Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 60, Issue 1, 2022

This article analyzes the role of different languages in the education sector of Aruba. For this purpose, we report some observations and reflections on language use and language policy in this multilingual country. The focus is on our pilot study at the University of Aruba in March 2020, consisting of explorative interviews with key actors in the field of language teaching and education policy. In particular, we analyze statements about ongoing changes with regard to the status and the use of Dutch and Papiamento in the current education system, including the challenges posed by the increasing importance of English. The article also discusses the consequences of ‘standard language ideology’ for language use and language teaching in postcolonial contexts.

In this case study, the concept of ‘multiple translatorship’ (Jansen & Wegener, 2013) is used to examine the international distribution of Cees Nooteboom’s novel Paradijs verloren (Lost Paradise). Many hands and minds contribute to making the literary text suitable for other target cultures with other literary systems. The transformative interventions of the actors involved are described in terms of the reception processes that Lüsebrink distinguishes in his model of structural elements of cultural transfer (Lüsebrink, 2008). The focus in this contribution is on the nature of the choices made by individual actors in a given context and the observable effects of their interventions. Special attention is given to the following three structural elements of reception processes formulated by Lüsebrink: the cultural adaptation form, the productive reception and the commentary form. In this contribution, insights are gained into the role of the translators, publishers, reviewers and also the author himself, in the dynamic processes surrounding the literary translation and the inter national distribution of Paradijs verloren (Lost Paradise) in German, French, English and Brazilian-Portuguese speaking areas.

Imagology studies the representation of national identities in (literary) texts, but is usually limited to a cultural-historical and intertextual focus. Hence the textual, ‘aesthetic function’ of literature is often neglected. In this article we argue that the textual analysis of literary techniques, specifically metafiction, can be a useful theoretical impulse for the premises of imagology. This proposed focus also does more justice to (metafictional) literature’s critical capacities regarding the representation of national identities and ‘the other’. This ‘textual’ form of imagology, focused on metafiction, will be applied to the literary representation of a specific European region, the Balkans, in De spelers [The players] (2009) by Manon Uphoff. This novel deals with a love affair between a Dutch woman and a man who fled his native country in response to the violent conflicts that resulted from the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. The representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in De spelers could be typified as stereotypical or balkanist discourse – a view that was articulated by reviewer Elsbeth Etty in the national paper NRC Handelsblad. We will argue, however, that the self-referential elements of Uphoffs novel have (self-)critical potential with regard to its balkanist representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.