The Coloniality of the Sea
This is a written version of the talk I gave on November 27, 2021 at the Hermitage Museum Amsterdam on the panel Activism, Academic Research and Decoloniality. The panel was part of the The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past Symposium. In the talk, I respond to the exhibition The Golden Coach at the Amsterdam Museum, which formed the occasion for this symposium.
(this is a work in progress and will hopefully evolve into a larger paper for the edited collection resulting from the symposium)
The Coloniality of the Sea
I originally wanted to dedicate my time today to critiquing the coloniality of the Dutch university system, including the University of Amsterdam; it’s complete lack of accountability to struggles for decolonization (both here and elsewhere); its complicity in ongoing colonial violence (such as in Palestine); the lack of social and racial justice within the university, let alone support for decolonial research and researchers. I wanted to talk about the need to invest in decolonial education; the urgency of dismantling the colonial university (including its investment in capitalism and environmental destruction) and for white people in power to step down, step up, step with, and make space. Then again, most of you already know this.
Instead, I would like to talk to you today about the ocean and the Golden Coach to look at what the ocean might teach us about the pervasiveness of Dutch imperialism. Following the work of my mentor Renisa Mawani, I take the ocean as a lens to develop a method to look at the entangled emergence of enslavement, indigenous dispossession, the emergence of racial capitalism, and environmental destruction in the Dutch context.
But first a bit about myself. I grew up under the clouds of white factory smoke in Amsterdam’s industrial appendix Zaandam. My grandfather on my maternal side was a second mate on Dutch commercial shipping lines in the decade after WWII. When I was finally literate enough to ask him about the other side of his maritime adventure stories, such as his encounters with decolonization struggles across the globe or the fact that he participated in the repatriation of colonial settlers from occupied Indonesia to the Netherlands, he had suffered a stroke and could no longer speak and write.
After he passed away, I asked my mom for his logbooks, but she had thrown them in the trash. Amid this ringing silence, I became intrigued by what at first seemed like a contradiction – the struggle of a small nation against the water and, on the other hand, Dutch maritime supremacy resulting in/from the colonization of Indigenous peoples and the transport of captive Africans and Asians across oceans, along with spices, ivory, gold, laws, perceptions of the human and the non-human, and diseases.
What was it about the country I had grown up in, with its self-perception of the Dutch as astute tradesmen and developers of maritime technology, that continued to resist coming to terms with its own colonial and imperial underpinnings? Deeply indebted to Gloria Wekker’s groundbreaking book White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, I wondered: what did the ocean have to do with the emergence of white innocence? What kind of genealogy of Dutch white innocence emerges when we start thinking from the ocean, ships, and shipping? That’s how I began my research into Dutch maritime imagination and how it informs dominant Dutch self-perception and the erasure of colonial-racial violence.
I am not strictly a decolonial scholar in the lineage described by Dr. Vasquez, but I am deeply influenced by, for instance, Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter who has taught me in an interview for Small Axe with David Scott that we don’t really have a history of the human, it is yet to be written. What we have is a history of the white male bourgeois subject who acts as a stand-in for the human. But also the understanding that modernity and coloniality are co-formations. We cannot have one without the other. Although I co-desire all-out transformation, revolution and decolonization of the globe, I don’t think it is up to me to claim that my work is decolonial. This is up to readers. What I am invested in though, is showing how modernity/coloniality are co-formations in the Dutch context, and how the conquest of maritime imagination plays a role in that. In other words, how we come to think about the ocean and its relations to us in exclusively racial capitalist terms. And, on the other hand, how this conquest of maritime imagination precludes and excludes non-Eurocentric imaginaries of and relation to the ocean.
In the exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum, I was intrigued by the decorative paintings made by Van der Waay and Witkamp in 1883 for the Amsterdam Pavilion at the World Expo. At the entrance to the Amsterdam Pavilion, visitors were shown three allegories on a golden background that symbolized Amsterdam as a rich trading port. One image shows a river god to symbolize the Y river. The second a woman with a trident symbolizing the sea. The third, a woman with a staff of mercury and a bag of money representing trade and prosperity. These three figurines have one thing in common – the ocean and the water. They symbolize Dutch perception of itself as a seafaring nation. Or in the words of Hugo de Groot, the Dutch were “those true sons of the sea, reared amid their own waters beneath a frosty, wind-swept sky, under the light of northern stars, and in an amazing number of cases accustomed even from childhood to spending more time upon the ocean than on the land.” De Groot wrote these sentences in the closing remarks to his defense of Dutch privateering, slavery and colonization in the Indian Ocean based on the idea that the Dutch should have the right to freedom of trade and navigation. Resistance to Dutch-style free trade, according to de Groot, would justify war and occupation. The entrance to the Amsterdam Pavilion served as a reminder to the visitor of the role of the ocean in the procurement of Dutch wealth through the erasure of colonial and racial violence.
Looking at this section of the exhibition, I am thinking of what the people from the colony thought when they entered the World Expo in 1883 and were locked into enclosures, after being kidnapped and put on Dutch ships in the wake of the slave trade’s abolition, to be held captive for the entertainment of whites.
Fifteen years later, van der Waay painted the panels for the Golden Coach, including the Netherlands and her colonies.
On the panel, we see a white lady – the mother country – in the center holding two shields. The right one with a sword, the one to the left with a ship carrying the Dutch flag.
Although the foreground of the colonial scene demands attention, my eyes wander to the background of this scene of colonial and racial violence depicted as willing subjection to the mistress in the foreground. My gaze rests not on the mountains to the left and right of the panel, but on the calm blue sea, which opens up far and wide behind the scene, colonial ships bobbing gently in the background. The calm blue turquoise asks that I look beyond the horizon.
In the foreground, the scene depicts Black and Brown people bestowing gifts to the white lady in the center, most of the gifts are wrapped in cloth, as if they were just unloading cargo from the ship and delivered in the lap of The Mother Country. These “scenes of subjection”, to use Saidiya Hartman’s terminology, take place not in a ballroom, a fort, or a castle, they are taking place amid the hustle and bustle of a port.
Looking at the green mountains in the background, I know I am not in The Netherlands. I am in the colonies. The calm blue sea stands in stark contrast to the wild, gushing waves and the frosty wind-swept skies displayed on the shield the white woman is holding. The rough waves envelop the ship, yet the ship perseveres to end up in the deceptively calm tropical waters of the colony.
Thinking about the Golden Coach, I always wondered, where did the materials to build it come from? And, how did they get here?
In the museum, I learn that it was made with ivory from Sumatra (perhaps we can also think about the destruction of non-human life for the benefit of the Dutch state); wood from Java; goat leather from Morocco; hickory-wood from what today is known as the United States. Gold and silver of unknown origins, but most likely from the “Americas” too. Today, 90% of global trade happens at sea, also accompanied by similar violent histories of the present.
In the exhibition, I learn about how the scene depicts slavery, colonial subjection, the Dutch civilizing mission, colonial cultivation systems, white supremacy. How it was paid for by the money of the Amsterdam working classes who worked in factories processing materials from elsewhere, on the docks, and on ships to transport the riches from the colonies under exploitative conditions.
We know now that the majority of the Amsterdam populace had a share in the colonial enterprise. They did so mostly through the intricate network of ships and shipping that stitched Dutch empire together and provided it the logistical and ideological fuel it needed.
To me, the shape of the panel almost seems like a ship, with the white woman as the figurehead. It is not unsurprising that later-on in the exhibition the Afro-Caribbean visual artist AiRich depicts the colonial panel as a ship, or rather as the hold of the ship. Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe reminds us that the hold is not just a space for the transport of kidnapped humans and cargo, but also a metaphorical space that carries with it, what she calls, “slavery’s as of yet unresolved unfolding.” AiRich shows what goes unseen in the celebration of the grandeur of Dutch colonial shipping. What remains of the old panel in the art piece is the white lady holding the shields with sword and ship, a reminder perhaps of Jan Pieterzoon Coen’s expression “there can be no trade without war.”
As activists, artists, and some scholars have shown coloniality is everywhere, in architecture, in education, in museum collections. But what about the coloniality of the sea? What about the sea’s ongoing resistance to - in the form of ocean acidification, rising sea levels, and warming temperatures - its subjection to a colonial capitalist regime of resource extraction and transportation? The emergence of modernity/colonialty has everything to do with the oceans, ships and shipping. Ships were not simply vessels that brought colonizers, cargo and captive Africans and Asians from A to B. They formed, as Renisa Mawani’s work shows, the very backbone of empire and their very own colonial-legal laboratories. The ocean, ships and shipping are cornerstones of the (legal) architecture of coloniality.
The role of the sea for Dutch imperialism, however, often remains invisible. Looking at the ocean, I hope, might shed light on how the plantation, the metropole, the colony and their cultural, legal, racial, libidinal, and capitalist economies are interwoven at sea. De Groot writes that one cannot claim ownership over the sea, because ships leave no tracks in their wake. Like de Groot’s work itself, those disappearing tracks are particular to how Dutch whiteness actively unsees the colonial-racial violence this country was built on. Looking at the wake with different eyes, as Christina Sharpe’s work insists on, it becomes impossible not to see, hear, feel, taste how coloniality and anti-Blackness pervade the present. What might an oceanic lens mean for the study of modernity/coloniality in the Dutch context? And how might it help visualize and visibilize what is occurring in the wake of Dutch ships and shipping? Thank you.