Scholars from universities and cultural institutions across the Low Countries respond to Gloria Wekker’s ground-breaking book White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016). This special issue grew out of an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Liège on 24 March 2021.

Table of contents:

Introduction: Reading White Innocence across Disciplines in the Low Countries

• Elisabeth Bekers, Kris Steyaert and Chika Unigwe

‘How Does One Survive the University as a Space Invader?’: Beyond White Innocence in the Academy. An Interview with Gloria Wekker

• Gloria Wekker

White … or Not Quite: The Representation of African Soldiers of the First World War

• Dominiek Dendooven

Layering the Cultural Archive: A Critical Reading of Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence and Rembrandt’s Painting of Two Black Men

• Agnes Andeweg

When Queerness Is Tinged with Nostalgia: Whitewashing Homonormativity in Low Countries Nationalism and Re-Imagining the Queer-of-Colour Past in North American Television and Fiction

• Bastien Bomans

How the Flemings Became White: Race, Language, and Colonialism in the Making of Flanders

• Sibo Rugwiza Kanobana

Aicha Is More Dutch but Less Dynamic than Ahmed: The Gendered Nature of Race in the Netherlands

• Stefan Grondelaers and Paul van Gent

White Discomforts, Black Burdens

• Chika Unigwe

Why My Aunt Was Hiding from the Sun

• Sacha Celine Verheij