Witte de With, a Name Contested Insights in the public debate about the historically charged name Witte de With Master Thesis Student Name Lotte Takkenkamp Student Number 454217 Supervisor Pauwke Berkers Date July 25th, 2019 Master Arts, Culture & Society Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication Erasmus University Rotterdam Witte de With, a Name Contested Insights in the public debate about the historically charged name Witte de With ABSTRACT Since February 2017, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam finds itself at the heart of a public debate. Due to a claimed blindness for its own historically charged name, an appeal was done for the institution to rename and no longer represent remnants of the Dutch history of expansion, colonialism and imperialism. The matter quickly evolved into a public discussion and therefore fits a broader range of public debates, aimed on rethinking history and the dominant position of the colonizer within writing the historical narrative. This research aimed to find answers to the question in what ways the name of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art is contested in the Dutch media. Through the method of qualitative content analysis and an open coding technique, 132 new articles from Dutch newspapers and weekly news magazines were analysed in order to establish what frames are presented by the mediawriters to contest the name. This study found that there are three stands taken within this public debate: (1) ‘culture critics,’ in their role as iconoclasts, explicitly state that the name should no longer be used; (2) ‘culture guards, protecting the use of the name and aiming to maintain it; (3) ‘culture narrators’, who want to maintain the use of the name however, aim to create a more broad and nuanced awareness about its historical roots by changing the narrative. The data showed that these three positions, dominantly used three types of arguments to defend their point of view (1) historical arguments; (2) arguments of social critique; and (3) moral arguments. The content of these three frames is used interchangeable and therefore the construction of these frames does not happen in a vacuum. On the contrary, the three positions are rather rigid and appear to evoke fierce reactions KEYWORDS: Decolonization, Heritage, Cultural conflict, Public sphere, Framing 1 Table of contents 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 5 2 Case description ‘Witte de With’ ................................................................................................... 8 2.1 Historical elaboration ............................................................................................................ 8 3 Theoretical framework ................................................................................................................ 10 3.1 Colonization, decolonization and the Dutch Canon .............................................................. 10 3.1.1 Colonization ................................................................................................................. 10 3.1.2 Decolonization ............................................................................................................. 11 3.2.3 The Dutch canon of decolonization .............................................................................. 12 3.2 Culture, heritage, identity and the nation ............................................................................ 13 3.2.1 Culture ......................................................................................................................... 13 3.2.2 Heritage ....................................................................................................................... 13 3.2.3 Identity ........................................................................................................................ 14 3.2.4 National Identity .......................................................................................................... 15 3.3 Theory on cultural conflict ................................................................................................... 17 3.3.1 Cultural conflict ........................................................................................................... 17 3.3.2 Populism in cultural conflict ......................................................................................... 19 3.3.3. Activism, race and cultural conflict ............................................................................... 22 3.4 Public sphere ....................................................................................................................... 22 3.5 Frames and the act of framing ............................................................................................. 23 3.6 Traditional media ................................................................................................................ 24 3.6.1 Newspapers and weekly news magazines ........................................................................ 25 4 Data and methods ....................................................................................................................... 27 4.1 Research context ................................................................................................................. 27 4.2 Method: qualitative content analysis of media coverage ..................................................... 27 4.3 The sample & unit of analysis .............................................................................................. 29 5 Results ........................................................................................................................................ 32 5.1. Developments within the public debate on the name of WdW ............................................ 32 5.2 Findings on the data set ....................................................................................................... 33 5.3 Findings through coding ...................................................................................................... 35 5.3.1 Historical arguments .................................................................................................... 36 5.3.2 Arguments of social critique ......................................................................................... 40 5.3.3 Moral arguments ......................................................................................................... 47 2 5.3.4 Other findings .............................................................................................................. 49 6 Conclusion and discussion ........................................................................................................... 52 6.1 Connection to literature ...................................................................................................... 54 6.2 Methods .............................................................................................................................. 56 6.3 Contributions and further research ...................................................................................... 57 Reference List ..................................................................................................................................... 58 Appendix A: Sample ..................................................................................................................... 66 Appendix B: Codebook ................................................................................................................ 71 Appendix C: Distribution of arguments ........................................................................................ 73 Appendix D: Translation of quotes ............................................................................................... 74 Appendix E, Open letter to Witte de With ................................................................................... 83 3 We nemen `t anderen meer kwalijk dat zij onze fouten kennen, dan ons zelf dat wij daaraan mank gaan. - Multatuli – 4 1 Introduction Since February 2017, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (WdW1) in Rotterdam has been a focal point for national public debates due to a possible name change. Criticism towards the meaning of the historically charged name was first expressed by the project group ‘Cinema Olanda’, which is an extension of the exhibition in the Dutch pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. By means of an open letter, Cinema Olanda claimed the name to be a remnant of the horrors of colonialism and a representation of power inequalities in relation to the white subject position within Dutch society. In this sense, the name is considered to be a symbol for glorification of the dominant historical narrative discourse of the Dutch, which undermines the dimension of the suppressed. Even though the critique is directed at WdW, the project group claims that “it extends well beyond this institution’s white walls”, as it also concerns society as a whole and other cultural institutions within (Martine, Sno, Warsame, Schor, Alhaag, Guggenbickler). In response, WdW openly re-evaluated its own name, which caused the media to pick up upon the considerations of the institute. Once entered the public sphere, two polarized opinions seem to dominate the debate. On the one hand, the opinion that the name should change in order to provide a more