Confronting Caribbean Challenges researcher, Sanne Rotmeijer, is just back from almost a year doing fieldwork on Curaçao and St. Maarten. She shares her perspective on identity, belonging, and what Brexit and nationalist...
Walking through the entrance gate to the shopping street ‘Pasar Baru’, Jakarta, was like stepping into my favourite movie, says Jemma Middleton. I recognised the different shops, the old and new architecture, the way a shopkeeper was advertising...
Confronting Caribbean Challenges researcher Jessica Vance Roitman was recently in Havana, Cuba for the yearly Association of Caribbean Historians conference. In this blog, she contemplates her role as a tourist feeding...
The fasting month in Indonesia comes with new gadgets and ‘special offers’ advertisements. Chris Chaplin wonders whether or not this affects the pious character of fasting. On the 6th June the majority of Muslims across the world welcomed the start...
Historian Bart Luttikhuis examines the origins of the widely-used estimate of 100,000 Indonesian victims of the Dutch-Indonesian War of Decolonization (1945-1950), and calls into question its accuracy. Ultimately, he wonders, does the number really matter?...
Unlike social scientists, many historians do not very often engage in a dialogue with their research subjects. For, as far as we know, the dead don’t read or speak back. But what happens if a historian ...
Indonesia's democratisation process is a case of the half-full glass. Pessimists argue that elections have descended into an ugly spectacle of vote-buying and manipulation that does little to distribute power in...
At the end of his brief European tour (Germany, Belgium, the UK), President Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’) last Friday paid a one day visit to the Netherlands. He had breakfast with the prime minister, and visited a large scale ...
KITLV researcher Jessica Vance Roitman is just back from two weeks working in the National Archives of Curacao. She reflects on the art of history, working with archival material, and the glimpses she’s caught of the social history of the Dutch Windward...
Communist Cuba is changing at an unprecedented pace. But nothing is what it seems in Cuba. Gert Oostindie reports after making a television documentary on the eve of president Obama’s visit. Classic Cadillacs and other old timers are ...