Wigbertson Julian Isenia

This year's pride season marked the 50 th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, an event that, while not the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement in the United States, should at least be viewed as one of the first major milestones in the movement's history. In the Netherlands, too, the history of LGBT activism has been commemorated in the recent exhibition 'With Pride' , organised by IHLIA LGBT Heritage (see the review by Michiel Odijk in this issue). After its first successful run at the Amsterdam Public Library, the exhibition toured the Netherlands and opened in Utrecht during its annual pride festivities on June 3. While praised for its thorough documentation of 40 years of Dutch queer resistance, there was also critique. A number of activists and scholars pointed to a lack of inclusivity and representation, which they argued compromised the exhibition's validity.Wigbertson Julian Isenia and Naomie Pieter, founders of Black Queer and Trans Resistance Netherlands (BQTRNL) and Black Queer Archive, represent two of these critical voices and address the structural exclusion of queers of colour in history writing and archival practices in their work. Julian co-edited the previous issue of Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (vol. 22(2): ‘Sexual Politics Between the Netherlands and the Caribbean: Imperial Entanglements and Archival Desire’) and, together with Gianmaria Colpani, Julian and Naomie organised the roundtable ‘Archiving Queer of Colour Politics in the Netherlands’ (Colpani, Isenia, & Pieter, 2019). In response to the IHLIA exhibi- tion, they proposed an exhibition under the title Nos Tei (Papiamentu/o for ‘We are here’ or ‘We exist’), which is to serve as an addition to the original ‘With Pride’ exhibition and ran independently from 11 July until 4 September

This roundtable stages a conversation amongst activists and cultural producers involved in feminist and queer of colour politics in the Netherlands from the 1980s to the present. Its primary focus is on the collectives and initiatives that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, such as SUHO (Surinamese Homosexuals), Flamboyant, Zami, Sister Outsider, and Strange Fruit. The roundtable participants-Anne Krul, Tieneke Sumter, Andre Reeder, Marlon Reina, and Ajamu-reflect on several issues, amongst which the political orga-nising around blackness in the 1980s and 1990s, the relations between queer of colour collectives and other movements, the links between political orga-nising and cultural work, the differences between activism and archiving in Curaçao and the Netherlands, and, finally, the possibilities and limits of archi-ving queer of colour histories in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The roundta-ble also discusses two exhibitions held at IHLIA LGBT Heritage in Amsterdam: We Live Here (2009), on the history of the black lesbian and gay community in the Netherlands, and With Pride (2018), on the history of Dutch sexual politics.

What does it mean to look for queerness in colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial archives? What can these archives tell us about formations of queer desire and sexual politics across times and places? And what can queerness tell us, in turn, about colonial domination, struggles for decoloni- sation, and the configuration of postcolonial societies? Equally important, what investments come to shape our work when a search for queerness orients our mining of colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial archives? The essays collected in this special issue offer some answers to these questions by discussing the place of sexual politics in the colonial and postcolonial relations between the Netherlands and the Caribbean. In order to do so, they draw on postcolonial studies, cultural studies, feminist and queer theories, as well as current debates on the archive taking place across these fields.

Gianmaria Colpani and Julian Isenia examine the intellectual work performed by queer of color collectives in the Netherlands during the 1980s and 1990s. Discussing two collectives (Sister Outsider and Strange Fruit) and two intellectuals working in them (Professor Gloria Wekker and film-maker André Reeder), they show how queer of color activism emerged from broader cultural exchanges inside and outside Europe.