art of remembering : the negotiation of colonial memory in contemporary visual art by Dutch Caribbean diasporic artists

In this thesis the author studies the creation of counter-memory and the workings of colonial forgetting and remembering in artworks by Deborah Jack and Avantia Damberg - artists from the Dutch Caribbean diaspora. As the debate on if and how to remember the negative effects of the role of the Netherlands in colonialism is growing in popularity, it is argued that it is important to look at how this issue is negotiated in the Dutch Caribbean diaspora. Insights from the fields of memory studies and postcolonial studies are brought together to understand the construction of canonical cultural memory related to colonialism in the Netherlands and to explore the ways in which processes of forgetting and remembering are an essential part of colonial oppression and thus of any anticolonial effort (Rothberg 2013, 365).