Dutch Politics of Intimacy in Colony and Metropole and Their Afterlives: Reflections on a Shifting Political Economy of Intimacy

This chapter analyses Dutch politics of intimacy in colonial Suriname, Curaçao and Indonesia and in the Netherlands. It discusses how the colonial authorities constructed and regulated interracialized intimacies and multiracialized bodies, how these policies were connected to racialized opportunity structures, and how the targeted people responded. It then examines how the political problematization of interracialized intimacies became intertwined with constructions of the Dutch nation against the background of the increased relocation of people from the colonies to the Netherlands in the twentieth century, with metropolitan political dynamics testifying to the long durée of colonial politics of intimacy.