Studying carefully selected cinematic and literary case studies, Arnoud’s Niels Stensen Fellowship project investigates how the end of the Dutch colonial era is transculturally, transnationally, and cross-medially remembered in the Netherlands and Indonesia. He hypothesizes that the focus on processing historical trauma in remembrance texts, rather than the acts of violence themselves, offer an opportunity to go beyond simple black-and-white definitions of perpetratorship on the one hand, and victimhood on the other.
Arnoud Arps’s project aims to provide a model for further comparative research on how ‘shared colonial history’ between nations is remembered across cultures, nations, and media by mapping out structures of memory-making and determining how the complex relationship between countries is intrinsically linked by media that continuously return to the colonial past. This model can be utilised to form memory junctions instead of deepening memory chasms between these nations.
As a Niels Stensen Fellow, Arnoud will conduct research at the University of Oxford and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
