Call for papers and conference: Voices of Resistance in and against Dutch Empire

On Thursday 12 and Friday 13 September, the conference Voices of Resistance in and against Dutch Empire takes place. The conference puts these often marginalised voices of resistance on centre stage. The call for papers closes on 1 April.

Recent trends in anticolonialism

Throughout the long history of Dutch empire, starting in the early seventeenth century and extending into the postcolonial present, various people both in imperial dependencies across the globe and the metropole have resisted the logics and realities of oppression and exploitation. While colonisers’ perspectives have received plentiful attention, this conference puts the often marginalised voices of resistance in and against Dutch empire front and centre. Drawing on recent trends in the intellectual history of anticolonialism, the conference will chart and discuss the intellectual interventions of actors who agitated against the Dutch empire and its legacies, from the 1600s to the 2020s.

The conference is a critical follow-up to the international conference Visions of Empire in Dutch History, organised in 2016 at Leiden University, and the resulting edited volume The Dutch Empire Between Ideas and Practice (as part of the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series, 2019).

Call for papers

The organisational committee consists of René Koekkoek (Utrecht University), Anne-Isabelle Richard (Leiden University), and Arthur Weststeijn (Utrecht University). They are inviting proposals on a wide range of topics, ranging from artistic and literary expressions of resistance to demands for symbolic and financial forms of reparations and/or restitution. The deadline for proposals is 1 April.