The New Colonial Reading List (De nieuwe koloniale leeslijst)

(Dutch edition only)

Now that statues are falling and the Dutch colonial past is being reexamined, it is high time to delve deeper into colonial literature. Because is that contaminated canon still worth reading? And isn’t it time to pull Oeroeg and De stille kracht off their pedestal? Why is there hardly any attention to Surinamese and Antillean literature? And which books and writers have been forgotten or overlooked?

On behalf of De Groene Amsterdammer, Rasit Elibol compiled The New Colonial Reading List: a collection of essays that subject the colonial classics to a necessary new reading, but above all place something next to and in opposition to them. In addition to ‘the Big Three’ of the Indian literary heritage – Multatuli, Louis Couperus and Hella Haasse – we read Frans Lopulalan and Suwarsih Djojopuspito, and we look at the great writers of Suriname, such as Edgar Cairo and Astrid Roemer, and the Netherlands Antilles, from Boeli van Leeuwen to Radna Fabias.