Organizer: Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Type/Location: Hybrid / Berkeley, CA

Description:

Contemporary cultural memories of the Dutch colonial past are highly contested. These memory chasms have even led to several legal complaints, in particular in relation to the release of films as The East (Jim Taihuttu, 2020) and art exhibitions such as Revolusi! in the Rijksmuseum. This shows that the Netherlands still struggles with their colonial past and how it should be represented and remembered. In both Indonesia and the Netherlands, the central issues in these discussions are who is allowed to say what about the past.

In this lecture, Arnoud Arps presents early findings of his postdoctoral study on how the end of the colonial era is transculturally and transnationally remembered in Indonesian and Dutch film and literature. Taking cinematic and literary representations of the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949) as its point of departure, he illustrates whose war is remembered and how.

This presentation highlights parts of a larger project that investigates the complex chasms and junctions between Dutch and Indonesian mediated postcolonial memories. The project will ascertain how memory trajectories of the colonial era diverge in Dutch and Indonesian cross-media released in the past five decades, but also determine where they overlap. The narrative focus by both countries – former coloniser and former colonised – on the trauma of the war, is understood to provide the grounds for rapprochement and understanding.

Speaker:

Arnoud Arps is a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial and Memory Studies at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an incoming Assistant Professor of Extended Cinema, Film Heritage and Memory at the University of Amsterdam. His work on cultural memory and media has, amongst others, been published in the journals Dutch Crossing (2023), M/C Journal (2022), Journal of Migration History (2022), and Southeast Asian Media Studies (2020). The Dutch Research Council (NWO) funded his PhD-project on how the Indonesian War of Independence is remembered in Indonesian historical re-enactment, film, and music from the last decade. He has been an editor for the scholarly journal Indische Letteren since 2019.

Registration:

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