Scholars from universities and cultural institutions across the Low Countries respond to Gloria Wekker’s ground-breaking book White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016). This special issue grew out of an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Liège on 24 March 2021.

Table of contents

Introduction: Reading White Innocence across Disciplines in the Low Countries

Elisabeth Bekers, Kris Steyaert and Chika Unigwe

‘How Does One Survive the University as a Space Invader?’: Beyond White Innocence in the Academy. An Interview with Gloria Wekker

Gloria Wekker

White … or Not Quite: The Representation of African Soldiers of the First World War

Dominiek Dendooven

Layering the Cultural Archive: A Critical Reading of Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence and Rembrandt’s Painting of Two Black Men

Agnes Andeweg

When Queerness Is Tinged with Nostalgia: Whitewashing Homonormativity in Low Countries Nationalism and Re-Imagining the Queer-of-Colour Past in North American Television and Fiction

Bastien Bomans

How the Flemings Became White: Race, Language, and Colonialism in the Making of Flanders

Sibo Rugwiza Kanobana

Aicha Is More Dutch but Less Dynamic than Ahmed: The Gendered Nature of Race in the Netherlands

Stefan Grondelaers and Paul van Gent

White Discomforts, Black Burdens

Chika Unigwe

Why My Aunt Was Hiding from the Sun

Sacha Celine Verheij