Worlding Dutch Literary Studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Whenever we start worlding Dutch literary studies, we find ourselves in the compartment. Once we move beyond the metropolitan centre(s) of Dutch literature, we encounter the compartments of literatures from or related to Indonesia, the Antilles, South Africa, Suriname, Congo, immigration to the metropolitan centres. This essay discusses ‘worlding’ as a possible method that can undo the compartments while also tackling the racialized logic that underpin them. After a general description of ‘worlding’, the essay discusses three recent publications that deal with the colonial past of the Low Countries: De postkoloniale spiegel, De nieuwe koloniale leeslijst and Zwarte bladzijden. Whereas all include aspects that world the discipline, a distinction can be made between the first two projects that involve a recentring on the nation and leave the compartments intact and the third one that offers a more oppositional strategy of worlding that addresses the racial grammar that subtends the discipline of Dutch literary studies and that invites us to imaginative acts of worldmaking.