IX - The Road is Mine: The Summer Carnival as a Case Study for Postcolonial Rotterdam

Summary

Every year in the summer holidays, Rotterdam dances like crazy at its vibrant Summer Carnival. This colourful parade of ethnic, diverse Rotterdam gives the city a buzz, and everyone joins in and revels in the party atmosphere. Extravagantly decorated stalls selling urban street food from all over the world, pulsating music, amazing costumes — the carnival is a highlight of Rotterdam's popular culture and makes the city the place to be. The Rotterdam Summer Carnival started in 1983 as an Antillean Dutch initiative and has evolved into a hyper-commercial event and the country's largest festival. At its peak in around 2007, it was attracting a million visitors.

Rotterdam embraced the Summer Carnival to show how the city embraces its modern, super-diverse population. Although Rotterdam likes to see it as a festival that demonstrates the city's appeal to tourists, the Summer Carnival is actually an expression of popular urban culture and the perfect case study for examining postcolonial Rotterdam from multiple perspectives. We start our chapter with what we call the Rotterdam Project, based on the concept of postcoloniality and popular culture. The second section consists of an ‘ethnographic description’ of the Summer Carnival that reveals Rotterdam as a postcolonial, super-diverse city.

THE ROTTERDAM PROJECT: COMMEMORATIVE CULTURE AND URBAN CULTURE

The story of Rotterdam is the tale of a port city shaped by combative people bursting with energy and willpower. That applied to the Dutch from the provinces of Brabant and Zeeland and the South Holland islands who migrated to the city from the second half of the nineteenth century, but equally to the Germans and Belgians or the Chinese who settled in the Katendrecht docklands from 1911. After 1945, Rotterdam became much more ethnically diverse with migrants from the former Dutch East Indies, Spain, Italy, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Cape Verde, Turkey, Morocco — and in recent decades from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Poland and other Eastern European countries. Even if you just consider the population dynamics, you have to conclude that Rotterdam is permanently a work in progress. What fascinates us is precisely the many different ways in which these different residents experience their urban environment — these people of Rotterdam who together form the city. How do they experience their city from a postcolonial perspective?