Dr Mikki Stelder

My interests range from exploring the history of the present of (Dutch) colonization, imperialism, racism, slavery and Indigenous genocide to thinking through the role of racial-sexual politics of (settler) colonial regimes, in particular in Israel/Palestine.

Furthermore, I am interested in exploring research methods that foreground different kinds of scholarly and critical inquiry centered around intersecting forms of Black, Indigenous, Transnational and Intersectional Feminist, Migrant and Refugee, Queer and Trans scholarship.

RESEARCH BIO: 
My current research project, Maritime Imagination: A Cultural Oceanography of the Netherlands is a study of Dutch imperial, racist and colonial entanglements and their present-day repercussions and re-narrations. I am particularly interested in the role that the ocean and maritime imagination play in both building and undermining Dutch empire and colonialism. This project approaches Dutch empire and colonialism through the prism of mare liberum or the “free sea,” developed by seventeenth century Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius. It aims to reveal how cultural, legal, (settler-)colonial, environmental and economic imaginaries of the ocean continue to inform the ways in which the Dutch idealize, obscure and glorify their own role of maritime supremacy globally. This project addresses questions related to how discourses of maritime trade, slavery, punishment and colonialism across Dutch empire shape (contemporary) white supremacist
logic; the (settler-)colonial liberal humanist imaginary; and global racial-capitalism.

By developing what I call a cultural oceanography, I seek to traverse and undo historiographic, disciplinary, spatial, and epistemic boundaries at work in existing studies of Dutch empire and colonialism and their effects. I endeavor to create alternative ways of theorizing the emergence of Dutch empire and colonialism, which contributes to an analytical framework capable of engaging with at the intersection of maritime, racial-sexual, legal, penal, environmental, and socio-economic discourses.

This project has been awarded the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant within the framework of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 838904).

My ongoing research interests include anticolonial-queer critique, the politics and praxis of listening, and the entanglements between racial-sexual politics and (settler) colonialism. My doctoral research focused on the racial-sexual politics of Zionist sexual politics, Palestinian anticolonial-queer critiques, pinkwashing and Palestinian Liberation. It examined the politics of listening at work in (non-)engagements with Palestinian anticolonial-queer critiques and proposed a different methodological engagement with these critiques by developing a practice of writing with Palestinian anticolonial-queer critiques.