The first half of the course will look at the legal invention of race, as developed through Dutch colonial practices in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the institution of global chattel slavery. We will trace these legal developments through the rise of the concept of state citizenship and explore how that citizenship was exercised differently in the European territory of the Netherlands and in its colonial territories in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. We will finish the week examining the impact of World War II and independence movements across Asia and Africa on legal practices of racialization in Europe.
The second half of the class will examine how race works in postcolonial Europe. We will look at the creation of laws passed to combat racial discrimination, at both the international and domestic levels, and policies created to address social and economic inequalities in groups of people the Dutch government referred to as ‘ethnic minorities’. We will then look at how those laws have (or have not been) enforced in the intervening decades, and how they have impacted activism regarding racial inequality, from the 1980s through the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2020s.
Despite the word law in the title, the course takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on history, sociology and anthropology, as well as case law and policy. The course will also take an intersectional approach to questions of racialized inequality and injustice, interrogating how issues of ‘race’ overlap with other social constructs like gender, sexual orientation, class and citizenship. While the focus will be on the Netherlands, the course will be comparative, placing Dutch practices in conversation with those across Europe and beyond.
We will assess the effectiveness of using of domestic and international laws and courts to combat racial inequality and brainstorms strategies to pursue these goals in the future. As much as possible we will draw on the people and resources in the City of Amsterdam to contextualize our discussions and make them concrete. The course will include several field trips and guest lectures where students can observe and discuss how legal constructions of race operate in everyday life.
Final assessment will take the form of an unessay, an independent project in which students define their own learning goal or question and demonstrate what they have learned in a medium of their choosing. Options may include creative writing, visual art, film or performance, as well as a traditional essay or research paper.
