Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance

259 Pages·2015·3.116 MB·English

by  DR. Paul Bijl

This incisive volume brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture B
ij
and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to l
rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia. Dutch commentators
have frequently claimed that the colonial past and especially the violence
associated with it has been ‘forgotten’ in the Netherlands. Uncovering
‘lost’ photographs and other documents of violence has thereby become a
recurring feature aimed at unmasking a hidden truth.
The author argues that, rather than absent, such images have been
consistently present in the Dutch public sphere and have been widely
available in print, on television and now on the internet. Emerging Memory:
Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance shows that
between memory and forgetting there is a haunted zone from which pasts
that do not fit the stories nations live by keep on emerging and submerging
while retaining their disturbing presence.
Paul Bijl is assistant professor of modern Dutch literature at the University
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of Amsterdam and an affiliated fellow at KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute
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Paul Bijl
of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. In his current research project, e
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funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) with g
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a Veni grant, he investigates the transnational circulation of the letters of n
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the Javanese writer Kartini (1879-1904) in Indonesia, Europe and the United M Emerging Memory
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Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in
Dutch Cultural Remembrance
ISBN: 978-90-8964-590-6
AUP.nl
9 789089 645906
Emerging Memory

Emerging Memory
Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural
Remembrance
Paul Bijl
Amsterdam University Press
The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation
for Scientific Research (NWO).
Cover illustration: C.B. Nieuwenhuis. Pedir, 1938. Photograph 16,8 x 23 cm. Royal Tropical
Institute, Amsterdam, inv.no. 60054676.
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
isbn 978 90 8964 590 6
e-isbn 978 90 4852 201 9 (pdf)
nur 688
© Paul Bijl / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2015
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Icons of Memory and Forgetting 13
Dutch Colonial Memory 16
Dutch Colonial Forgetting 22
Forgetting in Cultural Memory Studies 25
Objects: The 1904 Photographs as Portable Monuments 27
Method: Frame Analysis 29
Emerging Memory: Between Semanticization and
Cultural Aphasia 34
A Lack of Interest? 38
Overview 40
1 Imperial Frames, 1904 43
Introduction 43
The 1904 Expedition and the Atjeh War 45
The Surface of the 1904 Photographs 50
Genres of Empire 54
Images of Imperial Massacres 60
Times of Empire 69
Conclusion 82
2 Epistemic Anxiety and Denial, 1904‑1942 85
The Ethical Distribution of the Perceptible 89
Managing Established Frames 93
Icons of the Nation 103
Haunting Memories 107
An Icon of One Man’s Cruelty 115
Uncomfortable Colonial Conservatism 122
Conclusion 132
3 Compartmentalized and Multidirectional Memory, 1949‑1966 135
Compartmentalized Memory 136
Multidirectional Memory 165
Conclusion 182
4 Emerging memory, 1966‑2010 185
The Atjeh Photographs and the Violence of Western Modernity 186
Emerging Memory 204
Conclusion 223
Bibliography 229
List of where the 1904 photographs have appeared 247
Index 253
Acknowledgements
This book is based on my PhD thesis which I wrote between 2006 and
2010 at the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) of Utrecht
University. In the first place, my gratitude goes out to my daily supervisor
Ann Rigney. She not only offered me an intellectual training for which I
am deeply grateful, but also helped me to keep my eyes on the ball (that is:
finishing on time). She moreover provided me and the other members of our
research group with many opportunities to present our work and to gain
experience in many other aspects of academic life. I have hung out with PhD
students long enough to know that I was very lucky to have a supervisor I
could trust completely in intellectual manners, and one that was moreover
there to guide us through the process of becoming independent academics.
Her style in both the scholarly and social sense is a continuous source of
inspiration for me.
In the many stimulating conversations we have had over the years, my
second supervisor Frank van Vree of the University of Amsterdam provided
me with crucial insights into Dutch colonial and postcolonial history, while
his critical and open-minded attitude kept my senses sharp and my mind
active. Like Ann, Frank taught me to combine thorough empirical and
historical research with conceptually rigorous reflection – the art of which
I have far from perfected but which in my mind is the ultimate goal of our
type of research.
As this was the last step in my formal training, my acknowledgement
also goes out to Dick van Halsema, professor emeritus at the VU University
in Amsterdam, who was my first teacher. Now that I have started teaching
myself, I find myself increasingly returning to his invaluable lessons.
I thank the members of my reading committee Susan Legêne, Elsbeth
Locher-Scholten, Paulo de Medeiros, Julia Noordegraaf, Pamela Pattynama,
and Berteke Waaldijk for their time and efforts.
I want to thank the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research for
making this project financially possible. The staff at the Research Institute
for History and Culture I thank for providing a pleasant and caring work
environment. Maarten Prak and Frans Ruiter were inspiring examples of
how to be head of an organization with many aspiring but also meandering
and young scholars like myself, while Simone Veld and José van Aelst have
guided me through some of the more challenging moments in those four
years. This is also the place to thank Hans Bertens for the stimulating and
helpful conversations we have had.
8 EMErging MEMory
I am grateful to those who have provided me with feedback on my writing
during various stages of my project – Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Ann Jensen
Adams, Dick van Halsema, Liedeke Plate, Chiara de Cesari, Marta Zarzycka,
Elizabeth Edwards, and an anonymous peer reviewer of Amsterdam Univer-
sity Press – and whose comments have shaped individual chapters and the
frames of my book as a whole. Throughout the whole period, the members
of the Utrecht research group on cultural memory – Ann Rigney, Laura
Basu, David Wertheim, Chiara de Cesari, Jesseka Batteau, Alana Gillespie,
and Nicole Immler – have generously devoted their time to read my work,
listen to my presentations, and helped me with stimulating discussions and
probing questions. Many others have elaborately discussed the ins and outs
of my project with me, while providing me with the necessary signposts for
fields to which I was a newcomer. Here, I would like to especially mention
Astrid Erll.
Columbia University and especially Marianne Hirsch were my hosts
during six extraordinarily fruitful months in 2008 when I first conceived of
my thesis as a whole. Leo Haks offered me generous access to his collection
of books and postcards and helped me map out the enormous field of Dutch
colonial visual culture. Anneke Groeneveld of the Nederlands Fotomuseum
in Rotterdam, Jaap Anten of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast
Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, and Steven Vink of the
Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam offered me generous access
to the photographic collections of their institutes. I want to thank my col-
leagues at the Netherlands Graduate School for Literary Studies (OSL) for
all the great and fun events we organized together.
I thank my friends for their love and support. This book is dedicated to
my father, Arie, who encouraged me to choose a critical and social topic,
my mother Lous, who gave me the courage and ambition to start and finish
an enterprise like this, my brother Matthijs and my aunt Mieke.
Introduction
Icons of Memory and Forgetting
In the Dutch East Indies – the group of islands that is now part of the
Republic of Indonesia – a number of photographs of colonial atrocities
were taken in 1904. This study investigates the subsequent appearances
of these photographs in Dutch cultural memory, i.e. the way in which
groups of people remember the past through all kinds of representations.1
The photographs, which depict the results of massacres in villages in the
Gajo and Alas lands on the island of Sumatra, were taken by the Royal
Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) during a military expedition as part
of the Atjeh War, which lasted from 1873 to 1908.2 This study follows these
photographs over the course of the last century as they were framed by texts,
other images, and discourses within Dutch cultural memory by a variety of
mnemonic communities: groups that produce cultural memories and are
themselves shaped by these.3 The most important of these communities in
this book is the nation of the Netherlands as an imagined community, while
important other communities include the Dutch military (chapters 1 and 2)
and the Indische Dutch – those Dutch adults and children who had lived in
the Dutch East Indies (chapter 3). All in all, these photographs reappeared
more than seventy times in a wide variety of contexts.4
The two photographs that stand at the heart of this study were taken
on 14 June 1904 by a Dutch medical officer named H. M. Neeb of the Dutch
colonial army. They were taken after the massacre of 561 adults and chil-
dren of the village of Koetö Réh in the Alas land, south of the area called
Atjeh (now: Aceh) on the island of Sumatra (Figures 0.1 and 0.2, henceforth
1 For the most complete overview of the field of cultural memory studies, see Erll 2011. In this
study, I follow Frederick Cooper in defining a colonial empire as a “political unit that is large,
expansionist” and which subjects people to “coercive incorporation into an expansionist state
and invidious distinction”. What distinguishes colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries from other types of empires, Cooper writes, was the fact that “[s]ubordination was no
longer a fate to which anyone might be subject, but a status assigned to specific people, whose
marking therefore became an issue” (2005, pp. 27-8). Dutch policies and operations are called
“imperial” when I focus on the expansionist aspects of the Dutch colonial empire (especially
the many local wars between 1870 and 1914, which from an international perspective can be
characterized as the period of “modern imperialism”), and “colonial” in all other cases.
2 On the Atjeh War, see Van ’t Veer 1969; Reid 1969, 1979; Groen 1983; Siegel 2000.
3 For the concept of mnemonic community, see Zerubavel 2003.
4 See “List of where the 1904 photographs have appeared” at the back of this book.