Other Radicals: The Dutch Caribbean and the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition

Since the 1990s, scholars working within postcolonial studies, as in Black and Africana studies, have sought to excavate the multiple ways in which colonized subjects responded to the politico-economic exploitation and racialized cultural denigration experienced under European colonial projects. Such responses did not only involve physical resistance but also resulted in literary, artistic and philosophical traditions of anti-colonial critique. The enquiry has highlighted the role of these projects of critique within struggles for political freedom, economic self-determination and cultural dignity; identifying the challenges they posed to the established geopolitical and racial hierarchies that served to justify colonialism. Moreover it foregrounded their impact on processes of decolonization and nation building.

The Caribbean region, colonized from the sixteenth century onwards, has known centuries of recorded struggles against racial slavery, indentured labor and other forms of colonial oppression. Following the abolition of slavery and indentureship, the twentieth century saw the emergence and consolidation of Caribbean labor movements and political parties, struggles for political and economic self-determination, and movements demanding ethno-racial and cultural equality. These movements and the thinkers associated with them, while largely concerned with the Black experience, made important interventions in rethinking questions of freedom, justice and socio-political community (Bogues 2003).

However, the body of scholarship on these Caribbean anti/postcolonial movements and thinkers has almost entirely excluded Dutch Carribbean thinkers. This workshop, Other Radicals, part of a broader project with the same title, seeks to explore this near absence by focusing on the life, work and ideas of a number of key thinkers from the (former) Dutch Caribbean, such as Anton de Kom (1898-1945), Otto Huiswoud (1893-1961), Eddy Bruma (1925-2000), Shrinivási (1926-), Dobru (1935-1983), Frank Martinus Arion (1936-2015), Edgar Cairo (1948-2000), Astrid Roemer (1947-).