The thorny entanglements of theater and colonial historiography in the Netherlands Anti-colonial critique and imperial nostalgia in J. Slauerhoff’s play 'Jan Pieterszoon Coen' (1931)

This chapter examines a 1931 play by the Dutch writer J. J. Slauerhoff, Jan Pietersz. Coen, dramatizing the downfall of the eponymous seventeenth-century colonial figure. It charts avenues for a feminist and decolonial historiography, reflecting on the thorny entanglements of theater and colonial historiography as evident in the play and its controversial production history. The chapter underlines the need to think theater historiography in terms of multiple pasts, and reflects on how every staging of the play compels an engagement with these plural pasts. It examines the politics of this entanglement from two angles: first, it considers how every attempted staging of Slauerhoff's play brought the Dutch colonial past to bear upon the immediate political circumstances, thus raising questions of legitimizing current agendas with a selective understanding of the past, as well as questions of comparability and shared histories. Second, the chapter pays attention to the gendered and sexualized dimensions of performance historiography. It examines how the play articulates the relation between colonizers and colonized in gendered terms, thereby emphasizing the importance of feminist perspectives on performance historiography. The chapter argues for attention to the ambivalences and contradictions in the way theater is intertwined with colonialism.