Guadeloupe Reweaves Kingdom Thinking

AMSTERDAM--Francio Guadeloupe on Thursday delivered his inaugural lecture upon accepting the position of KNAW Professor in the Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam, using the occasion to call for a fundamental rethinking of how the Dutch Caribbean and Kingdom relations are studied, understood, and discussed in academic and public life.

In the lecture, titled “Reweaving Dutch Caribbean Studies,” Guadeloupe argued that the Kingdom of the Netherlands should not be approached as a fixed constitutional arrangement viewed only through institutions and official categories, but as a lived and continuously changing reality shaped by everyday movement, kinship, migration, labor, culture, tourism, and unequal power relations across the Atlantic.

Addressing an audience at the University of Amsterdam on March 12, 2026, Guadeloupe said his work focuses on how the Kingdom is experienced and used by people in their daily lives, and how those lived experiences in turn reshape the very meaning of Kingdom relations. Rather than treating the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean as separate and self-contained worlds, he said the realities of contemporary life point to deep and often overlooked interconnections between the islands and the European part of the Kingdom.

Guadeloupe’s lecture examined the Dutch Caribbean, including Aruba, Curaçao, St. Maarten, Bonaire, St. Eustatius, and Saba, within the wider framework of a trans-Atlantic Kingdom marked by mobility, tourism-driven economies, migration, and persistent structural inequalities. He pointed to the ways legal arrangements, systems of governance, and dominant public narratives continue to shape ideas of legitimacy, citizenship, belonging, and identity, often reproducing distinctions grounded in race, ancestry, and colonial-era thinking.

A central theme of the lecture was the need to move beyond rigid ethnic, national, and racial categories that have long framed scholarship and policy discussions about the Dutch Caribbean. Guadeloupe contended that such approaches flatten lived experience and fail to capture the layered realities of people whose lives are shaped by circular migration, family connections across borders, multiple affiliations, and continuous movement between the islands and the Netherlands.

That argument was sharpened through what Guadeloupe described as an “ethnography of singularities,” an approach that rejects both fixed identity labels and narrow social types in favor of seeing people as complex lives in motion. In the lecture, he described singularities as “perpetual becomings” shaped by social, existential, ecological, and technological relations, arguing that people are not merely copies of ethnic, national, or racial categories, even when they speak through those public scripts.

Using an ethnographic example from a conversation with a Dutch traveler heading to the Caribbean, Guadeloupe showed how stereotype, longing, memory, humor, and vulnerability can exist at the same time within one person. His point was not to excuse prejudice, but to insist that scholarship must listen closely enough to hear the deeper anxieties, desires, and contradictions beneath familiar labels. In that sense, his call to “reweave” Dutch Caribbean studies is also a call for a more exact and humane method of understanding Kingdom relations, one that takes lived complexity seriously.

The lecture also highlighted the extent to which culture now flows in multiple directions across the Kingdom. Guadeloupe pointed to the presence of Caribbean language, food, music, humor, and public figures in the Netherlands, while also noting the growing influence of Dutch and European popular culture on the islands. These developments, he said, demand new forms of scholarship that treat the Kingdom as an intertwined cultural and social space rather than a set of isolated territories.

At the same time, Guadeloupe did not romanticize this interconnection. He situated the modern Kingdom within broader systems of capitalism, inequality, environmental strain, and labor exploitation, especially in tourism-dependent islands where economic survival is often tied to industries that depend heavily on imported labor, fragile ecosystems, and unequal global flows of wealth and power.

Using a series of ethnographic reflections, Guadeloupe explored the realities of air travel, migration, tourism, romance, family caregiving, and labor in the Kingdom. He described these not as side stories, but as vital sites for understanding how constitutional structures are lived, negotiated, and transformed. He also pointed to the ecological contradictions embedded in this interweaving, particularly the role of frequent air travel and mass tourism in sustaining personal and economic ties while contributing to environmental harm.

Another major argument in the lecture focused on the politics of knowledge production. Guadeloupe addressed longstanding frustrations in the Dutch Caribbean over extractive research practices, in which outside scholars arrive, produce work about the islands, build international reputations, and leave local thinkers and institutions marginalized. He underscored the importance of collaboration, accountability, and a deeper engagement with local expertise, while also challenging narratives that reduce Caribbean societies to simplistic stories of corruption, dysfunction, or cultural difference.

Guadeloupe outlined four broad research directions that will shape his work going forward. These include studying trans-Atlantic cultural and intellectual interweavers, examining kinship and romantic relationships that stretch across the Kingdom, analyzing the social effects of Dutch tourism on both the islands and the Netherlands, and investigating the lives of workers and the structures of ownership and exploitation that underpin tourism-based economies.

He framed this agenda as part of a broader effort to “unweave” and “reweave” the Kingdom, not in order to erase its contradictions, but to better understand them and to contribute to a more just way of thinking about power, belonging, and interconnected life within the Dutch trans-Atlantic space.

The appointment places Guadeloupe at the center of an important academic and public conversation about the future of Kingdom relations, decolonial thought, and the place of the Dutch Caribbean within both scholarship and public policy. His lecture signals an effort to reposition Dutch Caribbean studies as a field that is not peripheral, but central to understanding the realities of the Kingdom itself.

Guadeloupe concluded his address with words of gratitude to family, colleagues, institutions, collaborators, and generations of scholars who helped sustain Dutch Caribbean studies even when broader academic attention was limited. In doing so, he situated his new chair not only as a professional milestone, but as part of a larger intellectual project aimed at renewing the study of the Kingdom as a moving, unequal, interwoven whole.

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