The case of Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s statue : Repressive voices and resistant silences in public space

Abstract

Jan Pieterszoon Coen is remembered both as a hero for establishing the Dutch spice monopoly, and as a perpetrator who in 1621 massacred the Bandanese population in pursuit of that monopoly. After his statue in Hoorn fell off its pedestal in 2011, the municipality decided to renovate it, in disregard of protesters requesting the statue’s relocation to Westfries Museum. As a compromise, the municipality granted the protest a voice by providing the statue with an updated inscription that acknowledges Coen’s controversial legacy, and an accompanying exhibition in Westfries Museum. In this chapter, I will analyze this paradoxical interplay of voice and silence in the negotiation of postcolonial memory, in which being granted a voice actually means being silenced.