Brown Nieces and Nephews in an All-White World: Gender and Genre in Dutch Children’s Novels about the Dutch East Indies, 1890-1930

Authors

  • Elisabeth Wesseling Maastricht University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10877

Abstract

This article discusses children’s novels about Eurasian children who were sent from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands for the purpose of character reformation. The corpus shows a remarkable dominance of girl characters, while in actual practice it was mostly Eurasian boys who were sent away for secondary education. I explain this discrepancy between literary text and socio-historical context through the shaping influence of literary genre – that is, of the tomboy story in this particular case. This deflection largely invalidates colonial children’s novels as reliable sources of information about historical educative practices, but it makes them all the more informative regarding the attitudes and values that drove these practices. I conclude by observing that these attitudes and values were anything but homogeneous or coherent, but allowed for a certain bandwidth of variation, which undercuts stark contrasts between colonisers and colonised.

Dit artikel bespreekt kinderboeken over Indo-Europese kinderen die vanuit Nederlands-Indië naar Nederland werden gestuurd met het oog op karaktervorming. Opvallend genoeg spelen meisjes het vaakst de hoofdrol in deze romans, terwijl het in werkelijkheid vooral Indo-Europese jongens waren die naar Nederland werden gestuurd voor middelbaar onderwijs. Ik verklaar deze discrepantie tussen literaire tekst en sociaal-historische context vanuit de sturende rol van literaire genre-conventies, in dit specifieke geval, van de zogenaamde ‘bakvis roman’. De dominantie van literaire genres diskwalificeert koloniale kinderliteratuur als een betrouwbare bron over historische opvoedkundige praktijken, maar het maakt ze des te informatiever waar het de houdingen en waarden betreft die ten grondslag lagen aan deze praktijken. Ik concludeer dat deze houdingen en waarden allesbehalve samenhangend of homogeen waren, maar een grote onderlinge variatie vertonen, wat het idee van een scherpe tegenstelling tussen kolonisator en gekoloniseerde ondergraaft.

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Author Biography

Elisabeth Wesseling, Maastricht University

Elisabeth Wesseling is professor of Cultural Memory, Gender and Diversity and director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University. She studies the ways in which Dutch educative discourses in children’s novels and textbooks were instrumental in selling, silencing and remembering practices of child separation in the Dutch East Indies. Her recent publications include ‘Are “the Natives” Educable? Dutch Schoolchildren Learn Ethical Colonial Policy (1890-1910)’ co-authored with Jacques Dane for the Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 10:1 (2018) 28-44, and her editorship of the volumes Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia in Contemporary Convergence Culture (London 2017) and The Child Savage (1890-2010): From Comics to Games (Oxford 2016). E-mail: lies.wesseling@ maastrichtuniversity.nl.

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Published

2020-11-12

How to Cite

Wesseling, E. (2020). Brown Nieces and Nephews in an All-White World: Gender and Genre in Dutch Children’s Novels about the Dutch East Indies, 1890-1930. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 135(3-4), 184–208. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10877