Francio Guadeloupe, Black Man in the Netherlands: An Afro-Antillean Anthropology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. xxxix + 181 pp. (Paper US$ 30.00)
“This essay can only be what it is: a sweet and sour urban tune heralding an antiracist future” (p. xiv). With this poetic opening, the Dutch anthropologist Francio Guadeloupe situates his experience as an Afro-Antillean man living in the Netherlands. Black Man in the Netherlands carves out intellectual space to give meaning to his identity and existence, built on a mix of experiences and ethnographic research, and glued together by what he conceptualizes as Urban Blackness.
For a nonanthropologist reader, Guadeloupe’s methodological introduction is dense and complex, though important for understanding his positionality, both as a scholar and as a Dutch Caribbean. What becomes evident is that he refuses to yield to the pressure of antiracism scholars and activists to adopt the common narrative of oppression, to “embody the role of the racially hurt outsider of the Dutch world” (p. xxi). That narrative, he argues, only further contributes to the naturalization of humans into racial groups. He warns us that any given description bears the risk of labeling becoming possession, and therefore another instrument of exclusion. Nor does racism have to lead to “eternal senses of non-belonging” (p. xxi). Instead, he engages the reader, just like C.L.R James, one of his sources of inspiration, did, to “see and act on liberating possibilities in the midst of structural symbolic and material injustice” (p. xxviii).
Guadeloupe’s perspective requires hope, realism, and optimism. It allows us to reimagine what Hannah Arendt has conceptualized as the existential power to express oneself and to act as human beings collectively (The Human Condition, 1958). Guadeloupe finds traces of this existential power in “small acts of decoloniality in convivial spaces, through urban popular culture” (p. 86).
Black Man in the Netherlands is an ode to urban popular culture, to the mixing and remixing of cultural expressions, and to conviviality. Each chapter offers a journey through Guadeloupe’s descriptions of friends, acquaintances, and research projects. It starts with his letter for a baby named Alyah who had just lost her father. Guadeloupe advises her (and thus us) to respect a simple philosophical formula: “I/We, meaning I am because We Are, and We are what We are because of how each and every individual acts and thinks” (p. 4). In the chapters that follow we visit the living room of Miss Anette, we go on stage with comedian Howard Komproe, we get access to the community centers of “oma Bea,” and we watch the friendship between Koen and Judmar evolve.
By eloquently describing acts of Dutch citizens who fight racism, Guadeloupe reveals traces of decolonization, of creolization, and of the construction of a more inclusive belonging. His inclusive concept of Urban Blackness offers us an alternative to the academic practice of constructing theories of Blackness as “a critical terrain which only the chosen few can enter,” as bell hooks criticized in Teaching to Transgress.
With this book, Guadeloupe explicitly makes room for nuance to the academic debate on Blackness. This becomes apparent in his attentiveness to his surroundings, which allows him to distance himself from essentialist identity politics, without losing sight of the problematic secondarization of brown-skinned people in Dutch society. He nuances the terminology on skin tones, preferring “brown” and “pink” over “black” and “white.” In addition, he takes context into account when describing racist incidents he has encountered. And he offers readers an insightful distinction in the variation of approaches of pink-skinned Dutch to multiculturalization. He even tempers his own ode to Urban Black culture by pointing out its less inclusive sides, such as the heteronormativity, the misogyny, the hedonism, and the capitalist elements of the music industry. The nuanced and inclusive approach Guadeloupe masters is, in my view, an essential contribution to the current body of literature on identity.
The final chapter reads as a critical love poem, placed in the context of a reunion with his friends, and dedicated to Time, the real factor of our changing world that we simply must acknowledge and accept. As readers we are reminded of the fact that we have a choice about how we perceive the world. Guadeloupe’s concept of Urban Blackness allows us to build a meta identity that surpasses the classic race identification and gives us agency in creating our own narratives. This book inspired me, and will hopefully inspire many more academics to embrace complexity, plurality, and optimism in our attempts to contribute to the creation of a liberated, nonracist, nonoppressive society.
