In 1796, John Gabriel Stedman published Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, an account of his five-year military service in Suriname. A ‘decent looking man,’ Stedman (1813: 116) reports, told him that:

I saw a black man suspended alive from a gallows by the ribs, between which, with a knife, was first made an incision, and then clinched an iron hook with a chain: in this manner he kept alive three days, hanging with his head and feet downwards, and catching with his tongue the drops of water (it being in the rainy season) that were flowing down his bloated breast. Notwithstanding all this, he never complained, and even upbraided a negro for crying while he was flogged below the gallows, by calling out to him –

You man? – Da boy fasi? Are you a man? you [sic] behave like a boy. Shortly after which he was knocked on the head by the commiserating sentry, who stood over him, with the butt end of his musket.

In his book, Stedman documented many more instances exposing the systematic cruelty of the plantation economy. The account also featured several engravings by William Blake, illustrating the atrocities graphically. This particular account of the hanging man was accompanied by a drawing that received widespread attention at the time (figure 1). The drawing shows a black man, naked except for a tiny white loincloth. An iron hook has been forced under his ribs. He is hanging on this hook, suspended from a wooden gallows, and bent in an unnatural and gruesome way. Blood is

The Changing Aesthetics of Savagery

Slavery, Belonging , and Post-Colonial Melancholia in the Netherlands

Markus BalkenholMeertens Institute

VU University Amsterdam

Etnofoor, Imitation, volume 22, issue 2, 2010, pp. 71-89

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pouring profusely from the wound in his side, and dripping on the bared bones of a ribcage on the ground beneath him.

Two hundred years later, in 1998, the hanging man appeared in Dutch Parliament. His image was summoned in a petition by a group of Afro-Surinamese1

women identifying themselves as the descendants of those enslaved Africans the hanging man represented. The petition was an intervention into Dutch memory politics, demanding a place for slavery in the historical narrative of the nation, and to recognize the concerns of those Afro-Surinamese people who continue to be haunted by the specter of slavery.

In this article, I want to explore the appeal of such examples of spectacular violence within the re-negotia-tion of the colonial past, or its re-memory, to use Toni Morrison’s term. In which ways is this spectacular violence employed? How and why is it mobilized politically? And how does it inform understandings of self in the formation of post-colonial subjectivity? In order to gain a better grasp of these questions, I will adopt Birgit Meyer’s concept of aesthetics of persuasion. Where Meyer uses this concept to understand the ‘interface of religion, sensation and politics,’ I explore the way aesthetics and the senses are political in the context of memory ‘in a way that helps us understand the broader modalities of modes of binding and the politics of belonging’ (Meyer 2010: 743).

I will argue that in the framework of current politics of belonging in the Netherlands, categories of the civi-lized and the savage should be understood as part of the broader modalities through which belonging is negotiated. The mobilization of representations of spectacular violence should be understood as a funda-mental critique of a liberal tradition that constitutes the basis for a modern Dutch self-understanding.

This article is based on my ongoing doctoral research in Amsterdam South-East about the dynamics of cultural memory, heritage, and slavery in current debates about citizenship and belonging in the Nether-

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lands. For my research I lived with two Afro-Suri-namese host families in Amsterdam South-East for a period of seven months, looking at the dynamics between Afro-Surinamese Dutch and white Dutch perceptions of slavery. I participated in the routines of the everyday, as well as in various commemorations, celebrations, cultural manifestations, festivals, funerals, birthdays, performances, et cetera. I spent time in cafes and bars, went on nights out, accompanied a Kaskawina band, and worked as a volunteer for a political campaign and in a cultural center. In the many informal conversa-tions, as well as semi-structured interviews with different people, mainly Afro-Surinamese-Dutch, the violence of slavery was one of the most prominent issues we discussed.

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Representations of the violence of slavery have always had an ambivalent appeal,2 especially in the service of various political agendas. Stedman’s Narrative is one of the most prominent examples for the political framing of violence. His book ‘ranks among the most important and influential humanitarian texts of the late eight-eenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (Klarer 2005: 559). Although the book itself was not explicitly intended as an engagement in abolitionist discourse,3 its textual and graphic accounts of violence were highly influential in different abolitionist arenas. Stedman’s account and other representations of violence were used repeatedly in British parliament in order to stimu-late the passing of abolitionist legislature in the late

eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries (Klarer 2005). Politics, it seems, thrived on emotions. These images

were explicitly employed to appeal to the emotions of the political opponents. Both the text and the images are intended to evoke commiseration, to ‘invite the reader to identify with the plot or the acting personae, to appropriate the action as a personal experience, to be appalled by it, and ultimately to take steps to bring about change’ (Klarer 2005: 560-61). In other words, personal embodied experience, evoked by the representation of cruelty, is fused with the body politic. ‘Brought before parliament, the graphic details of the horror of slavery stirred the emotions of the listeners in such a way that, in the event of a vote on these issues, the outcome of the ballots was very likely to be in favor of the abolitionists’ cause’ (Klarer 2005: 582; cf. Favret 1998).

Remarkably, the measure of political success hinged on the elaboration of detail, because depictions of the tortured body served to underscore the factuality of the material. Such narratives had to be ‘graphic in their descriptions in order to pass as truthful accounts.’ (Klarer 2005: 560).

Hence the insertion of these images into British political discourse conflated assertions of truthfulness and authenticity with an appeal to the senses and emotions. The images were intended to bring the beholders close to the experience of torture in an ‘authentic’ way, and thereby persuade them of the necessity of political action. The way in which they were styled, emphasizing the humanity of the enslaved by displaying the enormity of human suffering caused by the system of slavery, strongly influenced the images’ potential for political mobilization.

I find Birgit Meyer’s concept of aesthetics of persua-

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sion helpful here in order to get a better grasp of these dynamics of style, the body, and power. Her notion of aesthetics, which removes ‘aesthetics and the senses from the depoliticized isolation in which they were placed by Enlightenment thinkers’ (Meyer 2010: 755), can help explain how the specific forms employed here can function as devices in the production, contestation and reproduction of power structures. The appeal of images of cruelty, irrespective of the intentionality of those who wield them, is their capacity to evoke empathy. But rather than accepting this empathic faculty as merely given or innocent, it needs to be understood as an instrument of power. Empathy is governed by stylistic conventions that imply ‘the effec-tive use of particular styles that appeal to the senses and invoke emotions, thus doing the work of persuasion’ (Meyer 2010: 756-57). Moreover, the efficacy of these styles lies in their ability to conceal their made-ness. They ought to appear natural, according to Aristotle’s rhetoric, ‘for that which is natural persuades, but the artificial does not’ (Aristotle 1926: 353). The pained black body in these representations should thus be seen as a truth effect of an aesthetics of persuasion ‘author-izing the body as the harbinger of ultimate truth and authenticity’ (Meyer 2010: 756; cf. Van de Port 2006).

It would be a mistake, therefore, to take the aboli-tionists’ seemingly humanitarian project at face value. The representation of violence may seem self-evident, but it is not. Rather, it is part of conventions of style that are deeply enmeshed in relations of power. The aboli-tionists may have acted out of concern for the enslaved, they nevertheless, perhaps unwittingly, reproduced a number of the very paradigms sustaining the system of slavery. Several authors show, for example, the way in

which Stedman eroticizes cruelty and thereby repro-duces the lopsided gender relations at the time (Klarer 2005; Wood 2000; cf. Hartman 1997). There are many displays and descriptions of undressed women who are being punished in gruesome ways (e.g. figure 2). Causing widespread media attention, such images of naked and

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battered women seem to have appealed to contempo-rary erotic fantasies. The combination of female nudity with punishment paralleled pornographic imagery that was popular with Stedman’s audience. It catered to an already established mode of viewing, or, speaking with Meyer (2010: 755), a ‘tuning of the senses,’ and thus reproduced the power relations already in place. Such images reified a gender formation in which the woman is seen as passive and silent, almost patiently undergoing the most intolerable pain and denigrations.

While the women are silent, the male enslaved are given a voice. In Stedman’s account, they mock their executioners, seemingly unaffected by the pain they suffer. However, as Marcus Wood points out, this does not necessarily grant them more agency. Rather than a courageous act of triumph over the power of the state, ‘Stedman’s blacks define an absolute zero, an inability to suffer, a blindness to suffering, that places the black outside pain.’ (Wood 2000: 232). Such a representa-tion is in line with the idea at the time that blackness equaled savagery and that, as a consequence of their infra-human nature, black people were immune to physical and mental pain. Hartman (1997) argues that:

The purported immunity of blacks to pain is abso-lutely essential to the spectacle of contented subjec-tion or, at the very least, to discrediting the claims of pain. The black is both insensate and content, indif-ferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment. These contradictions are partly explained by the ambiguous and precarious status of the black in the ‘great chain of being’ – in short, by the pathologizing of the black body – this

abhorrence then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed the normative standards of the humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially tolerable as concerned the black slave (1997: 51).

Hence, while the display of black suffering in political discourse intended a humanitarian intervention, it simultaneously reproduced, whether deliberate or not, the idea of black servility and reified black subjectivity as brutish and belonging in the realm of the beastly and the savage.4

This is further exacerbated by the literary conven-tions of the time which accentuated the humanity of the white protagonist. The representation of black suffering is highly informed by a sentimentalist aesthetics, in which the suffering of Stedman’s autobio-graphical personification, rather than that of the black captive, occupies the center of attention (Wood 2000). On several occasions in the book, the protagonist Stedman runs away from extreme violence in terror, lamenting about the cruelty of the violence he had to witness. The typically sentimentalist register of intro-spection employed here suggests that Stedman himself suffers, whereas the blacks’ pain merely serves as a foil to exhibit his sensitivity and commiseration. Such an aesthetics stresses the humanity of the spectator rather than that of the victim.5

This instrumental use of the pained black body through which it is effaced, to borrow Hartman’s (1997) term, identifies the boundaries created by such an aesthetics of persuasion. The assumed savagery of the black person had implications for the possibility of empathy, and, by extension, the possibility of political mobilization. Is it possible to empathize with the

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savage whose inhumanity makes her so utterly different from the Self ? In addition, the focus on sentimental Stedman suggests an affirmative aesthetics of persua-sion in which the European audience persuaded itself of its own humanity.

Yet even if black humanity is acknowledged, the idea of empathy remains problematic. Hartman points out the slipperiness of empathy and its inherent diffi-culty.6 ‘Properly speaking, empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to understand the other or “the projection of one’s own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one’s own emotions”’ (Angeles 1981 as quoted in Hartman 1997: 18-19). Hence the abolitionists’ ‘empathic identification is as much due to [their] good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body’ (Hartman 1997: 19). In other words, the power relations inherent in discussions of savagery and civili-zation that are expressed by the regulation of the ability to speak for oneself and for others, remain unaltered. Indeed, they are reinforced.

Hence, the representation of the tortured black body might be understood as not so much a preoccupation with the fate of the enslaved in the colonies, as a styli-zation of the enlightened European Self. What I want to stress in the context of this article is that (a) these negotiations of Self and other, mediated through the display of violence, took place in terms of civilization and savagery, and that (b) throughout these negotia-tions, the voice of the (black) other was silenced. My interest here is not so much to expose the falseness and hypocrisy of these emotions, their dishonesty or untruthfulness, or the impossibility of empathy in general. Rather, I want to emphasize that the very idea

of emotional purity and truthfulness is itself political. Emotions never exist in a political vacuum, they always relate to, and are informed by, a political and ethical framework. Indeed, they must be seen as modes of the political.

The evocation of empathy is strongly informed by conventions of style that are politically interested rather than objective (Meyer 2010). The images of cruelty against blacks in the European political sphere can then be understood as an aesthetic formation (Meyer 2009) organizing the perception of the world in terms of savagery and civilization. Following Meyer and Rancière, this may be seen as a distribution of that which ‘presents itself to sense experience’ (Rancière 2006: 13). The strange simultaneous presence and absence of the enslaved Blacks in the European cultural imaginary, and the lack of their control over this repre-sentation, can thus be seen as an exclusion choreo-graphed by the distributive operations of an aesthetic formation that informed the political discourse of the time. Hence, as Meyer points out, an analysis of cultural form needs to be alert to ‘what aesthetics does and does not render sensible … by appealing to the body and inducing sensations.’ (Meyer 2010).7

The complex aesthetic formation – of which Stedman is a small but important element – could thus be described as a tuning of perception (Meyer 2010), through which the modes of articulating an idea of civilized Self and savage Others are authored – an authorship in which the voice of the enslaved is edited out. The dominance of this paradigm can hardly be refuted. However, an uncritical acceptance of this dominance would obstruct a perspective on the argu-mentative openings this paradigm also provides (cf.

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Gilroy 2009). Below, I will therefore look at how this dominant paradigm has been subverted in current politics of belonging.

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In 1998, the hanging man suddenly appeared in Dutch Parliament, and the subterranean memories (Hartman 1997) it evoked were brought to the surface. In the following, I want to show how this appearance signi-fied a change in the authorship of an aesthetics of violence. Although formally, the strategy of the peti-tioners was remarkably similar to that of the abolition-ists, it carried a very different charge. It embraced a notion of savagery, but now it was authored as a Euro-pean attribute. This emergence of a new authorial voice also signaled a shift in the interwoven politics of memory and belonging in the Netherlands.

On 30 June 1993, a day before the traditional cele-bration of Keti Koti, the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies in 1863, a large crowd of several hundred mainly Afro-Surinamese men and women gathered on Surinameplein in Amsterdam to commemorate the Dutch involvement in the Atlantic World. This marked a milestone for post-colonial debates in the Netherlands. For the first time, the abolition of slavery was remembered as part of a broader shared history of the Netherlands and former colonies and present-day dependencies in the Caribbean. Although the initiative explicitly made use of a national symbolic register, it did not address a formal political audience. Having emerged from the advocacy work of social welfare organizations, it was concerned mainly

with improving the material conditions of Afro-Suri-namese people in the Netherlands and has retained a comparatively low profile to this day. In the second half of the 1990s, this act of commemoration was followed by a different initiative, which explicitly addressed the formal political sphere.8

In the mid-1990s, Afro-European women’s organi-zation Sophiedela began to organize huiskamerge-sprekken (living room talks) with Afro-Surinamese women and some men all over the country. According to Barryl Biekman (personal interview 13 July 2010), Sophiedela’s chairwoman, these conversations under-scored the need for a larger Dutch audience to recog-nize the specific problems within Afro-Surinamese and Antillean communities in the Netherlands.

This need was articulated publicly on 2 July, 1998, a day after keti koti, when Biekman submitted a petition to the Dutch parliament, in which she compellingly pleaded for the creation of a monument in commemoration of the Dutch role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 2002, the Nationaal Monument Nederlands Slavernijverleden9 (see figure 3) was unveiled in the presence of Queen Beatrix, Prime Minister Balkenende, and many other high repre-sentatives of the Netherlands, Suriname, and the Dutch Antilles. The unveiling ceremony, the monument itself, the perceived marginality of its location, as well as the entire project continue to be highly contested. These dynamics are a central part of my research and will be treated in more depth else-where. Here, I examine in detail the petition that ultimately led to the monument. In it, the shifting authorship of an aesthetics of civilization and savagery and its articulation as a political project become clear.

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The petition (Biekman 1998: 1) opens by summoning an image of tolerance, freedom, and humanitarianism which, as I will show below, forms a crucial facet of Dutch identity:

We are aware, chairman, that the Netherlands uphold freedom and tolerance. … Furthermore, it always fit the policy of the Dutch government to support victims of war, all over the world, in one way or the other.10

The petition seems to reaffirm this image of a tolerant and humanitarian nation that has always been strug-gling for its own freedom and that of others in the face of overwhelming evil forces from outside: ‘Of course we are familiar with the struggle of the Netherlands, 80 years long, especially in the 16th and 17th century, against Spain to gain independence’ (Biekman 1998: 1).11 The opening of the petition seems reassuring, praising Dutch tolerance, charity, and compassion. Exactly because everyone agrees on these values, the petitioners

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continue to argue, it is not surprising that ‘African Surinamese,’ who still struggle with wounds of the past, will call on this beacon of humanitarianism:

When, every year anew, especially in the period around July 1, the date on which slavery was abol-ished in Suriname, African Surinamese, but also indigenous Surinamese, find that, generation upon generation, in 1998 it has been 135 years, they still struggle with an unreconciled past and identity issues ... then it is obvious that they will call for support where they are certain of the care there is traditionally for such issues. The Dutch Parliament (Biekman 1998: 1).12

This may sound reassuring, almost conciliatory, but the pleasantness does not last. The petition goes on to point out the discrepancy between a liberal aspiration and historical reality – a reality in which the Dutch were actively involved in the trans-Atlantic system and transported ‘West Africans as commodities to Suri-name’ (Biekman 1998: 3). This argument is under-scored in the following section by a considerable and very graphic list of the cruelties of that system. Central to the argument is the emphasis on the inhumanity of slavery, and specifically the slave-holders. The peti-tioners ask their readers to consider the fact that ‘fami-lies were separated cruelly,’ that ‘essential values and traditions were taken away from [the West Africans] deliberately and intentionally,’ that they were ‘chained like animals,’ that ‘they had to suffer psychological denigration and that they were burned alive.’ The peti-tion further considers:

that for example the Court of the Police and Criminal Justice sentenced the slave Kwakoe, who resisted a White officer, ‘to be strangled on a pole and branded, whereupon his foot was chopped off ’; that one punishment was particularly frequent, during which a hook was driven under the skin or through the ribs of the slave, and as if those terrible pains were not enough, white hot pliers were jammed into the fleshy parts of the slaves (Biekman 1998).13

Thus, the members of Parliament were introduced to the man with the iron hook stuck through his ribs. The intention of these lines clearly was to shock – and the strategy worked. The chairperson of one of the factions in Parliament who received the petition was obviously disconcerted, asking Biekman: ‘Does it really have to be like this?’ Biekman insisted that yes, this was the way it had to be. The Dutch needed to recognize the truth, instead of clinging to the watered-down representa-tions of slavery they knew from the patchy historical narratives recounted in the history books at school (see Horton and Kardux 2004). ‘The whites need to feel the pain we feel,’ as one of my informants told me.

It should be stressed here that these statements do not represent a homogeneous Afro-Surinamese perspective. The representation of slavery, and the way in which to deal with it, are highly contested both among Afro-Surinamese and in Dutch society at large. Nevertheless, these aesthetics played a pivotal role as an intervention in a politics of belonging, and are there-fore granted some prominence here.

The petition makes a rhetorical maneuver that is remarkably similar to the one made by the abolitionists

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of the 19th century. The hook from which the man was suspended in Blake’s image is symbolically driven into twentieth-century political discourse in the Nether-lands. Like the abolitionists, the petitioners used images of violence and cruelty to underscore their political argument by self-evidently linking violence to the necessity of its condemnation. These descriptions were meant to show how it really was, a truth that had been hidden from the awareness of the addressees, as well as the self-evident need to acknowledge this truth. In other words, their political power hinged on their claim for authenticity, an authenticity that can be found in the physical pain displayed.

However, why was this strategy successful in winning the parliamentarians’ attention? After all, they must have been used to representations of violence, consid-ering that any given news bulletin could be qualified as more graphic in the depiction of violence, not to mention the well-documented atrocities of the 20th century. In order to understand the persuasiveness of this aesthetics, it is necessary to sketch the mainstream Dutch politics of belonging it seeks to address.

The Dutch nation for a long time had a reputation of being a model nation of modernity, particularly famed for their tolerance (see Buruma 2006), enjoying what van der Veer calls a ‘global image and tourist brand as a wealthy, tolerant, and perhaps excessively liberal society’ (Van der Veer 2006: 112). Jonathan Israel, a prominent philosopher working on European and European colonial history from the Renaissance to the 18th century, and Spinoza in particular argues that: ‘Holland used to be regarded internationally as a particularly precocious and enlightened case in the development of the modern concepts of equality, both

sexual and racial, and freedom of expression’ (Israel 2004: 3ff, my italics, MB; cf. Van der Veer). Accord-ingly, commentators abroad seemed shocked recently to hear extreme right wing populist Geert Wilders sound the ‘death knell for the image of the Netherlands as a bastion of tolerance’ during the latest Dutch elec-tions (Independent, 11 June 2010).

In particular, the idea of religious tolerance is an important facet of the national Self, an idea that is often epitomized in the figure of the Huguenot. In the late 17th century, many Huguenots, fleeing religious perse-cution in France, settled in the Netherlands.14 This episode has been framed as a humanitarian and compas-sionate gesture by the people of the Netherlands, who offered the religious fugitives a safe haven from perse-cution. It is not uncommon to trace the family tree back to Huguenot ancestors (Geschiere 2009). Similarly, the Batavians, a freedom-loving people who presumably lived in the North of Holland and who liberated them-selves from Roman oppression are often styled as the Nation’s founding fathers (Vink 2007).

In the Netherlands, this image of a small and peaceful nation whose openness and tolerance towards strangers has gained her a wealthy position in the world was vividly expressed in a statement by Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende during a parliamentary debate in 2006. On that occasion, PM Balkenende and MP Halsema (of the Green Left party) entered a discussion about unemployment during the algemene beschou-wingen, one of the most important yearly plenary debates in Parliament receiving exceptional media coverage. Balkenende, responding to a critical question by Halsema, applauded what he perceived as an economic upturn:

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Who would have expected this [upturn], after the economic crisis, the negative growth and losing our competitive position? This is a considerable accom-plishment, and I am glad we achieved this. Let us, for once, be glad about this, then. I do not under-stand why you are so negative and annoying about this. Let us be glad with each other! Let us be opti-mistic! Let us say: Holland can do it once again! That !"#-mentality, looking beyond borders, drive! [pause] Right?15

The statement caused some commotion in the room, and some laughed at Balkenende. Halsema responded: ‘Do you really want to discuss the achievements of the !"# with me? As it happens, there’s something or other to knock down on.’16 Without further comment she returned to the discussion about unemployment. Balkenende replied: ‘I believe we live in different worlds.’17

The statement did not give rise to any real debate in Parliament. Jan Marijnissen of the Socialist Party argued that ‘the !"# has committed quite a few robbery tours across the globe.’18 Nevertheless, he admitted that ‘the perspective on the world appeals to me … but it may come across as a very strange thing to say for a Prime Minister, also abroad … especially in Africa they will be astonished.’19 Another $%, Gonny van Oude-nallen,20 went as far as to argue that ‘the !"# has … brought a lot of benefits’21 – without, of course, speci-fying to whom it brought them.

Balkenende made his statement in the midst of heated debates about the national past. An official historical canon had been presented three months earlier, to which various larger cities had responded by

announcing the development of their own historical canon, and the papers were full of discussions about a national historical museum. Amid these discussions, Balkenende’s statement received widespread and both critical and affirmative attention in the public debate that ensued. While some applauded Balkenende, the criticisms ranged from the somewhat lame response in parliament and moral indignation to a preemptive embrace of past atrocities, as well as more sober ques-tions about the implications for notions of Dutchness. For instance, Jan Blokker, a well-known journalist-historian and critical columnist, found the emptiness of both Halsema’s sarcasm as well as what he called the Pavlovian reactions of moral indignation embarrassing (NRC Next, 2 October 2006; see also De Volkskrant, 30 September 2006). Instead, he asked himself what about the national past he was supposed to be proud of, poignantly broaching a pervasive uncertainty about Dutchness (Geschiere 2009: 219; Meurs 2005). Finally, a group of Afro-Surinamese and Antillean Dutch gathered at the slavery monument the next day, demanding an apology from Balkenende. They argued that the statement was disrespectful for an entire group of Dutch citizens. Among these discussions about how to remember the national past, Balkenende’s statement and the debates it triggered reveal a fundamental diffi-culty of reconciling a self-image of tolerance and humanism with colonial atrocities.22

In spite of the criticisms, Balkenende’s statements subscribe to a recent cultural backlash that perceives colonialism as a project of civilization, reinstating the idea of the ‘White man’s burden’ that lingers in the idea that: ‘Dutch Golden Age culture is certainly the most important contribution of the Netherlands to the

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development of the modern West’ (Israel 2004: 3). Such imperial nostalgia, to use Renato Rosaldo’s words (as quoted in Gilroy 2004: 3), was also recently expressed to me by a journalist who freelanced for the daily free newspaper De Pers. Dissatisfied with critical debates about colonialism, he complained that they ‘only high-light the bad sides of colonialism,’ while neglecting the positive aspects. With beaming eyes, he announced: ‘Colonialism should be seen as a beacon of Enlighten-ment that brought Africa human rights, taught them how to read and write, and installed nation states. Look at how it was before the Europeans came: they were just killing each other!’ Similar to Jacques Chirac’s 1998 self-congratulatory understanding of abolition as the reinforcement and spread of the French Republic’s democratic foundations (Reinhardt 2005, 2006), this view is an expression of post-colonial melancholy that seems to pervade European memory discourse (Gilroy 2004). European colonial expansion and domination are interpreted as a project of civilization, or the benign emergence of peaceful trade relations.

Rather unsurprisingly, such an image of openness and tolerance clashes with a hardening political and social climate that is characterized by increasing xeno-phobia (Geschiere 2009). Yet these fantasies of toler-ance and libertarianism, conceptualized as opposed to pre-modern, backward, and potentially dangerous others are mobilized ever more forcefully in the public sphere in the Netherlands.23 This insistence reiterates an old paradox between liberal thought and liberal history that has haunted modern nations (Brion Davis 1975; see also Fischer 2004; Mehta 1997, 1999). A self-styled idea of openness and tolerance – grounded in the idea of cultural superiority – stands in contrast

with political and social practice. Much like other former colonial powers, the proclaimed failure of multicultural society in the Netherlands suppresses an awareness of colonial continuities in present European societies (Gilroy 2004). Like in other European contexts, the entrenchment of a liberal self-under-standing makes it difficult to incorporate into official history an activity that is so fundamentally opposed to a tradition of liberalism (Horton and Kardux 2004).

This post-colonial melancholia (Gilroy 2004) is exactly where the petition intervened. Armand Zunder, who works closely with Biekman, recently expressed this aptly: ‘A nation understanding itself to be civilized cannot permit itself to forget something like [slavery].’24 The petition addresses a self-perception of liberal humanism that is based upon a romanticized version of the colonial past by depicting a system of savage violence perpetrated by the European colonizing powers. The implicit dilemma of liberal thought and historical practice is now explicated through the same aesthetics of violence that had been mobilized in aboli-tionist discourse. Rather than a civilizing mission, European colonialism is styled as a brutal project of savagery. The almost unspeakable violence depicted is proof of this perspective’s authenticity, and the fact that these images were absent in historical narratives adds to their truthfulness: of course they wanted to hide these cruelties. The enslaved, on the other hand, appear as the tortured heroes, who, stripped of their ‘own’ (African) civilization, strive to free themselves from the inhumane cruelty they were forced to endure: ‘it is for these reasons that slaves wished to end their inhumane existence by fleeing into the woods and taking revenge from there and attack the plantations’ (Biekman 1998:

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3). The Maroons are redefined as resistance heroes, and the suffering of the enslaved is redressed in terms of martyrdom.25

In this perspective, which is new to the way in which the colonial past is negotiated in the Netherlands, the Dutch are assigned a new savage slot (Trouillot 1991). A narrative from a European perspective, in which the colonial Other is assigned the position of the uncivi-lized savage, is now subverted. The crucial difference between abolitionist discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the petition’s intervention in twentieth-century memory discourse is the question of authorship. Whereas the abolitionists spoke in place of the enslaved, now the same images are re-authored in a voice that speaks for itself: the descendants of the enslaved recapture their voice through recourse to the self-evidence of an aesthetics of violence.

Viewed in terms of an aesthetics of persuasion, it becomes clear how the changing authorship of this aesthetics signals a shift in power. Understood as, para-phrasing Meyer, an interface between the past, sensa-tion, and politics, this aesthetics of persuasion helps to specify more clearly the ‘the broader modalities of modes of binding and politics of belonging’ (Meyer 2010: 743). The national scope of the slavery monument, addressing a national audience, symbolically opens up a position for Afro-Surinamese in the heart of the Dutch nation, rather than at the margins of civilization.

But how persuasive was this aesthetics of civiliza-tion and savagery? It certainly did not appeal to every-body. Pim Fortuyn, the famous populist of the extreme right whose murder in 2002 sent shock waves through Dutch society, made this clear in his political manifesto titled De puinhopen van acht jaar Paars.26

Slavery is a chapter of the past, but the facts may speak nonetheless. The slave trade and slavery were conducted by the precursors of modernity, hence by our ancestors. … The intermediary trade, hence the Arabs, then brought [the slaves] to the coasts and from there we, the whites, the precursors of moder-nity, took over. In the eyes of the present, it is a cruel chapter of history, not just our history, but also that of the Africans – perpetrators and victims – and that of the Arabs. We could not and would not do it like this again now. … No reason, therefore, to feel guilty, especially not because, rightfully, the daughter cannot be held accountable for her father’s deeds, and even less a cause for financial compensation. Those who say to suffer even now from the past of their distant ancestors’ enslavement should be at the psychiatrist’s and not at the negotiating table about financial compensation.27

Fortuyn’s argument blatantly merges a grotesque islamophobia with the denial of colonial continuities in an attempt to undermine the monument’s claim to recognize the responsibility for the consequences of the damage caused by precisely this paradox between liberal theory and historical practice which he tries to re-establish. As Gilroy argues, ‘when colonial history and memory do manage to interrupt the trancelike moods of contemporary consumer culture,’ they are usually ‘whitewashed in order to promote imperialist nostalgia’ (2004: 3). There were also less hysterical criticisms directed at the monument, not least from the Afro-Surinamese community itself. The initiators of the commemoration on Surinameplein mentioned above, for example, argued that a monument was not

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what was needed. Instead, they demanded more atten-tion for the plight of many black people in material terms.

On the other hand, the Dutch government swiftly agreed to enter negotiations (Van Stipriaan 2001) as means of placating the petitioners’ demands. Neverthe-less, the monument remains a highly contested site. Many Afro-Surinamese do not feel represented by the monument, some even refuse to go near it. Others are simply not interested in these commemorations. Finally, the monument fails to appeal to Dutch society at large, either being rejected for various reasons, or, more frequently, because of a lack of interest. While much more can be said about these dynamics, in the context of this article they are relevant to the notion of an aesthetics of persuasion. The continuing contesta-tion surrounding the monument is a reminder that an aesthetics of persuasion should be seen as an ongoing political project rather than an objective that has already been achieved. Persuasion, then, should be understood as an art of contestation rather than a final settlement. Hence, rather than asking whether something is persuasive or not, or about the success or failure of appeal, an aesthetics of persuasion should be under-stood as always both persuasive and contested, an expression of a conviction as well as the attempt to make an impression.

LE"0-#$&

The emotional appeal of an aesthetics of persuasion plays a crucial role in the commemoration of slavery and a politics of belonging in the Netherlands. On the

occasion of this year’s thirty-fifth anniversary of Suri-namese independence in 1975, Elsevier, one of the most widely-read Dutch weekly magazines, dedicated a special issue to the topic of Surinamese-Dutch rela-tions. In the 98-page edition, two pages were dedicated to slavery and its commemoration. The relatively short piece – the sections on food and soccer are six pages each – is titled: ‘Feeling of guilt about “black holocaust”’ (Wynia 2010: 86). The author, Syp Wynia, a perma-nent staff member with Elsevier, depicts the issue of slavery as a case of moral blackmail by a rather small Afro-Surinamese elite who want to extort reparations from the Dutch government. According to Wynia, neither the Dutch public nor the Surinamese commu-nity in the Netherlands or in Suriname had been concerned with this question until ‘Surinamese immi-grants discovered at the end of the twentieth century that if you want to achieve something in the Nether-lands, morality is an effective means.’28 These ‘immi-grants’ – Wynia also calls them ‘slavery activists’ – exploited their knowledge of an ‘overwhelming sensitivity among Dutch people: the inclination for a feeling of guilt’29 for their own political ends. To Wynia, this ‘typically Dutch’ emotional vulnerability is intrin-sically apolitical and ought to have been left out of the political realm.

Wynia’s observation is correct – there is a pervasive feeling of being blackmailed morally by a small Suri-namese elite (cf. Oostindie 2004). Yet he is wrong in assuming that these emotions exist in a political vacuum. It is a mistake to believe that feelings of guilt should be left in a depoliticized subjective realm where they supposedly belong, simply because emotions are inseparable from the political – indeed, they are, as I

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have attempted to show, modes of the political. Such a view fails to recognize the scope of the argument to commemorate slavery. Reducing it to moral blackmail and avarice fails to grasp the fundamental critique it implies, and the subjectivities that are articulated through it.

The increased public awareness of racial slavery, and the savagery associated with it, hit a nerve with the Dutch audience, and the images of savagery associated with it have led to intense affective responses in public debates. However, rather than resorting to patholo-gizing these emotions in terms of guilt and blackmail, I have looked at how they make sense in a historical and socio-cultural framework, stressing the historical and philosophical continuities that inform such emotions. I have attempted to show that the images of violence summoned by the petition that led to the creation of the monument point to the fundamental and unre-solved dilemma of liberal-humanist thought and historical practice that resonate in the politics of belonging today. In other words, the petition seems to have touched upon the very foundations of western, in this case Dutch, historical self-understanding.

In order to grasp the depth of these dynamics, I have adopted the notion of aesthetics of persuasion to highlight the way in which a specific formation of civi-lization and savagery was styled and politically framed and re-framed. In such a framework, the issue is not the success or failure of a certain aesthetic. Rather, the idea of an aesthetics of persuasion enables us to grasp the modalities of a historical and political situation by looking at its specific form. Such an understanding of the modalities of a post-colonial situation takes us beyond the merely subjective. Or, more precisely, it

takes us right into the heart of the subjective; the civi-lized and the savage are old categories deeply rooted in European colonial expansion, but now they are styled in a new formation of post-colonial subjectivities.

E-mail: markus.balkenhol@meertens.knaw.nl

,-4&7

1 I use the term Afro-Surinamese to refer to ‘Creoles.’ The term ‘Creole’ is still commonly used, but it is experienced by some as derogatory. Strictly speaking, Afro-Surinamese also should include Maroons. However, the memory of slavery differs in certain aspects. There are also many cultural repositories through which violence is remembered, but Maroons tend to emphasize their resistance against slavery as a central element of their subjectivity.

2 Hartman (1997: 3) argues that the ‘ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated’ lead to a routine and familiarity by which the expe-rience of pain is devalued. However, here I want to look speci-fically at the use of the spectacular and ask about its appeal in a political sphere, exactly despite a prevailing familiarity with of images of violence.

3 It should be noted, however, that the book has been edited in crucial aspects, even to the point of censoring (see Price and Price 1988; Oostindie 1991)

4 This, of course, is situated in a long genealogy of the savage, whose racialized forms I cannot aspire to reproduce here. See specifically for the rise of scientific racism Drescher (1992), Buck-Morrs (2000). It should be pointed out that the dichotomy between civilization and savagery was by far not the only mode of Othering (Kuper 2005; see also Said 1978), nor was it a homoge-

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neous or straightforward category (Kuper 2005; Taussig 1987), or very stable (Fabian 2000). Nevertheless, it has been and continues to be a crucial presence in European imaginaries (Verrips 2001). The complexities of Stedman’s account are for an important part owed to the complexity of an idea of civilization and savagery.

5 The emphasis on physical pain must also be seen in the philo-sophical tradition of an ‘aesthetics of the sublime’ which is inspired by Burke (Klarer 2005: 572; see also Wood 2000).

6 For a more extensive analysis of empathy and visuality see Ben-nett (2005).

7 For an analysis of the absence/presence of racial slavery in western cultural production, see Hesse (2002).

8 It is important to note that there have been, and continue to be, different and competing initiatives to commemorate slavery. These dynamics are highly complex and deserve more atten-tion (see Horton and Kardux 2004)

9 National Monument for the Dutch Slavery Past.10 ‘Het is ons bekend, voorzitter, dat Nederland vrijheid en tolle-

rantie [sic] hoog in het vaandel heeft. … Het heeft bovendien altijd gepast in het beleid van de Nederlandse overheid om oorlogsslachtoffers, waar ook ter wereld, op de een of andere manier te ondersteunen’ (Biekman 1998: 1).

11 ‘Uiteraard is bekend de strijd die Nederland 80 jaar lang, met name in de 16e en 17e eeuw heeft gevoerd tegen de Spanjaar-den om onafhankelijkheid te verwerven’ (Biekman 1998: 1).

12 ‘Als de Afrikaanse Surinamers, maar ook de inheemse Surina-mers elk jaar opnieuw, vooral in de periode rond 1 juli, de datum dat de slavernij in Suriname werd afgeschaft, generatie op generatie, 1998 is het 135 jaar lang, konstateren dat zij nog steeds zitten met een onverwerkt verleden en identiteitsproble-men … dan ligt het voor de hand dat zij ooit voor steun zullen aankloppen daar waar zij weten dat voor dat soort zaken tradi-tioneel alle aandacht is. Bij de Nederlandse volksvertegenwoor-diging’ (Biekman 1998: 1).

13 These lines are taken literally from Anton de Kom’s (1934) book ‘We slaves of Suriname.’ The figure of Anton de Kom, who is known for both his anti-colonial struggle as well as his ‘civilized’ appearance (his trade mark being a suit and hat), underscores the humanist tone of the argument.

14 Ironically, some of them later owned plantations and slave laborers in Suriname.

15 ‘Wie had dat gedacht, na die economische crisis, die negatieve groei en het verloren gaan van onze concurrentiepositie? Dat is een prestatie van formaat en ik blij dat wij dat hebben bereikt. Laten wij daar ook gewoon een keer blij mee zijn. Ik begrijp niet waarom u hier zo negatief en vervelend over doet. Laten we blij zijn met elkaar! Laten we optimistisch zijn! Laten we zeggen: Nederland kan het weer! Die !"#-mentaliteit, over grenzen heen kijken, dynamiek! [pause] Toch?’ (algemene beschou-wingen 29 september 2007). The !"# (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United East India Company) was a private enter-prise, controversial because of its brutal military campaigns and the exploitative practices by which it upheld its trade monopoly.

16 ‘Wilt u echt met mij in discussie gaan over de prestaties van de !"#? Daar is namelijk nog wel het een en ander op af te dingen’ (algemene beschouwingen 29 september 2007).

17 ‘Ik geloof dat wij in verschillende werelden leven’ (algemene beschouwingen 29 september 2007).

18 ‘De !"# nogal wat rooftochten over de wereld heeft gepleegd’ (algemene beschouwingen 29 september 2007).

19 ‘De blik op de wereld mij aanspreekt … maar het kan zo raar overkomen van een premier, ook in het buitenland … met name in Afrika zal men daar raar van opkijken’ (algemene beschouwingen 29 september 2007).

20 She had split off from the right-wing populist party ‘List Pim Fortuyn.’

21 ‘De !"# heeft … veel goeds gebracht’ (algemene beschou-wingen 29 september 2007).

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22 Interesting in this respect may be the traumatic events of Sre-brenica, which shook the nation to its foundations.

23 Notably, these issues are often discussed in terms of homosexu-ality to mark the perceived backwardness especially of Muslim citizens. See Mepschen et al (2010)

24 ‘Een natie die zich als beschaafd beschouwt kan het zich niet permitteren om zoiets te vergeten.’ He made this statement during the presentation of his study on reparations at which I was present.

25 The complexities of this claim cannot be adequately disentan-gled here. In fact, since the Maroons have long been assigned a position of degenerate savages within Surinamese society, there seems to be a dilemma between post-colonial thought and historical practice that is similar to the one criticized.

26 The rubble of eight years of ‘purple’ rule, that is, the liberal-social-democrat government of the 1990s.

27 ‘De slavenhandel en de slavernij zijn bedreven door de voorloper van de moderniteit, door onze voorvaderen dus. … De tussen-handel, de Arabieren dus, brachten [de slaven] vervolgens naar de kusten en van daaruit namen wij, de blanken, de voorlopers van de moderniteit, het over. Het is in hedendaagse ogen een wreed hoofdstuk uit de geschiedenis, niet alleen uit onze geschie-denis, maar ook die der Afrikanen – daders en slachtoffers – en die der Arabieren. We zouden het nu niet weer zo kunnen en niet zo doen. … Geen enkele reden dus om ons schuldig te voelen, zeker niet indien terecht de dochter de daden van de vader niet mogen worden aangerekend, en al helemaal geen reden voor financiële compensatie. Zij die zeggen nog steeds last te hebben van het verleden van de slavernij van hun verre voorvaderen horen thuis bij de psychiater en niet aan de onderhandelingstafel over een financiële compensatie’ (Fortuyn 2002: 158).

28 ‘Surinaamse immigranten ontdekten aan het eind van de twin-tigste eeuw dat als je in Nederland iets wilt bereiken de moraal een effectieve weg is’ (Wynia 2010: 86).

29 ‘Een allesoverheersende gevoeligheid bij Nederlanders: de neiging tot schuldgevoel’ (Wynia 2010: 86).

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