Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Hanneke Stuit
2023-2024
Home institution
University of Amsterdam
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Cultural studies
Literature
Theme(s)
Contemporary violence & Justice
Cultural Studies
Migration
Post-colonialism
Fellowship dates
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Biography
I am Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and am affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).
Currently, I’m working on my second monograph, provisionally entitled Reimaging the Rural: Pastoral Entrapment and Dis-Enclosure in South Africa (Bloomsbury Academic). The book examines South African literature and film to glean new registers for thinking the rural beyond the trap of dominant and idyllic imaginaries about the countryside that are rooted in devastating colonial habits of thought about enclosure, cultivation and extraction. This project came to fruition in the ERC project Rural Imaginations.
My new project is entitled The Carceral Idyll: Imperial Legacies, Domestic Colonisation and the Will to Confine in the Netherlands, in which I explore the development of the “carceral idyll” – the belief that confining people in the right way and in the right place will benefit society – as portrayed in literature, documentaries, and marketing materials related to three specific detention sites in the Netherlands: the Colonies of Benevolence, camp Westerbork, and the asylum center in Ter Apel. The project seeks to shed light on the often unacknowledged influence of Dutch colonialism on imprisonment, both at home and abroad.
Research Project
The Carceral Idyll: Imperial Legacies, Domestic Colonisation and the Will to Confine in the Netherlands
In the Netherlands, carceral imaginaries tend to cluster into three seemingly unrelated strands: in popular culture there is a fascination with prisons as spectacles, collective memory tends to focus on experiences from camps during World War II, and contemporary media foreground precarious living conditions in refugee camps and migrant detention centers. Surprisingly, colonial histories that have structured these sites of confinement and surveillance, are often overlooked in discussions and depictions of these carceral forms.
Hanneke Stuit aims to explore the development of the “carceral idyll” – the belief that confining people in the right way and in the right place will benefit society – as portrayed in literature, documentaries, and marketing materials related to three specific detention sites in the Netherlands: the Colonies of Benevolence, camp Westerbork, and the asylum center in Ter Apel. The project seeks to shed light on the often unacknowledged influence of Dutch colonialism on imprisonment, both at home and abroad.
Research Interests:
carceral; rural; domestic colonisation; South Africa; The Netherlands; literature, affect & genre; metaphoricity & space