journal of visual culture Creolization and the Maison des civilisations et de I'unité réu nnaise Francoise Verges (in conversation with Vivian Rehberg) Abstract Gréoltté and creolization have emerged as conceptual vectors for understanding the polysemic configurations of societies born out of two matrices: the istand and the plantation. Here Francoise Verges speaks with Vivian Rehberg about her understanding of creolization on Reunion Island and the ongoing project to build a muscum (the Maison des Civilisations et de Lunité Réunionnaise) for reinterpreting and representing the specific, shared space of encounters and ‘exchange that is Reunion. The interview is followed by the translation of excerpts from the theoretical and poetic manifesto, Indian Oceans Creolizations, that Vergés co-authored with her colleague and friend Jean-Claude Carpanin Marimoutou. Keywords creolization + Indian Ocean « post-colonial + Reunion Island « slavery Journal of visual culture (JVC): We are here to talk about the Maison des civilisations et de l'unité réunionnaise (MCUR). How did the project come about? What are its aims? Frangoise Verges (FV): The project I wrote with Carpanin Marimoutou for MCUR started from a need for another aacrative and its visualization. Accor- ding to both the French colonial and republican narrative, Reunion does not exist without France and France gave birth to Reunion, But Reunion’s society ‘was born out of the encounter between very different groups and cultures: African, European, Malagasy, Muslim, Chinese, Hindu and others. We had to imagine how to represent the various processes of creolization that occurred throughout time. How do we create a museum, a cultural and visual space in30 @O@@ journal of visual culture 5(1) which intercultural practices and processes would be presented in such a way that the people living in Reunion would be able co apprehend the world their ancestors came from and the world they created? First, we had to represent the complex social, political and cultural life of the African, Indian, Chinese worlds, the traces brought to Reunion and which transformed and were mutually transformed, by what was already established on the island. We also wanted to show that these places named Africa, India, Madagascar were not places without history, that the slaves taken to Reunion came from complex places and contexts. Any group of slaves, indentured workers and colonists arrived from a place with a history, a social and cultural organization. And 10 years later that place was no longer the same, it was already a different place and the new group arriving in Reunion was also arriving into a changed place. These constant transformations, which are the topic of debate today, are important to keep in mind to avoid abstract generalizations. The second issue we wanted to address was: how does one visually represent that complexity? It is perhaps easier to describe it in words, but how do you visualize it? I have dealt with zhis very important question over the last two or three years. Add to the narrative that Reunion has no pre- colonial past, no native population; the society was entirely produced by colonialization, which is totaly fascinating. There is no possibility for a narra- tive of load and land. Everyone was a foreigner on the island. I started to think: we have to present the Indian Ocean pre-Europe. The territory must appear as an agent in history. The island existed before people settled on it or were forcibly taken to it. It existed in the Indian Ocean which had long been a space of exchange, encounter, conflict and contact, long before the arrival of Europeans. You display the multi-layered aspects of this India- oceanic world. Then the island was colonized and inhabited. But, again, how do you visualize it? You could have an Africa in the 17th-century room, an India room, etc., but what would it say about the complexity we want to represent? How do you work with all of the critical thinking about nonlinear narratives? How do you construct a visual pedagogy of this ‘complexity so that in the end you will have an idea of the mul-fayered world of Reunion society? The goal has been to alfow for a constantly evolving reading and to work berween pedagogy and the possibility of rereading and reinterpretation. JVC: How do you reconcile the processes that you describe with the notion of unity in the name of the project? FV: One of the points of the MCUR was to think of the permanent exhibition as one representing the different civilizations that gave birth to that Creole society, o that ‘unité réunionnaise’. “Unity” here refers to a society still being transformed, still in becoming, still in the process of creolization. Processes of ereolization cannot stop, otherwise you no longer have ereolization, you have something else, a national identity, for example. The diversity ts the condition of unity, itis not national unity but the representation ofa society in which contrasts and differences are at play as well 3 a unity in becoming, both (contrasts and unity) being produced by the same structures, Verges Creolization @@@@ Creolization on Reunion Island must be understood within the larger context of the Indian Ocean region. If the world of the plantation was its matrix, slaves, indentured workers and settlers arrived on the island with the ‘memories, the traces of their worlds. They came from complex cultures, which often had been affected already by contact with other cultures. The India-oceanic world served as the subterranean terrain of creolization. In other words, it was not simply the encounter between African slaves and white settlers which produced creolization but the encounter between individuals and groups already transformed by conquest and exchanges, coming from cultures as diverse as the cultures of Madagascar, the Comoros Islands, Mozambique, South India. Layers upon layers of significations interacted. The appellation ‘African’ and ‘Malagasy’ slaves tends to obscure the fact that it is an appellation for our times (and it further obscures the fact that on Reunion Island, the census at the end of the 17th century noted the Presence of slaves bought in India) which evokes a national or racial identity, whereas many groups in Madagascar or on the coasts of eastern Africa had been mixed already, affected by other cultures and encounters and had created their own identities and differences among themselves, ‘The process of identification and disidentification must be documented, Scholars of the Indian Ocean have insisted on the complexity of processes at work in a world criss-crossed for centuries by very different groups. All the regions around the ocean exhibited great social complexity. Creolization in the age of slavery was a complex process: each group came with its own under- standing of freedom, servitude, gender, kinship, authority and religion, Reading that multi-layered world through new technology and the interventions of ‘contemporary artists might enable us to show its complexity. | also think that spaces that integrate sound are very important and that the ‘narrative’ of the permanent display has to be designed to incorporate interruptions and possibilities for retracing one's steps. One has to invent a new scenogeaphy. JVC: Is the narrative organized thematically or chronologically? FY: We had to imagine a narrative that would not follow the narrative of text books focused around French history (remember, Reunion Island is a French department and a European region). I say ‘we’ because I work a lot with Carpanin Marimoutou, who is a poet and a professor of modern Creole literature at the University of Reunion. We suggested seven timerspace sequences: 1 the present (Reunion today); 2. the Indian Ocean world prior to European imperial intrusion; 3. the age of slavery; } 4. the period of modernization and industeiatization; 5. a period between the 1920s and the 1960s (end of colonial status in 1946, new oe challenges, decolonization in the region, new cultural movements); 6. the period between the 1970s and the 1990s (end of the rural world, ‘consumer society, new migratory movements); and at000 journs! of vieual culture 5(1) 7.a look at current and futures issues (new forms of globalization, new challenges). ‘As with any organized temporality, the sequences have some arbitrary dimension, but at some point you have to choose, We wanted to start from local dynamics and transformations, to show how each period has been affected by new arrivals and transformations — whether one is considering cooking, aesthetics, gardening, religious beliefs, gender relations, literature, architecture, medicine. How did the plantation affect the territory? What map of the island did the Maroons draw? When were the first Hindu tempies or mosques built? How did these different transformations affect the island in terms of space, urban settings? Ia each sequence, the island would be resent as a physical space so that its physical geography and transformations would be shown always as conteibuting to the processes of creolization. We did not want the civilizations to become fixed - we did not want to construct the ‘great authentic’ Africa or the ‘perfect’ India, but places already hybrid and complex. One has to remember that most of those who arrived ‘were poor, even the Europeans. Reunion was very far away for the colonial power and never occupied the same place in the French imagination as the Antilles. The French came from the poorest regions of France in the 17th and. 18th centuries. Indian indentured workers were poor, even if some of them reinvent themselves today as Brahmin. Of course, nobody asked the slaves if they wanted to come, The Chinese or Muslims were not well-off either. In the Indian Ocean, routes of deportation and exile were often convoluted, made of many travels, social transformations and cultural adaptations. Refiguring the itineraries of creolization in the Indian Ocean requires that we move beyond the model of the Atlantic triangle (which itself has been revised but nonetheless still shapes current thinking). To analyse India-oceanic middle passages, we must begin with a series of remarks. Slavery did not create a ‘triangle’ of commerce in the Indian Ocean, and slave trade cross-oceanic routes existed before the arrival of the Europeans (Africa to India, Africa to China, Africa to the Arab world). These cross-oceanic routes were also routes for other kinds of commerce and cultural contact, and routes of indentured work often retraced the routes of slavery (from Africa to the Mascarenes Islands, Seychelles and South Aftica, from India to the Mascarenes). In other ‘words, mapping out the Indlia-oceanic routes of passage requires drawing a cartography of contact zones in which Europe is just one player among many. others and requires ‘thinking’ the Indian Ocean and the processes of creolization. The Indian Ocean has been, and remains, a world of criss- crossed economies, intersecting systems of meanings and fragmented identities. The task is to find a methodology to articulate past and present, ‘not by drawing a linear process but by trying to configure the criss-crossing throughout time and space. The trope of ‘itinerary’ is useful as it indicates a process through a complex network of conjunctures, conditions of displacement and transplantation. The productive function of displacement and exile, exemplified here through creolization, should not mask ‘or marginalize the conditions that Jed to displacement (capture, sale into slavery or indenture, poverty, racism). These formations are sociohistorically_ Verges Creolization @@0@ contingent and culturally specific and any exploration of India-oceanic creolization should make clear that we are talking about circular and contingent processes. Representing slavery raises difficulties. There are a small number of textual and visual documents that justify the slave system — the Code Noir — but most. of the textual and visual documents on slavery are from the abolitionists. They are the propaganda images we all know presenting slaves in chains, directed at the European public, proclaiming ‘Look, slavery is bad!". The English were the first to use this iconography of slavery in the 18th century, with the well-known image of the male slave on his knees and the legend: ‘Am I not a man and a brother? on Wedgwood china. If we only present the iconography of abolitionism we are presenting a European moralistic vision concerned with producing pity and indignation, with responses of disgust and outrage. This iconography does not represent the complexity of the slave system in the Indian Ocean. This history needs to be told. We have no visual and very few textual documents of these practices. Here, it seems that working with contemporary artists might be especially fruitful JVC: Without denying the specificity and complexity of the Reunion context, are there other muscums or structures confconting similar issues that can serve as models or countermodels? FV; Most of the museums of slavery I have either physically visited or whose websites I have explored on the internet do not raise these issues. Their goals are really to recount the world of slavery and denounce that system. lt is rarely situated in a global context. There is, of course, the concept of the Black Atlantic, but slavery is not still considered as part of a huge global social organization in which Africans participated. In Africa you had cities, cosmopolitan cities in which brokers, middle-men and interpreters would go inland to get people, bring them to the port, sell them to the Dutch or the Portuguese or French. The slave trade transformed the economy and social organization on the African continent and, as it lasted more than three centuries, evolved and transformed itself to adapt to demands, competition, resistance. JVC: How is the history of slavery currently understood in Reunion? Is it taught in schools? FV: Lam the vice-president of the Committee on the Memory of Slavery (the writer Maryse Condé is its president), which was created in France after the state recognized slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity in May 2001. One of our tasks was to study if and how slavery was being presented in textbooks. We observed that slavery is mentioned but in very vague terms, as something bad, naturally, but in a very fragmented way that does not facilitate a comprehension of the event. However, we are talking about a system that lasted for almost three centuries - month after month, year after year ~and the thick history of slavery is not discussed. In Reunion in the 1980s, local historians and scholars began researching the question, but they focused on recounting facts, on doing serious archival000 journal of visual culture 5(1) research and bringing to light a lot of things we did not know and of course needed to know, but without reflection on freedom, disposability of people, Subjectivity, gender. There are mostly narratives about slaves as victims. We have to show that slavery was a matrix through which Reunion emerged and that concerned everyone, whether descendant of slave or not. When you arrive on the territory today you arrive on an island that was built on slavery for two centuries. You cannot ignore that, no matter where you come from ‘Another problem relates to commemoration. Commemoration has more to do with staging oneself than with those who came before. One puts one’s ‘compassion out there, hoping that this exhibition of pain or suffering will tenable a connection with the past, with ancestors. OF course, commemo- ration can have a pedagogical dimension, but more often than not I find the commemorative to be a narcissistic mise-en-scérte of oneself instead of a real historical work of the past, JVC: Who are some of the contemporary artists that may be able to address these issues? ‘There is a new generation of contemporary artists but few address these issues, although Krilin Pounoussamy, William Zitte, Gilbert Clain, Alain Padeau, of YoYo Gonthier have dealt with the representation of Reunion, its history and culture. We have not witnessed something like the Black Audio Collective Group or other politica) ast movements. Photographers have been more active in that kind of expression. I think we must wait a little longer, there is a school of arts now and new expressions will certainly emerge. We ‘must also count on the works of contemporary artists in Madagascar, South Africa, Mozambique, India. I think we will soon see amazing works. We see the exhibition as a mix of visual techniques ~ digital, documents, archives, films, interactive simulation — we plan to work a lot with new technology. We took the relative absence of objects as a starting point and, rather than lamenting this absence, we used it to imagine other forms of visual discourse. JVC: And what about the space itsell? FV: Above all, | would like the space to account for the possibility for reflection, for temporal shifts and jumps rather than linearity. One of the key things is that we want the visitor to enter the permanent exhibition through the present, undoing notions of causality and origins. We had to invent a place that did not fossilize history or memory, that semains a site open toward revisions and reinterpretations, that shows teolization processes and practices while restoring the spaces and histories that led up to this creolization. The spirit is that of a non-linear interpretation where the viewer is invited to ‘dialogue’ with what she sees, where she can suggest other meanings for things and objects. Reunionese anthropology, history and culture offer so many layers of intersecting mesnings that clash and connect that it is impossible to extract a homogeneous narration. Mecting this challenge by juxtaposing spaces of signification was an evasive device, since challenge by juxtaposing spaces Ov we iyrocal required thinking about the Verges Greolization @80@ space of the presentation as much as about the presentation itself. We still have to conceive this space in connection with its environment and its content. Its environment, since it is impossible 10 ‘represent’ creolization ‘without talking about the physical territory (mountains, ocean, plains, rivers, fields, towns), its constraints (cyclones, fragility of the soil, steep slopes) and its influence on the imaginary. It exists as a non-material and material heritage. Its content, because the challenge is to present intersecting stories and views, never allowing one of the terms to prevail yet nonetheless giving meaning, The goal being to construct a muscum, ie. a space where these presences are visualized, we had to think of mediations: how does one show the itinerary of the social and cultural process of the middle passage, of the elements that constitute Reunion culture? JVC: Where is it to be situated geographically? FV: The MCUR will be on the west coast of the island, near St Paul, where the first European and Malagasy settlers arrived. The regional council, French state and European Union are all involved. Jean-Claude Carpanin Marimoutou and Thave done the necessary studies and we have advanced quite a bit in the conceptualization of the project; now we are in the phase of ‘actualization’ Echoes from cultural associations and the larger population have been positive; many lament the absence of a place such as this. For example, although we have the registers for the arrivals of slaves, indentured workers and colonizers and the documents on the abolition of slavery in 1848, there is no place for the population to access them. JVC: Although there are French government-supported cultural institutions and structures such as the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (Regional Contemporary Art Fund), the Léon Dierx Museum, etc. om Reunion, those geographically situated in France are still only marginally interested in the artists living outside of the ‘métropole FV: When I began to return more regularly to Reunion after 1996, I was struck by the number of exhibitions and other cultural activities taking place. Some of the production was not particularly interesting and there was no notion of what might be a ‘Reunion’ art. A few years ago I organized a day- Jong workshop on this question. Most participants did not want to use a label, they believe art is universal, even though the practice of putting nationalities on wall labels still holds, and I found this absolutely unbeliev- able. I reacted by discussing where this notion of universal comes from. And somehow this leads to the notion that anything and everything is okay, which, of course is deadly for art. The idea of an India-oceanic identity was resisted, There is very little public debate about art, aesthetics and politics, visual culture. ‘This is not peculiar to Reunion. It is also about the status of the ‘outre-mer’ (overseas territories) in France, which is about either beaches and bananas or lazy people on welfare. How these territories question the nasrative of French republicanism is largely avoided and artists from these places are never exhibited with ‘national’ artists. For example, in 2003, the City of Paris, organized an exhibition called ‘Latitudes’. which chowed work from artists 3fom Keunfon, Madagascar, Tanzania, Mauritius, etc., and Caecilia Tripp and Jean-Christophe Royoux have done a documentary video project called Agora ‘Réunionnaise, which was shown at the ARC/Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as in other European cities. I worked on both projects, but these initiatives still have not had great impact because a certain idea of colonialism prevails in France. The French have a hard time understanding the pervasive colonialism that continues to exist, especially in places that have remained French territories, such as Reunion or the Antilles. JVC: Could you say something about your other contributions to artistic projects? In France you are known as a ‘politilogue’ (political analyst) and elsewhere asa cultural studies scholar. Yet you are also very implicated in the visual arts, for example, in your work with Isaac Julien, or on Documenta 11 FV: | collaborated with Isaac Julien on his Frantz Fanon project in 1996 and we began a dialogue on creolization which we continued throughout the years. Isaac’s family came from St Lucia but he was born in London. Those discussions helped in his conceptualization of Paradise Omeros for Documenta 11. Then Mark Nash, one of the co-curators, suggested to Documenta 11 director Okwui Enwezor that a platform on creolization be organized and that I should be in charge. The platform took place in St Lucia, with thinkers, writers and artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Europe. We asked: ‘What is creolization today?" ‘What conditions produce creolization” We discussed the plantation and colonization as matrices, whether or not there are similar conditions today. Can we speak of New York as a Creole city? For me, creolization emerged in conditions of violence, brutality and exile. A unity emerged, but the unity and the cond tions for unity were praduced by the same structure of inequalities, exploitation and constant contact berween groups. Yet, contact between cultures is not necessarily conducive to creolization. One theory cannot account for the permutations of cultural contact which change very quickly and are affected by so many elements (geopolitical, rcligious, economic). You ‘can observe creolization but you can also observe others’ creations produced by cultural contact. I also suggested that there are sites of creolization today; within a big city you might have a tiny space of creolization that coexists on the same terrain with spaces of liberal multiculturalism. or ghettos. Isaac and I are still in constant dialogue about his works. More recently, I wrote the catalogue for his show The Creole Phantom (June-August 2005) at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. 1 also worked on a project in Cape Town on ‘Affican Aesthetics’ where I discussed the aesthetics of cooking (2003). When I did research on Chinese restaurants in Durban, Maputo, Dar-es-Salaam and Port Louis (2004), I looked. at the aesthetics of the restaurants and, of course, at cuisine as a cultural site, | was interested in the ways in which things travelled on south-south routes, ‘what kind of transformations affected cultural exchanges. ‘The visual is crucial to me. am voracious when it comes to films, all kinds 7 as contributed to m; of films, for example. And the landscape on Reunion has contri y notion of the visual. I think that the ‘word’ can be a dry and erudite form of transmission and I believe that the visual, auditory and textual can be mixed together to great effect. There may have been less access to painting, for example, although there were salon exhibitions in Reunion, but you have great access to the visual through temples, Catholic shrines, the garden, the landscape, cemeteries, etc. JVC: The culture and expressive forms of a place are key to our under. standing of ‘civilizations’. In France, culture has been conceived of historically in terms of ‘heritage’ (patrimoine). How might MCUR confront the notion of patrimoine? FV: It has been an important question for us. Patrimoine in Reunion is ‘mostly ‘immaterial’, intangible, and the notion of ‘heritage’ is, as we know, extremely problematic. We suggested viewing heritage in connection with ‘systems of historicity’, which designates the way that a society or a group sees itself in time (relationship with death, the place of recollection and forgetfulness, representation of the past, etc.). The notion of heritage, how- ever, leads to the constitution of an ‘us, those who have inherited a past. What is this ‘us’? How can we present a common heritage of a ‘we’ that is dynamic and not fixed, because if it were, then heritage could be a pretext for the closing of this ‘we'? On Reunion, there are at once several pasts (those of the different groups that shaped the population) and @ past. But this is a widespread condition. What is special for Reunion, as for many territories that were colonized, is that the construction of a shared narrative was postponed, prevented by the colonial power. As Jacques Derrida observed, heritage is something we receive without being able to choose. You might say that heritage ‘chooses’ us. However, nothing forces us to preserve this heritage as it is. That would mean making heritage a prison, trapping ourselves in a genealogy that we would not be allowed to transgress, We have heritages. We inherited both the systems of thinking and practices of slavery, of engagisme and colonialism, along with the ideals and practices of anti-slavery, the Enlightenment and anti-colonialism, We are heirs to various civilizations — African, Malagasy, Indian, European, Asian ~ heirs to various religious and cultural beliefs and practices. These different heritages that merged and dissociated from one another did not remain static over the centuries, they ‘were creolized. Some aspects were lost, others were transformed. We created new ones. We have forgotten or reinvented their origins. Over the centuries new traditions have appeared, new practices and new beliefs, and that impetus is still underway. ‘The goal of MCUR is not to set out to search for lost origins, trying to restore an authenticity that is imaginary, to defend a nostalgia that ‘things used to be better’. Every culture has to be dynamic, adaptable, show flexibility and openness, not fear transformations, new ideas and practices, while still preserving what should be preserved. There is nothing in our heritages, no ‘matter how painful they are, that gives us the right to claim a moral superiority; nothing in our heritages that deprives us of the right to claim we are different, Confronted with heritage, one has often an impulse to preserve, reassert, defend, choose. To preserve from forgetfulness, denial, the policies of silence38 @OOO journal of visuel culture 5(1) and amnesia set up by the authorities who seek to impose one story, one tradition. To reassert what happened. To defend heritages because they gave rise to stories, myths, because they constitute landmarks that we need. To choose, because everything is not worth being preserved. Because we have to preserve and reassert, but without melancholy, without nostalgia. We have to reinterpret our heritages, subject them to a critical appraisal, so that some- thing new can happen, that is, history. We don’t have to be victims of our heritage, but reclaim it from a critical pasition to be able to pass it on. We have to give meaning 0 our heritages, t0 be active heirs because, to quote René Char, ‘No testament precedes our heritage’ Coneretely we are currently launching programme of collecting the ‘objects of the living present’ the goal is not to find ‘authentic’ objects but to recreate the social practices evoked by an object (a song, prayer, dress, plant, political mem- bership card) through collecting images, narratives and objects of everyday lf IVC: Have you worked out how to make this research and collection more widely accessible? EV: To display the processes of creolization, we thought of the itinerary. I was inspired by James Clifford's suggestion about ‘theory’. Clifford remarked that the etymological root of theory, theorein, is a ‘practice of travel and observation, a man sent by the polis to another city to witness a religious ceremony’ (Clifford, 1989: 177). Knowledge becomes a kind of itinerary and to map out the itineraries of Reunionese culture, we thought of drawing a cartography of routes, subject to conjunctures and other predicaments. We argued that the ‘itinerary’ is metonymical of the constitution of the Reunionese people and culture. No ancestor is autochthonous. Thus the genealogical relationship of each Reunionese passes through an itinerary, movement and displacement. The path draws the ancestor's course: the one Jeading from them t0 us and the one leading us back to them. Displaying the ineraries of persons, objects, rites, culinary practices, recipe ingredients, sounds, allows the visitor to follow the routes and itineraries of Reunionese culture. It is a mise-enscéne of its dynamism, its capacity to absorb and its fluidity. Nothing is fossilized, nothing is pure, and yet continuity emerges. ‘Reality is polymorphic, formed by multiple identities and constant metamorphoses,” and ‘itis at the heart of metamorphosis and precarty that the true continuity Of things lies’ (Gruzinski, 1999: 22) From the place of origin whence the ancestor came to the world, they contributed to build and bequeathed to us, the itinerary brings back a life. The richness of a world is restored and the neutral category (‘slave’, ‘engage’, ‘Kafe’, ‘Malabar’, ‘Muslim’), meaning one that negates singularity (how old? what gender? what place of origin: city, country, coast?), fades away before the combined individual and collective experience that shaped the Reunionese world. To illustrate what | am talking, about, it could be © the itinerary of an object ~ furniture, drum, pestle, rice cooker ~ that is associated with a time-space. Where does it come from? How did the item Verges Creclization @OO® {get to Reunion? How was it integrated in the home, in the public space? The everyday object — television, radio — is presented in its context but the object is not shown as ‘passive’. We can see how it transformed users’ lives (what was the impact of TV serials, of the radio? The impact on the way that men-women relations and social relations are perceived?) and how people transform it. These displays of itineraries reintroduce the everyday object in culture. There is no highbrow/lowbrow culture separation; © the itinerary of a rite ~ servis kafr, walking on fire ~ Where does it come from? How did it get to Reunion? How was it transformed? How was it integrated in the home, the public space? How has it evolved? © the itinerary of a person: a woman or a man whose trajectory the visitor follows from the native world with information on the social organization, culture and economy of that place, up to when they settled in Reunion. How does the trajectory transform the individual? How do they reinvent them- self? How is their identity, their life transformed by the colonial system? ‘These singular courses show the complexity and diversity of contributions. ‘They also bring back to life the forgotten stories of hundreds of thousands of people who came to this island. © the itinerary of a spice, medicinal plant, vegetable, something having to do with cuisine and health. Where did saffron come from? How was it integrated in the cuisine? Brédes, cod, rice, manioc? Where did knowledge about a particular medicinal plant come from? © the itinerary of sofidarity: connections between Madagascans and Reunionese, the role of sailors in disseminating revolutionary literature. ‘The itineraries draw the contours of a world in which south-south trade, European imperialism, slavery, indentured work and anti-colonial solidarity converge on a small island which, through its own dynamics, construct a culture. Current itineraries must be included, of Reunionese going to France, Canada, England and Madagascar, and of new groups arriving on Reunion, zoreys and Comorians. Observing creolization at work requires a capacity for transversal interpretation, it is an exercise in caution and prudence at jumping into ready-made categories. Anthropologists working on Reunion society have shown the extremely porous borders between practices usually associated with discrete ethnic groups. Laurence Pourchez. and Stéphane Nicaise especially have shown the profound singularity of Reunionese Practices. Groups have borrowed from different reservoirs of beliefs and practices. In her study of rituals for newborns, Pourchez (2002) has argued that ‘because of the mixing of the population, the family never favors one ancestor’ (p. 186; see also Benoist, 1998; Nicaise, 2004; Brandidas et al. 2001) against the other. It is impossible to celebrate one ancestral memory because it would mean ignoring another, and that would be very dangerous. ‘We must not forget chat in Reunion, it is the diversity of practices and identities that has built and continues to build a common world, rather than the other way around, a unity experiencing diversity (Brandidas et al., 2001, 2004), The itineraries offer an alternative spatialization of alterity JVC: Would you like to say something about the recent law calling for educators to teach only the positive aspects of colonialization in relatianshin tn MCTTR?See ERTeEEEESIEESUSTESONESTSSECESESTESOSESSTOSSOESCOSSSESISESESEETESESE SSS ESSSSISE SESS SASS SUOAEELEAEUCRUCE EE CIEOENETENEESESISES 40 eee journal of vieval culture 5(1) FV: In February 2005, a law was passed by the French parliament stating that the ‘positive aspects of French colonization’ be taught in schools. It contradicts the 2001 law about slave trade and stavery which { mentioned ‘earlier, but in a way, both are in line with French universalism, which sees itself 28 exceptional. In other words, the 2001 law is a declaration to the world of how much France remains faithful to its commitment to human rights and its tradition of protecting the oppressed (the heritage of the French Revolu- tion, revised through French republicanism) and the 2005 law declares that. French colonization cannot be separated from this commitment. If there were some excesses, they were the deeds of ‘bad! individuals. The colonial project elf carried universal goals (the mission to civilize), the law implies. And this is exactly what the majority of the French still think, After all, we are told, the colonizers built hospitals, schools, roads and bridges. It is amazing how much ‘we have to hear about roads and bridges! If there was such a compulsion to build them, why the necessity to colonize? In my book, La République coloniale (Bancel, Blanchard and Verges, 2004), | continue to explore the intimate relationship between French republicanism and French imperialism. ‘The relation cannot be underestimated. In a previous book, an analysis of French abolitionism (Verges, 2001), I examined the relation between aboli- tionism and colonization, “colonizing peoples to save them’. The tradition of ‘paternalism (France being the guide of backwards peoples) is still very strong. However, the February 2005 law also shows that colonial history is finally a contested terrain. It is because more and more young French people are demanding that the history of their enslaved and colonized parents be a part of the national narrative and not a marginal chapter in which we observe these reactionary expressions. The Fresch Republic is not yet decolonized and the recognition of an alterity which it denies is part of a current struggle, In the report of the Comité pour la Mémoire de I'Esclavage (2004), I suggested that the government organizes an inventory of all the objects related to slave trade and slavery which afe in the collections of French museums (national and regional). Then we will be able to analyse the visual discourse on these events, The programme has been accepted. Such an inventory will certainly ead to new work on the body and race, the representation of wealth, freedom and servitude. It is important to pursue this kind of work.