Layering the Cultural Archive: A Critical Reading of Gloria Wekker’sWhite Innocenceand Rembrandt’s Painting of Two Black Men
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: In this article I take a critical look at the ‘cultural archive’, one of the key concepts in White Innocence (2016), for which Gloria Wekker drew methodological inspiration from Edward Said, who coined the term in Culture and Imperialism (1993), and from Ann Laura Stoler’s observations on the ‘ethnography of the archive’ in Along the Archival Grain (2009). Drawing on debates in history, cultural analysis and memory studies, and using Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting ‘Two African men’ as case study, I wish to elaborate on Wekker’s observations on what the cultural archive as a conceptual tool allows us to see about Dutch history, memory and society, and what it obscures. Despite its obvious advantages for recognizing and acknowledging structures of coloniality still present in Dutch society, I plead for a more historically grounded approach to the cultural archive that may enhance the productivity of future research on, or in, the cultural archive in order to identify further possibilities of change.
Source: Dutch Crossing
Author: Agnes Andeweg
Institution: Utrecht University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4309760039