Disavowal and space: The aesthetics of postcolonial activism and LGBTQIA+ advocacy

Introduction

‘You are obviously too lazy to walk,’ said the bus driver, smirking at my pink onesie, when I asked him whether he drives to the LGBTQIA+-event ‘Pink Saturday’ [Roze Zaterdag]. According to the organizers, this event was about ‘diversity and dealing with intolerance.’ ¹ It is June 2023, and I headed to the city Goes in the province of Zeeland in the South-West of the Netherlands. Most of Zeeland is part of the Bible belt, an area of the Netherlands where far-right parties, farmers parties, and orthodox Christian parties receive the highest share of votes in national elections. When I get off the bus, a white man gives me a folder that says in bold letters, ‘Heaven or hell.’ He wears a t-shirt with the text ‘I love Jesus.’ Together with LGBTQIA+-rights, there was another topic in Zeeland that was seen as a matter of ‘Diversity’ that year: legacies of empire. In the 17^th century, the Dutch-West-India Company was the largest trader of enslaved people in the world—the province of Zeeland taking the lead. In the same Summer of ‘Pink Saturday,’ a local postcolonial advocacy group called for apologies for slavery by local governors and for a monument in the harbor city of Vlissingen that would make visible the afterlives of empire. But while public apologies were eventually made, the monument never came. The frontperson of this advocacy group, Angélique—a Black woman in her fifties who is a prominent figure in LGBTQIA+ activism, advocacy against anti-Black racism, and a supporter of women’s rights—told me in an interview that, in her view, the City Council’s decision to not allow a monument equals a disregard to Diversity and Inclusion: ‘[It is as if the local authorities say:] “Diversity and Inclusion, we push it away. Diversity and Inclusion, we don’t do that.”’ And although the organization of ‘Pink Saturday’ was in itself an achievement in this part of the country, government authorities did not hail rainbow flags when called for, kept on dismissing LGBTQIA+-policies as ‘symbolic,’ and missed opportunities to make policies more substantive.

In this article I am interested at this idea of ‘symbolism’ in connection with dynamics of ‘pushing away’ afterlives of colonialism and LGBTQIA+-discrimination—two issues that are seen as matters of ‘Diversity.’ Studies on the ‘symbolic’ quality of ‘Diversity’ made the point that ‘Diversity’ fails to address operations of power (Ahmed, 2012; Alexander, 2005; Bannerji, 2000; Davis, 1996; Lewis, 2000; Mohanty, 2003; Puwar, 2004). This symbolic quality of ‘Diversity’ is also referred to as an ‘aesthetic’ that takes the shape of apolitical pluralism (Ahmed, 2012; Melamed, 2011; Subramaniam, 2014). This critique makes sense in a time in which ‘Diversity,’ in Sara Ahmed’s words, was ‘not a scary word’ (66). But by now, diversity is a scary word. At the time of writing, the Trump administration in the United States has attacked ‘Diversity’ policies for racialized and gendered/sexualized groups in particular. The effects this has on Europe and the Netherlands are becoming clear: not only do the United States pressure (multinational) companies and universities in the Netherlands, ² they also pressure local government administrations to abandon their DEI policies. ³ While hegemonic ⁴ narratives of ‘diversity duress’ [diversiteitsdwang], ‘diversity drivel,’ [diversiteitsgeneuzel] and ‘woke hysteria’ [woke hysterie] gain salience, anxiety among policy advisors in Diversity and Inclusion is palpable.

I take the notion of ‘disavowal’ as a starting point to understand this—in Angélique’s words—‘pushing away.’ Critical race theorists working in and on the Netherlands have demonstrated that what is specific to Dutch racism is the disavowal of racism (Essed and Hoving, 2014: 20). The hegemonic narrative that the Netherlands is an anti-racist, hospitable and tolerant country enables what Wekker (2016) calls ‘white innocence’: not knowing, but also not wanting to know (Wekker, 2016: 17). The same fictitious self-image of progressiveness and liberation that enables racism helps to reinforce forms discrimination against the LGBTQIA+-community: while this self-image on the surface seems to embrace sexual and gender liberation, it in fact depoliticizes the Dutch gay identity and reinstalls heteronormativity (Mepschen et al., 2010: 971). The Dutch self-image of tolerance enables turning a blind eye to discrimination.

In this article I take issue with the idea that symbols are ‘just’ symbols and as such would be non-performatives. Social justice activists and conservatives draw on the construct of ‘symbolic politics.’ Symbolic politics are characteristically contrasted with substantive politics—although they often go hand in hand (Schiller and Jonitz, 2023). While social justice activists are wary to be seen as ‘only’ fighting for symbolic acts of ‘Diversity’ because such acts would be insufficient, conservatives—who oppose (what they call) ‘gender ideology’ and dismiss reparations for slavery—delegitimize public LGBTQIA+-symbols and monuments that commemorate slavery by insisting that these artefacts are merely symbolic and as such unnecessary. Building on recent discussions of disavowal (Abu El-Haj, 2023; Bhungalia, 2019; Hall, 2018; Sheth, 2024; Zupančič, 2024), I seek to understand its ‘aesthetics’ (Blakeley and Barron, 2025; Gassner, 2020). I argue that the dismissal of symbols as non-performatives can be mapped onto mechanisms that disavow discrimination in itself.

In a time where the far-right lumps together postcolonial advocacy and LGBTQIA+-advocacy as ‘woke’ and where intersectional solidarity politics are questioned (Aouragh, 2019; Siddiqui, 2021), it makes sense to draw these two social justice issues together—and this is something that, in Zeeland, conservatives and progressives do. During fieldwork, local politicians and bureaucrats mentioned to me these two issues in the same breath and discussed them in the same meetings. Opponents of social justice issues would say things like ‘no money for rainbow or slavery projects.’ ⁵ One time when I asked Angélique to comment on the fact that these two issues are interwoven, she suggested that the entanglement of these issues is self-evident ‘because they are carried out by the same people.’ Politicians, too, take up these two social justice issues in tandem. One provincial councilor kept on asking parliamentary questions about existing policies in Zeeland for people from the LGBTQIA+-community—thereby seeking to expose that Zeeland is not doing enough—and kept on making a case for ‘genuine, wholehearted, and broadly supported apologies’ for the ‘horror system of slavery.’ ⁶ Alongside these emic reasons to take LGBTQIA+-advocacy and postcolonial activism together, scholars in critical race theory and gender studies in the Netherlands have argued that thinking race and sexuality together is crucial (Crenshaw, 1989). While these grammars of difference co-construct each other, they are usually not thought together in intersectional ways because race is often absent in gender and sexuality studies (Wekker, 2016: 22; Browne et al., 2020).

This article is based on a year of ethnographic field research in Zeeland between June 2023 and June 2024, and ongoing conversations with interlocutors after. Interlocutors in this study were people working in municipal administrations, in local politics, and in advocacy. Some of them I met at local festivities and events and I became acquainted with other interlocutors through snowball sampling—which I continued until no new insights emerged. This story unfolds through eight main interlocutors. Angélique, the aforementioned Black postcolonial feminist queer activist, was a key interlocutor. Then, there were the alderman who retains the portfolio Diversity and Inclusion in the biggest municipality of Zeeland and the bureaucrat who works for him on this portfolio—both white. Other interlocutors were a Black local counselor in early twenties who wrote an amendment that pressured the mayor of the municipality he worked for to apologize for the ‘colonial past’ this specific city was responsible for, and a white local counselor in her fifties who combines jobs at a chemical concern. I also regularly spoke with two provincial councilors in their thirties—one of them racialized as white and one as brown—who were motivated to put social justice issues on the political agenda. I maintained contact with people working for the anti-discrimination agency—including with a Black queer man in his thirties who was the director at that time. While delinking names from someone’s words and opinions can be an effort to prevent public criticism, naming can be an effort to honor and recognize someone’s contribution to society. ⁷ In this article, my assessment regarding anthropological representation is that opacity regarding the names of interlocutors with institutional role is necessary to shield the politically sensitive balancing acts they engage in. My key interlocutor, Angélique, consented to being represented by her real name—to acknowledge her work and to let this work be traceable. Alongside individual gatherings in which I conducted ethnographic interviews with my interlocutors, I visited them at their workplace, met with them at celebratory events, and exchanged text messages, emails, and calls. Alongside these activities, I attended festivities on social justice issues (‘Pink Saturday,’ ‘Coming Out Day’), joined gatherings organized by the anti-discrimination agency, followed political debates that concerned (post)coloniality and LGBTQIA+-rights, read documents that were discussed in these debates, and closely followed the local news. While this article is set in Zeeland, the mechanism it describes speaks to other localities that are non-hospitable to (post)coloniality and LGBTQIA+-rights.

Diversity and disavowal

To understand why it makes sense to unite postcolonialism and LGBTQIA+-advocacy under the term ‘Diversity,’ it is relevant to attend to successive policy paradigms in the field of social justice issues in the Netherlands. The paradigm of ‘Diversity’ gained traction in the Netherlands from the 2020s onwards. Before that time, successive paradigms had appeared and disappeared: the multicultural paradigm (1970s), the minority paradigm (1980s), the integration paradigm (1990s), the citizenship paradigm (2000s), and the generic policy paradigm (2010s). ⁸ But it bears asking whether these paradigms are really all so distinct from each other: according to two senior policy advisors at the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs that I spoke with in 2023, these paradigms may have ‘a different vocabulary, their contents are the same.’ Labels such as ‘Diversity’ have an ‘expiry date,’ they explained to me. ‘You look for something neutral. You always have to deal with changing political connotations.’ Although ‘Diversity’ has replaced other vocabularies such as racism (Ahmed and Swan, 2006), continuities between successive policy paradigms are notable.

‘Diversity’ has different meanings in situated settings and mobilize different practices. Vertovec (2012) pointed out that, although ‘Diversity’ has its roots in the context of countering discrimination in the wake of the civil rights movement in the United States and sometimes indeed mobilizes repertoires of ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition,’ it does not necessarily. While we know that municipal governments pragmatically combine a variety of ideas under the header of ‘Diversity’ (Schiller, 2015), the drawing together of postcolonial advocacy and LGBTQIA+-advocacy bears special attention. Thinking race and gender/sexuality together is important: while these grammars of difference reinforce each other, they are usually not thought together intersectionally (Wekker, 2016: 22). While white cis-gendered men have populated the gay movement in the Netherlands thickly, a movement of antiracist lesbian activists gained traction in the Netherlands from the 1970s onwards in the form of the Black, migrant and refugee women’s movement [zmv-vrouwenbeweging] (Deekman and Hermans, 2001; Wekker, 2016: 115–118). This movement played a major role in drawing public attention to Dutch imperial history. ⁹

Up until the last decade of the twentieth century, barely any attention was given to imperial history across the Atlantic world (Hall, 2018) and in Netherlands (Nimako et al., 2014; Wekker, 2016). Dutch imperial history has long been absent in educational curricula as well as in ‘self-image and self-representations such as monuments’ (Wekker, 2016: 13). The Dutch context is characterized by ‘strong reflexes to belittle, deny, and erase’ its role as colonizer (Wekker, 2016: 39). Essed and Hoving (2014) point the finger to the Dutch ‘disavowal and denial of racism’ that consists of ‘rejecting the possibility to know’ (24). Wekker (2016) opens her book White Innocence by identifying responses of ‘denial, disavowal, and elusiveness’ to race (2)—despite race being the fundamental organizing grammar in Dutch society (23). In 2002, more than 130 years after the abolition of slavery, Dutch citizens of Surinamese and Antillean origin—who were organized in a prominent Afro European women’s organization that was associated with the Black, migrant, and refugee women’s movement—initiated the establishment of a monument to commemorate slavery in Amsterdam (Nimako et al., 2014; Wekker, 2016: 13). Although this monument ‘brought […] the legacy of slavery into the public domain, […] there was by no means a general political or academic shift in the views on slavery and racism’ (Nimako et al., 2014: 46), and instead, the monument seemed to enable celebrations of Dutch ‘multiculturalism’ instead of commemorations of slavery (Kardux, 2004; Nimako et al., 2014; Smith, 2007).

In this context, critical race scholars writing in and from the Netherlands have questioned the efficacy of ‘Diversity.’ They noted that hegemonic discourses inform the mind-set and practices regarding ‘Diversity’ (Ghorashi et al., 2015: 171), that pursuits of ‘Diversity’ leave unquestioned the status quo (Essed, 1996: 2; cf. Essed and De Graaff, 2002), that ‘Diversity’ can be ‘toothless’ (Ghorashi et al., 2015: 98), and that Whiteness trumps any notion of ‘Diversity’ (Wekker, 2016: 124). In a similar spirit, Francio Guadeloupe and Miriyam Arouagh have written on the ‘rituals of anti-racism’ in the Netherlands. While Guadeloupe (2022) speaks of ‘the obligatory ritual’ of specific embodiments he is invited to perform in circuits of anti-racism (Guadeloupe, 2022: xxi), Aouragh (2022) takes his point further by analyzing ‘ceremonial gestures’ of anti-racism in the Netherlands, and their ‘customs, habits, rites, initiations, performances, and hierarchies.’ These critiques chime an often-heard critique of discourses of ‘Diversity’ writ large that consider ‘Diversity’ an ‘empty signifier’ (Bannerji, 2000) that represents ‘empty pluralism’ (Mohanty, 2003: 193). Similar observations are made in scholarship on the ‘aesthetic’ of ‘Diversity’ (Ahmed, 2012; Melamed, 2011; Subramaniam, 2014).

My concern is that implying that ‘aesthetics’ are something superficial disregards the fact that the symbols that feature in aesthetic forms by definition refer to a signifier, and that these symbols play an important role in social processes—as studies in the philosophy, geography, and anthropology of symbolism has long demonstrated (Jabareen, 2024; Langer, 1957; Ortner, 1973; Turner, 1967). While the object which the aesthetic symbol symbolizes can be as ambiguous and untranslatable as the ‘forms of feeling’ (Langer, 1957), symbols initiate social action (Turner, 1967; cf. Ortner, 1984). Aesthetic logics, moreover, are interrelated with political logics (Jabareen, 2024). This interrelation can be traced back not only to Hannah Arendt’s adaptation of Kantian aesthetics but also in the works of Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin (Zerilli, 2016; Gassner, 2020: 35–44). Building on this insight that aesthetics are interrelated with political logics, I contend that, when our aim is to support social justice activism, a key concern is not so much the alleged superficiality of aesthetics or the supposed lack of performativity of symbolic acts, but the downplaying of the narrative power of symbols and the uncoupling the aesthetic from the epistemological. I argue that this downplaying of the narrative power of symbols and the uncoupling of the connection between aesthetics and epistemology can be mapped onto agendas of disavowal.

Scholarship on disavowal shows how the powerful turn against counternarratives that bring to the table unwelcome ideas that rub up against hegemonic narrativization that preserves legacies of empire. Disavowal, according to Hall (2018), is literally the ‘refusal to avow’ (13)—which means the refusal to allow something to exist openly. Indeed, many commentators connect disavowal with spatiality and perception: Steiner (1985) sees it as ‘turning a blind eye,’ and Catherine Hall understands it as ‘the refusal of something in plain sight’ (13). Surprisingly, however, the spatial dimension to the concept of disavowal remains undertheorized compared to its cognitive dimension—which is in part understandable because of the concept’s Freudian genealogy (Zupančič, 2024).

Despite disavowal's everyday connotation of 'denial,' various scholars have noted that disavowal is subtler than denial (Tarnowski, n.d.): disavowal can coexist with knowing and enables looking away regardless of it. These dynamics fit well with contemporary claims about post-raciality that may license racial disavowal (Goldberg, 2015: 152) and that may translate into ‘an urban aesthetic after race’ (Gassner 2025, 94). In Zeeland, with regards to contemporary legacies of colonialism, the facts are out: government authorities commissioned historical research about their role in slavery (Heijer, 2023; Heijer and Kok, 2021) and the local anti-discrimination agency closely monitors racism and LGBTQIA+-discrimination. ¹⁰ Disavowal, then, points to the mechanism in which these facts are not denied but rendered inconsequential.

Postcoloniality and LGBTQIA+-advocacy

Zeeland was the last province in the Netherlands to establish an anti-discrimination agency—after the province upheld for a long time that ‘there is no discrimination here.’ ¹¹ Initially, this agency only focused on racism that ‘foreigners’ [buitenlanders] experienced from the extreme right. To date, the agency monitors other forms of discrimination, too. Recent consecutive reports by the agency showed that discrimination on the basis of ‘skin color’ and on the basis of ‘sexual orientation’ are reported most often in Zeeland. In the light of these two forms of discrimination, in 2023 and 2024—when I did field research in Zeeland—two social justice issues marked the political agendas: advocacy against the afterlives of colonialism and LGBTQIA+-advocacy. These two forms of advocacy certainly had ‘momentum’—as the young Black local counselor once put it—but to him, the other side of the coin is that ‘the more momentum, the more pushback.’ ‘I notice this pushback around everything that concerns Diversity,’ he added.

With regards to coloniality, Zeeland is a remarkable place. For parts of the 17^th century, the Dutch-West-India Company was the largest trader of enslaved people in the world, and compared to other Dutch cities, the capital city of Zeeland (Middelburg) and its harbor city (Vlissingen) interchangeably owned the largest share in trading enslaved people (Heijer, 2023; Heijer and Kok, 2021). In the second half of the 18^th century, Vlissingen was the ‘undisputed capital of Dutch slave trade’: in West-Africa, representatives from this city exchanged guns and alcohol for people who were sold as slaves, and transported 60,000 enslaved people to plantations on occupied territory in the Caribbean (Heijer and Kok, 2021). Almost half of the 600,000 enslaved West-African people that the Dutch state kidnapped to (what was called) ‘the New World’ were shipped on vessels that were possessed by the province of Zeeland—whose governors owned several plantations (as is clear with plantations named after Zeeuwish towns such as Oostsouburgh, Westsouburgh and Nieuw-Vlissingen), colonized Suriname, and forced enslaved people to have their labor exploited (Heijer, 2023). Increasing awareness (among some people) about these facts does not undo colonial legacies and does not render racism in Zeeland as something ‘from the past’—I was reminded more than once by Angélique.

A striking example is a notorious Dutch figure of ‘Black Pete’ [Zwarte Piet], a beloved figure in a racist tradition celebrated in November and December (Brienen, 2014; Smith, 2007). ‘Black Pete’ is a white person with a blacked face, thick red lips, golden earrings, an Afro wig and a Moor’s costume who employs faulty grammar in a quasi-Surinamese accent figure (Wekker, 2016: 139–140). Among Dutch people from Surinamese and Antillean heritage, 73% finds this figure discriminating. ¹² In 2015, the UN concluded that ‘Black Pete’ is a remnant of slavery and appealed to the Dutch government to act on ongoing discrimination against people from African heritage in the Netherlands—pointing to the fact that they face disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment and are underrepresented in public functions. ¹³ While most cities that used to feature blackface in their celebrations stepped away from these practices, some places in Zeeland have not. ‘In Kruiningen [a locality in Zeeland], they [Black Petes] are smoke black, and nowadays it’s deliberate and all, so I mean, there is an extra layer to it,’ the alderman of the biggest municipality in Zeeland, once said to me. In response to activist efforts to change this tradition, Angélique has regularly met with white anger. She for instance told me that, in December 2025, a white man had come up to her in a café, accusing her of taking away from him ‘his celebration’ that he framed as part of ‘his culture’—although, in this particular year just as well, some of the faces of white people were again, in Angélique’s words, painted ‘blacker than black.’

With regards LGBTQIA+-advocacy, Zeeland is a remarkable place as well. Zeeland knows the highest rates of suicide of all Dutch provinces—especially among LGBTQIA+-people. In 2018, it was last province in the Netherlands to raise the rainbow flag on Coming-Out-Day, ¹⁴ and that same year, it was the last province of the Netherlands that became a so-called ‘Rainbow Province.’ Being a ‘Rainbow Province’ enables funding and advise from semi-government actors in implementing policies to counter the discrimination of LGBTQIA+-people—but other than that is non-committal. Still, in 2023, the province refused to sign the so-called ‘Rainbow Agreement’ that would make policy commitments for LGBTQIA+-people more binding, ¹⁵ a ‘rainbow pedestrian crossing’ was repeatedly painted black, ¹⁶ and when the province did not raise the rainbow flag in response to violence against people from the LGBTQIA + community elsewhere in the country, this led to debate. ¹⁷

At the background of the spatialization of ongoing legacies of colonialism and LGBTQIA+-advocacy, there is increasing attention to ‘Diversity’ in Zeeland. The Province of Zeeland and several municipalities have, for instance, signed the ‘Charter Diversity.’ This Charter was initiated by the Dutch Social and Economic Council (SER) in 2017, encouraging municipalities and provinces to ‘declare intent’ to promote ‘Diversity and Inclusion.’ Signing this declaration is non-binding and organizations who sign this charter can decide which measures they intend to commit to. In Zeeland, signing this charter was preceded by fierce political contestation. In the municipality Terneuzen, for example, that eventually signed the charter in 2024, city councilors had to pressure the city administration for no less than 4 years to get to this point. The city administration kept on saying that they were ‘working on it’ [ermee aan de slag zijn] ¹⁸ —but nothing happened for consecutive years. Eventually, when the charter was signed, it mainly was intended to increase ‘accessibility’ [toegankelijkheid] ¹⁹ —which is line with regulations by the UN that from 2016 onwards charge Dutch municipalities with the legal task to improve accessibility of persons with disabilities. Another example of the long-term pressure that preceded particular actions was the for the hailing of the Rainbow Flag on ‘Coming Out Day’: from the first amendment in provincial politics to be submitted for this cause in 2015, it took 3 years to eventually be raised. ²⁰ Generic expressions of commitment by government authorities are used to argue against what is seen as specific groups. I am thinking of claims like ‘we are there for all Zeeuwish people irrespective of religion or sexual orientation or anything else.’ ²¹

Initially, one senior white colleague I worked with expressed skepticism of my impressions that ‘Diversity’ is at times ‘pushed away.’ In a research meeting, October 2023, he said that: ‘If I propose to talk about Diversity, all doors open for me, and LGBTQIA+ sells like hot cakes!’ He recounted to me that ‘every organization nowadays has a Diversity officer, a Diversity agenda, and a Diversity toolkit.’ In working with policy practitioners in the field of Diversity throughout the Netherlands, especially with non-white people and queer people, however, I was given different impressions. I felt validated in these impressions when, 1 month after this meeting with this senior colleague, the far right rose to power in the Netherlands. The political party that received the highest share of votes in national elections—in the Netherlands writ large and in Zeeland as a province—is led by a politician who is convicted for inciting discrimination, laments against ‘woke dictatorship,’ ²² considers apologies against slavery ‘delirious’ and ‘unnecessary,’ ²³ and compared transgenders to camels and dromedaries. ²⁴ That same year, the farmers party received the highest share of votes in Provincial politics in Zeeland. In 2025, this party called for an immediate abolishment on ‘million euro devouring Diversity policies’—including inclusion-trainings for bureaucrats and ‘identity-driven policies such as Diversity quota.’ ²⁵

My family in law is from this area of the Netherlands. I got to know this place as an area where white heterosexual cis-gendered middle-class people of a certain age routinely expressed to me—a white cis-gendered queer woman in her thirties who lives in the capital city—that they feel left-behind. The alderman, upon my question what makes Zeeland stand out with regards to Diversity and Inclusion, confirmed to me that, ‘It’s the mentality. I mean, the bunch of us is not very progressive here. That’s just the true story.’ He sighs, and adds, about his efforts in the policy field of Diversity and Inclusion that, ‘One does not get popular with this topic here. […] It is more of a topic in the metropolitan area.’ A policy advisor who works for him nodded, and added: ‘It’s not progressive here, and not idealist.’ The director of the local anti-discrimination agency, a Black queer man, gave a comparable answer when I asked him a similar question. ‘I’m thinking of controversies around Black Pete and the Dutch history of slavery,’ he said. Along the same lines, a representative from a prominent Dutch research institute, Movisie, who advises ‘Rainbow Municipalities’ in the Netherlands including Zeeland, said to me in an interview that ‘Zeeland is quite a difficult Province… It’s in fact just really complicated.’ Alongside people in administration and in knowledge institutes, people working in local politics in Zeeland made comparable comments. The young Black councilor one time said to me that, ‘Everybody is more conservative here, even the progressives are more conservative.’ About representation in government, he added that: ‘The problem in Zeeland is in fact very simple. In politics, there are predominantly white heterosexuals who cannot empathize, completely cannot see, like, how someone experiences it [discrimination].’

Apart from this ‘mentality,’ what, according to my interlocutors, sets Zeeland apart from municipalities in the metropolitan area of the Netherlands, is that there are limited grassroots organizations. From people in LGBTQIA+-organizing, I consistently heard things like ‘It is very hard to find volunteers here.’ The person saying this was a volunteer from the LGBT-network Zeeland, and indeed, some months later, this network dissolved because of a lack of volunteers. Postcolonial advocacy faces a similar problem. There are three organizations—Keti Koti Zeeland, NinZeeland ²⁶ , and BLMZeeland—one person, Angélique, is prominent in all of them. When I described the agenda-setting of social justice issues by advocacy coalitions to one to one of the provincial councilors I worked with, he just said: ‘This is not happening here.’ His colleague added: ‘Well, there are a couple [of organizations]. There is Angélique. She is the leading person of these groups. So, there is just one person who is pulling it.’ This is how Angélique herself sees it too: ‘I have a lot of flames [pitten].’

Advocacy seems partly hard because of a discourse of ‘coercion’ [dwang]. When I spoke to a police person on ‘Coming Out Day,’ he told me that, regarding postcolonial activism and LGBTQIA+-activism, ‘The debate is very difficult here. In the metropolitan area, they are ahead of us, but if you impose things here, it won’t go well.’ Angélique’s persistent attempts to put the monument at the boulevard are consistently disregarded as ‘pushy behavior’ [drammerig gedrag] and as an instance of ‘imposing her opinion.’ ²⁷ Her surname is deliberately misspelled as if it contains the verb ‘whining’ ²⁸ —which Angélique tries to own as a badge of honor.

Given the absence of grassroots advocacy, a big chemical producer in the region, DOW, is sometimes referred to as ‘grassroots actor.’ DOW is the biggest employer in the region and was the biggest sponsor of ‘Pink Saturday.’ It has ‘Diversity as a priority,’ takes pride of its ‘culturally diverse’ employees, and won a local prize for LGBTQIA+-inclusion. ²⁹ The organization is famous for its ‘DOW Circles’: networks within the organization for gender (a women’s Circle), ethnicity (Circles for Asians, ‘Africans,’ ‘Middle-Eastern/North-Africans,’ and ‘Hispanics), ability (Circles for disabled people, Veterans), sexuality (a LGBTQIA+-people’s Circle), and age (Circles for older people and younger people). A provincial councilor once referred to these Circles as ‘bottom up’ and ‘kind of grassroots.’

The reason for DOW to sponsor Pink Saturday—and to beat the drum for these Circles—according to an employee of the organization, is that Zeeland is a shrinking region. ‘We have to get the youth back,’ one representative of the organization said to me, during a conversation I had with her on ‘Pink Saturday.’ She explains that young people who have studied in the metropolitan area of the Netherlands are likely to have been ‘in contact with Diversity’ and are less likely to return to Zeeland after their graduation when ‘Diversity’ is not attended to in Zeeland. Some figures in local politics who are active in the policy field of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ have a work history at this chemical concern. The alderman, who is seen by the policy advisor who works for him as ‘a person who watches over Diversity and Inclusion,’ has worked at DOW for years and borrowed from this company the idea that, in his words, ‘Diversity’ can be a ‘measure’ to fix ‘labor market shortages.’ ‘We want young people to stay in the first place, but if they leave, we want them to come back. And well, if you have lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years… In an academic environment… And having touched and tasted the progressive side of the Netherlands a bit... We want them to be able to land here again. And to see that time has not stood still entirely.’ The policy advisor who works for him confirmed to me: ‘DOW has certain ideologies, that have influence on society. The alderman is, like, affected by that, from the inside. […] As a municipality, we embraced that.’

But some local actors consider the role of DOW problematic. Speaking to the Black local counselor in his twenties who played a considerable role in motivating the municipality he works for to apologize for its ‘history of slavery,’ I learned that some consider role of DOW ‘superficial’ and ‘opportunistic.’ On various occasions, he drew my attention to the fact that, if the province does not ‘dance to the tune’ of DOW, this company will simply relocate to a country ‘where there is no such thing as ‘Diversity.’ This is a showstopper for him, because ‘Diversity’ should be about ‘principles’ and not ‘profit.’ ‘If you really support the principle of equity… I mean, principles are not for sale. Really. And if they are for sale, they are not intrinsic. […] Not genuine.’ According to him, the ‘big players’ in who ‘do the actual work’ in social justice in Zeeland are the (very few) grassroots actors that are around.

Symbols and signs

These grassroots actors in Zeeland have hard time pressuring local government actors to attend to ‘Diversity.’ In Zeeland specifically, especially in ‘small municipalities’ there is ‘no policy plan’ and ‘no one who is administratively responsible.’ ³⁰ This what the director of the local anti-discrimination agency called ‘shyness to act’ [handelsverlegenheid], giving the following example: ‘muddling about a little, hoisting a flag every now and then, and be done with it.’ According to Movisie, a characteristic example of non-performativity of local anti-discrimination goals are ‘prevention goals’ that are formulated ‘carefully’ and ‘without obligation’—thereby inhibiting ‘measurability’ and ‘impact’ (Movisie, 2022). While from 2009 onwards it is obligatory for municipalities to have a local anti-discrimination agency that counts discrimination cases and assists people who report a case, so-called ‘prevention goals’ that take the form of anti-discrimination interventions such as policy advise and education are not compulsory.

Over the last decade or so, several motions, plans, networks, and projects that were connected to postcolonial advocacy and LGBTQIA+-advocacy were launched in Zeeland. This includes the LGBT-network Zeeland that was founded in 2014 and that organized ‘Coming-Out Days,’ the Zeeuwish Policy Approach to Discrimination [Zeeuws Deltaplan Aanpak Discriminatie] that was initiated by the local anti-discrimination agency and showcases ‘best practices,’ and photo exhibitions and theatre performances about queer people. Some of these projects can be generally seen as projects from ‘a positive perspective’—that the national government advises to do ‘when there is no money,’ ‘when antidiscrimination policies trigger resistance in the municipality,’ or ‘[when] there is no local capacity’. ³¹ In such cases, it is suggested to ‘communicate [anti-discrimination policies] to the outside world in a more appealing way’ such as through the ‘perspective’ of ‘equal ‘treatment, equal prospect, or diversity’—because ‘practice and science show that people are more likely to talk about equal treatment than discrimination’ (idem: 70).

Over the course of fieldwork, I attended several events that surrounded ‘positive’ projects. On the ‘Coming Out Day’ in Middelburg, October 2023, a toast was brought to the fact that multiple Zeeuwish municipalities are now a ‘Rainbow Municipality,’ a price for organizations active in the field of LGBTQIA+-inclusion was awarded by two transwomen from Amsterdam who regularly perform in beauty pageants. During the award show, a drag artist lip-synced Whitney Houston’s song ‘Step by Step’ and a young queer person read a self-written poem. It seemed transformative to the audience: one of the provincial councilors, who had said to me in the break he thinks that ‘gender neutral toilets are definitely one bridge too far’—gasped at the transwomen, and whispered in my ear: ‘Do you really think they are actually born as men? You don’t see that at all.’ And at a gathering of the LGBT-network Zeeland, March 2024, it was celebrated that (some) people register the discrimination they face and that the anti-discrimination agency is there to support victims. This, too, seemed transformative: a police person who, before the event had started, told to me that he did not know about the local anti-discrimination agency, that reporting racism does not help anyway, and that victims of discrimination should just go to a psychiatrist, seemed to listen attentively.

Both the apologies for the history of slavery and specific interventions for LGBTQIA+ are often regarded by local politicians as ‘symbolic politics’ [symboolpolitiek]. I heard this expression among opponents and proponents alike. One afternoon, when I sat with the Black local counselor on a terrace close the city hall, he reminded me that even the liberal party initially claimed that ‘the apologies’ were ‘a bit of symbolic politics.’ And in the parliamentary debates I followed on LGBTQIA+-discrimination in Zeeland, labels such as ‘Rainbow Province’ and issues such as the ‘rainbow flag’ were consistently considered ‘symbolic politics,’ ‘a symbol’ [een symbool] and ‘a signal’ [een signaal]. Although symbols and substance often go hand in hand, ‘symbolic politics’ are characteristically juxtaposed with ‘substantive politics’ (Schiller and Jonitz, 2023). In this case, for proponents, these ‘symbolic politics’ are hoped to be a first step towards ‘concrete measures.’ For instance, one white local politician who works in a municipality that recently became a Rainbow Municipality said to me in a phone call that, although ‘the content is not there yet,’ she hopes for the signature of Rainbow Municipality to enable ‘next steps.’ And in a political debate on the ‘Rainbow Agreement,’ ³² proponents said that ‘symbolic steps [being a Rainbow Province] are a start but only get meaning if they are followed by concrete measures [the Rainbow Agreement].’ When I informally talked with a white provincial councilor at a network event, he confirmed to me that ‘The Rainbow Province was in fact a symbol. The Rainbow Agreement would lead to real policy. For bureaucrats to handle it. For it to translate into decisions. Without the Rainbow Agreement, for the time being, everything will remain the same.’ The Black local counselor said something similar to me about hailing the Rainbow Flag: ‘It’s a very passive signal. But it’s a signal. It says: we don’t find it [discrimination] ok. Full stop. Then there is the second step. Action. But failing to take a stance [by hailing the flag] in the first place is really just the moral bankruptcy of local politics.’

Alongside proponents of LGBTQIA+-interventions, opponents of these interventions also juxtapose substance with symbolism—in their case to disqualify the hailing a flag altogether. Opponents for instance claim to prefer ‘actual deeds’ over ‘symbolism’ ³³ —disregarding the possibility that, at least to proponents of LGBTQIA+-advocates, initial ‘symbolism’ may over time enable ‘actual deeds.’ It bears mentioning that reasons to not become a ‘Rainbow Province’ in Zeeland intersected with trope of ‘symbolic politics.’ In the debates that preceded Zeeland becoming a ‘Rainbow Province’ in 2018, ³⁴ interventions for what was seen as specific target groups would ‘deprive’ other groups [doelgroepenbeleid] who did not have such symbols, the government supposedly had more important things to do than raising flags [kerntakendiscussie and rolvermenging], and advocacy groups were seen as coercive [dwang]. (Still, a prominent member of the Christian party who said about himself that he is ‘not a fan of symbolic politics’ eventually made a decisive vote in favor of the ‘Rainbow Province’—a move he himself characterized as ‘a remarkable development’ [bijzondere ontwikkeling].) Similar reasons were mentioned several years later, in 2023, in debates about raising the ‘Rainbow Flag’ ³⁵ and signing the ‘Rainbow Agreement,’ ³⁶ accompanied by the comments that there is ‘no desire for a flag parade,’ that LGBTQIA+-policies are ‘ideological policies,’ and that ‘we are there for everybody already anyway’ and that group-specific interventions would ‘hollow out’ the equal treatment principle in the constitution [artikel 1].

Symbols do something and seem to be something to fight for. When local politicians who oppose flags substantiate their choice to not raise a rainbow flag by claiming that it is ‘naïve to think that that a such flag does something’ ³⁷ and ‘unclear if raising the rainbow flag […] contributes to a structural solution or improvement,’ ³⁸ something is nagging. As expressed by one provincial councilor in the context of the ‘Rainbow Alliance’—that eventually was not signed—‘not doing something is also a signal to the target group.’ ³⁹ Also, although local proponents of ‘rainbow municipalities’ and ‘rainbow provinces’ claim that ‘simply saying it’ is not enough and necessitates ‘policies and concrete actions,’ ⁴⁰ pragmatic approaches that are not upfront ‘substantive’ can be an initial way for social justice to take hold. One time in his office, the director of the local anti-discrimination agency for instance mentioned to me that ‘It does not matter to me why a municipality does something with this topic [Diversity and Inclusion].’ He explains to me that, for some municipalities, the only ‘hook’ [haakje] is the ‘the juridical’—i.e. the Dutch constitution and its principle of equal treatment [artikel 1]. For other municipalities, the ‘hook’ of ‘societal participation’ works better—‘as in: everybody should play a part’—and there are also municipalities that ‘attach’ [koppelen] it to ‘inclusion agendas’ regarding ‘accessibility’ that are prescribed by the UN. ‘And this is a very good thing, I find,’ he remarked. ‘You have to start somewhere.’

Postcolonial performances

In the aftermath of the violent murder of George Floyd in 2020 in the United States that sparked racial justice protests and awareness of institutional racism across the United States and in Europe, and in the Netherlands, the ‘Advisory Group Dialogue Group History of Slavery’ [Adviescollege Dialooggroep Slavernijverleden] was installed. On the annual celebration of ‘Keti Koti’ [The Chain is Cut] in 2021, a commemoration of the abolition of slavery, this advisory group launched the report ‘Chains of the Past’ [Ketenen van het Verleden], in which they advised the Dutch state to apologize for slave trade. The municipalities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam did so in 2021, followed by several other municipalities. Eventually, in 2022, the former Dutch minister apologized on behalf of the national government. These reports, in combination with the apologies by the Dutch state and other big municipalities, motivated the Province of Zeeland and its two municipalities that were most involved in the trading of enslaved people (Middelburg and Vlissingen) to make an apology in 2023. The current governing bodies of Zeeland are the legal successor of those responsible for slavery. Apologies took place during the Commemoration Year History of Slavery [Herdenkingsjaar Slavernijverleden], where it was remembered that Netherlands abolished slavery 150 years ago (in 1873). The pressure that politicians and activists exert on local governments can be contextualized by the upsurge of ‘national conversations’ about slavery across the Atlantic world (Hall, 2018) and of activists who challenge the demonization of LGBTQIA+-communities (Siddiqui, 2021).

A key figure at the background of these events was Angélique. Angélique is a former representative of the Labour party in the City Council in the Zeeuwish harbor city Vlissingen before starting her own political party—which she did because she felt the Labour party was ‘suffocating,’ that ‘her ideas were seen as irrelevant,’ and that she felt ‘silenced.’ ⁴¹ As a representative, in 2020, she was the first to appeal to city administration of Vlissingen for apologies for the ‘history of slavery’ ⁴² —which eventually happened in 2023—and in 2021, she was the first to call for the installation of a local monument. ⁴³ When we met, she worked at the local office of the Anti-Discrimination Agency, and was involved in multiple grassroots initiatives including Keti Koti Zeeland. About these multiple roles, she one time commented to me when I visited her in her office: ‘People find it hard. Very hard. [They ask me:] “When are you the Anti-Discrimination Agency?’ When are you Keti Koti?”’ For Angélique, this is a modality of what she calls ‘comfortable box thinking’ [veilig hokjesdenken]. ‘I don’t like boxes. I’m not in a box. You got the wrong person if you want boxes.’ Alongside her intersectional activism, Angélique presents herself as what she calls a ‘Suri-Zeeuwse’—a contraction of ‘Surinamese’ and ‘Zeeuws.’ She is a descendent of people who lived in slavery under the rule of Dutch colonizers in Suriname.

Getting provincial councilors to apologize was not easy. In a parliamentary meeting, ⁴⁴ one member of parliament who considers himself ‘the white norm’ [gewoon blank] considered apologies a matter of ‘virtue exhibitionism’ [deugdpronkerij], ‘hypocrisy,’ and claimed that ‘people in Zeeland sometimes had worse lives than slaves.’ In this same meeting, another representative considered apologies a form of ‘arbitrariness’ because there are also ‘white slaves’ [blanke slaven], and yet another member insists that apologies for slavery are a ‘hollowing out’ of the phenomenon of ‘apologies.’ About the eventual apologies in Middelburg, A local councilor remarked that, despite apologies elsewhere in the country, they were ‘a struggle’ [worsteling] and ‘certainly not a done deal [geen gelopen race].’ In Vlissingen, some city councilors were against apologies: they experienced apologies as a form of coercion, feared financial claims, and put into question the responsibility of the current city council for slavery. ⁴⁵ Angélique told me she finds it painful that these councilors—in her words—‘downplay’ slavery. I an interview with a local newspaper, she compared the apologies with a barking dog who is being given a trampoline: ‘For 150 years, my people were a little dog at the fence. Jumping and barking. […] Now, at last, it feels like we have been given a trampoline. We jump higher, and we are visible longer.’ ⁴⁶

But Angélique’s efforts to have a monument installed kept on hitting a wall. The night before Keti Koti would be celebrated and the city administration would apologize for the history of slavery, Angélique, on behalf of Keti Koti Zeeland, took the initiative to install a monument commemorating slave trade on the boulevard. She told me she did so because, up until that point, ‘There had been a lot of talk. Just talk, talk, talk. And barely any action.’ While seven other Dutch cities that were prominent in slave trade had already installed such a monument in the preceding years, Vlissingen, a city characterized by academic researchers as undisputed capital of Dutch slave trade, lagged behind. The monument was made by a local artist, who, together with Angélique, located it at the boulevard, at a place where up until 150 years ago—until the Dutch state abolished slavery—slave ships would sail by. The monument took the shape of a metal conus with a chain attached to it that symbolizes not also shackles but also ‘the chains that connect us’—the artist explained in an interview. ⁴⁷ The conus has cut-outs in the shape of drops that represent sea water, tears, and sweat. On the top of the conus, there is a bowl that can be lifted. Only when the bowl is lifted, it is visible from behind the brick wall that the monument is deliberately placed behind. ‘If you are not ready, if cannot bear to see it, you don’t have to see it,’ Angélique explained her choice of locating the monument behind the wall to me. All of this took place the day before Keti Koti, when the municipality of Vlissingen would present their public apologies about the city’s ‘history of slavery’ [slavernijverleden]. The monument was not intended as protest, but as a ‘helping hand’ to the municipality. ⁴⁸

But the day after its installation—on Keti Koti—people damaged the monument with racist and fascist slogans and stickers. On top of that, the municipality in Vlissingen considered the monument ‘illegal,’ and put pressure on Angélique to remove it. ⁴⁹ Together with the artist, Angélique wondered how this damage and forced removal would transform the meaning of the public apologies for the history of slavery that had been made: ‘If the proof [het bewijs] of these apologies—the monument—has to go, what do these apologies even mean?,’ the artist said. ⁵⁰ ‘Not placing the monument is a symbol for the lack of a moral compass and demonstrates that there is racism in our society,’ ⁵¹ he added. About half a year later, early 2024, the majority of the City Council voted against the reinstalment of the monument. I met Angélique in her office a day later. ‘What makes me sad, what makes me most emotional,’ she said to me, ‘is that they framed us as being a nuisance. As difficult. The history of slavery being something difficult. Something that Vlissingen played such a big role in. They just put it aside.’

The disavowal of the symbol comes in clearly. Angélique: ‘The political game that is being played here is played in such a dirty [vuil] way. Just looking away from this theme. This looking away… I mean… Zeeland seems to be the cradle of those who look away [de bakermat van wegkijkers].’ Angélique starts to cry. ‘The ease with which white people simply don’t want to talk about it… The luxury of this position of ignorance. Just not wanting to know, because you don’t want to give up this luxury of ignorance.’ I offer to stop recording, take a break, and propose to not use this part of the conversation, but Angélique says: ‘It’s fine. I just want to talk about it. That is acknowledged. Because we still have to work double as hard to get somewhere. But again, we are being disqualified as lazy, stupid, and difficult. I am enraged [razend]. It has been such a long haul already.’

Conclusions

The attempt to erect the slavery monument in Vlissingen is preceded by decades of attempts to bring the ongoing legacies of slavery into the public domain. While previous monuments meant to commemorate colonial legacies seemed to enable celebrations of multiculturalism writ large instead of making visible slavery and its aftermaths in the form of anti-Black racism, in Zeeland, the paradigm of Diversity seemed a vessel for LGBTQIA+ advocacy and postcolonial activism. While discourses of ‘Diversity’ are observed to carry the risk of concealing problems, that is not what seemed to be happening Zeeland. It is striking how the initiators of a postcolonial monument that they framed as ‘Diversity’ effort anticipated the politics of disavowal—in being deliberately placing it behind a brick wall. The materialization of evidence of slave trade was literally covered up behind a façade to protect the fragility of those who want to look away. Still, the monument was not tolerated by the local governing authorities in the public space. In a place that some people characterize as the cradle of those who look away, the forced removal of the monument facilitated the ongoing ‘putting aside’ of colonial afterlives.

In the upsurge of ‘national conversations’ about slavery across the Atlantic world and of activists who challenge the demonization of LGBTQIA+-communities, there seems to be increasing space for Black and queer activists to unfold a counternarrative. Even in the Dutch province of Zeeland—a non-hospitable environment for LGBTQIA+-rights and advocacy against anti-Black racism—there seems to be political ‘progress.’ Flags are hailed, apologies are made, and ‘facts’ are no longer lacking. Government authorities commissioned historical research about their role in slavery. The numbers are out. In the words of Said (1984), we could say that Black and queer activists have more ‘permission to narrate.’ But while white historians hand their commissioned research to government authorities, the visible artifacts in the public space by Black and queer advocacy groups remain contested. While the ongoing legacies of empire are known, its artefacts are pushed out of view. And while commitments to LGBTQIA-rights are made, substantive action is not taken.

In a context were symbolic and ritualized expressions of—what is seen as—‘Diversity’ are not exactly met with a lot of happiness, we should be careful to dismiss symbols and rituals as toothless. We do no longer live in a time where discourses of Diversity are something that organizations can take pride in. Symbols and rituals can be a form of counter-aesthetization that make possible counter-insurgent forms of seeing, interrogate hegemonic forms of knowing, and narrate social injustices and forms of structural violence. The repression and disqualification of these symbols and rituals makes their potential all the more poignant, and seem to indicate that these symbols and rituals do something after all. This rubs up against critiques that these symbols and rituals are obligatory depoliticized non-performatives. Of course, the sabotaging of substantive and more committal policies is amiss, but the dismissal of counter-hegemonic spatialization as ‘symbolic’—as if ‘symbolic’ equals redundancy—is, too.

While knowledge brings in motion symbols and rituals—as the commissioned research by historians that documented the depth of Zeeland’s complicity in slave trade catalyzed ritualized apologies—preventing symbols and rituals from the public sphere enables the disavowal of this knowledge. What this points to is that, somewhat unlike the time in which critical race scholars in the Netherlands did their ground-breaking work, disavowal does not necessarily hand in hand with denial. Without in any way contesting these early approaches that have been put forward, it seems important to point out that, in the ethnographic dynamics I unfolded, knowing in itself is not rejected. What happens is that forms of anti-discrimination aesthetics in the public sphere that would make turning a blind eye to knowledge difficult are warded off, and that symbols and signs are consistently disqualified—irrespective and regardless of knowing. These are the aesthetics of disavowal this article has brought attention to.