Framing justice in struggles over cultural heritage: the case of Black Pete in the ‘postcolonial’ Netherlands

Abstract

Anchored in Nancy Fraser’s theorizing of justice, the current study seeks to scrutinise the entwinement of contemporary struggles over justice with controversies over the meaning and the role of heritage. Through a discourse-analytic exploration of Dutch political debates about the racialised figure of Black Pete, the study demonstrates how a debate over heritage might encapsulate a struggle over economic, cultural and political justice, and in particular the right to (re-)define social relations and to (co-)determine societal norms and values. Four visions/discourses of justice are identified and classified along two distinctive axes–one related to the definition of whose moral reasoning and well-being is prioritised in controversies over the meaning and role of heritage (majority vs. minority); and the other pertaining to the delineation of how a specific vision of justice and imagined common good is to be realised (through reconciliation vs. struggle).