Lexington Books
Pages: 266
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-0-7391-6428-0 • Hardback • May 2012 • $133.00 • (£102.00)
978-0-7391-6430-3 • eBook • June 2012 • $126.00 • (£97.00)
Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, bilingual in Dutch and English, Elleke Boehmer is interested in the postcolonial debates that draw together Britain and the Netherlands. She is the author of four acclaimed novels, Screens again the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize, 1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (short-listed SANLAM award, 2000), and Nile Baby (2008), as well as the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). Her other books include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002), Stories of Women (2005), and the biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She edited Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and co-edited JM Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), and The Indian Postcolonial (2010). She is currently working on a memoir fiction part set in the Netherlands.
Sarah De Mul received her PhD at the University of Amsterdam and previously held a NWO Rubicon fellowship at the University of Leiden. She is currently FWO-Postdoctoral Fellow at K. U. Leuven University and Lecturer at the Open University the Netherlands. De Mul wrote a study of colonialism and memory in contemporary women’s travel writing (Colonial Memory, Amsterdam University Press, 2011) and a Dutch-languagemonograph on multiculturalism in Flanders Een leeuw in een kooi. (Meulenhoff-Manteau, 2009, together with K. Arnhaut, S. Bracke, B. Ceuppens, N. Fadil; M. Kanmaz). She is co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, with B. O. Firat and S. van Wichelen) and Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012, with W. Behschnitt and L. Minnaard). Her publications and research interests are situated in the field of comparative postcolonial studies with a particular focus on literatures in Dutch and English. Her current projects explore postcolonialism and transnationalism in the Low Countries, migrant writing in Flanders and European (colonial) writing about Africa/the Congo during the fin de siècle.
Chapter 1. Introduction: Postcolonialism and the Low Countries, Elleke Boehmer and Sarah De Mul
Part 1: Towards a Neerlandophone Postcolonial Studies
Chapter 2. Postcolonial Studies in the context of the ‘diasporic’ Netherlands, Elleke Boehmer and Frances Gouda
Chapter 3. Polderpoko: why it cannot exist, Isabel Hoving
Chapter 4. The “Ends” of Postcolonialism, Theo D’haen
Chapter 5. “Is the headscarf oppressive or emancipatory?” Field notes on the gendrification of the ‘multicultural debate’, Sarah Bracke and Nadia Fadil
Part 2: Postcolonial Memory
Chapter 6. (Un)happy Endings: Nostalgia in post-imperial and postmemory Dutch films, Pamela Pattynama
Chapter 7. Transnational Contact-Narratives: Dutch Post-Coloniality from a Turkish-German Viewpoint, Liesbeth Minnaard
Chapter 8. Representing post-apartheid South Africa: mothers, motherlands and mother tongues in the work of selected Afrikaans women writers, Louise Viljoen
Chapter 9. The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild's King Leopold’s Ghost, Sarah De Mul
Part 3: Literature and Multiculturalism
Chapter 10. Dutch Homonationalism and Intersectionality, Murat Aydemir
Chapter 11. Becoming UnDutch: "Wil je dat? Kun je dat?", Mireille Rossello
Chapter 12. Unlike(ly) Home(s). “Self-Orientalisation” and Irony in Moroccan Diasporic Literature, Ieme van der Poel
Chapter 13. ‘Games of Deception’ in Hafid Bouazza’s Literary No Man’s Land, Henriette Louwerse
In an era when many in the Netherlands and Belgium, in spite of their fiercely colonialist past, consider postcolonial thought 'outdated'—another word for the sigh of relief at escaping the need to engaging an object of resistance—this book couldn’t be more timely. 'Post-colonizing' the Low Countries is more necessary than ever. Smart, witty and brave, the essays, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, offer an incisive critique of the reiteration of colonial clichés, the refusal to rethink the remnants of injustice, and the attempts to justify neo-nationalism.
— Mieke Bal, Professor Emerita in Literary Theory, University of Amsterdam
Finally, a postcolonial turn in Dutch literary criticism has taken place. The Postcolonial Low Countries is the first book to theorize and bring together approaches that can be called neerlandophone postcolonial studies. The need for such a perspective has been enormous, not only because of the colonial legacies of the Netherlands and Belgium, but also because of the transnational formations through which the study of literatures in Dutch are currently being challenged. From now on, Dutch and Belgium literature can no longer be read the same.
— Ernst van Alphen, professor of literary studies at Leiden University
The Postcolonial Low Countries holds sparkling examples of boundary pushing work. Intersecting postcolonial studies and multicultural critique this timely intervention is likely to unsettle Neerlandophone literary establishments.
— Philomena Essed, Antioch University