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.

“…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.

Juliano Salgado speaks too, taking over from Wenders on occasion, remembering his father’s ‘superhero’ presence in their early family life while in exile in Paris during the Brazilian dictatorship. Wenders and Salgado want us to know that family life and the family home hold the photographer’s practice together: at a number of points in the film we also hear from Sebastião’s own father, a farmer from Minas Gerais in Brazil’s southwest, as well as Lélia, Salgado’s partner. Lélia, we learn, was the primary parent for Juliano (and his younger brother, Rodrigo) whilst Sebastião travelled the world for work; she is also the chief curator and designer of most of Sebastião’s exhibitions and publications.

From the outset, Wenders reminds us that Salgado commenced professional life as an economist, working on development projects with organisations like the World Bank and the International Coffee Organisation. Salgado turned to photography after borrowing Lélia’s Leica, turning his gaze onto subjects such as housing projects in France, the lives of Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers throughout Latin America, and the experience of famine in the Sahel. He learns about liberation theology in Ecuador and Peru, travelling with a radical priest who introduces him to poor communities in the throes of organising against state impunity and Church complicity. Salgado’s exposure to (and of) Indigenous peoples is also important to this period, which the film sacralises through the memory of a Saraguros man in a village in Ecuador, who told Salgado he believed the photographer was “sent from heaven”. To be sure, Salgado’s lifelong interest in Indigenous peoples has the consistent theme of unfettered access, with the blessing of his subjects, and the virtues of ‘non-modern’ time and technique. Later, this dovetails neatly with the photographers’ reverence for what he views as the “pristine” nature of the pre-industrial world.

These optics, which may be viewed as alternately colonial and humanistic, have rightly earned Salgado’s work forceful critiques that call into question the otherwise overwhelming respect and acclaim accorded to the photographer. These critiques remained present with me as I watched Le Sel de la Terre. As Parvati Nair recounts in her book A Different Light (2011), the most well-known critics of Salgado include Susan Sontag, Ingrid Sischy, and Michael Kimmelman, who have been variously concerned with the photographer’s politics and ethics by noting the relative voicelessness of his subjects, the aestheticization of their suffering, the grandeur and universality accorded to disparate human and planetary experience (in works such as Terra, Workers, Exodus, and Genesis), and a certain fetishization of the pre-modern, the non-industrialized, and the spiritual. These critics agree that there is a fundamental injustice in the production of reportage, artworks, and the like whose most visible benefit is to the producer, who enjoys considerable fame and financial benefit from the depiction of subjects who do not speak. Despite best intentions, Salgado as producer controls the narrative about the lives of these ‘others’. The questions posed by Sontag and others are as relevant to the work as the images themselves.

Indeed, we usually don’t know if the people in Salgado’s images gave their permission to be photographed, to be styled in a particular way, or to be placed into a narrative of global suffering that regularly skirts the colonial aesthetics of “the noble savage,” as well as the ‘inevitably’ poor, starving, or dead, contrasted by a ‘perfect,’ pre-human wilderness. We’re simply asked to accept Salgado’s vision, and to praise him for the extent and the intimacy of his ‘access,’ however attained. Whilst Salgado has raised awareness and donated funds through his work, we don’t know whether the lives of the people depicted in the midst of conflict and famine have materially improved. (Wenders, too, has a habit of deploying the colonial visual rhetoric of discovery and benevolence for unclear ends, as Simon Featherstone suggests of The Buena Vista Social Club.)

The critiques above find some confirmation in Le Sel de la Terre. For example, “Africa,” often spoken of as a singular entity, is described as the place of deepest inspiration and necessary return for the photographer’s practice, and also the site of greatest trauma. On photographing the displaced and violated in Central Bosnia, Salgado says: “it’s strange this was happening in Europe, at the end of the 20th century… these people had a European state of living, a European intellectual capacity”. “Africa” escapes such historicised incredulity, suggesting that Salgado sees the comparably structural suffering of people experiencing famine in the Sahel region as somehow more unavoidable. Within this context, the ‘strength’ and ‘humility’ of the suffering bodies that Salgado has witnessed throughout his career is regularly referenced, as is the defining power of Salgado’s own gaze, whilst Wenders, as many others have before him, praises Salgado’s “empathy for the human condition”.

Recounting an especially threatening moment photographing the effects of drought and the state manufacture of famine in Ethiopia – helicopters and machine guns bearing down on people fleeing that country in search of safety and nourishment – Sebastião notes, “I took a photo, and then I ran”. This particular zone of suffering has Salgado pairing with humanitarians Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF). In Mali, Salgado shows how MSF physicians “saved” children suffering from extreme starvation through a highly successful recovery program. Overall, Salgado’s images from this period are distinctly disturbing, and, as images of starved and dead Black bodies, they cannot be immune from the charge of racialized subjugation or poverty porn. Wenders does not consider this, though; instead noting softly that Salgado’s book Sahel: The end of the road, where many such photographs appeared, raised powerful “awareness” of the effects of the drought on the people and raised troubling questions about its political causes.

As the film continues we hear how Salgado’s witness nearly kills him after he accompanies UN soldiers to photograph refugees relocating from Rwanda to the Congo during the Hutu genocide, after which he contemplates giving up his vocation altogether. Wenders works this melancholic white man’s trope: we sense the burden of bearing, through interpreting, human suffering in artistic and intellectual practice, as well as the turn from materiality to nature for comfort if not redemption – that strange conflation of authorship, transcendence and self-loathing that has men hating humanity whilst striving to save it. The privileged capacity to leave these sites of suffering – such as being able to run from the machine guns – still apparently escapes Salgado’s attention. After Rwanda, Salgado decides that, “I no longer believed in salvation for humans”. If at this point we are still unsure how to understand the specific nature of Salgado’s moral and aesthetic burden, Wenders makes it explicit, “Sebastião had seen into the heart of darkness.”

In the end, Salgado doesn’t leave photography. He turns his lens from the fallen human world to the preservation of a pre-industrial harmony with nature at home on his family’s drought-ravaged farm in Minas Gerais. We see him tending to seedlings and looking out over newly greened hills. The Salgados’ ‘Instituto Terra’ is a regenerated sanctuary for native plants and animals of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, ‘returned’ to this state from its previous existence as the family cattle ranch. We hear of Salgado’s succour in seeing a tree he “helped to plant” flourish. This is doubtlessly the source material for Salgado’s edenic turn in Genesis, for which he decides to shift from the register of denunciation of his previous works (which critique consumerism, labour exploitation, land enclosure, and border protection) to one of optimistic announcement that “two-thirds of the earth is still as it was at the time of creation”. This, he says, can inspire us, as “the destruction of nature can be reversed.” In his encounters with the plants and animals, Salgado sees himself anew as a part of an ecosystem, as “of the earth”, which is timeless and embracing. Salgado appears as a new kind of benevolent settler, making the desert bloom, turning from a belief in human salvation to a hope for redemption through nature.

Lest we completely consign Salgado to the status of the Bono of photojournalism, it should be noted that Le Sel de la Terre does reveal a somewhat more complex eye than the above critiques might suggest if analysed individually. Salgado’s touch is gentle, and often leaves key questions unanswered. Even at its most romanticized, his effect is not one of the moral sledgehammer, and his approach is far from cynical. The film depicts a rather deferential man with a ruminative lens and a slow burning mood. Whilst we don’t know anything of the dynamics outside the frame, when Salgado is filmed with his subjects there appears to be mutual generosity and appreciation, with the affective exchange appearing quite horizontal: in a Zo’é indigenous community in the Amazon, we see children and adults laughing at him, using his camera, and posing for photographs with pride. Further, Salgado’s treatment of the humanitarian response to the tragedies he documents is not entirely uncritical. Of the displaced in the Sahel he reveals that, in moving a camp, MSF’s food distribution plans went awry and many more people died at the very point at which they had been told to expect food and safety. In documenting and exhibiting the human suffering of human-made conditions like war and famine, Salgado’s messaging appears more “come and see the blood on the streets” than the facile “make poverty history”. It might be Wenders’ rendering that is more wanting than Salgado’s practice. The authorial Salgado voice and eye is greatly exaggerated by Wenders’ gentle peritext and Salgado Junior’s longing to know his larger-than-life dad.

Indeed, Salgado’s images are part of the visual lexicon of movements for global justice, complicating their perception. Of Terra, the photographic volume concerning the struggles and successes of Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, Salgado says in an interview alongside the late Eduardo Galeano, that it was produced from a position of being “inside the debate”, of making images and showing them directly alongside those he depicted. In so doing he roundly rejects the notion of his work as “fine art”. This, says Salgado, is the way he is portrayed by the United States: i.e. as a ‘fine art photojournalist’. That portrayal, he argues, is categorically wrong. Salgado is a leftist, a former exile from military dictatorship, a critic that is moved by human suffering, humbled by human resilience, and disturbed by the intricacy of injustice. His photography, he says, is to be understood as a relation more than as an object; as document more than artwork. Certainly, during travels in South America in 2005 and 2007 I saw images from Terra on the walls of houses in the Movimento Sem Terra (the Brazilian landless movement) occupations, on the cover of Zapatista publications in southern Mexico, on display in various NGO offices in Brazil and Mexico and in a community farmhouse in a small town in south-eastern Bolivia. As Parvati Nair also recognises, an image made by Salgado signifies very differently within these networks: “its outreach is not the same as it would be in a book, next to specific text or on the walls of Movimento Sem Terra’s office.” Place and context are both important to situating, evaluating and interpreting Salgado’s body of work; something Wenders might have made more of.

Wenders concludes his introduction to the film with the words, “after all, people are the salt of the earth”. Salgado, however, seems to be telling us that it is people who have salted the earth – scourged it with exploitation, war, and famine – and that there is value in marginalizing humans entirely. By the end of Le Sel de la Terre’s 110 minutes, I’d have settled for a de-centering of the globalised male auteur as the vehicle for registering human experience.

The post Unsalting the Earth: Sebastião Salgado and Le Sel de la Terre 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.

According to Maya Deren in her seminal book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the Vodou rite of reclamation or the retirer d’en bas de l’eau, enables a family to “reclaim [an ancestor’s] soul from the waters of the abyss…and to lodge it in a govi [pot] where it may henceforth be …consulted … and so may participate in all the decisions that normally unite the members of a family in counsel” (46). While seemingly “primitive,” this ritual perseveres in the modern age because “the enduring presence of so many dead demands that it be tried again and again” (Lowe). This rite enables participants, both dead and alive, to performatively enact force in the material world through shared decision-making. I would like to argue that by bringing the dead back to life as a writer does when composing a text, in particular within a ritualized context such as publication and distribution, he/she enables a reading audience to participate in a cultural ritual, a performative act, one with external consequences: readers are affected by the voices they contact between the pages. Those rallied spirits alive in the book join the world once again as active participants. Like reading, Haitian Vodou is, through its “worship of metaphysical forces…ritualistic, rather than meditative, and involve[s] … [sustaining metaphysical forces] by feeding, or sacrifice, and [the spirits’] benediction [is] maintained by propitiation” (65). A Haitian’s religious system, Deren claims, “must do more than give him moral substance… it must provide the means for living. It must serve the organism as well as the psyche” (73). I aim to prove that the feeding of the spirits occurs in the reading, the praise in the writing. And the dead speak from the pages.

Collective memory is maintained through the performative act of writing. The writer becomes the mambo (priestess); the reader becomes a hounsis (initiate). Narrative construction must serve the writer, reader, and history by, according to Joseph Roach, “juxtapos[ing] living memory as restored behavior against a historical archive of scripted records” (242). Fiction functions as a record, promoting and maintaining culture. The voice of a text resounds with performative cultural iterations which reinscribe the identity of the writer, the reader, and the characters in the book. Too often readers are exposed to singular, authoritative voices from the Euro-centric majority and so marginalized voices are forgotten. While Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather write very differently, their narratives contribute to a North American western-centered sense of ethos: white, individualized, rooted, whole. But the Afro-American or Caribbean writer, as suggested by Derek Walcott, inherits a narrative fraught with loss and division, a history defined by the other. How then, can a post-plantation era writer contribute to his sense of cultural history? By resurrecting the past and offering, as Roach claims, “mnemonic materials- speech, images, gestures- that supplement or contest the authority of ‘documents’ in [any] historiographic  tradition”(242). Through the act of writing itself a Creole writer reestablishes the identity of ancestors and so weaves the past with the present. I see the dead speak through the text itself and shape the present in the extra-semiotic world. The text houses the cultural identity “of successive generations that sustain different social and cultural identities” (Roach 242), like the govi pot houses the dead.

James Weldon Johnson offers a complicated narrative in his fictionalized memoir The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published in 1912. In his fabricated autobiography, “a veil has been drawn aside: the reader…[is] given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America… [and is] initiated into the ‘freemasonry,’ as it were, of the race” (Johnson 3). Theorist Brent Hayes Edwards claims that the novel offers a “small but crucial shift of authority” from an Anglo-centered narration to an Afro-centered narration (41).

But defining who that narrator is becomes challenging. The speaker is of mixed race- his father is white, his mother black- but his mother never communicates this to him, and he defers to a white identity. After hearing her son call a classmate “nigger,” the speaker’s mother “turned on [him and said] ‘Don’t you ever use that word again’” (7). Unwittingly, the speaker is forbidden to use a word which is a label of self-representation, albeit one of slander and shame. But the narrator, who is arguably a construction of Johnson’s psyche or an amalgamation of his personal experience, is writing the word and indeed his fictionalized self in the story speaks this word. The written signifier, “nigger,” stands in for the self, the “I,” and maintains a sense of permanence in shared memory as it is written and published. But the “I” in this tale is not the “signified” Johnson even though the text was published within the autobiographical genre, although it later was recanted and Johnson claimed the text as fiction. Herein lays complicated notions surrounding presence and absence in Afro-American texts. I rely on Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida in order to mine the self-referential nature of ‘beingness’ in text. The binary of who one is, is reliant on who one is not. We understand black in relation to white, reader in relation to writer, self in relation to someone else. Yet the true nature of the self is unknowable, there is no Platonic essence, as the self is an identifier for some indescribable interior consciousness which is paradoxically understood by who one is not. To further complicate deconstructionist notions of being, our Platonic understanding of self suggests a static, unchanging identity, a singularness, a purity. In a contact zone and in the context of postcolonial theory, I believe there is an added danger to trying to define static selfhood. If the narrator of Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is defined in a singular way, he cannot have any other identity, he is solely white or solely “nigger”. But readers and narrators cannot get around self-referents. This is Johnson’s entire point- the limits of language and of consciousness. For the speaker there is a sense of Derridean essential drift, for the self and the identifier never align- the “nigger” and the “I,” as he doesn’t identify fully as black and definitely not as “nigger.” He continues to climb the American socio-economic ladder through playing ragtime music and in his later years as a white businessman. The narrator passes back and forth from the white and black world, defined by the gaze of others both black and white. Arguably, Johnson was not interested in a definitive notion of race or identity as the narrator remains unnamed; rather Johnson chose to pen a text representative of black experience at the turn of the century. This shifting sense of identity, this “dual personality” actually leaves room for Derridean différance, a play on the French for “to defer” as well as “to differ,” by deconstructing notions of selfhood, race, and representation. According to Heather Russell, the “narrative structure simultaneously veils and conceals while unveiling and revealing,” ‘leaving its readers’ “tasked with standing at the gateway… of The Autobiography’s hybrid structure” (Russell 30). Suzanne Scafe notes that with Johnson’s fragmentary voice of re- and un- representation, he “foreground[s]… the constructedness of the ‘I’ identity and privilege[es] the texture of experience and memory” (190). Through the “simmering gumbo pot” (Cartwright 100) of “I,” “nigger,” “white,” and “black,” “speaker” and “author,” Johnson summons readers to participate in his narrative by forcing them to wade through his various representations. Like the “composite and multiple” spirits, “every first-person consciousness, every “I”, is an assemblage, a plural ‘we’” (Cartwright 100). I argue that by adding an assemblage of narrative voices to the Afro-American literary tapestry, Johnson reclaims the unspoken lives of millions of men and women who have passed as white, or who have identified as black. The retirer d’en bas de l’eau of giving voice to the dead remedies breaches in black history by establishing the presence of an everyman, not deconstructing identity, but re-constructing it. This turn of the century text seems to me to take up Derek Walcott’s call for acts of presence through art, “allowing the group [(readers)] to act itself out by reiterating its structure [(identity)] and commenting on its [own] values” (Brown 210). I read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a govi pot to consult on my road to selfhood as I shift through fluid self-representations, the narrator providing me a predecessor to consult for advice through the performance of race and identity.

If Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man allows Johnson to reclaim shared memory through narration, then Eileen M. Julien’s Travels with Mae: Scenes from a New Orleans Girlhood (2009) addresses the specific and personal dead instead of the death of assumed identifiers. Julien’s text functions specifically because she writes from place- a contact zone. Common culture makes for “ersatz families both created and reinforced through ritualizing” (Brown 207). The setting of New Orleans offers an amalgamation of people, voices, perspectives, and opportunities for filial connections, but grounded in a specific culture where “community is both occasion for and the product of its own ritual activity” (Brown 210). Due to the multitude of voices (in addition to a factious history of violence, environmental disaster, and gentrification) a single voice can get lost. Readers can approach Julien’s text as a reclamation of the spirit of her dead mother. The performative act of writing this memoir contributes to the uniqueness of post-plantation shared memory and reclaims the past of New Orleans, her ancestral space.

For anthropologist and Vodou initiate Karen McCarthy Brown, the term “Vodou” was coined by outsiders and considered a religion, but its practitioners do not “believe” in Vodou, rather, they claim to “serve the spirits” (205). With this emphasis on action or serving, Vodou ceremonies illustrate that performative ritual creates a symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead: “the living need advice, warning, protection provided by…the spirits… The spirits, in turn, have to be…honored if they are to muster the strength… to protect the living” (206). It seems the act of performative remembrance is perhaps all the more vital for underrepresented populations. According to Keith Cartwright: “Our corrective effort to go to the mouth of the govi of New Orleans… calls for difficult acts of listening to subalternized voices that are often poorly represented, if recorded at all, in available texts. These voices that would balance our vision and open our eyes to clashing energies and contradictory impulses have been censored, silenced, and ignored” (101). Often readers are granted a glimpse into the lives of poor, marginalized black New Orleanians in fiction, but Eileen M. Julien offers readers an under-represented demographic: that of a middle class black girl who attended bourgeoisie balls, social clubs and parties. The members of the black middle class in New Orleans, as portrayed by Julien, developed their own exclusive subculture that was not a reaction to whiteness but rather a celebration of the presence of Blackness. Julien’s story unfolds in a series of vignettes reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize speech on the fragmentation of Caribbean history, which I see Julien repossessing. Travels with Mae is largely a celebratory novel filled with food, family, and humid New Orleans, neighbors where okra grows in the backyard, jazz music plays in the music hall, and dainty party dresses swirl around girls’ ankles.

Several vignettes in the memoir present insight into Julien’s relationship with her mother, most notably her mother’s last days when age and fear beset both Mae (Julien’s mother) and her aunt Fe. Julien “spend[s] Thanksgiving at home because death lurks here and everywhere” (99). Mae and Fe fret over food for mourners after a series of neighbors and relatives pass away. The sharing of food, in particular gumbo which is mentioned several times in the memoir, which I believe becomes a performative reclamation of the dead as those alive eat to remind themselves that they are still living and memorialize, through the act of living, those who have died. Gumbo, known widely as a New Orleans dish, also reminds those consuming it of their African heritage, as “Gumbo, Louisiana-style, shares common ingredients with Senegalese suppakanja”(105).

Another vignette, narrated through journal entries, brings Mae to life but in one of Julien’s dreams: “Her hands on my forehead- joy, ecstasy to know that even though she was dead, she was somehow alive!” (113). Interestingly Julien ends her memoir not with the death of her mother, but a scene when her mother was still alive, seeing her off at the airport, when she gestured to her mother from the terminal and her mother “came back!” (129). I offer that the return of her mother’s spirit and body seems an appropriate moment to end the text as Julien’s book becomes the public govi for Mae, “[b]ecause… of them, of my them, all that will be left is me, a book like this one, and my pen” (100). The use of the first person pronoun (my), and Julien’s claim over the city of New Orleans, is a performative act of reclamation. The ritual enactment of writing and reading Travels with Mae, or what Keith Cartwright infers is a “govi text,” seems to me to expose readers to her memorialized past, and brings her mother to life.

A fictive tale, Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983) offers another method for summoning ancestry and maintaining shared memory: ritual movement through the abject. Protagonist Avey/Avatara’s rebirth launches her through vomit, excrement, blood, and abjection to bring her dead ancestors back to life, as well as herself. It seems appropriate to mark this text as distinctly Modernist due to its self-conscious narration, rejection of Enlightenment notions such as free will, and its subtle commentary on fragmented family life in the face of racism and industrialization. Modernism is often thought to be a movement at odds with black/Caribbean/Afro-American experience. But Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic notes that some Afro-American literary ventures represent the notion of “the slave sublime” in which “the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marks out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later” (220-221). Paule Marshall, who was born to Barbadian parents and grew up in Brooklyn, was likely familiar with historical and cultural fracturing, and her protagonist Avery/Avatara has “slave sublime” experiences on her cruise vacation to the Caribbean in order for Marshall to explore her connection with our Afro-American past by “complicat[ing] individualist notions of personhood, authorship, filiation, or salvation, [by] present[ing] Avey as an avatar of lives that have preceded her, an avatar ritually bound to generations past and future” (Cartwright 50). Unlike the speaker in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man who performs fluid identifiers and  presents readers with an ancestry of changeable identification in order to complicate our understanding of beingness, Avey of Praisesong for the Widow moves through an abject bodily experience to divorce her mind from the body, and in bodily absence focuses on the spirit, or inner world.

The notion of bodily absence is of course a familiar one in Caribbean culture. Slavery forces an abject state because the physical body is othered; a body absent of consciousness or soul is arguably not a person. According to Carole Sweeney, “the optimum functioning of the slave system required not only utter disregard for the…slave body but also the denial of the existence of consciousness in individual slaves” (52). Under the terrors of slavery the body was the privileged binary within the body/mind binary, therefore the slave mind did not exist for white slave owners and so slaves functioned as soulless commodities. Economics deemed the slave body “collective” because slaves were only worth the value of their labor (Sweeney 52). Any fungible slave represented labor, and so could stand in for another slave. Despite Marshall’s heavy hand at characterization- Avey is a well-rounded character- she is just a body, a slave, albeit a victim of Anglophile consumerism rather than plantation labor. Avey’s life is absorbed by materialism— she buys fashionable clothes and expensive dinners. She lacks self-actualization; she is not a whole person but an unconscious body. After her rebirth into full spiritual and cultural consciousness, her retirer d’en bas de l’eau or reclamation of her soul, I see her as standing in for anybody but this time, she “situates [her] place in an historical continuum,” in memory (Sweeney 52).

I’d like to posit that we first encounter the performative, ritualistic aspect of a retirer d’en bas de l’eau at Ibo Landing, where Aunt Cuney tells young Avey about the Ibo slaves who walked off the slave ship and chose to drown in defiance against their enslavement. This first gesture initiated by ancestors, constitutes a collective defiance against the white slave owners who attempted to make slaves of both the Ibos’ bodies and history. The Ibos’ drowning, returning to what a Haitian may call the Waters of the Abyss where the loa and souls of the dead reside, brought the living— Avey— back to life.

The blurring of lines between the living and the dead plays out through abject instances in the novel. Avey’s vacation on the cruise ship the Bianca Pride (White Pride) could be likened to traveling a kind of perverse Middle Passage and she experiences this voyage in an abject state. On board Avey eats a European- style parfait and “her stomach, her entire midsection felt odd.”  She maintained— “[I]t felt like a huge tumor had suddenly ballooned up at her center” (Marshall 50, 52). Avey’s discomfort continued until she seemed “in the grip of a powerful hallucinogen- something that had dramatically expanded her vision, offering her a glimpse of things that were beyond her comprehension” (59). In this semi-catatonic state Avey escapes the ship to the island of Grenada where she finds herself in an “unlikely sacred room of mourning (a hotel)” (Cartwright 51). From there she smells a child’s filth and sweat (arguably her own); she releases her bowels on a small boat and finds herself anointed while sick by rum shack owner Legbert who represents Papa Legba the loa of the crossroads, and his daughter, perhaps a representation of an initiate, or hunsis. In one of the final scenes in the novel Avey attends the nation dance where diasporic Caribbean attendees dance for their ancestors, “drawing on…[a] shared pool of memories…to reconstruct [ritual African dances]” (Brown 209). Avey performs her own nation dance; her subconscious connects with the other dancers, moves beyond her body, and she suddenly remembers Ibo Landing, the resting place of her African ancestors. It seems Avey’s symbolic death and rebirth as she proceeds through abject stages of physical discomfort, allow her to reclaim her ancestral spirits, in particular the spirit of her mentor Aunt Cuney and the spirits of the Ibos. I see Ibo Landing as also offering up a ritualized space for a retirer d’en bas de l’eau. The water submerges the slave bodies and Avey’s repeated visits memorialize those under the water, making for a performative, ritualized space. Avatara resolves to bring her grandchildren there and share her ancestral past. Marshall’s narration reverses the intentions of slave owners who attempted to empty the Afro-Caribbean body of consciousness. By emptying herself of consciousness through physical abjection, I see Avatara standing in for her ancestors themselves and reaches back through history to reclaim collective memory in the govi pot of the body, no longer mindless, no longer soulless, but conscious.

I conclude with arguably my most definitive offering of the retirer d’en bas de l’eau, Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which Beloved, a two-year-old, is murdered by her mother who intends to rescue her from slavery. Beloved, residing in a woman’s body, emerges from a kind of Vodou Water of the Abyss “full of venom” to haunt her mother Sethe. Eventually the reclaimed child consumes her mother as Sethe wastes away and Beloved grows fatter and fatter on guilt and love. Finally the community of Black women who previously rejected Sethe because she killed Beloved and tried to murder her other three children, circle the house and exorcise Beloved’s spirit and Sethe is accepted back into the community again. Beloved is a warning of what can happen when we ignore the whispers of the novel’s epigraph: “Sixty Million and more,” slaves Morrison memorializes in her novel. Un-reclaimed spirits sleep uneasily, and so will our history if we fail to recognize the voices of speakers with fluid identifiers, the soul reaching beyond the abject body, and our ancestors calling from home.  There may be no better way to allow those voices to be heard than through the act of writing, where they can speak for themselves.

The post Writing Rites of Reclamation: Blackness and Caribbean Remembering appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Greece,
Your no is also a yes
To other things,
You spurned usurers
For Athens’ pride

Greece,
You stood through war
Resisted fascists,
Your poets wrote poems
On cigarette packs

Greece,
Your silences are oracles
Of time’s future,
With your aching hands
You fisted tables

You resisted the enemy
Greece,
You sabotaged
The plans of annexation
Burning bridges

Greece,
You let Marx sit on your
Stoic shoulders,
Your cynics defied kings
Trusted workers

Your history is a miracle
Greece,
You are a library
Of words that escaped fire
Survived Caesar

The world is in your debt
Greece,
They can’t repay
The wonders of your urns
And your verses

Today you brave penury
Greece,
With the grit
Of a working class poet
Who resisted

He left behind omens
On paper
They remain inscribed
In the eyes

“But perhaps dawn will reveal a new face”^[1]

Manash Bhattacharjee
July 10, 2015, Delhi

The post No is Yes (poetry) appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

By the end of the 18th century, the French were proud to own the richest colony in the world, Saint-Domingue, where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were disembarked off ships every year, most of them with a life expectancy of less than five years. The enslaved revolted in 1791, gained their freedom in 1793, and eventually declared national independence in 1804 after the French sent an expedition to re-establish slavery. Haiti was born.

In 1804, it was shocking that a group of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants dared to form their own nation founded on the abolition of slavery. By this time, to be enslaved was a social status associated with people of African descent in the Americas, so fighting slavery required fighting the racism intrinsic to the institution. Haiti’s existence challenged the narrative that the West told itself: certain people were meant for enslavement and exploitation; therefore, the system of inequality foundational to the Americas was simply normal, not unjust. The West, faced with the shock of Haiti’s existence, worked hard to keep that narrative alive.

In order to promote that story, Haiti was maligned. Haitians were considered violent, barbaric, and incapable of running a nation. Actions such as Haiti’s 1825 agreement to pay France billions of dollars in exchange for recognition, which weakened the Haitian economy from the start, were used to prove that Haiti couldn’t stand—not to show that the West in fact needed it to fail. This attitude, this desire to prove true the “doomed to fail” narrative, is alive and well two centuries later and it’s closely related to the story that we tell about protests in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore.

In 2010, the day after an earthquake in Haiti killed over three hundred thousand people, Pat Robertson announced that Haitians were paying for their “pact with the devil.” What was this “pact” exactly? Robertson suggested that in order to gain their freedom, Haitians needed the help of an evil force, to which they still owed their independence today.

Let’s break down this absurd accusation—Haitians’ ancestors dared to assert that they were not property; they dared to assert that their lives mattered. What made their freedom and eventual national independence possible? Their determination? Their inner sense of humanity? Their dream of a better life? No, says Robertson, opposing the institution of slavery was the “devil’s” work. And what’s worse, Robertson suggests that hundreds of thousands of people deserved to die two hundred years later because of it. Yet the most detrimental part of this accusation is that it props up the idea that violence belongs to and embodies Haiti and Haitians—not to the institution of slavery that offered misery and death to some and wealth and prosperity to others.

The fact that, two centuries after the first successful slave revolt in the Americas, people continue to locate violence only in the opposition to oppression rather than in the system that oppresses brings us to Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore today. Those who fight back and oppose a system that perpetuates inequity are “thugs” much like Haitian revolutionaries were “brigands.” We overlook the fact that life expectancy varies dramatically by neighborhood in Baltimore, the fact that minor traffic violations can ruin the lives of those who can’t afford to pay the fines associated with tickets, or the fact that certain police departments find racism funny. Slavery was abolished in the United States a century and a half ago, over six decades after Haitians claimed their freedom. Economic disparity and racism, both intrinsic to this institution that was foundational to the beginning of the Americas, have not been fully abolished. This, sadly, is why 2015 bears a striking resemblance to 1791.

Now you get the joke. Funny, huh?

The post From Port-au-Prince to Baltimore, with Love appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

In this moment it appears increasingly clear that the growing levels of inequality and the tensions in national politics in the South African context are igniting a new era of post-Apartheid voices.  These are the rising voices of a youth who are increasingly distrustful of “rainbow nation” doctrines and talk of neo-liberal racial democracy. In what has quickly become a historic wave of student-driven protests at the University of Cape Town, an unprecedented level of widespread debate, conversation, and tactical demonstrations have taken hold of the atmosphere and imagination of countless participants across the country and now across the globe.

The protests focussed around the calls for the removal of a statue of the imperialist megalomaniac and renowned “philanthropist”, one Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes was an avid businessman whose accumulated wealth stemmed largely from mining in Southern Africa, and he was also the colonial driver instigating the creation of the Rhodesian territory. The protest actions, since their inception, have demanded the removal of the statue along with firm commitments to address worker rights, curriculum and several other issues that have been laid out in full in a petition presented by students, workers, and staff.

The real catalyst for the international attention was born from a controversial demonstration, in the second week of March 2015, beneath the figure of Cecil John Rhodes perched on his throne, gazing dreamily at the still vastly unequal city from his timeless ivory tower, the University of Cape Town. The demonstration, calling for the statue’s removal, reached its climax when one protester, Chumani Maxwele, threw a bucket of faecal matter over the statue.

This spurred action and attracted a great deal of attention in both online and offline spaces.  The responses varied from damning condemnations to overwhelming support and mass mobilisation resulting in marches, petitions, open letters and hundreds of opinion pieces in national popular media outlets in particular.

On Friday the 20^th of March, a procession under the banner of the slogan “Rhodes Must Fall” was led from the main campus down to the University administration building, Bremner, were the Vice Chancellor’s office is located. Midway through the address the student driven contingent occupied the administration building and took up residence in a historic room named the Archie Mafeje room. In 1968 this room was occupied by hundreds of students at the university protesting an intervention from the then South African government that sought to rescind Mafeje’s appointment to the African Studies department, as a senior lecturer. Archie Mafeje, hailing from Ncobo in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, had studied and taught at the University of Cape Town while engaging in political activism and providing insight into fighting for the plight of Africa and its people. He went on to teach and work at the University of Dar Es Salaam before moving to work in The Hague, before finally returning to South Africa to continue his work developing social science research in the South African context.

Bremner building was quickly renamed by the student driven mass movement to “Azania House” invoking the spirit and legacies of the Black consciousness movements in South Africa in the 1970s. Azania house has become the center of operations for the social movement who have declared their unwillingness to move until the demands, particularly the removal of the statue, are met.

On the evening of Tuesday the 24^th of March in an address delivered by a cohort of black academics from the University of Cape Town, testimonials were given describing the difficulties around being a black staff member within the institution, and practical suggestions and dreams for “transformed” university spaces were shared in the lively, packed room, intermittently infused with protest songs and dances that served to raise spirits and refocus strength in the wake of the heaviness of the topic at hand.

Consistently over the days that followed, the collective occupying Azania House orchestrated protests and performance art demonstrations across the campus, interrogating the legacy of colonialism and how it is memorialised on campus. In a particularly powerful piece popularly titled Saartjie Baartman, a collective of artists left from Azania House and walked through the campus in chains, black paint and diapers, moving towards a sculpture on Baartman located in the University library.

SaartjieBaartman // Man walking with Chains. Photo credit: UCT Rhodes Must Fall

As the media attention, both national and international, continued to lock its gaze on the unrelenting “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, the broader debates in and around the movement continued to drive for changes beyond the physical fall of the statue. Azania House, in the evenings that followed March 24^th, has been home to guest lecturers presenting on various issues and the Archie Mafeje room in particular continues to be a space generating intellectual debate, art in various forms, and conversations regarding alternative educational pedagogies in ways that have been rarely seen on the University campus.

These lectures and dialogues have provoked a conversation regarding changes in the curriculum of key interest areas within the University that have consistently marginalised Afro-centric views, thoughts and teachings. This was particularly discussed in the Politics, Psychology, English literature, Philosophy and History departments, respectively.  Much debate surrounded revisiting the disagreements within the university that led to the departure of Professor Mahmood Mamdani in 1999, former AC Jordan chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town and a world-renowned post colonial scholar. Dialogue on the conditions surrounding Mamdani’s departure, approached in his paper “Teaching African in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, has provided a useful, tangible foundation from which this movement can begin to address specific curriculum deficiencies, particularly emphasising on how issues centered around the African continent are dealt with.

Another noteworthy trend stemming from the debates and conversations facilitated at the University has been the leadership shown by black women, and in many cases, black queer women. Several declarations and efforts have been made to ensure that the spaces and actions remain intersectional and develop through that lens going forward, which at present is no easy feat as issues continuously battle for priority.

International solidarity from other Universities outside of South Africa continues to flurry in, notably kicked off with protest action at from a radical collective located in Oxford University calling for the fall of Rhodes and for the “Decolonisation” of education.  The Black Student Union of the University of Berkley, California, issued a statement in solidarity and several other student groups in Universities in the region continue offer solidarity as the movement continues to pick up steam.

Oxford Student Protest. Photo credit: Ntokozo Qwabe 

De NieuweUniversiteit – vooreendemocratischeuniversiteit
Solidarity to the students of UCT. Photo credit: De NieuweUniversiteit – vooreendemocratischeuniversiteit

Within South Africa, universities across the country have responded to the chants echoing from the University of Cape Town. Protest action in Rhodes University, located in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, has reinvigorated conversations around the existing institutional culture in these universities and drawn connections to the symbolic, continued, existence of names, statues and sculptures left over from the colonial and Apartheid eras of South Africa. Debate has ensued about how these artifacts and names reflect the continued exclusion of different epistemologies of thought, different races, classes and gender based oppressions.

Notably, in Durban, at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, a statue of King George V has been defaced with paint as the ripples of anti-colonial rage continued to make waves on the East coast of South Africa. This campus, as with many university spaces in South Africa, is no stranger to protest, and this recent wave of student action locates itself within a broader conversation across the nation that seeks to apply pressure on the political imagination of the present day.

King George V vandalised, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Photo credit: Ntokozo Qwabe

Protest action, demonstrations and various other forms of activism continue to take place to varying degrees at many of the other universities across the country. Within the context of South African universities, an unbroken line of organized protest from the days of Apartheid has continued to characterise this landscape as groups of students and workers alike fight for improved worker rights, more inclusive University spaces, and progressive admissions policies tailored to meet the appetite for redress.  Concerns addressed include the limited financial backing and the lack of academic support measures for students, particularly students previously disadvantaged by the effects of the Apartheid system, and identification in part by using race as a proxy for disadvantage. These issues of debate, among many, remain firmly present in the mind, hearts and motivations driving many who now march under the banner of “Rhodes Must Fall.”

The removal of the statue, while largely symbolic, has been an appropriate rallying cry by which to tangibly address the practical implications of so called “transformation”, redress and the re-imagination of what the role and function of an African University should be.  The success of the removal of the statue will illustrate an important step in the ability for social movements under this banner to physically effect change in their environment. This process of physical change in the university space will begin to provide concrete, tactile shape to the intangible changes and transformations in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, several civil society organisations, notably the Marikana Support Group, and Equal Education have issued statements of support with the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, citing the need for critical introspection and declaring their rejection of the oppression and exfoliation that the legacy of Rhodes in many ways embodies.

In the broader political climate of South Africa, leading up to the elections in early 2014 the country witnessed the rise of a new player in the political landscape, the Economic Freedom Fighters. The party locates itself as a radical, militant economic emancipatory movement whose political discourse lies squarely on the “left”.  Their introduction has come at a time when the legacy of the “rainbow nation” project has begun to wane as the country grows increasingly vocal in its desire to improve basic services, infrastructure, and social mobility and reduce corruption and exploitation. The party, while controversial in its tactics and engagements, has injected energy into public discourse and popularised a language against inequality that has undoubtedly affected how many young South Africans are framing the understanding of our concerning levels of inequality.

The series of protests, demonstrations and conversations that have been re-invoked with vigour allowing a revitalization of post-colonial thought and discourse into the popular public domain across South Africa, and more broadly across many countries at this moment, illustrate the fading dreams of miraculous peaceful transitions from colonies to independent states. Only time will tell whether this wave will give way to fatigue or grow and change into broader movements, and whether institutions and organisations will take these conversation to different levels of engagement. If we can be certain of one thing it is this: a change is going to come.

The post “Rhodes Must Fall” – Decolonisation Symbolism – What is happening at UCT, South Africa? appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Quelle réponse, s’inscrivant dans une perspective postcoloniale, apporter aux attentats terroristes qui ont eu lieu à l’encontre du journal satirique français Charlie Hebdo, et ont conduit au massacre brutal de l’ensemble ou presque de son comité de rédaction? Le 7 janvier 2015, deux hommes armés ont pénétré dans les bureaux de Charlie Hebdo, situés dans le 11^ème arrondissement de Paris, tuant des dessinateurs de premier plan tels que Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous et Wolinski. Les deux tireurs auraient alors crié « Allahu Akbar » (Dieu est grand en arabe) et aussi « On a vengé le Prophète », faisant référence à une série de caricatures du Prophète Mahomet. On a identifié plus tard les tireurs comme étant les frères Kouachi, deux citoyens français musulmans d’origine algérienne s’étant formé au maniement des armes au Yémen, et appartenant à l’organisation terroriste islamiste Al-Qaïda dans la Péninsule Arabique (AQPA). Des preuves indiquent également que des liens existent entre les frères Kouachi et Amedy Coulibaly qui, deux jours après les attentats, tuait quatre otages dans un supermarché casher juif situé Porte-de-Vincennes dans le 12^ème arrondissement. Dans une courte vidéo posthume, Coulibaly affirme avoir appartenu à un autre groupe armé, L’État Islamique en Irak et au Levant (EIIL).

En tout, la tuerie de Charlie Hebdo a fait douze morts, y compris trois officiers de police. Une chasse à l’homme a suivi, à l’issue de laquelle les trois terroristes ont été abattus dans une embuscade policière se déroulant simultanément à deux endroits différents de Paris. La couverture sensationnaliste qu’a fait les médias de l’événement a contribué à l’intensification du choc post-traumatique que de nombreux Français ont éprouvé au lendemain des attentats. Le 11 janvier, environ deux millions de personnes, y compris 40 dirigeants à travers le monde, ont défilé dans les rues de Paris afin de montrer leur solidarité à l’égard des dessinateurs morts et de soutenir la liberté d’expression, ainsi que la liberté de la presse. Les gens n’ont pas manqué de pointer du doigt l’ironie causée par la présence de chefs d’état en provenance de pays tels que l’Egypte, la Turquie ou Israël, dont le bilan en matière de libertés est plus que discutable. Le slogan « Je suis Charlie » (I am Charlie) est devenu le cri de ralliement d’une foule autrement silencieuse dans son ensemble, encore en deuil et encore frappée par la signification des attentats. Les gens ont eu le sentiment qu’une partie de l’esprit irrévérencieux français s’était éteint dans les attentats. La question n’est pas de savoir si l’on aime ou non Charlie Hebdo, mais de comprendre que le journal était le symbole d’une époque vraisemblablement révolue.

Charlie Hebdo est d’abord apparu en 1970 dans le sillon de Mai 68, et comme successeur du magazine Hara-Kiri, interdit pour s’être moqué de la mort de l’ancien Président Charles de Gaulle. La posture gauchisante, anti-cléricale et anti-militariste du journal a amené ses dessinateurs à tourner en dérision toutes formes d’autorité, laïque ou non, comme le patriarcat. Son contenu sexuellement explicite, son langage cru et sa caricature du « beauf » (équivalent français du « redneck » américain) a servi à briser de nombreux tabous au sein d’un pays encore majoritairement rural, superstitieux et bigot. L’impertinence de Charlie Hebdo épousait à la perfection un des slogans révolutionnaires de Mai 68 : « Il est interdit d’interdire ». Après avoir cessé la publication du journal dans les années 80, Charlie Hebdo a repris son édition hebdomadaire. Depuis, le journal a comparu dans plus de 50 procès judiciaires, la plupart découlant de plaintes de la part de l’extrême droite, des grands médias, et de l’Église Catholique. Dans la plupart des cas, il a remporté ces procès. Depuis 2006 et la controverse au sujet des caricatures du Prophète Mahomet, Charlie Hebdo a systématiquement nié être un journal raciste et islamophobe. Le licenciement de l’éminent dessinateur Siné en 2008, suite à des accusations d’antisémitisme, l’incendie criminel contre les bureaux du journal en 2011, et les attentats terroristes en ce début d’année 2015, laissent cependant penser que si Charlie Hebdo est demeuré fidèle à son credo libertaire, la société française, quant à elle, a changé – et pas forcément dans le bon sens.

Étant Français, j’éprouve des sentiments très partagés s’agissant de défendre Charlie. En France, le blasphème n’est pas un délit et il existe une longue tradition de satire politique et religieuse faisant la fierté du pays, et remontant à la Révolution française. Ce n’est pas pour nier le contexte spécifiquement postcolonial dans lequel s’est inscrit la controverse autour de Charlie, ce qui m’a poussé à coucher sur papier mes pensées afin de provoquer davantage de débat au sein de la gauche. L’histoire commence dans les années 50 dans le cadre des luttes de libération anticoloniales, en particulier en Algérie. L’actuelle V^e République française est née du fait de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne, entraînant l’effondrement de la IV^e République. Ces luttes furent en général laïques, inspirées du nationalisme panarabe, du tiers-mondisme ou du communisme. Ces idéologies laïques n’ayant pas réussi à se constituer en alternatives viables au capitalisme, l’idéologie religieuse – « l’opium du peuple », pour utiliser une formule marxiste consacrée – est venue occuper un vide politique dans une époque que certains ont décrite comme étant « postrévolutionnaire » (Dirlik 1997). Ainsi qu’a ajouté un journaliste français du journal britannique The Guardian après les attentats, « le chaos qui a émergé pendant et après les guerres d’indépendance vis-à-vis de l’Occident (dont la responsabilité est clairement engagée) a fourni une excellente opportunité aux fanatiques de revenir au premier plan, dont la profonde rancœur face à l’évolution de leur pays était venue alimenter un désir de vengeance. »

Les Arabo-Musulmans qui ont émigré en France à partir des années 60 jusqu’à nos jours sont venus pour différentes raisons : pour fuir le fondamentalisme religieux (en Algérie : la décennie noire des années 90 et de la guerre civile), fuir la pauvreté, ou parce que ces derniers voyaient en France le pays de la liberté, égalité, fraternité. C’est je crois ici, toutefois, qu’une autre histoire commence. Les Arabo-Musulmans de deuxième et troisième générations sont nés en France et pourtant ont grandi dans un contexte de chômage de masse, de discrimination raciale et de montée du communautarisme ethnico-religieux. Les émeutes de 2005 furent un symptôme de la ghettoïsation rapide des banlieues, désormais largement racialisées (concomitant avec la montée de l’extrême droite), et qu’un film comme La Haine de Mathieu Kassovitz avait prédit dix ans auparavant. De bien des façons, les émeutes ont marqué un tournant décisif : considérées en France comme le plus grand soulèvement depuis Mai 68, celles-ci ont aussi conduit le gouvernement à réinstaurer la loi martiale. De manière significative, la dernière fois que c’est arrivé était pendant la guerre d’Algérie. Composé d’intellectuels publics, d’universitaires et de militants locaux issus d’origines diverses, la naissance en 2006 du parti politique décolonial Les Indigènes de la République est venu occuper un espace plus que nécessaire à gauche. Leur diagnostic était que la gauche française, à laquelle Charlie appartient, s’est rendue complice de la perpétration d’une situation s’apparentant à l’apartheid au sein d’une France néocoloniale.

C’est une réalité à laquelle des segments de la gauche, en particulier dans le monde anglo-saxon, n’ont pas hésité à se confronter en condamnant de façon quasi unilatérale le caractère islamophobe de la ligne éditoriale de Charlie Hebdo. Certains sont allés jusqu’à suggérer que n’importe quelle organisation de gauche digne de ce nom devrait faire de son mieux pour faire interdire Charlie Hebdo (par des moyens légaux, faut-il préciser!)[1]. Ce faisant, ces organisations se sont jointes au concert général de dénonciation et de colère émanant de Musulmans qui, à travers la planète, ont protesté contre la publication par Charlie Hebdo d’une nouvelle caricature du Prophète figurant sur la couverture de leur premier numéro suite aux attentats. Le journal indépendant a choisi de faire un tirage exceptionnel à 7 millions d’exemplaires au lieu des 60 000 habituels ; le numéro a été distribué dans plus de 20 pays, et traduit en espagnol, en italien, en anglais, en turc et en arabe. Il est significatif, cependant, que de nombreux canaux médiatiques anglo-saxons aient choisi de censurer le numéro afin de ne pas heurter la communauté musulmane. Beaucoup de critiques de Charlie, venant de la gauche, ont ainsi soulevé les préoccupations suivantes, que je n’essayerai pas de réfuter, connaissant bien le journal satirique : à savoir que Charlie a manifestement ignoré le contexte d’une islamophobie rampante en Occident; qu’il a appliqué une politique de « deux poids, deux mesures », en particulier depuis l’arrivée du directeur de la rédaction Philippe Val, quand il s’agissait de caricaturer les Juifs; et que de se moquer du christianisme, religion dominante en France, n’est pas la même chose que de se moquer d’une minorité religieuse opprimée telle que les Musulmans.

Je souhaiterais à mon tour soulever certaines préoccupations, dans la mesure où, que nous aimions ou non Charlie, ce dernier faisait et fait encore partie intégrante d’un certain esprit de gauche – libertaire, anarchiste, et anti-clérical. Devrions-nous nous précipiter pour « traiter » (ou interpeller, selon la terminologie de Louis Althusser) Charlie d’islamophobe, au risque d’étouffer notre critique de l’Islam politique et de la façon dont celui-ci a échoué au cours des quatre dernières décennies à remplir ses promesses de prospérité, d’égalité et de liberté ? Nous avons vu, en France et ailleurs, la manière dont l’accusation d’antisémitisme a servi à entraver toute critique du régime d’apartheid d’Israël vis-à-vis des Palestiniens. Ne devrions-nous pas aussi réfléchir au fait que des djihadistes aient choisi de prendre pour cible un journal gauchisant plutôt que, disons, le siège du Front National et de l’extrême droite de Marine Le Pen ? Cette simple réalité devrait nous alerter au climat politique profondément réactionnaire qui est le nôtre. La montée du fondamentalisme religieux, en outre, ne concerne pas seulement le Moyen-Orient et l’Islam, mais aussi l’Inde hinduvta et le sionisme juif, ou, plus près de l’Europe, un pays rongé par la crise tel que la Grèce, où l’Eglise Orthodoxe – avec la complicité du parti néo-nazi Aube Dorée –, a dans certains endroits remplacé l’État suite à l’effondrement du système social. Enfin, et surtout, ne devrions-nous pas réfléchir à la politique « représentationnelle » d’un journal satirique comme Charlie, au lieu de condamner ce dernier, et par là-même écarter des questions épineuses ? En effet, l’envie de conserver l’exclusivité de la (non-)représentation qui est faite de la figure hautement symbolique de Mahomet, sujet au demeurant contentieux même au sein de l’Islam, m’apparaît comme un geste auto-essentialisant renvoyant, par effet de miroir, à l’imaginaire orientaliste de l’Occident. Dès lors, on piège davantage l’Islam dans une image faussée d’elle-même, à savoir religieuse, dogmatique, ou arriérée.

Pour les Musulmans français, dont la condition est par certains aspects semblable à celle des Noirs américains aux États-Unis de par leur marginalisation de longue date, il n’existe guère d’autre choix que de se radicaliser ou de rester des « Musulmans modérés »  – l’équivalent français du « bon nègre ». Pourtant, le cas des frères Kouachi, qui parlaient à peine arabe et n’avaient rejoint le djihad qu’après de longues années de radicalisation, fait d’eux une parodie du « terroriste essentialiste » (Said 1988, 49) dépeint par les médias. Comme l’a fait remarquer dans le passé l’intellectuel Edward Said, « la chose la plus frappante concernant le “terrorisme” […] est son isolement de toute explication ou circonstances atténuantes, et aussi son isolement des représentations de la plupart des autres dysfonctions, symptômes et maladies du monde contemporain » (47). Souvent occulté des médias, en toile de fond apparaît l’enfance des frères Kouachi, qui ont grandi dans un ghetto parisien, avec une mère suicidaire et un père absent, ou encore le confinement d’Amedy Coulibaly dans les conditions sordides du système carcéral français. Cela montre qu’on ne peut pas évacuer le terrorisme en invoquant un acte irrationnel de barbarie (c’est-à-dire, étymologiquement, ce qui est étranger ou « Autre »). Cela ne signifie pas non plus que ces derniers ne furent que de simples « victimes du système ». Ils se posent plutôt en sujets rationnels portant des revendications spécifiques dont il faut tenir compte : de manière explicite, comme l’ont déclaré eux-mêmes les terroristes, l’exigence que la France cesse sa politique militaire interventionniste tuant des Musulmans à l’étranger ; et, implicitement, qu’elle se mette à « écouter » les nombreuses frustrations des banlieues françaises. Ainsi que l’a affirmé Gayatri Spivak, « la résistance prenant la forme d’attentats-suicides est un message inscrit à même le corps lorsque qu’aucun autre moyen ne réussit » (2012, 385).

Tout en gardant ce contexte à l’esprit, l’une des marques de fabrique du postcolonial (de caractère diasporique, discursif et privilégié tout spécialement) est sa célébration de la moquerie, de l’ironie et de la dérision, perçues comme étant subversives et transgressives. Comme l’a écrit la critique littéraire Sneja Gunew,

[Les minorités] n’ont pas le droit à l’ironie ou à d’autres hétérogénéités de langage et se limitent simplement aux contraintes linéaires ou uni-dimensionnelles, à la nécessité de « parler clairement » ou de risquer de souffrir du fardeau de se voir traduit, relayé par un porte-parole, représenté au sens double. (1994, 94)

La question n’est peut-être alors pas de déterminer si oui ou non nous jugeons les caricatures de Charlie Hebdo offensives, puisque pour beaucoup elles le sont, mais plutôt qui parle, et pour qui. La distinction qu’utilise Spivak entre représentation politique (vertretung, « se mettre à la place de ») et re-présentation artistique (darstellung, « mettre en place ») dans son essai réputé Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ? suggère que l’action de représenter est à la fois « procuration et portrait » (1988, 276). Alors qu’un petit groupe de terroristes armés se sont auto-désignés porte-paroles des Musulmans opprimés, Charlie a affirmé le droit de re-présenter, et de se moquer, des Musulmans, tandis que d’autres segments de la gauche (principalement blanche et laïque) cherchent maintenant à défendre ces derniers, après avoir longtemps nié l’existence de l’islamophobie en tant que catégorie valide[2]. En termes absolus, cependant, aucune représentation ne semble plus légitime qu’une autre, car en toute circonstance, les subalternes ne peuvent pas parler – c’est-à-dire que celles-ci sont privées de la possibilité de s’exprimer en leur propre nom. Ceux que Spivak appelle « impérialistes bienveillants » incluent aussi bien la gauche libérale (au sens anglo-saxon) que la gauche radicale-marxiste occidentale, dont le discours court toujours le risque de tomber dans l’essentialisme (stratégique ou non), constituant un autre exemple de « violence épistémique ». Pour Spivak, « [s]i, dans le contexte de production coloniale, les subalternes n’ont pas d’histoire et ne peuvent pas parler, la femme subalterne, elle, est davantage plongée dans l’ombre » (1988, 287). Cela a été vrai en France, qui a par exemple interdit le port de « signes religieux ostensibles » dans les écoles publiques en 2004, et la « dissimulation du visage » dans les espaces publics en 2010. Les femmes musulmanes, clairement visées bien que la loi ne le dise pas explicitement, ont été à peine consultées, sinon pas du tout.

Il n’est pas surprenant que l’auteur primé Salman Rushdie ait déclaré son soutien à Charlie Hebdo suite à une invitation à l’Université du Vermont le 14 janvier. Tout en étant « postcolonial » de par ses origines culturelles (l’Inde), Rushdie a toujours été un ardent partisan d’une remise en cause du statut quo, et connu pour sa contestation de l’islam en particulier. On a aussi accusé Rushdie de blasphème et d’avoir abusé de la liberté d’expression avec la publication des Versets Sataniques (1988), et on l’a forcé à vivre sous la menace d’une fatwa pendant de nombreuses années. Je crois que le positionnement cosmopolite privilégié de Rushdie est ce qui lui a en partie permis, avec un détachement suffisant, d’ « abuser » de ses origines indiennes comme moyen de décrire les dangers de l’anomie et de l’aliénation sociales dans une Angleterre multiculturelle, postcoloniale, à travers ses personnages Chamcha et Farishta. Cependant, alors que Rushdie a survécu à une menace de mort de l’ayatollah iranien Khomeini, d’autres, comme son traducteur japonais Hitoshi Igarashi, ont été assassinés. Des autodafés du roman ont eu lieu à travers la planète et, comme pour Charlie Hebdo, beaucoup de gens de la gauche se sont pressés d’accuser Rushdie, bien que ce dernier ait toujours affirmé que son livre n’avait, au final, pas grand chose à voir avec l’islam – et encore moins avec l’islamophobie. Ce qu’on a jugé incorrect dans le roman de Rushdie est sa lecture non-littérale (c’est-à-dire à la fois fictionnelle et fictive), ambivalente (capable d’être interprétée de deux façons) et parodique de l’islam, du Prophète et du Coran, entre le sacré et le profane, et à travers l’utilisation par Rushdie du réalisme magique.

De la même façon, on pourrait arguer que les caricatures de Mahomet venant de Charlie Hebdo constituent un détournement (au sens littéral comme au sens figuré) du signifiant religieux que représente le Prophète sur le terrain laïque, en tant qu’Être tangible faisant partie de la superstructure sociale et de la sphère idéologique, plutôt que/tout en étant simultanément un artefact figé symbole de la « différence tiers-monde ». Pour Chandra Mohanty, c’est ainsi que la différence tiers monde se lit et est lue aux yeux de l’Occident : « religieux (comprendre réactionnaires), orientés vers la famille (comprendre traditionnels), mineurs légaux (comprendre ils-ne-sont-pas-encore-conscient-de-leurs-droits), illettrés (comprendre ignorants), tournés sur eux-mêmes (comprendre rétrogrades), et parfois révolutionnaires (comprendre leur-pays-est-en-état-de-guerre- ils-se-doivent-de-se-battre !) » (1991, 72). Une action de glissement (« sliding-effect ») du langage, entre le dire (discours) et le vouloir dire (intentionnalité) est à l’œuvre lorsque Charlie, en 2006, reproduit des caricatures de Mahomet provenant d’un journal danois de la droite conservatrice (l’une d’entre elles montrant le Prophète, une bombe sur la tête), ou quand, en 2011, est fait le portrait, en page une, d’un Mahomet en pleurs déclarant que « c’est dur d’être aimé par des cons… », affublé du gros titre « Mahomet débordé par les intégristes ». Le langage, comme l’a observé le théoricien de la déconstruction Jacques Derrida, est, à partir du moment même où nous nous exprimons, toujours déjà rendu «Autre », altéré : « Cette structure d’aliénation sans aliénation, cette aliénation inaliénable n’est pas seulement l’origine de notre responsabilité, elle structure le propre et la propriété de la langue » (Derrida 1998, 25).

L’herméneutique entourant les caricatures (du latin caricare, « charger, exaggérer ») révèle l’indécidabilité fondamentale du système signifiant et ouvre ainsi le sens à l’excès, à la contingence, à l’indétermination : faire le portrait de Mahomet est blasphématoire; faire le portrait de Mahomet une bombe sur la tête est raciste/islamophobe par la suggesetion que tous les Musulmans sont des terroristes; faire ainsi le portrait de Mahomet fonctionne comme moyen de dénoncer l’extrémisme religieux. Au bout du compte, ces perspectives s’invalident les unes les autres, échouant à atteindre un consensus ou l’unanimité – ce qui est le propre d’un journal satirique et polémique comme Charlie[3]. Les éditeurs de Charlie ont constamment déployé leur droit à l’ « erreur » (du latin errare, errer ou vagabonder), à la démystification, à la liberté de rire de ainsi que (quelquefois) avec. Charlie Hebdo n’a cessé de réaffirmer le droit d’avoir tort, par-delà une partie de la gauche qui a depuis longtemps désavoué le journal; par-delà les menaces terroristes, mais aussi le politiquement correct. Sur la première couverture de Charlie suite aux attentats, l’on peut voir un Mahomet en pleurs, une pancarte « Je suis Charlie » autour du cou, disant que « tout est pardonné » – là encore, un message hautement ambigu qui résiste à l’interpellation.

Le militantisme laïcard affiché de Charlie Hebdo fut lui-même parfois dogmatique, sinon problématique dans un pays où la laïcité est devenu le cheval de bataille d’organisations issues de l’extrême droite telles que Riposte Laïque, ou bien du gouvernement et de ses tentatives de suppression de la différence culturo-religieuse. Encore une fois, je ne souhaite réfuter aucune des critiques suivantes de la laïcité émanant de la gauche : que la version républicaine française de la laïcité (c’est-à-dire la séparation de l’Église et de l’État dans toutes les questions relatives au affaires publiques) est, en pratique, appliquée de manière sélective; que l’État demeure partial vis-à-vis des Catholiques, à travers le financement direct d’écoles privées catholiques par exemple; que la laïcité ne devrait s’appliquer en principe qu’aux représentants de l’État (loi de 1905), plutôt qu’à ses citoyens (Musulmans récalcitrants), comme c’est désormais le cas depuis 2004 et l’interdiction du foulard islamique (hijab) dans les écoles publiques, ou l’interdiction de la burqa (voile intégrale) dans l’espace public. Cependant, je crois que Charlie  – peut-être malgré lui  – a tout de même aidé à « rendre possible… un sens de l’histoire et de la production humaine, ainsi qu’un scepticisme sain vis-à-vis des diverses idoles vénérées par la culture » (Said, 1983, 290). La compréhension qu’a Said du fait laïque ou séculaire se refuse à une simplicification à l’excès consistant à présenter un sécularisme intrinsèquement progressiste, et un fait religieux rétrograde, ou vice versa. Comme il l’écrit dans son livre The Text, the World, and the Critic:

Un érudit entend la religion en termes séculaires mais passe à côté de ce qui dans l’Islam donne encore à ses adhérents une nourriture spirituelle sincère. L’autre voit l’Islam en termes religieux mais ignore largement les différences séculaires qui existent au sein de la diversité qui compose le monde islamique. (276)

On se doit de maintenir cette double articulation non-manichéenne afin que la subalternité arabo-musulmane puisse un jour tendre à l’auto-représentation, en France, mais aussi ailleurs en Europe, où la principale menace à laquelle nous faisons désormais face n’est pas l’« islam », mais le fascisme. À moins que la gauche ne se mette à se mobiliser pour faire cesser les nombreuses « guerres contre l’erreur » de ce monde, en Afghanistan, en Irak, en Libye ou au Mali, où le néo-impérialisme français est lourdement responsable de la propagation de guerres confessionnelles et du fondamentalisme islamiste, l’exclamation célèbre de Kurtz face aux monstruosités du Congo belge dans le roman (post)colonial classique,Au Coeur des Ténèbres de Joseph Conrad (« L’horreur ! L’horreur ! ») continuera de se faire la chambre d’écho d’une autre apostrophe toute néocoloniale (« La terreur ! La terreur ! »). Considérée comme étant produite par la peur de l’invisible/indicible (par opposition à l’horreur vivide d’un cadavre), la terreur peut frapper n’importe où et à tout moment, rendant à leur tour les mesures antiterroristes futiles, certes, mais pas inoffensives. L’imposition dans les écoles d’une minute de silence en mémoire des victimes des attentats de Charlie Hebdo, en même temps que la criminalisation de voix contestataires, ne va servir qu’à réprimer davantage les libertés citoyennes et à réduire le droit à la désobéissance civile – en particulier pour celles et ceux dont la voix est déjà muselée.

Pour conclure, je citerai Jacques Derrida, qui dans son « discours sur la terreur » suite au 11 septembre 2001, nous rappelle ce qui rend unique la contribution historique européenne. Loin d’être eurocentrique, Derrida, ne serait-ce que de par ses origines juives algériennes, était bien conscient du fait que les idéaux laïques des Lumières se bâtissent alors sur la dépossession systématique du colonisé, dont les répercussions se font ressentir aujourd’hui. Nous voici donc face à une aporie, ou ce que Spivak appellerait un « double bind », auquel la gauche révolutionnaire aurait tort de renoncer, au prétexte qu’une telle problématique appartient exclusivement à l’héritage libéral, au même titre que le concept abstrait de « liberté d’expression » :

Dans la longue et patiente déconstruction qui est requise pour la transformation à venir, l’expérience qu’inaugura l’Europe au temps des Lumières (Enlightenment, Aufklärung, illuminismo) dans la relation entre le politique et le théologique ou, plutôt, le religieux, bien qu’étant encore inégale, irréalisée, relative, et complexe, aura laissé dans l’espace politique européen des marques parfaitement originales en ce qui concerne la doctrine religieuse (remarquez que je ne parle pas de religion ou de foi mais de l’autorité de la doctrine religieuse sur le politique). On ne peut trouver de telles marques ni dans le monde arabe ni dans le monde musulman, ni en Extrême-Orient, ni même, et voici le point le plus sensible, dans la démocratie américaine, dans ce qui dans les faits régit non pas les principes mais la réalité prédominante de la culture politique américaine.

 

Photo Credit:  Peinture murale, Oberkamf, 11^ème arrondissement (Paris, France); Copyright © Anne Marie Ricaud

The post « Je suis Charlie » ? Laïcité, islam et guerre de l’erreur appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

On Saturday March 7, 2015 Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS. Although the news made global headlines in much of the western media and elsewhere, on the African continent the announcement was only significant as a public confirmation of what had long been an open secret: that Boko Haram was as much a terrorist group as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any other group across time and space that has targeted innocent civilians in order to make a political statement. In spite of the similarities in the modus operandi and ideologies of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram, however, and in spite of the fact that Boko Haram has killed as many people as ISIS or Al-Qaeda, the group is less often referred to as a terrorist organization and much more frequently regarded as one of the numerous insurgent groups that have contributed to an erroneous and monolithic image of Africa as a continent of instability and conflict.

This piece sheds light on this inconsistency, approaching the politics of terrorism in Africa in terms of how political violence against poor, defenseless, civilians is conceived by belligerent groups on the continent. The piece also discusses the duplicity with which the murderous actions of ostensible terrorist groups in Africa are externally perceived within prevailing western discourses and often charitably contrasted with terror groups elsewhere, especially in a securitized post-9/11 world that prioritizes the lives of westerners over others.

I argue that the reason why Boko Haram and similar murderous groups in Africa’s recent past are infrequently cast as terrorist entities that pose a viable threat is because their victims have mainly been their fellow Africans.[1] From the Mau Mau in pre-independence Kenya to the African National Congress in Apartheid South Africa, there is abundant evidence to support an assertion that insurgent groups on the continent have only been readily labeled “terrorists” when their victims have been white or non-African, or when they have posed a threat to western interests, such as oil in Algeria. Interestingly, while ignoring the diverse sources of global terror, members of the Republican Party recently insisted that President Obama intertwine Islamism with terrorism during the White House Summit on countering violent extremism. The calls once more evidenced the strident hypocrisy with which many in the West have selectively labeled violent extremism to suit their expectations and political needs.

Such debates over terminology are telling, and indicative not only of the way in which terrorism is conflated with Islam but also the indifference with which the rest of the world accepts political violence, such as the one perpetrated by Boko Haram, as part of the everyday in Africa. The conflicts have also conditioned Africans themselves into polarizing conceptions of political order as exemplified by the violence of Al-Shabaab and other competing groups in the destroyed former Somalian state.

Indeed, many among Africa’s most notorious terrorists such as Jonas Savimbi, Charles Taylor, Joseph Kony and Foday Sankoh were called anything but terrorists in the prime of their murderous deeds. Thus, Taylor and Sankoh were frequently referred to by the rather venerated or predictably ethnic titles of “warlords,” or the troublemaking monikers of “insurgents,” yet rarely terrorists. Jonas Savimbi, an infamous terrorist in Angola who was responsible for the death of thousands of his fellow Angolans, was once welcomed to the White House by the Reagan administration. It should be pointed out that Savimbi’s UNITA “terrorists” laid more landmines that maimed or killed innocent civilians than any other fighting force in the history of Africa. One can be fairly certain that American taxpayer money contributed to that ignominious record, in spite of the Cold War rivalry that many would like to deploy to defend American excesses in that part of the world during the period in question.

Much more recently, as Foday Sankoh and his dreaded Revolutionary United Front terrorists chopped of limbs, disemboweled pregnant women and terrorized their fellow Sierra Leoneans such as myself for over ten years, the closest anyone in the West came to calling them anything deserving of their terrifying reputations was “rebels.” Indeed, of all the insurgent groups in Africa since the 1950s, only groups fighting white-minority governments for the right to self-determination, groups such as the Mau Mau in Kenya,[2] the Zimbabwean African National Union-Patriotic Front and the Zimbabwean African People’s Union forces in Zimbabwe, and the ANC in South Africa were readily and regularly referred to as terrorists. In the 1970s and 80s, the United States infamously placed the African National Congress on an international terror watch list. It was truly one of the head scratching moments in the history of the United States’ international relations. The “terrorist” label assigned to Nelson Mandela and other ANC officials was not removed until well after the ANC attained power in South Africa in 1994, and only following an embarrassing diplomatic faux pas for the United States State Department after Mandela visited the United States in the official capacity of the leader of a friendly country who also happened to be on the “terrorist” watch list.

Earlier this year, while the world’s attention was captivated by the gruesome attacks on the headquarters of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a far-greater massacre in scale (if one counts the proportion, not the assigned value, of human lives lost) unfolded several thousand miles away in Baga, a small town in northern Nigeria. According to eyewitness accounts, an estimated 150-2000 people were gruesomely slaughtered over a period of about three nights, from January 3 through January 7, by Boko Haram forces.
The carnage at Baga was one of the sharpest spikes in a long series of Boko Haram massacres in Nigeria extending back to 2009 that have so far left over 13,000 people dead, millions displaced, and countless communities devastated in Africa’s largest economy and its most populous country. Boko Haram has continued its reign of terror since Baga, and the terrorist group has now extended its killing fields across the borders of Nigeria into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger. All three neighboring countries have since joined Nigeria to launch a major offensive against the terrorist group. The African Union has also approved plans to send more troops to join the fight against Boko Haram.

The destruction of lives at Baga and the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters in Paris elicited quite different, and fascinating, responses in the media. In multiple ways, the varying responses were reflective of how differently terrorism on the African continent has been perceived and received, in contrast with terrorism taking place elsewhere. Whereas world leaders raced to France in the days following the massacres to stand with the French people in solidarity against terrorism, no one offered to make a similar trip to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, to stand with Nigerians in solidarity against “terrorism,” or to comfort survivors of what was one of the worst atrocities ever to be committed by a terrorist group anywhere in the world. Indeed, even the president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, who is seeking reelection from the people of Nigeria, reportedly first offered his condolences to France for the Charlie Hebdo attacks before making the first public comments about the massacres at Baga in his own country. It was the kind of duplicitous reaction one has come to expect in a stratified global community that attaches varying values to human lives, and one that firmly locks Africans and other residents of the developing world into a status and place of third-class global citizenship.

Thus, it is far easier for most observers to humanize violent events and empathize with victims elsewhere at the same time as they are indifferent to similar sufferings of Africans. Of course, global media quickly labeled the Charlie Hebdo attackers “terrorists” and “Islamic radicals” who appeared “well-trained.” On the other hand, the most common epithets for Boko Haram, so far, have been “militants,” “Islamists,” or “insurgents.” Only a few observers describe the incessant atrocities perpetuated by Boko Haram in global media as “terrorism” with any regularity. A recent report in the New York Times, for example, did not once refer to Boko Haram as “terrorists.”

The closest the world came to standing in solidarity with the victims of terrorism in Africa and the sufferings of the Nigerian people was via the hashtag #Bring Back Our Girls, which sprang up on Twitter following the abduction of over 200 innocent Nigerian girls from their boarding school by Boko Haram in 2014. The solidarity was as fleeting as it was fruitless, as some observers have pointed out. The hashtag now largely resides in the deep recesses of the Internet where the occasional troll fishes it up for new memes.

Many have long since dismissed the killings in northern Nigeria as religious, regional, or ethnic strife without accounting for the gaps in the evidence that point to much more than sectarian differences. Why, for example, has the group equally targeted moderate Muslims and non-Muslims in the region? A majority of the victims of the terrorist group have been the people of northern Nigeria, not the assumed political rivals of southeastern Nigerians from the predominantly Yoruba and Ibo ethnic groups. Another confounding detail is why Boko Haram occasionally has released some of their hostages while showing little mercy to others. The inescapable fact is, and should be, that politics in Africa is not unlike politics elsewhere. Political violence occurs less over religious or other ideology on the continent than over processes of public goods distribution and access to resources. Political scientists and economists advise that we must ask who benefits in every situation of public goods distribution, or why the process of distribution breaks down and results in violence in some contexts and not in others. In the case of Boko Haram, we must be prepared to look beyond the limited primordial explanations that have been offered by much of the western media and ask perceptive questions about who is benefiting from, or is likely to benefit from, the breakdown in political order in the northern region of Nigeria in order to begin to understand and find solutions to the problem.

As some observers have questioned, “where does Boko Haram obtain their weapons and equipment?” In several media appearances, Boko Haram elements are shown against the backdrop of gleaming new Toyota trucks and the occasional captured armored personnel carrier of the Nigerian military. Where does Boko Haram acquire new vehicles and weapons with which they attack poor villagers? With regards to access to the Internet, you do not have to be a geography buff to know that Boko Haram’s main areas of operation are some of the most isolated territories in Nigeria. Yet someone who stands to benefit from the terroristic actions of Boko Haram has been dutifully and diligently uploading the group’s videos and messages to the Internet, such as the most recent message of March 7thannouncing the group’s allegiance to ISIS.

According to scholars of insurgencies in Africa,[3] rural insurgencies are more often than not elite-led undertakings that originate from the fallout of urban competition for resources. Compared to urban elites, it is much more difficult for rural dwellers to organize due to collective action problems in rural communities and the relative lack of education to overcome such dilemmas. If the terrorism perpetrated by Boko Haram were a truly local affair, where did Abu Bakar Shekau, the mysterious purported head of the group, who has been described as lacking any form of formal education, acquire the resources to launch a military campaign that has been sustained for over half a decade? Part of the answer to this question lies in the same places in the Middle East and the Gulf States, where ISIS have also obtained their funding.[4] Now that Boko Haram has openly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, maybe the media will, from now onwards, consistently refer to the terrorist group in northern Nigeria as such. The change in terminology might be smaller in the scheme of things, but it will reflect a symbolic change of attitude and an awareness of the scale of the problem facing the global community, not just the western world.

In the search for solutions, we need not look any farther than in places such as the United States Congress where a treaty that was supposed to curb the international trade in small arms sat delayed for many years awaiting ratification. The influential gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, and their largely Republican sympathizers in the United States Congress have continually opposed the passage of the bill to serve their common interests. Ironically, the pro-gun rights coalition cobbled together primarily by conservatives in America helps puts the interests of such groups on the same page as the global terrorists they detest as threats to western values. Consequently, it is such missteps that allow bona fide terrorist groups such as Boko Haram to flourish. Indeed, what’s in a name?

Image Source: Wikipedia

The post What’s in a name? Boko Haram and the Politics of “Terrorism” in Africa 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.

What postcolonial response can be made of the terrorist attacks on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which led to the brutal massacre of most its editorial board? On January 7, two gunmen entered Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the 11th district of Paris, killing – amongst others – leading cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski. The gunmen are believed to have shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great in Arabic) and also “the Prophet is avenged”, in reference to a series of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad. The gunmen were later identified as the Kouachi brothers, two Muslim French citizens of Algerian descent who received weapon training in Yemen, as part of the Islamist terrorist organization Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Evidence also indicates that Amedy Coulibaly, who two days later killed four hostages at a Jewish kosher grocery in Porte-de-Vincennes in the 12th district, was connected to the Kouachi brothers. In a short video posted posthumously, Coulibaly claims to have belonged to another armed group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

All in all, the Charlie Hebdo shootings killed twelve, including three police officers. The three terrorists were hunted and ultimately gunned down by a police raid following a double hostage crisis, taking place simultaneously in two different Paris locations. The media’s sensationalist coverage of the event contributed to relaying and intensifying the post-traumatic shock that many French people felt in the aftermath. On January 11, about 2 million people, including more than 40 world leaders, marched in the streets of Paris to show solidarity with the dead cartoonists and support freedom of speech and of the press. The irony of political leaders being present at the march from countries like Egypt, Turkey or Israel, with dubious records with regards to freedom of speech and freedom tout court, was not lost on many people. The slogan, “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) became the rallying cry of an otherwise largely silent crowd, still mourning and still struck by the significance of what had happened. People felt that something of the French spirit of irreverence had died in the attacks. Whether or not we liked Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper was the symbol of an epoch that seems by now definitely gone.

Charlie Hebdo first appeared in 1970 in the wake of May 1968, and as a successor to the Hara-Kiri magazine, banned for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle. The newspaper’s left-leaning, anti-clerical and anti-militarist stance led its cartoonists to lampoon all forms of authority, both secular and non-secular, such as patriarchy. Its sexually explicit content, crude language and caricature of the “beauf” (French equivalent of the redneck) served to break many taboos in a still largely rural, superstitious and bigoted country. Charlie Hebdo’s impertinence espoused to perfection one of the revolutionary slogans of May 68: “Il est interdit d’interdire” (it is forbidden to forbid). After ceasing publication in the 1980s, the newspaper resumed its weekly edition. Since then, Charlie Hebdo has been involved in over 50 legal trials, most of them stemming from complaints from the far right, mainstream media, and the Catholic Church. In most cases, it won. Since 2006 and the controversy over the caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo has routinely denied being an Islamophobic, racist newspaper. The firing of leading cartoonist Siné in 2008 over allegations of anti-Semitism, the arson against the newspaper’s offices in 2011, and the terrorist attacks earlier this month however show that while Charlie Hebdo may have remained true to its libertarian credo, French society, on the other hand, had changed – not necessarily for the better.

Being French, I find myself deeply conflicted when it comes to defending Charlie. France does not forbid blasphemy and there exists a long and proud secular tradition of both religious and political satire, dating at least as far back as the French Revolution. This is not to deny the specifically postcolonial context in which arose the Charlie controversy, which pushed me to put my thoughts down on paper in what will hopefully trigger further debate on the Left. The story begins in the 1950s with anticolonial liberation struggles, particularly in Algeria. The current 5^th French Republic was born as a result of the Algerian war of independence, which caused the collapse of the 4^th Republic. These struggles were largely secular, inspired by pan-Arabic nationalism, third worldism, or communism. With the failure of these secular ideologies to prove inspiring alternatives to capitalism, religious ideology – “the opium of the people”, to use a consecrated Marxist formula – came to fill a political vacuum in an epoch described as “postrevolutionary” by some (Dirlik 1997). As one French journalist added in The Guardian after the attacks, “the chaos that emerged during and after independence wars (for which the west clearly has responsibility) provided an excellent opportunity for fanatics who had deeply resented the evolution of their countries, to return to prominence with a vengeance.”

Arab-Muslims who migrated to France from the 1960s onwards came for different reasons: to flee religious fundamentalism, to flee poverty, or because they saw France as the country of liberté, égalité, fraternité. This is, though, where I believe another story begins. Second and third generation Arab-Muslims were born in France yet grew up in a context of mass unemployment, racial discrimination and the rise of ethnico-religious communalism. The 2005 French Riots were a symptom of the rapid ghettoization of the now largely racialized banlieues (concomitant with the rise of the far right), and which a film like La Haine (Hatred) had predicted ten years earlier. In many ways, the Riots were a turning point: considered to be the biggest upheaval since May 1968, it also led the French government to re-institute Martial Law. Tellingly, the last time this had happened was during the Algerian War. The birth in 2006 of the decolonial political party Les Indigènes de la République, comprised of public intellectuals, academics and community activists from a variety of backgrounds, came to fill a much-needed space on the Left. Their diagnosis has been that the French Left – to which Charlie belongs – remains complicit with the perpetration of an apartheid-like situation within a neo-colonial France.

This is a reality that segments of the Left, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, have chosen to insist on in their quasi-unilateral condemnation of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial line as Islamophobic. Some went as far as to suggest that any left-wing organization worthy of the name should try its best to ban Charlie Hebdo (by legal means that is!)[1]. In doing so, these organizations have joined in the chorus of denunciation and anger on the part of Muslims across the globe who protested against the publication of another caricature of the Prophet by Charlie Hebdo on the front cover of their newest issue following the attacks. The independent newspaper chose to print an exceptional 7 million copies instead of the usual 60 thousand, and the issue was distributed in more than 20 countries as well as translated into Spanish, Italian, English, Turkish and Arabic. It is significant, however, that many Anglo-Saxon media channels chose to censor the issue in order not to shock the Muslim community. Many leftist critiques of Charlie have thus raised the following concerns, which, being well acquainted with the satirical newspaper, I will not attempt to refute: that Charlie conspicuously ignored the context of growing Islamophobia in the West; that it applied a double-standard, in particular since the arrival of editor-in-chief Philippe Val, when it came to the caricaturing of Jews; that poking fun at Christianity, being the dominant religion in France, is not the same as mocking a religiously oppressed minority such as Muslims.

Here, I would like to raise a few concerns of mine, for whether we like it or not, Charlie was and still is very much part of a certain – libertarian, anarchist, and anti-clerical – spirit of the Left. Should we rush to “call out” (interpellate, in Louis Althusser’s terminology) Charlie as Islamophobic, with the risk that it muffles in turn our critique of the failures of political Islam over the last 40 years to deliver its promises of prosperity, equality and freedom? We have seen in France and elsewhere the ways in which calling out someone as anti-Semitic has in effect served to stifle any critique of Israel’s apartheid regime with regards to the Palestinians. Should we also not pause a minute on the fact that Jihadists chose to target a left-leaning newspaper rather than, say, far-right Marine LePen’s National Front headquarters? This alone should alert us to the profoundly reactionary political climate in which we live. The rise of religious fundamentalism is, besides, not only true of the Middle East and Islam, but of proto-fascist “Hindutva” India and of Jewish Zionism, or, closer to Europe, of a crisis-ridden country such as Greece where the Orthodox Church – in collusion with neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn – have in some places replaced the State following the collapse of the welfare system. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, should we not further reflect on the “re-presentational” politics of a satirical newspaper like Charlie, instead of condemning it and effectively brushing off some thorny questions? Indeed, the urge to retain the exclusivity over the (non) representation of the deeply symbolic figure of Muhammad, which remains a contentious issue even within Islam, appears to me as a self-essentializing gesture that mirrors the West’s Orientalist imaginary. In effect, what it does is to further entrap Islam into a false image of itself as religious, dogmatic, or backward.

For French Muslims, whose condition is in some ways akin to Black Americans in the United States given their long standing marginalization, there now is little choice other than to either become radicalized or to remain “moderate Muslims” – the French equivalent of the “good nigger”. Yet the case of the Kouachi brothers, who hardly spoke Arabic and had only recently embraced the Jihad, makes a mockery of the figure of the “essentialist terrorist” (Said 1988, 49) depicted in the media. As Edward Said once remarked, “the most striking thing about ‘terrorism’ […] is its isolation from any explanation or mitigating circumstances, and its isolation as well from representations of most other dysfunctions, symptoms and maladies of the contemporary world” (47). Mostly occluded by the media, the Kouachi brothers’ background growing up in a Paris ghetto, with a suicidal mother and an absent father, or Amedy Coulibaly’s incarceration in the squalors of the French jail system, show terrorism cannot be explained away as an irrational act of barbarism (i.e. etymologically what is foreign and “Other”). This is not to say the latter were mere “victims of the system” either. Instead, they appear as rational subjects with specific demands of their own to be reckoned with: explicitly, as was stated by the terrorists themselves, that France ought to stop its politics of military intervention and killing of Muslims overseas; and, implicitly, that it should “listen” to the French banlieues’ many frustrations. As Gayatri Spivak argued, “suicide resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through” (2012, 385).

Keeping this context in mind, one of the postcolonial’s hallmarks (especially of a certain diasporic, discursive and privileged kind), has been its celebration of mockery, irony and derision, seen as subversive and transgressive. As postcolonial literary scholar Sneja Gunew has written,

[Minorities] are not permitted irony or other heterogeneities of language and are bounded simply by the linear or one-dimensional constraints, the necessity to ‘speak clearly’ or risk suffering the burden of being translated, spoken for, represented in its double sense. (1994, 94)

Perhaps the question, then, is not whether we deem Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures offensive, as for many they surely are – but rather who speaks, and who is spoken for. Gayatri Spivak’s useful distinction between political representation as vertretung (“stepping in someone’s place”) and between artistic re-presentation as darstellung (“placing there”) in her renowned essay Can the Subaltern Speak? suggests that representing is both “proxy and portrait ” (1988, 276). Hence, one ought to speculate upon the complicity between “speaking for” and “portraying” (1988, 277). When a small group of armed terrorists self appointed to speak on behalf of oppressed Muslims, Charlie affirmed its right to re-present, and mock, Muslims, while other parts of the (mainly white, secularist) Left now seek to defend the latter, after having dismissed Islamophobia as a valid category for many years[2]. In absolute terms, however, no representation seems more legitimate than the other, for in every circumstance, the subaltern cannot speak – that is, Muslims are prevented from speaking for themselves. Those Spivak calls “benevolent imperialists” include both the Liberal as well as the radical-Marxist western Left, whose discourse always runs the risk of falling back into essentialism (strategic or not), becoming yet another case of “epistemic violence”. “If,” for Spivak, “in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (1988, 287) This was true in France, which for instance, banned the wearing of “ostensible religious signs” in public schools in 2004, and “face covering” in public spaces in 2010. Muslim women, clearly the ones targeted although the law does not explicitly say so, were hardly or not consulted at all.

It is no surprise that award winning literary author Salman Rushdie has come out in defense of Charlie Hebdo following an invitation at the University of Vermont on January 14. While being “postcolonial” in that he is from a postcolonial culture (India), Rushdie has always been a staunch advocate of upsetting the status quo, and known for challenging Islam in particular. Rushdie was also accused of blasphemy and of abusing freedom of speech with the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988), and was forced to live under the menace of a fatwa for many years. I believe Rushdie’s privileged cosmopolitan positioning is what in part allowed him, with sufficient detachment, to “ab-use” his Indian origin as a means of describing the dangers of cultural anomie and alienation in a postcolonial, multicultural England through his two characters Chamcha and Farishta. While Rusdie survived a death sentence by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, others, like his Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, were murdered. Burnings of the book took place across the globe, and, as with Charlie Hebdo, many on the Left were quick to blame Rushdie, although the latter always claimed his book had, in the end, little to do with Islam – and even less with Islamophobia. What was judged wrong with Rushdie’s novel is its non-literal (i.e., both fictive and fictitious), ambivalent (able to be interpreted in two ways) and parodic reading of Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, in-between the profane and the sacred, and through Rushdie’s use of magic realism.

Similarly, we may argue how Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad caricatures constitute a détournement (hijacking) of the religious signifier of the Prophet onto secularized terrain, as a tangible Being part of the social superstructure and the realm of ideology, rather than/while being simultaneously, a frozen artifact of “third world difference”. For Chandra Mohanty, this is how the third world difference reads itself/is read: “religious (read not progressive), family-oriented (read traditional), legal minors (read they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their- rights), illiterate (read ignorant), domestic (read backward), and sometimes revolutionary (read their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war; they must-fight!)” (1991, 72). When in 2006, Charlie reproduced caricatures of Muhammad from a Danish far-right newspaper (one of which shows the Prophet with a bomb on his head), or when in 2011, a crying Muhammad is portrayed saying “it’s hard to be loved by morons”, along with the heading, “swamped by integrists”, what in effect takes place is an act of glissement (sliding-effect) of language, in-between dire (“to say”, i.e. speech) and vouloir dire (“to mean”, i.e. intentionality). Language, as Deconstruction theorist Jacques Derrida has observed, is, from the moment we speak, always-already made “Other”/altered: “This structure of alienation without alienation, this inalienable alienation, is not only the origin of our responsibility, it also structures the peculiarity and property of language.” (Derrida 1998, 25)

The hermeneutic surrounding caricatures (from Latin caricare, ‘load, exaggerate’) reveals the fundamental undecidability of the signifying system and opens up meaning to excess, contingency, indeterminacy: to portray Muhammad is blasphemous; to portray Muhammad with a bomb suggests that all Muslims are terrorists and it is therefore racist/Islamophobic; to portray the Prophet in this way works as a means of denouncing religious extremism. This multiplicity of perspectives ultimately invalidates each of them, failing to reach consensus or unanimity – which is what a polemical, satirical newspaper like Charlie does[3]. The editors of Charlie constantly deployed their right to “err” (from Latin errare, to stray, to wander), to demystification, to laughing at as well as (sometimes) laughing with. Charlie Hebdo has kept reaffirming its right to be wrong, pace a section of the Left that has long disavowed the newspaper, pace terrorist threats, pace political correctness. In the last Charlie cover following the attacks, a crying Muhammad is seen with a “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) placard around his neck saying “tout est pardonné” (all is forgiven) – yet again a highly ambiguous message that resists interpellation.

Charlie Hebdo’s self-proclaimed laïcard (secularist) militancy was itself sometimes dogmatic, if not problematic in a country where secularism has become the trumpeted cause of far-right organizations such as Riposte Laïque or of the French State’s attempt at suppressing culturo-religious difference. Again, I do not wish to refute any of the following leftist critiques of secularism: that the French Republican version of laïcité (i.e, the separation of Church and State in all matters of public affairs) is, in practice, being selectively applied; that the State is partial to Catholics, with direct State financing of private Catholic schools for instance; that secularism ought to exclusively apply to State representatives (Law of 1905), rather than to its (recalcitrant Muslim) citizens as well, as is now the case since 2004 and the ban of the Muslim headscarf (the hijab, or foulard in French) in public schools, or the Burqa ban in public spaces. But I believe Charlie – perhaps against its own will – nonetheless helped “enable…a sense of history and of human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the various idols venerated by culture” (Said 1983, 290). Said’s understanding of the secular speaks against over-simplification of secularism as inherently progressive, and religion as backward, or vice versa. As the latter wrote in The Text, The World, and the Critic,

One scholar understands the religion in secular terms but misses what in Islam still gives its adherents genuine nourishment. The other sees it in religious terms but largely ignores the secular differences that exist within the variegated Islamic world. (276)

This double, non-Manichean articulation must be sustained for Arab-Muslim subalternity to one day be able to represent itself, in France, but also elsewhere in Europe, where the main threat that we now face is not “Islam”, but fascism. Unless the Left starts mobilizing to put an end to the many “Wars on Error” of this world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Mali, where French neo-imperialism has had a heavy responsibility in the spreading of confessional wars and Islamist fundamentalism, Kurtz’s famous exclamation in the face of the monstrosities of the Belgian colonial Congo in Joseph Conrad’s classic (post)colonial novel Heart of Darkness (“The horror! The horror!”) will keep piercing through the historical chamber of yet another neocolonial apostrophe: “The terror! The terror!” Terror, as that which is produced by fear of the unseen/unknown (as opposed to the graphic horror of a dead corpse), may strike anywhere and at any time, in turn rendering counter-terror measures meaningless – though not harmless. The imposition in schools of a one-minute silence in memory of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, along with the criminalizing of any dissenting voice, will only serve to further repress citizens’ liberties – particularly those whose voice is already muzzled – and curtail their right to civil disobedience.

To conclude, let me quote Jacques Derrida, who in his “terror speech” following September 11, reminds us of what makes European historical contribution unique. Far from being Eurocentric, Derrida, if only because of his Jewish Algerian background, was well aware that the secularist ideals of the Enlightenment are built upon the systematic, enduring dispossession of the colonized. An impossible double bind, as Spivak would have it, which the revolutionary Left would be wrong to forsake on the pretense that such a problematic exclusively belongs to the Liberal heritage, like the abstract of “freedom of speech”:

In the long and patient deconstruction required for the transformation to come, the experience Europe inaugurated at the time of the Enlightenment (Lumières, Aufklärung, Illuminismo) in the relationship between the political and the theological or, rather, the religious, though still uneven, unfulfilled, relative, and complex, will have left in European political space absolutely original marks with regard to religious doctrine (notice I’m not saying with regard to religion or faith but with regard to the authority of religious doctrine over the political). Such marks can be found neither in the Arab world nor in the Muslim world, nor in the Far East, nor even, and here’s the most sensitive point, in American democracy, in what in fact governs not the principles but the predominant reality of American political culture.

The post Defending Charlie Hebdo? Secularism, Islam and the War on Error 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.

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.

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.

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.

Whenever I am asked about the Brazilian elections, people expect me to say something about the presidential run. It is the only election to which I am entitled to participate as a Brazilian living abroad. But it is only one of five choices voters had to make (voting is mandatory). Every four years for the last 26 Brazilians have voted for state governor and state legislature, a third of the senate, and the 513 representatives in congress. It has been this way since the end of the long and painful transition to democracy that started in 1974 with a warning by the general in charge that it was to be “slow, gradual and safe.”

The key to the safety to which the general alluded is the election of the next congress. Bear this in mind: even though the election in two rounds guarantee the president will get more than 50% of the vote, not a single president since 1990 has had more than a hundred representatives from his own party elected to congress. As a result, every presidency since then has been based on an intricate patchwork of heterogeneous alliances to govern. The relative shortcomings of each of the six administrations since 1990, besides their ideological leanings, are to a great extent the result of a majority which has always been – whether prone to corruption or not – very conservative in congress.

Consider, for instance, the two caucuses primarily identified with conservative causes. The so-called ruralistas or agro-business caucus (a modern packaging for the old landowning class that once ruled the country) and conservative evangelicals are together worth at least 235 votes in congress. Different assessments give the Bancada Ruralista between 159 to 227 congressmen and eleven senators. Calculations for the Bancada Evangélica vary from 73 to sixty-six members of the caucus in congress and three senators. Other notorious right-wing special interests’ groups that have had an important role in specific votes in congress are the Bancada da Bala [“Bullet Caucus”] with 11 members that defend the right to bear arms and the interests of the weapon industry and the bancada da Bola [“Football Caucus”] with 7 members that defend the interests of the national and state soccer federations.

These caucuses, especially the first two mentioned, guarantee that the federal administration, regardless of who wins the election, will do nothing substantially different about land distribution, forest conservation, and the rights of indigenous peoples, women or the LGBT community. The political power of the agro-business caucus has its source in the boom in the international commodities market causing a rapid expansion throughout the flatlands of the Midwest on to the north of the country and the encroachment of large properties growing crops such as soy beans and sugarcane. Evangelicals have, with one notable exception,[1] increased their presence in congress after each election in tandem with the fact that, according to the 2010 census, Protestants make up 42.3 million Brazilians or 22.2% of the population, up from a mere 9% in 1990. They are not as homogeneous a group as most people think: evangelicals make up 65% of these Protestants and are split into numerous antagonistic groups – internal conflict divides even the most powerful of the evangelicals, Assembléia de Deus, with 8.5 million members spread all over the country. They all tend to agree, however, on seeing women’s reproductive rights and LGBT marriage and adoption rights as threats to the foundation of society.

Even though almost half of congress seems to get elected on these platforms, too much proximity with the causes identified with these two groups may hurt a campaign for executive office. The agro-business politicians face rejection outside their political turfs and have become infamous for their positions against campaigns that intend to curb modern slavery or widespread logging while religious and class prejudice compounded with rejection of moralistic conservative activism curtail the political appeal of evangelicals beyond their constituencies. This is a good point of entry into some of the puzzles of this year’s presidential campaign.

After the promise of excitement, for the sixth consecutive time, the two candidates with most votes were candidates from PT and PSDB. Disappointment followed the thrill around Marina Silva, who started this campaign as vice-president in the ticket led by Eduardo Campos until he died in a plane crash in July. She ran a shorter campaign with much less time on TV – since mid August one hour of prime time Radio and TV is reserved daily to all the candidates according to the number and size of the parties that support them. But it is undeniable that, after a sudden rise to first place in most opinion polls, Marina Silva frustrated those who thought she could change the course of the election. Neither did she appeal to a more conservative electorate nor could she differentiate herself from PT, the political party in which she built most of her career. The beginning of her fall might have been when Marina Silva backpedaled on support for gay marriage after she was sternly admonished in a series of tweets by pastor Silas Malafaia. She ended up in third with more or less the same support she had four years ago. Silas Malafaia is one of a few US-style televangelists that vie for the leadership of the powerful Assembléia de Deus, organization for the most part under control of 77-year old pastor José Wellington Bezerra da Costa. The candidate for president officially supported by the elders of Assembléia de Deus was pastor Everaldo Pereira, who received a meager 0.75% of the vote.

Most major Brazilian politicians nowadays play a cynical game of mixed messages that try to please the religious electorate without seeming too close to it. Their powerful sway over an important parcel of the working class urban vote explains the uncanny number of “thanks to the Lord,” for example, in the final remarks during presidential debates. Shady alliances practically guarantee the ruralistas will support whoever wins the election and will be duly rewarded for doing so. Too much proximity with these groups during the campaign may hurt the chances of a candidate running for presidency, governorship or even the senate, but, once the election cycle is over, those 235 plus votes will be awaiting at the negotiating table.

Contrary to the cliché in conversations among disenchanted Brazilians, who say politicians are all “farinha do mesmo saco” [flour coming from the same sack], politicians and political parties are quite different. The five democratically elected presidents [Fernando Collor, Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dilma Roussef] differ widely in style and substance. Inflation went from 80% a month in 1990 to 6% a year in 2014. The minimum wage was around $100 a month in the 1990s and is now well above $300, which means that one of the most unequal countries in the world has finally done something to reverse a perverse trend of income concentration that had been imposed with the 1964 military coup. But the nature of the accomplishments and shortcomings of these administrations can only be properly understood taking into account the elephant in the room: they all dealt with a reactionary congress, some to their advantage, others, not. This political system seems to have exhausted its capacity for meaningful reform and this perhaps explains the explosion of diffused dissatisfaction that shook the streets of every major city in Brazil in June 2013.

Another cliché claims that whatever is going on “could be happening in Brazil only.” But political crises caused by the seeming incapacity of systems of representative democracy to present real alternatives to the fatalistic mantras of financial capitalism are now the rule rather than the exception all over the world. It is hard not to notice the stark contrast between fierce campaigns led by doggedly opposing political groups and administrations that, by and large, offer more or less the same with slight changes in emphasis. The will to project political antagonism between the three major candidates this year did not obscure that all of them carefully followed scripts written by marketing professionals, who “sell” a left-leaning candidate this cycle and a conservative one in the next. Much is made to obscure differences in new proposals for education and healthcare as well as continuities in anti-poverty and anti-hunger as well as economic policies that point to a complaisant acceptance of the conservative political status quo. While the conservative media insist that corruption is a matter of specific politicians appropriating public funds for themselves, the political system becomes universally corrupt because powerful private economic interests hold a tight grasp on the legislative and the executive on federal, state and municipal levels. The system becomes increasingly domesticated and choices narrow down to different versions of more of the same. The malaise is palpable and fuels the prospect of a Berlusconi-style political apparition or the return of neo-liberal orthodoxy to power.

The angst that permeates the election cycle this year can be summed up by one of the most popular slogans of the 2013 demonstrations: “Contra tudo o que está aí” (Against Everything That’s There). A quick retrospective of those events is necessary. The protests led by a group of daring young activists in São Paulo against inefficient costly public transportation were galvanized by the brutality of the police repression documented in traditional and social media. Suddenly, millions joined loosely organized demonstrations ranging from far-left anarchists to conservatives willing to bring back the military to power. Myriad groups chanted slogans against the World Cup, against the media conglomerate Rede Globo, against the police, against the homophobic congressman Marco Feliciano, against president Dilma Rousseff, against state or municipal authorities. Individuals held placards in favor of causes such as the sterilization of pets, “the army of Jesus,” the end of gun control and road tolls. The only slogans more or less universally accepted were either vague such as Vem pra rua (“Come to the Streets!”) or anti-politics such as Sem partido (“No Political Parties!”). Later at night the customary brutality of the military police was met with violent resistance. Media pundits feverishly tried to give the unrest a definitive meaning and politicians were shaken out of their complacency and scrambled to quiet somehow the unrest. For example, in one of his most pathetic moments, political commentator Arnaldo Jabor appeared on the prime time TV news first to excoriate the protesters as spoiled middle-class brats and then a few days later to hail them as great patriots about to change the country. The media was only truly outraged when some of their own were victims of the violence, first by the police and then by the protesters. A discourse was built around the idea of a clear-cut separation between small left-wing bands of evil-spirited but disciplined vandals bent on the subversion of the order and the good folk that made the bulk of the demonstrations.

Ultimately, fare increases were cancelled and in some places prices were even reduced. Then, an infamous corrupt politician was sent to jail. After a long silence and relative complicity with statewide repressive measures, the federal government decided to propose a thorough reform of the political system to be decided by officials elected specifically for that purpose. Outraged reformers suddenly became savvy pragmatists and vice-versa and absolute nothing substantive came out of it. It seems clear now that the only palpable result of those demonstrations “against everything that’s there” was not a Brazilian Berlusconi, but an even more conservative congress: the equivalent of throwing gasoline to try to put out a fire.

The post Beyond the Elections: Politics in Brazil appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Sempre que me perguntam sobre as eleições no Brasil, as pessoas esperam comentários sobre a disputa presidencial. É a única eleição em que posso participar como brasileiro vivendo no exterior. Mas é apenas uma de cinco escolhas que os eleitores têm que enfrentar. A cada quatro anos os brasileiros votam para governador, deputado estadual, um terço do senado e deputado federal. Assim tem sido nos últimos 26 anos, desde o fim da longa transição para a democracia que começou em 1974 com uma resalva do general em questão de que ela seria “lenta, gradual e segura.”

A chave para a segurança de que falava o general e a eleição do congresso nacional. Para entender claramente o que estou dizendo, é preciso ter em mente que, ainda que a eleição em dois turnos garanta que o presidente eleito tenha sempre mais de 50% dos votos válidos, nenhum presidente eleito desde 1990 teve mais que cem deputados de seu partido no congresso. Por causa disso todos os presidentes desde então governaram com base em uma complicada rede de alianças heterogêneas. As limitações relativas dos seis governos eleitos desde 1990, além das tendências ideológicas de cada um, se explicam em grande medida como resultado de um maioria no congresso que é sempre – independente de tendências à corrupção ou não – muito conservadora.

Consideremos, por exemplo, duas bancadas identificadas com causas conservadoras. Os ruralistas ou a bancada do agro-negócio (uma embalagem supostamente moderna para os descendentes das velhas oligarquias latifundiárias que já comandaram o país) e os evangélicos conservadores juntos tinham pelo menos 235 votos no congresso. Cálculos diferentes dão à Bancada Ruralista entre 159 e 227 deputados e onze senadores. Com respeito à Bancada Evangélica as avaliações variam entre 73 e 66 membros no congresso e três senadores. Outras bancadas conservadoras que eventualmente aparecem com destaque em votações e em comissões no congresso são a Bancada da Bala com 11 membros que defendem os interesses da indústria de armas e a bancada da Bola com 7 membros que defendem os interesses das federações de futebol e dos clubes. Esses votos, principalmente os que vêm das primeiras duas bancadas mencionadas, são a garantia de que o governo federal, não importa quem ganhe as eleições, fará muito pouco de substancial sobre reforma agrária, desmatamento e os direitos dos povos indígenas, das mulheres e da comunidade LGBT.

O poder político da bancada ruralista tem sua fonte no grande crescimento do Mercado internacional de commodities que ocasionou uma rápida expansão pelo planalto central e o norte do país de latifúndios produtores de soja e cana-de-açúcar. Nas últimas eleições os evangélicos, com uma exceção significativa,[1] aumentam sua presença no congresso a cada eleição em sintonia com o crescimento dos protestantes que foram de 9% em 1990 para 22,22% da população brasileira, totalizando 42.3 milhões. Esse não é um grupo tão homogêneo como muita gente pensa: os evangélicos são apenas 65% dos protestantes e estão divididos em vários grupos antagônicos – conflitos internos dividem até mesmo a Assembléia de Deus, igreja mais poderosa com 8.5 milhões de membros por todo o país. Todos os evangélicos parecem estar de acordo, entretanto, em imaginar os direitos reprodutivos das mulheres e o casamento e adoção de crianças por pessoas do mesmo sexo uma ameaça às fundações da sociedade.

Ainda que quase a metade do congresso seja eleita com base nessas plataformas, uma proximidade excessiva com causas identificadas com os dois grupos pode prejudicar uma campanha por um cargo executivo. Políticos ruralistas encaram forte rejeição fora dos seus redutos políticos e têm péssima reputação por combaterem tentativas de reprimir a escravidão ou o desmatamento enquanto preconceitos religiosos e de classe contra os evangélicos pioram por causa da rejeição do ativismo conservador moralista reduzem em muito seu apelo além do seu eleitorado. Está aí uma boa maneira de tentar decifrar um dos mistérios da campanha presidencial deste ano.

Após uma promessa de novidade, pela sexta vez consecutiva os dois candidatos com maior número de votos foram os do PT e do PSDB. Desapontamento acompanhou o frenesi sobre Marina Silva, que começou essa campanha como vice-presidente na chapa de Eduardo Campos até que ele morresse num acidente de avião em julho. Marina fez uma campanha mais curta e com menos tempo de televisão – desde meados de agosto reserve-se uma hora do horário nobre de todas as rádios e canais de televisão para propaganda política dividida de acordo com o número e o tamanho dos partidos de cada coligação. É inegável, entretanto, que após uma ascenção meteórica nas pesquisas de opinião, Marina Silva frustrou aqueles que pensaram que ela poderia mudar o curso das eleições ao se mostrar incapaz de atrair o eleitorado mais conservador sem alienar sua base de apoio formada por eleitores de esquerda insatisfeitos com os rumos tomados pelo PT, partido no qual Marina fez a maior parte da sua carreira. O começo do seu fracasso pode ter sido o momento em que Marina Silva voltou atrás em compromissos de campanha pelo apoio ao casamento entre homossexuais após ter sido severamente advertida pelo pastor pastor Silas Malafaia em uma série de tweets. Marina terminou em terceiro lugar, mais ou menos com o mesmo número de votos.  Silas Malafaia é um televangelista à moda estadounidense que luta pelo controle da poderosa Assembléia de Deus, organização em sua maior parte controlada pelo pastor José Wellington Bezerra da Costa de 77 anos. O candidato apoiado oficialmente pela Assembléia de Deus era o pastor Everaldo Pereira, que recebeu apenas 0.75% do voto.

A maioria dos políticos brasileiros hoje em dia faz um jogo cínico de mensagens mais ou menos indiretas que tentam agradar ao eleitorado religioso sem parecer demasiadamente próximo dele. A força desse eleitorado entre a classe trabalhadora explica o incomum número de graças ao senhor que, por exemplo, aparecem no final dos debates presidenciais. Alianças em manobras de bastidores praticamente garantem que os ruralistas darão apoio a qualquer um que ganhar as eleições e serão bem recompensados por isso. Uma proximidade excessiva com esses grupos durante a campanha pode prejudicar as chances de um candidato a presidência, governo estadual, ou mesmo ao senado, mas, ao fim do ciclo eleitoral, os mais de 235 votos no congress estarão aguardando o novo presidente na mesa de negociações.

Estou completamente em desacordo com o clichê que diz que politicos são todos “farinha do mesmo saco”. Os cinco presidents eleitos democraticamente [Fernando Collor, Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula e Dilma Roussef] diferem muito em estilo e substância. A inflação foi de 80% ao mês em 1990 para 6% ao ano em 2014. O salário mínimo estava em torno de $100 nos anos 90 e agora está acima de $300, o que significa que um dos países mais desiguais do mundo finalmente dispôs-se a fazer algo para reverter a perversa concentração de renda que foi imposta desde o golpe militar de 1964. Mas a natureza das conquistas e dos limites desses governos só pode ser compreendida levando-se em conta esse pequeno imenso detalhe que raramente figura nas conversas entre brasileiros: todos eles lidaram com um congresso reacionário, alguns a seu favor, outros em seu detrimento. Esse sistema político parece ter exaurido sua capacidade de produzir reformas substanciais e isso talvez explique a explosão de insatisfação difusa que tomou as ruas de todas as cidades brasileiras em junho de 2013.

Discordo de um outro clichê que diz que o que quer que esteja acontecendo “só poderia acontecer no Brasil”. As crises causadas pela aparente incapacidade dos sistemas de democracia representativa de apresentar alternativas reais aos mantras do capitalismo financeiro são antes a regra do que a exceção no século XXI. Não é difícil perceber o contraste gritante entre campanhas eleitorais ferozes entre grupos políticos polarizados e programas de governo que oferecem mais ou menos a mesma coisa com pequenas diferenças de ênfase. A vontade de projetar antagonismo entre os três candidatos com chances e vitória este ano não pode obscurecer o fato de que os três tentaram seguir scripts cuidadosamente escritos por profissionais de marketing que “vendem” um candidato progressista hoje e um candidato conservador amanhã. Faz-se muito para disfarçar diferenças entre propostas para a educação e saúde assim como as continuidades em políticas contra a fome e a pobreza assim como políticas econômicas que se baseiam numa aceitação complacente do status quo capitalista. Enquanto a mídia insiste que a corrupção é uma questão de políticos se apropriando de fundos públicos, o sistema político torna-se universalmente corrupto por causa de interesses econômicos que mantém controle do legislativo e do executivo nas esferas federal, estadual e municipal. O sistema se domestica cada vez mais e as escolhas se resumem e versões ligeiramente diferentes do mesmo. O mal estar é palpável e cresce a possibilidade da aparição política de algum Berlusconi ou o retorno da ortodoxia neoliberal ao poder.

A angústia que perpassou grande parte do ciclo eleitoral deste ano pode resumir-se em um dos mais populares slogans das manifestações de 2013: “Contra tudo o que está aí”. Faz-se necessária uma rápida retrospectiva dos eventos do ano passado. Os protestos organizados por um grupo ousado de jovens ativistas de São Paulo contra o alto-custo e ineficiência do transporte público ganharam uma nova dimensão com a brutalidade policial documentada pela mídia tradicional e pelas mídias sociais. De repente milhões se juntaram a protestos organizados de forma difusa por grupos de iam da extrema esquerda anarquista aos conservadores dispostos a trazer de volta os militares ao poder. Grupos os mais variados criavam gritos de guerra contra a Copa do Mundo, contra a Rede Globo, contra a polícia, contra o deputado homofóbico Marco Feliciano, contra a presidenta Dilma Rousseff, contra autoridades estaduais ou municipais. Indivíduos isolados seguravam cartazes a favor de causas como a esterilização dos animais domésticos, “o exército de Jesus” ou o fim do controle às armas de fogo e dos pedágios. Os únicos slogans aceitos de forma mais ou menos universal eram aqueles que primavam por serem vagos como “Vem pra rua” ou anti-política como “Sem partido”. Mais tarde à noite a costumeira brutalidade policial encontrava resistência violenta. Especialistas na mídia tentavam freneticamente dar um sentido definitivo a agitação social generalizada e a classe política saiu da sua complacência habitual para tentar aplacar a ira pública. Em um dos seus momentos mais patéticos, o comentarista Arnaldo Jabor apareceu no horário nobre criticando asperamente os manifestantes caracterizados como piralhos mimados de classe média e, poucos dias depois, celebrando os mesmos como grandes patriotas capazes de mudra o país. A mídia se indignava seletivamente com a violência quando esta atingia um dos seus, primeiro pela ação da polícia e depois dos manifestantes. Um discurso se construiu em torno de uma separação clara entre pequenos grupos organizados de vândalos mal-intencionados dispostos a tudo para subverter a ordem e a boa gente que era maioria nas manifestações.

Aumentos de passagens foram cancelados e em algumas cidades preços foram reduzidos; um político condenado por corrupção foi mandado para a prisão. Após um longo silêncio e relativa cumplicidade com as medidas repressivas tomadas pelos governos estaduais, o governo federal decidiu propor uma completa reforma do sistema político a ser proposta por uma constituinte eleita especificamente para esse propósito. Reformistas ultrajados de repente se transformaram em pragmáticos cautelosos e vice-versa e nada de substancial foi feito. Até agora parece que o único resultado palpável dos protestos “contra tudo o que está aí” não foi um Berlusconi brasileiro, mas um congresso ainda mais reacionário: o equivalente de atirar gasolina para tentar apagar o fogo.

The post Sobre Eleições Brasileiras 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.

 

The post Early Postcolonialism in Haiti: On Being between a Rock and a Hard Place appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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.

Faltando dias para a eleição presidencial, no dia 5 de outubro, com tantos temas em jogo (veja aqui um resumo), a novela política e ideológica do Brasil segue em suspenso. Ao invés de entrar nesses debates, discutirei uma nova política em nível menor, o do município de São Paulo. Os eventos atuais na cidade me levaram a considerar o seguinte: o que acontece a uma sociedade quando a urbanização está completamente orientada para o lucro? Se houver desenvolvimento social do espaço urbano, como será?

Durante a minha última estadia na cidade, entre maio e agosto de 2014, algo curioso ocorreu. O prefeito de São Paulo, Fernando Haddad (PT)  criou o Plano Diretor (agora referido como PDE, “E” significa “estratégico”), um complemento ao Estatuto da Cidade (2001). Na verdade, o PDE está longe de ser um esforço individual por parte do prefeito. Em vez disso, foi resultado de mais de nove meses de debate, envolvendo 114 audiências públicas, incluindo diretamente mais de 25 mil moradores. O plano de desenvolvimento urbano, criado em 30 de junho de 2014, foi sancionado um mês depois. Com um mandato de dezesseis anos para “humanizar” o desenvolvimento urbano, valorizar o meio ambiente, aliar  o conceito de “função social “à urbanização, além de apoiar “iniciativas culturais”, a experiência do PDE em São Paulo merece a atenção de todos.

Sim, chegamos a esse ponto. Por gerações, desde o boom da industrialização e da grande onda modernista, uma montanha-russa financeira  que empurrou São Paulo ao centro econômico no início do século 20, a cidade não dispunha de nenhum plano sério. A urbanização ocorreu em sua maior parte em função da especulação imobiliária, com milhões de deslocados, residentes migrantes improvisando espaços residenciais e comerciais, bem como serviços básicos, como eletricidade, água e transporte. São Paulo tem tomado forma, como resultado de acordos de curto prazo, amplificados por uma infra-estrutura maciça dos meios de comunicação comerciais, e não por  planos sócio-geográficos sustentáveis.

Photo Credit: Derek Pardue

Por que o PDE agora? Houve uma mudança de cima para baixo e o contrário também. Ora, Haddad tem sido comparativamente mais proativo do que prefeitos progressistas anteriores, tais como Marta Suplicy (2001-2004) e Luiza Erundina (1989-1992). Em retrospectiva, as administrações da cidade de São Paulo têm abertamente apoiado o desenvolvimento “wild west” combinado às forças policiais repressivas para controlar os protestos populares. O Partido dos Trabalhadores ou qualquer partido com agenda similar raramente ganha em São Paulo. Talvez, a mudança mais importante tenha sido a atitude e e a organização de base (grassroots) em torno da questão da moradia. Ocupar e reaproveitar prédios abandonados para moradia e centros culturais tornaram-se práticas comuns nos dias de hoje, especialmente em bairros centrais, mas também em alguns bairros da periferia. Grupos como FLM (Frente de Luta pela Moradia) e MTST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto) têm sido protagonistas na sensibilização para as questões cada vez mais urgentes relacionadas à moradia e à especulação imobiliária.

O PDE é uma nova tentativa, robusta, para reestabelecer o “social” no desenvolvimento urbano. A especulação imobiliária é um jogo de baixo ou nenhum risco para a elite que tem o capital. Ela se beneficia não só da  mídia publicitária,, cheia de panfletos de sonhos distribuídos em quase todos os semáforos, de outdoors em avenidas e rodovias, e propaganda na Internet, mas também frequentemente conta com o apoio do estado. Uma ala dos protestos contra a Copa do Mundo criticou precisamente as conexões entre o desenvolvimento do megaevento e o aumento da especulação imobiliária.

Não é que as administrações políticas dos últimos anos não tenham levado  em conta o planejamento urbano. Órgãos burocráticos, como EMURB (Empresa Municipal de Urbanização de São Paulo) já existem há décadas. Criada em 1971, a Emurb usa fundos públicos para a renovação de edifícios históricos, como o Edifício Martinelli, uma marca da indústria paulista moderna e gestão de elite. No entanto, nunca houve qualquer menção ao desenvolvimento sustentável e muito pouca ação no desenvolvimento de moradias populares, além dos projetos habitacionais distantes, que muitas vezes demonstraram o pior do populismo: infra-estrutura de má qualidade, resultando em políticas rápidos e escândalos subsequentes. Em 2009, a EMURB foi dividida em duas empresas públicas. A SMDU (Secretaria Municipal de Desenvolvimento Urbano) é a agência mais pertinente. Em maio de 2013, a SMDU foi reorganizadoa em face de um potencial PDE.

Em um mapa novo de São Paulo, o governo dividiu a cidade em setores para destacar os objetivos específicos do PDE. As categorias de desenvolvimento sustentável e igualitário propostas abordaram o problema em nível micro (bairro) e macro (a cidade como um todo). Por exemplo, território e sociedade se unem numa das iniciativas, conhecida como ZEIS (Zonas Especiais de Interesse Sociais). Na sua versão atual, o projeto prevê que a cidade irá utilizar fundos públicos para desenvolver até 33 quilômetros quadrados, sessenta por cento dos quais para famílias com renda inferior a 3 salários mínimos (cerca de 2.100 reais por mês). Em contraste à habitação pública anterior, esta construção é projetada não para a periferia, mas para o centro da cidade e bairros históricos, como Bela Vista, Brás, Santa Ifigênia, Campos Elíseos e Pari. Além disso, semelhante a um conjunto de leis de urbanização em Nova York, o PDE exige “cotas de solidariedade,” que estipula que qualquer proprietário (pessoa física ou jurídica) de uma propriedade com uma área superior a 20.000 metros quadrados deve dedicar 10% do espaço de habitação “social” em conformidade com o Estatuto da Cidade. Este espaço deve ser no local ou numa área do mesmo bairro.

Mudanças inspiradoras, mas será que pegam?

No Brasil, a crença na lei é sempre ligada à fiscalização, o processo complexo de regulação. Como foi observado várias vezes nos últimos dois meses, por Raquel Rolnik, em seu blog, há atualmente uma desconexão entre o PDE e a realidade de aplicação da lei. Como alertado anteriormente, os ativistas certamente sabem em o que o PDE implica, uma vez que eles e os seus representantes contribuíram para sua formulação. No entanto, o mesmo não pode ser dito para a polícia ou, infelizmente, muitos juízes, pois eles continuam a ignorar ou recusar-se a aceitar o conceito de função social da cidade. Para os investidores imobiliários, a “função social” do planejamento urbano representado pelo novo PDE é um dreno no lucro e um obstáculo injustificado ao desenvolvimento. Esta minoria tem muitos porta-vozes à sua disposição para culpar a cidade por causar especulação. Ironia brutal de braços com fingida ignorância.

A visão do Plano Diretor é que uma cidade deve ser organizada como um direito humano e não um recurso econômico. A cidade não é como diamantes ou tecnologia informática. Para o governo, esse tipo de desenvolvimento empreserial é de importância secundária. Em vez disso, a função principal de gestão da cidade deve ser a alocação e regulação do espaço como um gesto de contribuir para o bem comum. Dado o fato de que a maioria de nós vive em cidades e que esta tendência deve se intensificar, todos nós temos algo em jogo no tocante ao que vai acontece em São Paulo.

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