Rethinking Connections between Latin American Colonial and Dutch Atlantic Worlds

Montenegro, Giovanna; Montenegro, Giovanna

This panel challenges and rethinks connections between Latin American Colonial and Dutch Atlantic Worlds. It explores colonial and postcolonial experiences in the Americas that have been and still are in contact with Dutch language, culture and peoples. By engaging with different temporalities and spatialities in the ‘Neerlandophone’ Americas through literature and the arts, the panel contributes both to a diverse scholarship and to the act of imagining cultural interactions. We aim to provide novel insights into Dutch-Indigenous-Maroon-Hispanophone cultural exchanges, as well as to rethink histories and patterns of thought within the discourse on coloniality. This panel explores various influences, ranging from the ways in which competing colonial powers in the Americas influenced one another, to the ways through which colonized subjects have engaged with and resisted colonial powers. The panel will integrate studies on the transatlantic slave trade and its cultural memory, and by integrating an ecocritical and decolonial methodology, seek a response to these converging colonialisms ‘from below.’ The panel’s speakers do so by engaging with aesthetic interventions that explore how Indigenous, Afro-Descendant, and Dutch and Iberian materials, knowledges and languages entangle with each other. This is crucial because, due to language barriers, scholars focusing on the Dutch West India Company (WIC) either ignore similar case studies in the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts and vice versa.

Giovanna Montenegro’s paper will connect the figure of the cimarrón in Latin America and connect to maroon communities in Suriname in the colonial period. In particular, she will use German Moravian missionary accounts as well as current exhibits at the Saamaka Museum to contrast colonial and decolonial accounts of their fight for autonomy and engagement with their forest environments.

Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder’s presentation explores the role of water in negotiations between the Dutch WIC and communities in northeast Brazil, in order to challenge distinctions and to emphasize blurry exchanges between cultures. Thinking beyond water as ‘transparent,’ ‘neutral’ or ‘passive,’ here, water is an active, lively agent in connecting peoples and mobilizing their attitudes towards the environment. The presentation will focus on deltas in northeast Brazil as historical sites of colonialism, plantations and military power, as well as spaces where land and water, saltwater and river water, and Indigenous, Afro-descendant and Dutch cultures encounter each other.

Thalia Ostendorf’s presentation will consider the structures of kin and kin-like relationships in the context of Surinamese plantations and their afterlives/presents. In this European-made but distinctly Caribbean context the writings of Edgar Cairo (1984-2000) serve as an entry into the way language limits, hints at, and expands that particular Caribbean experience. Written in a mix of Sranantongo (a Surinamese creole language with its roots in Portuguese) and Dutch, Cairo’s work engages with and problematizes notions of ‘being native’ as a descendant of forcibly displaced people.

We are showcasing a variety of panelists across ranks and geographical regions, and LLCs that have not traditionally collaborated.

Thalia Ostendorf is currently Biographer in Residence at the University of Amsterdam, while working on the biography of Surinamese author Bea Vianen (1935-2019). She holds a BA and MA in Comparative Literary Studies (UU) and obtained her doctorate from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her postdoc project ‘Plantation Kinships’ (UvA, 2023-2025), investigated the nature of kin relations between people of the African diaspora in Suriname and the Netherlands whose ancestors were enslaved at the same plantations through the analysis of ‘Neerlandophone’ Surinamese literature by Edgar Cairo (1984-2000), and fieldwork in Suriname.

Giovanna Montenegro is author of German Conquistadors in Venezuela: The Welsers’ Colony, Racialized Capitalism, and Cultural Memory (2022). She was Fulbright US Scholar to Suriname from 2022-2023 where she started conducting research for her next book project: “Subverting Colonial Fantasies: Maroon and Indigenous Environmental Resistance in Suriname and the Guianas” which has just been supported by an NEH fellowship. She is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies Program at Binghamton University.

Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. Her project ‘Reimagining Ways of Living with Water in the Neerlandophone Space’ explores contemporary literature, oral history, arts and performance in formerly Dutch colonized spaces through an ecocritical and decolonial approach. Her project examines counter-narratives to the dominant Dutch narrative of a ‘battle against the water’ by analyzing artistic interventions that imagine sustainable and collaborative ways of living with bodies of water. She completed a Social and Political Philosophy research master’s at Radboud University Nijmegen, and a Liberal Arts and Sciences bachelor’s at Amsterdam University College.

93 Rethinking Connections between Latin American Colonial and Dutch Atlantic Worlds: Calls for Papers