The history of the introduction of the rijsttafel (rice table) to the Netherlands is in the first place a history of indifference. The dish and the social practice around it were not adapted readily by the Dutch public, nor, in general, looked upon favourably. Although some evidence points in the direction of racialized hostilities finding a way of expression in relation to food from the colonies, the dominant attitude seemed to be indifference. The history of the rijsttafel in the Netherlands can therefore also serve as a methodological case study into ‘indifference’. While Tara Zahra has suggested that indifference to one thing often means an interest in something else (in her case this related to allegiance and non-allegiance to nation and empire), I take a different approach here, because in the case of metropolitan colonial culture, it is the indifference itself that has an active function. This chapter is an attempt to trace what I call the ‘limits of permeation’ of colonial tropes or symbols, in this case the rijsttafel. By tracking where it was popular, and where it appeared, we can also approach the limits of this dissemination, and get sight of the forces that worked against it.

The limited appeal of the rijsttafel around 1900 may be a surprise in light of its postcolonial popularity. When Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte sat down for a Q&A session on social media in 2015, he answered the question as to what his favourite meal was with: ‘Indonesian rice table’.

As the previous chapter has shown, the presence of colonial subjects in the metropole was, albeit small, not uncommon. But other than domestic servants, who had been present in the metropole for as long as Dutch colonialism existed, (temporary) migration on a larger scale only took off around the turn of the twentieth century. The first Indonesian students arrived in the Netherlands only in the 1890s.

This chapter revolves around the problem of the reception of imperial propaganda, as identified by Bernard Porter in his critique on John Mac- Kenzie's work. That problem, which was already briefly mentioned in the introduction, is that there are two possible readings. The existence of abundant propaganda could mean that it was overwhelming, and therefore successful, or it could mean that it was not so successful, which would be the reason why ‘propagandists felt they needed to propagandize so hard’ in the first place. This chapter takes this problematique to Dutch schools. They were on the receiving end of significant promotional efforts regarding the empire, but the evidence also suggests that the reception was, at the very best, lukewarm. That makes the Dutch school system a good test case on how to interpret the histories of imperial propaganda. What campaigns were unloaded on schools, and how did this translate into classroom practice?

A first observation is that Dutch schools at the turn of the twentieth century had never been the stage of heated debates regarding the colonies.

The use of names from colonial Indonesia is fraught with the implications of history. In this context language is by no means a neutral conveyer of information, although it never really can be, working within the current philosophical confines. During the colonial era there were two lingua francas in use in colonial Indonesia: Dutch and Malay. The use of the former was discouraged for non-Dutch; the latter functioned as shared tongue for the population at large, and would become Bahasa Indonesia, or Indonesian, after independence. In 1972 the old spelling was overhauled by the Enhanced Indonesian Spelling System (EYD), dropping Dutch phonetics in favour of non-colonial alternatives. Thus, tj became c, dj became j, j became y, and oe became u.

In this book I have opted not to follow rigid rules as to avoid the spelling quagmire. But any choice comes with caveats. The use of modern Indonesian spelling would acknowledge the sensibilities that come with decolonization, while the old spelling would favour historical accuracy. I tend to the latter option by not changing the spelling of names in quoted sources and, to avoid confusion, also adopt those spellings in my own writing surrounding source citations. Thus, here you will come across Soewardi Soerjaningrat, not Suwardi Suryaningrat (who, by the time of the spelling overhaul, had already adopted the name Ki Hadjar Dewantara, or Ki Hajar Dewantara in EYD). For geographical names I opt for modern spelling in most cases. You will find Yogyakarta, not Jogjakarta. There are exceptions. You will come across Batavia, not Jakarta, when the city's role as the centre of colonial administration is stressed. In a similar vein I use the name Dutch East Indies, either to describe the administrative unit of the colony, or when the use of colonial Indonesia (or variants thereof) would seem absurd, as there is no point in calling the colonial army (Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger, KNIL) the Dutch-Indonesian army instead.

Another major obstacle in writing in English about colonial history in Dutch society are the confusions that arise with literal translations.

The subject of this study has been the Dutch public consciousness vis-à-vis the Dutch colonial empire during the time of modern imperialism, roughly spanning the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. This collective mentality is usually referred to with the term public imperialism, and its relevance as an object of study was established by British historians who held the assumption that, in order to administratively maintain the British Empire, a large pool of imperially minded citizens was needed from which to draw the workforce needed to do so. Scaling down both the colonizing nation and the empire in question, the case of the Netherlands provides a similar problematique, bringing to the fore the questions how this conquering of the metropolitan mind worked, how ‘steeped in empire’ Dutch society was, and what the limits of this cultural permeation were. But, as valid as these questions are, they also assume a monolithic public consciousness and provide a restraining binary logic of successful permeation or the lack thereof. In order to address these shortcomings, and in an attempt to render visible public ignorance and indifference to empire, I have approached Dutch imperial culture as fragmented by investigating other shades of empire-mindedness, such as anti-colonialism, and hitherto left-out narratives of Indonesians in the metropole.

This chapter examines the extent to which the Scouting movement's Dutch offshoot functioned as a tool of empire in the same way the British organization founded by Lord Baden-Powell did. The Dutch organization copied the imperial obsessions and anxieties of the British original, and produced some of its own, but a close inspection of the material shows that imperial ideologies embraced by the two movements differed. If the British organization revolved around a time-frozen and heavily distorted image of colonized peoples, whose masculinity had to inspire the ‘frail’ English youth and make them into competent administrators and soldiers for the empire, the Dutch organization, which was founded in the 1910s, showed an altogether different picture. The empire was not a place to inspire Westerners, as it was in Baden-Powell's conception, but a place where Westerners went to conquer, administer and rule. To Baden-Powell's stories about Zulu masculinity rites (appropriations of actual Zulu culture, at best ‘reinterpretations’ of things he witnessed when he served in the Boer War), the Dutch scoutmasters added worn-out nineteenth-century textbook stories about Jan Pieterszoon Coen as the seventeenth-century founder of Dutch rule in the Indonesian archipelago.

During the heyday of the modern Dutch Empire, colonial affairs could be vigorously debated in the Dutch press on one day, and be virtually forgotten the day after. It is this fundamental ambiguity in the position of the Dutch Empire in the life and society in the metropole that is the subject of this study. This ambiguity had much to do with the fact that the metropole was (and is) as often seen as part of the empire as it is not. Sometimes the connection between metropole and colony was all too obvious, for instance, when Dutch audiences read reports in their newspapers about the colonial wars that were waged in their name and when colonial military veterans were celebrated at home. At other times, a lack of enthusiasm ‘from below’ led various commentators to complain about the public's ‘lukewarm indifference’ to empire. Yet, the ambiguity when it comes to the perceived role of empire in Dutch society is not just a story of presences and absences, but also one of contradictions within single moments. The commentators who complained about imperial indifference are a case in point: they sought attention for colonial affairs in newspapers and other periodicals, and clearly felt a natural entitlement to take up that space, while at the same time their laments about a lack of attention to colonial affairs was based on the premise that it was, to their regret, not a natural thing to devote that much attention to such matters.

By the 1860s, the annual meetings of the Zeister Zendelingsgenootschap (ZZG, Zeist Missionary Society) had evolved into much more than just a meeting where the society's formalities where rushed through. The ‘mission days’ (Zendingsdagen), as they were called, attracted around 2000 people to the small village of Zeist, most of whom would arrive by train. They would spend the day attending a service, receive updates from the foreign missionary front, enjoy each other's company, listen to ‘edifying music’ and take hikes in the surrounding forests. For these numerous visitors, it must have been an enjoyable day. For the conveners, the local Moravian church (Broedergemeente or Hernhutters), on the other hand, it was burden as they experienced difficulties in handling this number of people. One of the loyal visitors, the Harderwijk-based pastor Simon Hendrik Buytendijk, would later recall it in this way: ‘The congregation appreciated the visitors, but we should remind ourselves that good things can also come in abundance. […] To avoid the hustle during the evening sermon, I went for a walk instead. I ran into some Moravian nuns, and they expressed their lament.’ As we will later see, this experience was the incentive for Buytendijk to take the concept of mission days to the next level. The next year he organized a mission festival (Zendingsfeest), which attracted a crowd three times as large as the meetings in Zeist. It was the start of a tradition spanning decades.

The early 1860s witnessed popular demand for mission days and festivals. Apparently, there was such a thing as a missionary public: a public that showed interest in the mission and whose existence was not orchestrated top-down, as the Moravian congregation barely advertised their meetings.

Fantastic Voyage (1966): In the midst of the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union have developed a technology to miniaturize matter. As General Carter explains while driving inside the mazelike top-secret underground facilities of the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces (CMDF), “We can reduce anything to any size we want. … We can shrink an army with all its equipment.” The process has a drawback: it persists for only one hour. The Czechoslovakian Dr. Benes has figured out how to make it last indefinitely. But an assassination attempt while he is escaping to the West leaves him in a coma with an inoperable blood clot in his brain. To save this valuable defector, the submarine Proteus, with a mostly medical five-person crew, will be miniaturized, injected into Benes's carotid artery, and travel via the arterial system to the clot; there the team will remove the thrombus with a laser gun, sail back along the venous system, and be extracted before they regain normal size.

At CMDF, Proteus's position is constantly monitored and marked on a huge outline of the human body. As the submarine approaches the brain clot through the inner ear, top medical officer Colonel Reid expresses his wonder to General Carter: “Imagine,” he says, satisfied but almost pensive, “they are in the human mind” (Brainfilms 7.1).

We have so far explored how the cinema performs the relationship between personhood and the body by means of fictions concerning the brain and its contents. From the “mad brain specialist” of The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936) and the crude disembodied brains of 1950s B movies, to The Matrix (1999), which offers a version of the philosophical fable of the brain in a vat (Chalmers 2005), and further on to the dying tycoon and the ailing elderly whites of Self/less (2015) and Get Out (2017), motion pictures have localized individuality essentially in the brain, and have imagined ways for personal identity to transcend the body's demise by transplanting the brain or its contents into other, typically younger and healthier bodies. Drawing credibility from both science and philosophy, they implicitly follow Roland Puccetti's 1969 conclusion, “Where goes a brain, there goes a person.” At the outset, movies assume that the brain is the somatic limit of the self and consider that the noncerebral physical body is secondary to personal identity. However, the body's role as repository of the brain and as the recipient's interface with the world shapes the hybrid subject's experience, and generates the motives and imbroglios that drive action.

Frankenstein films deserve a special place in the history of such fictions. At a general level, this is because “Frankenstein” designates “an authentic modern cultural myth” (Marcus 2002, 190).

The global increase in life expectancy has turned the deterioration of the brain into a health problem of epidemic proportions (WHO 2012). The challenge is both collective and individual. At the collective level, it is anticipated that the number of people with dementia and Alzheimer's will increase to 135 million by 2050, with over 70% of them living in lowor middle-income countries, and with costs escalating proportionately, especially for those countries, beyond the annual US$ 604 billion recorded in 2010 (ADI 2013). Part of the drama of dementias is that they affect both personal identity and the conditions of personhood. Beyond a certain point, the persons whom we knew are “no longer there” and the signs they produce seem reduced to signifiers of the disease. Using a chemical metaphor, the French philosopher Michel Malherbe (2015, 225) speaks of the “ontological denaturation” Alzheimer's operates: it ceases to be an “accident of life,” which is what illness usually are, even when chronic, and becomes the person's essence. That is why, for him, the question Alzheimer's raises is not the usual and superficial one, whether a loved one with the illness recognizes us, but a more fundamental one: whether and how we recognize her – not as she was before, but in her current manner of being in the world (ib., 9).