Search

This paper examines the successful translation and reception of Maria Dermoût's De tienduizend dingen (1955), most particularly in the U.S. and Italy: a quite unique case of a Dutch book which has found its way to world literature. In the late Fifties, this beautifully crafted literary work about the faded world of the Dutch Molucca's prior to WWII, could reckon on sympathy, empathy and interest in different countries. In the U.S., the ongoing decolonization process found a certain support, while Italy did its best to fully erase all traces of its colonial past and only few people with colonial roots tried to keep them alive. The ambivalent, liminar status of this fascinating book, written from a distant elsewhere by a displaced Eurasian author, can explain its appeal to translators Hans Koning and Quirino Maffi – both displaced, too – and international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basis of white innocence is a strong denial of the notion of racism by deniers, as well as a whitesplaining of the very thing whose existence is denied. The racism-is-relative discourse erases institutional racism and is blind to white privilege. It refuses to engage with history. 'Personal failings' ignores the reality of systems that have intentionally favoured a certain demographic; it suggests that everyone has equal access to these systems. It is this sort of discourse that has sustained the stereotype of certain demographics as intellectually or physically lazy, and shuts down conversations around equity, which results in more inequity. This paper explores how white innocence and black discomforts contribute to making racism thrive. To be a true ally, white non-racists must intentionally work to be anti-racist too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anton van den Wyngaerde's (c. 1490–1571) Panorama of Walcheren (after c. 1548) depicts the entire Island and the North Sea across ten metres of rolled paper. As the scene unfurls, viewers travel across Walcheren's dikes, roads, and waterways. Staffage accompanies the viewer on this mental journey, animating the topographical vision. Comparison with Jacob van Deventer's (c. 1500/5–1575) maps of Walcheren's largest cities (c. 1550) demonstrates van den Wyngaerde's pictorial style. His style's potential for cinematic absorption was suited to the panorama's intended audience and location. A version of this panorama hung in the Palacio de El Pardo of Philip II (1527–1598), King of Spain, by September 1564. That painted panorama, now lost, brought before the king's eyes an illustrated account of the Island's economic and defensive significance. Strolling the length of the gallery, Philip could envision past time spent on Walcheren and find himself immersed in the Island's cultural experiences while being reminded of its position. The viewing experience offered the king of Spain a microcosmic synecdoche of his imperial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the drama Die Offerande ['The Sacrifice'] (1941) by Hester Cornelius, in which the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism was grafted onto an Afrikaner cultural setting. To outline the context in which the play was created and performed, this contribution elaborates on the representation of Soviet socialism in the South African trade union periodical Klerewerker/Garment Worker, where the play was published. It aims to demonstrate that this propaganda play renders the socialist realist principle of narodnost (i. e. inclusion of a national folk element) by incorporating motifs characteristic of the Afrikaans farm novel, references to the historical events on which the Afrikanerdom founding myth is based, and characters representing 'typical' Afrikaners. Moreover, this article argues that the play's plot is reminiscent of the socialist realist novel master plot which illustrates the protagonist's transition from political immaturity to political awareness and his becoming the New Man. The important modification which Cornelius introduced was that she cast women in the main roles, so her play propagates the working-class New Woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gazette van Detroit was one of many immigrant newspapers started up in the United States shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. During the war, it kept the Belgian community of Detroit, wider Michigan and Southwestern Ontario (Canada) abreast of the developments in their former homeland, while also reporting on the hostilities elsewhere in Europe from a typically Belgian, and particularly Flemish perspective. It published to that end a variety of pieces under the scrutiny of the Belgian and later also the American government: (1) pieces submitted byregular contributors; (2) letters of Belgian soldiers; (3) articles gleaned from other news sources; and (4) pieces reproducing official information provided by the exiled Belgian government in Le Havre (France). Caught like most other media outlets in a powerful tide of national solidarity, much of this wartime reporting can be considered as propaganda, since it aimed to standardize public opinion by mobilizing the animosity of an entire community against a thoroughly evil enemy engaged in the victimization of an intrinsically good, heroic and unflinching opponent: the Belgian civilian population and army. To achieve this effect, the Gazette employed rhetorical strategies, such as over-lexicalisation, stereotyping and the kinship metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch-Flemish literary project De eenzame uitvaart (The lonely funeral) consists of city-based groups of poets who write poems and perform them at funerals of fellow citizens who died lonely and often anonymously. At first sight, this project could be considered as a revival of the genre of occasional poetry and, more generally, as an exponent of the 'revenge' of the lyric in the twenty-first century. This revenge, a term borrowed from Thomas Vaessens, implies that contemporary poetry no longer functions as a marginal and elitist genre but has reconquered its popular status and societal value – in short, its heteronomous function. This paper aims to question this idea of the lyric's revenge by analysing the ambitions (as expressed by the initiators of the project) and a selection of poems of De eenzame uitvaart. It contends that the project is founded on a firm belief in the potency of the lyric and its specific language but that this belief is often contradicted by the hesitant rhetoric of the actual poems. This discrepancy between great ambitions and hesitant practice is interpreted as a symptom of the contemporary status of the lyric, which takes revenge yet only reluctantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 16th century at the latest there were strong political, cultural and literary ties between the Iberian Peninsula and the Dutch speaking regions in north western Europe. Literature in general and especially romances from the 'south' were printed, translated and adapted in Dutch. After an introduction in which the contribution presents a short overview of the translation and adaptation of Iberian romances in Dutch the focus will be on the 'Amadijs' tradition especially. For the first time the Spanish source and the 'Amadijs' are compared, including an analysis of the paratextual elements of the first Dutch edition of 'Amadijs' (1546), which clearly shows that Nuyts did not follow his source as an inspiration for the design of his edition, but copied the design of earlier Dutch editions of narratives as a marketing strategy. Part four shows that the Dutch 'Amadijs' was obviously read by everyone in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the topic of sexual violence in Middle Dutch literature, centring on the play 'Lanseloet van Denemerken' (c.1405). Although medieval literature is known for its gender-based violence, the topic has not received much attention from scholars of Middle Dutch. This article aims to renew the scholarly debate by analysing the Middle Dutch text from an innovative intersectional perspective, integrating the analytical categories of gender, social status and narrative space and adopting those categories for literary studies. This analysis uncovers new meanings in the play and demonstrates that gender, status and space work together in creating an unsafe situation, in which the female protagonist Sanderijn is raped by the male protagonist Lanseloet. Subsequently, this article analyses recent scholarly publications on 'Lanseloet van Denemerken' to investigate how scholars in Middle Dutch literature are handling the sensitive topic of rape. It is demonstrated that our interpretations and discussions of the medieval text run the risk of being involuntarily influenced by present-day rape myths – false beliefs and attitudes about sexual violence that prevail in our current culture. Therefore, this article calls on researchers' shared responsibility to ensure a continuous and open discussion of sensitive topics in the field of Middle Dutch literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will consider certain art objects and underlying acts of patronage in the waning days of the ancien regime in Europe, partly through a trifecta of personalities who either produced or consumed art. Michel-Paul-Joseph Dewez (1742–1804) was a Brussels goldsmith and bronze caster; James Lockhart (1727–1790) was a Scottish military officer in the Austrian service and a court official; and Prince Charles Alexandre of Lorraine (1712–1780) was the governor general of the Austrian Netherlands from 1744 until his death in 1780. The works by Dewez that form the focus of this study include a pair of silver candlesticks that he made and Lockhart bought in about 1778, a rare survival from an age that ended in chaos and catastrophe as the ancien regime fell and revolutions erupted across Europe. Dewez also produced massive quantities of gilt bronze (ormolu) ornaments for a new Audience Chamber and Grand Salon commissioned by Prince Charles Alexandre of Lorraine for his Winter Palace in Brussels. While they lasted these rooms were among the most extraordinary courtly interiors in Europe. They have not survived, and with a few exceptions their sumptuous furnishings were also consumed in the fires of the French and Brabanconne Revolutions and their aftermaths. By assembling these stories of persons, things and their interrelationships into a single narrative, it is hoped that a soupçon more of light will be cast on a tumultuous time and its art, during the twilight years of the old Europe before the advent of the modern age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the use of Dutch in eighteenth-century Japan, the portrayal of Amsterdam in Jean Crosnier's L'Année Burlesque (1682) and wartime propaganda in the Gazette van Detroit during World War I.

Research shows that teachers and education are often represented negatively or stereotypically in popular and literary culture, both in the Dutch language area and in Anglophone contexts. Regarding contemporary Dutch literature, though, research on educational representations has until now focussed on small corpora of novels that explicitly deal with education. In this article, we explore the representations of teachers and education in a much larger and broader corpus: the 170 submissions to the bulk list of the prestigious Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs of 2013. We provide a Keyword in Context Analysis of 292 educational representations in this corpus and offer a demographic analysis of the 71 teachers who inhabit the novels under analysis. In doing so, we show that educational representations and teacher characters are relatively common in contemporary Dutch language novels. Our analysis also reveals that literary representations of teachers are predominantly negative in nature, especially regarding their behaviour towards students, their external presentation, and their pedagogical skills. Representations of education in general tend to be even more negative. In that sense, literary representations of education appear to converge with the negative public appeal of the educational sector in the contemporary Low Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean Crosnier (1652-1709), a Frenchman possibly of Huguenot background, fled to the United Provinces of the Netherlands havng committed a crime in his home country. During his stay there, he published several literary works and the Mercure Burlesque, which was a monthly gazette focused on gossip and news of various nature written in verse often in a very frivolous way. The present article analyses thow Crosnier wrote about the city where he lived in and its multicultural and polireligious environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first hundred years of the Dutch presence in Japan, the Dutch language was used by Dutch, other Europeans and Japanese in a range of social domains. This article considers how Dutch functioned in Japan in the following hundred years, i.e. c. 1700–1800. After discussing who knew Dutch in Japan, it examines the use of the language not by social domain, but rather by the linguistic processes that resulted from contact between Dutch and other languages in Japan. These include the learning of Dutch by non-native speakers, bilingualism, language competition, code switching and loanword integration. Particular attention is paid to the subject of translation, for it was during this period that Japanese interpreters and scholars began to translate Dutch texts to a significant degree and the discipline known as rangaku (lit. 'Dutch studies') emerged. This article therefore aims to increase our knowledge of Dutch as an emigrant language and of the linguistic diversity and resultant language processes in early modern Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the relocation to America of an important collection of Flemish art in the mid-1790s (and its return to Antwerp some twenty years later) helped shape the owners' identity, both in Belgium and America. Henri Joseph Stier (1743–1821), a direct descendant of Rubens, fled Antwerp with his family in June 1794, to avoid having the family's priceless art collection fall into the hands of the French, who were impounding art treasures as military levy. After the family returned to Antwerp in 1803, the collection was left to the care of the Stiers' youngest daughter, Rosalie Calvert, who had married an American plantation owner and remained in Maryland until her death in 1821. In 1816, Rosalie was finally able to send the collection back to Antwerp. Interestingly, this coincided with the return from France of many other Belgian paintings; a transfer in which Henri Stier and his son played important official roles, as art collectors and connoisseurs. The return of Belgian art treasures gave rise to a growing consciousness on the part of the Belgian people of their national culture and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I set out to introduce the Garment Workers Union (GWU) prose as a neglected part of Afrikaans-language literature. I offer an overview of texts written or translated by the GWU members and published in the official trade union organ Die Klerewerker/The Garment Worker. The presented workers' reading list is divided into original Afrikaans writings and translations from English into Afrikaans. All these texts offered the newly created white working class a new identification, manoeuvring between belonging to the national imagined community of Afrikaners based on the concept of nation and whiteness, and to a transnational workers' community based on the category of class. Looking at the impact of the Dutch and English language traditions in South Africa, I propose that the way in which European conventions made their way to Afrikaans literature, was class-based. Textsrecognized as artistic, incorporated in the Afrikaans literary canon, drew heavily on Dutch tradition. The English language turned out to be the medium that also circulated a less elitist thought. Therefore, it was English that enabled the movement of texts from Europe and the United States to South Africa that shaped the South African white working-class, including its Afrikaner part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Gloria Wekker looks back on how her experiences as a young student of colour and later full professor inspired her to write White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016). While exposing the university as a place whose modi operandi have historically been shaped by ingrained imperialist notions of race, she also offers administrators, researchers, lecturers and students practical suggestions that may help them turn academia into a more diverse and inclusive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

– In the historiography of the Dutch East Indies literature, the image has arisen of P.A. (Paul) Daum (1850–1898) as an author whose work experienced a striking transformation during his stay in the Indies: from a colonial to an anti-colonial author. Where Daum still showed himself an out-and-out colonial at the start of his authorship, he is said to have started to see the Indonesians with very different eyes over the years and finally to think and write about them with more nuance and understanding. This article, that focuses on the representation of Indonesians, argues that here is no such development to be found in Daum's attitude towards the indigenous people of the colony. To this end, three works by Daum, published over a ten-year period, are analysed: Uit de suiker in de tabak (From Sugar to Tobacco, 1884), Goena-goena (Guna-guna, 1887) and Aboe Bakar (1894). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, legal historians have become more cautious when it comes to rules that in the Middle Ages and the early modern period were defined as '(old) customs'. Earlier optimistic appraisals as to the age of such rules have been challenged. This article argues that efforts of debunking should be combined with a more thorough analysis of the legal consciousness of past societies. It proposes to look at old municipal private law, not as a set of rules fixed by tradition, but rather as a malleable body of norms. The symbolic qualities of law were such that renewal and rephrasal could be combined with an ideology of conservation. It was perfectly possible for administrators to promote new rules as being a part of an 'age-old law' of the city or the land, without breaching the implicit conventions as to the qualities of law. However, as will be demonstrated further, there were limits to the agency of administrators in this regard. The codes as to the features of law marked boundaries that had to be taken seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how the Dutch pop phenomenon Kinderen voor Kinderen mirrors the Zeitgeist of societal changes in the Netherlands. Strongly rooted in the left-winged pillar of the system of pillarization (verzuiling), Kinderen voor Kinderen dared to address controversial topics like the fear for the atom bomb, the changing female body in puberty, homosexuality and diversity. Bespreekbaarheid is the key word for our three case studies. The first – Brief aan Ernst – is an answer song for Doe Maar, a reaction to the doemdenken. The second one – Het Tietenlied – breaks the taboo of developing breasts. Lastly, the third case study – Kom erbij – is about diversity and gender issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of alba amicorum is still a relatively obscure yet growing pursuit in the Anglophone world. By browsing through these autograph albums, it is possible to unlock the names of Scots so long sunk into oblivion or simply reveal additional details and facets to the personality of those whose names have come down the centuries. Additionally, vriendenboeken weave networks of relations between Scots and Europeans expanding our understanding of these mobile and endeavouring individuals. These volumes are important as they help the historian get a clearer picture and add to the better knowledge of the peregrinatio scotica in particular vis-à-vis the Netherlands. The genre of alba amicorum fully deserves a greater consideration from the Scottish, and indeed British, historian. They offer a rounder picture of the contributors' identities and give a voice to Scottish women which is independent from that of their husbands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stichting tot Bevordering van de Vertaling van Nederlands Letterkundig Werk (The Foundation for the Promotion of the Translation of Dutch Literary Works) was a state-funded quasi-governmental organization established in 1954 to oversee the translation of Dutch literary works into a variety of languages until 1989. One of The Foundation's first key projects was the development of a series of Dutch imaginative works translated into English, eventually called the Bibliotheca Neerlandica, that would implicitly redress the imbalance in the international reception of Dutch literature and its fine-art counterpart in the Dutch Golden Age of painting. The translator, Alex Brotherton, was commissioned by The Foundation to translate three of the volumes and I selected one of these as my case study to consider whether his translation choices always met with success. On comparing his translation with the source text, I highlighted four key areas which were to challenge him and considered his decisions when dealing with proper names, foreign words within a text, titles and his fidelity to the source text. Brotherton was not the only player in the 1960s literary field and I considered others including publishing companies, the copy-editor and press reviews to ascertain the level of influence they had on the final published work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1675 the prolific etcher and engraver Romeyn de Hooghe designed, produced, and published a print depicting several disasters that had scourged the Republic of the Seven United Provinces from 1672 onwards. The print offers interesting insights in contemporary concerns that accumulated during All Saints Flood in 1675. In recent historical studies, the print has been used to illustrate contemporary belief in divine providence, and faith of the Dutch that history would take a turn for the better. But the iconography of the print is detailed and complex, and many of its vital elements have been ignored or were misinterpreted. Careful examination from an art historical perspective reveals that the print does not illustrate faith in a good outcome. On the contrary, De Hooghe accuses his fellow countrymen of a lack of faith using the New Testament story of a storm on the Sea of Galilee as a biblical parallel. Secondly, De Hooghe identifies discord as the cause of the current sad state of the Dutch Republic. He even implies that those responsible are the wealthy citizens in the prosperous Province of Holland who have neglected to take care of the republic's poorer members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the latest issue of the journal Dutch Crossing, following an online-first publication model before print. The topics covered include an analysis of Anton van den Wyngaerde's island depiction, the vicissitudes of Henri Joseph Stier's Flemish art collection during wartime, insights from Dutch travel guides about the United States, and an investigation into Turkish-Dutch migrant literature.

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented in which the editor discusses topics on the historiography of Dutch East Indies literature, the comparison of security in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the popular children's choir Kinderen Voor Kinderen.

An introduction to articles in the issue is presented on topics including Scotto-Dutch relations as seen through alba amicorum from the 1540s to the 1720s, role of translator in the literary field, and contemporary Dutch-Flemish literary project "De eenzame uitvaart."