Visiting Professor of the
King Willem-Alexander Chair for the Study of the Low Countries (University of Liège)

 

A conference organized by the Dutch Studies section (Department of Modern Languages) and by the research units Lilith and CEREP (University of Liège)

24 March 2021

 

Programme:

13.00 hrs welcome and introduction Kris Steyaert and Elisabeth Bekers

13.40 hrs Kathleen Gyssels (University of Antwerp), “Queering Wekker with Wynter and Taubira: Sycorax’ Sisters in the Struggle against White Male Heteronormative Prejudice”
14.10 hrs Liesbeth Minnaard (Leiden University), “‘Heb je dat, betrokken blanke wereldburger?’: Black Refugees and White Compassion in Two Works by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer”

14.40 hrs coffee break

15.00 hrs Dominiek Dendooven (In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres), “White... or not quite: The Issue of Race in First World War Studies”
15.30 hrs Bastien Bomans (University of Liège), “Beyond White Gays / Gaze: Imperialist Nostalgia, Racialized Homophobia and Queer Extravaganza”

16.00 hrs Agnes Andeweg (Utrecht University), “Exploring Layers in the Cultural Archive: The Case of Rembrandt’s Painting of Two Black Men”

16.30 hrs coffee break

16.45 hrs keynote lecture Gloria Wekker, Visiting Professor King Willem-Alexander Chair (University of Liège), “Beyond White Innocence in the Academy”
17.45 hrs discussion, moderator Elisabeth Bekers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

18.10 hrs end

 

 

Abstracts and recordings:

A crucial change determinant in European standard languages is the degree to which variants and varieties are deemed prestigious: (experimental) research has demonstrated that features associated with social success stand a higher chance of being imitated. An apparent counterexample to this causality is the growing success of the Moroccan accent in Dutch society, which seems to be at odds with its brutal downgrading as primitive and uneducated.

In this paper, we present findings from two studies designed to dig deeper than this public rejection. We constructed identical matched-guise experiments into the evaluation of male and female speakers with an indigenous-Dutch or Moroccan-Dutch background. We probed both traditional prestige perceptions (pertaining to education, income, professional competence,...) and the modern prestige considerations (pertaining to non-posh urban cool) which have been found to correlate with rapid linguistic diffusion.

Findings from these experiments force us to reconsider our view on ethnic accents. While Moroccan-Dutch males take the brunt of accent-based racism, they are not categorically rejected: Moroccan-flavoured speech is always deemed inferior to indigenous speech, but it is found to be the most dynamically prestigious of all Dutch speech (which plausibly determines its success). Female Moroccan may not engender such extreme reactions – Aïcha is definitely allowed more than Ahmed –, but it is a long way from being accepted as indigenous speech.

 

Kathleen Gyssels (University of Antwerp) Queering Wekker with Wynter and Taubira: Sycorax’ Sisters in the Struggle against White Male Heteronormative Prejudice

In this paper, I would like to link Gloria Wekker’s enduring efforts to make a wide readership conscious about the white privileges that continue to reign in Europe and America to two Sycorax sisters: in neighbouring Guyane, Christiane Taubira (1952-) has struggled her entire political career against white supremacy and ‘misogynoir’, yet has succeeded in passing in 2013 the vote for the gay marriage in the French Assembly. When I read Wekker, I cannot forget another resonant voice, that of Sylvia Wynter (1928-), who – born in Cuba and having spent many years in Jamaica and the United States – also traces back homophobia in Guyana and the larger archipelago, and which is ex/imported in the United States.

While Wekker’s White Innocence focuses mainly on the Netherlands, I want to reflect upon the relevance of her work in and for the three Guyanas, bringing her work home as it were. The Guyanas remain a much neglected hinterland of the global postcolonial area, and while Wekker quotes Fanon, Césaire, Gilroy, one could ‘upgrade’ the theoretical framework with the essays by two ‘womanists’ who fight the many ethnic, gender and other inequalities which still hamper the postcolonial society. The invisible triangle (Wekker, Wynter, Taubira) reflects a perverse reproduction of the masculinist domination and male discourses which recycle the ‘misogynoir’ of the respective ‘Centres’ (Amsterdam, Paris / Cayenne, Kingston and Georgetown).

 

Liesbeth Minnaard (Leiden University) ‘Heb je dat, betrokken blanke wereldburger?’ Black Refugees and White Compassion in Two Works by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

The so-called refugee crisis has triggered manifold responses in the field of European art and literature. In my contribution, I will discuss two works by the Dutch writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer as examples of Dutch ‘refugee crisis literature’: his highly acclaimed novel La Superba (2013) and the short-story ‘Fatou yo’, that was published in the text collection Gelukszoekers (2015), but that is actually also a fragment from the aforementioned novel.

I will start by briefly exploring the challenges and pitfalls in representing refugees in literature, taking the significance of race as a factor of difference into account. Which role does race play in relation to the seemingly inescapable trope of refugee victimhood and to the humanitarian and empathic mind-set that ‘refugee crisis literature’ mostly requires from its reader?

Then I embark on a comparative analysis of the two texts and of the way in which, as I will demonstrate, the texts position and, ultimately, manipulate their empathic reader. I will argue that the (racial) discomfort that results from this manipulation is considerably more effective within the framework of La Superba than within the Gelukszoekers collection, despite the latter’s explicitly activist agenda.

 

Dominiek Dendooven (In Flanders Fields Museum Ypres)  White… or not quite: The Issue of Race in First World War Studies

From 1914 to 1919, the French and British colonial empires imported hundreds of thousands of their non-white subjects to Europe to serve in the ‘Great War for Civilisation’. Although the British and French had different attitudes towards the use of non-European troops, there was one thing in common: blacks served in a subordinate position. For them, the involvement in a modern, European war had an impact that went far beyond their individual lives, with the rise of political awareness and activism among black veterans from the United States, the Caribbean and West Africa, but also an intensified and virulent racism in Europe, particularly in Germany.

 

Bastien Bomans (Université de Liège) Beyond White Gays / Gaze: Imperialist Nostalgia, Racialized Homophobia and Queer Extravaganza.

‘Where Did All the Critical White Gay Men Go?’ With Gloria Wekker’s question in mind, I propose to discuss the concept of imperialist nostalgia, i.e. ‘a condition in which colonizers mourn the passing of what they themselves have altered, destroyed, or transformed’. Wekker sheds light on how dominant discourses, emerging from white male gays and the white gaze, represent homophobia as being embodied by people of colour and more especially by young Muslim men. Through the racialization of homophobia and the consolidation of the white/gay/innocent triad, the ‘colour-blind’ rainbow flag is subtly overlaid on other realities. The imagery of imperialist nostalgia obscures the complex imbrications of systems of oppression, reinforces Islamophobia and racism, and denies the existence of intersectional queer identities and desires.

Far from obfuscating its epistemological implications, this paper examines the demystification of white gay innocence through what Gloria Wekker calls critical nostalgia – a type of nostalgia ‘with nonnormative sexualities as a basis upon which a politics of solidarity can take off, and for which hard work will be required’ – and understands queer extravaganza as one of its routes/roots. I will draw attention to how the TV show Pose (2018) and the novel Brother (2017) by David Chariandy reinscribe black and brown queer subjectivities and alliances onto historicity and offer a glimpse at future coalitions by potentially triggering the loss of self- alleged innocence of its (white gay) audience/readers.

 

Agnes Andeweg (Utrecht University)  Exploring Layers in the Cultural Archive : the Case of Rembrandt’s Painting of Two Black men

One of the key concepts in Gloria Wekker’s seminal book White Innocence is ‘the cultural archive’, a term Wekker borrows from Edward Said. In the reception of White Innocence, the epistemological use, or even the existence of the cultural archive has been contested, which is why I would like to scrutinize it further in my paper. What does the cultural archive as a conceptual tool allow us as scholars to see about Dutch history, memory and society? And what does it obscure? Drawing from debates in history, archival studies and memory studies, and using the case of Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting Two African men, as it is called since 2019, I will argue that despite its obvious advantages for recognizing and acknowledging deep- seated structures of coloniality in Dutch society, we need a more layered and precise understanding of the cultural archive in order to be able to address possibilities of change.

 

Gloria Wekker, visiting professor of the King Willem-Alexander Chair for the Study of the Low Countries (ULiège)  Beyond White Innocence in the Academy

In my book White Innocence (2016), I investigated the ways in which we keep the myth alive that four hundred years of imperialism has not left any traces in the metropolitan part of Empire, the Netherlands. To that end, I explored the cherished self-narratives that we, the Dutch, like to tell ourselves about who we are and I pointed to the stark social discrepancies that exist with those rosy, self-flattering narratives. It is White Innocence that enables us to hold on to those beloved narratives.

In my presentation, I will explore the concept of race as a highly underestimated part of our general and academic knowledge production in the Netherlands. What is the version of race that we, the Dutch, practice? I understand race as a silent but powerful organizer of our culture, of our self-representations and the representations of the Other, of our language and institutions and of society as a whole. I will present some case studies of everyday racism, as it is evident on TV and in everyday encounters. In addition, I will explore the role that White innocence plays in several disciplines in the academy and in widespread practices in that institution.

 

 

Discussion, moderated by Elisabeth Bekers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)