The Dutch Antillean islands have been part of the Dutch Kingdom since colonisation in the seventeenth century, but have only in the last thirty years gotten increasing attention in postcolonial studies. By doing visual research of photographs of the islands Aruba and Bonaire, this thesis contributes to the relatively small body of work about the islands in a way that has not been done before. The Dutch origins of the archives and photographs selected for this thesis, and the change from colony to part of the autonomous Netherlands Antilles in 1954, resulted in the following question: what constituted a Dutch gaze in relation to Aruba and Bonaire on photographs from 1910 until 2000, and what was the influence of the Charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1954 on this way of looking at the islands? Starting with content analysis, the photos were categorised and labelled. Further discourse analysis, using Edward Said’s theory of ‘Othering’ and William Gilpin’s concept of the picturesque, showed the ambivalent way the islands were represented from Dutch perspective. Different themes and pictorial approaches reveal that the islands are either represented by their ‘Dutchness’ and overall development, drawing the islands figuratively closer, or by their difference, essentially distancing them through Othering. The ‘decolonisation’ in 1954 did not have a major influence on this representation. Ultimately, the seeming ‘objective’ representation of the islands clouds the distant way this is done. The Dutch gaze in the photographs is therefore embedded in the negligent way the Netherlands has always been involved with the islands.
Master’s thesis: https://thesis.eur.nl/pub/49981
History of Society: Global History and International Relations Faculty of History, Culture and Communication Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 2019