Between “Dutch Tolerance” and “Moroccan Normality” | 239 Thamyris/Intersecting No. 27 (2014) 239–254 At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, after a decade in which harsh indictments of the supposedly failed multiculturalism of the Netherlands have become mainstream, and, in their wake, xenophobia and racism, the times when the Netherlands defined itself as a tolerant, multicultural nation seem almost forgotten. This past, however, is still very recent. A closer look at the days before the shift helps to understand the complex history of the Dutch negotiations of race and ethnicity. In the time span between 1996—the year in which several writers of migrant back- ground published their first writings—and 2001—the year of the National Book Week on “Writing between Two Cultures”—the Dutch literary field went through a phase of extraordinary openness: it celebrated a “happy multiculturality.” In these years the interest among publishers, reviewers and readers alike in what was called multicul- tural or ethnic literature was not only of considerable intensity, but also remarkably positive-tuned. Dutch literature seemed to embrace its multicultural richness in a similar way as Dutch society of that time boasted its (self-acclaimed) multiculturality and tolerance. This chapter takes one of the celebrated specimens of this multicul- tural literature, the novel Bruiloft aan zee (1996) by the Moroccan-Dutch writer Abdelkader Benali, as its central object of research. It offers a critical reading of this novel in the light of the broader “happy multiculturality” discourse and demonstrates how this novel critically confronts the idea of an all too happy, all too tolerant Dutch self-image. In the time before the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, when tolerance was still considered a Dutch virtue, this novel’s representation of cultural transgression explores and challenges the racist nature of the Dutch boundaries of Between “Dutch Tolerance” and “Moroccan Normality”: Benali’s Bruiloft aan zee as Challenge to an all too “Happy Multiculturality” Liesbeth Minnaard