, whilst consequently appropriating the signifying markers of this colonial history so as to edify a ‘black heritage’.
CRITICAL TOURISM: HERITAGE & MEMORY
Whilst the terms heritage and memory are often used as mutual synonyms within the context of the tourism industry, Sabine Marshall has argued that the mobilisation of these markers function to produce disparate tourism experiences. As Marshall distinguishes, “While heritage tourism revolves around the personal visit to tangible sites and preserved artefacts, memory tourism can be developed without the presence of such precious cultural objects and authentic remnants” (Marshall 327). As is discernible from Marshall’s definition here, tourism operative under the rubric of ‘heritage’ privileges the ‘material’, ‘physical’ sites at which the tourist develops their personal identification with ‘heritage’; that is, as encapsulated in the ritual nature of pilgrimage, for example, as structured around a journey towards a physical site. In comparison, memory tourism is not contingent on the material, despite the symbolic network of signs which serve to code the visitation of particular locations, as associated with specific memories. In this sense, memory tourism is not reliant on the visitation of a specific site, and does not necessarily engage the faculties of the tourist within the economic structures which inform practices of heritage tourism. Rudi Hartmann
qualifies this difference, arguing that “The traditional (and limited) understanding of cultural attractions in tourism [is] substantially widened by the use of the much broader term ‘heritage’, which includes tangible and intangible elements of the past that are used for some purpose – here for tourist visits – in the present” (Hartmann 170). As Hartmann’s comments here affirm, ‘heritage tourism’ thus privileges the ‘physical’ domain of memory i.e. the visitation of heritage sites, as a marker for ‘authenticity’.
It has been argued however, that privileging certain forms of tourism as more ‘authentic’ is ultimately subject to the many ironies which structure the touristic industry, and in turn, the touristic gaze (Urry 10). As Jonathan Culler points out in his essay “The Semiotics of Tourism”, “The authentic is a usage perceived as a sign of that usage, and tourism is in large measure a quest for such signs” (5). Culler highlights here the tensions intrinsic to tourism practices and discourses of ‘authenticity’; that is to say, whilst physically visiting a site of heritage seemingly signifies an encounter with an authentic location -- an experiential confrontation with the site of memory20 -- the structures that demarcate this site as ‘authentic’ are highly constructed. For example, if we think of the function of the descriptive plaque which informs tourists of the significance of a particular site, its discursive function legitimates it ‘authenticity’, whilst implicating it within a coded network of tourism iconography and cliché. For Culler, then, this “quest for signs” is ultimately what defines tourism within contemporary circuits; a ritual in which the site itself is displaced as a ‘sign’, becoming a ‘signified’ of ‘authenticity’ in a newly formed ‘signifying’ relation. In this sense, Culler argues that “The authentic sight requires markers, but our notion of the authentic is the unmarked” (8), thereby revealing the paradoxical nature of ‘authenticity’ within tourism discourses; the meaningful connection the tourist has to the ‘imaginary’ of the touristic site as ‘unmarked’, is, in actuality, an ‘imaginary’ that is coded as ‘unmarked’ through its ‘marked-ness’.
In awareness of Culler’s argument here (which perhaps betrays a scepticism towards practices of ‘heritage tourism’), Marshall formulates the concept of “personal heritage tourism”; a concept through which to refer to tourism practices that constitute “a search for roots and identity and is centred upon sites associated with one’s family or community heritage” (Marshall 329). This concept thus allows us to understand tourism practices which entail the visitation of sites of significance for family history or ancestry, as well as reunion sites for veterans such as war monuments or battlefields, for example. In this sense, Marshall sees “personal heritage tourism” as “the encounter of tangible sites, buildings, and material objects that encapsulate and inspire memories, even if these do not qualify as ‘monuments’ or lack authentication by established museum authorities (328). In terms of identifying the subjects of such touristic practices, Marshall proposes these are “individuals who are motivated by a desire to discover or reconnect with ‘where we come from’ and who want to delve into the past in order to find a new context for understanding their own self in the present” (329).
In Museums, Heritage, and International Development, Wayne Modest and Paul Basu argue that, “Understood as the active presence of the past in the present […] heritage is a simple fact: an inheritance that has the power to shape individuals’ and societies’ current predispositions and their visions of the future – for good or ill” (Modest & Basu 2). In this sense, heritage seems to entails a dualistic operation, whereby an individual lays claim to a heritage by virtue of their personal connection to it e.g. a heritage established on the grounds of ethnicity, for instance; yet, in turn, heritage also lays claims upon the individual as a form of “inheritance”. As is discernible from the above quote, this operation seemingly plays an important role with regards to socio-political contexts, in which an individual’s “visions of the future” are shaped by heritage. This suggests, then, a more “active” element at work within heritage discourses; that is, in contrast to memory discourses which embody a “passive
remembering”, as aforementioned. Yet, to be clear, that is not to say however, that individuals who have no immediate affiliation with a heritage – and its accompanying heritage sites (in terms of genealogy, lineage, ethnicity, race, or any other affiliation) – do not play an important function in terms of bringing attention to heritage work. On the contrary, Marshall affirms that “Through varied experiences, observations, and personal encounters, a tourist will inevitably become privy to a fraction of the host’s collective memory, take it home, and assist in its circulation by sharing it with others” (Marshall 332). Thus, within this context, Tosch’s work seemingly coheres with Marshall, in the sense that “Personal heritage is always shared heritage – even if it is only shared with one’s family, a very small group, or one’s dead forefathers” (Marshall 330). As such, the operation of the BHAT, as I see it, define a tangible form of tourism that displaces an ‘inauthentic’ quest for the ‘authentic’. However, the BHAT also edifies a precise form of “personal heritage tourism” which is centred around ‘black heritage’; a heritage demarcated on racial grounds in correspondence to a specific racial/ethnic diaspora. In this light, the tour embodies a singular model within the heritage industry; a form of “personal heritage tourism” that is shared by both the tour organiser, as well as its attendees.
To further consider the implications of ‘blackness’ as a critical concept within this context, Fred Moten’s critical considerations of an ontology of ‘blackness’ in Blackness and Nothingness has critical purchase here, in that it extends a discussion of colonialism in specific relation to ‘blackness’ as a critical concept. For Moten, in dialogue with Frank B. Wilderson, there exists an inherent tension in discussion ‘blackness’ as an ontological category within the context of Western thinking grounded in Western epistemologies. As Moten puts it:
“On the one hand, blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another; on the other hand, blackness must free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontology’s
sanction against the very idea of black subjectivity. This imperative is not something up ahead, to which blackness aspires; it is the labor, which must not be mistaken for Sisyphean, that blackness serially commits” (749).
As is evident here, defining ‘blackness’ as an ontological category potentially entails an emancipation of the ‘black subject’; that is, in stark contrast to a Western epistemology which was predicated on the view that ‘blackness’ constituted a synonym for the ‘sub-human’, and thus the ‘black’ person as ‘slave’ under colonial structures. For Moten however, given that Western epistemologies are rooted in colonialism21, ‘blackness’ must resist assimilation within an epistemology essentially grounded on a white, masculine, Western subjectivity, from which ‘blackness’ is deemed as being exclusive. As such, Moten sees the challenge within this context as resistance to the assimilation of ‘blackness’ into Western epistemologies, thereby inscribing the political potential of ‘blackness’ as precisely constituted from its position outside of the ontological. In this light, there perhaps exists a contradiction in mobilising an ontology of ‘blackness’ as a critical concept within a touristic framework. That is to say, through operating under the racial signifier of ‘black’ – and in turn its signifying cognate of ‘blackness’ – the BHAT produces a ‘heritage’ of ‘blackness’ in Amsterdam that simultaneously desires assimilation within the Western epistemology of Dutch history, whilst gaining its political traction from operating precisely in opposition to this ‘epistemology of ignorance’.
However, although ‘blackness’ functions within the tour as a critical concept, with its mobilisation facilitating the ‘writing’ of an ontology of ‘blackness’ within Amsterdam during the ‘Golden Age’, I acknowledge that it is used in a very broad sense. For example, ‘blackness’ is used within the BHAT to refer to the enslaved from Africa, as well as the colonised of the Dutch Empire, such as Indonesians, Surinamese, and Antilleans. Whilst the usage of this concept does amount to a “recognition of racial stereotyping and references to 21 For a more detailed discussion on this issue, see Chapter 2.
blackness and slavery” within the Dutch context (Jordan 213), its usage potentially also runs the risk of collapsing racial boundaries and ethnicities, through Tosch’s seeking to ‘write’ a ‘total’ narrative. That is to say, the tour’s focus on Amsterdam’s ‘black’ inhabitants during the seventeenth-century under the rubric of ‘blackness’ does not immediately distinguish between the narratives of colonised Indonesians during Dutch colonial rule , in comparison to narratives of freed slave who settled in Amsterdam.
The mobilisation ‘blackness’ in this context recalls Joseph D. Jordan’s comments that, “When the categorisation of bodily features encompasses a racial epidermal schema, we can observe the process of racialisation: the ‘process of investing skin color with meaning, such that ‘black’ and ‘white’ come to function, not as descriptions of skin color, but as racial identities’” (213). As this quote highlights, although ‘blackness’ may not be used in literal sense to refer to those of a black “skin color”, the “racial identities” of the tour’s ‘black subjects’ form a ‘black’ ‘imago’ onto which its narrative of an occluded ‘black heritage’ is projected. In this sense, whilst the narrative of the tour is careful not to prize such signifiers of race away from the implicit colonial structures which underpin racial terminology, it may also withhold a critical consideration of ‘blackness’ as “part and parcel of the hierarchical positioning of black as less or evil in the dark ontology”.
Thus, this chapter has outlined the singularity of the BHAT as a hybrid touristic form operative at the nexus of heritage and memory. Whilst largely adherent to a model of “personal heritage tourism”, the tour subverts aspects nostalgia for the visitation to ‘authentic’ colonial sites, so as to reveal colonial structures of the past within Amsterdam of the present. In the following chapter I will address such questions from a differing theoretical lens, attuned to the decolonial processes of the tour, whilst considering the spatio-temporal dimensions of the ‘tour format’. In this sense, the adumbrative attempts of this chapter to outline a working concept of ‘blackness’ have only partially alluded to the coterminous
epistemic and spatio-temporal operation of the BHAT. My further analysis will discuss the territorialising process through which the BHAT re-maps the city streets in line with a decolonial episteme, as well as consolidating the extent to which the decolonial can operate in the very heart of ‘Empire’22.
CHAPTER 2: MAPPING BLACKNESS: COLONIAL SPATIALITIES
“The truth is that politics, economics, religion, architecture and art in Amsterdam are all inseparable from the Dutch involvement in slavery and the slave-trade”,
Stephen Small, Preface to Amsterdam Slavery Guide
The online presence of the BHAT serves to reflect various critical issues that I would like to address in this chapter. For example, visitors to the website of the BHAT are introduced to information on its organiser; her inspiration for creating the tour; and additional information relevant to attending the tour. The critical aims of the tour however, appear somewhat inconspicuously, being presented alongside more common descriptions of significant sites that the tour visits during its passage through Amsterdam. Take the following passage for instance:
“Visiting Amsterdam from the canals is the best way to get experience this historic city. The tour journey begins in the heart of Amsterdam at the National WWII Monument in the Dam Square. While exploring the African legacies of the past and diverse Dutch culture, we will pass several historically and culturally significant landmarks that may include: the West India House, the Anne Frank House, the Hermitage Museum and much more” (Blackheritageamsterdamtour.nl).
As is evident here, this introduction to the tour foregrounds a general emphasis on the city of Amsterdam, with the mobile aspects of the tour e.g. its incorporation of a boat ride, serving to stress the singularity of perspective entailed by navigating the city via its canal system as a unique ‘selling point’. The ‘black heritage’ elements of the tour however – such as its exploration of “African legacies” – are only briefly mentioned in connection to a broad gesture towards the tour’s focus on “Dutch culture” as embodied in the “culturally significant landmarks” of Amsterdam (Blackheritageamsterdamtour.nl). Whilst we may rightly assume
that this preliminary description is tailored to appeal to a broad spectrum of potential tour attendees – illustrating the various perspectives and stimuli that implicate the BHAT amongst existing touristic circuits within Amsterdam – its under-acknowledgement of the tour’s critical propensities highlights the need for further theorisation in this respect.
With this in mind, having previously discussed the tour as a product of the heritage industry in the previous chapter, here, I wish specifically to focus on its critical functions within a critical capacity. To begin, this chapter will focus on the tour’s discursive-mobile operation from street-level, informed by a theoretical lens attuned to the politics of the city-space. I will address the tour’s critical positioning within the consumerist logics that construct Amsterdam as ‘branded city’, before bringing to bare ways in which the tour intervenes in the structuring conditions of Amsterdam through drawing upon Marco de Waard’s concept of the “geographization of urban space” (de Waard 143). Moving further, this chapter will then outline the discursive methods through which the BHAT makes the city a navigable, and in turn legible, site of ‘black heritage’. Drawing upon the work of decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Boaventura de Souza Santos, and Anibal Quijano, I will argue that the BHAT mobilises the form of the ‘walking tour’ from an epistemological “zero point” which challenges an “epistemology of ignorance” within the Dutch context. Thus, this chapter will extend my previous meditations on ‘heritage tourism’ as a critical practice through reading the tour in relation to the decolonial project.
NAVIGATING THE URBAN
As outlined in the previous chapter, the BHAT operates at a protean nexus of heritage and memory, drawing both critical and commercial vitality through illuminating an occluded ‘black heritage’. What remains to be discussed however, is an example of such critical work in practice. For context, then, I wish to briefly to consider this discussion in light of
Amsterdam as ‘branded city’, so as to frame my later analysis. In his discussion of Amsterdam in Imagining Global Amsterdam, Marco de Waard writes, “Dutch cultural tourism is uncommonly dependent on early-modern or ‘Golden Age’ heritage. This relative one-sidedness demands a ready inventiveness on the part of local tourist organizations, as it means that the same historic episodes need to be re-narrativized time and again” (de Waard 143). What de Waard refers to here, is the dominant reproduction and reification of ‘Golden Age’ Amsterdam as a ‘branded image’; one in which the colonial underpinnings of this epoch are undermined (and to an extent “passively remembered”, if arguably “remembered” at all), in an attempt to appeal to circuits of international tourism which identifies with, and are encourage to celebrate, this ‘imaginary’ of the ‘Golden Age’. Borrowing from Bharain Mac an Bhreithiún, this ‘city brand’ funcitons as “a means of approving or legitimizing aspects of the city's identity" (Bhreithiún 257), thus constructing “a unitary sense of place on the city as whole" (257). This model of cultural tourism therefore ‘brands’ Amsterdam as a commercial spatiality onto which dominant icons and narratives of the seventeenth-century ‘imaginary’ can be mapped for touristic purposes.
Discussing the coalescing processes surrounding Rembrandt 400, a festival which celebrated the four-hundred-year anniversary of the world renowned painter, de Waard proposes that the processes in which a biography of Rembrandt van Rijn was ‘mapped’ onto the geography of Amsterdam's centre was realised through a “geographization of urban space”. That is, a “geographization” process in which cultural attractions are made legible within consumerist structures as part of a narrative “brand” aimed at the subject of the international tourist. As such, this process serves to render sites in Amsterdam at once ‘local’ and ‘global’, thereby transcending the boundaries of the national; the very space of the centre of Amsterdam itself becomes constructed as an extension of a ‘branded image’ of the city as a hyperreal zone permeated with consumerist logics. For de Waard, in light of the coalescing
of ‘global flows’ and ‘local heritage’ at this nexus, the production of this touristic “brand” constitutes the collapsing of spatio-temporal boundaries, transforming ‘urban spaces’ into “transnational sites”23 of tourism. Yet, in turn, the Dutch colonial order and its various violent manifestations which facilitated the economic prosperity of the age are displaced under the weight of this ‘branded image’.
Following de Waard, I am inclined to see a similar process of “geographization” at work with the BHAT; that is, the tour’s discursive function is realised through the embodied the ‘walking tour’ format as a critical tool. In this sense, the knowledge operation that the BHAT puts into practice speaks to the potentiality of a politics of tourism – and ‘walking’ more explicitly – as a critical practice within the city-space. Indeed, as Michel de Certeau, shows in his work The Practice of Everyday Life, walking embodies a critical capacity through transgressive qualities; that is to say, although walking is structured according to the physical construction of the city, the pedestrian transcends the governance of structured routes on a daily basis, carving out their own path through a progress of urban navigation. As such, which walking is defined in the locality of the urban environment, it also exists on a "symbolic" level. In this sense, de Certeau argues that walking as a critical practice is both subject to, yet can also potentially "write" the subject’s accessibility within the city-space, through its spatio-temporal engagement with the city as ‘urban text’ (de Certeau 114).
To put it another way, the route that a pedestrian takes through the city on a daily basis – perhaps not always that of a conscious attempt at critical practice per se – is what constitutes the city-space as ‘accessible’. In contrast, actions such as occupying city-space in public protests constitute, and indeed lay claim to, a right to access the city in a more “active” sense; a radical potentiality which functions in relation to the ‘visibility' implied in practices of public protest. Indeed, as Judith Butler has argued, the “seen” aspect of ‘appearance’
23 De Waard employs this conceptual framework in relation to the ‘Rembrandt 400’ festival that occurred between Amsterdam and Leiden in 2006.
within public space can function politically, both as a claim to – and expression of – the subject as agent (Butler Politics 117). Recalling de Certeaus’s notion of walking as a potential “tactic”, then, the quotidian-mobile act can thus be seen to lay claim to a ‘site’ through which to exercise politics within the governing structures of the metropolis. As Pascal Gielen notes, moreover, "It is precisely in the interruption of the daily routine and of the regular social intercourse in the city that the public space originates and is charged politically" (Gielen 278). Clearly, walking is imbued with a potentiality to ‘interrupt’ the structuring mechanisms of the city space24 which structure the everyday, thereby demarcating the ‘site of appearance’ (Butler Politics 117) within the city-space25, as a ‘political act’. Whilst the mobilisation of walking as a critical practice offers political potentialities within the city, it should also be pointed out that, in de Certeau’s work at least, this conceptualisation of walking entails a specific conception of the subject. As I see it, the subject envisaged through de Certeau’s writing is not dissimilar from that of the flâneur: the white, male, bourgeois agent of nineteenth century literature, as epitomised in texts such as Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life26, and Edgar Allen Poe’s Man of the Crowd. As I see it, the dominant characteristics embodied by the flâneur continue to privilege the mobility of this subject within a contemporary setting. That is to say, in consideration of a women or person of colour as an agent within this contemporary context, their agency would be somewhat compromised due to the implicit hierarchies of race within Western society27.
24 Through referring to the city space in this context, I mean to refer an understanding of the city in accordance with to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “machinic-city”. In this sense, I adhere to the understanding that the city-space is structured by a composite set of mechanisms – economic, cultural, social – that the subject simultaneously functions to produce, whilst being subjected to, in the lived ‘everyday’ of the ‘global metropole’.
25 Such as in public protests.
26 Baudelaire embodies the nineteenth century French Romantic literary tradition. For a more detailed discussion of this corpus see FB Bowman (1990).
27 For a more detailed description of racial hierarchies within Dutch society, see my discussion on Wekker in the previous chapter.
As Andreas Huyssen interestingly observes however, "today it is the tourist rather than the flâneur to whom the new city culture wants to appeal -- even as it fears the tourist's underside, the displaced and illegal migrant" (Huyssen 50). Huyssen here, brings to our attention the primacy with which consumerist logics target the city walker in the contemporary metropole; as well as the “illegal migrant” as a contemporary “Other” of the tourist. This shift embodies the development from city walking as a form of flanerie (a practice of mobility through which the gaze constituted the flâneur’s critical practice), to its assimilation within economic circuits of tourism; privileging a subject complete with disposable income who is eager to engage with the ‘foreign’ metropolis through acts of consumption. Given the neoliberal ideologies that govern the contemporary city-space, white, middle-class consumers are thus privileged subjects, whilst those deemed dispensable in accordance within consumerist logics, such as the "illegal migrant" (50), perpetuated as "Other" by these ideologies, are therefore subjected to structures of exclusion within the city. With this in mind, I would argue that walking in the city entails something of an ethnographic operation, with the dichotomous dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and accessibility/inaccessibility being coded and constructed in in relation to the profiling of ethnicity/race, class, and gender; a process of codification which, in turn, defines the ‘accessibility’ with the subject can navigate the urban plane. Butler too reaffirms this point, arguing that “the field of the visible is racially contested terrain” (Butler Endangered 17).
Yet, from another perspective, despite such potentially exclusionary dynamics which inform the “site of appearance” (Butler Politics 117) of walking, such structures may be transgressed through the potential of “performativity”, if considered in relation to tourism as mobile act. For example, the ability of tourists to interrupt the quotidian seemingly suggests that the disciplinary functions of structures in the city-space can be “interrupted” (Gielen
278) through tourist practices. Indeed, as Paul Fussel argues, the tourist constitutes an individual whom travels so as,
“to raise social status at home and to allay social anxiety; to realize secret fantasies of erotic freedom; and most important, to derive secret pleasure from posing momentarily as a member of a social class superior to one’s own, to play a role of a ‘shopper’ and a spender whose life becomes significant and exciting only when one is exercising power by choosing what to buy” (Fussel qtd. in Culler 3).
As this brief summation captures, the tourist is constructed in a relationship of economic exchange to the ‘foreign’ environment in which they find themselves. Yet, this practice also constitutes a form of “performativity” in that the tourist is able to perform their agency in accordance to social relation of ‘value’; that is to say, relations of status, desire, and freedom, are ‘performed’ by the tourist as part of the ritual that tourism affords. With this discussion in mind, I would like to bring together these issues in the following section; namely, the potentialities of tourism as a critical, ethnographic practice as seen through the lens of decolonial theory.
DECOLONIAL SPACE: DELINKING AS PRACTICE
Walter Mignolo’s theorisation in The Darker Side of Western Modernity provides a framework through which to understand colonial epistemic logics, in an effort to break from the hegemony of such structures in which colonial logics circulate. In this sense, Mignolo conceives of the decolonial project as a form of critique that is not merely concerned with past historical conditions of subjection; on the contrary, it aims to confront the pervasiveness of European colonialism within contemporary contexts (as manifested in the continued hegemony of Western epistemologies), so as to facilitate the emergence and co-existence, of non-Western epistemologies. For example, in relation to the construction of race as a category of classification – subject to hegemonic structures of thinking in the Enlightenment
