BelMix Seminar Series : Betty de Hart - The ‘painful problem’ of mixed marriages and relationships: interracialised couples and the law from the interbellum to the postcolonial period (1920s–1970s)

Title: “The ‘painful problem’ of mixed marriages and relationships: interracialised couples and the law from interbellum to the postcolonial period (1920s-1970s)”

by Betty de Hart, Professor of Transnational Families and Migration Law (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

When: Friday 18 April 2025, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM (Brussels Time)

Where: Room S.12.234 (Rokkan), 12th floor of Building S, Campus Solbosch, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050 Bruxelles

And live-streamed online via Zoom. Register here to receive the link: https://shorturl.at/9PlFi

Abstract:

In May 1951, the local council of the town of Huizen in the Netherlands adopted a local police regulation, prohibiting town girls from hanging out at the gates of the camp where recently arrived Moluccan colonial migrants were housed. The newspaper Het Parool reporting on this regulation quoted the town mayor saying that he got ‘nauseous’ by the 15- and 16-year-old girls, who sought contact to the ‘Ambonese’. As will be demonstrated, this local police regulation was not exceptional, but part of a consistent pattern of regulation of mixed relationships and marriages between postcolonial and other migrants and Dutch nationals, that were framed in terms of ‘racial mixture’. This presentation addresses the gendered and racialized regulation of interracialized couples and their families through different forms of regulations and intense surveillance of their intimate relationships by national and local authorities, police and social workers.

Bio:

Betty de Hart is a Full Professor of Transnational Families and Migration Law at Vrije Universiteit. She conducts legal, empirical and historical research on the national, European and international rules that transnational families encounter, the views behind these rules as well as the impact on the everyday lives of transnational families. She is the author of a book on dual citizenship, in Dutch: Een tweede paspoort. Dubbele nationaliteit in de Verenigde Staten, Duitsland en Nederland (Amsterdam University Press, 2012). She was the recipient of a 2017 European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to establish an independent research team and research program for her research project EUROMIX: Regulating Mixed Intimacies in Europe. The project answers the question of whether, how and why ‘mixed’ relationships are regulated in Europe, how ‘mixed’ couples respond to regulation and the role that law and lawyers play in the way in which thinking about “race” has developed in Europe. She also received a 2021 research grant from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) Open Competetion Social Science and Humanities. Her project, entitled Love, Sex, Faith, explores the politics of emotion in migration law, bringing together family migration and asylum cases.