The memories they chose to recall present a challenge to two prevailing postcolonial
stories. One is the popular romance of the beloved and nurturing servant
that dominates Dutch memoirs; the other, a story of subaltern memory as the truth
of the colonial past. Our project celebrates neither. Instead, we push the accounts
of former servants against these Dutch renderings to explore how the dissonance
in their perceptions of intimacy and affect may unsettle our certainties about what
constituted the colonial and how it figures in people's memories today