Book Gathering | Our Colonial Inheritance | Research Center for Material Culture

PUBLIC EVENT | 20 September 2024 | 14.00 – 16.30 | Studio, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

The Wereldmuseum Amsterdam is delighted to host the book gathering of the exhibition catalogue and publication Our Colonial Inheritance. For this occasion we would like to thank everyone involved in the making of this publication, but also for those who were involved more generally in the exhibition project from the beginning: authors, editors, artists, designers, photographers, and curators.

Confirmed speakers include: Farida Sedoc, Sarojini Lewis, Wendeline Flores, Wayne Modest, Priya Swamy, Pepijn Brandon, Guno Jones, Ananya Kabir, and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken.

Open gallery

Program

We would like to take this gathering, not only to celebrate the publication, but also to reflect upon and celebrate the semi-permanent exhibition that has now been open for two years, to which this publication is a furtherance.

Time		Speaker \| Item
14.00 - 14.10		Entry
14.10 - 14.20		Welcome words by Wendeline Flores and Wayne Modest
	Panel 1
14.20 - 14.30		Farida Sedoc
14.30 - 14.40		Ananya Kabir
14.40 - 14.50		Sarojini Lewis
14.50 - 15.00		Priya Swamy
15.00 - 15.30		Round table discussion with speakers. Moderated by Wayne Modest
15.30 - 15.40		Small break
	Panel 2
15.40 - 15.50		Pepijn Brandon
15.50 - 16.00		Guno Jones
16.00 - 16.10		Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken
16.10 - 16.40		Round table discussion. Moderated by Wendeline Flores
16.40 - 16.45		Closing remarks by Ilaria Obata
16.45		End of program \| exit the museum

About the speakers

Farida Sedoc

Farida Sedoc is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She works in diverse mediums creating two- and three dimensional works. Exploring and questioning intersectionality and the influence of monetary economics, heritage and politics on the future of globalism and community life.

Sarojini Lewis

Sarojini Lewis (India/Sur/NL) 1984 has examined the connection between contemporary art and historic photographs of indentured labourers in her PhD in Visual Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi. Her artistic background is in Fine Art (MFA Fine Art Edinburgh University) with a specialization in photography, video art and book arts. She is currently working as a researcher and artist.

The photographs I make are superimposed with photographs of materials that I found in the emigration archives. Questions about “otherness” remind me that I am a descent of an exploited community. I contribute to the creation of a new image of Indo-Caribbean diasporic women, combining human fragility with empowered and confident social beings.

Recurring elements in her visual research are photographs of objects, people, migration and moments that reveal forgotten situations, and function as visual traces and fragments that create narratives that lead to new perspectives. www.sarojinilewis.com

Wendeline Flores

Wendeline Flores MA (1989) is the Curator for Caribbean Culture and Colonial Histories at the Wereldmuseum. Flores is a historian in the field of (post)colonial Dutch Caribbean History. She holds a BA and an MA in History from the Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam. She wrote her MA-thesis on the long-distance nationalism in journals by Antillean and Surinamese student migrants in the Netherlands (1950-1975). She has worked as a research intern at both the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (2011) and the National Institute for the Dutch history of slavery, and it’s legacy, NiNsee (2012). In 2014 she received a grant from the Silvia W. de Groot Fonds for her research in Aruba, Curacao, and Suriname. She worked as a Supervisor and Assistant Manager for Amsterdam Expo and BODY WORLDS (2014-2017).

Pepijn Brandon

Pepijn Brandon is Professor of Global Economic and Social History at the Vrije Universiteit. He also is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History. His work focuses on the history of capitalism, war and economic development, and slavery.

Brandon obtained his MA in history in 2007 (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam, and his PhD in history (cum laude) in 2013 at the same university. His dissertation, published in 2015 as War, Capital, and the Dutch State (1588-1795) (Leiden: Brill 2015; paperback edition Chicago: Haymarket Books 2017) won the D.J. Veegens Award of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He obtained an NWO Rubicon in 2013 and an NWO Veni in 2014. His current NWO Vidi project (awarded 2021) examines the dispossession of land in the Dutch Empire (16th-18th centuries). In 2019-2020, he headed a large scale research project commissioned by the City Government of Amsterdam into this city's historic role in slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and in 2021-2022 he led a research project on the involvement in slavery of predecessors of Dutch bank ABN AMRO.

Guno Jones

Dr. Guno Jones is professor of the Anton de Kom Chair in the History of Colonialism and Slavery and their contemporary Social, Cultural and Legal Impact. His research is interdisciplinary in nature. Currently, he is involved, as projectleader, in an interfaculty VU research project on the legal history of Dutch slavery (Juridische Slavernijgeschiedenis). He also participates in a KITLV research project on the role of the royal Dutch family in colonial history (Het Huis van Oranje-Nassau en de koloniale geschiedenis). Previously, he (mainly) held research positions at Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He lectured at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Faculty of Law, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities), University of Amsterdam (Faculty of Humanities) and the Institute for Graduate Studies and Research at the Anton de Kom University (Paramaribo).

Wayne Modest

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the Wereldmuseum (a museum group comprising four locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, Rotterdam and Nijmegen), in the Netherlands. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (2019, with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (2018, with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari).

Ananya Kabir

Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research spans creolisation across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, critical philology, and the relationship between literary texts, embodied and material culture, and memory. During 2013-18, she directed the ERC Advanced Grant-funded project ‘Modern Moves’ (on the global popularity of African-heritage dance). Currently, she is completing a monograph, ‘Alegropolitics’, on Africanity, dance, and reparation, and developing ‘Fort Creole’, a new project on the Dutch, the Portuguese, and transoceanic creolisation. Ananya has been awarded India’s Infosys Prize and Germany’s Humboldt Research Prize.

Priya Swamy

Priya holds a BA in World Religions from McGill University (Canada) and an MPhil and PhD in Area Studies from Leiden University. Her research critically engages with the ways in which people in and from South Asian diasporas innovate and rearticulate their religious and political beliefs across historical moments and social contexts. In order to trouble Hindu nationalist rhetoric, her work has focused on diasporic locations such as Suriname and the Netherlands, where Hindu material culture and religious practice can help us construct alternative narratives and histories of religion and ritual. Her focus has been on the legacies and material culture of Indian indentured labour not only to deepen solidarities and historical understanding across various South Asian diasporas, but to understand these legacies and objects as belonging to multiple, creolized locations such as the Caribbean.

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken was a Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture working as a co-editor with Wonu Veys and Josep Almudéver Chanzà on the output emerging from the Un/Engendering research speculations. She is assistant professor at University of Amsterdam affiliated with Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis. She was formerly Research Coordinator and Senior Researcher for the Research Center of Material Culture, superbly honoured to have worked at RCMC, and continues an affiliation with the City College of New York's Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education, fondly referred to as "CWE".