In postcolonial studies, the focus has traditionally been on colonised subjects and on the wide-ranging impact that (European) imperialism has had on non-Western societies. However, in the face of the resurgence of nationalism, it is as pertinent as ever to also ask what colonisation has done to the former colonisers. In my research project, I will pursue this question in relation to the literary and geopolitical histories of Great Britain and the Netherlands, both at the forefront of maritime exploration, trade and imperial expansion for several centuries. Establishing the new concept of ‘imperial awareness’, I will trace how the British and Dutch developed completely different affective relationships to empire, which continue to impact on their respective societies today. While, in the UK, the potency of empire as a positive referential frame can be witnessed, for example, in the success of the Brexit campaign, in the Netherlands, there has long been a marked disinterest in empire as something that can be commemorated and/or contested. In my project, I will focus on British and Dutch literary engagements with Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia between c. 1780 and 1930. In both English and Dutch, there exists a large body of literary materials engaging with this period of heightened colonial activity in the ‘East Indies’. However, while texts such as Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and Multatuli’s Max Havelaar are still read and taught, many others have not yet been made available to a broad readership. This is a gap I seek to close. Literature represented and supported the geopolitical developments that produced different British and Dutch understandings of empire. These contributed to the formation of distinct British and Dutch literary aesthetics, which have so far hardly received joint critical attention. Through extensive archival work at KITLV (NL) and Oxford (UK), I aim to compile the first Anglo-Dutch literary history that foregrounds the relation between the formal qualities of the selected literature and the material colonial reality of which it was a part. My corpus will include a variety of English and Dutch fiction and non-fiction, written about the East Indies during my period of enquiry. Throughout my project, I will draw on the concept of imperial awareness in order to consider British and Dutch colonial literatures, many of which I can only access at the respective archives, thus creating a new literary critical tool for assessing how the politics of empire continue to impact on the politics of different European societies today.
