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7 The Making of Suriland The Binational Development of a Black Community between the Tropics and the North Sea LIVIO SANSONE A msterdam is an important city of the region we now know, after Paul Gilroy (1993), as the Black Atlantic. It has become so relatively recently: since the mass-immigration of people of (mixed) African descent from Suriname in the late 1960s and early ’70s; the more recent pendulum migration from the Dutch Antilles; and the even more recent immigration from a variety of African countries, especially Ghana. These migrations have turned Amsterdam into the European capital with the largest percentage of “black” people— approximately 7 percent of the 800,000 inhabitants in 2000.1 In the Black Atlantic , Amsterdam has a special position on the fringe of the English-speaking ecumenia, in many ways reflecting the position of the Netherlands in relation to continental Europe and Britain. Most important, Amsterdam is a site of a process of ethnogenesis that is leading to the transformation of a Creole Caribbean culture into a new“black culture,”whose main actors are the secondgeneration sons and daughters of immigrants from Suriname. Over the past thirty years in the Netherlands, a somewhat traditional, Caribbean-oriented Creole culture has given way to a cosmopolitan, pan-black, and relatively“modern ” black youth culture with a head in Amsterdam but a heart in Paramaribo. Similar transformations have occurred in Britain and, to an extent, France (Grosfoguel 1997), where the cultural life of Caribbean immigrants has partially given way to a pan-black culture and identity among the younger generation who have grown up in Europe. These groups have moved, as it were, from an ethnic condition into a racial condition (even though, admittedly, in these 170 / The Making of Suriland cases the analytical difference between ethnicity and “race” is even fuzzier than usual). However, the transformation has taken on specific contours in Amsterdam for two related reasons: the rise of multiculturalism, which gained the support of the Dutch state in the 1970s and ’80s (it receded in the ’90s) and Amsterdam’s reputation as a capital of the so-called counterculture that favors so-called alternative lifestyles, such as those of the squatters movement, neohippies , new-age movements, Rastafarians, and so on. Some dimensions of this making of a Dutch black culture have been already highlighted by research, in particular regarding the involvement of a growing section of Creole youth with black youth styles and streetwise lifestyles (Sansone 1990, 1992a, 1994; van Niekerk 2003; Wermuth 1999). This chapter deals with an aspect that has been little explored in social research. It emphasizes how in this process, the place and relevance of Suriname as a homeland, as well as the role and sorts of popular music associated with the making of a Dutch black culture, have changed over time. It describes the modernization of one of the main aspects of traditional Surinamese Creole community life in the Netherlands : the organization of and participation in parties and feasts. In the second section, the chapter expands on the process that is making it possible to envisage a peculiar, magical “bi-nation,” Suriland—a country that overcomes the dilemmas of re-migration and homesickness by displacing the very notion of homeland. The transnational Surinamese population is developing new ways to cope with (cultural) colonialism and its aftermath. I will first provide some basic socioeconomic context. Caribbean migration to the Netherlands can best be described as a movement of people from small countries into another small country. The number of Caribbean migrants to the Netherlands totaled over 360,000 in 1996 (2.4 percent of the total population), of whom approximately 90,000 were from the Dutch Antilles (Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, St. Eustatius, Saba, and St. Maarten). The rest were from Suriname.2 Caribbean immigrants and their offspring also constitute a very large share of the total number of the allochtonen (the ethnic minorities who are the result of immigration). They are more urban than most other immigrants, both because they mostly were urban dwellers in the Caribbean (especially the Creoles) and because of where they have settled in the Netherlands. The Surinamese—and, in particular, the Surinamese Creoles—are more heavily concentrated in the main cities than other groups of allochtonen. For the Creoles, emigration has been from a city to a city—that is, from Paramaribo to one of the main Dutch cities (van Niekerk 1994: 47–49). The Creoles are people of African–European and African–Asian...

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