Saturday, March 15, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
In 1955, just one year after the islands of the former Netherlands Antilles and Suriname achieved governing autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Dutch government assigned millions of guilders to expand ‘the ethics of Dutch culture’ in its former West Indian empire. Through this postcolonial initiative to foster cultural exchange via The Foundation for Cultural Cooperation between the Netherlands, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles (Sticusa), Dutch leaders felt compelled as never before to invest in the export of Dutch culture to their partner states in the Caribbean. This paper examines correspondence and reports between Sticusa offices in the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean from the organization’s restructuring in 1955 until 1975, the year Suriname exited the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Sticusa. The Antilles, meanwhile, rejected models of territorial sovereignty and insisted on the right to maintain political and cultural ties with the Netherlands. By exploring the early decades of Sticusa’s operations, this paper questions whether and what kind of European nation-states emerged through decolonization. If investment in the transmission of metropolitan culture was a hallmark of imperial strategies, the case of Sticusa and the intensification of transatlantic ties in the aftermath of empire challenge assumptions of postcolonial cultural divestment. This paper will explore attempts to fashion a notion of ‘Dutch culture’ for export alongside concurrent efforts to render a distinctive ‘Antillean culture.’ As uniform rights and citizenship extended throughout the postcolonial Dutch Kingdom, this paper asks what purpose did the contradictory acts of distinguishing and assimilating culture serve?
