MARKUS BALKENHOL

Silence and the politics of compassion.

Commemorating slavery in the
Netherlands

Looking at the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands, this article makes a twofold argument. First, my
aim is to complicate the notions of historical silence, ‘erasure’ and ‘secrecy’ that have informed many post- and
decolonial projects. I show that the violence and brutality of slavery are in some cases even showcased. The
result is an often self-congratulatory image of a humanism that is often seen as ‘typically’ Dutch. At the same
time, the national slavery memorial has shown that engaging in a politics of compassion can offer ground to
refashion post-colonial futures. Here, humanism is neither accepted at face value nor discarded as damaged
goods, but salvaged and held to its promise. Second, I analyse the politics of multiculturalism, and the related
search for cultural essences in which ‘culture’ and ‘nation’ have turned into objects of love and anxiety. While
analyses have rightly understood emotions such as compassion as neoliberal models of governance, I argue
that such structures of feeling also have colonial roots. The highly affective politics of belonging and exclusion
today can be more fully understood if their colonial roots are included in the analysis.

Key words slavery, the Netherlands, memory, politics of compassion, race

Introduction

On 3 April 2008, Rita Verdonk, a former politician of the liberal rightist party VVD,
launched her political movement Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands) with
an ode to a glorious past. ‘Dutch culture’, she claimed, had emerged through the strug-
gle of ‘our ancestors’, giving birth to democratic values such as the freedom of speech
and religious freedom. ‘This culture, our traditions, our uniqueness (eigenheid), that’s
what we are proud of. That’s the Netherlands!’ But there is, she continued, an ‘away-
with-us movement’ that is jeopardising this culture. ‘They even question the Saint
Nicholas celebration. And they want to put up slavery memorials everywhere so as
to paint us black.’ This was nonsense, she continued, because ‘Dutch people simply
do not have it in them to discriminate! We have been a hospitable people for centuries.’
But this hospitality must now cease, she concluded. ‘Enough! There are limits. Because,
people, if our Dutch culture disappears, so will our values and liberties.’
Verdonk’s existential anxiety about Dutch culture and identity being subsumed in a
multicultural ‘drama’ dovetails with postcolonial melancholia over past greatness lost
(cf. Gilroy 2005). This articulation suggests that: (1) today’s multiculturalism remains
entangled with the colonial past and (2) these are eminently emotional entanglements.
Verdonk and her movement Trots op Nederland only existed for a brief period, but
she embodied a broader and durable sentiment that continues to dominate political and
social life in the Netherlands today. This is the desire for community, in which an
organic body of ‘the people’ is pitted against both racialised allochtones (a term used

278 Social Anthropology (2016) 24, 3 278–293. © 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12328
 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 279

in the Netherlands to refer to Dutch citizens with a migrant background; cf. Geschiere
2009) and the progressive elites who supposedly threaten ‘Dutch culture’. Observers of
this shift towards parochialism have time and again expressed their surprise: how could
a country that considers itself and is known internationally to be tolerant, open and
progressive embrace, all of a sudden, such a xenophobic and isolationist stance
(Geschiere 2009)? This seeming tension between cosmopolitan ambition and parochial
practice has been the subject of much recent research on sexual politics (Mepschen et al.
2010, 2013; Midden 2014; Uitermark et al. 2013; Verkaaik and Spronk 2011) and the
rise of right-wing populism (Oudenampsen 2013; Prins 2002). Clearly, parochialism
and cosmopolitanism can co-exist (cf. Meyer and Geschiere 1999; Comaroff and
Comaroff 2009). But how is it possible to claim, as Verdonk does, to be cosmopolitan
and at the same time advocate cultural closure? How can one make sense of the
paradoxical claim that the assault on the ‘Dutch culture’ of openness and benevolence
necessitates building a cultural fortress?
I think one possible answer lies in Verdonk’s affective logic, which implies a shift in
how states understand citizens, from ‘rational, individual and calculative subjects …
[to] affective subjects in search of attachments to something in common’ (De Wilde
2015: 22; Balkenhol 2015; Mepschen 2016; Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012). In
Verdonk’s narrative, the nation appears as a sensitive being whose empathy towards
others is its distinguishing characteristic, indeed its pride. But in this logic it is precisely
this sensitivity that makes the nation vulnerable, and thus necessitates not only compas-
sion, but also repression (Fassin 2005). In Sara Ahmed’s words, this is a cultural politics
of emotion in which ‘“soft touch” becomes a national character’ (2004: 2): ‘the meta-
phor of “soft touch” suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they
are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others. It
suggests that the nation is made vulnerable to abuse by its very openness to others’
(2004: 2; emphasis MB). The Dutch nation, personified, becomes both the object and
the subject of compassion: the object of compassion because it is portrayed as suffering
and in need of help, the subject of compassion because the Dutch nation, identity and
people are themselves presented as compassionate. Verdonk engages here in what I call
a politics of compassion: the political mobilisation of a particular emotion in negotia-
tions over the nation, citizenship and belonging.
Whereas Verdonk mobilises compassion for a parochialist project of cultural
closure, the politics of compassion in the Netherlands informs a wider political field
in which the meaning and practice of compassion are highly contested. In this field,
compassion can be mobilised by reactionary forces aiming for cultural closure, but also
offers an idiom in which these forces can be challenged. By mapping these dynamics, I
offer a more complex understanding of the postcolonial present in the Netherlands that
goes beyond simple oppositions of ‘white’ and ‘black’, ‘silence’ and ‘voice’, ‘denial’ and
‘recognition’.

Slaver y and compassion

Verdonk locates the essence of Dutch culture in a glorious past: in Dutch traditions, in
the struggle of ‘our’ ancestors against oppression and in the long history of hospitality
that distinguishes the Dutch as a people. But while Verdonk and the new nationalists
may have been the loudest exponents of reinstating ‘Dutch identity’, they were

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

280 MARKUS BALKENHOL

anything but lone voices. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, politicians across the board
had begun pressuring minorities to ‘integrate’ into ‘Dutch culture’. However, this led to
searching questions about who must integrate, what they should integrate into and what
integration is in the first place (Schinkel 2007: 20): ‘If the allochtoon had to integrate, an
obvious question was how to define into what she or he had to integrate. However,
defining this turned out to be not an easy job’ (Geschiere 2009: 133). In this search
for Dutch identity and culture, the past seemed to hold the answers. Cultural heritage,
history and tradition became the new buzzwords, uniting politicians, intellectuals, the
cultural sector and civil institutions. In May 2006, Jan Marijnissen of the Socialist Party
and Maxime Verhagen of the Christian Democratic Appeal pleaded in an op-ed to ‘save
our historical consciousness’ and proposed a National Historical Museum modelled on
the German Haus der Geschichte because, they argued, ‘it seems as though we no longer
have a shared identity’.1 Also in 2006, the Van Oostrom Commission, named after its
chairman historian Frits van Oostrom, unveiled the first national historical canon
(De canon van Nederland): ‘what everybody in any case ought to know about the
history and culture of the Netherlands’. In 2012 the Dutch government ratified the
UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The proponents of these projects hoped that education about the past would foster
historical awareness, which in turn would lead to mutual understanding between
‘cultures’ and thus more social cohesion. But what these initiatives failed to recognise
was that emotionally charged concepts like ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘tradition’ and ‘history’
are not simply about factual knowledge (a kind of Habermasian notion of rational
argumentation). Historical knowledge, precisely because it is so entangled with
questions of identity, is always also ‘known’ emotionally.
This entanglement of knowledge and emotions also riddled the commemoration of
slavery in the Netherlands from its very inception. While the idea that knowledge
about the past would lead to understanding, recognition and ultimately redress was
at the heart of the initiative for a national slavery memorial, those involved also
appealed to emotions from the outset. Foreshadowing the ensuing debates over history
and cultural heritage, black grassroots organisations had already recognised the grow-
ing investment in the past and national culture in the early 1990s. Beginning in 1993 the
Committee 30 June/1 July organised annual contemplative gatherings on Suriname
Square in Amsterdam to commemorate the shared history of the Netherlands and its
Caribbean colonies, including trans-Atlantic slavery (Balkenhol 2014). Slavery emerged
as a national issue in 1998 when the Afro-European women’s organisation Sophiedela,
chaired by the Afro-Surinamese politician Barryl Biekman, petitioned for a memorial
to commemorate the victims of the Dutch slave trade and slavery.
In their 1998 petition to the Dutch parliament, Sophiedela demanded that slavery
be recognised as part of Dutch history. The petition was a ‘call for recognition, atten-
tion, and the recording of [the African Surinamese] history’, by which the petitioners
meant education that recognises the ‘damaging side of slavery’. The petitioners, how-
ever, wanted to raise awareness not simply by revealing the ‘facts’; they presented these
‘facts’ in a way that was certain to evoke emotional response. The petition showcased a
long list of atrocities, including for instance a form of punishment in which ‘a hook was

1 http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4324/Nieuws/article/detail/1691966/2006/05/13/Red-ons-historisch-
besef.dhtml, accessed 17 February 2016.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 281

driven through the skin or under the ribs of the slaves and as if this terrible pain was not
enough red hot tongs were wedged in the slaves’ flesh’. With these graphic images, the
petitioners not only wanted to unmask the truth about slavery; showcasing this kind of
violence was necessary to appeal to the nation’s compassion:

We are aware, chairman, that the Netherlands feel strongly about freedom and
tolerance. … Much has been sacrificed for the preservation of this freedom. We
Surinamese, too, participate fully and with a deep sense of respect and compas-
sion in the Dodenherdenking (Commemoration Day) on 4 May and the celebra-
tion of freedom on 5 May. Moreover, the policy of the Dutch government has
always seen fit to support the victims of war in one way or another. … This good
work is not only known to African Surinamese, but also internationally. … [I]t is
therefore obvious that they will appeal for support where they know attention
has traditionally been paid to such issues: the representational organ of the Dutch
people.2

One might expect a nation looking for positive identification to collectively reject such
demands to own up to its violent past. Surprisingly, the confrontational strategy
initially paid dividends: the Dutch parliament quickly accepted the proposal for a
monument to slavery. Many people shared Biekman’s relief that ‘finally the moment
has arrived when the Dutch government and the Dutch parliament officially recognise
the Dutch slavery past as a historical fact’ (2002: 9). From cultural institutions to
politicians, many agreed that slavery had been silenced, and that it was high time this
silence was broken. During the high-profile bezinningsbijeenkomst (contemplative
gathering) at Laurens Church in Rotterdam in 2001, André Kramp, international coor-
dinator of the UNESCO Slave Route Project in Paris,3 delivered a speech in which he
argued that the ‘conspiracy of silence’ around the mass deportations of Africans to the
Americas needed to be broken.4 The Dutch Minister of Urban and Integration Policy
(grotesteden- en integratiebeleid), Roger van Boxtel of the liberal conservative party
D66, agreed: ‘It is so important that our Dutch slavery past is stripped of the aura of
secrecy and concealment.’5
On 1 July 2000, State Secretary of Education, Culture and Science Rick van der Ploeg
of the Labour Party stated: ‘Up until this day, the invisibility of slavery to a certain extent
continues. Because the history of slavery does not fit into the often-praised self-image of
the Netherlands as the tolerant and progressive nation of old.’6 Like van der Ploeg, liter-
ary scholar Joke Kardux argued that slavery had been ‘erased from public consciousness’
because ‘the Netherlands’ role in slaveholding and slave trading was so irreconcilable with
[the Dutch] sense of national identity’ (Horton and Kardux 2004: 51). Several other
historians critically engaged with the ‘deafening silence’ that, they argued, characterised
the Dutch attitude towards slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries (van Stipriaan 2005:

2 http://www.platformslavernijmonument.nl/organistatie-lps/organistatie-l-p-s, accessed 16 June 2016.

3 Kramp, who was born in a poor family in Totness, in the Surinamese rural district of Coronie, is
seen as a role model who has achieved a great career including a PhD, a government position in Su-
riname, and a position with UNESCO despite his poor background (Chin A Foeng 2008).
4 http://platformslavernijmonument.nl/pdf/toespraak2.pdf, accessed 17 June 2016.
5 See http://www.platformslavernijmonument.nl/toespraak3.php, accessed 19 November 2012.
6 http://www.platformslavernijmonument.nl/docs/speechvdPloeg1juli2000.pdf, accessed 26 November
2012.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

282 MARKUS BALKENHOL

46) and that, according to them, endures monolithically and largely unchanged up until
this very day: ‘as a consequence of the long silence in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, there are many who are perhaps only now beginning to leave slavery behind’ (van
Stipriaan 2005: 57, translation MB; cf. Oostindie 2001).
This initial success ironically became the memorial’s greatest obstacle. Everyone
who mattered seemed to agree. The memorial had promised to break the historical
silence about slavery by ‘unmasking’ the truth. But as Paul Bijl observed, ‘perhaps
surprisingly, it is mostly [white, MB] Dutch people themselves who utter this lament
[about forgetfulness] … Speakers, moreover, not only charge the other Dutch with
amnesia, but also emphatically include themselves. “We have forgotten about our colo-
nial past”’ (2012: 441). In other words, the simplistic notion of silence as erasure voiced
by some critics of colonialism underestimated ‘both the complexity and persistence of
what they see as Dutch colonial forgetting’ (Bijl 2012: 443). Having focused on
‘unmasking’ a repressed historical truth and the supposedly intentional actions of
groups such as historians, the media and the government, the wind was taken out of
their sails somewhat by a compassionate stance that seemed to say: ‘Yes! We are guilty.’
Paul Bijl examines how the structure of collective memory in the Netherlands
excludes colonial memories by displacing them: ‘the victims of colonialism are not
memorable within a national context and there is no language available to discuss them
as part of Dutch history’ (Bijl 2012: 458). I focus on a complementary structure of feel-
ing in which traces of colonialism do not lie ‘outside national history’ (Bijl 2012: 458)
but are silenced through assimilation.
Both of these forms of memory – displacement and assimilation – surfaced when
the slavery memorial was unveiled on 1 July 2002. The moment of the unveiling had
been highly anticipated; Dutch people of African descent had travelled to the unveiling
ceremony from all over the country. Who could fathom their disappointment when
they learned that they could not attend the ceremony? Ten months after 9/11 and less
than two months following the assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn (Margry 2011),
and with high-ranking guests including the Queen and the Prime Minister in atten-
dance, security for the ceremony was tight. Only invited guests, among them many
representatives of black elites, were allowed near the monument, thus excluding a large
number of ‘ordinary’ people. The image of people rattling the fences, excluded from the
ceremony, merged with an iconography of black suffering that had already been well-
established. Black people once more became the object of pity.
In the article ‘Slavery monument evokes no emotions among whites’, published in
the daily broadsheet De Volkskrant of 1 July 2002, historian and journalist Sander van
Walsum argued that the lack of interest on the part of ‘white Dutch’ jeopardises the
usefulness of the entire memorial project. While Van Walsum did not explain precisely
how and why ‘white Dutch’ lacked interest in the project, he noted that this indiffer-
ence was already apparent in 1963, on the 100th anniversary of abolition. Historian
Gert Oostindie, who had himself been active in the memorial project, supports this
view, contrasting the perspectives of ‘simply indifferent’ whites and emotionally in-
volved (betrokken) blacks. Even Barryl Biekman, chair of Sophiedela and the national
platform on slavery LPS, admitted that ‘not all have the same sentiments’ about slavery,
implying that white people are emotionally detached from the subject.
Indifference, however, is neither the only nor the leading emotion when it comes to
remembering slavery. For example, the conservative historian Piet Emmer once angrily
remarked that people might ‘have a go at [the monument] with a hammer’, suggesting

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 283

that there are many other emotions involved. At least for a moment, indifference
turned into effervescence around 1 July 2002 as comments, opinions, vox pops and
background articles filled the front pages of the newspapers. Within the swirling atten-
tion for slavery and the memorial project, few were indifferent or dispassionate.
Significantly, resentment towards commemorating slavery was time and again
expressed through references to compassion. Some argued that compassion should be
expressed towards all victims of slavery, not only select groups. Ironically, this included
the white Dutch (who had fallen victim to ‘Arab’ slavery in the Mediterranean). In
these dismissive statements, the Dutch nation was portrayed as compassionate. Syp
Wynia, editor of the conservative weekly Elsevier, argued:

At the end of the twentieth century Surinamese immigrants discovered that if

you want to achieve something in the Netherlands, morality is an effective
strategy. They noted that the Dutch were receptive towards claims of moral
inferiority. And that, vice versa, recognised victimhood leads to the granting of
moral superiority to the victim. In this sense coping with the slavery past displays
a typically Dutch character. (Wynia 2015: no page)

Silencing, in other words, here takes place by stylising the Dutch nation as the victim of
its own compassion. In these reactionary accounts, it is the supposed openness of the
Dutch character that makes it vulnerable to moral blackmail.
These were influential voices, but compassion was also mobilised in affirmative ways.
Especially after the monument’s unveiling, many commentators also expressed sincere
compassion with the black crowd who had been wronged once again. The daily newspa-
per Trouw published the following comment from a ‘white’ participant at the event:

I was at the unveiling of the National Slavery Monument, I am white and I was
ashamed. Around me countless black fellow citizens, often in gorgeous tradi-
tional attire, by the video screen gliding in the mud of the rain-soaked park, kept
at a distance by fences that were screened off with black plastic, patiently waiting
for the formal guests to leave the area, before they could approach the monument
themselves. How is it possible that those responsible for organizing this historic
event could have made such a mistake? [Minister] Van Boxtel, you have hereby
proven not to have understood much. The monument is the symbol of 1 July
and the sons and daughters of slavery should have been in the first row. (Bakker
2002: no page)

Other commentators also expressed compassion. Frenk der Nederlanden, a well-

known columnist, described his experience on the front page of Het Parool:

An officer pushes a 14 year old Surinamese girl away and shouts: ‘Distance!’ An
older black woman in colourful clothes is smashing her umbrella on the fences
that keep her from laying a little flower by the slavery monument further on in
the park. Mounted police try with all their might to prevent the angry crowd
from pulling down the plastic-covered fences. (der Nederlanden 2002: 7)

Similarly, Willem Breedveld, a long-time columnist and journalist at Trouw, wrote:

Imagine you are in a euphoric mood about finally being freed, only to find crush
barriers in your way, forcing you to powerlessly watch others appropriate the

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

284 MARKUS BALKENHOL

ultimate place for this freedom. It can drive you mad. This is why I understand
the anger that possessed the descendants of slaves […]. (Breedveld 2002: 11)

In the aftermath of the unveiling ceremony, the dominant image was that of ‘white’
indifference or anger and ‘black’ disappointment and emotional pain. But as I have
tried to show, the language of emotions was much more complex than this simple
binary suggests.
Emotional engagement with the memorial commemorating slavery nonetheless,
and in different ways, related to a common theme: that of compassion. Whether
mobilised politically to address the state (by grassroots organisations), dismissed as
the perversion of a ‘Dutch’ sense of compassion (out of resentment), or embraced as
an obligation for ‘whites’, slavery was understood as a moral issue that needed to be
discussed in terms of compassion.
Whether critical or affirmative, compassion appears as a normative moral stance
both deeply problematic and potentially transformative (cf. Spelman 1998). On the
one hand, compassion signals a power relation that is implied in the distance it creates
between a suffering and passive other and a compassionate and active self (Berlant
2004). On the other hand, compassion (unlike pity) can motivate political action and
solidarity with the goal of changing this very hierarchy.
In short, the unveiling of the slavery memorial was not the sudden revelation of a
well-kept secret, but an event marked by continuity rather than change. I therefore take
‘silence’ not as the absence of speech, but as a particular way of speaking – a language of
emotions that, I will show, mobilises compassion in particular. ‘Language’ here is
understood as embodied and performative, as appealing to the emotions. The display
of violence is essential in this emotional register, as it is necessary to bring into relief
the magnitude of compassion. Silence, then, is better understood as a particular mode
of remembering (cf. Bijl 2012: 444; Passerini 2003).

Silence, colonialism, nation

In History of sexuality, Michel Foucault argued that Victorianism led not to the silenc-
ing of sexuality, but to ‘a veritable discursive explosion’ (1978: 17). Precisely the effort
to restrict sexuality in all spheres of people’s lives made it necessary to manage it down
to the minutest detail. Implementing the prohibition to talk about sex in secondary
schools, for instance, meant that the entire institution was geared to the management
of children’s sexuality.
Paradoxically, this means that much discursive work must go into ‘silencing’: in or-
der to silence slavery, one needs to talk about it. A similar point has been argued by
Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his now classic Silencing the past (1995). Like Foucault,
Trouillot understands ‘silence’ as discursive silence and not the absence of speech.
The Haitian revolution, for example, was hotly debated in the French colonial
metropole. What mattered was not the absence of speech about this event, but the fail-
ure of colonial politicians to conceive of the evidence of a mass movement of highly
trained, motivated and organised black Haitians as a revolution. Trouillot argues that
18th-century men and women saw the Haitian revolution as a ‘historical impossibility’
because the ‘events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a
sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 285

conceptual frame of reference’ (1995: 82). In other words, silencing the Haitian revolu-
tion was not achieved through a simple absence of speech, but through the use of cer-
tain registers of speech that were unfit to grasp the black Haitian as a historical subject.7
The discursive non-presence of slavery, then, can be framed as a kind of ‘colonial
aphasia’ or an ‘occlusion of knowledge’ that is ‘a dismembering, a difficulty speaking,
a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts
with appropriate things’ (Stoler 2011: 125). This implies that a revelatory moment in
which the ‘truth’ about slavery would be presented and lead to a national act of
self-discovery (Bijl 2012) was doomed to fail from the start. Indeed, the claim that
such a moment is possible would reduce slavery to a mere ‘event’ that can be isolated
historically and then forgotten.
Following these understandings of silence as a specific form of discursive speech,
my notion of the politics of compassion as a contested political field is a way to
foreground the complexities of colonial memory and national self-image in the
Netherlands. While there may be cases of deliberate erasure, exclusion and repression,
the evidence I have presented thus far suggests that there are other modes of colonial
memory where slavery was not erased, but was assimilated into – and even became a
constitutive element within – projects of nation-building. In this mode of colonial
memory, it was even necessary to expose the violence of slavery.

Presences

The commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands began long before 2002. On 1 July
1962, a commemoration attracted some 1,000 visitors from across the country (Bosma
2009: 88). The 100th anniversary of abolition the following year drew larger numbers.
A demonstration was organised by the Surinamese foundation Wi Eegie Sanie (Our
Own Thing) in Amsterdam (Bosma 2009: 89), with 500 Surinamese-Dutch marching
through the city carrying banners stating Fri moe de (Freedom must come; Oostindie
2010: 165). Unlike today, these commemorations were focused less on black citizenship
and Dutch racism (Essed and Hoving 2014) and more tied to anticolonial struggle
(Bosma 2009; Oostindie 2010).
These commemorations attracted media and political attention. On 2 July 1963,
commemorations in Amsterdam, The Hague, Zeist, Paramaribo and Willemstad were
front-page news in the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, including a sizeable photograph
of the demonstration in Amsterdam. The chairmen of the upper and lower houses of
parliament conveyed their congratulations in telegrams to the Antilles and Suriname.
In Zeist, even the mayor attended the ceremony (Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant 1963:
no page).
7 Susan Buck-Morss has warned against ‘conflating two silences, the past and the present one, when it
comes to the Haitian story. For if men and women in the eighteenth century did not think in non-
racial terms of the “fundamental equality of humanity,” as “some of us do today,” at least they knew
what was happening; today, when the Haitian slave revolution might be more thinkable, it is more
invisible, due to the construction of disciplinary discourses through which knowledge of the past
has been inherited’ (Buck-Morss 2009: 50). She argues that ‘eighteenth century Europeans were
thinking about the Haitian Revolution precisely because it challenged the racism of many of their
preconceptions’ (2009: 51), and that Hegel’s famous master–slave dialectic is inspired by his intimate
knowledge of current affairs, including the Haitian Revolution. However, this source of his thinking
is never revealed explicitly, and it takes Buck-Morss’ refined work to trace it. In other words, Hegel
silenced the Haitian Revolution by talking about it in philosophical terms.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

286 MARKUS BALKENHOL

Three days earlier, the same newspaper had published a full-page cultural supple-
ment dedicated to slavery and abolition, covering white supremacy and racism, the
slow and unenthusiastic process of abolition in the Dutch colonies and the neglect of
the welfare of the freed people. The supplement also included an image of the auction
block from Benoit’s Voyage à Surinam (1839) and a historical advertisement announc-
ing the sale of a woman and her children (1832) – the same images that had played a
crucial role in the creation of the national slavery memorial.
The Nieuwsblad van het Noorden was even more explicit in its full-page coverage
of abolition. The article ‘1863: Wet afschaffing slavernij’ (1863: Law abolishing slavery)
had as its subtitle: ‘but for the negro slaves in the West, bondage remained a torturing
reality for ten more years’. It begins:

One hundred years ago […] slavery was abolished by law in the Dutch West
Indian colonies. Finally. Because already 30 years earlier the slaves in the English
colonies had been freed. 15 years later, the French colonies followed suit. Only
the Netherlands was not in a hurry. It is embarrassing that in all seriousness,
initial opinion was that the slaves should pay for their own freedom; it is also
embarrassing that, once the slaves were freed, they were obliged to work on
the plantations of their former masters for ten more years, under conditions that
were all but the same as they had been before emancipation. (Nieuwsblad van het
Noorden 1963: 17)

But even before these events, slavery and the violence of slavery had been present
in the public sphere. The historian C.K. Kesler, for example, published widely both in
professional and popular media in the 1920s and 1930s. His 1929 article in the widely
read leftist weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, ‘Feest in Suriname’, described the
celebration of Keti Koti8 two months earlier. Much can be said about this article, but
not that it erases violence9:

[John Gabriel Stedman] tells of the Spanish rack, a form of punishment in which
the victim, wedged into a triangular contraption of rods with their neck, arms,
and knees, is beaten on their bare back with tough tamarind branches on street
corners; of a rebellious slave, who, with his hands and feet bound, was hung from
the gallows on a hook that had been driven under his ribs, and who was left there
for a few days in his misery, until a compassionate soldier crushed the man’s skull
with the butt of his rifle, and many even more terrible stories. Those who read
this book and other writings from this time will become convinced that during
slavery, Suriname was a living hell for the negroes. As late as 26 January 1833,
the arsonist Codjo was burned alive in public with two of his accomplices, just
like it was done in the Middle Ages. (Kesler 1929: 13)

Note that the soldier ‘crushed the man’s skull’ as an act of compassion. In his
numerous publications in the West Indian Guide, Kesler frequently included highly

8 Keti Koti (lit. ‘broken chains’ or ‘break the chains’) is the Surinamese Creole (Sranantongo) term for
abolition day, 1 July 1863.
9 Van Stipriaan (2005) quotes this article, arguing that it boils down to a distortion that replaces facts
with a glorified nationalist fiction in which the cruelties of slavery or the agency of the enslaved have
no room. I agree with this interpretation, but it strikes me that Van Stipriaan makes no mention of
the extensive descriptions of violence in the very same article.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 287

graphic descriptions of the most unspeakable atrocities. In 1932, for example, he

published an article on the two famous fires that destroyed much of Suriname’s capital,
Paramaribo, in 1821 and 1832. Although the article makes a technical argument about
economic development and fire safety, Kesler turns to moral issues.
The 1832 fire was deliberately set by Kodjo, Mentor and Present, three black men
who aimed to spark a revolution by setting fire to the city. Unable to grasp the signif-
icance of the event as an act of anti-colonial resistance, Kesler qualifies this action as
‘fantastic’ and absurd. Nonetheless, he seems to care for the men, describing the details
of their punishment at length: burning at the stake, beheading and the public display of
their severed heads.
Nor did Dutch literature and intellectual thought avoid the subject of slavery.
Alison Blakely found that ‘The most common theme in Dutch literature on blacks is
the Dutch experience with African slavery’ (Blakely 1993). G.A. Bredero, for example,
condemned slavery as early as 1617 in his play Moortje:

Inhumane practice! Godless Knavery! / That men sell men into chattel slavery! / There
are some in this city who ply such trade. / In Fornabock, but it will not escape God’s
gaze.

But Bredero’s stance is ‘ambivalent’, both opposing and condoning slavery:

This [indictment of slavery] did not, however, prevent Bredero from presenting
his lover a black girl as a gift. Bredero is thus an early example of the ambivalence
which would continue in Dutch society concerning ethical principles and prac-
tices related to slavery. This would be apparent both in the lives of various
thinkers and in their works. (Blakely 1993: 172)

There were even some early abolitionist novels in the Netherlands. An English novel,
(Orinooko) The history of the royal slave by Aphra Behn (1688), was about an African
lured into slavery who killed his wife so that she could avoid enslavement, and who was
then cruelly mutilated before he could commit suicide (Blakely 1993: 172).
Two others, Reinhart by Elisabeth Maria Post (1791–92) (Paasman 1984) and
De Middelburgsche Avonturier published anonymously in 1760, depicted ‘good’ slave
owners. Other works defended slavery as a necessary evil; yet others romanticised
the lives of planters. ‘These contrasting outlooks concerning slavery suggest the
complexity of this issue for those who gave it serious thought’ (Blakely 1993: 176).
In 1780, a novel appeared in Batavia, the capital city of the Netherlands East Indies,
describing the murder of an unusually cruel mistress by a wronged slave. While the
play based on this event was staged in The Hague in 1801, the East Indies gentry
succeeded in having it banned from the stage.
According to a witness, this led to a proliferation of interest in slavery rather than
its ‘erasure’: ‘the bookseller (as he told me himself) sold infinitely more copies of the
play that day than what he had sold in the whole preceding six months’ (Blakely
1993: 176–7).
All this suggests that ‘erasure’ was at best one of many strategies to manage the
memory of slavery. At least in some cases, slavery was present in very explicit ways,
both in historical scholarship and in the general public sphere. I therefore agree with
Gert Oostindie who has argued that ‘[i]n Dutch historiography, there has long been

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

288 MARKUS BALKENHOL

an interest in slavery. There is thus no active repression, but neither is there a broad
awareness’ (2010: 163). This latter statement, however, invites critical examination of
what constitutes awareness. The fact that Kesler’s and other historical descriptions of
violence often resemble those on display in commemorations of slavery today should
make us pause. What kind of awareness does the display of violence foster?
Judging by their insistence on the violence and injustice of slavery, the historical
sources quoted above seem to be aware. Not only do they seem aware of the violence
and injustice, they also take the only possible humanist position by condemning slav-
ery. While it seems difficult to fault such a position for ignoring, neglecting or even
erasing the violence of slavery, the double bind remains: taking the position of compas-
sion always also implies hierarchy (Berlant 2004; Sontag 2004). The showcasing of
violence and injustice becomes constitutional for a humanist subject that both distances
herself from injustice and violence and at the same time dissociates herself from taking
responsibility for her own history.

The politics of compassion

Kesler expresses his moral outrage over the violence committed against the enslaved –
the inhumanity of being burned at the stake or beheaded – especially as these sentences
were also passed down on a woman. Exasperated, he laments that nobody showed
‘compassion’ (medelijden) for the victims: ‘Apparently, in general it was believed, from
high to low, that the punishment was a justified retaliation for the crimes committed’
(1932: 172).
For Kesler, the three black men who set fire to Paramaribo were no resistance
heroes. He saw them as criminals, but also as victims that deserved compassion.
His concern with the extreme and unjust violence they suffered, however, not only
draws attention to the fate of the enslaved, but also to the compassionate Kesler
himself.
Showcasing images of violence, I argue, functions to establish a compassionate
subject and a suffering object. The graphic descriptions of violence enable rather than
contradict the idea of a caring subject. One can even ‘crush a man’s skull’ in the name
of compassion! Indeed, the more intense the violence, the more significant its compas-
sionate condemnation, both for individuals such as Kesler and for collective subjects
such as the nation.
As I discussed above, Kesler in De Groene Amsterdammer dwelled at length on the
most repelling images of slavery. Detailed descriptions of torture and suffering served a
specific role in his narrative – to build up to the concluding statement: ‘No wonder that
… the governor, who conveyed the message of freedom, was venerated as “Father” Van
Landsberge for a long time. No wonder, also, that an even greater veneration emerged
for the mighty King […].’
The images of cruelty are necessary to make the veneration of the King logically
acceptable. Slavery, and the iconic images of violence associated with it, are
instrumentalised in what Susan Buck-Morss has called a ‘root metaphor’ connoting ev-
erything that is evil about power relations, but in turn portraying European nations –
who had themselves instituted these very power relations – as enlightened beacons of
liberty (Buck-Morss 2009). Kesler’s way of framing slavery suggests that he not so
much ‘erased’ slavery but embraced it. Here, images of violence are not excluded and

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 289

suppressed, but assimilated in a process of nationalist meaning-making. Kesler imagines

the Netherlands as a compassionate nation, which suggests that, at least in Kesler’s
narrative, the national self-image of tolerance and compassion did not emerge despite
slavery, but through it (cf. Stoler 2004).
In 1956, historian C.C. Goslinga portrayed slavery itself as a trajectory of
emancipation, set in motion by the compassion of the slaving nation and the
Protestant Church: ‘The only important fact that transcends the limited sphere of
colonial events from the French Time until the First World War, is, as far as the West
is concerned, the Emancipation of the slaves, which was announced on July 1, 1863.’
This ‘only important fact’, according to Goslinga, was not the outcome of the
struggle of the enslaved, but the ‘deed of Thorbecke’s second ministry during King
Willem III’s administration’, a King who ‘even received the nickname “The Good”
from the Creoles’ and was venerated by former slaves for his act of compassion.
Not only the signing of the Emancipation law, but slavery itself becomes a compas-
sionate act:

[A]s contradictory as that may sound, emancipation already begins with slavery
itself. After all, emancipation is not merely one deed, it is also a process, and
every measure, regulation, decision, or bill of which the slave is subject or object,
constitutes a link that eventually brings us to the end of a chain of three centuries
of intervention and care for the unpaid work force and to this memorable July 1,
1863, when Mgr. Kistemaker, then Apostolic Vicar and Bishop of Curaçao and
Subordinates, celebrated the release with a solemn Mass in the presence of
Governor Crol and other authorities. (Goslinga 1956: 9, emphasis MB)

Kesler, Goslinga and many others do not deny the reality of slavery and its inher-
ent violence. In order to understand how it has been possible to silence while speaking,
we need to look at the specific rhetorical strategies through which slavery was present
in Dutch discourse. At least in the sources I discuss here, slavery was not so much
excluded from discourse as semantically overdetermined in the service of nationalist
and religious aims. Slavery became an ‘easy metaphor’ (Buck-Morss 2009) in which
the Dutch nation and the Christian faith appear as institutions excelling in the care of
others.
Even when slavery was displaced, the nation could be imagined as compassionate.
Hence the stunning popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, trans-
lated into Dutch in 1853 and reprinted 120 times since. Uncle Tom’s Cabin not only
displaced slavery as something that happened elsewhere (Bijl 2012); it also allowed
imagining the Dutch nation as compassionate to the suffering of others.
Compassion here emerges as an ambiguous emotion indeed. As Lilie Chouliaraki
has argued,

Whereas [the] moral emphasis on pity has enabled, partially but significantly, the
alleviation of suffering among large populations in modern times, it has simulta-
neously established a dominant discourse about public action that relies heavily
on the visuality of suffering and on its emotional language of emergency
(Calhoun 2010). It is this reliance that, in Arendt’s famous critique, displaces
politics into the ‘social question’ – it displaces the long-term concern with
establishing structures of justice with the urgent concern for doing something
for those who suffer. (Chouliaraki 2012: 79)

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

290 MARKUS BALKENHOL

I share Hannah Arendt’s concern, but also understand the politics of compassion as a
political field in which, as Paul Gilroy has argued, there is ‘potential for political action
and pedagogy’ (Gilroy 2009: 46). I agree with Gilroy that compassion cannot be
rejected simply ‘because campus anti-humanism doesn’t approve of the dubious
aesthetic and moral registers in which an un-exotic otherness was initially made intel-
ligible’ (Gilroy 2009). The point is not to reject and condemn appeals to compassion
as sentimentality or hypocrisy (cf. Stoler 2006: 134), but to recognise that compassion
remains a problematic paradigm within which appeals to political action continue to be
made. By employing the term ‘politics of compassion’, my aim is not to dismiss hu-
manism, but to point out that in the case of the commemoration of slavery, compassion
and nationalism are two sides of the same coin.

Conclusion

My argument in this article is twofold. First, my aim is to complicate the notions of histor-
ical silence, ‘erasure’ and ‘secrecy’ that have informed many post- and decolonial projects,
most prominently the national slavery memorial. As I have shown, while active silencing
may occur in many cases, slavery and other colonial atrocities have often been present rather
than absent. Indeed the historical evidence I discussed suggests that historical ‘silence’ is a
complex, even contradictory phenomenon that in some instances showcases, rather than
erases violence and brutality. Since the 19th century, Dutch historians, journalists and play-
wrights have often emphasised the suffering of the enslaved, appealing to humanist sensibil-
ities for various reasons. This does not mean, however, that such showcasing of violence has
built political solidarity. Rather, the emphasis on suffering has ingrained an often self-con-
gratulatory image of a humanism that is often seen as being ‘typically’ Dutch. This spectacle
of suffering, in other words, is deeply invested in nationalist projects. At the same time, the
petition for a national slavery memorial has shown that engaging in a politics of compassion
can offer ground to refashion post-colonial futures, to use David Scott’s (1999) fortuitous
term. Here, humanism is neither accepted at face value nor discarded as damaged goods,
but salvaged and held to its promise. Such a more complex notion of historical silence means
that hopes for a definitive break, in which the past can finally be left behind, will have to be
abandoned. Instead, we need to understand the complex structures in which the colonial
past continues to inform the multicultural present, including particular structures of feeling.
This brings me to my second point concerning an analysis of the politics of multi-
culturalism, and the related search for cultural essences. The opening vignette of Rita
Verdonk’s speech, in which she turned ‘culture’ and ‘nation’ into objects of love and
anxiety, highlights the affective nature of this debate. This culturalist sentiment is as
strong as ever: at the time of writing (May 2016), polls are showing Geert Wilders’
Freedom Party (PVV), the successor of Rita Verdonk’s Trots op Nederland, to be the
largest party in parliament. Moreover, partly in response to this, an anti-racist move-
ment is gaining strength, in which the colonial presence is a central issue.10 A better
understanding of how colonialism informs the postcolonial present is therefore timely.

10 In this article I have developed an argument that is related to the one made in Gloria Wekker’s
White innocence (2016). It is perhaps a sign of the times that these two publications appear almost
at the same point. Unfortunately, because of this temporal overlap, I have no chance to discuss her
argument here. I do hope, however, that both publications will inaugurate a broader debate.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 291

Analyses have rightly understood emotions such as compassion in the wider

framework of neoliberal models of governance. Here I argue that such structures of
feeling also have colonial roots. Far from offering a comprehensive account of how
emotions have been shaped and reshaped in colonial and postcolonial times, my argu-
ment has been that the highly affective politics of belonging and exclusion today can be
more fully understood if their colonial roots are included in the analysis. In the present
case, such an analysis can provide an answer to the seeming paradox of embracing both
cosmopolitanism and parochialism at the same time: they have been two sides of the
same colonial coin for a long time.

Markus Balkenhol
Meertens Institute
Joan Muyskenweg 25
Amsterdam 1096CJ
Netherlands
[email protected]

References
Ahmed, S. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.
Bakker, M. 2002. ‘Zwarten hoorden op de eerste rij’, Trouw 5 July.
Balkenhol, M. 2014. ‘Tracing slavery. An ethnography of diaspora, affect, and cultural heritage in
Amsterdam’, PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Balkenhol, M. 2015. ‘Zwarte piet, racisme, emoties’, Waardenwerk 62: 36–46.
Berlant, L. 2004. Compassion: the culture and politics of an emotion. New York: Routledge.
Biekman, B. A. 2002. Gedenkboek realisatie van het nationaal monument Nederlands slavernijverleden:
met de menselijke waardigheid voor ogen. Den Haag: Landelijk Platform Slavernijverleden.
Bijl, P. 2012. ‘Colonial memory and forgetting in the Netherlands and Indonesia’, Journal of Genocide
Research 14: 441–61.
Blakely, A. 1993. Blacks in the Dutch world: the evolution of racial imagery in a modern society.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bosma, U. 2009. Terug uit de kolonie: zestig jaar postkoloniale migranten en hun organisaties.
Amsterdam: Bakker.
Breedveld, W. 2002. ‘Een bezoeking’, Trouw 3 July.
Buck-Morss, S. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and universal history (Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the
Americas). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Calhoun, C. J. 2010. The idea of emergency, in D. Fassin and M. Pandolfi (eds.), Contemporary states of
emergency: the politics of military and humanitarian interventions, 29–58. New York: Zone Books.
Chin A Foeng, L. H. 2008. ‘Van volksjongen tot Unesco-man’, Parbode November 22.
Chouliaraki, L. 2012. Cosmopolitanism as irony. A critique of post-humanitarianism, in R. Braidotti, P.
Hanafin and B. Blaagaard (eds.), After cosmopolitanism, 77–96. New York: Routledge.
Comaroff, J. L. and J. Comaroff 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
De Wilde, M. 2015. ‘Brave new neighbourhood. Affective citizenship in Dutch territorial governance’,
PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Der Nederlanden, F. 2002. ‘Voor de nazaten was geen plaats bij het Monument’, Het Parool 2 July.
Essed, P. and I. Hoving 2014. Dutch racism. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Fassin, D. 2005. ‘Compassion and repression: the moral economy of immigration policies in France’,
Cultural Anthropology 20: 362–87.
Foucault, M. 1978. The history of sexuality, vol. 1, an introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.
Geschiere, P. 2009. The perils of belonging: autochthony, citizenship, and exclusion in Africa and Europe.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

292 MARKUS BALKENHOL

Gilroy, P. 2005. Postcolonial melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gilroy, P. 2009. Race and the right to be human. Utrecht: Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen, Universiteit
Utrecht.
Goslinga, C. C. 1956. Emancipatie en emancipator: de geschiedenis van de slavernij op de benedenwindse
eilanden en van het werk der Bevrijding. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Horton, J. O. and J. C. Kardux 2004. ‘Slavery and the contest for national heritage in the United States
and the Netherlands’, American Studies International 42: 51–74.
Kesler, C. K. 1929. ‘Feest in Suriname’, De Groene Amsterdammer 31 August.
Kesler, C. K. 1932. ‘Na 100 yaar: Branden in Suriname’, De West-Indische Gids 15: 164–74.
Margry, P. J. 2011. Memorializing a controversial politician: the ‘heritagization’ of a materialized vox
populi, in P. J. Margry and C. Sanchez-Carretero (eds.), Grassroots memorials: the politics of memo-
rializing traumatic death. New York: Berghahn Books.
Mepschen, P. 2016. ‘Everyday autochthony. Difference, discontent and the politics of home in Amster-
dam’, PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Mepschen, P., J. W. Duyvendak and E. H. Tonkens 2010. ‘Sexual politics, orientalism and multicultural
citizenship in the Netherlands’, Sociology 44: 962–79.
Mepschen, P., J. W. Duyvendak and J. Uitermark 2013. ‘Progressive politics of exclusion: Dutch
populism, immigration, and sexuality 1’, Migration and Citizenship 2: 8–12.
Meyer, B. and P. Geschiere (eds.) 1999. Globalization and identity: dialectics of flow and closure.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Midden, E. 2014. Towards a more inclusive feminism: defining feminism through faith, in R. Braidotti,
B. Blaagaard, T. de Graauw and E. Midden (eds.), Transformations of religion and the public sphere,
210–27. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Muehlebach, A. and N. Shoshan 2012. ‘Introduction’, Anthropological Quarterly 85: 317–43.
Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant 1963. [Title not available], Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant 2 July.
Nieuwsblad van het Noorden 1963. ‘1863: Wet afschaffing slavernij’, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden
29 June.
Oostindie, G. 2001. Facing up to the past: perspectives on the commemoration of slavery from Africa, the
Americas and Europe. Kingston: Ian Randle.
Oostindie, G. 2010. Postkoloniaal Nederland. Vijfenzestig jaar vergeten, herdenken, verdringen.
Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
Oudenampsen, M. 2013. ‘De revolte van nieuwrechts. Neoconservatisme en postprogressieve politiek’,
Krisis. Tijdschrift Voor Actuele Filosofie 32: 48.
Paasman, A. N. 1984. Reinhart: Nederlandse literatuur en slavernij ten tijde van de Verlichting. Leiden:
Nijhoff.
Passerini, L. 2003. ‘Memories between silence and oblivion’, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory
238–54.
Prins, B. 2002. ‘Het lef om taboes te doorbreken. Nieuw realisme in het Nederlandse discours over
multiculturalisme’, Migrantenstudies 4: 241–54.
Schinkel, W. 2007. Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie: aanzet tot een theorie voorbij de
maatschappij. Kampen: Klement.
Scott, D. 1999. Refashioning futures. Criticism after postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sontag, S. 2004. Regarding the pain of others. London: Penguin Books.
Spelman, E. V. 1998. Fruits of sorrow: framing our attention to suffering. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Stoler, A. L. 2004. Affective states, in D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds.), A companion to the anthropology
of politics, 4–20. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stoler, A. L. 2006. ‘On degrees of imperial sovereignty’, Public Culture 18: 125–46.
Stoler, A. L. 2011. ‘Colonial aphasia: race and disabled histories in France’, Public Culture 23: 121–56.
Trouillot, M.-R. 1995. Silencing the past: power and the production of history. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Uitermark, J., P. Mepschen and J. W. Duyvendak 2013. Populism, sexual politics, and the exclusion of
Muslims in the Netherlands, in European states and their Muslim citizens: the impact of institutions
on perceptions and boundaries, 235–55. New York: Cambridge University Press.

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 S I L E N C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F C O M PA S S I O N 293

van Stipriaan, A. 2005. ‘Stilte! Niet storen! De slavernij is afgeschaft’, De Negentiende Eeuw:
Documentatieblad Werkgroep 19e Eeuw 29: 45–61.
Van Walsum, S. 2002. ‘Slavernijmonument roept bij blanke geen emotie op’, De Volkskrant 1 July.
Verkaaik, O. and R. Spronk 2011. ‘Sexular practice: notes on an ethnography of secularism’, Focaal 59:
83–8.
Wekker, G. 2016. White innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Wynia, S. 2015. ‘Het schuldgevoel over de ‘zwarte holocaust’. Verwerking van slavernijverleden is het
gevolg van Surinaamse onafhankelijkheid 40 jaar geleden. En Zwarte Piet werd het symbool’,
Elsevier 21 October.

Le silence et la politique de la compassion. La

commémoration de l’esclavage aux Pays-Bas

En regardant la commémoration de l’esclavage aux Pays-Bas, cet article formule un argument

double. Tout d’abord, le but est de compliquer les notions de silence historique, « d’effacement »
et de « secret » qui ont informé de nombreux projets post et dé-coloniales. Je montre que la violence
et la brutalité de l’esclavage sont même dans certains cas mis en évidence. Le résultat est une image
souvent auto-applaudissante d’un humanisme qui est souvent considéré comme « typiquement »
néerlandais. En même temps, le monument de l’esclavage national a montré que l’engagement dans
une politique de compassion peut offrir un terrain pour refaçonner des futures post-coloniales. Ici,
l’humanisme est ni acceptée à sa valeur nominale, ni jeté comme un bien endommagé, mais récupéré
et tenu à sa promesse. Deuxièmement, j’analyse la politique du multiculturalisme, et la recherche
connexe pour les essences culturelles dans lesquelles «culture» et «nation» se sont transformés en
objets d’amour et d’anxiété. Bien que les analyses ont justement compris les émotions tels que la
compassion à travers des modèles de gouvernance néolibéraux, je soutiens que ces structures de sen-
timent ont également des racines coloniales. La politique hautement affective d’appartenance et
d’exclusion peuvent aujourd’hui être mieux compris si leurs racines coloniales sont inclus dans
l’analyse.

Mots-clés esclavage, les Pays-Bas, mémoire, la politique de la compassion, race

© 2016 European Association of Social Anthropologists.