Introduction

In his well-known Culture and imperialism (1993), Said argued that imperialism and colonialism are constructed not only on the basis of military or economic force, but on culture as well (Said 1994). Culture and politics, he states, produce a system of control that goes beyond military power, as it works through representations and images. Such representations and images not only provide the underpinning and justification of colonialism and imperialism, but they have also continuously dominated the imaginations and memories of both colonisers and colonised. Said's emphasis on the ongoing influence of imperialism upon people and the cultures they live in relates to the continuing interdependent dialogue between peoples and the legacies of colonialism and imperialism: imperialism did not end with colonial rule and cannot be limited to a specific moment in history. Traces of Said's ideas about the continuing cultural influence of the colonial past are present in Dutch discourses on the critical appraisal of Dutch colonial rule in South-East Asia and the Caribbean. In 2000, Paul Scheffer published ‘Het multiculturele drama’ (‘The multicultural tragedy’) in the prominent Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, which provoked heated discussions on the integration of newcomers into post-colonial Netherlands. In a later book, he wrote:

In this chapter, I wish to take up the notion that although colonialism is often thought of as a phenomenon of the past, it continues in fact in new shapes and forms in our present-day post-colonial societies. I would like to extend this idea by underscoring the imaginative processes of post-colonial memory-making. These will serve to underline my argument regarding the significance of a systematic analysis of cultural memory in order to understand post-colonial migrant identity formations. Central in my argument is the notion of ‘memory community’, which will be used to refine the reductionist notion of identity politics. In contemporary discussions regarding the social and cultural integration of newcomers, a lack of social cohesion is often defined as the underlying cause of what Scheffer (2000) termed the ‘multicultural tragedy’.