Reading White Innocence across Disciplines in the Low Countries

Abstract

This special issue around White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016) by Gloria Wekker grew out of an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Liège in Belgium in 2021. The conference celebrated Wekker’s work and was occasioned by some notable anniversaries in the university’s history. In 2017, the University of Liège celebrated its bicentenary, a historical moment also for Dutch Studies as an academic discipline, for it was in Liège, in French-speaking Wallonia, that a chair for Dutch Literature and Eloquence was established in 1817, the very first outside the Dutch language area. The chair was created in the context of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the brief political union of present-day Belgium, the Netherlands and the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg from 1815 to 1830. On the instigation of King William I, who took a keen interest in educational matters, three universities were established in the southern parts of the realm: in Liège, in Ghent and in Louvain (its older university having been abolished during the Napoleonic era). The first professor to occupy the chair of Dutch Studies in Liège was Johannes Kinker, the famous philosopher, poet, critic and all-round man of letters. Following the Belgian Revolution in 1830, Kinker was forced to return to his native city of Amsterdam. In the aftermath of the revolution, the Faculty of the Humanities was closed for a few years, but when it reopened in 1837, Dutch Studies was still part of the academic curriculum, initially in a much reduced form. The bicentenary of Dutch Studies at Liège was commemorated in various ways. A tangible memento was the publication of a monograph painting a detailed picture of the