Contesting Cultural Heritage: Decolonizing the Tropenmuseum as an Intervention in the Dutch/European Memory Complex

Abstract

Much of what is considered cultural heritage in Europe-especially in Western and Southern European countries-originates from a past in which these countries were substantial colonial powers. Though the Netherlands has a 400-year history of colonialism, it has long received little attention in terms of the national commemoration and education of that colonialist history (van Stipriaan 2007;Essed and Trienekens 2008;Weiner 2014a;Wekker 2016). The rare times that colonialism is mentioned in educational programs, there is usually hardly any reflection on the way colonial history has affected the current privileged position

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…Another study discussed the 13th-century Mevlevi Sema ceremony as part of Turkish intangible heritage practice on SNS (Pietrobruno, 2014). From 17th to 19th centuries, slavery was the most contested North American topic (Carter, 2015;Cook and Potter, 2018 ;Morgan and Pallascio, 2015;Rhodes, 2019), while in the European context, works focused on colonial history and post-colonial discourses (Knudsen and Andersen, 2019;Peralta, 2019;Ryzova, 2015;van Huis, 2019). Other studies addressed the different perceptions and contemporary tensions on social media resulting from the Latin America war between Chile, Peru and Bolivia (Drinot, 2011), as well as vernacular perceptions of the 19th and 20th centuries penal history in Canada through museum visitor reviews on social media (Ferguson et al, 2015).…”

“…dissonant, difficult and penal heritage). Dissonant heritage was analysed in the context of (mis)dialogue and multivocality, including conflicting perspectives, revealing 'disharmonies and power relations within heritage' (van Huis, 2019) or 'disjunction and disarticulation between individual narratives and memories and the authorized narratives and frameworks' (Liu, 2018). These theorisations were activated in discussions of topics such as communication of immigration in Italy (Arrigoni and Galani, 2019a), German WW2 cemeteries in Normandy (Braun, 2016) and the troubling heritage of Cecil John Rhodes (Knudsen and Andersen, 2019).…”

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union

“…Moreover, various people and communities have protested against today's memory and heritage regimes that are perceived as fostering one-sided or discriminative memories and narrations of the past -particularly those related to minorities and peoples other than white, Christian Europeans. These "change agents" aim to promote alternative or silenced memories, or to re-narrate and reinterpret past events to form a more inclusive present (van Huis 2019;Turunen 2019a).…”

“…In studies extending the preservationist and conservationist paradigm, the concept of heritage has been approached as an act of communication (Dicks 2000), a process of emotional and cultural engagement (Bendix 2009), and a performance and cultural practice of regulation, control, mediation, and negotiation of cultural and historical values and narratives Waterton and Smith 2009). In these studies, heritage is emerging when something is narrated, defined, and/ or treated as heritage in a specific sociocultural context ( van Huis et al 2019). Critical heritage studies emphasize how heritage is about a political negotiation of identities (Waterton and Smith 2009).…”

“…Although many museums across Europe are re-evaluating colonial histories (e.g. Thomas 2009;Dixon 2012;Kros 2014;Buettner 2018;van Huis 2019;Turunen, 2019b), for the time being both colonialism and the many mobilities it entailed are poorly represented in the EU-AHD. This contributes to the exclusion of both Muslim and post-migrant communities from the EUropean heritage community currently under construction.…”