User:Trashpuppy/TO

Thesis Proposal

Working Title: Seaing History

This thesis will blend critical speculative and essayistic fiction to recount the socio-economic development and colonial expansion of The Netherlands and the continued repercussion thereof, from the perspective of the sea. The sea, at once ancient and new every day, local and global, shapeshifting and plural, is a witness. Used and abused as an infrastructure for trade, transport (of data), and territorial expansion. A source of creation and destruction.

By adopting the sea as the perspective of this thesis, I aim to talk about history by presenting a subjective non-linear reflection on history. The text will make extensive use of footnotes, incorporating various sources and stories in a collagelike manner. This exploration will occur within the framework of 4 specific locations, each giving rise to an experimental essay. The following section presents a proposed point of departure for the poetic enquiry informing each of the essays.

Bibliography

• Fox, D. (2019). Limbo. Fitzcarraldo Editions.
• Cole, T. (2012) The City as Palimpsest
• Coghlan, J.M. (2020). The Cambridge companion to literature and food. Chapter 11: Postcolonial Tastes. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
• Geuze, A. & Koekebakker, O. (2005). The Flood : 2nd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam ; catalogue ; [26 mei - 26 juni 2005]. Rotterdam: Internationale Architectuur Biënnale.
• Jaojoco, P. (2018). Spatial Historiographies: The Decolonial Mapping Toolkit. [online] THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/cartography-power/spatial-historiographies-decolonial-mapping-toolkit-patrick-jaojoco-frontview [Accessed 5 Dec. 2021].
• Klose, A. (2016). Container Principle. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mit Press.
• Lanchester, J. (2021). Gargantuanisation. [online] London Review of Books. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/john-lanchester/gargantuanisation [Accessed 15 Nov. 2021].
• Ocean Archive (2020) Corona under the Ocean. Episode 4: Water has Memory [Podcast]. TBA21–Academy and the Art Institute, FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. Available from: https://ocean-archive.org/view/1401 [Accessed 27 Nov. 2021
• Phillips, R. (2018). Placing Time, Timing Space: Dismantling the Master’s Map and Clock. [online] THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/cartography-power/placing-time-timing-space-dismantling-masters-map-clock-rasheedah-phillips [Accessed 5 Dec. 2021].
• REZAIRE, T. (2017). DEEP DOWN TIDAL
• Sekula, A., Buchloh, B.H.D. and Kunsthalle Bielefeld (1995). Allan Sekula : fish story. Düsseldorf: Richter.
• Sparkly Kat, A. (2021). Post-colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power and Labour.
• Taiwo, O. (2021). Our Planet Is Heating Up. Why Are Climate Politics Still Frozen? [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01/our-planet-is-heating-up-why-are-climate-politics-still-frozen-colonialism-environment [Accessed 4 Nov. 2021].
• Varvia, C. (2017). Students: Shipping Tales. [online] THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/09-islands/students-shipping-tales-christina-varvia.[Accessed 3 Nov. 2021].

Annotated Bibliography

1. Jaojoco, P. (2018). Spatial Historiographies: The Decolonial Mapping Toolkit. [online] THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/cartography-power/spatial-historiographies-decolonial-mapping-toolkit-patrick-jaojoco-frontview [Accessed 5 Dec. 2021].

Patrick Jaojoco is a writer and curator based in New York. His current focus is in political ecology and intersections of radically nonlinear histories and temporalities. This article, published in the (critically engaged) architecture magazine The Funambulist, explores the question what a decolonial map would look like. As cartography is rooted in colonialism, how can we imagine a counter-usage of the map? What Jaojoco proposes is that cartography should be understood as a not merely a spatial, but also temporal practice. To include history of erasure and injustices into a map would help to connect the past and present. Linking existing power structures to their problematic histories. Maps, are mostly used to document the present or construct the future. To include the history would propose an alternative past and radical futures.

I have thought about this article a lot, especially in the earlier phases of the thesis when developing a research question. Jaojoco in his article mainly focusses on the US and colonised territories more specifically. I started thinking about ways in which to adopt his proposed method to the context of a territory carrying out colonisation. I think in some ways with this thesis I focus on place, Rotterdam, through time, attempting to record and connect injustices to present day. In this way, this article informs the method of the thesis. 

2. REZAIRE, T. (2017). DEEP DOWN TIDAL

Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing. Her multi-dimensional practice focusses on navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles. She conceives of network sciences organic, electronic and spiritual, as healing technologies.

With Deep Down Tidal Rezaire focusses on water, memory and the internet. The interent, the inquality built into its fundaments, is neo-colonial and directly linked to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trading routes. She refers to water as a technology that copies and circulates all that it has seen and will see. Water thus at once becomes ancient and new everyday. This spiritual (as well as scientific) conception of water memory forms a point of departure for my thesis.  

2. Geuze, A. & Koekebakker, O. (2005). The Flood : 2nd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam ; catalogue ; [26 mei - 26 juni 2005]. Rotterdam: Internationale Architectuur Biënnale.

This book is the catalogue of the 2nd International architecture biennale in Rotterdam. This biennale focussed on the relationship between water and urban design in Rotterdam and other places in the world. This book gives quite a good timeline of the relationship of The Netherlands (built) environment to water. I don't think this book really provides such a critical view on this timeline and the implications of the Dutch use and abuse of water as an infrastructure. Talking about colonialism for example only within a specifically Dutch context where business owners are buying up newly formed land from farmers, driving them out of their homes. But maybe this book is precisely for this reason interesting to me, it is provocative. I see a lot of things to add and see some of the tangents of this book as in line with dominant conceptions within Dutch national imaginaries as related to the origin story it tells itself about itself. This book will be very useful for the first chapter of the thesis. 

3. Sparkly Kat, A. (2021). Post-colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power and Labour.

Sparkly Kat investigates western astrology through studying the etymology of the 7 most important planets. They unveil Western astrology, as an "anachronistic archive", a myth-making machine used to underpin racism and white supremacy. It is a language saturated with romanticised images of Greco-Roman times. The West tries to revive itself again and again through these idealised images of Greece and Rome and a "claimed" Roman genealogy. In other words, the storytelling of these ideals still reinforces Western political ideals. 

Sparkly Kat uses western astrology to respond to the west: astrology is here is used socio-politically, not psycho-analytically. It is a critical analysis of western astrology as a language and simultaneously a retelling and reshaping of this language. 

My interest in this book is two-fold. Firstly, I think this post-colonial historical investigation mixed with a re-using and re-telling of the language is something closely associated to what I aim to do with my thesis: re-telling "Dutch" history and present through a critical, post-colonial lens. How The Netherlands tells its history to itself is what I aim to investigate and re-cast. Secondly, with the second chapter (the etymology of the Moon) Sparkly Kat connects the Moon, ruling the tides, to the merchant - and later the (global) market. It is here that I have conceived a lot of the thoughts underpinning the second chapter of my thesis. What the Moon represents in western astrology, material fortune - monetary and the body, I think is very useful for me. The language we use for describing the economy and market is so closely associated to the water: liquidity, flux, sales, solubility etc. 

4. Klose, A. (2016). Container Principle. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mit Press.

Alexander Klose is a German cultural theorist. With this book he investigates the history of the container, how this box impacted our way of thinking and how it came to be the symbol or symptom, of our current state of globalisation. He described how containers collapse time and space and have become the most dynamic and networked object on both land and sea.

This book will be particularly helpful for the 3rd chapter of the thesis that focusses on the Europort. While not focussing on The Netherlands in particular, nor any other country, but rather focussing on the development in logistics from modernity onwards, he does talk a lot about (in)visibility. He calls containers modern-day pandora's steel boxes. Obscuring is a political tool. This made me think of how in history classes there was often an emphasis on the VOC as a transport company rather than the largest colonial enterprise and warmachine. There are a lot of parallels between VOC shipping and Cargo shipping. This also made me think of the image of the Cloud that comes to overshadow the physicality of the internet, the data centers. (In)visibility is one of the bigger threads throughout the thesis I think. How one image or narrative stands in for another.

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