Beyond the National Narrative

Debates about the history and legacy of European imperialism are the order of the day. Cities, institutions and museums, country houses, individual (royal) families: there is an appetite– or a moral demand– to investigate one's involvement with empire. 

Home affair

A feature of contemporary empire scrutiny is that it is often a home affair: what is the imperialist legacy of our country house, our city or our nation? In other words, the efforts are compartmentalised, directed at a domestic audience, and focused on how the national cultural memory and its representations are affected by this new consciousness around imperial heritage. Although we applaud this development, we believe this is the time to interrogate the nationally framed narratives and recognise that:

•  the imperial rule drew, in practice, on a complicated, transnational European network;
• that any retelling of this ‘shared’ history should include the ignored, suppressed or absent voices of the formerly colonised.  

In our academic practice we will need to add creative ways to redress, restore, repair, and move forward. For our investigation we are looking at the relatively unknown country of Suriname, north of Brazil, neighbour of former British and French Guiana. We will work in the triangle Suriname-Netherlands-UK to record, (re)tell, re-imagining and translate Suriname's colonial and postcolonial contact zone in an international language context. 

Suriname

Historical Suriname was a place of imperial encounters. For centuries, Suriname was a 'contact zone', an unequal network of colonial groups , the native peoples and the enslaved black population. Only the white elite was in a position to tell the story, such as the Scottish-Dutch army captain Johan Gabriel Stedman who wrote the seminal 18th century text on the Dutch ruled plantation economy of Suriname. Stedman's writing deeply penetrated into what is now regarded as the most important historiographic and literary text of Suriname, We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom. Both publications underline that colonial rule in Suriname offers a complicated, entangled story of empire that transgresses any national frame. This project brings Surinamese history and culture in a wider Caribbean and international context, high-lighting original Surinamese, Dutch, and British intersections, both historical and in today's multinational legacies.

We believe that looking beyond the current framing of imperial legacy as a national story will allow for more and diverse stories to emerge, in particular untold stories of the enslaved buried in colonial archives. We want to propose a transnational reading and writing that acknowledges the permeable context on many levels: floating between racial groups, cultures and language, history, literature and activism.  

Language, Imagery and Power

The connection between language, imagery and power will be explored in both creative and scholarly ways to find a fuller range of Surinamese histories. We will map the resistance and redressing of imperial inequality through existing autoethnography, informed fabulation, and the historiography of Suriname. We will work towards developing research tools, language and methods to investigate how colonial interconnections can shape restorative creative production today, in both Dutch and English. We recognise that the imagined and the creative plays a role in the exploration and redressing of historical narrative dominance and will work with artists to give shape to embedded voices which we see buried in historical accounts. The case of Suriname is particularly interesting because its national isolation is further exacerbated by the use of the Dutch language. Translation strand will facilitate a contemporary retelling of the nation of Suriname in a global context.