‘Colonial shorthand and historical knowledge: Segregation and localisation in a Dutch colonial society’, Journal of modern European history 18, 2 (2020) 177-193 (original) (raw)
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The history of segregation is usually concentrating on modern racial forms of it, in colonial settings or in large urban conglomerates. Mathematical definitions of segregation refer to the ratio between the type of segregated element (e.g. Blacks) in a given larger area and its sub-area. We are suggesting that pre-modern as well as postcolonial forms of segregation are far less determined by this space/race-alignment. For a long-term history of segregation concerned with many other dominating themes and objects of segregation (such as religion, non-racist ethnicity), we propose to concentrate on the fluid cognitive dimension of what segregation is, close distance: 'distance' can refer to physical space, but it is also far more open to cognitive forms of distance. 'Closeness' aims to draw attention to the fact that both the processing and enacting of separation and difference, from the early to the late period of colonialization, may have nothing to do with how far away or how close together people actually live. Ignorance and ignoring are one of the most important elements of this epistemic core of segregational behaviour and of what creates close distance in societies.
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is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His current research interests focus on the formation of identity in Java in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Notes Do you know the villages and quarters of the Javanese? Most likely you've only passed by them. Do you know what the Javanese farmer, of your own people, eats?... Believe me, Tuan, I know these people better than you do. You'll understand later, there is too much that you do not know about your own people. 1 In this passage from Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Child of All Nations, Minke, a budding Indonesian nationalist, is reprimanded by a Dutch journalist for his lack of understanding of his own people, the Javanese. Minke, from an elite aristocratic family, is one of the first Javanese to complete a Dutch high-school education and is enamored with everything European. The accusation of not knowing his own people is stinging, particularly coming from a Dutch gentleman who claims to have a superior knowledge of them. The fact that he cannot refute the accusation makes it all the more troubling for him. The colonizer's knowledge of the colonized has always been privileged in colonial discourse. Indeed, Minke himself cannot imagine an East-Indies totally independent of the Dutch. His concern in this matter is similar to that of the Dutch: the Javanese rulers and Javanese society in
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