Colonial echoing in Amsterdam’s pulse
Amsterdam has long been considered a global city - cosmopolitan, progressive, and open-minded. But its prestige is built upon a history of colonial conquest, extraction, and violence, already apparent in the 17th century. As the capital of the Dutch empire, Amsterdam was linked to the colonial expansion of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and WIC (West India Company), which orchestrated and profited from the transatlantic slave trade, resource plundering, and systemic oppression across the globe- notibaly in West Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The city’s layout, wealth, and institutional structures were shaped by these colonial encounters.
Today, this legacy is not just historical - but structural. Argentinian professor Walter Mignolo described ‘coloniality’ as the idea that colonization didn’t end but shifted form. Amsterdam’s coloniality lives on in its cityscape, economic privilege, and global financial positioning. A critical part of this is its role as a tax haven, which sustains neo-colonial extraction by enabling multinational corporations to avoid taxes in the Global South while exploiting labor and resources there (Doggart, 2020). This is coloniality in a modern form: a reinforcement of uneven development, wealth hoarding, and systemic inequality. So while Amsterdam may sometimes present itself as a pioneer of decoloniality in Europe, it also remains one of the most powerful nodes of ongoing colonial extraction. Amsterdam moves quickly with fast development, fast consumption, and fast communication. But when it comes to its colonial past and the deep, emotional impact that continues to haunt the present, it remains strangely still. It repeats colonial logic in its attempt to be seen as ‘post-colonial’. The image of a decolonial city becomes another product to consume. Today, the legacy of colonialism in Amsterdam is not only visible in statues, names, and historical facts - it is felt. It lives in the economic structures, emotional economies, and visual landscapes that continuously shape how we see ourselves and others. And decolonization, no matter how popular the term becomes-, cannot be declared just because a city has become aesthetically aware of its past. It requires deeper work - in the mind, in the nervous system, and in the structures of knowledge and care that we continue to reproduce today.
Marginalization occurs across a variety of facets, and is particularly understood by the framing of history, for both the stories and perspectives which are mentioned and ignored. History is not a spectacle to be analyzed, but a tool with which we can confront our present. Beyond the mapping and structures of this historical moment, we fail to recognize the depth that colonialism has on our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. This is demonstrated through constant judgement, perception, consumption and reproductions of power that show in our everyday choices (Mignolo, 2007). Neocolonial thinking demonstrates itself even within discourse around ‘resilience’. It is important to uplift marginalized communities by giving individuals autonomy, and respect, without getting caught in traps of victimization and dependency. Living in a city such as Amsterdam, which presents itself as progressive, might be what keeps us stuck and static from making sustainable progress (Gale & Bolzan, 2013). We get caught in the pain of recognizing our complicity to other’s experiences, but do not learn how to properly utilize that pain. Instead, individuals may replicate behaviors demonstrating deep systematic and sentimental expression, for what hasn’t been their personal experiences. This not only takes away from the voices of people we are trying to support, but blocks us emotionally from understanding where and how we are needed. Without recognizing that, we continue cycles of power, marginalization, victimization, and dependency. Just like the variety of characters in this world, there are a variety of approaches we can take - both individually and collectively - to build better societies and create space for everyone to use their agency and autonomy. A healthy ecosystem is made of diverse methods and species - in this case people, as one of many natural species. Let us work on ourselves and what we know without having to impose it onto others. Be proud, but not judgemental of those who have not internalized or accessed the knowledge you feel you have. This comes with taking care of yourself, recognizing your agency, influences, and the ways you interpret the behaviors of others. Recognize where your emotion is driven from, the narratives you consume on social media, how it makes you quick to label, to judge, to be prideful. Signs of a healthy cognition are not ones which include comparison and competition amongst individuals. You are only the hero and protagonist of your story and yours alone.
It is the presence and practice of modernity (a colonial legacy), which brings us to consistently want to consume and present our consumption, without taking the time to embody nor recognize what our experiences mean to ourselves. The act of consuming differs from that of experiencing, we might be moving too quickly without taking the time to radically care for ourselves and others, and it shows in how we end up commodifying culture, even when framed as a benefit and supportive practice. We often mistake recognition for resolution, thinking that our ability to feel slightly guilty counts as a solution or an effort on our behalf, when the effort is far more expansive, emotional, and collective. It is in the values we assign, moral superiority that we feel, and labels that we give to everything, that we can understand how coloniality still lives within us (Mignolo, 2007). It is not by remaining static on the individual and too often victimizing ourselves, but recognizing how we are all victims of this mindset. In this stagnation, we become complicit - especially when we reproduce the same patterns in the name of progress: moral superiority, competition for attention, trauma-as-capital, and healing as branding. Even the language of care can become colonized.
Even though formal colonialism has ended, the global system remains shaped by its colonial matrix of power - a structure of logic, knowledge, interaction, labor, and authority that privileges the Global North.
Dismantling colonial influences is not only confined to institutional practice or top-down approaches. This doesn’t mean eradicating European values or Dutch culture, but reconceptualizing speech, emotion, time, and our interactions with others. Even though formal colonialism has ended, the global system remains shaped by its colonial matrix of power - a structure of logic, knowledge, interaction, labor, and authority that privileges the Global North. Regarding my repeated mentions of care and solidarity: the presence of anger is an obvious given in the fight to decolonize, and understandably so. But a variety of approaches to the topic can be beneficial for collective gain. It’s important to recognize that not every given moment has to be a vexing fight. Anger influences what needs to be immediately changed so that individuals can properly take care of themselves, their families and communities, beginning the process of sustainable betterment. But when we’re thinking about long-term processes and benefits, we need to take the time to understand these internalizations of modern culture in what we consider both positives and negatives, for both will exist across our experiences. As humans are always reproducers of culture and sentiment . It is coursing through our consumption habits, aesthetics, lifestyle, and superiority. We need to continue moving beyond our symbolic practices, and recognize the power of decolonising self for the benefit of our cognition and connections (Mignolo, 2007). We may not be able to completely decolonize languages, but maybe we can still use communication as the tool to reframe and reshape our logic structures. Communication directly links to cognition, as the words and symbols that we use to describe things have a profoundly psychological impact on how we experience and interact with the world based on our internal perspectives (Kamoche & Thiong’o, 1987). Creativity, in this respect, demonstrates far more of our emotional experiences than we can ‘rationally’ explain—that is, if we recognize it as a human practice rather than something to be consumed.
Decolonizing the cognitive means reframing mental health practice, learning to listen to and feel for the differing perspectives and approaches from others. Collective care, creativity, and time are some of the primary things which help us heal ourselves in face of whatever experiences we’ve had . The ways in which psychology and trauma informed practice tends to be described does maintain a colonially influenced logic structure. If we move away from direct language for a second, to recognize the sentiment or different interpretations, maybe we can spot that there are deeply rooted benefits to understanding our emotions, which is something we all have in common as we flow through our lives on our own spectrum of experiences. Let us remember that our desires, fears, and intentions are shaped by the presence of modernity and/or coloniality in one way or another (Hakim et al., 2022). Healing the colonized mind is in part about unlearning and recreating the part of us that still ranks others, still seeks recognition through performance, and still sees care as a commodity. It is through this approach to self that we might be able to transition towards better things, towards a style of varied communication that can foster more practical, genuine, and beneficial decolonial practice in Amsterdam’s cityscape.