Emerging Memory
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Bijl This incisive volume brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia. Dutch commentators have frequently claimed that the colonial past and especially the violence associated with it has been ‘forgotten’ in the Netherlands. Uncovering ‘lost’ photographs and other documents of violence has thereby become a recurring feature aimed at unmasking a hidden truth. The author argues that, rather than absent, such images have been consistently present in the Dutch public sphere and have been widely available in print, on television and now on the internet. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance shows that between memory and forgetting there is a haunted zone from which pasts that do not fit the stories nations live by keep on emerging and submerging while retaining their disturbing presence. Paul Bijl is assistant professor of modern Dutch literature at the University MemoryEmerging of Amsterdam and an affiliated fellow at KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. In his current research project, Paul Bijl funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) with a Veni grant, he investigates the transnational circulation of the letters of the Javanese writer Kartini (1879-1904) in Indonesia, Europe and the United States. Emerging Memory Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance ISBN: 978-90-8964-590-6 AUP.nl 9 7 8 9 0 8 9 6 4 5 9 0 6 Emerging Memory Emerging Memory Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance Paul Bijl Amsterdam University Press The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Cover illustration: C.B. Nieuwenhuis. Pedir, 1938. Photograph 16,8 x 23 cm. Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, inv.no. 60054676. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 590 6 e-isbn 978 90 4852 201 9 (pdf) nur 688 © Paul Bijl / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2015 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 Icons of Memory and Forgetting 13 Dutch Colonial Memory 16 Dutch Colonial Forgetting 22 Forgetting in Cultural Memory Studies 25 Objects: The 1904 Photographs as Portable Monuments 27 Method: Frame Analysis 29 Emerging Memory: Between Semanticization and Cultural Aphasia 34 A Lack of Interest? 38 Overview 40 1 Imperial Frames, 1904 43 Introduction 43 The 1904 Expedition and the Atjeh War 45 The Surface of the 1904 Photographs 50 Genres of Empire 54 Images of Imperial Massacres 60 Times of Empire 69 Conclusion 82 2 Epistemic Anxiety and Denial, 1904‑1942 85 The Ethical Distribution of the Perceptible 89 Managing Established Frames 93 Icons of the Nation 103 Haunting Memories 107 An Icon of One Man’s Cruelty 115 Uncomfortable Colonial Conservatism 122 Conclusion 132 3 Compartmentalized and Multidirectional Memory, 1949‑1966 135 Compartmentalized Memory 136 Multidirectional Memory 165 Conclusion 182 4 Emerging memory, 1966‑2010 185 The Atjeh Photographs and the Violence of Western Modernity 186 Emerging Memory 204 Conclusion 223 Bibliography 229 List of where the 1904 photographs have appeared 247 Index 253 Acknowledgements This book is based on my PhD thesis which I wrote between 2006 and 2010 at the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) of Utrecht University. In the first place, my gratitude goes out to my daily supervisor Ann Rigney. She not only offered me an intellectual training for which I am deeply grateful, but also helped me to keep my eyes on the ball (that is: finishing on time). She moreover provided me and the other members of our research group with many opportunities to present our work and to gain experience in many other aspects of academic life. I have hung out with PhD students long enough to know that I was very lucky to have a supervisor I could trust completely in intellectual manners, and one that was moreover there to guide us through the process of becoming independent academics. Her style in both the scholarly and social sense is a continuous source of inspiration for me. In the many stimulating conversations we have had over the years, my second supervisor Frank van Vree of the University of Amsterdam provided me with crucial insights into Dutch colonial and postcolonial history, while his critical and open-minded attitude kept my senses sharp and my mind active. Like Ann, Frank taught me to combine thorough empirical and historical research with conceptually rigorous reflection – the art of which I have far from perfected but which in my mind is the ultimate goal of our type of research. As this was the last step in my formal training, my acknowledgement also goes out to Dick van Halsema, professor emeritus at the VU University in Amsterdam, who was my first teacher. Now that I have started teaching myself, I find myself increasingly returning to his invaluable lessons. I thank the members of my reading committee Susan Legêne, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Paulo de Medeiros, Julia Noordegraaf, Pamela Pattynama, and Berteke Waaldijk for their time and efforts. I want to thank the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research for making this project financially possible. The staff at the Research Institute for History and Culture I thank for providing a pleasant and caring work environment. Maarten Prak and Frans Ruiter were inspiring examples of how to be head of an organization with many aspiring but also meandering and young scholars like myself, while Simone Veld and José van Aelst have guided me through some of the more challenging moments in those four years. This is also the place to thank Hans Bertens for the stimulating and helpful conversations we have had. 8 EMERGING MemORY I am grateful to those who have provided me with feedback on my writing during various stages of my project – Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Ann Jensen Adams, Dick van Halsema, Liedeke Plate, Chiara de Cesari, Marta Zarzycka, Elizabeth Edwards, and an anonymous peer reviewer of Amsterdam Univer- sity Press – and whose comments have shaped individual chapters and the frames of my book as a whole. Throughout the whole period, the members of the Utrecht research group on cultural memory – Ann Rigney, Laura Basu, David Wertheim, Chiara de Cesari, Jesseka Batteau, Alana Gillespie, and Nicole Immler – have generously devoted their time to read my work, listen to my presentations, and helped me with stimulating discussions and probing questions. Many others have elaborately discussed the ins and outs of my project with me, while providing me with the necessary signposts for fields to which I was a newcomer. Here, I would like to especially mention Astrid Erll. Columbia University and especially Marianne Hirsch were my hosts during six extraordinarily fruitful months in 2008 when I first conceived of my thesis as a whole. Leo Haks offered me generous access to his collection of books and postcards and helped me map out the enormous field of Dutch colonial visual culture. Anneke Groeneveld of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Jaap Anten of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, and Steven Vink of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam offered me generous access to the photographic collections of their institutes. I want to thank my col- leagues at the Netherlands Graduate School for Literary Studies (OSL) for all the great and fun events we organized together. I thank my friends for their love and support. This book is dedicated to my father, Arie, who encouraged me to choose a critical and social topic, my mother Lous, who gave me the courage and ambition to start and finish an enterprise like this, my brother Matthijs and my aunt Mieke. Introduction Icons of Memory and Forgetting In the Dutch East Indies – the group of islands that is now part of the Republic of Indonesia – a number of photographs of colonial atrocities were taken in 1904. This study investigates the subsequent appearances of these photographs in Dutch cultural memory, i.e. the way in which groups of people remember the past through all kinds of representations.1 The photographs, which depict the results of massacres in villages in the Gajo and Alas lands on the island of Sumatra, were taken by the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) during a military expedition as part of the Atjeh War, which lasted from 1873 to 1908.2 This study follows these photographs over the course of the last century as they were framed by texts, other images, and discourses within Dutch cultural memory by a variety of mnemonic communities: groups that produce cultural memories and are themselves shaped by these.3 The most important of these communities in this book is the nation of the Netherlands as an imagined community, while important other communities include the Dutch military (chapters 1 and 2) and the Indische Dutch – those Dutch adults and children who had lived in the Dutch East Indies (chapter 3). All in all, these photographs reappeared more than seventy times in a wide variety of contexts.4 The two photographs that stand at the heart of this study were taken on 14 June 1904 by a Dutch medical officer named H.