Who tells (post)colonial history and how? A corpus-based analysis of postcolonial debates in European media
(2026) CADAAD 2026 — Location: Valladolid (8.July.2026)
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- How should we talk about colonisation? Should Belgium apologise or give compensation to the Democratic Republic of Congo? In 2020, at a time when such questions were losing momentum, the Black Lives Matters movement gave rise to a revival of postcolonial debates in Belgium (Verbeke 2020). While the dominant discourse converged on a semi-recognition of colonial abuses (Goddeeris 2015), the Congolese diaspora requested not to be excluded anymore from public discussions on decolonisation and highlighted the intimate connection between how history is told and by whom it is told. The present study approaches these debates from the perspective of their discursive construction, across a corpus of Belgian press articles published between 2020 and 2025 and commenting an aspect of the (post)colonial relationship between Belgium and the DRC. On the one hand, I will map whose voices (i.e. Afro-descendent or not) are included in these articles, paying particular attention to the space these voices are given, and to the identity features these voices put forward when expressing themselves on (post)coloniality. On the other hand, I will investigate how the syntactic and semantic encoding of Belgium and RDC when describing important historical events impacts the discursive representation of their responsibility regarding (post)colonial events, approaching this encoding from the perspective of agentivity (De Cock & Michaud Maturana 2014). With these measures, this study aims to shed light on possible dominant and alternative representations of postcolonial debates. References De Cock, B. & Michaud Maturana, D. (2014). La expresión de la agentividad en el Informe Rettig (Chile, 1991). Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 23(1), 123–140. Goddeeris, I. (2015). Postcolonial Belgium. Interventions, 17(3), 434-451. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2014.998253 Verbeke, D. (2020). Verlegde Sisyfus een steen? Gecontesteerd Belgisch koloniaal erfgoed en de herdenking van de herdenking (2004-2020). Brood & Rozen, 25(3), 50-59. https://doi.org/10.21825/broodenrozen.85722
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Niclaes, L. (2026, July 9). Who tells (post)colonial history and how? A corpus-based analysis of postcolonial debates in European media. CADAAD 2026, Valladolid. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/279015