Chapter 11 Oscillating between Margin and Centre: Dutch Literature of Migration
In: Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writers since 1945Search for other papers by Liesbeth Minnaard in
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Abstract
In the Netherlands, immigrant and ethnic-minority writing generally falls into three overlapping categories: postcolonial literature, Indies writing and what is nowadays mostly called migration literature – the work by writers whose presence in the Netherlands is somehow connected to the labour migration of the 1960s. This contribution describes the appearance of this literature, its initial exoticisation and the celebration of its (and its writers’) supposed ‘otherness’, the growth of a more serious interest in this work within the mainstream literary field as well as within academic circles and, finally, the acceptance of migrant and ethnic-minority writing, on the basis of its literary merits, as Dutch literature.