Slavery in the Cultural Imagination

Marrigje Paijmans is Assistant Professor in Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She was awarded the KNAW Early Career Award 2023 for investigating early modern literature from a critical perspective, thus recovering marginalised voices and balancing our understanding of the past. She has published widely on neerlandophone literature regarding, for example, Spinozist settlerism in North America, blackface in seventeenth-century theatre, and Afro-Surinamese resistance in plantation poetry. Karwan Fatah-Black is Senior Researcher at the Royal Dutch Institute for Caribbean and Southeast Asia Studies (KITLV-KNAW) and University Lecturer at Leiden University. Since completing his PhD (2013), he has studied the history of the Atlantic world, enslavement, and emancipation strategies. In partnership with museums and heritage institutions, he is working on creating new narratives about the colonial past and postcolonial futures.

• 1. Introduction, Marrigje Paijmans, Literary Imaginations, 2. Enslaved to the Passions: Slavery, Emotions, and Trade in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Comedy, Marrigje Paijmans, 3. 'Pleasant and Useful Reading for Dutch Youth': Attitudes on Slavery in A. E. van Noothoorn's Fictional Travel Accounts for Children (1843-1851), Claudia Zeller, 4. Convict Labour and Concubinage in the Dutch East Indies: Historical and Literary Reappropriations of Martha Christina Tiahahu's Anti-Colonial Revolt, Gerlov van Engelenhoven,Intersecting Imaginations, 5. The Elephant and Slavery: Thinking about Slavery through the Animal in the Early Modern Dutch Empire (1650-1800), Pichayapat Naisupap, 6. Law as a Sociocultural Imaginary: Legal Arguments, Social Hierarchy and Pro-Slavery in the Dutch Republic, ca. 1760-1780, Gertjan Schutte, 7. Januari's Ghost: A Tale of Slavery, Sexuality, and Boyhood on Board of a VOC Vessel, Alicia Schrikker, 8. Transformative Work: An Antislavery Petition at the National Exhibition of Women's Labour, 1898, Sophie van den Elzen,Visual and Spatial Imaginations, 9. Not Absent, But Not Seen: Narrating the History of Slavery at the Cape, Carine Zaayman, 10. (Re)Visualising Slavery: An Outlook on the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago, Nancy Jouwe, 11. Making an Embodied Absence Present: Tourism and the Cultural Imaginary of Slavery and Colonial Heritage in the Netherlands, Emmanuel Akwasi Adu-Ampong, 12. Reframing History: The Artistic Reclamation of Colonial Photography and the Quest for De-victimisation, Brenda Bikoko, 13. Imagining Dutch Slavery Legacies Through the Rural-Urban Divide in the TV-show Grenslanders, Anke Bosma,Philosophical Imaginations, 14. Born in Bondage: Slavery, Freedom, and Enlightenment in Spinoza, Hasana Sharp, 15. Coordinates of a Slave's Body in a Philosopher's Dream, Thomas van Binsbergen, 16. Human-ing Out Loud: Ontologies of Disorder in a Musically Exemplified Trans-Caribbean Option, Charissa Granger and Francio Guadeloupe, 17. Epilogue: Histories of Imagination and the Making of Cultural Archives, Susan Legêne.