In the introduction to the recently published Dutch Racism, editors Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving assert an exceptional quality to racism in the Netherlands. Describing it as “complex, paradoxical and a contested domain,” they suggest that the special quality of Dutch racism results from, among other things, its entanglement with willful ignorance and denial, the lack of a shared discourse on racism, a rise in populist mainstreaming of xenophobia, and the emergence of a discourse of the “right to offend” as part of the freedom of speech.1
While Essed and Hoving's claim for exceptionalism may be an arguable one, its validity for my purposes here is that their project delineates the terrain within which artist Charl Landvreugd's installation Movement No. 7: On Edgar Cairo was staged at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam between January and March 2014. For even if we are to question the need to bracket racism's...
