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Title Layering the Cultural Archive: A Critical Reading of Gloria Wekker's White Innocence and Rembrandt's Painting of Two Black Men
Full text https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/425615
Date 2022
Author(s) Andeweg, Agnes
Contributor(s) University College Utrecht; Overig externen TLC; ICON - guest publications
Abstract In this article I take a critical look at the 'cultural archive', one of the key concepts in White Innocence (2016), for which Gloria Wekker drew methodological inspiration from Edward Said, who coined the term in Culture and Imperialism (1993), and from Ann Laura Stoler's observations on the 'ethnography of the archive' in Along the Archival Grain (2009). Drawing on debates in history, cultural analysis and memory studies, and using Rembrandt van Rijn's painting 'Two African men' as case study, I wish to elaborate on Wekker's observations on what the cultural archive as a conceptual tool allows us to see about Dutch history, memory and society, and what it obscures. Despite its obvious advantages for recognizing and acknowledging structures of coloniality still present in Dutch society, I plead for a more historically grounded approach to the cultural archive that may enhance the productivity of future research on, or in, the cultural archive in order to identify further possibilities of change.
Subject(s) Gloria Wekker; Rembrandt; cultural archive; white innocence; 'Two African men'; Cultural Studies; Sociology and Political Science; General Arts and Humanities
Language en
Relation 0309-6564
Type of publication Article
Format application/pdf
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Identifier Dutch Crossing 46(3), 230-243 (2022)
Repository Utrecht - University of Utrecht
Added to C-A: 2024-03-11;09:40:50