The conference explores the ideas, practices and networks of anticolonial actors who navigated the Dutch empire from the seventeenth century up to today, including freedom fighters and poets, religious leaders and (formerly) enslaved rebels, artists and activists, musicians, political thinkers and intellectuals, journalists and writers. We thus interpret voices of resistance broadly, ranging from political protest to works of fiction and from artistic and literary forms of expression to philosophical tractates as well as pamphlets and other forms of ephemeral writing. We aim to take a long-term perspective from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century and combine East and West that have often been treated as separate sections of the historiography of Dutch empire.

Anticolonial stories have long served as chronicles about heroic resistance such as that of the nineteenth-century Javanese Prince Diponegoro or have confirmed teleological narratives ‘from empire to nation state’. We aim to contextualize such narratives by looking into related memory practices in anticolonial and postcolonial settings and by examining the transnational and transimperial entanglements of anticolonial networks. Besides contributions focusing on better-known anticolonial agitators and their networks, we are also interested in bringing together more subtle stories of, for example, legal resistance and more local accounts of religious defiance or economic subversion. Furthermore, we are interested in exploring not only what voices of resistance were fighting against but also in analysing the constructive agendas they put forth. From histories of political thought to meaningful practices of artistic, religious, and literary resistance, the conference will examine how anticolonial actors in transimperial contexts criticized and shaped the (end of the) Dutch empire.