Tracing Slavery

Looking at the ways in which the memory of slavery affects present-day relations in Amsterdam, this ethnographic account reveals a paradox: while there is growing official attention to the country s slavery past (monuments, festivals, ritual occasions), many interlocutors showed little interest in the topic. Developing the notion of trace as a seminal notion to explore this paradox, this book follows the issue of slavery in everyday realities and offers a fine-grained ethnography of how people refer to this past often in almost unconscious ways and weave it into their perceptions of present-day issues.