Memories of Interracial Contacts and Mixed Race in Dutch Cinema

Abstract

This essay explores the (post)colonial relationship between the present-day Netherlands and its former colony the Dutch East Indies – a continuing relationship that has generated a wide range of memories. Exploring two Dutch films on the colonial past and comparing them with two autobiographical writings of Dutch writers of mixed race, it argues that the recurrent theme of interracial contacts emerges as the privileged metaphor for the relation between Holland and its ex-colony. A recurring feature of Dutch representations of interracial contacts, it is specifically the figure of the Indonesian concubine, the so-called nyai, which continues to obsess the male gaze. The essay concludes that through their focus on loss, separation and failure in representing interraciality, the films speak primarily to the incapacity of the Dutch nation to engage effectively with its colonial past.

Keywords:

• Interraciality
• Dutch Cinema
• Nostalgia
• Memory

Notes

1. Minke's model was Tirto Adi Suryo (1880–1918), a journalist and activist. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pram.htm (accessed 24 September 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pamela Pattynama

Pamela Pattynama is Indisch Huis Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has published on gender and colonial discourse in Dutch (life) narratives, notably the representation of mixed race in Dutch (post-)colonial films and literature. Her book Passages. Vrouwelijke adolescentie als verhaal en vertoog (1992) counters the idea of female adolescence as an in-between stage. Currently, she is working on a book on the cultural memory of the Dutch East Indies in literature, film and life narratives