Travels through a land of dreams and fancies: Colonial travelogues, memory and the Dutch East Indies

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Travels through a land of dreams and fancies

Colonial travelogues, memory and the Dutch East Indies

Research Master Thesis Media Studies Arnoud Arps

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Travels through a land of dreams and fancies

Colonial travelogues, memory and the Dutch East Indies

Research Master Thesis Media Studies Research Master’s in Media Studies Department of Media Studies Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam

Date of submission: 27th of July 2015 Final version thesis

Supervisor: dr. M.A.M.B. (Marie-Aude) Lous Baronian Second reader: prof. dr. ir. B.J. (Jeroen) de Kloet Third reader: dr. L.K. (Leonie) Schmidt

Arnoud S. Arps 6081150

arnoud.arps@student.uva.nl

Image on title page:

‘Europese mannen en een vrouw voor een auto in Nederlands-Indië’ Photographer unknown, 1933-1940

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ABSTRACT

This thesis addresses the concept of the colonial travelogue as it travels through different media: from the analogue forms literature and home movies to contemporary digital counterparts. Specifically it elaborates on autobiographical travelogues from the Dutch East Indies and shows that post-colonial Dutch cultural memory practices are modulated by colonial travelogues from the Dutch East Indies. Colonial

travelogues are perceived as lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, with a coexistent material, functional and symbolical purpose. Whereas the material purpose changes due to the specificity of each medium, the functional and symbolical purposes are in constant flux due to the various affective links between audience and travelogues. Moreover, these affective links stand at the basis of alternating Dutch cultural

memories of the Dutch East Indies. As will be underscored, on the one hand this is the result of the temporal shift of the travelogues (understanding the travelogues in their colonial context as opposed to current post-colonial times) and on the other hand on the basis of a spatial relation of substitution (understanding media not only as carriers of memory, but also as constitutors of memory). Concluding, this thesis proposes that the colonial travelogue must be understood as a travelling mnemonic concept – a mnemonic concept that refracts and traverses disciplinary boundaries, historical periods and cultural contexts - which modulates post-colonial Dutch cultural memory practices in perpetually varying manners.

Keywords

Travelogue; Literature; Home Movies; Travelling mnemonic concept; Dutch East Indies

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INTRODUCTION:

THE MODULATION OF MEMORIES

When the Lady Dolly van der Decken, in answer to questions about her legendary husband’s whereabouts, murmured something vague about “Java, Japan or Jupiter,” she had Java in her mind as the most “impossible” of those impossible places. And, indeed, every schoolboy points the finger of

unceremonious acquaintance at Jupiter; and Japan lies transparent on the egg shell porcelain of many an elegant tea-table. But Java? What far forlorn shore may it be that owns the strange-sounding name; and in what sailless seas may this other Ultima Thule be fancied to float? Time was when I never saw a globe – all spun about with the net of parallels and degrees, as with some vast spider’s web – without a little shock of surprise at finding “Java” hanging in the meshes. How could there be latitude and longitude to such a thing of dreams and fancies?

Augusta de Wit

The quote presented above is taken from Augusta de Wit’s travelogue Fact and

Fancies about Java (1898), in which she describes her travels through the Dutch East

Indies. Although written more than one hundred years ago, stories such as these are still actively part of the Dutch cultural field concerning the Dutch East Indies. In the foreword of Bitterzoet Indië [Bittersweet Indies] (2014) Pamela Pattynama explains that after the Dutch East Indies formally ceased to exist in 1945, the many stories told by the Dutch about the Dutch East Indies did not.1 She states that the decolonization and the following migration initiated the recycling, continuation and revival of

existing stories on the Dutch East Indies (14). Such stories as the one from De Wit are constructed and dispersed through various means and media such as exhibitions, plays, films, photo albums and literature and are undoubtedly part of Dutch cultural heritage. It is therefore to no surprise that in studies on the national heritage of the Netherlands, the Dutch East Indies has been an object of study.2 Within these studies the role of media in relation to the construction of memory has been the most

1_{Pattynama
refers
to
the
17}th_{of
August
1945,
recognized
by
the
Dutch
government
as
the
official}

date of independence. She explains that prior to a statement by minister Bot of Foreign Affairs in 2005, the 27th_{of
December
1949
was
recognized
as
day
of
independence.
On
this
date
the
Dutch}

handed over the sovereignty to Indonesia. However, as opposed to 1945 The Dutch East Indies can also be seen as formally having ceased to exist with the occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942. After the Second World War, the Dutch never regained similar control over Indonesia as to prior to the war when it was officially the Dutch East Indies.

2_{For
examples,
see
Ons
Indisch
Erfgoed
(2008)
by
Lizzy
van
Leeuwen,
De
IWI-‐collectie
als} postkoloniaal erfgoed (2011) by Pamela Pattynama and Extended Family Films (2009) by Julia

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significant topic (notably in the work of Pamela Pattynama), although the main focus has been on literature. As Elleke Boehmer and Sarah de Mul have argued,

postcolonial researchers such as Pamela Pattynama, Liesbeth Minnaard, Louise

Viljoen and author Sarah de Mul herself have demonstrated how literature plays a role in the memorisation of the colonial past (Boehmer and De Mul 14). In regard to the Dutch East Indies this is exemplified by Pattynama’s work on the representation of Indo-Dutch mixed race communities in Dutch literature (14). Besides this elaboration on the relation between literature and memory, fiction films also have had critical attention (Pattynama 2007, 2014). Within these two forms of media, literature and film, a persistent mode of representation that constantly reappears can be recognized: these are travel narratives, meaning in the broadest sense stories that refract space, place and mobility in their representations.

It is from the 17th century onwards, as early as Dutch skipper William Ysbrantz Bontekoe’s tale East Indian Voyage (1618-1625) (1646), that travel

narratives from and about the Dutch East Indies were created. Through stories such as Bontekoe’s and the above quoted citation by Augusta de Wit, stories of “such a thing of dreams and fancies” produced lively images of the colony overseas. Travel

narratives arguably had and have a significant impact in the construction of our images and our understanding of other nations, cultures and people. Situated within a colonial discourse, colonial travel writing produced a biased view on colonial life. It is important to emphasize that in the current globalised world, travel narratives are still abundantly present; think of the many food travel shows, films about travel and travel blogs that can be found. Moreover, as explained, colonial travelogues are even now circulating. Because of this, both the colonial travelogues and its contemporary counterpart continuously shape the way the world sees the past.

These narratives are not neutral seeing that they produce constructed knowledge about the world through representation. Stuart Hall explained in

Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997) that

representation and culture are connected to one another and that “language is the privileged medium in which we ‘make sense’ of things and in which meaning is produced and exchanged” (1).3 In the videotaped lecture Representation and Media (Sut Jhally, 1997) Stuart Hall furthermore added that visual representation is not

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simply a reflection or distortion of reality, but rather that it is constitutive of it (6-7).4 He contends that “the process of representation has entered into the event itself” (7-8). Hall states that “it is one of its conditions of existence, and therefore

representation is not outside the event, not after the event, but within the event itself; it is constitutive of it” (7-8). Seeing the colonial travelogues as representations that constitute an event, these travelogues represent a Dutch East Indies that is understood in relation to the world of the reader or spectator. This suggestion is underscored by Hall’s idea that the meaning of representations can differ according to the change in audience: “And the representations – since they’re likely to be very different as you move from one person to another, one group or another, one part of society or another, one historical moment and another – just as those forms of representation will change, so the meaning of the event will change” (7). Seeing the travel narratives as representations that are constitutive of the reality of a spectator and understanding that the meaning of a representation differs when the audience changes, underscores why travel narratives are an important object to study. In particular in relation to how the Dutch colonial past in the Indies is represented through cultural practices,

considering its recurrence in the Dutch cultural landscape.

It is therefore noteworthy that in current academic debate, what seems to be lacking is a specific focus on the relation between contemporary memories practices of the Dutch East Indies and the travel narratives that have been circulating in Dutch culture since early colonial times. This thesis will therefore elaborate on colonial travel narratives, or from now on colonial travelogues, from the Dutch East Indies in various mediated forms. In delineating the vast amount of travelogues, in this thesis the focus lies on travelogues that are seemingly autobiographical. The definition of the travelogue already suggests that the travelogue captures the experiences of the author. The Oxford dictionary describes the travelogue in one sentence as “a film, book, or illustrated lecture about the places visited by or experiences of a traveller” and in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary, the travelogue is basically described as “a speech, movie, or piece of writing about someone’s traveling”. Still, three more elaborate definitions follow in the latter dictionary: “a talk or lecture on travel usually accompanied by a film or slides”, “a narrated motion picture about travel” and “a piece of writing about travel”. The three more specific definitions are the ones usually

4_{The
page
numbers
refer
to
the
published
transcript
of
the
lecture.
See
the
bibliography
for}

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linked to the travelogue, be it as a performance, a literary genre or a film genre. What is inherent to all the definitions is the autobiographical content of the travelogue. There are however, also travelogues that are not autobiographical, of which Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is the most notable. These travelogues are gathered under the denominator ‘imagined voyage’ or ‘voyage imaginaire’ (Longley Arthur 2-3). The distinction between autobiographical travelogues and imagined travelogues give the impression that there is a binary opposition between the two. Nonetheless, in this thesis I will show that there is no clear separation between the two, because all colonial travelogues represent the world in a biased manner and not ‘as it is’. Thus, in a way, all travelogues are partly

imagined, or constructed.

Although the selected travelogues have a seemingly personal disposition, they occupy a significant part of Dutch cultural memory on the Indies. Rather than seeing the travelogues as historical documents, this thesis elaborates on the image of the Dutch East Indies that is represented in the various mediated travelogues. Building further on Hall’s idea that the meaning of representations can differ due to a change in audience; this thesis will explore how colonial travelogues from the Dutch East Indies exert a modifying influence on post-colonial Dutch cultural memory practices, that is the cultural practices by which memories of the Indies are remembered and

represented.5 To define this concretely, this will be done on the basis of the following research question:

How are post-colonial Dutch cultural memory practices modulated by colonial travelogues from the Dutch East Indies?

The first step towards an answer is that colonial travelogues must be understood as what Pierre Nora has coined lieux de mémoire - or sites of memory where people can come in contact with memory - with a coexistent material, functional and symbolical purpose. These different purposes are explained by Nora as three aspects of a site of memory. To be considered as a lieu de mémoire, a site must hold these three aspects in coexistence (18-19). Nora gives the example of a historical generation: it is

5_{Ashcroft,
Griffiths
and
Tiffin
(1998)
have
shown
that
‘postcolonialism’
has
various
meanings.
In}

this thesis I follow the distinction of post-‐colonialism referring to a clearly chronological meaning and postcolonialism which refers to the dealing with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies (Ashcroft, et al, 186).

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material in the sense of its demographic content, functional because memories are transmitted from one generation onto the other and symbolical since it characterises a larger group that may have not participated in shared experiences (19). Colonial travelogues too are lieux de mémoire. Whereas the material purpose changes due to the specificity of each medium, the functional and symbolical purposes are in constant flux due to the various affective links made by the travelogues. In following the principle idea in visual culture theory that emotional experiences can be evoked by images (Smith 1995; Plantinga and Smith 1999; Bennett 2005), I argue that the images of the travelogues do this too, but the evoked experiences differ when the audience alter. Moreover, these affective links stand at the basis of alternating Dutch cultural memories of the Dutch East Indies. As will be underscored, on the one hand this is the result of the temporal shift of the travelogues (understanding the

travelogues in their colonial context as opposed to current post-colonial times) and on the other hand on the basis of a spatial relation of substitution (understanding media not only as carriers of memory, but also as constitutors of memory). In addition, the affective links made by the colonial travelogue and Dutch cultural memories can be understood through what is presented [the content] and how it is presented [medium specificity and the relation with the audience].

Before setting out the general outline and methodology, it is fruitful to first expand on the link between memories and the Dutch East Indies by explaining the main theoretical concepts that will be dealt with from the field of memory studies, a field that Astrid Erll rightfully classifies as a “multidisciplinary field” and “an interdisciplinary project” (2005, 1-2).

Memory and the Dutch East Indies

As an ex-colony of the Netherlands and as a non-existent homeland for many people, the Dutch East Indies still has a prominent place in contemporary Dutch culture and in Dutch collective memory. There are multiple examples that can be found in various cultural expressions. Not only are these cultural expressions manifold in the ways how the Indies are commemorated, but what is commemorated also varies greatly. There is for example a yearly ceremony on the 15th of August 1945 that is part of the

remembrance of the capitulation of the Japanese, marking the end of World War II in the Indies, which is broadcasted on national television. There are also many

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dedicated to the remembrance of the Dutch soldiers who died in the Indonesian War of Independence.6 In Bronbeek there is the ‘Indisch Herinneringscentrum’ [Dutch East Indies’ Memorial Centre] that commemorate the events during World War II and the subsequent decolonization. In the Tropenmuseum [Museum of the Tropics] in Amsterdam there is a permanent exhibition on the Dutch East Indies reflecting 350 years of Dutch presence in Indonesia. In the summer of 2014 a theatre play called

Once upon a time in the East was being performed throughout the country at De

Parade.7 From January until March 2015 Dutch author and filmmaker of Indo descent Marion Bloem toured through theatres in the country with her performance Geen

gewoon Indisch meisje [No Ordinary Indo Girl]. Every month, Moesson [Monsoon],

an ‘Indo’ magazine is published. There is a scientific journal named Indische Letteren [Dutch East Indies’ Literature] published every quarter of the year, which organises a yearly symposium. And Dutch director Jim Taihuttu is currently making a film on the ‘politionele acties’ or Indonesian War of Independence. To summarise, the Dutch East Indies are as alive as ever. The recurrence of the Dutch East Indies in these various cultural expressions must lead to the conclusion that the Dutch East Indies can be considered as part of Dutch cultural memory – “a collective symbolic order

through which social groups and societies establish their knowledge systems and versions of the past (their ‘memory’)” (Erll 99). This observation is acknowledged by the ‘Canon of Dutch History’, which is a list of fifty topics that was established by a committee consisting mainly of scholars form various Dutch universities

commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The goal of the list is to map out the most important events in Dutch history that are part of Dutch collective memory, summarised in the committee’s report titled A Key To Dutch

History (2007).

The term cultural memory is coined by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann who described it as “a collective concept for all knowledge that directs behaviour and experience in the interactive framework of a society and one that obtains through generations in repeated social practice and initiation” (126). It is in fact a collective

6_{The
‘Indisch
Monument’
is
located
in
the
Scheveningse
Bosjes
in
The
Hague
and
consists
of}

seventeen bronze figures. The Olympiaplein in Amsterdam is the location of the controversial ‘Monument Indië-‐Nederland’, which was originally made in honour of Dutch general J.B. Van Huetz. Later, the function changed to its current monument in honour of the relation between the Netherlands and Indonesia during the colonial period. In the centre of Leiden, the ‘Indië-‐

monument’ is a bronze statue of three male figures with an empty space in-‐between them.

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memory of a social group that creates a sense of unity, for example based on shared narratives. A quite striking example of such a shared narrative is the abovementioned ‘Canon of Dutch History’, which portrays selected events ranging from the spread of Christianity in the Netherlands to the great painter Rembrandt van Rijn in the style of a chronological map.

These events selected and presented in windows constitute what the committee calls ‘a canon for all Dutch people’ and one of the selected historical events is defined as ‘Overseas expansion’, which includes the colonisation of present-day Indonesia. Serving as background texts to these windows are a collection of fourteen ‘main lines of the canon’. Dutch colonial rule is categorised under main line number eight, titled ‘Business sense and colonial power’. The larger map arguably provides a grand Dutch shared narrative comprising of the fifty more specific ones. Another shared narrative that relates to the ‘overseas expansion’ and the ‘business sense and colonial power’ of the Netherlands, which will be elaborated on in this thesis, is that of the travelogue from the Dutch East Indies.

Research on memories comprises of a vast interdisciplinary academic field and comprises of many different angles. To study the relation between cultural memories

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of the Dutch East Indies and the various cultural expressions of it, a specification needs to be made. This research argues that memories of the Dutch East Indies are produced through a relation between specifically travelogues and memory that can be defined on the one hand as a non-linear temporal relation and on the other hand as a spatial relation of substitution. Within the broader framework of cultural memory, this thesis proposes that the colonial travelogue can be seen in relation to its later temporal counterpart, the post-colonial travelogue. Furthermore, the different mediated

travelogues can be seen as a spatial relation of substitution in the sense that they produce prosthetic memories. Alison Landsberg shows that prosthetic memory is “a new form of memory, which […] emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre of museum” (2). Although not having experienced the event, people feel as if they have, due to these prosthetic memories. They can thus replace natural memories in an artificial manner (20). Landsberg argues specifically that mass media create a fabricated bond between its users or audience and memory. In doing so, audiences construct a memory that is not their own personal one.

In the same sense I will show that the different mediated colonial travelogues give audiences the feeling as if they have experienced the travels themselves, thus replacing natural memories with prosthetic memories. However, this thesis does not focus on a specific mass medium such as television or film. Rather it elaborates on the concept of the travelogue, which as will be shown, does modulate post-colonial Dutch memory practices in a similar manner as mass media do. The following chapters will illustrate that the affective link between audience and travelogue is decisive for this modulation considering that it attunes both the temporal and the spatial relations between travelogues.

Famous (Indo-)Dutch writers such as Beb Vuyk (1905-1991), E. du Perron (1899-1940), Marie van Zeggelen (1870-1957), Louis Couperus (1863-1923) and Augusta de Wit (1864-1939) have all contributed, predominantly published during colonial times, to the immense corpus of written travelogues. Still, home movies are equally, but in a different manner, important for understanding the relation between travelogues and memory. These once private filmed travelogues have now become widespread and public through their readily accessibility in archives. Moreover, the use of these images in artworks and exhibitions has expanded the acquaintance of these images to the public.

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Building further upon the idea of temporal and spatial substitution, I argue that the affective link made by the travelogue will alter the way memories are made. To illustrate this, this research focuses on the overarching concept of the travelogue with the subgenres of travel narratives in literature, amateur film and its digital or

contemporary counterparts. The colonial travelogue

As stated, this thesis deals with the travelogue as “a speech, movie, or piece of writing about someone’s traveling”. The following chapters will specify how the colonial travelogue is perceived in their different mediated forms. Regarding the adjective ‘colonial’, this refers to the timespan in which the chosen objects of study have been produced: from 1861-1939 and specifically focusing on colonial Dutch East Indies.

As already mentioned, in this thesis a genealogy of the colonial travelogue will be set out. This is done to establish a broad understanding of the origins of the concept. Augusta de Wit’s earlier mentioned Facts and fancies about Java8, Beb Vuyk’s The Last House in The World (1905), Jan ten Brink’s Op de grenzen der

Preanger [On the borders of the Preanger] (1861) and H.C. Rutgers’ travelogue Wat ik op mijn Indische reis zag [What I saw during my Indies journey](1928) will be the

primary case studies for the chapter on the written colonial travelogue. For the second chapter on travelogues as amateur films, several home movies from the Dutch East Indies are analysed, namely Onze Indische reis [Our Indies journey] (Unknown, 1924), Indisch familiealbum I [Indies family album I] (Ch. de Vogel, 1933), Van

Marseille naar Nederlands-Indië [From Marseille to the Dutch East Indies] (Ab Boks,

1935), Een trip over Java [A trip over Java] (Unknown, 1938) and Kerbert terug van

verlof [Kerbert returned from leave] (Kerbert, 1939). Lastly contemporary versions of

the colonial travelogue are analysed. The main objects of study will be the Dutch television series Van Dis in Indonesië (Hans Pool, 2012), Instagram posts and the online travel community WaarBenJij.nu.

Importantly, the chosen colonial travelogues were either made by or represent the lifestyle of ‘Europeans’ in the Dutch East Indies. The demography of the Indies consisted of people originating from various countries. However, two large groups of ethnic people were commonly discerned on the basis of descent (and thus mostly on

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the basis of external characteristics): the ‘Europeans’ and the native inhabitants (later Indonesians). The group of Europeans consisted of the Dutch or totok (Caucasian, Dutch people who where either born in the Dutch East Indies or moved there) and the Indo-Europeans (people of both Dutch and native Indonesian descent) (Beets et al. 11-14).9_{The other group were the native Indonesians, who where not of European} descent.1011_{The fact that the travelogues were made by Europeans during colonial} times made it inevitable that these travelogues represent the Dutch East Indies from a colonial discourse. Therefore the represented Indies are biased by a Western vantage point on colonial life.

Methodology

The case studies that will be elaborate on are a selection of the colonial travelogue in literature, home movies and contemporary cultural artefacts. As I wish to argue, specific knowledge and memories of the Dutch East Indies is produced by an aspect of the colonial travelogue: the affective link made between audience and travelogue. Although the formal means by which this happens vary due to the specificity of each medium, it is asserted that it is the act of travelling itself that is key to this relation. Hence, the argument is that the colonial travelogue cannot only be seen as merely a genre or trope, but is rather in itself a lieu de mémoire that is fundamentally grounded in Dutch national heritage and that travels not only temporally – from colonial times to contemporary times- but also travels through media –from colonial literature, through colonial home movies to contemporary digital media. The concept of the travelogue is not bound to a specific medium. Rather, it traverses media and to this end it is needed to study the travelogue in its various forms. Because the travelogue appears so diversely in Dutch memory practices, the colonial travelogue can be considered as the fundament of Dutch cultural memories of the Indies. In

understanding the colonial travelogue as such, the main argument is that the colonial

9_{Beets
et
al.
clarify
that
these
distinctions
based
on
descent
were
commonly
used
until
the
forties}

of the twentieth century; later distinctions were based on circumstances such as the forced repatriation or based on own experiences.

10_{Yet,
to
be
recognized
as
a
European,
the
father
of
an
Indo-‐European
child
must
acknowledge
it}

as being his European child. Some Indo-‐European children who where not recognized as Europeans were therefore ‘banned’ to the native Indonesians.

11_{Dividing
the
population
of
the
Dutch
East
Indies
into
these
above-‐mentioned
ethnic
groups}

however is a distinction based on essentialist definitions. Another large group that is for example overlooked by these distinction are the peranakan Chinese families (people of Chinese descent that were born and raised in the Dutch East Indies).

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travelogue modulates postcolonial memories of the Dutch East Indies by means of their affective link.

To answer the earlier mentioned research question, this thesis makes a point for a relation between the travelling of the images through different media, the changing audiences and varying affective links and different modes of memory making, but all in the broader context of the colonial travelogue as a lieu de mémoire. The methodology of this thesis can thus be summarised as a genealogy of the

mediated colonial travelogue analysed on the basis of its formal properties, the travelogues’ affective link with the audience and understood in the theoretical framework of memory studies.

As a genealogy of the colonial travelogue, the thesis sets off from the first mediated form of the colonial travelogue: literature. Afterwards, the colonial travelogue in home movies will be elaborated on and lastly the colonial travelogue and its contemporary counterparts will be juxtaposed to study the remnants of the former into the latter. To do so, in this thesis an interdisciplinary methodological approach is used in which a textual analysis is used in combination with postcolonial theory, globalisation studies and memory studies. Since the travelogue itself travels through various spaces, media and time, I believe the travelogue needs a

methodological grid that is in itself comprised of different theoretical approaches. The interdisciplinary methodological approach that I use in this thesis is in line with the proposition of an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis by Mieke Bal in

Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002). The approach for her project is based

on the idea that “interdisciplinarity in the humanities, necessary, exciting, serious, must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than methods” (5). Bal makes clear that it is the object that takes centre stage, because the concept should help understand the object – in its own terms (8). Whilst talking about the evolution of film theory, Robert Stam states that it “cannot be narrated as a linear progression of movements and phases. The contours of theory vary from country to country and from moment to moment, and movements and ideas can be concurrent rather than successive or mutually exclusive” (2). Similar to this, I want to illustrate that the concept of the travelogue varies from medium to medium and from moment to

moment, and that movements and ideas (on travelogues) can be concurrent rather than successive or mutually exclusive. In consonance with Bal, the various objects

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that “this means that they are not isolated jewels, but as things always-already engaged, as interlocutors, within the larger culture from which they have emerged” (9). For Bal, the analyses of these objects then refrain to looking for issues of cultural relevance and aim to articulate how objects contribute to cultural debates. This is the reason why emphasis is made on the objects’ existence in the present. This results in the notion that it is the object itself that functions as the ‘speaker’ in an analytic discussion and not the artist or author of the object (9). The objects in this thesis (the various travelogues) will be analysed and understood through the overarching concept of the travelogue and positioned within Dutch memory culture.

In the end however, I want to argue that the affective link is deep-seated in the travelogue and important for the way we remember the Dutch East Indies. To

demonstrate this, each chapter of this thesis is subdivided into three parts that underscore the relation between affective link and memory making: the first

subchapter is a contextual analysis on the basis of historical aspects of the travelogue, the second is a textual analysis of the travelogue in which the content is related to the audience to determine the affective links and the third subchapter underscores the relation between the medium-specific affective link and private and Dutch collective memory.

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1. THE WRITTEN COLONIAL TRAVELOGUE

Obviously and as stated before, the genre of the travelogue has developed throughout the years. Where stories about the Dutch East Indies were first transferred orally, the written colonial travelogue was the first mediated form of the travelogue. It therefore functions as a prehistory of the later visual travelogues. Since extensive research has been done on the written colonial travelogue and to fully grasp the genre of the colonial travelogue, it is necessary to set out some of the various perspectives on the travelogue. In the first subchapter a short overview of existing studies on travel writing will be set forth that will underscore the autobiographical content of the written travelogue. Afterwards, two case studies will demonstrate how the

specificities of the form of colonial travel writing constitute certain representations of the Dutch East Indies. Finally, the constructed meanings of the representations will be related to memories on the Indies and the role of autobiographical content will come to the fore.

1.1 Memorable descriptions: The history of the written travelogue

As Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs acknowledge in the Cambridge Companion to

Travel Writing (2002), “writing and travel have always been intimately

connected” and thus “the traveller’s tale is as old as fiction itself” (1). From the sixteenth century onwards, writing became an essential part of traveling because documentation became an integral aspect of travel (Hulme and Youngs 3).

Reasons for this were first and foremost of a political and commercial nature. The people who paid for the travels, the sponsors, wanted reports and maps of the places visited. Through these stories, public interest was aroused and it attracted investment. In a similar vain, settlers were lured to the distant colonies via the travel stories (Hulme and Youngs 3).

It is however, the independence of perspective inherent to travel writing that is the real power of travel writing. What is meant by this is that the fact that the traveller was physically present and described through their own eyes what was there, which defeated speculation (Hulme and Youngs 4). This

autobiographical content is a common trait in Dutch East Indies’ literature. Many literary works from the canon of Dutch East Indies’ colonial literature can be considered as ego documents, which are “documents about personal events and

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life experiences” (Dekker 103). In regards to Dutch East Indies’ literature, Dorothée Buur has conducted research on these ego documents. The compilation she made, called Persoonlijke documenten. Nederlands-Indië/Indonesië [Personal documents. Dutch East Indies/Indonesia] (1973), consists of a bibliography of letters, diaries, poems, young-adult fiction, memoires, novels, travel stories and plays as long as they could be considered as ego documents concerning the Dutch East Indies or Indonesia. The book spans from 1800 until 1970 and when taking 1947 as Indonesia’s year of independence, Buur has compiled 161 pages of colonial literature, which translates to 1713 objects up to that year. 119 of these are written colonial travelogues. This extensive bibliography illustrates the vastness and ever presence of ego documents in Dutch colonial literature and colonial travelogues.

Importantly, the ‘independence of perspective’ or ‘documents about personal events and life experiences’ is the main point in regard to the affective link of written travelogues. The reason being that this shaped the format of the travelogue, but also influenced how readers perceived the texts. The authors of many of the written travelogues in Dutch East Indies colonial literature namely introduce their travelogue as presenting ‘life as they encountered it’. Three authors that appear in Buur’s bibliography who exemplify this are Dutch writers Augusta de Wit (1864-1939), Jan ten Brink (1834-1901) and H. C. Rutgers (1880-1964). The first chapter of Dutch author Augusta de Wit’s travelogue Facts and

Fancies about Java, which will be given more context in the succeeding

subchapter, is called ‘First glimpses’. De Wit starts with her explaining her first impression of Java, which is that of an “unspeakably tender, ethereal, and soft” country (3). In the remainder of the travelogue De Wit speaks from the first person, emphasising that she is describing the Dutch East Indies not only from her perspective, but also as it is – thus making a claim for the truth. The following travelogue from Buur is that of Dutch writer Jan ten Brink. After having just received his doctorate, Ten Brink travelled to the Dutch East Indies in 1860 to work as a teacher. He stayed for only one year, which he almost entirely spent in Batavia. However, he made one trip into West Java about which he wrote a travelogue called Op de grenzer der Preanger. Reisschetsen en mijmeringen (1861). Ten Brink divides his travelogue in reisschetsen [accounts of travel] and mijmeringen [musings]. It is important to note that by doing this, he clearly

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establishes that certain writings of him are factual whilst others are not. Similar to De Wit, this makes Ten Brink’s travelogue seem to portray ‘reality’ when not referring to his musings.

The Dutch author H.C. Rutgers was the secretary of the Dutch Christian Student Association from 1915 until 1936. He died in 1964 at the age of 84. In 1928 Rutgers wrote his travelogue Wat ik op mijn Indische reis zag. In the

travelogue he describes his journey from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies and back again. In the Dutch East Indies he travelled from Medan in North-Sumatra to various cities in Java. Rutgers introduces his travelogue by stating that he wants to write a simple travelogue. He specifies that one must not seek

anything scientific in the travelogue and that he presents himself not as an expert on the Dutch East Indies (5). He continues stating that he simply wrote down what he saw. Here, he constitutes the idea that all that he wrote is simply as it were. However, his European descent in combination with the colonial discourse from which he wrote makes his travelogue one with biased representations. This last point holds to be true for all writers.

Hulme and Youngs further argue that the eccentricities and extravagances of the traveller is what has attracted so many readers to the genre of travel writing (5). Whence attracted, readers could immerse themselves in the stories about far away places, which were poetic, exotic and undoubtedly different from their own environments. The relation between the depicted images of colonies and foreign countries produced lively images. What kind of images were produced and the consequences of these representations have been an object of study since the late nineties of the twentieth century and increasingly so (Duncan and Gregory 1). The recent emergence of the academic interest in travel writing resulted in various and varied works on the many aspects that entail travel writing. Mary Louise Pratt’s

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), in which she focuses

on how an imperial, or colonial, discourse is set out in the ways in which foreign countries are represented, can be considered a key text within the studies on travel writing. Other aspects of travel writing that have attracted scholars is the relation between gender and travel writing (Mills 1991; Kinsley 2008; Walchester 2014), ‘exoticism’ and ‘diversity’ in travel writing from the Francophone world

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activity that is animated by desire and haunted by guilt (Porter 1991). Dutch East Indies’ examples of research on travel writing are a collection on the topic of travels to the Indies (Van Zonneveld 1996), a book on imaginary voyages

(Buijnsters 2004) and recently a collection on travels within the Dutch East Indies (Honings and Van Zonneveld 2015).

In their study Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (1998), James Duncan and Derek Gregory recognise two ways in which travel writing has been approached. On the one hand “travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible” (2). On the other hand, “usually more self-consciously theoretical in its inclinations and drawing on both poststructuralism and post-colonialism, travel writing has been analysed as an ensemble of textual practices that can be made to disclose the characteristic gestures of an ‘imperial stylistics’” (2-3). It is this second approach that will be elaborated on in the following

subchapter. The corpus studied through this approach is however not Anglophone or Francophone as in the case of the studies mentioned above.

In their companion to travel writing, Hulme and Youngs realise that their volume only offers a “tentative map of a vast, little-explored area”, which is the academic field of studying travel writing, and thus they already acknowledge one of its drawbacks. Another drawbacks is its main focus on Anglophone travel writing. In fact, the conventional mode in which postcolonial studies is formed is either

Anglophone or Francophone (Boehmer and De Mul 61). Obviously the corpus of travel writing is not exclusive to the Anglophone and Francophone world and in this thesis Dutch East Indies’ travel writing will be elaborated on. In doing so, it adds to the growing field of travel in a ‘neerlandophone’ context.

In the chapter Towards a Neerlandophone Postcolonial Studies, Elleke Boehmer and Sarah de Mul argue for approaches that can be understood as

‘neerlandophone postcolonial studies’ by engaging with other scholars in the field of modern language. Boehmer and De Mul refer to Charles Forsdick and David Murray whose work has, as they say, “exposed the ineffectiveness and indeed redundancy of mostly anglocentric attempts to divide postcolonialisms along language-specific lines” (67). Whereas Boehmer and De Mul suggest a specific Neerlandophone postcolonialism, this thesis refers to established texts within postcolonial studies to understand the specificities of the Dutch East Indies’ travel writing. In doing so, this

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thesis steps away from a language-specific line and underscores how established texts remain functional when used to understand a different context. In the next subchapter Dutch East Indies’ travel writing will be studied through the lens of texts such as Edward Said’s and Mary Louise Pratt’s. And although these texts did not initially elaborated on the Dutch East Indies, the theories set out in these books are valuable to understand this differing context. Where Ann Stoler argued that conventional

postcolonial ideas about ‘coloniser’ and ‘hybridity’ need to be re-calibrated and elaborated to properly understand the mixed-race colonial elite in literature of the Dutch East Indies (Boehmer and De Mul 69), I suggest that Said’s and Pratt’s theories need to be slightly re-calibrated and elaborated on to give a proper analytical and historicised understanding of Dutch East Indies’ travel writing.

1.2 A land of dreams and fancies: The travelogue’s form in literature A tremulous splendor suddenly shot over the rush-beds and rank waving grasses of the marshy land; the shining reed-pricked sheets of water

crimsoned; and along the canal moving like an incandescent lava stream, the broadly curving banana leaves seemed fountains of purple light, and the palmetto and delicate mimosa fronds grew transparent in the all-pervading rosiness – almost immaterial. Even after the burning edge of the sun,

perceived for a brief moment, had sunk away, these marvelous colours did not fade; softly shining they seemed to be the natural tint of this wonderful land – independent of suns and seasons.

Augusta de Wit Written colonial travel accounts have been the object of study for many scholars (most notably in the works of Mary Louise Pratt). It is the ways in which they portray a land far abroad that is crucial in postcolonial studies and the question how these text do this, is central in this subchapter. Although the many written colonial travelogues can be approached from different angels, it is in particular the aestheticisation of the places described and the representations of the local inhabitants that draw particular attention here. This is so because travel (writing) relies on the description of the places that are visited and because the absence and presence of the local inhabitants is also quite striking. In all, the colonial discourse from which the book is written is the driving force of the ways in which these accounts of travel thus set out certain images of the relations of local inhabitants and colonisers, men and women, different social classes, etc. So first a focus will be given on how the Indies are represented.

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That living in the Dutch East Indies meant living in a beautiful place with splendid nature is hard to object when reading Augusta de Wit’s abovementioned description of the land. Take for example note of how De Wit in the quote above aestheticizes the Dutch East Indies and represents it as a “wonderful land” which is “independent of suns and seasons”, but in which local inhabitants are absent (10). After having lived in the Dutch East Indies throughout her younger years De Wit left the Dutch East Indies for her education in the Netherlands and England. In 1898 she returned to the Dutch East Indies and wrote impressions of her travels through the land. She wrote them for the Singaporean newspaper the Singapore Straits Times, which published these impressions. In her descriptions, she gives a lot of attention to the flora, the local inhabitants and the nature and landscapes of the Dutch East Indies. In the book, she portrays the flora, fauna and people of the Indies through various means, which can be understood on the basis of Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of Victorian discovery

rhetoric.12 Firstly, De Wit aestheticizes the landscape. After having arrived in the Indies in the harbour of Tandjong Priok, De Wit boards a train to travel through the country. As she is looking out of the window she sees the sun rising and describes it as follows:

There had been no heralding change of colour in the eastern sky; only the uncertain light that lay over the landscape had gradually strengthened; and, all at once, at some height above the horizon a triangular splendour burst forth, a great heart of flame which was the sun. The pools and tracts of marshy ground flooded by the recent rains were ridged with long straight parallel lines of red. The dark tufts of palm trees here and there shone like burnished bronze. And where they grew denser, in groups and little groves, the blue mist hanging between the stems was pierced by lances of reddish light (166).

What is apparent here is that De Wit did not simply described the land, she almost praised it as if it was sacred. It resonates with the claim by Susie Protschky, who analysed rural idylls in colonial paintings and photographs from the Dutch East Indies, that the naturalisation of Dutch conquest through images can be considered as part of ‘mooi Indië’ or, beautiful Indies, images. In her book Images of the Tropics (2011) Protschky combines both the realist discourse of ‘classic’ historians and the study of representations of ‘postcolonial’ researchers (Bijl 1). She claims that these drawings and photographs made in the Dutch East Indies were “constitutive of social, political and economic models of Dutch imperialism” (9), of which the

12_{For
more
elaborate
analyses
of
Augusta
de
Wit’s
Facts
and
Fancies
about
Java,
see
‘Het
land
van} droomen en dichten’ (Arps, 2015) and Impliciete feiten en expliciete fantasiën? (Arps, 2015).

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representations of ‘mooi Indië’ were part. The consequence of this kind of aestheticization is obviously that the coloniser wanted to keep the colony as a

valuable land. This kind of aestheticization creates an idea of a beautiful, ideal Indies. A land that is different from the home culture of the writer.

These lavish descriptions are not the only ways in which this was constituted. Another means of doing this is through what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘density of meaning’. In Facts and Fancies about Java, density of meaning is created through the use of many adjectives and references. In the abovementioned quote this is also apparent for De Wit uses many adjectives. She speaks of “a great heart of flame”, “burnished bronze”, “reddish light” (166), “melting gold”, “translucent green” (35), etc. Furthermore, De Wit makes references to her own culture. For example, when she is walking and sees a tree, she remarks that the grass underneath is “...tender grass, fresh as the herbage of an April meadow under western skies” (36). Indeed both the adjectives and the references create density of meaning. The consequence of this is on the one hand that it contributes to the aestheticization of the landscape and on the other hand that it makes the Other explainable through the Self.

In the same way that Pratt’s theory of aestheticization in the colonial travelogue becomes rather apparent in Facts and fancies about Java, many other colonial travelogues can be understood through this framework. However, there are also colonial travelogues that do not aestheticize the landscape so much, but rather portray a life in the Indies that is in stark contrast to paradise. An example of this is the novel by Beb Vuyk called The Last House in the World.

In the introduction to the translated version of The Last House in the World E.M. Beekman describes that it is “the luminous concept of adventure” that can be recognised in the novel due to Beb Vuyk’s affinity to mariners and enterprising individualists of the seventeenth century (3). And indeed, in The Last House in the

World Vuyk describes her life in Namlea on the island of Buru as a world full of

adventure. The novel was written when Vuyk and her husband moved to the remote island of Buru in the Moluccas to manage an enterprise in kayu putih oil, an essential oil taken from the kayu puith plant. In the novel, Vuyk describes her daily life there and Joop van den Berg considered these descriptions as faithful to the events that she experienced there (180).

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However, the most striking point of her story is the loneliness that seeps throughout the story. She describes her life as that similar of a pioneer in the wilderness, full of isolation. As Vuyk arrives at her house in Namlea the reader

follows her as she walks around the house: “We walk deeper into the garden, although ‘garden’ is too civilized a concept for this almost worthless, impenetrable wilderness” (32). In the descriptions of adventure, wilderness and loneliness, many colonial thoughts come to the fore. Especially the feeling of solitude of Vuyk is emphasised. She explains that the loneliness is only broken by tennis matches: “In the afternoon we play tennis with a couple of Chinese merchants and the clerks of the district office. Sometimes we talk and smoke cigarettes afterwards in the little house on the courts. It is good to know about their joys and worries, it breaks the loneliness Europeans live with, as if under a bell jar” (69). It is only when the boat from Makassar arrives when the Europeans feel as if they are part of the world (82). When Vuyk is expecting a baby, she claims that she could have lived without worries if she was not having a baby. During labour she again emphasises her loneliness when she tastes the salty flavour of her tears in her mouth and states that these are here “not because of the pain but because of the terrible loneliness.” (93). Her concerns are present due to the absence of a doctor, who needs to travel a full day to reach her and is only accessible every other week. Remarkable is therefore her choice to give birth with her man as ‘obstetrician’ rather than finding a local obstetrician to call for help. The local inhabitants after all do also give birth and surely there are people helping when this takes place. Besides this, Vuyk gives many more examples of loneliness, which is striking because of the presence of the local inhabitants, especially since she describes them rather elaborately. Also, her servants Heintje, Enggeh and Willem are

practically always around. This supposes a loneliness that came into existence due to the absence of (many) Europeans, for there are only three European families on the island. The solitude that hits her is not something unique to Vuyk. When she

describes the life of Heintje she divides it into three chapters, namely “Heintje’s life is divided into sharp divisions: his youth on Ambon, his work with Tuan Captain, and the lonely years after that.” (33). She speaks for Heintje and claims that the years without Tuan Captain (her European husband) were the lonely years for Heintje. Vuyk’s loneliness is possibly the result of the cumbersome relation she has with the other Europeans: her husband had a quarrel with the official of the island and the lieutenant, an other European, is not very often on Namlea. What is apparent again

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through this ‘European loneliness’ is that Vuyk does not see the local inhabitants as persons that can take her loneliness away. That this is actually quite impossible is attributed to their immaturity.

According to Vuyk the local inhabitants are lazy, they only work when they really have to (even in worrisome conditions they do not want to work) and when they work they create a debt because they prefer unfavourable labour relations. Vuyk also describes them as dirty and immature in both appearance, way of thinking and behaviour. That she describes the local inhabitants as immature is especially striking seeing that she describes her own child as being wise. When she looks into her child’s eyes he looks back: “He looks at me, his eyes are wise and serious and without fear.” (68). The result of this wisdom is that Vuyk does not feel lonely anymore. Notable in these descriptions of immaturity and wisdom is the fact that Vuyk describes mature local inhabitants as infantile. Her child on the other hand is only seven months old and is described as actually making “bird noises” (68). The distance Vuyk creates between the local inhabitants and herself is thus an irreconcilable difference, resulting in that her loneliness is maintained.

Writing from a personal perspective shapes the form of both De Wit and Vuyk’s travelogue. Their own experiences are the basis of these descriptions. Where De Wit paints a poetic Indies in which local inhabitants are mainly absent, Vuyk writes about an Indies where life is far from ideal. When both do write about local inhabitants, it is with a striking negative tone that sets the authors apart from the local inhabitants. The image that both travelogues portray is that the land of the Dutch East Indies itself is magnificent, but the local inhabitants quite the contrary.

1.3 The idyllic Indies: Dutch East Indies’ literature and memory

This aestheticization and the ways in which the local inhabitants are represented in the previous novels have produced a certain image during colonial times. And these ideas and pictures still pertain in contemporary Dutch culture. Specifically, the idea of nostalgia is evoked by the images of beautiful vistas, luxurious lifestyle and a naive approach towards the presence of local inhabitants as has been portrayed in literature such as Facts and Fancies about Java. However, as argued, literature such as Vuyk’s on the one hand do illustrate colonial underpinnings, but on the other hand represent a life in the Indies that is far from ideal although not being critical towards the colonial

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system either (that contemporary travelogues ‘to the Dutch East Indies’ are

ambiguous in the sense that they show both a critical and an idealised image of the Indies, will be underscored in chapter three). Still, both forms of literature evoke a colonial discourse in an explicit manner, namely through othering.

In the canonic Orientalism (1978) Edward Said describes how an oriental Other is constructed by means of European thinking. In line with Michel Foucault’s discursive formations, power is here exercised through the production of knowledge about the Other thus creating a distinction between the Self and Other. Said

researches this distinction between a Self and an Other through the concept of Orientalism, which “can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). Ever since Said’s description, the ways in which a Self and an Other is distinctly represented in colonial literature has been a constituent element of postcolonial studies. When Said wrote his book, he was talking about the Middle East as the oriental Other, or Orient, and not talking about Southeast Asia. Be that as it may, as the case studies have shown a similar form of othering and orientalism can be found in these written colonial travelogues. It shows that colonial literature from the Dutch East Indies is no exception to the frameworks that Said laid bare. It is exactly the notion of Orientalism that binds the colonial travelogues that seemingly differ in content. Whereas De Wit’s novel almost reads like a paean to the nature of the Indies, Vuyk’s novel is a raw sketch of the loneliness of European colonisers. However, the representation of the local inhabitants in relation to the Europeans themselves creates a distinct centre-periphery relation in which the Europeans are the perceived centre, and in which the local inhabitants are the perceived periphery. As has been shown, in the novels the Other is frequently represented as deferring from the home culture of the author. De Wit did this through a representation of the land as other, whilst Vuyk did this by othering the local inhabitants. In both Facts and Fancies about Java and

The Last House in the World, the local inhabitants are called ‘inlanders’ which is a

derogatory name for the local inhabitants. The term is widely and generally used in Dutch colonial literature to address the local inhabitants and the ‘inlanders’ were associated with the above described immaturity, dirtiness and dumbness. In line with Mary Douglas, the ‘inlanders’ are portrayed as dirt. Douglas described dirt as “matter

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out of place”, which implies two conditions: “a set of ordered relations and a

contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systemic ordering and

classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (44). Within the working colonial system, the ‘lazy’, ‘immature’ and literally ‘dirty’ local inhabitants are out of place. The result is that the local

inhabitants and their flaws are not neglected in the sketched paradise that is the Indies, but they are given a place in the colonial system as “matter out of place”. Because of this, the Indies still can be remembered as being idyllic. This nostalgic memory of the colony can thus remain in the post-colonial present.

Pamela Pattynama describes how the term nostalgia was firstly used in 1688 by Johannes Hofer to describe a form of homesickness of Swiss soldiers. During the centuries that followed, the meaning of nostalgia changed into an appealing cultural phenomenon. Pattynama writes that from the seventies onwards, nostalgia was used to describe a certain romanticising of the past, a longing for the past (27-28). She states that this form of nostalgia was not aimed at a specific period of time, but to the idea that ‘everything used to be better’ (29). This post-war yearning to an idealised past has since grown into a distinctive symptom of the modern western culture of remembrance (29). Still, not all contemporary post-colonial literature, images and films simply follow this nostalgia (although some do), and thus a body of texts is created that counter this nostalgic tendency. Nevertheless, in the overarching body of texts that describe, portray and represented the Dutch East Indies, colonial texts are overly present and uphold the colonial centre-periphery relation as is portrayed in the literature. Seeing the history of travel writing, their influence cannot be overlooked. Fortunately, the previously mentioned Peter Hulme and Tim Young recognise that travel has emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences (1). There is however a limitation to the claim Hulme and Young make, namely that they are only speaking about a specific form of travel. When they claim that “the academic

disciplines of literature, history, geography, and anthropology have all overcome their previous reluctance to take travel writing seriously and have begun to produce a body of interdisciplinary criticism which will allow the full historical complexity of the genre to be appreciated.” (1), they overlook travel in the various other forms in which it has emerged culturally next to travel writing. One of these is in amateur film.

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2. THE TRAVELOGUE AS HOME MOVIE

The travelogue can be established in many forms. One of them, in its written form, has been analysed in the previous chapter. The written colonial travelogue relied on the included photographs and the imagination of the reader to create an image of the Indies. However, the rise of the moving image resulted in the development of a wholly different travelogue: namely the filmed travelogue. The idea that visual

images take centre stage in how we represent, identify and make memory in the world is extensively argued (see Sturken 2001, Landsberg 2004, Hirsch 2008 and Pattynama 2012) From this chapter onwards, the visual travelogue is therefore considered as fundamentally relevant for post-colonial (from early post-colonial, to contemporary and following) memory practices of the Dutch East Indies. In this chapter a specific focus lies on the travelogue in the form of home movies or amateur film. The first subchapter focuses on the historical relevance of the travelogue as home movie and autobiographical aspects, whilst the travelogue as home movie is analysed in the second subchapter on the basis of its relation with the audience. Lastly, this chapter concludes by relating its autobiographical content and the relation with the audience to ideas on nostalgia and exoticism.

2.1 The future of film: The history of the filmed travelogue

The origin of the filmed colonial travelogue lies in the rise of film in the 1890s, when film succeeded photography as the most advanced medium of the time. Early film attracted viewers due to its new means of representation and its appeal as a “reality capture” machine (Martens 86-87). The moving images on display during early cinema where that of real events and were coined as ‘actualities’. To capture these “actualities”, filmmakers travelled all across the world and brought made images of the distant places and people who lived there back to the West. These films were called ‘travelogues’ and were also known as ‘scenics’. They displayed “nonfiction” subjects and were in the West praised in the early 1910s as “the future of the film industry” (Peterson 1). As Jeffrey Ruoff argues, the travelogue in film is “Neither a genre, nor a mode, the travelogue surfaces in all forms of cinema…” (17). One of the forms of cinema in which it appears is in amateur films or home movies. It is this specific mediated form that will be elaborated on here. This is however still a very

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broad denominator and a clear understanding of the ‘filmed colonial travelogue’ is needed.

A first point of departure for defining this concept is given by the Mirriam-Webster dictionary, which describes the travelogue in first instant as “a speech, movie, or piece of writing about someone’s traveling”. In relation to travelogues in film, Jennifer Peterson sees travelogues as “nonfiction films that take place as their primary subject” (Cited in Ruoff, 17). Furthermore, Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell in describing the amateur film in relation to home movies state that they are “A set of practices of non-professional, personal, or hobbyist filmmaking, often (as home movies), recording family and leisure activities…” (10). Having now set out the ‘filmed’ and the ‘travelogue’ in the concept of the filmed colonial travelogue, the adjective ‘colonial’ refers to the timespan in which the case studies of this chapter were made: from 1924-1939 and from the Dutch East Indies. In other words, the filmed colonial travelogue is understood as an amateur family film from and through the Dutch East Indies that has travel as its subject.

In the introduction to the anthology Mining the Home Movie (2008) Patricia Zimmermann tries to answer the question ‘why home movies?’ in relation to

academic research. Constituting that amateur films and home movies have long been seen as an irrelevant pastime, as nostalgic mementos of the past or as insignificant byproducts of consumer technology, Zimmermann claims that amateur film is “a vital access point for historiography in its trajectory from official history to the more variegated and multiple practices of popular memory, a concretization of memory into artifacts that can be remobilized, recontextualized, and reanimated” (1). It is exactly the shift in motion, situations and renewal of historical objects that is relevant in this study on the relation between home movies and memory. The home movie gained its popularity after its availability at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the

twentieth century the low prices made film cameras easier accessible to families. It remained however, a luxury for the higher classes. In the case studies examined in this thesis, the films are also produced by upper-class European families. The

increasing ability for wealthy families to film their daily lives makes these movies an important object of critical inquiry. Susan Aasman argues that home movies should be given critical attention seeing that these audiovisual media are an inextricable part of everyday culture in the twentieth century (3). The result is, as Aasman explains, that the study of these private forms of media can help understand everyday culture in the

Travels through a land of dreams and fancies: Colonial travelogues, memory and the Dutch East Indies

Travels through a land of dreams and fancies

Colonial travelogues, memory and the Dutch East Indies

Travels through a land of dreams and fancies

Colonial travelogues, memory and the Dutch East Indies

ABSTRACT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION:

THE MODULATION OF MEMORIES

1. THE WRITTEN COLONIAL TRAVELOGUE

2. THE TRAVELOGUE AS HOME MOVIE