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Article: Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies, 1600-1950.
- Article from:
- World Literature Today
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 University of Oklahoma. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The first of the five epigraphs in E. M. Beekman's study of colonial literature is Pessoa's poem on Henry the Navigator, "sole ruler ever to hold the world in the palm of his hand." Beekman tells us that the Dutch too held a vast empire, much of it taken from the Portuguese. They held on to it for a span of some four hundred years. Dutch explorers named Long Island, Cape Horn, and Easter Island and discovered New Zealand as well as Australia. Their trading empire had posts in North and South America, Formosa and Japan, on the African coast and at its Cape, on the Cochin and Malabar coasts of India, on Sri Lanka, and in Malaysia. In time, Dutch activity in Southeast Asia ...