This project was awarded a three-year Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (2019-2022). From 2019-2021, Mikki was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The last year of the project, they were based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

In the project, Mikki turns to the ocean to better understand Dutch contributions to global capitalist, racial, colonial and imperialist ideologies. By charting how ideas of Dutch maritime supremacy, trade, and commerce come to act as a smokescreen for Dutch conquest and enslavement, this project sheds light on the impact of 400 years of Dutch colonization and imperialism.

The project emerged from ongoing concerns regarding the one-sided narration of Dutch imperialist history, its effects on dominant Dutch self-perception; and the impact of Dutch imperialist ideologies on contemporary relations of power within The Netherlands and across the globe. It is a response to the growing concerns voiced by social justice movements regarding the impact of 400 years of Dutch imperial, colonial, racial, and gendered violence on contemporary relations of power. Particularly informed by Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Mikki turns to Dutch white innocence at sea. In Maritime Imagination, the ocean provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of Dutch state, empire, and self-formation.

Mikki is currently working on a book on the work of Dutch humanist and United East India Company lawyer Hugo de Groot (Hugo Grotius), whose writings continue to undergird contemporary international and maritime law and the extractivist imaginaries and practices of global capitalism. The book is called Contract Colonialism.

As part of Maritime Imagination, Mikki is also creating an ongoing series of work on the Dutch slave ship Leusden. This series draws on Black (feminist) studies scholarship on the Middle Passage to examine Dutch regimes of racial terror at sea. On 31 December 1737, the slave ship Leusden shipwrecked off the coast of Suriname. As the ship sank, the captain ordered his crew to lock 664 abducted African peoples aboard into the hold. Although the records tell us this is the largest recorded massacre in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the mass murder has remained but a footnote in the archive. This video essay seeks to attend to the lives taken and surviving in the wake of the Leusden. Although it is impossible to attend to the loss on the Leusden, this video essay insists on working through and thinking with this impossibility. In doing so, I am forever indebted to the works of Leo Balai, Dionne Brand, Hazel Carby, Gina Dent, Marisa J. Fuentes, Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Tiffany Lethabo King, Nancy Jouwe, Anton de Kom, Egbert Alejandro Martina, Katherine McKittrick, Cynthia McLeod, Jennifer Morgan, Fred Moten, Kwame Nimako, M. NourbeSe Philip, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Christina Sharpe, Stephanie Smallwood, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Jennifer Tosch, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Gloria Wekker, Glenn Willemsen, Eric Williams and Sylvia Wynter. This piece originally emerged as an academic essay. With this work I seek to shore up against the limitations of the academic form in the wake of the Leusden massacre.

Finally, Mikki collaborates with Renisa Mawani and Kristie Flannery on the Oceans as Archives series. This project brings together artists, scholars, and activists working on oceans from non-Eurocentric critical perspectives. The series has taken on the form of two conferences and an edited collection (in progress).