Authenticity and Absurdity

Movie director Ridley Scott is known for creating an authentic cinematic world within each of his films. The battle scenes in his newest blockbuster, Napoleon, have been compared to the opening sequence of Stephan Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, for their sense of feeling real (though obviously neither is real). In his House of Gucci (2021), Lady Gaga (playing Patrizia Reggiani) and Adam Driver (as Maurizo Gucci, heir to the Gucci fortune), talk to each other in English, with what are meant to be Italian accents. Gaga spent months speaking English with her ‘Italian’ accent before film shooting began, just to get it authentic. There’s only one catch. Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizo Gucci, being Italians, didn’t speak to each other in English with fake Italian accents. They spoke Italian, with authentic Italian accents.

I found House of Gucci to be an almost unbearably funny film. Hearing a gaggle of British and American actors babble in English with hilarious Italian accents created an unintended comical performance. Had they spoken in their own accents, it would have seemed less absurd. Which goes to show, what may seem authentic from one point of view, can seem absurd when looked at from another.

Claims to authenticity pop up in the most unlikely places. In his piece ‘Thirst for Authenticity’, philosopher Dale Jacquette went as far as to claim that the popularity of craft beers “can be understood as a metaphor for a deeper thirst for authenticity” (Beer and Philosophy, ed. Steven D. Hales, 2007). But we don’t want to simply consume authentic foods in authentic restaurants washed down with authentic beers. We want to live authentic lives and, ultimately, become authentic selves.

You can read the rest of this article of mine in Philosophy Now magazine.

 This is an outtake from the award winning documentary "Selling a Colonial War", directed by In-Soo Radstake and featuring me as an "international expert."

How Dutch Historians Unremembered Decolonization

Irish historian Paul Doolan claims that for many decades, Dutch historians have inadequately investigated the decolonization of Indonesia (1945-1949). In Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies, the result of over ten years of work, he states that historians were not innocent bystanders. “They played a significant role in silencing and unremembering the experience of decolonization in Dutch collective memory.”

Click here to read this article of mine in the journal The Low Countries, 1st March, 2022.

A Fictional War: Dutch propaganda and the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949)

 In December 1949, the Netherlands was forced to hand over sovereignty of its colony, the Dutch East Indies, to the Republic of Indonesia. Their long domination of the Indonesian archipelago had come to a brutal end with the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949). Hundreds of thousands of Dutch who had called the former colony home repatriated to the metropole and 150,000 soldiers returned from a war that had proven futile. Their memories were not forgotten, though their compatriots did not care to hear their stories. During the decades that followed, the war faded from Dutch collective memory. Today it frequently makes the news.

Click here to read my full article published at University of Exeter's Imperial and Global Forum, September 29, 2021.

Reservoirs of violence: Beb Vuyk's postcolonial stories

 The year 1945 marked the end of two occupations in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The first occurred with the German surrender in May. The second came about with the sudden surrender of Japan in August. The ending of World War Two in Asia left the Dutch East Indies in a volatile and complex situation. The “liberated” Dutch found themselves surrounded by hostile nationalist forces loyal to the newly founded Republic of Indonesia. Years of violence and a full-scale war ensued, with the Dutch reluctantly ceding sovereignty to the new republic in 1949. This study briefly looks at the situation that unfolded in late 1945 Indonesia and attempts to explain why the Dutch found the new situation hard to comprehend and to accept. I suggest that the short stories of Beb Vuyk offer unique insights into the reservoir of violence that had been expanding prior to 1945, the shift in violence between 1945 and 1949 and the violence as it was experienced by Asians and Europeans alike. Accepting that Vuyk's position within the colonial complex was that of a colonial before the war, I maintain that Vuyk challenges colonial narratives by drawing out some of the pathologies engendered by colonial intimacies. By reclaiming local, native and particular histories, her stories written between the late 1940s and late 1960s reflect a variety of experiences and do not privilege the experiences of European victims over Indonesians. 

Click here in order read this article of mine, published in the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, Volume 40, Issue 2, 2020

Here is the cover of my book, due to be published on September 27th, the result of over ten years of work.

To Forget or to Remember

 The final work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting (2008), provides a densely argued defence of the concept of collective memory. In one chapter he considers the short work on historiography by Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874). Ironically, what earned Nietzsche this special attention was Ricoeur’s need to ‘set apart’ Nietzsche’s work because it “contributes nothing to the critical examination of the historical operation.” Ricoeur saw Nietzsche as assaulting remembrance. By contrast, David Rieff, who attacked the concept of collective memory in his 2016 book, In Praise of Forgetting, applauds Nietzsche, and encourages the reader to take up Nietzsche’s moral imperative of ‘active forgetting’. Ricoeur and Rieff are on two different sides when it comes to social memory, but both authors share the view that Nietzsche prioritised forgetting over remembering history. As it turns out, both are wrong. 

More on this in my article in Philosophy Now magazine.