A Science of Reform and Retrenchment: Black Kinship Studies, Decolonisation and the Dutch Welfare State

Abstract

This paper charts the emergence of social scientific studies on Black kinship from its origins in the United States and colonial Caribbean to its revivification in the decolonisation-era Netherlands. Demonstrating how racial knowledge was from its inception a tool of transnational governance, the author argues that Black kinship studies also informed the development of the Dutch welfare state in the aftermath of decolonisation. Drawing upon Dutch state – and municipal – archival sources as well as the private papers and published works of key figures in Black kinship studies, she charts how publicly-funded sociologists and anthropologists tracked Dutch citizens from Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles through the metropolitan welfare state, producing a corpus of knowledge that connected kinship and welfare reliance. Though Caribbean-born Dutch citizens opposed the racist assumptions of state-funded scholarship, research on Black kinship ultimately informed the course of Dutch welfarism from the expansion of interventionist programmes in the 1970s to retrenchment in the 1990s.