Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies
Between Utopia and Dystopia: The Afterlives of Empire
Friday 19 & Saturday 20 November 2010
Book of Abstracts
AUSTIN, GUY: Postcolonial Algerian Cinema: From a ‘Constellation of Revolt’ to the ‘Crushed State of Melancholia’
Algerian cinema has often measured the state of the nation against the ideals of the independence struggle. Although not all reflections back to the revolution against French rule are entirely nostalgic, on the whole this period of history stands as a lost ideal, in Freudian terms a lost object. One might say that much Algerian cinema mourns this ideal. As Freud wrote, mourning is a reaction to `the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (Freud 1984: 253). When mourning becomes pathological, that is to say according to Freud obsessive and repetitive, it crosses over into melancholia. Freud’s description of this moment, when revolt at a great loss has become obsessive but impotent, is as follows: `the reactions expressed […] proceed from a mental constellation of revolt, which has then, by a certain process, passed over into the crushed state of melancholia’ (Freud 1984: 257). It bears close comparison with the `crushed’, alienated state of the Algerian population in the postcolonial era, and in particular after the so-called golden years of the Boumediène presidency.
This paper will address the melancholic representation of the ‘lost object’of the Algerian revolution and of the ideals of the independence struggle via close analysis of three cases studies set across thirty years of filmmaking and which parallel Freud’s identification of the shift from revolt to melancholia: La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (Assia Djebar, 1978), Youcef (Mohamed Chouikh, 1993) and Rome plutôt que vous (Tariq Teguia, 2007).
References:
Sigmund Freud, `Mourning and Melancholia’,Pelican Freud Library, Volume 11: On Metapsychology (Penguin, 1984), 245-268
BOJSEN, HEIDI: Albert Camus’ Defence of a French Algeria as a Utopian Idea of Nation or Empire Building and Cultural Merging
This paper sets out to discuss Albert Camus’ defence of a French Algeria as a utopian idea of nation or empire building and cultural merging. When Camus broke with Marxism, it was partly due to the fact that Algirian marxists refused to accept Algierian Arabs in the their midst. He attended numerous trials in Algeria, out of concern or interest in the rights (or lack of such) of the Arabo-Algerian population. Yet, for a number of reasons, he could not accept the idea of an independent Algerian nation. Among those reasons, it could be argued that he was too much enmeshed in colonial ideologies, such as the mission civilisatrice, understood as the right and duty to spread universal and humanitarian ideals in other cultures (utopia). Others might say that he feared that certain fractions of the nationalist Algerians constituted a far worse alternative (dystopia) than the unjust policies of the French government, policies that he often criticed in various papers and magazines.
The point of the paper is emphatically not to formulate an excuse or an accusation of Camus’ position. It is rather to investigate what we can learn from these apparent paradoxes. Do we miss part of the point when discussing Camus as either a colonial imperialist or a misunderstood humanist author with no sense of politics?
Can his failure to communicate an in-between-position be compared to similar experiences held by other intellectuals from the French colonies or postcolonies? Camus was Euro-Algerian. Should we read him as a postcolonial writer rather as part of the French canon and are these two categories mutually exclusive yet today? Is he then closer to a Maurice Delafosse than to a Blaise Diagne or an Aimé Césaire? Or is a comparison with Fama in Kouroma’s Les soleils des independences a better proposition?
BOUKARI-YABARA, AMZAT: La vision panafricaine de Kwame Nkrumah: De la realite à l’utopie?
La commémoration actuelle des indépendances africaines est à la fois un acte politique relatif à la construction des histoires nationales postcoloniales, et un objet de l’histoire populaire qui interroge un certain nombre de notions, et en premier lieu, celle de l’indépendance même. Nous partirons du postulat que l’indépendance, l’idéologie de l’indépendance et la réalité de l’indépendance sont trois choses bien différentes. Par faute de réflexion généralisée sur ce postulat de départ, l’intangibilité des frontières issues des indépendances et inscrites dans les anciens cadres coloniaux, la coïncidence entre le jour de l’indépendance et le jour de la fête nationale dans plusieurs pays africains, la sanctification ou la diabolisation de certaines figures historiques, et le choix fait par certains pays de conserver ou de modifier leur appellation héritée du temps colonial sont autant d’enjeux qui sont aujourd’hui oubliés, car sortis de l’actualité et de l’histoire politique et entrés dans le domaine de l’évidence.
Aussi, pour réfléchir sur l’indépendance concrète et pratique en tant qu’école de pensée africaine, nous devrons donc penser l’histoire par-delà les géographies, les cadres symboliques et les chronologies officielles. Il nous faudra inclure de manière pertinente l’histoire des Amériques et de l’Inde pour faire ressortir la spécificité des hommes et des femmes, ainsi que des collectifs, qui n’ont pas voulu faire de l’indépendance africaine une coquille vide ou une simple formalité administrative.
Nous discuterons donc de la notion d’indépendance en comparaison avec les notions de libération et d’autonomie afin de comprendre, notamment, comment le gouvernement continental panafricain réclamé par le leader ghanéen Kwame Nkrumah a pu passer du statut de projet possible à celui d’utopie en l’espace d’un demi-siècle.
BRISLEY, LUCY: From Melancholia to Utopia?: On the Paradox of Recent Theory
‘Postcolonial melancholia’ refers to the profound sense of disillusionment that followed the failure of many African nation-states to live up to their revolutionary ideals. Evoking traumatic images of dereliction and collapse, postcolonial melancholia points to an inability to move beyond the past. It is thus surprising that much recent interdisciplinary theory has embraced melancholia, figuring it as a transformative mode of grief that engenders political reform. Inspired in large part by Jacques Derrida’s text Spectres de Marx, as well as Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘postcolonial time-lag’, melancholia is seen to give a voice to marginalised peoples; Ranjana Khanna even goes so far as to contend that melancholia is the only hope for the future of the Algerian nation.
Yet to what extent is this ever-developing body of theory not simply a melancholic reiteration of the utopian ideals of the independence movement? Indeed, just as Frantz Fanon’s critique of the pitfalls of postcolonial nationalism in Les damnés de la terre incorporates a utopian desire for the birth of a ‘new man’, theories of melancholia are similarly imbued with a utopian lexicon, revealing a fetishistic desire for the new. Advocates of melancholia attest to its ‘critical agency,’ arguing that its capacity for critique can generate a future free from the inequalities of the past, yet such an investment in melancholia overlooks the way in which the postcolonial melancholy of the last fifty years has too often engendered violence and political extremism.
The recent theoretical turn to melancholia frequently belies a utopian investment in the new similar to that of the fifties and sixties which, ensconced as it is in a repetitive cycle of utopia/dystopia/utopia, cannot but fail to inaugurate its own ideals. It is only by working through the failings of the past, I argue, that political reform can begin.
COOMBES, SAM: Hopes and Frustrations of Departmental Life: The Ambiguities of Martiniquan Attitudes towards the Colonial Inheritance
In 1946, almost a century after the abolition of slavery, Martinique became a French ‘département’ and it has remained such until today. The island, like its neighbouring Guadeloupe and Guyana, has hence long held a fundamentally ambivalent status, maintaining close ties with its former colonial ruler against a backdrop of rejection of and resentment about colonial domination. Some Martiniquans, such as Patrick Chamoiseau in his Ecrire en pays dominé (Gallimard, 2007), still perceive Martinique to be a French colony in all but name.The recent referendum of January 2010 on the issue of greater independence from France underlined this ambivalent stance as the citizens of the islands voted en masse to remain French. The intellectual community was split over the issue, a staunch independentist like Raphael Confiant berating other writers and thinkers such as Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant for having voted against Article 74 in spite of continuing to declare themselves independentists. In this paper, I propose to scrutinise the complexities of the situation and status of Martinique today by way of analysis of the attitudes of the island’s intellectuals towards France today. I will discuss the extent to which the positions of intellectuals today remain trapped in the sort of ambiguity and internal contradictoriness which Confiant has rightly argued typified the stance of their illustrious predecessor Césaire in his Aimé Césaire. Une Traversée paradoxale du siècle (Ecriture, 2006). The question will be treated as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional one: the relationship of creolist intellectuals to the French language they still publish in will be considered; the evolution of the political and economic status of Martinique since ‘départmentalisation’ will be covered; and both theoretical and literary texts will constitute the basis of my discussion.
DE JONG, FERDINAND: Postcolonial Heterotopia: The Monument of the African Renaissance.
Since the start of his presidency in 2000 President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal has conducted a policy with the intent of validating the African heritage. The erection of a massive statue in Dakar - called Monument de la Renaissance Africaine - is clearly meant to be a cornerstone of his politics of spectacle. Competing in size with the Statue of Liberty, the statue has become the subject of many controversies relating to its cost and funding, its execution and formal appearance. In this lecture I will discuss its iconography and the wider issues it raised. I will suggest that these issues should first of all be situated in the current political context in which President Wade has lost the popularity he enjoyed when first elected. But it is clear that the controversies raised by the formal properties of the statue also hint at more fundamental questions relating to the future of the African postcolony. Conceived of as indexing a Pan-African Utopia, the monument is nevertheless perceived by many Senegalese and others as signifying a postcolonial dystopia.
ELDRIDGE, CLAIRE: Shades of Grey: Challenging Utopian and Dystopian Representations of the Algerian War of Independence
In the years following the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) two distinct communities of Algerians emerged in France. Tens of thousands of harkis - Algerians who had fought as auxiliaries under the French flag during the war – fled across the Mediterranean with their families in 1962, as waves of brutal revenge violence swept their newly independent homeland. Already present in France were thousands of their countrymen who had migrated to the metropole in search of work over the preceding decades. Unlike the harkis, these men and women had allied themselves with the independence movement supporting the ultimately victorious Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Consequently, although they shared a country of origin and a country of residence, their trajectories had diverged dramatically during the war, placing them on opposite sides of a seemingly unbridgeable historical and ideological divide. Yet in many respects both communities have had remarkably similar post war experiences, leading lives characterised by marginalisation, deprivation, and discrimination. They also shared the fate of having their histories confiscated by powerful, ideologically driven narratives created by other memory carriers who manipulated the past to serve their own needs. In the process, the nuances of individual trajectories were effaced, replaced by all encompassing representations that bore little resemblance to lived experience. The harkis were thus cast as either loyal French patriots or despicable Algerian traitors, while Algerian immigrants were subsumed into a supposed mass of willing participants in the FLN’s nationalist struggle conducted ‘for the people by the people’. Following decades of silence in the face of these externally generated, hegemonic interpretations, harkis and Algerian immigrants are now beginning to speak back. This paper seeks to examine not only the challenges these new narratives pose to previously dominant black-and-white representations of the war, but also to explore the connections and similarities between the memories of communities that are too frequently assumed to be irrevocably in opposition. Such an analysis is intended more broadly to offer insights into the processes of memory construction, transmission and legitimation in a postcolonial context.
FRITH, NICOLA: After ‘Loss’: Utopian Visions of French India during the Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857–58)
The Indian Uprisings of 1857–58 have been celebrated within Indian historiography as representing the first major step towards the decolonization of the subcontinent. Rather than focusing on the much studied British and Indian narratives of these events, this paper will consider how an Indian-led, anti-colonial revolt was viewed through the eyes of that ‘other’ colonizer, the French, as a moment in which to negotiate France’s problematic memories of colonial loss and its ongoing subordination to British hegemony. Importantly, the uprisings occurred only forty two years after France had signed the Treaty of Paris in 1815, effectively bringing French hopes in India to an end by reducing its colonial presence to five comptoirs scattered around the periphery of British India. As such, this treaty represented a ‘loss’ that was significant, yet incomplete, giving rise to a complex imperial afterlife that would be marked by nostalgia, melancholy and fragmentation. By reading the Indian uprisings through contemporaneous French newspapers reports and within the context of this partial loss, this paper will consider how these events presented an opportunity for French journalists to write back against their British rivals. It will demonstrate how the comptoirs were presented as calm utopias amid the dystopian storm of an Indian-led revolt, showcasing French colonialism as a preferable alternative to that of the British. More than that, it will show how these idealized images were underpinned by a will to project a utopian colonial vision beyond the nostalgic borders of ‘lost’ India and out towards the promise land of Algeria. As this paper will conclude, it was by negatively comparing British India to an edenic vision of French Algeria that the Indian uprisings became politically useful, reviving a positive vision of French colonialism at a time when France’s imperial power was much reduced and enabling French memories of loss to be deferred onto a potentially calamitous loss for British colonialism.
GLOVER, KAIAMA L.:On a Politics of Narcissism in the African Postcolony: Maryse Condé’s Hérémakhonon.
In her provocative first novel, Hérémakhonon (1976), Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé takes an up-close and very personal look at a post-independence sub-Saharan West African nation through the eyes of her bourgeois Antillean (anti-)heroine, Veronica Mercier. Having embarked explicitly on a quest to understand herself via an anticipated discovery of her African heritage, the narcissistic yet increasingly clear-eyed Veronica finds herself confronted with social and political realities that in every way contradict her hopes and expectations. Condé?s novel thus adopts the confidential and often aggressively cynical tone of an individual?s profound disappointment faced with the unraveling of her Pan-African dream. Foregrounding the uncomfortable intersections of the political and the personal ? the conflicts between affairs of state and affairs of the heart (and libido) ? Condé dismantles the post-colonial utopian vision in its most intimate aspects. She has configured a self-centered protagonist whose best efforts to ignore the violence and corruption that surround her are met with the unrelenting encroachment of a socially and politically dystopian postcolony. In this paper, I look closely at the extent to which Veronica mobilizes a putatively ?healthy? narcissism as a self-protective measure with respect to fragile communities ? both African and Antillean ? that would co-opt her. I consider in particular the usefulness of erotic self-assertion as foundation for a discourse of subversive (though not necessarily constructive) individualism.
GRINDEL, SUSANNE: Past Glories and Oppressive Tradition. Empires in European Textbooks.
The paper takes two observations as its starting point: the role of Empire and the role of textbooks in European memory.
Until as recently as the turn of the millennium there was no serious public debate in Europe about its colonial past. However, a number of issues like memory laws in France, controversies about Mau-Mau in the UK, Herero demands for compensation from Germany or the colonial exhibition at the Belgian Africa museum in Tervuren illustrate the growing awareness of the aftermath of Colonialism.
Textbooks have been crucial in the formation of collective identities and they still present –intentionally or not –national master narratives. They are key instruments to acquaint a new generation with its national biography. Furthermore, they are the most important media in the transfer of scientific knowledge to a broader public. And finally they represent a minimal consensus of what a society perceives as common grounds.
Thus it will be highly interesting to look at the ways in which textbooks present the afterlives of Empires – whether they advocate utopian or dystopian images of decolonization. In answering this question the paper focuses on two aspects:
Since textbooks work with material that has been formed in colonial contexts and discourses such as maps, images, material goods or written sources they run the risk of evocating past glories instead of coming to terms with a burdened past. Is this perhaps where textbooks as educational media come up against their boundaries?
Since postcolonial theory has also inspired textbook authors they try to acknowledge the entangled histories of metropoles and peripheries and take into account the voices of the colonized. But can textbooks as national master narratives really transcend national boundaries?
HARDWICK, LOUISE: Social Dispossession in Dystopian Guadeloupe: Nèg maron, lettre ouverte àla jeunesseand the Strikes Of 2009
In early 2009, the overseas French départements of Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana (Guyane) were rocked by a wave of general strikes railing against ‘la vie chère’ and the départements’ ongoing economic and political dependence upon metropolitan France. This paper proposes that the concerns highlighted by the strikes were already finding urgent expression in Guadeloupean cultural output from filmmaker Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny and author Ernest Pépin prior to 2009, in works examining social dispossession amongst young people (adolescents and those in their early twenties) trapped in the dystopian space of contemporary Guadeloupe. Their explorations of the current situation in the Antilles in general, and in Guadeloupe in particular, are remarkable for the attention with which they trace the colonial past from conquest through to the moment of decolonisation. During the 2009 general strikes, prominent figures such as Christiane Taubira and Elie Domota (leader of the controversial organisation LKP - Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon) drew attention in media debates to dates such as 1848 and 1946, questioning whether abolition and departmentalisation brought about any actual change in the power structures of the Caribbean DOMs, and in doing so drawing attention to the racial tensions which continue to dominate Francophone Antillean society: it will be demonstrated that these very questions were anticipated and interrogated by Flamand-Barny and Pépin. This paper will explore how these cultural activists make incisive, yet neglected, contributions to contemporary debates on economics, history and politics in the DOMs.