Fittingly, Mectoub made its American debut at Seattle’s Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which in an art scene that is particularly homogenous, stands out as a trailblazer. It exhibits artists hailing from at least thirteen countries and five continents many of whom are of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent, and/or deal with themes in their works connected to these regions. The gallery has established a practice that rejects aesthetic and conceptual narratives steeped in the European art historical tradition, in favor of discourse and praxis that support and promote diversity of experience and identity.

Mohamed, Nablus (2014), courtesy of the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

Coten’s Mectoub is the result of a discourse between photographer and subject, with Coten seeking to understand and document (mectoub means it was written, also destiny) identities other than what is considered ‘the standard’ (typically determined through a European lens). Coten’s decision to photograph Arab men bucks the global trend that focuses almost exclusively on the liberation of Arab and Muslim women who are framed as victims of an excessively oppressive Islamic patriarchy. Arab men are limited to caricatures of corrupt dictator, Muslim cleric or jihadist. Contrary to historical interactions between Westerners and Arabs, the men in Mectoub do not exercise their agency reactively. What we observe is a conversation. Coten asks “Who are you?” and these men respond assertively and unabashedly.

However tempting it may be to apply a Saidian analysis, the only, remotely Orientalist characteristic found in Mectoub is Coten’s French nationality. Mectoub is not the 19th century oft-salacious depictions of harems, bathhouses, and slave auctions. None of the men are dressed as devout, orthodox Muslims; thus a disassociation from Islam and the terrorist trope. Several are pictured bare chested, or with their shirts open in seductive, sexual poses. These postures could be interpreted as a nod to the odalisque genre of painting within Orientalist art however, the difference is that most of the men are looking directly at the camera and none of them are nude. When viewing the images, your eyes meet theirs straight away. The odalisque tradition portrayed fetishized female subjects: inanimate objects to be devoured by men. Coten depicts Arab men who are comfortable in their own skins, and who assert alternate gender and sexual identities over which the viewer, nor Coten herself, has no control.

Nubi, Cairo, courtesy of the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

To suggest these poses were elicited by Coten is too simplistic an assessment. It supports the antiquated concept of the colonial subject incapable of thinking for himself. Further, it implies homogeneity amongst a population of people with immense diversity. There are four main dialects spoken across the region, and while Islam is the dominant religion there are sectarian differences, as well as notable communities of Christians, Jews, Druze, and others.

Mectoub illustrates Arab men as proactive agents in the creation of their lives, their futures, and of their own representation. It effectively destroys the singular narrative that Arab identity is confined to patriarchal oppressive Islam and terrorism.  In a space where the agency of these men is intentionally brought to the fore, these men illustrate self-determination that we must consider has always been there, hidden behind prevailing monolithic narratives of the region. There is a power shift at work here. When the western viewer is no longer the sole agent and consumer of the identity of a people it once subjugated, imaginably there is discomfort, dissonance and a rejection.

Nabil, Algiers, Algeria, courtesy of the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

The post Scarlett Coten, Mectoub: In the Shadow of the Arab Spring appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

I spent my summers growing up at my grandparent’s residence in Lahore, Pakistan. Every morning, despite the sleepless nights spent goofing around with my cousins, I was begrudgingly woken up by my mother and taken to the breakfast table. “Eat!” nanabu (maternal grandfather) would say, “This is halal!” Despite his repeated insistence, my American upbringing conditioned me not to stomach (pun intended) the lahori delicacy of siri paye, or the head and hooves of goat. I looked on; however, as I could tell how much enjoyment my beloved grandfather took in eating and also giving food to others. Perhaps feeding others freely was an acquired trait rooted in his impoverished past as a laborer in pre-partition Amritsar. As my cousins and I had compromised on minced meat sandwiches with butter slathered toast – made by nanabu himself, mind you – the lethargy from the previous night subsided as our oblong breakfast table in Lahore converted into an intellectual coffeehouse.

Despite having completed only a fifth grade education, Nanabu would recite poetry from memorization. My grandfather was not educated; he was knowledgeable. His intellectual prowess would today be castigated by western secular epistemology, which de-legitimizes knowledge rooted in indigenous and religious traditions, attained outside the context of an institution. Many of his favorite poems mirrored Eastern/Islamic philosophy or political thought. He revered Iqbal; many Muslim colonial subjects from the Punjab did. “Nanabu agar aap parh likhe hotey aap shayad Einstein bante! (If you finished school perhaps you would have become Einstein!)” I would tell him. “Nahi,” he would say, “mai kuch nahi hoon.” (No, I am nothing.) He carried himself with humility, a rare trait to be found these days. After all, such morals only serve to strengthen human beings, yet weaken citizenship, the central social identity defined by the nation-state and its restrictive parameters.

His room smelled of a hint of cigarettes, English toffee, and cologne. If I were to smell his sweater long enough today, I am able to place myself back in his room, twirling from his music collection to his books to his chairs and coffee table for his guests, whilst catching a whiff of that intoxicating scent. It is an odd combination of smells for a young girl to adore, but I loved it nonetheless. Much to our parents chagrin, my cousins and I would mimick nanabu — and not TV or billboard ads — as we held the perfectly crafted cigarette between our fingers. I don’t know why our parents hindered us from constantly barging in his room, it was clearly the most exhilarating! The man had an aura of magnetism around him, which his eight children and twenty-five plus grandchildren can attest – although I admit, we are perhaps biased. I have always felt that it was his undying belief in self and community empowerment which made him unique; he exuded an understated confidence. “Khudi ko kar buland itna kay har taqdeer se pehle khuda bande se pooche ‘bata teri raza kya hai? (Elevate yourself so high that before every decree, God asks you ‘What is your wish?’)” he would often remind us. Nanabu sought refuge and agency in Iqbal’s concept of khudi; it allowed him the political imagination to envision a future beyond an occupied existence. He was amongst the Muslim underclasses of British Punjab; an ordinary man. And yet, in this ordinary existence of odd-end jobs, political turmoil, and social isolation, his rigorous and continuous engagement with intellectual advancement made him extraordinary.

My poetry classes at the breakfast table were complemented by evening lectures and discussions surrounding classical Urdu and Punjabi ghazals, or lyrical poems set to music. Nanabu taught us to recognize enlightenment through various mediums – whether in music, human relationships, or poetry. My cousins and I would often tip-toe into his room, paanch (meaning ‘five,’ as the rooms of the house were numbered) and turn on his stereo system. We were disappointed when a click of the on button did not result in the latest Western pop music as it did on MTV India, however, later on in life we would appreciate the wisdom behind nanabu’s mystical collection of poetic ghazals. Faiz taught me the multiple meanings behind struggle, Habib Jalib and Ustad Daman became a language for those silenced, and the raags, or musical notes, accompanied by Ustad Barkat Ali Khan and Begum Akhtar allowed me to envisage love as a metaphor for a broader political and spiritual vision. There is a well-known phrase in Urdu related to the complex art of raising children: taaleem-o-tarbiyat. Nanabu’s tarbiyat, or upbringing, of his children is (hopefully) apparent in our commitment to ihsan (the Muslim responsibility to seek excellence in worship), and his instilling of taleem (education) is in our constant search for knowledge, which elevates human beings.

Besides being my respected elder and fashion inspiration, nanabu was also my go-to political analyst in Lahore. His morning routine consisted of feeding the animals in our front yard, followed by reading his newspaper in the garden. As a quiet yet curious teenager, I was eager to inform myself about the world, and so I asked nanabu if he would subscribe to the English language newspaper for me. We read our Urdu and English newspapers and mutually reflected knowledge based on our respective times. He brought in wisdom rooted in poetic politics and spirituality. I was the young woman who asked questions – still a daring concept in many contexts. After 9/11, I would inform him about the plight of American Muslims. As I detailed the stories of mass surveillance, detainment, and racial profiling, my capricious tone – sometimes reflecting anger, sometimes desolation – revealed my adolescent reaction to the extremity of the situation. Nanabu; however, would simply nod with a monotonous expression as if he was somehow familiar with the narrative of isolation. His wounds as an occupied subject of British colonialism allowed him to relate to and critique post-9/11 geopolitics. He would speak of the economic disenfranchisement of Muslims in colonial Punjab, for instance, as an integral component of occupation. While the economic condition of Muslims in post-9/11 American cannot act as a parallel, the ideologies of power and occupation still permeate political and social contexts. Nanabu understood such ideologies, their centrality to US Empire, and their influence in peripheral institutions. My camaraderie with my grandfather reflected what I yearned for in the US: a detailed critique of Empire and its consequences. Our conversations provided me with the intellectual vigor to examine politics not from the perspective of those in power, but from the sea of people whose existence and resistance serves as a reminder of the spiritual heights the human race is capable of.

Like soldiers returning after a sanguinary war, survivors of the colonial and partition era also embodied significant trauma. Life moved on for my grandfather and others, but they were never able to revert to the previous state; I’m not sure if my grandfather ever did. Despite wounds rooted in enforced poverty, violence, and war, nanabu also shared stories that represented kindness, human empathy, and the will to implement ihsaan, or good, which Islam teaches is a part of worship. There was a particularly special story in which nanabu remembered the benevolence and companionship provided to him, a young Muslim boy, by a newly wedded Sikh woman in his time of distress. During one of his odd jobs, he had to deliver a package to someone’s house. He couldn’t find the house; however, and came across a Sikh woman who — through her ghoongat, or uniquely styled scarf which gave away her identity as a new bride — spoke to him in Punjabi: “Veer, ai lo roti kha. Assi chadd awaan ge. (Brother, here eat some food. We will drop off the package.)  Nanabu remembered the softness in her voice sixty-five years later as he lay on his deathbed in post-partition Pakistan, her kindness remembered across newly drawn geopolitical lines.

The humanity exemplified in my grandfather’s story problematizes the orientalist tropes of the ‘intolerant’ Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim taught in prevailing westernized discourses. Indigenous narratives evoking memory of a South Asia once known for its interreligious harmony, political unity, and camaraderie challenges the matrix of Empire and client state patronage and thus acts as a politicized weapon of truth-telling and resistance.

In a way, my grandfather’s generation represented a lost tribe. Freedom, for them, was a glimmering memory of the past. And yet memories often have the power to reinvigorate the beauty and consciousness found within the collective human spirit. Pakistan was created in 1947, and my grandfather’s love for his land was spiritually kinetic. I often wish my grandfather and Edward Said could have met, as Said’s writing often follows a theme on homeland and displacement.[2] Nanabu’s sentiments can be explained by a simple truth: as the country grew, so did he. As Pakistan’s newly born population crafted statehood, nanabu immersed himself in Islamic intellectual history, poetry, and grew intellectually. As the country neared its fifth year, nanabu laid the foundations for his business and contributed to Pakistan’s industrial growth. And when our repackaged colonial ‘leaders’ sold the country in promises of multi-billion dollar deals and validation from western interests, nanabu’s lamenting sighs echoed those of Faiz in poetic form: Chale chalo, kay woh manzil abhi nahi aye (Let us go on, for that goal has not yet arrived). What else is there to describe about a traveller’s compassion towards his fellow traveler?

He was not a class theorist, yet his critiques on the subject were much more refined than those of the elites of the country. “Inka bhi dehan rakhna chahiye” (We should take care of them too), he told me once as he pointed to the servant staff in our house. As I grew older my interest in the family business piqued, and so I would ask nanabu questions about his employees — ‘approximately how many employees?’ ‘What is their pay?’ ‘Are there unions?’ While memories have faded, I recall him always prioritizing the rights of workers in his responses. He did this in other contexts as well; car rides home after meeting with relatives or friends were slightly daunting, as everyone anticipated nanabu’s interrogation sessions.‘Kithon aye ho? Khane kinney da si? Ik mazdoor di kamaai day barabar tussi Ik din da khana kha lita! (Where are you coming from? How much was dinner? The dinner you all ate was equivalent to a worker’s salary!’) He would ask this in a pre-partition Punjabi vernacular that now seems like a wistfully lost art. I dearly miss that line of questioning; it reminded me to live amongst the people.

Towards the end of his life nanabu found it difficult to speak due to illness. What was perhaps most difficult for his family, and presumably for him as well, was to witness the slow acquiescence of a man brimming with stories, travels, lessons, and other remnants of wisdom. South Asian women are the ones usually depicted as vivacious, with their rich clothing and jewelry – however my grandfather was no less colorful. On one August 14th, Pakistan’s independence day, in an effort to get my grandfather to speak, my mother asked him the obvious question. “Aaj chauda August hai abaii, aaj kera din ai? (Today is August 14th dad, what happened today?)” With eyes wide open and his neck lifting from his reclined state nanabu replied — in a rather confident and doting tone: “Pakistan bana tha! (Pakistan was made!)” I remember his love for homeland not as a cry for nationalism but rather as a profound trust in the fruits of liberation and struggle for justice.

Islamic philosopher Syed Naquib al Attas defines knowledge as an individual’s recognition of his/her place in God’s hierarchy of beings.[3] My grandfather was not a theologian, but rather an individual part of a sea of people who recognize their existence as spiritual beings with a collective commitment to pursue knowledge as a means to implement ihsan in worldly and spiritual affairs. Part of this commitment also entails restoring the balance of tawheed, or oneness of God and His creation, within the self and greater society. Nanabu was not without flaws, but that is exactly the point. Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati says that human beings are constantly migrating – migrating within the soul – which parallels jihad al akbar, or the greater struggle with one’s ego.[4] He embodied a constant struggle: as a subject of a colonial occupation, as a laborer, as a self and community taught thinker, and as a self-made industrialist.

A month ago I sat in a mosque nanabu had built in Sheikhpura, a small industrial village on the outskirts of Lahore. I offered the early afternoon prayer, and as my forehead met with the carpet I thought about the significance behind such an act. In an age of modernity, where the technologies of progress are constantly defined by the self, my prayer represented the antithesis of what we call progress. That act of prostration, that dire need for the spirit to find its way home, represents sagely wisdom lost amidst today’s talk of progress. My grandfather’s praxis represented a softer revolution: to realign the soul with its Divine origin. The memory of him embodying khudi and revolutionary love is with me today, and continues to remind me of the deeper imperative to decolonize and indigenize collective political systems, but also individual hearts and minds as well.

The post Dispatches from Lahore: The Importance of Politicized Ancestral Narratives appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

En France, un certain nombre de rappeurs contribuèrent au tournant postcolonial de la France et de son rap. Parmi ces artistes, qui émergent dans les années 2000, se trouvent La Rumeur, qui le premier qualifia sa musique de « rap de fils d’immigré »[2], Casey, Rocé, La Caution ou encore Médine. Les identités plurielles postcoloniales énoncées dans le rap visent, comme l’explique Casey, à faire émerger « le point de vue des damnés des colonies »[3] et à démontrer l’hypocrisie de l’universalisme abstrait de la république qui masque en réalité son ethnocentrisme et, plus encore, sa colonialité[4]. Les « politiques de la ville » contemporaines – euphémisme désignant le traitement spécifique réservé aux banlieues – sont ainsi vécues par les populations ciblées, souvent originaires des anciennes colonies françaises, comme la continuité des politiques coloniales d’hier. Deux ans après les émeutes urbaines de 2005, Ekoué du groupe La Rumeur revenait sur les évènements et donnait voix à un sentiment partagé en pointant que « tout porte à croire que les tiers-quar [quartiers] ont toute la France contre eux »[5]. Puisque de nombreux rappeurs ont grandi dans ces quartiers et/ou sont « fils d’immigrés », ils sont identifiés par les pouvoirs publics et les médias comme les « porte-paroles » de la jeunesse postcoloniale des quartiers (Prévos 1998 : 67-69 ; Béru 2006 : 62-63). C’est à ce titre qu’un certain nombre d’entre eux furent conviés à venir s’exprimer sur les plateaux télévisés lors des émeutes de 2005[6]. Ceux qui refusaient de se plier aux injonctions à la responsabilité furent accusés par des personnalités de droite d’être « hardcore » et de propager un discours haineux « anti-Français ». Comme le notait le journal Le Monde, le rap fut dès lors mis « à l’index » (Le Monde 2005).

C’est parce que le fait postcolonial s’est imposé en France que la critique postcoloniale a trouvé sa place dans le rap françaises mais, dans le même temps, les rappeurs ont été des acteurs de premier plan qui ont contribué, avec d’autres, à ce tournant postcolonial. Dans un premier temps, j’explorerai une généalogie de l’émergence de la critique postcoloniale dans le rap pour en montrer la spécificité. Si les thèmes du rap postcolonial des années 2000 ne sont pas inédits, ils sont énoncés en des termes qui, eux, sont majoritairement absents du discours public. Dans un deuxième temps, je reviendrai sur la répression du rap depuis le procès intenté à Hamé. Je souhaite montrer que l’acharnement du pouvoir contre la critique postcoloniale dans le rap ne fait que donner de la force à cette dernière. Car en poursuivant les groupes de rap « postcoloniaux », le pouvoir affirme sa propre colonialité qu’il entendait pourtant réfuter.

I. Le tournant postcolonial du rap français

Le rap français a-t-il toujours été postcolonial ?

La plupart des universitaires écrivant sur le rap français s’accordent sur la dimension identitaire postcoloniale de cette musique sans pour autant distinguer suffisamment entre les différentes périodes (Prévos 2002 ; Béru 2006). J’affirme pour ma part que cette dimension postcoloniale n’est réellement devenue structurante que dans les années 2000. Cela ne veut pas dire que l’on ne trouve pas de commentaires sur la colonisation, l’esclavage ou l’immigration dans le rap des années 1990 – et notamment chez IAM, le Suprême NTM ou encore le Ministère A.M.E.R., les trois principaux groupes français des débuts[7] du genre – mais plutôt que la perspective adoptée diffère de ce que l’on observe à partir des années 2000.

Nombreux sont les rappeurs qui, dans les années 1990, ont traité dans leurs chansons du harcèlement policier contre les jeunes des quartiers populaires ou de la colonisation notamment. Prenons le Suprême NTM par exemple. Dans « Plus jamais ça », Kool Shen rappe :

• Les honneurs, la patrie, les conquêtes et les colonies
• On a déjà vu le résultat de ces conneries
• Alors va-t-on continuer à se laisser manœuvrer
• Par la haine d’un déséquilibré mental
• Je vous rappelle qu’il prône la ségrégation raciale
• Je vous rappelle encore que cet homme n’est pas normal
• Et ce depuis la déconvenue de la guerre d’Algérie[8]

Il y a ici un commentaire évident du passé colonialiste et impérialiste de la France. Mais cela suffit-il pour faire de « Plus jamais ça » un morceau « postcolonial » ? Le mot d’ordre « plus jamais ça » et la perspective adoptée tranchent avec le rap postcolonial des années 2000. Pour les groupes postcoloniaux, « tout brûle déjà », comme l’affirme La Rumeur qui titre ainsi son dernier album. Alors que la plupart des groupes des années 1990 commentent le passé colonialiste de la France, les groupes postcoloniaux des années 2000 vont plus loin en établissant un continuum entre le passé colonialiste de la France et l’actuelle colonialité du pouvoir. À la différence de ce qu’on observe chez Casey ou La Rumeur notamment, la perspective dans « Plus jamais ça » n’est que peu phénoménologique. Kool Shen décrit des faits plus qu’une condition qui lui serait propre[9]. Il poursuit d’ailleurs :

• Mais nous on s’en bat les couilles, on n’était pas là
• Et on est tous las de ce retour au même schéma[10]

C’est là une différence majeure avec les rappeurs postcoloniaux des années 2000 qui considèrent que leur condition postcoloniale, directement héritée du colonialisme, est inscrite en eux, gravée à même leur corps. Ils n’étaient peut-être « pas là » mais ces évènements, dans leur actualité, continuent de surdéterminer leur existence, qu’il s’agisse des opportunités d’accès à l’emploi ou au logement ou même, plus directement, de leur personnalité.

Dans « Tragédie d’une trajectoire », morceau qui n’est pas sans rappeler les pages autobiographiques de Fanon dans Peau noire, masques blancs, Casey décrit sa propre expérience vécue et les conséquences psychologiques de sa condition subalterne :

• Tout ça n’a pas de sens, mais tout ça laisse des traces
• Et je ne dis rien à ma mère le soir quand elle m’embrasse[11]

La tragédie de Casey, c’est de ne pas maîtriser sa trajectoire parce que surdéterminée par sa condition minoritaire. Dans le premier couplet, cette impuissance est énoncée par une série de questions : « Pourquoi suis-je si radicale ? » ; « pourquoi suis-je si marginale ? » et « pourquoi être stable dans ma tête est impossible ? » Il ne fait pas de doute ici que Casey décrit sa propre expérience vécue  ; bien que l’esclavage et la colonisation soient derrière elle, « tout ça laisse des traces ». C’est cette dimension phénoménologique qui est largement absente des premiers enregistrements du rap français, même si les prémisses d’une critique postcoloniale se font entendre. Les groupes des années 1990, s’ils abordent parfois la colonisation, l’immigration et l’esclavage, n’en font cependant pas des éléments déterminants de leur identité comme le feront les groupes de rap qui émergent dans les années 2000.

Il me semble que l’on peut avancer trois hypothèses pour expliquer cette différence générationnelle. Tout d’abord, le rap français était une musique dont l’imaginaire était encore largement américain. Or, ainsi que le note Laurent Béru, le rap est, aux États-Unis, un art post-ségrégation plus que postcolonial. Il a fallu que le rap français s’émancipe de ses influences pour devenir postcolonial, ainsi que le supposait le contexte français. Ensuite, c’est la construction médiatique du rap comme « expression des banlieues et des minorités » qui va amener les rappeurs, à partir des années 1990, à revendiquer un message directement politique sur la banlieue et les minorités raciales et ethniques. Tout à la fois rejetés et fétichisés, les rappeurs accèdent à une forme de médiatisation ambivalente et sont érigés en porte-paroles de la jeunesse urbaine postcoloniale. Dès lors, leur parole sur la banlieue est paradoxalement légitimée. Karim Hammou observe que « l’assignation médiatique du rap aux banlieues et l’ancrage du hip-hop dans les quartiers de la politique de la ville interagissent ainsi avec l’expérience sociale d’une frange de la jeunesse, dans un contexte de paupérisation des quartiers populaires, de ségrégation spatiale accrue et de tournant répressif dans la gestion des illégalismes populaires. Ils contribuent à légitimer l’élaboration musicale de formes d’écriture, de points de vue et de thèmes nouveaux » (Hammou 2012, 141). Par ce statut nouveau conféré par leur médiatisation soudaine, les rappeurs ont désormais un accès à la parole publique, et une injonction à l’expression d’un point de vue politique sur la banlieue. D’abord ludique, le rap devient politique. Comme l’affirme Mathieu Marquet dans son article sur la politisation de la parole rap, « c’est le fait même de pouvoir dire qui mène vers une envie de dire, et partant, à l’expression du et d’un point de vue politique » (Marquet 2013). Cette envie de dire va progressivement prendre la forme d’un discours postcolonial. Progressivement, car pour que le rap devienne postcolonial, encore fallait-il que le fait postcolonial se soit imposé en France. Cela ne s’est fait qu’au cours des années 2000 alors qu’il était largement ignoré ou minoré avant cela (Smouts 2010). C’est donc la troisième hypothèse que je formule : le contexte était davantage propice dans les années 2000[12]. Cela étant dit, je n’affirme pas, loin de là, que les groupes « postcoloniaux » n’ont fait que s’engouffrer dans la brèche. Au contraire, je pense que la France a effectué sa difficile mue postcoloniale en partie grâce au rap qui, dans le même temps, s’est nourri de la critique postcoloniale et de sa « bibliothèque […] en pleine expansion » (Cohen et al. 2007). Certains rappeurs ont donc été des acteurs qui ont introduit la critique postcoloniale en France, même s’ils ne l’ont bien évidemment pas fait seuls[13].

L’expérience vécue de la condition minoritaire comme fondement de la critique postcoloniale

Dans un article traitant des liens entre la critique postcoloniale et la critique de classe dans le rap français, Marie Sonnette affirme que la critique postcoloniale passe par des modes d’énonciation spécifiques, et notamment par la constitution d’un sujet collectif, un « nous » postcolonial. Pour autant, « derrière les “nous” englobant les minorités issues de la colonisation viennent s’apposer des réalités différentes selon les rappeurs et les morceaux » (Sonnette 2014 :168). Il me paraît nécessaire de préciser ici que cet article ne prétend pas à l’exhaustivité en ce qui concerne la critique postcoloniale dans le rap français. Plutôt, il va s’agir d’étudier quelques groupes et artistes considérés comme représentatifs de la critique postcoloniale ou ayant joué un rôle actif dans le tournant postcolonial de la société française (La Rumeur, Casey, La Caution et Rocé, principalement). Au-delà des différences qui existent entre les rappeurs et groupes étudiés, la critique formulée par les groupes de rap postcoloniaux témoigne d’une prise de conscience de la part des minorités dites « issues de l’immigration » d’inégalités structurelles de représentations culturelles et politiques et de discriminations systémiques à leur égard. Si les rappeurs ont publicisé (et ainsi politisé) les discriminations qui s’exerçaient à leur encontre, ils ont également revendiqué une identité culturelle partagée autour du souvenir de l’esclavage, de la colonisation, de l’immigration et des articulations entre ces trois mémoires. Pour nombre de jeunes dits « issus de l’immigration », seule la culture populaire, et en premier lieu le rap, est à même d’offrir des représentations susceptibles d’être réappropriées. A l’inverse, l’école, en tant qu’appareil idéologique d’État[14], est souvent un passage obligé dans l’apprentissage de la colonialité du pouvoir pour les élèves originaires des anciennes colonies. Dans un entretien, Hamé évoque le sentiment d’humiliation qu’il a souvent ressenti à l’école, depuis le « nos ancêtres les gaulois » jusqu’à l’enseignement de la colonisation et de la guerre d’Algérie (Tévanian 2012). Chez nombre de rappeurs, il s’agit là d’un trauma fondateur qui va nourrir leur critique postcoloniale et qu’ils vont mettre en scène dans leurs chansons. Casey se remémore ainsi ses années collège et le racisme de l’institution à son encontre :

• Au collège, ils me connaissent, se plaignent et ils gémissent
• La proviseure est une connasse qui me vire et me menace
• D’appeler la police pour ma sale tignasse
• Et les profs me provoquent, chaque jour me convoquent
• Et me disent qu’on me scolarise pour les allocs.
• Donc je réplique, moi l’enfant de la république
• Et on me rétorque que tout c’que j’mérite c’est des claques[15].

Dans « Le cartable renversé », paru sur l’album L’être humain et le réverbère, Rocé passe en revue un certain nombre des situations où se joue l’apprentissage des rapports de pouvoir, comme lorsqu’un enfant d’immigrés est pris pour cible par une institutrice :

• Jusqu’à ce jour la voix d’sa mère l’avait bercé
• Sur les bienfaits d’être droit envers l’autorité
• Loin des p’tits cons d’en bas que les emmerdes ont cerné
• En réponse au trama, son cartable renversé[16]

Image 1. La Caution, Peines de Maures/Arc-en-ciel pour daltoniens

Cet apprentissage du racisme et de la condition minoritaire est également évoqué par Nikkfurie, du groupe La Caution, dans « Thé à la menthe » : « Jeune, j’ai l’souvenir d’une « Madame Nicole » / Instit’ qui pensait qu’un bougnoule n’était pas fait pour l’école »[17]. Dans la phénoménologie de la domination mise en scène dans les paroles rap, l’école constitue le lieu premier de la prise de conscience du racisme. D’où la pochette de l’album Peines de Maures / Arc-en-ciel pour daltoniens (image 1) qui représente les deux rappeurs enfants, comme pour montrer que, « pourtant jeunes et innocents »[18], c’est bien à cette époque qu’ils ont pris conscience de leur condition postcoloniale. Bien que nés en France, les rappeurs ne sont pas perçus comme « Français » à part entière puisque « ce pays [la France] est presque le [leur] / Mais seulement presque »[19]. Ne pouvant être simplement Français, c’est dans la réappropriation du stigmate « indigène » ou « issu de l’immigration » que se joue la subjectivation des identités plurielles. Cette stratégie de la réappropriation du stigmate est explicite chez Rocé :

• Il y a un vécu à défendre
• Il y a une vision à répandre
• Et de nous vers eux
• Il y a une étiquette à leur rendre[20]

Pour les groupes et artistes qui portent la critique postcoloniale, le point de départ de leur « trajectoire » (Casey), de leur « identité en crescendo » (Rocé), de leurs « peines de Maures » (La Caution), c’est l’immigration et le souvenir de la colonisation, ainsi que le clame La Rumeur : « C’est une valise dans un coin / qui hurle au destin qu’elle n’est pas venue en vain »[21]. Le rap postcolonial semble avoir fait siennes les leçons de Benjamin dans ses « Thèses sur le concept d’histoire », et plus particulièrement celle-ci :

« Il existe un rendez-vous tacite entre les générations passées et la nôtre. Nous avons été attendus sur la terre. À nous, comme à chaque génération précédente, fut accordée une faible force messianique sur laquelle le passé fait valoir une prétention » (Benjamin 2000 : 428-429)

C’est donc dans l’appropriation du passé que le présent peut s’éclairer. Sans cela, « même les morts ne seront pas en sûreté » (Benjamin 2000 : 431). Et il suffit pour s’en convaincre de se remémorer les débats de 2005, année décidemment charnière, ayant mené à l’adoption d’une loi faisant valoir un prétendu « rôle positif » de la colonisation[22].

 II. Le rap postcolonial exposé, la colonialité du pouvoir démasquée

« Qui sont vos frères ? » : retour sur le procès intenté à Hamé

Image 2. Hamé, « Insécurité sous la plume d’un barbare », La Rumeur Magazine, n° 1, 29 avril 2012.

Depuis ses débuts en France, le rap a toujours été exposé médiatiquement, condamné moralement et poursuivi judiciairement par les représentants des forces de police ou par des politiques (Prévos 1998). Comme cela s’est produit aux Etats-Unis, le rap en France a très tôt été condamné par la classe politique pour la « violence » de ses paroles[23]. Mais alors que le fait postcolonial prend de l’importance dans les années 2000 et que l’écran de l’universalisme abstrait se fissure, le rap est alors dénoncé pour toute autre chose. Désormais, ce sont la critique postcoloniale et la francité même des artistes qui sont dans le viseur des hommes politiques. Initiateur de ce changement est le procès intenté à Hamé par le ministère de l’intérieur.

En 2002, Hamé écrit dans le fanzine du groupe publié à l’occasion de la sortie du premier album un pamphlet intitulé « Insécurité sous la plume d’un barbare ». Dans ce texte, il affirme notamment que « les rapports du ministère de l’intérieur ne feront jamais état des centaines de nos frères abattus par les forces de police sans qu’aucun des assassins n’ait été inquiété » (Hamé 2010). Un constat qu’illustre tristement la relaxe, après dix ans de procédure judiciaire, des deux policiers poursuivis pour non-assistance à personne en danger suite à la mort de Zyed Benna et Bouna Traoré en 2005[24]. À l’époque, celui qui n’était encore que ministre de l’intérieur, Nicolas Sarkozy, porte plainte contre le groupe pour « diffamation publique envers la police nationale » [25]. Le procès va durer huit ans, ce qui est assez exceptionnel pour une affaire de ce type : trois relaxes, deux jugements en appel et deux pourvois en cassation. Aucune condamnation donc, malgré l’acharnement du ministère de l’intérieur[26]. Alors qu’Hamé aurait pu se retrancher derrière la liberté d’expression, il a choisi de porter le procès sur le plan politique, souhaitant « ouvrir publiquement et politiser un débat jusqu’ici confiné dans la sphère de la recherche universitaire » (Monteiro 2008). C’est la colonialité du pouvoir qu’Hamé souhaitait mettre en accusation devant les tribunaux, comme aucun rappeur avant lui. C’est pourquoi Hamé s’est entouré d’experts –historiens, sociologues, enseignants, activistes etc. –, « en mesure de corroborer et d’étayer [ses] propos » (Acontresens 2007).

En amont du procès, l’avocat du rappeur explicitait lui aussi cette ligne de défense en faisant valoir que les témoins-experts allaient l’aider à prouver que « les humiliations policières à répétition font bien partie du quotidien pour un certain nombre de ces jeunes » (Monteiro 2008). La question étant de savoir quels jeunes et sur quels critères : « qui appelez-vous vos “frères”, qui semblent se faire trucider en toute impunité ? » demanda ainsi la juge rapporteur durant le procès (Acontresens 2006). Par son agacement, qui transparaît dans la formulation même de la question, la juge rapporteur sommait Hamé de s’expliquer sur ce qu’elle considérait comme un crime de lèse-majesté contre l’universalisme républicain, son supposé communautarisme. Hamé répondit que « frère » était un « terme usuel » qui revêtait une « charge affective » et désignait une « fratrie avec laquelle on peut se trouver des cicatrices et des espoirs communs » (Acontresens 2006). Pas d’essentialisme ni de communautarisme chez Hamé donc, mais plutôt une politique de la coalition[27]. Les frères d’Hamé sont tous les individus qui se reconnaîtront des cicatrices et des espoirs communs. Toutes ces cicatrices qu’ « on [leur] a demandé d’oublier », comme ce « 17 Octobre 61 qui croupit au fond de la Seine »[28]. Et au-delà, ces espoirs, cette « saleté d’espérance » comme la nomme Rocé[29].

Après huit ans de procès, Hamé sera définitivement acquitté en juin 2010. Plus qu’une histoire de personne, ce procès a été important en cela qu’il a finalement contraint le pouvoir à révéler sa colonialité puisque, ainsi que l’avait noté Hamé, « en nous intentant ce procès on nous signifie qu’on n’est pas autorisé à s’exprimer sur le plan politique » (Monteiro 2008). Récemment, Ekoué et Le Bavar, de La Rumeur, affirmaient dans un entretien ne rien regretter quant à leur engagement politique et postcolonial, allant jusqu’à dire que le procès qui leur avait été intenté « fait partie de l’histoire  de La Rumeur ». Et Ekoué de poursuivre : « on va fêter les 10 ans des émeutes [et] les mecs qui ont fumé Zyed et Bouna, ils sont toujours pas au placard » (Lebonson 2015).

Contraindre au silence les voix dissonantes

Depuis le procès intenté à Hamé et plus encore depuis les émeutes urbaines de 2005, le rap postcolonial est une cible privilégiée des politiques. La plus récente des attaques, toujours en cours au moment où j’écris ces lignes et connue sous le nom de l’ « affaire “Nique la France” », a vu Saïdou du groupe ZEP (« Zone d’Expression Populaire ») être mis en examen pour « injure publique » et « provocation à la discrimination, à la haine ou à la violence » pour un ouvrage co-écrit avec le sociologue Saïd Bouamama (lui aussi mis en examen) qui reprenait le titre d’une de ses chansons, « Nique la France ». Un groupe de députés UMP, parmi lesquels Christian Vanneste, celui-là même qui avait fait inscrire l’expression « rôle positif » dans la loi sur la « présence française outre-mer », avait soumis une question écrite au Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication. Je cite ici un passage éclairant, dans lequel ces députés s’interrogent :

« [Est-ce qu’il] apparaîtrait opportun [à Saïd Bouamama, sociologue algérien résidant en France] que des écrivains français publient, à titre d’exemple en Algérie, un ouvrage s’inspirant avec délicatesse du titre choisi par Saïd Bouamama mais intitulé, cette fois, “Nique l’Algérie” ? »

Ces députés semblaient ignorer dans un premier temps que le titre de l’ouvrage ne doit pas tant à Saïd Bouamama qu’au rappeur Saïdou. Mais la question était malgré tout intéressante par ce qu’elle révélait : en admettant que l’on ait le droit d’affirmer de manière provocatrice qu’on « nique la France », qui donc peut se permettre de tenir ce discours ?

Pour les députés, il était évident que même en acceptant que de tels propos puissent être tenus, ils ne pouvaient absolument pas l’être par un « non-national ». Mais plus que cela, il semblait bien qu’étaient visés tous les français « d’origine ». D’ailleurs, lorsque l’AGRIF (« Association Générale contre le Racisme et pour le Respect de l’Identité française et Chrétienne »), association d’extrême droite catholique, porta plainte contre les co-auteurs, elle ne manqua pas de signifier qu’elle traquait en réalité un prétendu « racisme anti-Français ». Et tant pis si Saïdou est lui-même Français. Plus ironique encore, la chanson qui a donné son titre à l’ouvrage n’est pas chantée par Saïdou lui-même. Ce sont des Français, directement identifiés par l’AGRIF et consorts comme tels car « Blancs », qui rappent sur un air de musette :

• « Nique la France, et son passé colonialiste
• Ses odeurs, ses relents et ses réflexes paternalistes »[30].

Cette subtilité a visiblement échappé aux différents acteurs dans cette affaire puisque seuls Saïdou et Saïd Bouamama furent poursuivis.

Mais en cherchant à étouffer certaines voix dissonantes par la censure, le pouvoir politique révèle les différents degrés de citoyenneté, selon que l’on soit du bon ou du mauvais côté de la « frontière raciale », faisant ainsi la preuve de ce qu’il cherche à taire. Saïdou notait en 2009 :

« Quand tu prends position [sur le « privilège racial blanc en France »] on va te définir comme un arabe issu de l’immigration, pas comme un intellectuel ou un artiste. Alors que si Blanchard [historien – blanc – spécialiste de l’immigration] dit la même chose, tout le monde va dire “Oui, effectivement, c’est indéniable” » (Tévanian 2009).

Soit une illustration de la citoyenneté à deux niveaux dénoncée par la critique postcoloniale. Malgré tout, même si la judiciarisation du rap postcolonial expose au grand jour la colonialité du pouvoir, il n’en demeure pas moins que ce sont autant d’interdictions de se produire sur scène, de censure et de procédures coûteuses qui s’appliquent sur ceux et celles qui dénoncent non seulement le passé colonialiste de la France, mais aussi son actuelle colonialité.

Conclusion

Dans cet article, j’ai souhaité retracer l’émergence de la critique postcoloniale dans le rap français en montrant à la fois que cette dernière n’a été rendue possible que par un ensemble de facteurs convergents mais aussi qu’elle a contribué, à son niveau, à la mue postcoloniale de la société française. Si une certaine dimension critique quant au passé colonialiste de la France et à son racisme structurel existait déjà dans les premiers albums de rap français, il était encore trop tôt pour parler de rap français postcolonial. C’est la polarisation de la société française autour des débats sur le fait postcolonial qui a rendu possible l’émergence d’une critique postcoloniale dans le rap français. Ainsi, ce n’est réellement qu’à partir des années 2000 qu’un certain nombre d’acteurs vont politiser leur condition minoritaire, plurielle et postcoloniale et dénoncer dans leur parole la continuité des pratiques coloniales qui s’appliquent à leur encontre, ce qui leur vaudra de s’attirer les foudres des sphères politiques et médiatiques. Loin d’être une politique isolée, ces attaques portées contre le rap – et plus encore contre les rappeurs et rappeuses – sont à ranger aux côtés des nombreux débats sur la laïcité (en réalité, sur l’islam), le rôle prétendument positif de la colonisation ou encore le caractère supposé « non intégrable » de certaines populations « issues de l’immigration » ou « de confession musulmane ». La condamnation morale du rap et son exposition judiciaire s’insèrent ainsi dans un dispositif de pouvoir plus large que l’on peut appeler racisme structurel ou colonialité du pouvoir.

Constamment ramenés à leur condition minoritaire, les rappeurs vont entreprendre une politique de réappropriation du stigmate en énonçant des identités culturelles articulées autour de la mémoire de l’esclavage, de la colonisation et de l’immigration. Soient des constructions hybrides, provisoires et mouvantes qui revendiquent un « droit à la différence dans l’égalité » (Balibar, 1997). Leur identité postcoloniale étant la raison de leur assujettissement, ils font de sa reconnaissance une condition sine qua non au vivre ensemble en France. C’est ce qu’exprime Rocé lorsqu’il affirme qu’il chantera la France lorsqu’elle le reconnaîtra « comme être multiple » (Rocé, « Je chante la France », 2006).

The post Colonialité du pouvoir, postcolonialité du rap : l’émergence et la répression d’un rap français structuré autour de la critique postcoloniale dans les années 2000 appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“…the upshot is that while we now feel we know nearly everything that African states societies, economies, are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are…” (Mbembe 2001:9)

Introduction

This collection of photographs, taken during recent visits to my native Sierra Leone, are part of a continuing effort to help others see a bit more of the everyday in Africa through my subjective eyes –behind the objective lens of a camera, of course.

The images are not intended to (UN)change anyone’s perceptions of the beautiful, diverse, and vibrant continent of over fifty(50) separate, independent countries that constitute AFRICA.

Such (r)evolutions are best left to western media and (ma)paternalistic observers who continue to distill their (in)versions of Africa.

We, Africans, do not often get the opportunity (or take the time?) to interpret the sights or sounds of our countries, as we see fit, in order to resist the uniform exaggerations of an exotic, faraway place ravaged by poverty, starvation, disease and conflict.

As Mbembe asserts, “… there is language that every comment by an African about Africa must endlessly eradicate, validate, or ignore, often to his/her cost, the ordeal whose erratic fulfillment many Africans have spent their lives trying to prevent…” (Mbembe 2001:5).

Everything takes place within the context or contours of the preceding or existing discourse.

Hopefully, these glimpses do not nullify that greater purpose…

********

All photographs courtesy of Fodei Batty

Ships docked at the Queen Elizabeth II Quay in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

Any Postcolony without a port to exploit its resources is not worthy of its misery

Although the Queen Elizabeth II quay is said to have one of the world’s deepest natural harbors, the presence of such a fine seaport has only expedited the exploitation of Sierra Leone’s natural resources by various multinational mining companies who use its fine services to ship commodities out of the country.

An Australian’s best friend: Diamonds from Sierra Leone — Bo, southern Sierra Leone

You, too, want a piece of me? An Australia diamond merchant seeks his fortune in the Postcolony.

Winners of Chinese Language Scholarships at the University of Sierra Leone — Mount Aureol, Sierra Leone, July 2015

From North-South to South-South domination? These students at the University of Sierra Leone were the “lucky few” who won scholarships to study the Chinese language at universities across China. They will be excellent speakers of the Chinese language, for the future.

Chinese car dealership in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Lumley, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

The Great Wall goes South: Chinese car dealership in Freetown

Chinese merchants in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

The Chinese are busy in Africa. Here a Chinese expatriate family hangs out in front of their store in Freetown as their employees also lounge rather idly nearby

On Umbrellas… — Lumley Market, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

…and on Jerry cans: President Obama is the Midas Touch in Sierra Leone — Construction site, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

Sierra Leone is a place in search of heroes and inspirational figures. Most Sierra Leoneans tend to look elsewhere because examples of good leadership within the country are rare. Hence, President Obama’s popularity across the country. Everything emblazoned with his name is an instant bestseller. The photograph of an umbrella carrying President Obama’s name next to a woman carrying her wares on her head and his name on a jerrycan are all evidence of the president’s popularity.

From Virginia to Sierra Leone: With Love? — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

A huge market for used cars; you cannot miss America’s finest anywhere you go on the streets of Freetown

Gifts to the Postcolony: Trojan Horses? — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

A popular sign across the developing world, all USAID-funded projects carry the questionable phrase “from the American People.” This one was stamped on a wall commemorating American support for a project preventing bush fires in the Postcolony.

Warscapes and Mercedes Benzes in Kenema, Sierra Leone — Kenema, eastern Sierra Leone, July 2015

Even though the war ended thirteen years ago, the landscape across Sierra Leone is still littered with the bitter memories of war –warscapes

Headscratcher: Office of Nuclear Safety, in Sierra Leone? — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

The postcolony is rife with contradictions. The sign on this building made for one head scratching moment. Nuclear energy in a state that has not found a way to provide sufficient thermal or hydroelectric energy to its people a century after the invention of electricity?

The sign on this nearly decrepit building in the heart of Freetown says it all: BE SMART! — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

Philadelphia Medical Clinic in Sierra Leone: another sign that says it all — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

Road Crossing Sign on the street of Freetown — Lumley, Freetown Sierra Leone, July 2015

This sign struck me as quite ironic because the constant flow of traffic does not allow children to cross the road safely on this busy street in the west of Freetown.

Total Domination in/of the Postcolony — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2015

A Total gas station. Next to residential dwellings…

The lifestyles of the rich and shameless contrast sharply with others: a mansion in Freetown — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012

Hardly do structures such as this make it into the pages of western media. There is, in fact, a direct correlation between the construction of mansions such as this one and the misery of the people. The more mansions rise, the more the misery of the people increases.

Not a mud hut in sight! Juba Hills, Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012

You see what you want to see in the postcolony. There are mud huts, diseases and poverty galore but there is also what you see above. In some cases, those who live here are responsible for the conditions of those who live where capitalist western media would like to divert your attention.

More mansions blend into lush foliage around the hills of Freetown — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012

And then there is this one, also in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Not your average mud hut? — Freetown, Sierra Leone. April 2007.

A street scene in Freetown, Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone. April 2007.

There is also the everyday.

Ingenuity — Freetown, Sierra Leone, July 2012.

Ingenuity is evident everywhere on the streets of Freetown. This is the postcolony, after all.

In a mud hut in eastern Sierra Leone – November 2006.

Perception is not reality. I could choose to show you the above…

Beautiful sunset along Lumley Beach, Freetown Sierra Leone — Freetown, Sierra Leone, circa 2007

…this beautiful sunset

*****

So, you see? My photographs have just played tricks on you by showing you the AFRICA that I want to show you! Perception is not reality…

The post (Alter)Native Lens: Seeing my Sierra Leone like a Postcolony appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Pourquoi parler – parler encore – de la « littérature française moderne et contemporaine » en notre début du XXIe siècle ? Quelles valeurs la littérature peut-elle créer et transmettre dans le monde actuel ? Quelle place doit être la sienne dans l’espace public ? […]Y a-t-il vraiment encore des choses que seule la littérature puisse nous procurer ? (2013 : 27)

Le désespoir vient peut-être du fait que la question est en elle-même une réponse, elle contient le diagnostic, elle s’appuie sur différents symptômes. C’est une réponse en ce que, comme Compagnon le mentionne, au moment où la littérature occupait une certaine place dans l’espace social, lorsque le Nouveau Roman semblait repousser les limites de la recherche de la littérature, « [t]oute mention du pouvoir de la littérature était jugée obscène, car il était entendu que la littérature ne servait à rien et que seule comptait sa maîtrise d’elle-même » (2013 : 33). Aujourd’hui, depuis les années 1980 à tout le moins, cette question semble indépassable, topos nécessaire des études littéraires qui se regardent penser. À cet égard, la conclusion de Compagnon, qu’il veut d’un certain enthousiasme, n’est pas sans inquiéter : après la révision de tous les pouvoirs que l’histoire occidentale a accordés aux lettres, d’Aristote à Voltaire, de Voltaire à Flaubert, de Flaubert à Blanchot, il semble ne rester de nos jours qu’un confus acte de foi, mâtiné d’humanisme bon enfant. Les mots de Compagnon, de fait, ressemblent un peu à une prière :

La littérature doit donc être lue et étudiée parce qu’elle offre un moyen – certains diront même le seul – de préserver et de transmettre l’expérience des autres, ceux qui sont éloignés de nous dans l’espace et le temps, ou qui diffèrent de nous par les conditions de leur vie. (2013 : 63)

De même, soutient-il, elle résiste à la bêtise d’une certaine manière, car « elle pense, mais pas comme la science ou la philosophie. Sa pensée est heuristique (elle ne cesse jamais de chercher), non algorithmique : elle procède à tâtons, sans calcul, par l’intuition, avec flair » (2013 : 69). On comprend qu’une telle mystique de la pensée littéraire amène Compagnon à soutenir, polémique instantanée à la clé, qu’on « est un meilleur ouvrier si on a lu Montaigne ou Proust[1] ».

Le constat de fragilisation du pouvoir de la littérature est donc devenu un lieu commun des études littéraires. Les thèses de William Marx sur L’adieu à la littérature, proposent un récit antimoderne des plus amusants, le Contre Saint-Proust de Dominique Maingueneau, la réduction sociologisante de la littérature inspirée des Cultural Studies, la vulgate nostalgique du bon vieux temps, déplaçant les âges d’or selon les affinités – le structuralisme des années 1960, le Sacre du grand écrivain romantique, et pourquoi pas, la parole entendue d’un Voltaire ou d’un Diderot – sont autant de démonstrations d’une inquiétude générale, d’un soupçon étendu. Il n’est pas interdit que cela trouve ses racines dans le déconstructivisme, avec des affirmations comme celles, célèbres, de Stanley Fish à l’aube des années 1980, lequel postule que « [c]e n’est pas la présence de qualités poétiques qui impose un certain type d’attention mais c’est le fait de prêter un certain type d’attention qui conduit à l’émergence de qualités poétiques » (2007 [1980] : 60). De cette inversion des termes de la littérature naît, de l’aveu même du théoricien, une fragilisation des études littéraires : « Si nous croyons réellement qu’un texte n’a pas de signification déterminée, comment pouvons-nous prétendre juger des approches du texte de nos étudiants, et d’ailleurs, comment pouvons-nous prétendre leur enseigner quoi que ce soit ? » (2007 : 83) C’est là le relativisme rhétorique des études littéraires, qui, dépouillées de leur scientificité, de leur valeur de vérité – toute vérité étant relative -, n’est plus qu’une organisation de valeurs soutenue par un argumentaire pour asseoir, comme toute organisation de valeurs, une certaine domination, une autorité – ici discursive et savante. Le critique marxiste Terry Eagleton ne disait rien d’autre : « La littérature, dans le sens hérité de ce mot, est une idéologie. » (1994 [1983] : 22) Et en tant qu’idéologie – il s’agit de la conclusion d’Eagleton –, elle tâche de s’auto-justifier, installant le projet des études littéraires sur des fonctions et utilités, car, démontre-t-il dans son panorama théorique du XX^e siècle, « [t]oute théorie littéraire présuppose une certaine utilité de la littérature même si ce que l’on en retire est purement inutile » (1994 : 205). Postmoderne, poststructuraliste, postcolonialiste, ce doute est constitutif des études culturelles contemporaines. Le dernier roman de Michel Houellebecq, Soumission[2], à bien y regarder, ne semble pouvoir ne parler que de ça : la déréliction tranquille d’une idéologie, la déréliction tranquille de la littérature et de sa gratuité d’expression consubstantielle.

Certes, le jugement est rapide, et assurément injuste. Le contexte de publication du roman est connu, assombri et enrôlé, d’une certaine manière, par la tuerie du Charlie Hebdo. La liberté d’expression devient une clé de lecture pour un roman qui exprime une réalité limite, dystopie prenant parfois les atours d’une utopie, où la civilisation occidentale s’effondre face à ses propres armes. La question au centre de Soumission semble effectivement être plutôt celle de l’exercice de la démocratie et du retour du religieux, le roman en présente les confrontations et contradictions à la manière d’une véritable fable politique. Or, la littérature constitue le prisme par lequel ces changements sont absorbés : la narration est tenue par un professeur de lettres à l’université, auteur d’une thèse sur Huysmans. Les paradoxes de la démocratie se heurtent à l’idéal littéraire, un idéal esthétique et, à bien des égards, aristocratique. Il s’agit bien  d’analyser ici comment le discours sur la littérature, son autorité idéologique, est en jeu dans cette crise démocratique, comment la question même du propre et du pouvoir littéraires se retrouve au centre de la crise sociale de cette fable politique. En cela, c’est la liberté d’une pratique qui semble en jeu, cette liberté que la littérature défendait au temps des Lumières. Plus largement, il s’agira de voir en quoi la réalité nationale que semble contraint de penser le roman est inapte face aux éclatements postcoloniaux et aux ruines conjointes des grandes téléologies et des impérialismes.

Une vie intellectuelle

Dès l’incipit de Soumission, le narrateur adopte le rôle de l’homme de lettres, il confie ses origines qui ressemblent à une idylle, mais une idylle intellectuelle :

Pendant toutes les années de ma triste jeunesse, Huysmans demeura pour moi un compagnon, un ami fidèle; jamais je n’éprouvai de doute, jamais je ne fus tenté d’abandonner, ni de m’orienter vers un autre sujet; puis, un après-midi de juin 2007, après avoir longtemps attendu, après avoir tergiversé autant et même un peu plus qu’il n’était admissible, je soutins devant le jury de l’université Paris IV-Sorbonne ma thèse de doctorat : Joris-Karl Huysmans, ou la sortie du tunnel. Dès le lendemain matin […], je compris qu’une partie de ma vie venait de s’achever, et que c’était probablement la meilleure. (S : 11)

Il n’y a pas d’autre origine pour François : son enfance semble singulièrement vide de sens, d’ailleurs on n’y réfère que de biais à la mort du père, mort un peu manquée, mort sans signification, lointaine et dérisoire. C’est qu’on sent bien que la vie intellectuelle du narrateur est détachée du reste, singulièrement détachée de tout, une véritable île biographique, politique et sociale. Vers la fin, la conclusion de l’existence de François semble ainsi n’avoir été balisée que par cette longue amitié intellectuelle : « Je rentrai doucement à pied, comme un petit vieux, prenant progressivement conscience que, cette fois, c’était vraiment la fin de ma vie intellectuelle; et que c’était aussi la fin de ma longue, très longue relation avec Joris-Karl Huysmans. » (S: 283) De la jeunesse de l’incipit jusqu’à ce « comme un petit vieux », une existence complète se dessine, où les certitudes des premiers instants -« jamais je n’éprouvai de doute »- menacent de laisser place à la vie, une vraie vie que le narrateur ne saurait remplir. Mais cela, c’était avant qu’il ne découvre, via un système politique qui change tout, les vertus de la soumission, s’exclamant d’espoir dans les dernières pages :

Que ma vie intellectuelle soit terminée, c’était de plus en plus une évidence, enfin je participerais encore à de vagues colloques, je vivrais sur mes restes et sur mes rentes ; mais je commençais à prendre conscience – et ça c’était une vraie nouveauté – qu’il y aurait, très probablement, autre chose. (S: 295)

Pour comprendre cette évolution, qui ressemble à divers égards à une révolution, il faut sans doute se replier sur le résumé de cette fable.

François a soutenu une thèse de doctorat après quoi, puisqu’ayant pondu une excellente thèse, il occupe pour ce qui semble être le reste de sa vie un poste de professeur de littérature, à Paris. Outre sa thèse, il compte pour unique haut fait dans sa carrière la rédaction d’un ouvrage sur les néologismes dans l’œuvre de Huysmans :

Les sommets intellectuels de ma vie avaient été la rédaction de ma thèse, la publication de mon livre ; tout cela remontait déjà à plus de dix ans. Sommets intellectuels ? Sommets tout court ? À l’époque en tout cas je me sentais justifié. Je n’avais fait depuis que produire de brefs articles pour le Journal des dix-neuvièmistes […]. Mes articles étaient nets, incisifs, brillants […]. Mais cela suffisait-il à justifier une vie ? Et en quoi une vie a-t-elle besoin d’être justifiée ?  (S: 47)

C’est que ces sommets intellectuels ne trouvent aucun contrepoint, ni relation amoureuse, ni quête sociale ou politique, aucune expérience de transcendance non plus ne traverse la vie de François. Sa vie sexuelle se limite, au gré des cohortes, nécessairement passagères, à des étudiantes, puis, plus tard, aux services d’escortes. La vie familiale est nulle et n’apparaît que dans son ultime disparition. Les élections extraordinaires qui se déroulent alors en France permettent un léger divertissement au narrateur, même si, confie-t-il, « Je me sentais aussi politisé qu’une serviette de toilette, et c’était sans doute dommage. » (S: 50) Les choses commencent cependant à bouger lorsque le Front national et la Fraternité musulmane se retrouvent au second tour des élections : « Que l’histoire politique puisse jouer un rôle dans ma propre vie continuait à me déconcerter, et à me répugner un peu » (S: 116), laisse tomber le narrateur. Une ambiance de guerre civile s’élève pour se rendormir aussitôt, après que la Fraternité musulmane ait effectivement remporté les élections. L’université où travaillait François devient alors une université musulmane où seuls les convertis peuvent enseigner; sans trop penser, il décide de prendre sa retraite. Mais on le convainc de revenir enseigner : invité à diriger la Pléiade de Huysmans, on l’appâte dans les filets de Rediger, grand président des universités, qui lui vante les vertus de son système islamique, les vertus de la religion et de sa transcendance, les vertus de la polygamie, en un mot, les vertus de la soumission : « L’idée renversante et simple, jamais exprimée auparavant avec cette force, que le sommet du bonheur humain réside dans la soumission la plus absolue. » (S: 260)

Ainsi raconté, le roman prend l’apparence d’une fable assez binaire, où un narrateur apathique est confronté à une situation qui l’éveille; de la vie intellectuelle à la vraie vie, voilà sans doute le pas que franchit François, en effet, une vie gérée par un retour religieux et spirituel, mais aussi un retour en force du politique, le politique comme contrainte de l’existence. Ce mouvement de retour religieux et politique montre bien, en contre-jour, ce qui définit la vie intellectuelle désintéressée et gratuite. Ainsi, dès les premiers moments du récit, le narrateur résume ses conditions de thésard :

Je souffrais de la pauvreté, et si j’avais dû répondre à l’un de ces sondages qui tentent régulièrement de « prendre le pouls de la jeunesse », j’aurais sans doute défini mes conditions de vie comme « plutôt difficiles ». Pourtant, le matin qui suivit la soutenance de ma thèse […], ma première pensée fut que je venais de perdre quelque chose d’inappréciable, quelque chose que je ne retrouverais jamais : ma liberté. (S: 14-15)

Cette liberté inappréciable, pour ainsi dire sacrée, sait justifier l’existence miséreuse du narrateur ; cette justification semblait combler les défaillances de la vie courante. On comprend, en fait, que pour subir des conditions de vie « plutôt difficiles », il faut que la quête transcendante en vaille la peine, et c’est bien cet acte de foi qu’on peut lire dans les premières pages de Soumission. Écrire une thèse sur Huysmans, qui sera conservée en cinq exemplaires dans les archives de l’université, exemplaires fort peu consultés par les chercheurs au demeurant (S: 246), permet de donner du sens à la vie : « À l’époque en tout cas je me sentais justifié » (S: 47) Plus encore, cette quête marquée par la liberté et la gratuité se voit reconnue par la société – à tout le moins, par l’appareil étatique :

Pendant plusieurs années, les ultimes résidus d’une social-démocratie agonisante m’avaient permis (à travers une bourse d’études, un système de réductions et d’avantages sociaux étendu, des repas médiocres mais bon marché au restaurant universitaire) de consacrer l’ensemble de mes journées à une activité que j’avais choisie : la libre fréquentation intellectuelle d’un ami. (S: 15)

Cette libre fréquentation sera renversée dans le roman. D’abord par le narrateur, qui ne trouve plus guère de sens aux entreprises intellectuelles – « Mon intérêt pour la vie intellectuelle avait beaucoup décru » (S: 99) -, qui ne sait plus ni les défendre ni les comprendre; ensuite par la société, visitée par un retour politique et religieux qui semble, dans ses principes, avoir raison de la libre fréquentation intellectuelle d’un ami.

L’opposition constitutive est, selon toute apparence, celle entre la liberté intellectuelle, fortement ancrée dans la vie démocratique – liberté d’expression, de pensée, liberté de la presse – et la soumission – soumission aux diktats dominants, religieux et politiques, organisation du quotidien par les contraintes du réel, etc. La société édifie des mécanismes pour laisser libre cours à la liberté : les « ultimes résidus de la social-démocratie » s’en chargent en ce qui a trait à la vie intellectuelle, mais également en assurant la liberté d’expression des journalistes et le vote au scrutin universel. Mais tout cela est fragilisé dans Soumission. Les journalistes ne savent plus rendre compte de la réalité, ils taisent – sous l’ordre des politiques, suppose-t-on – les miasmes de guerre civile qui opposent la jeunesse frontiste aux jeunes musulmans ; ces mêmes journalistes, une fois le premier tour d’élection passé, ne savent poser de vraies questions à Ben Abbes, président de la Fraternité musulmane, contraints par la réalité des urnes de reconnaître en cette organisation politique un espoir, celle qu’un parti du « front républicain » puisse battre l’extrême droite. Mollement, ainsi, la liberté de presse s’use parce qu’on ne s’en sert pas[3]. De même, lors des élections, des groupes armés assaillent des bureaux de scrutin. La liberté et son idéal s’effritent, coincés entre deux tirs nourris : les forces nationalistes et les forces religieuses. L’UMP et le Parti socialiste, les journalistes comme les intellectuels, doivent choisir leur dictature, prendre parti, sacrifier les principes démocratiques pour la démocratie.

Mais cette liberté dont l’idéal permet à François d’occuper la tâche qui est la sienne, qui lui donne licence d’enseigner la littérature à côté de l’existence, elle semble déjà compromise depuis longtemps. Huysmans, nous raconte le narrateur, avait de lui-même renié la liberté pour entrer au monastère :

Je comprenais aisément qu’on soit attiré par la vie monastique – même si, j’en étais conscient, mon point de vue était très différent de celui de Huysmans. Je ne parvenais pas du tout à ressentir son dégoût affiché pour les passions charnelles, ni même à me le représenter. (S: 98)

Il ajoute néanmoins qu’outre le sexe, son corps et sa vie ne lui procurent plus guère d’objets de jouissance dont le priverait la vie monastique :

Et des sources de plaisir, en général, je n’en avais guère ; au fond, je n’avais même plus que celle-là [le sexe]. Mon intérêt pour la vie intellectuelle avait beaucoup décru ; mon existence sociale n’était guère plus satisfaisante que mon existence corporelle, elle aussi se présentait comme une succession de petits ennuis – lavabo bouché, Internet en panne, perte de points de permis, femme de ménage malhonnête, erreur de déclaration d’impôts – qui là aussi se succédaient sans interruption, ne me laissant pratiquement jamais en paix. Au monastère, on échappait, j’imagine à la plupart de ces soucis ; on déposait le fardeau de l’existence individuelle. On renonçait également au plaisir; mais c’était un choix qui pouvait se soutenir. (S: 99-100)

À la liberté des plaisirs – corporels, intellectuels, émotionnels, sociaux- répond l’absence effective de ceux-ci, comme si le principe, ici comme dans le contexte politique du roman, ne suffisait plus à convaincre la réalité. Se soustraire à la liberté, en ce sens, c’est se soustraire à la jouissance comme à la souffrance ; et le sujet individuel, nous dit le narrateur, pourrait gagner au change. Lorsque Rediger tâche de persuader François de faire le pas vers l’islamisme, il souligne lourdement ce principe antithétique, prenant pour exemple la fermeture du bar de l’Hôtel Métropole de Bruxelles :

Penser que l’on pouvait jusque-là commander des sandwiches et des bières, des chocolats viennois et des gâteaux à la crème dans ce chef-d’œuvre absolu de l’art décoratif, que l’on pouvait vivre sa vie quotidienne entouré par la beauté, et que tout cela allait disparaître, d’un seul coup, en plein cœur de la capitale de l’Europe!… Oui, c’est à ce moment-là que j’ai compris : l’Europe avait déjà accompli son suicide. (S: 255-256)

L’art vécu, l’art inscrit dans la vie quotidienne, est dans cette Europe de plus en plus détachée de son fondement démocratique ; la liberté intellectuelle s’effrite non pas dans ses principes-répétons-le, des vestiges de la social-démocratie subsistent – mais dans sa réalité, dans son pragmatisme. Tout dans ce roman tend à relier la liberté du politique, perdue par pragmatisme, à la liberté de l’art et de l’intellect, de l’expression et, évidemment, de la littérature. Ces libertés élévatrices trônent bien en place dans la société de Soumission, mais la vie quotidienne ne sait leur donner un sens, ne sait les justifier. L’art est là, mais on ne peut le vivre, l’habiter vraiment, en jouir. Ces constats ne sont pas sans rappeler ce qu’écrivait Jacques Rancière à propos de la société de Flaubert, alors que se formait

sous le pouvoir même de l’Empereur Napoléon III et de ses lois d’exception, une insurrection démocratique nouvelle bien plus radicale que ni l’armée ni la police ne pourraient réduire. C’était l’insurrection de cette multitude de désirs et d’aspirations surgissant de tous les pores de la société moderne, l’insurrection de l’infinité de ces atomes sociaux en liberté, avides de jouir et de tout ce qui était objet de jouissance : l’or, bien sûr, et tout ce que l’or peut acheter, mais aussi, ce qui était bien pire, tout ce qu’il ne peut pas acheter : les passions, les idéaux, les valeurs, les plaisirs de l’art et de la littérature. (2007: 63)

Rancière précise : « Cette société de l’excitation, ils lui donnaient un autre nom : ils l’appelaient démocratie. » (2007: 62-63) Fuir la liberté quotidienne dans un monastère, être dépossédé de l’art et de sa gratuité, ne plus enseigner la littérature pour les vertus mêmes de la vie intellectuelle-sa vie intellectuelle est terminée, clame le narrateur, mais il retournera enseigner, pour les femmes et l’argent-, voilà le portrait radical d’idéaux démocratiques à vau-l’eau. Pour reprendre les termes de Rancière, on peut dire que la véritable jouissance de la vie quotidienne devient celle régie par le politique, celle précisément que l’armée et la police pourraient réduire, qu’elle encadre, pénétrant toutes les sphères de la vie privée. Rediger parle d’un suicide de l’Europe, un suicide qui aurait eu lieu il y a longtemps, aux premiers moments de la fondation de sa modernité. En montrant une vie intellectuelle qui s’effondre, de la jeunesse de François jusqu’à sa vieillesse, qui s’effondre sans qu’on l’attaque, Soumission met en scène-corroborant certes un air du temps, une morosité ambiante-ce suicide en action.

Ce qu’est la littérature

Mais malgré cette déréliction racontée, cette déréliction qui est le véritable mouvement diégétique du roman, on sent que demeure une charge idéologique, une manière de foi en l’activité littéraire. Lorsque François défend la littérature, en effet, s’entend, dans les mêmes mots ou presque, l’humaniste croyance d’Antoine Compagnon déjà citée :

Beaucoup de choses, trop de choses peut-être ont été écrites sur la littérature […]. La spécificité de la littérature, art majeur d’un Occident qui sous nos yeux se termine, n’est pourtant pas bien difficile à définir. Autant que la littérature, la musique peut déterminer un bouleversement, un renversement émotif […] ; autant que la littérature, la peinture peut générer un émerveillement […]. Mais seule la littérature peut vous donner cette sensation de contact avec un autre esprit humain, avec l’intégralité de cet esprit, ses faiblesses et ses grandeurs, ses limitations, ses petitesses, ses idées fixes, ses croyances […]. Seule la littérature peut vous permettre d’entrer en contact avec l’esprit d’un mort, de manière plus directe, plus complète et plus profonde que ne le ferait même la conversation avec un ami. (S: 12-13)

Le véritable voyage dans le temps auquel convie la littérature paraît fort bien exemplifié chez Houellebecq : sans cesse, comme ses autres œuvres laissaient ronronner la voix d’un Balzac, on entend ici l’esprit du temps de Huysmans, on sent, davantage que par le truchement simple de l’intertexte, que ce roman accompagne la littérature huysmansienne. Lorsque Godefroi Lempereur, spécialiste de Léon Bloy, laisse tomber, après un petit débat avec François :

C’est curieux […] comme on reste proches des auteurs auxquels on s’est consacrés au début de sa vie. […] nous restons toujours fidèle au champion qui a été le nôtre, nous demeurons prêts pour lui à nous aimer, nous fâcher, nous battre par articles interposés. (S: 58-59)

François rétorque, non sans qu’on puisse y lire de l’ironie : « Vous avez raison, mais c’est bien. Ça prouve au moins que la littérature est une affaire sérieuse. » (S: 59) Peu après, d’ailleurs, considérant des portraits du XIX^e siècle chez Lempereur, François notera la distance qui le sépare des personnages peints, de la réalité même des peintres. Il notera : « Maupassant, Zola, même Huysmans étaient d’un accès beaucoup plus immédiat. » (S: 67) Puis ajoutera aussitôt : « J’aurais probablement dû parler de cela, de cet étrange pouvoir de la littérature, je décidai pourtant de continuer à parler politique. » (S: 67) Si la littérature est « une affaire sérieuse », la politique s’impose à la réalité, elle s’immisce dans la trame de vie du littéraire, elle s’immisce dans la trame du livre. On rencontre alors ce paradoxe d’une foi totale en la littérature, une foi jamais contredite par quelque prise de parole, mais une foi qui semble, comprend-on, s’édifier sur l’absence d’autre chose : aussitôt que la politique devient une question d’importance, elle est présentée dans sa substitution à la littérature. De même, l’amitié plus profonde que tout qui semble lier François à Huysmans ne peut se développer qu’en l’absence de toute relation sociale digne de ce nom : sans ami réel, sans famille, sans amour, le narrateur n’a que la littérature qui prend toute la place, par défaut. Le discours de la place de la littérature qu’on peut lire dans Soumission paraît alors ambigu : une fois dépassée sa défense un peu doxique et attendue, faite d’idées reçues et de vœux pieux, on perçoit alors un ordre de discours fragile, chétif, sans guère de pouvoir véritable, qui tend à disparaître aussitôt qu’autre chose lui est opposé. Son inutilité, sa gratuité, ne sont mis de l’avant que dans la mesure où cela garantit son évanescence. Lorsque la Fraternité musulmane prend le pouvoir, l’université où travaillait François oblige ses enseignants à se convertir, je l’ai dit ; l’ordre religieux, comme dans l’ancien régime, vient alors soumettre, sous la forme d’une douce censure, la littérature sous sa férule. Lorsque la politique galvanise le pays, la littérature ne semble plus être qu’un vain sujet de discussion. Lorsque les petites gloires de la jeunesse ne suffisent plus à justifier l’existence, lorsque la littérature comme instance de consécration ne permet plus de se sentir épanoui, elle est remisée, on lui préfère des plaisirs plus directs.

C’est dire peu de choses du discours sur la littérature dans ce roman, qui en est pourtant pétri. Bien sûr, la littérature macule le texte, de l’aoriste qui en constitue le temps classique-un tel passé simple, à la manière d’une relique, assure la volonté littéraire de l’énonciation-jusqu’à sa fiction qui transforme le réel pour en proposer une hypothèse limite. En fait, ce geste performatif qui consiste à rendre très lointain une réalité qui historiquement n’a pas encore eu lieu-et qui vraisemblablement, n’aura pas lieu-amuse sans déconcerter, il s’inscrit très exactement dans une convention énonciative de la littérature. Par là, ce qu’on aperçoit avant toute chose dans la forme même du récit, c’est son caractère conventionnel, presque suranné. Comme si à montrer un énoncé plongé dans son ordre de discours, se soulignait le rituel, le dogme d’une pratique ne se rénovant guère, comme la littérature, dans le roman, ne peut rien rénover du monde soumis à des forces radicales. En résumant l’amour de la littérature à la rencontre d’un ami, d’un individu, en assurant que

la profondeur de la réflexion de l’auteur, l’originalité de ses pensées ne sont pas à dédaigner ; mais un auteur c’est avant tout un être humain, présent dans ses livres, qu’il écrive très bien ou très mal en définitive importe peu, l’essentiel est qu’il écrive et qu’il soit, effectivement, présent dans ses livres (S: 13),

on enlève tout pouvoir transgressif aux lettres, tout pouvoir politique, même poétique, aux livres, et l’étude de la littérature, la littérature comme gratuité de l’expression, comme quête du dicible, comme évolution des discours sur le monde, cette littérature n’est pas. Il ne reste qu’un artefact à ausculter dans les facultés universitaires.

Le pouvoir universitaire      

L’université est le lieu, pour la littérature, de sa protection et de sa consécration. Érigée sur un savoir légitime des lettres, elle trouve son autorité et son pouvoir dans son caractère immémorial, dans son refus de discourir sur le quotidien, l’ici-maintenant. Comme institution forte, l’université paraît capable de préserver le culte de la littérature dans le temps.

Culte, pourtant, on l’a bien vu, des plus fragiles : de quoi peut donc être fait le pouvoir d’une instance qui assure le ministère d’un savoir inutile ? Dans la société libérale et capitaliste, le système des études littéraires, en effet, paraît parasitaire :

Les études universitaires dans le domaine des lettres ne conduisent comme on le sait à peu près à rien, sinon pour les étudiants les plus doués à une carrière d’enseignement universitaire dans le domaine des lettres-on a en somme la situation plutôt cocasse d’un système n’ayant d’autre objectif que sa propre reproduction, assorti d’un taux de déchet supérieur à 95 %. (S: 17)

La littérature à l’université offre alors un service reproducteur pour la valeur littéraire, capable-et ne visant qu’à-produire des spécialistes dans un domaine sans effet pour la vie courante, c’est-à-dire sans débouché d’emploi immédiat. Certes, le narrateur convient qu’« une licence ou un mastère de lettres modernes pourra constituer un atout secondaire garantissant à l’employeur, à défaut de compétences utilisables, une certaine agilité intellectuelle laissant présager la possibilité d’une évolution de carrière » (S: 17). Sans « compétences utilisables », pourtant, la littérature paraît inadéquate pour un système capitaliste ; en ce sens, pourrait-on croire, la littérature est transgressive, elle est un ennemi de l’intérieur aux forces du mal-mal idéologique que dénonçait, par exemple, Gramsci, en posant l’Art et la Littérature contre l’hégémonie étatique et économique. Plutôt, dans Soumission, elle ressemble à un divertissement de luxe. Achetable et tolérée dans le capitalisme, elle le serait tout autant dans un état islamique :

Ce qu’ils [les dirigeants de la Fraternité musulmane] souhaiteraient au fond c’est que la plupart des femmes, après l’école primaire, soient orientées vers des écoles d’éducation ménagère-une petite minorité poursuivant avant de se marier des études littéraires ou artistiques; ce serait leur modèle de société idéal. (S: 82-83)

Éducation de la minorité, une éducation sans conséquence, la littérature s’inscrit aussi bien dans les régimes dogmatiques que dans le régime libéral; elle ne conteste, finalement, ni l’un ni l’autre des régimes, présentée, ici, comme un parasite social servant les désirs et besoins individuels.

La littérature à l’université est marquée par une convaincante force d’inertie. J’ai mentionné l’indifférence du narrateur vis-à-vis l’existence réelle, placé hors du social et du politique; il en est de même de ses collègues, qui ne croient pas aux conséquences du politique :

J’étais par contre frappé par l’atonie de mes collègues. Pour eux il ne semblait y avoir aucun problème, ils ne se sentaient nullement concernés, ce qui ne faisait que confirmer ce que je pensais depuis des années : ceux qui parviennent à un statut d’enseignant universitaire n’imaginent même pas qu’une évolution politique puisse avoir le moindre effet sur leur carrière; ils se sentent absolument intouchables. (S:78-79)

Ce sentiment d’invincibilité des professeurs à la fois se trouve conforté par un système opaque, élisant avec parcimonie ses pairs et leur assurant alors, par une sorte d’adoubement, les privilèges de la fonction, et semble avoir à voir avec le rôle historique des universitaires dans les mouvements sociaux. De fait, avec Mai 68, l’intellectuel français a acquis un pouvoir politique qui semblait solidifier le système universitaire sur lequel il était juché. Or, aujourd’hui, souligne-t-on dans Soumission, ce pouvoir n’est plus qu’une illusion. Alors que les professeurs refusant de se convertir à l’Islam reçoivent une généreuse retraite, le narrateur s’étonne de ce sacrifice financier :

Sans doute s’étaient-ils beaucoup exagéré le pouvoir de nuisance des enseignants universitaires, leur capacité à mener à bien une campagne de protestation. Cela faisait bien longtemps qu’un titre d’enseignant universitaire en tant que tel ne suffisait plus à vous ouvrir l’accès aux rubriques « tribunes » et « points de vue » des médias importants, et que celles-ci étaient devenues un espace strictement clos, endogame. Une protestation même unanime des enseignants universitaires serait passée à peu près complètement inaperçue. (S: 179)

L’universitaire est endogame et n’a plus davantage la parole que le reste des citoyens ; il n’appartient qu’avec peine à la société : « J’aimais prendre le métro un peu après sept heures, me donner l’illusion fugitive d’appartenir à la “France qui se lève tôt”, celle des ouvriers et des artisans. » (S: 27)Il privilégie, sur des bases arbitraires, des spécialistes de certains auteurs au détriment d’autres : « il n’était l’auteur que d’une vague thèse sur Rimbaud, sujet bidon par excellence » (S: 28); « Mes doctorants m’avaient pas mal fait chier dans la journée avec des questions oiseuses, du genre pourquoi les poètes mineurs (Moréas, Corbière etc.) étaient considérés comme mineurs. » (S: 53) Sans plus de pouvoir sur la société, l’universitaire exerce un pouvoir omnipotent sur son domaine, pratiquant l’exclusion et la cooptation avec une perversion intimement liée à l’application totale de la domination.

L’autorité  du professeur de lettres apparaît alors comme tout à fait symbolique, n’agissant que dans le cadre restreint du champ universitaire, et encore, dans celui plus restreint du domaine littéraire. Ajoutant à cela que le domaine lui-même est frappé de vacuité, d’inutilité, d’apathie, sans effet sur l’existence, et voilà un portrait bien cynique de la littérature à l’université.

Avant de conclure, je ne peux que relever une troublante régularité dans l’évolution du récit, liée inextricablement au statut de professeur d’université du narrateur : ce dernier, comme dans bien des romans de Houellebecq, n’a de relation amoureuse ou sexuelle que dans un rapport, lourdement souligné, d’autorité. Mais cette autorité, dès sa première apparition, appelle celle du professeur : « Je continuai, année après année, à coucher avec des étudiantes à la fac-et le fait que j’étais par rapport à elles en position d’enseignant n’y changeait pas grand-chose. » (S: 23) D’ailleurs, après que sa copine étudiante ait fui l’élection de la Fraternité musulmane et que l’université elle-même fût fermée, François ne cesse de se plaindre de la stagnation de sa vie sexuelle. Ce n’est qu’alors qu’il fait appel à des services d’escortes. Parmi ces escortes, il mentionne : « Elle était en mastère 2 de lettres modernes, elle aurait pu être une de mes anciennes étudiantes […]. Sexuellement, elle faisait son métier avec beaucoup de professionnalisme. » (S: 185-186) À la fin du roman, ce qui attire le narrateur vers un retour à l’université, c’est l’assurance qu’il aurait droit à plusieurs femmes fournies par le système, des femmes soumises selon les règles de la polygamie. Non sans perversion ou misogynie, Rediger décrit ainsi le système-lequel ressemble un peu à une philosophie de vie :

On peut, déjà, amener [les femmes] à être attirées par les hommes riches […]. On peut même, dans une certaine mesure, les persuader de la haute valeur érotique des professeurs d’université… […] Bon, on peut aussi accorder aux profs un traitement élevé, ça simplifie quand même les choses… (S: 294)

Tout cela ne peut évidemment être pensé hors des discours sur la littérature et ses pouvoirs, comme si, en fait, se trouvait dans ces rapports d’autorité celui du savoir littéraire dans la société. En effet, la littérature est d’ores et déjà liée à la culture féminine—l’éducation pensée par la Fraternité musulmane, je le rappelle, impliquerait de permettre à certaines femmes d’étudier la littérature. Jamais, par ailleurs, on ne mentionne d’étudiant, outre le narrateur qui fut bel et bien étudiant avant que ne commence le récit : ce sont des femmes qui étudient les lettres. L’université prend alors l’apparence d’un grand harem où les maîtres-professeurs-agissent comme le harem le suggère, en pigeant et dominant celles à leur service. Après tout, si la littérature est une longue discussion libre avec un ami, il n’est pas tout à fait absurde que son enseignement soit un libre assouvissement de ses désirs sexuels, dans une heureuse ambiance endogame. Alors, le sujet littéraire-la femme, radicalement dominée dans ce roman-peut se demander à l’instar de Myriam, amante-étudiante du narrateur :

[M]ettons que tu aies raison sur le patriarcat, que ce soit la seule formule viable. Il n’empêche que j’ai fait des études, que j’ai été habituée à me considérer comme une personne individuelle, dotée d’une capacité de réflexion et de décision égales à celles de l’homme, alors qu’est-ce qu’on fait de moi, maintenant ? Je suis bonne à jeter ? (S:43)

Le roman répond de façon éloquente. Il ne se contente pas de dire, tu deviens l’objet des dominants, on ne te jette pas, on te consomme. Ce que dit Soumission, plutôt, c’est bien : tu es déjà soumise, tu es déjà objet, seuls des principes te disent le contraire, la réalité, elle, sévit chaque jour. La liberté de l’individu, comme celle de la littérature, comme celle de la démocratie, ne meurt pas dans ce roman; au contraire, ces concepts sont déjà morts et ne proposent que les spectres d’eux-mêmes, des idées devenues lieux communs.

Il y va de Houellebecq

Le portrait est sombre, certes. Parler du cynisme de l’écriture de Houellebecq ressemble sans doute à un détour superflu, on connaît déjà ses capacités à creuser profond la tombe de l’humanité. Il serait vain, en ce sens, de tenter de lier la représentation et le discours de la littérature dans Soumission à quelque réalité postmoderne ; il ne serait guère productif de conclure, par exemple, reprenant la manière goldmanienne, que comme sujet transindividuel, Houellebecq rend compte d’une vision du monde, traversée par l’idéologie d’une classe sociale et d’une époque, construits d’interdiscours[4]. Ce serait donner beaucoup de foi à l’expérience de la littérature, foi que le roman lui-même attaque.

En fait, ce qui nous permet de lier ce roman à la semiosis social est bien le cynisme, le relativisme qu’il évoque, rappelant les crises des études littéraires et plus largement des sciences humaines : avec Fish et Eagleton, William Marx et Dominique Maingueneau se lit la perte de discours constitutifs capables ou autorisés à produire la vérité. L’esprit postmoderne, si tant est qu’il s’agisse de cela, devient alors l’organisateur-ou le désorganisateur-des discours sociaux, dont Soumission serait une exploration probante. Car, comme le roman le souligne, la fin de l’Occident, son suicide, sa disparition, s’effectue sans heurts, sans qu’on l’attaque, il termine dans une absence assez effrayante d’assaut. Perry Anderson soutenait déjà, après Fredric Jameson et Jürgen Habermas : « Le modernisme, dès ses origines, chez Baudelaire ou Flaubert, se définissait comme “anti-bourgeois”. Or le postmodernisme est ce qui advient lorsque cet adversaire disparaît sans même avoir été vaincu. » (2010 : 122) Le postmodernisme se construirait alors grâce à la fin des antonymes de la modernité, c’est une victoire de la modernité sans vainqueur. La formule de Terry Eagleton, radicalement politique, est encore plus amusante. Après avoir décrit une époque où la gauche vit les lendemains d’une grande défaite, incapable de retrouver du sens après la débandade-culturelle, politique, littéraire-, il laisse tomber :

Imagine, finally, the most bizarre possibility of all. I have spoken of symptoms of political defeat ; but what if this defeat never really happened in the first place ? What if it were less a matter of the left rising up and being forced back, than of a steady disintegration a gradual failure of nerve, a creeping paralysis ? […] There is, of course, no need to imagine such a period at all. It is the one we are living in, and its name is postmodernism. (1996 : 19-20)

Le roman de Houellebecq s’inscrit assez bien dans ce lendemain : la liberté intellectuelle, la liberté d’expression, la liberté de pensée sont défendues par des vestiges, des principes usés qui n’ont plus les moyens de leurs fondements. La littérature, vieil art de l’Occident finissant, prend une place certes, mais cette place est érigée sur du vide et vite disparue au profit d’affaires sérieuses : la politique, la religion, l’existence. L’université plane sur une gloire ancienne, mais elle n’est devenue qu’une chasse gardée, pur exercice de pouvoir autotélique, où l’autorité sur la littérature est omnipotente ; sur la société, nulle.

Soumission reconduit donc les idées reçues du postmodernisme, c’est peu de le dire. Mais après tout, peut-être fait-il un pas de plus ? Au sein d’une dialectique entendue où au terme postmoderne semblent, en homologie, répondre les termes poststructuralisme et postcolonialisme[5], l’œuvre de Houellebecq souligne le retour dont procède son discours. Il est vrai que le discours sur la littérature, le discours moderne et structuraliste, acceptait d’une certaine manière l’inutilité des lettres, car elles étaient un objet épistémique en soi, comme expérience du langage, elles justifiaient leur existence et leur distinction. Cela, cependant, se faisait sous le couvert d’une scientificité, et le structuralisme, cette « conscience éveillée et inquiète du savoir moderne » (Foucault, 1966 : 221) se voulait pour beaucoup critique des pôles nationaux et des normes ethnologiques. À cet égard, François, le narrateur de Soumission, n’est pas un critique structuraliste, il participe plutôt de cette « contre-modernité coloniale à l’œuvre dans les matrices dix-huitémiste et dix-neuviémiste de la modernité occidentale » (Bhabha, 2007 : 270). Englué dans un vieil humanisme – humanisme narcissique, mais humanisme tout de même -, il pense la littérature dans une acception linéaire, presque nationale, et à la polyphonie des discours sociaux qui s’emboîtent au sein des textes, il préférera la discussion entre amis, entre deux individus, ignorant la pluralité des voix dont serait faite la littérature dans son acception poststructurale et postcoloniale, au profit d’un échange intime. C’est en ce sens que l’idéologie dans le texte paraît antimoderne, pré-moderne même ; la littérature y prend les atours de l’art Péguyen, pré-sartrien, la politique devient une lutte de dogmes totalitaires, le nationalistme d’un côté, la religion de l’autre. Mais cette réalité pré-moderne, dans Soumission, est habitée par des êtres postmodernes, volontiers apathiques. De là l’élection d’un parti islamiste ayant pour principe ce qui s’oppose à la démocratie. De là la ruine de la littérature. Plus précisément, l’élection de la Fraternité musulmane, idéologiquement, est annoncée dans le roman par la perte même de l’idéal démocratique :

Un candidat centre-gauche était élu, pour un ou deux mandats selon son charisme individuel, d’obscures raisons lui interdisant d’en accomplir un troisième ; puis la population se lassait de ce candidat et plus généralement du centre gauche, on observait un phénomène d’alternance démocratique, et les électeurs portaient au pouvoir un candidat de centre droit, lui aussi pour un ou deux mandats, suivant sa nature propre. Curieusement, les pays occidentaux étaient extrêmement fiers de ce système électif qui n’était pourtant guère plus que le partage du pouvoir entre deux gangs rivaux, ils allaient même parfois jusqu’à déclencher des guerres afin de l’imposer aux pays qui ne partageaient pas leur enthousiasme. (S: 50-51)

Autant les politiciens semblent évincés de leur poste par des mouvements d’humeur, en vertu de leur « charisme individuel » ou de leur « nature propre », autant la littérature semble n’être plus l’affaire que de préférences personnelles. L’idéal s’en est allé. Comme rarement, en fait, ce roman nous met face à la parenté entre démocratie et littérature. Même si c’est pour, funestement, les unir dans la tombe. Par là, nous avons affaire à une fable tardivement postcoloniale. À la question d’Antoine Compagnon citée d’entrée de jeu, « pourquoi parler de la littérature française moderne et contemporaine », Soumission répond : parce que nous le faisons depuis longtemps, par habitude, inspiré par de vieilles idées qui n’ont plus rien à voir avec la société d’aujourd’hui, et cela tient autant pour le nom – la littérature, qu’est-ce encore ? - que pour le substantif – la littérature française conçue comme littérature tout court, tout-littérature, chez Compagnon, est pour le moins embarrassante et exige un peu de lucidité, un pas de côté pour percevoir le monde après l’impérialisme.

La « gratuité d’expression » que serait la littérature, manière de nommer « l’art pour l’art », n’est pas davantage reconnue dans ce roman que la mission démocratique de la littérature comme la présentait, par exemple, Erich Auerbach et son Mimesis : mission de discours qui consistait à intégrer dans la parole admise toutes les classes sociales, tous les faits, des plus illustres aux plus quotidiens, l’ouvrage majeur d’Auerbach montre que l’histoire littéraire descend l’échelle des classes au fil du temps pour en venir jusqu’à nommer et représenter les mineurs (chez Zola) ou les femmes (chez Woolf, notamment). Ni « gratuité d’expression », ni « liberté d’expression »-le tout exprimer-, la littérature est chez Houellebecq une sorte d’artifice nihiliste, un divertissement existentiel. C’est pourquoi il a été assez étonnant et assez contradictoire que ce roman ait été lié aux thèmes de l’attentat de Charlie Hebdo. Il y a évidemment la simultanéité de la sortie du livre avec les événements : paru au début janvier 2015, le livre de Houellebecq annonçait déjà un petit scandale, on entendait surgir l’épithète « xénophobe » s’additionnant à celles qui pesaient sur l’écrivain depuis ses premiers livres. Mais par le contenu aussi, le livre et la tragédie entretenaient un dialogue. La mise en scène de la Fraternité musulmane qu’effectue Houellebecq, après tout, peut sembler moqueuse vis-à-vis de la communauté musulmane, et c’est en réponse à des moqueries satiriques que les attentats ont été perpétrés le 7 janvier 2015. Pourtant, on l’a vu, dans Soumission, le « je suis Charlie » et les professions de foi sur la liberté d’expression trouvent évidemment peu de substance, outre, peut-être, par sa capacité et son courage d’exprimer une hypothèse limite. En fait, le paradoxe devient des plus troublants quand on réalise qu’en effet, pragmatiquement, le livre, en tant qu’objet littéraire, revêt une charge politique, s’inscrit dans un contexte et milite, d’une certaine manière, dans ce contexte – ce serait l’idéologie du texte. En présentant François, à l’instar d’Antoine Compagnon, fêtant la littérature comme discussion intime avec un ami, le roman souligne la morbidité de cette position, car, en lui-même, après la tuerie du 7 janvier 2015, il devient un acte politique, une parole sur le monde reconduisant les diktats et les désamorçant dans le même geste. Comme le disait Eagleton, toute théorie littéraire postule une utilité à la littérature. Ici, plus simplement, on dénude l’inutilité dans laquelle elle paraît avoir été cantonnée. Cette dénudation revêt quelque acte rebelle, en sous-texte, et dans cette ironie houellebecquienne évanescente se lit la nécessité de redonner à la littérature sa valeur de discours. Les événements de Charlie Hebdo infléchissant sans doute la lecture, il reste néanmoins au terme de cette errance nihiliste l’impression qu’aux nouveaux dogmes, réels et tangibles dans la société postcoloniale, il faut savoir réimposer le dogme de la liberté, et même, une liberté inquiétante, que portait jadis – il faut s’en souvenir – ce qu’on nommait la littérature.

The post L’inquiétante liberté de la littérature: Le cas de Soumission de Michel Houellebecq appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Michel Houellebecq crea una “ficción política” en un contexto anti-musulmán que ya estaba lo suficientemente inscrito en el imaginario social y político de la Francia actual[2]. Nos encontramos ante una ficción, calificada por el propio autor como “ficción política” pero cabría preguntarse en qué condiciones el texto de un premio Goncourt puede escapar al efecto mediático, reductor y tramposo respecto a la comunidad musulmana. ¿Cómo puede la literatura escapar al contexto social, político e identitario del momento actual? Un escritor –lo quiera o no- detenta una auctoritas y su “ficción política”, como tantos otros discursos en campos diferentes, hace del Islam el “problema” de Francia y el desafío de nuestra civilización. Para contrarrestar esta profusión de estereotipos y clichés negativos, ¿es suficiente la crítica, la descalificación –que ésta dependerá de la ideología que compartamos? Ni Houellebecq es el causante de los fantasmas y miedos de buena parte de la sociedad francesa, ni ha escrito un artículo periodístico ni tampoco ha dictado orden ministerial alguna. Su discurso se sitúa en la “esfera estética” (Butler) y cuenta con la protección que le concede la propia ficción. Por tanto, siguiendo los postulados de la filósofa, defiendo la controversia que el texto suscita y abogo por “resignificarlo” a la luz de perspectivas críticas diferentes.  Pretendo confrontar el texto a sus propios fantasmas: la época decadente de Huysmans y el deseo de transponerla a la época actual; y por otro lado, las fantasías sexuales de un héroe solitario y morboso que se encuentran saciadas en una particular visión de la mujer en el contexto también particular –y a veces irreal- de un Islam ficción.

Si el discurso se define por su contexto social, esta novela no hubiese tenido la misma repercusión –a nivel internacional al menos-, de no haberse perpetrado los atentados  contra la revista Charlie-Hebdo; y si el discurso se define igualmente, como señala Judith Butler, por su capacidad de romper con el contexto, el análisis que reflejo a continuación pretende desviar el foco de atención mediático y demostrar que estamos ante un discurso estético que podría ser calificado de islamófobo, irreverente o simplemente machista y patriarcal (este calificativo no lo he encontrado mencionado en la pléyade de artículos y reseñas que sobre la novela se han publicado en multitud de medios).

SINOPSIS

La novela pone en escena a François, un profesor de Universidad algo desmotivado con su profesión. Con 44 años, soltero, mantiene una relación sentimental –más bien sexual- con Myriam, judía y menor que él. El contexto antisemita que vive un París de 2022 a las puertas de un cambio político radical, la llevan a volverse a Israel con sus padres. François, especialista en Huysmans, nos retrata cómo se gesta ese cambio político.  Una gran coalición unida frente a un FN que ha pasado a la segunda vuelta de las elecciones presidenciales, permite que el partido Fraternité Musulmane gobierne Francia, resucitando como primer ministro a un decadente François Bayrou. Los despidos –en modo de generosas prejubilaciones- se suceden en la nueva Université islamique Sorbonne- Nouvelle. Las alumnas van todas ataviadas con su pertinente burqa o velo y los profesores se convierten repentinamente al Islam y exhiben esposas menores de edad. Rédiger, rector de esta nueva Universidad, un belga convertido al Islam, autor de un pequeño manual sobre el Islam, será el encargado de “fichar” a François, previa conversión eso sí, al Islam.

Lo que pretendo señalar es que Soumission no es una novela islámofoba –a pesar de ofrecer una visión sesgada y muy particular del islam que más adelante veremos-, en el sentido que apunta Butler, en el que todo discurso –un texto literario lo es- es reiterativo de su contexto. Las infamias, los discursos racistas se repiten de múltiples formas y nada puede impedir su reiteración. En este sentido, Houellebecq no inventa nada que no se encuentre en el discurso político francés, en los medios de comunicación, que no esté en el debate social en Francia y en Europa. En segundo lugar, a pesar de que el propio autor y algunos críticos han definido la novela dentro del género de “ficción política”, el texto tiene más de ficción que de análisis político, por mucho que los nombres propios, la puesta en escena, o algunos datos pretendan dar una apariencia de realidad.

Una fantasmagoría literaria: François, alter ego de Huysmans.

La novela pone en escena a un protagonista, François, 44 años, soltero, profesor de Literatura en la Universidad Sorbonne-Nouvelle, autor de una tesis sobre Huysmans. Desde el principio, el paralelismo con el autor objeto de su tesis es evidente. François comparte características decadentes; sentimentalmente solo en la vida, se encuentra en permanente búsqueda de sí mismo. Su soledad le duele, y aunque mantiene una esporádica relación con Myriam, judía y menor que él, ella termina volviéndose a Israel junto a su familia por el antisemitismo que impera y que amenaza a la comunidad judía de Francia. De nuevo soltero, se siente incapaz de entablar una relación de pareja y termina consumiendo sexo con prostitutas. Muchas son pues, las similitudes que encontramos entre los dos personajes. Ambos andan buscando a una mujer desde la juventud; François, recorre cada uno de los lugares que visitó Huysmans (Abbaye de Ligugé) y, finalmente, ambos terminan su existencia convertidos a la religión, Huysmans se convertirá al cristianismo y François terminará convertido al islam. La novela traza así un recorrido paralelo entre el protagonista de la novela y el objeto de su investigación. Con una clara intención  de acentuar el decadentismo de nuestra época actual –y el futuro sombrío que promete-, Houellebecq hace coincidir el decadentismo de Huysmans con el de su protagonista, un hombre que ve cercano su ocaso intelectual, sin perspectivas de iniciar una vida en común, solitario y desencantado:

“… à ma grande surprise, il y avait une lettre dans ma boîte. Je jetai un regard dégoûté à mon salon, incapable d’échapper à cette évidence que je n’éprouvais aucun plaisir particulier à l’idée de rentrer chez moi, dans cet appartement où personne ne s’aimait, et que personne n’aimait. Je me servis un grand verre de calvados avant d’ouvrir la lettre”. (Houellebecq 2015: 228)[3]

El paralelismo temporal se pone intencionadamente de manifiesto para hacer converger las dos épocas que viven el protagonista y su autor preferido. En una conversación con Rédiger, el rector de la Universidad, ya convertido al Islam, con una brillante carrera política por delante  y casado con dos esposas, ambos recrean las similitudes entre la decadencia de finales del siglo XIX y la época actual. François, se deja convencer por los razonamientos de su colega y se pregunta a sí mismo: “Comment ne pas adhérer à l’idée de la décadence de l’Europe ? (257). La contestación a su pregunta se encuentra en el imaginario de una gran parte del electorado de centro-derecha francés: un fuerte deseo de sentimiento religioso invade la sociedad, un rechazo del ateísmo y del humanismo, la reivindicación del sometimiento de las mujeres y una vuelta al patriarcado, son algunas de las respuestas. Todo ello debe hacerse forzosamente con el sometimiento de las élites –la élite política y universitaria- quienes permitirán afianzar los tópicos conservadores de una sociedad que ya no confía en la religión católica como garante de los valores morales (matrimonio heterosexual, procreación, patriarcado, sumisión de la mujer al hombre,…). En este contexto de perdición, como el que vivió la antigua Roma, el rearme moral y familiar de Europa sólo queda representado por una nueva era, con poblaciones inmigrantes musulmanas en su mayor parte (275-276).

Más que ficción política, asistimos a una ficción decadente en la que la ensoñación, la simbología y todo el contexto son fantasmagóricos. El paralelismo entre François y Huysmans es particularmente significativo puesto que al final de la novela, en el proceso de acercamiento y posterior conversión al Islam, François acaba el prefacio para las obras completas de Huysmans que le publicará la prestigiosa editorial La Pléiade:

“Je rentrai doucement à pied, comme un petit Vieux, prenant progressivement conscience que, cette fois, c’était vraiment la fin de ma vie intellectuelle; et que c’était aussi la fin de ma longue, très longue relation avec Joris-Karl Huysmans. (283)

El morbo del Islam (Mujer, Poder y Sexo)

Desde las primeras páginas, el protagonista François muestra un tono despectivo hacia los Gender Studies, elucubrando sobre la vida sexual de la entonces rectora de la Universidad de París III, especialista en esta disciplina:

“Chantal Delouze, présidente de l’Université de Paris III-Sorbonne, me paraissait une lesbienne 100% brut de béton, mais je pouvais me tromper, peut-être éprouvait-elle une rancune envers les hommes, s’exprimant par des fantasmes dominateurs, peut-être le fait de contraindre le gentil Steve, à s’agenouiller entre ses cuisses trapues, lui procurait-il des extases d’un genre Nouveau”. (29)

En otro momento, en un encuentro con su colega Lempereur, nuestro protagonista se pregunta por la vida sentimental de éste, haciendo una reflexión general sobre las mujeres:

“Je me demandais s’il avait une compagne, ou une petite amie quelconque; probablement, oui. C’était une sorte d’éminence grise, de leader politique dans un mouvement plus ou moins clandestin; il y a des filles qui sont attirées par ça, la chose est reconnue. Il y a aussi des filles qui sont attirées par les spécialistes de Huysmans, à vrai dire. J’avais même parlé une fois à une fille jeune, jolie, attirante, qui fantasmait sur Jean-François Copé; il m’avait fallu plusieurs jours pour m’en remettre. On rencontre vraiment n’importe quoi, de nos jours, chez les filles”. (89)

El personaje de François se nos presenta como un “consumidor” de sexo porque sus encuentros con Myriam son esencialmente sexuales –incluido algún que otro fragmento que pudiera pertenecer a la literatura erótica-, pero siempre desde el punto de vista masculino. Es significativa la loa que le brinda a su órgano sexual –de género femenino en francés- como si de su mejor amiga se tratara:

“Modeste mais robuste, elle m’avait toujours fidèlement servi –enfin c’était peut-être moi, au contraire, qui étais à son service, l’idée pouvait se souvenir, mais alors sa férule était bien douce: elle ne me donnait jamais d’ordres, elle m’incitait parfois, humblement, sans acrimonie et sans colère, à me mêler davantage à la vie sociale”. (99)

Tras la marcha de Myriam a Israel, François recurre casi de forma sistemática a la prostitución, única forma de combatir su angustia sexual que parece ir acorde con la situación política que invade el país. Durante buena parte de la novela, el análisis que los protagonistas –mayoritariamente masculinos- hacen de las mujeres, es bastante simplificador, considerándolas casi exclusivamente como cuerpos sexuados, tanto en lo que se refiere a las mujeres musulmanas como a las occidentales. Muchos momentos ofrecen meros análisis sexuales de ellas:

“Vêtues pendant la journée d’impénétrables burqas noires, les riches saoudiennes se transformaient le soir en oiseaux de paradis, se paraient de guêpières, de soutiens-gorge ajourés, de strings ornés de dentelles multicolores et de pierreries; exactement l’inverse des Occidentales, classe et sexy pendant la tournée parce que leur statut social était en jeu, qui s’affaissaient le soir en rentrant chez elles, abdiquant avec épuisement toute perspective de séduction, revêtant des tenues décontractées et informes”. (91)

Con el cambio de gobierno que se presenta gracias a una coalición de varios partidos contra el FN, lo primero y más destacado que resalta nuestro protagonista es la mirada masculina sobre el cuerpo de las mujeres. Una mirada androcéntrica y sexuada detecta que las mujeres sólo llevan pantalones con blusas largas, que las faldas han desaparecido, anulando así la mirada excitante que involuntariamente y “por genética”[4] le provocan a François culos y coños desdibujados por unos pantalones al final de unas piernas largas. (177)

Sólo en la página 226, se nos habla de las mujeres musulmanas –no de las prostitutas-, destacando su capacidad de despertar el deseo sexual de los hombres aunque se las considere unas eternas menores de edad: “En régime islamique, les femmes –enfin, celles qui étaient suffisamment jolies pour éveiller le désir d’un époux riche- avaient au fond la possibilité de rester enfants pratiquement toute leur vie.” (227). Asistimos así a un Islam que estigmatiza a las mujeres musulmanas. La nueva Universidad islámica de la Sorbona se llena de burkas y la conversión al Islam de muchos de sus ancianos docentes, les permite casarse con jóvenes incluso menores de edad. Un Islam desfigurado y machista aparece como el suministrador de jóvenes vírgenes a los decrépitos profesores de Universidad. Las mujeres no tienen presencia pública aunque asisten a clase pero la mirada masculina y occidental que la novela les presta es reductora y sexuada. Llama la atención el morbo que le produce alguna prostituta musulmana que frecuenta François. El morbo que supone su origen musulmán acentúa el placer de un protagonista inmerso en un ennui existencial que tiene sus consecuencias en una constante apatía sexual: “…je me décidai pour Nadiabeurette; ça m’excitait assez, compte tenu des circonstances politiques globales, de choisir une musulmane” (185).

La cita de Khomeini que encabeza el último capítulo de la novela, nos introduce de lleno en la falsa imagen de la religión musulmana reducida a su vertiente política, y a la amalgama a la que quieren reducir y homogeneizar a la población musulmana de Francia. En las páginas que siguen, las mujeres son la eternas jóvenes y bonitas acompañantes de hombres de negocios o de profesores. François se detiene especialmente en las dos esposas de Rédiger, su primera mujer Malika y la segunda, una joven de quince años. Rédiger es el flamante rector de la Universidad islámica París-Sorbona, de origen belga, autor de una tesis sobre el matemático Guénon[5] y Nietzsche, casado con dos mujeres y que quiere incorporar a François al cuerpo docente siempre y cuando éste se convierta al Islam.

El Rector de la recién estrenada  Universidad islámica es quien nos da la clave del título de la novela y una definición del Islam que podría ser –lo es- blasfematoria: el súmmum de la felicidad humana radica en la sumisión y para él hay una relación directa entre la sumisión de la mujer al hombre, tal y como aparece descrita en la novela Historia de O, y la sumisión del hombre a Dios, tal y como la concibe el Islam (260)[6]. Este símil carnal del sentimiento religioso no es sólo irreverente, podría llegar a ser considerado por quienes profesan la religión musulmana como un acto blasfematorio.

Los continuos consejos que el protagonista recibe sobre las mujeres, reflejan su imagen frívola, señalándolas como seres fácilmente manejables y educables. Si bien se sienten atraídas por el aspecto físico, es fácil hacerles ver el lado seductor de la riqueza y más aún, el lado erótico de los profesores de universidad…  Ello nos demuestra que, como dice Butler, el texto lleva inscrito el sexo del imaginario del autor. Para François, el Islam le aporta morbo y placer a su triste y aburrida existencia. El Islam viene a llenar un vacío existencial, moral y sexual en una vida de héroe solitario y decadente. El final de la novela deja relucir que, más que un hueco espiritual, el Islam viene a llenar con mujeres sumisas, la vida de François, algo así como lo que le supuso a su padre, su segunda pareja. Al morbo del Islam, se añade la erótica que supone la imagen distorsionada de una religión que mantiene en permanente estado inferior a la mujer y explota su imagen sexual que para el hombre tiene:

“Quelques mois plus tard il y aurait la reprise des tours, et bien entendu les étudiantes –jolies, violes, timides. (…) Chacune de ces filles, aussi jolie soit-elle, se sentirait heureuse et fière d’être choisie par moi, et honorée de partager ma couche. Elles seraient dignes d’être aimées; et je parviendrais, de mon côté, à les aimer.

(…)

Un peu comme cela s’est produit, quelques années auparavant, pour mon père, une nouvelle chance s’offrirait à moi; et ce serait la chance d’une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente”. (299)

CONCLUSIÓN

Michel Houellebecq podría haber escrito otro texto sobre la cuestión musulmana en la que apareciese una Francia reinventada en su diversidad, en lugar de un país crispado por una identidad fantaseada y mortífera (Plenel 2015: 101)[7]; sin embargo, lo que ha escrito bajo una dudosa calificación de ficción política es un texto en el que sitúa frente al espejo a buena parte del electorado conservador francés. Houellebecq recrea una ensoñación literaria en la que el aspecto decadente y misógino irreal sobresale al más puro estilo dix-neuvièmiste. Siguiendo a Butler, dependiendo del contexto, de las lecturas y resignificaciones, el texto adquiere nuevos significados. Así, una lectura feminista ha permitido resistir a la literalización de la escena imaginaria de un Islam reducido y engañoso. Como bien apunta ella: “Lire tels textes contre eux-mêmes, c’est admettre la performativité du texte qui n’est pas soumise à un contrôle souverain” (2014:100). De esta manera, he querido mostrar que un mismo texto adquiere nuevos significados y que el discurso originariamente “hiriente” o incluso xenófobo, podría ser calificado de discurso patriarcal y machista sobre el que muchos lectores habrán pasado de puntillas. El contexto político de su publicación ha centrado el “daño” o el odio hacia lo musulmán, sin embargo, y consecuencia de él, pocas personas habrán leído el mismo texto bajo la perspectiva de género y habrán deducido que, en cuestión de mujeres, el Islam es a este siglo lo que la religión católica fue a los finales del siglo XIX. Un conservadurismo y una fuerte misoginia invadieron buena parte de la producción artística y literaria de finales del siglo XIX. La hipersexualización y la orientalización de la mujer se materializaron en el mito de la Mujer Fatal y en el personaje bíblico de Salomé del que Huysmans fue uno de los grandes abanderados junto a pintores como Moreau. Éste es, tal vez, el pacto del discurso estético: releerlo y dotarlo de nuevos significados, explotar la performatividad y la política.

The post Soumission de Houellebecq : ¿Islamófoba, decadente o misógina? appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Il peut paraître étonnant que l’on cherche à définir de la même manière les limites du discours humoristique alors qu’il repose précisément sur l’établissement d’un brouillage des rapports entretenus entre le discours et son intention supposée : « l’humoriste [...] ne dit sérieusement rien, ne prend probablement rien au sérieux mais il en conserve l’apparence[1] ». Il fait de son discours un lieu indécidable, où l’intention ne constitue plus un paramètre pertinent pour l’analyse. Dans cet espace spécifique où sens et opinion ne constituent plus les valeurs cardinales qui président à la construction du discours, il paraît paradoxal de souhaiter sanctionner les écarts de ce discours sur la présomption d’une intention transgressive. De même, il paraît contradictoire de partir à la recherche de ses limites. Aussi, peut-être que ce que l’on désigne comme de l’humour, dès lors que l’on invoque la liberté d’expression, n’en est-il tout simplement pas ?

C’est à partir de cette réflexion, que nous souhaitons réfléchir à la question posée par une certaine pratique de l’humour dont on omet de rappeler qu’elle s’ancre dans une idéologie républicaine qui entretient un rapport très ambigu à l’égard des voix minoritaires. On verra notamment que ces impensés de la satire sont visibles dans les pratiques humoristiques revendiquées comme les plus libertaires, comme l’humour noir surréaliste, et ce afin de remettre en question la viabilité du dialogue que l’on pense instaurer grâce à ce qui est, en fait, une forme de satire.

Satire et non simplement humour, registre finalement peu présent dans les médias dès lors que l’on tente de le définir. En effet, l’humour est un discours qui met en jeu la crédibilité de celui qui s’exprime ; il est l’inverse d’une parole d’autorité et c’est pourquoi il est si difficile de le décrire et de lui assigner un contenu idéologique précis. Il permet tout et son contraire : divertir gratuitement comme transmettre une vérité philosophique invisible à l’œil nu ; proposer une critique à la fois tendre et mordante.

Son caractère fuyant le rend tout à fait inapte à la communication médiatique et politique. Comme le rappelait Jean-Marc Moura : « L’humour réside dans le sentiment de coexistence du rieur et du risible, son sourire est celui d’un spectateur embarqué, distant et solidaire à la fois de ce dont il s’amuse[2]. » À l’inverse, le discours du chroniqueur ou du journaliste doit marquer la distance avec sa cible, pour asseoir sa propre autorité de contradicteur. Ce que nous appelons alors trop vite « humour » est en réalité de la satire : qu’elle soit potache ou mordante, qu’elle s’illustre dans la caricature ou le billet d’humeur, elle porte une forme d’autorité et, forte de l’affirmation préalable du positionnement politique du satiriste, elle dessine les contours des partis et renforce les clivages idéologiques. Plus généralement, elle permet l’unité autour d’un principe négatif, la constitution d’un ennemi commun à partir de son identification et de sa critique.

La difficulté pour le satiriste est alors d’exprimer des valeurs positives après la destruction de valeurs ennemies. C’est très souvent pour cette raison que l’on préfère parler « d’humour » : plus neutre, plus innocent, l’humour ne devrait pas susciter de représailles. Au contraire, il devrait permettre la création d’une communauté idéale de complices : « Les gens sont intelligents, toujours plus intelligents qu’on ne le croit. On fait confiance à l’intelligence de l’humour[3] », a déclaré Luz au moment de la sortie du  numéro de Charlie Hebdo du 14 janvier. Autour de cette valeur – l’humour associé à l’intelligence -, il est même possible d’appeler ceux que l’on vise à rire d’eux-mêmes, afin précisément de se joindre au reste de la communauté. L’idéal d’une satire républicaine, en quelque sorte : celle qui annule les différences ethniques, religieuses ou politiques en vue de l’avènement d’une harmonie rationaliste.

En fait, une telle vision du travail satirique tient à une certaine compréhension du rôle politique de l’humour parmi les intellectuels de gauche français. À ce titre, il paraît intéressant de revenir sur ses fondements, perceptibles dans une œuvre théorique et littéraire : L’Anthologie de l’humour noir d’André Breton[4]. Tout d’abord parce que cet ouvrage identifie une nouvelle forme de la dérision, l’humour noir, dont la présence dans les médias ne peut être remise en question, et ce à l’époque d’un durcissement idéologique – 1939 – qui n’est pas sans rappeler notre propre actualité. Ensuite parce qu’en « inventant » ce registre, Breton pose les bases d’une réflexion sur le rôle politique de l’humour, et crée inconsciemment un nouveau type de satire très propre à s’épanouir dans le contexte de la liberté d’expression républicaine post-Libération.

L’Anthologie réunit des textes où l’humour noir exprime « une révolte supérieure de l’esprit ». Face à ce qui l’effraie, l’aliène, l’homme fait le choix de se moquer, et de réduire ainsi l’objet de sa peur : « Le moi se refuse à se laisser entamer, à se laisser imposer la souffrance par les réalités extérieures […] ; bien plus, il fait voir qu[e les traumatismes du monde extérieur] peuvent même lui devenir occasion de plaisir[5] ». Les récents événements ont donné lieu à des dessins de presse porteurs d’une telle motivation : face à l’horreur, il est possible de se révolter par l’humour.  Ils mettaient en scène les dessinateurs de Charlie Hebdo au Paradis, en pleine poursuite de leur activité « d’humoristes ». Par exemple, un dessin d’Alex mettant ce bon mot au sujet des attentats dans la bouche de Cabu : « Une liquidation le jour des soldes, fallait le faire… ! »[6]. Le contexte—un nuage au paradis—, et la mise en valeur de l’équivoque déréalisent l’événement, signalant la capacité de l’esprit humain à s’extirper du tragique. Révolte singulière en apparence donc, mais dont on sait qu’elle est tendue vers la contestation collective.

Pour Breton, cet humour a même nécessairement une dimension politique : car ce qui aliène l’homme, ce n’est pas uniquement la mort, c’est aussi l’organisation sociale du monde capitaliste. C’est ainsi que l’humour noir de Swift apparaît, dans la notice qui lui est consacrée, comme guidé par « un besoin frénétique de justice[7] ». Quant à l’obscénité et à la violence des scènes sadiennes, elles naîtraient du désir de faire advenir « la véritable égalité[8] ». Le projet esthétique acquiert ainsi une dimension éthique : comme le rappelle Jean-Marc Moura, l’humour aura beau ici s’incarner poétiquement, ce sera afin de proposer « manière de vivre (éventuellement de mourir) qui déborde toute préoccupation textuelle[9] ». L’humour noir consiste donc dans la construction d’une posture humoristique problématique, qui prône le désengagement dans l’unique but de réaffirmer la dimension contestataire d’une telle attitude, profondément critique à l’égard de la société qui l’entoure. L’humour noir n’est donc pas désengagé, mais au contraire, au service des plus faibles.

Aussi, selon Breton, il ne faut pas se méprendre sur le sens de textes mettant en scène les tortures exercées sur les pauvres et les marginaux : « Le mauvais Vitrier » martyrisé par le dandy baudelairien, ou les sévices infligés à Juliette par le très riche Minski. En effet, pour Breton, c’est précisément à travers la violence infligée au plus faible que l’on pourra susciter le sentiment d’indignation qui engendre les vraies révolutions. L’humour est l’ennemi de la « sentimentalité à l’air perpétuellement aux abois[10] », l’ennemi du pathétique. Car comme le rappelait Mireille Rosello, « l’un des paradoxes de l’humour noir consiste précisément à dénoncer l’ambiguïté qui consiste à plaindre le pauvre pour mieux se dérober à son agressive demande de justice[11] ». Il s’agit donc d’indigner et de provoquer le faible pour le contraindre à réagir, sous le prétexte que lui éviter les coups, le protéger, c’est déjà le traiter comme un citoyen de seconde zone, destiné à subir la violence des puissants.

Rien de tout à fait différent dans ces propos tenus par Charb en juin 2013 : « C’est en refusant par peur ou par paternalisme de traiter les musulmans comme des citoyens avant de les traiter comme des croyants qu’on fait de l’islam un tabou[12] ». Autrement dit, c’est en partant de la théorie qu’instaure le contrat social républicain qu’il faut envisager la représentation de la communauté musulmane, et ce en dépit de ce que l’on sait des discriminations qu’elle subit, sur la base même de l’identité religieuse. Les discours d’André Breton et de Charb sont, de fait, issus d’un même moule : celui d’une compréhension et d’une pleine intégration des principes de la laïcité républicaine. Dès lors, l’émancipation du faible dépendrait de sa responsabilisation, quels que soient ses moyens matériels, sa capacité ou non, à répondre aux coups. Cette vision des choses est souvent celle qui justifie actuellement une certaine pratique de la satire–et non de l’humour–qui a cours dans les médias, et précisément chez Charlie Hebdo.

De fait, les unes de Charlie ont cet objectif : provoquer les plus faibles pour critiquer le traitement qui leur est réservé par les plus forts. La une montrant les esclaves sexuelles détenues par Boko Haram en pleine revendication concernant leur droit aux allocations familiales pouvait ressortir d’une telle pratique[13]. Max Fisher, dans un article étudiant précisément la question d’un éventuel racisme de Charlie Hebdo, s’est intéressé à cette couverture et a rappelé qu’elle était représentative d’une satire fonctionnant sur différents niveaux de compréhension[14].  Représenter ces victimes revendiquant un droit social au sein même de leur martyr et simultanément rappeler le discours de l’extrême-droite concernant le soi-disant détournement des droits sociaux par la population immigrée, c’est provoquer l’indignation du public à deux niveaux : en mettant en scène d’une part la pesanteur des violences physiques exercées contre ces femmes et, d’autre part, la violence symbolique exercée par les discours actuels contre les populations immigrées. Une autre couverture provocante (« à laquelle  vous avez échappé »), celle qui représentait Christiane Taubira sous la forme d’un singe[15], répondait à la même exigence : indigner en exerçant une violence contre une figure stigmatisée par le discours de l’extrême-droite. Ces couvertures provocantes ont bénéficié de la protection apportée par le principe de liberté d’expression, en raison de paramètres qui leur sont en réalité extérieurs : ce qui importe ici, c’est le contexte de cette prise de parole. Charlie Hebdo est considéré comme un magazine libertaire, détesté de l’extrême-droite. Nous sommes alors invités à ne pas prendre en compte la production d’images à caractère raciste, ce qui peut paraître insupportable et incompréhensible aux yeux de ceux qui ne connaissent ni l’histoire du journal, ni la sociologie de son lectorat. Ou encore, aux yeux de ceux qui ont tout simplement des doutes sur la bonne foi de la ligne éditoriale, sur son éventuelle orientation conservatrice.

Plus ambivalente, une couverture telle que celle qui visait directement les intégristes djihadistes, montrant un imam tenant à bout de bras le Coran censé le protéger d’une balle qui le transperce avec pour légende : « Tuerie en Égypte : Le Coran c’est de la merde »[16]. Une fois de plus la caricature vise apparemment le discours d’extrême-droite, insultant envers l’islam en montrant parallèlement le caractère infondé de la peur de l’islamisme radical, puisque ses premières victimes sont les musulmans. Mais, simultanément, Charlie invite brutalement la communauté musulmane à se détacher de ce qui ferait soi-disant sa faiblesse, c’est-à-dire sa croyance dans un contexte républicain où celle-ci ne constitue pas un paramètre identitaire acceptable. Il s’agit donc bien de provoquer la communauté minoritaire pour lui intimer l’ordre de se dégager de ce qui fait d’elle une minorité dans un contexte laïque. Mais dès lors, on lui demande de ressembler au plus puissant : certainement pas d’inventer une puissance en accord avec son identité. De la même manière, les caricatures que l’on considère comme blasphématoires–celles qui mettent en scène le prophète Mahomet, malgré l’interdit qui pèse sur sa représentation–sont des rappels constants aux musulmans de leur différence, et des invitations régulières à se conformer au cadre dominant.

Il serait ainsi bon que nous commencions à comprendre ce que ce type de fonctionnement peut avoir de fallacieux et de relatif. Déjà, Mireille Rosello constatait que dans L’Anthologie les bourreaux étaient en réalité les seuls bénéficiaires de la liberté offerte par l’humour noir. Les schémas de domination demeuraient les mêmes et ne faisaient que reproduire les schémas existants. Notamment, elle remarquait que le rôle de victime était essentiellement tenu par une femme et que de nombreux textes étaient en réalité des satires misogynes. La masse des images de violence et des discours tournés contre un type de faiblesse–la féminité–ne produit, au final, aucune indignation du fait du développement d’un sentiment d’habitude, ce type de violence faisant par ailleurs partie intégrante de l’existence d’une femme. En tant qu’homme, je peux trouver ce qui leur arrive terrible et réclamer l’émancipation du sexe faible. En tant que femme, je vois une représentation complaisante de mon vécu et si cela m’agace, c’est aussi un objet de lassitude. La liberté demeure donc celle de l’humoriste et du compilateur ; elle ne touche pas la lectrice, au pire démoralisée, au mieux, furieuse. Et lorsque les femmes prennent exceptionnellement le statut d’humoristes–deux auteures ont droit à leur notice dans L’Anthologie–le discours critique leur impose des images stéréotypées (la sorcière, la femme-enfant), qui signalent une incapacité du théoricien de l’humour noir à offrir à ces figures de réels espaces de liberté[17].

Ainsi, la conception d’une satire impitoyable, car révolutionnaire, n’est possible que sous un certain point de vue, celui du dominant. De la même manière que la satire ne peut permettre l’intégration de sa cible que du point de vue du satiriste, persuadé d’accomplir un devoir citoyen, en invitant les minorités à rire d’elles-mêmes au nom de l’égalité de droit. Ce fonctionnement nous renvoie au contrat social universaliste propre à la culture française qui, rappelons-le, est l’émanation d’un groupe relativement homogène : les acquis de la Révolution française et la mise en place de la laïcité sont le fait d’hommes blancs, de confession judéo-chrétienne, excluant les femmes dans un premier temps–grandes oubliées du suffrage universel, et ce jusqu’en 1946—, et, plus tard, les populations colonisées—le code de l’indigénat limitant de manière discriminatoire le champ d’application des principes républicains. Si cela répondait à un trouble de l’identité blanche elle-même–la laïcité doit permettre de lutter contre les tensions confessionnelles qui opposent les catholiques et les protestants–force est de constater que c’est aujourd’hui cette identité qui est majoritaire, alors même que les équilibres sociaux se sont trouvés modifiés et que la population française est désormais confrontée au défi de la diversité[18]. Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, la réponse trouvée à cet enjeu a consisté à réaffirmer les principes républicains et à renforcer la laïcité en légiférant sur les signes ostensibles[19] dans l’idée que des valeurs qui visent à annuler les différences demeurent les bonnes ; et que sévir contre ceux qui les contestent c’est précisément leur montrer qu’ils font partie prenante de la République. Interdire le port du voile intégral[20] dans la rue a ainsi été justifié par la volonté de protéger les musulmans contre leur propre religion, considérée comme un facteur de division du tissu social. Annuler leur différence en leur rappelant leur statut de citoyen à part entière, c’est toujours simultanément leur refuser le droit de s’exprimer sur les effets que peut avoir le système en place sur leurs existences, sur les discriminations qu’ils subissent.

Il paraît donc tout à fait contradictoire de faire reposer, aujourd’hui, la provocation satirique sur l’exercice de la liberté d’expression, tout en se justifiant de la légèreté du discours humoristique, discours que seuls ceux qui se revendiquent d’un point de vue culturellement différent ne seraient pas à même d’apprécier. La satire, telle qu’elle est pratiquée dans le contexte de journaux et magazines se revendiquant des principes de la République, n’est pas simplement critique : elle est invasive, et ce au point d’affirmer l’intérêt qu’il y a pour sa cible à être attaquée.

Il ne s’agit pas de douter des motivations des journalistes de Charlie Hebdo, mais plus largement, d’envisager la possibilité que notre vision de la satire soit en réalité biaisée : elle tient à l’idée qu’en République, tous ont les mêmes droits, et que ceux qui n’en profitent pas n’ont qu’à se manifester et les réclamer. Les présenter comme des victimes ou évoquer leurs différences, les plis et la complexité de leur identité, serait leur faire injure. En conséquence, les provoquer revient à leur lire leurs droits, à leur fournir un passeport. Cependant, ce raisonnement ne tient pas compte de la non-validité de sa prémisse : l’échec de la société démocratique tient à ses inégalités, dont souffre tout particulièrement en France la communauté musulmane. Tant que l’égalité de droit ne sera pas réalisée, il n’y aura aucune raison de considérer que nous pouvons tous rire des mêmes choses.

L’attentat de Charlie Hebdo se compte parmi de nombreux malentendus qui émaillent le dialogue de la République avec ses minorités. La pratique française d’une satire républicaine, visant à l’universalité alors qu’elle n’émane que d’un groupe pouvant jouir pleinement de ses droits démocratiques, est l’un de ces malentendus. Aucune compréhension n’émergera tant que nous n’aurons pas pris conscience de l’ampleur du chantier démocratique, tant que nous n’aurons pas même pris conscience qu’il est nécessaire de repenser ses fondations. Il ne s’agit nullement d’appeler à l’autocensure, et on rappellera à juste titre que la presse satirique a également longtemps critiqué les institutions dominantes—Charlie Hebdo s’est aussi violemment attaqué à la religion catholique. Il s’agit plutôt, pour la presse, de s’interroger sur les discours qu’elle véhicule, et au nom de quelles valeurs elle s’en justifie. La satire n’est pas innocente, c’est d’ailleurs ce qui fait tout son intérêt ; elle n’est pas déconnectée par nature des conditions socio-historiques dans lesquelles elle s’énonce, et c’est ce qui fait son efficacité. En prendre conscience, c’est déjà réfléchir à l’impact de son travail et comprendre que les valeurs qui garantissent la liberté d’expression instaurent une économie du rire à deux vitesses.

The post De l’humour noir aux caricatures : impensés d’une tradition satirique appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

In the 239-year history of the United States, the closest this would-be nation has come to accomplishing that largely unfulfilled promise of immigration at Ellis Island is letting in the multitudes of Europeans who have arrived on its shores in several waves since the earliest decades of its founding. Like the Statue of Liberty itself, a gift  from one occidental community to another, most arrived in the United States with little more than the shirts on their backs as their sole worldly possession, but a path to possible acceptance and integration nevertheless.

Other would-be immigrants from elsewhere: the Orient, the non-western world, and nether regions have found the fabled “golden door” of America firmly shut to this promise.

Look no further for the evidence for this assertion than the uninformed, yet calculated statements of Donald Trump, the man who might easily become President of the United States were the presidential elections to be held today. In announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination on June 16, 2015, Trump boldly declared to global media that “…when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems…”

Is that not, in fact, the promise enshrined at the feet of Lady Liberty? If Trump’s inarticulate and rather unfortunate assertions had any element of truth in them, why should Mexico not send their worst when America, arguably the most prosperous country yet in the history of human civilization, boldly promises to welcome “…poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and make better citizens out of them?  How does this country conceive of immigrants, and of the idea of freedom itself?

Opinion polls have since shown that Trump’s contemptuous attitude towards would-be immigrants is actually a pervasive sentiment across the contemporary American political landscape and within the cultural mainstream, one shared by many respondents in opinion polls around the country.

Trump’s claims were not only outrageous and divisive, they were also largely untrue. When most countries around the world today send their immigrants, Uncle Sam demands that only their brightest, their most talented and most diligent be allowed to remain.

Except for the State Department’s Refugee Admissions Program and the Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery Program, current immigration laws of the United States demand that visa applicants and travelers demonstrate binding ties to their home countries such as property and family. It is expected that legal immigrants be educated with at least a high school diploma. Most of those who come through legal immigration channels, in fact, arrive with far more than that, comprising the upper echelon of society in their countries of origin.

Statistics from the United States Census Bureau  and Data from the Department of Homeland Security show that the more substantive percentage of immigrants to America are legal immigrants and not illegal immigrants, as falsely claimed by Trump and believed by most of his sycophantic followers.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Fortune 500 companies and other major economic stakeholders are staffed with some of the most educated and talented immigrants anywhere in the world.

The denial of entry to those most in need is not exclusive to the United States. Across the Atlantic, the ignominy of the current immigration discourse in Europe is sadly similar to that championed by the far-right in America.

This summer has seen perhaps the highest mass transnational migration of human beings the world has seen this century. From the war in Syria, the post-Gadhafi instability in Libya, and the continuing political and economic crises in several parts of Asia, central and North Africa, refugees have fled by boats and land routes in desperate bids to reach the relative peace and stability of European shores. The Syrian refugee crisis alone has generated over 4 million refugees in neighboring countries, with over half of the country’s population displaced.

Their mass arrival in many parts of Europe has been met with scorn akin to that faced by the most outcast of minority groups in Europe, such as the Romani, have faced in their history of transmigration across Europe.

From train stations to open fields, refugees and migrants[1] have been left to perish in the elements while European politicians dither in deciding what to do about and with them. Only recent coverage of children’s bodies washing up on European shores and deaths of dozens of migrants on a truck in Austria have spurred enough outcry to generate a more organized response from the EU.

Ironically, the greatest migrants the world has ever known, Europeans, now refuse to countenance those caught in similar predicaments and circumstances as thousands of their ancestors.

From the revered Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in the so-called “New World” to Boer Trekkers in the Veldts of Southern Africa, Syrian, Asian, and North African migrants are now undertaking the same perilous journeys for similar reasons –religious freedom, economic opportunity and safety.

Everywhere they arrived across “new worlds,” from the Americas, through Africa, Asia, Australia to New Zealand, European migrants supplanted autochthones, transforming the very definition of citizenship in the process: If you brave oceans and arrive anywhere in the world, if you fancy your destination, if you plant roots and make it your own, you may belong and claim a place…but only if you are European!

Look no further for affirmation of this perverse doctrine of citizenship than the fates of native communities– Aborigines, Maoris, and Zulus, and Native Americans in the Americas, as they continue to fight for recognition in their native lands.

Yet, whereas the exploits of the Pilgrim Fathers or the European explorers are lauded as brave, intrepid and adventurous in historical accounts, those of the current boat migrants and refugees who are in similar circumstances are described as desperate, and even foolish, for jumping on rickety boats and risking all with their families to disturb the peace, tranquility, and  more critically the economies and narrowly defined national characters of Europe. The regard for the quality of an endeavor, and the humanization of those involved, still depends on the place of origin of the subjects in question.

The hypocrisy of “open borders” is unfathomable when you contrast how migrants have been treated in the summer of 2015 with discourses of global trade and economic exchange. “Globalization is inevitable!” “To trade…everyone!” “Open borders!” Weaker countries in the developing world are constantly harassed, bullied, humiliated and reprimanded by the World Trade Organization, the European Union and other hegemons of neoliberal reforms to open their borders to global trade, as long as their people always stay inside those borders.

Had Cecil the Lion’s murderer been denied a visa to enter Zimbabwe, you can bet your last dollar that the State Department would have been furious at the Zimbabwe government for being foolish and petulant over a “few travel bans” on Zimbabwean authorities for “human rights violations.”

As soon as conflicts erupt or are instigated through the interventions of European powers or their American counterparts in the postcolonies, however, those same advocates of the “free movement” of (European?) people and goods change their tone and cry out for their borders to be closed. “Keep the hordes at bay,” they weep, “lest Europe collapses under the weight of the problems they bring with them.”

Thus, we now have arrived at another shameful milestone in the history of the human community. Future conflicts will be deadlier precisely because belligerents will be reassured by the fact that the Europeans and Americans who have long dominated the economic and political landscape will stand by and do nothing as countries are ravaged and civilians displaced. They also know no one will directly intervene to stop them and, more disturbingly, they know Europeans will promptly shut their borders to innocents trying to flee the atrocities.

On Wednesday, September 2, 2015, body of a dead boy washed up on the beach of a popular tourist destination in Turkey. Only in death was the boy recognized as a human child in crisis. There cannot be a more symbolic reminder of the world’s failure to offer refuge to those who seek it, just as Pilgrim Fathers once sought refuge from their oppressors in Europe. The boy was found face down in the sand as if the innocence of his young life that was prematurely extinguished had proclaimed a big “shame on you Europe…I have left your world for a much better place!”

The post Braving Oceans: Migration and Subjective “Illegality” from the Pilgrim Fathers to Boat Migrants appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“Fanon was angry. His readers should still be angry too. Angry that the wretched of the earth are still with us. Anger does not in itself produce political programs for change, but it is perhaps the most basic political emotion. Without it, there is no hope,” (Macey 2000, 503).

The past decade has seen an increase in both popular and scholarly interest in the work of Frantz Fanon. What has brought about this revival in interest in Fanon, who is now discussed at numerous conferences and colloquia and whose work is increasingly featured in both academic and media literature? What are the conditions of our contemporary moment that compel some of us to turn towards Fanon and revisit his now classic texts, from Wretched of the Earth to Black Skin, White Masks? And just as importantly, how are misreadings of Fanon’s work contributing to the dilution of the revolutionary nationalist potential inherent in most of his writing? Two examples of seminal works that have been recently published include Lewis Gordon’s What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought and David Macey’s Fanon: A Biography. These works look at Fanon through the events that happened in his life to understand the ways in which he viewed and analyzed social reality. Just as important, although seldom referenced, is work by Neil Lazarus (1999, 2011) and Benita Parry (2004). Lazarus’ chapter on Fanon in his excellent work, The Postcolonial Unconscious and Parry’s analysis of Fanon’s work in her book Postcolonialism: A Materialist Critique constitute important interventions in the way Fanon has been misread by multiple scholars.

Our contemporary moment is characterized by the constant drive towards capitalist accumulation through an increasing process of neoliberalization in the current setting of late capital.[1] This material reality, that is universal but that has a multitude of particularities across the globe, conditions the social categories that produce experience, from class, race, and gender, to (dis)ability and sexuality. However, this has come alongside a tendency within academia to shy away from discussing this very material reality. This is largely due to the turn away from Marxism, as well as to the popularity of both postcolonial and postmodern approaches. The role of the neoliberal university is also important to note, as it pushes for more specialization, more profit, and therefore less critique and less radical thinking. This tendency has meant that although important events such as the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have been interpreted through numerous lenses, what is absent is usually analysis employing a lens that engages the global capitalist system and that analyzes social justice with particular attention to neoliberalism and neocolonialism.

This hesitance within academia when it comes to a discussion of neocolonialism (especially through a Marxist lens) is what has driven me towards Fanon as an important scholar within the long tradition of anti-colonial scholarship. It is unfortunate that it has often been scholars who identify as postcolonialists who have rejected the concept of neocolonialism and posited that global relations in our current moment are nuanced and complex, and that we should be wary of repositing a binary of East and West. Here Derrida’s argument that binary oppositions are a violent hierarchy that must first be inverted before they can be decimated is useful, as it shows the need to use binaries solely in order to invert them—without this inversion, they cannot be done away with (Parry 2004, 16). Moreover, as both Benita Parry (2004) and Neil Lazarus (2011) have deftly argued, calls for “complexity” and “nuance” can often serve power by softening the critical edge of critique and should thus be approached with caution. Fanon’s work can certainly be seen as falling within the so-called “trap” of reproducing binaries. He has touched on questions of race, capitalism, nationalism, and neocolonialism, through an analysis that clearly articulates the power relation between the West and the colonial (and neocolonial) world. His background in psychiatry has meant that he often highlighted the psycho-social effects of colonialism and racial domination, even while noting the economic and political processes underlying this domination. Indeed in his work we see the intersecting of these various structures, all through the lens of his involvement in the Algerian war of independence, of which he was a part. His work often relies on psychoanalytical assumptions, although, as Gordon points out, for Fanon the psychoanalytical emphasis is on the racial rather than the sexual.

It seems clear to those of us working within a Marxist framework that many of the problems Fanon addressed in the 1950s and 1960s continue to reproduce themselves in the contemporary moment, albeit at times expressing themselves differently. Indeed the Arab uprisings are a testament to this; would it be possible to argue that neocolonialism, capitalism, and nationalism are not part of the story? (That said, apparently it is indeed possible, judging by the state of Middle East studies today.) Thus it is clear that Fanon remains relevant. The question, then, is: which Fanon? In this article I want to discuss two readings of Fanon’s work that approach him from divergent perspectives and yet still maintain his revolutionary potential. The first is Lewis Gordon’s forthcoming book on Fanon entitled What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought, which highlights the analyses of racial domination present in Fanon’s work. The second is Neil Lazarus’ chapter on Fanon in The Postcolonial Unconscious and his chapter on Fanon in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World and Benita Parry’s discussion of Fanon in her book Postcolonialism: A Materialist Critique, which focuses on the question of nationalism. These two sets of texts highlight the way in which Fanon can be read differently according to where emphasis is put, and yet still be acknowledged as an anti-colonialist revolutionary thinker whose work remains relevant today.

Lewis Gordon and the question of race

Lewis Gordon begins his book What Fanon Said with a superb introduction that clearly articulates the role of race in how Fanon has been received. He writes,

We should step outside of the tendency to reduce the thought of African intellectuals to the thinkers they study. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre was able to comment on black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor without becoming ‘Césairian,’ ‘Fanonian,’ or ‘Senghorian’; Simon de Beauvoir could comment on the work of Richard Wright without becoming ‘Wrightian’; Max Weber could comment on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois without becoming ‘Du Boisian.’ Why then is there a different story when black authors comment on their (white) European counterparts? Standard scholarship has explored whether Du Bois is Herderian, Hegelian, Marxian, or Weberian; whether Senghor is Heideggerian; and whether Fanon is every one of the Europeans on whom he has commented – Adlerian, Bergsonian, Freudian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Lacanian, Marxian, Merleau-Pontian, and Sartrean, to name several (2015, 18).

This is related to the tendency to reduce black intellectuals to their biographies; or, in other words, to assume that white intellectuals produce ideas and theory, while black intellectuals relate experiences. The point here is not to simply say Sartre is Fanonian or de Beauvoir Wrightian; the point is to emphasize that the opposite is always the case: that black intellectuals are always read and understood through white intellectuals. Thus from the outset Gordon is setting the stage for the centrality of race in his book. Indeed the first few chapters focus explicitly on the ways in which Fanon discussed race, particularly from a psychological perspective. Fanon’s first brutal experience with racism in France—when a French child told his mother he was afraid when he saw Fanon—plays a central role here, as does Fanon’s analysis of interracial relationships. It is clear that Gordon has a soft spot for Fanon’s work and that he sees its continuing relevance today: there are multiple points throughout the book where he points out how Fanon’s analysis of the Martinique or Algeria of the early twentieth century continues to be relevant today.

Gordon also produces a very nuanced analysis of Fanon’s gender politics, which have been subject to much heated debate.[2] Fanon has been attacked by many white feminists (and non-white feminists working within the liberal tradition) for his comments on Mayotte Capécia’s Je Suis Martiniquaise. These feminists saw Fanon’s analysis of Capécia’s inferiority complex as sexist and dismissed his work in its entirety based on that reading. I would posit that Fanon’s reading of this particular work is not sexist but rather shows the reality of how race and gender intersect to produce complicated forms of desire. Here Capécia’s desire for white men—and white men alone—is seen as a desire to be white, to attain whiteness. It is clear for Fanon that this form of desire is therefore to be criticized. Fanon’s reading is in effect one that analyses gender through a critical race perspective and thus it is no surprise white feminists were uncomfortable with it. While Gordon dismisses claims that Fanon’s reading of Capécia was sexist, he does, however, critique Fanon for his “epistemic sexism.” Here he argues that Fanon’s work is clearly indebted to Simone de Beauvoir, and that despite this he did not cite her or mention her influence in any form. Gordon writes, “I cannot excuse Fanon’s failure to articulate his indebtedness to de Beauvoir…it is clear de Beauvoir not only offered much intellectual sustenance to Fanon’s thought but also that he was well aware of at least her two major contributions at the time of writing Black Skin White Masks. Her presence at the level of ideas but exclusion at that of citation is a form of epistemic sexism,” (Ibid, 58). Thus Gordon condemns readings of Fanon that posit his sexism and dismiss him based on that and yet simultaneously notes that there are traces of sexism in Fanon’s work. In addition, it is useful to note the problematic way in which Fanon at times discussed Algerian women, repositing a Western separation between the public and private sphere and over-emphasizing the role of the veil.

Nevertheless, it is clear, as Gordon demonstrates, that Fanon’s theoretical analysis of the position of Algerian women within the battle for independence is correct. Gordon writes: “Whether Fanon’s portrayal of the facts are accurate does not affect the main point of his analysis: how could liberating Algerian women be taken seriously when the approach to doing so is to impose a structure that makes the women (1) subordinate to all French and other European peoples and (2) only of value to the extent to which their plight could be used to maintain subordination of Algerian men and women,” (Ibid, 150). Fanon’s analysis of the relationship between the French settler-colonizers and Algerian women is a heavily psychoanalytic one, where he posits that white French settlers dreamed of ripping the veils off Algerian women and penetrating them—in other words, deflowering the country (Ibid). What is notable here is the way in which Algerian women are part and parcel of the Algerian revolution, as Fanon himself constantly pointed out. Gordon writes that this shows how these women’s fight for the freedom as women is an outgrowth of struggles against colonization and slavery, a point that has been made by both Assia Djebar in the Algerian context and Angela Davis in the American one (Ibid, 155). This is not to say that women only fought for independence and not for gender justice or an end to patriarchy, but rather to demonstrate the ways in which these various struggles are interconnected.

The unwillingness on the part of many feminists to engage with Fanon should be seen as a missed opportunity to enrich the field of postcolonial feminism. Fanon’s analysis of capitalism, class relations, neocolonialism and nationalism can greatly enhance the work of feminists working in contexts that were formerly colonized. In an excellent article, Ashley Bohrer points out that many anti-imperialist Marxist feminists in particular have used Fanon to discuss colonialism and neocolonialism, noting in particular Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. By looking at the ways in which Fanon influenced these two feminists—who are indeed central to Marxist feminism—Bohrer shows “how his thought is foundational for a contemporary Marxist analysis of capitalist patriarchy,” (2015, 379). Fanon argues that colonialism should, above all, be analyzed from the perspective of economics: “The colonized world is one structured by economic violence, and in particular, the violent and coercive appropriation of the labour of the oppressed,” (Ibid, 380). This economic exploitation is internalized by the colonized through complex webs of socialization. Thus cultural imperialism is part and parcel of economic imperialism.

While Fanon has rarely been labeled a Marxist, it is clear from the above passage that his work contains important analyses of colonial capitalism. I argue that Fanon’s call to “stretch Marxism” should be seen as a useful for feminists working in the Global South because it calls for both a centering of Marxism while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which capitalism conditions life in the colonies (as opposed to the métropoles). In other words, I believe “stretching Marxism” here can be seen as a means of dislodging Eurocentric Marxist accounts that do not consider colonialism as central to capitalist accumulation and that do not account for how capitalism in the postcolony (Mbembé 2001) is different. Here Bohrer’s point that Fanon’s analysis had a lasting effect on Italian Marxist feminism shows the importance of his materialist critiques of capitalism. Silvia Federici, for example, arguably one of the most important feminists today, cites Fanon as one of her major influences alongside Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank. Marxist feminists have long critiqued Marx’s exclusion of the social reproduction carried out by women in the home; feminists such as Federici and Dalla Costa also noted the exclusion of the distinctive form of labour carried out in the colonies (a point that had previously been made by Rosa Luxemburg). Alongside critiques by Marxists from the Global South that center colonialism within capitalist accumulation, it is clear that Marxism can and should be stretched. This is precisely why I believe Fanon remains an important inspiration for feminists working in the Global South: his work on capitalism and colonialism, both at the level of materiality and ideas, is now more crucial than ever in light of the continued dominance of liberal feminism globally.

Lazarus, Parry, and the “Postcolonial” Fanon

So how has Fanon been read by postcolonial theorists, whose work is focused on the Global South? Here the readings have been less than promising. Neil Lazarus begins his chapter in The Postcolonial Unconscious by pointing out that Fanon is an exception among anti-colonial writers writing during the era of decolonization because of the extent to which he has been engaged with by postcolonial scholars. This engagement, however, has often meant a specific kind of reading of his work that has turned it into a “post”-theoretical discourse that addresses subject formation (2011, 122). How to account for this shift in the Fanon that propagated Third World nationalist anti-colonialism to the Fanon in the work of Homi Bhahba[3] and others who focused on the subject?[4] Lazarus writes, “The containment of the historic challenge from the ‘Third World’ that had been expressed in the struggle for decolonization in the post-1945 years must be seen in the light of the global reassertion and consolidation of what (Samir) Amin calls ‘the logic of unilateral capital’,” (Ibid, 124). The triumph of neoliberalism and reassertion of a neo-imperialist world order—with the US at its head—meant that a new reading of Fanon was needed: a ‘postcolonial’ Fanon; “…not only post-colonial, but also post-nationalist, post-liberationist, post-Marxist, and post-modern,” (Ibid). In other words, the opposite of the revolutionary Fanon that preceded this shift.

A second major difference between the first Fanon and the second is the focus on nationalism in the former and its conspicuous absence in the latter. Fanon was greatly influenced by the Algerian war for liberation. This meant that nationalist anti-colonialism, violence, class, ideology, and the ‘Third World’ in general were major themes in most of his work. This goes against the general tendency, however, to see nationalism as a deeply destructive force. As Benita Parry has noted, there is a tendency to disparage nationalist discourses of resistance within postcolonial studies (2012, 35). More than simply disparaging nationalism, Parry rightly points out that the field of postcolonialism often analyzes colonialism as a cultural event, mediated through texts, rather than focusing on the concrete, material, socio-economic and state-based processes that also made up colonialism. Indeed, reading Fanon, it is difficult to understand how he is been appropriated by a field so heavily influenced by postmodernism (postcolonialism) given his emphasis on precisely the material, the socio-economic, and the national.

Regarding nationalism, Lazarus writes: “Some contemporary theorists of ‘postcoloniality’ have attempted to build upon Fanon’s denunciation of bourgeois nationalism. Yet Fanon’s actual standpoint poses insuperable problems for them. One fundamental difficulty derives from the fact that far from representing an abstract repudiation of nationalism as such, Fanon’s critique of bourgeois nationalist ideology is itself delivered from an alternative nationalist standpoint,” (1999, 78). In other words, although many within postcolonial studies view nationalism as a thoroughly modern and negative force, Fanon instead saw it as a means to liberation while simultaneously warning us of the pitfalls of bourgeois nationalism. The national project could also become a socialist one, rather than a capitalist one. This emphasis on capitalism and imperialism further distinguishes Fanon from those within postcolonial studies who see Marxism as being of little use to contemporary analysis. What I find especially important here is that Fanon’s anti-colonialist nationalism allowed for a bridge to an internationalism that was anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist in nature. This bridge is precisely what is missing in much of the work being done today.

I conclude with a quote from Lazarus about the importance of anti-colonialism: “It is important to try and keep alive the memory of the ‘revolutionary heroism’ that was everywhere in evidence in the struggle for national liberation. Even more important is to insist that the concrete achievements of this struggle are still intact and continue to provide a vital resource for present-day social and cultural practice. It is not only that the lives of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world were changed decisively by the experience of anti-colonial struggle. It is also that these changes are irreversible. No matter how great have been the defeats that have had to be endured since decolonization, the perduring solidaristic significance of the anti-colonial struggle has not been erased,” (1999, 120-121). This quote, as well as Lazarus’ and Parry’s readings of Fanon, show that for them his greatest contribution has been to the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the Algerian war of independence. This is the frame they read him through, and to do this they have engaged in much-needed critiques of postcolonial attempts to sanitize Fanon and render him part of a postmodern canon that is often severely lacking in material analysis. For Lewis Gordon, Fanon’s greatest contribution appears to be his work on race and the ways in which the world is structured by anti-Black racism. Moreover, where Gordon emphasizes the centrality of Fanon for scholars and activists fighting against anti-Black racism, David Macey instead emphasizes that Fanon’s allegiance, first and foremost, was to the Algerian war of independence. Thus we see here three slightly different framings of Fanon: one where Fanon is an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist revolutionary, one where Fanon is a global anti-Black racism scholar; and one where Fanon is above all an Algerian revolutionary. This is not to say that all of these writers do not acknowledge the many dimensions of Fanon’s work. Parry and Lazarus write about Fanon’s views on race and his deep commitment to the Algerian struggle; and Gordon affirms the centrality of Algeria for Fanon as well as his clear materialist critiques of the global system. The point is simply that each writer places the emphasis somewhere else; each reads Fanon through a different lens.

Some may argue that this ability to read Fanon in such diverse ways is a benefit; but this would fall into the liberal trap of seeing pluralism as constructive. Indeed as I have shown, Lazarus’ and Parry’s demonstration of how postcolonialists such as Bhabha have mis-read Fanon shows the dangers of accepting all readings as equally valid. Looking back at Fanon’s work, it is clear that there are central themes that cannot be ignored: his anti-racism, his nationalism, his class analysis, and, above all, his incessant call to others to fight against oppression.

The post Reading and Mis-Reading Frantz Fanon appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Men in the Sun follows three Palestinian refugees: Abu Qais, Assad, and Marawan as they attempt to illegally cross the Iraq-Kuwait border in order to seek employment in the Gulf state; their trauma of existential exile is further exasperated by a harrowing smuggling journey they must undertake in the belly of a water container. Throughout the novella, the characters wrestle over the cost of the journey as well as their own safety and indignation with the profiteering smuggler, but eventually succumb to their struggles. The passive deaths of the men against the backdrop of their ongoing struggle to reach Kuwait amid the suffocating heat of the tank closes the novella with poignant irony.

Kanafani, however, was not allegorizing an aesthetic ideal, but rather a cutthroat and dangerous reality. The distinction between these two ideas mirrors the difference between the traditional allegory and what is known as the modern allegory. Benjamin speaks to this in the German context of drama tragedies. In the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin makes a relevant distinction between classical German idealism and Romantic thought on one hand, and the modern allegory on the other.[1] He projects his own ideas of what an allegory should constitute in German Baroque literature by making the following comparison: “By its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful nature. But beneath its extravagant pomp, this is precisely what Baroque allegory proclaims….”[2] Benjamin additionally argues that the Baroque movement is corrective of the art of the classical and Romantic traditions which have a “false appearance of totality,” especially when merged with the theological, and which distort the true form and function of the allegory.[3] Benjamin defines an allegory as a form of expression akin to those of speech and writing, which carries certain attributes such as ambiguity, multiplicity of meanings, disunity, and a shock experience![4]

Traces of Benjamin’s allegory can additionally be found in his chapter “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”[5] In this chapter, Benjamin distinguishes some features of his own conception of allegory, prominent amongst which is his preoccupation with the notion of experience. The concern for Benjamin is ultimately when shock enters and permeates experience. An example of a modern experience of shock can be as standard as walking through a crowd. This can inspire “fear, revulsion, and horror,” as demonstrated in both Poe’s and Baudelaire’s poetry.[6] The first line of the latter’s sonnet A une passante reads: “The deafening street was screaming all around me.”[7] Bauldaire’s poetry is dominated by a defensive response to that unique shock experience, which the poet, in one of his poems, must combat spiritually and physically. Another reflexive defense, as argued by Freud who Benjamin also cites, would be a person’s own consciousness wherein shocks are parried and protected against materializing into a negative experience or even the recollection of a previous one. Muhsin al-Musawi writes that the novella represents “the writer’s defense mechanism against uprootedness and cruel annihilation.”[8]

Most saliently to the Palestinian narrative, Benjamin does not argue for the suppression of an experience but instead seems to be emphasizing the changing nature of that experience, particularly within modernity. Moreover, the nature of experience changes in light of the form of the experience that is partaken. Forms of mechanical reproduction, for instance, carry no place for experiences because they partake in the deterioration of the ‘aura’ of those experiences.[9] According to Benjamin, its aura diminishes when a work of art becomes reproducible such as in the technology of the camera as well as in modern ‘crowd’ experiences which are “closer to mechanization,” according to Benjamin.[10] Hence, one might argue that Benjamin’s notion of experience, though preeminently an experience in its own right, is also invested with intense emotions or psychological ideas such as shock, trauma, and mechanization which might deform or distort the experience in light of Benjamin’s conception of the modern allegory, which purports such characterizations.

Within Kanafani’s novella, geography and memory become elemental to the experience of trauma and struggle. In the opening scene, Abu Qais lies on the ground near Shatt El-Arab, the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He recalls a classroom lesson in which the location of Shatt El-Arab was taught, and moves on to measuring the distance between where he is at present and where he is going: “On the other side of this Shatt, just the other side, were all the things he was deprived of. Over there was Kuwait.”[11] Hence, memory impels geography to become more prominent, but also further traumatizes the present experience. In an analysis of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, Benjamin argues that a “memoire involontaire” (experienced in the register of forgetting) is capable of robbing a person of the “ability to experience,” and causing the “present state of collapse of the experience that he once shared.”[12] This is precisely the case with Abu Qais, whose synesthetic experience of the “scent of the earth,” which constitutes the memoire involontaire, gives way to the realization that he is dispossessed from his homeland of Palestine, the bearer of these scents that he is immersed in recollecting in the present. In another scene, Assad is cautious about choosing a proper guide for the trip; he recalls the first time he had to undergo an ill-fated smuggling passage from Jordan to Iraq, during which he was duped by his guide into walking around the H4 pipeline stretching from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean. The journey resulted in him barely evading death and in his subsequent obervation, “If they had taken me to the desert prison, Al-Jafr, at H4, I wonder if life would be kinder than it is now.”[13] Therefore, a recollection, whether positive or negative, opens up to a traumatic and destructive present moment which removes the ‘essence’ of experience and which emphasizes an immense geographic distance and journey to be undertaken.

Edward Said in particular has written on this situating of the characters in the ‘present.’ In his analysis of Men in the Sun, Said writes that the conflict in the book turns about the “contest in the present; impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinian must carve a path for himself in existence.”[14] Though this statement might look futuristically upon the role of the Palestinian, it also shows how the future is dependent upon the present situation, which is in constant contestation with its own stability and struggle against dissolution. Hence, the present (or rather the present situation) becomes continuous in light of the volatility of the Palestinian political reality and the political action or lack thereof of the Palestinians who occupy its core. For instance, the attention to time in the novella is attached to the dangerous position the characters find themselves in. They must pass two checkpoints in the heart of the smuggler’s container, Abu Khaizuran; the time spent at each checkpoint is meticulously calculated and appraised, so that each minute is counted either towards the characters’ survival or demise. When the characters emerge safely the first time, they discuss the period of their submergence in the air-tight container with much anxiety. Abu Qais says, “It was six minutes. I was counting the whole time. From one to sixty, a minute…I counted six times….”[15] Passing the time it takes to go past two checkpoints while holed up in a tank, the characters’ overbearing experience of time extends to and is in fact determinant of their death. By the time Abu Khaizuran reaches the second checkpoint and is delayed, the characters, who have taken refuge in the container, are dead. The subliminal political message that Abu Khaizuran puts forth is: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?”[16] Therefore, the time to act becomes important, the opportunity for which is missed in the novella, causing Palestinian resistance to revert back to its ‘present stage’ where the present continues to represent instability, the possibility of demise, and even apathy. The world which Kanafani writes about is one of Palestinian political disenchantment; Arab leaders have either turned their backs on Palestine or enabled policies repressive of Palestinians within their own countries. By 1970, Palestinians suffered from isolation in Lebanon, were driven out of Jordan beginning with the events of Black September, and were marginalized under two post-coup administrations in Iraq and Syria. This goes to show how allegory cannot presently be grounded in a conception of the Palestinian situation as stable, especially when connotations of temporality and nature of struggle might change with the ability to resist the occupation and dispossession.

The personal story of Abu Khaizuran might represent a symbol of that resistance; it is offered as a counterpoint to the despondent story of the three characters, who refused to knock or bang on the sides of the tank, in which they were smuggled across the Iraq-Kuwait border, in order to save their own lives. This futility is further illustrated when Abu Khaizuran later becomes impotent during the 1948 war. His impotence is allegorical of the loss of nation and his own country’s political failure.  He laments his losses, but also tries to re-assert his masculinity by desiring to get married. Abu Khaizuran is then seen as attempting or desiring to regain what has been lost of his body and virility as well as his nation whereby, one can argue, a wishful restoration of masculinity is equated with a desire for nationhood and its fruition.  Though he proclaims that the motives for helping the characters cross over are greed and a plain desire to settle down, he also tells them that he had acted as their savior and “rescued them from the claws of the fat man,” who has led many to their graves through his negligent smuggling practices. He more importantly dismantles the indestructible façade of the fat man by recounting how he has stopped being unconquerable to many who take the trip, and wish to return and “throttle him.”[17] His valedictory message—knocking, inspiring resistance and action—emphasizes the more hopeful and salient message he tries to convey against the tragedy of the novella.

By that, one can largely argue that the world or situation of national identity that the author allegorizes is prone to change, even positively. There are, however, conflicting debates on how a national allegory should function and to what it should pertain. Frederic Jameson turns the “other” of the allegory into the frozen category of nationalism and national identity when he argues in a seminal essay that “all third-world texts are necessarily…allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories…”[18] Jameson continues to argue that such texts project a political dimension, and should primarily be read politically in light of the continuing experience of colonialism and struggle for independence that dominate “Third World” cultures. Incapable of reflecting private subjectivity in their works —or anything of the private domain which is inseparable from politics in third-world milieus — third-world authors cannot recount “the individual experience,” and therefore construct national allegories in relation to “the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collective itself.”[19] Hence, the collective identity is posited as public, national, and political altogether, an idea contended in the famous rebuttal offered by the critic Aijaz Ahmad.

Ahmad, first and foremost, contends that Jameson’s argument is both reductionist and positivist since nationalism is not necessarily the only political experience of all third-world countries whereby “there is nothing else to narrate” and that national allegories are not the most exclusive nor the only forms of literary device and expression used. Ahmad also objects to the totalizing of historically, economically and nationally different experiences into binary oppositions such as first/third world, and nationalism/postmodernism, to name a few.[20] With regards to the collectivity of the national experience, Ahmad uses Jameson’s private/public argument to argue that a personal experience can be a collective along the lines of other forms of collectivity such as race, gender, religion, class…etc., other than the nation, thus eliding the use of national allegory altogether.

My main concern is not whether the private or collective is allegorized, but rather whether the reader of the allegory discerns its “breaks and heterogeneities,” the gaps and discontinuity, and “the multiple polysemia…rather than homogenous representation,” all of which are attributes that Jameson considers when deciphering his national allegory.[21] Jameson, however, searches for these attributes on a textual level and does not discern their extra-textual validity. On that note, Amy Zalman, who authored a journal article on two of Kanafani’s novels, suggests a compelling reversal: she writes that the ‘extra-literary ground’ is that which is in flux while “the more stable narrative exists inside the novel.”[22] This debate invokes Benjamin’s argument showing how an allegory can function in a new way to explain the discordant realities both inside and outside the worlds of the novella. Benjamin does so by naturalizing the ambiguity of an allegory, which, according to him, is a basic characteristic that must be present (within the allegory). Ambiguity in allegory works against the law of economy, and therefore “is always the opposite of clarity and unity of meaning.”[23] One can argue that the ambiguous situation of characters that essentially become functions of the remittance system and immigration reality finds some common ground with (the outside) reality in the other/counterpart of the allegory, causing both worlds of the allegory to become more bridgeable. This holds true in Benjamin’s attribution of the notion of ‘truth’ in allegories. For him, allegory could not exist “if truth were accessible: as a mode of expression it arises in perpetual response to the human condition of being exiled from… truth.”[24] Similarly to ambiguity, “exile from truth” extends across the border between the novel and the outside world whereby the daily realities of the refugees and characters, as well as the political fruition of their homeland or Palestine as state, grow more eccentrically adverse and far-fetched, and also intersect. For example, the notion of the past homeland and the collective memory of the lost 1948 war are points that remain as fragments of memory or traces and reminders of an unattainable truth both inside and outside the novella.  Consequently, perhaps what Benjamin’s notion of allegory supports is a rethinking of the allegory based on new, non-fixed experiences that aid in opening up space for change and resistance (such as Abu Khaizuran), as well as bridging both sides of the allegory by its inherent emphasis on attributes such as ambiguity and disjunction.

Literary critics and scholars have been all too aware of the text’s polyphonic art of ambiguities, fragments, breaks and absences. Kanafani’s work has been received variously as a piece of resistance literature, a work of representation, and as a post-colonial text. Saree Makdisi, for instance, argues that the novella implicitly rejects national boundaries, a point that echoes Ahmad’s proposition. Boundaries also include: “the conceptual and political systems that go with them, above all that of the independent nation-state.”[25] Abu Khaizaran’s haunting question: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” suggests a call for “purposeful resistance that brings life to death,” as argued by Mausawai in the Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence. He continues: “The purgatory denounces a reality, but it also draws attention to its complications.”[26] The complications are precisely the ambiguities of Palestinian existence, one that lives despite and beyond its own death. An allegory, such as the one that Benjamin proposes, must take into account the peculiar, ambiguous, and shocking character of the Palestinian situation. In other words, the (political) situation to which a reader might attach or affix an allegorical relationship is an unstable and fluid one. Benjamin’s pertinent criticism of the allegory adopts in its framework this dissonance between the two worlds of the allegory, namely by attaching new meanings and attributes to them as well as attempting to bridge them. Trauma and shock are pertinent to any experience being allegorized. The tension between national and non-national or modern allegory presented in this essay strikes at the core of a contemporary debate on Arabic literature between Jameson and Ahmad. Indeed, the modern allegory should redefine itself to fit and be able to represent a reality that cannot possibly be defined.

The post “Men in the Sun” and the Modern Allegory appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Photo credit: Morgana Damásio. In protest in 2014 against the genocide of the Black population in the city of Salvador, Bahia promoted by the courageous and fearless campaign REAJA OU SERÁ MORT@! (REACT OR YOU WILL DIE!)

On February 6, 2015, the police of the Brazilian state of Bahia executed twelve Black boys and men with gunshots to the neck in the Vila Moises area of the Cabula neighborhood in the city of Salvador. There were signs of torture, such as broken arms and sunken eyes, violent treatment that could have equally been the work of the police of São Paulo, Alagoas, Rio de Janeiro, or Pernambuco. These are law enforcement practices disseminated throughout the country. The youngest victim was fifteen years old. The oldest was twenty-seven.

A massacre isn’t simply an isolated anomaly, and it shouldn’t be seen as such. Massacres practiced by the police forces of Brazilian states[1] exemplify a complete failure of public safety policy and of our republican values, as well as a human rights violation.

Rather than the deaths themselves, the novelty of this massacre was the ensuing public discourse of the recently elected governor of Bahia, Rui Costa, who defended the killings. The police chief[2] went further on the morning after the massacre, inspired by the never ending police chronicles, deeming the massacre a successful police operation that killed preventatively. The chief of police defined the massacre as a goal of the police snipers who, rather than police alongside a community and meet its individual needs, decide to eliminate targets in seconds from a calculated distance. This illustrates the ways in which the police trivialize and disrespect the lives of people who pay taxes and the salaries of a police force that kills when it should be protecting them.

Terrified witnesses in Cabula stated that the twelve boys and men were unarmed, there were no signs of confrontation, and they were rounded up and beaten before being taken to a field surrounded by bushes and executed. Since the governor belongs to the left-wing party, there were those declaring nostalgia for the truculent times of Antônio Carlos Magalhães, the three-time governor of the state of Bahia, in what amounted to a cruel joke, as bad as those likening Governor Rui Costa with the retired Portuguese soccer player with whom he shares the same name.

Further fanning the flames, the governor responded ironically to a question posed at a February 6^th press conference[3] about the possible scare that the violence perpetuated by the operation could cause to tourists from São Paulo, habitual visitors to Bahia’s carnival. In an attempt to be witty, he attacked the public safety record of the southern state by implying that São Paulo tourists are accustomed to violence since São Paulo has the highest rate of bank robberies in Brazil. Since it is known that the police executioners alleged that the twelve massacred boys and men were going to assault banks, it wouldn’t be frivolous to infer from the context that the twelve Black Bahians were killed (preemptively) to protect White São Paulo tourists. It is also widely known that White tourists from São Paulo flood Bahia’s carnival annually in search of the famed ‘exoticism’ of the Black Bahian woman. The racist intertextuality of government discourse is as macabre as the application of the death penalty for young Black males.

The Secretary of Public Safety of São Paulo, Alexandre de Morães, did not hesitate to respond. He in turn called the governor of Bahia “feeble and ignorant,” [4]in an exchange of informalities reminiscent of comic book dialogue. He revealed that the crime rate of Bahia is four times worse than that of São Paulo, and concluded that the statements of the northeastern representative disrespected the affection that Paulistas[5] have for Bahians and the importance of tourism to Bahia. Done—the geopolitical supremacy of São Paulo ended the conversation! Even the response, logically, of the modern football captain is no match for the Robocop captain of the metropolis that looks down upon Brazilian Northeasterners, revealing the country’s regional fractures.

And where are the twelve dead boys and men in this discussion? They disappeared in the volatile and folksy speech of the murderers who justify their act as a fight against crime.  And what about the families of the victims? No one listens to, supports, or compensates them. They are victims of the deadly artillery deployed in a dreadful game that’s been bought in advance, in which the loser is already declared before the referee’s coin toss. An isolated voice has a name, last name and an address; a lady, or a young brother or victim’s cousin who might be the next victim. The grandfather of one of the deceased, Natanael de Jesus Costa (age 17), screamed at the entrance to the hospital that his grandson simply went to deliver pizza to his girlfriend’s house, which was next to the field that later served as the stage on the night of the crime. The boy disappeared from home, only to reappear on the list of bodies to be recognized in the coroner’s office.

And what do the bulk of the population in poor and indigent neighborhoods do now? They repeat, like parrots, the discourse of the legitimization of death heard in the sensationalist bandit-hunting television programs. They believe that if they align with the strongest contingent, the owners of weapons, they will receive protection because they are the workers and the others are the outlaws. What a farce! No one – no one – is a citizen when there is impunity! And the taste of the victims’ blood will only reach the mouths and the eyes of the supporters of the massacre when the gunshots destroy the lives of the children raised by their families and their community—the people who have seen them grow and bring pizzas to their girlfriends, or who were overcome by substance abuse, or by overt pressure as well as the allure of drug trafficking. It’s always our dear boys who become dead bodies littering ground.

None of these twelve ‘preemptive’ deaths is justified, even if one of them had a criminal record. And they are certainly not a testament to the success of a police operation. An operation that purposefully results in twelve deaths is arbitrary and illegal. It is catastrophic. Policing should preserve life, not eliminate it to then be excused by explanatory technicalities.

The survival of young Black men throughout Brazil is at stake in the face of a racist construction of the preferred suspect. This is already inadmissible. More reckless still, is that the governor publicly legitimizes and defends the massacre as a kind of winning shot, all the while immortalizing police shootings in poor and unprotected neighborhoods that cannot, and should not, be transformed into gladiator stadiums, where the police practice shooting young, Black male targets in accordance with the wishes of the governor.

This article was originally published in Portuguese on February 9, 2015. Quando a execução sumária é legitimada como gol de placa no campeonato de extermínio da população negra, jovem e masculina

Additional Reading

• PM de Salvador ameaça comunidade após chacina, denuncia Anistia Internacional
• Brazil police kill 13 would-be bank robbers: officials
• Massacre do Cabula e o gol do Governador

The post Summary Execution: A Recent Episode of Police Violence Against Young, Black Males in Bahia, Brazil appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

When it came time to leave for the march, I hesitated, but in the end I went, sensing the urgency of the moment.   The most moving moment for me was seeing a rabbi, imam, cardinal, and Greek Orthodox priest walking with locked arms.  But the diversity of that quartet was quite unique, and when I looked around at the marchers, they looked homogeneous on the whole.  France’s diversity had not come to the march in force.  The next morning when I walked into a press stand, the front covers of the dailies Aujourd’hui and Le Parisien featured the same shot (centered differently only by a centimeter) of a group of similar-looking people around a French flag at Place de la République.  I couldn’t help thinking I was looking social and ideological reproduction in the face.  I deplore the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery store, but in terms of the nation’s response I couldn’t help wondering if there shouldn’t be a new reading to the dominant French interpretation of those republican values that have remained the same since revolutionary times and that were clearly in focus here  – “la laïcité” and “la liberté d’expression.”

News headlines immediately grabbed hold of the slogan that has paced the debate since: “l’unité nationale.”  But national unity for whom and among whom, I wondered.  In the weeks following the attacks, the debate has turned toward such issues as the place of a history of religions in schools (though what of colonial history and decolonization?); the exclusion faced by ethnic minorities in France, particularly young men for whom the unemployment rate reaches 40-50% in some disadvantaged banlieues, all marginalized from the sphere of work and decision-making; the fact that in these same neighborhoods single-parent families are twice as numerous as the national average and that the high school drop out rate has not lowered over the past twenty years.  In the disaffected banlieues, a conspiracy theory about government and intelligence service involvement in the attacks is mounting among young people (interestingly, it has also been mobilized by the far-right Front National’s founder and icon Jean-Marie Le Pen), pointing to the distrust they feel for the government and French institutions.  Teachers who have been charged with unpacking the attacks are overwhelmed by this skeptical stance, but also cognizant of the challenges their students face and the disenfranchisement that sometimes grows out of them.  Are these students driving a wedge in national unity, or pointing to one that already existed?

By and large, those on the inside, including leaders on the right and left in France whose views concur on “la laïcité” and “la liberté d’expression,” are calling for a reaffirmation of republican values – more of the same, while those on the outside are asking to be seen and heard.  If the debate is to be honest, some hard questions will have to be asked: Is responsible freedom part of the “liberté de l’expression” in France?  Some have perceived that one, or perhaps two, male phalluses figure as the Prophet Muhammed’s head and nose in the Charlie Hebdo published a week after the attacks (which would be in keeping with the style of its cartoonist Luz).  If that is the case, the cartoon borders on pure vulgarity.  To view this cartoon as a unifying symbol for freedom of expression confounds me.  As Muslims around the world protested this most recent cartoon, and newspapers in Great Britain and the United States, including the New York Times, have decided not to reprint it, French exceptionalism appears to have resurfaced.  Indeed, how can wearing a headscarf in school be bound up with a version of “laïcite” that allows for Christmas to be named and celebrated in schools, but does not allow for observance of the Islamic holiday of Eid to be accepted as an excused absence?  On this point, do the French have a consensus on what it means?  Anne Hidalgo, born in Spain and now Mayor of Paris, has called laïcité respectful of all religions, while many others see it as espousing the total absence of religion from public life and institutions.  These are obviously two very different things.

For a country that has diversified considerably over the last 50 years, especially as a result of postcolonial immigration, and today has the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe, France owes it to itself, all of its citizens, and the world beyond to take an honest look at how it has acknowledged and integrated its internal diversity, including but not limited to its religious minorities.  Part of that is recognizing the diversity of belief among the Muslims of France, and recognizing that “Muslims of France” does not correlate directly to the people it is meant to designate given their wide-ranging spectrum of belief and practice.  “Muslim” isn’t synonymous with people with origins in a Muslim country – take for instance the Charlie Hebdo editor who died in the attacks, Mustapha Ourrad.  And “Muslim” isn’t synonymous with immigrant; just as “immigrant” isn’t synonymous with the ethnic minorities of France who still have no way of being named as such.

A curious advertisement by the private TF1 television station has preceded some recent films I’ve seen and aims to counteract prevailing pessimism about France’s decline. The advertisement contradicts stereotypes about the French, and ends with “Partageons des ondes positives” [Let’s spread good vibes].  It’s safe to say morale in France has been low.  The recent Republican March has certainly buoyed morale, as well as François Hollande’s and Manuel Valls’s popularity ratings.  But the real test will come with time.  While France decries the literalism of other national ideals, particularly those in Anglo-Saxon countries, it remains unwilling to inspect the exclusion created in the republican ideals laid out in the Déclaration des droits le l’homme, cited very often these days, and to move them forward.  To not do so would seem to be turning a blind eye to reality.  And now back to my essay, or back to the conundrum of ethnic minority writing, which exists in reality but not in the French language.

All images featured in this piece are copyrights of the author.

The post What does French National Unity Look Like? Personal Reflections on Charlie Hebdo appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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First, there was the balkanization of the response to address a problem ostensibly caused by a contemporary Berlin Conference –directives out of the Washington Consensus. Thus, France responded to Ebola in Guinea, its former colony. The United States responded to Ebola in Liberia where some of its former subjugates had grudgingly returned about two centuries prior. And the greatest colonialist of them all, Great Britain, reluctantly took charge of its former burden Sierra Leone.

How neat! But was this the best approach by which to tackle one of the most deadly viruses known to man in the 21^st Century?  In the middle of 2014, Ebola was raging in Liberia. The country had the highest number of recorded cases and casualties per day. Then Liberians wailed out to Uncle Sam. The might and cavalry of the United States military came charging in. It seems that this time, the response to a viral epidemic will be militarized, according to Adia Benton. Before long, the numbers began trending downwards in Liberia. Sierra Leoneans cried, “oh Britain where art thou?”

Then there is France. Vive La Postcolonie! Patron François Hollande paid a visit to former charge Guinea. There were many promises of sending Ebola in Guinea back to the gates of hell. Back to the dawn of colonialism? The most memorable of Hollande’s photo ops in Guinea was, of course, that of him gazing into the deep eyes of a beautiful Guinean lady who was head of the Ebola Survivors Association in Guinea. Oh her beauty! What beauty? “If only”…a perfunctory sigh of regret. Colonial “mistress,” reversed? Did Julie quiver several thousand miles away in the métropole? Will she be next? Were scooters dashing out of the Elysée Palace at breakneck speeds for midnight trysts for Françafrique?

But let us proceed to the facts. What do Kent Brantly, Nancy Writebol, Rick Sacra, Craig Spencer, Nina Pham, Amber Vinson, Ashoka Mukpo, Thomas Eric Duncan, and Martin Salia all have in common? All of them, at some point, were actively sick with Ebola on United States soil.

Now let’s go to another much shorter set of names, what do Martin Salia and Thomas Eric Duncan have in common? They are the only two people known to have died of Ebola on United States soil.  There could be medical and biological factors accounting for the difference between the fates of Salia and Duncan and the others, or other yet unnamed factors. But no matter the spin or twist on it, you cannot easily get past the inescapable fact that the only people to have died of Ebola within the mighty trillion dollar, formidable, United States healthcare system were Africans from two affected Postcolonies.

We constantly keep tabs on subaltern elements in Postcolonies to ensure they stay firmly within our ideological line. Agents are admonished to work harder in order not to leave any space for terrorists and anti-Western ideologues to occupy and ferment trouble. “Tap phones if you can!” “Extraordinarily render if you must!” “No holdbacks.” “We’re in the fight of our lives.” “The clash of civilizations is at hand!”

Yet from December 2013 to March 2014 no one knew that one of the most deadly pathogens known to man was decimating innocent populations in the jungles of the Postcolony? Would we have known earlier had a pesky anti-Western ideological ferment taken root instead?

The noblesse obligé of indulgent colonial maternalism led France and Britain to come in only when indescribable things had hit the ceiling. “Manifest destiny must be fulfilled.” “We cannot leave these helpless Africans to perish lest we find the problem at our doorsteps in the morning of reckoning.” “They cannot fend for themselves.” “We must help them.” This is the “white man’s burden,” to quote the venerated Basil Davidson.

In time, an emergency response was scrambled to challenge the virus. Too little, too late? Where was the response when Ebola festered for over three months orphaning innocent children faster than drones?

Many have blamed weakened local healthcare systems for enabling the spread of the virus, but what is the response when African politicians pillage their countries to support ostentatious lifestyles in Western métropoles? As the health systems crumbled most paid, and still pay, lip-service to the effectiveness of aid.

Commercial flights to the three most affected countries have long since been restricted lest anyone repeats Eric Thomas Duncan’s folly in thinking he could transport Ebola to Western shores. But where is the response, even now, as politicians in the affected countries send their girlfriends, wives and children to the safety and comfort of the same Western shores as they abandon the poor to their Ebola doom? WHERE ARE YOU?

Even the explanations of the origins of the virus smack of imperial arrogance. First we were told by no less an authority than a study published in the respected New England Journal of Medicine that patient zero of the outbreak was a two-year old boy in the forests of Guinea who contracted the virus by eating fruit bats. Imagine a two-year old independently acquiring and consuming a fruit bat! Then the origin of the outbreak was recently re-explained as patient zero having contracted the virus NOT from eating the fruit bats, but from coming into contact with their droppings while playing with other children in the hollow of a tree in his village.

But what explanations have been offered by Guinean, Liberian and Sierra Leone scientists for the origins of the Ebola virus in their countries? Wait, are there scientists in the Postcolony? Who is a “scientist,” anyway? “We tell you who scientists are, or not, because we train them –we train the best in the world.”

“In any case, dismiss anything anyone from the Postcolony says. It’s all conspiracy theories and wild figments of the imaginations of a vanquished people.”

For Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to survive Ebola and the next calamity that could be lurking around the next bend, they will first have to survive postcolonial imperialism and the self-interested dictates of the consensus in London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington.  The Ebola epidemic served as a reminder of colonial frameworks yet to be overcome.

The post Surviving Ebola, Surviving Postcolonialism? appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Hollywood has had, at best, an oblique relationship to America’s longest running nightmare, slavery. As Donald Bogle demonstrated in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, the screen is haunted by the first images of Blackness and slavery by white actors performing in black face in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) and D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). The industry’s most enduring twentieth century film of slavery, Gone With the Wind (1939) portrayed the end of slavery not through the eyes of the white master, but through a plantation’s headstrong mistress, Scarlett O’Hara. The film also provided the first Oscar to a Black actress, Hattie McDaniel for her role of Mammy. Our latest filmic encounters with slavery Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) continue this process of cinematic indirection, even while focusing our gaze on what was largely ignored in the 1930s versions—the enslaved themselves.  For instead of showing the liberation from slavery as primarily a Black struggle, both of the more recent films continue the well-worn narrative that the only way for their black protagonists to be free is through the agency of white men. Yet interestingly, the white men are not ostensibly abolitionists, even though they are sympathetic to the plight of the central Black characters, Django (played by Jamie Foxx) and Solomon Northrup (played by Chiewetel Ejiofor). Rather, the white men are interested allies, men who have an agenda that goes beyond race, a desire for redemption themselves that both enables but limits their ability to be true liberators.

This article uses Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) to consider slave cinema (films that take slavery as their main subject) as unique sites of labor in which Black bodies are organized as commodities to perform economies of “pleasure and terror” (Hartman:1997) on the screen as cultural workers under the rubric of United States capitalism and white supremacy within the Hollywood film industry. Based on close readings of the films, interviews with directors (McQueen and Tarantino) and screenwriter (John Ridley), as well as a close reading of Solomon Northrup’s text, 12 Years a Slave, I argue that the economies of terror and pleasure produced through these films reify colorblind ideology and white supremacy by denying Black people empathic capacity or viewing them as full human beings. To understand the problem of the colorblind is to understand the function of two types of overlapping modes of performance – aesthetic and efficacious – in which the aesthetic performance of Black social death is congruent with the way in which the performance of Black laborers is persistently marginalized within Hollywood.

Tarantino’s story begins in 1858, in the still of a night in Texas. Two slave traders (who go by the name of the Speck Brothers) make their way through the darkness on horses followed with their chattel in tow when they are confronted by an odd character, Dr. King Schultz (Christopher Waltz), who insists on purchasing their slave, Django. We later find out that Schultz is in the business of bounty hunting on behalf of a judge in Austin, and Django is in fact the only individual who can positively identify Schultz’s next bounty – a trio of overseers who formerly whipped, scarred, and then sold Django and his wife to separate plantations. Thus, when Schultz guns down the Speck brothers after their refusal to sell Django, he is acting out of pure economic interests. For Schultz, profit motivates Django’s purchase. He states, “On the one hand, I despise slavery. On the other hand I need your help. If you’re not in a position to refuse, all the better. So for the time being I’m going to make this slavery malarkey work to my benefit. Still, having said that, I feel guilty. So I would like the two of us to enter into an agreement” (Django 2012). The agreement is for Django to assist Schultz in capturing his bounty, for which Django will receive not only twenty-five dollars per bounty, but also his freedom. This begins Django’s journey into an improbable world of violence to fulfill his “super-objective” – to rescue his German speaking wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington). The final scene culminates in fireworks when Django literally explodes the Candieland Plantation. The destructive act also destroys the antagonist of the film, the loyal slave Steven, played by the loyal Tarantino collaborator Samuel L. Jackson. Steven’s loyalty to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) parallels Jackson’s loyalty to Tarantino who became “the filmmaker’s ticket to street cred” (Vognar, 27). Tarantino’s film suggests, therefore, that the white character who liberates the Black man does so because of some inexplicable but evident infatuation with the Black body and violence.

12 Years also pictures gratuitous violence, yet without the sensational violence on the order of Django’s exploding plantations, or the Spaghetti Western romanticism of riding off into the moonlight. The viewer watches Northrup (a formally free New Yorker) make several attempts to escape bondage on his own after having been kidnapped and sold into slavery by two white slavers. McQueen’s epic 12 Years ends in 1853 with Northrup leaving behind the repeatedly brutalized and sexually violated Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) in the dirt road before he is then reunited with his family. Northrup is finally “rescued” (for lack of a better word) from the Louisiana plantation by former friends from New York who, after having received word of his location by way of a sympathetic Canadian named Bass (Brad Pitt), have come to the plantation along with the United States Marshall to retrieve Northrup. In Tarantino’s piece, Django, with Schultz, kills white bounty for money on behalf of the same government that sanctions slavery as an institution. Yet, the institution of slavery, and the United States government that sanctions it, is never contested in either of these films – certainly not contested in the way that Christopher Dorner contested the Los Angeles Police Department as arbiter of racial and anti-Black violence.[1] While scholars such as Walter Johnson have suggested that there is a collapse between Django and Dorner (to an extent I believe this to also be true) there is a distancing in Tarantino’s use of the Western genre that allows audiences to find pleasure in Django’s violence while disconnecting the historical factuality of slavery from the very real racial inequality of the present. Because “the United States is constructed at the intersection of both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix,” (Wilderson: 2005,1) these two films, despite the different approaches, are not for Black audiences. Rather, they are ways for civil society,[2] “the ensemble of so-called private associations and ideological invitations to participate in a wide and varied play of consensus making strategies,” (Wilderson: 2005, 4) to render slavery as either historical adventurous entertainment or somber sentimental docudrama. This without the viewer being implicated in the perpetuation of slavery’s legacy in the present day police state, carceral system, and racial economic disparity. Any demand for contemporary social justice is elided in 12 Years by McQueen’s choice to end his film with Northrup’s return to his family in New York and not with the trial and the subsequent acquittal (á la George Zimmerman) of Northrup’s kidnappers. Similarly, Django would have its audience believe that by riding off into the moonlight, the slave is being returned to civil society.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

My discussion thinks through “social death,” the desire and disavowal of Black flesh as a fetish which masks colorblindness but also undergirds, and locks into place, “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (Patterson 13). To understand slaves as simply property is to fall short of understanding “the principal way in which power is immediately interpreted in socially and cognitively acceptable terms” (18). Social death is structured through an unrelenting discursive, sexual, and corporeal violence, whose effects are felt today in the most vernacular of ways; in particular the unrelenting Black necropolitics of the carceral system. This is what Wilderson means when he refers to the “contingency of violence,” (Wilderson:2010) that holds civil society together (the world of the living), and a matrix of gratuitous violence that places the slave (in this case the Black) outside of civil society through a structural antagonism. Hence the non-slave, non-Black people, may engage in conflicts within civil society that can be reconciled through various mechanisms such as courts, schools, museums, and cinema. However, the constituent elements of civil society (a commons which can be equally accessed) are anti-Black.

While Black actors appear on the screen as characters, Django and 12 Years still render Black people and Black suffering illegible. As Frantz Fanon demonstrated in Black Skin, White Masks, the proscriptive therapy for suffering colonized subject/objects was and is decolonization.  However, the psychoanalytic conceptualization of what it means to suffer, to be a human, is located in the Jewish Holocaust as the constant reference point for humanity. This is evidenced in interviews by Tarantino’s and McQueen’s repeated conflating of slavery with fascism, “little family quarrels,” (Fanon 87)[3] and Anne Frank. Black suffering and empathy[4] for Black humanity is incomprehensible because the grammar through which to understand Blackness is choreographed by a white Eurocentric discourse. As Susan Leigh Foster suggests, research “indicates that empathy and the feelings, such as compassion and admiration that it enables, are “hard-wired” in the brain” (Foster 127). However, empathy must be organized and socially choreographed through performance. While human beings may be hard-wired to empathize by projecting their condition into the situation of another, colorblindness, as the lingering effects of social death, is a technique that prevents the development of a language through which to recognize (and hence empathize) in a way that affords Black people a humanity and a voice.

What is the Colorblind and its Relationship to Performance?

As scholars such as Eithne Quinn and Brandi Catanese have demonstrated, colorblind ideology has shaped labor markets from the Antebellum South to current day Hollywood. Slavery, as a production of the African American subject/object, should be considered in terms of the stylized behaviors of Black bodies to occupy a certain social role as well as the economic imperatives that performance opens up in relation to those bodies at different moments in history. Django and 12 Years are representative of sources of labor in which unions, guilds, agencies, and a multi-million dollar Hollywood network are a part of an economic order that has historically marginalized Black labor. These diegetic experiences produce a paradoxical tension between Black performance within the Hollywood apparatus that affords employment to a small percentage of Black talent (actors, writers, directors, and producers)[5] and an almost return to plantation-like ghettoization through the corralling of laborers and objects within an industry which continues to propagate whiteness as the norm[6] reaping tremendous profit in the process.[7]

Working through the effects of aesthetic and efficacious performance elucidates how race continues to structure relationships of power and how at “both institutional and cultural levels, performance has become the medium through which American anxieties about race (and in particular, blackness) are pondered, articulated, managed, and challenged” (Catanese 3). Ejiofor’s performance of Northrup as a free man, skilled laborer, violinist, and slave means survival as an actor within the Hollywood industry just as performance of labor meant survival for Northrup.[8] The desire and necessity to perform was at once a paradox for Northrup, for it was the offer from Merrill Brown and Abraham Hamilton (Northrup’s captors) to perform in their traveling circus company which lead to his kidnap. As Northrup wrote, “They also remarked that they had found much difficulty in procuring music for their entertainments, and that if I would accompany them as far as New-York, they would give me one dollar for each day’s services, and three dollars in addition for every night I played at their performances, besides sufficient to pay the expenses of my return from New-York to Saratoga” (Northrup 13). The slavers veil their nefarious intentions with promises of financial return just as Schultz’s relationship to Django was driven by the profit motive.

The Black body in these films is still a fungible object despite Tarantino and McQueen laboring to convince otherwise. These films ask us to suspend our disbelief and buy into, as Tarantino purports in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, “a different place…an unfathomable place… not just…a historical story play…but actually…a genre story… an exciting adventure”  (Gates 50). Tarantino gets away with this by conflating a Western genre story (civil society) with that of the Antebellum South (social death). Django’s and Northrup’s struggle relies on unique exceptional individuals who are able to endure American slavery and further inflate colorblind ideology by suggesting that the “racial regime” (Robinson xii) is about individual choices (rugged individualism) and not the power of the institution or collective struggle to change it. Rugged individualism is embodied by Django’s decision to role play a Black slaver as well as his constant decision to return to emancipating his wife rather than taking up arms with other slaves. To be truly manumissioned (in the eyes of Wilderson or Fanon) would require fulfilling an excess lack which would mean the implosion of civil society and the film and entertainment industry as we know it. Historically, this is most clearly evidenced by the temporal relationship to the Constitution as a legal framework for slavery,[9] the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which further solidified the Constitution’s relationship to Black folks, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford of 1857, which not only upheld the Fugitive Slave Act, but removed the Black body (as text or corpus) out of any conceptualization of civil society in Justice Tauney’s decision.[10] There was no empathy for the Black within the Constitution because the Constitution only applied to human beings; not to property or those who were three-fifths of a human.

Moving from New York to Washington, D.C. (a slave holding territory), Northrup and the reader/audience are led further into the South’s forced performance spaces by Brown and Hamilton. Northrup writes, “The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol! Such is a correct description as it was in 1841, of William’s slave pen in Washington, in one of the cellars of which I found myself so unaccountably confined” (23).  And it was there in the nation’s capital and with a savage beating at the hands of the slaver James H. Burch that Northrup would learn to perform what Harvey Young refers to as “the still stand of [B]lack bodies” (Young 29) the Black embodiment of silence for survival. Northrup’s text demonstrates the awareness of the very capitalist processes that are at the central trappings of social death. Observing the slaver peddling human flesh forces Northrup to negotiate an economy of terror that is dependent upon the corporeal power of his labor for which he gains nothing in return.

Colorblind ideology also operates to produce apathetic narratives around Black labor within the material conditions of the film industry itself. Film and cultural studies scholar, Eithne Quinn, demonstrates how the ideology of colorblind practices grew out of neoconservatism within Hollywood during the 1960s and was initiated as part of anti-Black campaigns against Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s findings of widespread discrimination. Quinn writes:

a new “colorblind”’ discourse was first fomented by intellectuals and policy advisers around the turn of the 1970s. These influential advocates, many of whom became known as neoconservatives by the late 1970s, came from the right of the Democratic party and the left of the Republican party and turned sharply away from the black freedom struggle, which they had supported, after the mid- 1960s civil rights victories. Proceeding from the assumption that discrimination had more or less ended with civil rights reforms, these new conservatives championed a laissez-faire approach to racial equality. That strategy was to have far-reaching implications. (Quinn 467)

As Quinn goes on to suggest, this logic of the colorblind, as ideology and policy, has been perpetuated and now buttresses the current state of the industry through white nepotism between individuals and institutions and denies Black participation. Indeed, Quinn suggests that Jack Valenti – head of the Motion Pictures Association of America from 1966 to 2004 — galvanized support for anti-Blackness through the strategic deployment of neoconservative rhetoric.

The logic of neoconservative rhetoric fulfills white supremacy by pealing off cultural producers such as 12 Years writer John Ridley who will then deploy neoconservatism when discussing the lack of Black economic mobility in return for a seat at the executive table. As he stated in his 2006 Esquire magazine op-ed piece titled “The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger,” ascendancy necessitates assimilation at all costs even when it means negating empathy for poor and working class Blacks. In the opening lines Ridley writes:

LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT NIGGERS, the oppressed minority within our minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can’t catch a break. Notoriously poor about doing for themselves. Constantly in need of a leader but unable to follow in any direction that’s navigated by hard work, self-reliance. And though they spliff and drink and procreate their way onto welfare doles and WIC lines, niggers will tell you their state of being is no fault of their own. (Ridley:2006)

This rhetoric was born out of the false belief that the few gains that Blacks had made through the Civil Rights struggle had somehow genuinely leveled the playing field and that anything else granted to Blacks through federal intervention was reverse discrimination, despite the fact that those in the position of white privilege were constantly lobbying the state and federal governments for advantageous tax accommodations and relaxed corporate regulation. It is as if Ridley has downloaded the neoconservative playbook and refashioned himself as a Black Valenti. Before continuing to identify the ideal models (Collin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) for the ascension of niggers, Ridley makes clear that he is not a nigger. Furthermore, he must tow the party line that his own success is the result of his ability to keep the promise of taking what is rightfully his in exchange for his investment, energy, and dedication to the American Way. He writes:

Now, let me tell you something about my generation of black Americans. We are the inheritors of “the Deal” forced upon the entrenched white social, political, and legal establishment when my parents’ generation won the struggle for civil rights. The Deal: We (blacks) take what is rightfully ours and you (the afore-described establishment) get citizens who will invest the same energy and dedication into raising families and working hard and being all around good people as was invested in snapping the neck of Jim Crow. In the forty years since the Deal was brokered, since the Voting Rights Act was signed, there have been successes for blacks. But there are still too many blacks in prison, too many kids aggrandizing the thug life, and way too many African-Americans doing far too little with the opportunities others earned for them. If we as a race could win the centuries-long war against institutionalized racism, why is it that so many of us cannot secure the advantage after decades of freedom? That which retards us is the worst of “us,” those who disdain actual ascendancy gained by way of intellectual expansion and physical toil—who instead value the posture of an “urban,” a “street,” a “real” existence, no matter that such a culture threatens to render them extinct. “Them” being niggers. (Ridley:2007)

In 1967, EEOC studies showed that at all of the major studios Black employment was never higher than 2.1% and of that, they were all low-skilled and low-paying jobs. Beyond the paucity of Black and minority employment in the studios at the corporate level was systemic exclusion within the trade and guild organizations, which required that union employees vouch for an individual who wanted to enter a trade or guild. As a further obstacle for minorities, guilds and unions such as the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees screened applicants with questionnaires that inquired into the nature of employment held by applicants’ parents and grandparents. In this context, empathy as acceptance is reserved for the white working middle and upper middle class laborers who solidified their privilege through unionization. The fact that white men such as Valenti, who only recently retired in 2004, continue to be the arbiters of the Hollywood film industry and the broader economy of America, Ridley’s critique of Black dysfunctionality[11] is disingenuous as it ignores systemic racism of the present.

Tarantino has been able to actualize his fetish for Black bodies and Black death without consequence by creating and delivering an economy of pleasure through which audiences can consume an unrelenting ideology of tolerance for Black suffering. Django, is not an individual case of necropolitics within a slave narrative. It is part of a genealogy of Tarantino’s “dead niggers” or “dead nigger storage” as witnessed in his own on screen performances in Pulp Fiction (1995). Dead niggers – social death writ large – have been very good to Tarantino earning him an Oscar for best screenplay for Pulp Fiction and Django. Echoing Ridley, Hollywood’s rush to celebrate McQueen’s 12 Years as an unprecedented work about slavery, negates Gordon Parks’s television adaptation of 12 Years (1984). As Janice Harris Jackson suggests in her editorial for New York Amsterdam News:

African artists risk getting lost in the concept of “art for art’s sake.” The 2013 film “12 Years a Slave” is certainly very powerful. It is the most painfully carnal and graphic portrayal of slavery that I have ever seen. Its cinematography engages and disturbs all of the senses. It is intimately terrifying and a brilliant moment in filmmaking, but we must remember, nonetheless, that this excellent work is not the first cinematic portrayal of Northup’s story. Its remarkable artistry is bonafide while its “discovery” is fraudulent. (Jackson: 2014)[12]

Parks (an award winning African American photographer) worked on a limited budget from the National Endowment for the Humanities (created for PBS). As Jackson points out, the lack of acknowledgement from any sector of Hollywood, most importantly McQueen, Ejiofor, Ridley, or any corner of the 12 Years team would suggest an investment in the mythology that African Americans have been somehow incapable of working through slavery on their own terms.

The Economies of Terror and Pleasure

In McQueen’s and Tarantino’s attempts to represent the terror of slavery, Black cultural laborers must perform what Sadiya Hartman refers to as “scenes of subjection” (Hartman:1997) in order to bring into materiality the historicity of slavery. This performance is always brokered through the interpreter (filmmaker, biographer, historian) who must filter the lens of the spectator’s gaze. This filtering is problematic because it pleads for empathy by asking whites to read their subjectivity into the condition of the slave. The white spectator reads themselves, and thus whiteness as ontological condition, into the non-ontological. White audiences can seclude themselves in the economies of pleasure produced by Tarantino’s Django. It is an opportunity for them to enjoy the brilliance of Tarantino’s boldness and edgy filmmaking because they are not asked to take seriously the possibility of Black suffering. With 12 Years, it is not the Black as a person who suffers, rather it is white subjectivity projected into the narrative of Northrup.[13] Subsequently, cinema plays a slight of hand by suggesting that through the genealogy of slave cinema, the nation has embraced a racial progress toward colorblind egalitarianism.

McQueen’s film unearths performances of horror and traumas that echo through the crack of the whip. In the world of Edwin Epps’s plantation, the inscription of cruelty through a confluence of performative labor and torture enmesh, intertwine, ejaculate, and unrelentingly receive the violence of the racial regime. The absurdity of these performances is captured in Northrup’s passages such as the following:

All of us would be assembled in the large room of the great house, whenever Epps came home in one of his dancing moods… “Dance you [damned] niggers, dance,” Epps would shout. Then there must be no halting or delay, no slow or languid movements; all must be brisk, and lively, and alert. “Up and down, heal and toe, and way we go,” was the order of the hour. Epps’ portly form mingled with those of his dusky slaves, moving rapidly through all the mazes of the dance. (Northrup 137)

Epps’s desire to see the “niggers dance” was no less about his desire for amusement than it was about instruction and reminding of how to behave and perform as a slave. The spectacle simultaneously operates to maintain the idiom of power through the surveillance of Black bodies. The master instructed the slave how to dance in order to remind the slave that they were not the master of their own body. The very pleasure of the performance derived by Epps was terror for the slave. “Formations of terror and enjoyment” solidified the relationship of domination because representing power was essential to reproducing domination. Terror and domination also produced economies of enjoyment which “bound the black body, [and] permanently affixed [it] in its place, engender[ed] pleasure not only rooted in the buffoonery and grotesqueries of Cuff, Sambo, and Zip Coon but above all deriving from the very mechanisms of this coercive placement; it is a pleasure obtained from the security of place and order and predicated upon chattel slavery” (31). I would argue that these very same economies of enjoyment permeate throughout audience consumption of 12 Years and Django. In particular, scenes such as Mandingo fighting in Tarantino’s Candieland, in which two Black bucks are forced to fight to the death for the amusement of plantation owner, Calvin Candie, are capable of reproducing a similar spectacle of amusement. Django’s misplaced vengeance, not at Candie, not at the state as sanctioning institution of Black violence, but at the ultimate slave, Stephen, satisfies similar (white) audience desires.

While Black audiences may have gone to see 12 Years or Django to support the overwhelmingly Black casts, as one columnist, Orville Lloyd Douglas, writes, “The narrow range of films about the black life experience being produced by Hollywood is actually dangerous because it limits the imagination, it doesn’t allow real progress to take place. Yet, sadly, these roles are some of the only ones open to black talent. People want us to cheer that black actors from…12 Years a Slave are likely to be up for best actor and actress awards, yet it feels like a throwback, almost to the Gone with the Wind era” (Douglas: 2013). In response to Douglas’s editorial and augmenting commentary over the lack of insurrectionary impulses, Demetria Lucas suggests the following in The Grio:

And maybe I’m just too demanding and never satisfied, because I (and Douglas) want more options than watching blacks suffering in servitude with stoic dignity. If Hollywood insists on giving me slave narratives, can I least get a Nat Turner movie where a black man goes H.A.M. at the injustice of it all? If I must watch servants, can I get more maids, like the character Minnie from The Help, who exact revenge? Must black people always be calm and righteous in the face of social abuses? (Lucas: 2013)

While Django explodes and scales up the act of revenge to the point of farce, 12 Years remains in steady tension through calmness and “critical stillness,” and this is especially true in relationship to the most salacious of performances.

Sexual Desire and Fetish

While intimated, Tarantino denies the visualization of sexual abuse of the light skinned German speaking Broomhilda whom, by Django’s account was, “not a field nigga…she pretty.” However, if Broomhilda is not a field nigga, then what is she? Bound by the particularity of white sexual desire for Black flesh in Northrup’s text, Patsey, on the other hand is “the queen of the field,” queen of Epps’s desire, and the desire of white audiences to hold onto the Black female body as a sexually dysfunctionally functioning object. While the darker skinned Nyong’o has been awarded the Oscar and People Magazine named her most beautiful person of the year for 2014, her acceptance speech at the Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon reveals a paradoxical disavowal and desire that I have been exploring:

I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned. The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first. And every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I had been the day before. (Nyong’o:2014)

When placed in conversation with Kerry Washington’s performance and career trajectory, Nyong’o’s statement reveals how Broomhilda’s sexual violation as “mulatta” is denied on the screen in exchange for her contrapuntal relationship to the position of “field nigga.” In so doing Django makes sexual violation of the Black female body all the more palatable for civil society by reifying the notion that sexual violation is acceptable for some bodies, if not for others.

The darkness of Patsey’s flesh as a Jezebel, her inability to be raped because of her lascivious tendencies, simultaneously secures the validation of relentless sexual violence visited upon the Black female corpus. As Hartman writes in her discussion on seduction and the ruses of power, “the actual or attempted rape of an enslaved woman was an offense neither recognized nor punishable by law, but also its repression was essential to the displacement of white culpability that characterized both the recognition of the black subject as the originary locus of transgression and offense” (80). Sexual domination as a technique of control worked to return the Black female body to the place of object by denying ontology and natal sexual identity. The Jezebel trope validated and justified unfettered access to the Black female body, in turn precluding any consideration that it was even possible for the sexual relation between master and slave to be anything other than necessary and consensual.

The historicity of sexual violation of female slaves at the hands of white masters often took on a pedophiliac nature. Such history was documented in the legal case of State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave (1855)[14] as well as in McQueen’s 12 Years in the relationship between the Patsey and Epps.  Northrup writes:

Patsey is twenty-three—also from Buford’s plantation… [She]…was queen of the field… Her back bore the scars of a thousand stripes; not because she was backward in her work, nor because she was of an unmindful and rebellious spirit, but because it had fallen her lot to be the slave of a licentious master and a jealous mistress…Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once, when Epps refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp. (143)

Both in the passages and scenes in the book and film, the depiction of Epps’s relationship with the Patsey further illustrates the tyrannical process of gender constitution within the economy of terror and enjoyment. This process renders the Black female body as sexually illegilible, and with the state’s collusion, incapable of being raped. Hartman writes:

The eliding of rape must also be considered in relation to what is callously termed the recognition of slave humanity and the particular mechanisms of tyrannical power that converge on the black body. In this instance, tyranny is not a rhetorical inflation but a designation of the absoluteness of power. Gender, if at all appropriate in this scenario, must be understood as indissociable from violence, the vicious refiguration of rape as mutual and shared desire, the wanton exploitation of the captive body tacitly sanctioned as a legitimate use of property, the disavowal of injury, and the absolute possession of the body and its “issue.” (86)

Patsey is forced to endure the desire and disavowal of both master and mistress, rendering her culpable of unprovoked violence that she must suffer at the hands of both parties and even at the hands of Northrup, when he is forced to whip her. Patsey has no right of redress under the law. She is the one deemed responsible for her own suffering, in which the nonexistence of rape means that the enslaved woman is a guilty accomplice and seducer. The omissions of any kind of jurisprudence must be read symptomatically within an economy of bodies in which the full enjoyment of the slave as thing depends upon unbounded authority and the totalizing consumption of the body and its fungibillity. Patsey as free laborer is queen of the field in her ability to barrel cotton as well as fulfilling Epps’s sexual fetish. There is no empathy for Patsey for she is the very purpose of her suffering.

Yet, McQueen has described the relationship between Epps and Patsey as one of love? In an interview with Charlie Rose for PBS, McQueen is asked specifically about Epps the character and his relationship to Patsey. Rose asks, “You see Epps as a victim of a man who could not see anything beyond his own property?” (Rose:2013) McQueen responds, “I think Epps is a human being first of all, just like everyone here at this table… [sic] He doesn’t understand how, he, a white slave owner, is in love with this black slave. There is a passion there which, you know, love is a thing where it decides. You don’t decide. And his dealing with that is classic. It’s a classic tragedy in a way” (McQueen:2013).  Granted, as a filmmaker McQueen would have to ask of his actor to commit to the role of a three-dimensional person. Northrup’s description of Epps in the book doesn’t bode well as he suggests that the slaves referred to Epps as “old hog-jaw,” when not in earshot – a nuance which is absent in the film.

However, I read the dynamics between these two individuals as not love, but the quintessential example of simultaneous desire and disavowal of the Black body by the white patriarchal heteronormative gaze. It is this contradictory dialectic, which cannot be euphemized as love, through which power is produced, and in this case enacted upon the slave’s body in the most brutal and horrific ways. Such brutality is embodied in a scene in which Epps brings Patsey out into the moonlight and mounts her on top of a wooden cart. After climaxing, he slaps Patsey with full force across the face and proceeds to choke her. Epps stops short of completely asphyxiating Patsey as he realizes that he is vulnerable to discovery and the jealous rage of his wife. The absolute authority that the master holds over the slave as object – as thing – pushes the relationship between Epps and Patsey toward what Harvey Young suggests as a fetish for the Black body as a souvenir object. Young’s discussion of the spectacle of lynching, which renders the Black body as souvenir, a fetish, emerges from his historiographic reading of the brutal practice.

Patsey’s body, as Epps’s queen and souvenir, takes on an aura of mystique because in addition to being incomplete, her body is also illicit. It displays the romance of contraband, for its scandal is its removal from its natural location and its appeal to the person who takes the object and the audience to whom it is displayed. Taken away from its environment, which is unlike the one in which it is displayed, the souvenir’s presence reveals its own theft (170). Epps’s nonconsensual control and desire to possess Patsey within political and sexual economies is not love but a fetish.[15] Young, citing William Pietz, defines the properties of the fetish as having four traits:  “it is materially based; it synthesizes multiple elements in a single body; it has social value; it has power to affect the physical body” (179). Epps’s fetish over Patsey’s body synthesizes his desire to brutalize Patsey with the whip and his genitalia, while simultaneously lending social value to his status as master. Indeed, in perhaps one of the most horrific scenes after Patsey has been whipped, we see Epps strolling in the pastoral of his plantation holding hands with a prepubescent young girl who is a spitting image of Patsey. Epps has found another souvenir to replace his old one and a thing through which to further enact his fetish. On this point Ridley seems to grasp the non-empathetic condition of negrophobic pedophilia.

 Colorblindness and its Relationship to the Ruse

Citing Fanon, Afro-pessimists such as Jared Sexton and Wilderson have called attention to the ruse of analogy which negates social death, Blackness, and further reifies the non-ontological condition of the slave. It is this non-ontological condition in relationship to civil society that Wilderson suggests throws the Black into a state of objecthood which cannot be understood through the analogy. This is what McQueen and Tarantino cannot comprehend. As Fanon wrote, “the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe…the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe (101). However, Fanon did not say the negrophobe is invariably an anti-Semite. Yet, the metadiscourse on racial formation and its relationship to domination necessitate that any conversation about Black suffering is immediately checked by analogizing it to European fascism.

When asked why make 12 Years now, McQueen automatically defaults to the Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. It is only through lens of the Holocaust, that slavery seems to make sense for McQueen, his interviewer, and for whiteness writ large. The grammar that constructs the parallax through which suffering is understood is still rooted in the ontological condition that has provided the natural metaphor through which one can ask what does it mean to suffer? However, Auschwitz is not unprecedented for one whose frame of reference is the Middle Passage. The Muselmann is not the slave. Yet, the historiography of intellectual thought emerging out of the Second World War has fortified and extended the “interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense which positions the German/Jewish relation as the sine qua non of a structural antagonism” (Wilderson 36). This historiography allows political philosophy to attribute ontological and social significance to the Jewish Holocaust that can be resolved because the Jew can be returned to civil society as a human being. This is the difference between being hunted and being sold.

In a roundtable discussion with the Hollywood Reporter’s David Simpson in 2011, McQueen is the only one of six male directors who is not white.[16] At the end of the hour and seven minute interview Simpson asks, “You’re all men. Only one of you, Steve, is a minority.” There is uncomfortable laughter with eyes turned down as the group attempts to name three to four woman directors. Then McQueen states, “The question should be different. The question should be why are there no Black directors since there are more women directors than there are Black directors.” To which Simpson presses further, “So, what’s the answer?”  It is here where I would argue that McQueen shows the disjuncture between African descended people of the North Americas and his positionality as a Black British artist.  Similar to his other interviews, McQueen cannot fathom the idea that the very negation of Blackness, as non-ontology, is the principle reason for the underemployment of Black directors. Because directors construct the reality of the film set, they are often the primary arbiters of employment for talent in front of the camera. Hence the paucity of Black directors correlates with the casting of Blacks and other minorities. McQueen fumbles around for an answer, concluding:

I’m always astonished by American filmmakers, particularly living in certain areas, when they never cast one person as a Black person, who have never actually put a Black person as a lead in a movie. I’m astonished. It’s shameful. [sic] How can you be living in a country or cities in America as a director and not cast sort of [Black] people, I don’t know, you live in New York and not cast Black actors or Latino actors. It’s shameful. It’s unbelievable. (McQueen:2011)

Simpson presses on, “Why is that?” McQueen nods with his head to the rest of directors sitting in the circle who are now all silent and squirming awkwardly in their chairs, further intensifying the very point of McQueen’s Blackness as an alienated condition.  McQueen continues:  “You ask them. It’s bizarre…I feel it’s odd. I feel it’s shameful. Tremendously shameful in fact.” Simpson then presses the question to the rest of the group about why this reality, which McQueen has made blatantly obvious, exists. There is a pause from the group and then the following answers, “I’m not stepping into that,” and “I don’t know.” For a moment, McQueen had managed to articulate the problem. The exchange took place three years before McQeen’s 12 Years won the Oscar for Best Picture. The conversation could not “hold the break” (Moten:2003). Rather it had to close by returning to a discussion what the coming year would hold for independent versus commercial (as if inclusion isn’t commercial) cinema. A topic to which the other roundtable directors were more than eager to entertain given their inability to speak back to McQueen’s previous remarks.

This is not to suggest that the Black is at the top of every hierarchy of discrimination. Rather it is to call attention to the manner in which “violence which…destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and interdeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability” (Wilderson 38) with practical and real implications. Another way to think about this is the constant echo-chamber of Black on Black violence that Ridley espouses as the dysfunctionality of niggers.  In filtering the suffering of the Black through the white lens of the Holocaust, we are blinded, calloused, and indifferent to Black social death, and the lives of actual people. We can see this indifference in President Obama’s reaction to the carnage Adam Lanza unleashed on New Town, Connecticut, in which President Obama, rightfully so, decried that this “kind of senseless violence” has to stop and pointed his anger toward the gun manufacturing industry and structural inequality in mental health.  Adam Lanza, a member of civil society, was mentally disturbed, not a thug, right?  By contrast, the President’s rhetoric regarding Black youth dying either at the hands of other Black youth or at the hands of the state often has been couched in a language of absentee-fatherism, gangster youth music and culture, urban decay, and the necessity to just pull up one’s trousers. This language, even coming out of President Obama’s mouth, is never an issue of mental health caused by colonialism and internal colonialism of the mind.

In fact, it finally took the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, for the President to finally pose the question to the American public on live television, in effect, asking how would a jury have reacted if Trayvon Martin made the same claim to stand your ground. Or better yet, can Black people make the same claim to the second amendment and the right to self-defense? In the press conference the President stated:

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?  And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? (Obama: 2013)[17]

Yet, this would have nothing to do with mental health because as Fanon demonstrated, “A drama is played out every day in the colonized countries. How can we explain, for example, that a black guy who has passed his baccalaureate and arrives at the Sorbonne to study for his degree in philosophy is already on his guard before there is the sign of any conflict?” (123). For President Obama and Django the state’s sanctioning of violence cannot figure into the question of Black liberation. However for Fanon, writing and fighting were revolutionary acts to bring about the denouement within the drama of a dying colonialism.

Conclusion

This article has used Django and 12 Years to work through recent iterations of slave cinema. I have demonstrated that these films are representative of unique sites of labor in which Black bodies are organized as commodities to perform economies of pleasure and terror within a Hollywood film industry that propagates colorblind ideology and white supremacy by denying Black people empathic capacity or humanity. Furthermore, simultaneous desire and disavowal for Black bodies has created a fetish for Blackness that has been conflated with love as well as the suffering of white innocence. In exploring these relationships, I have also been calling for an understanding of how colorblind ideology is intertwined with aesthetic and efficacious modes of performance in which Black social death is congruent with the way in which the performance of Black labor is persistently controlled and marginalized in Hollywood. As a consequence, cinema helps shape the discussions around race relations that continue to affect the lived experiences of Black people in the United States.

I didn’t cry when I went to an invited screening of 12 Years, which had a predominantly Black audience.  As Wilderson concludes, empathetic aesthetics, by which popular socially progressive films are underwritten, dissipate cinema’s critical potential by hailing the spectator to an impoverished ensemble of questions, such as Isn’t it sad? Isn’t it tragic? Why do some people behave badly and others don’t? (339).  Certainly, within McQueen’s project we are asked to move in the direction of these moral questions at the expense of analytical ones. Yet, just like analytic film aesthetics that strive to repudiate moral assessments by privileging effect over cause as well as independent cinema’s implicit and explicit political promise, neither tradition processes the ensemble of questions nor approaches a language through which to articulate the economy of Black non-ontology.

In Django Unchained, we are never asked to ponder any kind of relationship to civil society, as the protagonist is presumed to live outside society except when accessed as fungible object by the will of the state to perform the role of bounty hunter alongside Schultz. All of this, despite the fact that the will of the state determines that the slave has no relationship to the state because the slave is a non-citizen, a non-human. But exploring the relationship of Blackness to civil society is neither Tarantino’s project nor concern. Tarantino, like Ridley, is concerned with the box office and obsessed with Black necropolitics. As the history of capitalism in the United States has demonstrated, Black bodies and money make excellent bedfellows. While Ridley recognizes that he is in fact being consumed and simultaneously prospering, but yet cannot comprehend why he is being consumed in parasitic like fashion (and thus must insist that he is a unique host unlike the other niggers), the parasite, Tarantino, feasts. Tarantino wants us to indulge with him in his fetishization of the slave’s body. He will do anything to it he wants. He will kill it, eat it, fuck it, shit on it, and then fuck it again. His obsession, yes, festishization, with the Black body has no end and he wants everyone to know it. He enjoys knowing that everyone knows it. It is through this process that his status as white, male, and privileged is affirmed, and for this his audiences handsomely reward him.

*******

Acknowledgements

Funding for this project was made possible by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, a research center within the Institute for American Cultures at University of California, Los Angeles. For their generous sharing of time, resources, and knowledge I would like to thank Vice-Provost Belinda Tucker, Professor Darnell Hunt, Dr. Ana-Christina Ramon, the Bunche Center staff, and the Race and Hollywood team for committing their energy to the study of diversity (or lack thereof) in the Hollywood and entertainment industry. I am most grateful to Dominic Steavu-Balint, Leo Cabranes-Grant, Darnell Hunt, Bob Myers, Rael Jero Salley, and Jeffrey Stewart who contributed to the shaping of this essay by lending insights and providing comments on drafts.

The post Economies of Enjoyment and Terror in Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

En effet, dans les cercles intellectuels comme dans les rues européennes, peu de noms de féministes arabes sont connus. Qui se souvient du nom de la journaliste libanaise Rose al-Yussuf (1898-1958) ? de l’égyptienne Houda Cha’rawi (1879-1947) ? de la tunisienne Bchira Ben Mrad (1909-1993) ? Et pourquoi les écrits féministes de Tahar Haddâd (1899-1935) sont-ils si peu traduits et si peu diffusés en Europe ? Nous constatons aujourd’hui cette invisibilité flagrante du féminisme arabe, sans en connaître les raisons profondes. Les féministes contemporaines sont un peu plus connues, telle Fatima Mernissi très active dans l’ensemble du Monde arabe, ainsi qu’en Europe. Mais tandis que le féminisme occidental (européen et nord-américain) s’est constitué comme une entité complexe, le féminisme arabe semble ne pas avoir existé hier, et peiner à exister aujourd’hui.

Kimberlé Crenshaw peut nous aider à comprendre ce phénomène d’invisibilité d’un féminisme non-occidental. Tout d’abord parce qu’elle a contribué à faire connaître les travaux de Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell et Barbara Smith et en particulier leur ouvrage All Women are White, all the Blacks are Men[2]. Ce titre énonce un préjugé qui explique pourquoi les femmes afro-américaines ont été d’emblée exclues des mouvements féministes. Et ce préjugé peut aujourd’hui s’appliquer aux sociétés arabo-musulmanes vues d’Europe et s’énoncer de la sorte : Toutes les femmes sont occidentales ; tous les Arabes, tous les Musulmans sont des hommes. Ainsi, en 2014, le féminisme mondial reste un féminisme foncièrement occidental, qui accepte malaisément d’inclure d’autres féminismes comme le féminisme arabe ou le féminisme musulman. C’est dire à quel point les découvertes de Kimberlé Crenshaw sont d’actualité.

Quelle est la réception effective de l’œuvre de Crenshaw dans le monde arabo-musulman contemporain ? Dans quels domaines l’intersectionnalité s’y applique-t-elle particulièrement ? Et comment certains concepts y sont discutés, sans que l’ensemble de la méthode initiée par Crenshaw ne soit remis en cause ?

Intersectionnalité et sociétés

La réception de l’œuvre de Kimberlé Crenshaw dans le monde arabo-musulman est contrastée. Non encore traduite à ce jour en langue arabe, elle se trouve assez bien connue des universitaires des pays anglophones (notamment l’Egypte) mais très peu connue dans les pays francophones (comme l’Algérie). On peut donc parler ici d’une réception limitée, l’œuvre de Crenshaw ayant encore trop peu d’impact direct sur les sociétés arabo-musulmanes. Pourtant, la notion d’intersectionnalité ouvre un domaine de recherche fort utile dans des sociétés qui peinent parfois à penser leur hétérogénéité. L’ouverture prochaine de départements d’Etudes féminines (comme à l’Université de Tunis) devrait pallier ce manque, et permettre aux théories féministes non-occidentales d’être plus visibles.

Le cas de l’Egypte, où l’œuvre de Kimberlé Crenshaw est la plus reconnue dans le Monde arabe, est une exception : il s’agit d’un pays dont l’élite est parfaitement anglophone, et il s’agit du pays de Nawal Saadawî, figure de proue du féminisme arabe, longtemps exilée aux USA. Ainsi, le féminisme arabe devient visible dès lors qu’il se trouve porté par une figure internationale, maîtrisant la langue de l’autre (ici, la langue anglaise) et vivant dans le pays de l’autre (ici, les USA). Autrement dit, le féminisme de Saadawî a acquis une forme grandissante de visibilité à mesure qu’il s’occidentalisait. Cette visibilité ne réduit cependant pas l’invisibilité de tous les autres féminismes du Monde arabo-musulman, bien qu’il en encourage l’émergence.

L’invisibilité des féminismes du Monde arabo-musulman tient donc peut-être à la langue. Enoncées en langue anglaise, les théories de Nawal Saadawi rencontrent celles de Kimberlé Crenshaw, en Egypte, ou aux USA. Nawal Saadawî s’intéresse elle aussi à ce point de croisement aveugle entre diverses catégories : femmes, pauvres, malades, exploitées, emprisonnées. En tant que médecin, elle soigne ces patientes dont l’existence est niée par la société, et elle décrit leur parcours, parfois en s’identifiant très fortement à elles[3]. Il nous faut noter que les femmes auxquelles s’intéresse Nawal Saadawî sont opprimées par la société dans laquelle elles vivent, et non par l’extérieur (c’est-à-dire l’Occident). Elles peuvent dès lors plus facilement susciter l’empathie de femmes occidentales, qui, elles non plus, ne supportent pas la dictature, ni les dérives du patriarcat…

La solidarité s’avère plus compliquée lorsque les femmes qu’il s’agit de soutenir ne correspondant pas au prototype de la femme occidentale, par exemple lorsqu’elles sont voilées, et semblent soumises. Kimberlé Crenshaw avait vu juste en parlant de « the centrality of white female experience in the conceptualization of gender discrimitation[4]». A sa suite, Elsa Dorlin a montré comment « les [premières] associations féministes se déchirent et se scindent sur la question perverse de la prééminence « légitime » des femmes et épouses « blanches » sur les Noirs et par conséquent sur les femmes « noires », excluant purement et simplement ces dernières de la catégorie « femmes[5]» ». Autrement dit, les femmes arabo-musulmanes non-occidentalisées ne seraient pas des femmes comme les autres. Certains propos rapportés et analysés par Elsa Dorlin, datant de plus d’un siècle, et s’appliquant aux femmes afro-américaines, rejoignent des propos circulant depuis une dizaine d’années en France et en Europe au sujet des femmes arabo-musulmanes. Par exemple, il y a plus d’un siècle, aux USA, la Présidente de la Fédération générale des clubs des femmes expliquait ainsi qu’elle ne pouvait accepter Mrs Lowe parmi ses membres : « Mrs Ruffin appartient à son propre peuple. Là, elle sera un leader et pourra faire beaucoup de bien, mais parmi nous elle ne peut que créer des problèmes[6]». Ce préjugé s’applique aujourd’hui à la femme de culture ou d’apparence arabo-musulmane en France, ou ailleurs en Europe. En tant que femme arabo-musulmane, elle se trouve renvoyée aux siens, tandis que les siens la renvoient à leur tour à sa condition de femme. Finalement, elle n’est jamais totalement elle-même : dans une communauté de femmes occidentales et féministes, la femme arabo-musulmane est d’abord perçue comme arabo-musulmane (a fortiori si elle est voilée) ; et dans la communauté arabo-musulmane, elle est perçue comme une femme, avec des droits et des devoirs spécifiques. Aucune de ces perceptions ne rend à cet individu (qui se trouve être une femme, de culture arabo-musulmane) toute son humanité.

De plus, il nous semble que la question du féminisme arabo-musulman s’articule avec la question post-coloniale. Elsa Dorlin cite d’ailleurs, en note, Edward Saïd[7]. Si les femmes africaines-américaines n’ont pas eu leur place dans les premiers mouvements féministes aux USA, c’était à cause du racisme. Et si les femmes arabo-musulmanes n’ont pas aujourd’hui leur place dans les mouvements féministes, c’est peut-être une conséquence de la colonisation et de l’orientalisme.

En effet, durant la colonisation, la femme arabo-musulmane était très présente dans l’imaginaire collectif français. En peinture comme en littérature, elle fut constamment représentée, puis très photographiée. Et l’on peut noter qu’elle était le plus souvent représentée assise ou allongée, nue et parée de bijoux. Or, il se trouve que les femmes arabo-musulmanes d’aujourd’hui, dans le Monde arabo-musulman comme en France, peuvent apparaître comme l’exact contraire de l’ « orientale » : les femmes voilées figurent une verticalité en marche, qui trouble et parfois effraie. L’image fréquemment utilisée pour exprimer le malaise ressenti devant des femmes entièrement voilées est celle de « fantôme ». Ainsi, tandis que la femme arabo-musulmane colonisée et orientalisée était couleurs et chair, la femme arabo-musulmane d’aujourd’hui paraît spectrale, insaisissable. Même lorsque ses prises de positions rejoignent celles des féministes occidentales, le voile creuse entre elles un fossé.

Mais le monde n’est pas binaire, et les fossés se creusent au sein même des sociétés arabo-musulmanes. L’intersectionnalité n’opère donc pas seulement entre ancien colonisateur et ancien colonisé, mais au cœur de toutes les sociétés, car toutes les sociétés de notre monde contiennent des éléments hétérogènes. Autrement dit, la question de la femme arabo-musulmane se pose aujourd’hui partout dans le monde, et le même paradoxe s’observe ici comme ailleurs : le voile la rend visible, mais inaudible, et le féminisme arabo-musulman semble ne pas exister, à moins d’être porté par des femmes arabo-musulmanes occidentalisées.

On voit de ce fait que les théories de Kimberlé Crenshaw permettent d’élucider des paradoxes très contemporains. La femme de culture arabo-musulmane vue d’Europe, et en particulier vue de France, pays de la laïcité, se retrouve à l’intersection de plusieurs catégories (sexuelles, sociales, historiques, économiques, culturelles) qui la rendent invisible. Elle sera tour à tour appréhendée comme arabe (non-européenne), ou comme musulmane (non-laïque), ou comme immigrée (même lorsqu’elle a la nationalité européenne), ou comme issue d’une ancienne colonie française, ou comme issue de tel milieu social… Mais son identité singulière, qui coïncide avec le point d’intersection de ces catégories plurielle, peine à être reconnue. Des rôles lui sont assignés, qui entravent sa connaissance de soi, et sa reconnaissance par autrui.

Ainsi, le passage semble étroit pour que les femmes arabo-musulmanes, et a fortiori les plus féministes d’entre elles, puissent se faire entendre et se défendre, tout en échappant à la fois au repli traditionaliste, à l’orientalisme latent, à l’occidentalisation forcée, au sexisme et au racisme.

Intersectionnalité et littératures post-coloniales

Cinq ans avant la parution de l’article de Kimberlé Crenshaw « Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex : A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics » Alice Walker publiait la Couleur pourpre[8]. Dans ces deux textes fondateurs, l’un socio-juridique, l’autre romanesque, il est question des violences domestiques dont les femmes afro-américaines sont victimes. Cette coïncidence entre la parution d’un article scientifique et un roman, traitant de la même problématique, est intéressante. Elle révèle que parfois la littérature devance, ou rejoint la sociologie. En ce qui concerne la notion d’intersectionnalité, cette convergence semble remarquable dans les littératures issues du Monde arabe. On trouve cette problématique de l’invisibilité due à l’intersectionnalité dès 1945, date à laquelle Kateb Yacine commence à écrire Nedjma[9] dont le personnage se trouve être une femme, juive par sa mère, arabo-berbère par son père, nue dans une célèbre scène de bain, et finalement voilée, et errante. Quelle que soit la forme qu’elle prend, Nedjma ne parle pas. Elle est toutes les femmes que l’on veut, mais elle ne semble être personne. L’entrecroisement de sa judaïté, de son arabité, de sa féminité et de son statut de colonisé la font littéralement disparaître. Comme disparaissaient des statistiques les femmes afro-américaines battues sur le sort desquelles Kimberlé Crenshaw s’est penchée.

Après Kateb Yacine, d’autres écrivains ont continué à mettre en scène cette disparition des femmes arabo-musulmanes du champ de vision du féminisme humaniste, parmi lesquels Naguib Mahfouz, Assia Djebar, Hanan el-Cheikh, Fadhila Chabbi et, plus récemment Emna Belhaj Yahia. Dans son roman intitulé Jeux de rubans[10], Emna Belhaj Yahia s’interroge sur le voile en Tunisie. Elle rapporte ses pensées tandis qu’elle attend son tour chez l’épicier :

Je regarde les femmes auprès desquelles je fais la queue : nous ne sommes que deux à ne pas être voilées, c’est-à-dire à ne pas porter ce grand foulard qui enveloppe le cheveu et encadre le visage. Cela fait quelques années déjà qu’on commence à s’y habituer. Mais je suis tout de même à chaque fois surprise que cette nouvelle façon de s’habiller se répande autant et envahisse si vite le décor. Tout de suite, je me sens différente. Peut-être plus par les pensées qu’elle soulève en moi, que par le fait lui-même. (…) A les regarder de près, attelées comme tant d’autres aux tâches quotidiennes, ces femmes n’ont rien d’inquiétant dans le visage, rien d’agressif, à mon égard en tout cas, et ne manifestent aucune hostilité. Je revois à l’instant toutes celles qui leur ressemblent, que j’avais déjà remarquées bien des fois et qui, dans les quartiers populaires, ont sauté sur cet habit pour pouvoir exercer tranquillement leur métier d’aide-ménagère. Dans ces lieux-là, ce sont elles qui subviennent aux besoins de la famille[11].

Ici, une première raison de se voiler est explicitée : travailler, pouvoir aller et venir dans la rue, sans passer pour une prostituée. Mais la position de la narratrice est ébranlée lorsque son fils lui présente la jeune fille dont il est amoureux : étudiante, coquette, au caractère affirmé, et voilée. Le roman s’achève d’ailleurs sur une scène apocalyptique qui a tout d’une hallucination, et qui révèle l’immense perplexité de la narratrice :

[Mes enfants] se tiennent par la main et, derrière eux, il y a toute leur descendance, leurs enfants, petits-enfants, arrière-arrière-petits-enfants, qui avancent en dizaines de rangées correspondant à des dizaines de générations successives, de celles nées il y a plus d’un siècle à celles qui naîtront dans plus de cent ans. Mais, comme c’est curieux, elles se suivent dans un ordre singulier : une rangée où les femmes ont des foulards sur les cheveux, suivie d’une autre où elles ont les cheveux au vent, et ainsi de suite à l’infini, dans une alternance presque parfaite, vagues régulières, enlacées, exposant leurs différences comme si chaque rangée était une réplique à l’autre, comme si pour s’affirmer, elle avait décidé de marquer son opposition en reniant la tenue de celle qui l’a précédée. (…) C’est quoi, ce mystérieux manège ? Et pourquoi ce fétichisme d’un tissu sur la tête qu’on enlève, remet, retire de nouveau pour le remettre encore une fois, quelques temps après, et puis s’en défaire, et recommencer l’opération par la suite, tout au long des siècles ? Elles sont vraiment énigmatiques, les filles d’Eve, avec l’habillage de leurs corps, sur cette terre qui est la mienne ! J’aimerais les comprendre, mais je n’y arrive pas encore[12].

Ainsi, il y aurait autant de raisons de se voiler, que de ne pas se voiler. Les premières féministes arabes se voilaient pour aller travailler, ou pour participer aux assemblées politiques. Puis elles se sont dévoilées, pour être les égales des hommes. Aujourd’hui, les jeunes filles se voilent pour de multiples raisons : par réaction contre l’occidentalisation-laïcisation de leur culture, par réaction contre la nudité orientaliste, par réaction contre leurs parents, par désir de retrouver des racines identitaires, pour intégrer une communauté, pour retrouver une spiritualité, pour faire coïncider leur foi et leur apparence…

Pour Emna Belhaj Yahia, la plus commune de ces raisons serait une réaction par rapport à la génération précédente. Le résultat de toutes ces réactions en chaîne est une essentialisation de la féminité, en laquelle la narratrice ne se reconnaît pas. En effet, si, pour une génération, la femme doit être voilée ; pour la génération suivante, elle ne doit pas l’être, et cela à l’infini, comme si la femme se réduisait à ce qu’elle porte ou ne porte pas. A cette essentialisation, Emna Belhaj Yahia préfère sans doute un féminisme existentialiste, où l’existence précède l’essence, et non l’inverse.

De ce fait, la littérature contemporaine met en scène l’intersectionnalité tout en remettant en cause la catégorie de « femme ». Notons aussi que cette déconstruction de la catégorie de « sexe » s’accompagne d’une déconstruction de la catégorie de « race ». D’ailleurs, la langue arabe utilise le même terme pour dire « sexe » et « race », désignés tous deux par jins (qui peut aussi se traduire par « espèce »). De ce point de vue, la langue arabe semble nous inviter à dépasser les catégorisations « sexuelles » et « raciales » pour penser en termes de catégories mouvantes, et toujours à redéfinir.

Ce travail de redéfinition de notions liées au genre (masculin/féminin) ou à la culture (arabo-musulmane/occidentale) s’observe chez des écrivains tels Tayeb Sâlih, Amara Lakhous, ou encore Amin Maalouf. Ils appartiennent à une littérature post-coloniale qui repense les rapports de force tout en déconstruisant la notion d’identité fixe. Dans ce sens, ils s’inscrivent dans ce que Leslie McCall a appelé la complexité anticatégorique de l’intersectionnalité[13]. Amin Maalouf est allé jusqu’à théoriser cette nouvelle conception de l’intersectionnalité dans Les Identités meurtrières[14] en utilisant un modèle non plus à deux mais à une infinité de dimensions. En quelques mots : il se trouve que je peux être perçue comme une femme, ou bien comme un individu de culture musulmane, ou bien comme un.e salarié.e ou bien comme une personne aimant la nature etc. Or, ce qui est perçu de moi n’est pas la totalité de ce que je suis ; ce que je mets en avant n’est pas non plus la totalité de ce que je suis. L’identité est kaléidoscopique, et dépend des moments, des enjeux, des protagonistes et des circonstances. L’intersectionnalité n’est plus un croisement entre deux voies, mais un tourbillon d’intersections.

L’autre apport de cette littérature post-coloniale issue du Monde arabe à l’intersectionnalité de Kimberlé Crenshaw est la fin de la notion de « race ». Le mot n’est plus guère utilisé en langue française, bien que des théories « racistes » continuent à avoir cours. Il semblerait que les luttes contre les catégories de « sexe » et de « race » soient indissociables dans les littératures post-coloniales issues du Monde arabe. Car il s’agit de lutter contre tous les sectarismes. Et cela se fait aujourd’hui non seulement dans des ouvrages scientifiques, ou dans des romans, mais aussi dans la littérature enfantine. Deux exemples récents : dans sa série « Mes histoires préférées », la Maison d’édition tunisienne Messa opère une petite révolution à l’intention des enfants : Dora l’exploratrice y est présentée comme « une jolie petite fille brune de peau[15]» à un lectorat pour qui la blancheur est un critère de beauté ; et, dans un autre livre de cette même série, la princesse choisit elle-même celui qu’elle épousera, en interrogeant ses prétendants (tous les personnages masculins de Disney, réunis ici) et en tuant ceux qui ne répondent pas à ses questions[16].

Pour conclure, l’intersectionnalité de Kimberlé Crenshaw a non seulement traversé les décennies, mais aussi les frontières. C’est un formidable outil d’analyse, dont les catégories peuvent être discutées, mais dont l’efficacité opératoire ne se dément pas. Appliqué aux cultures arabo-musulmanes, cet outil nous aide à comprendre pourquoi les femmes peuvent y sembler invisibles : comme Nedjma, à la fois femme, arabe, juive et colonisée. A l’aide de l’intersectionnalité, nous saisissons mieux ce passage entre la représentation de la femme orientalisée et la femme voilée, toutes deux très présentes dans les imaginaires collectifs, mais inaudibles. Dans les deux cas, le son est coupé[17]: les femmes peintes par Delacroix durant son séjour algérien de 1832 ne parlent pas, et lorsque, aujourd’hui, en France ou ailleurs, une femme voilée prend la parole, on s’interroge sur son voile avant de l’écouter. La femme orientalisée de naguère et la femme voilée d’aujourd’hui se rejoignent dans un silence qu’il nous revient d’entendre et d’analyser.

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Towering over the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the recently completed African Renaissance Monument casts a long shadow that stretches out across the surrounding suburb of Ouakom. Ahead of these three colossal bronze figures – a man, a woman and a child – is the Atlantic Ocean. Behind, an otherwise barren landscape is scattered with tell tale signs of development: here a cluster of cranes, there the foundations of a hotel rising up from the beach scrub. The skyline of Dakar is changing.

The brainchild of former Senegalese president Abodulaye Wade, the 49-metre high African Renaissance Monument (Le Monument de laRenaissance Africaine) was billed as an effort to challenge “centuries of ignorance, intolerance and racism” about Africa (Ba, 2009). To this end the monument represents a confluence of two distinct agendas. On the one hand, it embodies a moment of enormous optimism. As the name suggests, the statue signifies a rebirth of sorts; the right to a future just over the horizon signalled by the bronze child’s outstretched hand. In aiming to “match the Statue of Liberty or Paris’ Eiffel tower” (Ibid), however, the ARM also stakes out a claim in a global arena of national monumentalisation. This statue does not merely celebrate; it competes. The latter goal is complicated by a number of factors: a lack of transparency around the cost of the project, labour secured from a North Korean investment cartel, and an “un-Islamic”, even Stalinist aesthetic belie its scope and ambition. Collectively these concerns have engendered extensive debate in the global press. While Wade’s supporters argue that the statue brings life to Africa’s “common destiny” (Walker, 2010), celebrated Cameroonian curator Simon Njami has called the monument (in O’Toole, 2012) the “‘most outrageously stupid thing in the world”.

African Renaissance Monument – Photo by Author

In terms of sheer schizophrenic impact, the ARM is perhaps an apt metaphor for another giant looming large in the Dakarois cultural imaginary. The Dakar Biennale or Dak’art, the oldest mega show of its kind on the African continent, is likewise the meeting place of two ideological commitments that can make for uneasy bedfellows. As the descendent of poet, politician and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “First World Festival of Negro Arts”, the biennale is closely bound up in the rhetoric of a contemporized pan-Africanism[1]. In its most recent incarnations the event has also strategically aspired to internationalism. To extend my metaphor, Dak’art turns its gaze to the West with its feet still anchored in African soil and as the African Renaissance Monument suggests, this can at times be an awkward, even inherently unstable, cultural and political location. In the text that follows I briefly chart some moments of friction that emerge as a consequence of these two ideological metanarratives overlapping in Dak’Art 2014, and evaluate to what extent the biennale has succeeded in reconciling a pan-African regionalism with its alignment to a global art world.

Rather than polarise these discourses and risk rendering them mutually exclusive, I hope to examine their points of intersection (and cross-pollination) in order to ask after Rasheed Araeen, “Can Africa assert its independence or develop its own direction and vision…without critically confronting the dominant structures of art around the world today?” (Araeen 2003: 100).

The theme of this year’s Dak’art, “Producing the Common”, makes for an interesting point of departure. In the show’s comprehensive accompanying catalogue, curators Elise Atangana, Abdelkader Damani and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi establish their approach as “a conscious act of engaging what is collectively shared” that “take[s] into account what effects everyone, the Whole-World” (2014: 21). The phrase whole-world (Tout-Monde) is drawn from the writings of Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant to describe a field of social relations: a world configured as an archipelago of “islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, lands thrusting out, mixing and connecting…” (cited in Dash, 2011). It is a radically egalitarian sentiment that also leaves room for cultural specificity, sharing some significant ground with the work of another theorist invoked at length in Dak’art press materials, Michael Hardt. Hardt’s conception of the common, from which “Producing the Common” takes its cue, operates as a politically and socially charged territory:

[The common] is not the realm of sameness or indifference. It is the scene of encounter of social and political differences, at times characterized by agreement and at others antagonism, at times composing political bodies and at others decomposing them (2009).

As a guiding principal of the biennale, “Producing the Common” thus locates Dak’art 2014 not only at the tense intersection of politics and aesthetics, but also at a meeting point between the global black consciousness movement brought to bear by Glissant[2], and the Western political philosophy of thinkers like Hardt. In the space of Dak’art’s catalogue, such bodies of thought seemingly sit comfortably side by side.

Read in conjunction, however, the references to Hardt and Glissant that punctuate Dak’art’s press resources also couch the show in a resoundingly academic rhetoric. I cannot resist recalling the experience of sitting at a conference at the primary Dak’art venue of the Village de la Biennale, translation headset in hand, and listening to the women behind me parody the academic language of a catalogue essay. They threw words back and forth teasingly, taking turns to find a pleasing turn of phrase: “interdependence”, “arbitrating”, and “communitarian solidarity”.

In framing the exhibition in a particular lexicon – the language of the academic, the university, the elite – it is worth asking for whom the triumvirate of curators aim to produce this “common” The 62 odd artists on the main exhibition? The Senegalese public? An international art market? Glissant’s whole world? In an earlier essay, ‘Curating Africa, Curating the Contemporary’, Nzewi offers the model of the counter-public by way of explanation. His is a public called into being by a curatorial approach that establishes Dak’art unambiguously as a “counter-exhibition”. He advances that it is the “discourse [of Dak’art] which imagines and produces a pan-African ‘exhibitionary’ world” at odds with a dominant biennale typology (2012: 6-7).

Dak’art curators (left to right): Abdelkader Damani, Elise Atangana, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi

“Counter-publics”, as the notion is expanded in the work of American social theorist Michael Warner, are a kind of bounded audience at odds with a prevailing social paradigm. It is worth noting Warner’s first criterion by which the parameters of a public are defined. “Publics,” he writes, “are a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” (2002: 49). They exist only as the end for which information is manufactured, or in the case of Dak’art, for whom exhibitions are organized. Such publics come into beingby virtue of being addressed (2002: 49-51). There is a degree, then, to which Dak’art forges its own countercultural arena of reception, generating a unique brand of pan-African internationalism that it simultaneously defines and delimits. Bearing that in mind, I am inclined to argue that there is, still, room to expend critical energy inventing (or perhaps reinventing) a register that reflects the needs of a contemporary African public. Following Nzewi, if Dak’art’s objective is to “imagine and produce” a pan-African exhibitionary model, particularly one that falls under the rubric of egalitarianism, surely inclusivity would be a worthy cause célèbre?

In a way I am doing an injustice to Dak’art 2014 by reading the exhibition through its theoretical framework. The active “producing” contained within “producing the common” was more evident in the main exhibition space of the Village de la Biennale. There, diaspora artists and African residents shared a level playing field unbounded by either theoretical partitions or artificial national borders. The tone was set by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s installation “As god wants and devil likes it” (O.R.G.A.S.M. Congress) (2011-2014) in the central courtyard, which modifies the European Union logo to include the African continent at its centre. Henda’s accompanying series of photographs, equal parts staged and manipulated documentary footage, featured prominent European leaders in Afros and cornrows. The resulting scenes were playful, but also represented a critique of Africa’s place in a global political arena. In re-signifying his subjects, Henda figures the possibility of re-scribing not just a bitter colonial past but also a political present and, indeed, a future. His codified politicians are both caricatures of Africanness and placeholders of a sort. And indeed, the vision of an Africa at the heart of a European emblem – an Africa that acts as a centrifugal force around which Europe must operate – is a potent symbol for the agenda that undercuts Dak’Art.

Although opening a day late (and who gets to say, really, that exhibitions should function according to a preordained schedule) Dak’art’s main venue was polished and sharply curated. Standing amongst the cosmopolitan crowd of collectors, curators and artists, I was reminded of the biennale’s many siblings the world over: perhaps Documenta, Manifesta or the Venice Biennale. Filipovic et al observe that the nomination ‘biennale’ frequently refers less to a specific periodicity – simply a bi-annual art event – and more to a model of exhibition practice that is “often grandiose in scale, sometimes dispersed across several locations in a city, [and] at times locally embedded through site-specific commissions while being global in ambition” (2010: 14). A biennale conceived as such is not a name only, but rather a series of aesthetic and critical standards capable of legitimating certain curatorial models, certain artists, and certain spaces.

O.R.G.A.S.M., by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Photo by author.

Let me be clear. Conforming to the standards of an international biennale typology is not a fault, nor am I levelling a critique of that aspiration here. Calling for something as reductive as “local flavour” would be too much like demanding that selected work exhibit an “African essence”. Ironically, the biennale selection committee upheld that same principle of “essence” as a necessary precondition for entry until Dak’art’s 2004 iteration (Fillitz, 2011). It is through such ill-defined criteria, taken on board unequivocally, that the mechanisms of colonialism are institutionalized and sustained. And make no mistake, such mechanisms are still at work. As Araeen asks of the present generation of African artists, “If the social, economic and political conditions of Africa are still struggling against the global hegemony of the West, how can its art be free from this hegemony?” (2010: 100).

That said I would like to point out that Dak’art 2014’s detailed (if madcap) press page links to an article from Italy’s Domus magazine that opens with the line “For the first time in its history, Dak’art has begun to resemble a real biennale” (Pensa, 2014, my emphasis). Written by the director of Wikipedia’s collaborative WikiAfrica initiative, the review is exhaustive and full of flair and critical dexterity. The authoritative judgement implied in that first statement, however, is compounded by the addition of the line “From what they say [the curators] seem well aware that a biennial – even in Africa – can certainly not represent a continent” (Ibid, my emphasis). Needless to say the author is not alone in this sentiment (over the years, such conversations have plagued Dak’art) but she does explicitly foreground something important. Adhering to the standards of international biennales reifies those same standards and ascribes universality to them, allowing for a category like “real biennale” to operate with relative impunity. And who polices the boundaries of that definition, after all? Who decides what constitutes a sufficiently ‘real’ exhibition?

It is in Dak’Art’s fringe programme, known colloquially as the ‘Off’, that the “realness” of a biennale is further complicated. The ‘Off’ is not confined within an orderly exhibition model. Over the course of Dak’art’s month long run, more than 250 artists exhibit work in the city and surrounds. Artwork materialises in disused warehouses and car dealerships, along bridges and in courtyards. I would suggest that the ‘Off’ allows for Nzewi’s imagined counter-public to be more truly activated. The mode of address in the streets of Dakar is less clearly defined, the art-public relation more protean and nebulous. Thus, “the common” is untethered from the curatorial dialogues engineered between works and expanded to encompass a more complex social sphere of engagement. An artwork that appears in the street – that most public of public spaces, and ideally available to all – necessitates, even demands, a different tone and register of engagement.

This is not always without complication. In the case of “Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness”, such engagements were far from polite. Curated by Koyo Kouoh and Ato Malinda at the Raw Material Company venue in suburban Dakar, the show sought to profile explorations of queer African experience. Among others, the show featured South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases portrait series of black lesbian women, and Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu’s Pagan, exploring contemporary African homophobia as a colonial hangover. Within a day of opening, religious fundamentalists had attacked the gallery space, broken windows and destroyed light fittings on its front facade. According to Senegalese newspaper Le Monde, Mamè Mactar Guèye, vice-president of Senegalese Islamic organization Jamra, spearheaded the attack. In a subsequent television interview, Guèye explained, “This event is supposed to promote our culture, but proves to be propaganda for unions which are against nature. Undeniably, this edition of Dak’Art has been detrimental to our morality and to our laws” (Forbes, 2014). The show closed early due to pressure from the Senegalese state.

To me, this incident represents a clash between the immediate conditions of locality and globality; between the enactment of a local political logic and an aspirational internationalist agenda. In a predominantly Islamic country where perceived acts of homosexuality remain illegal, an exhibition of queer visual culture imagines and produces publics outside the bounds of the immediate political present. That is not to say those publics do not already exist- the opening event was duly attended by a diverse group of local and international artists and activists, some of them very outspoken figures in the Dakar community. The press release by Secretary General of Dak’art Babacar Mbaye Diop’s, however, suggests that these counter-publics exist beyond the purview of Dak’art. He formally disassociated the biennale from the troubled (and troubling) ‘Off’ show, bluntly stating that Dak’art was “not responsible for collateral exhibitions” (Forbes, 2014). As a crucial insight into the biennale’s objectives, this event manifests the frictions that exist when local particularities encounter internationalism and both commitments are equally compromised.

Critic Clementine Deliss, describing the first iteration of Dak’Art in 1992, acknowledges what she deems a “misguided faith in the so-called international art circuit” that has “deterred the organizers from developing a pan-African approach” (1993: 136). Notably, her review is titled “When internationalism falls apart”. Deliss finds fault with both the biennale’s pan-Africanist and internationalist ambitions. For her, writing in the early 90’s, the event had a long way to go. As Fillitz (2011) has suggested, though, it is all too easy to force upon Dak’art the goal of dismantling the dominant aesthetic discourses of a Euro-American art world without taking into account its ambivalent cultural location or, indeed, the needs of exhibiting artists.

Much like the African Renaissance Monument, Dak’art is caught between looking outward and inland. Situated at the meeting point of distinct national and international cultural agendas, the event is necessarily conflicted at times. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the intersection of pan-Africanism and internationalism – that metaphorical crossroads – is also a vantage point. From that unique point of view, new worlds are visible.

The post Dak’art 2014: At a crossroads appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The history of El Paso’s queer population, in particular, has been briefly illustrated in various works, most notably by El Pasoan gay authors Arturo Islas and John Rechy, who both speak to various aspects of homosexual life in their burgeoning city.[3] This paper will place El Paso’s queer community in a larger discussion with intersectionality by exploring the chronicle of the city’s alternative nightclub – the Old Plantation (or OP) – across four decades, the 1970s to 2010s. By studying queer encounters along the border through intersectional lenses, it will uncover varying racial and sexual anxieties between the American imperial state via Fort Bliss and the surrounding Latina/o population. Due to El Paso’s bicultural history and segregated past, queer life must be examined through several academic and community–based methodologies, which cultural historians such as Hayden White and Lynn Hunt have employed in their studies of peoples and interactions, especially the use of oral testimonies.[4] Furthermore, a “people’s history” of queer life will elucidate sexual encounters (and transactions) that cannot be found easily in the traditional archive. Previous scholars like Madeline D. Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy have researched culturally homogeneous queer sexualities in cities before, but in locales without national borders or without multiple races like Latina/os.[5]

In order to historicize this city’s queer nightlife given the deprivation of printed sources, it employs theoretical frameworks from Latina/o scholars such as Michael Hames-Garcia, Juana María Rodríguez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Ramón Rivera Servera, all of who have investigated queer Latina/o communities, relationships, and discourses.[6] Their scholarships retain the intersectional lenses of race, time, location, and sexuality to unravel histories of biopower and sexuality. The paper builds upon the models set forth by Hames-Garcia, contending that queer Latino identity is created in resistance to the “imposition of modern colonial manifestations,” such as white gay mainstream culture.[7] Furthermore, it adheres to the scholarship of queer Latina/o dance clubs laid out by La Fountain-Stokes, Rodríguez, and Servera, who suggest that the dance floor, rather than being a site of literal dancing, is more a location where colonized subjects, usually Anglo gay males, feast on the Latino-ness, or “latinidad” of the “othered” men present in the club.[8] Finally, it models oral testimonies upon historian Nan Alamilla Boyd, and the “historical narrative theory” proposed by Karen Halttunen.[9] In “Cultural History and the Challenge of Narrativity,” Halttunen calls for a “domestication of theoretical issues [about] narrativity” within the discipline of history to elaborate upon the relationships and connections between people in assembling histories.[10] This paper will construct a single narrative from several oral interviews to help uncover the queer past in the American Southwest, but should be used only as a starting point in further understanding the intricacies and intersectional nature of queer life and identity within contested borderlands between modern empires.

Before the OP: Cold War Gender Rights

In the early 1960s, the second wave of feminism permeated the United States with intellectuals such as Betty Freidan pushing for women and men to redefine gender roles by working in jobs and political spheres that were traditionally reserved for a single sex.[11] At the same time, Cold War era political and social sentiment transformed the nation’s civil rights positions, “as the primacy of anticommunism in postwar American politics and culture left a very narrow space for criticism of the status quo.”[12] Consequently, racial and sexual diversity were notions that were considered dangerous in a black/white, heterosexual society. Given the influence of the Feminist movement and the Cold War, 1960s El Paso homosexual life was hidden within “McKelligon Canyon or past the border into Mexico,” recalled Cristina Hernandez, a self-identified El Pasoan lesbian.[13] Hernandez, a fifty-five year old Mexican American, had spent her entire life in the borderlands region. The history of cruising, or driving slowly through city alleys and streets scouting for sex had been one of the main vehicles for El Paso gay men to find each other, but not lesbians.[14] Because of a lack of queer, in addition to heterosexual nightlife, El Pasoans negotiated the national boundary to experience the vibrant entertainment of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

Ever since the 1950s, Ciudad Juárez was deemed a cultural hotspot for northern Mexico and the southwest United States, hosting famous celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean who publicized their visits to the city known for its vivacious lifestyle.[15] Scholars, such as Rachel St. John, have even proposed that most northwestern Mexican border cities experienced a golden age of vice and international nightlife during the first half of the twentieth century.[16] El Paso resident Cristina Hernandez commented that before the rise of the disco era and the year 1973, Ciudad Juárez became “the city of sexual expression that lesbians could retreat to when they were not living different lives as heterosexual women in the city of sexual repression [El Paso].”[17] For several decades, El Pasoan queers not only separated their public from private lives, but also traversed the U.S.–Mexico border to fully embrace and perform their reserved sexual lives, especially when Cold War America retaliated against the conception of sexual freedom. In 1973, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission lowered the legal drinking age from 21 to 18, and “many lesbians who crossed the border for alcohol and partying could now remain within the U.S., consuming booze,” stated Hernandez.[18] Perhaps it was of no coincidence that the legal drinking age changed, as the American disco music movement was concurrently growing in tandem around the United States, “especially among Hispanic and Black demographics.”[19]

Hernandez alleged that the disco movement “brought mainstream gay culture into straight bars and clubs, allowing for lesbians and gays to return to El Paso and participate in a new [revitalized] gay nightlife.”[20] The Pet Shop, one of the first lesbian bars in El Paso history, opened sometime in the early 1970s. According to El Pasoans Yolanda Chávez Leyva and Irma Montelongo, the Pet Shop was located underground in a prewar building that would later become the San Antonio Mining Bar.[21] Leyva, a leading fifty-eight year old Chicana lesbian, moved back to the city after completing college at Austin in the 1980s. Montelongo, a native fifty-two year old El Pasoan, experienced the many changes in nightlife within the region. Leyva and Montelongo revealed that the social environment of the bar was distinct from established disco bars and clubs, as “working-class femme and butch lesbian couples made up most of the patrons and they listened to a mixture of rock and roll, blues and disco.”[22] Furthermore, Montelongo maintained that “many of the butch lesbians embodied masculinity and at times, exhibited that masculinity by engaging femme and other butch lesbians within the dance space of the establishment.”[23] Leyva stated that her first experience in the Pet Shop was surprising yet comforting: “I walked downstairs into a place where all kinds of women had the freedom to do what they wanted.”[24] The Pet Shop succeeded in attracting a large lesbian population, in part because of the revitalized El Pasoan nightlife, or in part because of the new drinking law. But most of all, because this space operated as separate venue from mainstream disco culture, providing a safe haven for lesbians to congregate and express their sexualities. Word of mouth about its success reached other parts of Texas, and soon, more “alternative” bars began to open up downtown.

Creation of the OP: Queer “El Chuco”[25]

In the mid-1970s, Dallas-based company Craven Entertainment dispatched businessman Bob Bonaventure to scout for possible alternative bar locations that would bring the lesbian, gay and hetero-disco communities together in West Texas. Bonaventure, according to friend and co-worker Jak Klinkowaski, was thought to “believe that the trade secret to gaining a large audience – whether gay and straight – was to position a large ‘alternative’ club away from other clubs.”[26] Klinkowaski, an Anglo American El Paso native, worked in many of the queer bars throughout the last decades of the twentieth century. The space Bonaventure purchased eventually led to a conversion in El Paso’s queer culture. In 1977, he discovered that 219 South Ochoa Street had become vacant, and founded the thirty-five year-old bar that would go down as one of the longest running gay establishments in West Texas: the Old Plantation (OP).[27] According to several lesbian and gay oral histories, the OP bar was mixed with both women and male patrons.[28] During its first year, the bar included “multiple performances” of “drag shows, foam parties, all girls nights and military nights,” as well as a diverse audience of “whites, blacks, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, lesbians and gays and everything else in-between,” recalled Klinkowaski.[29] The minority, Montelongo and Klinkowaski recalled, “were Anglo males,” which was understandable given the large El Paso Latina/o demographic.[30]

The OP, like the Pet Shop, became a prime location for same-sex sensual expression and intimate encounters. Montelongo mentioned that the most unique part of the bar was the “female” bathroom, where “lesbians, straight women, and drag queens congregated and interacted with each other.” She recalled that the conversations that took place were illustrative of how different each “woman” viewed fashion, boys, girls and popular culture: “I remember talking about hair, dancing and music and even learned new colloquialisms.”[31] The bar brought the queer population of El Paso together on a single dance floor, and in closed, safe spaces like the bathroom. Rodríguez suggests in her work that “in multigendered queer Latino spaces, fags and dykes, both friends and strangers, will often invite each other out on the dance floor.”[32] The OP was no exception. There finally existed a fully public venue for perceived “deviant” behaviors and identities to congregate.

After homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, it was assumed that lesbians and gays were able to express themselves with the understanding that their sexual identities were no longer classified federally as mental disorders.[33] This was not the case for the transgender community, as American psychiatrists maintained the notion that transgender identity was an illness that was synonymous with Gender-Identity Disorder (GID).[34] Susan Stryker has argued that after 1973, transgender populations throughout the U.S. felt left out of a national gay rights discourse because their identities had remained stigmatized. Stryker upheld that the transgender movement’s “politics toward the medical establishment were more like those of the reproductive freedom movement than those of the gay liberation movement.”[35] Moreover, she suggested that transgender individuals “wanted to secure access to competent, legal, respectfully provided medical services for a nonpathological need not shared equally by every member of society,” a concern that their queer sisters and brothers did not have to worry about.[36] While the political activism and awareness of lesbian and gay communities mobilized nationally and within the OP and El Paso, transgender persons still had to grapple with the reality that federal recognition and support of transsexuality would not arrive for some time.

As legal transgender legal rights idled, trans culture flourished. Klinkowaski pointed out the early 1970s were exciting due to the rise in “drag king culture and transgender participation at places like the OP.”[37] Drag kings essentially performed a gender and sexuality that was usually opposite of the drag king’s biological sex and acted gender. Thus, many drag kings were persons born with female sex organs who embodied notions of “masculinity” and contested “maleness.” Chanel, an forty-five year old Anglo American El Pasoan drag queen, or male performing femininity, stated that she “met various transgendered ‘women’ who told [Chanel] that they would perform as drag kings within the OP because other homosexuals and friends were more accepting of their lifestyles as drag queens and kings.”[38] Chanel commented that when she witnessed many transgendered females pushed to perform drag, she questioned her own desire and sexuality. Transgender persons posed a threat to the El Paso gay rights movement in that the people who represented transgender identities did not fit into the homosexual and heterosexual binary that was formed uniquely in the aftermath of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. While 1970s El Paso nightlife evolved to include more private spaces for lesbians and gays to interact, it reinforced the discrimination and overall national intolerance for the lifestyle and identity of transgender people living along and crossing the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands.

Even though the El Pasoan heterosexual population viewed the sexual conduct inside the OP bar as illicit, sexual behavior was not as polarized during the 1970s before the time of carnal epidemics. The exchange of oral and anal sex was “usually unprotected,” commented Chanel, as HIV had yet to enter society.[39] Chanel and Klinkowaski noted that while many individuals came to the bar to enjoy alcohol and disco music, others, “especially Anglo American males,” came there for sex. The two described that the place had become an outlet to “fast-track” sexual experiences. Chanel remarked that many of his “straight-identified” male friends “came to the OP, scouted out some Jorge or Guillermo [meaning any Latino looking boy], penetrated them and then left the club, never to speak to them again.”[40] The bar was an innovative dance space, not only due to the consumption of latinidad, which Rodríguez, La Fountain-Stokes and Servera articulate in their research, but also because the location operated as a space where two men, one identifying as “gay” and the other “straight,” executed sexual acts without personal knowledge of one another, but with complete anonymity and disclosure. In addition, the proximity to the national border bifurcated cultural and sexual understandings between Anglo, Latino, and other “foreign” men.

The reputation of the OP as an alternative bar would take a “moral blow,” after 1982, when Lawrence Altman described a disease that “attacked and killed homosexual men” called Gay-Related-Immune-Disorder, or GRID, in his controversial New York Times article.[41] In the words of Chanel, “it was as if everything they [bigots, heterosexuals, society] said was vindicated, our lifestyles were scientifically condemned.”[42] Thus, OP sexual politics for gay men, as Chanel pointed out, “were disrupted and sexual activity decreased in number for several weeks,” as the public waited to learn about the proper precautions in distancing oneself from contraction.[43] Still, unprotected sex occurred between various bar attendees. Chanel and Klinkowaski reaffirmed that “having unprotected sex up to 1984 was considered normal and there wasn’t the stigma that existed today.”[44] After GRID (Gay Related Immune Disease) was reclassified scientifically as HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and the use of a condom was articulated as the best defense in protecting oneself from the disease, the sexual behaviors in the bar rehabilitated with the increased use of the condom.

The erotic practice of “barebacking” also arose from the HIV/AIDS stigma in response to changes in contemporary sexual behaviors during the 1980s. At the time, many in the El Pasoan queer community were both in denial and acceptance of the possible consequences and “euphoric risks” associated with anal sex without a condom. Tim Dean historicizes and explains the phenomenon of barebacking in relation to the prejudice of homosexual life as “both the premeditation and eroticization of unprotected anal sex.”[45] Thus, barebacking was the sexual act of unprotected sex in an HIV/AIDS conscious age. Before the pandemic, Chanel engaged in unprotected sex that was synonymous with barebacking, but the action lacked the associated social and moral stigma in a post-HIV/AIDS discursive environment. Now, the “gesture” of barebacking brought intimate, political, and social underpinnings. The lens of “gesture,” first used in deconstructing queer life by Rodríguez, can also serve as another intersectional unit in investigating queer behaviors. She explains gesture as “a socially legible and highly codified form of kinetic communication, and as a cultural practice that is differentially manifested through particular forms of embodiment.”[46] Hence, the gesture and practice of barebacking was politically charged.

In The Subculture of Barebacking, Dean revealed that the notion of hypermasculinity was associated with the exchange of semen during gay bareback sex as “hypermasculinity accrues to the man who assumes what used to be thought of as the female role in homosexual relations. The more men by whom one is penetrated, the more of a man he becomes.”[47] Chanel and Klinkowaski stated that barebacking held an inimitable attraction for them: “it felt good before, but now raw sex felt more intimate and deeper,” explained Chanel.[48] Sex between two participants of the same gender altered structures of power, control and masculinity. Furthermore, kinship became the ultimate result rather than the consumption of more masculinity, as the entrance of sexual risk made the act of sex more dangerous. Dean argued that bareback subculture’s hypermasculinization of bottoming, “its picturing erotic submission as a proof of manhood could be seen as a compensatory response to modern society’s feminization of male homosexuality.” Dean’s contention is corroborated by the testimonies taken from various attendees of the OP, and fits the categorization of gesture, which Rodríguez unpacks in her research.[49]

While the entrance of GRID and later HIV/AIDS reformed club attendance, sexual practices as well as understandings of sexual identities at the OP, the bar still became a landmark of El Paso queer culture. The bar featured weekends where “events were either sold out or near occupancy level,” remembered Klinkowaski. The OP, unlike other night clubs like The Pet Shop, attracted “the most diverse clientele out of all the clubs” as “Blacks, Whites, Cholos, and Drag Queens all shared the dance floor,” something various queer residents were not accustomed to seeing in El Paso.[50] Attendance was high at the bar, and popularity only increased over time. Eventually, Bonaventure realized that his bar was too small to accommodate El Paso’s queer and “straight” audience, and decided to move it to a larger venue. In 1985, he found an open lot across the street at 301 S. Ochoa Street.[51] The New Old Plantation as Bonaventure called it was advertised as “bigger, better and operated by gays and lesbians.”[52] The OP’s move added more publicity and audience to the nightclub, and its existence was now fully recognized and felt throughout El Paso. Chanel stated that “tipping,” or the process of drag queens engaging in sexual acts with white and black military men, increased as the New OP’s building had two floors where individuals could retreat to and maintain a sense of privacy. As the dance space of the New OP was split between different stories, people could choose their crowd and ambience. Chanel remembered the sexual politics, and “gestures” of the club:

Younger boys situated themselves at the focal point of the dance floor while older men circulated the periphery, scouting for any men. And if he had luck, he and his boy would go upstairs and move to a corner to either make out, or perform oral sex.[53]

Klinkowaski similarly recalled:

I remember the girls’ bathroom was where to hookup, mainly because its where all the trannies went. And it also helped that it was ‘cleaner,’ not just in hygiene but some trannies were ‘Poz’ [HIV-Positive] and therefore always used condoms.[54]

It became apparent that while the club featured the same demographics of the original OP, sexual encounters and meetings were executed in new spaces in the two-story gay discotheque. Simultaneously, the anal sex that was performed in the dark corners and bathrooms of the New OP was split between barebacking and protected sex, whether or not knowledge of HIV/AIDS was present.

The club’s dance floors allowed for multiple performativities of gender and sexuality in comparison to its original, which was styled more as a bar than a nightclub. While Klinkowaski and Chanel mentioned that “straight” men came to find young Latino males, Mexican Americans and Mexican-nationals from Ciudad Juárez also interacted with the “heterosexual” men. The space of the club had perhaps transcended nation as well as ethnicity. Adrian Gutierrez, another gay attendee during the early 80s, noted that “the only reason why the OP was different was the inclusion of Anglo straight acting men.”[55] Gutierrez, a forty-nine year old contractor for the U.S. Army Military Beaumont Medical Center, was a teenager when the OP first opened. Gutierrez revealed that many of the men he had sex with from the OP were enlisted soldiers who were usually single but mentioned that a couple of them were married to women and had children. He believed the “rush and taboo” associated with sleeping with “straight men” made the act attractive in addition to barebacking.

Gutierrez stated that “masculine” or “straight acting men” were most desirable for gays, mainly because they embodied a masculinity and sexuality that he and his friends envied and craved. The club transformed into a site of contact for consumption(s) of masculinity between distinct parties; in Gutierrez’s case, he received the thrill of being with a “straight” man, which informed his sense of manliness. More interestingly is that his Anglo sexual partners gained something particularly special in return: consumption of latinidad, or alternative masculinity, that he (the military male) had eroticized and “othered” onto Gutierrez. Historian George Chauncey has explored a similar sexual exchange of masculinity between effeminate “fairies” and more masculine “queers” in New York City; the difference in the case of the OP and Gutierrez was that ethnicity and race were also exchanged between sexual partners.[56] Using the theories set forth by Hames-Garcia, Gutierrez also desired Anglo military men because of the innate “modern colonial power dynamic” that epistemically thwarted Gutierrez into desiring kinship from colonizers.[57] But Rodríguez believes that scholars must think of consuming latinidad as a practice of reaffirming agency for the consumed Latina/o. She contends that “rather than attempt to redeem or erase our [Latina/o] experiences of violence and violation, register the possibility of recovering pleasure in the shame of abjection, a sexual pleasure that engages the sexual submission demanded of racialized subjects.”[58] In applying Rodríguez, the exchange of racial fetishization serves both parties.

It is notable that the impact of Fort Bliss and its men held a unique position in terms of the behavior of people who attended the club. The presence of Fort Bliss had long been felt before the opening of the OP in 1977. Historian Leon C. Metz writes that Fort Bliss was founded in response to the U.S. War with Mexico during 1848, citing that the U.S. Department of War felt the need to form a military post to occupy and protect the area opposite Mexico’s Paso Del Norte.[59] Fort Bliss was created at a time when Mexican-nationals and Anglo Americans fought a borderless conflict. And for over a century, the fort was steadily growing, and represented a facet of the past and presence of military history. When the original OP opened, this military presence had already existed and was over a hundred years old. According to the 1960 through 2000 censuses, the size of the Fort Bliss military population had progressively increased through time, with a total population of 8,286 persons or 1,444 households and families by 2000.[60] That figure did not include troops who arrived at the fort for deployment overseas, government contractors, or El Pasoan hired workers, which would bring the population number to over 30,000. Moreover, it did not include troops who arrived to the area for a two-week briefing before deployment to Asia.

Klinkowaski, Chanel, and Gutierrez, revealed in their oral interviews that the OP’s dance stage was filled with military personnel: “we began to see not only whites and Latinos, but also Middle Eastern men who informed us that they were employed by the U.S. military as contractors.”[61] Why did the OP environment attract so many agents of the state? In one of the interviews with an enlisted soldier who wanted to remain anonymous, it was noted that the club became the “only homosocial space where we [anonymous] could be intimate with each other and acknowledge our sexualities. Being on post [Fort Bliss] everyday takes a toll on you, as you must act straight-edged all the time in an environment that is dominated only by men.”[62] The atmosphere of the club was much like that of Fort Bliss; the difference was that one’s sexuality and behavior was not judged and embraced on the OP dance ground and in the closed spaces of the facility.

The last few oral histories that this author conducted were with servicewomen that were referred to by other club owners. Based on several testimonies from anonymous military women who moved to Fort Bliss in the early 1990s, there indeed existed a large lesbian servicewoman community. One respondent stated that “lesbian and bisexual life was easy to navigate at the OP and other alternative bars like Nua Nua, the San Antonio Mining and the Whatever Lounge because they had been distanced enough from the military base.”[63] The same female army soldier stated that she was looking for femme lesbians, and commented that the club was the best place to find mostly femme, Latina lesbians. Another female army officer regarded the Whatever Lounge as her favorite spot because she looked for both femme as well as butch lesbians. When asked if they saw or met any transgendered persons, both women replied no, suggesting that the “transgendered people they did see in the 1990s were able to transition and perform in full gender,” thus making them lesbian or gay rather than transgender in the women’s eyes.[64] Before the use of the Internet, several spaces within downtown El Paso operated as meeting points for lesbian servicewomen.

The two female military officers also knew from other female colleagues before they were stationed to Fort Bliss that the lesbian culture had grown increasingly throughout El Paso since the late 1970s.[65] The women confirmed that they felt a sense of “unanimity because they had the luxury of separating their public lives as military servicewomen from their lesbian lifestyles in downtown as their work would never leave the gates of Fort Bliss and into the larger, civilian El Paso.”[66] While lesbian life was not exposed publicly on Fort Bliss, lesbian state agents migrated downtown, in the same way that 1960s El Pasoan lesbians traveled to Ciudad Juárez. The presence of Fort Bliss had a significant influence on the demographic that attended the OP. Chanel reiterated that “because the OP featured new and exotic men who wanted men, it became even more of a popular nightclub.”[67] The original and New OP channeled sexual politics that reflected more national discourses concerning not only mainstream Anglo gay culture, but also racial and ethnic tensions and desires.

New Leadership at the OP: The Decline of Queer “El Chuco”

In 1986, Klinkowaski left the employment of the New OP and Bonaventure eventually sold his club to its current owners, Jesus Santillan and his partner Gilbert Morales. Under the leadership of Santillan and Morales, who also owned The San Antonio Mining Cluband The Whatever Lounge, the use of social media was employed, as they advertised their New OP through magazines such as El Paso 411, a local digest.[68] In the 1990s, the two men achieved more publicity by promoting the club in West Texas queer publications such as 1994’s El Paso PRIDE and 1999’s Microcosm El Paso/Juarez, which were circulated throughout El Paso, Las Cruces, and Ciudad Juárez.[69] Klinkowaski and Chanel continued to visit the OP during milestone events, such as the “Halloween costume garty,” and the New Year’s Eve party, both of which were usually heavily attended.[70] The owners contended that during the 1990s, they began to see “a decrease in attendance to the OP, as the clubs on Stanton Street were more popular and more people cruised them.”[71] During the early 1990s, newer gay clubs began opening on Stanton Street, an area located directly in the heart of downtown El Paso. Klinkowaski and Chanel believed that because of the creation of a “pride square that featured new and upcoming clubs such as 8 and ½,Chiquita’s,and The Briar Patch,” there was less of an impetus to return to the other side of downtown to visit the OP.[72]

At the time when queer individuals and interested heterosexuals had a choice in attending different alternative clubs, Santillan and Morales decided to advertise the club as a space that featured an exclusively gay male clientele by appealing to the majority-male, military community. Marketing was again spread through word of mouth, but also through El Paso 411, and queer publications like PRIDE.[73]The new owners not only had to compete with other gay and lesbian bars and clubs, however, but also had to remain knowledgeable of current trends and fads in popular culture that they could incorporate into their gay male nightclub. In one interview with a source affiliated with the New OP who wished to remain anonymous, the New OP tried hosting events, which aimed to spark the interest of younger males as well as portraying a nostalgic 1970s theme such as disco to the older crowd. Thus, themes like “July All Red White Blue Block Party,” and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Dance” were commonplace at the club.[74] The argued result was that the OP would see a return of past attendees. The actual effect, however, was a dwindling attendance rate, especially since the owners mainly appealed to gay males and interested heterosexuals.

The process of recreating a male homosocial gay club by projecting Anglo military culture as caricature is similar to the notions of Jasbir Puar’s ascendency of whiteness and larger homonational projects. As Puar writes, the “national homosexual subject,” who has historically been a white Anglo male, “seeks to dismantle any foreign homosexual culture or politic,” and impose a uniformed Anglo homonormativity that “aims to destroy any sexual-racial other that does not adhere to whiteness.”[75] The themed events that Santillan and Morales constructed illustrated how beliefs of imposing homonational sentiment in the OP would assist in attracting a larger male audience. Gutierrez notes that during the 90s, “many mid-aged men lost interest in the OP and the club was more populated with young under-21-year-olds and older, white Anglo and African American military men.”[76] The multiculturalness and diversity of the OP shifted to Hames-Garcia’s epitome of “modern colonial” systems, where military men exoticized not only the colonized, Latino-ness of the younger men, but also their gayness that did not prescribe to the hegemonic, homonationalist model of queer identity that the military men understood.[77] And so, as the military presence on Fort Bliss increased through the 1990s, so too did the Anglo male attendance at the club.

The 2000s “saw a steady interest back into the New OP, increased participation in queer events like Mr. Pride Texas, and its citywide collaboration with El Paso Sun City Pride” during June Pride Fest, revealed Klinkowaski.[78] Chanel stated that with the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 “much more Puerto Rican and African American vets were seen in the club,” something that they recall was “new and called attention in the gay community.”[79] When asked how they knew these men were veterans, Chanel responded that “their straight edged-ness with distinct military haircuts, which were usually short fades, pinpointed them as vets.”[80] The sexual encounters in the OP throughout the 2000s were “militarized” due to the increased attendance from wartime soldiers. Santillan and Morales had succeeded in revitalizing the level of male attendance at their club vis-à-vis homonational propaganda. Puar argues that homonationalism is a byproduct and symptom of war-related sentiment and emerges in response to “terrorist assemblages and attacks upon notions of citizenship, identity and sexuality.”[81] The Iraq War and the proximity of Fort Bliss to the New OP reasserted the need for military men to escape the government land and perform their same-sex desires with Mexican-national and Mexican American males. Homonationalism and a post-9/11 Anglo gay identity, however, became difficult to completely impose in a border city, as many of the non-military attendees who entered the club “were mixed, bilingual and lived separate lives as Mexican Americans and as jotos (fags),” declared Gutierrez.[82]

Santillan and Morales began to employ new social media outlets that had never been accessed before, such as MySpace and eventually Facebook, to maintain the slowly growing interest in their decades-old club.[83] The posters the two circulated in downtown El Paso and on social media websites employed images of queer military men to attract the various demographics the OP had seen in attendance during the early 1980s. They commissioned these images and concepts from the late 1990s until the 2010s. The themes associated with these documents illustrated the appeal and fixation for Anglo military personnel. In a study of archived posters produced by the owners of the OP, one can view how these advertisements conflated traditional images such as the military uniform and colors reminiscent of national holidays, such as Labor Day, with queer themes. Moreover, veterans who revealed their military IDs at the door received free admission.[84] Santillan and Morales hoped that by appealing and commodifying the military to the OP’s diverse clientele, the club would remain busy or at least regain its historic demographic of military men and El Paso Latinos. Images of army men illustrated the masculinity Gutierrez, Klinkowaski, and Chanel desired. At the same time, these images and others like them, reminded the spectator of a fantasy: sexual activities with the colonizer, an idea that “aroused” young men like Gutierrez. The backdrop of the Iraq War persuaded Santillan and Morales to recreate homonational imagery to attract a once popular demographic back to the New OP. Gutierrez surmised that many of the soldiers he met and slept with eventually left Fort Bliss and arrived to the club to forget the duties of a serviceman during war times.

Homonational imagery, the aesthetic that Santillan and Morales tried to embed in their club, succeeded in drawing gay males from the city, Northern Mexico, and Fort Bliss. But it could no longer contain El Paso’s ever growing queer identity of lesbians and other gay men. The U.S.-Mexico border and Fort Bliss functioned as catalysts in assisting Latina/o lesbians and gays to break free from “white Anglo gay culture and identity,” and embrace a queerness that exceeded the narrow categorization that Santillan and Morales tried to incubate. Over time, the OP no longer became a club for gays, but “for allies and everything in-between.”[85] After thirty-five years of evolution, El Paso queer identity metamorphosed. The original and New OP was a bar, and later a club, that illustrated the power, gender, and sexual politics that would raise and harness the uniqueness and interchangeability of borderland sexual identities and behaviors.

The New OP officially shut down on October 27, 2012.[86] No official word has been given to why Santillan and Morales suddenly closed it doors. Online social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook allowed El Pasoans of all generations to comment on the legacy the club left on the city.[87]

Conclusion

In the history of U.S. sexuality, scholars have contended that the lesbian, gay, and transgender past grew in tandem with the Civil Rights era, blossomed during the Stonewall Riots and took shape through the 1970s and 1980s. This paper argued that in borderland cities with predominately Latina/o populations like El Paso, scholars must examine sexuality and the story of LGBT movements through multiple intersectional lenses and academic methodologies to further elucidate the contested history of queer peoples. The original and New OP provided the first long-standing alternative public space for folks of all sexual identifications in the bordered, bicultural city of El Paso. Bonaventure built a bar that staged music and sexual trends, which were in conversation with the national sexual movements of the U.S. from the 1970s to the 2010s. Sexual behaviors and identities transformed, however, with the entrance of HIV/AIDS and war, as attendees altered sexual acts based on national stigma, homonational imagery, and wartime sentiment. The dance floor of the OP came to represent colonial, racial, and ethnic consumptions between Anglos and Latina/os, gay males, and men who have sex with men, military personnel and civilians. Even more, the themes and commercialization of the OP revealed the interconnectedness between its political assemblages and sexual norms. After thirty-five years, the old and the New Old Plantation stood as a testament to the construction of community spaces and most especially, racial and ethnic fetishisms within the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. Queer nightlife did reside in the American Southwest, fighting local, national, and international normative discourses of gender and sexuality. The principal border for queer communities and individuals situated along the U.S.-Mexico national boundary is the borderland called their sexuality.

The post This Borderland Called My Sexuality: Excavating Queer Nightlife of the American Southwest Through the Lens of Intersectionality appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

1. Les palimpsestes verbo-culturels de Mai 68 : une analyse lexi-culturelle des médias

Dans cet article, le mot-clé « événement » est presque un synonyme du mot « parole », d’où mon attention à la lexiculture, qui représente l’une des méthodologies de recherche les plus actuelles permettant d’analyser la culture d’une communauté, justement, par son système sémiotique, c’est?à?dire le langage. Galisson définit les expressions que nous prenons en considération ici comme des « palimpsestes verbaux » obtenus par la « délexicalisation » de l’énoncé de base et sa substitution par un « sur?énoncé », devenant ainsi des révélateurs culturels, donc des « palimpsestes verbo-culturel » (P.V.C.). Seul celui qui vit dans la même « sémiosis sociale » peut les reconnaître, d’où l’existence d’une « identité collective » qui « possède le mystérieux pouvoir d’agréger, de solidariser, d’aider à vivre ensemble des individus qui se reconnaissent en elle (implicitement, ou explicitement)[1] ». Dans la société française, Mai 68 semble ne pas être tombé dans l’oubli[2] et de nombreux interlocuteurs partagent encore sa mémoire… discursive. Cette section propose une analyse lexicale de huit de ces P.V.C.

• « Sous LE PAVÉ… (la page) »

Il s’agit titre d’un site Web d’une coopérative dont le but est l’éducation populaire, enjeu d’éducation au politique et au social. Elle enseigne à « prendre conscience de l’importance de se révolter » et de « s’entendre sur les mots[3] ». Le P.V.C. dérive du sous-énoncé « sous les pavés, la plage », par une délexicalisation avec filiation phonique et avec modification par suppression phonémique (plage à page). On remarque une transformation du nom, du pluriel au singulier, et du caractère graphique conférant de l’importance au terme « pavé », ainsi qu’une substitution d’un nom commun à un autre (plage à page); les points de suspension et les parenthèses sont ajoutés. Bien plus, il faut remarquer la polysémie du terme « pavé » (défini de façon dépréciative comme un gros livre), à partir de laquelle un jeu de mot s’établit. Le « pavé » fait appel à la « page », créant une synecdoque et véhiculant le message principal de l’association : l’éducation populaire pour créer les bases de la compréhension du monde capitaliste afin de le démanteler, en donnant importance aux « pages de la vie » de chaque citoyen.

• « Sous les pavés, Libé… mais sous la pluie, rien de nouveau »

La source médiatique de ce P.V.C. est un article du 18 avril 2008, « France Inter célèbre Mai 68… à sa manière »[4]. Il s’agit de sous?titres à deux paragraphes de l’article. Les sous-énoncés en question sont « sous les pavés, la plage » et « rien de nouveau sous le soleil ».Ce palimpseste est fort intéressant, car on peut l’interpréter de deux façons. Si on le considère comme une expression unique, alors il s’agit d’un palimpseste-amalgame qui mélange les deux sous-énoncés ci-dessus, tandis que si on les considère comme deux palimpsestes séparés, les remarques à faire sont multiples. Le premier est une modification de l’originel par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et avec déstructuration syntaxique : le nom commun est remplacé par un nom propre (plage à Libé), abréviation de Libération. Le deuxième est toujours une delexicalisation, sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique, mais avec une inversion des syntagmes par rapport à l’expression originelle, créant ainsi un parallèle avec le palimpseste précédent. Or, puisque la lexiculture nous permet de jouer avec les mots, pourquoi ne pas voir dans le célèbre « nihil novi sub sole », en français « rien de nouveau sous le soleil », une source d’inspiration qui arrive à Bernard Cousin pour créer son slogan, « sous les pavés, la plage » ?

• « Sous les pavés, des bulles »

La source médiatique de ce P.V.C. est une émission télévisée sur Mai 68, diffusée sur Public Senat le 2 mai 2008. Le sous-énoncé est encore une fois « sous les pavés, la plage », transformé par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique, vu que le nom « plage » est remplacé par un autre nom de la même catégorie, « bulles ». La seule différence est dans le nombre et dans le partitif qui suggèrent l’idée d’une quantité considérable et indéfinie, en opposition à l’idée de la « plage », déterminée et définie. Au-delà des déterminatifs employés, les deux énoncés jouent sur leur signification connotative : le sous-énoncé définit le caractère imaginaire et lyrique de Mai 68, alors que le P.V.C. renvoie, par une relation métonymique, à la création des bandes dessinées auxquelles l’émission télévisée a consacré un Spécial Mai 68. Les bulles représentent donc les BD ressorties de l’action à la fois révolutionnaire et poétique déroulée sur la rue, dont le pavé est le symbole. Il faut donc remarquer un même rapport symétrique des énoncés aux niveaux non seulement linguistique et grammatical, mais aussi au niveau de la signification, ce qui exige un travail d’abstraction et d’imagination, rappelant toujours l’atmosphère de Mai 68.

Dans cette catégorie il y a d’autres P.V.C., comme « sous les pavés la terre », « sous les pavés, le design », « sous les pavés, la grève » ou « sous les pavés, l’underground ».

• « Pour consommer sans entraves »

Ce P.V.C. se retrouve dans un article intitulé « Que reste-t-il de 68 ? » dans Le nouvel Observateur. Il contient un entretien avec Daniel Cohn?Bendit et Luc Ferry, écrit le 17 janvier 2008 et inséré dans un dossier spécial sur Mai 68.Le sous-énoncé est« pour jouir sans entraves », qui subit une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique. Le verbe « jouir » est remplacé par un mot de la même catégorie grammaticale, c’est?à-dire le verbe « consommer ». Et c’est à partir de ce verbe que l’on peut saisir la critique que Luc Ferry lance envers les événements de Mai 68, qui ont été pour lui « la première grande libération de la société de consommation de masse ». Le P.V.C. s’insère en effet dans un cotexte qui révèle un ton plus que critique sur le concept de « consommation », créant des champs sémantiques opposés, celui de la « destruction » et celui de la « révolution ». Du dernier font partie les mots « mouvement », « valeurs », « libération » et « lutte », alors que du premier font partie les termes « casser », « destruction » et « déconstruction ». De plus, il faut noter que le sème « libération » pourrait appartenir aux deux champs sémantiques, mais sa collocation dans la structure de la phrase confirme la critique de l’énonciateur, Luc Ferry, associant au terme « libération » une idée négative. De fait, si Mai 68 a toujours été défini comme un mouvement de libération des valeurs culturelles et morales, pour Ferry il s’agit d’une « libération de la société de consommation de masse » ou encore d’« une révolution de futurs consommateurs qui changeront de portable tous les six mois ». La phrase en question est ainsi structurée :

Mai 68 a été un mouvement non pas de lutte contre la société de consommation, mais la première grande libération de la société de consommation de masse.

À travers la rhétorique de la négativité et la particule adversative, Luc Ferry oppose deux idées contrastantes : ce que Mai 68 aurait dû être, c’est?à?dire une « lutte contre » la consommation de masse, et ce qui au lieu se serait réellement passé, c’est?à?dire une « libération » de la consommation de masse.

Ce n’est donc pas un hasard si l’émetteur change le verbe « jouir » avec le verbe « consommer », conférant au slogan un ton de moquerie et de critique.

• « La culture c’est la chienlit »

Il s’agit d’un slogan tiré d’une photo d’un blog personnel qui se réfère à une manifestation de protestation de la part des Verts contre une émission de télé?réalité dans le troisième arrondissement de Paris, « Star’ac »[5]. Le sous-énoncé « la chienlit, c’est lui » est transformé par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et sans déstructuration syntaxique dans la première partie de l’énoncé. Ainsi, le nom commun « chienlit » est remplacé par un nom de la même catégorie, « culture », tandis que, dans la deuxième partie, on assiste à une déstructuration syntaxique par laquelle le pronom « lui » est remplacé par un nom commun « chienlit ». Entre le sous-énoncé et le P.V.C., un chiasme se crée, changeant d’ordre les termes de l’expression : dans la source, c’est le terme « chienlit » qui est mis en évidence en incarnant la figure de Charles de Gaulle, à l’époque critiquée par les soixante-huitards, tandis que dans le P.V.C. le terme en évidence est la « culture » considérée après comme « chienlit ». Ce rapprochement est une évidente dénonciation de ce type d’émission, (de télé?réalité), proposée comme « culturelle » mais qui en réalité est l’exaspération de la société de consommation contemporaine. Bien évidemment, le procédé, tout à fait ironique, utilisé par les énonciateurs est basé sur l’antiphrase : ils affirment le faux pour sous?entendre leur critique féroce d’un type de « culture », jugée déviante, et contre ses partisan. Ce sont ces derniers qui auraient transformé la culture en une mascarade, une véritable « chienlit ».

Dans cette catégorie, il faut rappeler aussi l’expression « La chienlit, c’est Sarkozy ».

• « L’imagination prend la Bastille »

C’est le titre d’un reportage sur la marche pour une sixième République[6]. Le sous-énoncé « l’imagination prend le pouvoir » est reformulé par une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et avec déstructuration syntaxique d’un nom commun à un nom propre, indiquant une institution publique. La Bastille est interprétée par l’historiographie comme un symbole historique de liberté et de révolution. Au moment de la Révolution française, elle symbolisait le pouvoir despotique du Roi, qui l’employait comme prison. Le 14 juillet 1789, le peuple français l’occupe et la détruit, d’où la célébration de ce jour comme fête nationale. Malgré sa destruction, le mythe de la Bastille existe aujourd’hui encore, constituant donc une mémoire à la fois historique et discursive, et très forte puisqu’on parle de révolution. Dans ce reportage, en fait, on prépare une marche symbolique vers la « Bastille », donc vers la liberté, et les instruments les plus utilisés sont les slogans, réhabilitant le style de Mai 68, tels que « Nous, on peut », « J’ai des mots à faire défiler », ou le titre de l’émission.

• « Obama, nous sommes tous des Oussama »

La source médiatique de ce P.V.C. est un article de Libération datant du 14 septembre 2012, écrit à la suite d’une tentative d’assaut de l’ambassade américaine à Tunis par des salafistes protestant contre le film américain « L’innocence des Musulmans »[7]. Ce palimpseste donne le titre à l’article, mais c’est aussi un slogan crié par un manifestant lors de l’assaut.

Le célèbre sous-énoncé en question est « nous sommes tous des juifs allemands » qui subit une délexicalisation sans filiation phonique et avec déstructuration syntaxique, de fait la modification voit le passage d’un adjectif (dans ce cas deux, « juifs » et « allemands ») à un nom propre, « Oussama ». De plus, il y a des transformations ultérieures dans l’énoncé : les énonciateurs ajoutent à leur slogan le nom propre, Obama, président de l’Amérique qui rime avec Oussama, prénom de Ben Laden, en créant une rime interne et donnant une structure circulaire à l’énoncé.Le cri de solidarité que les soixante-huitards avaient crié à Daniel Cohn?Bendit se transforme en un cri de révolte et de défense de leur religion de la part des Musulmans salafistes[8]. Ce slogan évoque toujours une idée d’union et de solidarité qui peut s’élargir bien évidemment au journaliste qui l’a d’ailleurs choisi comme titre de son article. Outre la provocation faite réellement par les Musulmans contre les Américains, je pourrais y voir aussi la solidarité de certains Français, en premier le journaliste et le journal Libération, s’exprimant contre l’islamophobie.

Suivant cet exemple, je peux citer aussi « Nous sommes tous des Arabes[9] », « Nous sommes tous la France[10] » et « Nous sommes tous Américains[11] ».

• « Nous sommes là pour boire »

Il s’agit d’un slogan pour la campagne publicitaire du vin de la région Languedoc-Roussillon, l’une des plus grandes productrices de vins au monde, par la vaste extension de son vignoble totalisant une surface de 40 000 hectares.Le sous-énoncé « Nous sommes le pouvoir » est modifié par une délexicalisation avec filiation phonique et avec modification par fragmentation morphemique basée sur une assonance entre le mot « boire » et le syntagme « là pour boire ».Au niveau linguistique, l’énoncé évoque une masse, désignée par le déictique subjectif « nous », prête à l’action, à l’acte de boire : le ton du P.V.C. transmet une idée d’exigence qui, hors de parallélisme, peut vouloir faire l’éloge de la qualité du vin très demandée et mettre en évidence la grandeur, en termes d’extension physique aussi, de la production de vin, tout cela souligné par ce jeu phonique basé sur l’assonance entre le verbe « boire » et le terme « pouvoir ».

Sans être en mesure de donner une quantité considérable d’exemples, mais du moins satisfaisante pour le but établi, je peux constater que les expressions liées à Mai 68 sont nombreuses : en particulier, me fait réfléchir la provenance de ces P.V.C. soit dans des sites Web reconnus et officiels, soit dans des journaux plus périphériques ou bien des blogs personnels, ce qui confirme l’actualité de l’événement, malgré les décennies passées. Il a pénétré dans la culture des Français, puisqu’il fait partie d’une étape sociale et historique fondamentale pour l’Hexagone. Évidemment, Mai 68 est non seulement descendu dans la rue, mais il y est resté! Bien plus, selon le deuxième axe de ma réflexion, qui essaie de saisir le lien entre culture et médias, ces derniers sont vus comme porteurs de réalité sociale et donc de bagage culturel et historique de chaque peuple. Les P.V.C. en sont un exemple significatif.

2. Mai 68 et sa mémoire discursive dans les médias : les mots-événements

À propos du lien entre culture et médias, Sophie Moirand, soulignant l’importance du concept de « culture partagée », a postulé l’existence d’une « mémoire des mots » « voyageant aucours du temps, d’une communauté à une autre et d’une époque à une autre » selon l’orientation dialogique de Bakhtine, et que « tout membre d’une collectivité parlante ne trouve pas des mots neutres libres des appréciations ou des orientations d’autrui, amis des mots habités par des voix autres[12] ». Dans un autre travail, la chercheuse insiste sur le fait que les mots définissent l’événement et l’inscrivent dans un imaginaire commun grâce à la fonction des médias :

Ce ne sont pas les interlocuteurs qui interagissent directement dans la presse, mais les textes, les énoncés, les mots eux-mêmes, les titres, les photos, les dessins de presse, avec les discours qu’ils transportent, ceux qu’ils anticipent et ceux qu’ils rencontrent sur l’aire de la page… Les discours des médias sont essentiellement des discours « médiateurs » d’autres discours[13].

Elle nous montre la force énonciative des textes médiatiques et leur interdisciplinarité, car on peut étudier les textes d’un point de vue non seulement linguistique, mais culturel et sociologique. Charaudeau a postulé l’existence d’un modèle socio-communicationnel du discours où existe un « contrat médiatique[14] » basé sur « l’information » et la « captation » liant le texte au lecteur : le texte médiatique doit informer et en même temps capturer l’attention de son lecteur par l’emploi d’un langage, dirions-nous, « séduisant » qui fasse appel à un imaginaire, culturel et linguistique, collectif. L’approche de la chercheuse Moirand, soutenue par les thèses du professeur Charaudeau, se prête donc bien à l’analyse du langage de Mai 68 qui a envahi le domaine médiatique et qui révèle la complexité non seulement du discours médiatique même, mais des mécanismes socio-culturels qui en dérivent. L’événement Mai 68 est repris dans la presse d’aujourd’hui imposant sa majesté historique à travers un fonctionnement intertextuel, confirmant encore une fois le pouvoir de la parole sauvage, agissante et révolutionnaire qui encore au XXI^e siècle ne cesse de faire irruption dans la vie sociale de l’Hexagone.

Dans cette partie, j’analyserai un corpus de cinq articles de presse, évidemment groupés autour du moment discursif de Mai 68 dont l’air se fait sentir au long des textes à travers les mots-événements. Ils datent de 2007 à 2012 et ils concernent des sujets d’actualité variés.

2.2 Analyse du corpus

Le premier article, écrit en 2007 et paru dans Le monde diplomatique,explique le scénario du documentaire « LIP, l’imagination au pouvoir » sur un mouvement ouvrier en avril 1973. Bien évidemment, le contenu se prête à la réhabilitation, presque spontanée, dirions-nous, des mots?événements de Mai 68 : de fait, l’annonce des licenciements de l’usine LIP déclenche la révolte où les acteurs principaux sont les ouvriers, les syndicats et les patrons, et qui mieux que ceux-ci peuvent réhabiliter la mémoire de Mai ? Au cours du texte, l’auteur semble utiliser des mots qui attestent son savoir sur Mai 68, comme « grève », « camarades », « ouvriers », et de certaines expressions aussi, notamment « tout est possible » rappelant l’atmosphère de rêverie et de lutte soixante?huitarde. Au premier paragraphe, on lit :

le syndicaliste ouvrier Charles Piaget se montre hostile à la grève. Il préfère que ses camarades freinent le rythme des machines et celui des mains ; mais« ils avaient tellement les cadences dans la peau que c’était pas possible de ralentir ». Ils arrêtèrent de travailler dix minutes par heure.

L’image du rythme des « machines » et des « cadences » incessantes n’est?elle pas un écho direct aux revendications des ouvriers de l’époque ? Les mots deviennent donc symbole d’intertextualité d’un slogan soixante?huitard « BRISONS LES VIEUX ENGRENAGES » : il rappelle l’image des engrenages qui roulent sans cesse et écrasent l’homme. Les « usines », au centre de la contestation de Mai, reviennent au cours du texte à côté d’un autre slogan, « tu n’as pas besoin de lui », se référant au « patron » qui, avec « l’ouvrier » et les « camarades », définissent les acteurs concernés dans ce type d’événement. Ce qui est intéressant, selon mon interprétation, c’est la présence d’une phrase que l’auteur a voulu mettre exprès pour stimuler la mémoire du lecteur envers Mai 68, c’est?à?dire « y compris sur les plages ». L’extrait se poursuit ainsi :

Que faire de toutes ces montres ? On décide de les vendre et de remettre en route l’usine pour en produire de nouvelles, cette fois sans patron (« tu n’as pas besoin de lui »). La vente est un énorme succès, y compris sur les plages.

Il est évident que les montres de l’usine LIP à Besançon ne sont effectivement pas vendues sur les plages, (même si personne ne pourrait l’empêcher !); par contre, leur image m’a spontanément renvoyée au célèbre slogan « sous les pavés, la plage » et à la rêverie et à la puissance que les soixante-huitards confiaient au pavé, leur symbole de révolte, ce qui donne une identité culturelle au texte.

L’idée de rêverie mène à un autre article qui tisse un réseau de mots?événements sur Mai 68. Déjà le titre, « Sur les pavés, le pochoir », considéré lui-même comme un P.V.C.[15], plonge le lecteur dans cette « sous-culture » : la proposition « sur », renvoyant à la superficie du pavé, confirme l’idée de matérialité et de créativité, puisque l’article suggère des techniques pour dessiner sur les murs et décorer la rue. D’où l’emploi du terme « pochoir », l’instrument privilégié par l’illustratrice Keri Smith et auteure du guide Réveillez la rue! Idées, astuces et outils pour embellir le quotidien. Si, dans l’énoncé?source, le pavé est lié à la plage par une dimension presque onirique, dans le P.V.C. sa signification réside pour la plupart dans sa dimension dénotative : le pavé est au service d’un instrument concret, le « pochoir », qui déclenche de toute façon l’imagination et encourage les gens à pratiquer l’art de la rue. Le titre du livre renvoie donc à Mai 68 et à l’endroit le plus « massacré », c’est?à?dire la rue. D’autres désignations, comme par exemple « graffiti », « murs », « imagination » et « beauté ». Évidemment, ce dernier me rappelle le célèbre slogan, « la beauté est dans la rue ». Cette forme verbale s’unifie à d’autres au cours du texte, comme par exemple « créer de la beauté », « disséminer de petits mots poétiques » et enfin le titre même du livre « réveillez la rue », ce qui désigne le moment discursif de Mai 68 et en particulier son aspect à la fois lyrique et réactionnaire.

Cet aspect est repris dans un autre article tiré de Libération et publié le 20 mars 2010, « La jeunesse kurde prend le maquis[16] », où reviennent les mêmes acteurs des articles précédents, comme par exemple « camarades » et « jeunes », ainsi que d’autres mots?événements qui désignent Mai 68, à savoir « actions », « cocktails Molotov » ou « guérilla ». Dans ce cas aussi, il s’agit d’un P.V.C. dont le sujet est repris dans l’image de « jeunes camarades » qui rejoignent la guérilla kurde pour prendre le maquis. Il est intéressant de remarquer que non seulement le journaliste réhabilite l’imaginaire de Mai 68, notamment dans le titre de l’article, mais les témoignages des jeunes manifestants confirment l’idée que derrière chaque action révolutionnaire le souvenir de Mai 68 est bien fort, d’ailleurs les mots le confirment. En guise d’illustration, voici des extraits de l’article en question :

« Mon fils a 14 ans. De temps en temps, il participait avec ses camarades de classe aux manifestations dans le centre?ville. Il ne parlait pas beaucoup avec nous. Un soir, il n’est pas rentré à la maison. On était inquiets. Je suis allé voir ses camarades et on m’a informé qu’il était parti avec un groupe d’une trentaine d’autres jeunes »,raconte un fonctionnaire de Diyarbakir, la capitale du sud?est de la Turquie.

L’une des entrées du mot « camarade » dans le dictionnaire implique aussi l’idée d’un groupe solide et compact de gens[17]; on lit dans le texte que ces jeunes se nomment « Jeunesse » et qu’« ils détestent les journalistes et affirment « s’exprimer dans des actions avec cocktails Molotov et non dans les salles de conférence de presse ». Ce témoignage sous?entend aussi l’idéologie de Mai 68 qui oppose les actions de rue aux « salles de conférence » typiquement bourgeoises et ce n’est pas un hasard si le journaliste nous explique que l’origine de ces jeunes est justement bourgeoise, sous l’exemple des soixante-huitards.Dans un autre article, « Comment les conflits sociaux minent l’Afrique du Sud », publié dans Challenge le 31 août 2012, et traitant des conflits sociaux dans l’Afrique du Sud, apparaissent les mêmes mots?événements, comme « camarades » et « pavé » à côté d’autres nouveaux termes, par exemple « gréviste », « réformes » et « revendications », et d’expressions métaphoriques, notamment « nombre de salariés battent le pavé en dansant et en chantant leurs revendications ». Les acteurs de l’événement, « salariés », et les termes « pavé » et « revendications », avec les actions verbales « danser » et « chanter », sont une référence évidente à l’atmosphère de Mai. Bien plus, l’article se conclut par un témoignage d’un manifestant qui ressemble au ton des slogans soixante-huitards, on lit « Ils nous ignorent », où l’opposition des pronoms « ils » et « nous » est une constante que l’on trouve souvent sur les murs parisiens à l’époque et derrière laquelle se cache une opposition sociale entre la bourgeoisie, définie par le déictique objectif « ils », et le prolétariat qui se fortifie dans l’action collective et intime du « nous ». L’imaginaire de Mai revient dans deux autres articles, « Grève générale en Grèce contre la rigueur », tiré de Challenge et publié le 11 mai 2011, et « Grèce : manifestations et débrayages contre le nouveau train de rigueur », publié dans l’Express le 12 septembre 2011 concernant la crise et les protestations en Grèce. Ici, les mêmes mots?événements apparaissent, notamment « cocktail Molotov », « pavé », « grève » et « manifestation ». En particulier, l’expression « battre le pavé » est présente dans le sous?titre du premier, « Des milliers de manifestants ont commencé à battre le pavé » et dans le deuxième, « les médecins, dont les salaires sont menacés de nouvelles réductions, et les enseignants dénonçant la grande misère de l’éducation publique, ont aussi battu le pavé mercredi pour dénoncer le nouveau tour de vis ». Le pavé, emblème de la révolte, revient comme outil principal dans toutes les manifestations et il est associé à l’image de la rue. Dans le deuxième article, l’expression verbale « descendre dans la rue » apparait dans le contexte de lutte sociale et de sauvegarde des droits personnels. Bien plus, l’article relate les « banderoles » qui ont dominé la manifestation de la Grèce, à savoir « Ils nous poussent vers l’extrême pauvreté » où l’opposition connotative des déictiques objectifs et subjectifs revient, ou encore « Santé gratuite pour tous » et « Non au bradage de la patrie », rappelant le style sec et direct de la parole « sauvage ». Ainsi, la structure énonciative semble?t?elle être reprise dans ce mouvement discursif réhabilitant la mémoire de Mai 68, ce qui permet de pousser l’analyse de la chercheuse Moirand à un niveau supérieur, car ce ne sont pas seulement les mots qui deviennent événements, mais les tournures discursives mêmes qui acquièrent le mouvement de l’énonciation soixante-huitarde.

En conclusion, je peux bien affirmer l’existence d’une mémoire collective et d’une culture partagée réveillant le souvenir de Mai 68 : tous les médias ont recours à cet imaginaire bien vivant chez les Français qui ne cesse jamais de surprendre et surtout d’exprimer la « rage » et l’action des manifestants, car tous les mots?événements dans les articles pris en considération confèrent à leur contenu une touche révolutionnaire et rêveuse à la fois, typique de Mai 68. Ce qui frappe, c’est la diversité des articles contenant ce souvenir. Le pouvoir des mots et leur force ne s’obscurcit jamais : non seulement les murs avaient parlé en Mai 68, mais même aujourd’hui ils font parler les textes créant un véritable dialogue dans les médias qui suit le chemin naturel de la mémoire et de la culture.

The post Mai 68 au service de l’interdiscursivité médiatique : entre mémoire révolutionnaire et mémoire discursive. Deux approches interdisciplinaires : lexiculture et mots événements appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The female voices in Shafak’s novel merge in a curious manner. One family lives in the United States, Armenian refugees who emphasize the importance of their traditions. The Turkish family that remains in Istanbul, however, has changed and modernized. The two young girls in the novel, Armanoush (Armenian-American) and Asya (Turkish), are unlikely, disparate step-sisters, who begin to bridge the gap between Turkish and Armenian traditions. The families are faced with challenges despite the similarity of their cultures, in terms of food, music and religious traditions. The two girls are unknowingly linked by a weak father, Mustafa, himself a product of persecution and upheaval. At his death, Mustafa transforms from a physical being into a silent, physical space that allows for conversation, healing and understanding. Without words to define his transformation, Mustafa the man disappears and instead becomes the framework of a mythological text.

Myth is a sacred type of speech that allows people to recognize and name the unspeakable. Roland Barthes believes that all obvious cultural objects have the power to attain mythical properties. Barthes says,

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter. (109)

The body of a man has the ability to transform from a physical presence into a culturally significant text, filled with symbol and rhetoric larger than the individual. In coming to understand the events in Mustafa’s life that led to his eventual demise, the reader becomes a key participant in the evolution of myth. Barthes states that: “[M]yth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things” (109). Therefore, in order to understand Mustafa’s mythological significance, the reader too must know his history.

Shafak takes great pains to explain a character’s societal and cultural significance. She uses categories as names, creating nick-names laden with socially constructed, obvious and essentialized identities. This unique approach must be differentiated from simply explaining a society or culture. Here, characters represent a specific aspect of a society and their actions, expressions, words and descriptions allow the reader to comprehend the nuances from particular stereotypes within the culture. By creating characters with disparate identities, she creates forms and through these forms, she enables speech. Shafak is, of course, designing a mythological society that parallels the actual. She leaves intelligent, obvious and accessible signs in this created culture. When Armanoush, self-named ‘Madame My-Exiled-Soul’ in her online chat room, decides to seek her roots, she claims, “I need to find my identity…. This is a journey into my family’s past, as well as into my future. The Janissary’s Paradox will haunt me unless I do something to discover my past” (117). Shafak deftly moves Armanoush from one place to the next through conversations with people categorized by their stereotype, creating layers of intersections and accessible, informative bridges simultaneously. The reader must note the importance of this technique, or overlook the meaning of Zeliha’s introduction, Armanoush’s journey to discover her Turkish family or Mustafa’s eventual death. This proves that the characters’ identities have been formed, in part, by cultural norms. They are mapped by things greater than themselves.

Due to the accepted norms placed upon women by religion and culture, the reader is doubly shocked at Zeliha’s rebellious nature, which forms a complex grid of intersections. The novel begins with Zeliha’s attempted abortion. Everything within this first chapter startles the senses. Unlike traditional Turkish women, Zeliha Kazanci speaks brusquely and rebelliously, but also places importance on traditional cultural practices such as the delicacy of teacups and the ritual of prayer. She embodies anger, rage, frustration and strength all of which affirm her voice, body and occupation as the text that deciphers the entire mythology. Zeliha’s narrative and experience is solidly placed within a marginalized world, outside of Islamic norms and made possible only through the use of character types. As Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, “[W]e will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few” (“Mapping the Margins” 1299). In other words, Shafak’s novel utilizes culturally prescribed stereotypes in order to highlight disparities of identity. The Kazanci family forms the body of this myth and, therefore, in a male-dominated society, Zeliha is able to own a tattoo parlor, wear miniskirts and speak her mind, bridging both ancient custom and radical modernism.

From this introduction, the novel moves quickly while many characters are described, some developed, and some left as shadowy substances that represent nothing more than their assigned role. In this deluge of characters, Shafak purposefully chooses to begin and end the novel with the strength, resilience and rebelliousness of Zeliha. In order to understand The Bastard of Istanbul, one must understand Zeliha’s full-bodied mythological representation which contrasts with Mustafa’s bare form. Mustafa, Gulsum’s only son and Zeliha’s older brother, is introduced as a “king in his house” and “precious from the day he was born” (31). As a child, Mustafa was arrogant, rude, greedy and unlikeable to everyone but his family. Due to the fact that most of the men in the Kazanci family die unexpected deaths before reaching the age of fifty, these women decide to send Mustafa away for school as a form of protection. Mustafa’s existence within the Kazanci household allows him only silence as he is smothered by women.  The women, then, conspire to keep Mustafa alive and out of reach of the family curse by sending him to the United States. Until the very end of the novel, he resides in Arizona and does not return to Istanbul. Other than a quick history of Mustafa, the novel barely discusses him, proving that he is minimized by his own weaknesses and overshadowed by strong women.

As a voiceless, adolescent male, deified by a group of women, Mustafa, therefore, remains a shadowy figure throughout the novel. The reader learns about him through the voices and eyes of his sisters and future wife, Rose. In fact, Mustafa first speaks more than two thirds of the way through the novel, and then only about weather in Istanbul. He hints at regrets, but does not articulate them. Instead, the narrator notes, “[I]f truth be told, more than Arizona or any other place, it was the future that he [Mustafa] had chosen to settle in and call his home – a home with its backdoor closed to the past” (285). Without a past, Mustafa is an unactualized shell. Yet, the reader should recognize the cultural importance of the only male in a Turkish family. Typically, families would rely on the male to complete all business transactions in addition to offering a certain unspoken respectability. Instead, Shafak points out the way that female voices in a Turkish society can create intimacy and richness. And she allows the story to unfold through the Kazanci women. Shafak utilizes the language of the novel as both a background into social institutions and representative of social values. Roland Barthes explains the way that one accesses idea through form. Bridging both ideology and semiology, Mustafa is idea-in-form, he functions purely as a cultural stereotype representative of historical ideologies (Barthes 112). Deified, fragmented, bereft of emotion, Mustafa’s voice arrives in only two sections of the novel: Zeliha’s rape and Mustafa’s own death.

Shafak creates other human bodies in order to assume a space which will represent an idea-in-form, linked by universal, culturally significant history. In this way she builds a mythological, but culturally significant family. Generally speaking, The Bastard of Istanbul is a novel of women. The first chapter alone introduces the reader to Zeliha and the four other remarkably different women in the Kazaci household.  In addition to living without a male in the house, the Kazanci sisters assume extravagant qualities including clairvoyance and hypochondria. The mother, Gulsum, ironically avoids sentimental attachments, presenting as a severe and nearly silent figure throughout the novel. Mary Douglas writes, “To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring” (121). The family within their societal role, then, becomes the culturally significant text expressing sexual taboo and ritual.

The novel opens with the lines, “Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it. That includes the rain” (1). Water serves as a linguistic device at critical times in the story, meant to draw attention to the implicit cultural identifiers. In this case, the character of Zeliha, on her way to obtain an abortion curses the rain, in direct contrast to etiquette and expected cultural norms. Then, as she receives anasthesia, Zeliha imagines cobblestones falling from the sky. The text reads, “[I]t was raining cobblestones from the blue skies. When a cobblestone fell from the sky, a cobblestone lessened from the pavement below. Above the sky and under the ground, there was the same thing: VO-ID” (19). Zeliha screams and the doctor abandons the abortion. First, real rain descends into the text, and then links into the cobblestones of Zeliha’s dream. Zeliha, sister of a ‘prince’, beautiful, youthful, falls in the same sense as the cobblestone, through a void. As she prepares to cross the physical boundary of abortion, Zeliha’s body becomes a text heavily laden with images. Mary Douglas notes, “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins” (121). Therefore, as Zeliha’s body awaits an abortion on the surgical table, she absorbs and reflects societal symbolism. For her, the chanting of the Friday prayer, typically a holy day, resulted in an internal awakening that allows her to abandon the abortion and accept the life of a single mother in a society that values the male.

The major events in this novel all incorporate rain. The element of rain, then, becomes the link that allows an object to transcend daily discourse and enter into myth. The rain from this scene links modern day Istanbul and Zeliha’s story directly to Noah’s ark as told by Auntie Banu, which will further enlighten the way in which bodies can be read as culturally significant texts. The familiar story of Noah’s ark is changed slightly in this retelling. Auntie Banu’s story focuses on the way that all members of Noah’s ark must share food. The ingredients physically combine to create community and sustainability through the image of a single pot of ashure. It is important that Shafak uses such a common myth and equally as important that she edits it to pinpoint a singular cultural event involving food. This shared history allows the story’s transcendence into a mythopoetic form. Instead of the biblical story of the flood, the myth transforms into one through which readers will experience struggle, survival and salvation in terms of these two families. Barthes writes, “Unlike the form, the concept is in no way abstract: it is filled with situation. Through the concept, it is a whole new history which is implanted in the myth” (119). In this case, Noah’s ark models an entire narrative that involves flood, famine, hardship and salvation. Rain signifies growth, change, and transfer and links the three major events of this novel: Zeliha’s rape, Zeliha’s abortion and Mustafa’s death.

The Kazanci family represents a marginalized portion of Turkish culture and history, evidenced by the oddities of Mustafa’s burial. The women in this novel deal with the dead body in a very unique manner, mixing both fairy tale and tradition and finally dipping into myth. The family chooses not to bury the body immediately, which is rare in Turkish society.  Instead, Mustafa’s body is washed, prepared for burial and transported back to the Kazanci household for a viewing, despite numerous religious objections.

 The body was cleansed with a bar of daphne soap, as fragrant and pure as the pastures in paradise are said to be. It was scrubbed, swabbed, rinsed, and then left to dry naked on the flat stone in the mosque-yard before being wrapped in a three-piece cotton shroud, placed in a coffin, and despite the adamant counsel of the elderly to bury it on the same day, loaded in a hearse to be driven directly back to the Kazanci domicile. (338)

The Kazanci women blend and bend the rules of Islam depending on their emotional needs. They determine that the body should remain visible to family and friends, but more importantly, to the reader. It is significant that the novel ends with Mustafa’s body resting within the Kazanci household, unburied, shrouded, in much the same role as his entire life: surrounded by women, silent, lifeless and yet, significant. The women circle around Mustafa’s shroud, creating a new space and a new ritual.

The irregular treatment of Mustafa’s shrouded body allows the story to assume mythological properties. As the body is prepared for burial, the narrator notes, “[I]t started to drizzle; sparse, reluctant drops, as if the rain too wanted to play a role in all of this but just hadn’t taken sides yet” (338).  Once again, the presence of rain alerts the reader of the story’s framework, and of the underlying mythology. Noah’s flood has begun to trickle into a modern era, blending old with new, at play with chronological time. Not only does water fall from the sky, but soccer fans flood the streets. These fans interrupt the funeral procession, a fact that becomes relevant when discussing the intersection of myth and fairy tale. Mary Douglas claims, “Just as it is true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true (and all the more so for that reason) that the body symbolises everything else” (122). The reader literally follows the frame of the story through the watery streets of Istanbul, flooded with the modern noise, people and cars. Disgusted with the soccer fans, the driver of the hearse asks Armanoush and Asya, “Aren’t they Muslim or what?” (345). Attempting to show his disgust at the lack of respect for religious customs he sees in the soccer fans, this comment actually solidifies the transformation of fairy tale into myth. Shafak is asking the reader to answer this question. Are the people in this novel Muslim? Are they modern? Are they traditional? And where is the line between the two drawn?

The story of Zeliha’s rape follows closely on the heels of Banu’s retelling of Noah’s ark and ashure. The story begins, “But the day Auntie Zeliha was raped was not a rainy day” (307).  The absence of rain highlights the physical divide, the rupture of time and of nature. As Armanoush, the youngest of the Armenians, and a second generation Armenian-American, begins to comprehend the differences that exist between the two cultures, she notes, “For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between” (164-5). Void, anger, avoidance and isolation fill the current ‘rupture’. In a similar way, Zeliha and Mustafa begin their lives within this void. Brought up as witnesses to and products of the estrangement of their cultures, the rape only confirms the existence of a hyphenated line. The absence of rain during the violent event obviates the discord between time and nature.

In this novel, there are two events that interrupt the natural flow of life:  Zeliha’s rape and the Armenian genocide. Shafak explores the events of the Armenian genocide through the story of Hovhannes Stamboulian, an Armenian author and intellectual. The reader sees only his march to prison, an unfinished children’s story upon his desk. Guards demand that he leave his desk mid-story while writing a myth that relies heavily upon culturally significant objects, such as the pomegranate. This is the beginning of the genocide, the rupture of time and nature. After his death, most of Hovhannes’ sons and daughters move to the United States to begin again, removed from the painful location of persecution.  Hovhannes’ daughter, Shushan, marries into the Kazanci family, which is Turkish, and remains in Istanbul for a short time. She ultimately abandons her Turkish family to rejoin the Armenian family in the United States. Shushan begins a new life and from there is mother to a wholly Armenian family inside America. The family that she has abandoned, purportedly Turkish, assumes a family curse. Something of the unnatural and evil sentiments reflective of the fear involved in the persecution remains hidden among the Kazanci men, and it is said that they are fated to die before their fiftieth birthday. Ignorant of this, Shushan left the Kazanci family for America, and married again, becoming a mother to an Armenian-American family in addition to the Turkish family she left behind. Armanoush, the youngest of the Armenian-Americans, notes the “mordant gap between the children of those who had managed to stay and the children of those who had to leave” (254). The silent past affects both Turks and Armenians, but without addressing the issues, the gap between two cultures widens. In much the same way, the two families’ histories unexpectedly intertwine and this is to Shafak’s purpose of creating space to discuss cultural taboo.

Mustafa cannot entirely bear the blame for his impulsive, irrational, angry conduct. Raised by women who pampered him, raised to be a prince, raised to be the man who breaks the family curse, Mustafa has little chance of finding his own voice in life. Instead, in an act of pure rage, Mustafa rapes and unknowingly impregnates Zeliha’s body which then assumes the weight of repression and the fallen woman. Zeliha’s body physically becomes larger with motherhood in direct opposition to Mustafa’s emaciated body and literal absence. Asya’s arrival as a bastard is important because she will be the key piece which forces dialogue in the end. As Barthes claims, “[I]ts [the myth's] point of departure is constituted by the arrival of meaning” (123). The presence of both Zeliha and her daughter, Asya, at Mustafa’s death allows them to hold a discussion about past events. Mustafa’s death creates space for the rejection of taboos, such as incest and rape, and replacement of myth with the conceptual neologism of future inclusivity. His death removes Zeliha from mythology and places her solidly back into a future of unruptured time, a future in which she has overcome the cultural difficulties placed upon women in Turkish society.

Throughout the novel, Shafak plays with time and place. She moves seamlessly between past and present, the United States and Istanbul. She carefully highlights the weakness and lifelessness of the present day, Americanized Mustafa so that, when looking back at the time continuum of historical events, one understands the origination of the puppet strings he wears. Mustafa is a creation of his heritage, nothing more, nothing less. Due to family pressures, family heritage and political upheaval, he could not have been other than what he was. He could not have acted differently. The weight and complexity of the intersections of his particular identity did not allow for tools that would enable atonement. Instead, he seeks silence, distance and avoidance. Because he is male, Mustafa achieves this separation without question. Most importantly, Mustafa’s silence and virtual departure from his family create a different kind of form from Zeliha’s. Like his ancestor, Hovhannes Stamboulian, Mustafa’s absence generates the space where story unravels.

Mustafa’s destined path began generations before his birth, with the imprisonment and death of the Armenian intellectual, Hovhannes Stamboulian. As guards lead him to prison, Hovhannes recalls a passage from Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him” (235). And generations later, Mustafa arrives to prove Rousseau’s point and link himself to Hovhannes’ story. Mustafa is the product of secrets, of pain and of tragedy.   His attempt at a life of silence obviates the need for healing. Mustafa’s form allows the two families access to their painful, personal history. Likewise, Mustafa’s death opens the door for a discussion of taboo, rape, incest and genocide. The narrator explains: “In time he had learned to appreciate the desert, its infinity soothing his fear of looking back, its tranquility easing his fear of death. At times like this he remembered, as if his body reminisced on its own, the fate awaiting all the men in his family. At times like this he felt close to committing suicide. Finding death before death found him” (269). Mustafa’s weakness prevents him from confronting his own past, which he escapes as long as he can. However, upon his return to Istanbul, he finally accepts that he is not a prince and no longer wishing to live a lie, he succumbs to his fated destiny. Aware that Auntie Banu had poisoned his ashure, he eats anyway.

Using Auntie Banu’s voice, Shafak incorporates traditional fairy tales into the story. The popular fairy tale style introduction “Once there was; once there wasn’t” frames the novel, a verbal signifier that allows for a different sort of reality. The story of two families, then, transcends its reality by accessing the framework of fairy tale. Mary Douglas writes, “There can be thoughts which have never been put into words. Once words have been framed the thought is changed and limited by the very words selected. So the speech has created something, a thought which might not have been the same” (64). In this case, the introduction of “Once there was; once there wasn’t” offers a comfortable prop in the form of accessible, obvious forms, much in the same way that Shafak labels characters in a way that reflects their personalities.

Both Asya and Armanoush interact with social groups named for their attributes. Armanoush belongs to an online chat room where everyone has given themselves labels, such as hers: Madame My-Exiled-Soul. Likewise, Asya often visits a cafe in Istanbul where her friends are labeled, but not named. For example, she dates the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. Framed by their titles, the characters in this novel outline basic cultural stereotypes.

These cultural identifiers function in much the same way as theater props. Only necessary in staged environments, props serve as a means to an end. In this novel, Shafak utilizes the djinni, magical and mischievous deities, as a sort of prop. Fairy tales involve magic and enchantments, so in a culture where djinni are perceived to be real, the fairy tale drifts into myth. As is often the case, this family is full of secrets, rigidity and rebellion. Auntie Banu relies upon djinni to tell her of historical events. These voices build a bridge over the ever-widening gap created by war, incest and rape.  The two victims, Zeliha and Mustafa, have only one verbal exchange throughout the novel, during the rape scene. Banu, the eldest sister, relates the story of Zeliha’s rape at the hands of her older brother, Mustafa, to the reader through the invention of djinni.

In order to access the images of a specific mythology, the reader needs to identify with the symbols. Layers of complexity exist within each image and as it sheds the specific unique identity, it gains a concrete, culturally accessible value. Barthes explains the way that the signified comes to be known through the signifier within a system of mythology. Barthes’ metalanguage, or mythology, arrives when one utilizes a group of forms as a place of global sign. The original bodies lose their individuality and instead come to represent a larger notion. Only when the reader understands the historical links between characters can each character of The Bastard of Istanbul represent the larger ideology of myth as described by Barthes. In this created society, forms of oppression interrelate to create a system of oppression, reflecting multiple layers of discrimination in much the same way as contemporary societies. As Auntie Banu continues to investigate the past and relay it to the reader with the help of the djinni, she obviates layers of discrimination. Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, “[T]he failure to embrace the complexities of compoundedness is not simply a matter of political will, but is also due to the influence of a way of thinking about discrimination which structures politics so that struggles are categorized as singular issues. Moreover, this structure imports a descriptive and normative view of society that reinforces the status quo” (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race”48). Therefore, Auntie Banu’s narration in addition to the elements of mythology and cultural stereotypes all enable the transcendence of Mustafa’s death from the death of an individual into a redemptive, healing space, one that overcomes taboo and secret. Again, Barthes explains, “When it [meaning] becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains” (117). Mustafa is now a mere form, a key word, set out to assist the reader decipher the remaining signs of the text. Mustafa’s absence speaks more powerfully than his presence.

Mustafa as the form, or the signifier, cannot be the sum total of the story. A form must be utilized in order to speak about structure. Therefore, he becomes an actual, physical space over which Zeliha feels able to tell Asya the truth about her father. Asya, being the ‘bastard’, was unprepared to hear that Mustafa, her uncle, was also her father. Zeliha notes that this discussion must take place at his death, that the time for discussion is fleeting. She says to Asya, “’I finally realized, I owed you an explanation. And if I don’t make it now, there will be no other time” (353). She means, of course, that the family curse, the political history, the rape and the family history all the way back to Hovhannes Stamboulian can be laid to rest. As Barthes noted earlier, the unnatural occurrences in this story and within history, have led the characters to precisely this spot. They transcend their spatio-temporal plane, enabling their bodies to represent larger issues in the cultural context. Mustafa is the prop that results in a cultural neologism. And the ‘bastard’ is no longer a bastard.

Ruth Benedict explains the complexity of an individual within society. She states, “In reality, society and the individual are not antagonists. His culture provides the raw material of which the individual makes his life” (251-2). Culture has indeed shaped these characters and is inseparable from them. The farther one moves from the initial event or rupture, the more it writes a narrative, transforms into myth. Barthes claims, “[W]e are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification” (110). Mustafa’s physical purpose in the novel would be lost without the family history, and more specifically, without Zeliha’s presence at his death. Shafak assigns and specifies very concrete images to each of her characters for the purpose of obviating their cultural significance.

Mustafa’s existence in The Bastard of Istanbul can certainly be seen as marginal. Mary Douglas claims that structures are most vulnerable at their margins (121). And the Kazanci women are, without a doubt, marginalized characters in both actual, mainstream culture and within the auspices of the novel. The fact that the reader gains access to culturally significant rituals and events through the eyes, voices, actions and habits of the Kazanci women, speaks to this marginalized structure. Douglas explains:

Any culture is a series of related structures, which comprise social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and through which all experience is mediated. Certain cultural themes are expressed by rites of bodily manipulation… The rituals enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body. (128)

In other words, the Kazanci women represent the margins of society and they mythologize Mustafa’s body through a blend of ritual and superstition. More importantly, societal margins often represent important but often unheard voices within society. As Douglas claims, “What is being carved in flesh is an image of society” (116). Zeliha realizes this when she designates Mustafa’s burial as the space in which to discuss the cultural taboo of at least incest, if not rape.

The marginalized, then, participate in Mustafa’s funeral in multiple ways. First, and most obvious, are the Kazanci women: mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of the fallen ‘prince’. Yet soccer fans and pedestrians participate as well, obviating the idea that this novel discusses not only familial rites, but societal ones. The narrator describes the scene of soccer fans: “Thus they all flowed along the avenue in a flood of red and yellow, amid chaos and clamor” (344). It is important to note that the people flowed, much like water. They flowed because they will be the redemptive elements of the novel, while also creating a present day mythology. Red and yellow soccer fans surround the green hearse, which carries Mustafa in a white shroud. Color symbolizes both an adherence to Islamic traditions as well as diversity and a celebration of life. These colors swirl into a pot of ashure, given at Noah’s ark, a mix of everything. Margins are everywhere present in this scene, as if replacement characters and scenarios for Noah’s ark. Instead of an ark, Shafak designs a Turkish household that grows to include an Armenian-American family member. Crenshaw notes that, “The struggle over which differences matter and which do not is neither an abstract nor an insignificant debate among women…they raise critical issues of power” (“Mapping the Margins” 1265). These families and voices become the elements that transcend their cultural identifiers, that transcend present and past in order to perform a creation myth.

The element of water moves through the text in a significant way. Rain was absent on the day of Zeliha’s rape. However, its absence may be just as significant as the presence of rain in other scenes. Events that disrupt nature must exist in order for change and growth to occur. Decades later, as the green hearse carries Mustafa towards the family house, pedestrians sing, “Let earth, sky, water listen to our voice/ Let the whole world shake with our heavy steps” (344). These pedestrians reflect the function of marginalized voices in much the same way as the Kazanci women represent modern day culture in Turkey. And they sing their importance.

What follows the end of a myth? The reader is led to believe that, as is often the case in fairy tales, there is a happily ever after to this story. Shafak’s novel begins as fairy tale, which involves magic and enchantments such as the djinni. She then melds the story into myth, in order to elucidate the way in which a society may renew itself. Though marginalized, the Kazanci family finds a way to create a vibrant future. Auntie Banu uses djinni often and retells common folklore consistent with fairy tales. In this case, genocide, rape and incest significantly rupture chronological time, which also allows the story of the bastard to enter the realm of mythology. The Kazanci family seeks and creates a new way of life through inclusion and acceptance.

Myth is laden with meaning only if the object itself loses individuality and gains universality. In other words, a physical presence must disappear allowing myth to appropriate image, laden with new meaning.  Barthes claims, “In semiology, the third term is nothing but the association of the first two” (121), meaning that The Bastard of Istanbul conveys meaning through both cultural mythology and culturally relevant signifiers. Mustafa’s body allows for a space over which Zeliha can discuss the taboo subjects of incest and rape. Mustafa’s death is a product of the unnatural rupture of time, healed only by the full disclosure to Asya about the identity of her true father.

While this novel incorporates many elements of rupture, disease and division, it also allows for healing, discussion and community. Through marginalized voices, repurposed cultural stories, and tragedy, Shafak enables discussion and proposes a reparation of time through myth. The reader feels that Zeliha’s future holds much promise as she stands apart from the shrouded Mustafa, clutching two fragile tea cups purchased at the beginning of the novel, moments before her attempted abortion. Both the teacups and the baby survived two decades of struggle. And finally, rain closes the novel, once again highlighting the fact that myth underlines this novel. Rain enables each character a function on the chronological timeline towards a modern people. The novel ends hopefully, a hodge-podge family full of once marginalized voices, now the ‘first peoples’ of a modern era.

The post Mythology, Taboo and Cultural Identity in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Black Gay Genius, an anthology edited by Steven Fullwood and Charles Stevens, opens with a meditation, a series of haunting questions that linger and will, perhaps, never be answered. In the Introduction, the editors ask us to tarry alongside them; they invite us to wrestle with how to negotiate the legacy of Joseph Beam’s In the Life[1] and envisage its continued influence.

“How do we honor [Joseph Beam] and that generation of black gay men? How to handle his legacy, so heavy with ambiguity?”

[...]

“How do we excavate the site that Joe occupied and conquered so brilliantly, we who inherit his courage and his loneliness? How do we create a project in conversation in an incompleteness?”

And it is the struggle to create a communion within and against an incompleteness—which can never be completely resolved—that drives this beautiful anthology. Each essay included in Black Gay Genius grapples with the implications of “un-burying our dead, our memories and our futures.” Each contributor “invite[s] us to look back, look ahead and, most critically, reveal where we might be now.” It is an invitation to engage in what Christina Sharpe would call “wake work.” Sharpe writes,

“Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances; a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also ‘the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)’; finally, wake also means being awake and, most importantly, consciousness.”

The contributors to Black Gay Genius have taken up the commitment to perform “wake work”—to situate themselves in the wake of the In the Life, the ground breaking anthology of literary works by Black gay men—with a passion. Joseph Beam’s life was stolen. He was working on Brother to Brother, a second anthology of Black gay men’s writings, when he died unexpectedly of AIDS-related complications on December 27, 1988—just three days before his 34th birthday.

Black Gay Genius is a hymn to Joseph Beam, and his work. However, it is not a hagiography, the editors assure us. Instead, the book traces how Joseph Beam’s legacy speaks to our present reality. In the process, “Joe isn’t elevated to sainthood, he is humanized and unpacked. Memory stripped of sentimentality and faced head-on without blinking.”

Such an unflinching endeavour to ‘‘wake the dead with discursive interventions’’ is not easy. The wake work of recovering “those black gay men whose lives were ripped from us, violently” leaves us “suspended in place [...], our fingers deep in the grime of the rubble.” The rituals of raising the dead, our memories, and futures suggest, “we might need to perpetually bury our dead over and over again so that we can truly appreciate those individuals who came before us.”

Joseph Beam, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, his “spirit family,” emerge through and within the revelatory essays, stories, interviews, and poems. Beam’s presence saturates the book, but the ‘real’ Joseph Beam never materializes. “The ‘real’ Joseph Beam is,” as Robert F. Reid-Pharr remarks, “available to us only as metaphor.” The image of Joseph Beam that surfaces in Black Gay Genius “represents nothing more than an attempt to frame and delimit what Beam was good at.” Reid-Pharr urges us to “resist the impetus to read Hemphill, Beam, or any of the other black lesbian and gay creative intellectuals whom we take them to represent, as simply forebears of an ever-nascent black gay/lesbian/queer cultural enterprise.”

Instead, Robert F. Reid-Pharr suggests a continued engagement with “the discursive artifacts that Hemphill and Beam left behind,” and invites us to approach their works “as living and engaged documents.” While admitting that we “cannot predict with any certainty the uses to which these works will be put in the future.” I read Reid-Pharr’s words as an adjuration to curate the dead, the voices that speak and dream in terrifying spaces of silence. To attend to the dead is a queer act.

The meditations in Black Gay Genius call for a critical wakefulness to the cuts, ruptures, silences, and wounds that shape how we connect ourselves to not only a Black gay past, but also our Black gay present, and future. However, Black folk’s relation to ‘contemporary’ time and its dissipation—or, perhaps, accumulation would be more fitting—is a sticky matter. The historical conditions of Black life have deeply affected how Black folk experience the ‘passage’ of time. The afterlife of slavery “has so welded past and present that it is virtually impossible and certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring, as it were, in time.”

Black (gay) folk live “in expectation of something that has not yet been realized, is delaying being realized, is constantly unaccomplished and elusive.” In his essay In The Life and Death, Kenyon Farrow presents a queered/blackened way of “measuring time,” that illuminates the temporal strictures and structures of an anti-black world. Farrow opens his essay by noting that he “mark[s] the passage of time by death.” He learned to ‘keep time’, he tells us, by “the casket-count that marches to the beat of time passing.” A rhythm that has become an indelible feature of Black life: approximately every 28 hours a black person is killed by police officers.

Thinking In the Life—and death—alongside the ongoing, steady assault on Black life is to inhabit “a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them.” ‘Black time’ emerges as “the ‘moment’ of no time at all on the map of no place at all.” Farrow’s question of “how to best make Black gay premature death legible to Black people as a part of the structural violence that we’re all dealing with,” when Black gay men exist not only outside of ‘White time’, but ‘straight time’ as well makes it the more pressing. Black gay lives often disappear under the banner of ‘Black community’—a proxy for ‘Black family’.

For our survival, we need to “be politically and emotionally engaged around the totality of Black suffering (violence, unemployment, the inability for Black men to love each other, etc.).” When we say Black Lives Matter, we need to go “beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.”

Black gay men and women in the Netherlands are dealing, perhaps unsurprisingly, with similar issues of erasure of our particular kind of suffering, “due to the “heterosexist erotics of family,” that often shape popular Black political attitudes. Where do Black gay men and women, who destabilize a politics of respectability and civility, fit in the (sanitized) archives of Black memory? It seems that irrespective of our geographical location and temporal frame Black gay lives are engulfed by silence, and subject to erasure.

The gestures that Joseph Beam’s writings have made “to end the deafening silence about our lives” are themselves precarious, passing. To speak our truth is not enough in a world where most ears are not attuned to the distinctive features of Black suffering, which is often heard as what Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best call “black noise.” Black political aspirations and demands are “inaudible or illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality.” And yet, Black gay women and men must continue to write, sing, dance, dream, and organize—despite the fact that much of what we have to say is ignored within and without Black communities; it goes literally unheard—even when it is screamed into ears, and onto pages.

David Green suggests in his essay Erotic and the Crisis of Black Love: At Home with Joseph Beam, Melvin Dixon, and In The Life a queering of Black home in order to make Black gay lives legible. Green writes that “we must all live ‘in the life’, if we truly wish to survive this and future life.” While musing on Green’s entreaty, I drifted back to Kenyon Farrow’s words and Christina Sharpe’s theorization of wake work: in the life and in the wake. To live ‘in the life’ in the wake is to inhabit an antinomy between life and death. How, then, do we in this space of impossibility, of incommensurability—where “the time of slavery” appears to lag, lengthen out, stand still—begin to imagine a “future life” in the afterlife of slavery?

The question of “future life” cannot be divorced from the urgency of attending to the centrality of death, and “doing time,” in Black (gay) life—so much of the “future life” work we do is centred on attending to the dead, the “prison slave,” and the “prison slave-in-waiting.” In a certain way, I imagine, heterosexual, cisgender Black folk are already living ‘in the life’. Black life is already queered. It is lived against the odds. Jared Sexton uncovers the queerness of Black life when he notes, “that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death.” [emphasis in original] Being Black/queer is “a fatal way of being alive.” When our future is already precarious, and constrained by an anti-black time frame (every 28 hours) our persistence is an act of resistance. We need to say over and over and over again that it is possible to imagine different futures. We need to “believe in and create the world that we actually deserve.”

In Queer Relative: Joseph Beam, Audre Lorde, and the Diasporic Poetics of Survival in the 1980s, Alexis Pauline Gumbs breathes more life into this queerness that “disrupts the reproduction of a social narrative that says that Black life is worthless.” We must conjure alternative visions of freedom and survival from the violence and terror that haunts Black (gay) life across the Diasporas. In the wake, daring to dream and surviving is a queer thing to do. And yet, we must avoid the temptation of over-romanticizing the power of dreams, “as if having a dream were all we needed to transform ourselves and our futures.”

“Black dreams,” Joseph Beam warns us, “are dashed as assuredly as Black dreamers are killed.” And yet, Joseph Beam dared not only himself, but also us as well to dream “dreams borne of personal conviction and desire.” In the foreword to On Black Men David Marriott takes on Joseph Beams’ plea to dream the unthinkable in order to “contest the dream work of racist culture in its verisimilitude, address and imagine another kind of experience, another kind of living present and future.” [emphasis in original]

In the Life called a tradition of Black gay writing into existence, and left in its wake seeds of new possibilities; “the [ethical] commitment to dream ourselves differently,” to find and nurture “healthy (meaning non-patriarchal, non-objectifying) holistic love between Black women and Black men.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs shows us that Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam have provided a cognitive map. We must respond to the call of those who came before us, those who are no longer with us.

In Making Ourselves from Scratch Joseph Beam asks us, “what is it that we leave them beyond this shadow-play?” The most valuable thing we can leave behind is evidence that you do not have to make yourself from scratch. Black Gay Genius shows the evolving influence of Joseph Beam’s dictum.  It not only offers, but also inspires a sustained engagement with Joseph and his work. To use a turn of phrase like “a timely contribution” to describe Black Gay Genius seems jarring when “Black life is filled with untimely deaths.” This deeply moving anthology reminds us that our journey doesn’t end with death—one way or the other we remain in the life.

The post Black Gay Genius (Book Review) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

**********

Title
“The Strategic Success of ISIS Propaganda”

Date & Location
October 24, 2014 – University of Madison, Wisconsin (CEH)

Abstract
To borrow the words of Judith Butler, “if we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.” For reasons that will readily become apparent, the present lecture derives not simply from my professional area of expertise, but also from an uncomfortably personal connection. Of course, the spheres of personal experience, political convictions, and academic work are never as separate as one might like to believe, imagine, or pretend. On rare occasions, however, these closely related arenas intersect more fully—one might even say violently. “Strategic Success of ISIS Propaganda,” was, in fact, prompted by precisely such a brutal collision—provoking painful self-examination, at levels personal and cultural.

This analysis of ISIS propaganda is limited to a singular genre of production that I title: “The Beheading Series.” This infamous video set, comprised of four installments, depicts the decapitations of Western journalists and aid workers, including—at the time of writing—James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, and Alan Henning. These political snuff films have prompted a heightened level of global hysteria, media hyperbole, and inflammation of viral fear that comes closest in intensity to the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. But on that day, an atrocity was committed on American soil, and claimed thousands of casualties. Here, however, pixelated screens mediate and distort the atrocity, in terms of both space and time (“over there” seems yet “over here”); the death toll of U.S. citizens numbers merely two. What makes ISIS propaganda more horrifying than its terroristic predecessors? Stated differently, how does it succeed—and why? Further, the necessary questions are not simply “what” is different, nor “why,” but also—how? And—for whom?

I argue that the “Beheading Series” is not a recruitment attempt. Rather, this set of films is best understood as an advertisement campaign for apocalyptic war (or, “reverse recruitment”)—an extremely effective use of viral marketing techniques, that draws from horror films, video-game-style “immersive media,” and models of public diplomacy’s “soft power” arsenal—i.e., the “branded nation.” “The Beheading Series” belongs to a particular genre of propaganda, produced for a specific body of consumer-spectators, coded “the West.” Successful PR, after all, requires “knowing the audience.” And ISIS knows quote-unquote “us” very, very well. I demonstrate that the group’s media sophistication includes the deliberate exploitation of Islamophobia (with which Western cultures currently wrestle), and thrives within the (now) invisible distinctions between the spheres of entertainment, politics, and news.

Finally, against this lecture’s thematic backdrop, I also argue for the cultivation of visual literacy as an increasingly urgent tool for critical political analysis. This essential skill enables recognition of an influential connection rarely—if ever—voiced in public forums, such as the global mass media. I refer here to the intertwined relationship between the intense power of emotional affect, and the nebulous sphere of “geopolitics,” a connection that is particularly pronounced in our collective transnational context—i.e., consumer capitalism’s globalized marketplace. By purchasing ISIS advertising as if an “impulse buy,” the political arena and news media—however unwittingly—serve as (to borrow a term from security studies) “collective force multipliers.” The ad campaign, literally, goes viral—and most ominously, entirely by design.

The post The Strategic Success of ISIS Propaganda (video lecture) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

On my last trip to NYC, I was overwhelmed with Homeland season four’s new advertisement campaign plastered on almost every public bus in the city. The American political thriller has received overwhelming support, with six Emmys and five Golden Globes. President Barack Obama has even claimed it his favourite show on television.[1] Focusing on CIA agents and their fight against terrorism, the show has received widespread criticism over its (mis)representations of Muslims and Islam, all while maintaining a universalized view of Muslim spaces. Laila Al-Arian has called it “TV’s most Islamophobic show.”[2] Despite this criticism, the show’s newest campaign demonstrates no sign of progress in its representations of Muslims and, specifically, Muslim women.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Producers of the American political thriller revealed that the new season’s plot takes place in Islamabad, Pakistan and Kabul, Afghanistan. Season four’s poster features lead actress Claire Danes (as Carrie Mathison) wearing a red headscarf surrounded by a group of burqa-clad women. Although the poster does not reference a specific location in which the image takes place, by the style of dress of the women in the poster we are to assume that these are Afghan women. In one of the show’s video teasers titled “Target Confirmation”, the same red veil is shown on Carrie as she undergoes a ground mission in Pakistan. As Carrie walks onto the road, the teaser shows a brief close up shot of a Pakistani woman gazing at Carrie. As the teaser goes on, Carrie sees male terrorist suspects and gives the order to destroy them. Upon giving this order she–in slow motion–unwraps the red veil off her head and throws it aside carelessly. The camera then shows a slow motion shot of the red scarf as it makes its way to the ground.[3] The teaser ends with a shot of the CIA led missile explosion and the falling red veil is placed in the center of the frame.

It is important to first acknowledge the varying geographies present in the poster. Considering that the Afghan burqa is traditionally blue in colour and taking into account Carrie’s red veil in Pakistan, the poster blurs distinctions of Muslim spaces by combining varying illustrations of Muslim women’s cultural dress into one image. Homeland’s deep interest and fondness of Muslim women’s attire is consistent all throughout the show’s ad campaign and costume design. It even made it all the way to the episode titles, with season four episode three named after the traditional South Asian dress “Shalwar Kameez” even though the episode’s plot is irrelevant to the attire it references. In its universalized pooling of different cultural and Islamic dress, the show dispenses of any factual articulation of the different meanings behind different forms of covering. Homeland’s point here is not necessarily to depict the specific location of the storyline, rather to visually demonstrate that the show is about Muslims­–and the CIA’s patriotic fight against them.

The poster and the teaser both limit Muslim women’s participation to outer physical appearance. Using images of passive veiled Muslim female bodies to suggest eastern backwardness and western emancipation efforts for eastern freedom is a common trend in popular representations of Muslim women. By removing all forms of active dialogue with the represented Muslim women, Homeland references historic and cultural orientalist stigmas of Muslim women’s ‘passive oppression’ in the face of backward eastern societies. Similar orientalist images have been circulating for decades. For example, circa 1900-1930, European photographers based in North Africa and the Middle East established studios to market and produce commercial postcards displaying images –mostly staged female nudes/veiled/erotic dancers–of the Orient[4]. In his critique of French postcards depicting face-veiled Algerian women, Malek Alloula highlights the colonial de-humanizing implications of these images on the subjects in question. In the case of postcards depicting a group of Moorish women in full veil attire, Alloula argues that the veil is seen by the colonial photographer as a generalized mask; where whenever the photographer captures a veiled woman, “he cannot help but include in his visual field several instances of her […] For it is always a group of veiled women that the photographer affixes upon his plate” [5]. The striking similarities of the aesthetic grouping of face veiled women in both the postcards and Homeland’s poster pose the question: What purpose do these images serve?

Moorish Women Taking a Walk. Postcard from The Colonial Harem, by Malek Alloula. Image Credit: ReOrienting the Veil, University of North Carolina

In the case of the French postcards, images of veiled Algerian women caught the imagination of western audiences by allowing them to look into the ‘exotic’ life of women in the French colonial east; this imagination thereby allowed for the justification of French colonial presence. Taking into account Homeland’s plot in Afghanistan and Pakistan, season 4’s campaign brings forward colonial fantasies of imagined eastern–Afghan and Pakistani–Muslim women through the praxis of U.S foreign policy. As the traveling colonial postcards repetitively reproduced stereotypes from one western home to the other, Homeland’s traveling poster buses and orientalist moving images also work to recycle and fixate the stereotype of far-away Muslim women as non-resistive passive victims stuck in religion-based fanaticism and turmoil.

For the case of contemporary post- 9/11 North American society, Homeland functions alongside larger political frameworks working to ideologically justify U.S imperialism. Anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod suggests that since 2001, defending the rights of Muslim women was offered as a rationale for military intervention in Afghanistan; thus, images and stories of oppressed Muslim women have been widely circulated in North America and Europe (a timing that is not coincidental). For Abu Lughod, stereotyping Muslim women “distracts us from the thornier problem that our own politics and actions in the world help create the (sometimes harsh) conditions in which distant others live”[6]. As seen in Homeland’s campaign, emphasis on region-cultural depiction works to “artificially divide the world into separate spheres–-recreating an imaginative geography of West versus East, us versus Muslims, cultures in which First Ladies give speeches versus others where women shuffle around silently in burqas.”[7] In the case of the show, it is Carrie playing the role of the first lady.

The campaign’s poster draws on the implications of ‘third world’ vs. ‘first world’ difference through its use of colour and juxtaposition. Presented in deep black, the burqa-clad women are all standing facing forward while Claire Danes looks back and gazes resistively straight at the audience in her bright red scarf and peeking blonde hair. By separating Carrie from her imagined Muslim female counterparts, the poster presents a strong contrast that isolates and labels one party as privileged and the other as voiceless, oppressed and in need of outside intervention. Similarly, the teaser also reinforces such distinctions of privilege through the dramatic visual portrayal of Carrie’s act of unveiling. Homeland’s insertion of the non-Muslim character Carrie Mathison in conflated Muslim spaces illustrates a striking colonial framework that subjugates Muslim women’s imaged bodies for the glorification of Carrie’s western efforts of feminist-based resistance.

What does it mean to have a whole teaser illustrating a non-Muslim American woman unveiling in Pakistan? In removing and disposing of the scarf while veiled Muslim women are present in the scene, Carrie attempts to play out an act of agency against a backdrop of women who are presumed to lack freedom and autonomy. Carrie removes the veil as an affirmation of power, for she has just ordered the killing of a group of threatening male terrorists. Her feeling of empowerment in destroying dangerous men plays out in her decision to unveil. In its insinuations of power dynamics, the scene draws a direct relationship between veiling and ideas of weakness. Similar to the colonial gaze of the French’s postcards, Jasmin Zine borrows the term “imperialist feminist gaze” to suggest the recurring colonial motives played out under the banner of feminism[8]. Zine highlights the collision between feminism and Orientalism, where the two allow for the othering of Muslim women through the lens of the feminist gaze[9]. The imperialist feminist structure creates a binary that inherently juxtaposes ‘oppressed’ third world Muslim women against ‘liberated’ women of the west. Placed alongside Carrie’s unveiling, the close up shot of the Pakistani woman early in the scene visually affirms the imperial feminist binary. The teaser is extremely problematic in its depictions and not only undermines but also blatantly questions veiled Muslim women’s agency in every way.

What is most interesting about the show, however, is that it does not at all focus on specific Muslim women issues or their lives. Homeland’s Western women, like Carrie, are given a highly acknowledged individuality.

Photo 1 of Marvel comic still taken from page 4 of 27 from Ms. Marvel 001 digital comic book

In contrast, Eastern Muslim women are simply used to reiterate and support Carrie’s occidental livelihood. The show’s poster campaign and storyline are almost irrelevant to each other in their subject matter. The difference between the two acts as proof of the bleak reality of face-value imperialist feminism for what is really a national propagandist pop cultural creation. For audiences in North America, the ongoing failed depictions of Muslim characters[10] in popular texts only further instigates Islamophobic threats and pushes for the exclusion of North American Muslims from their societies[11].

In order for any form of representational progress–in popular fiction–to occur, we have to reject the idea of imperialist feminism by creating roles that negate existing stereotypes and that actively work to resist and refute them. Marvel comics recently released a new comic series featuring the first-ever lead female American Muslim superhero. The new Ms. Marvel stars a 16-year-old Pakistani-American superhero named Kamala Khan and is on its sixth printing with over 30,000 print copies sold, placing it among the top-selling comics in the market[12]. Created by Sana Amanat, Ms. Marvel provides a positive example in the popular representations of Muslim women. The superhero presents a non-universalized young woman’s negotiations of daily life as a Muslim in America, all while battling super villains. This comic book production not only acts in favour of diversity, but also allows audiences to identify with strong characters with similar relatable experiences and backgrounds.

Image Credit: Photo 2 of Ms. Marvel’s portrait taken from Marvel’s web image gallery and marvel.wikia.com

While positive representations, such as Kamala, demonstrate a hopeful move to Muslim audiences, the imperialist-led struggle does not end there. Indeed, the media dangerously enforces and creates marginalizing stigmas, but the real-life danger inflicted on those marginalized–both external and internal–remains harshly present in the everyday. As mentioned earlier, Homeland’s point to focus on non-American human targets and places re-directs people’s attention away from the local American governing villains–who, as Abu-Lughod reminds us, actively work to inflict violence on distant others for imperial gains. For a true re-scripting of the imperialist colonial structure, I urge us to self-reflect on how each of our everyday lives contributes to or resists this imperialist framework. I call for the pursuit of productive decolonial action by locals in Western communities against their local Western powers. Active participatory resistance takes many forms, and creating a lead Muslim female superhero is certainly one of them.

The post Framing Muslim Women: The Problem with Homeland’s Season 4 Campaign appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Haiti was postcolonial before postcolonial was cool. As the result of the first successful slave revolt in the Americas, Haiti declared its independence in 1804 and formed the first anti-slavery postcolonial nation. Early Haitian literature has, however, often been disregarded—perhaps due to the nation’s early and unique postcolonial status. In this piece, I’d like to offer an example of the powerful commentary on postcolonialism that studying early Haitian literature provides.

The first Haitians worked to form their nation in an environment of extreme hostility. American states, for example, passed laws to prevent slaves from coming from the Caribbean because they feared the spread of revolt. The French tried to re-colonize the nation for decades.[1] When the French finally recognized Haiti in 1825, it was only after the new nation agreed to pay an “indemnity” that plunged Haiti into debt and economic hardship. From 1825 to 1947, Haiti paid France a sum that some have estimated to be over 20 billion dollars in today’s money.[2]

This hostile environment certainly influenced the development of intellectual life in early Haiti. It was difficult for Haitians to gain respect as authors and thinkers among their former colonizers. Much of what they wrote was in defense and praise of their national independence, which understandably was a status that Haitians viewed as indispensible in a highly colonial world dependent on slave labor.

A long history of prejudice, including accusations of imitation and inferiority, has plagued the reception of early Haitian writing. Thankfully, a growing cohort of scholars is turning its attention to this literary treasure-trove.[3] This post is about one short Haitian play that is a vital and understudied part of this corpus.

In 1841, the newspaper Le Cancanier published a short play titled Mr. Granier and his Assistant Study the Question of Abolition in Basse-Terre. The newspaper was published by T. Bouchereau, giving it a political bent opposed to the president at the time, Jean-Pierre Boyer. The latter negotiated France’s recognition of Haiti, which means that he was also responsible for an agreement that initiated Haiti’s massive debt. Mr. Granier and his Assistant offers a humorous take on the ability of any (formerly) enslaved person to engage in debate with the pro-slavery colonialists, which can be read as a criticism of Boyer, but also a broader statement asserting the futility of any intellectual or political engagement with the French at all.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence on January 1, 1804 after defeating Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Vertières in November of 1803. Napoleon’s troops were also sent to Guadeloupe, where the formerly enslaved (slavery had been abolished in all French colonies in 1794) also battled against re-enslavement. The resistance forces in Guadeloupe were, unfortunately, defeated. Guadeloupe stood in contrast to Haiti: the island remained (and remains) under French control, which failed to abolish slavery there until 1848.

Mr. Granier and his Assistant takes place in Basse-Terre, capital of an island that serves as Haiti’s opposite, a place where French control and slavery still exist. Mr. Granier is a Frenchman who travels there with his assistant, Capo, a silent character who does nothing but “take notes” related to his colleague’s observations. Granier’s goal is, supposedly, to study the possibility of emancipation. He meets with a young enslaved boy named Yanko. The entire play recounts their rather one-sided conversation.

The conversation begins by showing Granier’s obtuse ignorance of his own prejudice. He states that he has “no prejudice of caste” and that this is why he will allow Yanko to stand and fan him with a palm leaf while they talk. He asks Yanko, “Are you happy?” Yanko responds, “Well, no, good white sir.” Granier is annoyed to hear this response and complains, “Oh, this race is never happy.” Yanko meekly contends that it is because he is beaten. He suggests that slaves might work more if they were beaten less. Granier, shocked, accuses Yanko of having “insurrectional ideas.” He uses the names of Haitian revolutionary leaders as insults. Yanko’s responses could not be more deferent. He states that he wouldn’t dare dream of freedom as if it were a real possibility and would only bow down at the feet of the person who broke his chains. Nonetheless, every response that Yanko offers further confirms Granier’s belief that slavery is necessary. The play ends with Granier telling Capo to write: “After scrupulous study and the most conscientious investigations, we are convinced that slavery is the natural state of the black beast…” Granier’s last words are: “Anti-abolitionism pays!”

The complete futility of Yanko’s conversation with the Frenchman was feasibly hilarious to Haitian readers. It highlights the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation in which France’s slaves found themselves. No matter how pleasant or deferent they were, the (formerly) enslaved’s experiences were never heard and only used to further confirm the opinion of the colonizer. Mr. Granier and his Assistant honors Haiti’s postcolonial status by demonstrating the impossibility of escape for those still enslaved in Guadeloupe. In a less overt way than many other early Haitian texts, this play argues for the vital role that national independence played in Haitians’ ability to find respect for their own intellectual ideas and experiences as humans.

This play offers a perspective on postcolonialism that was perhaps unique to the nineteenth century and Haiti in particular: don’t bother trying to articulate the “post” part of postcolonial to the colonizer. Haitians were speaking a language incomprehensible to those in power; neither waging a war of independence nor acquiescing to colonial hierarchies could result in respect for their humanity. Postcolonialism, this play suggests, would have to be forged through national independence and, perhaps most effectively, a kind of national independence not recognized by the former colonizer.

Note: Dr. Curtis has translated Mr. Granier and his Assistant from the French into English. The play will be read at Wellesley College’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities on December 8, 2014.

 

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It was my first exposure to a nationalist rhetoric, the business of nation-building, even if the nation in question was still a part of a larger country. I was, as an Anglophone, not a part of the narrative, not really. And even as a young kid, I recognized some of the holes in the story; I still have a clear picture in my head of a drawing of a demure-looking peasant girl, one of the “filles du rois” who were brought over to New France to marry the men who were here. We had been taught about how hard life was in New France, and what orphan girl from France would not relish the chance to come here, marry a man she had never met, in a new land?

And what of the Natives? We dutifully made our model longhouses, learned where the various tribes lived, but never spoke of the taking of Native lands, only of the English taking of French lands once the Seven Year War was over. We learned about Louis Riel only because he stood up to the English and spoke French and the fight was framed around linguistic rights. Nowhere were the stories of Residential schools, or of the Catholic missionaries and other representatives often violently repressing Native religion and spirituality.

All that changed in 1990, with what is known as The Oka Crisis. Issues of race and class and language came to head during the crisis. Building a golf course and condos on sacred burial ground. Blockades that prevented suburbanites from going to their jobs in the city. White people throwing stones at women, children, and the elderly. Hearing my parents and grandparents grumble about how much the Natives “already were getting out of our hard-earned taxes.” I was about to be a teenager, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so callous as to build a golf course over (what I understood to be) a cemetery.

The 1990s were a time of great tensions between the Francophone and the Anglophone and Allophone communities. Laws changed, and there were battles over store signs, lawsuits over someone in a store saying “Hi” instead of “Bonjour” when addressing a patron in a store… Our high school had a French side and an English side, and there would be brawls monthly after school. A separatist government was elected into power at the provincial level and as the Official Opposition at the federal level. Friends and I were often greeted with graffiti or taunts of “Anglos Go Home” when walking around downtown Montreal. When the 1995 Referendum came, it was my first opportunity to vote in my life: I voted against separation.

The Premier of Quebec blamed “money and the ethnic vote” after the loss. By money, he really meant the Anglophones. It was under that atmosphere that I decided that I was going to attend a Francophone university… to study English. My Anglo friends warned me that I would face hostility there, that I would be miserable, and that I was wasting my time going to a French university when there were perfectly good English universities I could attend instead. Friends who thought themselves so much more worldly than I because they had traveled overseas, but would never think to visit anywhere in Quebec other than Montreal.

College is often an utopic time for a youth, where you come into your own as a person. It was no different for me. Despite the warnings of my friends and family, I loved my five years in Sherbrooke. I studied Canadian and Québécois literature in a truly bilingual setting, made friends with people from across the province, and in fact from French-speaking communities from all over Canada, and learned a great deal about Quebec, its culture, and its people. My people. Nationalism became at once more problematized, but also more sympathetic to me than it ever had before.  I learned more about La grande noirceur, where the political class and the Church worked together to keep Quebec in “a Dark Age”, and about the Quiet Revolution that followed in the 1960s. I read radical Québécois literature alongside nationalist English-Canadian works, in an environment that challenged my thinking on a host of issues around race, class, and language.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and starting a PhD on the other side of the country is a good way to realize that your bilingual bubble of goodwill isn’t shared. Resentment out West for the special treatment Quebec was seen to be getting. Resentment by the French populations of Western Canada for the erasure of their presence and identity. Realizing that most people didn’t care about Canadian literature. Going to a postcolonial conference and being dismissed because, as an eminent scholar put it to me, “I don’t read theory in French.” Seeing the colonial mentalities everywhere, but still especially in myself.

Move to the United States. I grew up in a racially homogeneous area, in a country with a different history of racial strife. But in the States, I realized how fraught my ignorance of the history and significance of race in particular really was. Teach at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. Teach at an HBCU. Teach at a regional state university in one of the poorest rural regions in the country. Watch, listen, measure my reactions. Get on Twitter and diversify my timeline in a way that stretches my thinking on race, class, gender, and intersectionality.

I tell this story because it has been less than five years since I’ve taken the time to think about being a body within a colonial and colonialist setting, even still today. How my students are also navigating through the messages they are getting about their place, their position, their due, and their view. I am an educator, getting an education, undoing another education, making another.

The post A Colonial Miseducation: Language & Unmaking Canadian Identity appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

At present, the exhibitions The Unicorn Incorporated (Curtis R. Barnes) and Your Feast Has Ended (Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu) have been on display at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA for nearly three months. The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition and retrospective of the work of Curtis R. Barnes. As described by the Frye, “For over five decades, Barnes has worked as an artist, illustrator, muralist, and community advocate. In his sculpture, painting, and drawing, he employs imagery derived from his vast experience, mystical erudition, and heritage.”[1] Your Feast Has Ended is a joint exhibition featuring the work of the artists Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin and Nep Sidhu, who explore themes of death, ancestor veneration, environmental exploitation, legacies of colonialism, and fetishization through multimedia works including but not limited to sculpture, video installation, pelts, and adornment.

These exhibitions have been the subject of much discussion and bewilderment, the force behind figurative kicks in the ass and literal calls to action in Seattle’s artistic community this summer. The works contained within these exhibitions bring to bear a number of “–isms,” “–archies,” and other troubling aspects of our society that the politically correct would prefer to remain in the background: non-mainstream spirituality, racism, patriarchy, homicide, body fetishism, and social control to name a few. Further, the makers of these works are representative of nationalities and ethnicities that typically are not visible in the art world.

Two years of intense conversation and collaboration between Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Director of the Frye Art Museum, and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes resulted in The Unicorn Incorporated and Your Feast Has Ended, as well as a bevy of multidisciplinary, accessible, community oriented programs constructed specifically to support and expand their reach. It must be acknowledged that these installations couldn’t have happened anywhere but the Frye. Its historical policy of “always free” looms large in an artistic and cultural landscape where museums and other cultural institutions are increasing admission prices to compensate for shrinking funding sources, rising operational costs and the general effects of global economic malaise. Undeniable too is Birnie Danzker’s leadership. Her beliefs that curation never really achieves denouement, and that exhibitions are not singular events where artists simply turn over their work and agency to the museum, has allowed a significant degree of multidisciplinary thinking and practice to be incorporated into traditional modes of art curation and art education.[2]

Why do these exhibitions matter?

Discourse, of the generative kind, is salient and necessary. Given their bellicose, in your face nature, these exhibitions have certainly revived seemingly forgotten conversations around issues such as gentrification and police violence.  Yet the factor that has implicitly, and for some, subversively, caused the most discomfort is that we are witnessing versions of manhood, represented by men descending from African, Native American, and Indian lineages whose presence has historically been, and continues to be, contested. That these are four men who do not fit the stereotypical tropes created and systematically distributed worldwide about African, Native American, and Indian men means that their art can’t be made to fit such a narrowly defined narrative either[3]. In order to think about their art, we must accept that the existing, dominant paradigms based in large part on European aesthetic standards (or minimally a European filter on the aesthetics of African, Asian and Native American cultures) fail miserably. We have no control over creating or manipulating the value of these works. We must consider that the themes and ideas proffered by these exhibitions may not be for us, even if they are about us. These ideas may very well signal the resurgence of a way of being that, though hidden for reasons of protection and self-preservation, has always existed and has always been about creation, connectivity, being self-determined, and sustaining a community of beings who are free and self-sufficient.

The Unicorn Incorporated: Curtis R. Barnes

Look Them, by Curtis Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

The Unicorn Incorporated is the first solo exhibition of Curtis R. Barnes, a life long artist and Seattle resident. Barnes’ formal and informal education included cherished time with his grandmother in his home in the Central District, Seattle’s historically African-American neighborhood, where he states, “she taught me how to read, count, and write in cursive, and she introduced me to Aesop’s fables, a variety of folk tales, mythology, and other make-believe worlds.”[4] During his elementary school years, at the recommendation of one of his teachers, his mother enrolled him in art classes at the Frye, which were like “a new world of magic.”[5] Subsequent art education included art courses at the University of Washington, eventual degrees in painting and sculpture from Cornish School of Allied Arts as well as a degree in wood technology.

Curtis R. Barnes’ portfolio traverses significant spans of time, mediums and experiences.  The works selected for The Unicorn Incorporated are but a snap shot. His work for the Afro-American Journal gives a clear view of the violence and oppression visited upon African-American people in Seattle, and is representative of Barnes’ ongoing work to raise consciousness for those willing to be present and receive the message. Barnes’ editorial cartoons for the Afro-American Journal problematize the carefree, liberal, progressive view associated with the city of Seattle: the work titled “White Seattle Is Doomed” (1971) depicts the entrance to the city as barred by crisscross wood panels. His conté drawings explore and celebrate the female form, while his Mask series, in pen and ink, confronts the viewer with the reality that everyone has something to hide. His intrigue of the unseen is further explored with the African Unicorn in his “Television in the Sky” series bringing to bear the importance of mythology at the familial, community, and societal levels. These works are a profound commentary on connectivity to other planes and realms, where the ancestors and other spiritual entities reside, and states very plainly that although fragmented at times, the connectivity has always been and will always be there; we must know it and respect it.

Barnes’ wood sculptures constitute only three pieces in the exhibition but are among the most poignant. In particular there is “Look Them” (1975), a nearly 4 foot tall sculpture with four figures all intertwined, supporting each other. This work immediately calls to mind similar aesthetics found among Bantu peoples of West Central Africa who created sculpture for use in ceremonies to venerate their ancestors.  The concept of the blood’s memory[6] explains “the visible manifestations and ongoing praxis of displaced peoples in their respective Diasporas. In this case, it very adeptly explains the historical and ongoing praxis of African culture and tradition found in every place outside of the African continent where people of African descent reside.”[7] Barnes’ commentary that, “Wood is important to me because it is alive and has veins”[8] invites analysis of the artist’s insistence upon the physical manipulation of living things.  The impact that such manipulation has may only play out long after the manipulator has ceased to exist in human form, as well as the ability of the artist, or any maker for that matter, to tap into that blood’s memory and sit consciously with his/her ancestors and create in the way his ancestors did without loss of time, space, or relevance.[9] This kind of artistic practice is a continuation of Curtis R. Barnes’ early time spent with his grandmother and the manifestation of his respect for and ability to master other worldly modes of doing and being.

Your Feast Has Ended: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu

The official title of this joint exhibition is O Ye Parasites, Your Feast Has Ended and if you are bothered by the title, then this exhibition is for you. A synchronistic selection of work representing a diverse range of media, the pieces in this exhibition are like long time comrades whose relationships to each other, irrespective of the different narratives they tell, are timeless and unfaltering.  Where The Unicorn Incorporated is retrospective and introspective, and according to Curtis R. Barnes, self-explanatory, Your Feast Has Ended is a call to action beckoning both those who have been fed upon and issuing a warning to the “parasites” that their food supply has dried up. This exhibition is a collusion of acts that follows the realization of the need for change, to remove the blinders, to reconnect to the Host.[10]

Consistent throughout this exhibition is a tribute to ancient and contemporary spiritual traditions, or the Host. These artists, through an intentional and sustained connection with the Host, have created objects whose primary form is art but whose function is a spiritual vessel. These vessels have been consecrated in accordance with each artist’s pact and agreement with the Host; similarly perhaps, to what their ancestors did when they walked the earth. In doing this work, these men are no longer solely artists, but also shamans, and their artistic practice is now also ceremony.

Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes

Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot!, by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Magic and spell, weaved betwixt and amongst sobering stories of death, dismemberment, resurgence, and salvation are tantamount in Alley-Barnes’ work in this exhibition. The pelts cum trophies are the most intriguing of the artist’s work in Your Feast Has Ended, as they merge the artist’s fascination with our society’s obsession with fetish and signal his ability, like that of a shaman, to repurpose materials for divine use. Though what you see before you is indeed a confluence of vintage materials and garments, each pelt represents a different narrative, infused with incantation, which transforms it into something ‘other.’

Alley-Barnes’ work, “Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot! (An Incantation for Jazz and Trayvon)”, is simultaneously a death rite for Trayvon Martin, as well as a spell designed to speak directly to the living spirit of Jazz, to whom this piece is also dedicated. The notion of speaking to an individual’s spirit is ancient spiritual practice and is often a solution used when a child or adolescent is engaged in damaging behavior that could cause great harm if not death to the child. Through leveraging the right combination of words in the form of prayer at a predetermined time towards the spirit of the individual, the spirit is convinced to stay and re-orient itself towards healthy behaviors. Doing so, in effect, saves the person.

Calves of Saint Sa-Rah Lu-Pit-Ta, by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

This work is especially poignant in light of the artist’s own experience with police brutality and the recent string of murders of young Black men committed by police officers. The message here is straight, no chaser: do not think for one moment that we do not still have ceremony to lay our dead to rest and that we won’t use the same to teach, protect and exalt our people who are still here.

Alley-Barnes describes his form of sculpture as refuse alchemy . He sources used materials, that he then recycles and formulates into sculpture. These sculptures are visual representations of the ancient and extinct Matuzdi people, and the vehicle through which Alley-Barnes’ shares with us his personal reflections on dismemberment. His work “Calves of Saint Sah-Rah Loo-Pee Tah” is a commentary on the literal and figurative destruction of the bodies of women of African descent, dating back to Sarah Baartman and also referencing present day occurrences, namely the media’s obsession with actress Lupita Nyong’o’s phenotypic traits, which reduce her to her parts divorced from their sum.

Alley-Barnes returns to the feminine, specifically the divine feminine, in his short film “Sacred” where he asserts the necessary role of women in reestablishing physical and terrestrial balance. Water soothes, and like a woman, can give birth and nurture life. At the beginning of the film we witness scenes that are replete with abundance and beauty: the sound of water drops pierce our ears, a bulging, quivering drop of water sitting on a leaf, and a beautiful woman fully submersed in water. By the end of the film we are acutely aware of water as a scarce commodity in high demand that must be controlled at all costs, even to the point of exhaustion. We are also left to ponder the extent to which divine intervention, calling on women with their inherent connection to the Host, can assist in righting the ills we have carelessly visited on ourselves, and environment.

Nicholas Galanin

This Country Is A Lie And Well, by Nicholas Galanin. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Standing at the entrance to the exhibition, your eyes follow the light and suddenly you are under attack from Galanin’s porcelain arrows sitting quietly above. It’s a surprise attack but the choice is yours: turn and leave, or move forward. Your decision-making is interrupted by words broadcasted on a pirated radio station, created by Galanin and his brother Jerrod, in a traditional Tlingit wood storage box built to hold ceremonial items. Tlingit language springs forth from it and our ears ring loudly in our attempts to understand a tongue that was nearly obliterated. The lesson here: language exists because we are a communal people and we must continually engage in dialogue to build community. When language is taken from a people, as was done to Native Americans, communities are forever changed and entire cultures destroyed.

Inert, by Nicholas Galanin. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

Galanin’s point of departure is the land itself. Whether it is the battles between Native peoples and colonialists, the materials he uses to construct his works (wood, silver, copper, etc.) the blood of Native men and women spilled on this soil or the animals that once roamed Tlingit territory in present day Alaska – land is preeminent and predominates; without it we would have nothing.  Galanin intends to shock and awe. The point is to feel something affectively. It may be empathy for the wolf in “Inert” whose hind legs and back are flattened and unable to move, a symbol of the cultural stasis of Native American cultures. Or it may be visceral disgust upon viewing the rape whistle transformed into earrings. Should a rape whistle be an earring? Perhaps not, but Native American women continue to grapple with the legacy of rape. It is a part of the American historical record. Native American art has been reduced to what the market place deems as valuable: trinkets and mementos stripped of historical weight. Don’t we all have a dream catcher?

Galanin broadens the commentary on destruction by issuing a specific indictment of reckless de-ritualized animal sacrifice through the mass killing of its native animal species in “This Country Is A Lie and Well” and “Inert”. Taking it a step further, he decries police violence as an extension of the systematic colonial oppression visited upon Native American people in the Northwestern United States, with “How about those Mariners?” a video installation of a Tlingit warrior carrying a carving knife much like the one John T. Williams (to whom the work is dedicated) was legally carrying when he was murdered by a Seattle Police Officer in 2010. Galanin’s work intentionally broaches uncomfortable historical events that were visited upon Native peoples and speaks loudly against continuing marginalization of Native American peoples and their art forms.

Nep Sidhu

Paradise Sportif, Nep Sidhu. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

When language and architecture are merged the result is a third space, and Sidhu dedicates his grandest pieces of the exhibition to spatial exploration. Heavily theorized, particularly within the field of postcolonial studies, Edward Soja defines the third space as, “as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality.”[11] Each of Sidhu’s panels in the Confirmation series is both the portal to the third space and the third space itself. Looking into the center of each work creates a dizzying optical effect such that you feel you can enter it and go beyond to another place.[12] And that is precisely the point. Sidhu combines his experience with the death of his mother written out in Kufic script (which he studied for nine months with an Imam to learn), with the experiences of his fellow Constellationeers[13] Ishmael Butler and Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (Butler’s lyrics about his mother and Alley-Barnes’ observations on Seattle’s cursed history), mounts them on brass and sheet veneer marble to become the Confirmation series, and has shared them with us in a newly sanctified space: the Frye Art Museum.

Confirmation B, by Nep Sidhu. Photo courtesy of the Frye Art Museum.

With “Re (Confirmation) A” this work creates a portal through which Sidhu and Butler can continue to communicate with their deceased mothers – a hopefully soothing realization that though the body ceases to be the spirit is always there in this third space.[14] “Confirmation B” takes it a step further: the combination of language and architecture is not solely a portal, but a vehicle for the necessary incantation that is the precursor to ancestor veneration. The script in “Confirmation B” contains Sidhu’s mother’s last words to him as she made her transition. The message here is that we need simply to activate language and earth in the appropriate iteration, and conversations with our ancestors will recommence. The third spaces of “Re (Confirmation) A and “Confirmation B” represent the realm of the ancestors and more specifically that realm where our mothers are ever present. The third panel of the Confirmation series, “Curse Words”, is a visual representation of an excerpt of a written work of the same name written by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. This fragment tells the story of the blood-drenched contradictions of the beautiful territory now called Seattle, providing a commentary on the transgressions visited upon the land and its original inhabitants. The mind piercing red reminds us how much blood soaks this land, and forces us to reckon with our stake in it.

If the Confirmation series illuminates our path towards the third space, Sidhu’s Paradise Sportif clothing line exemplifies how we must comport ourselves once we get there: protect and exalt.   Intending to uplift our present day shamans so that they can work efficaciously, the garments are necessarily beautiful, but what they do and what they mean is more relevant. In Sidhu’s own words,

“When understanding the power of our past messengers and healers, the garments that they wore played significance in their function as much as their understanding of nature, rhythm, dance and medicine. When dealing with negative or destructive spirits during a ceremony, the healing of an illness could inspire revenge in the spirit that caused it. The spirit could not effectively attack a shaman wearing a powerful costume, nor could it recognize the shaman when he or she was out of costume. In both cases, the shaman was protected in the spiritual realm. The garments worn functioned in much the same way as playing the same music during meditation to induce a meditative state. By always wearing the same costume during trance states, the costume itself became an instrument for facilitating access to that state.”[15]

Sidhu has intentionally steered clear of turning Paradise Sportif into a commercial line. To date this collection has only been seen at the Frye, on Sidhu’s web site, and donned by the members of the Black Constellation collective, of which he is a part. It is apparent that Sidhu seeks out people and places that embody and radiate the light that he carefully infuses into every piece.

And now?

On September 14 and September 21, Your Feast Has Ended and The Unicorn Incorporated complete their respective runs at the Frye Museum. While it is significant that these exhibitions started in Seattle, which so desperately needed to be shocked out of its complacency, these exhibitions speak both to and far beyond this city, and thus they must travel. Sidhu’s work must be seen in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dakar, Marrakech and his hometown of Toronto. Alley-Barnes’ work must visit Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Galanin’s should reach as broadly as possible throughout the Americas to countries like Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru where the indigenous imprint remains indelible. The challenges of planning and executing such global exhibitions aside, there must be a concerted effort to make these exhibitions accessible to those who are open to the large-scale metamorphosis invoked by this body of work. Our responsibility as viewers of this work and culture patrons is to lend our minds and voices towards its actual and conceptual longevity. The artists have done their job. Now it is time to do ours.

The post Transcendence, Transformation and Continuum: Summer 2014 at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum appeared first on The Postcolonialist.