The Dutch East Indies, Its Government, Problems and Politics.

AbstractThe powerful concept of orientalism has undergone considerable refinement since Edward Said popularized the term with his eponymous book in 1978. Orientalism typically is presented as a totalizing process that creates polar oppositions between a dominating West and a subordinate East. U.S. orientalisms, however, reflect uniquely North American approaches to identity formation that include assimilating characteristics usually associated with the Other. This article explores the complex relationship among three individuals—U.S. composer Charles T. Griffes, Canadian singer Eva Gauthier, and German-trained Dutch East Indies composer Paul J. Seelig—and how they exploited the same Javanese songs to lend legitimacy to their individual artistic projects. A comparison of Griffes's and Seelig's settings of a West Javanese tune (“Kinanti”) provides an especially clear example of how contrasting approaches manifest different orientalisms. Whereas Griffes accompanied the melody with stock orientalist gestures to express his own fascination with the exotic, Seelig used chromatic harmonies and a chorale-like texture to ground the melody in the familiar, translating rather than representing its Otherness. The tunes that bind Griffes, Gauthier, and Seelig are only the raw materials from which they created their own unique orientalisms, each with its own sense of self and its own Javanese others.

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The Story of the Dutch East Indies

International Affairs ◽

10.2307/3017847 ◽

1947 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 140-140

Author(s):

E H G Dobby

Keyword(s):

East Indies ◽

Dutch East Indies

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Private Trade and Elite Privilege. The Trial of Nicolaas Schaghen, Director of Bengal

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300003971 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 20 (3) ◽

pp. 69-86 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Pamela McVay

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

Board Of Directors ◽

East India Company ◽

Dutch East India Company ◽

High Court ◽

East Indies ◽

Hands On ◽

Dutch East Indies ◽

At Home

It is common wisdom among the historians of the Dutch East Indies that everyone in the Dutch East India Company engaged in private trade. That is, ‘everyone’ traded in goods supposedly monopolized by the Company and ‘everyone’ abused his or her position to squeeze graft from the Company's trade. It was, supposedly, to get their hands on the private trade and graft that people joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) in the first place. But back in the Netherlands the VOC's Board of Directors (the Heeren XVII) objected vociferously to private trade, which drained Company profits and shareholder revenue. To appease the Heeren XVII back at home, the various Governors-General and Councillors of the Indies (Raad van Indië), who represented the Heeren XVII in Asia, issued annual placards forbidding private trade while the High Court (Raad van Justitie) carried out infrequent desultory trials for private trade. But these prosecutions were inevitably doomed to failure, so the story goes, because everyone engaged in private trade would ‘cover’ for everyone else.

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Racial Slurs and Whispers in Situated Testimonies of Dutch Imperial Fiction

positions asia critique ◽

10.1215/10679847-8722784 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 67-91

Author(s):

Laurie J. Sears

Keyword(s):

Social Relations ◽

Mixed Race ◽

Colonial Literature ◽

Significant Time ◽

East Indies ◽

The Social ◽

Dutch East Indies ◽

Dutch Colonial

Storytelling brings into vivid focus the emotions and affects that different classes and races of people experienced in the imperial Dutch Indies island worlds. The storyteller explored in this article is Maria Dermoût (1888–1962), a mixed-race Dutch woman (Indo) who was born and raised on Java in the Dutch East Indies and who spent more than thirty years there. This article argues that Dermoût is a key writer for understanding affective economies, because she devotes significant time and effort in her fiction to fleshing out Native characters, something that few writers of her time did. The novella Toetie, one of Dermoût’s last works, uncovers Indies and Dutch attitudes toward race and color, moving her work from the genre of Indies Letters, or Dutch colonial literature, to that of postcolonial critique, with an exploration of forms of servitude, affect, and the social relations of her time.

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‘Behoed ons arme volk voor de vulkaan-poëten’

De Moderne Tijd ◽

10.5117/dmt2020.3-4.012.honi ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 (3) ◽

pp. 382-422

Author(s):

Judith Bosnak ◽

Rick Honings

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

The Other ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Poor People ◽

Content Type ◽

East Indies ◽

Dutch East Indies ◽

Literary Reception

Abstract ‘Save our poor people from the vulcano poets’. The literary reception of the Krakatoa disaster of 1883 in the Netherlands and Indonesi On August 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatau in the Dutch East Indies erupted and collapsed, causing the deaths of tens of thousands, mainly as a result of devastating tsunamis. The Krakatau eruption was one of the first disasters to take place beyond the Dutch boundaries that received so much attention in the Netherlands. Because the Indies were a Dutch colony, a response of the motherland was rather logical. In many places, charity activities were organized to raise money for the victims. This article focuses on the Dutch and Indonesian literary reactions on the Krakatau disaster. For this purpose, two scholars work together: one specialized in Dutch Literary Studies and the other one in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. In the first part of the article several Dutch charity publications are analysed; the second part focuses on Indonesian sources (in Javanese and Malay). How and to what extend did the reactions in the Netherlands and Indonesia differ?

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