Kick-start Fellowship Nancy Jouwe

Programme: Tuesday 8 November 2022

10 -11.30 Walking tour on the traces of slavery and its afterlife in Utrecht

Please sign up for the walking tour no later than Monday 7 November 14:00 by emailing yasmin.bordens@hku.nl.

For the walking tour, we gather in front of the Broese bookstore, Oudegracht 112. The walking tour will be about 90 minutes, from Oudegracht 112 to Ledig Erf. From there, we will continue to the HKU Loods. Depending on the number of participants there will be one walk in English and one in Dutch.

12:00 Lunch (bring your own) at HKU Loods (MAFA location), Koningsweg 2
12.30 Intervention by Prof Kitty Zijlmans
12.45 Lecture by Nancy Jouwe
13.25 Conversation and Q&A
14:00 End of programme

Intro Nancy Jouwe

'The past has a presence in the present. It resonates. This notion will be the starting point of my fellowship, with a focus on the Dutch colonial history and its current resonances in the city of Utrecht and other cities and locations around The Netherlands. As a cultural historian, my work revolves around unravelling historical events, but I am also curious to see how the past resonates in our current cultural and social reality. Not just in the city, but also in an institution such as HKU, and how to share and make space for these insights and methods with students and staff of HKU.

Since I became a freelancer in 2013, I have co-edited seven book publications on the history of colonialism and slavery, including its afterlife in the Netherlands and in former Dutch colonies. These publications have been accompanied by walking tours in Amsterdam and Utrecht, and several public lectures, seminars, workshops in Europe, the United States, South Africa and Indonesia. Central to these diverse gatherings are questions such as: what does the Dutch and European colonial past, including slavery, look like and how does it resonate in our current everyday life, even if we do not really notice it? These questions are relevant when we pass buildings, and to our thinking, in our use of language and our practices, even in our infrastructures.'

Utrecht

'In 2022, Utrecht will celebrate its 900th ‘birthday’, as the city of Utrecht received city rights on June 3, 1122. This has been celebrated by several institutions. Remarkably, until very recently historians who focused on Utrecht’s local history did not mention the colonial history of the city and its connection to slavery. Moreover, historians for the most part did not even seem to take an interest in Utrecht’s colonial history. Likewise, cultural and heritage institutions and locals do not associate their city to this specific aspect of the past.

The 2021 publication Slavernij en de stad Utrecht (‘Slavery and the city of Utrecht’) (Walburg Press) for which I was coordinating editor, helped put an end to this dominant narrative. The research was commissioned by the municipality and showed that Utrecht was deeply involved in colonial slavery. The conclusions of this research clearly resonated with the cities’ mayor and city council members. Based on our findings, the mayor of Utrecht formally apologized on February 23, 2022, for the cities’ involvement in the worldwide colonial slavery system. Until recently, Utrecht citizens and institutions understood themselves to be not at all connected to Dutch colonialism. This realization, accompanied by a formal expression of accountability, shows that the narrative of how the city understands itself, is changing.'