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Dwinegeri—Multiculturalism and the Colonial Past (Or: the Cultural Borders of Being Dutch)

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Dwinegeri—Multiculturalism and the Colonial Past (Or: the Cultural Borders of Being Dutch) DWINEGERI—MULTICULTURALISM AND THE COLONIAL PAST (OR: THE CULTURAL BORDERS OF BEING DUTCH) Susan Legêne Introduction Th is chapter questions mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion regarding national identity, norms and values of Dutch pillarized-cum-colonial society of the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Th e ‘boundaries of the Netherlands,’ discussed in this volume in so many diff erent ways, will be approached here as cultural borders in defi nitions of citizenship. My argument will intersect with a second storyline, on the history of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. Th is museum, founded in 1864 as a Colonial Museum, is one of the largest ethnographic museums in the Netherlands. It opened its doors in 1871 in Haarlem as a museum of ‘tropical products,’ and a center of expertise for the exploitation of Indo- nesian craft s, export crops and other natural resources. Th e museum changed profoundly when, in the 1920s, it moved to Amsterdam in order to become part of the Colonial Institute (founded in 1910), and its collection of tropical products were enlarged with the ethnographic collection of Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. Aft er Indonesian independence the museum in 1950 was renamed as the Tropenmuseum, a name it has retained. Th is change of ‘world scope,’ from the colonial to the tropi- cal, was refl ected in its second major change in display policies. In the 1970s, the ‘Indonesian collections’ (both the ‘tropical products’ and the ethnographical objects) were stored. Instead, the museum in its new permanent exhibitions visualized daily life in the then Th ird World as a backdrop for the new policies on Dutch development cooperation.1 In 2003, the museum changed again. In the new semi-permanent exhibi- tion Eastward Bound! Art, culture and colonialism, the Tropenmuseum 1 D.v. Duuren, 125 jaar verzamelen. (Amsterdam: Tropenmuseum, 1990); S. Legêne, ‘Past and future behind a colonial facade: the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam,’ Archiv für Völkerkunde 50 (1999): 265–274; S. Legêne and E. Postel-Coster, ‘Isn’t it all Culture? Culture and Dutch development policy in the post-colonial period,’ in Fift y years of Dutch development cooperation 1949–1999, ed. J.A. Nekkers & P.A.M. Malcontent (Th e Hague: SDU Publishers, 2000), 271–288. 224 susan legêne returned to its core collections, while also addressing the topic of the (Dutch) overseas colonial past. By implication the museum put its own history on display, which is a history of colonialism as it took place ‘at home,’ in the Netherlands. It is this notion of ‘home-colonialism’ that is relevant for our discussion here of the cultural borders of being Dutch. We approach ‘the cultural borders of the Netherlands’ with reference to the current context of Dutch multicultural society and current debates on national identity and Europe. In We, the people of Europe? Etienne Balibar repeatedly points out the workings of colonial hierarchies from the past in today’s discussions about transnational citizenship. But where do we see these workings, how can we recognize them? Balibar defi nes nationalism as ‘the organic ideology that corresponds with the national institution.’ And he continues that this national institution ‘rests upon the formulation of a rule of exclusion, of visible or invisible “borders,” materialized in laws and practices.’2 So, in order to understand whether and how colonial hierarchies from the past might work today, we fi rst should fi nd out which mechanisms of exclusion in colonial contexts worked in Dutch society of the time. Both the legal and the cultural distinctions between overseas colonial subjects and Dutch citizens helped defi ne the Dutch nation. But how did that work? In the first part of this chapter I will indicate that in the history of the Colonial Museum we may fi nd some keys to investigate this process. For those who were at home in the Netherlands, that museum was one of the main institutions that really visualized ‘others’ and thus also defi ned ‘self.’ As such, the museum contributed to drawing the cultural borders of being Dutch. In the second part I will argue that the dominant historical discourse on Dutch colonialism has been an important aspect of the above- mentioned ‘organic ideology’ of nationalism which rests upon the formulation of a rule of exclusion. Dutch discussions on the nation until recently were dominated by the historical pillarization discourse with its focus on the struggle for autonomy within individual (religious) pillars and on middle class civility as the national common bond. In 2 E. Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Refl ections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2004), 23. Italics in original. See also 57, and 121: ‘In each and every of the European nation-states, there exist structures of discrimination that command uneven access to citizenship or nationality, particularly those inherited from the colonial past.’.
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