Journalistiek oriëntalisme

In the interwar period, the leading Dutch journalist C.K. Elout conducted two research trips to the Dutch East Indies for the newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad. This article studies Elout’s letters from his travels in the context of the growing journalistic interest in the Netherlands in colonial matters in the 1920s. The reason for this interest was the increase in information transferred between the Netherlands and South-east Asia as a result of new technologies and rising tensions in the Indies due to the emergence of the anticolonial movement. Through his letters, Elout intended to stimulate colonial reporting in the Netherlands, with the goal of strengthening overseas ties. Therefore, this corpus of texts can be seen as a form of journalistic orientalism in which the author extensively reflects on the differences between the West and the East. This article focuses on these reflections and demonstrates how they influenced Elout’s later commentary on the news from the Dutch East Indies.