NWA-ORC Re/Presenting Europe: Popular Representations of Diversity and Belonging

Diverse groups within Dutch society have not always been included in dominant representations of Europe and Europeanness. This is a failure of accurate knowledge-production. It has led to exclusion, social tension, and racism.

The persistent picture of Dutch citizens being white, native to Europe, and product of Greco-Roman heritage —an image that is visible in the practices of educators, policy makers, and academics— misrepresents the polyethnic make-up of the Netherlands and the continuing legacy of the country’s imperial past. To this day, the Netherlands is part of a trans-Atlantic Kingdom consisting of Dutch citizens on six Caribbean islands. In the heyday of empire many Indonesian elites and all inhabitants of Suriname were rights-bearing Dutch citizens (Raben, Oostindie,). Many chose Dutch citizenship after political independence, migrating to what some considered the homeland. Home signifies a land of family and belonging and of legitimacy. When we include naturalized economic migrants, refugees, and their offspring in this historical and sociological account it reveals the persistent failures of past and present understandings of Dutch – and indeed European - identity. A practice of countering such representations can be found in the fields of popular culture (sports and music), emancipatory politics (anti-racist activism), and education (calls to decolonize the curriculum and diversify the teaching body). This work, of addressing damaging perceptions of Dutchness as historical and majority whiteness, has now become urgent, relevant, and highly visible. It is liberating to some Dutch and European communities and threatening to others. Much of this struggle is around the terms Blackness and whiteness. This points to the need to acknowledge the falseness of such a binary.

In the project, therefore, we address definitions and juxtapositions of dominant categories, minoritized categories, and self-identification in the categories of identity and belonging. These categorizations are insufficient (because they essentialize) but that they are also necessary for understanding social phenomena in order to avoid colorblindness. We have to acknowledge their historical and lived effects to discuss the roles of race/ethnicity in social experience. The visibility of racialized minorities hip hop or sports may present a counter-narrative of identity formation while further marginalizing women, LGBTQ+, etc. This project addresses the question: How can we improve representation?

It also shows how Dutch tensions about identity and representation are entangled in a wider set of European and postcolonial European processes. Hence, we respond to the call by situating Dutch-based research within a framework of local and global, postcolonial, and European processes. Our research is grounded in a recognition that Europe has (and has for a long time had) a black and brown presence. There are a range of perspectives on the need for such terms, and there is some tension across our work packages around such categorizations. We take this up in the project. Moreover, we synthesize and compare our findings from the Dutch context with research on similar struggles in other Western European polities, the Caribbean, and the USA. Therefore, our combined work packages will examine the failures of past representations of Dutchness and European-ness and provide accurate knowledge and representations of the current postcolonial creole reality of the Netherlands and Europe. This will address a source of friction and a threat to resilience produced by inadequate representations.