oa Archival Optimism and Archival Pessimism: The Case of Javanese-Surinamese Diasporic Heritage in the Netherlands

Being Javanese-Surinamese in the Netherlands constitutes a double diasporic identity. When slavery ended in Suriname in the late nineteenth century, the Dutch colonial administration brought indentured laborers from the East Indies (now Indonesia) to work on Caribbean plantations. A century later, around Suriname’s independence in 1975, many of its residents relocated to the Netherlands. At present, in Suriname and in the Netherlands, music, dance, linguistic, culinary, and other collective practices that developed among Javanese workers on the Surinamese plantation convey this colonial history in sounds, images, words, and flavors. Recent efforts of the Javanese-Surinamese Dutch community to raise visibility and awareness of their distinctive culture and history have engaged formal heritage discourses and archival institutions in the Netherlands, such as organizing to induct the Javanese-Surinamese gamelan musical tradition onto the Inventory of Dutch Intangible Heritage and donating photos and oral histories to Dutch municipal archives. In this paper, I consider this postcolonial diasporic community’s efforts to engage with institutions of heritage and archive in the European metropole in relation to scholarly discourses of what I term “archival optimism” and “archival pessimism.” Is it possible to simultaneously acknowledge the deeply colonial roots of diasporic histories and archival institutions on the one hand, and, on the other, to engage with the archive as a potentially useful tool that can be used for a postcolonial community’s own goals and purposes?