| This research programme has, as its focuses, the interplay of identity politics among postcolonial migrants in the Netherlands, the growing receptivity of the host society to such strategic appeals, and the changing objectives for which these are being used. Postwar migration has changed Dutch society profoundly. The number of Dutch with postcolonial roots from the Netherlands Indies, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba is around one million (i.e. 6.3 per cent of the Dutch population). Much research has been done on the settlement and patterns of integration of postcolonial migrants in the Netherlands and attitudes of the host society, with its emphasis ranging from the socioeconomic through the political to its cultural and religious dimensions. This research project takes an approach to the legacy of colonisation which, in the Dutch context, is relatively new: it is an enquiry into the construction and strategic use of such postcolonial identities by the groups involved in their trajectory of social integration and mobility, as well as in their endeavour to create a distinct place for their communities and countries of origin on the Dutch political agenda. Whereas these groups share a colonial background, their respective decolonisation histories have been markedly different. There is a noticeable contrast between the various communities involved, both in terms of their ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, their numbers, their place in colonial society and the background to their migration to the Netherlands, as well as in the timing of their migration and in their community s intergenerational patterns of insertion into Dutch society. Another crucial contrast is that migrants from Indonesia came from a society to which they could not return, whereas the Dutch Caribbean societies continue to be linked to the Netherlands by an intensive migration circuit. In a general sense, the receiving society has long tended to neglect the heterogeneity of the postcolonial migrant communities, while these differences are in many respects more fundamental than their common colonial heritage and yet it is this common colonial past which now provides them all with an instrument for political contestation. The theoretical aim of the project is to utilise concepts developed in the study of identity politics and transnationalism in a thorough historical analysis of the postcolonial migration experience as it took shape over the past six decades in the Netherlands, and compare these to postcolonial experiences elsewhere in Western Europe and the United States. |
