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Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
This contribution explores how the polarisation between religion, gender and sexuality in relation to nationalism manifests in the Dutch city of The Hague. Conceptual debates on secularism and sexual nationalism, as well as the materialist study of religion, are brought into conversation with ethnographic data on African Christian placemaking in the city. The contribution demonstrates how materialisations of Dutch secular nationalism become visible in religious spatial practices of religious migrant communities in their interaction with the city. It argues that African Dutch communities – youth in particular – experience and navigate the city as a space of multiplicity. They live, produce, and navigate contestations over gender and sexuality in secular and religious spaces in the city on a day-to-day basis. It offers alternative perspectives in relation to the political mobilisation of religion, secularity, gender and sexuality as culture wars or discursive battlefields in research and policy debates.
State apologies and the related expression of emotions, such as guilt and repentance, are seen as an essential part of dealing with atrocious pasts. Against this view, the article analyzes from a postcolonial perspective the impact of emotions in the negotiation of state apologies in postcolonial memory politics. In a transnational comparative discourse analysis, I examine the conditions of the (im)possibility under which state apologies are discussed in public and media debates in 2021, focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in France and the OvaHerero and Nama Genocide (1904–1908) in Germany. In France, public opinion rejects apologies as an act of “repentance.” In Germany, the planned apology becomes impossible because the government equals the “historical and moral responsibility” with development cooperation. Through a transnational comparison that analyzes the structuring effects of emotional discourses in memory politics, the article shows that dealing with the colonial past primarily follows the interests of the European nation-states, thus leaving the postcolonial power imbalances intact.
Photographic images of interior Dutch Borneo’s nature and, more particularly, her peoples and cultures are examined as they were produced and used around the turn of the twentieth century, from their creation in the context of pioneer exploration across the island to their presentation and display, in various forms, for consumption by the general public back in Europe. A young Dutch army medical officer, later university professor, Anton Nieuwenhuis, a talented Indo military topographer and photographer, Jean Demmeni, and an elderly Norwegian professional explorer, Carl Lumholtz: These three major, yet quite different, players of the “there and then” scene strongly contributed, each in his own way, through the combined power of their visual and textual testimonies, to the shaping of affirmative representations, ideas, and imageries among their home public about Borneo and the peoples of her hinterland, these independent Dayak tribes, which had long been suffering from prejudiced reports, disrepute, and outright ignominy.
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