Objects and framings of heritage, archives, and academic knowledge production generate worldwide, fierce societal debates on the legacies of colonial violence, past injustice and present-day institutional racism. Whether bronzes from Benin, daggers from Bali, fossils from Java, photo-albums from…

On 1 November 2018, Marieke Bloembergen was appointed Professor of Archival and Postcolonial Studies at the Institute for History.

The Platform for Postcolonial Readings brings together researchers, especially junior researchers, in Belgium and the Netherlands interested in issues of globalization, inter/transculturality, diversity and inclusivity, intersectionality, and postcoloniality. We are an open group (do join us!) and meet…

The ethics of ghosts, spectres, and mediums in postcolonial literature

Postcolonial Displacements explores the multiple ways in which migration in South Asia contributes to the imagining, questioning, subverting and reframing of territories, nations and communities. The project focuses on the contested fringes of the politically divided South Asian subcontinent, across…

This paper explores how citizenship is enacted and experienced in welfare encounters for Egyptian migrant parents in Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan, highlighting the importance of social citizenship and personal interactions in shaping belonging.

The Dutch colonial past in Indonesia has had a major influence on literature.

Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

The Platform for Postcolonial Readings organizes seminars for MA- and PhD-students and researchers in the field of postcolonial and globalisation studies in Belgium and the Netherlands. As an open network, discussion platform, and reading group, our meetings are open to all.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

In this dissertation Itandehui Jansen examines the ‘Voice’ of the filmmaker from a political and aesthetic perspective.

The Dutch Center for Travel Writing Studies s a scientific center that develops and coordinates initiatives to promote research into travel writing. It actively seeks contact with external (scientific and social) partners to collaborate on issues surrounding cultural / national identity, cultural contact…

The master’s programme in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University offers the most in-depth and comprehensive programme on the history of colonialism and globalisation currently available in Europe.

Indonesian translation of the book Recollecting Resonances from authors Bart Barendregt and Els Bogaerts.

You can find an overview of events organized by the Platform for Post-Colonial Readings below.

Representing Japanese Colonial 'Heritage' in Taiwan

The project seeks to explore the interplay of valuation and inequalities in science, using the interdisciplinary and planet-critical field of forest research as empirical case. It examines which/whose knowledge is recognised on what grounds, and how social dimensions like gender and geographical location…

An interdisciplinary cultural analysis of how the Hindustani double migration informs contemporary processes of identification and problematises the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity.

This study, Calypso, The Trinidadian Experience, has sought to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre as a mechanism (or as part of a broader mechanism) that has exerted on-going social influence within Trinidadian society…

Close cooperation in education between Leiden University and Indonesian partners occurs in many fields and range from student exchanges to science research projects.

A post-colonial approach to the concept of time in the past and present Maya culture

The aim of the Indonesian-Dutch Literature Collective (which is allied to the Society of Dutch Literature (MNL)) is to support research into the literature of and about the Dutch Indies, from the era of the Dutch East India Company to the present. Starting in 1986, the collective has published its own…

In the study of West-East relations, difference often takes centre stage. This holds for both culturalist and postcolonial perspectives. By contrast, in my investigation of Netherlands-Iran political relations in the 1960s and 1970s, I will focus on the role of SIMILARITY. What lay at the root of the…

A comparative study of colonialism and rural settlement in first millennium BC west central Sardinia

References to nature and the environment in the Caribbean literary and the contemporary age of globalization.

The subject of motherhood is interwoven with themes of survival, power and identity. It is also at the heart of any consideration of women’s writing. Conversations of Motherhood sensitively charts common themes, intersecting experiences and related topics within the cultural specificities of South African…

This programma, an initiative of the Institute for History in partnership with Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta. Aims to study more than 20 kilometers of Dutch archival materials in The Netherlands, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

Four years of protracted negotiations and bitter warfare passed between the declaration of Indonesian independence on 17 August, 1945, and the official transfer of sovereignty on 27 December, 1949.

The NWO has awarded Sara Polak a Rubicon grant. In September, she will start a 12-month period of research at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

This doctoral project, entitled Sinophone as Method: Reimaging Chinese Cinema in the Global Era, aims to explore the intricacies of knowledges and practices with regard to notions of China, Chinese, and Chineseness.

In 1933, Maria Ulfah Santoso was the first Indonesian women to earn a law degree. During her studies in Leiden University she became involved with Indonesia;s nationalist movement. She went on to be Indonesia's Social Minister, as the first female cabinet member. In this article, historian Wildan Sena…

Research projects which are assisted by the NVIC in the field of Arabic studies.

This doctoral project by artist and educator Luiz Zanotello engenders a postcolonial understanding of time, space and movement by means of artistic research methods. The project examines the contradictory effects of the abyssal line of thought within the tropics as a starting point.

ASLU 29 Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen, Valentina Raffa (2015)

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

Counter-Discourse in Zimbabwean Literature is a study of specific aspects of counter-discursive Zimbabwean narratives in English. In discussing the selected texts, my thesis is based on Terdiman’s (1989) the postcolonial concept of counter-discourse.

BASCE brings together those in the Benelux who are committed to exploring the changing relations between culture and the environment.

Master

The organization of the Platform for Postcolonial Readings is a collaboration of main organizers and occasional guest organizers.

This project explores the religious lives of a Surinamese Hindu community practicing in Amsterdam at the Sri Radha Krishna Mandir from an interdisciplinary perspective.