The Crow's Nest and the Hold

In this essay, I deploy what Renisa Mawani (2018) has called an “oceanic framework and methodology” for the study of Dutch imperialism and its aftermath. A turn to the ocean allows for a different understanding of the breadth
and depth of the Dutch colonial project. This chapter evolved out of the Amsterdam Museum exhibition Golden Coach (2021) and the Futures of the Dutch Colonial Past symposium. In the first part, I present an oceanic reading of the Golden Coach exhibition to show how Dutch maritime imagination formed the conditions of possibility for the panel ‘Tribute from the colonies’ emergence. In the second part, I turn to the oceanic imaginaries of Surinamese anticolonial and antifascist revolutionary Anton de Kom. In Wij Slaven van Suriname (1934), De Kom offers a poetic oceanic lens to critically examine Dutch maritime self-perception.