Diantha Vliet wins Emerging Scholars Competition in Black European Studies

Prijswinnaar Diantha Vries

Lecturer Diantha Vliet has won the Emerging Scholars Competition in Black European Studies for her book proposal based on her thesis ‘Postcolonial Pete: Race, Media, and Memory in the Politics of Dutch Identity’. She will now rewrite her dissertation on the discourse of the Zwarte Piet debate and the relationship between memory, nation and racism in the Netherlands, into a book, which will be published as part of the Imagining Black Europe series by the international academic publisher Peter Lang.

Blackness in the Netherlands

The awards in the Emerging Scholars Competition are presented annually by the publisher Peter Lang. All submissions are rigorously peer reviewed. “I think the book promises to provide a historical contextualisation and media analysis of the specific local contested status of Blackness in the Netherlands”, writes one of the reviewers of Vliet’s proposal. “And, at the same time, ‘the battle over Black Pete’, understood as a battle of belonging, resonates with other larger European contexts and the global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Timely and relevant

“The topic is certainly timely and relevant”, agreed one of the other judges. “[The research] provides a fruitful and insightful discussion of the television show Sinterklaasjournaal and its role in shaping images and narratives of Black Pete”, they continue, “as well as the general ambivalence of the creators of the show with regards to their responsibilities in producing images of race.”

Diantha Vliet

Diantha Vliet is a lecturer at the Department of Media and Culture Studies. She received her BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Utrecht University/University College Roosevelt (2011), her MA in Film Studies from Columbia University (2013), and her PhD in Media and Communication from Temple University (2020). Vliet also conducts research into the Afro-Dutch experience, objectivity in journalism, digitality, and the role of the media in the cultivation of collective memory.