Dutch Politics of Music-Washing at Eurovision: The Monstrous Hybrid of Commodified Musical Legacies of Slavery, Imperialist Utopianism, and White Nationalism

The paper investigates the Dutch entry at Eurovision 2021, when the Netherlands’ representative Jeangu Macrooy performed a song that referred to the singer’s Afro-Surinamese origins and to the ages of slavery enforced in Suriname by Dutch colonists between the mid-1600s until its abolition in 1863. I interpret the performance and its public reception through how Western coloniality has been trying to appropriate, simplify, or commodify musical legacies of slavery since the early 1900s. Resultingly, such postcolonial musical hybrids represent the merging of two opposing utopianist ideologies—the call for freedom of those entrapped by the Western capitalist colonial empire and this empire’s continuous urge to expand its authority and modes of exploitation.