Framed against Timothy Clark's comments on the potency of ecocriticism, in this contribution I first zoom in on how cultural critique according to Rosemarie Buikema can contribute to discussions on matters of common concern. I then sketch two lines of argument that emerge from her work: firstly, the way in which art and culture can break through societal silences and, secondly, the importance of history and the past for cultural production in the present. Both issues are important where it concerns climate change and the Anthropocene. They lead to the essential question when thinking about ecocriticism: not 'where goes cultural critique' (the 'quo vadis' question), but what kind of critique is necessary?
In this chapter Rosemarie Buikema elaborates on how decolonial feminist artists and scholars are engaged in knowledge production by means of deploying a poetics of recycling as a way to re-orientate themselves towards the relation between the subject and the object of knowledge, matter and form, signifier and signifed. Buikema analyses the work of El Anatsui and Nandipha Mntambo to illustrate the power of this poetics of recycling and gives the example of an exhibition in which the Museum of Equality and Difference (MOED) re-curated the cultural heritage of abolitionism, giving centre stage to the black, previously enslaved woman Sojourner Truth, rather than the white Dutchman Nicolaas Beets. She concludes that the collective fijield of decolonial feminism envelops engaged scholars and artists like a sensitive skin that continuously responds to the context in which it fnds itself.
In A monument to the country. Official statistics in Belgium, 1795-1870, Nele Bracke unravels why and how the Belgian state and its predecessors organized and developed an official statistical apparatus in order to collect numerical information. The study captures the underlying objectives and structures, as well as the methods to compile statistics. Nele Bracke investigates the meaning and significance of government statistics in the 19th-century State and society. In Belgium, early social scientists established an internationally renowned 'statistical system' designed to collect information about the country, the people and the society. This 'statistical system' was built around the 'Commission centrale de Statistique' (statistical committee) and the production of demographic, economic and agricultural censuses. In the first part of the book, the author analyzes the institutional history of the 'Commission centrale de Statistique' and its predecessors. In the second part of the book, she studies the censuses
In 1635 or shortly thereafter, a Dutch ship was laden with all sorts of materials and products, mostly metals, but also textiles from the booming wool industries in both Flanders and Holland, a shipment of leather and exotic ivory. It was a ship of considerable size (at least 300 last) and departed from the Dutch Republic at a time of profound troubles. The Eighty Years' War between the Republic and Spain was far from settled. War at sea was unremitting and intensifying, with Dunkirk privateers an unruly menace to Dutch shipping. Spanish rule in the southern Low Countries was highly militarised, and constant campaigns were waged against it from the North. Central Europe was devastated by the Thirty Years' War, which had entered a new phase through new alliances. The heavy and strategically valuable cargo of the Dutch ship was assembled from North and South, as well as from a range of places in central Europe. The ship departed for a destination that it never reached. It sank off the coast of Texel, where it was discovered 350 years later. From 1985 to 1999 the wreck site and finds were subject to archaeological research, producing information on the ship, its setting and historical context as well as on the production and distribution of the individual shipments in the cargo, and informing us about the structure of early modern industry and trade, operating despite and because of the war. The present study, initiated by Wilma Gijsbers in 2010 and supported by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE), the Maritime Archaeology Programme at the University of Southern Denmark (MAP-SDU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; a one-year Odyssee grant), is the first to bring together all this evidence and evaluate it as a whole.
