Smash the Pillars: Decoloniality and the Imaginary of Color in the Dutch Kingdom

About Smash the Pillars

Smash the Pillars builds on and captures the efforts by scholars and activists to decolonize Dutch history and memory and resist the physical, epistemological, and psychological violence imposed by the Dutch state, its institutions, and dominant narratives.

Contributions not only offer an unparalleled glimpse into decolonial activism in the Dutch kingdom but also provide us with a new lens with which to view contemporary decolonial efforts, from the towers of academia to the streets, from theoretical publications to anti-colonial consciousnesses.

The book embodies a sociological call for the re-thinking of Dutch society throughout its transatlantic kingdom.

Co-editors Melissa Weiner and Antonio Carmona Báez will discuss the volume's contents and the context in which decolonial spaces and thought have been developed in contemporary Netherlands.

About the speakers 

Melissa F. Weiner is Associate Professor of Sociology at The College of the Holy Cross. Weiner’s work primarily examines racial identity formation in the context of education, most recently in the Netherlands, focusing on racializing discourses and practices appearing in diverse classrooms.

She has been affiliated with the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (Ercomer) at Utrecht University and the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam. Weiner’s publications include Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City (Rutgers, 2010), articles in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Race, Ethnicity & Education, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Social Problems, Du Bois Review, Sociology Compass, The Sociological Quarterly, and Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, and chapters in multiple edited volumes.

Antonio Carmona Báez is President of the University of St. Martin in the Dutch Antilles and has served as Assistant Professor of social sciences at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Born in New York City and having spent half of his life in the Netherlands, he has also taught at the departments of political science and development studies, and the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.

He is translator of various decolonial works including the forthcoming Wij slaven van Suriname by Anton de Kom. Carmona Báez is author of State Resistance to Globalisation in Cuba (Pluto, 2004) and a number of articles, chapters and contributions concerning political economy, social policy and the condition of labour in the Caribbean and decolonial thought appearing in the Journal of Developing Societies, International Critical Thought, Sexualities, and multiple edited volumes.