This study examines how international political developments during the long 1990s (1989-2001) influenced the Poetry International Festival, focusing on both its programming and public image. It asks whether changing geopolitical conditions affected the selection of poets and the themes addressed in festival discussions. To analyse the festival's image, the study employs J & eacute;r & ocirc;me Meizoz's concept of posture, adapting it so it encompasses a set of auto- and hetero-representations of a collective actor. The analysis is based on five festival editions (1989, 1990, 1994, 2001, and 2002). The findings show that changes in the festival's auto- and hetero-representations were complex and uneven. In the early 1990s, Poetry International presented itself as a strongly politicized and activist festival, offering a 'safe haven' for dissident poets in a divided world. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not prevent Western intellectuals from reproducing Cold War - style divisions between Western Europe and other regions, particularly Central and Eastern Europe, even though non-Western voices sometimes challenged this view. In the early 2000s, the festival gradually shifted towards a more globalized and less explicitly politicized profile, reflecting broader post - Cold War trends in world poetry.
Fredric Jameson famously stated that 'a certain spatial turn' is 'one of the more productive ways of distinguishing postmodernism from modernism proper'. Postmodernity, which Jameson considers a direct consequence of 'late capitalism' and therefore a state that has subsisted during and after the 1990s, led to a fragmented experience of the world and to art that privileges space over time. This also applies to what Tom LeClair called 'systems novels': expansive prose narratives that use large-scale spatial synecdoche to represent a globalized world, establishing connections between its various parts to offer a cohesive perspective on its totality. The 'systems novel' is not a historical subgenre, but a form that proliferates into the present; the Surinamese-Dutch writer J.Z. Herrenberg has been at work on a multi-volume prose work, Door het Oog van de Cycloon, that displays almost all of LeClair's formal characteristics. The two published volumes, Nederhalfrond (2018) and Opperhalfrond (2023), present an analysis of Dutch society, focusing on the capitalist subsumption of space and state surveillance, describing these national developments in an international, emphatically European context. This essay attempts to reconstruct Herrenberg's totalizing cultural critique, ultimately apprehending his rendition of the present as a form of cognitive mapping.
Drawing on press materials, literary interventions, and political debates, this study reconstructs the immediate reception of the Rushdie affair in the Low Countries and traces its longer-term repercussions within two key domains: the literary field and party politics. The article first demonstrates that Dutch and Flemish writers responded to the fatwa against Rushdie with striking unanimity, framing the controversy as an existential struggle over artistic autonomy, informed by local memories of earlier literary trials. It then shows how the affair functioned as a political wedge issue, contributing to emerging debates on secularism, multiculturalism, and the limits of tolerance. Rather than confirming contemporary expectations of an imminent 'end of history' following the collapse of the Cold War order, the Rushdie affair revealed the emergence of a new kind of ideological conflict. It exposed fault lines not structured by traditional left right divisions, but by tensions between secularism and religion, universalist conceptions of free expression and claims of cultural or religious offence. In the Low Countries, the affair thus functioned as an early indicator of debates that would come to dominate the 1990s and beyond, reshaping discussions of multiculturalism, tolerance, and the place of religion in liberal democracy.
The 1989 International PEN Congress in Maastricht marked a decisive moment in the cultural and political transformations preceding the end of the Cold War. Held only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the congress became a forum for negotiating ideological narratives, literary responsibility, and changing patterns of international cultural exchange. Participants debated the decline of collective political projects and the rise of individualism, asking how writers might respond to global challenges in a supposedly post-ideological age. The discussions revealed that the notion of an "end of ideology" was itself deeply ideological, often obscuring existing power relations. This tension became particularly visible in debates surrounding the Salman Rushdie affair, which exposed the limits of post-ideological neutrality and reaffirmed freedom of expression as a fundamental principle of PEN. Further controversies concerning world literature, the admission of the Soviet-Russian PEN Centre, and the election of the organisation's president highlighted enduring asymmetries within the international literary sphere. Rather than inaugurating a neutral cultural order, the Maastricht Congress demonstrated that the collapse of Cold War ideologies generated new arenas of contestation centred on epistemic authority, representational justice, and the conditions under which literary freedom can be exercised.
This article reads Koen Peeters's Grote Europese roman (Great European Novel, 2007) as an analysis of the long 1990s and its aftermath. It presents post-Cold War Europe not as a site of renewal, but as one of boredom, alienation, and sameness. Social exchange is reduced to branding, marketing, and transactional logic. Drawing on Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift, Marc Aug & eacute;'s notion of the non-place and Fredric Jameson's concepts of hyperspace, the waning of affect and cognitive mapping, the article demonstrates how the corporate gifts industry functions as a metaphor for a Europe stripped of meaningful contact. The protagonist's journey through European capitals initially reproduces this emptiness, as he moves through airports, hotels, and conferences that flatten both identity and history. Gradually, however, his business itinerary develops into a process of cognitive and historical reorientation. The novel ultimately suggests that Europe can only become imaginable as a community when it recovers non-commodified forms of exchange and remembrance.
This article offers a postsecular reading of Wormen en engelen (Worms and Angels, 2017) by Maarten van der Graaff, a novel that critically engages with the Dutch literary tradition of representing Protestant upbringing. While authors such as Jan Wolkers and Maarten 't Hart framed religion within narratives of secular emancipation, Wormen en engelen questions the validity of such stories and shows a renewed interest in Christian religion. First, the novel ascribes a specific spatiotemporal logic to classical secularization narratives, based on a spatial dichotomy and a teleological time frame. An analysis of the novel's spatiotemporal organization reveals how the narrative can at first still be read as playfully engaging with these conventions, but ultimately transcends them. Second, the novel introduces new metaphors for understanding religion and secularity. These metaphors frame religious institutions and experiences through phenomena the narrator elsewhere associates with secularity, such as the post-Fordist economic order and technologically mediated, embodied experiences. By foregrounding these dynamics, Wormen en engelen oscillates between a renewed appreciation of religion and the awareness that religion is equally influenced by secularity, rather than existing in opposition to it.
In descriptions of eighteenth-century Suriname, the perspective of Afro-Surinamese people, both free and enslaved, is virtually absent because they hardly left any written sources behind. This article attempts to bring the Afro-Surinamese experience to the fore in Dutch colonial poetry of Jan Jacob Mauricius (1692-1768) and Paul Fran & ccedil;ois Roos (1751-1805). It does so, by reading the poetry through the lens of the swamp, an environment that was feared and preferably avoided by the Dutch, and precisely therefore a place of refuge for freedom seeking Afro-Surinamese. Using theoretical concepts such as 'hybridity,' 'opacity,' 'ecological personhood,' and 'relational sacred,' next to anthropological studies of Afro-Surinamese oral traditions and objects, the article examines how Maroons engaged with the ecology of the swamp to enhance their chances of survival and challenge the plantation system. It hypothesizes that Mauricius and Roos's colonial representation of Suriname is destabilized by imaginations of the swamp, creating space in the poetry for an unfolding of Afro-Surinamese agency that involves alliances with the swamp and its inhabitants. Specifically, it examines Dutch and Maroon usage of metamorphosis, featuring representation and 'Relation', respectively, to express their different experiences of the swamp as an environment that is either decaying or fermenting. On the whole, this article aims to be a probing of the disciplinary boundaries of Dutch literary studies, and a contribution to the project of decolonizing them.
The writer Aphra Behn (1640-89), the first woman to earn her living by creative writing in English, was the author of Oroonoko, a remarkable 1688 prose work set largely in Suriname. This article examines the significance of Behn's work for Suriname: its accounts of the flora, fauna and landscape of the country, and the likelihood of the author having visited it when it was an English colony in the early 1660s, but above all its depiction of the people and practices found in Suriname in the late seventeenth century. Oroonoko is unique for its time (and many subsequent centuries) for paying attention to all three racial groups co-existing in Suriname in its early colonial days: the indigenous population (referred to by Behn as 'Indians'), the European colonizers and plantation owners (English and, from 1667, Dutch), and the enslaved Africans brought to Suriname. The eponymous hero of Oroonoko is prince from Coramantien on the West African coast, who is betrayed and sold into slavery in Suriname. Behn's complex and fascinating work follows his story and, in doing so, strongly and vividly condemns the slave trade - one of the earliest English texts to do so.
Raoul de Jong, the son of a Dutch mother and a Surinamese father, has never met his father until he receives an email just before his twenty-eighth birthday asking to meet. Intriguingly his father tells him about a family curse: one of his ancestors, a medicine man, could transform himself into a jaguar. "Please, son, leave it alone," his father urges him, but this is enough for the curious writer to do exactly the opposite. Gripped by this mystery, Raoul decides to go to Suriname in search of the jaguarman.
In Boni. In het spoor van de Surinaamse vrijheidsstrijder, Tessa Leuwsha reconstructs the life of Boni, the 18th-century Maroon leader who resisted Dutch colonial rule in Suriname. Drawing on colonial archives, oral traditions, myth, and imaginative reflection, she traces his presence across Suriname, French Guiana, the Netherlands, and Ghana. Blending biography, historiography, and literary narrative, Leuwsha interweaves fragmented records with memory and landscape, exposing the limits of colonial discourse while restoring depth to a figure long reduced to stereotype. Her prose highlights the interplay of fact, storytelling, and imagination in recovering Maroon resistance. Praised in both Surinamese and Dutch press, Boni stands out for its literary approach to historical recovery, situating a local freedom struggle within wider Atlantic histories of slavery, resistance, and memory.
Suriname is, in many ways, one of the most enigmatic countries one can imagine. With almost four hundred kilometres of muddy coastline and an impenetrable interior, the area has always remained both inaccessible and ungovernable. The country consists of 93% rainforest, making it one of the greenest countries in the world. On the narrow coastal strip, which covers less than 7% of the country's total land area, lives an extremely divers population, composed of Africans, Hindustanis, Javanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Europeans, Jews and Indigenous peoples. This bewildering multitude of identities is rooted in a unique colonial history, specific to the imperial endeavours of the Dutch. Considering the Amazon rainforest holds a centuries-old history of its own, one could state that Suriname is full of contradictions: it is at once utterly unknown and, because of its many faces, intimately familiar.
In this article, I examine the print 'A Group of Africans' from John Gabriel's Stedman's Narrative, one the most iconic images of Surinamese slavery and the transatlantic slave-trade. Inspired by Hartman's research methodology of critical fabulation, I explore archival sources, autobiographies, and other texts depicting African voices to provide the people depicted in the painting with context and specificity about their capture and appearance now on the shore of Suriname. Via the identification of the vessel in the background (de Vrouwe Elisabeth), we can trace its journey, identify captain Jan Harmel and the Rotterdam owners. First-mate Joachim Nettelbeck narrates part of this journey in his German autobiography, Ein Mann. The first-person narrative archival texts discussed here (Stedman, Nettelbeck, Equiano, Newton, Du Bois) differ markedly in reliability, their moments of writing, and participation in the action and reflection (Genette's diegetic and non-diegetic narrator). The navigation of these texts and archives leads to a clearer portrait of Surinamese slavery, transatlantic slavery, and the people depicted by Stedman in this painting.
This contribution argues that a critical re-evaluation of Dutch colonial history requires a fundamental structural change in institutional epistemologies, moving beyond a simple methodological shift. By examining the transnational artistic and literary practices of Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke and Surinamese-Dutch writer Raoul de Jong, this paper demonstrates how their creative work forges a new 'poetics of relation' to confront and dismantle imperial ways of thinking. Through a transdisciplinary analysis, the study compares Locke's use of a 'Black Baroque' aesthetic - which employs abundance and excess to recontextualize colonial symbols - with De Jong's performative writing and resistance to literary categorization. The analysis reveals how both artists actively embody a logic that subverts the traditional separation of past and present, challenging established frameworks and foregrounding the knowledge held within ancestral memories and lived experiences. Locke and De Jong share a mode that is not merely a critique of colonialism but an act of re-creation, offering a path towards a language of human connection that transcends national borders.
What did Roman Catholic missionaries working in the Orient make of the Vereinigde Oost-Indische Compagnie and the new forms of global capitalism they exported to their sphere of influence in the Indian Ocean? One might assume men-of-the-cloth giving their lives to God to be adversarial to servants of Mammon, particularly given the marked religious divisions of seventeenth-century Europe (actually sharpened rather than weakened during the Carnatic wars of the mid-eighteenth century). But discipline, engagement and utility were actually concepts of common applicability, and we should not overlook the fact that the capitalists organised in the East-India Company (f. 1602) met their match in the spiritual Company of Jesus (f. 1640). The question is one that requires large data analysis and that, given today's technologies, is primarily computational. With a data sample of 80 primary source extracts, we use the software Sketchengine to conduct a formal co-occurrence analysis to understand relevant linguistic associations, and model the returns into a 20-point prosodic scheme that can be evaluated in order to assess whether iterated attitudes changed over time.
This article explores the reception of the British writer, essayist, and critic Walter Pater in the Low Countries, a topic largely overlooked in existing scholarship. Stephen Bann's Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (2004) mentions four Dutch translations but lacks a dedicated chapter on the Dutch and Belgian reception. Despite the limited number of translations, Pater's ideas influenced Dutch and Belgian literary circles from the late nineteenth century onwards, shaping discussions in periodicals, books, and personal correspondence between authors. Focusing specifically on the Dutch-language literary reception, this article reveals Pater's impact through journals such as De Gids and De Nieuwe Gids, and authors such as Willem Byvanck and Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck. In mapping Pater's reception in the Low Countries, this article also examines connections between Pater's idea of Anders-streben (other-striving) and notions of po & eacute;sie pure or zuivere lyriek (pure lyricism), with Paul Van Ostaijen's adaptation of Pater's dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music, to be found in his 1924 essay on Oscar Jespers, as the most notable example of this. By compiling diverse sources to trace Pater's reception and intellectual legacy in the Low Countries, this article initiates a comprehensive study of Pater's transnational influence.
On 29 May 1342, a devastating fire swept through Mechelen sparing only one of its six parishes. This traumatic event is memorialized in a Middle Dutch rhymed text later inserted into Jan van Boendale's Brabantsche yeesten (Gesta of the Dukes of Brabant), sometime before 1444. This article explores whether the poem may originally have been conceived as a standalone monologue, composed soon after the disaster. Rather than intended from the outset as part of Boendale's chronicle, it may have been created for public performance, to console the community, foster solidarity, or condemn the surrounding cities' inaction. To further explore this possibility, the poem is examined in relation to sproken: short, topical verse narratives performed by professional entertainers at courts, in monastic communities, and in urban settings. This comparison raises the question whether the Mechelen text might represent a rare example of a sproke anchored in a specific local historical event. The community-oriented nature of such performances may partly explain their poor preservation. While the hypothesis is compelling, several key features of sproken remain hard to verify or are shared across genres, ultimately leaving its confirmation uncertain.
In the summer of 1461, a remarkable party travelled through the Low Countries. It was made up of oriental ambassadors, led by the Italian Franciscan Ludovico da Bologna. They all pretended to represent rulers seeking military support against the Turks. Because of their exotic appearance, the passage of the delegates generated amazement and wonder. This embassy, in a broad context, has been studied extensively. The historical debate often focusses on the authenticity and credibility of the envoys. This article draws on narrative and archival sources from the Low Countries that have not been exploited before. Using these, it shows that the Duke of Burgundy did not support the embassy out of naivety. He was not misled by a bunch of adventurers, as is sometimes suggested. Philip the Good deliberately used the ambassadors for his own propaganda purposes and to justify his crusading plans. This strategy should be seen in the light of the Burgundian 'theatre state'.
