In Becoming Afro-Dutch, artist, curator, and researcher Charl Landvreugd argues that we do not yet have a language to understand Afro-Dutchness, and that it is insufficient to rely on the discourses developed in African American, Afro-British, or Caribbean cultural theory alone. This critical monograph on continental European Black art and cultural history articulates the specificity of Afro-Dutchness and the way that Blackness has been translated and (mis)understood across multiple decades of cultural policy, while also providing an incisive analysis of the Dutch state’s aim to showcase “diversity” in a way that is comfortable to the white cultural class, without ever addressing issues of racism or race.
Simultaneously, Landvreugd traces how recent generations of artists are effectively constructing a new visual language to name their Afro-Dutchness by deepening the way their being is shaped across multiple cultural identities and national histories. These time travelers and wanderers are the Wakaman: cultural workers that embrace their hybridity and multiplicity and have defined, on their own terms and through their own words, their nativity within the Dutch art scene.
Becoming Afro-Dutch is a key theoretical and art-historical work, as an introduction to both different international genealogies of Black arts and culture and to the different movements that shaped the specificity of Afro-Dutch artists in particular.
About the Author
Charl Landvreugd is Head of Research & Curatorial Practice at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He serves as an external tutor at various art academies, is on the supervisory board of Het Nationale Theater, and is a member of the Production/Collection Fund Commissioning Committee of the Hartwig Art Foundation. Previously, he served as Head of Research in Visual Arts & Post-Contemporary Practices at the Masters Institute of Visual Cultures, AKV | St. Joost in Den Bosch and was on the supervisory board of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and the Akademie van Kunsten. Landvreugd has held fellowhips at BAK Utrecht, Van Abbemuseum, and the Research Center for Material Culture. His writing has appeared in Open Arts Journal, Small Axe Magazine, ARC Magazine, Uprising Art, and Metropolis M, among other venues.