Start Date
26-5-2026 4:45 PM
End Date
26-5-2026 5:00 PM
Description
This paper explores how the Dutch tea industry, shaped by colonial ambition, wartime scarcity, and domestic ritual offers a unique cultural lens for examining crisis and resilience. From the exploitative structures of the Dutch East India Company to the quiet strength of tea rituals during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, tea serves as both a historical commodity and a symbolic thread running through Dutch cultural memory. At the heart of this exploration is the idea of honouring imperfection: embracing the cracks left by conflict, dislocation, and scarcity rather than concealing them. Drawing on the metaphor of tea leaves; fragile, fragmented, yet able to infuse and transform, this paper traces how narratives and visuals steep ordinary materials with meaning. In literary memoirs, postcolonial reflections, and contemporary artworks, tea emerges as a practice of continuity, a gesture of care, and a medium through which memory is preserved and reimagined. Using a combined narrative and visual methodology, the paper engages with archival materials, museum collections from the Rijksmuseum, Tropenmuseum, the Nederlands Fotomuseum, and contemporary visual work by artists such as Lidwien van de Ven. The analysis spans genres including culinary memoir, poetry, postcolonial fiction, and photography to reveal how tea rituals and representations convey both rupture and renewal. Rather than presenting crisis and hope as opposites, the Dutch tea story illustrates how fragility and resilience often co- exist, how rituals surrounding tea have become moments of repair, adaptation, and quiet resistance. As such, this paper argues that in food cultures, marked by rupture, imperfection is not only inevitable but is meaningful, and can become a site of transformation.
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A Storm in a Teacup: Fragility and Resilience of The Dutch Tea Industry
This paper explores how the Dutch tea industry, shaped by colonial ambition, wartime scarcity, and domestic ritual offers a unique cultural lens for examining crisis and resilience. From the exploitative structures of the Dutch East India Company to the quiet strength of tea rituals during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, tea serves as both a historical commodity and a symbolic thread running through Dutch cultural memory. At the heart of this exploration is the idea of honouring imperfection: embracing the cracks left by conflict, dislocation, and scarcity rather than concealing them. Drawing on the metaphor of tea leaves; fragile, fragmented, yet able to infuse and transform, this paper traces how narratives and visuals steep ordinary materials with meaning. In literary memoirs, postcolonial reflections, and contemporary artworks, tea emerges as a practice of continuity, a gesture of care, and a medium through which memory is preserved and reimagined. Using a combined narrative and visual methodology, the paper engages with archival materials, museum collections from the Rijksmuseum, Tropenmuseum, the Nederlands Fotomuseum, and contemporary visual work by artists such as Lidwien van de Ven. The analysis spans genres including culinary memoir, poetry, postcolonial fiction, and photography to reveal how tea rituals and representations convey both rupture and renewal. Rather than presenting crisis and hope as opposites, the Dutch tea story illustrates how fragility and resilience often co- exist, how rituals surrounding tea have become moments of repair, adaptation, and quiet resistance. As such, this paper argues that in food cultures, marked by rupture, imperfection is not only inevitable but is meaningful, and can become a site of transformation.