Keti Koti Talks '17: Perspectives on the Slavery Past and its Afterlife

Slavery was a dehumanizing practice that created structures of relations that still live with us today. Like other former colonial powers, the Netherland’s wealth and position in the world can, in part, be traced to its past colonial activities. Such power and privilege came at a specific cost to the formerly colonized and enslaved. Many, however, would argue that this debt has not been properly recognized, nor addressed by Dutch institutions and society. How then do we repair a historical wound that is not yet acknowledged in its complex and sometimes insidious persistence, nor even considered a shared past? 

Within the context of the Keti Koti commemoration and celebration, the Research Center for Material Culture invites an interdisciplinary group of thinkers to share their critical perspectives on the legacies of slavery and the colonial past in contemporary Dutch society. These talks will give insight into how the slavery past and its legacies manifest in the present.

Keti Koti Talks is a prelude to the exhibition on the slavery past and its afterlives opening at the Tropenmuseum later this year, which explores this history and its presence in contemporary life through narrated experiences of the enslaved and their descendants. The exhibition zooms in on the condition of enslavement, the (cultural) responses of the enslaved, and the experiences of those living slavery’s afterlife in present-day Dutch society. The exhibition seeks to understand what it means to live as a subject of colonial power and how the legacies of slavery and colonialism live on for descendants as citizens within the Netherlands today.