2025/03/04 by Marek Susdorf · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/03007766.2025.2468989
openalex publication_date 2025/03/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
The paper investigates the Dutch entry at Eurovision 2021, when the Netherlands’ representative Jeangu Macrooy performed a song that referred to the singer’s Afro-Surinamese origins and to the ages of slavery enforced in Suriname by Dutch colonists between the mid-1600s until its abolition in 1863. I interpret the performance and its public reception through how Western coloniality has been trying to appropriate, simplify, or commodify musical legacies of slavery since the early 1900s. Resultingly, such postcolonial musical hybrids represent the merging of two opposing utopianist ideologies—the call for freedom of those entrapped by the Western capitalist colonial empire and this empire’s continuous urge to expand its authority and modes of exploitation.