Reframing Postcolonial Studies: Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms [1st ed.] 9783030527259, 9783030527266

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Reframing Postcolonial Studies Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms

Edited by David D. Kim

Reframing Postcolonial Studies “This timely volume confronts the legacies of post-colonial thinking as a set of material and textual practices. Looking at museums, public monuments, statues, literary texts, languages and artworks, it questions the vexed legacies of colonial culture, as well as the theoretical and critical literature that has sought to understand it. From the vantage point of the ‘post’ post-colonial (as a temporal as well as theoretical construction), successive authors look at specific instances and mediations of Imperial Europe’s global ambition: the way poetry and fiction imagine potential pasts, the way video and film redress the harm of history, the way provenance and particularity complicate the politicisation of heritage. Drawing on urban theory, art history, literary analysis, environmental humanities and linguistics, the book is ambitious and wide-ranging, asking us what it is to live creatively and critically with the residues of colonial appropriation and sedimentation while in open dialogue with the subjects who still live in its wake.” —Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art, University of College London, UK “The attention of postcolonial studies has moved to decolonizing the colonial archive: to the institutions that house objects, artworks, materials, even bodies culled from the colonized world, to the corporations and universities that profited from slavery and colonialism, and to the statues in the public sphere that even today commemorate the racist history of colonial plunderers. Reframing Postcolonial Studies addresses the urgent issues that Black Lives Matter has raised with respect to everyday material practices and the frameworks in which our knowledge and cultural heritage are conceptualized and stored. The book points urgently to the many ways in which our society must reinvent itself to enable equitable justice for all.” —Robert J. C. Young, Julius Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA

David D. Kim Editor

Reframing Postcolonial Studies Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms

Editor David D. Kim Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-52725-9    ISBN 978-3-030-52726-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty / Stephanie Nnamani This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Our Teachers and Students, Past, Present, and Emerging

Acknowledgments

Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the product of an intensely collaborative project, which has taken nearly three years to complete. It contains the signatures of many different interlocutors whose contributions have been invaluable for reframing the following discussions. First of all, I owe the contributors my utmost gratitude. All of them were excited to join this volume from the beginning. It has been an immense privilege to learn from our regular exchanges both in person and via email. Second, I wish to thank Megan Laddusaw, Christine Pardue, and Arun Prasath at Palgrave Macmillan. Their prompt and thoughtful guidance throughout the editorial process has been outstanding. I could not have asked for a more supportive place to publish this book. Third, I had the fortune to receive Viola Ardeni’s meticulous editorial assistance in the beginning of this project. Last but not least, my sincere gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewer whose encouraging and thought-provoking comments on the book proposal and the final manuscript have enriched the book in both profound and subtle ways. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic whose lasting devastation has yet to be assessed, acknowledging the unwavering support of these colleagues surely has a new special meaning for me. May 2020

David D. Kim

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Contents

1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial Patrimony  1 David D. Kim Part I Conceptual Vigilance  41 2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43 Bill Ashcroft 3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture 69 Susan Slyomovics 4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing Francophonie 93 Dominic Thomas Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111 5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy113 Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François ix

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6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee 7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial Dilemmas in Visual Representation157 Afonso Dias Ramos Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189 8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide191 Reinhart Kössler 9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215 Katrin Sieg 10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249 Frieda Ekotto 11 Afterword261 Graham Huggan Index269

Notes on Contributors

Bill Ashcroft  is a renowned critic and theorist, a founding exponent of postcolonial theory, and the co-author of The Empire Writes Back (1989), the first text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial studies. He is the author and co-author of 21 books and over 200 articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages. He also serves on the editorial boards of ten international journals. His latest work is Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2016). He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Frieda Ekotto  is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor in the Departments of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of ten books, the most recent scholarly monograph being What Color is Black? Race and Sex across the French Atlantic (2011). Her early research traced interactions between philosophy, law, literature, and African cinema, and she works on LGBT issues, with an emphasis on West African cultures within Africa as well as in Europe and the Americas. She received the Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical Literature in 2014 and the Benezet Award for excellence in her field from Colorado College in 2015. In 2017, she co-produced the feature-­ length documentary Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters, which premiered at the University of Michigan. That year, she also received

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an Honorary Degree from Colorado College and in 2018 was given the Zagora International Film Festival of Sub-Sahara Award for her work in African cinema. Graham  Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His work straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and environmental humanities, and much of his research over the past three decades has involved individual and collaborative attempts to cross the disciplines (literary/cultural studies, anthropology, biology, geography, history). His most recent published book is Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet (2018), and he is working on a co-written study of modern British nature writing. Other publications include The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010, co-authored with Helen Tiffin), and the sole-edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013). Emmanuel  Bruno  Jean-François  is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones contemporains (Poetics of Violence and Contemporary Francophone Narrative, 2017). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as the PMLA, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Nouvelles études francophones, and Lettres romanes. He has recently co-edited a special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, titled “Mapping Francophone Postcolonial Theory,” and a special issue of Cultural Dynamics on “The Minor in Question.” Jean-François is working on a second monograph, titled Indian Ocean Creolization: Empires and Insular Cultures. It focuses primarily on contemporary literatures and expressive cultures from the Mascarene Archipelago. David D. Kim  is an associate professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Parables: Memory and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany (2017), as well as the co-editor of Imagining Human Rights (2015), The Postcolonial World (2017), Globalgeschichten der deutschen Literatur (2021), and Teaching German Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2023). His digital humanities project is called WorldLiterature@UCLA. He is working

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on two major projects, one of which explores the notion of beastly citizenship, the other Hannah Arendt’s relationship with non-Jewish alterity. His research has been supported, among others, by the American Council of Learned Societies. Reinhart  Kössler  is a sociologist and former director of the Arnold-­ Bergstraesser-­Institut in Freiburg, Germany. He is also a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Freiburg, as well as an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Freiburg University of Education. His research interests include theory of society, sociology of global relations, institutional pluralism, and memory politics. His regional focus is southern Africa where he has worked recently on ethnicity and postcolonial reconciliation. Books include In search of survival and dignity. Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia Under South African Rule (2005); The Long Aftermath of War. Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia, ed. with A. du Pisani and W. Lindeke (2011); Gesellschaft bei Marx, with Hanns Wienold (2013); Namibia and Germany. Negotiating the Past (2015); Völkermord  – und was dann? Die Politik der deutsch-namibischen Vergangenheitsbearbeitung (2017). Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee  is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His areas of research cover from Victorian to imperial, colonial, and contemporary cultures, postcolonial theory, crime fiction, travel writing, comparative and world literary systems, as well as environmental theory and literature. His publications include, among others, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015), Natural Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture: Fevers and Famines (2013), Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010), and Crime and Empire: Representing India in the Nineteenth-Century (2003). Afonso  Dias  Ramos is an Art Histories Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien (2018–2019) in Berlin, Germany, affiliated with the Freie Universität Berlin. He is investigating ongoing controversies around colonial-era monuments and artworks worldwide. He received his PhD in History of Art from University College London. He has previously studied at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He is the co-editor of Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa (2019). His articles have been published in journals

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such as New Global Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Object, Lobby, The Burlington Magazine, and Oxford Art Journal. Katrin Sieg  is Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University where she is also affiliated with the Department of German. She is the author of three monographs on German and European theater, performance, cinema, and popular culture. In addition, she has written articles in the areas of feminist, postcolonial, and critical race studies. She is completing Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press. Her book Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002) won two prizes in theater studies. Susan  Slyomovics  is a distinguished professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her publications include The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance (1988); The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998); The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib (editor, 2001); The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005); Clifford Geertz in Morocco (editor, 2010); and How to Accept German Reparations (2014). Her research project is on the fates of French colonial statues and monuments in Algeria. Dominic Thomas  is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor and Chair of the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also “European Affairs Commentator” for CNN. He is the author and editor of books, as well as journals, on African and European culture, globalization, history, and politics, including Black France (2007), Museums in Postcolonial Europe (2010), La France noire (2011), Francophone Sub-­ Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts (2011), Africa and France (2013), Racial Advocacy in France (2013), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (2014), Francophone Afropean Literatures (2014), Afroeuropean Cartographies (2014), The Invention of Race (2014), The Charlie Hebdo Events and Their Aftermath (2016), Vers la guerre des identités (Towards the War of Identities, 2016), The Colonial Legacy in France (2017), Global France, Global French (2017), Sexe, race et colonies (2018), and Visualizing Empire (2020). He edits the Global African Voices series at Indiana

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University Press, which focuses on translations of African literature into English. He has also translated works by Aimé Césaire, Sony Labou Tansi, Alain Mabanckou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Abdourahman Waberi. He was elected to the Academy of Europe in 2015. He has held fellowships, residencies, and visiting professorships in Australia, France, Germany, Mali, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) Palestine Postcard 1936 (1936) Amer Shomali, Visit Palestine (2009) Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2012) Photo of Youcef Zighoud, original sepia-toned, date unknown (Wikipedia Commons) Statue of Youcef Zighoud, August 20, 1970, inauguration in Constantine (Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia, personal archives of Ahmed Benyahia) The war memorial of 1922, Constantine, Algeria Caption: “Coq de la Victoire” (Photo Agence Jomone, Algiers, circa 1957, no. 105, author’s collection) Emptied plinth of the French war memorial (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia) Zighoud Youcef statue in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery, February 2020 (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia) Nirveda Alleck, The Migrant’s Tale (2017) (Photograph by Nirveda Alleck) TheExhibitionist.org website banner TheExhibitionist.org website banner

7 7 55 56 58 73 74 76 86 87 119 234 235

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial Patrimony David D. Kim

…the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Arendt 1958, p. 9) ...the traditional material is transformed to fit a prevailing new situation, or hitherto unnoticed or neglected potentialities inherent in that material are discovered in the course of developing new patterns of action. —Karl Mannheim, The Problem of Generations (Mannheim 1952, p. 295)

Which understanding of  our postcolonial patrimony is calling us to action now? At first glance, there appears to be an endless number of possible answers to this momentous question, not least because it presupposes a globally dispersed, heterogeneous “we” in solidarity. A straightforward reply is also confounded because of the polarizing dispute that has arisen

D. D. Kim (*) Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_1

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in the field between Marxist “revolutionary” thinkers and poststructuralist “revisionary” theorists (Huggan 2013). For these reasons alone, singling out one received legacy on which our rich body of scholarships and their responses to the world might converge seems impossible. And yet, a certain horizon of expectations and aspirations may be discernible after all, one that distinguishes a critical renewal of tradition from a mere contestation of the old on some untrodden territory. Reframing Postcolonial Studies has originated in a collective action to examine this prospect, as we bear the weight of our intellectual inheritance at the onset of another pivotal decade for the future of common humanity. Except for anthropological investigations and multidirectional intersections between Holocaust memory and decolonization, the matter of patrimony has figured only peripherally in postcolonial studies. However, the time is now to concentrate on this topic because it runs through the latest major rearrangements of the field. Several developments account for this sea change. With the natural progression of time, there is an allegedly self-­ evident reason in various parts of the world for bringing the process of postcolonial detachment to an end once and for all. With the biological succession of generations, various affective and ideological attachments to the heritage of imperialism are being broken, destabilized, or reformed not necessarily for the better. At the same time, a new generation of postcolonial artists, writers, thinkers, and activists has come of age, contesting such self-centered claims and differentiating itself from formative predecessors—the ones credited with decolonization and, thereafter, with the establishment of postcolonial studies—with a critical consciousness of inheritance and legacy. What is reframing postcolonial studies today stems from the conflict and solidarity in this acute “non-simultaneity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit), as several generations respond similarly, differently, and relationally to colonial fantasies and postcolonial resurrections (Bloch 1962, p. 104).1 Given the international and multidisciplinary scope of the field, it is essential to understand to what extent this dynamic process mounts a response to the most pressing concerns in the world, including racism, sexism, nationalism, public health, inheritance, war, and sustainability. The main task involves challenging the times, as they are dictated by oppressive cultural, economic, political, and religious forces, and engendering alternative linkages of past, present, and future. Such transformative action is only possible when scholars, teachers, students, activists, artists, writers, and filmmakers recalibrate their vocabularies, which have been important

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for the field, in light of the latest postcolonial struggles. For this “concept-­ work” to be effective, they need to be invested in methodological innovation and open up postcolonial criticism to incisive political activism (Stoler 2016, p. 17). Without such critical and creative coordination, postcolonial inheritance would survive mostly as a self-absorbed academic discipline without much worldly impact. That is the reason why this volume seeks to close the loop by taking a fresh look at the three parts of contemporary postcolonial studies: living concepts, cross-disciplinary methodologies, and bold intersections of scholarship and activism. The following investigations examine how they have recently changed through individual and cooperative efforts to decolonize museums and public spaces marked by colonial signposts, to cultivate community organization and transversal affinity in times of political, ecological, and pandemic crises, and to redress questions of reconciliation, reparation, repatriation, or retribution in pursuit of “a truly universal humanism” (Shih 2008, p. 1361). To be sure, the force of “reconstructive intellectual labor” has been transforming the field since the very  beginning (Gilroy 1993, p.  45).2 With gripping references to Négritude intellectuals, other African, African American, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and Caribbean writers, as well as West European thinkers, the first generation of critics gave rise during the 1980s and early 1990s to postcolonial theory, which changed the academic landscape primarily in anglophone countries.3 The impetus behind a second, more global postcolonial wave a decade later was again this indefatigable sense of self-reflexivity, as more and more academics and activists, discontent with “Europe” as “the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories,” shifted their focus from conceptual dichotomies, political impositions, and literary analyses to ambivalent translations, subversive displacements, and material reconsiderations (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 1).4 After the field had become established first in departments of English, history, and comparative literature at North American, British, Indian, and Australian universities, this subsequent wave reshuffled the field beyond its concentric constellation by applying conceptual, methodological, and historical findings to other cultural, disciplinary, linguistic, and national contexts, and by interrogating theoretical formulations with historical inquiries into different places of alterity. In addition to scrutinizing analytic terms whose “insight” was not deemed to travel “well across adjacent disciplines and scholarly fields,” scholars, students, artists, and activists worked more deliberately on non-Western, Indigenous, early modern, and minor European ways of knowing (Scott 2005, p. 389). Their collective action,

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enhanced by professional organizations, libraries, and other university-led initiatives, interrogated “canonical knowledge systems”—even those within the relatively young field—and fruitful results came directly from far-reaching exchanges across “disciplinary boundaries and geographical enclosures” between literary scholars, historians, and colleagues in neighboring areas of study such as anthropology, geography, sociology, art history, gender, film, translation, performance and Holocaust studies, and, more recently, international human rights, as well as environmental, digital, and urban humanities (Gandhi 1998, p. 42; Prakash 1995, p. 12).5 Roughly four decades in the making, then, the vibrant character and diversity of postcolonial studies have been energized by a tireless spirit of “reenactment” (Prakash 1995, p. 11). This reconstructive dynamism has been instrumental in posing a strong opposition to skeptics who believe that to live well in postmodernity is to bid farewell to postcolonial remains.6 With incisive investigations of archival conventions, governmental records, photographs, paintings, films, maps, performances, memoires, travelogues, letters, oral traditions, digital databases, and literary narratives, postcolonial critics have kept their original spirit alive by revealing “interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice,” as well as “the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach” beyond the transitional period of independence, especially in the lives of women and children, victims of war, racialized ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and working-class families (Young 2012, p.  20). Alarmed by “the duress” with which imperial formations continue to accrue in postmodernity, they reaffirm arguably the most foundational lesson in postcolonial studies  that the post in postcolonial is irreducible to a temporal marker (Stoler 2016, p. 7).7 Having identified earlier blind spots in anglocentric literary and historical approaches to colonialism, contemporary postcolonial projects illuminate how heterogeneous and interconnected illiberal democracies are at an international scale, and why these unequal societal structures are built upon the ruins of past imperial regimes.8 More recently, this work has engaged a new generation of critics, artists, and activists who draw upon the trailblazing oeuvres of anticolonialism, the political imaginaries of the Bandung period, and later postcolonial criticisms to reshape the world in tune with their own anxiety, courage, hope, curiosity, enthusiasm, and grievance. They are  exemplifying what Hannah Arendt calls “action.” She argues that this capacity, which comes with the status of being “newcomers and beginners,” is inherent to each generation and connotes both the right and the ability “to take an

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initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule,’ indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere)” (Arendt 1958, p. 177).9 Although Arendt falls short of specifying how this beginning owes itself to what precedes it, it is useful here for conceptualizing how the lessons of past colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial activities are being reframed in currently transformative debates and community-based organizations. A combination of old and new action works up and down generational lines to revitalize resilient, forward-looking initiatives in reparative justice. Reframing Postcolonial Studies consists of carefully selected case studies that shed light on this action. Written by scholars of different generations, the eleven chapters show how, under contemporary historical conditions, preceding models of creativity, scholarship, and activism offer indispensable points of orientation as well as frustrating limits. They interrogate how current intellectual endeavors are informed by individual and community-­based actions outside of the academy and they demonstrate to what extent conceptual, methodological, and activist concerns are pivotal for contemporary postcolonial interventions. As far as I know, Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the first volume whose rationale is formulated in such explicitly intergenerational, future-oriented terms.10 The tripartite organization of this volume is applicable to any scholarly topic or academic discipline, so long it seeks to intervene in the world, but as the contributors make clear in their individual and mutually resonating case studies, conceptual vigilance, methodological deliberation, and scholarly activism acquire new strengths when different generations come together to reflect on their conjoined inheritance and legacy and take action in pursuit of a more reassuring future. Instead of being content with the truism that every generation wrestles with its inheritance and heritage, this compendium illuminates without trying to be comprehensive how foundational concepts, hybrid methodologies, and scholarly activisms are subjected to renewed scrutiny in the latest communication between postcolonial scholar-citizens.

Postcolonial Patriarchy, Inclusive Patrimony Perhaps it is best to explain at this point the motivation behind the following collaborative undertaking, as well as the value of its tripartite organization. Several experiences and inspirations come to my mind, but one of them stands out above all else because it hits closest to home, so to speak.

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In the summer of 2019, my home institution—the University of California, Los Angeles—celebrated its centennial and the rhetoric of honoring its past accomplishments, both communal and academic, with the call for charting an even bolder future during the next 100 years was pervasive on campus. It was during this period of mostly self-congratulatory festivities that the Fowler Museum, affiliated with the university, showcased a very different example of what it meant to look back in order to move forward. The museum was dedicated to exploring “global arts and cultures with emphasis on Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas” and, during these hot dry months typical for southern California, it exhibited a tripartite installation, titled Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa (Fowler Museum 2020). One of the three artworks was called We Live in Silence and it projected onto a large wall screen a 37-minute-long series of seven “chapters” where mostly black actresses portrayed different stages of modern African history (We Live in Silence n.d.). Visitors were asked to sit down in a completely dark room on one of two wooden benches whose tilted orientation toward the screen seemed to transform the cinematic production into a church-like catacomb. Indeed, what unfolded before their eyes was hardly reassuring. It was full of contradictions, as things familiar and foreign, historical and fabricated, grotesque and peaceful, religious and secular commingled, thereby refracting the direction of what was commonly known about Africa’s modernization or “development” and what European Enlightenment had prophesied about modernity  (Spivak 2018). Much of this estrangement in Bertolt Brecht’s sense of Verfremdungseffekt came from the lead character—a young black woman—who occasionally looked into the camera and directly addressed the audience. The video captured her radical transformation, beginning with her violent, rape-like subjugation to white colonial rule and Christianity (see Fig.  1.1), and ending with her splendid coronation in an independent nation, as the rest of society was falling apart (see Fig. 1.2). The final chapter showed in slow motion how the black protagonist— now a suit-wearing  man—sat like an apathetic, narcissistic despot on a throne in the middle of a long dining table, while young women dressed in elegant black or white clothes were joining him in the festivity. They were celebrating the beginning of a new political era. In the foreground, though, the scene could not be any more different: a car was burning upside down; a fanatic black pastor was blessing a small congregation of

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Fig. 1.1  Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)

Fig. 1.2  Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)

believers in a voodoo-like ritual; a black man with a gun in hand chased someone else across the screen; and a white policeman with a German shepherd on a leash charged another group of young black men. Those on top did not register at all what was unraveling right before their eyes.

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As the title of this video installation indicated, silence was determined to be the root of societal problems in Africa, a root nourished by colonial rule and Methodist evangelism. According to the protagonist, silence was an abiding feature of modern African subjectivity because “whitewashing” technologies originally in the service of colonial power exerted their spellbinding power over those now living under the aegis of capitalist “development.” Even with decolonization, Africans had not escaped police brutality, religious indoctrination, economic exploitation, and gun violence because the black oligarchy in power continued to use these tools in order to oppress them. As Neil Lazarus observed in reference not just to sub-Saharan Africa, but to the non-Western postcolonial world at large, this situation was illustrative of “leaders and ruling elites” who “came to identify their own maintenance in power as being of greater importance than the broader ‘social’ goods of democratization, opportunity and equality, and they increasingly used the repressive apparatuses and technologies of the state (often inherited from the colonial order) to enforce order and to silence or eliminate opposition” (Lazarus 2006, p.  12). Consequently, speaking freely in the public sphere or participating equally in society remained unattainable for the demos. Although the political ruler or the religious guardian was one of them, so to speak, little had changed in the larger deep-rooted belief—the product of long-standing forced assimilation to white colonial rule—that both the authority and the capacity to rule over others belonged to only one man at the head of a self-appointed, selectively Westernized elite. As Octave Mannoni had put it in Prospero and Caliban, this sort of “personality” as “the sum total of beliefs, habits, and propensities” mimicked the colonizer’s psychology instead of challenging inherited assumptions about the superiority of European civilization or about African inferiority (Mannoni 1990, p. 25). Of course, the depiction of an unchangingly repressive postcolonial Africa is not rare in Western public discourse (Naipaul 2010). Both neoliberal and neoconservative thinkers revert to dystopian descriptors to condemn non-Western liberation movements for having gone astray from their original mobilizing desires for freedom, rule of law, democracy, and sovereignty. Upholding Manichean oppositions that are constitutive of imperialisms past and present, their steady stream of analyses resurrects sweeping liberal principles—concepts of a strictly Western progressive and positivist order—to explain why Africans have failed to seize their moment of political awakening notwithstanding the departure of European colonizers from their land.11 It brings to mind Kant’s iconic formulation of

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Enlightenment by asserting that their fault lies in being unmündig—having no voice, being unemancipated—out of fear or due to laziness to come to political consciousness.12 Needless to say, postcolonial inquiries into these conditions have revealed how misguided such a line of argument is concerning those haunted by the specters of imperialism. Since the 1970s, the privatization of social services, the displacement of rural populations to urban shanty towns, the gentrification of metropolitan neighborhoods, the extraction of natural resources without sustainable practices or robust laws, and the passing of anti-regulatory policies have all contributed to expanding uneven political structures and exploitative economic practices in the former colonies. After 9/11 and the Great Recession, and with Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States as a symptom of white nationalist protectionism on the rise at a global scale, these developments are emblematic of post-Cold War neoconservative American and European foreign policies in utter disarray. Not surprisingly, Kudzanai Chiurai’s video installation refuted their validity by showing that Africans could not be blamed alone for their apolitical, non-democratic silence; nor did it convey Africa as a conflict-ridden place where there was no more hope for a different future. The key lay in a radical reconceptualization of postcolonial patrimony critical of colonial patriarchy. Since women’s experiences had repeatedly been excised from political life in this part of the world, Chiurai placed them at the center of his artwork, leaving all other conditions the same. So how exactly did he do it? What did his installation do to take up again the problem of gender inequality in the postcolony? Few contemporary African artists and activists orient themselves expressly around scholarly debates in postcolonial studies, but in this case scholarship, artistic creation, and activism genuinely go hand in hand. In fact, the decisive factor here is action in Arendt’s sense of intergenerational renewal. Chiurai, the artist, was born in 1981 roughly a year after Zimbabwe’s independence. He belongs to the first generation of Zimbabwean citizens who have no first-person experience with colonial rule or anticolonial resistance. His familiarity with corruption, exile, censorship, disenfranchisement, and poverty is linked to a broader, transnational order of black differential citizenship and resonates across time and space with Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic phrase in the 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that victims of racial discrimination “are caught in an inescapable mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (King Jr. 2020). Therefore, an exacting assessment of Chiurai’s artwork requires that we consider how this generational perspective figures as a new

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variable in ongoing postcolonial action. To put it differently, We Live in Silence is a reminder of Wole Soyinka’s observation during the late 1990s that “it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest,” since there is “never” a way of weighing “evenly” all the different responses to colonial violence and its aftermath (Soyinka 1999, p. viii). Every postcolonial generation needs to confront the task of dealing with the colonial present without easy recourse to a predetermined practice of forgiveness, indemnity, reparation, or remembrance. We Live in Silence is a bold and creative example of such action. I would like to point out that this installation highlighted cultural, religious, political, and economic entanglements between “Africa” and “Europe.” Signs of religious syncretism, linguistic translation, political continuity, and cultural adoption were seen everywhere in the video. It also made a convincing case for linking the violence under white colonial rule to the chaos in a “whitewashed” postcolony. Still, none of these features was really what made Chiurai’s work so innovative. Its most striking aspect was imagining an African nation, however morally conflicted or politically injurious it was, where women—not men—played decisive roles in the country’s complicated history. By fabricating a class of wealthy, emancipated, and powerful women on top of society, it showed how they profited—like so many politicians in post-independence Africa—from postcolonial inequities. This representation was not simply a rehearsal of a major chord in postcolonial studies. By employing a Xhosa woman whose violent rise to power reminded viewers uncannily of an authoritarian leader such as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, We Live in Silence played familiar notes in an empowering minor key. It reactivated a utopian sensibility of what postcolonial patrimony could mean if women held leading positions in society.13 It dared to ask questions that were considered impossible, unrealistic, or irresponsible based on the norms of past national liberationist ideologies or according to contemporary globalists and imperialists. Would a postcolonial nation like Zimbabwe have followed the same historical trajectory—from colonial oppression to independence and back to neocolonialism—if a woman had been in power? How did Chiurai’s allegory criticize contemporary life in Africa as a continuous ordeal in silence and as an extension of patriarchal slavery? And what was the enduring linkage it presented between violent sexual fantasies and colonial tropes? What could visitors learn from engaging in this speculative exercise? Last but not least, how did the installation contest what visitors commonly encountered in museums of anthropology, art, and ethnology across

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Western Europe and North America? To what extent did it overcome the flawed process of curatorial censorship all too often carried out in the name of postcolonial reconciliation or liberal democratic civility? I do not want to dwell much longer on this case study, but in order to drive home the overarching framework of the volume, it seems instructive to compare Chiurai’s action with a fitting example from the preceding generation. Such a comparison underscores how a younger generation reframes what has been examined before in conceptual, methodological, and activist terms. It also demonstrates why the contemporary world in its cultural, environmental, economic, or political specificity is impossible to understand without a deep postcolonial reference. These issues will be examined closely in the following chapters. First, the comparison. In the essay titled “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’” and published in 1992, Anne McClintock famously took issue with the term “post-colonial” and its cognates, shortly after the field had established itself in the US academy. Her critique focused on three conceptual coordinates—time, space, and gender—and their inextricable connections in postcolonial studies, but she began by observing that “the term ‘post-colonialism’” was profoundly Eurocentric because it consigned in a sequential manner “the cultures of peoples beyond colonialism to prepositional time,” namely the post in postcolonialism (McClintock 1992, pp. 85, 86). The distinct temporality of a non-­ European community was defined again in relation to, and in succession of, European colonial history, although there was so much knowledge, history, and experience preceding and following the colonial period. The term “post-colonialism” set up another false “binary opposition” (McClintock 1992, p. 85). In other words, to divide “the colonial” and “the post-colonial” in this grammatological way was to blur the necessary differentiation between colonizer and colonized, and between those who benefited from colonial rule and those who were its lasting victims. These two conceptual simplifications, McClintock argued, led to the wrong impression that the “post-colonial” somehow captured the “multiplicity” of historical conditions under which different countries around the globe were struggling to deal with their colonial past, but in actuality their responses varied widely from one polity to another: from ambivalence, denial, and silence to naiveté, resistance, and shame (McClintock 1992, p. 86). Such divergent attitudes could not be reduced to a single temporal prefix.

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McClintock went on to say that the same criticism held true for the term “de-colonization” and she singled out Zimbabwe among several formerly colonized countries (McClintock 1992, p. 88). She wrote: In Zimbabwe, after a seven-year civil war of such ferocity that at the height of the war 500 people were killed every month and 40 per cent of the country’s budget was spent on the military, the Lancaster House Agreement choreographed by Britain in 1979 ensured that one third of Zimbabwe’s arable land (12  million  hectares) was to remain in white hands, a minute fraction of the population. In other words, while Zimbabwe gained formal political independence in 1980 (holding the chair of the 103-nation Non-­ Aligned Movement from 1986–1989), it has, economically, undergone only partial decolonization. (McClintock 1992, pp. 88–89)

Here,  McClintock condensed into one single paragraph a great deal of historical information about armed struggles in Rhodesia during the 1960s, followed in 1980 by the democratic election of an independent government under Mugabe’s political leadership and the subsequent founding of the Republic of Zimbabwe. And when referring to the Lancaster House conference, she alluded to the fact that, in order to gain political independence, the newly founded state had agreed to a drastically uneven distribution of land between the white minority and the black majority.14 Thus, Zimbabwe was a postcolonial country where the legacy of Rhodesia’s racist administrative structure was well alive. This explained again why McClintock also omitted the hyphen in the word “decolonization.” In addition to blurring any strict temporal division between colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism, she took issue with the possibility of clearly differentiating perpetrators from victims within this vexing context, as newly elected political leaders were complicit in preserving colonial structures and practices in postcolonialism. Last but not least, McClintock registered how past colonial violence had transmogrified into a new “global militarization of masculinity” (McClintock 1992, p. 92). On the international stage, she identified her own government—the United States—as a major post-Cold War culprit in this “military gangsterism” (McClintock 1992, p. 94). At the same time, she accused “the national bourgeoisies and kleptocracies” in formerly colonized nations of denying women hope and justice (McClintock 1992, p. 92). These elites, she wrote, invoked “‘post-colonial’ ‘progress’” and “industrial ‘modernization’” to conceal the violence of their own power

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partly grounded in the preservation of gender inequality (McClintock 1992, p. 92). She concluded that this was the reason why she remained skeptical of hopeful proclamations, whether they adopted the rhetoric of anti-imperial resistance against economic globalization or the triumphalist language of post-1989 neoconservative liberalism. Nearly three decades separate McClintock’s essay from Chiurai’s installation, but her insights into gender inequality and multitemporality remain as timely as ever. Nonetheless, the inversion of gender hierarchy in We Live in Silence condemns the continuing history of sexual violence in Zimbabwe from a resolutely contemporary perspective. Chiurai’s action calls attention to the vexing conjunction between patriarchy and patrimony by denouncing—without being cruel toward the elders who have themselves suffered horrendously from colonial oppression and religious indoctrination and, thereafter, in anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation-­ building—the ongoing violence against women’s body and spirit. While acknowledging non-economistic things, which Pierre Bourdieu associates with “intergenerational relations” such as “debt,” “recognition,” “a feeling of obligation,” “gratitude,” “filial devotion,” and “love,” Chiurai’s audacious negotiation construes a simultaneously critical and hopeful space for speculating on an equitable future (Bourdieu 1998, p. 190). There is a lot more to be said about the other chapters in We Live in Silence where viewers find subtle references to Macaulay’s infamous “Minute Upon Indian Education” (1835), the French-language film Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun 1967) produced by Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo, and the mourning of a naked, lifeless matriarch against the backdrop of Warazulwa ngenxa yami, a South African Wesleyan Methodist hymn in isiXhosa. They remind viewers of Chiurai’s main goal, which is reframing what counts as tradition from the latest feminist perspective. To put it more bluntly, the recognition that colonial violence is not eradicated from a postcolony is hardly new; it is a basic lesson that spans generations. Accordingly, Achille Mbembe observes that every postcolony’s “age” is “a combination of several temporalities”: precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial (Mbembe 2001, p. 15). It is against this multitemporal backdrop that Chiurai’s installation advances the debate on the postcolonial by inventing the story of a Western-educated Xhosa woman whose violent and exploitative rise to power deviates from history and her fictitious story disrupts the dominant, progressive, male-centric narrative regarding the previous generation’s sacrifice for national independence. On the basis of this critical gendered intervention, viewers feel challenged to raise questions about

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historical guilt, social inequality, and political responsibility, especially with a view to women as victims of white colonial rule and black postcolonial patriarchy, and—not to forget—as bearers of this oppressive patrimony. Such a potentially explosive critique emerges from the audacious position that calling out older generations for failing to live up to their promise is necessary for proposing a different African utopia where action lies in the hands of women now. At a technical level, the installation demonstrates action by reimagining the history of Africa’s citizenry within the context of an anthropological museum. By intermixing classificatory genres such as film, performance, music, and photography, it transgresses the age-old “encyclopedic,” “cosmopolitan” rule that a chronological display of possibly looted objects, along with black-and-white photographs, suffices as an authentic, impartial, and “reasoned” form of museum curation in the twenty-first century (Cuno 2011, pp. 102, 104). It exposes past imperial practices by which cultural artifacts, visual documents, or even human remains have arrived in Western institutions. It clarifies for viewers why a reconciliatory, pluralist approach to the curatorial presentation or the archival preservation of non-Western art is neither critical nor sufficient in the contemporary postcolonial world. We Live in Silence sets the modern history of Africa back in motion by carrying the postcolonial legacy forward on the basis of three etymologically related terms: gender, generation, and genre. Now what about its installation within the walls of an American university? The issue of legacy has lately boiled over in all parts of the globe, not least in the United States where corrupt college admission decisions, Confederate memorials, monuments and statues, as well as political movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #NoDAPL, #MeToo, and Occupy Wall Street have heightened people’s sensibility of what counts as public good, what qualifies for shared inheritance, and why there persists an unmet need for reparative justice. My institution has not been immune to these soul-searching conversations, since it sits as a public land-grant institution on a land that originally belongs to the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva peoples. Its institutional history is inextricably linked to the pain of settler colonialism and Christian proselytism among Native Americans.15 In recognition of this historical trauma, the Fowler Museum moved in the right direction by curating Chiurai’s installation as a vehicle of decolonial transformation in North American higher education.16 No longer committed to the idea that museums were sites of a distinctly art historical or anthropological exhibition, it emphasized the need to involve all of the visitors’

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senses and reconceptualize non-Western works of art as things that were both alive and communicating, not inert and disjoined from their places of origin. According to Jane Chin Davidson, this significant shift in the museum’s mission entailed a growing public duty wherein the university museum diverged “from the Western convention” in separating art and art history from archeology and anthropology (Davidson 2018, p. 3). It focused on “global art” as opposed to “world art,” knowing full well that many “ethnographical artifacts” in Western archives and museums had been acquired under varying legal, illegal, and extralegal conditions (Davidson 2018, p. 3). The museum also learned to exercise “an important self-reflexive scholarly agency through constant evaluation of the processes for representing cultures and for modes of cultural analysis” instead of taking upon itself the whitewashing role of a universal institution (Davidson 2018, p. 3). It fostered cross-disciplinary conversations about locally specific classifications and definitions while pointing to false universalist assumptions about identity, history, temporality, art, space, and heritage. In resonance with McClintock’s concern some three decades before, the Fowler Museum refused to represent Africa and its many notions of inheritance as things stuck in the past. By exhibiting We Live in Silence, it took responsibility within a larger university community in the United States for decolonizing minds.17

Regenerating the Future of Postcolonial Studies This case study exemplifies what is at stake in the following pages. It shows that the latest transformative activities in postcolonial studies address conceptual issues, interdisciplinary methodologies, and activist concerns— things that have long preoccupied scholars, teachers, and practitioners in the field. Yet, these modalities are being woven together on the current intergenerational playing field in response to contemporary struggles against dispossession, discrimination, displacement, and degradation. Building upon existing concepts, methodological breakthroughs, and imaginative coalitions, the subsequent chapters address abiding questions about archive, memory, cultural inheritance, historical legacy, political responsibility, and reparative action. Going beyond the perennial debates on the tension between theory and praxis or on the disparity between activism and scholarship, they examine literary texts, visual artworks, language and immigration policies, public monuments, museum exhibitions, moral dilemmas, and political movements to revitalize our postcolonial

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action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimentation, and scholarly activism. More specifically, they push the limits of postcolonial critique in three coordinated ways: first, through a meticulous reconceptualization of long-standing key terminologies in the intersection of past, present, and future; second, in cross-disciplinary, collaborative methodologies, which serve to uncover colonial remains in contemporary politics and society from layers of occluding debris; and third, in a combination of community-based, bottom-up engagement with political activism and critical scholarship. Rather than offer brand-new paradigms, these nuanced reorientations model without trying to be exhaustive how postcolonial studies are being pursued nowadays by several generations in conversation with one another, and how their individual and collective actions are confronting effectively economic dispossession, political disenfranchisement, racism, sexism, nationalism, ecological exploitation, and historical aphasia in global modernity. The following list of queries is indicative of action in this collaborative, intergenerational sense. What is the location of utopian thought in postcolonial criticism? What potential does a postcolonially inflected utopianism hold today? How does it connect memories of historical trauma or anticolonial resistance to transformative visions of the future (Chap. 2)? How does one go about assessing Algeria’s contemporary efforts in decolonizing public spaces with statues whose provenance reveals as much about French colonial rule as it does about post-independence nationalism? Which cultural and political concepts are at stake here (Chap. 3)? Or why is a younger generation of intellectuals and writers challenging francophonie now? To what extent is this concept in need of revaluation given its appropriation by the ruling class in France? What is required to ensure that francophonie does not mark a superficial and reconciliatory future mediated by the French language and dominated by the French nation (Chap. 4)? And how do transnational writers from the Caribbean and Mascarene islands help us imagine relationships of a minor-to-minor, transoceanic solidarity as opposed to a continentally or territorially grounded alliance (Chap. 5)? What insights are shareable between postcolonial studies and energy humanities? What conceptual benefits and methodological innovations come from their emerging alliance (Chap. 6)? What conventions and taboos rule contemporary decolonial protests and why are visual representations so central to these controversies (Chap. 7)? Or what sort of outreach in solidarity is possible between scholars and activists in the aftermath of a colonial genocide? How do communal

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demands for reparation, scholarly investigations, and private friendships work side by side in such a bonding (Chap. 8)? And what hopeful interventions have recently occurred in European museums as allies of actionbased postcolonial research? How have activists put pressure on these monumental institutions and their long-standing archival practices?18 To what extent are such activisms supportive of larger struggles against nationalism, racism, and xenophobia in Western Europe (Chap. 9)? Finally, what is there to learn again from Frantz Fanon, as we confront anti-black racism in the twenty-first century? How does the Black Lives Matter movement carry his pioneering legacy forward without reaffirming his patronizing, homophobic worldview (Chap. 10)? These questions are possibly dizzying in their eclectic coverage of concepts, geographies, languages, histories, memories, and themes, but what the answers bring to light as a whole is a critical engagement with postcolonial patrimony as a matter of intergenerational reframing. Reframing Postcolonial Studies is a book that recognizes the significance of conceptual vigilance, methodological innovation, and action-­ based research for figuring out what inventories of postcolonial thought and practice need to be retooled for newcomers, as they search for their own vectors of change in contemporary society. It explains how and why past imperial categories, practices, systems, and norms survive as unfinished formations in the twenty-first century and it reactivates the sort of critical consciousness that takes up essential parts of its intellectual and political heritage in a time-dependent intersection of present and future. Let me tease out this process in reference to Edward Said. After the publication of Orientalism (1978), Said deliberated on the mechanism of scholarly practice by highlighting “filiation” and “affiliation” as the two types of relationship to one’s subject within the humanities. As he pointed out in his introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), negotiating between these modes of relation was not to take issue “with the activity of conserving the past, or with reading great literature, or with doing serious and perhaps even utterly conservative scholarship as such” (Said 1983, p. 22). The problem lay elsewhere, namely with “the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption” in the humanities that “the Eurocentric model” should continue to dictate what counted as “a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar” (Said 1983, p. 22). Restricting itself to an “orthodox canon of literary monuments,” this norm ruled out “everything that [was] nonhumanistic and nonliterary and non-European” and its effect was to maintain an intellectual culture of

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“continuity” in resemblance of “biological procreation” (Said 1983, p. 22). According to Said, this sort of critic faithfully inherited what was being passed down from one generation to another and reaffirmed humanistic scholarship within a narrow, provincial, national, and Eurocentric frame of reference. By contrast, a secular critic—a critic whose scholarly attention was simultaneously focused on the real world—examined how that other, naturalized, evolutionary model was only possible because things were hidden through prejudicial disposal or intellectual theft. It looked beautiful, coherent, and tranquil on the outside, but the purpose of “secular criticism” was to expose precisely what had forcibly been made invisible in a filiative manner. It dispelled the fantasy of pure humanistic inquiries untainted by worldly concerns by investigating unequal colonial encounters as well as hidden postcolonial intermixtures. This alternative mode of criticism was empowering in a subversive sense. Thriving on “affiliation,” it constituted “a sovereign methodology of system” in its own right (Said 1983, p. 23). As an American citizen of Palestinian origin whose grounding in comparative literature harkened back to Erich Auerbach’s cosmopolitan-exilic tradition, Said understood that filiative relationships were inevitable in academia, just as they were in every other community.19 However, he argued that it was important to reform the humanities through affiliative relations. I would like to think with Said that what travels up and down the intergenerational chain and takes up the question of postcolonial patrimony in pursuit of a more equitable future originates in such affiliative relationships, even as filiative connections sometimes weigh heavily on our shoulders. This dynamic process operates according to “a secular rhythm at work in history” (Mannheim 1952, p. 286). As Karl Mannheim spells out in a widely known essay on generation, it introduces a new pattern of action to our “inventory” of thoughts and practices what is worth remembering and what “is no longer useful” in the present moment (Mannheim 1952, p. 294). This conceptual model lays a strong intellectual and political foundation for this multiauthored anthology. It reframes the dominant language of newness in postcolonial studies by thinking critically about the continuously changing rhythm of generation and its impact on inheritance, hope, and legacy in transmission. I understand that this framework is not without risks. It appears to be out of sync with the larger postcolonial project whose impulse is strongly retrospective. Since the primary objects of postcolonial inquiry are colonial violence and its aftermath, critics and activists

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alike seek to correct this protracted history by calling out past crimes against colonial subjects and by exposing present forms of exploitation as results of a continuing pattern in socioeconomic and political disparities both within and between countries of the Global North and the Global South. In such passionate demands for a different present and a better future, both the past and the present are accorded intense reflection, whereas the future receives far less speculative attention. The postcolonial optic is by definition sensitive to recognition, reconciliation, repatriation, retribution, or reparation and any hasty orientation toward the future risks inflicting further pain on victims past and present. Still, there are good reasons for being more deliberate about the future, as the contemporary political situation makes this task necessary. Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder touch upon this important point in The Postcolonial Contemporary (2018). After making a persuasive argument in support of the need to continue evaluating the present in postcolonial terms, they describe what they see as the latest development—the “new”— in the field. They write: A new generation of critics and activists is increasingly interested in issues that had already seemed to be outmoded when postcolonial studies first entered the academy: anarchist tactics, socialist imaginaries, anti-imperial internationalisms, and traditions of mass protest and popular resistance. Twenty-first-century developments are also raising new concerns about the urgency and possibilities for translocal solidarity, postnational democracy, and planetary politics. (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, pp. 8–9)

This new generation, the co-editors suggest, can be differentiated from the preceding one insofar as it has rediscovered the usefulness of earlier decolonial movements for addressing contemporary cultural, financial, ecological, and political challenges. Since no specific example is given, I surmise that what Kim Watson and Wilder have in mind are political imaginaries of the Bandung period or earlier anticolonial solidarities such as the ones in Egypt, India, China, and Korea during the heady months of 1919.20 The second part of their observation is less cryptic. When we think of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, climate change, gender discrimination, data security, international war, migration, public health, and terrorism, border-crossing cooperation is essential and such an engagement requires reframing existing postcolonial concepts and methodologies,

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some of which have been available, as Kim Watson and Wilder point out, since the 1970s. I concur with this historical assessment in a broad sense, but it presents several problems, which are difficult to ignore. All of them boil down to a fuzzy notion of generation, which perpetuates the old-new or past-present binary without being any more instructive about the future. Kim Watson and Wilder spell out in optimistic terms that their focus on “the postcolonial contemporary” both as “a proposition” and as “a question” probes the nature of “relations between past, present, and future” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, pp. 1–2). They explain that postcolonial violence calls for a “new” set of critical tools with which scholars and activists are able to interrogate past “colonial conditions of knowledge production, their ongoing legacies in postcolonial periods, and their power to produce and reproduce systems of inequality within and between nations, societies, continents” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 3). However, they do not specify how the future figures as an essentially utopian, political, moral, or ethical category in reconsidering “conventional notions of past and present and their relation” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 10). The future quietly disappears from their view. I also take issue with the claim that border-crossing, subversive concerns are what define such “new” critics and activists in postcolonial studies. It implies that the immediately preceding generation has focused mostly on national and international issues without paying much attention to anti-capitalist, bottom-up, democratic, transnational movements at scales below and above the nation. That is not the case. Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), Sheng Hu’s From Opium War to the May 4th Movement (1991), and Benita Parry’s essay “Resistance Theory/ Theorizing Resistance; or, Two Cheers for Nativism” (1994) were very different examples of influential works that pursued during the 1990s scholarly and community-based approaches to resistance and solidarity. Graham Huggan is right to point out in this regard that Marxist revolutionary vocabularies such as “‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘decolonization’” have “never disappeared from the postcolonial lexicon in the first place,” although critics such as Lazarus and Parry “want to reinstate” them (Huggan 2013, p. 4). A more nuanced and less polemical portrayal of the field shows that the concepts, theories, and strategies of past liberation movements “are continually renegotiated in a complex revisionist process that allows the relationship between past and present … to be productively reassessed” (Huggan 2013, p.  4). Analogously, there are plenty of

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scholars, students, and activists today who work very much at local and national scales. Although there appears to be a clearly discernible trend in one way or another, such an observation presupposes a particular habitus within the discipline and is itself a symptom of institutional filiation. Huggan’s elucidation leads me to my next comparison. With The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013), Huggan has showcased how the negotiation between revolution and revisionism informs many contributions to contemporary postcolonial studies. Yet, this anthology, too, pays little attention to the future. In fact, Huggan gives a few reasons for this predisposition. He writes that the future is only subject to “predictions and assessments,” which, in turn, attest to “the continuing significance of the past” (Huggan 2013, p.  22). Most of his conceptual and ideological emphases in the introductory chapter link the past and the present, but the future is registered only as a “speculative or hypothetical” template, which is ultimately impossible to decipher in scholarly verifiable terms (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Huggan also contends that emancipatory mobilizations are hopeful only to a limited extent. As revolutions have repeatedly shown in modern history, they are prone to violence and war and bring as much suffering as progress. These are certainly legitimate concerns, but I argue that, if we are to close the loop between criticism and activism as necessarily interlinked parts of the postcolonial, there will need to be a bolder, sustained discussion about our continuously changing relationship with postcolonial patrimony and our conviction to shape the future through “anticipatory,” “world-improving” action (Bloch 1995, pp. 11, 92). Action, hope, and resilience are exhausting frames of mind in an era of illiberal austerity democracy, but let us be inspired, as Said suggests, by the creative role we play as critics, writers, artists, and activists in calling out all related forms of oppression and in  re-envisioning a very different postcolonial world. I admit that, as co-editors of The Postcolonial World (2017), Jyotsna Singh and I likewise fail to address this blind spot. This expansive collection is similar to The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies in the sense that the main focus rests on a past-present dialectic and its potential for “imagining a range of affective communities that re-think hierarchies of difference,” and for “re-figuring modes of knowledge production in a range of explorations—in the material, textual, visual, and digital worlds” (Singh 2017, p.  26). Both volumes make clear that reconfiguring currently available modes of interpretation entails remembrance, retrospection, and reparation, but feelings and thoughts regarding the future hover

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only vaguely in our shared postcolonial ethic. My own essay in The Postcolonial World employs digital humanities methodologies to track how “postcolonial scholars loosely share a common toolbox of theories and strategies,” even as “their work looks different from one cultural, national, geopolitical, or institutional context to another,” and I close by stating that “the future of postcolonialism” is guaranteed by this “planetary and public spirit,” which binds us in both filiative and affiliative terms to various intellectual disciplines and non-academic communities (Kim 2017, pp.  530, 542). However,  I do not probe this optimism any  further in intergenerational terms. Perhaps the most striking parallel I see between the book you are reading and another is found in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History (2019). This massive volume deserves a separate, in-depth discussion given the wealth of conceptual issues, methodological innovations, and activist strategies that populate its pages. Let it suffice here to examine, without repeating her numerous case studies from the Belgian Congo, Israel, Palestine, Algeria, Egypt, Germany, France, and the United States, the extent to which her provocative work on archives, photographs, and museum objects contributes to the same collective project. Azoulay’s focus on the shutter as “a synecdoche for the operation of the imperial enterprise altogether” resonates with our goal to see things in a reactivated frame or with Kim Watson and Wilder’s use of the visual lexicon—“the postcolonial optic”—in The Postcolonial Contemporary (Azoulay 2019, p. 2). Azoulay begins her book with a biting critique of what she calls “the banner of the ‘new’” (Azoulay 2019, p. 39). For her, “the new defines imperialism,” since it operates “in a suicidal cycle” to innovate itself, and this desire for continuous expansion, novelty, or progress is self-­destructive and leaves nothing but “debris” in collateral or direct damage (Azoulay 2019, pp. 17–18). Azoulay acknowledges, though, that this observation is neither new nor of utmost importance; for what is truly needed is a way to interrupt this dominant, incessant drumbeat: “The question is how to rupture, stop, and retroactively reverse the category of the ‘new’ that seems to have survived intact, coeval with the real, and how to undo its facticity in and through research and scholarship” (Azoulay 2019, p. 23). Such a reversal, Azoulay writes, comes from generating a potential historical narrative whereby political concepts and cultural institutions are exposed as “imperial devices” instead of being mistaken for “neutral” modes of containment or communication (Azoulay 2019, p.  39). The

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targets of her critique include “‘archive,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘human rights,’” as well as museums and universities (Azoulay 2019, p. 39). Azoulay’s inquiry into “imperial visions of belonging and unbelonging” turns out to be a very personal undertaking (Azoulay 2019, p. xiii). It explains the value of “being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics” (Azoulay 2019, p. 43). As she explains, her upbringing as a Palestinian Jew, first, in the state of Israel and, then, in France has compelled her to “unlearn” what she has been told about herself and the world in its divisibility (Azoulay 2019, p. 3). Not only does her personal familial story intersect with the displacement of Arab communities from Palestine beginning with the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, but it also invokes a much longer colonial history going as far back as the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and, later, the French colonial occupation of Algeria during the Vichy regime. Given this multilayered, conflicting inheritance, Azoulay contends that “unlearning” has been central for her to mount a forceful opposition to imperialism: “Unlearning imperialism involves different types of ‘de-,’ such as decompressing and decoding; ‘re-,’ such as reversing and rewinding; and ‘un-,’ such as unlearning and undoing” (Azoulay 2019, p. 10). As these prefixes indicate, her gaze is fixed firmly on the imperial past whose stubborn power over the present calls for several different modes of resistance. She refuses to identify herself, as she puts it, “as an Israeli, or to be recognized as an Israeli,” since this national identity is associated with the theft of “lands and the property of others” (Azoulay 2019, p. xiii). It stands for what she has “inherited” as an implicated subject of past colonial violence and present imperial injustice (Azoulay 2019, p. xv). Last but not least, it encompasses her employment at a “neoliberal American university” whose intellectual property and material wealth are inseparable from the history of transatlantic slavery and the systemic dispossession of ethnic minorities over generations (Azoulay 2019, p. xv). I am not in a position to criticize how Azoulay feels about her own identity vis-à-vis Roger Azoulay, her father,  whom she criticizes for not embracing boldly or more openly their commonly shared Maghribi background.21 I am in awe of her far-reaching study and encourage readers to go back and forth between her book and this volume. However, what strikes me as an unsatisfactorily addressed object of inquiry in her work is again the future. Like Huggan, Azoulay is skeptical of any vision

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pertaining to this horizon, although her reasons are different from his. She thinks that any future-oriented vocabulary is already predetermined by “an imperial enterprise,” which equates future with “progress” (Azoulay 2019, p. 55). Since “rehearsal, reversal, rewinding, repairing, renewing, reacquiring, redistributing, readjusting, reallocating” are long overdue processes, she conceptualizes the notion of “potential history” in strictly retrospective, reparative terms (Azoulay 2019, p. 56). This explains why, when she appeals to a future more in line with her vision of the world, she resorts to the language of “imagination.” Imagine a strike not as an attempt to improve one’s salary alone but rather as a strike against the very raison d’être of these institutions … Imagine experts in the world of art admitting that the entire project of artistic salvation to which they pledged allegiance is insane and that it could not have existed without exercising various forms of violence, attributing spectacular prices to pieces that should not have been acquired in the first place. (Azoulay 2019, pp. 159–160)

Azoulay’s distrust regarding the future makes sense alongside the duress of imperialism she seems to sense everywhere, but neither the act of imagination in an individual protest nor the collective activism of artists, curators, and scholars within the context of a museum or in another public sphere is as hypothetical or as radical as she portrays it to be. As my examination of Chiurai’s installation has shown, and this becomes clear time and again in the following pages, imagining this sort of future is already here and now. Azoulay’s intervention in the ongoing process of imperialism polarizes the past in contradistinction from the future and this version of potential history seems to be grounded less in historical accuracy than in rhetorical persuasion.

Chapter Summaries In Chapter Two, which opens the first section of the book on concepts, Bill Ashcroft helps us reframe postcolonial studies at a conceptual level, although the other vectors of change—methodology and activism—are never lost from sight. He is the co-author of volumes that have established the conceptual foundation of postcolonial studies, and here he discusses how our interpretation of postcolonial narratives changes, once it is linked to Ernst Bloch’s critical notion of utopia (Ashcroft 2017; Ashcroft et al.

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1989; Ashcroft et  al.  1998; Ashcroft et  al. 2013). His essay is titled “Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures” and it illustrates the prominence of future thinking in postcolonial creative production, as well as the usefulness of utopian theory for postcolonial criticism today. According to Ashcroft, a persistent failing in postcolonial criticism has been the tendency to reduce resistance to a simple dynamic of opposition. By demonstrating the importance of future in postcolonial analysis, he explains how a writer’s engagement with imperial power is potentially transformative. While grounding himself in the long-standing aesthetic and theoretical discourse on utopianism whose beginning is traceable to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Ashcroft refers to Bloch’s notion of Vor-­ Schein—or “anticipatory illumination”—as a means to imagine Heimat as opposed to nation as a concrete place of sociopolitical relations. Thus, postcolonial utopianism looks beyond the nation and its inheritance of colonial structures. Its localization emphasizes the link between cultural memory and varying visions of the future. It recalibrates the linearity of time with a messier trajectory in which the cultural past is imprinted onto an intimate and politically reactivated future. As Ashcroft claims, these relationships are crucial for postcolonial studies because they consider the incomplete process of decolonization even after national independence. Although his case studies are principally literary and reflect his preference for literature in postcolonial theory, the range of postcolonial writers he examines across different continents and generations points to the undiminished role that future plays in every form of resistance to colonial rule and post-independence injustice. In Chapter Three, “On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture,” Susan Slyomovics follows suit with a fascinating essay on the “statuomania” in French Algeria. This term, she observes, originates in reference to the vast number of statues, war memorials, and monuments in this colony beginning in 1830. What she uncovers is an eye-opening historical, geopolitical, and affective provenance between Algeria and France based on their postcolonial afterlives. The historical backdrop against which she tracks the history of a particular statue is “the ‘repatriation’ of cultural and historical treasures [stolen] from French Algeria.” According to Slyomovics, this conceptualization is misleading because it quietly condones the illegal removal of looted objects from their places of origin. At the center of her investigation is the 1972 statue commemorating the Algerian war hero and martyr Youcef Zighoud (1921–1956). Sculpted by artist Ahmed

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Benyahia for Algeria’s third largest city of Constantine, the statue’s creation, emplacement, disappearance, and reappearance recount multiple efforts in post-independent Algeria to decolonize public space. Here, research into postcolonial provenance goes beyond the physical location of art and the question of legal ownership. It encompasses artist and object biographies, artwork creativity, entangled or shared senses of heritage, as well as a global circulation of aesthetic symbols in the making of monuments to glorify the French and Algerian nation-states. Slyomovics pursues this interdisciplinary work on the basis of a stunning video interview of Benyahia available on YouTube and documenting Algeria’s “Generation independence, Jil al-istiqlal.” Her study is exemplary of “a protean archive,” which is neither clearly “bounded” nor successfully “policed,” but consists of displacements, gaps, projections, and cross-references, which are crucial for postcolonial research in the twenty-first century (Stoler 2018, p. 49). In Chapter Four, titled “Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing Francophonie,” Dominic Thomas examines the close association between language and identity in postcolonial France where the past does not prove to be past after all. He begins with the astute observation that President Emmanuel Macron belongs to the first generation of French citizens born after the end of French colonialism, and that this historical marker has been used as an all too facile indicator for France’s ability to move on and leave behind its colonial past. As Thomas shows, though, there is more to the story. Language policy served historically to bolster the nation’s overseas colonial ambitions and, in the postcolonial era, the same action, guideline, and protocol have curiously re-emerged under the aegis of francophonie. Now, it marks Macron’s renewed program for “a happy future” in the relationship between France and its former colonies. In response, critics have highlighted how diplomatic soft power initiatives continue to prioritize neocolonial ties. Critical of this narrow conceptualization of francophonie, they are calling for a greater bibliodiversity in reference to such a cultural, linguistic, and political concept. They are collectively channeling efforts in reframing the symbiotic linkage between French as language and France as nation. They are advocating for the denationalization, defrancophonization, and decolonizing of francophonie. This latest critical and creative activism underscores the rigid association between national language and cultural identity in postcolonial France. Last but not least, Thomas sheds light on a dangerous cooptation by the Far Right of French foreign policy in public discourse.

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The second section of this book is dedicated to methodological challenges, although again it makes insightful conceptual and politically activating observations. In Chapter Five, “Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy,” Bruno Jean-­ François explores Creole literatures, as well as expressive cultures from the Mascarene Islands and the Caribbean region, to illustrate how they have long thought in cross-cultural and intergenerational terms. They foreground narratives of migration and displacement, which put diverse peoples, cultures, and languages into close contact over extended historical periods. They bring together trajectories and epistemologies that turn the commonalities of minor-to-minor solidarities into the rhetoric of a new humanism. In Jean-François’s attentive reading, the creative works of Nathacha Appanah, Nirveda Alleck, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau—all of them being transnational artists, writers, scholars, and activists—generate powerful relational imaginaries and transoceanic connections, which destabilize historical, geographical, and cultural divides, as well as colonial imaginaries. Their figuration of the clandestine migrant is generative of a new kind of kinship whereby comparative history, minor solidarity, and human empathy are woven together in ways that render a utopian future more graspable. Chapter Six is a compelling investigation of energy as a new paradigm for postcolonial studies in the wake of the Iraq War. Titled “Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities,” it demonstrates Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s conception of oil not only as the main fuel for capitalist modernization or global modernity, but also as a deep historical linkage between energy, climate, and empire. So what precisely do postcolonial studies and energy humanities have to say to each other? What cultural, sociopolitical, historical, and economic insights are gained when we place empire and energy side by side? What “history of a future” appears on the horizon and how does it present a chance to break from the colonial present? (Jameson 2003, p. 76). Given that postcolonial studies constitute a well-established field and energy humanities an emergent one, we might expect their relationship to be marked by wars of position or by anxieties of influence. However, Mukherjee makes a stunning case for cross-­ fertilization and cross-hatching. If postcolonial studies have been accused of eliminating the matter of history from its purview, he explains how energy humanities have suffered from insufficient attention to the dynamics of empire. In his view, not only can a conversation help correct these built-in perspectival lacunae of the two fields, but it can also help us

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understand how empire and energy are intricately interconnected. Based upon a nuanced analysis of terms that belong to conceptions of energy in the postcolonial world, Mukherjee provides readers with a thrilling reading of two literary texts on nineteenth-century colonial India: Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Neel-Darpan (1861) and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge-­ Builders” (1898). The interdisciplinary results include new possibilities for rethinking historical periodization, literary and non-literary alike, and placing the concept of labor or energy back at the center of critical inquiries into modern capitalist colonial empires. Titled “From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial Dilemmas in Visual Representation,” Chapter Seven presents another methodologically innovative study, namely a transnational analysis of the two most controversial decolonial protests in contemporary visual culture. First,  Afonso Dias Ramos turns his attention to the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign at the University of Cape Town (2015) as an example of the demand to remove public memorials celebrating imperialism and slavery outside of the museum. Second, he examines the display of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2017) at the Whitney Biennial in New York City where the right to show historical images exposing the bodily violence of racial terrorism and white supremacy within the museum is hotly contested. By considering these divisive debates side by side, Dias Ramos illuminates the reasons why monuments and pictures—and more generally, aesthetic practices and visual cultures—have emerged as the most controversial issues of public history. He sensitizes readers to art and heritage as interlinked issues in postcolonial meditations on the colonial past and the future. The next three chapters, which comprise the third section of this volume, exemplify the extent to which contemporary postcolonial studies resist confinement in scholarly institutions either safely housed in affluent universities or in market-driven publishing houses around the globe. Although they register gaps between postcolonial scholars and those whose utopian action aims to bring an end to the colonial present, their investigation shows how scholarship and activism go hand in hand, especially in the latest controversies pertaining to European museums and other public reparative actions. What they explore are both individual projects and collective movements, which have transformed attitudes toward the colonial past by contesting long-standing categories, familiar classifications, and outdated concepts. They illustrate solidary relations, which are committed to making a difference in the afterlives of colonial victims and the lives of their living descendants.

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In Chapter Eight, Reinhart Kössler reflects on German postcolonial relations with Namibia where researchers directly related to the former colonial power engage with community partners to pursue postcolonial justice. Titled “Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide”, his action-based research examines moral, ethical, political, and intellectual problems that arise in such an “outreach solidarity.” He draws upon his personal lifelong interaction with members of Namibian communities, which seek recognition, apologies, and reparations from the German government for the genocide of 1904–1908. As he makes clear, relations of trust and friendship, which seemingly lie outside the purview of scholarship, serve as vital preconditions for gaining relevant insights into this international negotiation and for bridging the postcolonial gap between researchers and activists in the aftermath of this historical trauma. With Chapter Nine, “Postcolonial Activists and European Museums,” Katrin Sieg guides readers back to European museums where activist interventions have succeeded in altering museum protocols, structures, and representations regarding colonial histories. Against the backdrop of pioneering works during the late 1980s and 1990s that reveal colonialist practices in European collections, exhibitions, and museums, Sieg offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date examination of decolonial interventions in several museums of anthropology, ethnology, and history across Europe. She focuses on evaluating the latest actions taken to make institutional structures more inclusive and to bolster contemporary struggles against the surge of nationalist, racist, and anti-immigrant movements and political parties. According to Sieg, museums are not only prime targets for contesting cherished myths of superior European accomplishments, but also potential allies in fighting against racial injustice, historical amnesia, and political irresponsibility. Activists, as she demonstrates, put pressure on monumental institutions to support minoritized communities while mobilizing antiracist groups around museums as allies. In Chapter Ten, “Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter,” Frieda Ekotto emphasizes the critically future-oriented philosophy that Négritude intellectuals, particularly Fanon, provide contemporary activists in their struggle against racism and sexism. At the center of her examination is the Black Lives Matter movement. She investigates how this mobilization constitutes a collective action, which builds upon one of the most revered founders—or fathers—of postcolonial patrimony. For her, Fanon’s seminal text Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is essential for understanding

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the contemporary African American activism. In focusing on Fanon’s call for an “active consciousness” coupled with an acute attention to the objectification of black men, this chapter explains how we can understand better the impact that perceptions of Blackness have on American society, as well as the use of contemporary tools by black activists  to combat pervasive racism. Ekotto sheds light on the difficulty of Fanon’s foundational text in its paradigmatic effort to develop a language for understanding the human being in non-colonial, non-racist terms. At the same time, she identifies how, in demanding black and gay rights, #BlackLivesMatter moves beyond Fanon’s patrimony. Ekotto indicates how exclusionary, racist practices remain stubborn legacies of colonial violence, and why established categories such as identity, rightfulness, and dignity need to be interrogated further for the welfare of black and other marginalized communities. Her study contributes to the ongoing significance of Fanon’s oeuvres for the latest generation of activists and critics today, as they wrestle with the condition of alienation and social injustice.22 Graham Huggan’s afterword, Chapter Eleven, concludes this book with incisive reflections on the preceding chapters, and with measured assessments of the challenges that are associated with connecting critique to praxis. I feel very fortunate that he has agreed to share his deep knowledge of the field in response to the action captured in this volume, not least because his essay, which includes an instructive evaluation of action research, is symbolic of the sort of intergenerational dynamics that I have hoped to locate at the center of conceptual, methodological, and activist concerns in postcolonial studies. To reframe postcolonial studies is to exchange such critical and creative thoughts across generational perspectives.

Notes 1. Ernst Bloch used this term during the first half of the 1930s when he drew upon a preceding discussion among art historians and cultural critics about the relationship between modernism and fascism in architecture to make a contemporary political point: “Not all people exist in the same Now” [Nicht alle sind im selben Jetzt da] (Bloch 1962, p. 104). According to Bloch, people lived in different presents based on different combinations of age, social class, and geographic location. The reference to Bloch here is not coincidental because, first, his meditation focuses on a dialectical relationship between past, present, and future and, second, Bill Ashcroft uses

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his notion of utopia in the next chapter to reflect on the futurity of postcolonial literatures. 2. According to Benita Parry, postcolonial studies originated as early as the 1970s, but given the transdisciplinary scope of the field today, this timeframe seems to make sense only in anglocentric terms (Parry 2012, p. 348). For a more interdisciplinary historicization of the field, see Boehmer and Tickel (2015). 3. To clarify this thesis, let me mention the most notable names of this generation. There is the subaltern studies group consisting of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, and Sumit Sarkar. A far more dispersed and eclectic group includes, among others, Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, Mary Louise Pratt, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Robert J.C. Young. 4. Graham Huggan offers a detailed and critical account of these two “waves” of postcolonial criticism, the first one covering “the period between, roughly, the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s,” the second one following thereafter (Huggan 2008, pp. 10–12). 5. Edward Said’s intellectual trajectory from Orientalism (1978) to Culture and Imperialism (1993) is paradigmatic of this disciplinary shift. For assessments of this change within the boundaries of existing disciplines other than English and history, see Friedrichsmeyer et  al. (1998) for German studies, Kiberd (1997) for Irish studies, Mignolo (2000) for Latin American studies, and Lionnet and Shih (2005) for East Asian, transoceanic, Caribbean, and South American studies. There is also a huge library of scholarships that explore questions of comparison and incommensurability. For example, see Melas (2007). 6. For the latest discussion about “the potential exhaustion” of postcolonialism, see Agnani et al. (2007). 7. Ann Laura Stoler uses this term “to capture three principal features of colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements.” She associates the word with “durability,” “duration,” and “endurance,” all of which underscore the importance of revealing “the occluded histories of empire” in the present moment (Stoler 2016, pp. 7, 14). Here, the historical referent is also a lively debate among postcolonial critics during the early 1990s on the term “postcolonial” vis-à-vis “colonial” (McClintock 1992; Shohat 1992). There is no need to revisit this discussion because detailed summaries are available in several publications (Huggan 2013, p. 20; Kim 2017, p. 527; Young 2016, p. 57). What I wish to point out is that, for Ann Laura Stoler, the prefix “post” similarly serves “as a mark of skepticism rather than assume its clarity,” the reason for this doubt being

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that the historical legacy of colonialism remains traceable today (Stoler 2016, p. ix). She is not suggesting that this postcolonial condition is obvious somehow. What she is arguing is that it manifests itself in a “refashioned and sometimes opaque and oblique” reworking of past imperial inequities (Stoler 2016, pp. 4–5). Therefore, she calls attention to “duress” as a multisensory template for “train[ing] our senses beyond the more easily identifiable forms that some colonial scholarship schools” have interrogated in the past (Stoler 2016, p. 6). 8. The contested arguments over affiliated terms such as “neocolonial,” “anticolonial,” “decolonial,” “imperial,” and “global” are constitutive of these inquiries. For a deliberately polemic essay on the meaning of “colonial modernity” in contradistinction to “global modernity,” see Dirlik (2005). 9. I am fully aware of Arendt’s racist attitudes toward African Americans following the Little Rock Crisis in 1957, as well as the disturbing absence of Native Americans in her political and philosophical reflections. For my analysis of these issues, see Kim (2018) and Weissberg (2012). 10. Chantal Zabus has edited a multi-authored volume titled The Future of Postcolonial Studies (2015). Two of the contributors to this project—Bill Ashcroft and Graham Huggan—can also be found in the following page, but one would be incorrect to think that that book engaged with the future in any sustained terms. The Future of Postcolonial Studies is a retrospective tribute to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back (1989) edited by Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 11. The binary oppositions include, among others, the colonizer versus the colonized, white versus black, civilization versus barbarism, nation versus tribe, and center versus periphery. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal book Provincializing Europe is commonly cited when scholars of postcolonial studies describe how key conceptual categories borrowed from European Enlightenment traditions are of “undoubted international significance,” but need to be understood within particular historical contexts. Chakrabarty writes in this regard: “To ‘provincialize’ Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity.” Examples of universalized concepts in political modernity include “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality” (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. x, xiii, 4).

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12. In his 1784 essay titled “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”, Kant defines this elusive concept as follows: “Enlightenment is the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s intellect without the direction of another. This immaturity is self-incurred when its cause does not lie in a lack of intellect, but rather in a lack of resolve and courage to make use of one’s intellect without the direction of another” (Kant 2006, p. 17). Here, immaturity is an inadequate English rendition of the German word Unmündigkeit, which alludes to the mouth—Mund— and connotes the ability to speak for oneself in the public sphere. Hannah Arendt draws upon Aristotle to contrast speech with violence. She argues that a citizen, “a political being,” is essentially “endowed with speech” and this communicative capacity is antithetical to “the phenomenon of violence” (Arendt 2006, p. 9). It is beyond the scope of this essay to take a careful look at Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s challenging engagement with the “legacy of the European Enlightenment,” but for more information, see Spivak (2012, p. 1). 13. We Live in Silence is not alone in this long generational shift. Just to give an older example from literature, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions tells the “coming of age story of a young Zimbabwean girl” who “asks readers to engage the history of colonialism, cultural roles for women, the impact of education, the importance of community, and the act of writing in their importance for the formation of an African woman’s identity.” This novel has been described as a preeminent novel written by “a newcomer” who replaces Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the American curriculum (Willey and Treiber 2002, pp. ix–x). 14. According to George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front had “inherited an established set of legal institutions” for which racial difference was an integral component. Political repression, along with military force, was also a vital part of governmentality. As such, the democratically elected government “followed in the footsteps of its predecessors” by crushing dissenting opinions, criminalizing political oppositions, and upholding “the legacies of settler rule” (Karekwaivanane 2017, pp. 162, 185). For more information about land politics in postcolonial Zimbabwe, see Drinkwater (1991) and Rutherford (2001). 15. For more information about the Tongva in Los Angeles, see the following digital humanities project: Mapping Indigenous LA (Perspectives n.d.; Mapping n.d.). 16. For more information about decolonial movements in American higher education, see Carp (2018) and Wilder (2013).

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17. Gender inequality among the museum staff has been known for some time, but the latest available study of diversity among artists in major American museums clarifies the need to reframe what these institutions do today. Of the 10,108 identifiable artists whose works have been displayed in 18 major US museums, nearly 76% are white men. Of the individually identifiable artists, 85.4% are white and only 12.6% are women. The entire pool can be broken down further into ethnic groups: 85.4% white, 9% Asian, 2.8% Hispanic/Latinx, 1.2% African American, and 1.5% other ethnicities (Topaz et al. 2019, pp. 8, 11). 18. It is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter to revisit the long-­ established debate on colonial archives, which modify non-European things into European constructs and organize European systems of knowledge above non-European ones. This analysis necessarily shifts the conversation concerning archives from objects to processes while remaining critical of empires and nation-states as moral guardians of authenticity, territoriality, and truth. For more information about this foundational debate, see White (1973); Mudimbe (1988); Derrida (1996); Spivak (1999); and Stoler (2009). As I will show shortly, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book Potential History is a bold continuation of this investigation. 19. For an incisive reading of Said’s affiliation with Auerbach’s exilic trajectory, see Mufti (2016, p. 26). 20. Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment meets Kim Watson and Wilder’s assessment of what is “new” in the field. This award-winning book places conceptual, methodological, and activist issues center stage while examining deep historical linkages between the seemingly separate, yet concurrent anticolonial movements in 1919: the Egyptian Revolution (Saʿd Zaghlūl), Gandhi’s satyagraha (also Jawaharlal Nehru) in India, the May Fourth Movement in Beijing (Wellington Koo, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong), and the March First Movement (Kim Kyusik and Syngman Rhee) in Seoul. According to Manela, they mark the beginning of a dramatic turning point in the global history of imperialism. This is not the place to offer a detailed review, but suffice it to say that Manela investigates what sort of historical inquiry is able to move beyond the usual framework of national or international history, such that those anticolonial national movements following US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech lend themselves to one and the same postcolonial narrative. As he explains, histories of anti-­ imperial resistance have long been situated within strictly national contexts as if there were no way of thinking beyond “imperial enclosure[s],” such that Indian anticolonialism is subsumed under British imperial history or Indian national history, Chinese nationalism under the rubric of modern China, Korean nationalism under modern Korean history or Japanese colonial history, and so forth (Manela 2007, p. xi). The challenge entails

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“‘internationaliz[ing]’ the history of the United States” not by documenting “how the impact of the world at large has been reflected in American history,” but by investigating “how the United States has been reflected in the world, in the histories of other societies,” especially from non-Western perspectives, whether they are anti-American or not (Manela 2007, p. x). Thus, Manela reforms the notion of international history by relating the work of non-Western political agents to that of American counterparts without placing the center of this historical narrative in the United States or in Western Europe. At the same time, he consults with the works of area specialists and emerging fellow global historians to delve both vertically and horizontally into the eventful years 1918 and 1919 (Bayly et al. 2006). Reading The Wilsonian Moment a century after its subject of historical investigation is fascinating because it clarifies even more the limits of our contemporary postcolonial optic. At a time when the current sitting President of the United States rubs shoulders with authoritarian rulers while undoing, for better or worse, the country’s long-standing Wilsonian commitment to promoting democracy around the globe, it is impossible not to see some of the latest protests against corrupt, oppressive regimes, financially exploitative or environmentally unsustainable dealings, and cruel mistreatments of forcefully displaced or otherwise marginalized persons as prevailing legacies of locally grounded anti-imperial movements. Since the Iraq War, the crisis in American neoconservatism has opened up an unprecedented political vacuum where a radically different future is imaginable again after three decades of “left melancholy,” to borrow Wendy Brown’s term (Brown 1999). 21. For Azoulay’s criticism of the father, see Azoulay (2019, pp. 13–15). Susan Slyomovics offers a detailed historical context within which Azoulay’s argument appears in a very different, problematic light (Slyomovics 2014, pp. 218–220). 22. For a major publication on Fanon’s enduring importance in this regard, see Khalfa and Young (2018).

References Agnani, Sunil, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel. 2007, May. Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? PMLA 122 (3): 633–651. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006 [1963]. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books.

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Ashcroft, Bill. 2017. Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. New York: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. Key Concepts in Post-­colonial Studies. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso. Bayly, C.A., Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed. 2006. AHR Conversation: On Transnational History. The American Historical Review 111 (5): 1441–1463. Bloch, Ernst. 1962. Erbschaft dieser Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Boehmer, Elleke, and Alex Tickel. 2015. The 1990s: An Increasingly Postcolonial Decade. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50 (3): 315–352. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brown, Wendy. 1999. Resisting Left Melancholy. boundary 2 26 (3): 19–27. Carp, Alex. 2018. Slavery and the American University. The New York Review of Books, February 7. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/07/ slavery-and-the-american-university/. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts? Representations 37 (Winter): 1–26. ———. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cuno, James. 2011. Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Davidson, Jane Chin. 2018. Introduction: A Critical Conversation—Global/ World Art and the University Museum. In Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum, ed. Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger, 1–18. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dirlik, Arif. 2005. The End of Colonialism? The Colonial Modern in the Making of Global Modernity. boundary 2 32 (1): 1–31. Drinkwater, Michael. 1991. The State and Agrarian Change in Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fowler Museum. 2020. Who We Are. Fowler Museum at UCLA. https://www. fowler.ucla.edu/about-fowler/. Accessed 7 January 2020. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds. 1998. The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New  York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hondo, Med. 1973 [1967]. Soleil Ô. New Yorker Films. Hu, Sheng. 1991. From Opium War to the May 4th Movement. Trans. Dun J. Li. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Huggan, Graham. 2008. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———, ed. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2003. Future City. New Left Review 21: 65–79. Kant, Immanuel. 2006. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? In Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld, Trans. David L.  Colclasure, 17–23. New Haven: Yale University Press. Karekwaivanane, George Hamandishe. 2017. The Struggle over State Power in Zimbabwe: Law and Politics Since 1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khalfa, Jean, and Robert J.C. Young, eds. 2018. Frantz Fanon: Alienation and Freedom. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kiberd, Declan. 1997. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kim, David D. 2017. What Is the Postcolonial World? Assembling, Networking, Traveling. In The Postcolonial World, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim, 526–548. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. What Is Solidarity? Reading Hannah Arendt Between Innovation and Tradition. In Back to the Future: Tradition and Innovation in German Studies, ed. Marc Silberman, 121–146. Oxford: Peter Lang. Kim Watson, Jini, and Gary Wilder. 2018. Thinking the Postcolonial Contemporary. In The Postcolonial Contemporary, ed. Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder, 1–29. New York: Fordham University Press. King Jr., Martin Luther. 2020 [1963]. Letter from Birmingham. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/letter-frombirmingham-jail/552461/. Lazarus, Neil. 2006. Postcolonial Studies After the Invasion of Iraq. New Formations 59: 10–22. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, eds. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1835. Minute on Indian Education. February 2. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/ txt_minute_education_1835.html.

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Manela, Erez. 2007. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1952 [1927/1928]. The Problem of Generations. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti, vol. 5, 276–322. London: Routledge. Mannoni, Octave. 1990. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Trans. Pamela Powesland. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Mapping Indigenous LA. n.d. University of California, Los Angeles. https://mila. ss.ucla.edu/. Accessed 17 May 2019. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McClintock, Anne. 1992. The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-­ Colonialism’. Social Text 31/32: 84–98. Melas, Natalie. 2007. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mudimbe, V.Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mufti, Aamir R. 2016. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Naipaul, V.S. 2010. The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief. New York: Knopf. Parry, Benita. 1994. Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance; or, Two Cheers for Nativism. In Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 172–196. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2012. What Is Left in Postcolonial Studies? New Literary History 43 (2): 341–358. Perspectives on A Selection of Gabrieleño/Tongva Places. n.d. esri. https://www. arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=4942348fa8bd427fae02f 7e020e98764. Accessed 17 May 2019. Prakash, Gyan. 1995. Introduction: After Colonialism. In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash, 3–17. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rutherford, Blair A. 2001. Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe. New York: Zed Books. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.

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Scott, David. 2005. The Social Construction of Postcolonial Studies. In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, 385–400. Durham: Duke University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2008. Comparative Racialization: An Introduction. PMLA 124 (5): 1347–1362. Shohat, Ella. 1992. Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’. Social Text 31–32: 100–113. Singh, Jyotsna G. 2017. Introduction: The Postcolonial World. In The Postcolonial World, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim, 1–32. New York: Routledge. Slyomovics, Susan. 2014. How to Accept German Reparations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Soyinka, Wole. 1999. The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2018. Development. In Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, ed. J.M.  Bernstein, Adi Ophir, and Ann Laura Stoler, 118–130. New  York: Fordham University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities In Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2018. Colony. In Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, ed. J.M. Bernstein, Adi Ophir, and Ann Laura Stoler, 59–58. New York: Fordham University Press. Topaz, Chad M., Bernhard Klingenberg, Daniel Turek, Brianna Heggeseth, Pamela E. Harris, Julie C. Blackwood, C. Ondine Chavoya, Steven Nelson, and Kevin M.  Murphy. 2019. Diversity of Artists in Major U.S.  Museums. PLoS One 14 (3): 1–15. We Live in Silence. n.d. Goodman Gallery Johannesburg  +  Constitution Hill. https://www.contemporaryand.com/exhibition/kudzanai-chiurai-we-live-insilence/. Accessed 21 May 2019. Weissberg, Liliane. 2012. From Königsberg to Little Rock: Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Childhood. In “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile After 1933, ed. Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel, 80–99. Berlin: De Gruyter. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

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PART I

Conceptual Vigilance

CHAPTER 2

Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures Bill Ashcroft

A significant new frame for postcolonial analysis is the link between postcolonial writing and the philosophy of utopianism. The gestation of this link may be traced to the year 1989 when The Empire Writes Back was published, a year after the Utopian Studies Society was formed. Despite this coeval emergence, it took several decades before postcolonial critics began to see the importance of utopian thinking to the insurgent temperament of postcolonial writers and intellectuals. The future has always been the abiding concern of the colonized and oppressed because the anticipation of freedom is the driving force of resistance. Yet, postcolonial criticism has given the concept of future hope—without which political resistance would have no point—far too little attention. One important new key to postcolonial criticism, then, is an observation of the ways in which postcolonial literatures have unlocked a vision of the future. Literature has a crucial role to play in this regard because imagination forms the basis of the utopian in literature, and the process of imagining is key to the utopian in postcolonial transformation.

B. Ashcroft (*) University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_2

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Utopia is not a vague wish, but a vision of possibility that effects the transformation of social life, an imagined future that can be at once oppositional and visionary. This potential explains the importance of literary and other creative arts in postcolonial utopianism. The distinguishing feature of all visions of utopia is the critique of those social conditions that make utopia necessary. As postcolonial writers demonstrate, the utopian is grounded in a critique of the present, not just of the colonial past. “Any utopianism worth the name,” says Zygmunt Bauman, “must engage in a significant polemic with the dominant culture” (Bauman 1976, p. 47). In Demand the Impossible (1986), Tom Moylan coins the term “critical utopias,” which “dwell on the conflict between the originary world and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is more directly articulated” (Moylan 1986, pp. 10–11). In postcolonial writing, this leads to an inevitable clash with post-independence administrations, which tend to perpetuate the structures of imperial rule. In other words, the utopian vision is transformative, its vision of the future a transformation of the present. Rather than foresee a particular utopia, the function of postcolonial utopianism is to open up a space for political action that is buoyed up by the possibility—indeed, the probability—of social change. The prominent feature of postcolonial utopianism, then, is critique. The dynamic function of the utopian impulse is not to construct a place, but to enact the utopian desire for freedom in the engagement with power. Liberation in this way comes through transformation. However, despite the ubiquity of future thinking in postcolonial writing, there has been a persistent failing in postcolonial criticism, namely, a tendency to reduce postcolonial engagements to a simple dynamic of opposition (and, inevitably, to a history of failure). Resistance has been both central and necessary to postcolonial engagements, but we do well to guard against the temptation to see resistance as simply opposition. In Dusklands, J.M. Coetzee alerts us to the problem of force. The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of new mythology. (Coetzee 1974, pp. 24–25)

The emancipatory drive of postcolonial discourse, the drive to re-empower the disenfranchised, is too often conceived in terms of a simplistic view of

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colonization, but the most successful resistance has been transformative and the appropriation and transformation of the colonizing language by postcolonial writers can be taken as a metonym for the creative adaptation of Western modernity itself. Therefore, the transformation of present social conditions so central to any utopian vision is achieved in postcolonial literatures by a transformation of the tools of oppression, in particular the colonizing language. The appropriation of those technologies and discourses employed to oppress the colonized, particularly the English language, is perhaps the most radical demonstration of the insurgent power of the postcolonial (Ashcroft 2001). Resistance without a utopian element, a vision of possibility, can never be truly transformative, and transformation is the key to confident postcolonial resistance.

Art and Literature Ernst Bloch’s magisterial The Principle of Hope (1986) (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1938–1947) serves as the cornerstone of twentieth-century utopian thinking. Here, art and literature have an unparalleled function because their very raison d’être is the imagining of a different world. This is the source of their utopian function—what Bloch calls their Vor-Schein or “anticipatory illumination” (quoted in Zipes 1989, p. xxxiii).1 The anticipatory illumination is the revelation of the possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat, his word for home that we have all sensed but have never experienced or known: “It is Heimat as utopia … that determines the truth content of a work of art” (Zipes 1989, p. xxxiii). Heimat becomes the utopian form in postcolonial writing that replaces the promise of nation. It may lie in the future, but the promise of Heimat transforms the present. Indian poet Meena Alexander explains something of the ambivalence of Heimat. When traveling to join her father, seconded to the Sudan from India after the Bandung conference, she turned five aboard ship. I still think that birthday on the deep waters of the Indian Ocean has marked me in ways utterly beyond my ken. It has left me with the sense that home is always a little bit beyond the realm of the possible, and that a real place in which to be, though continually longed for can never be reached. It stands brightly lit at the edge of vanishing. (Alexander 2009, p. 2)

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For Alexander, home is always on the horizon, always up ahead. At the same time, poetry and place are bound up together. “If poetry is the music of survival,” she says, “place is the instrument on which that music is played, the gourd, the strings, the fret” (Alexander 2009, p.  4). When home becomes detached from place, the implication is that the music of poetry flourishes by producing different worlds—worlds that offer the horizon of the future, the horizon of Heimat. As the home we have sensed but have never experienced, Heimat remains a constant beacon for the spirit of liberation, even after the goals of colonial independence appear to have been achieved. Such a vision of Heimat occurs in simple but powerfully evocative lines from Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho’s “Mythmaker” in The Harvest of Dreams: “The children will be home … Those children will / be home / Some day” (Anyidoho 1984, p. 197). For Bloch, art and literature offer the most consistent expression of “the anticipatory consciousness” or “pre-appearance” that characterizes human thinking (Bloch 1986, p. 215). This is nowhere more evident than in the writing of the colonized. The future is everywhere anticipated either in fact or by implication, and this is one reason why I contend that literature is the seedbed of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial is not after colonialism, nor is it a way of being. It is a way of reading the engagements of the colonized with power and this is the point at which utopianism and the postcolonial literatures come together, for literature has power, as attested by the number of post-independence writers jailed by the state. Literature is one of the most powerful expressions of what Lyman Tower Sargent calls “social dreaming” (Sargent 1994, p. 9). At a rally in support of Salman Rushdie during the fatwa, Ben Okri proclaimed the following: Writers are amongst other things the dream mechanism of the human race. Fiction affects us the way dreams affect us. They share the same insubstantiality. They both have the capacity to alter reality. Dreams may be purer because they are not composed of words, but when fiction has entered into us, it no longer exists as words either. (Okri 1990, p. 77)

The power of the dream means that anticolonial rhetoric is just the beginning of the political trajectory of postcolonial creative work.

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Postcolonial Utopia and the Nation There is a certain irony in the existence of postcolonial utopianism today, since the colonialist ethic is central to Thomas More’s Utopia. In fact, this story presents the colonial process in microcosm: King Utopus conquers the land; its name is changed; the indigenous inhabitants are “civilized”; what was previously a “wasteland” is “cultivated”; and the land is physically reconstructed. In this respect, Utopia anticipated quite directly the imperial ideology that would drive England’s expansion. The search for Utopia was extended in the eighteenth century by the literary imagination of various kinds of colonial utopias in isolated regions of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, or the Pacific, with a blithe disregard for the possible feelings of the inhabitants. In time, imperial expansion itself was driven by the utopian drive to populate the world with the British race and to “civilize” the invaded inhabitants. One of the major exports of this imperial expansion was something formed in reaction to it: identity, in particular national identity. According to John Atkinson Hobson, “[c]olonialism, in its best sense,” by which he meant the settler colonies, “is a natural overflow of nationality” (Hobson 1902, p. 8). He went on to quote historian John Robert Seeley: “When a State advances beyond the limits of nationality its power becomes precarious and artificial” (Hobson 1902, p. 11). Hobson’s complaint was that empire-bred nationalism undermined the possibility of a true internationalism. Partha Chatterjee, on the other hand, sees nationalism as an impediment to true decolonization because these countries are forced to adopt a “national form” that is hostile to their own cultures in order to fight against the Western nationalism of the colonial powers (Chatterjee 1986, p. 18). Not only that. Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Far from nation-states freeing themselves from imperialism, the corporate powers that enacted the spread of imperialism tended to make nation-­ states mere instruments to record the flows of commodities, monies, and populations that they had set in motion. This is important because nationality and nationalism and their failed visions of independence are fundamental to the study of postcolonial utopian thinking. The pre-independence utopias of soon-to-be liberated postcolonial nations provided a very clear focus for anticolonial activism in British and other colonies. Yet, this appeared to come to an abrupt halt, once the goal of that activism was reached and the somber realities of

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post-independence political life began to be felt. The national form, if we continue Chatterjee’s terminology, generated a species of decolonizing planning at odds with the cultural vision of the societies themselves. The postcolonial nation, a once glorious utopian idea, became superseded in the literature, particularly in Africa, by a critical rhetoric that often landed authors in jail. The concept of the nation, or at least the nation-state, has been robustly critiqued in the field because the postcolonial nation is marked by disappointment, instituted on the boundaries of the colonial state and doomed to continue its oppressive functions. This applied equally to national subjects and the African diaspora. Afro-­ diasporic consciousness grew out of the nation-state’s neglects and exclusions. The African diaspora’s consciousness of itself has been defined in and against constricting national boundaries. The derogation of blackness, though varied from nation-state to nation-state, has been and remains global and transnational, making Afro-diasporic peoples’ relation to the nation-state “contingent and partial.” (Gilroy 1987, p. 158)

In Africa, though, writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o, and Okri, as well as more recently women writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Sade Adeniran, and Unomah Azuah have gradually replaced post-independence despair with a broader sense of future hope. Postcolonial utopian vision takes various forms, but it is always hope that transcends the disappointment and entrapment of the nation-state. Armah is better known for his earlier novels, which are deeply pessimistic about the post-independence African regimes. One example would be The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Yet, that dystopian view of the present betrayal of Africa by its leaders is closely connected to the utopianism that emerges in his work. Two Thousand Seasons (2003) is an example of an allegorical rewriting of African history in which a pluralized communal voice recounts the experiences of his people over a period of 1000 years. In a sense, it is an extension of the critique of his earlier trilogy, but this time it generates a discourse of possibility. The center of this imaginative history is the account of the betrayal of the people by their king into slavery, the subsequent rebellion against the slave ship, and the choices offered by the idea of return. The deception of rulers and governments is a familiar theme for Armah and, in most of his novels, they are given a large measure of the blame for Africa’s neocolonially dependent state.

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Whether kings who have sold their subjects into slavery or political leaders who have adopted, without question, Western habits and values, the rot begins with power. Where another of Armah’s strategies is to interpolate “world history” with a narrative of the pharaonic past, Okri manages to achieve the sense of a different kind of history in the language itself, as well as in his narrative. His representation of a fantastically expanded world of experience in Infinite Riches (1998) conceives the rich horizon of African reality, an imaginaire that constantly resists the temptation of the Western reader to appropriate it into a familiar landscape. Thus, Okri does in narrative what many examples of transformed language do in postcolonial writing—communicating and resisting at the same time. This leads to a language that overlaps with magical realism, a language of excess and accretion, a layering of experience in which the border between reality and the spirit world is dissolved. While pre-independence nationalism saw a utopia in the decolonized nation, the postcolonial utopian vision expresses itself in a form of hope that transcends the boundaries of the state and continues to anticipate this kind of future even in the light of the failure of the nation. The natural assumption is that utopianism died with post-independence disillusion, but a utopian view of the future remained essential to the transformative function of literature (Obiechina 1992). Négritude offers a fulcrum for this discussion. This deeply influential philosophy—so often depicted as essentialist, binary, exclusionary, and backward looking—embodies a vision of the future grounded in a resurgent memory of the past. The kind of recuperative return we find in African literature offers a strategy that can harness the dismay underlying the proliferation of political critique. Future thinking has the effect of pushing liberationist sentiment outward. In Agostinho Neto’s poetry, it is the vision of Africa in the world and not simply freedom from Portuguese rule that begins to transfer wishful thinking into willful action. When he writes that it is now time “to march together … to the world / of all men,” he is suggesting something that comes to be taken up by writers after writers in Africa, the desire to enter the world of all men, the world of an Africa that is no longer formed in the imagination of Europe (Neto 1974, p.  3). This is the ultimate meaning of the poem “Reconquest” where he urges Africa to “go with all humanity” to conquer the world and bring peace (Neto 1974, p.  40). Neto is intensely internationalist and, consequently, a key figure in the African vision of the future. Although profoundly Angolan, profoundly

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African, and passionately devoted to political liberty, his poems reach beyond Africa. In “Sculptural Hands,” he sees beyond Africa: “love emerging virgin in each mouth” (Neto 1974, p. 49). And further, beyond the tiredness of other continents, he sees “Africa alive” and the “sculptural hands” of the strong reaching into the future (Neto 1974, p. 49). In “A Succession of Shadows,” he celebrates African hands “open to the fraternity of the world” united in peace for the future of the world: “For right, for concord, for peace” (Neto 1974, p.  23). In the poem “With Equal Voice,” Neto offers a rousing call for reconstruction, for (African) men who (as slaves) “built the empires of the West / the wealth and opportunities of old Europe”—people of genius heroically alive “now building our homeland / our Africa” (Neto 1974, p. 84). The poem calls for Africans to “re-encounter Africa,” to “resuscitate man,” and to herald a new beginning, an independent people entering the “harmonious concert of the universal,” as he celebrates “the daybreak over our hope” (Neto 1974, p. 84). Future thinking may also reconstitute the nativist tendencies of national thinking. In Malaysia, for instance, one problem for nationalists demanding that literature construct national identity has been the choice by many Malaysian writers to write mainly of a specific community, as in the case of K.S.  Maniam, Mohammed Haji Salleh, Che Husna Azhari, and Wong Phui Nam. Although this disrupts the concept of a single national identity, it represents the actual heterogeneity of the Malaysian nation, and indeed of all nations. Ee Tiang Hong celebrates this unity in diversity with a compelling image of the tree in Tembusu. Symbolizing the nation as a tree with its roots deep in the soil, the poet celebrates the great tree, which “still upholds its versatility … turning and twisting in every limb and fiber,” but nevertheless resumes “In some quiet hour / Its steadfast / stature” (Merican et al. 2004, p. 69). Postcolonial writers’ willingness to foreground the heterogeneity of the nation beneath the structures of the state suggests a considerable revision to the now somewhat notorious idea of Frederic Jameson that all Third World texts are national allegories (Jameson 1986, p. 69). Aijaz Ahmad’s equally notorious response was to accuse Jameson of turning all Asian and African critics and writers into mystified “civilizational others” by reducing all the issues they dealt with to the problem of a nationalist struggle against colonial oppressors and their postcolonial successors (Ahmad 1987, p. 3). Ahmad underestimated the importance of allegory and the undoubted prominence of national concerns. But by the same token,

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“national allegory” fails to embrace the complexity of the relationship between literature and the idea of nation. In particular, it “fails to adequately describe the dissolution of the idea of nation and the continuous persistence of national concerns” (Franco 1989, p. 211). Indeed, we could also say that the term “nationalism” itself fails to grasp the complexity of writing that expresses a future hope that in some respects might fall into the category of national concerns and yet appears to supersede completely the idea of nation as a failed or at least contested category. Whether expressing national concerns or not, though, contemporary utopian thought works beneath, above, or outside the concept of the nation-state.

Memory and the Future As we see in the work of Armah and Okri, an important phenomenon in postcolonial utopianism is the role of cultural memory. This can be precarious if it leads to the nostalgic belief in a precolonial cultural perfection, but the power of memory comes through its capacity to visualize the future. In fact, utopianism cannot exist without the operation of memory because the future is always grounded in the past and in a cyclic continuity between the past and the future through the present. This polarity between past and future often seems insurmountable in European philosophy. Bloch asserts that, for Plato, “Beingness” is “Beenness” and he admonishes Hegel “who ventured out furthest” because “What Has Been overwhelms what is approaching … the categories Future, Front, Novum” (Bloch 1986, p. 8). The problem with Being or the concept of Being in Hegel was that it overwhelmed Becoming—obstructing the category of the future. It is only when the static concept of Being is dispensed with that the real dimension of hope opens up (Bloch 1986, p. 18). The core of Bloch’s ontology is that Beingness is Not-Yet-Becomeness. Thus the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs completely to the Not-Yet-­ Become, Not-Yet-Brought-Out, Manifested-Out in the world … From the anticipatory, therefore, knowledge is to be gained on the basis of an ontology of the Not-Yet. (Bloch 1986, p. 13)

We can see why Bloch is disinterested in utopia as location. Utopianism is fundamental to human consciousness because human beings always strive forward, anticipating, and desiring. While utopias exist in the future, utopianism, or what Bloch also calls “anticipatory consciousness,” is heavily

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invested in the present. In Bloch’s reinterpretation of Marx, the ontology of becoming has a political, liberatory dimension. As Chris Abani says in reference to the African in a globalized world, “identity is a destination” (Aycock 2009, p. 7). The idea of becoming is critical in the transformative processes of postcolonial cultures. The curious interrelation between the memory of the past, the anticipation of the future, and the experience of the present characterizes all future thinking and nowhere more resolutely than in postcolonial writing. The resonant and often repeated phrase of Édouard Glissant—“a prophetic vision of the past”—captures this idea perfectly (Glissant 1989, p. 64). This is the reality that distinguishes utopianism, or social dreaming, from mere wishful thinking. This characteristic enables the voice from the “Nowhere” of utopia to speak to the present social conditions. The importance of utopia being situated “Nowhere” was articulated by Paul Ricœur (Ricœur 1986, p. 16). His position might best be explained by the fact that “reality” itself is framed by ideology and that it is impossible for the critic to escape it (Ricœur 1986, p. 171). Utopia is important for a critique of the present that originates nowhere. The nowhere of utopia is the only place outside of ideology from which it can be critiqued. Bloch’s preference for Becoming over Being anticipates the postcolonial concept of circular time. He is fascinated with the cyclic continuity between the past and the future in the present, which leads to what we might call a non-teleological eschatology in which “the drive upwards at last becomes a drive forwards” (Bloch 1986, p. 1278). The characteristic of modernity with its concept of chronological “empty” time, dislocated from place or human life, is a sense of the separation between past, present, and future. Although the present may be seen as a continuous stream of prospections becoming retrospections, the sense that the past has gone and the future is coming separates what may be called the three phases of time: past, present, and future. One of the features of postcolonial texts, particularly those from Africa and the Caribbean, is a transformed conception of time that sees it as layered and interpenetrating, spiraling rather than linear. This conjoining of time is related to a radically different epistemology—a different way of knowing. This way of knowing is profoundly utopian because it includes the past and the future in the perception of the present. The crucial characteristic of the genre of the novel is its engagement with time. The telling of stories appeals to us because they offer the progress of a world in time and can thus become narratives of temporal order.

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But magically, by unfolding in time, they take us out of time. It may be that narrative, whose materiality is isomorphic with temporality, provides a way (though not the only way) of communicating different experiences of time. How, then, can the novel convey a different knowledge of time, specifically knowledge of what has been considered the “broken” time of the traumatized colonized subject? One way of doing this is through the circular time developed in oral storytelling. But a more common way is to convey experience itself as a palimpsest of different phases of time and different orders of reality, as Chinua Achebe does in a scene where elders of the tribe perform the dance of the egwugwu, or spirit beings, an occasion in which the ontological distinction between acting and reality, the human world and the spirit world, dissolves (Ashcroft 2014). Perhaps the most profound example of the laminating of time can be seen in the Aboriginal Dreaming. There is a beautiful description of this sensibility in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell when the narrator goes with an Aboriginal man to visit his ancestral country, which was still “the country of his Old People.” The Old People, indeed, suggested to me another way altogether of looking at reality and the passage of time than my own familiar historical sense of things, in which change and the fragmentation of epochs and experience is the only certainty. (Miller 2007, pp. 233–234)

The Dreaming is the comprehensive demonstration of the infusion of the present and future with the hope of a mythic past, a fusion of time and place, because the Dreaming is never simply a memory of the past, but the focusing energy of the present. The Aboriginal subject is surrounded at all times with the present embodiments of the antiquity of the Dreaming, a state that completely subverts linear time. The utopianism in Australian Aboriginal novels such as those by Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) owes very little to the Western utopian tradition; for the Dreaming is a radical infusion of the present by a myth that encompasses both past and future. Though in a different way, postcolonial literatures continually affirm this sense of the future in the past and bring us back to our understanding of revolution as a revolving or spiraling into the future, as well as a revolt against the failures of the past. The concept of a spiral into the future perfectly captures the utopian hope without which resistance could not take place. Importantly, it demonstrates the way the future emerges from the

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past. The future, or the “In-Front-Of-Us,” is always a possibility emerging from the past not as nostalgia but as renewal (Bloch 1986, p. 4). For Caribbean writers and artists who work in the borderland of language, race, and identity, the past is a constant sign of the future. One of the most common and popular examples of this is the limbo dance, a performance of slave history, which reenacts the crossing of the Middle Passage in a continuous reminder of memory, survival, and cultural resurrection. Kamau Brathwaite puts it as follows: “Long dark deck and the water surrounding me / Long dark deck and the silence is over me” (Brathwaite 1969, p.  35). The dancer goes under the limbo stick in an almost impossible bodily position, emulating the subjection of the slave body in the journey across the Atlantic, going through the limbo of the Middle Passage but rising triumphant on the other side. The performance of memory is a constant reminder of a future horizon, a return that performs each time the rising of the slave body into a future marked not only by survival but also by renewal, hybridity, and hope. The dance is a metaphor of slave history that celebrates the present with the continuous reenactment of future hope. Brathwaite’s poem reminds Wilson Harris of the importance of the limbo dance, which leads him to state: “I believe that a philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of the imagination” (Harris 2008, p. 10). So past, present, and future are conjoined in the creative work in the same way that the dance performs a radical transformation of the reality of slave exile. The descendants of the slave labor of sugar plantations have developed a culture that draws its ontological energy from the very fact of displacement, of homelessness, heterogeneity, and syncreticity. This is not revolution but transformation, and its relation to time is exactly the same as that on which revolution depends because the revolt is also a revolving in which past, present, and future are conjoined and mutually enforcing. Friedrich Kummel sees this relation between past, present, and future as a feature of all human life, so that “the openness of future and past is, in other words, the vital condition for the conduct of man’s life and all his actions” (Kummel 1968, p. 50). We make the past our own by bringing it into a free and positive relation with the present. “The natural discrepancy of future and past constitutes a productive tension, which forms the real medium for new action and new mediation” (Kummel 1968, p. 50). In other words, the tension of revolution is rendered productive by its location in a spiraling compression of time.

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A very clear example of the power of memory to circulate in the present with a dream of the future can be found in the strategic use of a postcard called Visit Palestine designed in 1936 by Franz Kraus (see Fig.  2.1). Palestinian art and literature are important demonstrations of postcolonial creativity because Palestine is still colonized by an apartheid regime. The postcard identifies Palestine as a destination—an actually identifiable place in the world before the Nakba (the catastrophe)—and out of

Fig. 2.1  Palestine Postcard 1936 (1936)

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the reality of the country as a destination emerges the utopian concept of destiny.2 The postcard operates as a hinge between past, present, and future by becoming a palimpsest. The postcard also becomes a hinge between past and present in Amer Shomali’s reproduction of it in Visit Palestine (2009) in which the border wall testifies to the attempt by the state of Israel not just to incarcerate the Palestinians, but to wall off the past (see Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2  Amer Shomali, Visit Palestine (2009)

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What the Visit Palestine postcard series reveals is that Heimat can be the luminous possibility of the present and, in this respect, it is far from static. It is a dynamic horizon of everyday living. This is particularly significant in the case of the Palestinian people because the wall has been described as “an attempt to steal the horizon” (Ashwari 2015). This theft is visual, political, and spiritual and only a utopian view of the horizon of the future can offer the prospect of freedom. In Palestine, the utopian impulse revolves around the reality of a place, but the utopian is enacted in the engagement with power. The vision of utopia is located in the act of transformation of coercive power, a certain kind of praxis rather than a specific mode of representation. This is brilliantly presented in a photographic work, Nation Estate, by Larissa Sansour (see Fig. 2.3). It represents the Palestinian homeland in the form of a skyscraper. This also plays upon the Visit Palestine theme. The artist explains her work as follows: The idea of “Nation Estate” is that should any future Palestinian state hope to house the entire population, one would have to think vertically. And hence the idea of a single skyscraper with whole cities on each floor came about … The nation state reduced to a building simply became the “Nation Estate”—a single block of forced migrants. The subtitle of the picture, “Living the High Life,” expands on the irony. (Sansour 2012)

Crucially, from our perspective, Nation Estate centers on that idea of place, which remains critical toward any colonized perception of the future. It is a conception of place that operates within a layered conception of time in which past, present, and future conjoin as the essential feature of revolutionary hope. In doing this, Sansour’s utopia avoids the trap of transcendental abstraction or hopeless impracticality, which comes from being quarantined in the future. The imbrication of memory and the future in postcolonial literatures raise the issue of the function of history in colonization, particularly in Africa. Since the nineteenth century, Africa’s place in history has carried the unwelcome burden of an ahistorical past. Hegel’s notorious abolition of Africa from his Philosophy of History is well known.3 But the consequence of this has been that Africa, like the rest of the world, wants to enter history, because, as Ashish Nandy puts it, “[historical] consciousness now owns the globe … Though millions of people continue to stay outside history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to

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Fig. 2.3  Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2012)

the empire of history to become its loyal subjects” (Nandy 1995, p. 46). We have seen how Armah and Okri engage the empire of history in different ways. In the case of Armah, we find a history that interpolates the master discourse of European history. In Okri’s case, we find the positing of a different kind of history, a history that might disregard the boundaries between myth and memory, a history that subverts the tyranny of chronological narrative. This is the history offered by Okri in Infinite Riches.

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Both utopian strategies operate in postcolonial literatures and both work to insert postcolonial reality into the canon of English literature. In a poetic rendition of the history of colonialism, “Gods of the Pathways,” Anyidoho observes that Africa stands at the crossroads at which the ahistorical past can become the new ground for a vision of the future. “We are standing at The CrossRoads,” says the poet, at the meeting point of “NightMare and DawnDream.” But there are those who still remember the past and who can speak of “ancient joys long buried / beneath a topsoil of bad memories” (Anyidoho 2009, p. 140). The message is that the topsoil of the bad memories of colonialism can be swept away, that cultural memory can be the basis of a renewed vision of the future. In “Gathering the Harvest Dance,” he suggests that the future can only be realized when “We come today to Stare our History in the Face” (Anyidoho 2009, p. 142). History is exchanged for the hope produced by Ancestral Harvest Songs, the vehicles of cultural memory. The writer apprehends the transformative potential of that past not only to disrupt the dominance of European history, but also to reconceive of a place in the present, a place transformed by a vision of the future that fulfills this past.

Modes of Utopian Thinking in Postcolonial Writing Utopianism drives postcolonial writing in many different ways, as the Vor-­ Schein of the transformative text engages in various kinds of social dreaming. Four very different examples demonstrate how varied the process can be: the symbol of Aztlán in Chicano literature, the archipelagic outwardness of Caribbean writing, the sense of “Oceanic Hope” in the Pacific (Ashcroft, 2016), and the aim to establish a better England in early settler colonial writing.

Chicano Borderlands The Chicano version of utopian thinking, the Aztlán myth, proved to be a surprisingly resilient weapon in the Chicano political arsenal because it so comprehensively united ethnicity, place, and nation. It differs from other postcolonial utopias because it combined the mythic and the political so directly: on the one hand, it was a spiritual homeland, a sacred place of origin; on the other hand, it generated a practical (if impossible) goal of reconquering the territories taken from Mexico. But this union of sacred and political proved to be its secret power. Aztlán, the Chicano utopia,

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became a focus for Chicano cultural and political identity and a permanent confirmation of the possibility of cultural regeneration. For a people dwelling in the cultural, racial, and geographical borderlands, Aztlán represented its national hope. At the First Chicano National Conference in Denver in 1969, the conference manifesto, called “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (The Aztlán’s Spiritual Plan), encapsulated for the first time the hopes, political aspirations, and cultural identity of the Chicano people. It gave birth or rebirth to the myth of Aztlán, the sacred Aztec homeland, a myth that would have an incomparable effect on the Chicano sense of identity and national purpose. Remarkably, although the myth was many centuries old, it had virtually been forgotten among Chicanos before 1969. A Chicano nation-­ state existed “Nowhere” because it could never come about. But the identification of the myth of Aztlán with both the Chicano people and the Southwest of the US meant that the concept of an ethnic nation became prominent in Chicano consciousness. Aztlán occupies a real, although fluid, site based in the unbounded space of the borderlands. As such, it is describable by Michel Foucault’s term “heterotopia.” The reality of the Chicano nation supported as it is by the Aztlán myth offers the model of a space that, according to Foucault’s sixth principle of heterotopias, has “a function in relation to all the space that remains” (Foucault 1986, p. 27). While these may represent the fruits of an imperial utopianism, they greatly differ from the utopianism that began to be generated in postcolonial literatures.

The Caribbean The strategies developed in the Caribbean to reshape self and society, strategies based on a critique of the history of slavery and its consequences, offer some of the most powerful examples of utopian thinking by enacting a belief in radical transformation. This belief results in a demonstration of political resistance as it has always been most effective in postcolonial literatures: transformative, innovative, and future thinking. What gives this transformative urge its force and scope is what may be called an archipelagic consciousness, a sense of the vibrant multiplicity of the region that embeds itself in every individual cultural production. Creative expression has had a central role in this process of cultural transformation. Caribbean literature, owing to its radical creolization of the English language, has been at the forefront of the innovative

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production of Caribbean culture and thus it has been a major factor in the region’s capacity for future thinking. The anticipatory illumination in art and literature reveals the “possibilities for rearranging social and political relations so that they engender Heimat” (Zipes 1989, p. xxxiii), a place beyond nation, perhaps even beyond time, but a home given its unique character by the concept of the archipelago. Archipelagos are not simply the “other” of continents; they challenge the polarity of “Old World” and “New World,” of land and sea, of island and continent and, indeed, they go so far as to challenge binary thinking itself. The salient question here is: how is archipelagic thinking directed toward the future and how does it generate hope rather than simple opposition? The utopian dimension of such thinking comes about through the appropriation and transformation of inheritances of all kinds, both inheritances from colonial culture and those from other islands. Seen in this light, thinking with the archipelago offers us a clue to the Caribbean capacity for fluidity, multiplicity, and transformation in everything from language and literature to history and myth, including practices such as carnival, politics, religion, folklore, and food. This way of thinking is inevitably transformative, exogenous, and creative, confirming both the hope for the future and the capacity of that imagined future to critique the present. When we see how writers such as Brathwaite, Harris, Glissant, Martin Carter, and Derek Walcott think with the archipelago, we see how the transformative processes of creolization and its cultural effects occur.

The Pacific-Oceanic Hope The Caribbean archipelago has been perhaps the most fertile and resourceful generator of postcolonial future thinking. But there is a similar orientation to the Not-Yet-Become in another island region: the Pacific. The history of this region differs greatly from that of the Caribbean. Here, the indigenous people maintain a continuous connection to an Oceanic past in contrast to the slave society’s severance from an African (or Asian) homeland. Yet, both share the same need for identification with something larger, whether geographically, historically, or imaginatively, and this takes form in both regions in a regional, archipelagic consciousness. In the Pacific, this utopian dimension has come to be recognized as Oceania, an ingenious redefinition of the significance of islands that had seemed tiny, insignificant, and marginal. Oceania is not only itself the name for a utopian formation, but of a particular attitude to time and within which the

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remembrance of the past becomes a form of forward thinking that embeds itself in a vision of the achievable—a concrete utopia. Oceania owes its very meaning to the persistent reality of the crosscurrents of time and space in the region. Albert Wendt’s article “Toward a New Oceania” reads: I belong to Oceania—or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile part of it and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination … So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope—if not to contain her—to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain. I will not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. (Wendt 1976, p. 49)

For Wendt, it is a vision created and nurtured above all by art and literature. “In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania” (Wendt 1976, p. 60). Epeli Hau’ofa first picked up Wendt’s vision in 1993 in an essay entitled “Our Sea of Islands” (1995), which reversed the bleak denigration of island nations by a simple change of perspective. Rather than islands in a far sea, they could be regarded as a sea of islands. Island nations may be tiny, but the history, myths, oral traditions, and cosmologies of the people of Oceania constituted a world that was anything but tiny; it was a vast space, a space of movement, migration, of immensity and longevity. The difference is reflected in the names: Pacific Islands and Oceania. One denotes small, scattered bits of land, the other “connotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants,” a world in which people moved and mingled unhindered by the boundaries of state, culture, or ethnicity (Hau’ofa 1993, p.  92). This moving world, which seems to have been confined, constricted, and striated by the various boundaries of modernity, is the world of Oceanic hope, the world of the future.

Settler Colonies: Creating a New World While utopian communities have been established on various occasions in the postcolonial world usually based on religious and communitarian principles, the settler colonies are distinctive in the utopian drive that propelled people to settle. Throughout the British Empire, in particular,

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settlers fleeing the rigid class structures and economic inequality of Britain saw the colony offering a new start to free settlers. As one emigrant put it in a letter home, “eight hours is a day’s work. That is the best of this country. We go to work at 8 a.m., and leave at 5 p.m. A man is a man, and not a slave” (Sargent 2001, p. 6). But the escape from class was not matched by an escape from the civilizing mission. As Thomas Campbell puts it in a poem from 1828, the immigrant’s anticipation is as follows: To see a world, from shadowy forests won, In youthful beauty wedded to the sun; To skirt our home with harvests widely sown, And call the blooming landscape all our own, Our children’s heritage, in prospect long. (Campbell 1874, p. 249)

But if this start was not always as completely utopian as some texts hoped, it was an improvement for most settlers and settler colonies demonstrated more purely utopian writing than any other colonized country. In Australia alone, Sargent lists 243 utopian works—both eutopias and dystopias—up to 1999 (Sargent 1999). By the mid-nineteenth century, the dystopian perception of the Antipodes was strongly augmented by a sense of its potential for the British race. In 1852, Samuel Sidney wrote as follows: Australia … a land of promise for the adventurous … a home of peace and independence for the industrious … an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and the easiest best paid employments are to be found. (Sidney 1852, p. 17)

James Anthony Froude, in Oceana or England and Her Colonies, envisaged a global commonwealth of English-speaking colonies in which the words of “Rule Britannia” would come true. Colonists would “become the progenitors of a people destined to exceed the glories of European civilization, as much as they have outstripped the wonders of ancient enterprise” (Froude 1886, p.  429). Consequently, the settler colonies have never been able to escape the civilizing mission bequeathed to them by British imperialism. A disillusion with colonial utopia was bound to the economic inequality that came with capitalism. William Lane, whose ironically titled The Working Man’s Paradise (1892) was written to help fund the families of

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shearers and bush workers charged with conspiracy after the 1891 shearers’ strike, led a migration to a utopian settlement called New Australia in Patagonia. Disillusioned and unemployed, many bush workers saw the strike’s failure as the end of their hopes for an egalitarian workers’ Australia. When Lane proposed starting anew in South America, over 2000 prospective colonists signed up immediately. Perhaps the most famous recruit was poet Mary Gilmore who stayed at New Australia from 1985 to 1902 (Whitehead 2003). But like most utopian communities, New Australia could not manage the problem of power and collapsed under Lane’s authoritarian rule. Disillusioned with the class hypocrisy of nationalism, the utopians left only to be disillusioned in turn by New Australia. In all these manifestations of postcolonial utopianism, there is a vision of Heimat that transcends, for whatever reason, the “home” of the nation. While the initial vision of an independent nation in anticolonial rhetoric was doomed, the sense of a future that promised the arrival to a home that was sensed but not yet experienced underpins the continued resistance to imperial domination. Just as imperialism marries itself more comprehensively to that movement of global capitalism that dwelt at its origins, so does postcolonial utopianism adapt itself to the changing nature of imperial power. As it does so, the prospect of a future beyond oppression remains the driving force of the transformative power of postcolonial literatures.

Notes 1. This is Zipes’s English translation from Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1970). 2. The idea of Palestine as a place with actual inhabitants refutes Golda Maier’s following notorious statement: “There were no such things as Palestinians … They did not exist.” It is quoted from Sunday Times (15 June 1969) and The Washington Post (16 June 1969). 3. “The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character … At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit” (Hegel 1956, p. 99).

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References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1987. Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’. Social Text 17: 3–25. Alexander, Meena. 2009. Migrant Memory. In Poetics of Dislocation, 4–40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Anyidoho, Kofi. 1984. Harvest of Our Dreams, with Elegy for the Revolution. London: Heinemann. ———. 2009. The Return. Black Renaissance 9 (1): 136. Armah, Ayi Kwai. 1968. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann. ———. 2003 [1973]. Two Thousand Seasons. Popenguine: Per Ankh. Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge. ———. 2014. Knowing Time: Temporal Epistemology in the African Novel. In Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds, ed. Brenda Cooper and Robert Morell, 64–77. London: James Curry. ———. 2016. Oceanic Hop. In Crosscurrents in Postcolonial Memory and Literature, ed. Borg Barthet Stell and Ivan Callus, 23–56. Malta: Malta University Press. Ashwari, Hanan. 2015. Make Hummus Not War. ABC Radio National. Aycock, Amanda. 2009. An Interview with Chris Abani. Safundi 10 (1): 1–10. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1976. Socialism: The Active Utopia. New  York: Homes and Meier. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1969. Islands. London: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Thomas. 1874. Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales. In The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell. Reprinted from the Early Editions. With Memoir, Explanatory, Etc. London: Frederick Warne and Co. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coetzee, J.M. 1974. Dusklands. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Franco, Jean. 1989. The Nation as Imagined Community. In The New Historicism, ed. Aram Veeser, 204–212. New York: Routledge. Froude, James Anthony. 2010 [1886]. Oceania or England and Her Colonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilroy, James. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson. Glissant, Édouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J.  Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Harris, Wilson. 2008. History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas. Caribbean Quarterly 54 (1–2): 5–38. Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1993. Our Sea of Islands. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell and Vijay Naidu, 2–16. The University of the South Pacific in Association with Beake House. ———. 1995. Our Sea of Islands. In Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, 86–98. Durham: Duke University Press. Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. 1956. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover. Hobson, John Atkinson. 1902. Imperialism: A Study. London: James Nisbet. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social Text 15: 65–88. Kummel, Friedrich. 1968. Time as Succession and the Problem of Duration. Trans. Francesco Gaona. In The Voices of Time, ed. J.T.  Fraser. London: Allen Lane. Lane, William [John Miller]. 1980 [1892]. The Working Man’s Paradise. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Merican, Fadillah, R.S. Hashim, and R.M.M. Subramaniam. 2004. Voices of Many Worlds: Malaysian Literature in English. Selangor: Times Publishing. Miller, Alex. 2007. Landscape of Farewell. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen. Nandy, Ashis. 1995. History’s Forgotten Doubles. History and Theory 4 (2): 44–66. Neto, Agostinho. 1974. Sacred Hope. Trans. Marga Holness. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House. Obiechina, Emmanuel. 1992. Parables of Power and Powerlessness: Exploration in Anglophone African Fiction Today. Issue 20 (2): 17–25. Okri, Ben. 1990. Statements at Conference Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London: Ben Okri, Maggie Gee, Farrukh Dhondy, Anon., Malise Ruthven, Marina Warner. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 2 (1): 77–89. ———. 1998. Infinite Riches. London: Phoenix House. Ricœur, Paul. 1986. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H.  Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. Sansour, Larissa. 2012. Islam SciFi Interview with Larissa Sansour. Islam and Science Fiction, May 12. http://islamscifi.com/islam-scifi-interview-of-larissa/. Sargent, Lyman Tower. 1994. The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited. Utopian Studies 5 (1): 1–37. ———. 1999. Australian Utopian Literature: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography. Utopian Studies 10 (2): 138–173.

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———. 2001. Utopianism and the Creation of New Zealand National Identity. Utopian Studies 12 (1): 1–18. Sidney, Samuel. 1852. The Three Colonies of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia; Their Pastures, Copper Mines & Gold Fields. London: Ingram, Cooke, & Co. Weller, Archie. 1998. Land of the Golden Clouds. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Wendt, Albert. 1976. Towards a New Oceania. Mana Review 1 (1): 49–60. Whitehead, Anne. 2003. Bluestocking in Patagonia: Mary Gilmore’s Quest for Love and Utopia at the World’s End. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Wright, Alexis. 2006. Carpentaria. Sydney: Giramondo. Zipes, Jack. 1989. Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, ed. Ernst Bloch, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, xi–xliii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 3

On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture Susan Slyomovics

After the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 and the subsequent subjugation of large swaths of North African territory into the French metropole as France’s southern provinces across the Mediterranean, large numbers of statues and monuments were erected in these newly colonized spaces.1 Such large-scale sculptural presences represented an on-the-ground “statuomania”—to borrow Maurice Agulhon’s evocation of widespread monumental memorializations, which peaked during the interwar period in France (Agulhon 1978; Sherman 1998, 1999). French statuomania would also invade Algeria (Jansen 2012, 2013, 2014). Although no legislation required war memorials, France’s Law of October 25, 1919, to commemorate the dead of World War I triggered substantial state subventions for such statues and monuments in both France and Algeria (Journal officiel de la République française 1919, p. 11910).

S. Slyomovics (*) University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_3

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According to architectural historian Françoise Choay, the word “monument” originates in the Latin verb monere, pointing benignly toward “recall” and ominously toward “warn” (Choay 2001, p. x). Indeed, warnings and threats dominate monuments in the overseas colonies. The significance of European settler-colonial implantations of stone statues and war memorials was well understood by the native Algerian population given the large number of Algerian Muslim colonial troops who had fought and died for France in the two world wars (Kidd 2002). By 1912, a mandatory military service for three years—one more than required of French citizens in the colony or the metropole—had been instituted for Algerian Muslim colonial subjects based on the census of eligible males. Approximately 175,000 Algerian Muslims fought for France during World War I with estimates between 25,000 and 35,000 killed in battle. During World War II, Algerian Muslim soldiers made critical contributions to the liberation of France despite its subsequent collective “colonial aphasia” about their military centrality (Stoler 2011). Statistics for the year 1944 estimate that half of the 550,000-strong French army came from the colonies: 134,000 Algerians, 73,000 Moroccans, 26,000 Tunisians, and 92,000 from French West Africa (Recham, 1996; Lormier 2006). Frantz Fanon was right to link French Algeria known for its plethora of monuments and war memorials representative of the larger “colonial world” to the visible and materialized expressions of colonial occupation and forced conscription. A motionless, Manichean world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who constructed the bridge; a world which is sure of itself which crushed with its stones the backs flayed by whips; this is the colonial world. (Fanon 1961, p. 53)

The postcolonial afterlives of these monuments inscribe a historical, geopolitical, and affective provenance between Algeria and France. Specifically, even before Algerian independence from France in 1962, the French military in retreat along with allied European settler populations—the latter numbering over a million people from the total population of nine million—removed large numbers of monuments, church bells, and statues, as well as archival and portable material objects (Slyomovics 2020c). Since then, this migration, which has also been misnamed the “repatriation” of cultural and historical treasures from French Algeria, persistently conflates illegally removed objects with legal designations for the European

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colonists now living mainly in France. First human beings, then things, were labeled rapatriés d’Algérie: “the repatriated of Algeria” (Aldrich 2005; Slyomovics 2020a, b). Given that culled material objects were, and are, both moveable and cherished by France, they, too, departed north across the Mediterranean along with the people who carried them. Conversely, the parallel counter-dynamic fates for the remaining French colonial statues, church bells, war memorials, and monuments in Algeria varied wildly. Post-independent possibilities have been their preservation, reuse, appropriation, destruction, and disappearance. To illuminate the complex histories of these monuments and sculptures, which oscillate between varied involvements by iconoclasts and iconodules, expansive meanings for the art historical term “provenance” chart artistic relations between the French metropole and its former prize colony of Algeria. Once restricted to documenting and authenticating artworks according to origins and subsequent chains of transfer, Gale Feigenbaum and Inge Reist have embedded this concept in anthropological notions, as they are articulated by Arjun Appadurai concerning “the social life of things” (Appadurai 1986). Feigenbaum and Reist underscore the connections between provenance and the anthropology of objects because “[t]he role of provenance is contingent on the societies, disciplines, and institutions that make use of its focus of inquiry, tools and records” (Feigenbaum and Reist 2012, p. 1; Higonnet 2012, pp. 196–209). Thus, provenance writ large and specific to anthropological methods engages with the imperial context of artistic removals and exchanges between France and Algeria, while owing its discursive power as a historically specific tool for Western domination (Said 1978, p. 2). The following study of Ahmed Benyahia’s statue demonstrates that in Constantine, Algeria’s third largest city, postcolonial provenance research is more than mere physical and legal ownership. It encompasses artist and object biographies, artwork creativity, entangled shared heritages, and a global circulation of esthetic symbols in the making of monuments to glorify both the French and Algerian nation-state (Förster 2016; Hoskins 2006; König 2017).

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A Case Study in Provenance: Ahmed Benyahia and the Statue of Youcef Zighoud In the late 1960s, Algerian artist Ahmed Benyahia (b. 1943), a recent graduate from the prestigious École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Algiers, obtained a commission to create a statue of the resistance fighter, hero, and martyr Youcef Zighoud (1921–1956). Known by his nom de guerre Colonel Si Ahmed, Zighoud had died in combat in the Constantine region during the brutal seven-year-long Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). He had participated in early revolutionary political party formations, a series of key successor clandestine organizations and congresses, and spearheaded the struggle in Wilaya II or Zone 2 as head of the North Constantine region for the main nationalist party of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). He was called “the man of 20 August 1955” for executing a military confrontation on that date deemed an early turning point in gaining the population’s support. In the first year of the Algerian war, his attack on European settlers resulted in murderously disproportional French army reprisals and collective punishments targeting the surrounding Algerian Muslim population (Horne 1977, pp. 119–123; Djerbal 2003; Mauss-Copeaux 2013). The tale of Ahmed Benyahia and his commemorative statue to Youcef Zighoud unfolds during a riveting video interview, which was conducted by historian Natalya Vince and filmmaker Walid Benkhaled in 2019. Entitled “The long history of a short-lived statue,” their interview launched an important YouTube series visually documenting Algeria’s “Generation independence, Jil al-istiqlal.” This video shall form the scaffolding for this essay as well. Giving full rein to the narrator’s expressive style, Vince and Benkhaled’s film interview techniques included keeping the camera close to Benyahia’s face and excising distracting interviewer questions. For 22  minutes, Benyahia took listeners through the convoluted transformations and peregrinations that his statue had undergone from creation to entombment. More than that, he articulated what postcolonial provenance research meant for a living Algerian memory of the French colonial past through his own artistic creativity, which was constrained by difficulties in the creation of new public cultures. Benyahia’s interview begins with the critique of an early statue of the Emir Abdelkader (ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Muḥyiddı̄n, 1808–1883). It was commissioned immediately after Algerian independence and Benyahia takes issue with the poor execution, lack of proportion, and

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unconvincingly scaled dimension that depicts the illustrious, emblematic nineteenth-century hero inadequately. Sculpted by Italian artists, it constituted the first iteration of numerous reinforcements to the perception that the ruling post-independence FLN party under President Houari Boumedienne (1965–1978) had little confidence in the emergent young and talented generation of Algerian artists (Nimis 2015). In contrast, Benyahia states, the second and current statue of the Emir Abdelkader from the 1980s possesses a singular aura attached to an object (Pouillon 2008, p.  166). The second iteration of the Emir on horseback with an upraised sword represents an equipoised substitution because his twentieth-­century equestrian statue was positioned after 1962 in the same place where the statue of General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, the Emir’s nineteenth-century French nemesis, had stood. Both the central Algiers square that bore Bugeaud’s name and his 1853 statue were French colonial projects to reorganize public space carved out from the destruction of the urban fabric of Algiers (Çelik 1999, pp.  63–72; Prochaska 1990; Sessions 2006). Only the Emir’s statue reflects a spatial decolonization through substitution, since the surrounding streetscape and architecture have remained unchanged. According to Benyahia, in order to work on the statue of Youcef Zighoud, he circumvented authorities to head to the local eponymous village of Zighoud Youcef (for the town, the surname precedes the hero’s first name) where he had gained trust from Zighoud’s local resistance fighters and combat veterans (mujahidin). While amassing the requisite clay, he also visited Zighoud’s wife and sister, as well as his military comrades, to receive detailed descriptions of the hero’s face. For only a single photo existed of him (see Fig. 3.1).2

Fig. 3.1  Photo of Youcef Zighoud, original sepia-toned, date unknown (Wikipedia Commons)

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As the statue took shape, a local FLN official proudly informed the regional hierarchy about the project. Benyahia was immediately ordered to appear in person before various dignitaries, including representatives of Algeria’s Office of Mujahidin in charge of former combat veterans. They concluded that the village of Zighoud Youcef was too small for the statue: “too small even for Constantine, he is a national figure.” The villagers arrived to battle the authorities in the big city. The matter ended badly, though. The mayor of the village was imprisoned on fabricated charges and Benyahia was obliged to continue the work subject to surveillance by FLN cadres in Constantine. On August 20, 1970, on the fifteenth anniversary of Zighoud’s daring military attack and the eighth anniversary of independence, the completed statue was inaugurated to great fanfare and ceremony. Military escorts in parade uniforms accompanied the statue, along with Zighoud’s former comrades-in-arms attired in traditional robes and bearing wartime firearms. Benyahia estimates 10,000 people were in attendance when the statue was officially placed inside the FLN party headquarters in Constantine (see Fig. 3.2). Ten minutes into the interview, Benyahia finally intervenes in Constantine’s multiple and successive war memorials with a critical

Fig. 3.2  Statue of Youcef Zighoud, August 20, 1970, inauguration in Constantine (Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia, personal archives of Ahmed Benyahia)

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conception of topics such as provenance, heritage, and the decolonization of public space. A shattered interwar French colonial “monument to the dead” (monument aux morts) became not only the material source, but also the background and condition of possibility for Benyahia’s Zighoud statue. Benyahia claims that he cannibalized an already deposed French colonial monument to the war dead of 1914–1918, which had been erected in Constantine’s central Place de la Brèche in 1922. This monument comprised a tall column arising from a decorated plinth topped by France’s emblematic Gallic cockerel, the coq Gallois (“À Constantine” 1922, p. 8). It was officially inaugurated on October 7, 1922, by General Valentin surrounded by a contingent of French soldiers, the deputy mayor Émile Morinaud (1865–1952), the bishop of Constantine, and various colonial municipal officials and dignitaries amid the viewing local population. The provenance of the Gallic cock resides in its transformed history and symbolism, once imported from France to Algeria, for Benyahia’s statue, specifically for its bronze composition. These aspects become crucial to Benyahia’s capacity to undermine colonial practices and legacies while keeping them alive. With regards to provenance, Benyahia becomes the true heir to the esthetic power of three-dimensional sculptural artforms regardless of their origin in French colonial monument making. Benyahia’s appropriated cockerel—more commonly called “rooster” in American English, itself a euphemism for “cock,” thus overlapping with “penis”—refers to the young adult male chicken. It is a male gallinaceous bird known by the Latin tag Gallus gallus domesticus and, of course, it is notorious in French as the coq Gaulois. France, French-speaking Belgium, Japan, and Portugal have adopted the rooster as a national symbol, a fighting crowing animal hierarchically at the top of the pecking order.3 A bronze cockerel statue from Benin (okukor) attests to the bird’s cross-cultural powers: first looted by British forces in 1897, then donated to a Cambridge University college in 1905, it is currently featured in repatriation agreements with Nigeria. In fact, the bird’s wings were pivotal for Benyahia’s 1970 sculpted oeuvre (see Fig. 3.3). When I started to do the bronze part of the statue […], someone said to me: “There’s the wings of the Gallic cockerel, which have been impounded.” And I remembered that, in 1962, there had been clashes opposing the army of the frontiers supported by the Wilaya 1 [of the National Liberation Army] against the Wilaya II in Constantine—basically, it was a race to take power,

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Fig. 3.3  The war memorial of 1922, Constantine, Algeria. Caption: “Coq de la  Victoire” (Photo Agence Jomone, Algiers, circa 1957, no. 105, author’s collection) and they started killing each other in the city of Constantine. The frontier army won, they were well equipped and well organized, and they occupied Constantine. There was a huge crowd, and there was the Gallic cockerel, and they started shooting at it. Except the Gallic cockerel did not abdicate, it refused to fall! [Benyahia laughs.] So they brought in a ten-ton truck, ropes, and cables and they pulled. The column broke into pieces and the Gallic cockerel fell. The wings and the body were separated. They were picked up and taken to the pound in the Bardo area of Constantine. When I went there, I only found the wings, I didn’t find the body of the cockerel. Since I would have kept it with all I know now about the importance of memory. But there were only the wings, so I melted them down to mold part of Zighout Youcef because I wanted to put the statue where the Gallic cockerel had been. So in some way there is this fusion of history—the past via the Gallic cockerel and the future by the statue of Zighoud. I made the statue with the index finger pointing. (Vince and Benkhaled 2019, 10:51–13:13)

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Intrinsic to Benyahia’s description of his own statue as a “fusion of history,” these continuities and ruptures are played out between settlers and the colonized not only in the immediate aftermath of Algeria’s independence but also after the French conquest in 1830. For example, the statue of St. Augustine still standing in front of the basilica in his birthplace of Annaba, Algeria, was cast in bronze melted down from the cannons of the defeated Ottomans.4 To trace the violent fates awaiting some, but not all, of French colonial statuary after 1962, art historian Nabila Oulebsir calls for “mirror readings” (lecture en miroir): A statue or monument collapses and one hundred thirty years of colonization thus suddenly disappear. This “cleansing” of the artistic heritage is the purification of urban space overloaded with traces and signs of an abolished history, that of French Algeria. It started on the first Independence Day in the capital through the recovery of former places of power and urban centers. In that brief breath of freedom granted to the Algerian population, one of the first acts expressed by the latter to the proclamation of independence was to march and demonstrate that same day at strategic points in the capital of Algiers. Spaces and places that are not neutral as in the Place du Gouvernement or the Boulevard de la République, public buildings like the Post Office, constituted the urban and architectural scene of freedom regained. (Oulebsir 2004, p. 310)

Oulebsir alludes to the “cleansing” time when Algerians recovered spatial freedoms beginning with their first July 5, 1962, Independence Day celebrations also targeting major French civic and religious monuments: Joan of Arc statues were famously draped with a veil and Algerian flags. Algerian independence did not spare the country further battles between warring factions of the Algerian army, which had carved the country into six interior autonomous zones (wilaya) plus a separate Algiers autonomous zone to battle the French army. In July 1962, Constantine as the capital of the resistance zone Wilaya II was the site of internal struggles among Algeria’s victors. Benyahia witnessed clashes that erupted on July 25 between the forces of Wilaya I commander Tahar Zbiri who was allied with the powerful, better-equipped Algerian army positioned on the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers (armée des frontiers) against the resistance fighters of Wilaya II from the country’s interior forces who followed the opposing unsuccessful leadership under the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic: 25 people were killed and 30 wounded. A second clash in Constantine on August 15 and 16 between the two

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antagonistic parties claimed 100 additional deaths. Constantine’s local fighters were on the losing side, which gave rise to repercussions for Benyahia’s statue. Civil discord and post-independence chaos ensued until the fall of 1962 when Constantine came under the sway of the army of the frontiers, and local resistance fighters were sidelined. Algeria’s postcolonial achievement of sovereignty was deeply contradictory, divisive, and bitterly fought to the finish. In Constantine, the capacity to enact internecine battles between factions of the Algerian army after independence devolved into an attack on the crowing cockerel, the symbol of the departed French colonial military order that had rendered invisible (or barely acknowledged) the sacrifices of conscripted Algerian soldiers during two world wars. The French war monument’s destruction is parsed as a violent form of reclaiming public space on the part of the formerly colonized, as Oulebsir describes the means of symbolic, playful, violent, or embodied manifestations of mirrored reversals during the early days of independence. Fanon certainly points to the doubled colonial and postcolonial heritages of violence as an integral aspect of cathartic emancipatory forces required to free the native affectively from the status of colonial subject. The Algerian War of Independence is deemed among the bloodier twentieth-century wars of decolonization. Consequently, the post-independent period of decolonization was a ferocious process despite the absence of settlers who had departed in 1962. More than half of the European settler population left North Africa between January 1, 1962, and December 1963, a two-year exodus representing nearly two-thirds of almost one million repatriated who held French citizenship in Algeria (Choi 2016). Nonetheless, their enduring and prominent architectural imprints continued to frame the urban spaces of post-independent Constantine such as the Place de la Brèche (“the Square of the Breach”) with the material remains of the war memorial and the surrounding French colonial administrative buildings. Even before the 1922 implantation of the Gallic rooster crowing France’s victory over Germany in World War I, a war that had marked the first time colonial North African troops were conscripted into a European conflagration, the Place de la Brèche was implicated geopolitically in France’s 1837 conquest of Constantine. It would result in the massive reordering of the Algerian urban space into the upper European and lower “native” quarters.5 Algerian troops and city dwellers under Ahmed Bey of Constantine fought valiantly against the French invasions during the 1830s, even successfully repulsing the first assault. Only following massive

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bombardments of the city were Constantine’s fortifications breached by Lieutenant Colonel Louis Juchault de Lamoricière (1806–1865). Finally, he entered the vanquished city at the head of French army troops on October 13, 1837. Architecturally, his posthumous imprint as an urbanist determined the shape of many Algerian towns and cities. He designated separate native Algerian enclaves, the hallmark racial separations of the settler colony: “Natural segregation was increased by the decision of Lamoricière to confine (cantonner) the Arabs in isolated neighborhoods that later become ‘Negro villages’ (villages nègres)” (Julien 1964, p. 255). Lamoricière was a principal architect in every sense of the word of the 1830 conquest of Algeria and the subsequent subjugation of the territory. In addition to the breach of Constantine’s defenses in 1837, when elevated to the rank of general by 1847, he famously captured Algeria’s great resistance leader, the Emir Abdelkader. After the French conquest of Constantine, the city’s redesign proceeded apace with radical planning to realign and level sections of the precolonial ramparts, which required eliminating the city gates of Bab El Oued and Bab Djedid. The year of conquest, Constantine reputedly possessed some 59 mosques, 35 zaouias (buildings housing Sufi confraternities), four medersas (school mosques), and nine marabouts (saints’ shrines). As elsewhere throughout Algeria, a good deal of the native Algerian architecture was demolished or repurposed (Pagand 1989, p.  124). The eighteenth-­century mosque of Souk el Ghzel (“market of spun wool”) was transformed into the Catholic church of Notre-Dame-des-SeptDouleurs in 1839, consecrated a cathedral in 1876, and reverted after independence to the mosque of Hassan Bey, the name of its founder-­ builder (Boudjada 2003). The twelfth-century mosque of Sidi Makhlouf was destroyed and replaced between 1849 and 1854 with the seat of the newly built neoclassical-style prefecture and town hall (Badjadja 2011). The central Place de la Brèche was created and enlarged by the addition of three main streets bored through the winding streets of the precolonial Muslim city known as the medina. These dramatic constructions resulted in a military version of Haussmanization in the colonies, one that preceded and was concurrent with Georges-Eugène Haussman’s renovation of Parisian streets through similar acts of percément, the favored French planning word for penetrating, regularizing, and “piercing” into the urban fabric. Whether in Paris, Algiers, or Constantine, military engineering shaped massive urban clearance and destruction between 1840 and 1870 (Çelik 1997, pp. 26–38).

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The local population was well aware that the Place de la Brèche marked the spot where the invasion breached the city’s defenses, and that this open square was a second breach to separate a new European city from the Algerian medina. The square, its name, and the built French colonial architecture laid over the ruins of the former Arab-Berber-Muslim town reflected the enduring violence that befell the city of Constantine. Entire Algerian Muslim streets and homes were razed to make way for settler-­ colonial architectural structures, including the main square cordoned off by the surrounding colonial courthouse and post office among which the people of Constantine still live. The French colonial administration chose to erect the elongated war memorial, a phallic shaft plus the cockerel on the site of the breach in the ramparts, which signaled the fall of the city (Foura and Foura 2003). Inevitably, Lamoricière, the conqueror of Constantine, was commemorated with a statue in a square of Constantine created through demolition and named after him. His statue tells another violent story in which the French Army removed his sculpture mere days after independence. Alain Amato, a repatriated settler from Constantine to France, was the first to document the movement of over several hundred significant military and religious statues from Algeria to France including Lamoricière’s. All of them were brought to the metropole as part of a so-called salvage mission of repatriation. Then came independence, and in one night from July 8th to 9th, 1962, the statue was toppled and shipped to Marseilles by the French Army Engineering Corps [le Génie de l’Armée française]. It stayed on the docks of Marseille until June 1963. It was transferred to Nantes, the Minister of the Armies having assigned it to the hometown of de Lamoricière. Upon arrival it was stored in sections in the warehouse of Moutonnerie. About a year later Mr. Pennetier, Mayor of Saint-Philbert de Grand Lieu and general counsel of the Loire-Atlantique, learned of its existence and had the idea to claim it for his town. There is indeed a place called “La Moricière” two kilometers from Saint-Philbert, from which the family takes its name. Five years would pass during which Pennetier actively lobbied and on June 29, 1969, rewarded for his tenacity, he inaugurated the statue in front of two thousand people. The body of General Lamoricière lies in the chapel of the cemetery of Saint-­ Philibert. (Amato 1979, p. 187)

Thus far, moveable French colonial art in public spaces had been violently implanted over razed Algerian spaces. They would then sustain more

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violence through French disassembly (destruction in the form of spoliation on behalf of repatriation), Algerian disassembly (partial demolition), and ultimately Algerian reuse by Benyahia’s statue.

Commemoration Through Street Renaming or Statues? To underscore a theory of provenance that accounts for the improbable destructive events that overtook his statue, Benyahia narrates in the aforementioned YouTube video interview that the mujahidin (war veterans) at that time asked why he had created Zighoud’s statue with a pointing index finger: And I said, “it’s a composition, it’s just like that.” And they said “No, we think that you wanted to say to us: “You’ve betrayed the Algerian revolution, the mujahidin of independent Algeria, or independent Algeria has betrayed the martyrs.” I said, “That’s your reading!” And I think that’s one of the reasons—but the fundamental reason was given to me by President Boumedienne in person, because I met him in 1975 at the Cherchell Military Academy. He said to me, “Ya fanan, artist, France has left for us traps, mines. One of them is regionalism and tribalism. If we erect the statue of Zighoud now, the Kabyles are going to say, why didn’t you do Amirouche [“Colonel” Amirouche Aït Hamouda, 1926–1939]? And the Chaouia, why didn’t you do Ben Boulaïd [Mostefa Ben-Boulaïd, 1917–1956]?” (Vince and Benkhaled 2019, 13:20–14:22)

Benyahia returned to Paris assuming that his work on the statue was complete. However, he learnt afterward that a certain Colonel Abdelghani in charge of the Constantine military region had ordered his Zighoud statue to be removed. One midnight in 1972, it disappeared into waiting trucks never to be seen again until 1986. Thanks to a university conference organized in Constantine on how to write history, a delegation of administrators requested his statue’s whereabouts in order to reinstall it for the forthcoming August 20 commemoration of Youcef Zighoud. He informed them that it was their responsibility to find it: And when they found it, surprise! The statue of Zighoud Youcef, his symbol, had been guillotined! The body on one side, the head on the other. We didn’t know what happened. They found it in a garage somewhere, they didn’t tell me where. So it had to be restored. I got in touch with an old

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welder from the Bardo area and we did what we could to restore it. Just as we were going to install it, where the cockerel had been, a telegram arrived from the offices of President Chadli Bendjedid stating: “Any public installation of the statue of Zighoud Youcef postponed.” And so for a second time we couldn’t install it. It stayed like that. We restored it, and we took it back to its starting point at the headquarters of the party. And it stayed there. Two years later, there was the revolution of ’88, multi-partyism, the FLN disappeared. This huge building before becoming the headquarters of the party had been the Constantine Chamber of Commerce and Industry during the colonial period. It’s a very beautiful building and the FLN did not want to give it back for political reasons. They decided to give it to Justice, to make it a court. So they had to get rid of the statue. (Vince and Benkhaled 2019, 17:36–21:53)

So where is the statue now, as Benyahia recounts its latest location? For a good while the building [where his statue was housed] was empty. I met a friend who was director of the land registry and I said to him that the statue has been abandoned and he said to me, “I’m going to make it public property (bien public), so no one can touch it anymore.” It came into public ownership (propriété public) with a legal existence. It was given an identity. Because Zighoud Youcef on his own wasn’t enough! Then one day they decided to decommission the building and reallocate it. I went to see the FLN, the administration and I said to them, “Listen, this history, this statue has really had its ups and downs. Either Zighoud Youcef is a hero of the revolution as we’ve been told and the statue should be installed in public, or Zighoud Youcef is a traitor and I’m ready to melt the statue down. There is a third solution, you give it to me and I’ll put it in my garden.” And we left things like that. Then one day I was at home, and I heard my children say, “Dad, Dad, your statue.” It was on the news, the Minister of Mujahidin [war veterans], Mr. Abadou, without asking my opinion or anything, had decided to install it in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. […] And they made a pathetic plinth and they installed it any old way and it’s there in the Martyrs’ Cemetery until today. (Vince and Benkhaled 2019, 19:32–21:14)

Benyahia’s statue both reproduces and represents local anticolonial ways of knowledge unacceptable to Algeria’s leadership in the early decades of independence. Not only did he restructure unequal relations between the colonizer and the colonized, but he also acknowledged the colonizers while subsuming them physically into the sculpture. The relevant background to Benyahia’s remarkable appearing and disappearing Zighoud statue is the complementary history of endless, dizzying name changes for streets, towns, schools, and more, which characterize regime changes in

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both colonial and decolonizing historical moments. Acts of conquest, destruction, settler-colonial land expropriation and appropriation in cities and the countryside were made material through valorizing the French settler-conqueror-pioneers’ dominion over the Algerian landscape (Çelik 1997, 1999). In addition to monuments, French place-names for newly colonized urban spaces and rebaptized streets were invented from the 1830 conquest. Constantine’s legal place-name changes, termed “hommages publics,” fill file boxes at the colonial archives of the Archives d’Outre-Mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, France. Records of city council deliberations describe bureaucratically the ways in which the colonial municipality honored the European, but rarely the Algerian Muslim dead of World War I (ANOM GGA 6G/2). A high point for changing names was reached between the two world wars.6 Streets, schools, and squares were dubbed for prominent settlers, army divisions, generals of the Algerian conquest, and famous French historical actors such as Joan of Arc. In turn, post-­ independence Algerian renaming reversed colonial history, reverting to precolonial Arab-Berber names or recreating new toponyms and extending saint names beyond the local shrine. Zighoud Youcef became a frequent replacement name of an Algerian hero for French colonists and generals.7 In Constantine, the Boulevard Joly de Brésillon is positioned like a sweeping street-cum-promenade overlooking the valleys below, as it descends into the Place de la Brèche and skirts the 1922 cockerel monument.8 After independence, Joly de Brésillon was renamed Boulevard Zighoud Youcef, as was the town of Condé-Smendou where Zighoud was born. The Place de la Brèche was renamed “the First of November Square” in commemoration of the launch of the Algerian revolution on November 1, 1954. As with many new name assignments for central city squares throughout Algeria, Constantine locals have retained the colonial name of Place de la Brèche, which is emblematic of the population’s resilience in assimilating and repopulating the former European quarter built on the destruction of parts of their medina. Former colonial names have often endured through habit, affection, and rejection of new cumbersome decolonizing rubrics. To stop Benyahia’s statue from appearing in public, President Boumedienne intervened through practices of material dememorialization at the behest of the state with directives against regional heroes in three-­ dimensional form. It is noteworthy that Zighoud’s sole photo (Fig. 3.1) continued to recirculate as sketches and reproductions of the original image during the annual August 20 memorializing day in the Constantine region. Boumedienne’s refusal to acknowledge valorous regional actors in

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sculpture (while promoting place-name replacements) is no longer true. Since Boumedienne’s death in 1978, commissioned statues of Algeria’s revolutionary heroes have proliferated, many of which are prominently on view in nodal urban sites. In some towns, heroic statues adorn traffic roundabouts as Algeria’s cities expand exponentially outward from their central core. These commemorative statues are often part of state partnerships with municipalities and governorates in the service of public art projects to decorate or redecorate newer districts as well as colonial urban cores. For example, the statue of Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–1995) decorates the colonial-era square of Tlemcen city center. It was erected in 2016 to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Ben Bella, Algeria’s first president from 1963 until 1965, was deposed by Boumedienne, just as the Tlemcen city square deposed the town’s French colonial war memorial and it was removed to the French Var town of Saint-Aygulf (Amato 1979, pp.  177–179). In Oran, Algeria’s second largest city, the statue of the town’s local resistance hero, Ahmed Zabana, graces a traffic circle along the extended seaside boardwalk. Both are the works of Algerian sculptor Mohamed Karoub, but unlike Benyahia’s statue infused with genuine French colonial bronze, they are burnished with patinated bronze resin or fake bronze.9 Versions of the Emir Abdelkader on horseback with sword aloft, itself the Algiers replacement statue for the conquest General Bugeaud, populate new urban neighborhoods throughout the country.

Anticolonial Sculpture Through the Reproduction of Colonial Statuary What are French Algeria’s colonial statues: art in public space, a lament for a lost French Algerian empire, objects with a soul or a visual record of the Algerian native and the European settler who died together for France in two world wars? What national traditions of sculpture do these statues and war memorials invent and what questions confront the different viewers? How have European forms of war memorializations, formed from the Franco-Prussian war and two world wars, emerged in contemporary Algeria out of interactions with colonization, extended mandatory military conscription of the colonized, and Franco-Algerian postcolonial relationships? An overabundance of theories and speculative approaches grapples with these questions. For historian David Prochaska, the same placement and creation of war memorials, which have proliferated through Algeria since

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independence, speak to a “clear-cut case of a cultural pattern which has been transferred to a different social and historical context and filled with a different but analogous content” (Prochaska 1990, p.  209). Étienne Balibar conceives of Benyahia’s statue in ways not otherwise applicable to Franco-Algerian relations through recourse to division into fractionated nations: “Algeria, France: one or two nations? Algeria and France, taken together, do not make two, but something like one-and-a-half. Algeria is irreducibly present in France just as France is in Algeria” (Balibar 1998, pp. 73–88). Alternatively, Benyahia’s monument might be an example of “palimpsest memoryscapes”—Paul Basu’s term for monuments erected in Sierra Leone, a former British crown colony (Basu 2007). Another helpful compound term of his is the intentional “postcolonial pastiche,” in which the word “pastiche” possesses a positive valence: it is a “collage” never a postmodern mimetic pastiche or an act of “shallow imitation, forgery and travesty” (Basu 2013, p. 11). It is evident that Benyahia’s statue represents anticolonial heroism, but at the same time it reproduces colonial statuary conventions in accordance with French wartime memorialization. Since Benyahia has witnessed and confronted both colonial and postcolonial forms of violence in this regard, his statue seems to depict these layered histories of brutality, all the while encoding meaningful reciprocal exchanges among at least three warring parties. Moreover, he exemplifies a certain receptivity to the colonizer’s art in ways that François Pouillon suggests that Algerian art and art historical processes must pay attention to “complicities” (Pouillon 2002, p. 142). He describes them as follows: “internal fissures and the interaction processes that are part and parcel of all relations, including those between dominating and dominated” (Pouillon 2002, p. 142). Pouillon goes on to say: That complicities do exist between them [is] the ransom to be paid for a history that is never truly heroic. … To put it another way, rather than considering the tautological art of identity lost and regained, we would instead be attending to real spaces filled with relational knots that are always difficult to untangle and that in any case cannot be reduced to a confrontation between self and other, past and present. (Pouillon 2002, p. 142)

Perhaps, one conclusion is that the history of Algerian conscription and army service during two world wars is reflected in allegiances to France’s esthetic objects dotting the Algerian landscape. War memorials possess an aura that is both national and local, both colonial and postcolonial, not to

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mention emotionally intense. On occasion, they are shared by natives and former settlers. This complication involves counterintuitive perspectives that incorporate traditions of monument making in post-independent Algeria. Generated from, and generative of, Algerian cultural decolonizing compulsions in relation to French imperialism and colonialism, the provenance of Benyahia’s sculpture projects past violence onto the experience of the present. Other features of provenance are that the Zighoud statue registers endless Algerian deferrals despite Benyahia’s implacable decolonizing project to install a worthy Algerian statue where the Gallic cockerel atop its column crowed over his hometown Constantine square for forty years. These anticolonial and postcolonial formations of artistic knowledge speak to the surprising persistence of his statue of Zighoud Youcef, standing upright with the bronze head reattached to the body, in its latest, yet perhaps not last, resting place in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery,

Fig. 3.4  Emptied plinth of the French war memorial (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia)

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Fig. 3.5  Zighoud Youcef statue in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery, February 2020 (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia)

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even as the decorated, yet emptied, plinth of the French colonial war memorial remains in place in the Place de la Brèche (see Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).

Notes 1. Research for this article was funded by the Fondation IMéRA, Aix-Marseille University, during a fall semester 2019 residency in Marseille, France. I am most grateful for Ahmed Benyahia’s comments, permissions, archival photographs, and participation in this essay. I thank Natalya Vince and Walid Benkhaled for their video, permission to reproduce materials, and readings of this essay. All quotes in English by Ahmed Benyahia are drawn from their subtitled video and numbered according to their online time codes. 2. This single known photo of Youcef Zighout is the public domain in Algeria and the United States at: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zighoud_Youcef#/ media/Fichier:Zighout_Youcef.jpg. 3. Archaeologist Naomi Sykes (2012) understands the global spread of the chicken (of which the rooster stands as the adult male) into new societies was more because of cockfighting prowess and less so for meat: “These introduced animals, so different from the native fauna and coming from remote realms, were seemingly imbued with cosmological power. Everywhere the chicken was introduced—Asia, Africa, America and Europe—it was quickly incorporated into magic and ritual practices” (p. 165). 4. One of the most impressive equestrian statues erected in Algiers to the Duc d’Orléans was similarly fabricated from melted-down Ottoman cannons. Labeled “a neat reuse of imperial booty” by Aldrich (2005, p. 170), it was removed to France after Algerian independence and eventually re-sited in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. 5. See “Ordonnance of 9 June 1844”: “Ordonnance du Roi qui règle le mode d’administration de la ville de Constantine, et régularise les prohibitions dont sont frappées les transactions immobilières dans cette ville.” Article 1 maps out the urban racial divides: “La ville de Constantine sera divisée en deux quartiers, un quartier indigène et un quartier européen” (Corps du droit francais ou recueil complet des lois, decrets, ordonnances 1847, vol. 8, p. 188). This ordonnance effectively launched the creation of the European city, allowing settlers to move in, and ended the military jurisdiction over Constantine which had hitherto prohibited European settlement. See also Parks (2019, pp. 115–116). 6. All documents for name changes were based on “Ordonnance du 10 juillet 1816” originally requiring ministerial oversight but as of 1920, naming powers were passed on to the prefecture or local city council, thereby accounting for the interwar frenzy of new names.

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7. Parenthetically in France, battles over street names related to Algeria continue to beleaguer French municipal authorities faced with public outcries about removing or restoring a difficult heritage commemorating contested people or events in Franco-Algerian history. French streets named for March 19, the date of the Evian Accords that signaled the process toward independence, are contested. For former settlers and their allied populations both the street and the date are signs of mourning, not celebration. 8. According to a nostalgic post by a European settler of Constantine, Joly de Brésillon was an early colonist from the 1850s allotted land for a cotton concession that never materialized: http://les-quatre-elements.over-blog. com/2017/05/le-boulevard-joly-de-bresillon-constantine.html. 9. I thank Amine Kasmi, professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Tlemcen, for this information.

References À Constantine: Inauguration du monument aux combattants. 1922. L’Afrique du Nord Illustrée, October 22. Agulhon, Maurice. 1978. La ‘statuomanie’ et l’histoire. Ethnologie française 2 (3): 145–172. Aldrich, Robert. 2005. Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Amato, Alain. 1979. Monuments en exil. Paris: Atlanthrope. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badjadja, Abdelkrim. 2011. La Bataille de Constantine 1836–1837. Saint-Denis: Éditions Édilivre Aparis. Balibar, Étienne. 1998. Algérie, France: une ou deux nations? In Droit de cité: Culture et politique en démocratie, ed. Étienne Balibar, 73–88. Paris: Éditions de l’Aube. Basu, Paul. 2007. Palimpsest Memoryscapes: Materializing and Mediating War and Peace in Sierra Leone. In Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa, ed. Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands, 231–259. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. ———. 2013. Recasting the National Narrative: Postcolonial Pastiche and the New Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument. African Arts 46 (3): 10–25. Boudjada, Yasmina. 2003. L’église catholique de Constantine de 1839 à 1859: cas de l’appropriation de la mosquée Souk el Ghzel par les Français. In Villes rattachées, villes reconfigurées: xvie–xxe siècles, ed. Denise Turrel, 285–303. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais. Çelik, Zeynep. 1997. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 1999. Colonial/Postcolonial Intersections: Lieux de mémoire in Algiers. Third Text 49: 63–72. Choay, Françoise. 2001. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Trans. Lauren M. O’Connell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Choi, Sung-Eun. 2016. Decolonization and the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Corps du droit francais ou recueil complet des lois, decrets, ordonnances, publiés depuis 1789 jusq’a nos jours. 1847. Paris: Imprimerie et librarie générale de jurisprudence de Cosse et N. Delamotte. Vol. 8: 4 January 1844–31 December 1847. https://books.google.fr/books?id=7eJnvMxc_EwC&pg=PA189&lpg=PA18 9&dq=ordonnance+du+9+juin+1844&source=bl&ots=TWLvMSPMUj&sig= ACfU3U1aja9YGaJuR3R-rcnikRLPMYRXlA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj 0mZzxy4LmAhVJ8uAKHbzTDjMQ6AEwCXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=o rdonnance%20du%209%20juin%201844&f=false. Djerbal, Daho. 2003. Mounadiline et mousebbiline: Les forces auxiliaires de l’ALN du Nord-Constantinois. In Des hommes et des femmes en guerre d’Algérie, ed. Jean-Charles Jauffret, 282–296. Paris: Autrement. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: F. Maspero. Feigenbaum, Gail, and Inge Reist. 2012. Introduction. In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, 1–5. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Förster, Larissa. 2016. Plea for a More Systematic, Comparative, International and Long-Term Approach to Restitution, Provenance Research and the Historiography of Collections. Museumskunde 81: 49–54. Foura, Mohamed, and Yasmin Foura. 2003. Les places publiques dans la ville de Constantine. Villes en parallèle 36–37: 316–339. Higonnet, Anne. 2012. The Social Life of Provenance. In Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, 196–209. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute. Horne, Alistair. 1977. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. London: Macmillan. Hoskins, Jane. 2006. Agency, Biography and Objects. In Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 75–85. London: Sage. Jansen, Jan C. 2012. 1880–1914: une ‘statuomanie’ à l’algérienne. In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (1830–1962), ed. Abderrahmane Bouchène et al., 261–265. Paris and Algiers: La Découverte and Barzakh. ———. 2013. Erobern und Erinnern. Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und französischer Kolonialismus in Algerien, 1830–1950. Munich: R. Oldenbourg. ———. 2014. Une autre ‘Union Sacrée’? Commémorer la Grande Guerre dans l’Algérie colonisée (1918–1939). Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 61–62: 32–60.

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Julien, Charles-André. 1964. Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, la conquête et le début de la colonisation (1827–1871). Paris: Presses universitaires françaises. Kidd, William. 2002. Representation or Recuperation? The French Colonies and 1914–1918 War Memorials. In Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, 184–194. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. König, Viola. 2017. Es geht um mehr als Provenienz [It Is About More Than Provenance]. Museumsjournal 4: 8–11. Loi relative à commémoration et la glorification des morts pour la France au cours de la Grande Guerre. 1919. Journal officiel de la République française, October 26. Lormier, Dominique. 2006. C’est nous les Africains: L’épopée de l’armée française d’Afrique (1940–1945). Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Mauss-Copeaux, Claire. 2013. Algérie, 20 août 1955: Insurrection, repression, massacres. Paris: Payot. Nimis, Érika. 2015. Small Archives and the Silences of Algerian History. African Arts 48 (2): 26–39. Oulebsir, Nabila. 2004. Les usages du patrimoine: Monuments, musées et politiques coloniales en Algérie, 1830–1930. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme. Pagand, Bernard. 1989. La Médina de Constantine (Algérie): de la ville traditionnelle au centre de l’agglomération contemporaine. Poitiers: Editions du Centre Inter-universitaire d’Études Méditerranéennes. Parks, Robert P. 2019. Claiming Bits and Pieces of the State: Squatting and Appropriation of Public Domain in Algeria. Middle East Law and Governance 11: 103–135. Pouillon, François. 2002. 150  Years of Algerian Painting: Relevance for Understanding on the Post-Colonial Situation. French Politics, Culture & Society 20 (2): 141–158. ———. 2008. Les images de l’émir Abdelkader: de l’Algérie coloniale à l’Algérie algérienne. In Le corps du leader: Construction et représentation dans les pays du Sud, ed. Carlier Omar and Nollez-Goldbach Raphaëlle, 163–170. Paris: L’Harmattan. Prochaska, David. 1990. Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press. Recham, Belkacem. 1996. Les musulmans algériens dans l’armée française (1919–1945). Paris: L’Harmattan. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sessions, Jennifer. 2006. Ambiguous Glory: The Algerian Conquest and the Politics of Colonial Commemoration in Post-Revolutionary France. Outre-­ mers 93: 91–102. Sherman, David. 1998. Bodies and Names: The Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France. American Historical Review 103: 443–466.

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Sherman, Daniel. 1999. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slyomovics, Susan. 2020a. Dismantling a World: France’s Monumental Military Heritage in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria. Journal of North African Studies. Advance Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2019.1644901. ———. 2020b. The Virgin Mary of Algeria: French Mediterraneans En Miroir. History and Anthropology 31: 22–42. ———. 2020c. Repairing Colonial Symmetry: Algerian Archive Restitution as Reparation for Crimes of Colonialism? In Time for Reparation? Addressing State Responsibility for Collective Injustice, ed. Jacqueline Bhabha, Caroline Elkins, Walter Johnson, and Margareta Matache. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, forthcoming. Stoler, Anne Laura. 2011. Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture 23 (1): 121–156. Sykes, Naomi. 2012. A Social Perspective on the Introduction of Exotic Animals: The Case of the Chicken. World Archaeology 44 (1): 158–169. https://doi. org/10.1080/00438243.2012.646104. Vince, Natalya, and Walid Benkhaled. 2019. The Long History of a Short-Lived Statue. Interview with Ahmed Benyahia. YouTube. Uploaded 11 November 2019 by Vince and Benkhaled. Subtitled in English, French and Arabic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wllPtQNYw04&feature=youtu.be&fbcli d=IwAR3ArOU_0yf0jpNfMhWEHFOui73bw-1VEcrNU0DQ5kqvYNs KGfqoHOTAfLY.

CHAPTER 4

Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing Francophonie Dominic Thomas

We are in a country that is called the French language… —Alain Mabanckou, “Interview with Alain Mabanckou” (Manteau 2013, p. 15)

During the first 18 months of his presidency, Emmanuel Macron visited the African continent on no less than ten occasions, obligatory stops for every French leader. These visits provide French presidents with the opportunity to formulate meaningful statements about French-African historical relations while delineating the contour of future interaction. Successive leaders commonly seek to demarcate themselves from their predecessors, introducing policies that herald the new turning points in their affairs with former colonies. Of course, such interventions are not without controversy. More often than not, they are defined by a disquieting paternalism and a narrow conceptualization of African culture and society, as evidenced in the speeches of former presidents François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and François Hollande.

D. Thomas (*) University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_4

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The concern with maintaining France’s influence in Africa has often served to explain and underscore “France’s own struggle with ‘modernity and globalization’ and failure to recalibrate its foreign policy according to new geopolitical coordinates” (Thomas 2013, p. 104). Indeed, the challenge has always been to reconcile colonial history with the demands that come with defining these new alignments. President Macron announced on November 28, 2017, during his visit to Burkina Faso that “I am from a generation of French people for whom the crimes of European colonization cannot be disputed and are part of our history” (Macron 2017). Of course, he was not the first French president to acknowledge the criminality of the colonial enterprise.1 After all, Sarkozy had claimed in his speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, on July 26, 2007, that “no one can ask of the generations of today to expiate this crime perpetrated by past generations. No one can ask of the sons to repent for the mistakes of their fathers” (Sarkozy 2007).2 President Macron’s angle on the question was significant because he pointed to the fact that he was the first French president born after the official end of French colonialism. This provided a new dimension to the age-old challenge of reframing postcolonial French-African relations. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to explore these considerations, assess their broader implications, and gauge the credibility of these measures, all the while evaluating what the multiple responses from intellectuals, scholars, and writers reveal concerning the status of postcolonial studies in France today.

Reframing Diplomacy The focal point of President Macron’s global diplomatic strategy has been the promotion of the French language. He took the opportunity to outline the framework for this policy objective in his so-called Speech at the University of Ouagadougou. “The challenge for francophonie,” he said on this occasion, “is the will to reinvent a happy future in our shared language, so that we are not limited to the tragic events of the past” (Macron 2017). I distinctly remember this speech, especially the moment when he announced—much to my surprise—that he had enlisted Franco-Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou in this recently unveiled initiative. I knew for a fact that Mabanckou had not accepted an earlier solicitation to participate in this state-sanctioned project. Furthermore, a cursory glance at his writings, social media postings, newspaper articles, and conference interventions provides ample evidence to substantiate a long-standing critique of

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the limitations of institutional francophonie. In his “Open Letter to Emmanuel Macron” from January 15, 2018, Mabanckou reiterated his concerns with the latest incarnation of state-sanctioned language policy: “What has really changed? Unfortunately, francophonie is still perceived as the logical continuation of France’s foreign policy in its former colonies” (Mabanckou 2018a). All things considered, then, it seems incumbent on us to evaluate President Macron’s attempts at appropriating a well-known francophone writer, all the more so given the complexity of colonial experiences and their historical legacies. Kenyan author Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o remains the incontrovertible reference when it comes to assessing the symbiotic connections between imperial motivations and the role of European languages. His writings highlight the nefarious ways in which linguistic practices strengthen the expansionist apparatus, most notably in his book of essays Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Here, he argues as follows: The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe … Unfortunately writers who should have been mapping paths out of that linguistic encirclement of their continent also came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of imperialist imposition. (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, pp. 4–5)

Ngũgı ̃ is forced to conclude as follows: The language of African literature cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention and a problem calling for a resolution. On the one hand is imperialism and its colonial and neo-colonial phases … But on the other, and pitted against it, are the ceaseless struggles of the African people to liberate their economy, politics and culture. (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, p. 4)

Consensus has never been reached on this issue. For example, disparities have been recorded between responses in anglophone as opposed to francophone circles, with less antagonism in the latter around the question and greater acceptance of the potentialities of French. Whereas some francophone writers have experimented with other languages—Senegalese author Boris Boubacar Diop published the novel Doomi Golo (The Hidden Notebooks) in Wolof in 2006—the publication of the manifesto “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français” (“Manifesto for a ‘World Literature’ in

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French”) in March 2007 (to which we shall return shortly) summarized and was indicative of the situation given that some forty-four multinational authors came together to embrace the diversity of the French language as a medium for cultural expression. Invariably, though, each linguistic sphere “came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe” (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, p. 5). With this in mind, President Macron’s statements have breathed new life into this long-standing conversation, and reactions have been quite different around the globe. This can be partially explained by the emergence of a new generation of thinkers whose work has coalesced around postcolonial issues. The field of postcolonial studies in France has been defined by suspicion, “rejection,” “reservations,” and “reticence” on the part of the French academy, a reaction that can be explained by the widely held perception that the critical apparatus comes “from elsewhere,” and that the critical tools it offers do not somehow apply to France (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2017, p.  249).3 This observation is questionable particularly when one considers that several key postcolonial theorists—Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty— have not even been translated into French until very recently. However, as French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch explains, the locations in which these “tools” and “apparatus” were first conceptualized is secondary to their pertinence to the cultural, political, and social analysis of complex historical relationships. It is a mode of pluralistic thought that consists in rereading the past and using it in a present that is swollen with a diverse array of legacies. Colonialism plays a role and has left a trace on contemporary society. Those traces are not the same for everyone, and they differ for the formerly colonized, the former colonizers, and even within those two groups. Such legacies are both contradictory and inseparable. (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2017, p. 246)

In reality, though, the disparaging reception of postcolonial studies has more to do with the difficulty that France has in coming to terms with colonialism itself (Bancel et  al. 2017). One indicator of this could be found in 2005 when the French National Assembly voted on a decree (that was later abrogated), namely the Debré Bill 2005-158: “Law concerning the recognition of the Nation and national contribution in favor of repatriated French,” which reaffirmed the “positive aspects of the French colonial experience” (Legifrance n.d.). This situation is all the more paradoxical

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given the degree to which French and francophone thinkers have infused the canon of postcolonial thought, as corroborated by the works of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Albert Memmi, Valentin Mudimbe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Thomas 2005). Today, many of the most influential intellectuals, philosophers, and writers concerned with postcolonial issues not only write in French but also hail from a broad and diverse range of geographic regions (Congo, Djibouti, France, Réunion, Senegal, South Africa, the United States, Zimbabwe, and so on). They include, most notably, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Elsa Dorlin, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Alain Mabanckou, Achille Mbembe, Léonora Miano, Sabelo Ndlovu-­ Gatsheni, Felwine Sarr, Françoise Vergès, and Abdourahman Waberi (Dorlin 2006; Mbembe 2010b; Miano 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Vergès 2019). Together, their pioneering works have set in motion the process of decolonizing mindsets while revisiting, as Felwine Sarr has described it, the idea of a colonial library, or the vast historical accumulation of constructs and stereotypes that continue to shape perceptions of the African continent today. Their works delineate the contours of a postcolonial world in which cultural, economic, political, and social realities do not correlate with the monolithic ways in which politicians and policymakers conceptualize the African continent and francophonie.4

A History of Violence The fundamental point of contention when it comes to the question of language within the French context has to do with the apparent inseparability between language as a hegemonic tool at the service of nation-­ building imperatives and the desire to modify this paradigm. This concern is expressed in calls for greater bibliodiversity in publishing, distribution, and translation in line with principles ratified by UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions: “Bibliodiversity is cultural diversity applied to the world of books. Echoing biodiversity, it refers to the critical diversity of products (books, scripts, eBooks, apps, and oral literature) made available to readers” (Alliance Internationale des Éditeurs Indépendants 2018). To this end, a collective of publishers and bookshop owners published a column in Le Monde newspaper on February 20, 2018. In response to President Macron’s project, they stated: “Francophonie must be enshrined in bibliodiversity, and we are working every day to achieve that goal. This is the

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vision of francophonie we subscribe to, the only one that will make people more curious, tolerant, and open-minded” (Le Monde 2018). These debates must be analyzed against the historical backdrop of colonial violence. Achille Mbembe has convincingly demonstrated how “the various histories of slavery and the history of different forms of colonization confirm that these institutions were veritable manufacturers of difference. In each and every case, difference was the result of a complex process of abstraction, objectification and hierarchization” (Mbembe 2010a, p. 119). The French colonial project, bolstered by its mission civilisatrice and the desire to impart universal values, was necessarily cultural and political. Education and language policies furnished the outline of these hierarchical arrangements while implementing deliberately mechanisms that marginalized and subsumed other languages. This dimension has been key to positions embraced by Ngũgı ̃ and others who ask critically: “What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and a writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?” (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, p. 26). The logic here is hard to contest. Interesting to ask, then, is why francophone authors have, for the most part, interpreted this dynamic differently. For example, the Congolese novelist and playwright Sony Labou Tansi understood that the relationship was, at the origin at least, defined by violence, but he was quick to detect the intrinsic vulnerability of the colonial infrastructure, the futility of its efforts aimed at annexing and commandeering the “natives,” and in view of that to relinquish any sentiment of dependence. In an interview with Ifé Orisha, Sony Labou Tansi explained this issue as follows: I write in French because that is the language in which the people I speak for were raped, that is the language in which I myself was raped. I remember my virginity … One must say that if between myself and French there is anyone who is in a position of strength, it is not French, but I. I have never had recourse to French, it is rather French that has had recourse to me. (Orisha 1986, p. 30)

These comments are especially interesting when one considers recent statistics published in a much-cited 2014 report by the International Organization of Francophonie (OIF) concerning French-language usage: “The future of the French language (of Francophonie) lies firmly in the hands of Africans” (OIF 2014). It estimates that by 2050 roughly 80

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percent of French speakers would be Africans. It is impossible to ignore the strategic implications of President Macron’s policy ambitions against this projection. The term francophonie was coined in 1880 by the French geographer Onésime Reclus. The OIF, founded in 1970 in the aftermath of French colonialism, extends membership to an international community of people using the French language. In this case, though, membership essentially replicates France’s historical influence overseas. It has deep colonial roots. The International Organization of La Francophonie represents one of the biggest linguistic zones in the world. Its members share more than just a common language. They also share the humanist values promoted by the French language. The French language and its humanist values represent the two cornerstones on which the International Organization of La Francophonie is based. (OIF 2014)

Though representing countries and regions that commonly use the French language, the organization has come under growing scrutiny, since its implicit verticality toward the French state remains a concern. As we shall see, the association of humanist value with the French language has also been contested just like the political role of the organization. The France Diplomatie website confirms with its statements relating to the role of francophonie why this distrust is not unjustified: “a bilateral policy which aims to raise the profile of French abroad,” “a multilateral policy which aims to bring French-speaking countries together as a political community,” and “[t]his institution contributes to peace, democracy, human rights, the promotion of French and cultural diversity, and the development of shared and sustainable prosperity” (France Diplomatie 2019). Together, these declarations, measures, and statements serve to confirm how successive governments had recourse to language policy as an intrinsic component of diplomacy, as a “the key tool for promoting one’s civilization” (Védrine and Moïsi 2001, p. 87). Likewise, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Védrine once argued: “Globalization develops according to principles that correspond neither to French tradition nor to French culture: mistrust of the state, individualism removed from the republican tradition, the inevitable reinforcement of the ‘indispensable’ role of the United States, and the English language” (Védrine and Moïsi 2001, p. 17). While the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, established in 1959

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under the leadership of the novelist André Malraux, had previously shared this goal of promoting, protecting, and sponsoring culture in order to fulfill the Gaullist project of elevating the grandeur, namely “France’s inordinate soft power,” the imperative today is to “remain relevant, and a paradoxical embracing of the strategic importance of a global community of French speakers” (Barnes and Thomas 2017, pp. 1, 4).

Reframing Francophonie President Macron announced in his welcoming address at the seventeenth summit of the OIF held in Armenia on October 11, 2018, that “[t]his language belongs to none of us, it is the property of all, and has today emancipated itself from its former link with the French nation in order to welcome all imaginaries”—words that echoed the speech previously delivered in Ouagadougou (Macron 2018). I refuse to refer always back to the same perceptions of the past. There has been fighting, there have been errors and crimes, there have been great things and happy stories. But I am deeply convinced that our duty is not to make matters worse, our duty is not to stay in this past, but to live this generation’s adventure wholeheartedly. (Macron 2017)

President Macron may have embraced a different approach, appointing the Franco-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani as his personal representative for francophonie, rather than a civil servant or a politician to what had previously been a minister or secretary of state-level appointment. However, the implications remain questionable. In fact, they have been largely debunked by authors and intellectuals. The deliberate linking of language with colonial history has ensured that the “language question” is back front and center in debates pertaining to the postcolonial era. Yet, this past is certainly not foreclosed, age-old grievances persist, and not everyone agrees that simple gestures are either adequate or sufficient in order to turn the page on history. The lack of agreement over the colonial past means that its legacy continues to haunt contemporary France. The connection of the French language to colonialism and imperial ambitions remains an irrefutable fact of history. Linguistic practices find themselves anchored in mechanisms that operate in such a way as to institutionalize hierarchical power relations between a center in the Global North and a periphery in the Global South. The central role ascribed to

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language in French foreign policy today, partially as a way to respond to the imperatives of globalization, is associated as well with alarming instances of protectionism (in the discourse of the Far Right) and in the arguments made by advocates of defensive identities (Bancel et al. 2015). These groups have argued that France is in “decline,” pointing to demographic changes resulting from immigration and birth rates, a loss of political influence, and shifting cultural frameworks, factors that, in their view, are the result of decolonization and a “reverse colonization,” eventually culminating in the “replacement” or “substitution” of French citizens of “pure white stock” as the product of uncontrolled immigration (Camus 2012).5 These issues are relevant to postcolonial questions today and require new frameworks which are capable of engaging with such dangerous arguments. The range of interlocutors in these debates has expanded tangibly, and a wide range of conclusions have followed suit. For Ngũgı ̃, the question posed itself initially in terms of the ways in which languages operated simultaneously as “a means of communication and a carrier of the culture,” such that accepting European languages contributed inevitably to a “fatalistic logic” that would ultimately subsume other languages to their imperial conquerors (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, pp. 7, 13). Today, critics of President Macron’s way of apprehending and presenting the issue have fastened upon the expressed desire to “move on.” That gesture in and of itself constitutes a hierarchical power concession given that it originates with the perpetrator of colonial maleficence. This history continues to breathe new oxygen into the postcolonial era, since neocolonial arrangements linger and shape contact with the Global South. This takes the form of foreign policy agendas that continue to bolster African dictatorships and corrupt governance as paths to maintaining France’s global relevance instead of relinquishing neocolonial ties. Analogies can be made with governmental intervention by the Ministry of the Colonies in 1931, which staged the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris as a way to rekindle enthusiasm for France overseas. For President Macron, barriers between different geographic and linguistic spheres are at best “artificial,” unhelpful if the ultimate goal is to “move on” and relinquish “perceptions that were, and constructions that must evolve” (Macron 2017). However, the reality is such that this artificiality is experienced very differently by those populations impacted by these policies and the broader political ramifications. Thus, postcolonial theories operate as a counter-discourse to that of the French state, reevaluating the imbalance between concrete and imagined centers and peripheries. One may agree with President

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Macron’s conclusion that “Francophonie is a living thing, which extends beyond our borders and whose heart beats somewhere not far from here … And this francophonie is not French francophonie, it has long since escaped France’s control,” but why should it serve as an “instrument for economic integration,” economic development, or even democratization? (Macron 2017).

Horizontality: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing Francophonie The symbiotic link between France as a nation and the French language made headlines in 2007, a major postcolonial turn of sorts, when the signatories of the manifesto for a world literature in French declared the following: Let’s be clear: the emergence of a consciously affirmed, transnational world-­ literature in the French language, open to the world, signs the death certificate of so-called francophonie. No one speaks or writes “francophone.” Francophonie is a light from a dying star … With the center placed on an equal plane with other centers, we’re witnessing the birth of a new constellation, in which language freed from its exclusive pact with the nation, free from every other power hereafter but the powers of poetry and the imaginary, will have no other frontiers but those of the spirit. (“Toward a World Literature in French” 2009, pp. 54–56, translation altered)

For Franco-Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi, the whole point was precisely to “undo the suffocating knot” of language, race, and nation, and, as Mbembe argued similarly, to “denationalize the French language” (Waberi 2010, p. 72; Mbembe 2006). As a statement of ideals and intentions, the choice of words for the manifesto may appear at first glance somewhat like an oxymoron, bringing together the contradictory terms of world literature in French. Something was perhaps lost in translation, since ultimately the purpose of enacting an “equal plane with other centers” was designed to foster greater horizontality, to decolonize mindsets. In this way, world literature effectively meant postcolonial francophone literature, but this center has been displaced, and “its absorptive capacity that forced authors who came from elsewhere to rid themselves of their foreign trappings before melting in the crucible of the French language and its national history” has been weakened (“Toward a World Literature

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in French” 2009, p. 54). The manifesto provided the impetus for international exchanges and assessments of the state of postcolonial France (Forsdick et  al. 2010). For almost a decade, though, the question had virtually disappeared from mainstream focus until President Macron revived it. The reactions to President Macron’s declarations were almost immediate and took on new dimensions. Front and center was once again the need to reframe the debate in such a way as to redefine the place of France itself—as nation—in broader discussions pertaining to a sense of proprietorship over the language in its global diversity. Mabanckou published the “Open Letter to President Macron,” denouncing the “francocentrism” and narrow conceptualization of “francophonie,” and numerous authors and intellectuals soon joined the fray (Mabanckou 2018a). President Macron’s speech in Ouagadougou provided an inventory of what his policy could help combat, including gender equality, terrorism, healthcare, and climate change. In response, Vergès asked: “We might wonder in what way the French language is equipped to tackle gender equality or fight against global warming or digital development? [After all] women who were enslaved or colonized were able to express their will for emancipation in their creole of African languages,” observations that are all the more valid given that “France has yet to fully recognize its responsibility for slavery, colonization, and the role it plays in protecting tyranny” (Vergès 2018a). The critique focuses on France’s lingering neocolonialism known as françafrique, a tradition or a system that goes against all principles of transparency and democracy, fueling inequity and corruption, and safeguarding oppressive dictatorial regimes (Verschave 1998). As Mabanckou reminds us, these are modern-day “monarchs who subjugate their people in French” (Mabanckou 2018a). Therefore, demands have been made for nothing short of a “decolonization of the French language,” for “the discourse of European supremacy” to be abandoned, and for a concerted analysis of the surreptitious ways in which President Macron has attempted to occlude the colonial question (Vergès 2018b, pp. 73, 86). In light of the oft-cited demographics on the future of French speakers worldwide, “Paris can no longer decide alone how French should be spoken or written” while expecting to “hold onto its role as the enlightened guide it has bestowed upon itself since it set out to colonize (Vergès 2018b, p. 73). The discourse of francophonie, as Lydie Moudileno has shown, adheres overly to a “disturbing nostalgia for empire and what colonial propaganda

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once hailed as Greater France,” almost as if “at this time of declinology it had become necessary to reaffirm the power of a Greater Linguistic France … desperately clinging to the canon as Proust once did to his madeleine” (Moudileno 2018). Together, these changes call for a systematic and ambitious “enterprise aimed at decolonizing francophonie and denationalizing the French language” (Vergès 2018b, p. 74). Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi, too, has provided a lucid appraisal of this situation, emphasizing by what method francophonie actually operates as a synonym for French soft power. When one looks to the dynamism displayed in the francophone African and Afro-Diasporic context, ample evidence exists of the degree to which individual practitioners are “emancipated from French influence,” such that France should “rethink the terms of its presence on the continent if it wishes to remains a strategic player on the African continent” (Kisukidi 2018, p. 83). The geopolitical stakes have not been lost on President Macron, for whom the goal is nothing short of aiming to “rekindle the yearning and longing for a reputation damaged by the practices of the French State in Africa during the colonial era and also since Independence” (Kisukidi 2018, p. 84). Although President Macron may rhetorically claim to “revamp France’s Africa policy,” this new approach remains only symbolic, since the primary concern is with leaving “untouched the key characteristics of its economic and military power on the African continent” (Kisukidi 2018, pp. 85, 86). President Macron’s eagerness to enlist writers such as Mabanckou can be explained by his eagerness to legitimize a project that can contribute in vital ways to the future of French economic and political influence specifically in its former colonies and more generally on the African continent. As Waberi concludes, “[President Macron] seeks to conscript them [francophone writers] under his banner to defend and promote France’s grandeur, reenacting historical scenes from yesteryear with the Senegalese infantrymen” (Waberi 2018). For France to change, a complete overhaul is needed.

“We Are in a Country That Is Called the French Language” For a long time, Mabanckou has encouraged a more inclusive sense of linguistic ownership. In 2018, he responded to an interview question by explaining that “[i]n literature, we are in a country that is called the French

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language,” and that “the French language cannot be confined by geography” (Manteau 2013, p. 54). This is quite a different position than the one adopted by Ngũgı ̃ or President Macron. The difference can be explained partially by distinct colonial histories, but the primary reason is because times have changed. In The Tears of the Black Man, Mabanckou questions francophone Cameroonian author Patrice Nganang’s proposition to “write without France” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 53). The latter is a writer who believes that such a decision would also be helpful to the process of “reclaiming the lateral mobility of our forefathers and mothers who used to move from one country or place to another, and from one language to the next, without having to first legitimize their movements” (Nganang 2007, p. 237). Yet, Mabanckou challenges the logic of such a scheme by asking: “How does being francophone prevent one from being a writer? Surely the shadow of France is not so cumbersome that it prevents one from being a writer?” (Mabanckou 2018b, p.  53). For more than half a century, independence from colonial rule has afforded postcolonial subjects a certain distance, but also a level of emancipation that implies liberation from those who define themselves through a particular language. The main argument put forward by those who today would prefer to write “without France” is that the French language is tainted with a fatal, insurmountable, unforgiveable flaw: it was the language of the colonizer. That it is a language that prevents us from speaking with any kind of authenticity. (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 54)

The point is that literary expression allows for a reclaiming of integrity and the gradual emergence of a territory of the mind rather than a physical enclosure or space that contains. Indications of this newfound reality are plentiful, and writers are unashamed when it comes to this truth. “I therefore ask myself the following crucial question,” Mabanckou writes, “are writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, and Edwidge Danticat ‘inspired by colonial ideology’ when they reveal the extent of their talent as writers in the English language?” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 55). Couldn’t we apply a similar reasoning to that adopted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1754 in A Discourse on Inequality?

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The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying “This is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Beware of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!” (Rousseau 1984, p. 109)

There are striking parallels in terms of the attempt to assert the place of language in the realm of the nation. Those who use language as a tool for creative expression, in turn, have challenged the need for a border where one has no business existing. This transition has to be premised on positioning France itself in francophonie—in other words, in a constituent component of a broader cultural, political, and social entity. Ivorian novelist Véronique Tadjo has spoken to this effect when she writes: “the time has come for the literatures of the Global South to be inscribed in the francophone Occidental imaginary … Literature written in French does not need to claim to be French to exist. This is the crucial difference that must be celebrated because that is where true francophonie is to be found” (Tadjo 2018). This is a prerequisite for a shared linguistic space and relationship. In the past, as Mabanckou and Mbembe have argued, “‘francophones’ were not so much those who, though not French, spoke French. They were those who, above all, were ‘ruled’ by French … and who became the subjects of a language” (Mabanckou and Mbembe 2018). As such, the two authors stand “opposed to any definition of the French language founded on a nationalist ideology” and favor instead a “world-language, a planetary language” (Mabanckou and Mbembe 2018). Likewise, francophonie cannot function as an ideological apparatus or as a geopolitical resource, and “whether one likes it or not, the French language no longer belongs only to the French”: “henceforth, the French language is transnational” and “permission is not needed to inhabit it” (Mbembe and Mabanckou 2018, pp. 62–63). As Vergès poses in relation to the debate launched by President Macron on the future of the French language and francophonie, the central question that remains unresolved is whether or not “France is ready to relinquish its privileges” (Vergès 2018b, p. 80). In other words, will the process of turning a page on history pave the way for a meaningful and substantive

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reframing of France’s relationship with its former colonies, or will new mechanisms and devices merely replace older ones and perpetuate postcolonial asymmetries? “In our world of hierarchical division,” Mbembe argues, “the idea of a common human condition is the object of many pious declarations. But it is far from being put into practice. Old colonial divisions have been replaced with various forms of apartheid, marginalization, and structural destitution” (Mbembe 2017, p. 161). To inaugurate a new era, one that contributes genuinely to a reframing of postcolonialism, one would need a “new theory of post-francophonie” (Vergès 2018b, p. 80). A new generation of postcolonial Africans wake up every day, “asking themselves how they can become what they are not yet” and, in this regard, “institutional francophonie has nothing to contribute” and “de-­ francophonization” is the only way forward, “namely the weaning of language policy from French power politics” (Mbembe and Mabanckou 2018, pp. 65–66). Mabanckou reminds us in The Tears of the Black Man with reference to the Congolese poet and historian Théophile Obenga who is himself speaking about Aimé Césaire: “The words may be theirs but the song belongs to us” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 54).

Notes 1. All translations from French are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. For more information, see Gassama 2008. 3. Also see Bancel 2012; Diouf 2010. 4. This work has taken place alongside that of several scholars working in French institutions. See Moura 2007; Smouts 2007; Thomas 2017. 5. For more information, see Bancel et al. 2016.

References Alliance Internationale des Éditeurs Indépendants. 2018. https://www.allianceediteurs.org/-bibliodiversity-indicators,276-?lang=fr. Bancel, Nicolas. 2012. Que faire des postcolonial studies? Vertus et déraisons de l’accueil critique des postcolonial studies en France. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 115 (3): 129–147. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Ahmed Boubeker. 2015. Le grand repli. Paris: La Découverte.

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Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Dominic Thomas, eds. 2016. Vers la guerre des identités? De la fracture coloniale à la révolution ultranationale. Paris: La Découverte. ———, eds. 2017. The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barnes, Leslie, and Dominic Thomas. 2017. Introduction: Global France, Global French. Contemporary French Civilization 42 (1): 1–11. Camus, Renaud. 2012. Le grand remplacement. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Éditions David Reinharc. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. 2017. Postcolonial Studies in French Academia. In The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Dominic Thomas, 246–256. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Diop, Boris Boubacar. 2006. Doomi Golo. Dakar: Éditions Papyrus Afrique. Diouf, Mamadou. 2010. Les postcolonial studies et leur réception dans le champ académique en France. In Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Ahmed Boubeker, Florence Bernault, Françoise Vergès, and Achille Mbembe, 149–158. Paris: La Découverte. Dorlin, Elsa. 2006. La matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française. Paris: La Découverte. Forsdick, Charles, Alec G.  Hargreaves, and David Murphy, eds. 2010. Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. France Diplomatie. 2019. Francophony and the French Language. https://www. diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/francophony-and-thefrench-language. Gassama, Makhily, ed. 2008. L’Afrique répond à Sarkozy. Contre le discours de Dakar. Paris: Philippe Rey. International Organization of Francophonie. 2014. The French Language in the World. Paris: Éditions Nathan. https://www.francophonie.org. Kisukidi, Nadia Yala. 2018. Francophonie, un nouveau French Power. La diplomatie de l’attractivité. Revue du Crieur 2: 83–89. Le Monde. 2018. Nous, éditeurs indépendants, vivons et faisons vivre la francophonie. February 20. Legifrance. n.d. Loi no. 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés. https:// www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000444898 &dateTexte=&categorieLien=id. Mabanckou, Alain. 2018a. Francophonie, langue française: lettre ouverte à Emmanuel Macron. BibliObs. https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/actualites/ 20180115.OBS0631/francophonie-langue-francaise-lettre-ouverte-a-emmanuelmacron.html.

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———. 2018b. The Tears of the Black Man. Trans. Dominic Thomas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mabanckou, Alain, and Achille Mbembe. 2018. Le français, notre bien commun? BibliObs. https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20180211.OBS2020/lefrancais-notre-bien-commun-par-alain-mabanckou-et-achille-mbembe.html. Macron, Emmanuel. 2017. Speech at the University of Ouagadougou. https:// www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2017/11/28/emmanuel-macrons-speechat-the-university-of-ouagadougou.en. ———. 2018. Discours au Sommet de la francophonie à Érevan. https://www. elysee.fr/emmanuel-macr on/2018/10/12/ discours-au-sommet-de-la-francophonie-a-erevan. Manteau, Valérie. 2013. Interview with Alain Mabanckou: ‘Je participe à la défense de la langue francaise. Que font les xénophones?’. Charlie Hebdo 1119: 15. Mbembe, Achille. 2006. Il faut dénationaliser la langue française. http://www. multitudes.net/denationaliser-la-langue-francaise/. Accessed 30 January 2019. ———. 2010a. Pièce d’identité et désirs d’apartheid. In Je est un autre. Pour une identité monde, ed. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, 115–122. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2010b. Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille, and Alain Mabanckou. 2018. Plaidoyer pour une langue-­ monde. Abolir les frontières du français. Revue du Crieur 2: 61–67. Miano, Léonora. 2012. Habiter la frontière. Paris: L’Arche Éditeur. Moudileno, Lydie. 2018. Vous avez dit ‘misère(s) de la francophonie’? http:// afrique.lepoint.fr/culture/lydie-moudileno-vous-avez-dit-misere-s-de-la-francophonie-16-02-2018-2195512_2256.php. Accessed 26 January 2019. Moura, Jean-Marc. 2007. Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2013. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA. Nganang, Patrice. 2007. Writing Without France. In Words and Worlds: African Writing, Literature, and Society, ed. Susan Arndt and Katrin Berndt, 233–240. Trenton: Africa World Press. Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann. Orisha, Ifé. 1986. Sony Labou Tansi face à douze mots. Equateur 1: 29–32. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984 [1754]. A Discourse on Inequality. Trans. Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin Press. Sarkozy, Nicolas. 2007. Address at the University Cheikh Anta Diop. http:// www.africaresource.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&i d=437%3Athe-unofficial-english-translation-of-sarkozys-speech&catid= 36%3Aessays-a-discussions&Itemid=346.

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Smouts, Marie-Claude, ed. 2007. La situation postcoloniale. Les postcolonial studies dans le débat français. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Tadjo, Véronique. 2018. Il est grand temps d’inscrire la littérature du Sud dans l’imaginaire francophone occidental. Le Monde, January 26. https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2018/01/26/il-est-grand-temps-d-inscrire-la-litterature-du-sud-dans-l-imaginaire-francophone-occidental_5247846_3212.html. Thomas, Dominic. 2005. Intersections and Trajectories: Francophone Studies and Postcolonial Theory. In Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, ed. Anne Donadey and H. Adlai Murdoch, 235–257. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ———. 2013. Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration and Race. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2017. L’Afrique à l’université américaine. In Penser et écrire l’Afrique, ed. Alain Mabanckou, 81–91. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Toward a World Literature in French. 2009, March–April. Translated by Daniel Simon. World Literature Today 83 (2): 54–56. Védrine, Hubert, and Dominique Moïsi. 2001. France in an Age of Globalization. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. Vergès, Françoise. 2018a. Ces habits usés de la francophonie! http://afrique.lepoint.fr/actualites/francoise-verges-ces-habits-uses-de-la-francophonie-13-022018-2194444_2365.php. ———. 2018b. Décoloniser la langue française: Pour une politisation de la Francophonie. Revue du Crieur 2: 69–81. ———. 2019. Un féminisme décolonial. Paris: La Fabrique. Verschave, François-Xavier. 1998. La Françafrique. Le plus long scandale de la République. Paris: Stock. Waberi, Abdourahman. 2010. Écrivains en position d’entraver. In Pour une littérature-­monde, ed. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, 67–75. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. ———. 2018. Francophonie: Le site de l’Elysée dévoile une vision du monde passablement réductrice. Le Monde, February 14. https://www.lemonde.fr/ afrique/article/2018/02/14/francophonie-le-site-de-l-elysee-devoile-unevision-du-monde-passablement-reductrice_5256711_3212.html.

PART II

Hybrid Methodologies

CHAPTER 5

Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François

In her opening remarks to a 2008 article titled “Postcolonialism, Language, and the Visual: By Way of Haiti,” Françoise Lionnet raises the following question: “Who can rightly claim today the condition of postcoloniality?” (Lionnet 2008, p.  227). As it brings to the fore a certain challenge of legitimacy and ethics, her argument considers how the complex expression of minor and resistant identities—that is, through the circulation of peripheral literature and cinema in the global cultural market—pushes us to think “in terms of the more nuanced understanding of postcolonialism as a humanism,” or rather as a new humanism (Lionnet 2008, p. 228). While Lionnet’s discussion ultimately suggests in a sense that fiction from the Global South can perform emancipatory projects by reimagining, remaking, and transforming human subjects and subjectivities, it further triggers some methodological questions: if we can ask who can rightly claim today the condition of postcoloniality, how can we also name and represent the multiple forms this condition takes from one part of the globe to another? How do we approach and compare them without

E. B. Jean-François (*) Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_5

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flattening the differences and nuances they foreground, and without misusing or appropriating them? How do we respond to creative voices that imagine the pain or mediate the suffering of others in a movement of solidarity that requires them to connect these painful experiences to their own?1 As I began to reflect on these questions and their possible implications for renewed discussions of postcolonialism, a rather recent Mauritian text came to my mind. In Tropique de la violence (Tropic of Violence), a polyvocal novel published in French in 2016, Nathacha Appanah alludes to the realities of the contemporary migration crisis, as it appears in the Comoros Islands—an Indian Ocean archipelago located in the Mozambique Channel off the coast of East Africa. Although the novel takes the reader to a geographical region that is hardly ever cited in news reports regarding “illegal” migration circuits impacting Europe, it subtly points out that one of the four islands of the Comoros (Mayotte) is today not only the fifth Overseas Department of France (with Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and La Réunion), but also the ninth ultraperipheral region of the European Union (Lionnet and Jean-François 2016). In 1975, Mayotte decided explicitly to retain its colonial ties to France, whereas the other three islands (Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli) became independent. As of today, the people in Mayotte continue to share linguistic, cultural, and religious practices with the rest of the Comoros, but they identify themselves largely as Europeans—at least legally and politically speaking—since they have a European passport, are part of the Euro zone, and are represented in the European Parliament. Upon reading Appanah’s novel, I was particularly struck by a passage where one of the narrators referenced the tragic story of the kwassa kwassa, the fishing pirogues used by thousands of Comorans over the past two decades to make the crossing “illegally” from the three independent islands to the European territory. During the past ten years, more than 20,000 Comorans, including children, have died at sea while crossing the Mozambique Channel also known as le canal de la mort, the death channel. While my aim here is not to embark on a lengthy discussion about the geopolitical issues at stake in Mayotte, I approach this narrator’s particular comment about the kwassa kwassa as one that metaphorizes the methodological and epistemological underpinning of my main argument. In doing so, I want to show how the transnational intervention of Creole voices on migration issues across the Global South performs the idea of postcolonialism as new humanism, as it engages with questions of comparative history, minor solidarity, and transoceanic empathy.

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An old story, heard of a hundred times, and rehashed a hundred times. The story of a country that glitters and that everybody wants to reach. This country bears multiple names: Eldorado, mirage, paradise, chimera, utopia, Lampedusa. It’s the story of these boats called here kwassa kwassa, elsewhere pirogues or ships, that have always existed to allow men to willingly or forcefully cross the waters. It’s the story of human beings who have taken these boats and to whom multiple names were given, since the beginning of times: slaves, indentured laborers, plague-ridden, convicts, repatriates, Jews, boat people, refugees, undocumented aliens, illegal immigrants. (Appanah 2016, p. 53)2

Appanah uses the kwassa kwassa as a point of entanglement for bringing together the multiple, yet cyclical and ever-repeated, stories of oppressed peoples, precarious populations, and subaltern groups who—at different times and in different geographies—have crossed the waters, generating experiences and trajectories that re-world the world we know by destabilizing the historical, geographical, and cultural divides, as well as the imaginaries inherited from colonialism. When I say “re-world the world,” I am drawing from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of mondanisation or world-becoming as a way of foregrounding the multiple processes that account for the ever-changing nature of the world, as the latter encompasses a diversity of worlds, a plurality of meanings, temporalities, and modes of being (Nancy 2007 [2002]). What I am arguing is that Appanah’s compound image of the migrant’s itinerary further illustrates the transformative impact a creative work has on our thoughts about so-called discrete historical mo(ve)ments across time and space, especially related experiences of precarity and suffering. In the face of the relentless global “migration crisis,” which has seen the relocation of millions over the past decades, I ask the following set of questions: how does the creative act of bringing together historically and geographically distinct narratives of crossings recalibrate our vision of enduring precarities? And how do the long-standing hybrid and multilingual practice and imaginary worlds of writers and artists from Creole contexts extend to contemporary experiences of migration, displaying a planetary reach that engages more broadly with the idea of humanism through questions of hope and agency, subaltern solidarities, and ethical hospitality? Writers and artists from Creole regions have long explored multidirectional mappings, allowing transcolonial and transnational solidarities and conversations to emerge. While colonial imagination has

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persistently portrayed island colonies and archipelagoes of the Global South as vulnerable and fragmented isolates, one only needs to consider the cultural and literary productions of the Mascarene region and the Caribbean archipelagoes in order to appreciate how insular histories and archipelagic voices relate far more to stories of exchange, encounter, and empathy than one would initially think (Cohen and Sheringham 2008). By consistently engaging with narratives of migration and displacement that put diverse peoples, cultures, and languages into close contact over extended historical periods, Creole literatures and expressive cultures have trained our minds for the past 300 years to think transnationally. The complex overlapping of universes they portray through cartographies of human mobility tests our capacity to conceive of world history differently and to question the colonial taxonomies that have ultimately resulted in the division between the powerful North and the “peripheral” spaces of the Global South.

Transoceanic Dialogues, Subaltern Agencies The longue durée histories of the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic region, and the Mediterranean are filled with stories of mobility, networks, and cultural exchanges. As such, when studied through transoceanic lenses and using comparative frameworks—as in the emerging field of comparative Creole studies—they provide a rich terrain for thinking more broadly about “how to capture and represent the history of the people who breached, bridged and leaked across … materially elusive spaces” precisely from the perspective of “ordinary people—the seafarers, slaves, soldiers, migrants and labourers—who move in an often-circular fashion around, between and across polities, nations, colonies and empires,” rather than from the perspective of imperial powers or national bodies (Anderson 2013, p. 503). On the one hand, the journey of diasporic populations and dispossessed communities presents a valuable counterpoint to some of the surveillance strategies and scripted political tactics by which European powers—during the colonial and postcolonial periods—seek to control transnational mobility, erect borders, and maintain geopolitical frontiers. In addition, as Lionnet argues, “in the New World of the Western Hemisphere, as in the Old World of the East Indies, … colonial disruptions undermined existing institutional and ritual frameworks that authorized specific contexts of

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negotiated exchange and interactive universalisms” (Lionnet 2015, p. 299). On the other hand, Clare Anderson points out the following: [W]hen empires fractured into independent countries, with decolonization in the twentieth century, newly established state archives and their documentary holdings quite naturally became the foundations for the writing of national, regional (or if you prefer) area studies histories. … [P]aradoxically enough the rightful democratisation of archives and their geographical boundedness have worked against the use of this archive and to write connected forms of imperial or colonial history, at least from the perspective of the Global South. (Anderson 2013, p. 504)

Contesting this very partitioning of geographies and temporalities, of epistemologies and memories, of state subjects and racialized identities, Creole literatures and expressive cultures—be they oral, written, or visual—provide a growing body of works that serve as alternatives to such lost archives of mobility which colonial regimes have in part erased and which modern imagined nations have failed to preserve. Through intertwined histories of islands and seas, of littorals and archipelagoes, these works connect minor narratives and subaltern biographies of various populations across the plural or “Oceanic South” (Lavery and Samuelson 2018). By engaging with stories of transoceanic routes, they express what Australian captain, author, and photographer Allan Villiers calls “brotherhoods of the Sea … giving rise to cosmopolitan populations” (Sheriff and Ho 2014, p. 4). While I prefer the use of the word “kinship” over “brotherhood,” it is indeed through such kinships that creative works address and contest both what Walter Mignolo describes as “epistemic colonial difference” and what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls “ontological colonial difference” (Mignolo, 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Undoing the systems of representation that have been relayed by colonial taxonomies, linear genealogies, and traditional historiographies about precarious peoples or their ontological state as non-beings in the world, the fictional worlds imagined by writers and artists of the Mascarene Islands and the Caribbean offer alternative ways of representing and dealing with the violent and repressed histories of slavery, indenture, and other forms of coercive displacements that have impacted islands such as Mauritius, La Réunion, Martinique, and Haiti. They counter the destructive effects of both coloniality of knowledge and “coloniality of Being” on non-Western human subjects, all the while displaying ethical solidarity and transmittable

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agencies that resist the enduring production of stateless human bodies across the Global South (Maldonado-Torres 2007). By refusing the disavowal of subaltern histories in the making of Creole, cosmopolitan, and global cultures, they foreground what Nancy has described as être-au-monde or “being-in-the-world” (Nancy 2007 [2002], p. 44). This way of being—in Lionnet’s words—“[puts] together what … [has] been divided, or subsumed…, thereby opening spheres of freedom that offer new potential for the full … deployment of more autonomous lives connected within large historic patterns of global exchange” (Lionnet 2015, p. 295). By thinking transversally about the multiple experiences of subaltern and racialized bodies across geographies and temporalities, and by approaching “transoceanic dialogues” both as a method and as a framework for understanding the esthetics and hermeneutics of creative works originating from Creole spaces, one can appreciate better how these creators represent particular ways of this being-in-the-world, which generate mutual intelligibility and empathy (Bragard 2008). I will return to this point in the final section of my essay.

Unknown Destinations, Hope-Filled Trajectories The Migrant’s Tale is an art installation by Nirveda Alleck, an award-­ winning Mauritian visual artist (see Fig. 5.1). Her piece was exhibited in the 2017 Contemporary Cultural Festival, Porlwi, an event held in the capital port city of Mauritius, Port Louis. Founded and developed during the eighteenth century by French Governor Mahé de Labourdonnais who administered the island on behalf of the French East India Company or Compagnie des Indes orientales, Port Louis is home to a World Cultural and Natural Heritage site recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): the Aapravasi Ghat, an immigration depot established by the British government after the abolition of slavery, which saw the arrival of almost half a million indentured laborers from India between 1834 and 1920.3 In fact, one can read from the UNESCO website that “the buildings of Aapravasi Ghat are among the earliest explicit manifestations of what was to become a global economic system and one of the greatest migrations in history” (UNESCO 2019). This third iteration of the festival, subtitled “Porlwi by nature,” invited attendees to “pause in the midst of [one’s] frantic [life] to reflect on our relationship with the natural world” (Porlwi 2019). Exhibited right

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Fig. 5.1 Nirveda Alleck, The Migrant’s Tale (2017) (Photograph by Nirveda Alleck)

outside a harbor facility called the Granary, Alleck’s installation showcased a pirogue, a small fishing boat, which evoked kwassa kwassa in Shimaore, barques in French, and pateras in Spanish.4 It included an uprooted green leafy tree standing tall in the middle of the pirogue. In a personal exchange I had with the artist, Alleck explained that she had “imagined a migrant (here represented by the tree) on a boat en route for an unknown destination” (Nirveda Alleck, personal exchange). In addition to this original scenography of uprooting, movement, and deterritorialization, Alleck created a 12-minute-long sound recording, playing in loop, which featured diverse excerpts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the fourteenth-century-long narrative poem considered today as an exemplar of world literature. Although the poem was originally written in Italian, viewers of The Migrant’s Tale could hear at the beginning of the recording an excerpt from the second canto of the first cantica (Inferno) read out loud in French. This particular excerpt referencing the “dark woods” was followed by another passage—this time read in English— from the second canto of the third cantica (Paradise) with the following opening lines: “All ye, who in small barque have following sail’d, / Eager to listen, on the advent’rous track” (Alleck 2017). As the two excerpts in different languages gradually intersected and overlapped with each other,

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they were joined by a third voice, quoting this time an excerpt from the second cantica (Purgatory), which disrupted the original linear chronology of Dante’s text so as to render the recording ultimately incomprehensible. While Alleck’s act of translation and intertwining of languages remind us in a unique way how various linguistic systems, cultures, and imaginaries were brutally put into contact both on slave ships and later on plantation colonies, her installation resonates with other creative works such as Cameroonian Em’kal Eygongakpa’s Gaia beats/bits III-i/doves and an aged hammock (2017). This artwork, too, skillfully interweaves visual representations of oceanic routes with spoken tales of movement and errantry to contest Western universal teleologies. In her critical review of Eygongakpa’s installation, Stephanie Hessler underscores the multisensorial dimension of aquatic crossings and their metaphorical link to expressions of solidarity and transversality. An audio track of poetic tales and rhythmic sounds evokes a linguistic polyphony of different biographies and destinies, all joined by the sea. Connected by water and maritime ties, the movements of people, animals, goods and ideas transcends the biographical and point to global webs of power and solidarity. The archipelagic thinker, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant metaphorically evoked our common aquatic roots—“that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches,” resonating with Brathwaite’s assertion that “the unity is submarine.” (Hessler 2018, p. 43)

This interpretation also applies to Alleck’s use of Dante’s recording. Like Eygongakpa’s hammock, Alleck’s boat challenges us to approach narratives of crossings from a relational and rhizomatic perspective. Yet, the spoken fragments from Dante’s poem only seem to provide the migrating tree with glimpses of its forthcoming adventures into unknown destinations or dark woods—into Hell, Paradise, or even Purgatory—by way of a linguistic overlap that ultimately becomes almost impossible to unpack. Alleck describes her work as follows: It [The installation] addresses the migratory experience of those who set off to faraway lands, filled with hope; multiple narratives that attempt to reconcile language and cultural barriers as experienced by the migrant. It is a reexamination of our insular identities and histories. Yet the spoken text … from Dante’s Divine Comedy, … although poetic and evocative, fails to give

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any indication as to the destination itself, hence reinforcing the sense of the unknown destination. (Alleck, personal exchange)

By representing this multidimensional, multidirectional, and unpredictable experience of the migrant, Alleck reimagines the disjunctive geographies and temporalities generated by European empires, along with their legacy of conquests and the multiple waves of forced migrations that have transformed islands such as Mauritius into Creole societies. In addition, the artist extends or connects her representation of the boat and its sailing tree to more contemporary experiences of migration by alluding to those who have had to face the unknown, but are nonetheless filled with hope. Thus, her installation seems to be in direct dialogue with Appanah’s narrative of the kwassa kwassa. Alleck’s The Migrant’s Tale shares numerous thematic, conceptual, and esthetic characteristics with another literary text: a long poem titled Ceux du large (Afloat) and published in 2018 by acclaimed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi. Written in three different languages—French, English, and Mauritian Kreol—the text recounts the hardships faced by contemporary migrants at sea. The fussy stretch of your fate The sand at your feet has churned to mud The sea washes faces and names … Nothing awaits absence Yet belief resists The sea’s molestation … The plop of discarded bodies Pain-grinned lips Glue-parched tongues Salt gritting wounds On the reverse side Of the skin … Endless exodus Blind-faithed file Of blind-led blind Gibbering steps Towards a future not yet nuked. (Devi 2017, pp. 35, 38, 52)

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Devi’s poem overtly stresses the violence of the oceanic route, “the sea’s molestation,” “the pain-grinned lips,” and “salt gritting wounds.” The reality of unknown destinations and the drifting trajectory of migrant boats are repeatedly evoked by the poet who writes that “South is lost, north is far; the rest is all guesswork of reefs and receding horizon” (Devi 2017, p. 44). Just like Alleck’s allusions to hope, though, the text references belief as a form of resistance and blind faith as the capacity to save one’s future. While both works are grappling with the global context of precarity that forces marginalized populations into new departures to try their fortune elsewhere, the use of the term “adventure” and the image of the flourishing tree that could be re-rooted elsewhere (in Alleck’s installation), together with references to belief, faith, and resistance (in Devi’s poem), confer a strong agency to the migrant. Examining similar representations from the Caribbean region to discuss the trajectories of Dominicans relocating “illegally” to Puerto Rico, Michaeline Crichlow argues that “hope-filled movements … demonstrate a willful expression of an imagination of new worlds by those seeking movement and those actually undertaking it” (Crichlow 2012, pp. 114, 118). As such, these trajectories can be portrayed “as mo(ve)ments in a tragic yet hopeful resistance—an extra-ordinary politics of making place, of exercising existence of a ‘place’ in the violent mappings of the present” (Crichlow 2012, p. 118). As Crichlow argues, such representations enable a “remaking” or a “re-ordering of subjectivities” for those disenfranchised populations from the Global South that reinvent themselves—their humanity—by tracing geographical routes and historical trajectories in non-linear ways (Crichlow 2012, p.  132). While it is clear that similar representations participate in the decolonial process that challenges “hegemonic [frames] of self-referencing” and thus serve as the basis for dismantling the coloniality of Being, I argue that this kind of being-in-the-world expressed in the works of writers and artists from Creole regions is achieved through the expression of transversal solidarity and transoceanic empathy (Crichlow 2012, p. 133).

Transversal Solidarity, Shared Humanity In his 2017 poetic essay titled Frères migrants (Migrant Brothers), a text written in solidarity with migrants across the world today, Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the authors of the celebrated 1989 manifesto Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), reflects on the state of the world

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(Bernabé et al. 1990). For the Martinican author, the uneven process of globalization in the aftermath of colonialism has deprived oppressed populations of their world, causing a reverse migratory flow in which millions of peoples from the Global South relocate to the Global North. In his view, this mo(ve)ment of reversal is a way for migrants to reclaim a world that has been taken away from them. Commenting on the protectionist attitude of Western nations and empires, and on their obsession with defending borders and erecting new frontiers, Chamoiseau writes that “they repress migrants because migrants would not leave the world to them. Migrants are taking the world back from them … by the infinity of the word A-C-C-U-E-I-L which they would have us to spell in all the languages of the world” (Chamoiseau 2017, p.  56).5 The first part of this quote reiterates Crichlow’s idea that migrants, refugees, and escapees taking to the sea are not passive subjects but risk-taking agents of change who engage both willingly and actively in the reversal of their destiny. The second part stresses the role that hospitality, as it is captured in the reference to world languages, and ethical empathy play in the enactment of this reclaiming action. While the very reordering process involved in such crossings, which redefine spaces and territories, whether geographical, epistemological, or racial, reminds one of the dynamics at stake in the processes of creolization and hybridization, the trespassing of boundaries imposed by both colonial and modern forms of empires express a shared desire of subaltern peoples to destabilize the fixity of assigned territories. Therefore, I am suggesting that the experience and worldview of Chamoiseau as a Creole writer serve as a basis for engaging in subaltern solidarity and for approaching narratives of crossing from a comparative historical perspective. This perspective, in turn, envisions stories of migrants not as isolated journeys, but as parts of a larger history of claiming and reclaiming lands and seas that allow human beings and subaltern groups seeking to survive across geographies and temporalities to represent themselves differently and change their own destiny. Chamoiseau calls migrants “brothers” before declaring: “Solidarity imposes itself as principle…. A fervent and multidimensional solidarity” (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 22).6 Using the kind of rhizomatic ethics at play in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, he approaches the world as “polyrhythms engendered by differences, whenever these differences attract each other and find each other, often uniting as much as they repel each other, while retaining a trace of the memory of the other” (Chamoiseau

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2017, p. 73).7 As he situates his philosophical intervention within a bigger relational scheme that allows him to index the shared humanity of numerous migrants, or what he calls Homo migrator, he establishes the latter’s performative movement as one that foregrounds a common condition (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 74). Discussing the link between various forms of structural precarities made worse by the lack of solidarity, Chamoiseau ultimately opposes global barbarism to Glissant’s Relation, insisting on the fact that resistance is fruitless when it is not invested in the work of Relation: [This barbarism] ties together our ills and troubles, leading us to examine our challenges collectively. Everything is linked, everything is entangled! A fruitless resistance is primarily one that fails to create links … the multiple worlds that imagine themselves as autonomous and impenetrable exist only in our stagnant imaginaries. (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 38)8

Arguing that productive resistance is that which functions in tandem with performative acts of linkages and networks, Chamoiseau—like Appanah or Alleck—captures the overlapping experiences and knowledges of diasporic populations across the South as a means to decolonize history, beings, and imaginaries. Turning this “solidarity between peoples formerly subjugated by Western imperialism” into the “rhetoric of a new humanism,” he establishes bridges, connections, and extensions among the numerous faceless groups who contribute to the dynamics of globalization (Vergès 2003, p. 243). He draws “an alternative cartography of the human” (une autre cartographie de nos humanités), which contests demarcated territories, imposed genealogies, and falsely universalizing epistemologies (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 59). Since the establishment of borders and frontiers between geographies, histories, memories, and epistemologies has proven particularly instrumental for justifying fundamental inequalities, or what Mignolo describes as “colonial difference,” modern Western thinking has long dismissed the non-essentializing mental and relational geographical frameworks that could account for the multidirectional crisscrossing of cultural zones and for the sophisticated or cyclical overlapping of local histories (Mignolo 2000, p. 3). Hence, I would contend that, as they investigate the intersectionalities and border-crossing processes that subaltern perspectives and “minor transnationalisms” produce, writers such as Chamoiseau, Devi, and Appanah, and artists like Alleck give voice to powerful relational

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imaginaries that reinvest diasporic and transoceanic connections to better challenge the (neo)colonial divides that have kept minor groups, “peripheral migrants,” and subaltern histories separate (Lionnet and Shih 2005). Offering instead the image of a plural history, which points to the ever-­ reiterated structures of oppression across multiple localities, their transformative readings of colonial and postcolonial histories become the creative terrain for thinking anew the commonalities between various experiences of human displacements over time.

Interactive Readings and the Work of Empathy Let me return to my opening questions. How do we name and represent the multiple forms of postcoloniality across the Global South today? How do we connect them without flattening the differences and nuances they foreground? How do we respond to literary voices that imagine or mediate the suffering of others in a movement of transversal solidarity? Without reducing the complexity of these interrogations, I suggest that part of the answer to these issues has to do with the capacity of those creative voices to feel, express, and inspire empathy with others’ histories, while acknowledging and respecting the opacity—or what Glissant calls the right to opacity—of these very others (Glissant 1990). Empathy is described by Suzanne Keen as a “sharing of affect” (Keen 2007, p. 208). For Martha Nussbaum, it results from an “imaginative reconstruction” of the experience of others (Nussbaum 2003, p.  302). In other words, the work of empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of our shared and inclusive humanity, but one that respects difference and opacity and does not presuppose complete or mutual intelligibility. Since resonances and echoes between one’s experiences and others’ can indeed become the creative terrain for writers and artists to draw unscripted relationships (or mises en relation), their works can give us—as readers and critics—access to interactive readings, transcultural literacies, and hybrid methodologies, which navigate across established geographies, histories, and genres, and which approach the world, including the world of representations, in more inclusive terms. According to Chamoiseau, “the undefinable relationality among all the living [is what] moves us, affects us…. In the end, it fills us with an ethics that requires no big demonstration”9 (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 55). This explains that the relational nature of creative representations enables transnational writers to “negotiate the divide between relativism and moral authority” and to steer “reader’s empathies

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toward an ideal of inclusivity” (Lionnet 2015, p.  293). This inclusivity comes close to what Lionnet describes as “interactive universalisms,” an expression initially used in the singular form by Seyla Benhabib to theorize interactive models of universality, but which Lionnet pluralizes to think of embodied differences and embedded identities as a starting point and a common ground for nurturing mutual or reciprocal empathy. Using two literary examples, I want to explain what I mean by interactive readings and transcultural literacies, and how they generate empathies geared toward inclusivity. In Tropique de la violence, Olivier—both a narrator and a policeman in the text—says the following, as he reflects on the precarious and disposable lives of dying migrants in the Comoros: I found myself full of hope, when that episode with the little Syrian boy washed on the Turkish beach happened. I thought to myself that someone, somewhere, would remember this French island and say that here as well children die on beaches … at times, I feel like I am living in a parallel dimension; that whatever happens here never crosses the ocean nor reaches anybody. We are alone … Aren’t lives in this land worth as much as all lives elsewhere? (Appanah 2016, pp. 52–53)10

Upon reading this passage from Appanah’s novel, several readers would recall the photograph of the drowned Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, on a beach in Turkey in the summer of 2015—at a time when international media kept representing growing numbers of families and children dying in the Mediterranean. Some readers might even recall images of the Calais jungle in France, or the eviction of more than 6400 “illegal” migrants from this refugee encampment on 170 buses in October 2016. The wide circulation of these images has brought global attention to border problems and the migrant crisis in Europe. Yet, interestingly enough, to give visibility to the human tragedies happening not in continental Europe, but in the Mozambique Channel, Appanah draws on these very images to map out a different geography of the migration crisis—a geography that incorporates marginal islands—thereby bringing together comparable experiences of suffering and drowning to denounce better the selective ordering of human lives. As he questions the unequal value given to these lives, some of which are considered grievable, and others not, Appanah’s narrator reminds us of Judith Butler’s discussion of precariousness, namely when she asks: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? and finally, what makes for a

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grievable life?” (Butler 2004, p. 20). To these powerful questions, I wish to add: how does one create ethical conditions under which the thousands of lost and unknown migrants’ lives become grievable, while also ensuring that grievability is not just about bearing witness—not just about us, but also about others? With regard to my argument about transoceanic empathy, it is indeed crucial that the recognition of the other plays a central role in one’s identification with that same other without seeking to capture the latter’s being in abstract terms. It is not secondary that Butler draws from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical approach to ethics. Dwelling on the large-scale empathy generated by the photograph of the drowned child in the Mediterranean, I contend that Appanah’s novel mediates a form of recognition of unknown (and, therefore, mostly invisible) Comoran migrants in the Mozambique Channel. In other words, although the narrator points to the fact that their story never crosses the ocean, the novel bridges what Andreea Ritivoi describes as the critical “discrepancy between the abstractness of victims as a mass of faceless individuals and the concreteness of the victim as a single person, particularly one we know or see” (Ritivoi 2016, p. 57). In addition to transcending the geopolitical divides responsible for the selective ordering of human lives and experiences, the transoceanic solidarity displayed by the novel tactically engages in interactive representations of suffering to trigger readers’ empathy. While remaining careful not to partake in the facile universalization of human emotions or reactions, I believe that the capacity to make sense of a shared tragedy through the exploration of such interactive universalisms is precisely what gives Appanah’s creative work its ethical character.

Transcultural Literacy and the Grievable Body By engendering transcultural literacies, Devi’s Ceux du large uses a different, albeit comparable tactic from Appanah’s novel to steer the “reader’s empathies toward an ideal of inclusivity,” namely by referencing, as Alleck does with Dante’s Divine Comedy, texts from the European literary canon (Lionnet 2015 p.  293). In the following stanzas, for instance, the poet writes: In the blue meadow sleeps a little shrew Not far away— Hardly a few miles—

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Under a tired sky Sleeps a little guy He’s almost fifteen He fell down from the sky Or more specifically From the landing gear Of a plane Frozen and dead after one hour’s flight He lies, asleep, not far from the little shrew In the blue meadow There is a large hole Where his skull used to be. (Devi 2017, p. 49)

Taking a close look at this excerpt, readers familiar with nineteenth-­ century French poetry would most likely recognize the allusions Devi makes here to Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le dormeur du val” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”), a well-known sonnet that depicts the tragic fate of a young soldier during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. There is, of course, a lot more to say about the intertextual and intersectional elements at work in this passage, and about the ways in which Devi reworks not only the content, but also the form and rhythm of Rimbaud’s initial poem. Within the context of my discussion, though, let me state simply that, as Devi depicts the fate of migrants, refugees, and escapees, she deploys tactics of cultural mediation that engage with precarity and tragedy by means of a translation of cultural knowledge. The poet writes that “it’s no joke to be clairvoyant” (la voyance n’est pas une plaisanterie) (Devi 2017, pp. 22, 48). As such, when representing the painful realities of what Achille Mbembe calls the “postcolony” for a contemporary Western readership, she uses transparent references to Rimbaud’s canonical literary patrimoine so as to address this particular audience directly (Mbembe 2001). Thus, she does more than simply “write back” to the West, to use the expression coined by Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffith as early as 1989 (Ashcroft et al. 1989). She performs an act of transcultural representation, which triggers empathy through a rapprochement of embodied differences and embedded identities. Indeed, although the poet never discloses whether or not she is actually referring to a real event in this passage, her wording evokes an incident in 2015 where a Mozambican orphan, Carlito Vale, wishing to reach Europe

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clandestinely, hid in the wheel well of an aircraft traveling from Johannesburg to London. As the British Airways aircraft was about to land after having completed its 800-mile-long journey, the frozen body of this young man, trapped for about 11 hours in an enclosure whose temperature had plunged to −58F/−50  °C, fell from the undercarriage of the plane and smashed through the metal panels covering the air conditioning unit of an office block. His decapitated corpse and body parts were later found on a roof below the Heathrow Airport flight path. In an article from The Guardian Weekly, journalist Ben Quinn writes that “while Vale’s motivation for his desperate gamble of stowing away on the flight will perhaps remain unknown, his story is one of millions of other migrants. At its core is the simple dream of a better life elsewhere” (Quinn 2016). By bringing together the tragedy of the young French soldier and that of the Mozambican migrant, Devi’s relational approach challenges us to think of creative works as potential crossroads of historical, cultural, and racialized traditions. Through a clever intertwining of political imaginaries, geographies, and temporalities, she navigates across literary sensibilities and embodied stories as means of drawing a common ground for exploring a new expression of humanism. While she uses the allusion to the “large hole / Where his skull used to be” to refer to the decapitated body, the literal absence of a face calls for a different approach to questions of grievability and empathy as opposed to mere recognition and legibility (Devi 2017, p.  49). Indeed, through the shocking image of a headless subject, the intertextual human figure staged by the poem distances itself from the Cartesian subject of Rimbaud’s poetry in order to reimagine the migrant subject as a crossroad. Devi complicates any attempt to talk about human rights in merely abstract terms. She asks what constitutes right human living, for whom, and where. By approaching the sight of a single dead migrant as one that refers to more than the death of an individual other (or of individual bodies), one that extends to other deaths, she creates what Chielozona Eze describes as “an atmosphere of moral urgency,” “an urgent moral plea” that touches humanity in its plural dimension (Eze 2016, p. 197). Whereas the uneven process of globalization reinforces logics of inequality and exclusion and suppresses at the same time the capacity for human empathy by engendering narratives that dehumanize or criminalize particular racial, cultural, and gendered groups, Devi decenters and transcends the challenging debates on humanism, human rights, and the human (Slaughter 2007; Anker 2012). In addition, she forces a

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reexamination of the notion of grievability by envisioning recognition otherwise, namely and paradoxically through the image of a headless figure. In his book dedicated to ethics and human rights, Eze argues the following: The body realizes its existence only in relation to, or in reaching out to the external world, to other bodies. It touches because it is being touched. Other bodies make ours perceptible. The disappearance of these other bodies in death is, in tune with the chiasmic structure of bodily existence, the disappearance of our own bodies. (Eze 2016, p. 199)

If there is grievability here—and I am suggesting that there is—it is because Devi’s text approaches empathy transculturally. It does so not necessarily as an immediate response to the death of a migrant, but rather as “the result of hermeneutical application through narrative understanding,” which is to say, by means of “an expanded consciousness that goes beyond a concrete event to a historical set of circumstances and [that] can comprehend both their particular meaning and a larger moral, social, or political significance” (Ritivoi 2016, p. 71). The creative works of writers and artists from Creole contexts perform multiple geographical, temporal, historical, and ethical linkages. They offer new representations of the movement of disenfranchised populations and plot new cartographies of subaltern agencies, connecting the Middle Passage, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean. They provide us with a space for what Seyla Benhabib calls “enlarged thinking” (Benhabib 1992, p. 9). By foregrounding comparative history, transoceanic empathy, and what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih describe as “minor-to-­ minor networks,” these works relocate and recalibrate our vision of diasporic minorities and dispossessed subjects across imperial, national, linguistic, and historical contexts (Lionnet and Shih 2005, p. 8). As their imaginative intervention “re-worlds” the world, as we know it, it draws a “landscape of another world” (paysage d’un autre monde) and helps us appreciate the border-crossing processes that subaltern realities and minor transnationalisms have produced (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 134). In bringing together mobilities, political systems, and cultural experiences located at the periphery of developed nation-states in the North, their fiction and art embody and perform emancipatory projects that extend to new ontologies of place-making as processes that definitively involve the reimagining and reconfiguring of othered human subjects.

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Notes 1. My opening questions were further inspired by an interview with Lionnet. She pointed out in that conversation: “These are the challenges of our field: how do we respond to creative voices that imagine the pain of the ‘other’?” (Jean-François 2018, p. 140). 2. The original reads as follows: “Une vieille histoire, cent fois entendue, cent fois ressassée. L’histoire d’un pays qui brille de mille feux et que tout le monde veut rejoindre. Il y a des mots pour ça: eldorado, mirage, paradis, chimère, utopie, Lampedusa. C’est l’histoire de ces bateaux qu’on appelle ici kwassas kwassas, ailleurs barque ou pirogue ou navire, et qui existent depuis la nuit des temps pour faire traverser les hommes pour ou contre leur gré. C’est l’histoire de ces êtres humains qui se retrouvent sur ces bateaux et on leur a donné de ces noms à ces gens-là, depuis la nuit des temps: esclaves, engagés, pestiférés, bagnards, rapatriés, Juifs, boat people, réfugiés, sans-­papiers, clandestin.” All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 3. There are actually two World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage sites in Mauritius. The other one is the Morne Brabant, a hideaway mountain for runaway slaves located on the southwestern coast of Mauritius. For a detailed presentation of both sites, including pictures, see Lionnet 2015. 4. In an article dealing with “Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the Spanish-African Border,” Jørgen Carling writes, for instance, that “the principal mode of unauthorized entry to Spain from Africa has been smallscale smuggling in wooded boats known as pateras” (Carling 2007, pp. 319–320). 5. The French original reads that “ils refoulent les migrants parce que les migrants ne leur laissent pas le monde. Les migrants le leur reprennent … par l’infini du mot A-C-C-U-E-I-L qu’ils nous forcent à épeler dans toutes les langues du monde.” 6. “Le solidaire s’impose comme principe … Une solidarité ardente et multiforme.” 7. “polyrythmies qui naissent des différences quand elles s’appellent et qu’elles se trouvent, s’accordent souvent, se repoussent autant, mais conservent chacune le souvenir de l’autre.” 8. In the original, we read: “[Cette barbarie] lie tous nos malheurs et nous oblige à considérer ensemble tous nos défis. Tout est lié, tout est noué ! La résistance stérile est d’abord celle qui ne sait pas lier. … les mondes multiples se percevant autonomes et se croyant étanches n’existent que dans les stases de nos imaginaires.”

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9. “indéfinissable mise en relation avec le tout-vivant du monde nous émeut, nous affecte … Nous remplit en finale d’une éthique sans grande démonstration.” 10. The original reads: “Il m’est arrivé d’espérer quand il y a eu le petit Syrien échoué sur la plage turque. Je me suis dit que quelqu’un, quelque part, se souviendrait de cette île française et dirait qu’ici aussi les enfants meurent sur les plages. … j’ai parfois l’impression de vivre dans une dimension parallèle où ce qui se passe ici ne traverse jamais l’océan et n’atteint jamais personne. Nous sommes seuls … Les vies sur cette terre valent autant que toutes les vies sur les autres terres, n’est-ce pas ?”

References Aapravasi Ghat. 2019. UNESCO. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1227. Alleck, Nirveda. 2017. The Migrant’s Tale (Art Installation). Anderson, Clare. 2013. Subaltern Lives: History, Identity and Memory in the Indian Ocean World. History Compass 11 (7): 503–507. Anker, Elizabeth. 2012. Fictions of Dignity. Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Appanah, Nathacha. 2016. Tropique de la violence. Paris: Gallimard. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. London & New York: Routledge. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self. Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1990. In Praise of Creoleness. Callaloo 13 (4): 886–909. Bragard, Véronique. 2008. Transoceanic Dialogues. Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures. Brussels: Peter Lang. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Carling, Jørgen. 2007. Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the Spanish-­ African Borders. The International Migration Review 41 (2): 316–343. Chamoiseau, Patrick. 2017. Frères migrants. Paris: Seuil. Cohen, Robin, and Olivia Sheringham. 2008. The Salience of Islands in the Articulation of Creolization and Diaspora. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 17 (1): 6–17. Crichlow, Michaeline A. 2012. Making Waves: (Dis)Placements, Entanglements, Mo(ve)ments. The Global South Special Issue 6 (1): 114–137. Devi, Ananda. 2017. Ceux du large. Paris: Bruno Doucey. Eygongakpa, Em’kal. 2017. Gaia Beats/Bits III-i/Doves and an Aged Hammock (Art Installation).

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Eze, Chielozona. 2016. Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature. Feminist Empathy. Palgrave Macmillan. Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Hessler, Stephanie, ed. 2018. Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview Through Art and Science. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press. Jean-François, Emmanuel Bruno. 2018. An Interview with Françoise Lionnet. Crossing Boundaries, Thinking Intersectionally: Pedagogy, Methodology, and the Challenges of Relationality. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 22 (2): 131–141. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavery, Charne, and Meg Samuelson. 2018. The Oceanic South. https://wiser. wits.ac.za/content/oceanic-south-13051. Accessed 7 February 2019. Lionnet, Françoise. 2008. Postcolonialism, Language, and the Visual: By Way of Haiti. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44 (3): 227–239. ———. 2015. World Literature, Postcolonial Studies and Coolie Odysseys: J.-M.G. Le Clézio’s and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels. Comparative Literature 67 (3): 287–311. Lionnet, Françoise, and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François. 2016. Literary Routes: Migration, Islands, and the Creative Economy. PMLA 131 (5): 1222–1238. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. On the Coloniality of Being. Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 240–270. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007 [2002]. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. New  York: State University of New York Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinn, Ben. 2016. Heathrow Stowaway Who Fell to Death Identified as Mozambican Migrant. The Guardian Weekly, January 10. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/10/heathrow-stowaway-who-fell-to-deathidentified-as-mozambican-migrant. Accessed 7 February 2019. Retrospective. Festival of Contemporary Culture. 2019. Porlwi. http://www. porlwi.com/retrospective. Accessed 7 February 2019. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. 2016. Reading Stories, Reading (Others’) Lives: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Narrative Understanding. Storyworlds. A Journal of Narrative Studies 8 (1): 51–75.

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Sheriff, Abdul, and Engseng Ho, eds. 2014. The Indian Ocean. Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies. London: C. Hurst. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc. The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press. Vergès, Françoise. 2003. Writing on Water: Peripheries, Flows, Capital, and Struggles in the Indian Ocean. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11 (1): 241–257.

CHAPTER 6

Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee

Writing in the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by US-led allied forces, Neil Lazarus and Priyamvada Gopal pointed out the paradox this historic cataclysm posed to academic postcolonial studies. They wrote: What we are proposing is that, ‘after Iraq’, postcolonial studies must change not because the world has changed but because ‘Iraq’ shows that, in quite substantial ways, it has not changed. This sounds paradoxical, of course. Why should postcolonial studies have to change if, and indeed because, the world has not changed? The answer to this question is that up until now, postcolonial studies, in its predominant aspect, at least, has demonstrated a notable disregard of what Kanishka Goonewardena and Stefan Kipfer, in their contribution to this issue, call ‘the contemporaneity of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism,’ that is, of the deep structural dimensions of the world system. (Gopal and Lazarus 2006, p. 7)

Such a perspectival lacuna, they suggested, was the result of historical conditions of this scholarly field, which was marked simultaneously by the

U. P. Mukherjee (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_6

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fading of the insurgent energies of anticolonial national liberation movements of the Bandung era and the demise of Soviet socialism. Such epochal transformations, in turn, gave rise to the misconception, particularly amongst academics employed in European and North American universities, that all resistance to the now triumphant status quo of the “Washington consensus” and “Reaganomics” was not only futile, but also decisively over (Gopal and Lazarus 2006, pp. 7–8). Therefore, Lazarus and Gopal argued that, in order to remain “constitutionally, a politically progressive intellectual field,” postcolonial studies would have to embrace a “body of work that register[ed] the actuality of the world system and the structuring effects of this system (upon consciousness, culture and experience as well as upon material conditions of existence)” and “work towards a new ‘history of the present’—a new reading, above all of the twentieth century, liberated from the dead weight either of the Cold War or of a compensatory ‘Third Worldism’” (Gopal and Lazarus 2006, p. 9). Such calls for making postcolonial studies more rigorously (historical) materialist are, of course, not new. Lazarus’s own work—in particular, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002) and The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004), Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), and Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997) have built in their distinctive yet overlapping ways conclusive cases for such theoretical, methodological, and ethical reorientations. Yet, Gopal and Lazarus’s use of “Iraq” as a conjuncture in the Gramscian sense, in relation to postcolonial studies, seems to me to be appropriate, insofar it introduces a new paradigm to the field, which may be summoned by a single word, namely energy. The Iraq conflict is often referred to as an “oil war.” The evidence in support of this hypothesis has been amply provided both within the domain of mass media—famously by luminaries such as former US Republican Senator Chuck Hegel and former Chair of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan (Purple 2008)—and in scholarly analyses (Jhaveri 2004; Hurst 2009; Colgan 2013; Muttitt 2018). Here, as Gopal and Lazarus suggest, Iraq appears merely as a single recent link in the long historical process of the forcible appropriation of resources on a massive scale, one that we call imperialism or colonialism. In another sense, though, it may be that the specific nature of this resource—oil—compels us to reconsider how we think empires and colonies, and what we thought we knew about energy and its place in such historical formations and

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processes. For a while now, oil is being acknowledged as the fuel without which what we consider modernity to be would not have come to pass—at least not its current configuration. The central role it has played in the geo-atmospheric event we call “climate change” also urges us to interrogate not only the social relationships conditioned by the use of this or that resource, but also the much deeper histories of energy, climate, and empire altogether. This scalar difference and symbiosis between the particular and diverse forms of energy are precisely what Allen MacDuffie calls the “material and representational” dimensions of the current “energy problem” (MacDuffie 2014, p. 2). For MacDuffie, the failure to differentiate between energy as a “usable resource” and as “an ambient agency circulating endlessly through the world” can, in the final instance, be located in the nineteenth century, and particularly in the pivotal figure of Robert Malthus whose idea of a closed system of a “single, inescapable world-environment” should be seen as one of the most durable interpretative frames deployed over the past two centuries (MacDuffie 2014, pp. 3–5). The Malthusian imagination, which should properly be designated environmental, as classically anthropocentric, since it conceptualizes energy primarily as a system running on fossil fuels and servicing a particular mode of production, industrial capitalism, which, in turn, supports human social relations marked by growth, consumption, and inequality. It proceeds analogically, insofar as all other ways of life are subordinated to this logic. To see the world as a closed system, as a domain in which usable energy is constantly decreasing, is, in fact, a sign of the way in which urban-industrial logic surreptitiously comes to structure the representation of everything…. The city, the world, the cosmos—all of these seem analogously “closed,” with entropy mounting and energy sinking towards zero, because each subsists on a finite supply of resources. (MacDuffie 2014, p. 10)

Although MacDuffie prefers “urban-industrial logic” as a designation, it is clear that what he is talking about is what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”—the imperative to subjugate, in imagination and in practice, all Lebenswelten in the interests not of “humans” as such, but humans of a particular kind: the homo economicus (Fisher 2009). Thinking about oil and Iraq seriously can then allow us to examine the close relationship between empire and energy, but not just any kind of empire. What we are talking about here are modern, industrial, capitalist

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empires. Such, indeed, has been the core insight offered by a new theoretical paradigm provisionally designated as “energy humanities.” However, what I am suggesting is not so much that postcolonial studies should recharge itself by plugging into “energy humanities.” Rather, it seems to me that the two fields are bound by certain elective affinities that orient them toward excavating a “history of the present,” as Gopal and Lazarus put it. By the same token, one critical task at this point may be to identify such affinities in order to map out a “history of a future” that may or may not come to pass, but without which we have no chance whatsoever of breaking out of the “windless present” (Jameson 2003, p. 76). In the following pages, I shall be making a necessarily provisional attempt at such a cartography.

Time, Work, Power There is no need to limit ourselves to the twentieth century in order to stitch together such a “history of the present.” One of the signal achievements of energy humanities has precisely been to deepen Fernand Braudel’s insight into modernity’s longue durée by suggesting the various forms of overlapping, interlocking, and contradictory energy regimes as periodizing devices and structures. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer put it in their foundational anthology as follows: “To be modern is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by energy…. We are citizens and subjects of fossil fuels through and through, whether we know it or not” (Szeman and Boyer 2017, p. 1). To be modern is also to inhabit the world made and unmade by historical capitalism. Therefore, thinking with energy asks us to revisit how we periodize the history of capital itself not as an exercise in nostalgia, but in an effort to shape a different future: The way one establishes epochs or defines historical periods inevitably shapes how one imagines the direction the future will take. And so it is with the dominant periodization of the history of capital, which has been organized primarily around moments of hegemonic economic imperium […]. What if we were to think of the history of capital not exclusively in geo-political terms, but in terms of the forms of energy available to it at any given moment? (Szeman 2017, pp. 55–56)

As Szeman goes on to suggest, one of the things that would happen, once this question was posed, would be to refine the history of capital as a

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single, yet internally and unevenly differentiated world-system: “steam capital” in 1765, followed by the advent of “oil capitalism” in 1859 (Szeman 2017, pp. 55–56). One of the other things that would happen when we reordered the history of capitalist modernity thus would be to make other kinds of periodization, such as that of literary history, imaginable. A few years before Szeman, Patricia Yaeger made exactly this suggestion. She asked: “[I]nstead of divvying up literary works into hundred-year intervals … or categories harnessing the history of ideas…, what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible?”(Yaeger 2011, p.  305). Note, however, how the question of empire tends to fade out of view in these proposals for re-­imagining histories, both literary and non-literary. Confined to the category of geopolitics and economic hegemony, it remains unclear how the energizing of historical periods might also relate to that of historical formations, of which empire is but one. We shall return to this issue below. If re-ordering periodization can thus be thought of as one of the first achievements of “energy humanities,” the second one has been to restore the question of labor or work to a position of central importance to any understanding of capitalist modernity. Strictly speaking, this has been the contribution primarily of scholars and theorists associated with the “world-­ ecology” paradigm, but since their work, and in particular that of Jason W. Moore and Andreas Malm (despite the energetic debates and disagreements between them), is so obviously invested in thinking seriously about energy, it can with some justification be included in the domain of “energy humanities.” Consider the very definition of “world-­ecology,” as Moore proposes it: “the fundamental co-production of earth-­moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layer of human experience,” which is impossible to sustain without a structuring concept of work/energy—“work/energy helps us to rethink capitalism as a set of relations through which the ‘capacity to do work’—by human and extrahuman natures—is transformed into value, understood as socially necessary labor time” (Moore 2015, p. 14). That is, “world-ecology” reveals work/energy as the mediating device that draws all human and nonhuman life-forms into a particular kind of social relationship, marked by the twin forces of appropriation and exploitation (Moore 2015, p. 17). In fact, the distinction made between appropriation and exploitation may be particularly suggestive for any postcolonial inquiry that seeks to think about empire in a new key. If by “appropriation” we understand “those extra-economic processes that identify, secure, and channel unpaid work

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outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital,” and by “exploitation” the extraction of profit from wage labor, it may be that (modern) empire is the formation and (modern) imperialism the process that sutures the two together (Moore 2015, p. 17). Such an understanding of energy as work leads to the third insight gained by energy humanities—an expansive and sophisticated theory of social power. Malm notes that despite “the semantic confluence in the anglophone world, thermodynamic and social power are nearly always treated as distinct phenomena,” whereas in reality: No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labour—the power of some to direct the labour of others—as conditions of their very existence … [W]e should direct our attention to power in the dual sense, first of all in the processes of labour. That is the point of contact between humans and the rest of nature, where biophysical resources pass into the circuits of social metabolism. (Malm 2016, p. 19)

This conception of social power turns conventional accounts of the history of industrialization on its head. The familiar story of “industrial revolutions” tends to privilege technological determinism, where scientific entrepreneurs such as James Watt appear to respond to solve the structural crises brought about by a scarcity of resources with their inventions and thereby chart out a new pathway to “growth.” As Malm’s meticulous study of the transition from water to steam power in Britain shows, though, this flies in the face of all available evidence. British industry, in particular British cotton industry, did not suffer from a scarcity of water or from a rise in cost of capital outlay in setting up watermills. Rather, the switch from water to steam—from “flow” to “stock” in Malm’s vocabulary—happened because it better served the interests of capitalists as a class over those of British workers.1 Capital prevailed over labour in the key industry of the British economy— smashed the unions, reestablished proper hierarchy, extracted more output out of fewer workers at lower cost—by means of power, in the dual sense of the word. Automation drew its force from an extraneous energy source. Only the mobilisation of that source made it possible for the cotton capitalists to begin the process of salvaging profits at the expense of labour … the power ensured by capital through the technological restructuring of the

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cotton industry was summoned straight from power in extra human nature. (Malm 2016, p. 68)

The key components of “flow” energy like running water, light, and wind are res communes because they are difficult to appropriate for individual use. By contrast, “stock” energy such as coal and oil are “piecemeal, splintered, amenable to concentration and accumulation, and divisible” and, therefore, congenial to the logic of private property (Malm 2016, pp.  117–119). It is this material logic contained in the “stock” energy form rather than any techno-scientific invention that makes its fusion with the social logic of British industrial capitalism both possible and desirable: The struggle against labor called for machinery, which called for steam power, which called for growth, thereby coupled to the growth of manufacturing. Steam stood precisely in the middle, between the lower and the upper levels, as the apparatus mobilizing the nether world at the behest of capital. (Malm 2016, p. 222)

The third gift of “energy humanities,” then, is the insight that social power is always composed of different kinds of energy resources and that such energy resources are always already socialized. In the case of capitalism, commodities are produced for exchange-value only by increasing the rate at which bio-physical resources are appropriated. Fossil fuel, or “stock energy,” becomes historically indispensable in this process and should properly be thought of as what Malm calls “fossil capital”—both a “triangular relation between capital, labour and a certain segment of extra-­ human nature” and a “process […] an endless flow of successive valorization of value, at every stage claiming a larger body of fossil energy to burn” (Malm 2016, p. 290). Periodization, labor/work, power—it is not hard to see how each of these concepts, re-energized, as it were, are valuable devices for postcolonial studies primed to ask the right questions and wrestle for some appropriate answers in an epoch defined by the interlinked crises of climate, capital, and world-hegemony. Earlier, I had spoken of elective affinities between energy humanities and postcolonial studies. What, then, are the insights that the latter gifts to the former so that it can continue to deepen and widen its theoretical and conceptual currents? Part of the answer may be offered by works in progress at the moment, such as Malm’s own sequel

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to Fossil Capital, which is provisionally called Fossil Empire. But as we wait for the fruition of such scholarly labor, we can readily enumerate some of them.

“Stock,” “Flow,” “Colonial Difference” There is no need to rehearse the appropriate criticisms aimed at academic postcolonial studies—particularly when parading under the sign of “poststructuralism” or “postmodernism”—for its excessive celebration of “difference.” Indeed, some of the key works in the field I named above were written as notes of dissent against this strain. And yet, it is undeniably true that any analysis of modern imperialism has to investigate the relationship between the dominant center or core and the dominated periphery (as well as the mediating semi-periphery) as one characterized simultaneously by similarities and differences. The most distinctive of histories of colonialism attempt to think dialectically between such similarities and differences rather than fall into the trap of dualistic interpretation. Such a relationship is obtainable at every level of empire—political, economic, social, material. As Sumit Sarkar comments in his definitive overview of modern India: The capitalist state in Britain had needed to break up the rebellious popular eighteenth-century cultures and communities of poor peasants and artisans that derived from customs held in common…. The patterns of colonial development … were significantly different. Here, too, many solidarities of resistance, old or new, were sought to be repressed: “thugs,” criminalized tribes, non-sedentary groups, rebellious adivasis and peasants, and eventually anti-colonial mass movements. But the tiny foreign ruling elite needed, always, shifting alliances with more or less privileged indigenous strata. These would be most useful when they could draw upon reserves of “tradition” and “community,” whether truly old or freshly minted. (Sarkar 2014, p. 34)

Such political differences were co-produced with economic ones. In a capitalist world-economy, colonies were compelled by force and collaboration to be the suppliers of food and raw materials to Europe and North America. Thus, instead of consumption, the majority of agriculture in India was earmarked for export even or especially in times of scarcity or famine. Such famine years coincided precisely with transformations in the world currency markets, when the falling Indian rupee was pegged to

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silver, while Britain and many of the other imperial powers moved to the gold standard (Sarkar 2014, pp.  155–156). Therefore, despite being “closely tied to […] the country that had pioneered industrialization,” India did not attract any investment in key sectors such as cotton, steel, and engineering. Capital was invested largely in transport (railways), tea plantation, coal mines, and jute mills (Sarkar 2014, p. 199). Finally, in the face European racist and oligopolistic control of key industrial, indigenous capital and labor displayed distinctive patterns of diversification. The former, on the one hand, showed preference for “the pervasive combination of large factories with putting-out units, small workshops, and petty or artisanal forms of production”; the latter, on the other, were far less urbanized than her metropolitan counterpart, retaining much stronger and durable connections with villages where she returned periodically while employed, invested their savings in land, and retired to after the duration of their employment (Sarkar 2014, pp. 221–222). Such accounts of colonial “difference” serve to remind us that if “fossil capital” came to dominate the energy regime of modern empires, it did, not do so at the same rate or in the same manner across space and time. It is a confirmation that at both general and specific levels of the operation of historical capital, what obtains is what Trotsky had called the “law” of combined and uneven development. This acknowledgment of colonial “difference” also has implications for one of the core problematics of energy humanities that we have already touched upon: periodization. Of course, the problem of temporality is already coded into the body of “stock” energy like coal. As the material form of “past climate, past metabolism, past topographies, all gone forever,” cut off from “diurnal, seasonal, historical, even civilizational time,” coal outstrips any time-scale perceptible to its human users (Malm 2016, p. 42). Undoubtedly, it is this uncanny and ghostly eruption of the past that was crucial in the making of the powerful cultural expressions of “steam fetishism and steam demonism” in the nineteenth century: “In a sense, the combustion of fossil fuels is material necromancy: the conjuring up of dead organisms, reawakening their vital forces to steer the actions of the living” (Malm 2016, p.  2019). Over the same period, in a colonial possession such as India, the energy regime was even more unevenly structured—with wood, water, and coal being used extensively together and no marked transition between one and the other occurring at least until the middle of the twentieth century, despite the relatively early operation of coal mines in Raniganj in 1814 or the discovery of the rich seams in Jharia

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in the 1890s (Sarkar 2014, pp. 229–230). The social relations co-productive of such a mixed energy regime also confirmed scrambled temporalities and historical periods. The most “advanced” collieries ran on a “semi-serf system reminiscent of Scottish mines in the eighteenth century,” while the Indenture Act of 1865 and the “Indigo Terror” of the 1850s and 1860s revealed an entrenched plantation system in sectors such as tea and indigo, which was akin to the slave states of the American south or the Caribbean islands. It is with some justification, then, that social relations in colonial India, and particularly in rural colonial India, have been called “semifeudal,” marked by what Jairus Banaji has called a “formal,” and not the “real,” subsumption of labor (Patnaik 1971, pp. 123–130; Bhaduri 1973, pp. 120–137; Banaji 1977, pp. 1375–1404). The co-­existence of wood, water, and coal and that of feudal, mercantilist, and industrial capitalism in India account for an unsettling presence of the past and the pastness of the present, in turn, was registered in a whole variety of literary and cultural forms—from the famous colonial gothic mode of a Rudyard Kipling to speculative fiction of Durgacharan Ray (Debganer Martye Aagaman, 1880) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Sultana’s Dream, 1905). Thus, the problem of historical temporality and periodization, coded in the materiality of “fossil capital” was sharpened in the colonies and registered in a cultural mode often called the “postcolonial uncanny” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998; Obert 2015). This relationship between time, periodization, and literary-cultural forms of registration is the second of the gifts offered by postcolonial studies to energy humanities. This brings me to my third point. Energy humanities, by definition, accord a central importance to literature and culture. If a central task of the field is to “reimagine modernity,” this can only be achieved by revealing “the energy dimension of the ‘spontaneous consent’ of hegemony” (Szeman and Boyer 2017, pp. 3–4). And in the revelation of this “energy unconscious,” literature is assumed to play a key role (Szeman and Boyer 2017, p. 8). But what exactly this role entails is far from settled. It is striking that some of the most notable commentaries, which have emerged thus far, are often concerned with the absence or lack of literature’s registration of matters energetic. Thus, Amitav Ghosh laments the lack of a “single work of note” about the “oil encounter” and blames it variously on the “professionalization of literature,” American imperial insularity, and the “conventions of naturalistic dialogue” and “monolingual speech communities,” which he believes are typical of the novel form (Ghosh 2017, pp. 432–433). There are things to be said about Ghosh’s

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conclusions regarding both literary history and the conventions of the novel form. But perhaps the most important lesson in this regard may be drawn from what Neil Lazarus has observed about the curious disjunction between postcolonial literatures and postcolonial theory—that not only scholars associated with the latter domain have tended to work within an extremely restricted body of works, but they have also tended to ask the same questions, deploy the same methods, and arrive at the same answers at the cost of ignoring what the vast and varied literatures they are supposedly working with actually has to offer (Lazarus 2011, p. 19). Preeminent among these ignored or forgotten offerings are “representational schemas that are pervasive, very widely distributed, often cardinal, and even definitive,” and which allow us to see not any “fundamental aliennes”’ between societies and cultures, but “deep-seated affinities and community athwart and across the ‘international division of labour’” (Lazarus 2011, p. 19). As with the “postcolonial unconscious,” so with the “energy unconscious.” Decoding it means not only moving beyond a handful of “oil novels” or “energy lyric,” but also letting go of what we think we know about the novel form’s alleged monolingualism or proclivity for “naturalist dialogue.” With this in mind, I wish to turn in the final section of the essay to two literary works of nineteenth-century colonial India. Despite (or perhaps, because of) their diverse formal and generic affiliations, not only do they register affinities and communities across colonial and imperial (and therefore, international) divisions of labor, but they also illustrate simultaneously the energy dispensations that are co-produced with them and sustain them. These texts are fairly well-known in postcolonial studies, but reading them together as registrations of colonial energy regimes may allow us a glimpse of postcolonial studies in a new key. In one sense, Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Neel-Darpan (1861) and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge-­ Builders” (1898) can be gathered under the rubric of what Tabish Khair has, in another context, called “Babu fiction” (Khair 2001). That is, they all dramatize the affinities (and competitions) across racial lines between men who are simultaneously privileged and dominated (economically, politically, culturally), and who put forth, in the final instance, their claims to be what Tithi Bhattacharya has felicitously called “sentinels of Culture” (Bhattacharya 2005). Such shared affinities may in part explain their canonization, to varying degrees, within postcolonial studies. As Ranajit Guha shrewdly notes about Neel-Darpan, at the time of its publication, Mitra was “one of those young men […] who managed to have some bad prose and worse verse in Sambad Prabhakar between 1853 and 1856” (Guha

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1974, pp. 1–2). The play itself received indifferent critical reception; the topic, which involved the tyranny of European indigo planters, was hardly a revelation. And yet, a luminary like Sibnath Shastri could pronounce that Mitra’s play had spoken for their generation. Guha’s explanation is that it is only when the Indigo planters decided to sue it for libel, the literati of Calcutta (both Indian and European) decided to rally behind the play, and in the process, turned the text into a pre-text—for the fabrication of a nice little middle-class myth about a liberal Government, a kind-hearted Christian priest, a great but impoverished poet and a rich intellectual who was also a pillar of society—a veritable league of Power and Piety and Poetry—standing up in defence of the poor ryot. Coming when it did, this myth did more than all else to comfort a bhadralok conscience unable to reconcile a borrowed ideal of liberty with a sense of its own helplessness and cowardice in the face of a peasant revolt. (Guha 1974, p. 3)

What Guha calls “a borrowed ideal of liberty” stitches the three texts together, albeit with some significant differences. Most notably, of course, Kipling’s short story appears anxious to disassociate this ideal from the Indian babu, and even from imperial governance altogether. My suggestion here is that “liberty” in this literature is tightly associated with a variety of competing energy regimes on which its articulation and activation depends. All the types of energy identified by Malm—“stock,” “flow,” and “animate power”—are at play here, and without them none of the key narrative claims can be mounted.

Bhadralok, Ryot, Coolie Neel-Darpan’s bhadralok (“gentlemanly”) credentials are paraded in a series of prefatory remarks before the action of the play begins. The real risk of pauperizing the “Bengal ryot, a peasant proprietor,” to the condition of a “serf”—so we hear—is that it dooms imperial efforts to “develop the resources of India” to failure (Mitra 1861, p. 10). France, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and other “advanced” European nations are said to have statistically proven that the well-being of the social comfort of this class renders “people averse to revolution, and friends of order” (Mitra 1861, p. 10). Queen Victoria is imagined as “the mother of the people” who has “now taken them on her own lap to nourish them” and she has

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dispatched many “great men” who will “very soon take hold of the rod of justice in order to stop the sufferings which the ryots (peasants) are enduring from the great giant Rahu, the indigo planter” (Mitra 1861, pp. 15–16). Such antiradical reassurances, however, can only be secured in the play through a staging of a conflict between the metabolic imperatives of “animate power” and that of water-borne “flow” energy harnessed in the interests of colonial capital. The indigo plant is the source of the blue dye (still) used extensively in cotton textiles, and as Guha and Sarkar have both shown, the “indigo rebellion” of 1860 was a response to a constellation of national and international crises: a slump in London indigo prices, the Union Bank crash in Calcutta, the consequent squeeze put on the more modest planters by the sector’s big beasts, which meant that the cultivators were increasingly terrorized into growing a crop that was economically unviable for them (Guha 1974, p. 1; Sarkar 2014, p. 123). Like other tropical plants, indigo thrives in relatively high soil temperatures (18–20 °C) and high volumes of water are required for washing away any residual salinity (around 1000 m3 per hectare). If planted as a “cash crop” alongside a “food crop” like rice, it can lead to a competition for “energy flows” to the detriment of the latter. In Mitra’s play, the global crises of falling profit rates in colonial agri-business can only be shown through a specific local conjuncture, where soil water, air, and other forms of energy flows are directed away from the subsistence needs of the cultivators to the planters’ economic priorities. Hunger, therefore, appears as the most recognizable sign of this conjuncture. Goluk Chunder Basu laments in the opening moments of the play, Svaropur “is not a place where people are in want—it has rice, peas, oil, molasses […] vegetables in the field, and fish from the tanks— whose heart is not torn when obliged to leave this place?” (Mitra 1861, p. 22). Thus, we understand that the scarcity, which compels the “big” and “small” ryots to migrate is artificial, engineered by the practice of loans forced on them by the European planters in order to divert their land and labor to indigo cultivation. Hunger also affects the people disproportionately. It is much more acute for tenant farmers like Sadhu Charan or Torapa than for landowners like Goluk Basu and his family. The latter’s claim to “gentlemanliness” in the play is secured not only, as Guha rightly argues, through the possession by the men of a certain amount of cultural capital—the ability to access colonial law courts, their familiarity with Shakespeare (whose works in translation is cited by Bindu Madhab, one of Goluk’s sons, in his letter)—but also via their voluntary subjection to the

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affliction of starvation in solidarity with their tenant farmers. Bindu Madhab underscores this point in the Third Act of the play where he explains that the Basu family has “other ways of living; the loss in Indigo for one year or two might stop feasts and religious ceremonies, but they will not produce want of food” (Mitra 1861, p. 120). But since that is not an option for the “smaller” ryots, they risk an open legal confrontation with the planters Wood and Rose. When Goluk loses his case and is jailed, he fasts for four days before committing suicide. His death brings the ryots on the brink of insurgency, but the moral fiber of “gentlemen” requires their refusal to turn their self-sacrifice into a trigger for radical action: “Two hundred ryots with clubs in their hands are crying aloud […]. I told them to go to their houses, since if the saheb gets the least excuse, he will, […] burn the whole village” (Mitra 1861, p. 170). Mitra’s gentlemen-farmers accrue a liberal sensibility through a conflict between “flow” and “animated” energy forms where the former is diverted from the latter through an act of colonial and capitalist fiat. But we can go further than this. What is often overlooked in discussions of Mitra’s play is how sexuality and religion are integrated within this matrix of interplay between energy forms not only to indigenize liberalism, but also to recast it in a conservative Hindu mold. The planter’s outrage lies not only in the forcible appropriation of the Basu’s lands, but also in the process that encroaches upon the sexual claims of the family’s patriarchs on women. Such claims are typically coded as “honour,” as Goluk demonstrates: “What honor remains to us now? The planter has prepared his places of cultivation round about the tank […]. In that case, our women will be entirely excluded from the tank” (Mitra 1861, p. 23). The “dishonouring” of indigenous patriarchy culminates in the rape of women like Khetromoni who interprets her violation by the planters as an assault not against herself, but against her husband (Mitra 1861, p.  106). What is especially notable is that such violence is presented, above all, as the colonial appropriation of a definitive form of gendered “animate energy”— sexual reproduction and motherhood. The suffering of Khetromoni after her rape is likened to that of still birth or abortion, and her final, anguished plea is to be turned on her bed “to my father’s side” (Mitra 1861, p. 172). The play ends with the figure of Sabitri, Gokul’s widow, cradling the dead body of her eldest son Nobin, while attempting in vain to force her breasts onto his mouth. Bindu, her surviving son, arrives to find another dead body, that of Nobin’s widow Sarolata, who has been killed by Sabitri: “As the mother, having destroyed the child whom she was fondling for making

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it sleep on her lap, on awakening will go to destroy herself, so wilt thou” (Mitra 1861, p. 187). The colonial appropriation of the Basu’s land, hitherto reserved for the modesty and “honor” of their women, sets the stage for an equally violent appropriation of their bodies, which in the play have no meaning outside that assigned to them by patriarchy. Such “honor” is also distinctively Hindu not only because it is drawn in contrast to European women such as the planter’s wives, whose “shamelessness” is exhibited in their public appearances on horseback (Mitra 1861, p.  61), but also because it is Muslim men like Amin who as the planters’ agents, are directly responsible for its negation. Drawing on the hoariest and crudest Islamophobic stereotypes, Mitra draws Amin as a corruptor of the proper channels of “animate (sexual) energy.” He has served up his own sister to his master’s pleasures in order to further his career, and his very body is seen as anathema to Hindu sensibilities: “Oh, the beard! When he speaks, it is like a he-goat twisting about its mouth […]. fie! fie! The bad smell of onions” (Mitra 1861, p. 54). He is the “degenerate” who is instrumental in Khetromoni’s rape, the force who is “ruining the country” to the extent that his religious marker—“Musulman” (Muslim)—is used as a term of abuse among the Hindu ryots. Amin’s graphic violence against the peasants is of a piece with his sexual violence against their women, he is the Other against which the moral credentials of a Hindu liberal order, and of a liberal ordering of energy, are secured by Mitra. Written nearly four decades after Mitra’s play, Kipling’s “The BridgeBuilders” is often correctly read as the paradigm of a muscular imperialism that presents work/labor—in particular “men’s work”—as the raison d’être of empire. But comparing it to Mitra’s play, and keeping in mind some of the interpretative protocols of energy humanities, we are able to offer a slightly different conclusion: that, for Kipling, true “liberal” values are only realized through material labor/work; that this labor/work is racialized and gendered insofar that only some (white, European) men are able to perform it properly, while it behooves upon other (non-white, non-European) men to follow the examples of the former; and that this idealized brotherhood is achieved by a balancing out of the forces of “flow” and “stock” energies, which are brought about by a judicious use of “animate power.” The story begins with the engineer Findlayson surveying like a sovereign the imminent completion of his good work: the great Kashi bridge being thrown across the river Ganges. Such work demands simultaneously

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the mastery of the aquatic forces of the river, the entropic drag of state bureaucracy and tropical diseases, as well as the “animate power” of the colonized humans and beasts under his charge. In general, the latter cannot really be distinguished from each other—the one “crawling […] climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below,” the other “by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work” (Kipling 1987, pp. 5–6). But there is an exception. The foreman of the human workers, Peroo, who “was a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar, familiar with every port from Rockhampton and London, who had risen to the rank of a serang on the British India boats, but wearying of routine muster and clean clothes had thrown up the service and gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure of employment” (Kipling 1987, pp.  8–9). Peroo’s familiarity with the “flow” energy of the sea; his expertise with the “tackle and handling of heavy weights”; the authority he wields over the laborers in the name of “honor”—all these things make him more than an invaluable assistant to the British engineers Findlayson and Hitchcock. They are virtually co-­ authors of the civilizing imperial mission. Kipling serves this “liberal” assumption of (qualified and precarious) equality with an expert dose of irony. While Findlayson smiles paternalistically at Peroo’s proprietorial behavior toward the bridge, the readers are invited to smile back at the Englishman’s easy assumptions of racial superiority through accounts of Peroo’s heroism that “saved the girder of Number Seven Pier from destruction when the new wire jammed in the eye of the crane, and the huge plate tilted in its slings” (Kipling 1987, pp. 8–9). Peroo’s instinct for water compels him to warn Findlayson that the river is bound to react unfavorably to being “bitted and bridled” by the bridge, since “she is not like the sea, that can beat against a soft beach” (Kipling 1987, p. 11). The engineer is skeptical, since Peroo offers this insight in the distinctly non-secular language of Hindu cosmogony. The bridge, we are told, was meant to undergird the secular triumph of fossil (“stock”) energy—steam railways—over that of the “flow” of the Ganges. For Findlayson, the railway bridge stands for militarized imperial order “loopholed for musketry and pierced for big guns” and signifies the pukka—permanent—nature of empire (Kipling 1987, pp. 5–6). But it is Peroo’s understanding that proves to be superior (“The bridge challenges Mother Gunga […], but when she talks I know whose voice will be the loudest”), as unseasonal rainfall upstream results in a flood that threatens the bridge, and along with it, the “honor” of imperial work.

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As was the case in Mitra’s play, “honor” here is a key component of patriarchy. Peroo urges his workmen to “fight [the river] hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out”; and even as the flood threatens the destruction of countless (Indian) lives and property, it is his own “honor” that Findlayson is most worried about—“Mother Gunga would carry his honour to the sea with the other raffle […]. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood or fell” (Kipling 1987, pp.  17–18). At this critical juncture in the tussle between “flow” (the river) and “stock” (the railway bridge), a particular kind of indigenized “animate power” intervenes. As the exhausted workers watch the flood water creep up the bridge, Peroo offers some opium pellets to Findlayson which he claims are “meat and good toddy together, and they kill all weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing else at all […] clean Malwa opium” (Kipling 1987, p. 19). Much like indigo, opium was an essential “imperial cash crop” insofar the profits accrued from its export from India (most famously, to China) were essential for maintaining a favorable balance of trade and geo-­political power, and its cultivation diverted massive amounts of land, water, and labor that would otherwise have been expended on subsistence agriculture (Trocki 1999; Brook and Wakabyashi 2000; Baumler 2001; Melancon 2003). In making it the drug of choice of the Indian laborers who use it to fend off the effects of their depleting metabolic reserves caused by a lack of food, as well as that of the English engineer, who dulls the anxiety caused by his impending loss of honor, Kipling reveals uncannily accurate picture of both the political- and energy-unconscious of modern imperialism. With a striking flick of the narrative switch, the ingestion of opium famously takes us from a realist to a “critical irrealist” register (Löwy 2007). Instead of firing up his capacity to keep up his vigilant work on the bridge, the opium activates a dream-work in Findlayson which holds the key to solving the stand-off between empire’s “flow” and “stock” energies. Findlayson dreams of the Hindu gods debating the fate of the bridge, and by extension, that of British empire in India. When Ganges, in the shape of a crocodile, complains about the bridge builders taming her, she is answered by Ganesh (the elephant god) and Shiva (the bull) that it is the coal-powered railways that had ushered in the era of the “fat money-­ lenders,” since “all the towns are drawn together by the fire-carriage, and money comes and goes swiftly, and the account-books grow as fat as myself” (Kipling 1987, p. 26). On the one hand, this dream-work justifies

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empire through the hegemony of a class-fraction. It is assumed that what is good for the “fat money-lenders” is good for everyone. On the other hand, it reverses or at least modifies Findlayson’s hitherto militarized vision of imperial work; no musketry loops or gun-ports here disturb the steady accumulation of wealth. It falls to Krishna, one of the original Hindu trinity, to pronounce judgment on the epochal nature of “stock” energy that drives the railways: Great Kings, the beginning of the end is born already. The fire-carriages shout the names of new Gods that are not old under new names. Drink now and eat greatly! Bathe your faces in the smoke of the alters before they grow cold! […] As men count time the end is far off; but as who know reckon it is to-day. (Kipling 1987, pp. 32–33)

The peace between the “flow” of the Ganges, and the “stock” of the railway bridge is then brought about by the opium fuelled metabolic surge in the “animate power” of imperial workers. This balancing act between the material forces of empire is replicated in its ideological domain. If Findlayson enters the non-secular world of Peroo through the opium smoke, Peroo travels in the reverse direction, as Findlayson emerges from his reverie. He relates to the Englishman what his near-death experience during a sea-storm on board an English ship has taught him: If I lose hold I die, and for me neither the Rewah nor my place by the galley where the rice is cooked, nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London will be any more for me. “How shall I be sure,” I said, “that the Gods to whom I pray will abide at all?” (Kipling 1987, p. 35)

Peroo’s work on the English steamship, in this respect, confirms the judgment of Krishna that Findlayson witnesses. Postcolonial scholarship tends to read Kipling and Mitra in oppositional terms—one as an arch imperialist, the other as a radical nationalist. But by paying attention to how their texts respond to various forms of energy that charges the everyday life of empire, we detect the currents of mutual interest that binds them almost despite themselves. Their investment in a specific, even peculiar, kind of liberalism—class-bound, genderand race-inflected, yet marked by a temporary and precarious masculine fellowship, if not equality—makes visible the contradictions that run through every level of modern capitalist imperialism and colonialism. It

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allows us to pitch postcolonial studies in a new key for an era that is hotly tipped to signal the end of the “capitalocene.”

Note 1. Malm divides energy sources into three main types. “Flow” signifies those like wind and water that are solar in nature and can be directly collected or concentrated by prime movers. “Animate power” signifies the kind conditioned by metabolism embodied in living creatures. “Stock” refers to the kinds like coal, which are highly concentrated, cut off from weather fluctuations or metabolic demands, and require intricate chemical and technological processes to be converted to mechanical energy (Malm 2016, pp. 39–42).

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Gopal, Priyamvada, and Neil Lazarus. 2006. Editorial: After Iraq. New Formations 59: 7–9. Guha, Ranajit. 1974. Neel-Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror. The Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (1): 1–46. Hurst, Steven. 2009. The United States and Iraq Since 1979: Hegemony, Oil, and War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2003. Future City. New Left Review 21: 65–79. Jhaveri, Nayana J. 2004. Petroimperialism: US Oil Interests and the Iraq War. Antipode 36 (1): 2–11. Khair, Tabish. 2001. Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 1987. The Day’s Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwy, Michael. 2007. The Current of Critical Irrealism: ‘A Moonlit, Enchanted Night’. In Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont, 193–206. Oxford: Blackwell. MacDuffie, Allen. 2014. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Capital and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. Melancon, Glenn. 2003. Britain’s China Policy and the Opium Crisis: Balancing Drugs, Violence, and National Honour, 1833–1840. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mitra, Dinabandhu. 1861. Neel Darpan Or, The Indigo Planting Mirror. Trans. Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Calcutta: C.H. Manuel. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Muttitt, Greg. 2018. No Blood for Oil Revisited: The Strategic Role of Oil in the 2003 Iraq War. International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 12 (3): 319–339. Obert, Julia C. 2015. The Architectural Uncanny: An Essay in the Postcolonial Unhomely. Interventions 18 (1): 86–106. Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge. Patnaik, Utsa. 1971. Capitalist Development in Agriculture: A Note. Economic and Political Weekly 6 (39): 123–130. Purple, Matt. 2008, July 7. Hagel Skewers Iraq War, Defends Greenspan’s Oil Comments. https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/hagel-skewers-iraqwar-defends-greenspans-oil-comments. Accessed 8 January 2019. Sarkar, Sumit. 2014. Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

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Szeman, Imre. 2017. System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster. In Energy Humanities: An Anthology, ed. Szeman and Boyer, 55–70. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer, eds. 2017. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Trocki, Carl A. 1999. Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750–1950. New York: Routledge. Yaeger, Patricia. 2011. Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources. PMLA 126 (2): 305–326.

CHAPTER 7

From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial Dilemmas in Visual Representation Afonso Dias Ramos

Censorship is to art what lynching is to justice. —Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Gates 1990, p. 23)

This chapter considers two of the most contested and covered polemics in the current struggle to decolonize urban environments and visual cultures around the globe: the campaign to remove Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Cape Town in 2015, which led to the largest protests in South Africa since the fall of apartheid rule, and the dispute over the exhibition of a painting by a white artist in New York—the most talked about controversy of the art world in 2017—that showed the lynched black body of Emmett Till.1 These events instantly became the most salient campaigns in targeting symbolic markers of colonialism and white supremacy in- and outside the museum. By echoing and catalyzing similar actions across the world, they generated a massive cultural footprint in the form of mass rallies, protest

A. D. Ramos (*) Institute of Art History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_7

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art, public talks, academic events, online exchanges, op-eds, essays, and monographs.2 It seems fair to say that they have come to define the contemporary discourse on memory and visual politics. However, it is difficult to navigate, let alone arbitrate, the richness of arguments and opposing factions that are at stake in these emotionally charged disputes, especially given the media circus, which flattens them into caricatures. Although this chapter seeks to advance a revisionist historicization of these matters and derive their theoretical implications for the current debates, any comprehensive overview lies beyond its purview. My goal is to throw instead the two concurrent polemics into a productive dialogue for the first time. On the one hand, I want to examine the challenges with sanitizing colonialism and racism, as they are embodied by monuments outside the museum. On the other hand, I wish to consider the reasons for not displaying any explicit representation of historical violence inside the museum. In a more general sense, I am interested in exploring why the fate of monuments and pictures has become the prime issue of public history today. What does it mean to have a statue and a painting acting as the flashpoints in the ongoing row over cultural appropriation, identity politics, political correctness, and free speech? What critical implications does this triumph of material and visual cultures hold for the very future of postcolonial studies? In March 2015, a student named Chumani Maxwele carried a bucket of human waste from the township of Khayelitsha and dumped it on the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. A wave of demonstrations ensued around this monument. It gave voice to a dispossessed majority that felt deprived of basic sanitation, national resources, and a decent education. It denounced the failed project of the rainbow nation. A month later, the statue was removed amidst widespread protests, public debates, and violent clashes, and this event sent shockwaves across South Africa, as dozens of other monuments were targeted by attacks and white civilian militias rushed to public statues in order to prevent and protest against their defacement. As this movement expanded to take on broader social and economic issues, its ripple effects traveled across the world, inspiring similar actions on university campuses in California, Edinburgh, and Oxford, and global debates on colonial-era monuments reached an unparalleled momentum. Two years later, in March 2017, there was an uproar on social media during the private opening of the Whitney Biennial, the longest-running and most prestigious survey of American art. The first pictures posted

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online revealed the painting Open Casket by white artist Dana Schutz. It was a depiction of Emmett Till according to a postmortem photograph, the black teenager who had been lynched in 1955. This canvas had been shown in Europe before without a backlash, but when curators Christopher Lew and Mia Locks placed it on display in New York, it drew protests against their complacency toward, as well as complicity in, racism. They were accused of tone-deaf artistic appropriation and profiteering of black death, and this dispute bitterly divided the art world, crossing over into mainstream culture and tangling up in an already heated debate over the destiny of confederate monuments.3 Judging from the furor on both sides of the Atlantic, these artistic objects tread upon the cultural fault lines and political divides of our time. But what time would this be after all? There is a newfound impetus around colonially minded notions of reparation, repatriation, restitution, and restoration. Yet, this is matched by a rise in intolerance, nationalism, xenophobia, populism, and identitarianism. It is a time of unparalleled idolatry due to the proliferation of images, an increased preservation of heritage, and a visual turn in the humanities. It is a time of unrivaled iconoclasm, as tens of thousands of public symbols are being removed from former socialist countries.4 Are these paradoxes and contradictions the makings of a richly agonistic democratic society or the stirrings of a collapsing social consensus, a foretaste of some cultural civil war? It seems to have gone unnoticed that the culture war once fought over the literary canon, great books, and university curricula has become mostly image-driven today, playing out across visual pictures and urban landscapes. Art and heritage, in other words, have now come to lead public conversations over whether to redress, and how to address, contested and grievous pasts. This shift mirrors a broader development in contemporary society and is meaningful in and of itself, as visual modes of political protest and historical narration gain unprecedented urgency. But, at the same time, as Jacques Derrida warned, our predicament is that we still remain “by and large in a state of quasi-illiteracy with respect to the image” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, p. 59). In many ways, and this is the crux of this chapter, postcolonial scholarship has become emblematic of this impasse. Once forged out of literary studies, this field is yet to come up with capacious theoretical models and a language complex enough to deal with images and the specific challenges that art and heritage raise in protests today, namely, the anxieties concerning the representation of colonial violence and the violence around the representational structures inherited

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from the colonial era.5 There is much to learn from contemporary controversies inside and outside the space of the museum and about our obstinate inability to view them as being mutually implicated. With identity an increasingly fevered focus for conflict in politics and culture, art and heritage could offer a prism to refract debates that too often remain reductive. The two contestations over a monument and an image resulted in swift and strong political reactions. In cultural discourse, one of their primary effects is to have overinflated the currency of the idea of decolonization, making the term postcolonial recede precipitously into the background. This is a perplexing development. On the one hand, the term decolonization is fraught with definitional ambiguities and risks being rendered meaningless now by overstretch, overreach, and overuse. On the other hand, it signals the potential failure of the postcolonial project at large: both in the political sense that the promises of independence were unfulfilled, as inequalities have outlived the legal eradication of racism and segregation, and colonial logics are still at work, and in the epistemic sense of a critical body of work that has either exhausted itself or has been given up on—as we increasingly lose sight of its foundational critiques of binary representations and drift away from its theoretical models that privileged appropriation and ambivalence, hybridity and negotiation—and lies in dire need of experimental methods and methodologies to deal with and work through the present-day quandaries. At this juncture, one should turn to these controversies around built environments and visual images. They configure a creative experimentation with theory, politics, and activism, which productively interlaces the museum, the university, and the streets. They also bring together material histories and affective communities in ways that urgently require new conceptual protocols and cognitive modes. A rethinking of postcolonialism must tend to this magma of critical energy, interconnecting art, activism, and academia, and according to visuality the primacy that it has hitherto been denied. In what follows, I will reframe the recent episodes as part of long-­ burning debates rather than spontaneous outbursts, underscoring how they always cut across nation-specific contexts of race politics. I focus on South Africa and the United States aware of the Anglophone hegemony in postcolonial studies, but also insistent that both countries are singularly productive sites from which to think through dilemmas of race and representation due to their privileged role in global anti-racist discourse and stand as symbolic benchmarks for the extremes of ethnic segregation and racial terrorism. I do so by interweaving the stories of two historical

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figures: Cecil Rhodes as the embodiment of white imperial domination, and Emmett Till as an icon of racial injustice. Their lives spanned two different centuries of white supremacy and black subordination within a system that tied three different continents. They have also been targets of intense artistic, academic, and activist production in the past four decades. We must historicize such contemporary disputations to envision alternative relations to the colonial past and to redefine the terms and conditions of this renewed engagement. Hence, I want to move away from the points that have vitiated the discussion into a stalemate and break free from the roundabout nature in which some conversations have been conducted. One must resist the media coverage that abusively frames them as a split between left and right or between black and white, couching the complex formal, affective, political dilemmas in limited and limiting terms. These public quarrels over monuments and markers involving histories of racial conflict throw a light on the quickly transforming ethics of visuality in civil society and harp on issues at the forefront of contemporary art scholarship like debates on the materiality, agency, and temporality of objects, the curation of difficult knowledge and traumatic memory. Instead of rushing headlong into the politics of indignation, it is necessary to consider how they generate insightful responses in art and criticism and compel institutional reforms, as well as renewed public debates on what spurs the making and unmaking of monuments, what visual symbols represent, what models of memory they imply, and whose archives they shape.

The Story of Emmett Till In January 2017, months before the opening of Whitney Biennial, the incoming Trump administration invited black British singer Rebecca Ferguson to perform at the inauguration. She agreed to do so on one condition: to sing “Strange Fruit.” First recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, covered by Nina Simone in 1965, and sampled by Kanye West in 2013, this known anti-racist hymn once shocked audiences for graphically describing lynched African Americans. The request was denied. So it did not go unnoticed that country singer Toby Keith took her place on stage and played a song previously accused of glorifying lynching. On the steps of the capital, Keith blared out: “Take all the rope in Texas / find a tall oak tree, / Round up all them bad boys / Hang them high in the street / For all the people to see.”6 The dissonance of this inaugural act portended a changing political climate and the deteriorating race relations, especially

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following the milestones of Barack Obama’s preceding presidency: the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington a few months before; the first memorial to the 4075 African-­ American lynching victims was inaugurated shortly thereafter in Alabama; and lynching was about to become a federal crime after 200 bills were voted down over more than 100 years.7 The centrality of lynching is germane, as the hallmark of American racism, which stands in historically for all forms of discrimination against the black population. But one case in particular bubbled up time and again—that of Emmett Till. In 1955, this black teenager from Chicago was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he came across Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working at a local grocery store. Accusing him of wolf-whistling at his wife, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W.  Milan kidnapped Till from his uncle’s house at gunpoint at night. They tortured and shot him, strung barbed wire as well as a 75-pound metal fan around his neck, and dumped the lifeless body in the Tallahatchie River. The murder trial went swiftly. An all-white jury acquitted both men. Later, in exchange for money and protected by double jeopardy laws, the killers confessed the crime to a magazine without facing legal consequences.8 Till’s body, found three days later, was so disfigured that it was only identifiable by an initialed ring. When the casket arrived in Chicago—its lid screwed down and padlocked—the mother took it to a funeral home to have it opened. After seeing her son’s bludgeoned body, Mamie Till Mobley wanted everyone to witness it. “Let the world see what I have seen,” she famously stated, insisting on an open-casket funeral—50,000 people showed up—as the unedited black-and-white photographs of the corpse were published on the press (cited in Tyson 2017, p. 72).9 These grisly photographs helped lend momentum to the nascent crusade for the civil rights movement, as a turning point for changes in race relations. The ordeal of Till’s lynching returned a vengeance half a century later when the outrage over police brutality and execution-style shootings against black men boiled over in the US.10 “What’s happening in our country today with black men unarmed being shot,” said Oprah Winfrey during the Black Lives Matter protests, echoing the common sentiment, “it’s like a new Emmett Till every week” (TMZ 2016). This analogy was taken up by newspapers and social media, pointing to the age-old stigmatization of black men as dangerous, in need of constant surveillance, and subject to death with impunity.11 In 2017, Till’s case was even reopened, after news surfaced that the woman who had initially accused him

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confessed to fabricating the story and providing false testimony during the trial.12 But as the media spotlight focused on this story and the violent confrontations surrounding the removal of statues and flags across the US, what flew largely below the public radar was the fate of the public signposts in memory of Emmett Till. This is a significant counter-narrative. It had taken activists more than 50 years of lobbying to put them up. Since then, though, these markers have repeatedly been stolen, shot at, torn down, and vandalized by unknown people; they have had to be replaced on a regular basis.13 Such was the highly charged context within which the 2017 Whitney Biennial responded to issues of racism and police brutality, by assembling the most diverse edition of the biennial to date. And yet, no one foresaw the firestorm caused by Till’s abject naked body and the waltz of protests and counter-protests that ensued. The black artist Parker Bright fired the opening salvo with a week-long protest in the gallery, wearing a T-shirt that read “Black Death Spectacle” and obstructing the painting from view. He chatted with onlookers, arguing that it was “an injustice to the black community,” perpetuating “the same kind of violence enacted on Till” (Kennedy 2017). Another young artist, Pastiche Lumumba, joined in. He released memes online and adapted one of them in a banner that he hung next to the museum: “The white women whose lies got Emmett Till lynched is still alive in 2017. Feel old yet?” Then British artist Hannah Black posted an open letter online, which has since been deleted, calling Whitney “to remove Dana Schutz’s painting … with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed” (cited in Basciano 2017). Black argued that it is “not acceptable for a white person to transmute black suffering into profit and fun,” adding that “the subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others … The painting must go” (quoted in Basciano 2017). The incendiary letter was signed by artists, critics, curators—all white co-signers were later taken out—and it bore the brunt of counter-­ protests.14 Opposing calls for destroying and removing the work, Coco Fusco identified in it a “deeply puritanical and anti-intellectual strain” that put “moral judgment before aesthetic understanding” (Fusco 2017). The notion, Fusco argued, that “any attempt by a white cultural producer to engage with racism via the expression of black pain [was] inherently unacceptable foreclose[d] the effort to achieve interracial cooperation, mutual understanding or universal anti-racist consciousness” (Fusco 2017). The writer Zadie Smith released a riposte, mocking any claim of ownership and

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authority over the representation of a historical event, and asking whether non-African-Americans could reclaim this icon or how black ought one be in order to address black pain (Smith 2017). Francis Fukuyama took Black’s letter as an illustration of an alarming in-fighting among the left, which has been setting “progressive blacks and whites against one another” (Fukuyama 2018).15 As the dispute escalated, the curators stood by their decision, claiming to have sought “empathetic connections in an especially divisive time” (cited in Carissimo 2017). Unknown parties hacked into Schutz’s private email and used it to submit a fake apology published by Huffington Post and New York Magazine. The artist followed suit with an official statement clarifying that the work had been made in response to anti-black violence and that it would not be sold. She added: “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother” (quoted in Basciano 2017). Some saw this identification as the proof of Schutz’s cluelessness on racial issues and a hollow excuse; for even if the painting was not sold, a career bump would surely ensue. A group of artists then called the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston to cancel Schutz’s subsequent solo show there, even though the offending painting was not featured. It accused the ICA of “condoning the coopting of Black pain and showing … perpetuating centuries-old racist iconography that ultimately justifies state and socially sanctioned violence on Black people” (cited in Voon 2017). In response to this organized boycott, a coalition of over 80 high-profile figures from the art world—Marina Abramović, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Cindy Sherman, among others—signed an open letter of “unequivocal support for Dana Schutz” and the ICA for refusing “to bow to forces in favor of censorship or quelling dialogue.” It asked fellow artists not to “perpetrate upon each other the same kind of intolerance and tyranny that we criticize in others” (Neuendorf 2017). As this shock battle blew up, the two sides of the barricade became clear. One opposed trespassing of the perceived red line of censorship and free speech, detecting therein a nasty form of identity politics, which espoused moral posturing, esthetic literalism, cultural essentialism, and racial particularism. Not only did they point out that the same biennial included a graphic painting by Henry Taylor (titled “The Times They Ain’t a Changing, Fast Enough!”) based on a video still of Philando Castile being shot by the police, but they also often made the analogy with the Mirth & Girth crisis of 1988 when a portrait by a student of the Art Institute of Chicago depicting the recently deceased African-American

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mayor in women undergarments led black aldermen to confiscate it with the police and threaten the institution with cutting public funds. The opposing side pointed to a long genealogy of artists, curators, and institutions invoking free speech in the interest of entrenching whiteness in an art world, which despite its vocal insistence on diversity and inclusivity failed to represent truly, do justice and reckon with black humanity, privileging instead white gatekeepers and white-centric approaches to race. Consequently, neologisms as “white-peopleing” or “whitewalling” were coined (Harriot 2017; D’Souza 2018). They pointed out that Schutz’s previous work had never dealt with race issues. In addition to being accused of opportunism, it recalled the controversy at the 2014 Whitney Biennial when one of the few black female artists, Donelle Woolford, had turned out to be a fictitious character by white male artist Joe Scanlan. These were the general terms of the debate, but conversations broke down along specific fracturing lines. In retrospect, most objections to the painting boiled down to three basic dilemmas: first, a political dilemma over whether black pain is off-­ limits to whites, raising issues of cultural appropriation and identity politics, and the differentiation between the right to or of representation, and between speaking as and for; second, a moral dilemma over the ethics of representation—whether explicit images implicated in political violence ought to be withheld or broadcast, how to weigh the trauma they perform against the one they represent, and what is the capacity of art to produce and reproduce pain; and third, the esthetic dilemma, dealing specifically with the choice of medium in relation to the subject matter, the differential values accorded to the languages of abstraction and figuration, and the particular work that painting does in relation to the photographic archives. Thus, unlike their cartoon depictions on the media, these three dilemmas bred fruitful and often surprising disputes and should warrant thorough and nuanced investigation. I want to frame this problematic as an examination of graphic images of racial terrorism inside the museum, and of public markers that commemorate white supremacy outside the museum in which the vandalism to Till’s signposts is included. One can then engage more productively with actions that exceed the parochialism accorded to such matters by the US media, since these disputes are transregional in scope and scale, as they are also apparent in recent events in Senegal, Belgium, India, Ghana, Portugal, or the UK. It is worth pointing out that within the US context the debate began in earnest in 2015, one month after Rhodes’s statue had been

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removed in Cape Town, South Africa, when the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof opened fire in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. These racially motivated murders set off rallies across the country. Many demanded the immediate removal of confederate monuments and flags from public spaces. Only weeks after the massacre, activist Bree Newsome led the charges by scaling the flagpole outside of South Carolina’s statehouse and removing the confederate flag. Alabama and South Carolina hauled down their own emblems from state capitol grounds and similar actions were taken in Columbia, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The debate has raged on ever since, with the toppling of monuments and the erection of new ones on private land. A slew of rallies and counter-rallies led up to the tragic incidents of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when a man rammed a car into the crowd of peaceful protestors. Those in support of preserving monuments included people who claimed that they ought to be kept intact on purely historical grounds, often because these could be read against the grain, since statues sent mixed signals and took on different hues for various constituencies. There were also far-right groups, which openly praised white supremacy and slavery. Then, there were others who wanted the monuments to be abolished. They argued that these markers commemorated slavery and white supremacy, that they were blind glorifications of the past and needed recontextualization, relocation, or destruction. The tension between the whitewashing of the past as enshrined in the urban environment and the vexations of a visual culture, which explicitly exposes violence, is far from being an American preserve. One such clue can be gleaned from the widely distributed picture of Dylann Roof. Here, he is wearing Confederate symbols and the flags of the two last white minority states in the world: Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa. In addition, Roof’s website was called The Last Rhodesian, a cause célèbre for white supremacists throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the civil rights movement in the US won historic victories.16 The resurgence of this mythology today is confirmed by a boom in online sales in US apparel marketing specializing in Rhodesian-themed memorabilia. This trend reminds us that, when the first iteration of the current culture wars took place, the last bastion of white minority rule—South Africa—was largely intact still due to the support of the US. The cult of Rhodes has also come to the forefront in the present culture wars due to student movements in South Africa, as they struggle with issues akin to the ones in the US.

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Cecil Rhodes A notorious aspect of the campaign galvanized by the removal of Rhodes’s statue is how it has mobilized tools of visual activism and contemporary art. Take the millions of selfies taken on site and the contagious live streaming of events on social media, as well as the protest of black youth marching around it masqueraded as slaves. There is more: the performance of Sethembile Msezane posing as a Zimbabwe bird statue rising, as the crane lifts off Rhodes, and the shadow of Rhodes’s statue painted in black on the ground, after it is lifted off. These representations exemplify that the destruction of images can also be an event full of images (Wendl 2019). It shows that esthetic questions are at the core of how the colonial past is currently being curated, mediated, and negotiated. The backlash consisted of the same accusations leveled against the removal of colonial statuary everywhere: a random, anachronistic, and biased act in nature, the removal is deemed a way of judging history by today’s standards, an attempted erasure of the past, and the blank-slating of what happened. Some of these recurrent criticisms show that the more polarized and divisive the political climate becomes, the more consensual the past is made out to be. Why Cecil Rhodes? There is perhaps no other figure who has been considered around the globe more an embodiment of white supremacy within the colonial context than Rhodes. A close second is King Leopold of Belgium, whose statues have also been contested.17 Contrary to popular opinion, this is no anachronism. The perception of Rhodes as an unscrupulous imperialist and a ruthless expansionist was one of his time, and he died a highly controversial figure. The animosity during Rhodes’s lifetime had been immortalized by Mark Twain in a tongue-in-cheek comment: “He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian applause for it … I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake” (Twain 1897, p.  483). Although Rhodes was not hanged, the obituary in the Guardian pulled no punches, remarking that “the judgment of history will, we fear, be that he did more than any Englishman of his time to lower the reputation and impair the strength and compromised the future of the Empire” (Guardian 1902). Criticisms never stopped reigning in even after his death, contesting the means and ends of his supposedly humanitarian mission. The extent of this divisiveness seems to have evaporated today, as any trace of dissent in the

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past can simply be discredited in one fell swoop as political correctness, social justice, and ideological revisionism. Rhodes was one of the first cases in the recorded history of an academic community protesting en masse against his honorary degree. In 1892, some dons objected when Oxford considered doing so. When this was overturned in 1899, the inauguration of Rhodes as an honorary doctorate of civil law became a scandal, as many scholars failed to understand how a man perceived to have incited war to further private profit could be honored thus (Maylam 2015). Even as Rhodes walked across Oxford University to receive the degree along with Herbert Kitchener, the officer who had instituted concentration camps in South Africa, the latter shouted audibly before the crowds: “Remember, Mr. Rhodes, that if any one attacks you, I wear a sword at my side to defend you” (Oxford Magazine 1900, p. 254). It was that night in Oriel that Rhodes is said to have first found out about the college’s poor financial situation and offered to leave it £100,000  in his will—£40,000 to finance a building, the rest for fellowships for students from Germany, the US, and the British colonies. The donation was commonly perceived as a public relations stunt by a man who had fallen from grace, a man who used his personal fortune to buy back social prestige and immortality. Some newspapers made this clear by telling readers that “if many things can be proved against Cecil Rhodes, much must be forgiven him, because he loved Oxford much” (Saturday Review 1902, pp.  453–454). At the unveiling of a memorial tablet at Oxford in 1907, in a widely reprinted speech, former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery proclaimed: In South Africa, that region of perplexity which will, at any rate, remain for all time a monument of British generosity … the name of Rhodes will always be preserved … But is it not after all in this University of Oxford that his fame is most secure? (Proceedings at the Unveiling of the Rhodes Memorial Tablet 1907, p. 8)

These anxieties are telling. They deserve to be reconsidered in the midst of the most systematic campaign to topple Rhodes-related symbols in South Africa nowadays, and the related movement at Oriel College in Oxford to bring down Rhodes’s statue. The debates have, in effect, failed to recall the scorn that ensued, after the city of Kimberley in South Africa had announced its intention to build one of the first statues in honor of Rhodes during his lifetime. A reaction of disbelief quickly followed in France. Some newspapers declared that

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“mud and blood are the only materials fit for such work” (Saissy 1990). The poet Galimafré contributed a ballad to the occasion: “If you want to glorify / Murder, rapine and looting, / So erect, o English people, / A statue to Cecil Rhodes!” (Galimafré 1900). Cartoonist Henry Paul projected a monument with his bust above the inscription “To Cecil Rhodes— The 10,000 Casualties of the British Army,” the whole piece encircled by fences. There was such incredulity that, even on his death in 1902, some front pages declared point-blank: “There is already talk of building a statue to Rhodes. It is unlikely that a man who started a cruel war … will ever have a statue. The five million he added to the national debt ought to serve him as a lasting monument” (Le Matin 1902). In Rhodes’s time, many doubted that he would ever have a statue. It was only after his death that this occurred in significant numbers, and most of them were paid with donations from the company he had founded. This benign posthumous fate was satirically captured in a literary parable of 1928 by the Belgian magistrate Jules Leclercq, an emissary of King Leopold who had had dealings with Rhodes. In Leclercq’s short story, Rhodes did make it to heaven after all to everyone’s surprise. Only this was not on account of his good deeds. After a life of terrestrial expansionism, ruthless profit-making, and war goading, he was deemed so big a sinner that the devil himself was forced to recognize that there were no gates or windows in hell wide enough to let him in (Leclercq 1926). Rhodes’s death eventually allayed such resentments, especially after the will had been made public. It secured his reputation as a benefactor or a philanthropist mostly through the scholarship scheme, although it did not go unnoticed that one of the wealthiest men in history, the president of the largest corporation in the world, died without leaving a penny to charities. Despite the onslaught of laudatory biographies, an analysis of the statues built in his honor reveals that they were mostly belated and short-­ lived, attesting to their controversial status and contested legacy. The commemorative wave only began in earnest in the thick of decolonization and the civil rights movement during the 1950s. The 1948 election of the National Party in South Africa and the creation of the Federation in 1953 spurred the embrace of British heritage and the Rhodes myth with fresh urgency, offsetting the rising anti-imperial sentiment.18 This development peaked in the centenary of Rhodes in 1953 when the British Queen, after unveiling a memorial tablet at Westminster Abbey in England, traveled to Rhodesia on a pilgrimage to Rhodes’s grave in Matopos, attended the Rhodes Centenary Exhibition in Bulawayo and signaled London’s

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approval for the Federal venture. Even in 1960, as white settlers fled from the Congo, Queen Elizabeth went to Lusaka (today’s Zambia) and threw a party for the unveiling of a brand-new statue of Rhodes, using the occasion to grant that town the status of a city. These symbolic gestures were not lost on the population. When Zambia’s independence was declared four years later, someone immediately covered with tar the sign of a major thoroughfare: Cecil Rhodes Drive. A few days later, the city council voted to remove Rhodes’s statue. Out of courtesy, it was dismantled and shipped to Rhodesia at a time when freedom fighters were gaining ground there. Indeed, shortly thereafter, Rhodes’s statue on Jameson Avenue in Salisbury (now Harare) would be bombed, which led to the killing of black pedestrians in Kopje and Harari by white civilian militias in retaliation. In 1962, a year after Robert Mugabe declared that “Rhodes had stolen the country from Africans and that he would dig up Rhodes’s Grave and send it to England,” a petrol bomb would be thrown at his grave (quoted in Maylam 2015, p. 38). There were countless other incidents, which placed this historical figure at the symbolic core of the white order. In 1968, after Rhodesia had left the Commonwealth, the first new flag was raised to great fanfare in front of Rhodes’s statue. Conversely, when Ian Smith struck a deal with the US in 1976, a group of settlers left a white wreath at the statue’s feet along with a card that read: “In memory of independent Rhodesia” (Moorcraft 1979, p. 52). In 1980, crowds rushed to this spot to celebrate the nation’s independence, as authorities employed a crane to topple the enormous bronze statue of Rhodes. Then, a playful sign was placed on that empty pedestal. It advertised the space for rent. In the two countries named after Rhodes, present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe, the statues were toppled when white minority rule regimes were deposed. However, South Africa held onto them. Although activists and academics expressed contempt for the untouched permanence of these statues, they were perceived as touchstones of a gentle transitional process led by Nelson Mandela, of a negotiated settlement as opposed to a violent rupture.19 But when younger generations grew tired of waiting patiently for the fruits of democracy, this agreement became less clear. Consequently, the statue has been a consistent target of protest over the last decades (already in the 1950s), with Afrikaner students standing against British expansionism. In 2014, when a Rhodes statue was defaced in response to the killing of the Marikana mine strikers, the activist collective Tokoloshe released a

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manifesto declaring the failure of the postcolonial project and popularizing the slogan: “coz 1994 meant fokol.” This has been part of a series of searing indictments of a political vision that did not significantly move beyond the structures of separatism and segregation of the past in a supposed postcolonial present. This rallying around the statue also coincided with the outrage over a program of academic scholarships, which were set up through the symbolic partnership of “Rhodes-Mandela.” It was to many an outrageous alliance, since the latter was the emblem of the new Africa, whereas the former was the ur-symbol of imperialist Africa. Once caught on camera wagging a finger at a statue of Rhodes, Mandela quipped: “Cecil, now you and I are going to work together” (Nyamnjoh 2016, p. 110). Later, in a press conference, Mandela went on to say: “We are sometimes still asked by people how we could agree to have our names linked…. To us the answer is easy … for us to come together across historical divides to build our country together” (Nyamnjoh 2016, p. 110). In the afflicted rainbow nation, though, impatience with reconciliatory measures was palpable. As hopeful optimism turned into restless frustration, students started asking questions about the enduring presence of this colossal statue erected in an everlasting gratitude to the most spectacular of modern empire-builders, a man who had once fought hard to deny votes to black subjects, a man who had stated his intention to build a university “from the kaffir’s stomach” (quoted in Magubane 1996, p. 108).20 Rhodes’s belief in racial superiority was not uncontentious during his lifetime. As early as 1899, Booker T. Washington released inflammatory editorials, accusing Cecil Rhodes of being “directly responsible for the killing of thousands of black natives in South Africa” (Washington 1899). For Marcus Garvey, too, Rhodes was the epitome of white exploitation and should be a leading target for the global anti-racist struggle. On June 6, 1928, he declared in a rousing speech before a crowded Royal Albert Hall in London: The consumptive Cecil Rhodes went to Africa, we treated him with kindness and consideration. What is the result? They have made Rhodesia so that a black man cannot walk on the sidewalks of that country. That is not a fair return for all that we have done. We have laid our hearts and our souls bare before you … we are only asking you now for a reasonable consideration of our case. (Hill 1990, p. 203)

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This critical strand would gain—not lose—momentum through the ages. Even decades later, in 1968, Stokely Carmichael blasted how the attempts to erase imperialist bloodshed or black debasement with a gesture of charity managed to spin history’s judgment: You see, because you’ve been able to lie about terms, you’ve been able to call people like Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist, when in fact he was a murderer, a rapist, a plunderer and a thief […] And that was called philanthropy. But we are renaming it: the place is no longer called Rhodesia, it is called Zimbabwe […] Rhodes is no longer a philanthropist, he’s known to be a thief—you can keep your Rhodes Scholars, we don’t want the money that came from the sweat of our people. (Carmichael 1969, p. 155)21

These quarrels over Rhodes’s afterlife have been continually actualized in Zimbabwe where the flurry of activist interventions in the sites built up after him remains nonstop to this day. But as the protests in South Africa inspired hundreds of similar acts elsewhere and moved on to larger economic and social issues, one of the underreported spin-offs of the movement turned to art collections on the grounds of the University of Cape Town. It had come full circle in terms of renegotiating the bind between the blind glorification of white supremacy outside the museum and the instances of visual representation of violence on their walls. It is pertinent at this point to revisit the most damning piece written against Rhodes in his lifetime, one specifically designed to offset the flood of hagiographic accounts, namely, Olive Schreiner’s novella Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). This exposé—intended to break “the nightmare power which Rhodes has exercised over the country”— described extra-legal killings by white soldiers in land-grabbing ventures by placing a graphic photograph of three Mashona rebels lynched by Rhodes’s men in Bulawayo as frontispiece (quoted in Maylam 2015, p. 87).22 This picture—the original one had been found on display in a hairdresser’s shop window in Kimberley—provoked such a scandal that it was removed from all future editions until 1974.23 This censorship is of the utmost importance to current disputes in that it testified to the unique visceral effect that photographs had in dissolving romanticized claims as well as flat-out denials, and in trumping the power of words. It was likewise proof that European empires engaged in practices that tried to convince the public of the absence of real racism in their overseas colonies. In fact, when Schreiner died, her mother sought to repair Rhodes’s name.

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And this is the most telling point: she decided that the best way to counteract the damage done by a damning photograph was to use all of the proceeding book royalties to build him a statue. In this sense, one can read the lynching of Blacks as a necessary counterpart to the monument of white domination. Images and statues should then be analyzed together as deeply interrelated phenomena not least because only a few journalists covering Till’s trial in Sumner, Mississippi, failed to notice that, while awaiting verdict, the white audience sat on the benches outside the court, while the black audience was sitting outside on the lawn under a Confederate statue built in honor of those who had fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy. During the Jim Crow laws and the civil rights protests, confederate monuments such as Rhodes’s statues were placed strategically to inspire fear into the black population. As Till’s killers later admitted, they had lynched the schoolboy to send a message to the black community. Therefore, it was no accident that the peak of such monuments coincided with that of public lynching. Both enforced the same ends by different means: white superiority and black subordination. The photographic medium was deeply implicated in these operations. It amplified the warning as an image-transmission device. It ensured that the message was replicated, transmitted, and broadened for viewers beyond local communities. Violent images and sanitized monuments always exist in a dialectical tension, and the contemporary controversies are at pains to resolve this conundrum. What was so specific, then, about the picture of Emmett Till? How did it manage to flip the historical script? And why is this of contemporary relevance? When Till’s mother insisted to have unedited photographs taken of the disfigured body, she turned the lynching tradition against itself by documenting her protest against racial violence. As Jesse James evocatively put it, she “turned a crucifixion into a resurrection” (cited in Harold and DeLuca 2008, p. 265). In fact, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had already been fighting lynching by using pictures by racists against them, but she displayed her son’s mangled body to encourage national grief. That is the reason why, for many, Till’s murder is seen as the precursor of current efforts to record visually every instance of police brutality against African Americans. Private grief is turned into political gesture, the covered casket is made available to the eye. No longer a souvenir of collective action, the perpetrator image became the victim image. This sent powerful shockwaves, which many saw as having jumpstarted the civil rights movement. The

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shock tactics accounted for their transformative power in the collective imagination, but it also came at an exceedingly high emotional price. There was an endless list of black authors who vividly recollected the life-­ changing distress of first encountering the pictures: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Baldwin, Elridge Cleaver, Joyce Ladner, Audre Lorde, Anne Moody, and so forth.24 Miles Davis recalled that “that shit was horrible and shocked everyone in New York. It made me sick to my stomach. But it just let black people know once again just how most white people in this country thought of them. I won’t forget them pictures of that young boy as long as I live” (Davis and Troupe 1989, p. 194). Muhammad Ali stated that no public figure had ever affected him more than Till, and that the visceral punch of looking at the newspaper pictures with friends led them to vandalize a rail yard in blind rage (Ali and Durham 1975). While this historical image has called the public to moral consciousness and political transformation, one must not forget that its rhetorical power was and remains uniquely traumatic. There is perhaps no single picture in America that spells division in quite the same way. The most highly charged photography in African-American history, its prominence has to do with the fatal strike it has blown against white supremacy, and the stakes are understandably high when it is appropriated, remediated, and repurposed. Of course, whites were also instrumental in mobilizing this story to support the civil rights movement. Bob Dylan’s first protest song was about the murder and trial of Till and William Faulkner received death threats for speaking out against this injustice. Historically speaking, then, the insinuation that the subject has been a taboo for whites does not hold up to scrutiny. By the same token, the embrace of Till in popular culture is dogged by misappropriations by African Americans. The use of Till’s name by Bill Cosby’s publicist and wife to discredit dozens of female accusers of sexual assault led to media reproach in 2018 (Victor 2018). Rapper Lil Wayne flippantly alluded to Till’s beaten face as an analogy for rough sex in a 2013 song and it led to protests, calls for boycott, and the loss of sponsor deals (Michaels 2013). What is striking, then, is that, contrary to music and literature, the work of images seems to be much more complex in this regard, partly because their unsettling and affecting agency makes it exceedingly difficult with finding any ground rules for use and interpretation, and with mapping out its complex associations with history, memory, experience, and identity. These crucibles cut to the heart of current postcolonial disputes. After all, practices of appropriation and remediation have been continuous since Till’s death in 1955, the year when David

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Driskell painted Behold Thy Son, and the painting was followed by a stream of visual takes on the corpse (with no shortage of dubious or gaudy artistic adaptations). Therefore, the crux of the matter lies in the inadequacy and shortcomings of any postcolonial theory attuned to the vexed interface between visual culture and critical race theory, the want of a methodology that reconciles an ethics of disturbing photographs with the differential treatment of black lives. On the one hand, the racialized economy of looking is a complicated one especially in regards to these photographs because Till’s alleged offense was that of “reckless eyeballing”—a criminal act of looking across the color line during the Jim Crow era, connoting an underlying menace or illicit desire that authorized fatal violence in response, and a carryover of what was known under slavery as “eye service,” the punishable offense of an enslaved man looking at his overseer (Mirzoeff 2018). On the other hand, the decision to publish the images, however they transformed historically, was a deeply contentious one and divided the editorial board at Jet magazine. By the 1950s, the New York Times had refused to print lynching pictures, fearing that they would inspire—not denounce—similar acts. Such arguments against a public showing of graphic material had been around for decades.25 In the same vein, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi, decided not to have the open casket images on display. Conversely, the infamous Black Male exhibition at the Whitney in 1994 showed those graphic photographs, alongside the video of the Rodney King beating, and it was criticized for buttressing a visual legacy fixated on abject states. Consequently, where Till’s casket lies at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture is the only room where no pictures are allowed. Context and narrative are everything, but there is ultimately no safe way to control an image. Theorists as Fred Moten have recently used Till’s photographs to rehash the now well-rehearsed trope that we need to look at them, and look again, but what they also suggest is that the classic model of opposition between visibility and invisibility—a framework so dear and foundational to certain strands of postcolonial criticism—has collapsed (Moten 2003; Azoulay 2008). It fails to do the job. Things are no longer as simple as making something invisible visible. The nexus between visual culture and violence is infinitely more ambiguous, nuanced, and complex. It requires us to ask other and new sets of questions: who is being looked at, and who does the looking? To what ends and by what means? Who gets to decide who looks at whom? Aren’t there dangers in

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exposure? Are images only produced by violence or are they also productive of violence? What is one’s investment in or position on pictures? Can one apprehend photographs sonically, not visually? What modalities of experience are encoded in them? And what is the social agency of these prints? How does one solve the dilemma of curating classificatory tools that are also technologies of memory? As the representation of Till’s body became a focal point in this discussion, it signaled the urgency of a critical reflection on the visual representation of historical trauma. It made clear how scarce scholarship was on this subject, and the extent to which it played a marginal role in postcolonial studies. We should remember that, after a moratorium of over eight decades, images of lynching only began to be parsed and studied systematically in the twenty-first century. The ground-breaking event took place in the museum as part of a touring exhibition in 2000 called Without Sanctuary and based on the lynching photographs and postcards once taken as souvenirs. Here, the reckoning with historical events was done through images. Although the viewing engendered impassioned controversy, resistance, and contestation, it placed lynching back in public consciousness, thereby prompting a renewed debate on how lynching was to be remembered and how artifacts of atrocity should be presented.26 We must challenge some of the nostrums we have developed to talk about race and representation. The priority seems to lie with cultural elements that are driving the polemics today: the urban environment and visual images. In fact, it has been overlooked that the foundational texts of photographic theory came into being against the backdrop of decolonization they nonetheless refuse to acknowledge. Georges Bataille’s founding essay on extremely violent photographs, The Tears of Eros (1961)—banned by André Malraux—for instance, is oblivious to the fact that its images of Chinese torture were largely staged for the camera by French photographers, and used by colonial propaganda to justify European rule.27 Roland Barthes’s case is even more paradigmatic. While he laid down the classic model for deconstructing visual culture in support of imperialism—the known critique of the image of a black boy in uniform presumably saluting the French flag on the front cover of Paris Match on June 25, 1955, the year Till was killed—, he dismissed brutal images of repression in Guatemala as meaningless because they were over-constructed (Barthes 1979). In another instance, Barthes famously demolished the photo-exhibition “The Family of Man” for its universalizing rhetoric, using Till’s example to undermine the argument, but at no point did he address or acknowledge

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the photographs that had thrust the case into relief. Neither did Susan Sontag, one of the most formidable early critics of photography, who wrote on the waning impact of images as colonial empires invested inordinate funds in propaganda campaigns based on atrocity photographs to sway the public opinion, and as Till’s image proved to be the most consequential photograph for African-Americans rights in the US. This indicates the stunning ineptitude to handle images of colonial and racial violence within the dominant critical framework, but it also thrusts into relief the fundamentally unresolved tension in postcolonial studies between deconstructionist and materialist approaches.28 Similarly, the most authoritative study on the history of the destruction of art and heritage, Dario Gamboni’s The Destruction of Art (1997), traces a genealogy of these manifestations back to the French Revolution, but reserves a meager nine pages to colonial and postcolonial contexts in a chapter revealingly titled “Outside the First World.”29 This concerted inattention to the long and rich record of these cases, and the central role which they have always played in enforcing and contesting imperial power, shows the lack of a contextualization that would not only account for their robust comeback today but help us make historical and political sense of them. Among postcolonial theorists, Paul Gilroy’s work stands out most ominously in this regard. Tirelessly celebrated for such foundational studies as There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1987) or The Black Atlantic (1993), the provocative follow-up book Against Race (2002) faced a wall of resistance and left a cold trail in its wake. Gilroy argued that divvying humanity into different identities based on skin color distorted the best promises of democracy. Warning against the coming peril of ethnically absolutist groups or essentialist categories, he advocated the need to think of history transnationally, and to consider conceptual and perceptual ways of developing cosmopolitan responses to race-thinking. The ways in which such a prophetical call was snubbed and rebuffed in the midst of a rigidification of identity lines should warrant close attention. But the same study is also relevant in that it postulated that the triumph of the image had spelled the death of politics, reducing people to mere symbols. This privileging of literature and music as the conduits to think through the present-day conundrums is significant since it fails to acknowledge that the visual has been the locus in which these conflicts have played out in inventive ways. As Hannah Arendt once astutely pointed out, “Half of politics is image-­ making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image” (Arendt 1972, p. 8).

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Conclusion The accumulation of controversies continuously swirling around modes of addressing the colonial past ensures that any serious discussion about the ethics or politics of visual representation is bound to be a minefield. It is a precondition of thought, and therefore, it should not fall into a set of prescribed responses; rather, it should embrace the sort of open-endedness that is proper to every profound dilemma. Schutz’s critics have rightly pointed out that a fixation on censorship and free speech forecloses any deep conversation catalyzed by polemics. In fact, only a tiny minority signs in on calls to destroy or proscribe her work.30 They contend as well that censorship requires a top-down action, and that free speech is only used as a ruse to normalize hate speech against minorities and shut down any legitimate response to it. As David Priestland notes, no one raises issues of free speech when thousands of statues of Lenin are taken down across Eastern Europe (Priestland 2016). Indeed, there is an urgent debate to be had about the postcolonial politics of memory and the symbolic realm. Yet, if the issue of free speech and the red flag of censorship are used to suck up all oxygen, it must also be said that the insistence on these points has been used to mask an unwillingness to oppose the removal or burning of the painting in clumsy attempts that reinterpret and relativize such calls, and in an authoritarian impetus to dictate who does what on which terms. Toxic strains in identity politics must be addressed, as they are always slippery slopes. A cautionary tale can be found in South Africa, which serves as a coda to this chapter. In an unsettling development after the removal of Rhodes’s statue, one group took to the art collection on university walls. As part of the student actions against objects said to perpetuate colonial oppression, they set 23 artworks on fire. In addition, a self-appointed committee called for the museum on campus to investigate any artworks, which depicted black bodies in dehumanizing ways or were perceivable as being offensive. Seventy-five were removed from public sight.31 Among the works deemed problematic were those of anti-apartheid photographers. They had been celebrated the world over for having thrown the South African struggle into the media limelight, for revealing and denouncing the inequities of racial segregation. However, that was precisely what some students rejected. They argued that the protest photographs showed whites and blacks living in separate worlds, the former as overlords and the latter as second-class citizens. Thus, these images peddled a stereotyping that was

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hurtful to those born after the apartheid era and complicit in upholding institutional racism. Once again, the gist of the argument was that the images enacted and prolonged the violence they depicted, that their performative excess trumped their representational function.32 Therein lies the rub of representation and its postcolonial discontents today. As David Joselit has recently argued in reference to portrayals of blackness: “We need to be more skeptical of the ideological promises of representation” (Joselit 2015). What have we come to expect from art and heritage, and from the ways in which they mediate and curate the past? Are they to reflect a time to come? Have the production and reproduction of historical violence been thrown into a feedback loop? Has the documentation of violence been superseded by the violence of documentation?33 Is this part of a necessary shock to the system, one that will make clear that decolonization is not an institutional tool, nor a harmless set of virtue-signaling, open-ended questions, but rather, as Frantz Fanon puts it, “a program of complete disorder,” one that “sets out to change the order of the world” and does not involve “a friendly understanding” (Fanon 1968, p. 35)? Indeed, at stake in these controversies is the mediation and curation of colonial history. This comes down to esthetic disputes primarily waged through the visual sphere in a push-pull between the sanitization encoded in the urban landscape, and the contested status of denunciations of violence. The wager is how to calibrate this representational problem, which is by necessity always open to accusations of revisionism, bias, amnesia, and exaggeration. There is a marked absence of expertise especially by visual theorists in this camp. This might be the critical breakthrough we need with statues as rallying points and images as lighting rods. It has become a mantra of our time to call for a conversation, stage high-profile events, and leave behind a trail of unanswered rhetorical questions. In this efflorescence of public quarrels over the meaning of colonial history and racial divisions, there has been no shortage of contenders speaking at each other, and not to one another. This essay has posited that at the heart of these controversies lies a meaningful disagreement over how long ago history was. These dilemmas involve a reckoning with symbols that are remainders of the past for some but still act as reminders for others. We need to attend to these particular ways in which visual culture has led to political mobilization and concrete action. If we are to make any progress in finding new languages and new methodologies, we need to keep track of the social lives of monuments and images. We can probe the

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extent to which their building originates in the advancement of a certain agenda, how they stand for a particular ideology, and how they are perceived in the constantly transforming configuration of equality and difference. Given that reparations for colonial abuse and torture are being litigated in courts, and investigations of provenance and restitution of artworks are currently on the table, the time seems ripe for a reckoning with imperial history, since its violence, segregation, and disenfranchisement are in living memory. But as these conversations easily get jammed into acrimonious gridlocks, I contend that we need precisely the postcolonial. What binds these iconoclastic manifestations both in- and outside of the museum is a creative experimentation with theory, politics, and activism. So how do we develop periodic outrage into sustained political action? Artists, writers, and historians ought to follow new intersections of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers. With new generations feeling increasingly hemmed in between a grievous past and the prospect of a catastrophic future, there is a want and dearth of generative, hopeful, and redemptive comings. Such a counter-vision requires creative imagination, as well as invigorated discussion, concerning the enduring violence of the past and the dilemmas it poses. It demands renegotiating the terms of the contract and brokering new rules of engagement. Hence the pressing need to return to postcolonial theory because it allows us to talk about the conversation itself in its militant attempt to dissolve essentialist theories, ethnic absolutisms, and sectarian collisions, eschewing one-size-fits-all solutions. We need to go back to it and get beyond it at once.

Notes 1. I am grateful for the opportunity to have shared parts of this essay at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, as well as the Forum Transregionale Studien, Freie Universität, and Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and am indebted to the insightful interlocutors I found in each occasion. Special thanks is due to Tamar Garb, without whom this essay would not have been possible. 2. Attesting to the public interest, one essay by Coco Fusco (2017) reached over 100,000 views online within three days. So much has been published in the last four years that a cursory reference list of articles is impossible. Only a small portion will be cited here.

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3. Besides hundreds of impassioned op-eds on mainstream media outlets in the US, this case made it on daytime television when the popular morning show The View (March 22, 2017) held a five-minute discussion about it, with all hosts unanimously siding with Dana Schutz. 4. In Ukraine, for instance, an anti-Soviet initiative made law in 2015 set out to rid the nation of USSR-era symbols, ordering the renaming of streets and cities, as well as the dismantling of monuments from public space. By 2017, all 1320 statues to Lenin had been removed. In 2016, the Polish government urged regional authorities to take down 500 Soviet monuments and compiled a list of 1500 streets and organizations to be renamed. In the last decade alone, similar cases have been reported in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Mongolia. 5. In a telling admission, the doyen of postcolonial studies, Edward Said, confessed, “When it comes to the oral and the verbal … I have a very highly developed vocabulary … When it comes to the visual arts … I feel somewhat tongue-tied … just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic” (Mitchell 1998). 6. The hit song “Beer for My Horses,” recorded by Toby Keith and Willie Nelson in 2003, sparked controversy when the journalist Max Blumenthal denounced it as “a racially tinged, explicitly pro-lynching anthem” (Blumenthal 2008). This accusation unleashed a crossfire of defenses and attacks. Keith himself put out a statement claiming that the song was “not a racist thing or about lynching” (Fox News 2008). 7. In counterpoint to the current disputes over confederate markers, it is worth recalling that when Barack Obama stepped into office, he was falsely accused of having removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the oval office. This symbolic gesture alone was enough for conservative critics such as Dinesh D’Souza and Mike Huckabee to accuse Obama of serving a hidden anti-­colonial agenda that ultimately sought to overturn white power, downsize America, and affront the UK. 8. On January 24, 1956, four months after their acquittal, Roy Bryant and J.W. Millan received $3000 to $4000 for sharing their story and admitting their guilt in Look magazine. 9. On September 22, 1955, one week before the trial, Jet magazine would publish the close-up photographs of Emmett Till’s mutilated face taken by David Jackson. It immediately sold out. For the first time ever, Johnson Publishing Co. did a second printing. When this sold out too, thousands more copies were run off the press. The Chicago Defender also published similar pictures two days later. 10. See, for instance, Wilkerson 2016; Hobbs 2016. For an overview, see Gorn 2018, pp. 285–290.

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11. To add insult to injury, in 2016 one book claimed that Till grew up in a single parent home because, a decade before he was lynched, his father faced a tragically similar end. A black soldier in the U.S.  Army during World War II, he was court-martialed and hung for raping two Italian women, on trumped-up charges and after an unfair trial. See Wideman 2016. 12. The confession was revealed in Tyson 2017. 13. The first sign was only installed in 2007 after a long and concerted effort by activists. See Haag 2018. Because of the repeated vandalism, a 500 pound-heavy bulletproof memorial was erected on October 19, 2019. 14. This controversy had endless spin-offs: Parker Bright, the artist whose protest was captured on a widely-circulated Instagram picture, raised money to stage a protest in Paris after finding out that French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa appropriated it as part of an installation at Palais de Tokyo—the artist and curator then removed the work from view and issued an apology—, and then subsequently painted that picture of himself in a canvas titled Confronting My Own Possible Death (2018). Somali-Australian artist Hamishi Farah was also accused of gaining access to Schutz’s Facebook account to painting a photograph of her child as payback, and then showing this work entitled Representation of Arlo (2018) at the LISTE art fair in Basel. 15. Siding with Schutz, Francis Fukuyama viewed the incident as “an example of adopting a stereotyped and vastly over-generalized understanding of an individual, based on how racial identity supposedly limits her” (Fitch 2019). 16. By 1976, there was a “sprawling proliferation of pro-Rhodesian organizations in the United States,” Gerald Horne has written, “The transatlantic question of race was the essential glue that held the lobby together” (Horne 2001, p. 101). 17. A similar debate blew up in Belgium in 2010. While some were continuing to honor King Leopold II who had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans in his private colony of the Congo Free State, others attacked his statues, especially after Louis Michel, former Belgian Foreign Minister, had spurned the recent scholarship and the heaps of criticism as nothing but “false accusations” (cited in Mock 2010). 18. The Federation, also known as the Central African Federation, comprised Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi). 19. Achille Mbembe aptly pointed out: “The debate therefore should have never been about whether or not it should be brought down. All along, the debate should have been about why did it take so long to do so” (Mbembe 2015). 20. “The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise,” Cecil Rhodes told the house the House of Assembly in Cape Town in 1887.

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Then, he said: “We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa” (quoted in Magubane 1996, p. 108). Akin to the n-word in the United States, the k-word is the worst racial expletive for Blacks in South Africa. 21. In the 1970s, black students started boycotting the scholarships. The question of scholarships for women had been raised periodically in different quarters from the early 1920s, but the first female Rhodes Scholars were only elected in 1977. 22. Felix Gross, too, stated the following about Schreiner’s novella: “The book caused a sensation not only because it accused Rhodes of the murder, rape, theft, and torture committed by Chartered Company troops in Matabeleland but because of its frontispiece, a repulsive picture omitted in later editions, of three hanged Natives dangling from trees. It was an unmitigated condemnation of Rhodes as a man, a politician, and a coloniser” (Gross 1957, p. 398). 23. In the run-up to the 1994 elections in South Africa, this photograph was taken out of the permanent exhibition at the Schreiner House, Cradock, due to unusual number of young white men rallying around it (Walters and Fogg 2010). 24. See Moten 2003, pp. 59–76. 25. The NAACP’s The Crisis printed lynching photographs to fuel public sentiment. During the 1930s, though, they received letters complaining that “the printing of such pictures did not aid the fight against lynching, but served only to create racial hatred.” The editors replied: “the sheer horror of lynching serves to rouse ordinarily lethargic people to action” (NAACP 1937, p. 61). 26. In terms of the scholarship in this bourgeoning field, the ground-­breaking volume was Allen 2000, followed by Apel 2004. 27. For more on this, see Brook et al. 2008. 28. In the two famous parentheses in Barthes’s essay used to dismantle the pretence of a grand narratives of humanity, he points to colonial history in France and racial terrorism in the US: “Go and ask the parents of Emmet [sic] Till, the young negro murdered by white men […] what they think of the Great Family of Man” (Barthes 1993 [1957], p. 102). 29. Dario Gamboni himself avowed, “Extending this inquiry beyond its [Western] limits would represent a much too ambitious endeavour, as the subject is enormous, and largely—to my knowledge—unexplored. But a brief glance is at least needed, if only because the destruction of art is so often interpreted as belonging to stages of civilization supposedly relegated to societies defined successively as ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developed’” (Gamboni 1997, p. 107).

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30. Christina Sharpe (Mitter 2017) and Aruna d’Souza (2018) were among the most eloquent critics to point this out. 31. A website called Does This Offend You allowed students to report artworks which offended them personally. This was then flagged up with a curatorial team, which had to come to a decision. 32. In 2018, in France, a long-awaited academic survey of the imperial history of sexual exploitation in visual culture came under fire due to the objections against the reproduction of such images. The newspaper Libération received several letters of protest after publishing a special issue on the publication, and the official book launch would be indefinitely postponed because of the heated polemic. Pascal Blanchard refused to debate this issue, using the example of lynching photographs in the US to point out that the display of shocking images may be contentious but ultimately sparks a conversation (Blanchard et al. 2018). 33. The Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Max Price, doubled down on these claims in an op-ed: “Even if you know the historic context of the photos, a powerful contemporary context may overwhelm this, leading you to conclude that the photos are just one more indication of how this university views black and white people” (Price 2017).

References Ali, Muhammad, and Richard Durham. 1975. The Greatest: My Own Story. New York: Random House. Allen, James. 2000. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palm. Apel, Dora. 2004. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1972. Crises of the Republic. New  York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Barthes, Roland. 1979. Shock Photos. In The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, 71–73. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 1993. The Great Family of Man. In Mythologies, 100–103. London: Random House. Basciano, Oliver. 2017. Whitney Biennial: Emmett Till Casket Painting by White Artist Sparks Anger. Guardian, March 21. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Dominic Thomas, and Christelle Taraud, eds. 2018. Sexe, race et colonies: La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours. Paris: La Découverte. Blumenthal, Max. 2008. Toby Keith’s Pro-Lynching Publicity Tour Hits Colbert, CBS and More. Huffington Post, June 8.

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Brook, Timothy, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue. 2008. Death by a Thousand Cuts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carissimo, Justin. 2017. Black Artists Ask the Whitney to Take Down Painting of Emmett Till. Independent, March 21. Carmichael, Stokely. 1969. To Free a Generation: The Dialectics of Liberation. New York: Collier. D’Souza, Aruna. 2018. Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. New York: Badlands Unlimited. Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. 1989. The Autobiography. New  York: Simon and Schuster. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. 2002. Echographies of Television. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fitch, Andy. 2019. You Can’t Get This Without Making Somebody Else Feel Bad: Talking to Francis Fukuyama. Blogs – Los Angeles Review of Books, April 1. Fox News. 2008. Toby Keith Hits Back at Accusation That Song Is Pro-Lynching. August 8. www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,400084,00.html. Fukuyama, Francis. 2018. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fusco, Coco. 2017. Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till. Hyperallergic, March 27. Galimafré. 1900. Une Statue à Cecil Rhodes! (Ballade). La Lanterne, March 3. Gamboni, Dario. 1997. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 1990. 2 Live Crew, Decoded. New York Times, June 19. Gorn, Elliot J. 2018. Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till. New York: Oxford University Press. Gross, Felix. 1957. Rhodes of Africa. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Guardian. 1902. Cecil Rhodes Obituary. March 27. Haag, Matthew. 2018. Emmett Till Sign Is Hit with Bullets Again, 35 Days After Being Replaced. New York Times, August 6. Harold, Christine, and Kevin Michael DeLuca. 2008. Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till. In A Reader in Communication and American Culture, ed. Lester C. Olsen, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope, 257–271. Los Angeles: SAGE. Harriot, Michael. 2017. This White Woman’s Painting of Emmett Till Belongs Under the Definition of White-Peopleing, Not on a Museum Wall. The Root, March 21. https://www.theroot.com/this-white-womans-painting-ofemmett-till-belongs-under-1793483717. Hill, Robert A., ed. 1990. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Vol. 7. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Hobbs, Allyson. 2016. The Power of Looking. From Emmett Till to Philando Castile. New Yorker, August 5. Horne, Gerald. 2001. From the Barrel of the Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press. Joselit, David. 2015. Material Witness: Visual Evidence and the Case of Eric Garner. Artforum 53 (6) https://www.artforum.com/print/201502/ material-witness-visual-evidence-and-the-case-of-eric-garner-49798. Kennedy, Randy. 2017. White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests. New York Times, March 21. Le Matin. 1902. Cecil Rhodes. April 5. Leclercq, Jules. 1926. Aux chutes du Zambèze: du Cap au Katanga. Paris: Pierre Roger. Magubane, Bernard. 1996. The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910. Trenton: Africa World Press. Maylam, Paul. 2015. The Cult of Rhodes: Remembering an Imperialist in Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Mbembe, Achille. 2015. Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. Lecture Presented at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Johannesburg, South Africa. Michaels, Sean. 2013. Lil Wayne Backtracks from His ‘Offensive’ Emmett Till Lyric’. Guardian, May 2. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2018. Tactics of Appearance for Abolition Democracy #BlackLivesMatter. Critical Inquiry. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/ tactics_of_appearance/. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1998. The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said. boundary 2 25 (2): 11–33. Mitter, Siddhartha. 2017. What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This? Hyperallergic, March 24. https://hyperallergic.com/368012/ what-does-it-mean-to-be-black-and-look-at-this-a-scholar-reflects-onthe-dana-schutz-controversy/. Mock, Vanessa. 2010. Belgium Revisits the Scene of Its Colonial Shame. Independent, June 30. Moorcraft, Paul L. 1979. A Short Thousand Years: The End of Rhodesia’s Rebellion. Salisbury: Galaxie Press. Moten, Fred. 2003. Black Mo’nin. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, 59–76. Berkeley: University of California Press. NAACP. 1937. Do Lynching Pictures Create Race Hatred?. The Crisis, February. Neuendorf, Henri. 2017. Coming to Dana Schutz’s Defense, Cindy Sherman and Other Artists Pen an Open Letter to Her Critics. ArtNet, August 4. https:// news.artnet.com/exhibitions/dana-schutz-defend-open-letter-1042361. Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2016. #Rhodesmustfall: Nibbling at the Resilient Colonialism in South Africa. Bamenda: Lang.

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Oxford Magazine. 1900. Notes and News. March 7. Price, Max. 2017. A subtle kind of racism. News24, June 16. Priestland, David. 2016. Free Speech Debate. Lecture Presented at St Antony’s College, Oxford, UK. February. Proceedings at the Unveiling of the Rhodes Memorial Tablet. 1907. Oxford: Printed for the Rhodes Trustees. Saissy, A. 1990. La Capitulation de Cronje. Le Journal, February 28. Saturday Review. 1902. Mr. Rhodes’s Will and His Way. April 12. Smith, Zadie. 2017. Getting In and Out: Who Owns Black Pain? Harper’s Magazine, July. TMZ. 2016. Oprah Says There’s a New Emmett Till Everyday Now. August 23. www.tmz.com/2016/09/23/oprah-emmett-till-african-american-museum/. Twain, Mark. 1897. More Tramps Abroad. London: Chatto & Windus. Tyson, Timothy B. 2017. The Blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster. Victor, Daniel. 2018. Bill Cosby’s Publicist Invokes Emmett Till to Discredit Accusers. New York Times, April 27. Voon, Claire. 2017. Protesters Call on ICA Boston to Cancel Dana Schutz Show, July 26. https://hyperallergic.com/392451/dana-schutz-ica-bostonprotesters-letter/. Walters, Paul, and Jeremy Fogg. 2010. The Short Sorry Tale of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland and Its Frontispiece. English Studies in Africa 53 (2): 86–101. Washington, Booker T. 1899. To the Editor. Colored American, July 20. Wendl, Tobias. 2019. From Cape Town to Timbuktu: Iconoclastic Testimonies in the Age of Social Media. In Image Testimonies: Witnessing in Times of Social Media, ed. Kerstin Schankweiler, Verena Straub, and Tobias Wendl, 165–180. London: Routledge. Wideman, John Edgar. 2016. Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File. New York: Scribner. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2016. Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration. New York Times, February 12.

PART III

Action-Based Scholarships

CHAPTER 8

Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide Reinhart Kössler Unsre Herrn, wer sie auch seien, sehen unsre Zwietracht gern Denn solang wir uns entzweien, bleiben sie doch unsre Herrn. [Our masters who rule us Hope our quarrels never stop For so long they split us they can remain on top.] —Bertolt Brecht, “Solidaritätslied” (Brecht 1931, pp. 369–370)

Researching a transnational postcolonial relationship that involves a former colony and its former colonizer poses specific challenges.1 This is especially true when the researcher happens to be a citizen of the erstwhile colonial power. Obviously, much of social research in the Global South is still undertaken within this framework, which involves power differentials,

R. Kössler (*) Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_8

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trauma, and habitual attitudes, which have not been reneged by formal independence. Still, there are specific considerations when the research addresses the consequences of state-driven mass crimes such as genocide and takes up movements and campaigning that revolve around them. The long-term research project upon which I wish to reflect finds itself at these precarious crossroads. To a large extent, it has evolved alongside the very process it seeks to address as a topic of investigation. Inevitably, this spawns a personal perspective. Therefore, I shall briefly rehearse the factual background, the genocide of 1904–1908  in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) and its aftermath, particularly the current conflicts that center around the quest for closure in the terms of a serious engagement with the past (cf. Adorno 1963). Along the lines of “working through” in psychoanalysis, this involves, inevitably, stubborn resistance (Freud 1991, pp.  135–136). This discussion will lead to a subsequent reflection on the forms and premises of transnational solidarity in a postcolonial setting and I will offer concrete illustrations of the Namibian-­ German experience. Afterward, I will describe my research from two main perspectives: first, in regard to the involvement of my scholarly work in the movement for recognition of the genocide and its reparation and reconciliation; second, in the way such an orientation shapes the scholarly endeavor. At the same time, the discussion will provide additional insight into the processes under scrutiny.

Genocide in German Southwest Africa Between 1903 and 1908, a series of anticolonial resistance wars shook the foundations of German colonial rule in Southwest Africa. Today, this complex and quite uneven process is known as the Namibian War. The specific feature that has marked the memory of German colonialism up to the present is the genocide committed by the German colonial army, the so-­ called Schutztruppe, in suppressing those resistance efforts by Namibian indigenes in central and southern Namibia. According to the relevant United Nations (UN) Convention, the notion of genocide hinges on the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (UN General Assembly 1951). Besides outright mass killings, it includes serious bodily harm or the imposition of life conditions that imperil the survival of a particular targeted group. In the Namibian case, genocide evolved in three forms and stages. The first phase began after the decisive battle at Ohamakari on

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August 11, 1904. The Schutztruppe pursued the retreating Ovaherero relentlessly into the waterless Omaheke steppe toward the border with British Bechuanaland (Botswana). During these weeks, thousands died of hunger and thirst. On October 2, 1904, the commanding general Lothar von Trotha issued his infamous proclamation, which clearly stated his intention to eliminate Ovaherero from Namibia by outright shooting and by sealing off any retreat from the steppe, such that people died in their droves from thirst and hunger. In addition, the proclamation declared that the Ovaherero were “no longer German subjects,” and that they were now outlaws, so anybody was free to kill them (Zimmerer 2008).2 On April 22, 1905, Trotha issued another proclamation against the Nama who had embarked on a fierce guerrilla campaign since October 1904. In this declaration, he reaffirmed his eliminatory and genocidal intentions. Survivors were imprisoned in concentration camps. These marked the second phase of the genocide. Prisoners included entire “tribes”—women, children, and the elderly besides active fighters (Zimmerer 2011, p. 158). Conditions were especially harsh, if not outright lethal, in the coastal towns of Swakopmund and Lüderitz. Forced labor and inadequate provision for survival of the prisoners meant “annihilation by neglect” for thousands (Zimmerer 2011, pp. 158, 272). It is estimated that 80 percent of the Ovaherero and 50 percent of the Nama living in the region prior to the war had perished by the time the concentration camps closed in May 1908. On their release, prisoners faced the consequences of land expropriation and the 1907 Native Ordinances as part of the genocide’s third and last phase. They were stripped of their livelihoods and regimented into tightly controlled labor relations (cf. Bley 1996, pp.  170–173; Zimmerer 2001, pp.  56–109). Wholesale expropriation of the land of “insurgent tribes” was designed to undercut any possibility for survivors to rebuild an autonomous communal life. At the same time, this land was made available for enhancing white settlement. Last but not least, the Ordinances banned the local population from owning large livestock, which impinged on Ovaherero communal life centered around holy cattle. Regimented obligation of wage labor and restrictions against settling in larger numbers, as well as an early version of pass laws, completed a set of measures aimed at reducing Africans to an atomized chattel labor force. One of the unique features of the Namibian War consisted in the makeup of the German colonial army. In contradistinction to most cases, including the coeval Maji Maji War in German East Africa, present-day Tanzania, colonial soldiers in Namibia were overwhelmingly from

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metropolitan Germany (Mann 2003, pp. 25–26). Consequently, the death toll among Germans was much higher than it was in other cases. During the Maji Maji War, only very few Germans commanded troops recruited in other African regions. This was the pattern in most colonial wars (cf. Becker and Beez 2005). The exceptionally high German physical presence and death toll may account for the unusually high impact the Namibian War had on the German public. The war was covered extensively in the press and Trotha’s actions provoked heated controversy, including parliamentary interventions by the Social Democrats and the Center Party. Political conflict culminated in a snap election in 1907, which was occasioned by both parties’ reluctance to accede to government demands for further funds to continue the war. A fierce campaign fought by the Right on the basis of chauvinist and colonialist slogans resulted in a realignment of German politics through the so-called Bülow Bloc of all parties to the right of the center (Sobich 2006). The war and the genocide were subsequently represented in an avalanche of memory books and novels, which celebrated the killing of Africans. Moreover, the new communication medium of the picture postcard was used by soldiers to convey greetings home, along with harrowing scenes of executions or depictions of the deportation of human remains. When considering possible lines of continuity in the history of German violence during the first half of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, the banalization of atrocity or inhumanity through mass communication would need to be considered as a major contributing factor (Kössler 2015, pp. 88–97). In fact, the same sentiments were carried forward by a vibrant colonial revisionism, once Germany lost its colonies through the Versailles Treaty in 1919 (Wegmann 2019).

Communal Memory Versus Colonial Amnesia The considerable attention accorded to the Namibian War and the colonial genocide through 1945 contrasts starkly with the colonial amnesia that has characterized the (West) German public mind since the defeat of Nazism. At the turn of the new millennium, not many Germans were even aware that their country had once been a colonial power, and eminent politicians proclaimed Germany’s potential as a broker in Africa on account of its ostensibly light baggage from colonial legacy. Since 2004, the centenary of the genocide, this attitude has changed somewhat mainly through an evolving relationship between civil society actors on both sides. They

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include on the Namibian side, above all, activists from the victim communities and traditional leaders; on the German side, they are small nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and more informal networks dedicated to postcolonial issues—more specifically, the reconciliation with Namibia. In this exchange, the asymmetrical postcolonial relationship that exists between Namibians and Germans is inverted (Kössler 2020). Power differentials weigh heavily in enabling Germans to ignore both their own postcolonial reality and the consequences of German colonialism, as they persist in Namibia today. One may not even talk here of a “strong wish to forget,” since this would presuppose a stronger awareness than is actually the case (Assmann 2013, p.  134). On the other hand, the memory of anticolonial resistance and the genocide has been kept alive over the decades in Namibia, above all, by the affected communities (Krüger 1999; Gewald 2000; Biwa 2012; Kössler 2015). Such vibrant memory and corresponding performative practices may be considered as vital resources in the struggle to assert what members of affected communities consider to be their right, namely adequate recognition and redress. In spite of heavy strictures that came with colonial rule, these groups managed to reconstitute communal ties. Oral traditions played a key role in this process, while memories of the Namibian War and the genocide were figuring prominently in their communal interactions. However, demands for German recognition of the genocide, as well as for apology and appropriate redress, emerged only after Namibia’s independence in 1990. When attempts to approach high-ranking German visitors such as the chancellor and the president failed during the subsequent decade, claimants switched to a more confrontational approach, which included litigation in the US courts and an increase in civil society activity and mobilization. In 2004, a turning point was reached with the centenary of the battle of Ohamakari, as thousands of Ovaherero commemorated the genocide. German Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul offered a personal, though unofficial, recognition of the genocide and her deep regret. Yet, this foray proved ineffective in swaying the official German stance of shunning the term of genocide with reference to Namibia. It did not address the question of reparation either (Kössler 2015, pp. 251–261). During the subsequent years, demands for exactly these goals were taken up on a larger scale. Whereas the movement had focused on Ovaherero before, now Nama and Damara came to the fore as well. One important step was a motion passed by the National Assembly with just

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one abstaining vote. It called for the Namibian government to facilitate negotiations about an apology and reparations. There was further agreement between the overwhelming majority of Nama Kapteins and Ovaherero Paramount Kuaima Riruako to cooperate on this matter. This alignment left out the Ovaherero Royal Houses in an enduring rift among Ovaherero. The Namibian government slowly revised its very reticent approach to the issue of recognition of the genocide, an apology and reparations by Germany (cf. Niezen 2018). Another important turning point came in 2011 with the first repatriation of human remains, which had been transported to Germany under the colonial rule. The Namibian government made it possible for a delegation of some 70 people to receive the remains in Berlin. Official German response was seen as slighting the Namibians and it led to a diplomatic debacle. At the same time, existing ties with German support groups, including sections of the Afro-German community, were strengthened and new ones forged. In Germany, the year 2004 had seen an unexpected surge of interest in the colonial past occasioned by the centenaries of the genocide in Namibia and, shortly thereafter, of the Maji Maji War (see Zeller 2005). Beginning in 2007, the presence of the Left Party (Die Linke) in the German Parliament (Bundestag) created new openings for parliamentary initiatives. These moves were largely based on a number of local postcolonial initiatives with the participation of Afro-Germans mainly in Berlin. In 2011, members of these small, yet very active communities formed long-term links with some key members of the Namibian delegation. During the following years, these initial links were consolidated into lasting relations between civil society actors on both sides. These actors comprised NGOs linked to victim groups and their traditional authorities on the Namibian side, as well as more or less informal groups that coalesced on small activist NGOs on the German side. Meanwhile, some of the Namibian activists increased public awareness by appearing in traditional Ovaherero and Nama attire on stately streets of central Berlin and demonstrating in support of the demands of victim communities. In 2015, a tentative move by the German government to accede to the term of genocide opened the way for negotiations, but the modalities of these talks have raised serious controversies in Namibia (Kössler and Melber 2017, pp. 84–93). Large groups among victim communities protest vehemently against the fact that they have not been accorded a presence at these negotiations in their own right apart from being represented by the Namibian government. This conflict raises sensitive issues about the

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writ of the postcolonial state and about the rights of communities who claim their status as indigenous peoples under the appropriate international conventions today (cf. Kössler 2019b). The legitimacy of the Namibian government to be the sole representative of the victim groups by virtue of their being citizens of Namibia and on the basis of the principle of national sovereignty is challenged on the grounds that not all communities in Namibia have been subjected to the genocide and, indeed, to effective German colonial rule (Kössler 2007). Further, it is argued that partly as a consequence of the genocide there exists a sizable Ovaherero and Nama diaspora in Botswana and South Africa. According to this reasoning, these descendants of refugees from the genocide cannot be represented by a government whose territory does not include their place of residence and whom they have not elected. Finally, the Namibian government’s legitimacy to represent genocidal victims is challenged by reference to the relationship based on the protection treaties with the German colonial power. These treaties were signed by leaders of individual communities and only later was the present territory of Namibia constituted. The relationships that have been formed between Namibian and German activists since 2011 comprise by and large groups in Namibia who oppose the present format of negotiations with groups in Germany. Inevitably, German activists are drawn into an internal conflict in Namibia, at least at certain conjunctures. This became particularly evident in late August 2018 on the occasion of the third repatriation of human remains. After the confrontative experience of 2011, a second repatriation had been organized as a surprise action in 2014. This had antagonized victim communities and it was here that the conflict between these groups and the Namibian government first became evident. The demand for self-­ representation found expression in the widely publicized slogan “Not About Us Without Us.” More than four years later, the two governments asked for the “good offices” of the Protestant churches in both countries to avoid another confrontation. However, initial refusal to sponsor travel to Berlin for dissident communal leaders, including Ovaherero Paramount Chief Vekuii Rukoro, along with the apparent exclusion of most of the Berlin-based German activist groups from the central restitution ceremony, resulted yet again in heated controversies, which were brought into the open by a protest vigil in front of the venue at Gendarmenmarkt in central Berlin. This open conflict linked up Namibian dissidents with German activists in a very clear way, and in his speech at the church, Rukoro blamed the Namibian Embassy in Berlin for moving against

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German activists who over the years had shown solidarity with the victim groups.3 Even though the repatriation of human remains was initially presented by a range of Namibian spokespersons as a purely traditional and, thus, apolitical affair, the political implications are quite clear now. The same goes for the overarching issues connected with the consequences of the genocide, particularly the quest for recognition, apology, and reparation. Having described the ways in which solidarity work from the German side has become enmeshed in such politics, I wish to turn now to the question of how meaningful research can be pursued within this context. Before I do so, though, a few words on the notion of solidarity are in order.

Transnational Solidarity in Postcolonial Settings At first sight, the notion of solidarity appears rather unproblematic. It may be seen as something inherently human, “our essential humanity,” or for some, as “a grand idea” (Rorty 1989, p. 189; Bude 2019).4 Consequently, it has been said that as “the epitome of emotive binding forces,” it “is expected of solidarity that, near and far, it will resolve the most diverse issues” (Hondrich and Koch-Arzberger 1992, p.  9). In more mundane terms, solidarity has been seen as “the idea of a mutual connection between members of one group” (Bayertz 1998, p. 11). While this is evocative of the catchy phrase “One for all and all for one,” Hauke Brunkhorst also refers to “the solid” in the word, thus pointing to solidarity as the basis of the nation-state, as well as to human rights, that is to concerns that transcend the boundaries of the state (Brunkhorst 2002, p. 10). Such a perspective was mapped out most spectacularly during the early days of the French Revolution in 1789, but it still carries meaning in cosmopolitan concerns today—that is, in terms of mutual recognition as humans (Brunkhorst 2002, p.  110; Kössler 2018a). For some, solidarity is the epitome of subalterns, wage workers in particular, standing and acting together to achieve aims against all odds, as Brecht’s once popular song quoted in the epigraph conveys. Even then, we can learn from Karl Marx that such solidarity requires serious effort since initial competition among workers has to be overcome and the nexus of the organization needs to be upheld (Marx 1968b [1849], pp. 420–421). This implies strong pressure for keeping members in line. Again, scholars of classical sociology link the social nexus to one or another form of solidarity, in other words, the basic bonds that hold any

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society together. Thus, Émile Durkheim (1893) famously differentiated between “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity. Whereas the former binds together stereotyped, largely identical “segments” such as clans and lineages of common ancestry, the latter works in a differentiated division of labor, where all participants depend on each other for their success or even their survival. This dichotomy is replicated in the influential counterposing of “community” and “society.” Ferdinand Tönnies (1887) saw the former as a close relationship based on blood bonds and face to face acquaintance, whereas the latter term denoted larger and anonymous connections.5 These approaches pinpoint social structure less than action and they highlight different ways of achieving coherence in society. By doing so, they underline the fact that solidarity is not easily achieved or understood even in situations of propinquity. More problems arise when we reflect on forms of solidarity that imply relationships between settings across large spatial distances, widely divergent living conditions, and life outlooks. This is particularly true when we turn to the proposition of international solidarity within a framework of postcolonial asymmetry. International solidarity is a well-worn and attractive slogan. It is not only heard in chants at appropriate public manifestations, but it is also invoked when individuals and communities challenge the political asymmetry in North-South relations based on differentials in available material resources and opportunities for people to shape their own lives. This form of solidarity is expected to join people who live in diverse social settings whereas the relationship underlying working-class solidarity involves basically comparable conditions. I designate these two distinct ideal types as group solidarity and outreach solidarity. Outreach solidarity comes in diverse forms, which frequently reproduce the very postcolonial asymmetry its proponents hope to overcome. One prominent example would be “Third World” solidarity.6 This movement was widespread globally, particularly in Western Europe and North America between the 1960s and 1980s. Activities included very militant action, but they referred mostly in quite abstract ways to struggles of anticolonial resistance and national liberation in various regions of the Global South. Still, this radical left in the North operated with assumptions about a common project couched in the goal of socialism. Such underlying conceptions disregarded the dimension of nationalism inherent in national liberation movements. This aspect came to the fore after the victories of liberation movements in Indochina and southern Africa. In hindsight, such misconceptions were attributable to a certain disregard for the

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partners in solidarity and their actual goals. They originated in a general attitude of anti-imperialism, which was equated with socialist objectives. However, national liberation movements of the second half of the twentieth century were states in waiting and acted as such, while they confronted a violent and warlike stance of persistent colonial powers. In this essay, I posit a very different relationship. While the goals may vary between the partners in solidarity, there are common concerns, as well as more direct exchanges especially in comparison to the former experiences. Important features of this form of solidarity include enhanced possibilities of communication and travel, which make for much denser contact and personal exchange than the ones in former relationships between “Third-Worldist” and national liberation movements. At the same time, as in the case of Namibian descendants of genocidal victims and their German partners, both parties may have different outlooks on various issues of social identity, but they do share a well-circumscribed common objective, namely an appropriate apology and consequent reparation by the German state on account of the genocide. Both parties of the relationship see themselves in opposition to their respective governments and they make use of their civil rights under both dispensations to advance a shared concern, which is admittedly narrower than the goal of national liberation or the overcoming of colonialism. However, what is at stake is a germane dimension of the postcolonial relationship and close cooperation on this particular issue justifies the designation of this relationship as transnational solidarity.

Solidarity in Diverse and Asymmetrical Settings Still, any rash identification would elide real differences, which are inherent in postcolonial situations and particularly in the aftermath of genocide. In terms of asymmetry, even where Germans or citizens of any other former colonial power are prepared to countenance the postcolonial situation that forms part and parcel of their everyday life-worlds, they are not prompted to show such awareness in daily experience. In Namibia, though, reminders of the colonial impact are thrust on members of victim groups in the form of oral traditions but also on account of their daily environment—a landscape that testifies to the genocide by being adapted to commercial agriculture after wholesale land expropriation, the layout of towns, as well as monuments and colonial buildings. On the other hand, Germans can afford to ignore their country’s past as a colonial power or not even be

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aware of it. In this situation, it takes distinct acts on a cognitive as well as on an emotional level to countenance the actually existing postcolonial situation and further, to translate such insights into appropriate attitudes and behavior, including relevant action. For Germans who opt for postcolonial awareness, then, their privileged postcolonial position translates into a challenge for actively engaging with the colonial past and do so as far as they feel prompted to take up this historical responsibility.7 Outreach solidarity hinges on being prepared to acknowledge such responsibility, along with its consequences on a personal level in regards to behavior and attitudes and on the level of the state in terms of appropriate political action such as apologizing and reparations. This attitude is a prerequisite for building trust between the two sides and a form of solidarity that reaches out in both directions. Exemplified by Rukoro’s intervention on behalf of German activists, it includes pursuing a meaningful engagement with the dire past and a genuine effort in reconciliation. It remains important that the two sides be not collapsed into one. There exists an incontrovertible difference between the positions of victim and perpetrator, which in this case have been very clear since the beginning. Given that direct perpetrators or survivors are no longer alive, we can only talk about positions defined by the past. These positions remain relevant when one speaks about the genocide and, even more so, when it comes to the forms of reconciliation: the need to countenance what has happened, to acknowledge responsibility, and to recognize the need for redress. Namibians and Germans also act in quite diverse social and cultural contexts. In Namibia, an ethnic dimension of the concern with the genocide and its aftermath is hard to deny or avoid. This is given by the very intent to destroy or eliminate a specific group of people inherent in Trotha’s two genocidal proclamations. By contrast, Germans live mostly in social contexts that differ greatly from this. For instance, ethnicity in Germany is linked to regional identification, is only of minor importance and hardly ever questions the national nexus. Thus, Germans need to familiarize themselves with the situation of their Namibian counterparts and develop a measure of empathy. For Namibians too, it is important to develop concrete ideas about the situation in Germany. On a very practical level, a clear conception of how German politics works is needed to operate effectively. Thus, when the first motion calling for a recognition of the genocide for reparation and reconciliation was introduced by the Left Party in the Bundestag in 2007, some Namibian activists were gratified by the contents and believed that

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appropriate action would soon follow. I encountered a need to explain the German party system and the isolated position of the Left within it to convey a more realistic assessment and enhance an understanding of what could (and still can) be expected from such an initiative. Perhaps more importantly, the intricacies of the German federal system regularly come into play within the context of restitution. Even human remains are treated as objects or artifacts, which falls short of the understanding of victim communities who consider them as ancestors. This challenge also applies to the recent debate calling for their re-­humanization (Rassool 2015; Kössler 2018b). Restitutions of such human remains housed in anthropological collections and museums, are treated by the German side under the sovereign responsibility of the German member states (Länder) for cultural matters.8 Since foreign policy is a federal concern under the German constitution, the Foreign Office has acted in many cases as the main negotiator in dealing with the Namibian government. Further, according to the National Assembly resolution of October 2006 the Namibian government is supposed to act as a facilitator as opposed to a negotiator (National Assembly of the Republic of Namibia 2006). This messy institutional setup has led to quite problematic situations. In an exemplary way, this happened during the first repatriation of human remains deported from Namibia. In September 2011, the large Namibian delegation saw themselves slighted by the federal government, which had led the negotiations to bring about the event. Conditions in Berlin were such that some delegates even considered returning to Namibia without the skulls. According to later testimonies, it was vital for at least a good number of the delegates that individuals and groups of sympathetic civil society were forthcoming, supportive, and comforting.9 Such experiences forged personal relationships that went beyond a formal commitment to solidarity. With visits going back and forth during the subsequent years, with more Namibians coming to Berlin than Germans going to Namibia, friendships consolidated as solid bases for trust. Still, clear asymmetries and disparities persist. They concern access to information, as well as the unequal frequency with which Namibian and German members of the emerging network are present on each of the two poles. Clear differences also continue to exist in the actor constellations on both sides and in ways the issues are highlighted. Thus, public attention to issues concerning the genocide and its aftermath remains very uneven with Namibians being far more educated than Germans on these questions.

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Researching and Doing Memory Politics In an early stage of my research, an eminent colleague told me that he appreciated what I had in mind, but he asked nonetheless: how do you want to research this? At the time, around 2002, I thought of looking into communal commemorations in southern and central Namibia related to the genocide. The obvious dimension of addressing the German side of this memory politics only came to the fore in a serious way with the centenary events of 2004. This event moved me from endeavoring a thick and certainly sympathetic observation to pursuing a research that clearly went beyond participant observation. Since then, it has turned out to be a lasting part of my life for the past 16 years. With the rise of the movement that demanded recognition, an apology, and reparation for the genocide from Germany, a research simply on memory practices in Namibia would have been untenable. Within the context of entangled history, it has to be acknowledged that what happened in Namibia at the beginning of the twentieth century formed an integral part of German history, which remained indelibly linked to colonialism, in general, and to the Namibian War, in particular (Randeria 2002). It would have been an unsupportable abstraction from these linkages just to research Namibian memory practices. Moreover, on a pragmatic and ethically important level, many doors would have been closed on me had I not undertaken to place postcolonial entanglement center stage in my research. Turning to memory practices and particularly to those that cross-­ cultural and national divides carries certain risks. In reflecting the claim of an academic history devoted to “truth” in contradistinction to “myth” and “ideology” (Koselleck 2004), Aleida Assmann has pointed to the much more disorderly field one enters when dealing with the “history of memory” as an eminently social affair (Assmann 2013, pp. 21–22). Here, “history” is harnessed to direct political concerns and to construct commodified “heritage,” and the consequent contradictions cannot be resolved by simple appeals to purely academic scholarship since it will not be possible to preserve such formal purity in the face of popular needs and practices (Witz et al. 2017). In one way or other, the critical mind has to countenance “critique in the scuffle” (Marx 1970 [1844], p.  381). In researching postcolonial Namibian-German memory politics, this entails also taking sides.

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As a researcher, but also as a politically committed person and a citizen, I consider such positioning to be almost inevitable. From the beginning in the early 1990s, my research in Namibia has been informed by earlier commitments within the West German “Third World” movement and, since the late 1970s, by the broad anti-apartheid movement, which opposed the illegal occupation of Namibia by South Africa up to 1990 (Kössler 2016). At first sight, this idea may appear to militate against sterling propositions for scholarly behavior, which insists on refraining from value judgment. However, even the classical protagonist of this requirement stresses that the choice of research subject and, thus, the endeavor itself is value-­ driven (Weber 1973 [1917], pp. 499–500). Again, there is broad agreement about the need for detachment, or “stoicism,” when it comes to analyzing one’s findings regardless of sentiments (Marx 1968a [1861], p. 112). Likewise, more recent interventions in support of “public sociology” have strongly upheld a “professional” ethos, which must never be sacrificed for the intended public impact and advocacy (Burawoy 2005). Regardless of one’s precise stand on the issue of value judgment, then, strict scholarship does not clash necessarily with an active commitment to and on the field of study (Adorno et al. 1969). However, this broad statement addresses a wide range of different research situations and approaches, all of which beckon to address the balance to be struck between commitment and analytical distance. For one, public sociology is concerned more with conveying sociological knowledge to a broader, often action-oriented public than actually involving that public in the research process. Also, while at least some of the practitioners of public history take very seriously the intricate issues of orality and the need to respect its practitioners over and above their role as mere providers of sources, the exact relationship between these different protagonists seems rather loose. Demand for professionalism implies not only the application of tools of the trade but also a certain analytical distance, which is again not to be confused with disinterestedness. Things get messier and more interesting when we move to field situations where researchers engage with everyday situations on a systematic, intense, and long-term basis. Social anthropologist Gerd Spittler has termed his own approach “thick participation”—a clear reference to Clifford Geertz’s “thick description”; this approach radicalizes participant observation and entails “not only interpretative as opposed to physical participation but also social propinquity” (soziale Nähe) and life experience (Erleben), involving the full use of the

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researcher’s senses, clearly over and above “language-based research” (Spittler 2001, pp. 1, 19; 2014). From a different angle, these issues are explored in what may be called off-duty activities of anthropologists if the field will ever be receptive to such an idea. Convivial drinking emerges as a little talked about way of relaxing, fostering, and reproducing personal ties that are vital for successful research. As Steven van Wolputte and Mattia Fumanti conclude, such forays involve “bodily experience that, however upsetting they may be, also mark and present the self as a bounded unit of experience, summarized in Malinowski’s adage ‘I was there’” (Van Wolputte and Fumanti 2010, p. 280). For my purposes, the main issue is propinquity, as it entails all sorts of personal relationships, including friendship. Such friendship may be instrumental and limited to the research project, as social anthropologist Sakhumzi Mfecane has explained in reference to his research with HIV positive men in rural South Africa. Though genuine, the researcher may avoid becoming “deeply involved with participants’” on a personal level and also restrict the duration of such friendships to the research process (Mfecane 2014, pp. 127, 135). Still, such friendships generate demands and expectations that the researcher might consider questionable or that overtax their physical and emotional possibilities. In part, at least, this is precisely because expectations and expected benefits work in two directions within such contexts, which are again marked by material inequalities (Pauli 2006, pp.  33–36). Such expectations may also lead to outcomes and positions that will turn research into a collaborative and partly contentious discursive process (Daniel 2019). Relations of personal trust prove vital when researching situations that may put both researchers as well as their partners into jeopardy (cf. Reich 2019). Moreover, thick participation10 may foster those unexpected situations that prove vital for researching topics that touch on personal sensitivities and hinge on the “building up of relationships” (Häberlein 2014, p. 138). These brief pointers suffice to highlight the need and fecundity for messy rather than outwardly orderly approaches when researchers take account of a complex and disorderly reality. To be sure, such messiness needs to be retrieved in the process of analyzing data which also involves the researcher to create a distance from the subject matter, even in spite of personal relations and debts they may have incurred in the process. I see my own research in a similar vein, which might be termed as thick engagement. I would like to use the aforementioned experiences to elaborate on this approach.

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Although solidarity is not coextensive with personal friendship, the process I have outlined above shows the importance of personal encounters for outreach solidarity. Close long-term contacts have fostered personal friendships that grow out of solidarity and these have again fed into my research. My work in Namibia where I have paid many, sometimes prolonged, visits for nearly 30 years is driven by the friendships I have cultivated with a limited number of key informants among local, mainly Nama, communities. In my research, which I situate in the intersection of sociology, social anthropology, and history, different kinds of communication, personal, sometimes quite subjective and confidential, were employed strategically for proceeding, gaining information, and sorting out some of the confusing conflicts (Kössler 2005, 2015). At first sight, such relationships might appear purely instrumental, even though elements of reciprocity are involved. Thus, many of my interlocutors perceived my research on communal identities in southern Namibia as an effort to write at last “our history,” although this was not my intention. Still, I made serious efforts to accommodate as much of their concerns as possible, resulting in the book: In Search of Survival and Dignity (Kössler 2005). In terms of research ethics, I saw a clear obligation to make my research available to the communities with which I had become involved. The first and vital decision consisted in publishing my research in English, and not in German. It was gratifying, then, for me to receive reports and feedback on my book when talking to one of the communities. There were also individual exchanges, as well as signs of appreciation, including the launching of my book in 2005 by the late Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi. Almost imperceptibly, this network of contacts and friends transformed, broadened, and thickened as the issue of the genocide of 1904–1908 gained prominence, both in the public realm, particularly in Namibia, and in my own research which increasingly became intertwined with activism, in a way a continuation of my involvement in the struggle against Apartheid. That might still have been considered in terms of value orientation, where it was not too difficult to establish or maintain the prerequisite analytical distance. Such distance became an issue when my research topic blended with political pursuits in the fields of memory of the genocide and reconciliation in a way that relationships with many partners in Namibia were increasingly determined by a common purpose. As indicated above in connections with forms of solidarity, such common purpose does not obliterate a whole array of differences in outlook and everyday life experience. There also remain differences in the forms of

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work and action between activists and scholars even with an activist strain. Still, relationships formed in such contexts and growing into friendships differ markedly from friendly relationships formed in other fieldwork. They are decidedly not instrumental since they rely not only on mutual affection but also on a common concern, on trust and obligation that flow from its pursuit. The latter aspect came home to me with force and clarity when I had published Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past (2015). At the time, I imagined this might be the final step in an effort that had lasted more than a decade. I felt satisfied in a way and ready for new projects and challenges. It soon turned out that this was completely unrealistic. The book launch in Windhoek took place some six weeks after the German Foreign Office had it made known that they would no longer shun the term genocide in their pronouncements, and negotiations between the Namibian and the German governments were getting underway. So, there seemed to be reason for expecting the issue to come to some point of closure. Within a few months, new lines of conflict emerged. As has been shown, in Namibia, these revolve around the demand of large groups in victim communities to be represented in the negotiations in their own right; between Namibia (regardless of all differences) and Germany, disagreement continues around the demand for reparation and once again also around the verbal recognition of the genocide, and an appropriate apology. As before, these issues resulted in clear expectations and requests, not only for active engagement and advocacy which increasingly has included joint action with Namibians in Germany, mainly in Berlin; similarly, Namibian actors require advice for assessing and navigating the intricacies of German politics, also to calibrate their own actions. Meanwhile, the issue of how to deal with the memory of genocide is clearly far from coming to any form of closure; government negotiations have been stuck as they are well into their fourth year11; and oppositional groups of victim communities are campaigning vigorously in both Namibia and Germany and, at the same time, pursuing a lawsuit in New York. The need to continue my work both in terms of research and publication and as a matter of activist participation in Germany and support in Namibia flows out of the relationships I have cultivated over many years. It is also closely linked to the obligations that cannot be severed from these relations of solidarity and friendship. Again, turning to the scholarly side of this nexus, there remains a fine balance to be struck when it comes to issues of analytical distance or objectivity. Take the description and analysis of some of the inter-Namibian contradictions, such as those that have

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arisen around the negotiations between the Namibian and German governments and the insistence of victim groups for an autonomous role at the negotiating table. While it would not be appropriate to take sides in this matter for an outsider and for a German citizen, in particular, existing personal bonds and obviously quite diverse approaches by Namibian actors have meant that the conversation with those who stand for an autonomous role in the negotiations and oppose the victim groups being subsumed under the Namibian government is much more intensive for the great majority of German civil society actors, and for scholars immediately concerned with the issues of the long aftermath of the genocide. From my own perspective, I can link this apparent bias to some of my earlier work researching traditional communities in southern Namibia and, more broadly speaking, to my attempts at understanding the relationship between such groups and the modern, independent state in other parts of southern Africa (Kössler 2005, 2011, 2012a). These issues can be addressed as problems of institutional pluralism. Such pluralism entails fundamentally different social logics—that of the modern state, on the one hand, and that of traditional/ethnic communities, on the other. I suspect that part of the ongoing conflict in Namibia over the modalities of negotiation with Germany is linked to this institutionally grounded conflict (Kössler 2019a). Regardless of personal sentiments, I would argue that such considerations pertain to the realm of scholarship. They may inform politics, as any social science analysis might do, but they are not informed by politics or by demands of solidarity. They give clues to pursuing certain avenues of investigation. Still, conflicts between scholarly research and solidarity or friendship do arise. They mostly end in amicable discussions about issues ranging from factual mistakes to ways of presenting the cause in question. In some cases, though, the asymmetrical postcolonial relationship, which forms the broad framework of the entire process, calls for discretion. Longstanding personal propinquity and friendship have also generated trust on both sides of the relationship, such that information not suitable for publication, but essential for mutual understanding are shared regularly. Thus, solidarity, friendship, and common purpose, also controversy at times, have proven to be indispensable for the specific kind of research I have addressed in this contribution, and also for the political interventions this work entails.

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Notes 1. I would like to thank the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of the Western Cape for the opportunity to present some of my views in their seminar series on August 8, 2018. 2. The full text appears in English translation in Gewald 1999, pp. 172–173. Also see https://weareproudtopresent.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/ the-extermination-order/. Accessed June 5, 2019. 3. This information is according to an anonymous newspaper report based on Nampa news agency, The Namibian (Windhoek), August 31, 2018. Later developments, including the promotion of one leading Herero activist to the position of Deputy Minister in the Namibian government in March 2020, demonstrate the fluidity of these processes, as well as the sometimes surprising agency of participants. 4. For a more extensive argumentation of this issue, see Kössler and Melber 2002; Kössler 2012b. 5. Weber transformed Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft into processual ones, Verge meinschaftung/Vergesellschaftung, thereby escaping essentialistic implications (Weber 1985 [1922], pp. 21–23). 6. On the frequently misunderstood, potentially revolutionary meaning of the term “Third World,” see Kalter 2011, pp. 54–55. 7. It is important to distinguish responsibility from guilt. In the wake of the Holocaust, a fictitious claim assigning collective guilt to Germans was used as a ruse precisely to evade such responsibility. See Frei 2012 [1996], 2002. 8. The technical term is Kulturhoheit der Länder. 9. See accounts in Biwa 2012, 2017; Förster 2012, 2013; Kössler 2015, pp. 289–298. 10. The German originals differentiate between Teilnahme and Teilhabe. 11. At the time of revision of this text, German Ambassador Christian-­Matthias Schlaga, about to leave his post after completing his stint, made it clear that the negotiation process was not completed yet and stated “we do not have a timeline” (quoted from an interview in an anonymous newspaper report, Windhoek Observer, 28 June 2019).

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Häberlein, Tabea. 2014. Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilhabe—Ein Plädoyer für ethnologische Forschung über soziale Nahbeziehungen. Sociologus 64 (2): 127–154. Hondrich, Karl-Otto, and Claudia Koch-Arzberger. 1992. Solidarität in der modernen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Kalter, Christoph. 2011. Die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt. Dekolonisierung und neue radikale Linke in Frankreich. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Gibt es ein kollektives Gedächtnis. Divinatio 19: 23–28. Kössler, Reinhart. 2005. In Search of Survival and Dignity. Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia Under South African Rule. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan. ———. 2007. Facing a Fragmented Past: Memory, Culture and Politics in Namibia. Journal of Southern African Studies 33 (2): 361–382. ———. 2011. Traditional Leadership, Local Control and the Rule of Law in Southern Africa. In The Problem of Violence. Local Conflict Settlement in Contemporary Africa, ed. Georg Klute and Birgit Embaló, 283–300. Köln: Köppe. ———. 2012a. Ambivalences of Traditional Institutions in Southern Africa. In The Africana World: From Fragmentation to Unity and Renaissance, ed. Mammo Muchie, Sany Osha, and Matiotleng Mathu, 239–262. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa. ———. 2012b. Development and Solidarity: Conceptual Perspectives. In Die eine Welt schaffen. Praktiken von “Internationaler Solidarität” und “Internationaler Entwicklung”/Create One World. Practices of “International Solidarity” and “International Development”, ed. Berthold Unfried and Eva Himmelstoss, 19–37. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt. ———. 2015. Namibia and Germany. Negotiating the Past. Windhoek and Münster: University of Namibia Press and Westfälisches Dampfboot. ———. 2016. Namibia, Genocide and Germany: Reinhart Kössler Interview. Review of African Political Economy. http://roape.net/2016/11/01/ genocide-namibia-germany-interview-reinhart-kossler/. ———. 2018a. Cosmopolitanism and Reconciliation in a Postcolonial World. In Beyond Cosmopolitanism. Towards Planetary Transformations, ed. Ananta Giri, 215–231. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018b. Imperial Skullduggery, Science and the Issue of Provenance and Restitution: The Fate of Namibian Skulls in the Alexander Ecker Collection in Freiburg. Human Remains and Violence 4 (2): 27–44. https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/abstract/journals/hrv/4/2/hrv.4.issue-2.xml. ———. 2019a. Diversity in the Postcolonial State: The Case of the Return of Looted Heirlooms from Germany to Namibia in 2019. NAD: Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie: Diritto, Instituzioni, Società 2/2019: S. 109–124. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/NAD/issue/view/1421.

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———. 2019b. The Bible and the Whip. Entanglements around the Restitution of Robbed Heirlooms. ABI Working Paper No 12. https://www.arnold-bergstraesser.de/sites/default/files/field/pub-download/kossler_the_bible_the_ whip_final_0.pdf. ———. 2020. Postcolonial Asymmetry. Coping with the Consequences of Genocide Between Namibia and Germany. In Postcolonialism Cross-Examined. Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present, ed. Monika Albrecht, 117–134. Abingdon: Routledge. Kössler, Reinhart, and Henning Melber. 2002. Globale Solidarität? Eine Streitschrift. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel. ———. 2017. Völkermord  – und was dann? Die Politik der deutsch-namibischen Vergangenheitsbearbeitung. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel. Krüger, Gesine. 1999. Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein. Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkrieges in Namiba 1904 bis 1907. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Mann, Michael. 2003. Incoherent Empire. London & New York: Verso. Marx, Karl. 1968a [1861]. Theorien über den Mehrwert. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. ———. 1968b [1849]. Lohnarbeit und Kapital. In Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 6, 397–423. Berlin: Dietz. ———. 1970 [1844]. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung. In Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 1, 378–391. Berlin: Dietz. Mfecane, Sakhumzi. 2014. Friends in the Field. In Ethical Quandaries in Social Research, ed. Deborah Posel and Fiona C.  Ross, 125–139. Johannesburg: HRSC Press. National Assembly of the Republic of Namibia. 2006. Motion on the Ovaherero Genocide. http://genocide-namibia.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ 2006_09_Motion_Genocide_nam_parliament-1.pdf. Niezen, Ronald. 2018. Speaking for the Dead: The Memorial Politics of Genocide in Namibia and Germany. International Journal of Heritage Studies 24 (5): 547–567. Pauli, Julia. 2006. ‘Und was wirst Du geben?’ Situationen und Formen der Reziprozität in der Feldforschung. Ethnoscripts 8 (2): 30–47. Randeria, Shalini. 2002. Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India. In Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness, ed. Yehuda Elkana, Ivan Krastev, Elísio Macamo, and Shalini Randeria, 284–311. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Rassool, Ciraj. 2015. Human Remains, the Disciplines of the Dead and the South African Memorial Complex. In The Politics of Heritage in Africa, Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures, ed. Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool, 133–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Reich, Hanna Lena. 2019. Exploring the Night. Fieldwork Experiences from Nairobi. In The Multiplicity of Orders and Practice, ed. Thomas Hüsken, Alexander Solyga, and Dida Badi, 385–398. Köln: Köppe. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sobich, Frank-Oliver. 2006. “Schwarze Bestien, rote Gefahr”: Rassismus und Antisozialismus im deutschen Kaiserreich. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Spittler, Gerd. 2001. Teilnehmende Beobachtung als dichte Teilnahme. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 126: 1–25. ———. 2014. Dichte Teilnahme und darüber hinaus. Sociologus 64 (2): 207–230. Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen. Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag (R. Reisland). UN General Assembly. 1951. Convention 1021. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf. Van Wolputte, Steven, and Mattia Fumanti. 2010. Last Call for Alcohol. An Epilogue. In Beer in Africa. Drinking Spaces, States and Selves, ed. Steven Van Wolputte and Mattia Fumanti, 275–280. Wien: LIT. Weber, Max. 1973 [1917]. Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreiheit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften. In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 489–540. Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck). ———. 1985 [1922]. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Wegmann, Heiko. 2019. Vom Kolonialkrieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika zur Kolonialbewegung in Freiburg. Der Offizier und badische Veteranenführer Max Knecht (1874–1954). Freiburg: Rombach. Witz, Leslie, Gary Minkley, and Ciraj Rassool. 2017. Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zeller, Joachim. 2005. Genozid und Gedenken: Ein dokumentarischer Überblick. In Genozid und Gedenken, ed. Henning Melber, 163–188. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel. Zimmerer, Jürgen. 2001. Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner. Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia. Münster: LIT. ———. 2008. War, Concentration Camps and Genocide in South-West Africa. The First German Genocide. In Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War (1904–1908) in Namibia and Its Aftermath, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer, Joachim Zeller Jürgen, and Edward Neather, 41–63. Monmouth: Merlin Press. ———. 2011. Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust. Münster: LIT.

CHAPTER 9

Postcolonial Activists and European Museums Katrin Sieg

Omitting colonial history from the national narrative or depicting colonialism only through a flattering, nostalgic lens used to be the norm in most European history and art museums until well into the first decade of this century. Museums of ethnology and natural history exhibited the results of imperial hoarding, but rarely did they thematize the circumstances under which they had acquired human remains and precious artifacts. This has changed over the past two decades. Now, many museums embrace national or European narratives that acknowledge the reality of cultural diversity and foster more self-reflective approaches to collective history. They are searching for styles and techniques appropriate for their new role as “difference engines,” affirming cultural heterogeneity and fostering the qualities and skills required for citizenship in multicultural societies (Bennett 2006). This identity crisis echoes and even amplifies a larger social and political contradiction marked by the ubiquity of imperial remains and the fundamental reluctance to relate built environments, institutional structures, cultural habits, and structures of feeling shaped by

K. Sieg (*) Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_9

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colonial economies to the global system of conquest, colonization, and trade. Yet, in a context where colonial history is not consistently integrated into school curricula and public spheres, museums have become key sites for decolonizing myths of national genius and European superiority. On the one hand, they model newly cooperative modes of storytelling. On the other hand, they help legitimate critical, yet marginalized perspectives long considered threatening to a consensus-oriented museology. In former settler-colonial nations, indigenous communities and descendants of the enslaved have been the main agents of decolonizing museums. In the past, they have insisted on revising national narratives that privilege white immigrants. They have challenged institutional authority in addition to demanding a say in what is shown and how. They have also won the right to have human remains and sacred artifacts returned. From James Luna’s Artifact Piece (1987) and Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992) to Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s The Couple in the Cage (1992), artists’ performances and installations were key during the late 1980s and early 1990s in illuminating colonial practices of collecting and exhibiting, and exploring what these could tell us about whom the museum constructed as a subject of the gaze and as an object of representation. Some scholars are being critical of the museological preferences that have emerged in response to these contestations and expectations, but museums in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand have pioneered inclusive national narratives while altering their institutional structures and curatorial practices.1 In Europe, too, museums have taken a turn toward decolonizing. The House of European History (opened 2017) thematizes conquest, slavery, and colonialism as part of imperialist competition culminating in war and genocide. Museums of national history in Berlin and Copenhagen have mounted acclaimed temporary exhibitions in which “voices from the colonies” are incorporated in their permanent exhibitions. Smaller history museums in Manchester, Hanover, and Flensburg have likewise wrestled with colonialism in regionally specific ways. Art museums in Eindhoven, Amsterdam, Dresden, and Bremen have examined colonial and postcolonial imaginaries. The migration museum in Paris celebrates postcolonial migrations, whereas museums of slavery in Liverpool and Pointe-à-Pitre set their subject by necessity within the context of circum-Atlantic trade and plantation economy. Museums of ethnology across the European continent, quite a few of which have their origin as colonial museums, have

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recently rebranded themselves as museums of world culture. A number of them have undergone extensive makeovers during the last decade, metamorphosing behind closed doors.2 Among them are the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RCMA) in Tervuren, Belgium (reopened as Africamuseum in 2018), the Troopen Museum in Amsterdam, the World Museum in Vienna (reopened 2017), and the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin whose collections have moved to the Humboldt Forum since fall 2019. The Musée du Quay Branly was the first major museum in Europe built explicitly for a postcolonial age. It opened in Paris in 2006 and, since then, it has drawn large crowds, albeit with mixed reviews.3 Having assembled substantial parts of their collections in the heyday of the colonial era and holding material remains of the colonial and precolonial past, these museums of ethnology seek to reframe their collections now in celebration of diversity while bringing the institutions into alignment with national imaginaries, which have accentuated multiculturalism, European integration, and global connections over the past quarter century or so. Nonetheless, critics have problematized the museums’ embrace of multiculturalism without a concomitant effort to confront past violence, acquisition history, and the institution’s historic complicity with the colonial project. Without confronting “hard truths,” these museums risk institutionalizing a certain divorce between symbolic and social practices while positioning world culture museums as expedient fig leaves in fundamentally racist societies.4 European museums were long insulated from the political pressures experienced by museums in the Anglo-American world not least by a legal framework that protected them from accountability to indigenous communities. Although the affirmation of diversity had become normative, the European houses turned deaf ears to the right enshrined in the 12th article of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People: “the use and control of [indigenous groups’] ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains” (UN General Assembly 2007). Barricading themselves behind the claim to serve as custodians of humanity’s cultural heritage, self-proclaimed “universal museums” were long loath to entertain requests for returns or harmonize their internal rules with the code of ethics first passed in 1986 by the International Council of Museums (and subsequently amended in 2001 and 2004).5 This attitude has only recently begun to change.6 A report on colonial collections in French museums, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron and published in November 2018, epitomizes that shift. Programmatically

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titled “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics,” it has increased political pressure on museums from the top.7 The report recommends that museums step up provenance research and be proactive in the restitution process, and it has made waves not just in France.8 Moreover, in the eyes of critics, the reluctance of museums to change is partly a result of their institutional culture and demographic composition. Like other publicly funded high-cultural institutions in Europe, the professional staff does not reflect the cultural diversity that museums are supporting now. However, the discrepancy between cosmopolitan mission and institutional structures and codes has created an opening for activist groups. Postcolonial activists have pushed against the conceit of a “universal museum,” protesting against European museums’ selective adoption of the new museology, which has emerged since the late 1980s. Their wariness of a facile and safe multiculturalism pushes museums to confront the uncomfortable truth of colonial violence and their own historic implication in the colonial project. Activists publicly amplify indigenous requests for the restitution of human remains and patrimonial objects, and they use the return of remains as occasions to interrogate neocolonial international relations. In addition, postcolonial activists in Europe seek to link historic practices to contemporary struggles against racism, xenophobia, and the surge of nationalist, anti-immigrant movements and parties. By doing so, they discover museums not only as prime targets for contesting the cherished myths of European superior accomplishments but also as possible allies in their struggles for racial justice. They pressure these institutions to enact support for minoritized communities in tangible ways and mobilize anti-racist groups that might not have considered museums as allies. This chapter looks at activist interventions to analyze strategies they have prioritized to decolonize museums. It also considers how the museums have responded to them. I begin by examining the protests against the RMCA in Tervuren by Congolese immigrant associations and against the Humboldt Forum in Berlin by the activist coalition No-Humboldt 21, as well as the occupation of the Musée de la Cité de l’Immigration in Paris by undocumented workers. These actions are primarily aimed at changing institutional structures of racial exclusion. Afterward, I turn my attention to the guided walks through museums of history and art in Berlin, Paris, and London, which interrogate the representation of racialized difference. After looking back at more than a decade of decolonizing actions in and against museums, I conclude by asking how museums have redesigned

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their exhibitions and whether the institutional relationships they have struck with stakeholder groups have successfully aligned the museums with larger struggles for racial justice.

Decolonizing Institutional Structures Some activist interventions began as protests against a specific museum’s representation of colonial history. They led to regularized partnerships, which, in turn, allowed for a revision of the historical narrative. The fierce protests by the Congolese immigrant community against an exhibition shown at the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium in 2005 are a case in point. Founded by King Leopold II as a colonial museum to showcase artifacts from the Congo, the RMCA became embroiled in public debates about colonial violence perpetrated in the Congo, and the museum initially took a defensive stance.9 The vigorous protests of Congolese immigrant associations against the exhibition La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial (The Memory of the Congo: Colonial Times) at the RMCA led to the inclusion of Congolese immigrants on the museum’s advisory council.10 The resulting exchanges with curators subsequently prompted the museum to collaborate with local Congolese in the critically acclaimed exhibition Indépendance! (Independence!) which, on the fiftieth anniversary of independence, put a Congolese perspective front and center in the museum’s recollection of Belgian colonialism and its assessment of Congolese independence. The curator of that exhibition, social anthropologist Bambi Ceuppens, is now a permanent member of the curatorial staff of the recently reopened Africamuseum.11 The cooperation between the RCMA and local immigrants became a model for reorienting museums of ethnology across the continent. The museum spearheaded the first of a series of cultural programs and networks funded by the European Commission, and by taking on this leadership role, it contributed to the dissemination of this model as a best practice for emulation elsewhere. From 2007 to 2009, and from 2010 to 2012, five museums of ethnology under the leadership of the RCMA entered into a two-stage project named READ-ME I  +  II to exchange ideas about the role of ethnographic museums and to promote “a new relation to the ‘Other’, which will also inspire a societal reflection in a multicultural Europe” (READ-ME 2010).12 Museum professionals at participating museums collaborated with migrant and minority associations on exhibitions that thematized migration and cultural differences. Many

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museums of ethnology on the continent have since sought out community partners for exhibitions or events that showcase the cultural diversity of cities in which they are located. In 2011, for instance, the Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg mounted the exhibition Africans in Hamburg: An Encounter with Cultural Diversity, which presented the results of oral histories collected from African migrants.13 In 2013, the Überseemuseum Bremen (Overseas Museum Bremen) celebrated the opening of the new African section in its permanent exhibition by hosting an African Night with local associations. Yet, some of the efforts these museums and many others have made lack permanent cooperative arrangements with local networks of immigrant residents and institutions. There are several reasons for this disjunction: for one, museums remain committed to showcasing a variety of regions and/or the best of their collections, and curators are not motivated to nurture community relations when collections do not align with local demographics (Harris and O’Hanlon 2013). In addition, Vito Lattanzi notes that there remains a clear asymmetry of authority and expertise between museums and their partners, as well as a pattern of involving associations and individuals on an unpaid volunteer basis (Lattanzi 2013, pp.  231–232). It should not come as a surprise that, under such conditions, communities are not motivated to donate their labor to institutions. Since the early 2000s, the German government’s plan to reconstruct the former Hohenzollern Palace in the center of the capital Berlin has generated tremendous controversy. Critics of the plan object to the symbolic restauration of unified Germany’s imperial power, especially in view of the country’s prominent role in European unification and eastern expansion. These fears are not allayed by the plan to move the collections of the Museum of Ethnology—once among the largest in the world— from the suburb of Dahlem to what is named the Humboldt Forum within the Palace.14 The project has been touted as one of the largest cultural-­ political projects in Europe. According to a concept paper published by Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Foundation and one of the trio of directors of the Humboldt Forum, this organization will bring visitors “in touch with as much of the world as possible” (Parzinger 2011). Parzinger promises that the Forum will turn Berlin into a unique, internationally distinctive “center for the research of non-European cultures” and establish the German capital as “a leading cultural and museum city around the world” (Parzinger 2011).

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Back in 2007, as soon as the plans for the Humboldt Forum were announced, they faced fierce criticisms. In 2013, the No-Humboldt 21 coalition of postcolonial, anti-racist, and immigrant associations formed to stop the construction of the Humboldt Forum and demanded public debate about decolonization. 82 organizations signed their resolution. Under the leadership of three organizations—the artist collective artefakte//anti-Humboldt, Berlin-postcolonial (whose mission was to foster a critical colonial memory culture), and the online media platform Afrotak/ Cybernomads—, the coalition staged public discussions, teach-ins, and public happenings to call for returns and restitution while confronting Germany’s violent colonial history. The founding statement of No-Humboldt21 took issue with Parzinger’s 2011 concept paper: “[T]he current concept violates the dignity and property rights of communities in all parts of the world, it is Eurocentric and restorative. The establishment of the Humboldt Forum is a direct contradiction to the aim [of] promoting equality in a migration society” (No-Humboldt21 2013). The coalition organized public debates and artistic happenings, which sought to demonstrate the museum not as a legitimate owner of its own holdings, but as the beneficiary of colonial conquest and coercion. The colonial past should not be redeemed through a display of ill-gotten treasures, but it should be confronted head-on, and artifacts should not be used to entrench ideas of cultural difference and shore up an implicit German-European superior norm. They demanded that “experts from the countries of the global south [be] involved in presenting their own works in a way that promotes equality of opportunity, has an awareness of power dynamics and focusses [sic] on portraying similarities between peoples” (No-Humboldt21 2013). For example, artefakte//anti-Humboldt participated in an exhibition and a conference, titled Art and Jack-in-the-Box, in June 2015. The events took place at the Kunsthaus Dresden, a municipal art gallery in Dresden, a city in the eastern German state of Saxony. Art and Jack-in-the-Box was the last in a three-stage collaborative project, which had taken place over the course of the preceding year in Cape Town, South Africa and Porto Nuovo, Republic of Benin. Partners in this international collaboration came to Dresden. In addition, Afro-German activists from Berlin traveled to Dresden for the event. The city had achieved notoriety in international news as the birthplace of a right-wing populist movement known as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West). As Syrian refugees began to arrive in Germany in large numbers that summer, Dresden became a stronghold of the right-wing party Alternative for

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Germany, which held weekly rallies.15 In this charged political situation, the officials from Dresden University, the Museum of Ethnology, and the Kunsthaus gallery who welcomed conference participants all expressed their hope that this final presentation of artistic and activist collaborations would help to intervene in a racist local public sphere, open people’s minds, and restore the city’s tarnished image. Many of the artworks, talks, and performances presented at the Kunsthaus supported postcolonial countries’ requests for the return of human remains and contested artifacts. At a more general level, they sought to deconstruct and dismantle ethnological techniques of othering in a variety of artistic media and forms. Occupying the entire first room of the exhibition space, the art installation Columns of Memory by Nigerian artist Peju Layiwola combined columns made of colored plastic material with small masks and plaques recalling the famous Benin bronzes and, in its form and materiality, sought to mark violently ruptured traditions.16 Carted off by the British during a punitive raid in 1897, these valuable artifacts were later auctioned off in London and the Museum of Zoology, Anthropology, and Ethnology in Dresden purchased an estimated 10 percent of the more than 2500 bronze sculptures and plaques. Despite requests by the state of Nigeria, no European museum has returned any of the bronzes, although two sculptures depicting a bell and a bird, respectively, were returned voluntarily in 2014 by the grandson of a British agent who had participated in the looting.17 In Layiwola’s installation, birds and bells were featured on textile wall hangings surrounding numerous columns made of colored plastic, and replicas of the bronzes were attached to these columns. They recalled museum plinths but offered at the same time a Benin vernacular version, which reconnected the bronzes to contemporary Nigeria.18 The textile wall hangings, recalling the singular return of artifacts, assisted the project of restitution. Significantly, Layiwola’s sculptural reparation did not equal the imaginative restoration of Benin art, the king’s palace, or traditional society; instead, Layiwola emphasized the fact that she was part of the second generation of women sculptors, altering an artistic practice previously reserved for men. Today, she is one of the most outspoken, persistent, and internationally visible advocates of returning the Benin bronzes, a prolific maker of images and sculptures revolving around the raid, the organizer of one exhibition on the topic, as well as the editor of an anthology that discusses this cultural challenge.19 The installation Broken Windows 6.3 by the artist Dierk Schmidt, one of the members of artefakte//anti-Humboldt, might be regarded as the

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German counterpart to Layiwola’s imagined repatriation. It consisted of empty glass cases bearing etched and scratched markings, which resembled the glass boxes in which two of twenty Herero skulls had been presented during the 2011 ceremony held at the Charité research hospital on the occasion of their handover to a Namibian delegation. The numbers and inscriptions that were often etched and scratched into the skulls or affixed to them by racial scientists registered the history of their violent appropriation for scientific purposes and attested to their status as objects. Schmidt’s empty, scratched boxes preserved that violence, but it refused to duplicate it by representing the skulls. Instead, the empty boxes evoked the skulls’ utopian return to the status of the subject and to Namibia. This aspect became especially palpable in one box, which was scratched from the inside and punctured. Once displayed inside, the object appeared to have fled through a hole in the glass.20 In the discussions at the Kunsthaus, participants debated how the project of decolonization could best be achieved. Activists of color from Berlin were among those who most forcefully insisted that institutional change needed to have priority, that the staff of cultural institutions had to be made more ethnically diverse and include members of communities of color before tackling matters of repatriation and restitution and even before inventing new esthetic practices better capable of capturing cultural and social diversity.21 By contrast, many other participants believed that the deconstruction of forms and categories constituted political work on the imagination, cognition, and feelings that would have further effects on the institution as well as on the discourses of race and diversity in society at large. Whereas the former feared a purely symbolic approach to decolonizing the museum (and cultural institutions more generally), the latter decried the construction of a competition or a hierarchy between esthetic and institutional approaches to decolonization. While the collaboration with experts from the Global South was key to the coalition’s vision of cultural representation in a postcolonial world, the interventions organized by No-Humboldt21 differed from the protest at Tervuren and the museum-instigated collaborations noted above in that they upended, rearranged, and broadened the category of people to whom museums should be accountable. Among professionals, such accountability (when it is recognized) is restricted to the “source community,” namely, the descendants of the original makers to whom artifacts and collections may be traced and who may claim ownership and authority (Brown and Peers 2003, p. 2).22 In effect, the activists of No-Humboldt21 pushed open

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the legal concept of filiation, which defined who was deemed legitimate in filing a claim to restitution. Instead of establishing descent or, at least, cultural continuity in a limited sense, they called for a broader sense of affiliation and solidarity.23 Although Namibian immigrant Israel Kaunatjike and Tanzanian immigrant Mnyaka Sururu Mboro feature prominently in public discussions about the return of human remains, the organizations collaborating in No-Humboldt21 comprise black Berliners without a biographical connection to the former colonies, along with white Germans.24 Therefore, opposition to the Humboldt Forum echoed the shift of postcolonial politics toward the paradigms of critical whiteness studies in academia by including immigrants, racialized minorities, and white Europeans as subjects who insisted on entangled histories and were implicated in different ways in the work of decolonizing the former metropole. Although the coalition’s public actions have abated now with the completion of the Humboldt Forum, its website continues to function as an archive of ongoing debates about the project of decolonizing museums of ethnology. The Dresden event illustrates the expansion of who has a stake in museum representations beyond representatives of source communities like Layiwola, along with the broadening of what counts as political activism beyond calls for inclusive hiring practices and for the return of contested collections. It links decolonial activists to anti-racist constituents while engendering symbolic transformation as well as material, institutional change.25 Similarly, the occupation of the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris from October 2009 until January 2010 by 500 undocumented immigrant workers (sans-papiers), most of whom were from Mali and Senegal, expanded the salience of museums’ progressive aspirations to contemporary European denizens threatened by racialized labor and legal regimes. It differed from the interventions discussed above because activists were not concerned here with museum practices of collecting and exhibiting. Instead, they called out a contemporary museum’s ideological break with the colonial past and turned the institution into a stage for public demands for postcolonial justice. Occupiers chose the museum, which had opened in 2007, to protest their illegalization and discrimination in France, since the immigration museum sought to redeem the blatantly colonialist murals decorating the Palais de la Porte Dorée in which it was housed. Not unlike the Humboldt Forum, which seemed to be interested in redeeming the building’s imperialist envelope through a celebration of non-European material culture, the Musée de l’Histoire de

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l’Immigration occluded its historical origin in the Colonial Exposition of 1931. The four-month-long occupation drew on the pro-immigrant narrative of the museum to call out the government’s lagging implementation of new guidelines that provided a path to legalization and promised to protect undocumented migrants against predatory employers.26 Although this activist intervention used the museum merely as a visually effective backdrop, and not as a means to alter the institutional structure, it held the museum to its role as a decolonizing agent in order to contest contemporary structures of racialized inequality and injustice. Even before the age of Instagram, this was an inspired choice. Documentary photographer Mathieu Pernot picked up on the rhetorical opportunity this choice of venue afforded. His photograph Sans Papiers, which hung in the permanent exhibition as a reminder of the building’s history during my visit in 2015, framed the plight of undocumented workers as neocolonial by using the colonial-era frescoes in this space as a backdrop. It showed an occupier walking by a fresco depicting a white-bearded missionary in a white hooded robe, blessing two kneeling black men dressed only in loincloths and lifting their hands to him entreatingly. One figure was wearing slave shackles around his wrists, suggesting that slavery was part of a heathen society to which the missionary brought the promise of salvation. The juxtaposition between the young black man with an idealized image of France’s mission civilisatrice punctured the binaries the painting was reinforcing. Whereas the fresco suggested that vulnerability, dependency, and exploitation were products of an alien and violent society, this illegalized worker underscored that they were a function of French laws and policies. The young worker’s white hoodie also resembled the missionary’s robe, signaling that the postcolonial migrants who organized the occupation with the support of France’s largest trade union had assumed the place of the subject-agent of history. Their calls for justice and equality contrasted with the supplicant position of naked Africans in the fresco.27 Regretfully, as Sophia Labadi shows in her discussion of the occupation, the museum ultimately did not live up to its decolonizing mission. On the contrary, it invoked “security concerns” to expel the activists when the state refused to accede to their demands. Labadi explains how the museum, which had made no attempts to empower migrants beyond depicting migration in a positive light, conformed to the priorities prevailing in the political realm where the rights of racialized populations are easily subordinated to the “security” of the white majority (Labadi 2018, pp. 120–121).

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Together, these examples illustrate that the museum has become a significant actor in wider social debates. While interventions are not always primarily directed at institutional transformation, several of them have insisted on the institution’s responsibility to model inclusive hiring, staffing, and cooperative practices. For good reasons, activists have prodded museums to put into practice ideological promises of postcolonial justice, which often remain at a purely symbolic level of representation. Museums in Europe and elsewhere have tended to respond to such interventions (or their prospect) by seeking to transform themselves into postcolonial “contact zones.” The ascendancy of this concept can be traced to James Clifford’s seminal article, which adopts Mary Louise Pratt’s term of the colonial contact zone. Pratt defined “the contact zone” as a “space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and culturally separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (quoted in Clifford 1997, p. 192). The contact zone is marked by selective cultural appropriation and improvisation, and by the “auto-ethnographic” attempts of the colonized—not always received or heard by colonial powers—to explain their cultural system in terms that the powerful can understand (Pratt 1991, p.  35). By conceptualizing museums as contact zones, Clifford called attention to the epistemic violence lodged in centuries of colonial collecting, in owning the human remains and material culture of indigenous communities and exhibiting them in ways that supported ideologies of cultural hierarchy and the civilizing mission. He also pointed out in a more hopeful sense the way to undo this violence by describing what happened when curators in the Portland Art Museum invited Tlingit into their basement to share treasured objects from the group’s past with them, listened to the stories, songs, and memories activated by their encounter with these items, and grasped them as part of ongoing legal, political, and social struggles over land and fishing rights. To the Tlingit, their storytelling constituted gifts of trust that, in turn, incurred obligations on the part of the museum staff: “We’re telling you these things, [a Tlingit elder] says to the white people assembled. We hope you’ll back us up” (Clifford 1997, p. 190). Although Clifford offered this story in a set of cautionary tales about western institutions’ failure to meet indigenous peoples’ expectations raised by such invitations, the idea that museums could be conceptualized as contact zones quickly caught on as a shorthand for more egalitarian, reciprocal relations within this context. As Robin Boast pointed out in 2011, a museum

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mission statement rarely fails to invoke “multiperspectival representation” nowadays or acknowledge indigenous authority over an object’s meaning (Boast 2011, p.  56). What museums hope to accomplish by partnering with a community is to expand their visitor base and increase their profile and standing. Yet, many of these collaborative endeavors prove to be not only temporary but also superficial, as museums spruce up their exhibitions with videotaped testimony while retaining control of the overall exhibition. Labadi confirms Boast’s findings. She criticizes museums for inviting members of source communities to explain an object’s significance, all the while producing videos that can be integrated into the existing exhibition as a primary goal. However, Labadi notes that the museums in Manchester and Copenhagen she has studied are shifting away from such product-­ driven projects toward collaborations, which cede more space and authority to immigrants and their representatives. She traces this reorientation from largely consultative relations and one-off projects with immigrant communities toward more sustained efforts at immigrants’ capability-­ building—for instance, by seeking to overcome language barriers through language courses and by improving employment opportunities through professional training. To sum up, some activist interventions, particularly in the practice of ethnological collecting and exhibiting, aim to change exclusionary institutional structures by advocating for community involvement, curatorial partnerships, and international collaborations that would introduce divergent perspectives into the museum, push the museum into different political alignments and toward public advocacy for those it represents, and thereby contribute to the overcoming of racism in European societies. However, the manner in which museums have interpreted and implemented the concept of the museal contact zone demonstrates that cooperation with selected community partners all too easily reproduces the power differences between racialized people and museum staff. In addition, it proves that the voices of people of color invited into the center are subordinated to the museum’s message primarily to enhance its standing and relevance and that they are tokenized or turned into native informants, without increasing either their access to the institution or authority over the stories told in it about violent histories, cultural differences, or social opportunities. While museums’ facilitation of migrants’ language learning and basic professional training more directly tackles some barriers to the goal of social inclusion, these approaches sometimes revise

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narratives of colonialism and postcolonial relations, but they do not always or necessarily do so. Let me now turn to activist interventions that prioritize work on perception and the imagination as a precondition for tackling the structures underpinning institutional authority.

Decolonizing Perception How do museums shape what we see and, hence, what can be known about colonial history? In the last decade, a number of postcolonial scholars and intellectuals have prompted visitors to take a more skeptical look at museums by designing guided walks. These tours range from the project “Kolonialismus im Kasten” (Colonialism in a Box), created in 2009–2010 by a collective of German historians in the German History Museum and still ongoing, and Françoise Vergès’s guided walk “The Slave in the Louvre” (2012–2013) to Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art Tours” through several British art museums (since 2018). They offer what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal readings” of images, artifacts, and elisions (Said 1993, pp. 66–67). With this concept, Said urged fellow postcolonial scholars to bring into the foreground the larger historical and political processes on which seemingly unremarkable, commonplace references are contingent but remain unquestioned, to give an account of the operations of power that separate European lifestyle and colonial production site, and to restore the struggles of the colonized against colonial oppression that are typically excluded or distorted in a colonialist text. The tours aim to reveal the museum’s historic complicity with the colonial project and transform ways of seeing. These projects, which tend to be initiated and carried out by (art) historians, have contributed greatly to the popular diffusion of reading strategies developed in postcolonial studies, encouraging those who have signed up for or downloaded tours to adopt a more skeptical stance toward the institution of the museum and, more generally, toward authoritative claims about cultural difference. Although their methodologies are arguably similar, the three tours take place in rather divergent contexts. The differences between them return us to the difficulty of linking material and symbolic change and raise intriguing questions about how the museum may best support the decolonizing of international economic power relations. In 2009, a group of young women historians, most of them Ph.D. students focusing on various aspects of colonial history, developed a guided walk through the empire section in the German History Museum. The

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tour was part of a larger program of activist events and artistic happenings around Berlin that commemorated the 125th anniversary of the Africa Conference and explored the legacies of colonialism. The association Berlin-postcolonial, which had been founded two years earlier, took a leading role in coordinating events, and some members of the historians’ collective were actively involved in the association. The historians targeted the German History Museum because its permanent exhibition, having opened to some fanfare three years earlier, promised a forthright confrontation with mass violence and genocide in Germany’s past, yet squeezed all references to German colonialism into a single glass box. The museum’s aspiration to foster a self-reflective stance about national history provided the historians with a critical opening. They noted that the permanent exhibition presented visitors with a “national history that link[ed] them with some and divid[ed] them from others” (Bauche et al. 2013). The collective pinpointed the permanent exhibition’s approach to colonialism as an emblem of purposely ruptured connections, disavowing entangled histories, and producing what Ann Laura Stoler described as colonial “aphasia” (Stoler 2011).28 Not only had the museum unduly compressed colonial history, but it also suppressed colonialism as a key dimension of worker’s history, women’s history, history of science, and cultural history during the age of empire. “Colonialism in a Box” restored these severed linkages and unpacked the arrangement of objects in the colonial glass case. The accounts the guides provided often supplemented the information presented on the museum labels. For instance, they contrasted the museum’s representation of medical scientific advances through the photographs of Nobel prize laureate Robert Koch alone in his South African lab, with stories of his research in South and East Africa (then British and German colonies), where he collaborated with Africans and used them as medical subjects. They also told the story behind an oil painting in the “Prussian myths” section, Prussian Romance, which depicted the black military musician Gustav Sabac el-Cher in an embrace with a white woman (possibly his wife, Gertrud Perling). The musician’s father had been “gifted” to Prince Albert of Prussia by an Ottoman viceroy and worked as a valet at the Prussian court. While the accompanying label describes Sabac el-Cher as a “successful black Prussian,” evidenced by his career and marriage to Perling, the historians referred to his father’s status as a “slave” exchanged by aristocrats. They further noted the hardening of racial boundaries during the colonial era. Viewing Sabac el-Cher’s embrace without knowing

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about the harassment of interracial couples, the state’s curtailing of immigration from Africa, and the passing of anti-miscegenation laws during the colonial era, as the historians explained, the painting and its accompanying plaque suggested the successful career of a model migrant while bolstering—instead of interrogating—the myth of Prussian cosmopolitanism and tolerance.29 The historians’ commentaries about the objects displayed in the colonial box were particularly rich. At a time when the German government and the museum staff studiously avoided the term genocide to refer to the mass violence that German soldiers had committed in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia), the historians refrained from using euphemisms. They included mass violence and extermination in the story of German colonialism illustrated by such innocuous objects as cocoa tins, an oil painting of the Kilimanjaro, and the uniform of colonial troops. In addition, they raised crucial epistemological and ethical questions. A photo album belonging to a colonial soldier, which included images of an execution, catalyzed reflections on how museums were to deal responsibly with objects that reinscribed the (murderous or exoticizing) perspective of the colonizers. Drawings of anonymous black women prompted them to ask how museums were to cope with the absence or dearth of objects that could tell alternative stories of colonization from the perspective of the colonized. What to do when museum collections lacked objects that testified to the reality and agency of the colonized vis-à-vis colonial domination? “Colonialism in a Box” called out the museum for its insufficiently critical representation of the past, introduced competing perspectives, and situated its project in anti-racist, decolonial counterpublics. The collective collaborated with actors of color in Berlin’s anti-racist and postcolonial circles to record the recontextualizing narratives they had researched, and in 2013 it launched a website, which included an audio guide that could be downloaded for free. It alerted visitors to the politics of museological choices by confronting visitors with discordant visual and aural tracks, by asking them to veer off the prescribed path, and by revealing the implications of spatial layout. It thereby encouraged them to be more astute readers of authoritative historical narratives and institutional truth claims. The collective seized the opening created by the museum’s aspiration to fostering self-reflective democratic citizenship through an unsparing confrontation with past violence. However, the collective refuted the museum’s assertion that Germany has completed the labor of mourning required to achieve an anti-fascist, non-racist identity. “Colonialism in a Box”

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underscored the need to change institutional codes as a condition for overcoming crucial barriers to democratic participation. As part of the 2012 Paris Triennial, postcolonial theorist Françoise Vergès curated guided walks through the Louvre called “The Slave at the Louvre: An Invisible Humanity.” It bore similarities with “Colonialism in a Box,” but it was specifically tailored to the genre of the art museum. The Louvre was a willing partner in the tour. Since 2000, the museum has showcased non-European masterpieces in its Pavillon des Sessions (now renamed the Department of the Arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas) to counter the charge of Eurocentrism and to refute the implication that only European art is worthy of that designation, whereas non-­ Europeans merely create “artifacts.”30 The revision of esthetic categories evidenced by such institutional changes served as a critical opening for Vergès. Art historian Carol Duncan has referred to the Louvre as the first “truly modern art museum” (Duncan 1991, p. 88). When in 1793 the French revolutionaries designated the royal art collection as a public museum, they signaled the political virtuousness of their own government. By converting treasures, which had enhanced the king’s standing or had underscored the legitimacy of his rule, into evidence of individual and national genius, the Louvre powerfully dramatized the epochal turn. Duncan characterizes the function of the western art museum typified by the Louvre as that which makes the modern state look good: “progressive, concerned about the spiritual life of its citizens, a preserver of past achievement and a provider for the common good” (Duncan 1991, p. 93). At the same time, Duncan argues, the art museum provides a narrative of the history of art that not only flatters nationalist narcissisms (the Louvre popularized the periodization of art history into distinct national schools, with French art at its apex), but also purges art history of “social and political conflict, and distills it down to a series of triumphs, mostly of individual genius” (Duncan 1991, p. 94). It presents as national or universal very particular class and gender interests. Moreover, its idealization of active contemplation affirms a form of engaged citizenship without the need to redistribute any real power. Finally, the Louvre’s seemingly neutral tracking of the evolution of forms and techniques from Egyptian and Greek antiquity via the Renaissance to European modernity exemplifies the Enlightenment’s enshrining of scientific truths, empiricism, and reason in secular rituals, which usurp the authority of religious belief they purport to supersede. Duncan’s analysis suggests a number of promising entry points for the

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project of decolonizing the art museum. Vergès’s guided walk builds upon some of them. Born in Paris, raised in the French Overseas Department La Réunion, and educated in Paris and Berkeley, Vergès serves as Chair of the Postcolonial Studies department in the Sorbonne’s College of Global Studies. She is also an active public intellectual in colonial memory politics outside of academia, serving on the committee of the Memorial for the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes and chairing the French National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery.31 The framing dates of the Louvre’s collection (1793–1848) hold special significance in the history of slavery since the first refers to the first abolition of slavery after the Haitian Revolution and the second to the abolition of slavery in all French colonies after Napoleon had reintroduced the practice in 1802. Vergès did not seek to shed light on depictions of slaves in the exhibition or in the depot, as the walk’s title seemed to suggest; rather, she invited curators and artists to join her in historicizing selected paintings in the galleries and use them as prompts for thinking about race and colonialism today. The invited artists were sent an inventory of paintings beforehand, an inventory that ranged from still lives of objects that had been brought to Europe through trade and from plantations to mythological depictions such as Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Vergès’s introduction to the walk alerted visitors that she would contest the focus on individual genius and elision of social and political conflict in art history. It was the role of curators to provide biographies of objects such as cowrie shells, tobacco, sugar, and tea, which had arrived in European households, and place them within the colonial economy, which had remained outside of the frame. Examining a canonical painting such as François Auguste Biard’s Abolition of Slavery, 27 April 1848 prompted Vergès to ask how freedom came to be iconographically associated with whiteness, and blackness with servitude, and contrast the privileging of white freedom-lovers in abolitionist paintings such as this one with the historic centrality of the enslaved in struggles for freedom. Vergès’s walks employed the method of contrapuntal reading, which Said had developed for literary criticism, and which art historian Julie Hochstrasser had adapted to postcolonial art criticism in her seminal study Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (2007). In this book, Hochstrasser employs as her main critical methods historicization, denaturalization, and revisionism driven by the perspective and historical experience of the colonized. They allow her to conclude that the alluring painted objects in Golden Age still lives function as commodity fetishes disavowing

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the excruciating and violent conditions under which colonial products were made, traded, and transported to Europe. Vergès shared Hochstrasser’s conclusion that rendering the labor and humanity of the enslaved invisible naturalizes the gap between “consumers and producers in a society learning new ways to live in luxury” (Vergès 2016, p.  11). Both critics help to clarify the relevance of historicizing artistic representations of slavery for people today. Whereas Hochstrasser directs her critique to art history, Vergès addresses hers to the museum. While docent tours are common in art museums, they tend to shore up the idea of artistic genius. By contrast, Vergès has promoted an approach to artworks that is conversational, critical, and creative. Participating artists are invited to associate freely with a painting of their choice and draw connections to the present, to politics, or to another artform.32 For instance, black British filmmaker Isaac Julien reflected on the drowned African migrants on the shores of the island of Lampedusa, as he stood in front of The Raft of the Medusa. The same painting, and the legend depicted in it, inspired Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé to “develop a theory of literary cannibalism” that would devour metropolitan tropes and traditions (Vergès 2016, p. 11). The tour’s open, improvisational style of conversation aimed to puncture the secular rituals enacted at art museums where individual strolls or docent tours insulated a glorified cultural heritage from historical or political inquiry. While “The Slave in the Louvre” did not find as extensive an audience as “Colonialism in a Box” had, the postcolonial artists and intellectuals who serve as guides resembled the Berlin collective by modeling a similarly skeptical and interrogative mode of citizenship. Six years later, Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art Tours” through six museums in London, including the British Museum, aroused considerable attention in the press, social media, by politicians, and among museum scholars. In addition to supplementing the portraits of prominent national figures with information about their significance for colonial history, the art historian introduced listeners to a range of topics that were relevant for decolonizing the museum—beginning with the question of returning stolen objects and considering the ethics of displaying sacred artifacts. The tabloid Daily Mail and the London Times criticized the tours, and a Member of Parliament denounced them as “sensationalist” (quoted in Procter 2018). Unintimidated by the initial shrill attacks, Procter took the opportunity to explain her approach and objectives in the opinion pages of the Guardian and subtly steered traffic toward her website The

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Exhibitionist where tickets and “Uncomfortable Art” merchandise such as buttons and postcards can be purchased (see Figs. 9.1 and 9.2). The guide’s short bio can be found on her agency Greene & Heaton’s website. Greene & Heaton frame Procter, an Australian who lives in London, as an enterprising millennial: unable to find a job after completing her degree as an art historian, the young “museum enthusiast” began to podcast reviews of exhibitions and museums, before finding notoriety and success with Uncomfortable Art Tours (Greene & Heaton). An article in the Guardian that secured Procter’s reputation condenses the tours into unabashedly provocative questions: “Was Lord Nelson a white supremacist? Was Queen Victoria a thief?” (Minamore 2018). The text is accompanied by illustrations that superimpose the terms “Slaver!” and “Invader!” over portraits of Queen Elisabeth I and Lord Nelson, graffiti-­ style. Guardian reporter Bridget Minamore has characterized Procter’s audience as typically white, young, and female. She goes on to note that

Fig. 9.1  TheExhibitionist.org website banner

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Fig. 9.2  TheExhibitionist.org website banner

there is little discussion during the tour because participants broadly agree with Procter’s narrative. The reporter remarks as well that she finds the tour both entertaining and educational. According to Procter, museum professionals are studying her tour as a model for how to design similar walks through their houses as well. By 2018, the project of decolonizing the art museum has turned mainstream and profitable. Whether they target history or art museums, the three tours share the contrapuntal approach developed by Said and Hochstrasser: they set exhibited objects within a larger material history that subtends representation but is elided by it; they restore histories of imperialist violence effaced by the museum’s focus on artists, collectors, national schools, and formal properties; they contrast the colonialist perspective encoded in what is shown and how with stories that center on the agency of the colonized; and they draw lines between historical colonialism and contemporary neocolonial practices of consumption in- and outside of the museum. Whereas “Colonialism in a Box” supplements museum displays with object biographies that restore the imperialist power relations in which the acquisition of ethnological artifacts takes place, Vergès and Procter identify and criticize specifically the art museum’s historic support for colonialism. By fostering a stance of uncritical contemplation, it helped mystify the process of

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dehumanization and exploitation as a civilizing mission and rendered the humanity of distant workers invisible. All of the institutions targeted by the three interventions tolerated the tours or even cooperated with the guides. While all tours cultivated a contrarian and subcultural rhetoric (which was, in turn, commodified in the form of political messaging buttons by Procter), only the “Colonialism in a Box” tour managed to hack the museum enduringly on behalf of postcolonial, anti-racist counterpublics. The sustained interest generated by the tour, the audio guide, and the careful updating of the website likely contributed to the museum’s decision to organize a temporary exhibition “German Colonialism” (October 2016–May 2017), which garnered wide critical and popular acclaim.33 It remains uncertain, though, whether the show—presented during a transitional moment of the museum’s history—will infuse the museum’s permanent exhibition with a contrapuntal, multiperspectival museology championed by the historians’ collective.34 At every single public discussion that was part of the event program accompanying “German Colonialism,” audience members asked the museum staff how the objects and ideas of the special exhibition would be incorporated into the museum’s narrative of German history. I heard these questions as signs of a desire to lock in the anti-racist consensus they saw expressed in the exhibition and make it durable, shortly after a right-wing party had won seats in parliament for the first time since WWII. The AfD (Alternative for Germany) party amplified the volume of anti-immigrant, overtly racist language in the public sphere. It also challenged the prospect of decolonial reframing of exhibited ethnological objects while questioning the need for provenance research (Schulz 2018). While the “German Colonialism” exhibition raised the matter of violent acquisition processes and debates about provenance research and restitution of artifacts, it made scant efforts to include African perspectives on these questions or collaborate with experts from countries in the global South, as the No-Humboldt21 activists had demanded. Although the exhibition furnished in many ways a model of anti-racist pedagogy supported by community collaboration, the preponderance of black voices and faces in the exhibition and the online materials complementing it obscured the museum’s scant attention to international relations, and to the claims of African, rather than Afro-­ German, stakeholders. The museum positioned Black Germans as the main agents of decolonial work: it framed them as contemporaries who continue to be mortgaged to racist perceptions, beliefs, and feelings that

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thickened as an effect of colonial interactions and predations. It also provided Black German anti-racist activism with a heroic lineage going back to anti-colonial struggles. The centrality of a Black German perspective on German colonialism and its afterlife was signaled by the museum’s invitation to Sharon Otoo, a Berlin-based Black writer who had recently been awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize for literature delivered the welcome address to the assembled cultural luminaries and political dignitaries at the festive opening of the exhibition. As Otoo was speaking, a group of Herero activists stood in silent protest outside the museum doors. While some protesters belonged to the Berlin-postcolonial network, others traveled from Namibia to attend the first congress “Restorative Justice after Genocide” in the German capital to reiterate their call for an official apology and for reparations. Their protest threw into relief the exhibition’s neglect of the question of how to decolonize international relations. It also highlighted that mobilizing domestic anti-racist initiatives for postcolonial politics may conflate both agendas and falsely suggest that the solutions to anti-racism also solve the problem of international power differences. To the Herero protesters outside the opening night party, the genocide and negotiations surrounding apology and reparations highlight persistent inequalities within multiethnic postcolonial nations and in the global political economy.35 These cannot be solved through practical solutions offered within the exhibition, which advocated for the removal of colonial traces from everyday language and street signs, and for the return of artifacts and human remains. The other, rather obvious point driven home by the Herero protesters is that the activist interventions should not be measured by how effectively they compel museums to adapt their practices of collecting and exhibiting. Instead, they aim to draw museums and the people who visit them into larger political struggles about race, justice, and representation. They reveal that museums have long served to naturalize partisan interests and agitate the institution to realign its allegiances. They seek to change the way museums represent the colonial past in order to open a space for imagining more equitable modes of metropolitan conviviality. Where the three projects differ is the degree to which they prefigure such conviviality in their very process, and thereby avoid confining social transformation to the symbolic realm. The prominence of intellectuals and artists in interventions that prioritize symbolic practices have provoked accusations of individuals profiting from the work of postcolonial critique, while racist and exclusionary

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practices are persisting. For instance, the project “Plantation Congolaise” (CATPC) has criticized postcolonial artists on that count. It targets museums as places where the divorce of critique from social transformation becomes institutionalized. CATPC proposes to repatriate the profit generated by the sale of Congolese chocolate sculptures on the international art market back to the plantation and support its transformation into a worker-owned cooperative. The video documentation of this project on the walls of the white cube, and the names of the two internationally renowned artists who have also sponsored the project, Sami Baloji and Renzo Martens, on the plaque next to it mimic the familiar mode of artistic display and allow the museum to ask wealthy patrons for donations. Yet, the project’s commodified form of appearance functions now as a placeholder for economic processes that accord a different position to the museum in racial justice and economic redistribution projects (Martens 2017). Moreover, it encourages a mode of consumption quite different from the traditional contemplation of an auratic object through which cultural capital accrues to institution, patron, and connoisseur. It exposes processes through which art generates value in international institutional contexts. Rather than veil socioeconomic and political conflicts behind esthetic concerns and categories, the CATPC documentary enjoins viewers to grapple with the ways in which art is implicated in neocolonial processes. Similarly, the local history museum in the Berlin district of Treptow has integrated since 2017 a community-curated display of a human zoo in its permanent exhibition. Alongside images and biographies of performers, it includes documentation of the wide variety of decolonizing initiatives and activist struggles in Berlin. As in the case of CATPC, the framed “artworks” on the wall point to political contestations beyond the museum and invite visitors to join or at least learn more about these struggles outside the museum. This approach opens the museum to the concerns of the local community while impeding the drawing of boundaries around the past or the political tensions and social inequalities in metropolitan society.

Conclusion Against museums’ habit to recognize the stakes of source communities only under very restricted circumstances, postcolonial activists have asserted the interests of racialized people today, whether they are descended from the formerly colonized or not, because they are held hostage by

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patterns of perception that have become entrenched since the colonial era. Against museums’ tendency to close off colonialism in the past, they take issue with neocolonial structures and the racialization of the global economy. Against the inclination to depict colonialism as something that happened in another part of the world, they propose the concept of entangled histories. And against the museums’ documentation of the material culture and physical anthropology of the colonized, they promote the interrogation of whiteness, of European lifestyles and prerogatives as being contingent on non-European colonization and exploitation. Immigrants, people of color, and artists in Europe have developed contrapuntal accounts of museums’ implication in colonial economies in order to contest the myth that Europe’s political and economic achievements are products of a superior civilization and that migrants and refugees are now seeking to free-load on these achievements. Historicizing our globalized world allows them to show how museums, along with other scientific and cultural institutions, nurture the delusion that the attainment of democracy, peace, and prosperity is an autonomous accomplishment. Juxtaposing hegemonic narratives with the perspective and the struggles of the colonized allows visitors to grasp deeply entangled, violent histories, which reveal that European affluence is inseparable from the control and exploitation of the non-European world. The interventions I have discussed in this essay target museums that have already positioned themselves as progressive institutions, which are attuned to new museological approaches. While some groups have brought pressure on museums to include experts from countries of the global South or from immigrant and minority communities in curatorial decisions about what and how to display (or return), others focus their efforts on raising visitors’ awareness of the epistemic and cultural violence in which museological choices implicate them. Museums have in turn sought to strike various compromises in response to demands for inclusion and revision. Many have embraced the concept of a museological contact zone by inviting communities into the institution, but they continue to subordinate their contributions to hegemonic narratives and exploit their labor. Others have begun to acquire works by non-European artists and of European artists of color to supplement and diversify their collection, without, however, thematizing how European art has contributed to rendering the humanity and the labor of non-Europeans invisible, and how the international art market continues to generate value by estheticizing postcolonial, racialized conflicts. To forestall such compromises, many

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activist interventions insist on a two-pronged approach: changing perceptions as well as institutional structures and protocols. Museums have now reopened to the public, most recently, in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Tervuren. The mammoth Humboldt Forum, protested so vigorously for nearly a decade, is scheduled to open in stages beginning 2020. While a detailed assessment of the changes they have made falls outside the purview of this chapter, it seems fair to conclude that, with the notable exception of the House of European History, the days of master narratives are over. In Vienna and Tervuren, museums favor a disarmingly eclectic approach: they document past wrongs, pose questions about the ethics of exhibiting, teach new ways of seeing, and offer more critical accounts of colonialism than before. They still strive to introduce their visitors to a specific part of the non-European world through artifacts or visual media, but often in partnership with immigrant communities and sometimes by hiring curators of color. Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art Tours” fit into such an approach, as museums seek to combine safe-space multiculturalism with unsparing confrontations with the colonial past. Few postcolonial or anti-racist activists will be satisfied by such eclecticism, but it is hard to imagine that they will protest these new museums.

Notes 1. Just to give two examples: Silke Arnold-de Simine criticizes the premise that empathy with suffering produces a greater sense of social or political solidarity; Margaret Werry expresses skepticism toward the style of “soft belonging” enacted at the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum in New Zealand Aotearoa (Arnold-de Simine 2013; Werry 2012). 2. For an overview of the debates that accompanied these transformations, see the section on Ethnographic and World Culture Museums in Peressut et al. (2013). This is one of the capstone volumes published online as an open access document from the multiyear research cluster on Museums in the Age of Migrations (MeLa) with support from the European Commission. See Plankensteiner 2018. 3. See Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Diaz 2008. 4. For instance, Sally Price notes the museum’s decontextualizing, estheticizing framing of non-European artifacts (and artists). The fetishizing, depoliticizing gaze at difference cultivated in the permanent exhibition, she charges, not only contributes little to an understanding of postcolonial conflicts in France, but harnesses art to compensate for racist discrimina-

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tion and state violence against postcolonial communities (Price 2007, p. 128). Nelia Diaz arrives at a similar judgment (Diaz 2008). 5. See Simpson 2001. Price captures the initial resistance of the Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) to Maori demands for repatriating human remains in Paris Primitive. The MQB has since then changed its stance. By contrast, neither the British Museum or the Humboldt Forum have budged much so far. See the comments by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, about her reasons for resigning from the advisory council of the Humboldt Forum (Savoy 2017, p. 9). 6. In France, years-long negotiations resulted in the return of the remains of Sara Baartman to South Africa in 2002. In Germany, small groups of human remains from the erstwhile colony of German-Southwest Africa (present-­day Namibia) have been returned from institutes in Berlin and Freiburg since 2011, and in 2019, two objects belonging to the Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi were returned from the Linden museum of ethnology in Stuttgart. Austria repatriated the remains of a San couple to South Africa. New Zealand has successfully repatriated many Maori remains from European museums. 7. The report, authored by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, is available online. See Sarr and Savoy 2018. 8. In Germany, two university research clusters recently tackled the challenge of how to decolonize museums. At the University of Tübingen, Thomas Thiemeyer, professor of cultural and museum studies, ethnologist Gabriele Alex, and the Linden Museum in Stuttgart collaborated on a research project entitled “Difficult Heritage: How to Deal with Colonial-Era Objects in Ethnologial Museums” (Schwieriges Erbe: Vom Umgang mit kolonialzeitlichen Objekten in ethnologischen Museen, 2016–2018). Historian Bernd-­Stefan Grewe at the University of Freiburg directed the research cluster “Colonial Worlds” (Koloniale Welten, 2015–2018) with support from the German Research Council. At the transnational level, such investigations are supported by funding from the European Commission. See note 2 about MeLa and note 11 about READ-ME I + II. 9. For a detailed discussion of the RCMA’s changing stance, see Bragard 2011; for a more recent and more skeptical assessment, see Goddeeris 2015. For a discussion of public debates about Belgian colonialism following the publication of Adam Hochschild’s best-selling book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism, see Castryck 2006. 10. See the interview with Vito Lattanzi on the lessons drawn by European museum professionals from the Belgian case in Lattanzi (2013). 11. For a discussion of the reopened museum, see Hochschild 2020. 12. See also http://www.africamuseum.be/.

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13. The Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg was renamed Museum am Rothenbaum. Künste und Kulturen der Welt in 2018. 14. For a discussion of the circumstances under which the erstwhile Royal Ethnology Museum in Berlin amassed its vast collection, see Zimmerman 2001. 15. The activist group Dresden-postkolonial organized a city walk for conference participants that took us by the museum of ethnology and a former exhibition site for human zoos, but also by the courthouse where an Egyptian immigrant and her husband had been murdered in 2009, and where a public memorial to these hate crimes, made by a Turkish German artist, had recently been defaced. To our student activist guide, colonial history, recent hate crimes, and current xenophobia were linked by racism. 16. For a discussion of the significance of the Benin bronzes for art history and for the debate about restitution, see Lidchi 1997. 17. See also Layiwola 2014. 18. The kingdom of Benin, where the raid occurred, is located in today’s Nigeria. It is not to be confused with the contemporary Republic of Benin, called the kingdom of Dahomey, during the colonial era. 19. See Layiwola 2010. 20. Schmidt’s interest in reparative justice goes back to his cycle of abstract paintings about the Herero genocide, titled Die Teilung der Erde— Tableaux on the Legal Synopsis of the Berlin Africa Conference, 2005–2011. It was exhibited at documenta XII (2007). In 2018, a retrospective of his work was shown in Madrid. See Schmidt 2018. 21. Discussions about diversity—and lack of it—in media and the arts had become more prominent since 2010, in response to the use of blackface in German theater. For a discussion of that debate, see Sieg 2015. 22. British museum scholars Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers, in their anthology Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader (2003) apply the term “source communities,” sometimes called “originating communities,” to “groups in the past when artifacts were collected, as well as to their descendants today.” Against critics’ charge of an asymmetrical, predatory, and extractive relationship signaled by the term “source community,” Brown and Peers offer the term to recognize “that source communities have legitimate moral and cultural stakes or forms of ownership in museum collections, and that they may have special claims, needs, or rights of access to material heritage held by museums. In this new relationship, museums … acknowledge a moral and ethical (and sometimes political) obligation to involve source communities in decisions affecting their material heritage” (Brown and Peers 2003, p. 2). Note, however, that these claims and obligations are not legally binding.

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23. James Clifford notes the legal negotiations necessary for the return and burial of the remains of Ishi in 2000 (Clifford 2013). The legal broadening of the terms “filiation” and “source community” was also fought for by Native American groups who in 2007 sued the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology for the return of unidentified human remains. For a discussion of that process, see Lonetree 2012. However, the revision of the Native American Graves and Repatriations Act in order to accommodate the return of unidentified remains, or of remains of individuals (like Ishi) whose community of origin has no contemporary descendants, differs from the shift I discuss in Europe, where postcolonial activists have identified racialized communities as proper stakeholders of museum practices regardless of descent. 24. The same was the case in Vienna, where Black Austrians opposed the exhibition Benin—Kings and Rituals at the Worldmuseum (2009) and supported the Nigerian state’s request for the return of looted masks and sculptures. However, despite the presence of Nigerian refugees in Vienna at the time, that group was not the main driver of the protests and public discussions; conversely, the Black Austrians who engaged with the museum did not claim direct filiation with the makers of the prized artifacts, but rather understood themselves as being in solidarity with Nigerians. These discussions are documented in Kazeem et al. (2009). 25. For a discussion of several of the events organized by artifakte//anti-­ Humboldt, see the special issue “Afterlives” on the online journal darkmatter (November 2013). 26. In June 2010, the French government had adopted “New Guidelines on Regularization Through Work,” which promised legal status to undocumented migrants with a full-time work contract for 12 out of the previous 18 months. 27. For a detailed discussion of the occupation and its outcomes, see Labadi 2018. 28. For a detailed reading of “Colonialism in a Box” as an attempt to undo colonial aphasia, see Sieg forthcoming. 29. See also Pieken and Kruse 2007. 30. James Clifford (1988) spelled out the value hierarchy contained in these terms in “On Collecting Art and Culture.” 31. From 2003 to 2010, Vergès was part of a group that sought to develop plans for a museum on La Réunion, plans that ultimately failed to come to fruition. She tells the story of the Maison des civilizations et de l’unité réunionnaise (House of Civilizations and of La Réunion’s Unity) in Vergès (2014). 32. Vergès described the preparation of the tour as follows: “An inventory of the paintings or objects exhibited in the galleries and that made reference

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to slavery was sent to people that I had invited: Shuck One, the graphic artist; Leonora Miano, the writer; Carpanin Marimoutou, the poet and professor of literature; Isaac Julien, the visual artist; and Maryse Condé, the writer. Each person chose one of the inventoried objects. On the day of the tour, the visitors were welcomed by three people: Laurella Rinçon, a Conservateur du patrimoine; by one of my guests; and by me. I introduced the visit, first explaining the role and the place of colonial slavery in the culture and history of European society and the importance of its heritage for the contemporary world, Laurella Rinçon presented the artists, and the invited guest was given carte blanche to speak either about the work or the place of slavery in his or her own work, or about anything that the painting or the object brought up in his or her mind” (Vergès 2013). 33. For a detailed reading of that exhibition, see Sieg forthcoming. 34. The exhibition ran after Alexander Koch had resigned as the DHM’s director (summer 2016) and before his successor Raphael Gross assumed the post (2017). 35. The slogan “About us without us is against us” on the signs refers to the negotiations between the German and Namibian governments, which neither—in the estimation of many Herero and Nama activists—sufficiently includes the voices of affected communities, nor represents the interests of Herero dispersed by the genocide to neighboring countries, whose governments are not party to the negotiations. For a detailed discussion of the controversial negotiation process, see Kößler 2015.

References Arnold-de Simine, Silke. 2013. Mediating Memory in the Museum. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bauche, Manuela, Dörte Lerp, Susann Lewerenz, Marie Muschalek, and Kristin Weber. 2013. Kolonialismus im Kasten: Erinnern und Vergessen im DHM. Publikative.org, February 26. Bennett, Tony. 2006. Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture. In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures, Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A.  Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, 46–69. Durham: Duke University Press. Boast, Robin. 2011. Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited. Museum Anthropology 34 (1): 56–70. Bragard, Veronique. 2011. ‘Indépendance!’ The Belgo-Congolese Dispute in the Tervuren Museum. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-­ Knowledge 9 (4): 93–104. Brown, Alison K., and Laura Peers, eds. 2003. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge.

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Castryck, Geert. 2006. Whose History Is History? Singularities and Dualities of the Public Debate on Belgian Colonialism. In Europe and the World in European Historiography, ed. Csaba Lévai, 71–88. Pisa: Pisa University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. On Collecting Art and Culture. In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 215–251. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. Museums as Contact Zones. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 188–219. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2007. Quai Branly in Process. October 120: 3–23. ———. 2013. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Diaz, Nelia. 2008. Cultural Differences and Cultural Diversity: The Case of the Musée du Quai Branly. In Museums and Difference, ed. Daniel J.  Sherman, 124–154. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Duncan, Carol. 1991. Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 88–103. Washington: Smithsonian Books. German History Museum. About Us: Foundation and History. https://www. dhm.de/en/about-us/foundation-history.html. Goddeeris, Idesbald. 2015. Postcolonial Belgium. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 17 (3): 434–451. Greene & Heaton. http://greeneheaton.co.uk/clients/alice-procter/. Harris, Claire, and Michael O’Hanlon. 2013. The Future of the Ethnographic Museum. Anthropology Today 29 (1): 8–12. Hochschild, Adam. 2020. The Fight to Decolonize the Museum. The Atlantic 325 (1): 90–97. Kazeem, Belinda, Charlotte Martinz-Turek, and Nora Sternfeld, eds. 2009. Das Unbehagen im Museum: Postkoloniale Museologien. Vienna: Verlag Turia + Kant. Kößler, Reinhart. 2015. Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Labadi, Sophia. 2018. Museums, Immigrants, and Social Justice. London: Routledge. Lattanzi, Vito. 2013. [S]oggetti Migranti. In European Museums in the 21st Century: Setting the Framework, ed. Luca Basso Peressut, Francesca Lanz, and Gennaro Postiglione, 219–232. Milan: Politecnico di Milano. Layiwola, Peju. 2010. Benin1897: Art and the Restitution Question. Ibadan: Wy Art Editions. ———. 2014. Walker and the Restitution of Two Benin Bronzes. Premium Times Nigeria, July 27. Lidchi, Henrietta. 1997. The Politics and Poetics of Exhibiting Other Cultures. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, 151–222. London: Sage.

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Lonetree, Amy. 2012. The Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways: Decolonization, Truth Telling, and Addressing Historical Unresolved Grief. In Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, 160–167. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Martens, Renzo. 2017. Cercle d’Art de Travailleurs des Plantation Congolaise. Filmed in April 2017  in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo. YouTube Video, 4:33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raq4F__4rMQ. Minamore, Bridget. 2018. Slaver! Invader! The Tour Guide Who Tells the Ugly Truth About Museum Portraits. Guardian, April 24. No-Humboldt21. 2013. http://www.no-humboldt21.de/resolution/english/. Parzinger, Hermann. 2011. The Humboldt Forum: ‘To Be in Touch with as Much of the World as Possible’: The Goal and Significance of Germany’s Most Important Cultural Project at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Berlin Palace-­ Humboldtforum Foundation. https://www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/en/ newsroom/media-library/bilder/image-detail/article/2013/11/27/mediathe-humboldt-forum-to-be-in-touch-with-as-much-of-the-world-as-possible. html?sword_list[]=humboldt&no_cache=1. Peressut, Luca Basso, Francesca Lanz, and Gennaro Postiglione, eds. 2013. European Museums in the 21st Century: Setting the Framework. Milan: Politecnico di Milano. Pieken, Gorch, and Cornelia Kruse. 2007. Preussisches Liebesglück: eine deutsche Familie aus Afrika. Berlin: Propyläen. Plankensteiner, Barbara, ed. 2018. The Art of Being a World Culture Museum: Futures and Lifeways of Ethnographic Museums in Europe. Vienna: Kerber. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession 91: 33–40. Price, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Procter, Alice. 2018. Museums Are Hiding Their Imperial Pasts—Which Is Why My Tours Are Needed. The Guardian, April 23. READ-ME  – European Network of Diasporas Associations and Ethnographic Museums. 2010. https://culturelab.be/archive/read-me/. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. https://restitutionreport2018.com/. Savoy, Bénédicte. 2017. Ein unlösbarer Widerspruch: “Das Humboldt-Forum ist wie Tschernobyl”—die Kunsthistorikerin Bénédicte Savoy gehörte bis vor Kurzem dem Expertenbeirat des grössten Projects der deutschen Kulturpolitik an. Eine Bilanz. Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 21. Schmidt, Dierk. 2018. Guilt and Debts. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

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Schulz, Bernhard. 2018. Anfrage an die Bundesregierung: Wie die AfD mit Museumsbesitz aus Kolonialzeiten umgeht. Tagesspiegel, August 9. Sieg, Katrin. 2015. Race, Guilt, and Innocence: Facing Blackface in Contemporary German Theater. German Studies Review 38 (1): 117–134. ———. forthcoming. Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Simpson, Moira G. 2001. Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era. London: Routledge. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2011. Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture 23 (1): 121–156. UN General Assembly. 2007. Resolution 61/295, Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, A/61/L. 67. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. Vergès, Françoise. 2013. The Slave at the Louvre. Manifesta Journal 16: 18–27. ———. 2014. A Museum Without Objects. In The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History, ed. Iain Chambers, Alessandra de Angelis, Celester Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona, and Michaela Quadraro, 25–38. London: Ashgate. ———. 2016. The Slave at the Louvre: An Invisible Humanity. Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 38–39: 8–18. Werry, Margaret. 2012. Nintendo Museum: Intercultural Pedagogy, Neoliberal Citizenship, and a Theatre Without Actors. In Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, ed. Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, 25–41. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zimmerman, Andrew. 2001. Anthropology and Anti-Humanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter Frieda Ekotto

What matters is not to know the world but to change it. —Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon 1967, p. 17) Frantz Fanon is regarded by many as one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century. —Teodors Kiros (Rabaka 2015, p. 251)

Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after Barack Obama’s presidency and in the era of Donald Trump, after the violent events of Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, and as we watch the rise of white nationalism in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Christchurch, New Zealand, to name just a few places, racial politics remains entrenched in American life.1 In addition, as the refugee crises, the impending withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and the 2019 parliamentary elections in Europe have shown, reverberations of the colonial past are palpable in contemporary upheaval, discord, and violence. These societal ills all have their origins in colonial

F. Ekotto (*) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_10

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history and memory, origins that have often been overlooked, if not erased, even as they continue to affect our contemporary world. To address this history alongside current events, this chapter reads Black Lives Matter together with Frantz Fanon’s work on the struggle for the dignity of Black people around the world. It demonstrates how, in addition to the work of Négritude thinkers (Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon Damas, and W.E.B. Du Bois), Fanon’s writing offers the historical background necessary for understanding the Black Lives Matter movement and, more broadly, the Black American experience during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Fanon was among the first to articulate enduring questions about the Black condition in the world, and his theoretical insights establish why there will be no peace as long as the dignity of Black men, women, and children are ignored, their lives crushed. Fanon’s seminal articulation of how colonialism produces trauma, chaos, and loss only grows in importance as time passes. In his work, he confronts the disturbing ways in which racial violence is repeated due to its entrenchment in the cultural imaginary and despite Black subjects’ efforts to speak out against domination. In this chapter, I will focus on how his work can help us to understand better the Black Lives Matter movement, which has undertaken the recuperative work of exposing violence against Black people by bringing attention to whiteness and the White gaze. I give particular attention to Fanon’s insights into the violence of the Black condition and how Black people must transform this violence into acts of resistance. I begin by discussing a formative moment in Fanon’s text Black Skin, White Masks (1952), when he first felt consciously compelled to transform the violence of the White gaze into action. I then describe how the Black Lives Matter movement has channeled quotidian violence against Black Americans into a powerful movement. I finish by reflecting upon the continuity between Black Lives Matter and previous American movements, even as I consider how its unique qualities appear to be shaping new modes of representation in mainstream media.

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks As a young man, Fanon embraced Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “committed literature” and, at the age of 26, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks with a clear purpose: to identify racism, its societal underpinnings and functioning, its effects on Black men such as himself, and, most importantly, the necessity of action in the face of discrimination.2 Despite Fanon’s clear

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purpose in writing the book, though, the complexity of his conceptual work, as well as the nature of his prose, results in a text that is extremely difficult to read. The text moves continually between medical terminology and poetry, between analysis of historical texts and novels. As his biographer David Macey writes, the book “is difficult to categorize in terms of genre” (Macey 2000, p. 161). Yet, this methodology is essential to Fanon’s task of developing a non-colonial, non-racist notion of the human being. It refuses to compartmentalize racism and its effects. It seeks to understand racism as a “sociogenic” force that “emerges from the social world— that is, the intersubjective world of culture, history, language, and economics” (Gordon 2015, p.  22). This force, Fanon demonstrates, affects Black individuals in innumerable ways: first, in the direct violence to which they are frequently subjected, whether physical or emotional; second, in the resulting effects of this violence on individuals’ self-regard; and third, in their social relations. In his work as a psychoanalytic theorist, Fanon powerfully evoked the ongoing traumas of racism and the therapeutics of psychic and social change. Psychoanalytic treatment, according to Fanon, can save the individual psyche from “disintegration” under the impact of racism and its production of “inferiority complexes,” but the traumatic neuroses of subjects objectified by racism—and I would add, of subjects differently and concurrently subjected to sexism, homophobia, and class oppression—are not curable by psychoanalytic treatment alone (Fanon 1967, pp. 99–100). The pathology of oppression calls for “combined action on the individual and on the group,” and for the opening of psychoanalytic witnessing into the field of social change: “my objective, once [the patient’s] motivations have been brought into consciousness, is to put him in a position to choose action … that is toward the social structures” (Fanon 1967, p. 100). Fanon foregrounds the moment he sought to transform this violence against Black men into action in the opening lines of “The Fact of Blackness,” a critical chapter in Black Skin, White Masks. There, he recounts two overwhelming and emblematic verbal attacks on his personhood, which he endures as a Black man living in France. They are, first, the common epitaph “Dirty nigger!” and, second, “simply,” as Fanon puts it, a young boy’s casual remark to his mother, “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon 1967, p. 109).3 These remarks, by being both extraordinary and quotidian, bring Fanon to reflect upon the paradox of living as a Black man in a racist, colonial society.

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I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. (Fanon 1967, p. 109)

Raw and paralyzed by objectification, Fanon finds himself being restored to the world by the attention of others—the very liberating and vital attention of witnessing—only, and almost immediately, to “[fumble] … the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other [fixing] me there…” (Fanon 1967, p. 109). Thus, he begins to present a paradox, which is the key element of his work: the fact of being both seen and not-seen. One generally feels that, in being seen, one is given value, and thus one seeks it out, but what Fanon realizes is that, as a Black man, he is fundamentally not being seen; he is only present as an object. This moment is of pivotal importance because the realization it provokes compels Fanon to take action to transform a White imaginary that insists on the objectification of Black men. As a psychologist, Fanon was well aware of the internal suffering inflicted by a continually racialized existence. However, he also believed that being aware of this suffering was not enough. One must actively resist its perpetuation by bringing attention both to blackness and whiteness. Fanon underlines this in Black Skin, White Masks, where he argues blackness is dialectically inextricable from whiteness. He also claims with much controversy that blackness—as most Blacks live and experience it—is actually a creation of, and a reaction to, whiteness, white history, and culture, as well as white racial and colonial imaginaries.

#Black Lives Matter In exposing the fact that most Black lived experiences have been and remain constructed (or deliberately destructed) by Whites, Fanon seeks not to devalue the Black experience but to foster an anti-racist and, ultimately, revolutionary-humanist, active critical consciousness among Blacks (as well as among other non-Whites and Whites). This active consciousness is what makes Fanon’s work key to contemporary anti-racism

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movements such as Black Lives Matter. His call resonates, for example, with that of Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. In October 2014, she issued the following “her story”: Black Lives Matter is about: how do we live in a world that dehumanizes us and still be human? The fight is not just being able to keep breathing as a human. The fight is actually to be able to walk down the street with your head held high—and feel like I belong here, or I deserve to be here, or I just have a right to have a level of dignity. (Garza 2014, n.p.)

In her articulation of a right to live in the world with dignity, Garza directly engages Fanon’s experience with the young boy who so casually remarks on Fanon’s blackness. For Garza, this fight for dignity is urgent. In contemporary America, boys can carry guns and casual racism can too frequently turn fatal. It is for this reason that Black Lives Matter demands that Americans draw their attention to the relationship between casual, unexamined racism, the frequent deaths of Black men, and the equally frequent acquittal of White perpetrators. Since George Zimmerman, a white vigilante, was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin in 2012, Black Lives Matter has insisted that Americans face the fact of brutality against young Black men. Even more, it has asked for action to recognize holistically the reasons for, as well as the results of, systemic racialized violence. In the United States, recurring violence is incurred, in part, because of persistent clichés about young Black men, clichés that continue to feed the imagination of some police officers as well as the public. This appears starkly in the words of Darren Wilson, the police officer, who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In an interview that appeared in The New Yorker a year after the shooting, Wilson is quoted as saying: We can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago … We have to fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment. (Quoted in Halpern 2015)

Here, Wilson suggests that racial violence has nothing to do with him. Rather, he identifies the problem to be with “people’s life-long history.” In doing so, he indicates that even a year after the event, when he could have had the opportunity to reflect upon his actions, he still maintains that America’s racialized history is not his own, and that other people—Black

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people—need to figure out how they feel, or rather how not to feel, the effects of a racist police state upon their daily lives. Then, he can go about his job. As Wilson’s case so starkly demonstrates, this denial of the importance of history and the refusal to examine one’s own perception continue to inflict violence upon citizens in the United States (and around the globe). It also brings us back to Fanon who insisted that we do feel and even more, that we act. The “universe” into which Blacks find themselves is anti-Black, racist, and white supremacist. It is not a world that Black individuals have created or constructed. Thus, Fanon argues that we “must be extricated” from this inhospitable universe because Black individuals are not and cannot truly live, in any sense of the word, free, proud, and productive human lives in this current world. Wilson’s suggestion that he is not implicated in conditions of blackness is not a new one. Over the past one hundred years at least, Black writers, thinkers, and artists have documented similar refusals to confront this reality.4Yet, it remains invisible because its perpetuation is controlled by dominant discourses. (Wilson’s comments make this point clearly enough.) One of the innovations of the Black Lives Matter movement is its use of social media to shift the focus of the gaze from Black bodies to the violence itself. This, in itself, is not new. We find the same idea, for example, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus.” Writing from the perspective of a Black man, he challenges his readers “to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the White man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen” (Sartre 1948, p. 7). He continues: “Today, these Black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze is thrown back in our eyes” (Sartre 1948, pp. 7–8). Yet, the Black Lives Matter movement returns the White gaze with an important difference. It uses social media as a platform to demand that Black people be treated as human beings and unalienable citizens. This, in fact, is an important intervention in the history of the White gaze. Today, anyone can snap a picture that has the potential to circulate globally. As accessibility and ubiquity have made images of violence commonplace, Black Lives Matter creates a model for how to use technology to continue the fight for Black dignity. Drawing from this important contemporary intervention, Black scholars are increasingly vocal in their insistence that White individuals examine both their own behaviors, as well as their adherence to abstract ideas of nation, country, and justice. As with Fanon, they are asking for a holistic

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examination of how institutions perpetuate and even enforce racial injustice that affects the well-being—and indeed, the very lives—of Black Americans. In his opinion article for the New York Times, “Sacrificing Black Lives for the American Lie,” Ibrahim X.  Kendi compellingly responds to a Minnesota jury’s decision, which places the responsibility for Philando Castile’s death not on the police officer who shot him, but on Castille himself despite the video evidence to the contrary. Kendi argues: This blaming of the Black victim stands in the way of change that might prevent more victims of violent policing in the future. Could it be that some Americans would rather Black people die than their perceptions of America? Is Black death more palatable than accepting the racist reality of slaveholding America, of segregating America, of mass-incarcerating America? Is Black death the cost of maintaining the myth of a just and meritorious America? This is not just the America people perceive. This is the America people seem to love. And they are going to defend their beloved America against all those nasty charges of racism. People seem determined to exonerate the police officer because they are determined to exonerate America. And in exonerating the police officer and America of racism, people end up exonerating themselves. Americans who deeply fear bodies, who think their fears are sensible, can empathize when cops like Officer Yanez testify that they feared for their lives. To diagnose police officers’ lethal fears as racist, juries and prosecutors would also have to diagnose their own fears of Black bodies as racist. That is a tall task. It may even be easier to get a racist cop convicted of murdering a Black person than it is to get a racist American to acknowledge his or her own racism. Racist Americans keep justice as far away from Black death as possible to keep the racist label as far away from themselves as possible. But this can change. Killing the post-racial myth and confessing racism is the first step toward antiracism. Police officers can recognize that label as the start of their better selves instead of the end of their careers. Americans can recognize that label as an opening to a just future. (Kendi 2017)

Kendi’s call echoes Fanon’s: to make claim to the validity of perspectives that come from the very experience of suffering, and the importance of fighting against forces that have created, perpetuated, and hidden the depths of this systemic racism.

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Intersectional Solidarity Black Lives Matter continues the struggle for dignity, which Fanon and other thinkers demanded in the early twentieth century. Fanon’s work was rooted in the complex history of blackness and anti-colonial struggle. Black Lives Matter engages with similar conditions with the current situation of police brutality. But there is one issue in which I find the leaders of Black Lives Matter have moved beyond Fanon’s own limitations. By bringing their own diversity of background and experience, they have expanded the range of people for whom it is essential to fight.5 Garza and the movement’s co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi are not only feminists and members of BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), but they are also active and vocal in their fight for LGBTQ rights. For example, Garza has openly confronted the fact that, although their movement has been created by feminists and lesbians (Patrisse Cullors is openly gay), patriarchy—Black as well as White— continues to usurp their voices. Garza writes: Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy. (Garza 2014, n.p.)

That is why, for Garza, Black rights must converge with those of other groups, particularly gay, trans, and disabled people who are oppressed in their own Black communities. Each of these groups has had significant and unique experiences, and they often draw from these experiences in their calls to action. Indeed, Black Lives Matter goes beyond divisions that can be found within some Black communities, which call on Black people to love Black, live Black, and buy Black and which keep straight Black men in the front of the movement, while sisters, people who identify as queer and trans, and disabled folk are given background role or are not acknowledged at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, the undocumented, individuals with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. The co-existence between Black and gay rights is an important part of American history. It is one of the greatest alliances, a true legacy. I am

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thinking here of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Bayard Rustin—all central figures in the civil rights movement who were publicly and politically gay. These leaders have helped to interrogate the impact of exclusions that accompany acts of categorization and to engage with the experiences of marginalized subjects in their multiple facets in order to demonstrate the dysfunction of categories. As with these figures, the Black Lives Matter Movement does not display Black men walking next to those whom they victimize merely to create divisions. They do this to acknowledge that racism, sexism, and homophobia together continue racist and colonial iterations of otherness.

Conclusion In the end, the fact of blackness remains the bedrock of historical reality for Black people around the world, even as the communication of this trauma entails a psychosocial compromise formation that necessitates a careful titration of these truths. I would contend in accordance with Audre Lorde that “it is not difference which immobilizes us but silence” (Lorde 1984, p. 144). Given that sexism, racism, and homophobia are “real conditions of all of our lives in this place and time,” our responsibility for the oppression of others (even as we are oppressed ourselves) requires that we “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside [ourselves] and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there” in order that we “[s]ee whose face it wears” (Lorde 1984, p. 113). In the work of survival, we must break silences and respond to others, to make what Lorde calls poetry: the “revelatory distillation of experience” (Lorde 1984, p. 37). It is here that we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival, heal the devastating rifts between subjects produced and multiplied by trauma, and address oppressive and hierarchical constructions of difference in the psychosocial spaces (and there are no other) where communication and communion take place (Lorde 1984, p. 37). This work is continuing and even gathering momentum in such mainstream forums as Netflix, which in summer 2019 released the series When They See Us about the infamous, false convictions of five men of color— Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana Jr.—on charges of a violent assault and rape, which occurred in New York’s Central Park in the spring of 1989. The expressed purpose of this series is to expose the way racial perceptions continue to allow these kinds of gross injustices to occur. In an interview, director,

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co-writer, and executive producer Ava DuVernay describes why she wanted the series to be called When They See Us rather than “Central Park Five,” which had been the series’ working title. She explains: “Central Park Five” felt like something that had been put upon the real men by the press, the prosecutors, by the police. It took away their faces; it took away their families; it took away their pulses and their beating hearts. It dehumanized them. They are Yusef, Antron, Kevin, Raymond and Kharey, and we need to know them and say their names. (DuVernay 2019, n.p.)

This act of revising history and making claims to names is just another way that contemporary Black activists are forcing discussions of whiteness into contemporary American discourse. They are insisting that Americans reassess their assumptions about how Black people are seen in contemporary American society. When They See Us recounts the complex racial circumstances that brought these boys to prison for the crime of being Black or Latino. Along with other Black activists, it asks us to consider the loss of dignity, of freedom, even of life, that, as Claudia Rankine writes in her book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), continues to be inscribed upon Black bodies and Black skin. Until this memory, this history, and this present moment are seen, acknowledged, and honored, until White police officers can no longer off-handedly remark “Look, a Black man” and proceed to arrest or shoot him, the violence inflicted upon Black bodies will continue, and the dignity due to Blacks will be denied.

Notes 1. This essay is dedicated to Daniel Maka Njoh. 2. Littérature engagée, articulated by Sartre in “Qu’est-ce que la littérature.” For Sartre, to write was to take action. 3. The original expressions read “Sale nègre” and “Tiens, un nègre.” 4. The Congolese philosopher Valentin Yves Mudimbe beautifully articulated that memory as part of history in The Idea of Africa. See Mudimbe 1994. 5. We find in contemporary readings discomfort with Fanon’s apparent disregard for women. This is perhaps most clearly manifested by the fact that he never directly cites his engagement with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, which is certainly important to the development of his ideas. As displayed in the film Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask by Isaac Julien (1995), Fanon was also homophobic.

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References DuVernay, Ava. 2019. Opra Winfrey Presents: When They See Us Now. Netflix Interview.https://www.netflix.com/title/80200549. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans.Charles Lam Markmann. Grove Press. Garza, Alicia. 2014. A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alica Garza. October7. https://news.northseattle.edu/sites/news.northseattle. edu/files/blacklivesmatter_Herstory.pdf. Gordon, Lewis. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Halpern, Jake. 2015. The Cop. The New  Yorker,August3. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop. Julien, Isaac, dir. 1995. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask. Kendi, Ibrahim X.2017. Sacrificing Black Lives for the American Lie. The New York Times, June24.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/ philando-castile-police-shootings.html. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Macey, David. 2000. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. Verso. Mudimbe, Valentin Yves. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rabaka, Reiland. 2015. The Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and The Evolution of An Insurgent Idea. Lexington Books. Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Orphée noir. In Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sedar Senghor. Presses universitaires de France.

CHAPTER 11

Afterword Graham Huggan

Postcolonialism has been pronounced dead so many times that its body should by now be reeking, but it always manages to find new ways of resurrecting itself. Some of these lives are neither as new nor as miraculous as they seem, and postcolonialism today probably stands most to gain by being more attentive to its own origins—to the anticolonial sentiments that gave rise to it in the first place, and to the liberation movements to which it gave full-blooded intellectual and, in some cases, material support. It is therefore probably wise to be skeptical of the latest attempts to “reframe” postcolonial studies, as the editor of this collection, David Kim, seems to be suggesting here. That said, postcolonial theories and methods, while the core principles associated with them remain more or less unaltered, have always moved—sometimes all too quickly—with the times. There is thus something to be said for revisiting key terms and adapting them to new contexts. And there is something to be said as well for recognizing the limitations of previous approaches: text-based criticism, for instance, though literature and literary criticism continue to play a useful role in a field that is less non-discipline-specific than it sometimes claims to

G. Huggan (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_11

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be, and that remains broadly cultural, even culturalist, in its methodological orientation despite its collective commitment to material change. Postcolonialism’s greatest limitation to date has been its obsession with critique, which continues to have its place, but as Rita Felski argues, has become so “powerfully normative” within the Western academy that any attempt to question it is automatically seen as “a reactionary gesture or a conservative conspiracy”—as if oppositionality were in itself the hallmark of intellectual rigor, and as if the only possible critique of critique is that it is not oppositional enough (Felski 2015, p. 8). It is true that postcolonial critique, over time, has produced some remarkably banal readings of literary and other cultural texts that, even when pursued with sensitivity and nuance, risk being reduced to “either heroic dissidents or slavish sycophants of power” (Felski 2015, p. 191). And it is also true that certain lines and angles of pursuit have become all too predictable, and that the postcolonial field, without necessarily straying into self-parody, has become somewhat ossified in its thinking and axiomatic in its approach. My own view—one apparently shared by the contributors to this volume—is that it is vitally important to hold onto critique as a catalyst for transformation, but not to assume that its moves are always radical, still less to claim a separation of “critical language” from “everyday language,” thereby widening what Felski calls, melodramatically no doubt, the “great divide between [sophisticated] critique and [naïve] common sense” (Felski 2015, p. 138). Perhaps the most damning criticism of postcolonialism is that it has long since lost the “real-world” applicability it had in its first phase, when anticolonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon doubled as academic scholars and revolutionary activists, putting their bodies on the line as well as their theories to the test. In the kinds of qualitative and interpretive approaches that generally pass for postcolonial criticism today, the emphasis has tended to be on representations of the world rather than action within it (Greenwood and Levin 2001). This emphasis has not necessarily changed with the much-vaunted shift from “postcolonial” to “decolonial” critical practices that, despite having emerged from different intellectual traditions, are more entangled with one another than is frequently supposed (Bhambra 2014). It is significant that some of the language I am using here is borrowed from the domain of action research, a broadly conceived field of inquiry that has been defined in terms of “a participatory process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes,” and that seeks to “bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in the pursuit of practical solutions to

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issues of pressing concern” (Reason and Bradbury 2008, p.  4). Action research takes many different forms, by no means all of which are associated with a more popular and harder-edged term, “activism,” but it shares activism’s broad desire for people to “work together to address key problems in their communities or organizations—some of which involve creating positive change on a [local] scale, and others of which affect the lives of literally millions of people [across the world]” (Reason and Bradbury 2008, p. 1). Examples of action research are few and far between in the postcolonial field, although it has long been acknowledged that one of the primary purposes of postcolonialism is to bridge the gap between theory and practice—to make meaningful interventions into the social world, both past and present, that it seeks to describe. It is difficult to disagree with Robert Young’s longstanding view that “our responsibility as [postcolonial] academics, writers and intellectuals […] is to link our work to the many issues of injustice and inequality operating in the world today” (Young 1999, p. 30). However, it seems a stretch to claim, as Young then does, that the field’s “intellectual engagement will always be activist”—as if activism were the most apposite term for “engaged academic and intellectual work” (Young 1999, p. 34). While allowances can and should be made for different forms and definitions of activism, few practitioners of postcolonialism today can stake a genuine claim to the kinds of direct social and political action that are usually associated with activist campaigns. There are notable exceptions, of course—Edward Said’s life-long support for the Palestinian cause, or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deeply committed literacy work in West Bengal—but postcolonial scholars, by and large, have been significantly less interventionist than they claim to be, and more likely to support the general move toward the decolonization of knowledge than to lend their active support to social and political movements of different kinds. They have been more likely, too, to work individually than to perform the sorts of collaborative work that bring academics and non-­ academics together as “co-researchers” and open up communicative spaces in which different forms of authority are recognized, and people who have been spoken for by others are empowered to speak for themselves (Reason and Bradbury 2008). This is the kind of “bottom-up” engagement with scholarship that Kim encourages in this volume, sitting alongside its valuable reconceptualization of terms, its productive engagement with cross-disciplinary methods, and its welcome insistence on a multisited, multilingual approach to a field

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that has long since ceased to be the glorified branch of English literary criticism that it once was. Whether this aim is achieved is another matter. Perhaps the closest we come to this effort is found in Reinhart Kössler’s fine essay on the legacies of genocide in Namibia, which urges us to rethink solidarity and resistance—foundational postcolonial categories—in unfamiliar, emotionally charged contexts. Kössler’s essay is the one here that most obviously pursues an action research agenda in which “co-­ participants” get a say in the knowledge that is produced about them, although other essays such as Katrin Sieg’s are certainly interested in building broad coalitions of academics, artists, and activists that provide the material and epistemological basis by which colonial representational legacies may be transformed. The essay that strikes the most contemporary chord is Afonso Dias Ramos’s elegant piece on the fate of monuments (Cecil Rhodes) and portraits (Emmett Till) in public history, recent incidents around which he sees as “flashpoints in the ongoing row over cultural appropriation, identity politics, political correctness and free speech.” “Row” is the right word and, as Dias Ramos pointedly asks, this and numerous other contemporary examples enjoin us to think about how we might “develop periodic outrage into sustained political action”—very much a question for our times. The empty moralism that has often surrounded such heavily mediated campaigns as Rhodes Must Fall and Why Is My Curriculum White? is a case in point here; not that these campaigns are not worth pursuing, but they illustrate the stranglehold of the media (especially new media) over public discourse in an increasingly attention-seeking age. They are also potentially signs of what Richard King, pulling no punches, calls a coming together of “narcissism and allegiance” in which “smug self-righteousness […] passes for real political engagement,” and politics itself risks becoming a “matter not of reasoned argument but of identification,” a public opportunity for personal self-display (King 2013, pp. 190–191). King goes too far in claiming that “political engagement is on the wane,” and that it has effectively been replaced by “displays of personal awareness” (King 2013, p. 191). Most of the most prominent social and political movements of our times—from the Arab Spring to Extinction Rebellion—are clear demonstrations of both. The key question remains of what difference postcolonialism makes, and what particular strategies are available, borrowing from Young again, to “foreground [the]

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accountability [of academic work] by forging links with the lived politics of the social world” (Young 1999, p. 29). Some of these strategies are outlined in the essays in this volume. One strategy seems to be to invest in new areas of inquiry, as in Pablo Mukherjee’s Marxism-inspired essay on the energy humanities, which he sees as part of a larger political drive foreshadowing the end of the “Capitalocene” and, with it, a fossil-fuel-dependent world. Another strategy is to insist, as Frieda Ekotto does, on alternative epistemologies from the Global South, which remain criminally neglected in a field supposedly dedicated to celebrating them; or to find exciting new ways—as Bruno Jean-François, Susan Slyomovics, and Dominic Thomas do—of reflecting on the colonial past in the wake of the by now well-established transnational and memory “turns.” All of these strategies, to a greater or lesser extent, confirm the value of postcolonial criticism as a vehicle for “social dreaming,” Bill Ashcroft’s resonant term for the utopian thought at the heart of anticolonial/anti-­ capitalist action. Such thinking is urgently needed at a time when the capitalist world-system is more entrenched than ever, and colonialism’s discrepant pasts find ever-new ways of secreting themselves into the present, even as they continue to be wilfully neglected, strategically misrepresented, or ideologically outflanked. As I argued several years ago, “postcolonial studies will continue to be relevant as long as colonialism— multiple colonialisms—exist in the current world order, even if the field’s remit is, paradoxically, to play its utopian part in making colonialism and the imperialist ideologies that drive it a thing of the past” (Huggan 2013, p. 22). I still hold to this observation, but I am worried. One source of anxiety is my perception that the postcolonial field, even though it is gaining new ground, continues to be forced back on the defensive, still fending off attacks that it is “ensnared in an increasingly repetitive preoccupation with sign systems and the exegetics of representation,” and still accused of lacking social relevance at a time when “relevance” is increasingly dictated by the various government institutions that see fit to regulate our intellectual lives (Parry 2004, p. 12). I see the relentless search for “new postcolonialisms” as part of this defensive reflex, which is driven in my own country (the UK) by an unsubtle coupling of research and innovation (all research must be “innovative,” but in ways that the government wants, and all research must have “impact,” but in ways that the government prescribes). These are minor

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worries perhaps, but in my view, they hide a major one: my possibly counterintuitive fear that postcolonialism is vulnerable to criticism because it really is less relevant than it claims to be, and that its commitment to theory is not necessarily matched by a commitment to practice on either local or global scales. This depends, of course, on what “practice” is taken to mean: in collaborative fields such as action research, “practices” are generally understood in terms of individual behaviors and actions that are also collectively constructed, leading to an emphasis on participation as the process by which research participants are given the chance to become researchers themselves (Kemmis 2008, p.  125). As noted above, this model remains under-used in the kinds of research that are associated with postcolonialism, although social scientific approaches to the social and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples are sometimes postcolonial (or decolonial) in their implications, even if these terms are rarely used by Indigenous peoples themselves. With that in mind, I want to close by taking the liberty of referring to an essay that is not included in this volume, namely Colin Salter’s excellent article “Intersections of the Colonial and the Postcolonial: Pragmatism, Praxis and Transformative Grassroots Activism at Sandon Point.” Published in the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies in 2014, this article documents an early twenty-first-century community campaign in the northern suburbs of Wollongong (in New South Wales) to protect the ecologically rich area of Sandon Point from a proposed residential estate, which was discovered to intersect with Aboriginal claims for the same area as a major cultural meeting ground and spiritual (Dreaming) site. The two struggles merged, and shared stories of the area’s past came to lay the foundations for what Salter calls a “politics of experience” that would eventually lead to “decolonising work” (Salter 2014, n.p.). The article traces a shift from “speaking for” to “speaking with,” which is characteristic of action research (Salter 2014, n.p.). Drawing on Simone Bignall’s work, it also charts the process by which a collaborative struggle, fusing two different kinds of social activism, may be seen as providing the basis for “an emergent collective ethos of postcolonialism” itself (Bignall 2010). It is tempting to see this as a model for the kind of activist work that Young and others have long been calling for, in which academic scholarship, while not directly activist itself, supports the activist struggles that are part of its own intellectual domain. This is hardly postcolonialism “reframed,” and in many ways it goes back to the field’s anticolonial and liberationist origins, updating these by

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insisting on (a) the authority of experience, (b) the value of collaborative engagement, and (c) a participatory approach. At their best, the essays in this volume support this approach, enriching a field that can certainly be relevant if it wants to be, and that continues to generate new knowledge through experience and action, which are very much part of intellectual life.

References Bhambra, Gurminder. 2014. Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues. Postcolonial Studies 17 (2): 115–121. Bignall, Simone. 2010. Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenwood, Davydd J., and Morten Levin. 2001. Pragmatic Action Research and the Struggle to Transform Universities into Learning Communities. In The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, ed. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, 1st ed., 103–113. London: SAGE Publications. Huggan, Graham, ed. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kemmis, Stephen. 2008. Critical Theory and Participatory Action Research. In The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, ed. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, 1st ed., 121–138. London: SAGE Publications. King, Richard. 2013. On Offence: The Politics of Indignation. Melbourne: Scribe. Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge. Reason, Peter, and Hilary Bradbury, eds. 2008. The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. 2nd ed. London: SAGE Publications. Salter, Colin. 2014. Intersections of the Colonial and the Postcolonial: Pragmatism, Praxis and Transformative Grassroots Activism at Sandon Point. Journal of Settler Colonial Studies 4 (4): 382–395. https://www.tandonline.com/doi/ abs/10.1080/2210473x.2014.911654/. Accessed 2 March 2020. Young, Robert J.C. 1999. Academic Activism and Knowledge Formation in Postcolonial Critique. Postcolonial Studies 2 (1): 29–34.

Index1

A Aapravasi Ghat, 118 Abani, Chris, 52 Abdelkader, Emir, 72, 73, 79, 84 Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 174 Aboriginal Dreaming, 53 Abramovic, Marina, 164 Achebe, Chinua, 33n13, 53 Action activism, 3, 5, 9, 15–17, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30, 47, 160, 167, 180, 206, 224, 237, 263, 266 research, 30, 262–264, 266 Adeniran, Sade, 48 Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi, 48 Adorno, Theodor W., 192, 204 Africa German Southwest Africa, 192–194, 241n6 history, 6, 14, 57 literature, 48, 49 Afrikamuseum, see Royal Museum of Central Africa

Ahmad, Aijaz, 50, 136 Alabama, 162, 166 Alexander, Meena, 45, 46 Algeria, 16, 22, 23, 25, 26, 69–72, 75–86, 88n2, 89n7 Alighieri, Dante, 119, 120, 127 Divine Comedy, 119, 120, 127 Alleck, Nirveda, 27, 118–122, 124, 127 The Migrant’s Tale, 118, 119, 121 Alternative for Germany (AfD), 222, 236 Amnesia, 29, 179, 194–198 Anderson, Clare, 116, 117 Anyidoho, Kofi, 46, 59 Apartheid, 55, 107, 157, 179, 206 anti-apartheid, 178, 204 Appadurai, Arjun, 20, 71 Appanah, Nathacha, 27, 114, 115, 121, 124, 126, 127 Tropique de la violence, 114, 126 Arendt, Hannah, 4, 5, 9, 32n9, 33n12, 177

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Armah, Ayi Kwai, 48, 49, 51, 58 Artefakte//anti-Humboldt, 221, 222 Ashcroft, Bill, 24, 25, 30n1, 31n3, 32n10, 45, 53, 59, 128, 265 Assmann, Aleida, 195, 203 Azhari, Che Husna, 50 Aztlan, 59, 60 Azuah, Unomah, 48 B Bachir Diagne, Souleymane, 97 Baldwin, James, 174, 257 Banaji, Jairus, 144 Bandung, 4, 19, 45, 136 Bauman, Zygmunt, 44 Benhabib, Seyla, 126, 130 Bennet, Tony, 215 Berlin-postkolonial, 237 Biard, François Auguste, 232 Abolition of Slavery, 27 April 1848, 232 Black, Hannah, 163, 164 Black Lives Matter, 17, 29, 30, 162, 166, 249–258 Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), 256 Bloch, Ernst, 2, 21, 24, 25, 30n1, 45, 46, 51, 52, 54 Botswana (British Bechuanaland), 193, 197 Boyer, Dominic, 138, 144 Brathwaite, Kamau, 54, 61, 120 Braudel, Fernand, 138 Brecht, Bertold, 6, 198 Bremen Overseas Museum, 220 Brennan, Timothy, 136 Bright, Parker, 163, 182n14 Britain, 12, 63, 140, 142, 143 British Airways, 129 Brown, Michael, 253 Bugeaud, Thomas Robert, 73, 84

Bülow Bloc, 194 Butler, Judith, 126, 127 C Calcutta, 146, 147, 152 Cape Town, South Africa, 157, 166, 182n20, 221 Capitalism, 63, 64, 135, 137–139, 141, 144 Caribbean, 3, 16, 27, 31n5, 47, 52, 54, 59–61, 116, 117, 122, 144 archipelago, 61, 116 Carmichael, Stokely, 172 Central African Federation, 182n18 Césaire, Aimé, 97, 107, 250 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 27, 97, 122–125, 130 Frère migrants, 122 Charlottesville, 166, 249 Chatterjee, Partha, 31n3, 47, 48 China, 19, 34n20, 151 Chirac, Jacques, 93 Chiurai, Kudzanai, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 24 Choay, Françoise, 70 Christchurch, 249 Clifford, James, 226, 243n23, 243n30 Climate change, 19, 103, 137 Coetzee, J.M., 44 Colonialism colonialist ethic, 47 colonization, 45, 57, 77, 84, 94, 98, 101, 103, 216, 230, 239 colony, colonies, 9, 25, 26, 47, 62–64, 70, 71, 79, 85, 93, 95, 104, 107, 116, 120, 136, 142, 144, 168, 172, 182n17, 191, 194, 216, 224, 229, 232, 241n6 settler colonialism, 14 Comoros Islands, 114, 126 Mayotte, 114 Constantine, 26, 71, 72, 74–81, 83, 86, 87, 88n5, 89n8

 INDEX 

Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 96 Cotton, 89n8, 140, 141, 143, 147 Creole, 27, 103, 114–118, 121–123, 130 Mauritian Kreol, 121 Crichlow, Michaeline, 122, 123 Crow, Jim, 173, 175 Cullors, Patrisse, 256 D Damas, Léon, 250 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 33n13 Danticat, Edwige, 105 Davis, Angela, 174, 257 de Labourdonnais, Mahé, 118 Debré Bill, 96 Decolonization, 2, 8, 12, 20, 25, 47, 75, 78, 101, 103, 117, 160, 169, 176, 179, 221, 223, 263 Democracy, 4, 8, 19, 21, 32n11, 35n20, 99, 103, 170, 177, 239 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 97, 170, 219 Devi, Ananda, 27, 121, 122, 124, 127–130 Ceux du large, 121, 127 Diaspora, 48, 197 Dorlin, Elsa, 97 Dresden Ethnology Museum, 222 Du Bois, W.E.B., 250 Duncan, Carol, 231 Dylan, Bob, 174 E Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien, 97 Ee Tiang Hong, 50 Egypt, 19, 22 Empathy, 27, 116, 118, 123, 125–130, 201, 240n1 transoceanic empathy, 27, 113–130 Empire Writes Back (1989), 32n10, 43

271

Energy, 16, 27, 28, 53, 54, 135–153, 153n1, 160, 265 power, 140, 141 Enlightenment, 6, 9, 32n11, 33n12, 231 Equality, 8, 32n11, 103, 150, 152, 180, 221, 225 Ethics, 22, 47, 113, 123, 125, 127, 130, 161, 165, 175, 178, 206, 217, 233, 240 Europe the European Parliament, 114 European Union, 114, 249 the Euro zone, 114 Eygongakpa, Em’kal, 120 Gaia beats/bits III-i/doves and an aged hammock, 120 Eze, Chielozona, 129, 130 F Fanon, Frantz, 17, 29, 30, 35n22, 70, 78, 97, 179, 249–258, 262 Faulkner, William, 174 Felski, Rita, 262 Ferguson, Rebecca, 161, 249, 253 Fisher, Mark, 137 Fossil fuel, 137, 138, 140, 141 Foucault, Michel, 60 Françafrique colonialism, 103 France Franco-Prussian War, 84, 128 French East India Company, 118 Overseas Department of France, 114 Freedom, 8, 43, 44, 49, 57, 77, 118, 163, 170, 232, 258 Free speech, 158, 163–165, 178, 264 Froude, James Anthony, 63 Fukuyama, Francis, 164, 182n15 Fumanti, Mattia, 205 Fusco, Coco, 163, 180n2, 216 The Couple in the Cage, 216

272 

INDEX

G Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 4, 34n20 Ganges, 149–152 Garvey, Marcus, 171 Garza, Alicia, 253, 256 Geertz, Clifford, 204 Genocide, 16, 29, 191–208, 216, 229, 230, 237, 242n20, 244n35, 264 Namibia, 29, 195–197, 201, 203, 206, 230, 237, 264 Géricault, Théodore, 232 Raft of the Medusa, 232, 233 Germany German Center Party, 194 German East Africa, 193 German Left Party, 196, 201 German Parliament (Bundestag), 196 German Southwest Africa, 192–194, 241n6 Gandhi, Mahatma Ghosh, Amitav, 144 Gilmore, Mary, 64 Gilroy, James, 3, 20, 48, 96, 177 Glissant, Édouard, 52, 61, 97, 120, 123–125 Gomez-Pena, Guillermo, 216 The Couple in the Cage, 216 Gopal, Priyamvada, 135, 136, 138 Gordon, Lewis, 251 Grievability, 127, 129, 130 Griffiths, Gareth, 32n10 Guadeloupe, 114 Guha, Ranajit, 31n3, 145–147 H Haiti, 117 Haji Salleh, Mohammed, 50 Hamburg Ethnology Museum, 220 Harris, Wilson, 54, 61, 220

Hau’ofa, Epeli, 62 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51, 57, 64n3 Heimat, 25, 45, 46, 57, 61, 64 Herero skulls, 223 History entangled history, 203, 224, 229, 239 history of the present, 31n7, 136, 138 Hobson, J.A., 47 Hochstrasser, Julie, 232, 233, 235 Hollande, François, 93 Holocaust, 2, 4, 194, 209n7 Homo economicus, 137 Hondo, Med, 13 House of European History, The, 216, 240 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), 205 Humanism, 3, 114, 115, 124, 129 Humboldt Forum, 217, 218, 220, 221, 224, 240, 241n5 I Independence, 4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 25, 46, 47, 63, 70, 72, 74, 77–80, 82, 83, 85, 88n4, 89n7, 104, 105, 160, 170, 192, 195, 219 India, 19, 28, 34n20, 45, 118, 142–146, 151, 165 Indian Ocean, 45, 114, 116, 130 Indigo, 144, 146–148, 151 Indochina, 199 Industrialization, 140, 143 the industrial revolution, 140 International Colonial Exhibition, 101 International Organization of Francophonie (IOF), 98–100 Iraq, 135–137

 INDEX 

J Jameson, Frederic, 27, 50, 138 Jansen, Jan, 69 Julien, Isaac, 233, 244n32, 258n5 K Keen, Suzanne, 125 Kendi, Ibrahim X., 255 King Leopold of Belgium, 167 Kipling, Rudyard, 28, 144–146, 149–152 Kisukidi, Nadia Yala, 97, 104 Kolonialismus im Kasten (Colonialism in a Box), 228 Korea, 19 Koselleck, Reinhart, 203 Kössler, Reinhart, 29, 194–198, 202, 206, 208, 264 Kraus, Franz, 55 Kummel, Friederich, 54 Kurdi, Alan, 126 Kwassa kwassa, 114, 115, 119, 121 L La Réunion, 114, 117, 232, 243n31 Labadi, Sophia, 225, 227 Lamoricière, Louis Juchault de, 79, 80 Landscape, 3, 49, 63, 83, 85, 130, 159, 179, 200 Lane, William, 63, 64 Lattanzi, Vito, 220, 241n10 Layiwola, Peju, 222–224 Lazarus, Neil, 8, 20, 135, 136, 138, 145 Legacy, 2, 5, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 30, 32n7, 35n20, 75, 95, 96, 100, 121, 169, 175, 194, 256, 264 Lenin, Vladimiv Ilylic Ulyanov, 178, 181n4

273

Liberation, 8, 20, 44, 46, 70, 105, 136, 199, 200, 252, 261 Ligon, Glenn, 164 Lil Wayne, 174 Limbo dance, 54 Lionnet, Françoise, 31n5, 113, 114, 116–118, 125–127, 130, 131n1, 131n3 Literature, 3, 17, 18, 25, 27, 33n13, 43, 45–46, 48–51, 53, 55, 57, 59–62, 64, 95, 97, 102, 104, 106, 113, 116, 117, 119, 144–146, 174, 177, 237, 244n32, 261 literary canon, 127, 159 Longue durée, 116, 138 Lorde, Audre, 174, 257 Lumumba, Pastiche, 163 Luna, James, 216 Artifact Piece, 216 M Mabanckou, Alain, 94, 95, 97, 103–107 MacDuffie, Allen, 137 Macey, David, 251 Macron, Emmanuel, 26, 93–97, 99–106, 217 Maji Maji War, 193, 194, 196 Malawi, 182n18 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 117, 118 Malm, Andreas, 139–141, 143, 146, 153n1 Malraux, André, 100, 176 Malthus, Robert, 137 Mandela, Nelson, 170, 171 Manela, Erez, 34n20, 35n20 Maniam, K.S., 50 Mannoni, Dominique-Octave, 8 Martinique, 117 Marx, Karl, 52, 57, 198, 203, 204

274 

INDEX

Mascarene islands, 16, 27, 117 Mauritian Kreol, 117, 118, 121, 131n3 Mauritius, see Mauritian Kreol Maxwele, Chumani, 158 Mbembé, Achille, 13, 97, 98, 102, 106, 107, 128, 182n19 McClintock, Anne, 11–13, 15, 31n7 Medina, 79, 80, 83 Mediterranean Sea, 130 Memmi, Albert, 97 Memory memorialization, 69, 84, 85 politics, 29, 191–208, 232 Mexico, 59 Mfcane, Sakhumzi, 205 Miano, Léonora, 97, 244n32 Middle Passage, 54, 130 Mignolo, Walter, 31n5, 117, 124 Miller, Alex, 53 Mission civilisatrice, 98, 225 Mitra, Dinabandhu, 28, 145–149, 151, 152 Mitterand, François, 93 Monument, 14, 15, 17, 25, 26, 28, 69–71, 75, 77, 78, 83, 85, 86, 158–161, 166, 168, 169, 173, 179, 180, 181n4, 200, 264 Moody, Anne, 174 Moore, Jason W., 139, 140 More, Thomas, 25, 47 Moten, Fred, 175 Moudileno, Lydie, 103, 104 Moylan, Tom, 44 Mozambique, Channel, 114, 126, 127 Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, 34n18, 97, 258n4 Mugabe, Robert, 10, 12, 170 Mujahidin, 73, 74, 81, 82 Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, 224–225

Musée du Quay Branly (MQB), 217, 241n5 Museum, 3, 157, 202, 215–244 N Naipaul, V.S., 8, 105 Nama, 193, 195–197, 206, 241n6, 244n35 Kaptein, 196 Namibia, 230 Namibian National Assembly, 202 Namibian War, 192–195, 203 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 115, 118 Nandy, Ashish, 57, 58 Nation, 6, 10, 12, 16, 20, 25, 26, 32n11, 45, 47–51, 57, 59–61, 64, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 158, 171, 181n4, 254 nation-state, 26, 34n18, 47, 48, 51, 60, 71, 130, 198 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 173, 183n25 Nationalism, 2, 16, 17, 34n20, 47, 49, 51, 64, 159, 199, 249 Nationality, 47 National Museum of African American History and Culture, 162, 175 Native Ordinances in Namibia (1907), 193 Nazism, 194 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, 97 Negritude, 3, 29, 49, 250 Neocolonialism, 10, 103 Neto, Agostinho, 49, 50 Newsome, Bree, 166 New York, 28, 157, 159, 174, 207, 249, 257 New Zealand, 216, 240n1, 241n6, 249

 INDEX 

Nganang, Patrice, 105 Nigeria, 75, 222, 242n18 No-Humboldt21, 218, 221, 223, 224, 236 North, 71, 116, 122, 130 “Not About Us Without Us,” 197 Nussbaum, Martha, 125 O Obama, Barack, 162, 181n7, 249 Obenga, Théophile, 107 Obiechina, Emmanuel, 49 Oceania, 61, 62, 231 Ohamakari, 192, 195 Okri, Ben, 46, 48, 49, 51, 58 Omaheke steppe, 193 Open Casket (2017), 28, 159 Opium, 151, 152 Organization of the United Nations (UNO) UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, 217 UNESCO (World Cultural and Natural Heritage site recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 118 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, 97 Orisha, Ifé, 98 Oulebsir, Nabila, 77, 78 Ovaherero, 193, 195–197 P Pacific region, 47, 61 Palestine, 22, 23, 55, 57, 64n2

275

Paris, 79, 81, 88n4, 101, 103, 216–218, 224, 232 Parry, Benita, 20, 31n2, 31n3, 136, 265 Parzinger, Hermann, 220, 221 Peripheral cinema, 113 Pernot, Mathieu, 225 Phui Nam, Wong, 50 Place de la Brèche, 75, 78–80, 83, 88 Plato, 51 Politics identity politics, 158, 164, 165, 178, 264 memory politics, 29, 191–208, 232 political correctness, 158, 168, 264 Porlwi, 118 Postcolonial literature, 25, 31n1, 43–64, 145 memory, 51, 57 theory, 3, 25, 46, 96, 145, 175, 180, 261 utopianism, 25, 44, 47, 51, 64 Postcolony, 9, 10, 13, 128 Pouillon, François, 73, 85 Pratt, Mary Louise, 31n3, 226 Primrose, Archibald, see Lord Roseberry Procter, Alice, 228, 233–236, 240 Protest art, 157 Puerto Rico, 122 Q Queen Victoria, 146, 234 R Railway, 143, 150–152 Randeria, Shalini, 203 Rankine, Claudia, 258 Rassool, Ciraj, 202 Reagan, Ronald Reagonomics, 136

276 

INDEX

Reclus, Onésime, 99 Recognition, 13, 14, 19, 29, 96, 127, 129, 130, 192, 195, 196, 198, 201, 203, 207 Reconciliation, 3, 11, 19, 192, 195, 201, 206 Reparation, 3, 10, 17, 19, 21, 29, 159, 180, 192, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 203, 207, 222, 237, 243n32 Repatriation, 3, 19, 25, 70, 80, 81, 159, 196–198, 202, 217, 223 Responsibility, 14, 15, 81, 103, 201, 202, 209n7, 226, 255, 257, 263 Rhodes, Cecil, 28, 157–180, 264 Rhodesia, 12, 166, 169–172, 182n18 Rimbaud, Arthur, 128, 129 Riruako, Kuaima, 196 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 105, 106 Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA), 218, 219 Rukoro, Vekuii, 197, 201 Rushdie, Salman, 46, 105 Rustin, Bayard, 257 S Sabac el-Cher, Gustav, 229 Said, Edward, 17, 18, 21, 31n3, 31n5, 34n19, 71, 96, 181n5, 228, 232, 235, 263 Salter, Colin, 266 Sansour, Larissa, 57, 58 Sargent, Lyman Tower, 46, 63 Sarkar, Sumit, 31n3, 142–144, 147 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 93, 94 Sarr, Felwine, 97, 241n7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 97, 250, 254 Schmidt, Dierk, 222, 223, 242n20 Schreiner, Olive, 172, 183n22

Schutz, Dana, 28, 159, 163–165, 178, 181n3, 182n14, 182n15 Schutztruppe, 192, 193 Seeley, John Robert, 47 Segregation, 79, 160, 171, 178, 180 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 97, 250 Sherman, Cindy, 164 Shih, Shu-mei, 3, 31n5, 125, 130 Shomali, Amer, 56 Sidney, Samuel, 63 Simone, Nina, 161 Slimani, Leïla, 100 Smith, Zadie, 105, 163, 164 Solidarity group solidarity, 199 international solidarity, 199 outreach solidarity, 29, 199, 201, 206 Third World solidarity, 199 working-class solidarity, 199 South Global South, 19, 100, 101, 106, 113, 114, 116–118, 122, 123, 125, 191, 199, 221, 223, 236, 239, 265 Oceanic South, 117 South Africa, 97, 157, 158, 160, 166, 168–172, 178, 183n20, 183n23, 197, 204, 205, 221, 241n6 South America, 47, 64 Spittler, Gerd, 204, 205 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 31n3, 33n12, 96, 263 Stoler, Ann Laura, 3, 4, 26, 31–32n7, 70, 229 Szeman, Imre, 138, 139, 144 T Tadjo, Véronique, 106 Tansi, Sony Labou, 98

 INDEX 

Tanzania, 193 Terror terrorism, 19, 28, 103, 160, 165, 183n28 Thick engagement, 205 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 48, 95 Tiang Hong, Ee, 50 Tiffin, Helen, 32n10, 128 Till, Emmett, 28, 157–180, 264 Tometi, Opal, 256 Tongva, 33n15 Troopen Museum, 217 Trump, Donald J., 9, 249 Trump administration, 161 Twain, Mark, 167 U Überseemuseum Bremem, see Bremen Overseas Museum Ukraine, 181n4 United Kingdom (UK), 12, 63, 140, 142, 143, 165, 181n7, 249, 265 United States of America (USA), 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 34n17, 34–35n20, 60, 88n2, 88n3, 97, 99, 136, 160, 162–166, 168, 170, 174, 177, 181n3, 181n7, 182n16, 183n20, 183n28, 184n32, 195, 216, 253–255 University Oxford University, 158, 168 University of California, Berkeley, 6, 158 University of Cape Town, 28, 158, 172, 184n33 University of Edinburgh, 158 UNO, see Organization of the United Nations

277

Utopia, 14, 24, 25, 31n1, 43–64, 115 Utopia (1516), 25, 47 Utopianism, 16, 25, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51–53, 59, 60 utopian thinking, 43, 45, 47, 59, 60 See also Postcolonial, utopianism Utopian Studies Society, 43 V van Wolputte, Steven, 205 Védrine, Hubert, 99 Vergès, Françoise, 97, 103, 104, 106, 107, 124, 228, 231–233, 235, 243n31, 243–244n32 Versailles Treaty, 194 Vienna World Museum, 217 Villiers, Allan, 117 Vince, Natalya, 72, 76, 81, 82, 88n1 Virginia, 166, 249 von Trotha, Lothar, 193, 194, 201 W Waberi, Abdourahman, 97, 102, 104 Walcott, Derek, 61, 105 Walker, Kara, 164 Weber, Max, 204, 209n5 Weller, Archie, 53 Wendt, Albert, 62 West, 50, 128, 221 Western nations, 123 West, Kanye, 161 White supremacy, 28, 157, 161, 165–167, 172–174

278 

INDEX

Whitewashing, 8, 15, 166 Whitney Biennial of Art, 28, 158, 161, 163, 165 Wieczorek-Zeul, Heidmarie, 195 Wilaya, 77 Wilson, Fred, 216 Mining the Museum, 216 Witbooi, Hendrik, 206 Witz, Leslie, 203 World War I, 69, 70, 78, 83 World War II, 70, 182n11, 236 Wright, Alexis, 53

Y Yaeger, Patricia, 139 Young, Robert J. C., 4, 31n3, 31n7, 263–266 Z Zambia, 170, 182n18 Zighoud, Youcef, 25, 72–88 Zimbabwe, 9, 10, 12, 13, 33n14, 167, 170, 172, 182n18 Zipes, Jack, 45, 61, 64n1