Discord Consensus

complex, topical stories to political contemporary events, such as the
independence wars in Indonesia in 1948 and global migration in the
2000s. Thus these reviewers refuse to reflect on colonial discrimination
in the postcolonial present.
Introduction
In this chapter I will differentiate between ‘post-​colonial’ with a hyphen,
which I understand as simply the period after decolonisation, and
‘postcolonial’ without a hyphen as a way of critical thinking that is aware
of and resistant to colonialist strategies.
With this first, declarative sentence I intend to do more than offer
guidance to the reader or key definitions. With it I aim to stress a temporal
aspect that is integral to my understanding of postcolonial literature:
that the postcolonial novel engages with the politics of colonialism,
which exists outside the materiality of the book. It thus confronts contemporary
readers with colonial pasts and places, and shows its relevance
and urgency in the post-​colonial present. In this way, postcolonial
literature challenges the traditional consensus on time as progressively
chronological, in line with colonialist ideas about colonial development.
What comes post, this critical form of literature hints, is not necessarily
beyond colonialism. Posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti explains:
postcolonial time [. . .] is not frozen for the postcolonial subject and
the memory of the past is not a stumbling block that hinders access
to a changed present. Quite the contrary, the ethical impulse that
sustains the postcolonial mode makes the original culture into a
living experience which functions as a motor for cultural self styling.
[This] produces the core of the world’s best literature. 1
I shall illustrate this postcolonial mode whilst discussing the work of the
Dutch author Hella S. Haasse (1918–​2011) who was born into a Dutch
civil servant family in the colonial Dutch East Indies, focusing on her
literary debut Oeroeg (1948), her last novel Sleuteloog (2002) and the
contemporary reception of these works. Haasse’s postcolonial standpoints
prove to be in contrast with contemporary readers’ responses at
the time of publication, as expressed in newspaper reviews. My selection
of Dutch newspaper reviews is based on Literom, 2 a Dutch online
database. Literom enabled me to find reviews that were published in the
‘A sort of wishful dream’ 119