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This essay takes its point of departure in images of the victims of the 2023 Turkish-Syrian earthquake. It examines their rhetoric, comparing them to those of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who washed ashore on a Turkish beach in 2015, and contrasting with the narrative techniques employed by two contemporary novels. It combines cultural critique with an inquiry into the role of art as an agent of change to imagine new ways of doing citizenship and promoting social change in times of crisis, in line with Rosemarie Buikema's mission to develop new and multilayered scenarios for change and transnational justice.

In this essay I discuss Buikema's ideas about the specific function of literature in times of social upheaval and political violence. Buikema resists the current tendency to reduce engaged novels to their political views and statements about the world. To their author's intentions, basically. A literary analysis has to do justice to the ways in which political themes are represented, which largely escape authorial control. Close (inter)textual analysis can arrive at different experiences of a work of art. Buikema illustrated this conviction with an analysis of Coetzee's Disgrace. I continue her analysis and read Disgrace for its stunning literary representation of hegemonic masculinity and how a white macho man is transformed and healed. Women and blacks guide him in this process.

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?

Reading the news about Iran today one can hardly imagine that relations between the Netherlands and Iran were excellent until 1979. Mohammed-Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Persia, was known in The Netherlands as a visionary and reformer. Persia was represented as a mythical land with an ancient civilization. The Dutch royal family enjoyed visiting the shah, and large and small Dutch companies were successful in Iran.

When in the 1970s awareness spread about repression under the shah, the Dutch government was faced with difficult choices. How could these relations be continued, now that public opinion had turned against it? The Dutch government decided to ignore the criticisms, and firmly held on to the idea of the shah as an enlightened despot. As such, it did not see the Iranian Revolution coming, and suffered the consequences.

This article is focused on Professor Buikema's intellectual oeuvre and the relation between art and politics as it materialised in MOED (Museum of Equality and Difference). Astrid Kerchman and Rosa Wevers, MOED's former project coordinators, reflect on their collaboration with Buikema through an interview with artist Iris Kensmil on the important role of art in complex social issues relating to emancipation, representation, and resistance. Drawing on the interview with Kensmil and Buikema's Revolts in Cultural Critique (2020), Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken reflects on the meaning of feminist leadership within an institutional context.

Urbanity and migration are considered to be two basic components in definitions of modernity. They force us to reflect on how the boundaries between the local and the global are determined and surpassed. Often this results in politically charged discussions about transnationality and national identity, monolingualism and multilingualism, inclusion and exclusion. The contributions to this issue of CLW demonstrate that literature can play a significant role in this debate. The authors highlight the representation of city and migration in a wide variety of novels published in Dutch, English, German, Spanish and French with a particular interest in political commitment.

"Historical research into disasters and disaster processing has expanded enormously in recent years. The threat of climate disasters and pandemics is raising awareness that disasters have a major impact on community development. The period 1755-1918 also saw numerous disasters that affected Dutch society, such as the Leiden gunpowder disaster of 1807, several cholera outbreaks and large-scale river floods. Volcanic eruptions and flooding were recurring phenomena in the colonies. And then there were major international disasters, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Spanish flu in 1918. Crisis and Catastrophe examines the influence of these catastrophes on belief in God, solidarity and charity, and local and national identity formation. Attention is also paid to the cultural representation of disasters in literature, paintings and memorial books."