Bande dessinée

Some contemporary French cartoonists have published comics that either themselves serve as post-colonial lieux de mémoire in place of disappeared colonial people, places, events or objects, or that otherwise recall colonial lieux de mémoire. The graphic novel Cannibale (2009), adapted by Emmanuel Reuzé from Didier Daeninckx's eponymous prose novel (1998), returns to the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, which has become a post-colonial lieu de mémoire. The 1931 event, staged at the zenith of French imperial rule, and overseen by Maréchal Lyautey, was grandiose in conception, size and scope, and racist too, in fact. Both versions of Cannibale feature a Kanak narrator sent to perform as a New Caledonian cannibal in the Parisian exhibition. This essay analyzes how Reuzé uses cartooning techniques such as visual symbolism, subjective viewpoints, visual and verbal narration, inset images, and visual rhymes to critique French colonialism and to commemorate its victims.

Toys

This article examines colonially-themed toys as historical sources that provide insight into the way that metropolitan boys and girls learned embrace the French empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that colonially-themed toys such as drums, dolls, and games encouraged forms of play that instilled a colonial mindset and attitude among metropolitan French children. These actions provided the foundation for a cognitive framework and worldview that naturalized colonialism and racial and civilization hierarchies. The residues of these earlier practices and imaginations remain, marking toys as a particularly rich genre of material culture with which to understand the inculcation of colonialism and lingering colonial nostalgia.

Couscous

This article proposes to consider couscous, a North African specialty and a favourite dish of the French, as an edible site of memory. Displacing the focus from gastronomy, a discourse of national culinary superiority, to a single dish, I retrace the irresistible ascent of couscous to fame in the French culinary pantheon. The military conquest and colonization of Algeria familiarized French diners with the dish and associated it with forms of racialized and sexualized colonial burlesque in songs and vaudeville. Settlers appropriated it as terroir to claim their “Algérianité.” North African immigration and decolonization created a de facto market of consumers in France, while the industrialization of food production made this preparation into a valuable commodity and a ready-made meal, obfuscating its colonial roots. The French’s affection for couscous is often hailed as a sign of tolerance in an otherwise divisive and fraught public conversation about immigration, identity, and discrimination. However, couscous’ colonial baggage and racialized legacy continue to resonate, shaping tastes, and informing political rhetoric as well as cultural hierarchies. The (after)taste of empire lingers on at a granular level, as edible memory.

Jeanne Duval

This particular attempt at imagining a site of memory made of words may appear irreverent at first, but it has been crafted as an homage to a formidable woman: Jeanne Duval. I have taken the liberty of fictionalizing a first-person narrator who will talk about ‘herself’, at the risk of usurping her voice and her identity. Jeanne (whose name was or was not Duval) was a woman of colour and she had a long-term turbulent relationship with the enfant terrible of French nineteenth-century poetry, Charles Baudelaire. As a result, historical accounts both magnify and marginalize her. Trying to do justice to a historical character who was so much more than a muse but may not have been happy to embrace the role of exemplary black foremother, this text puts together the numerous and often incompatible portraits of Jeanne Duval. She appears and disappears in biographies (Emmanuel Richon), novels (Fabienne Pasquet), short stories (Angela Carter), academic studies (Claude Pichois). She is both present and absent, celebrated and erased in the so-called ‘Black Venus cycle’ of Baudelaire’s Flower of Evil as well as in paintings by Edouard Manet (Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining) and Gustave Courbet (The Painter’s Studio). The objective was to question the process of memorialization that might silence or appropriate her instead of providing her with a safe space of memory. It remains to be seen to what extent Jeanne is here celebrated or betrayed.

Les Sans-papiers

Control and selection have been implicit dimensions of the history of immigration in France, shaping and defining the parameters of national identity over centuries. The year 1996 was a turning point when several hundred African sans-papiers sought refuge in the Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle church in the 18th arrondissement of Paris while awaiting a decision on their petition for amnesty and legalization. The church was later stormed by heavily armed police officers, and although there was widespread support for government policies intended to encourage legal paths to immigration, the police raids provoked outrage. This provided the impetus for social mobilization and the sans-papiers behaved contrary to expectations and decided to deliberately enter the public domain in order to shed light on their conditions. Emerging in this way from the dubious safety of legal invisibility, claims were made for more direct public representation and ultimately for regularization, while also countering popular misconceptions and stereotypes concerning their presence and role in French society. The sans-papiers movement is inspired by a shared memory of resistance and political representation that helps define a lieu de mémoire, a space which is, from a broadly postcolonial perspective, very much inscribed in collective memory.

BUMIDOM

The demographics of contemporary France show that there are an estimated 800,000 people of French Caribbean birth or descent presently living on the French mainland. Problematizating this presence properly begins with the end of the Second World War and the advent of two events closely situated in time: the inauguration of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ period of French economic expansion (approximately 1946-1975), and the departmentalization law of March 1946. The need to respond to postwar labor shortages, and to regulate and stabilize the labour force being brought into France to address these shortages, gave rise to the birth of BUMIDOM as a state agency early in the Fifth Republic. BUMIDOM’s goal was to furnish a state-organized and -controlled labor pool. Migration to the metropole – and its attendant ethnic, cultural and linguistic corollaries there along with the socioeconomic transformation of the DOMs – has probably been the most visible consequence of BUMIDOM’s creation.

Le Bagne

The bagne retains an ambiguous status as a lieu de mémoire, in part because of its predominantly extra-metropolitan location, in part because most understandings of the institution rely heavily on representations freighted via literature, film and graphic fiction. In French Guiana and New Caledonia, the bagne was nevertheless the major driver in the attempted mise en valeur of those colonies in the face of varying degrees of resistance to settlement. Moreover, France’s carceral archipelago extended beyond those key sites to include penal colonies in North and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as Indochina. The essay scrutinizes the rich body of material that has served as a vehicle for memories of the institution, but uses a focus on contemporary memorial practices in French Guiana and New Caledonia to suggest a distinct divergence in forms of interpretation, especially regarding the place of the penal colony in colonial expansionism. Although until recent years the bagne has often acted as more of a postcolonial lieu d’oubli, in a context of complex postcolonial politics and of growing interest in penal heritage its status as a lieu de mémoire is becoming increasingly apparent.

The Abolition of Slavery

April 24th 1998, a two-meter-high iron statue of a slave, arms raised towards the sky, breaking free from his/her chains, was erected clandestinely in Nantes, the primary French slave port of the eighteenth century. Faced with the local government’s refusal to erect a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer association decided, in secret, to commission a sculpture. Following the organization’s initial success of hijacking the inauguration, the statue was vandalized. It soon became a performative monument, a memorial palimpsest, and a centre stage of a symbolic combat where opponents and supporters clashed. This essay reveals the democratic praxis at the heart of this commemoration debate. With both the pressure of citizens on the political body, and the triple practice of diversion, subversion, and taking hostage of (public) space, the association thwarts the writing and power strategies of the city of Nantes and its culture of silence. Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer not only resists official discourse but subsequently imposes its own version of French history on the whitened pages of France’s colonial narrative, thus reclaiming a past, a story, an identity, by bringing to light existences and testimonies, and defining new lieux de parole.

Marseille

This contribution examines the city of Marseille’s strikingly vague relationship to its colonial past. Through an analysis of economic policies developed in response to the national government’s colonial expansion, the essay shows how Marseille’s business leaders effectively channeled natural resources from throughout the French Empire to enhance their own production capacities. Aided by the population flow to and through the city, industry in Marseille also took advantage of access to cheap colonial labor. After the independence of Vietnam and Algeria, however, local leaders were faced with a new challenge with the mass arrivals of European populations who chose to resettle in France. Today the city’s relationship with its colonial past remains palimpsestic: readily visible in heavily Algerian neighborhoods such as Belsunce but officially unacknowledged by museums or memorials.

Borders

This essay argues for a broader conception of the ‘border’ in a contemporary, postcolonial context. French borders are increasingly diffuse geographically and conceptually. Multidirectional population flows, the effects of European border policies and the ideational borders that delineate between putative insiders and outsiders must all be taken into account. In strictly spatial terms, the contemporary borders of France and Europe are not simply physical lines (however fluid or permeable) where people cross or are compelled to stop, but zones, spaces of contact and back-and-forth, or a ‘borderland’, to use étienne Balibar’s concept. Drawing on historical studies of immigration and current border theory, the essay takes two primary approaches to borders: first as social and political concepts and then as physical spaces or zones. It then concludes examples of cinematic representations of border crossings and border experiences, taken from French, francophone and wider European film industries.