The Platform for Postcolonial Readings brings together researchers, especially junior researchers, in Belgium and the Netherlands interested in issues of globalization, inter/transculturality, diversity and inclusivity, intersectionality, and postcoloniality. We are an open group (do join us!) and meet…

Objects and framings of heritage, archives, and academic knowledge production generate worldwide, fierce societal debates on the legacies of colonial violence, past injustice and present-day institutional racism. Whether bronzes from Benin, daggers from Bali, fossils from Java, photo-albums from…

Postcolonial Displacements explores the multiple ways in which migration in South Asia contributes to the imagining, questioning, subverting and reframing of territories, nations and communities. The project focuses on the contested fringes of the politically divided South Asian subcontinent, across…

This paper explores how citizenship is enacted and experienced in welfare encounters for Egyptian migrant parents in Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan, highlighting the importance of social citizenship and personal interactions in shaping belonging.

The ethics of ghosts, spectres, and mediums in postcolonial literature

The Dutch colonial past in Indonesia has had a major influence on literature.

On 1 November 2018, Marieke Bloembergen was appointed Professor of Archival and Postcolonial Studies at the Institute for History.

In 1933, Maria Ulfah Santoso was the first Indonesian women to earn a law degree. During her studies in Leiden University she became involved with Indonesia;s nationalist movement. She went on to be Indonesia's Social Minister, as the first female cabinet member. In this article, historian Wildan Sena…

Indonesian translation of the book Recollecting Resonances from authors Bart Barendregt and Els Bogaerts.

An interdisciplinary cultural analysis of how the Hindustani double migration informs contemporary processes of identification and problematises the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity.

Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

A post-colonial approach to the concept of time in the past and present Maya culture

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

The aim of the Indonesian-Dutch Literature Collective (which is allied to the Society of Dutch Literature (MNL)) is to support research into the literature of and about the Dutch Indies, from the era of the Dutch East India Company to the present. Starting in 1986, the collective has published its own…

The Platform for Postcolonial Readings organizes seminars for MA- and PhD-students and researchers in the field of postcolonial and globalisation studies in Belgium and the Netherlands. As an open network, discussion platform, and reading group, our meetings are open to all.

You can find an overview of events organized by the Platform for Post-Colonial Readings below.

The organization of the Platform for Postcolonial Readings is a collaboration of main organizers and occasional guest organizers.

The bi-annual interactive seminars of the Platform for Postcolonial Readings are all about sharing our enthusiasm about our field of research and our eagerness to learn more about its theoretical intricacies. Our seminars, although informal, adopt a well-defined format. Each meeting is organized around…

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths?

In this dissertation Itandehui Jansen examines the ‘Voice’ of the filmmaker from a political and aesthetic perspective.

Subproject of

Representing Japanese Colonial 'Heritage' in Taiwan

This dissertation takes a technological approach to ceramic production and provides a fine-grained view of the circum-Caribbean region.

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

In Dutch society’s discussions about remembering the colonial past, voice is often used as a metaphor for empowerment ('we must raise our voices'), whereas silence is often used as voice’s negative counterpart, signifying a loss or lack of power ('we will no longer be silenced'). Yet, silence is expressive:…

The master’s programme in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University offers the most in-depth and comprehensive programme on the history of colonialism and globalisation currently available in Europe.

This doctoral project by artist and educator Luiz Zanotello engenders a postcolonial understanding of time, space and movement by means of artistic research methods. The project examines the contradictory effects of the abyssal line of thought within the tropics as a starting point.

Mobility, Globalisation, and Interculturality is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

This book explores the intellectual history of the Dutch empire from the sixteenth century to the postcolonial era, going beyond systemic thinkers to understand how empire was perceived in day-to-day life. It takes a transnational and transimperial approach to the Dutch empire, connecting European,…

A comparative study of colonialism and rural settlement in first millennium BC west central Sardinia

The Dutch Center for Travel Writing Studies s a scientific center that develops and coordinates initiatives to promote research into travel writing. It actively seeks contact with external (scientific and social) partners to collaborate on issues surrounding cultural / national identity, cultural contact…

Lecture, Vrienden van het Instituut Kern

References to nature and the environment in the Caribbean literary and the contemporary age of globalization.

This study, Calypso, The Trinidadian Experience, has sought to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre as a mechanism (or as part of a broader mechanism) that has exerted on-going social influence within Trinidadian society…

This book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial…

In the study of West-East relations, difference often takes centre stage. This holds for both culturalist and postcolonial perspectives. By contrast, in my investigation of Netherlands-Iran political relations in the 1960s and 1970s, I will focus on the role of SIMILARITY. What lay at the root of the…

The subject of motherhood is interwoven with themes of survival, power and identity. It is also at the heart of any consideration of women’s writing. Conversations of Motherhood sensitively charts common themes, intersecting experiences and related topics within the cultural specificities of South African…

This special issue of Politique européenne 2019/4 (N° 66) contains, among others, a contribution by Astrid Van Weyenberg.

What is nationalism and how can we study it from a historical perspective? Writing the History of Nationalism answers this question by examining eleven historical approaches to nationalism studies in theory and practice.

Mesoamerican Manuscripts: New Scientific Approaches and Interpretations brings together a wide range of modern approaches to the study of pre-colonial and early colonial Mesoamerican manuscripts. This includes innovative studies of materiality through the application of non-invasive spectroscopy and…