Colonial Wrongs – Can the former coloniser re-colonise? with Solange Mouthaan.

“I’m afraid that I will look deeper into that rotten war of yours than you do yourselves. That is the destiny of someone from the post-war generation who thinks that his future is determined by the past of his ancestors (The Interpreter of Java, Alfred Birney).” 

My research leave has taken me on a long overdue journey from the Netherlands to Indonesia and the legacy of their colonial relationship. What started off as a descriptive reflection on the manner in which Dutch civil courts addressed colonial wrongs stemming from the extreme violence by the Dutch during the war of independence (or war of decolonisation depending on what side of the story you position yourself) within a transitional justice framework turned into a broader reflection on colonial wrongs, the interaction of time (past, present, future), colonial town planning and environmental harms with a view to examine the notion of colonial environmental wrong and what ‘reparation’ would look like. The above quote helped me make sense of my own positionality within this research and ignite a desire to make sense of the (untold) stories and images and to therefore a different but not unrelated research topic is colonial law and intergenerational trauma. Rather than present a paper, I would welcome your support in discussing these ideas.

This is being planned as a hybrid event and further details on location as well as the MS Team link will be circulated at a later date.