Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 60, Issue 2, 2022

This article traces the career of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Old and New East Indies, 1724-1726) by François Valentyn during the nineteenth century. Valentyn’s multivolume work on the Dutch East India Company’s trading area continued to be used until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Dutch colonial empire in Asia was reduced to the Indonesian archipelago. During this period, it served as an important frame of reference for the development of the colonial policy in the East Indies and as a source of inspiration for new publications on colonial Indonesia in the Netherlands. It only lost its value when more up-to-date works were published and reservations about the way the work was written increased, such as the unsatisfactory manner in which the information it contained was accounted for.

Rob Nieuwenhuys, one of the most prominent historians of the Dutch East Indies literature, characterizes Johannes Olivier (1789-1858) as a writer who was critical of the European sense of superiority in the Dutch East Indies. Olivier worked in the colony in the service of the Dutch government from 1817 onwards. After returning to the Netherlands in 1826, he became a writer and published several books, including Aanteekeningen gehouden op eene reize in Oost-Indië (1827, Notes taken on a trip to the East Indies), Land- en zeetogten in Nederland’s Indië (3 volumes, 1827-1830, Land and sea expeditions in the Dutch East Indies) and Tafereelen en merkwaardigheden uit Oost-Indië (1836-1838, 2 volumes, East Indies tableaux and curiosities). How did Olivier write about the Javanese and European population of the Indies? According to Nieuwenhuys ‘the Javanese’ is Olivier’s main character, for whom he felt great sympathy. But is this really the case? With a postcolonial rereading of his travel texts, I will argue that Olivier used the Javanese to hold up a mirror to the Europeans in the colony.

In the 1630s Japan initiated an isolationist policy and closed its borders for most foreigners. Between 1641 and 1853 employees of the Dutch trade mission on the artificial island Deshima in the harbour of Nagasaki were the only Europeans to reside in Japan. One of them was Jan Frederik van Overmeer Fisscher (1800-1848), the supervisor of the warehouse during his sojourn in Japan. After returning to Europe Van Overmeer Fisscher published Bijdrage tot de kennis van het Japansche rijk (1833, A Contribution to the Knowledge of the Japanese Empire). This paper discusses the image of Japan presented by Van Overmeer Fisscher, and tries to establish how he obtained the information that he used in his book.

During the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century, the view from Hotel Bellevue in Buitenzorg (now: Bogor) became one of the obligatory sights for the Western tourist visiting Java. In numerous colonial travel texts from this period we find laudatory descriptions of this must-see. In addition to textual descriptions, visual depictions appeared; the panorama was frequently represented in etchings, drawings, paintings, photographs, and postcards. Drawing on Dean MacCannell’s sociological site sacralization theory (1976), which is supplemented by Sean Smith’s insights on the colonial picturesque aesthetic (2019), this article attempts to show how the textual and visual representations of this particular sight contributed both to its development as a tourist attraction in the Dutch East Indies and the consolidation of the imperial status quo at the time. In this way, we will get a better understanding of how tourism in the Dutch East Indies contributed to the creation and perpetuation of a colonial reality.

In this article I investigate the ‘adiaphorization’ of ethical discomfort in travel stories in the Dutch magazine Avenue (1965-2002) – a politically oriented, high-quality glossy that attracted a wealthy, anti-bourgeois, audience. Which became increasingly clear during this period, and also led to an international code of conduct for ethical tourism in the 1990s, is the fact that the desire to travel is at odds with its harmful effects. Traveling began to raise ethical dilemmas, for instance regarding encounters with ‘the Other’. How have Dutch travel authors, and popular magazines, in a period of ever-increasing mass tourism, dealt with this issue? In a heterogenous selection of four early Avenue travelogues (1967-1972), I will analyse the discursive strategies of romanticising travel and the role of a cosmopolitan discourse informed by insights from both postcolonial theory and travel writing studies. Furthermore, I will study the material qualities of the magazine (its photography and advertisements) and reflect on the effects of the fact that travel stories are mainly preserved in book form, stripped of their original glossy context and, possibly, of their ethical ambiguity.