‘These are large ideals that we hope for’: heritagising the past and present of anti-racist activism in the Black Archives

This article focuses on The Black Archives (TBA) in Amsterdam, a cultural organisation that is establishing itself as an alternative centre of knowledge production about the legacies of colonialism. It situates TBA’s efforts to recover and produce a lineage of Black Dutch anti-racist activism in the period before and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations. This moment marks a stage where a particular way of doing activism – one that employs practices of memorialisation and heritage-making – begins to gain legitimacy within mainstream public discourse. By critically assessing how TBA is bringing previous campaigns into dialogue with the 2020 protests, this article aims to explore the tensions and contradictions that arise when memories that are not fully sedimented are used as a resource to produce stable, cohesive identities. What kind of politics is made possible by the heritagisation of activism in the present?