The Art of Remembering: The Negotiation of Colonial Memory in Contemporary Visual Art by Dutch Caribbean Diasporic Artists

Abstract

In this thesis I research the creation of counter-memory and the workings of colonial forgetting and remembering in artworks by Deborah Jack and Avantia Damberg - artists from the Dutch Caribbean diaspora. As the debate on if and how to remember the negative effects of the role of the Netherlands in colonialism is growing in popularity, I argue that it is important to look at how this issue is negotiated in the Dutch Caribbean diaspora. I bring together insights from the fields of memory studies and postcolonial studies (fields that have historically lacked much mutual meaningful scholarly interaction) to understand the construction of canonical cultural memory related to colonialism in the Netherlands and to explore the ways in which processes of forgetting and remembering are an essential part of colonial oppression and thus of any anticolonial effort (Rothberg 2013, 365). Using semiotics, this insight will allow me to analyse the artworks as artistic interventions that create counter-memories that challenge the canonical cultural memory on colonialism through a diasporic, marginal position by remembering (pre- )colonial memories and connecting these with contemporary colonial dynamics between the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean. Through exploring the concepts of diaspora and countermemory and analysing to artworks that actively negotiate colonial memory and forgetting I identify diasporic as an important site from which counter-memory is created and canonical cultural memory related to colonialism can be contested.