Postcolonial social dramas in European provincial towns: Frank Westerman’s literary journalism

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on two literary reportages by Dutch writer Frank Westerman: El Negro en ik (2004; El Negro and me) and Een woord een woord (2017; A word a word), addressing postcolonial conflicts within provincial areas of Europe, seemingly alien to tensions about racism or the colonial past. In El Negro and me, the stuffed body of a 19th-century black man exhibited in a museum in a Catalan town becomes the centre of a controversy over his removal from display. In A word a word, a series of Dutch towns reveals a postcolonial presence in the form of South Moluccan terrorism. Using Victor Turner’s concept of social drama – a public crisis that unveils the conflicts at work within a community – the article discusses Westerman’s reframing of these provincial spaces within (post)colonial history. Both works, while discussing conflicts that are distant, geographically or temporally, from present-day Netherlands, intervene in contemporary Dutch debates on multiculturalism and inclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Frank Westerman
• social drama
• provincial towns
• postcolonial history
• provincialism
• multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Translations from Westerman’s works are by the author.

2. The definition of literary journalism is contested. John S. Bak (2011), for instance, argues that literary journalism is best defined as a discipline, not as a literary genre or form.

3. For a few correctives to Turner’s model, see Sommer (2019, 301–304).

4. Arguably, Westerman uses the Afrikaner term “uitlanders” rather than the Dutch term “buitenlanders” to connect Dutch migration policies with another history of migration and exclusion. Uitlander (foreigner) was a term used for British immigrants in late-19th-century South Africa, whose rights were initially restricted by the Boer majority.

5. The controversy over El Negro could also be framed within the debates, started in the 1980s, over the restitution of colonial artefacts and human remains (see Tyhacott and Arvanitis 2014). In the Netherlands, the debate on the restitution of human remains started in 1998, in the wake of the exhibition Bone by Bone: Human Remains from Dutch Museums Collections, which prompted the first claim for restitution addressed to a Dutch museum (Van der Maas 2014, 140).

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Lucio De Capitani

Lucio De Capitani holds a Ph.D. in Modern Languages, Cultures and Societies and Language Sciences (English Literature) from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research interests include South Asian writing in English; colonial, postcolonial and world literatures; literary anthropology, activist writing; literary journalism; travel writing; postcolonial ecocriticism; sci-fi and cli-fi; and refugee literature. He has published papers on Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai and Robert Louis Stevenson. He currently teaches English Literature and English Language modules at Ca’ Foscari, the IUAV University of Venice and the University of Bologna as an adjunct professor.