Yannick Coenders | Washington University in St. Louis (original) (raw)

Articles in English by Yannick Coenders

Research paper thumbnail of Colonial recursion: state categories of race and the emergence of the “Non-Western Allochthone”

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything bu... more Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything but stable and self-evident. Indeed, states continuously change the number of racial categories, their labels, and methodology for classification. Yet, despite the instability that characterizes official racial classification, colonial distinctions between Western and non-Western continue to shape racial taxonomies. This article advances an analytic of recursion to explain this continuity. Recursion refers to cultural processes that sustain and reanimate colonial logics of race beyond formal colonial contexts. I highlight three processes in particular: recuperation, modification, and reinscription. I demonstrate the utility of a recursive analytic through a historical analysis of the twentieth-century emergence of the novel Dutch race category “non-western allochthone.” Examining government reports and social science research on immigrant populations, I trace how state officials and prominent social scientists drew on and recalibrated a colonial binary distinction between Europeanness/whiteness and non-Europeanness/non-whiteness to distinguish supposedly assimilable from unassimilable migrants. A recursive analysis illuminates how changes to official taxonomies do not necessarily unsettle, and may even rest on, durable colonial conceptions of race.

Research paper thumbnail of Metahistory as diaspora practice: mobilising the Dutch black radical tradition

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery... more Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery, black collectives in the Netherlands are increasingly turning to the history of history writing (metahistory) by black radical thinkers. Counter histories in which transatlantic slavery features central, serve to situate ongoing practices of institutional racism and to articulate claims to citizenship and national memory. Placing different mobilizations of these histories in an international context, we identify two repertoires through which activists invoke them: iconicity and articulation. While both emphasise the importance of tradition, iconicity highlights the canonisation of persons and events and suggests that they can be drawn upon for inspiration in all times, and places. Traditions formed through articulation are brought into existence as part of the cultural-political work of mobilisation, when the mobilisation ends they may be reinterpreted and rearticulated to a new political context. These repertoires are not mutually exclusive and may even be mutually constitutive. However, this article shows different uses of alternative histories in the Netherlands and highlights the tensions between the two registers to understand ongoing formations of antiracist and anticolonial political subjectivities.

Research paper thumbnail of Never Having Been Racist: Explaining the Blackness of Blackface in the Netherlands (Public Culture)

Public Culture, 2018

The accusation that Black Pete – the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas ... more The accusation that Black Pete – the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas festival – is a racist caricature has recently become a staple of the Dutch culture wars, leaving media and cultural producers in a quandary over the figure’s meaning and fate. This essay focuses on two recent seasons of the widely popular children’s television program Sinterklaasjournaal. The show deployed new storylines to maintain the innocence of the traditional celebration in the face of mounting anti-racist critique by refabricating truths that not only erase the colonial roots of Black Pete’s blackness, but also deny any connection to race altogether. In so doing, however, these storylines further destabilized the main Sinterklaas narrative, akin to an everyday lie that is about to be discovered. Endeavors by storytellers to disconnect the Black Pete figure from racial Blackness resulted in representing the character as racially white but covered in soot, while conveying the message that the origin of dark skin is dirt. The narrative strife over Black Pete illustrates the fragility of the Dutch absencing of race, as the latter proves to resurface in the very effort to obliterate it. Instead of artificially reconstructing the semantic unity of discrete stories, this essay introduces a deconstructive approach that apprehends consistency as an effect of power. We show how various actors work at making changes in the hegemonic story to maintain its coherence in response to threats from alternative accounts, in the process generating new contradictions and challenges that require further narrative work.

Research paper thumbnail of Race and the Pitfalls of Emotional Democracy: Primary Schools and the Critique of Black Pete in the Netherlands (Antipode)

A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete has met wi... more A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete has met with growing contestation in the past decade over its caricatural representation of people of African descent. Attacks on this national “happy object” elicited a host of majority responses that converged in professing non-racism. As the celebration is primarily thought of as a children’s festival, schools across the Netherlands had to decide whether to maintain, alter or suppress the Black Pete character. This article considers the spatial politics of race that informed school decisions about the festival. We show geographical variation in the distribution between change and non-change. However, we find that both strategies were justified in the name of respect for “black feelings”, even as calls for mutual tolerance between proponents and opponents of Black Pete normatively portrayed multicultural society as conflict-free and ultimately strove to disarm anti-racist critique by framing it as anti-democratic.

Anti-racist critique often meets with dismissive professions of color-blindness and blanket refusals to consider change. This article discusses how anti-racism can also be disarmed through concessions that deny racist bias but claim to be merely accommodating the irrational feelings of oversensitive racial others. By probing school responses to the controversy over the blackface figure “Black Pete” at the center of the Sinterklaas festival, we show that normative celebrations of ethnic and cultural diversity can serve to symbolically erase racial domination and deflect anti-racist critique by demanding “mutual respect” between artificially neutralized opinions and emotions.

Keywords: racism; whiteness; geographical imagination; Netherlands; politics of happiness

Papers by Yannick Coenders

Research paper thumbnail of Metahistory as diaspora practice: mobilising the Dutch black radical tradition

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020

Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery... more Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery, black collectives in the Netherlands are increasingly turning to the history of history writing (metahistory) by black radical thinkers. Counter histories in which transatlantic slavery features central, serve to situate ongoing practices of institutional racism and to articulate claims to citizenship and national memory. Placing different mobilizations of these histories in an international context, we identify two repertoires through which activists invoke them: iconicity and articulation. While both emphasise the importance of tradition, iconicity highlights the canonisation of persons and events and suggests that they can be drawn upon for inspiration in all times, and places. Traditions formed through articulation are brought into existence as part of the cultural-political work of mobilisation, when the mobilisation ends they may be reinterpreted and rearticulated to a new political context. These repertoires are not mutually exclusive and may even be mutually constitutive. However, this article shows different uses of alternative histories in the Netherlands and highlights the tensions between the two registers to understand ongoing formations of antiracist and anticolonial political subjectivities.

Research paper thumbnail of Colonial recursion: state categories of race and the emergence of the “Non-Western Allochthone”

American Journal of Cultural Sociology

Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything bu... more Recent scholarship on state-based race categories shows that racial classification is anything but stable and self-evident. Indeed, states continuously change the number of racial categories, their labels, and methodology for classification. Yet, despite the instability that characterizes official racial classification, colonial distinctions between Western and non-Western continue to shape racial taxonomies. This article advances an analytic of recursion to explain this continuity. Recursion refers to cultural processes that sustain and reanimate colonial logics of race beyond formal colonial contexts. I highlight three processes in particular: recuperation, modification, and reinscription. I demonstrate the utility of a recursive analytic through a historical analysis of the twentieth-century emergence of the novel Dutch race category “non-western allochthone.” Examining government reports and social science research on immigrant populations, I trace how state officials and prominent social scientists drew on and recalibrated a colonial binary distinction between Europeanness/whiteness and non-Europeanness/non-whiteness to distinguish supposedly assimilable from unassimilable migrants. A recursive analysis illuminates how changes to official taxonomies do not necessarily unsettle, and may even rest on, durable colonial conceptions of race.

Research paper thumbnail of Metahistory as diaspora practice: mobilising the Dutch black radical tradition

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery... more Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery, black collectives in the Netherlands are increasingly turning to the history of history writing (metahistory) by black radical thinkers. Counter histories in which transatlantic slavery features central, serve to situate ongoing practices of institutional racism and to articulate claims to citizenship and national memory. Placing different mobilizations of these histories in an international context, we identify two repertoires through which activists invoke them: iconicity and articulation. While both emphasise the importance of tradition, iconicity highlights the canonisation of persons and events and suggests that they can be drawn upon for inspiration in all times, and places. Traditions formed through articulation are brought into existence as part of the cultural-political work of mobilisation, when the mobilisation ends they may be reinterpreted and rearticulated to a new political context. These repertoires are not mutually exclusive and may even be mutually constitutive. However, this article shows different uses of alternative histories in the Netherlands and highlights the tensions between the two registers to understand ongoing formations of antiracist and anticolonial political subjectivities.

Research paper thumbnail of Never Having Been Racist: Explaining the Blackness of Blackface in the Netherlands (Public Culture)

Public Culture, 2018

The accusation that Black Pete – the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas ... more The accusation that Black Pete – the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas festival – is a racist caricature has recently become a staple of the Dutch culture wars, leaving media and cultural producers in a quandary over the figure’s meaning and fate. This essay focuses on two recent seasons of the widely popular children’s television program Sinterklaasjournaal. The show deployed new storylines to maintain the innocence of the traditional celebration in the face of mounting anti-racist critique by refabricating truths that not only erase the colonial roots of Black Pete’s blackness, but also deny any connection to race altogether. In so doing, however, these storylines further destabilized the main Sinterklaas narrative, akin to an everyday lie that is about to be discovered. Endeavors by storytellers to disconnect the Black Pete figure from racial Blackness resulted in representing the character as racially white but covered in soot, while conveying the message that the origin of dark skin is dirt. The narrative strife over Black Pete illustrates the fragility of the Dutch absencing of race, as the latter proves to resurface in the very effort to obliterate it. Instead of artificially reconstructing the semantic unity of discrete stories, this essay introduces a deconstructive approach that apprehends consistency as an effect of power. We show how various actors work at making changes in the hegemonic story to maintain its coherence in response to threats from alternative accounts, in the process generating new contradictions and challenges that require further narrative work.

Research paper thumbnail of Race and the Pitfalls of Emotional Democracy: Primary Schools and the Critique of Black Pete in the Netherlands (Antipode)

A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete has met wi... more A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete has met with growing contestation in the past decade over its caricatural representation of people of African descent. Attacks on this national “happy object” elicited a host of majority responses that converged in professing non-racism. As the celebration is primarily thought of as a children’s festival, schools across the Netherlands had to decide whether to maintain, alter or suppress the Black Pete character. This article considers the spatial politics of race that informed school decisions about the festival. We show geographical variation in the distribution between change and non-change. However, we find that both strategies were justified in the name of respect for “black feelings”, even as calls for mutual tolerance between proponents and opponents of Black Pete normatively portrayed multicultural society as conflict-free and ultimately strove to disarm anti-racist critique by framing it as anti-democratic.

Anti-racist critique often meets with dismissive professions of color-blindness and blanket refusals to consider change. This article discusses how anti-racism can also be disarmed through concessions that deny racist bias but claim to be merely accommodating the irrational feelings of oversensitive racial others. By probing school responses to the controversy over the blackface figure “Black Pete” at the center of the Sinterklaas festival, we show that normative celebrations of ethnic and cultural diversity can serve to symbolically erase racial domination and deflect anti-racist critique by demanding “mutual respect” between artificially neutralized opinions and emotions.

Keywords: racism; whiteness; geographical imagination; Netherlands; politics of happiness

Research paper thumbnail of Metahistory as diaspora practice: mobilising the Dutch black radical tradition

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020

Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery... more Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery, black collectives in the Netherlands are increasingly turning to the history of history writing (metahistory) by black radical thinkers. Counter histories in which transatlantic slavery features central, serve to situate ongoing practices of institutional racism and to articulate claims to citizenship and national memory. Placing different mobilizations of these histories in an international context, we identify two repertoires through which activists invoke them: iconicity and articulation. While both emphasise the importance of tradition, iconicity highlights the canonisation of persons and events and suggests that they can be drawn upon for inspiration in all times, and places. Traditions formed through articulation are brought into existence as part of the cultural-political work of mobilisation, when the mobilisation ends they may be reinterpreted and rearticulated to a new political context. These repertoires are not mutually exclusive and may even be mutually constitutive. However, this article shows different uses of alternative histories in the Netherlands and highlights the tensions between the two registers to understand ongoing formations of antiracist and anticolonial political subjectivities.