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.
Author(s): DR. Paul Bijl
Series: Heritage and Memory Studies
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 258
Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Icons of Memory and Forgetting
Dutch Colonial Memory
Dutch Colonial Forgetting
Forgetting in Cultural Memory Studies
Objects: The 1904 Photographs as Portable Monuments
Method: Frame Analysis
Emerging Memory: Between Semanticization and Cultural Aphasia
A Lack of Interest?
Overview
1 Imperial Frames, 1904
Introduction
The 1904 Expedition and the Atjeh War
The Surface of the 1904 Photographs
Genres of Empire
Images of Imperial Massacres
Times of Empire
Conclusion
2 Epistemic Anxiety and Denial, 1904‑1942
The Ethical Distribution of the Perceptible
Managing Established Frames
Icons of the Nation
Haunting Memories
An Icon of One Man’s Cruelty
Uncomfortable Colonial Conservatism
Conclusion
3 Compartmentalized and Multidirectional Memory, 1949-1966
Compartmentalized Memory
Multidirectional Memory
Conclusion
4 Emerging memory, 1966-2010
The Atjeh Photographs and the Violence of Western Modernity
Emerging Memory
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of where the 1904 photographs have appeared
Index
