Demonstrating Dutch: Nationalism and Cultural Racism in the 2013 Anti-Putin and Pro-Black Pete Protests in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article examines two separate events of 2013: the pro-Black Pete demonstration in the Hague and the anti-Putin demonstration in Amsterdam. By analyzing the contexts and bodies of these debates, this paper looks at several ways in which a Dutch national subject is imagined within these events. I argue that these are local and global sites that are both creating, and created by, structural forces of in- and exclusion within and beyond a notion of “Dutch national identity.” In this paper, I use a transnational feminist framework and queer of color critique to analyze the multiple linkages within, between, and among both spaces to ask how Dutchness is demonstrated.