Reframing Postcolonial Studies: Edited by David D. Kim

Reframing
Postcolonial Studies
Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms
Edited by David D. Kim
Reframing Postcolonial Studies
“This timely volume confronts the legacies of post-colonial thinking as a set of

material and textual practices. Looking at museums, public monuments, statues,
literary texts, languages and artworks, it questions the vexed legacies of colonial
culture, as well as the theoretical and critical literature that has sought to under-
stand it. From the vantage point of the ‘post’ post-colonial (as a temporal as well
as theoretical construction), successive authors look at specific instances and medi-
ations of Imperial Europe’s global ambition: the way poetry and fiction imagine
potential pasts, the way video and film redress the harm of history, the way prov-
enance and particularity complicate the politicisation of heritage. Drawing on
urban theory, art history, literary analysis, environmental humanities and linguis-
tics, the book is ambitious and wide-ranging, asking us what it is to live creatively
and critically with the residues of colonial appropriation and sedimentation while
in open dialogue with the subjects who still live in its wake.”
—Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art,
University of College London, UK
“The attention of postcolonial studies has moved to decolonizing the colonial

archive: to the institutions that house objects, artworks, materials, even bodies culled
from the colonized world, to the corporations and universities that profited from
slavery and colonialism, and to the statues in the public sphere that even today com-
memorate the racist history of colonial plunderers. Reframing Postcolonial Studies
addresses the urgent issues that Black Lives Matter has raised with respect to every-
day material practices and the frameworks in which our knowledge and cultural heri-
tage are conceptualized and stored. The book points urgently to the many ways in
which our society must reinvent itself to enable equitable justice for all.”
—Robert J. C. Young, Julius Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
New York University, USA
David D. Kim
Editor
Reframing
Postcolonial Studies
Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms
Editor
David D. Kim
Department of European Languages
and Transcultural Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-52725-9 ISBN 978-3-030-52726-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6
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To Our Teachers and Students,
Past, Present, and Emerging
Acknowledgments
Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the product of an intensely collaborative

project, which has taken nearly three years to complete. It contains the
signatures of many different interlocutors whose contributions have been
invaluable for reframing the following discussions. First of all, I owe the
contributors my utmost gratitude. All of them were excited to join this
volume from the beginning. It has been an immense privilege to learn
from our regular exchanges both in person and via email. Second, I wish
to thank Megan Laddusaw, Christine Pardue, and Arun Prasath at Palgrave
Macmillan. Their prompt and thoughtful guidance throughout the edito-
rial process has been outstanding. I could not have asked for a more sup-
portive place to publish this book. Third, I had the fortune to receive
Viola Ardeni’s meticulous editorial assistance in the beginning of this proj-
ect. Last but not least, my sincere gratitude goes to the anonymous
reviewer whose encouraging and thought-provoking comments on the
book proposal and the final manuscript have enriched the book in both
profound and subtle ways. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic
whose lasting devastation has yet to be assessed, acknowledging the
unwavering support of these colleagues surely has a new special mean-
ing for me.
May 2020 David D. Kim
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial

Patrimony 1
David D. Kim
Part I Conceptual Vigilance 41
2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43

Bill Ashcroft
3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia

and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture 69
Susan Slyomovics
4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing

Francophonie 93
Dominic Thomas
Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111
5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor

Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy113
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François
ix
x Contents
6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial

Dilemmas in Visual Representation157
Afonso Dias Ramos
Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189
8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German

Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide191
Reinhart Kössler
9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215

Katrin Sieg
10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249

Frieda Ekotto
11 Afterword261
Graham Huggan
Index269
Notes on Contributors
Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, a founding exponent of

postcolonial theory, and the co-author of The Empire Writes Back (1989),
the first text to offer a systematic examination of the field of postcolonial
studies. He is the author and co-author of 21 books and over 200
articles and chapters, variously translated into six languages. He also
serves on the editorial boards of ten international journals. His latest
work is Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2016). He is an Emeritus
Professor at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Frieda Ekotto is Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor in the Departments
of Afroamerican and African Studies, Comparative Literature and
Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author
of ten books, the most recent scholarly monograph being What Color
is Black? Race and Sex across the French Atlantic (2011). Her early
research traced interactions between philosophy, law, literature, and
African cinema, and she works on LGBT issues, with an emphasis on
West African cultures within Africa as well as in Europe and the
Americas. She received the Nicolàs Guillèn Prize for Philosophical
Literature in 2014 and the Benezet Award for excellence in her field
from Colorado College in 2015. In 2017, she co-produced the feature-
length documentary Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters,
which premiered at the University of Michigan. That year, she also received
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
an Honorary Degree from Colorado College and in 2018 was given the
Zagora International Film Festival of Sub-Sahara Award for her work in
African cinema.
Graham Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial
Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His
work straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and envi-
ronmental humanities, and much of his research over the past three
decades has involved individual and collaborative attempts to cross the
disciplines (literary/cultural studies, anthropology, biology, geography,
history). His most recent published book is Colonialism, Culture, Whales:
The Cetacean Quartet (2018), and he is working on a co-written study
of modern British nature writing. Other publications include The
Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), Postcolonial
Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010, co-authored with
Helen Tiffin), and the sole-edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial
Studies (2013).
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is Assistant Professor of French and
Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State
University. He is the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones
contemporains (Poetics of Violence and Contemporary Francophone
Narrative, 2017). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as
the PMLA, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Nouvelles
études francophones, and Lettres romanes. He has recently co-edited a spe-
cial issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, titled “Mapping
Francophone Postcolonial Theory,” and a special issue of Cultural
Dynamics on “The Minor in Question.” Jean-François is working on
a second monograph, titled Indian Ocean Creolization: Empires and
Insular Cultures. It focuses primarily on contemporary literatures and
expressive cultures from the Mascarene Archipelago.
David D. Kim is an associate professor in the Department of European
Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Parables: Memory and
Responsibility in Contemporary Germany (2017), as well as the co-editor
of Imagining Human Rights (2015), The Postcolonial World (2017),
Globalgeschichten der deutschen Literatur (2021), and Teaching German
Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2023). His digi-
tal humanities project is called WorldLiterature@UCLA. He is working
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
on two major projects, one of which explores the notion of beastly

citizenship, the other Hannah Arendt’s relationship with non-Jewish
alterity. His research has been supported, among others, by the
American Council of Learned Societies.
Reinhart Kössler is a sociologist and former director of the Arnold-
Bergstraesser-Institut in Freiburg, Germany. He is also a professor in the
Department of Political Science at the University of Freiburg, as well as an
associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Freiburg
University of Education. His research interests include theory of society,
sociology of global relations, institutional pluralism, and memory politics.
His regional focus is southern Africa where he has worked recently on
ethnicity and postcolonial reconciliation. Books include In search of sur-
vival and dignity. Two Traditional Communities in Southern Namibia
Under South African Rule (2005); The Long Aftermath of War.
Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia, ed. with A. du Pisani and
W. Lindeke (2011); Gesellschaft bei Marx, with Hanns Wienold (2013);
Namibia and Germany. Negotiating the Past (2015); Völkermord – und
was dann? Die Politik der deutsch-namibischen
Vergangenheitsbearbeitung (2017).
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is Professor of English and Comparative
Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His areas of research cover
from Victorian to imperial, colonial, and contemporary cultures, postco-
lonial theory, crime fiction, travel writing, comparative and world literary
systems, as well as environmental theory and literature. His publications
include, among others, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a
New Theory of World-Literature (2015), Natural Disasters and Victorian
Imperial Culture: Fevers and Famines (2013), Postcolonial Environments:
Nature, Culture and Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010), and
Crime and Empire: Representing India in the Nineteenth-Century (2003).
Afonso Dias Ramos is an Art Histories Fellow at the Forum
Transregionale Studien (2018–2019) in Berlin, Germany, affiliated with
the Freie Universität Berlin. He is investigating ongoing controversies
around colonial-era monuments and artworks worldwide. He received his
PhD in History of Art from University College London. He has previ-
ously studied at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Université
Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He is the co-editor of Photography in Portuguese
Colonial Africa (2019). His articles have been published in journals
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
such as New Global Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Object,

Lobby, The Burlington Magazine, and Oxford Art Journal.
Katrin Sieg is Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for
German and European Studies at Georgetown University where she is also
affiliated with the Department of German. She is the author of three
monographs on German and European theater, performance, cin-
ema, and popular culture. In addition, she has written articles in the
areas of feminist, postcolonial, and critical race studies. She is com-
pleting Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum,
forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press. Her book Ethnic
Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002) won
two prizes in theater studies.
Susan Slyomovics is a distinguished professor in the Departments of
Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University
of California, Los Angeles. Her publications include The Merchant of Art:
An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance (1988); The Object of Memory:
Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998); The Walled Arab
City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the
Maghrib (editor, 2001); The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco
(2005); Clifford Geertz in Morocco (editor, 2010); and How to Accept
German Reparations (2014). Her research project is on the fates of French
colonial statues and monuments in Algeria.
Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor and Chair of the
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He is also “European Affairs
Commentator” for CNN. He is the author and editor of books, as well as
journals, on African and European culture, globalization, history, and
politics, including Black France (2007), Museums in Postcolonial Europe
(2010), La France noire (2011), Francophone Sub- Saharan African
Literature in Global Contexts (2011), Africa and France (2013), Racial
Advocacy in France (2013), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution
(2014), Francophone Afropean Literatures (2014), Afroeuropean
Cartographies (2014), The Invention of Race (2014), The Charlie Hebdo
Events and Their Aftermath (2016), Vers la guerre des identités (Towards
the War of Identities, 2016), The Colonial Legacy in France (2017), Global
France, Global French (2017), Sexe, race et colonies (2018), and Visualizing
Empire (2020). He edits the Global African Voices series at Indiana
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
University Press, which focuses on translations of African literature into

English. He has also translated works by Aimé Césaire, Sony Labou Tansi,
Alain Mabanckou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Abdourahman Waberi. He
was elected to the Academy of Europe in 2015. He has held fellowships,
residencies, and visiting professorships in Australia, France, Germany,
Mali, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image
courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) 7
Fig. 1.2 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image
courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) 7
Fig. 2.1 Palestine Postcard 1936 (1936) 55
Fig. 2.2 Amer Shomali, Visit Palestine (2009) 56
Fig. 2.3 Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2012) 58
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Youcef Zighoud, original sepia-toned, date unknown
(Wikipedia Commons) 73
Fig. 3.2 Statue of Youcef Zighoud, August 20, 1970, inauguration in
Constantine (Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia,
personal archives of Ahmed Benyahia) 74
Fig. 3.3 The war memorial of 1922, Constantine, Algeria Caption:
“Coq de la Victoire” (Photo Agence Jomone, Algiers, circa
1957, no. 105, author’s collection) 76
Fig. 3.4 Emptied plinth of the French war memorial
(Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission
of Ahmed Benyahia) 86
Fig. 3.5 Zighoud Youcef statue in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery,
February 2020 (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced
by permission of Ahmed Benyahia) 87
Fig. 5.1 Nirveda Alleck, The Migrant’s Tale (2017) (Photograph by
Nirveda Alleck) 119
Fig. 9.1 TheExhibitionist.org website banner 234
Fig. 9.2 TheExhibitionist.org website banner 235
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
Action! On Reframing Postcolonial Patrimony
David D. Kim
…the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something

anew, that is, of acting.
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Arendt 1958, p. 9)
...the traditional material is transformed to fit a prevailing new
situation, or hitherto unnoticed or neglected potentialities inherent in that
material are discovered in the course of developing new patterns of action.
—Karl Mannheim, The Problem of Generations
(Mannheim 1952, p. 295)
Which understanding of our postcolonial patrimony is calling us to

action now?
At first glance, there appears to be an endless number of possible
answers to this momentous question, not least because it presupposes a
globally dispersed, heterogeneous “we” in solidarity. A straightforward
reply is also confounded because of the polarizing dispute that has arisen
D. D. Kim (*)
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: dkim@humnet.ucla.edu
© The Author(s) 2021 1

D. D. Kim (ed.), Reframing Postcolonial Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_1
2 D. D. KIM
in the field between Marxist “revolutionary” thinkers and poststructuralist

“revisionary” theorists (Huggan 2013). For these reasons alone, singling
out one received legacy on which our rich body of scholarships and their
responses to the world might converge seems impossible. And yet, a cer-
tain horizon of expectations and aspirations may be discernible after all,
one that distinguishes a critical renewal of tradition from a mere contesta-
tion of the old on some untrodden territory. Reframing Postcolonial
Studies has originated in a collective action to examine this prospect, as we
bear the weight of our intellectual inheritance at the onset of another piv-
otal decade for the future of common humanity.
Except for anthropological investigations and multidirectional intersec-
tions between Holocaust memory and decolonization, the matter of pat-
rimony has figured only peripherally in postcolonial studies. However, the
time is now to concentrate on this topic because it runs through the latest
major rearrangements of the field. Several developments account for this
sea change. With the natural progression of time, there is an allegedly self-
evident reason in various parts of the world for bringing the process of
postcolonial detachment to an end once and for all. With the biological
succession of generations, various affective and ideological attachments to
the heritage of imperialism are being broken, destabilized, or reformed
not necessarily for the better. At the same time, a new generation of post-
colonial artists, writers, thinkers, and activists has come of age, contesting
such self-centered claims and differentiating itself from formative prede-
cessors—the ones credited with decolonization and, thereafter, with the
establishment of postcolonial studies—with a critical consciousness of
inheritance and legacy. What is reframing postcolonial studies today stems
from the conflict and solidarity in this acute “non-simultaneity”
(Ungleichzeitigkeit), as several generations respond similarly, differently,
and relationally to colonial fantasies and postcolonial resurrections (Bloch
1962, p. 104).1
Given the international and multidisciplinary scope of the field, it is
essential to understand to what extent this dynamic process mounts a
response to the most pressing concerns in the world, including racism,
sexism, nationalism, public health, inheritance, war, and sustainability. The
main task involves challenging the times, as they are dictated by oppressive
cultural, economic, political, and religious forces, and engendering alter-
native linkages of past, present, and future. Such transformative action is
only possible when scholars, teachers, students, activists, artists, writers,
and filmmakers recalibrate their vocabularies, which have been important
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTION! ON REFRAMING POSTCOLONIAL PATRIMONY 3
for the field, in light of the latest postcolonial struggles. For this “concept-
work” to be effective, they need to be invested in methodological innova-
tion and open up postcolonial criticism to incisive political activism (Stoler
2016, p. 17). Without such critical and creative coordination, postcolonial
inheritance would survive mostly as a self-absorbed academic discipline
without much worldly impact. That is the reason why this volume seeks to
close the loop by taking a fresh look at the three parts of contemporary
postcolonial studies: living concepts, cross-disciplinary methodologies,
and bold intersections of scholarship and activism. The following investi-
gations examine how they have recently changed through individual and
cooperative efforts to decolonize museums and public spaces marked by
colonial signposts, to cultivate community organization and transversal
affinity in times of political, ecological, and pandemic crises, and to redress
questions of reconciliation, reparation, repatriation, or retribution in pur-
suit of “a truly universal humanism” (Shih 2008, p. 1361).
To be sure, the force of “reconstructive intellectual labor” has been
transforming the field since the very beginning (Gilroy 1993, p. 45).2
With gripping references to Négritude intellectuals, other African, African
American, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and Caribbean writers, as well as
West European thinkers, the first generation of critics gave rise during the
1980s and early 1990s to postcolonial theory, which changed the aca-
demic landscape primarily in anglophone countries.3 The impetus behind
a second, more global postcolonial wave a decade later was again this inde-
fatigable sense of self-reflexivity, as more and more academics and activists,
discontent with “Europe” as “the sovereign, theoretical subject of all his-
tories,” shifted their focus from conceptual dichotomies, political imposi-
tions, and literary analyses to ambivalent translations, subversive
displacements, and material reconsiderations (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 1).4
After the field had become established first in departments of English, his-
tory, and comparative literature at North American, British, Indian, and
Australian universities, this subsequent wave reshuffled the field beyond its
concentric constellation by applying conceptual, methodological, and his-
torical findings to other cultural, disciplinary, linguistic, and national con-
texts, and by interrogating theoretical formulations with historical inquiries
into different places of alterity. In addition to scrutinizing analytic terms
whose “insight” was not deemed to travel “well across adjacent disciplines
and scholarly fields,” scholars, students, artists, and activists worked more
deliberately on non-Western, Indigenous, early modern, and minor
European ways of knowing (Scott 2005, p. 389). Their collective action,
4 D. D. KIM
enhanced by professional organizations, libraries, and other university-led

initiatives, interrogated “canonical knowledge systems”—even those
within the relatively young field—and fruitful results came directly from
far-reaching exchanges across “disciplinary boundaries and geographical
enclosures” between literary scholars, historians, and colleagues in neigh-
boring areas of study such as anthropology, geography, sociology, art his-
tory, gender, film, translation, performance and Holocaust studies, and,
more recently, international human rights, as well as environmental, digi-
tal, and urban humanities (Gandhi 1998, p. 42; Prakash 1995, p. 12).5
Roughly four decades in the making, then, the vibrant character and
diversity of postcolonial studies have been energized by a tireless spirit of
“reenactment” (Prakash 1995, p. 11). This reconstructive dynamism has
been instrumental in posing a strong opposition to skeptics who believe
that to live well in postmodernity is to bid farewell to postcolonial remains.6
With incisive investigations of archival conventions, governmental records,
photographs, paintings, films, maps, performances, memoires, travel-
ogues, letters, oral traditions, digital databases, and literary narratives,
postcolonial critics have kept their original spirit alive by revealing “inter-
related histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice,” as well
as “the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach” beyond the
transitional period of independence, especially in the lives of women and
children, victims of war, racialized ethnic minorities, people with disabili-
ties, and working-class families (Young 2012, p. 20). Alarmed by “the
duress” with which imperial formations continue to accrue in postmoder-
nity, they reaffirm arguably the most foundational lesson in postcolonial
studies that the post in postcolonial is irreducible to a temporal marker
(Stoler 2016, p. 7).7 Having identified earlier blind spots in anglocentric
literary and historical approaches to colonialism, contemporary postcolo-
nial projects illuminate how heterogeneous and interconnected illiberal
democracies are at an international scale, and why these unequal societal
structures are built upon the ruins of past imperial regimes.8
More recently, this work has engaged a new generation of critics, art-
ists, and activists who draw upon the trailblazing oeuvres of anticolonial-
ism, the political imaginaries of the Bandung period, and later postcolonial
criticisms to reshape the world in tune with their own anxiety, courage,
hope, curiosity, enthusiasm, and grievance. They are exemplifying what
Hannah Arendt calls “action.” She argues that this capacity, which comes
with the status of being “newcomers and beginners,” is inherent to each
generation and connotes both the right and the ability “to take an
initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and
eventually ‘to rule,’ indicates), to set something into motion (which is the
original meaning of the Latin agere)” (Arendt 1958, p. 177).9 Although
Arendt falls short of specifying how this beginning owes itself to what
precedes it, it is useful here for conceptualizing how the lessons of past
colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial activities are being reframed in cur-
rently transformative debates and community-based organizations. A
combination of old and new action works up and down generational lines
to revitalize resilient, forward-looking initiatives in reparative justice.
Reframing Postcolonial Studies consists of carefully selected case studies
that shed light on this action. Written by scholars of different generations,
the eleven chapters show how, under contemporary historical conditions,
preceding models of creativity, scholarship, and activism offer indispens-
able points of orientation as well as frustrating limits. They interrogate
how current intellectual endeavors are informed by individual and
community-based actions outside of the academy and they demonstrate to
what extent conceptual, methodological, and activist concerns are pivotal
for contemporary postcolonial interventions. As far as I know, Reframing
Postcolonial Studies is the first volume whose rationale is formulated in
such explicitly intergenerational, future-oriented terms.10 The tripartite
organization of this volume is applicable to any scholarly topic or academic
discipline, so long it seeks to intervene in the world, but as the contribu-
tors make clear in their individual and mutually resonating case studies,
conceptual vigilance, methodological deliberation, and scholarly activism
acquire new strengths when different generations come together to reflect
on their conjoined inheritance and legacy and take action in pursuit of a
more reassuring future. Instead of being content with the truism that
every generation wrestles with its inheritance and heritage, this compen-
dium illuminates without trying to be comprehensive how foundational
concepts, hybrid methodologies, and scholarly activisms are subjected to
renewed scrutiny in the latest communication between postcolonial
scholar-citizens.
Postcolonial Patriarchy, Inclusive Patrimony

Perhaps it is best to explain at this point the motivation behind the follow-
ing collaborative undertaking, as well as the value of its tripartite organiza-
tion. Several experiences and inspirations come to my mind, but one of
them stands out above all else because it hits closest to home, so to speak.
6 D. D. KIM
In the summer of 2019, my home institution—the University of California,

Los Angeles—celebrated its centennial and the rhetoric of honoring its
past accomplishments, both communal and academic, with the call for
charting an even bolder future during the next 100 years was pervasive on
campus. It was during this period of mostly self-congratulatory festivities
that the Fowler Museum, affiliated with the university, showcased a very
different example of what it meant to look back in order to move forward.
The museum was dedicated to exploring “global arts and cultures with
emphasis on Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas” and,
during these hot dry months typical for southern California, it exhibited a
tripartite installation, titled Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa
(Fowler Museum 2020). One of the three artworks was called We Live in
Silence and it projected onto a large wall screen a 37-minute-long series of
seven “chapters” where mostly black actresses portrayed different stages of
modern African history (We Live in Silence n.d.).
Visitors were asked to sit down in a completely dark room on one of
two wooden benches whose tilted orientation toward the screen seemed
to transform the cinematic production into a church-like catacomb.
Indeed, what unfolded before their eyes was hardly reassuring. It was full
of contradictions, as things familiar and foreign, historical and fabricated,
grotesque and peaceful, religious and secular commingled, thereby refract-
ing the direction of what was commonly known about Africa’s moderniza-
tion or “development” and what European Enlightenment had prophesied
about modernity (Spivak 2018). Much of this estrangement in Bertolt
Brecht’s sense of Verfremdungseffekt came from the lead character—a
young black woman—who occasionally looked into the camera and
directly addressed the audience. The video captured her radical transfor-
mation, beginning with her violent, rape-like subjugation to white colo-
nial rule and Christianity (see Fig. 1.1), and ending with her splendid
coronation in an independent nation, as the rest of society was falling
apart (see Fig. 1.2).
The final chapter showed in slow motion how the black protagonist—
now a suit-wearing man—sat like an apathetic, narcissistic despot on a
throne in the middle of a long dining table, while young women dressed
in elegant black or white clothes were joining him in the festivity. They
were celebrating the beginning of a new political era. In the foreground,
though, the scene could not be any more different: a car was burning
upside down; a fanatic black pastor was blessing a small congregation of
Fig. 1.1 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image courtesy of
Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)
Fig. 1.2 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image courtesy of
Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)
believers in a voodoo-like ritual; a black man with a gun in hand chased

someone else across the screen; and a white policeman with a German
shepherd on a leash charged another group of young black men. Those on
top did not register at all what was unraveling right before their eyes.
8 D. D. KIM
As the title of this video installation indicated, silence was determined

to be the root of societal problems in Africa, a root nourished by colonial
rule and Methodist evangelism. According to the protagonist, silence was
an abiding feature of modern African subjectivity because “whitewashing”
technologies originally in the service of colonial power exerted their spell-
binding power over those now living under the aegis of capitalist “devel-
opment.” Even with decolonization, Africans had not escaped police
brutality, religious indoctrination, economic exploitation, and gun vio-
lence because the black oligarchy in power continued to use these tools in
order to oppress them. As Neil Lazarus observed in reference not just to
sub-Saharan Africa, but to the non-Western postcolonial world at large,
this situation was illustrative of “leaders and ruling elites” who “came to
identify their own maintenance in power as being of greater importance
than the broader ‘social’ goods of democratization, opportunity and
equality, and they increasingly used the repressive apparatuses and tech-
nologies of the state (often inherited from the colonial order) to enforce
order and to silence or eliminate opposition” (Lazarus 2006, p. 12).
Consequently, speaking freely in the public sphere or participating equally
in society remained unattainable for the demos. Although the political
ruler or the religious guardian was one of them, so to speak, little had
changed in the larger deep-rooted belief—the product of long-standing
forced assimilation to white colonial rule—that both the authority and the
capacity to rule over others belonged to only one man at the head of a
self-appointed, selectively Westernized elite. As Octave Mannoni had put
it in Prospero and Caliban, this sort of “personality” as “the sum total of
beliefs, habits, and propensities” mimicked the colonizer’s psychology
instead of challenging inherited assumptions about the superiority of
European civilization or about African inferiority (Mannoni 1990, p. 25).
Of course, the depiction of an unchangingly repressive postcolonial
Africa is not rare in Western public discourse (Naipaul 2010). Both neo-
liberal and neoconservative thinkers revert to dystopian descriptors to
condemn non-Western liberation movements for having gone astray from
their original mobilizing desires for freedom, rule of law, democracy, and
sovereignty. Upholding Manichean oppositions that are constitutive of
imperialisms past and present, their steady stream of analyses resurrects
sweeping liberal principles—concepts of a strictly Western progressive and
positivist order—to explain why Africans have failed to seize their moment
of political awakening notwithstanding the departure of European colo-
nizers from their land.11 It brings to mind Kant’s iconic formulation of
Enlightenment by asserting that their fault lies in being unmündig—hav-

ing no voice, being unemancipated—out of fear or due to laziness to come
to political consciousness.12 Needless to say, postcolonial inquiries into
these conditions have revealed how misguided such a line of argument is
concerning those haunted by the specters of imperialism. Since the 1970s,
the privatization of social services, the displacement of rural populations
to urban shanty towns, the gentrification of metropolitan neighborhoods,
the extraction of natural resources without sustainable practices or robust
laws, and the passing of anti-regulatory policies have all contributed to
expanding uneven political structures and exploitative economic practices
in the former colonies. After 9/11 and the Great Recession, and with
Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States as a symptom of white
nationalist protectionism on the rise at a global scale, these developments
are emblematic of post-Cold War neoconservative American and European
foreign policies in utter disarray. Not surprisingly, Kudzanai Chiurai’s
video installation refuted their validity by showing that Africans could not
be blamed alone for their apolitical, non-democratic silence; nor did it
convey Africa as a conflict-ridden place where there was no more hope for
a different future. The key lay in a radical reconceptualization of postcolo-
nial patrimony critical of colonial patriarchy. Since women’s experiences
had repeatedly been excised from political life in this part of the world,
Chiurai placed them at the center of his artwork, leaving all other condi-
tions the same. So how exactly did he do it? What did his installation do
to take up again the problem of gender inequality in the postcolony?
Few contemporary African artists and activists orient themselves
expressly around scholarly debates in postcolonial studies, but in this case
scholarship, artistic creation, and activism genuinely go hand in hand. In
fact, the decisive factor here is action in Arendt’s sense of intergenerational
renewal. Chiurai, the artist, was born in 1981 roughly a year after
Zimbabwe’s independence. He belongs to the first generation of
Zimbabwean citizens who have no first-person experience with colonial
rule or anticolonial resistance. His familiarity with corruption, exile, cen-
sorship, disenfranchisement, and poverty is linked to a broader, transna-
tional order of black differential citizenship and resonates across time and
space with Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic phrase in the 1963 “Letter
from Birmingham Jail” that victims of racial discrimination “are caught in
an inescapable mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (King Jr.
2020). Therefore, an exacting assessment of Chiurai’s artwork requires
that we consider how this generational perspective figures as a new
10 D. D. KIM
variable in ongoing postcolonial action. To put it differently, We Live in

Silence is a reminder of Wole Soyinka’s observation during the late 1990s
that “it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must
continue to rest,” since there is “never” a way of weighing “evenly” all the
different responses to colonial violence and its aftermath (Soyinka 1999,
p. viii). Every postcolonial generation needs to confront the task of deal-
ing with the colonial present without easy recourse to a predetermined
practice of forgiveness, indemnity, reparation, or remembrance. We Live in
Silence is a bold and creative example of such action.
I would like to point out that this installation highlighted cultural, reli-
gious, political, and economic entanglements between “Africa” and
“Europe.” Signs of religious syncretism, linguistic translation, political
continuity, and cultural adoption were seen everywhere in the video. It
also made a convincing case for linking the violence under white colonial
rule to the chaos in a “whitewashed” postcolony. Still, none of these fea-
tures was really what made Chiurai’s work so innovative. Its most striking
aspect was imagining an African nation, however morally conflicted or
politically injurious it was, where women—not men—played decisive roles
in the country’s complicated history. By fabricating a class of wealthy,
emancipated, and powerful women on top of society, it showed how they
profited—like so many politicians in post-independence Africa—from
postcolonial inequities. This representation was not simply a rehearsal of a
major chord in postcolonial studies. By employing a Xhosa woman whose
violent rise to power reminded viewers uncannily of an authoritarian leader
such as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, We Live in Silence played familiar
notes in an empowering minor key. It reactivated a utopian sensibility of
what postcolonial patrimony could mean if women held leading positions
in society.13 It dared to ask questions that were considered impossible,
unrealistic, or irresponsible based on the norms of past national liberation-
ist ideologies or according to contemporary globalists and imperialists.
Would a postcolonial nation like Zimbabwe have followed the same his-
torical trajectory—from colonial oppression to independence and back to
neocolonialism—if a woman had been in power? How did Chiurai’s alle-
gory criticize contemporary life in Africa as a continuous ordeal in silence
and as an extension of patriarchal slavery? And what was the enduring
linkage it presented between violent sexual fantasies and colonial tropes?
What could visitors learn from engaging in this speculative exercise? Last
but not least, how did the installation contest what visitors commonly
encountered in museums of anthropology, art, and ethnology across
Western Europe and North America? To what extent did it overcome the
flawed process of curatorial censorship all too often carried out in the
name of postcolonial reconciliation or liberal democratic civility?
I do not want to dwell much longer on this case study, but in order to
drive home the overarching framework of the volume, it seems instructive
to compare Chiurai’s action with a fitting example from the preceding
generation. Such a comparison underscores how a younger generation
reframes what has been examined before in conceptual, methodological,
and activist terms. It also demonstrates why the contemporary world in its
cultural, environmental, economic, or political specificity is impossible to
understand without a deep postcolonial reference. These issues will be
examined closely in the following chapters.
First, the comparison. In the essay titled “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls
of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’” and published in 1992, Anne McClintock
famously took issue with the term “post-colonial” and its cognates, shortly
after the field had established itself in the US academy. Her critique
focused on three conceptual coordinates—time, space, and gender—and
their inextricable connections in postcolonial studies, but she began by
observing that “the term ‘post-colonialism’” was profoundly Eurocentric
because it consigned in a sequential manner “the cultures of peoples
beyond colonialism to prepositional time,” namely the post in postcolo-
nialism (McClintock 1992, pp. 85, 86). The distinct temporality of a non-
European community was defined again in relation to, and in succession
of, European colonial history, although there was so much knowledge,
history, and experience preceding and following the colonial period. The
term “post-colonialism” set up another false “binary opposition”
(McClintock 1992, p. 85). In other words, to divide “the colonial” and
“the post-colonial” in this grammatological way was to blur the necessary
differentiation between colonizer and colonized, and between those who
benefited from colonial rule and those who were its lasting victims. These
two conceptual simplifications, McClintock argued, led to the wrong
impression that the “post-colonial” somehow captured the “multiplicity”
of historical conditions under which different countries around the globe
were struggling to deal with their colonial past, but in actuality their
responses varied widely from one polity to another: from ambivalence,
denial, and silence to naiveté, resistance, and shame (McClintock 1992,
p. 86). Such divergent attitudes could not be reduced to a single tempo-
ral prefix.
12 D. D. KIM
McClintock went on to say that the same criticism held true for the
term “de-colonization” and she singled out Zimbabwe among several for-
merly colonized countries (McClintock 1992, p. 88). She wrote:
In Zimbabwe, after a seven-year civil war of such ferocity that at the height
of the war 500 people were killed every month and 40 per cent of the coun-
try’s budget was spent on the military, the Lancaster House Agreement
choreographed by Britain in 1979 ensured that one third of Zimbabwe’s
arable land (12 million hectares) was to remain in white hands, a minute
fraction of the population. In other words, while Zimbabwe gained formal
political independence in 1980 (holding the chair of the 103-nation Non-
Aligned Movement from 1986–1989), it has, economically, undergone only
partial decolonization. (McClintock 1992, pp. 88–89)
Here, McClintock condensed into one single paragraph a great deal of

historical information about armed struggles in Rhodesia during the
1960s, followed in 1980 by the democratic election of an independent
government under Mugabe’s political leadership and the subsequent
founding of the Republic of Zimbabwe. And when referring to the
Lancaster House conference, she alluded to the fact that, in order to gain
political independence, the newly founded state had agreed to a drastically
uneven distribution of land between the white minority and the black
majority.14 Thus, Zimbabwe was a postcolonial country where the legacy of
Rhodesia’s racist administrative structure was well alive. This explained
again why McClintock also omitted the hyphen in the word “decoloniza-
tion.” In addition to blurring any strict temporal division between colo-
nialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism, she took issue with the
possibility of clearly differentiating perpetrators from victims within this
vexing context, as newly elected political leaders were complicit in preserv-
ing colonial structures and practices in postcolonialism.
Last but not least, McClintock registered how past colonial violence
had transmogrified into a new “global militarization of masculinity”
(McClintock 1992, p. 92). On the international stage, she identified her
own government—the United States—as a major post-Cold War culprit in
this “military gangsterism” (McClintock 1992, p. 94). At the same time,
she accused “the national bourgeoisies and kleptocracies” in formerly col-
onized nations of denying women hope and justice (McClintock 1992,
p. 92). These elites, she wrote, invoked “‘post-colonial’ ‘progress’” and
“industrial ‘modernization’” to conceal the violence of their own power
partly grounded in the preservation of gender inequality (McClintock

1992, p. 92). She concluded that this was the reason why she remained
skeptical of hopeful proclamations, whether they adopted the rhetoric of
anti-imperial resistance against economic globalization or the triumphalist
language of post-1989 neoconservative liberalism.
Nearly three decades separate McClintock’s essay from Chiurai’s instal-
lation, but her insights into gender inequality and multitemporality remain
as timely as ever. Nonetheless, the inversion of gender hierarchy in We Live
in Silence condemns the continuing history of sexual violence in Zimbabwe
from a resolutely contemporary perspective. Chiurai’s action calls atten-
tion to the vexing conjunction between patriarchy and patrimony by
denouncing—without being cruel toward the elders who have themselves
suffered horrendously from colonial oppression and religious indoctrina-
tion and, thereafter, in anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation-
building—the ongoing violence against women’s body and spirit. While
acknowledging non-economistic things, which Pierre Bourdieu associates
with “intergenerational relations” such as “debt,” “recognition,” “a feel-
ing of obligation,” “gratitude,” “filial devotion,” and “love,” Chiurai’s
audacious negotiation construes a simultaneously critical and hopeful
space for speculating on an equitable future (Bourdieu 1998, p. 190).
There is a lot more to be said about the other chapters in We Live in
Silence where viewers find subtle references to Macaulay’s infamous
“Minute Upon Indian Education” (1835), the French-language film Soleil
Ô (Oh, Sun 1967) produced by Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo, and
the mourning of a naked, lifeless matriarch against the backdrop of
Warazulwa ngenxa yami, a South African Wesleyan Methodist hymn in
isiXhosa. They remind viewers of Chiurai’s main goal, which is reframing
what counts as tradition from the latest feminist perspective. To put it
more bluntly, the recognition that colonial violence is not eradicated from
a postcolony is hardly new; it is a basic lesson that spans generations.
Accordingly, Achille Mbembe observes that every postcolony’s “age” is “a
combination of several temporalities”: precolonial, colonial, and postcolo-
nial (Mbembe 2001, p. 15). It is against this multitemporal backdrop that
Chiurai’s installation advances the debate on the postcolonial by inventing
the story of a Western-educated Xhosa woman whose violent and exploit-
ative rise to power deviates from history and her fictitious story disrupts
the dominant, progressive, male-centric narrative regarding the previous
generation’s sacrifice for national independence. On the basis of this criti-
cal gendered intervention, viewers feel challenged to raise questions about
14 D. D. KIM
historical guilt, social inequality, and political responsibility, especially with

a view to women as victims of white colonial rule and black postcolonial
patriarchy, and—not to forget—as bearers of this oppressive patrimony.
Such a potentially explosive critique emerges from the audacious position
that calling out older generations for failing to live up to their promise is
necessary for proposing a different African utopia where action lies in the
hands of women now.
At a technical level, the installation demonstrates action by reimagining
the history of Africa’s citizenry within the context of an anthropological
museum. By intermixing classificatory genres such as film, performance,
music, and photography, it transgresses the age-old “encyclopedic,” “cos-
mopolitan” rule that a chronological display of possibly looted objects,
along with black-and-white photographs, suffices as an authentic, impar-
tial, and “reasoned” form of museum curation in the twenty-first century
(Cuno 2011, pp. 102, 104). It exposes past imperial practices by which
cultural artifacts, visual documents, or even human remains have arrived in
Western institutions. It clarifies for viewers why a reconciliatory, pluralist
approach to the curatorial presentation or the archival preservation of
non-Western art is neither critical nor sufficient in the contemporary post-
colonial world. We Live in Silence sets the modern history of Africa back in
motion by carrying the postcolonial legacy forward on the basis of three
etymologically related terms: gender, generation, and genre.
Now what about its installation within the walls of an American univer-
sity? The issue of legacy has lately boiled over in all parts of the globe, not
least in the United States where corrupt college admission decisions,
Confederate memorials, monuments and statues, as well as political move-
ments such as #BlackLivesMatter, #NoDAPL, #MeToo, and Occupy Wall
Street have heightened people’s sensibility of what counts as public good,
what qualifies for shared inheritance, and why there persists an unmet
need for reparative justice. My institution has not been immune to these
soul-searching conversations, since it sits as a public land-grant institution
on a land that originally belongs to the Indigenous Gabrielino-Tongva
peoples. Its institutional history is inextricably linked to the pain of settler
colonialism and Christian proselytism among Native Americans.15 In rec-
ognition of this historical trauma, the Fowler Museum moved in the right
direction by curating Chiurai’s installation as a vehicle of decolonial trans-
formation in North American higher education.16 No longer committed
to the idea that museums were sites of a distinctly art historical or anthro-
pological exhibition, it emphasized the need to involve all of the visitors’
senses and reconceptualize non-Western works of art as things that were

both alive and communicating, not inert and disjoined from their places of
origin. According to Jane Chin Davidson, this significant shift in the
museum’s mission entailed a growing public duty wherein the university
museum diverged “from the Western convention” in separating art and
art history from archeology and anthropology (Davidson 2018, p. 3). It
focused on “global art” as opposed to “world art,” knowing full well that
many “ethnographical artifacts” in Western archives and museums had
been acquired under varying legal, illegal, and extralegal conditions
(Davidson 2018, p. 3). The museum also learned to exercise “an impor-
tant self-reflexive scholarly agency through constant evaluation of the pro-
cesses for representing cultures and for modes of cultural analysis” instead
of taking upon itself the whitewashing role of a universal institution
(Davidson 2018, p. 3). It fostered cross-disciplinary conversations about
locally specific classifications and definitions while pointing to false univer-
salist assumptions about identity, history, temporality, art, space, and heri-
tage. In resonance with McClintock’s concern some three decades before,
the Fowler Museum refused to represent Africa and its many notions of
inheritance as things stuck in the past. By exhibiting We Live in Silence, it
took responsibility within a larger university community in the United
States for decolonizing minds.17
Regenerating the Future of Postcolonial Studies

This case study exemplifies what is at stake in the following pages. It shows
that the latest transformative activities in postcolonial studies address con-
ceptual issues, interdisciplinary methodologies, and activist concerns—
things that have long preoccupied scholars, teachers, and practitioners in
the field. Yet, these modalities are being woven together on the current
intergenerational playing field in response to contemporary struggles
against dispossession, discrimination, displacement, and degradation.
Building upon existing concepts, methodological breakthroughs, and
imaginative coalitions, the subsequent chapters address abiding questions
about archive, memory, cultural inheritance, historical legacy, political
responsibility, and reparative action. Going beyond the perennial debates
on the tension between theory and praxis or on the disparity between
activism and scholarship, they examine literary texts, visual artworks, lan-
guage and immigration policies, public monuments, museum exhibitions,
moral dilemmas, and political movements to revitalize our postcolonial
16 D. D. KIM
action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimenta-

tion, and scholarly activism. More specifically, they push the limits of post-
colonial critique in three coordinated ways: first, through a meticulous
reconceptualization of long-standing key terminologies in the intersection
of past, present, and future; second, in cross-disciplinary, collaborative
methodologies, which serve to uncover colonial remains in contemporary
politics and society from layers of occluding debris; and third, in a combi-
nation of community-based, bottom-up engagement with political activ-
ism and critical scholarship. Rather than offer brand-new paradigms, these
nuanced reorientations model without trying to be exhaustive how post-
colonial studies are being pursued nowadays by several generations in con-
versation with one another, and how their individual and collective actions
are confronting effectively economic dispossession, political disenfran-
chisement, racism, sexism, nationalism, ecological exploitation, and his-
torical aphasia in global modernity.
The following list of queries is indicative of action in this collaborative,
intergenerational sense. What is the location of utopian thought in post-
colonial criticism? What potential does a postcolonially inflected utopia-
nism hold today? How does it connect memories of historical trauma or
anticolonial resistance to transformative visions of the future (Chap. 2)?
How does one go about assessing Algeria’s contemporary efforts in decol-
onizing public spaces with statues whose provenance reveals as much
about French colonial rule as it does about post-independence national-
ism? Which cultural and political concepts are at stake here (Chap. 3)? Or
why is a younger generation of intellectuals and writers challenging fran-
cophonie now? To what extent is this concept in need of revaluation given
its appropriation by the ruling class in France? What is required to ensure
that francophonie does not mark a superficial and reconciliatory future
mediated by the French language and dominated by the French nation
(Chap. 4)? And how do transnational writers from the Caribbean and
Mascarene islands help us imagine relationships of a minor-to-minor,
transoceanic solidarity as opposed to a continentally or territorially
grounded alliance (Chap. 5)? What insights are shareable between postco-
lonial studies and energy humanities? What conceptual benefits and meth-
odological innovations come from their emerging alliance (Chap. 6)?
What conventions and taboos rule contemporary decolonial protests and
why are visual representations so central to these controversies (Chap. 7)?
Or what sort of outreach in solidarity is possible between scholars and
activists in the aftermath of a colonial genocide? How do communal
demands for reparation, scholarly investigations, and private friendships

work side by side in such a bonding (Chap. 8)? And what hopeful inter-
ventions have recently occurred in European museums as allies of action-
based postcolonial research? How have activists put pressure on these
monumental institutions and their long-standing archival practices?18 To
what extent are such activisms supportive of larger struggles against
nationalism, racism, and xenophobia in Western Europe (Chap. 9)? Finally,
what is there to learn again from Frantz Fanon, as we confront anti-black
racism in the twenty-first century? How does the Black Lives Matter
movement carry his pioneering legacy forward without reaffirming his
patronizing, homophobic worldview (Chap. 10)? These questions are
possibly dizzying in their eclectic coverage of concepts, geographies, lan-
guages, histories, memories, and themes, but what the answers bring to
light as a whole is a critical engagement with postcolonial patrimony as a
matter of intergenerational reframing.
Reframing Postcolonial Studies is a book that recognizes the signifi-
cance of conceptual vigilance, methodological innovation, and action-
based research for figuring out what inventories of postcolonial thought
and practice need to be retooled for newcomers, as they search for their
own vectors of change in contemporary society. It explains how and why
past imperial categories, practices, systems, and norms survive as unfin-
ished formations in the twenty-first century and it reactivates the sort of
critical consciousness that takes up essential parts of its intellectual and
political heritage in a time-dependent intersection of present and future.
Let me tease out this process in reference to Edward Said. After the pub-
lication of Orientalism (1978), Said deliberated on the mechanism of
scholarly practice by highlighting “filiation” and “affiliation” as the two
types of relationship to one’s subject within the humanities. As he pointed
out in his introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983),
negotiating between these modes of relation was not to take issue “with
the activity of conserving the past, or with reading great literature, or with
doing serious and perhaps even utterly conservative scholarship as such”
(Said 1983, p. 22). The problem lay elsewhere, namely with “the almost
unconsciously held ideological assumption” in the humanities that “the
Eurocentric model” should continue to dictate what counted as “a natural
and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar” (Said 1983, p. 22).
Restricting itself to an “orthodox canon of literary monuments,” this
norm ruled out “everything that [was] nonhumanistic and nonliterary and
non-European” and its effect was to maintain an intellectual culture of
18 D. D. KIM
“continuity” in resemblance of “biological procreation” (Said 1983,

p. 22). According to Said, this sort of critic faithfully inherited what was
being passed down from one generation to another and reaffirmed human-
istic scholarship within a narrow, provincial, national, and Eurocentric
frame of reference. By contrast, a secular critic—a critic whose scholarly
attention was simultaneously focused on the real world—examined how
that other, naturalized, evolutionary model was only possible because
things were hidden through prejudicial disposal or intellectual theft. It
looked beautiful, coherent, and tranquil on the outside, but the purpose
of “secular criticism” was to expose precisely what had forcibly been made
invisible in a filiative manner. It dispelled the fantasy of pure humanistic
inquiries untainted by worldly concerns by investigating unequal colonial
encounters as well as hidden postcolonial intermixtures. This alternative
mode of criticism was empowering in a subversive sense. Thriving on
“affiliation,” it constituted “a sovereign methodology of system” in its
own right (Said 1983, p. 23).
As an American citizen of Palestinian origin whose grounding in com-
parative literature harkened back to Erich Auerbach’s cosmopolitan-exilic
tradition, Said understood that filiative relationships were inevitable in
academia, just as they were in every other community.19 However, he
argued that it was important to reform the humanities through affiliative
relations. I would like to think with Said that what travels up and down
the intergenerational chain and takes up the question of postcolonial pat-
rimony in pursuit of a more equitable future originates in such affiliative
relationships, even as filiative connections sometimes weigh heavily on our
shoulders. This dynamic process operates according to “a secular rhythm
at work in history” (Mannheim 1952, p. 286). As Karl Mannheim spells
out in a widely known essay on generation, it introduces a new pattern of
action to our “inventory” of thoughts and practices what is worth remem-
bering and what “is no longer useful” in the present moment (Mannheim
1952, p. 294).
This conceptual model lays a strong intellectual and political founda-
tion for this multiauthored anthology. It reframes the dominant language
of newness in postcolonial studies by thinking critically about the continu-
ously changing rhythm of generation and its impact on inheritance, hope,
and legacy in transmission. I understand that this framework is not with-
out risks. It appears to be out of sync with the larger postcolonial project
whose impulse is strongly retrospective. Since the primary objects of post-
colonial inquiry are colonial violence and its aftermath, critics and activists
alike seek to correct this protracted history by calling out past crimes
against colonial subjects and by exposing present forms of exploitation as
results of a continuing pattern in socioeconomic and political disparities
both within and between countries of the Global North and the Global
South. In such passionate demands for a different present and a better
future, both the past and the present are accorded intense reflection,
whereas the future receives far less speculative attention. The postcolonial
optic is by definition sensitive to recognition, reconciliation, repatriation,
retribution, or reparation and any hasty orientation toward the future risks
inflicting further pain on victims past and present.
Still, there are good reasons for being more deliberate about the future,
as the contemporary political situation makes this task necessary. Jini Kim
Watson and Gary Wilder touch upon this important point in The
Postcolonial Contemporary (2018). After making a persuasive argument in
support of the need to continue evaluating the present in postcolonial
terms, they describe what they see as the latest development—the “new”—
in the field. They write:
A new generation of critics and activists is increasingly interested in issues

that had already seemed to be outmoded when postcolonial studies first
entered the academy: anarchist tactics, socialist imaginaries, anti-imperial
internationalisms, and traditions of mass protest and popular resistance.
Twenty-first-century developments are also raising new concerns about the
urgency and possibilities for translocal solidarity, postnational democracy,
and planetary politics. (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, pp. 8–9)
This new generation, the co-editors suggest, can be differentiated from

the preceding one insofar as it has rediscovered the usefulness of earlier
decolonial movements for addressing contemporary cultural, financial,
ecological, and political challenges. Since no specific example is given, I
surmise that what Kim Watson and Wilder have in mind are political imag-
inaries of the Bandung period or earlier anticolonial solidarities such as the
ones in Egypt, India, China, and Korea during the heady months of
1919.20 The second part of their observation is less cryptic. When we
think of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, climate change, gender discrimina-
tion, data security, international war, migration, public health, and terror-
ism, border-crossing cooperation is essential and such an engagement
requires reframing existing postcolonial concepts and methodologies,
20 D. D. KIM
some of which have been available, as Kim Watson and Wilder point out,
since the 1970s.
I concur with this historical assessment in a broad sense, but it presents
several problems, which are difficult to ignore. All of them boil down to a
fuzzy notion of generation, which perpetuates the old-new or past-present
binary without being any more instructive about the future. Kim Watson
and Wilder spell out in optimistic terms that their focus on “the postcolo-
nial contemporary” both as “a proposition” and as “a question” probes
the nature of “relations between past, present, and future” (Kim Watson
and Wilder 2018, pp. 1–2). They explain that postcolonial violence calls
for a “new” set of critical tools with which scholars and activists are able to
interrogate past “colonial conditions of knowledge production, their
ongoing legacies in postcolonial periods, and their power to produce and
reproduce systems of inequality within and between nations, societies,
continents” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 3). However, they do not
specify how the future figures as an essentially utopian, political, moral, or
ethical category in reconsidering “conventional notions of past and pres-
ent and their relation” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 10). The future
quietly disappears from their view. I also take issue with the claim that
border-crossing, subversive concerns are what define such “new” critics
and activists in postcolonial studies. It implies that the immediately pre-
ceding generation has focused mostly on national and international issues
without paying much attention to anti-capitalist, bottom-up, democratic,
transnational movements at scales below and above the nation. That is not
the case. Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996), Paul Gilroy’s The
Black Atlantic (1993), Sheng Hu’s From Opium War to the May 4th
Movement (1991), and Benita Parry’s essay “Resistance Theory/
Theorizing Resistance; or, Two Cheers for Nativism” (1994) were very
different examples of influential works that pursued during the 1990s
scholarly and community-based approaches to resistance and solidarity.
Graham Huggan is right to point out in this regard that Marxist revolu-
tionary vocabularies such as “‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘decolonization’”
have “never disappeared from the postcolonial lexicon in the first place,”
although critics such as Lazarus and Parry “want to reinstate” them
(Huggan 2013, p. 4). A more nuanced and less polemical portrayal of the
field shows that the concepts, theories, and strategies of past liberation
movements “are continually renegotiated in a complex revisionist process
that allows the relationship between past and present … to be productively
reassessed” (Huggan 2013, p. 4). Analogously, there are plenty of
scholars, students, and activists today who work very much at local and
national scales. Although there appears to be a clearly discernible trend in
one way or another, such an observation presupposes a particular habitus
within the discipline and is itself a symptom of institutional filiation.
Huggan’s elucidation leads me to my next comparison. With The
Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013), Huggan has showcased
how the negotiation between revolution and revisionism informs many
contributions to contemporary postcolonial studies. Yet, this anthology,
too, pays little attention to the future. In fact, Huggan gives a few reasons
for this predisposition. He writes that the future is only subject to “predic-
tions and assessments,” which, in turn, attest to “the continuing signifi-
cance of the past” (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Most of his conceptual and
ideological emphases in the introductory chapter link the past and the
present, but the future is registered only as a “speculative or hypothetical”
template, which is ultimately impossible to decipher in scholarly verifiable
terms (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Huggan also contends that emancipatory
mobilizations are hopeful only to a limited extent. As revolutions have
repeatedly shown in modern history, they are prone to violence and war
and bring as much suffering as progress. These are certainly legitimate
concerns, but I argue that, if we are to close the loop between criticism
and activism as necessarily interlinked parts of the postcolonial, there will
need to be a bolder, sustained discussion about our continuously changing
relationship with postcolonial patrimony and our conviction to shape the
future through “anticipatory,” “world-improving” action (Bloch 1995,
pp. 11, 92). Action, hope, and resilience are exhausting frames of mind in
an era of illiberal austerity democracy, but let us be inspired, as Said sug-
gests, by the creative role we play as critics, writers, artists, and activists in
calling out all related forms of oppression and in re-envisioning a very
different postcolonial world.
I admit that, as co-editors of The Postcolonial World (2017), Jyotsna
Singh and I likewise fail to address this blind spot. This expansive collec-
tion is similar to The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies in the sense
that the main focus rests on a past-present dialectic and its potential for
“imagining a range of affective communities that re-think hierarchies of
difference,” and for “re-figuring modes of knowledge production in a
range of explorations—in the material, textual, visual, and digital worlds”
(Singh 2017, p. 26). Both volumes make clear that reconfiguring cur-
rently available modes of interpretation entails remembrance, retrospec-
tion, and reparation, but feelings and thoughts regarding the future hover
22 D. D. KIM
only vaguely in our shared postcolonial ethic. My own essay in The

Postcolonial World employs digital humanities methodologies to track how
“postcolonial scholars loosely share a common toolbox of theories and
strategies,” even as “their work looks different from one cultural, national,
geopolitical, or institutional context to another,” and I close by stating
that “the future of postcolonialism” is guaranteed by this “planetary and
public spirit,” which binds us in both filiative and affiliative terms to vari-
ous intellectual disciplines and non-academic communities (Kim 2017,
pp. 530, 542). However, I do not probe this optimism any further in
intergenerational terms.
Perhaps the most striking parallel I see between the book you are read-
ing and another is found in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History
(2019). This massive volume deserves a separate, in-depth discussion
given the wealth of conceptual issues, methodological innovations, and
activist strategies that populate its pages. Let it suffice here to examine,
without repeating her numerous case studies from the Belgian Congo,
Israel, Palestine, Algeria, Egypt, Germany, France, and the United States,
the extent to which her provocative work on archives, photographs, and
museum objects contributes to the same collective project. Azoulay’s
focus on the shutter as “a synecdoche for the operation of the imperial
enterprise altogether” resonates with our goal to see things in a reactivated
frame or with Kim Watson and Wilder’s use of the visual lexicon—“the
postcolonial optic”—in The Postcolonial Contemporary (Azoulay
2019, p. 2).
Azoulay begins her book with a biting critique of what she calls “the
banner of the ‘new’” (Azoulay 2019, p. 39). For her, “the new defines
imperialism,” since it operates “in a suicidal cycle” to innovate itself, and
this desire for continuous expansion, novelty, or progress is self-destructive
and leaves nothing but “debris” in collateral or direct damage (Azoulay
2019, pp. 17–18). Azoulay acknowledges, though, that this observation is
neither new nor of utmost importance; for what is truly needed is a way to
interrupt this dominant, incessant drumbeat: “The question is how to
rupture, stop, and retroactively reverse the category of the ‘new’ that
seems to have survived intact, coeval with the real, and how to undo its
facticity in and through research and scholarship” (Azoulay 2019, p. 23).
Such a reversal, Azoulay writes, comes from generating a potential histori-
cal narrative whereby political concepts and cultural institutions are
exposed as “imperial devices” instead of being mistaken for “neutral”
modes of containment or communication (Azoulay 2019, p. 39). The
targets of her critique include “‘archive,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and

‘human rights,’” as well as museums and universities (Azoulay 2019, p. 39).
Azoulay’s inquiry into “imperial visions of belonging and unbelong-
ing” turns out to be a very personal undertaking (Azoulay 2019, p. xiii).
It explains the value of “being with others, both living and dead, across
time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peo-
ples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics” (Azoulay
2019, p. 43). As she explains, her upbringing as a Palestinian Jew, first, in
the state of Israel and, then, in France has compelled her to “unlearn”
what she has been told about herself and the world in its divisibility
(Azoulay 2019, p. 3). Not only does her personal familial story intersect
with the displacement of Arab communities from Palestine beginning with
the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, but it also invokes
a much longer colonial history going as far back as the expulsion of Jews
from Spain in 1492 and, later, the French colonial occupation of Algeria
during the Vichy regime. Given this multilayered, conflicting inheritance,
Azoulay contends that “unlearning” has been central for her to mount a
forceful opposition to imperialism: “Unlearning imperialism involves dif-
ferent types of ‘de-,’ such as decompressing and decoding; ‘re-,’ such as
reversing and rewinding; and ‘un-,’ such as unlearning and undoing”
(Azoulay 2019, p. 10). As these prefixes indicate, her gaze is fixed firmly
on the imperial past whose stubborn power over the present calls for sev-
eral different modes of resistance. She refuses to identify herself, as she
puts it, “as an Israeli, or to be recognized as an Israeli,” since this national
identity is associated with the theft of “lands and the property of others”
(Azoulay 2019, p. xiii). It stands for what she has “inherited” as an impli-
cated subject of past colonial violence and present imperial injustice
(Azoulay 2019, p. xv). Last but not least, it encompasses her employment
at a “neoliberal American university” whose intellectual property and
material wealth are inseparable from the history of transatlantic slavery
and the systemic dispossession of ethnic minorities over generations
(Azoulay 2019, p. xv).
I am not in a position to criticize how Azoulay feels about her own
identity vis-à-vis Roger Azoulay, her father, whom she criticizes for not
embracing boldly or more openly their commonly shared Maghribi back-
ground.21 I am in awe of her far-reaching study and encourage readers to
go back and forth between her book and this volume. However, what
strikes me as an unsatisfactorily addressed object of inquiry in her work is
again the future. Like Huggan, Azoulay is skeptical of any vision
24 D. D. KIM
pertaining to this horizon, although her reasons are different from his. She
thinks that any future-oriented vocabulary is already predetermined by
“an imperial enterprise,” which equates future with “progress” (Azoulay
2019, p. 55). Since “rehearsal, reversal, rewinding, repairing, renewing,
reacquiring, redistributing, readjusting, reallocating” are long overdue
processes, she conceptualizes the notion of “potential history” in strictly
retrospective, reparative terms (Azoulay 2019, p. 56). This explains why,
when she appeals to a future more in line with her vision of the world, she
resorts to the language of “imagination.”
Imagine a strike not as an attempt to improve one’s salary alone but rather
as a strike against the very raison d’être of these institutions … Imagine
experts in the world of art admitting that the entire project of artistic salva-
tion to which they pledged allegiance is insane and that it could not have
existed without exercising various forms of violence, attributing spectacular
prices to pieces that should not have been acquired in the first place.
(Azoulay 2019, pp. 159–160)
Azoulay’s distrust regarding the future makes sense alongside the duress
of imperialism she seems to sense everywhere, but neither the act of imagi-
nation in an individual protest nor the collective activism of artists, cura-
tors, and scholars within the context of a museum or in another public
sphere is as hypothetical or as radical as she portrays it to be. As my exami-
nation of Chiurai’s installation has shown, and this becomes clear time and
again in the following pages, imagining this sort of future is already here
and now. Azoulay’s intervention in the ongoing process of imperialism
polarizes the past in contradistinction from the future and this version of
potential history seems to be grounded less in historical accuracy than in
rhetorical persuasion.
Chapter Summaries
In Chapter Two, which opens the first section of the book on concepts,
Bill Ashcroft helps us reframe postcolonial studies at a conceptual level,
although the other vectors of change—methodology and activism—are
never lost from sight. He is the co-author of volumes that have established
the conceptual foundation of postcolonial studies, and here he discusses
how our interpretation of postcolonial narratives changes, once it is linked
to Ernst Bloch’s critical notion of utopia (Ashcroft 2017; Ashcroft et al.
1989; Ashcroft et al. 1998; Ashcroft et al. 2013). His essay is titled
“Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures” and it illus-
trates the prominence of future thinking in postcolonial creative produc-
tion, as well as the usefulness of utopian theory for postcolonial criticism
today. According to Ashcroft, a persistent failing in postcolonial criticism
has been the tendency to reduce resistance to a simple dynamic of opposi-
tion. By demonstrating the importance of future in postcolonial analysis,
he explains how a writer’s engagement with imperial power is potentially
transformative. While grounding himself in the long-standing aesthetic
and theoretical discourse on utopianism whose beginning is traceable to
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Ashcroft refers to Bloch’s notion of Vor-
Schein—or “anticipatory illumination”—as a means to imagine Heimat as
opposed to nation as a concrete place of sociopolitical relations. Thus,
postcolonial utopianism looks beyond the nation and its inheritance of
colonial structures. Its localization emphasizes the link between cultural
memory and varying visions of the future. It recalibrates the linearity of
time with a messier trajectory in which the cultural past is imprinted onto
an intimate and politically reactivated future. As Ashcroft claims, these
relationships are crucial for postcolonial studies because they consider the
incomplete process of decolonization even after national independence.
Although his case studies are principally literary and reflect his preference
for literature in postcolonial theory, the range of postcolonial writers he
examines across different continents and generations points to the undi-
minished role that future plays in every form of resistance to colonial rule
and post-independence injustice.
In Chapter Three, “On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed
Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture,” Susan
Slyomovics follows suit with a fascinating essay on the “statuomania” in
French Algeria. This term, she observes, originates in reference to the vast
number of statues, war memorials, and monuments in this colony begin-
ning in 1830. What she uncovers is an eye-opening historical, geopolitical,
and affective provenance between Algeria and France based on their post-
colonial afterlives. The historical backdrop against which she tracks the
history of a particular statue is “the ‘repatriation’ of cultural and historical
treasures [stolen] from French Algeria.” According to Slyomovics, this
conceptualization is misleading because it quietly condones the illegal
removal of looted objects from their places of origin. At the center of her
investigation is the 1972 statue commemorating the Algerian war hero
and martyr Youcef Zighoud (1921–1956). Sculpted by artist Ahmed
26 D. D. KIM
Benyahia for Algeria’s third largest city of Constantine, the statue’s cre-
ation, emplacement, disappearance, and reappearance recount multiple
efforts in post-independent Algeria to decolonize public space. Here,
research into postcolonial provenance goes beyond the physical location
of art and the question of legal ownership. It encompasses artist and object
biographies, artwork creativity, entangled or shared senses of heritage, as
well as a global circulation of aesthetic symbols in the making of monu-
ments to glorify the French and Algerian nation-states. Slyomovics pur-
sues this interdisciplinary work on the basis of a stunning video interview
of Benyahia available on YouTube and documenting Algeria’s “Generation
independence, Jil al-istiqlal.” Her study is exemplary of “a protean
archive,” which is neither clearly “bounded” nor successfully “policed,”
but consists of displacements, gaps, projections, and cross-references,
which are crucial for postcolonial research in the twenty-first century
(Stoler 2018, p. 49).
In Chapter Four, titled “Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and
Defrancophonizing Francophonie,” Dominic Thomas examines the close
association between language and identity in postcolonial France where
the past does not prove to be past after all. He begins with the astute
observation that President Emmanuel Macron belongs to the first genera-
tion of French citizens born after the end of French colonialism, and that
this historical marker has been used as an all too facile indicator for France’s
ability to move on and leave behind its colonial past. As Thomas shows,
though, there is more to the story. Language policy served historically to
bolster the nation’s overseas colonial ambitions and, in the postcolonial
era, the same action, guideline, and protocol have curiously re-emerged
under the aegis of francophonie. Now, it marks Macron’s renewed pro-
gram for “a happy future” in the relationship between France and its for-
mer colonies. In response, critics have highlighted how diplomatic soft
power initiatives continue to prioritize neocolonial ties. Critical of this
narrow conceptualization of francophonie, they are calling for a greater
bibliodiversity in reference to such a cultural, linguistic, and political con-
cept. They are collectively channeling efforts in reframing the symbiotic
linkage between French as language and France as nation. They are advo-
cating for the denationalization, defrancophonization, and decolonizing
of francophonie. This latest critical and creative activism underscores the
rigid association between national language and cultural identity in post-
colonial France. Last but not least, Thomas sheds light on a dangerous
cooptation by the Far Right of French foreign policy in public discourse.
The second section of this book is dedicated to methodological chal-

lenges, although again it makes insightful conceptual and politically acti-
vating observations. In Chapter Five, “Kinships of the Sea: Comparative
History, Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy,” Bruno Jean-
François explores Creole literatures, as well as expressive cultures from the
Mascarene Islands and the Caribbean region, to illustrate how they have
long thought in cross-cultural and intergenerational terms. They fore-
ground narratives of migration and displacement, which put diverse peo-
ples, cultures, and languages into close contact over extended historical
periods. They bring together trajectories and epistemologies that turn the
commonalities of minor-to-minor solidarities into the rhetoric of a new
humanism. In Jean-François’s attentive reading, the creative works of
Nathacha Appanah, Nirveda Alleck, Ananda Devi, and Patrick
Chamoiseau—all of them being transnational artists, writers, scholars, and
activists—generate powerful relational imaginaries and transoceanic con-
nections, which destabilize historical, geographical, and cultural divides, as
well as colonial imaginaries. Their figuration of the clandestine migrant is
generative of a new kind of kinship whereby comparative history, minor
solidarity, and human empathy are woven together in ways that render a
utopian future more graspable.
Chapter Six is a compelling investigation of energy as a new paradigm
for postcolonial studies in the wake of the Iraq War. Titled “Re-charge:
Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities,” it demonstrates Upamanyu
Pablo Mukherjee’s conception of oil not only as the main fuel for capitalist
modernization or global modernity, but also as a deep historical linkage
between energy, climate, and empire. So what precisely do postcolonial
studies and energy humanities have to say to each other? What cultural,
sociopolitical, historical, and economic insights are gained when we place
empire and energy side by side? What “history of a future” appears on the
horizon and how does it present a chance to break from the colonial pres-
ent? (Jameson 2003, p. 76). Given that postcolonial studies constitute a
well-established field and energy humanities an emergent one, we might
expect their relationship to be marked by wars of position or by anxieties
of influence. However, Mukherjee makes a stunning case for cross-
fertilization and cross-hatching. If postcolonial studies have been accused
of eliminating the matter of history from its purview, he explains how
energy humanities have suffered from insufficient attention to the dynam-
ics of empire. In his view, not only can a conversation help correct these
built-in perspectival lacunae of the two fields, but it can also help us
28 D. D. KIM
understand how empire and energy are intricately interconnected. Based

upon a nuanced analysis of terms that belong to conceptions of energy in
the postcolonial world, Mukherjee provides readers with a thrilling read-
ing of two literary texts on nineteenth-century colonial India: Dinabandhu
Mitra’s play Neel-Darpan (1861) and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge-
Builders” (1898). The interdisciplinary results include new possibilities
for rethinking historical periodization, literary and non-literary alike, and
placing the concept of labor or energy back at the center of critical inqui-
ries into modern capitalist colonial empires.
Titled “From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial Dilemmas in
Visual Representation,” Chapter Seven presents another methodologically
innovative study, namely a transnational analysis of the two most contro-
versial decolonial protests in contemporary visual culture. First, Afonso
Dias Ramos turns his attention to the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign at the
University of Cape Town (2015) as an example of the demand to remove
public memorials celebrating imperialism and slavery outside of the
museum. Second, he examines the display of Dana Schutz’s painting Open
Casket (2017) at the Whitney Biennial in New York City where the right
to show historical images exposing the bodily violence of racial terrorism
and white supremacy within the museum is hotly contested. By consider-
ing these divisive debates side by side, Dias Ramos illuminates the reasons
why monuments and pictures—and more generally, aesthetic practices and
visual cultures—have emerged as the most controversial issues of public
history. He sensitizes readers to art and heritage as interlinked issues in
postcolonial meditations on the colonial past and the future.
The next three chapters, which comprise the third section of this vol-
ume, exemplify the extent to which contemporary postcolonial studies
resist confinement in scholarly institutions either safely housed in affluent
universities or in market-driven publishing houses around the globe.
Although they register gaps between postcolonial scholars and those
whose utopian action aims to bring an end to the colonial present, their
investigation shows how scholarship and activism go hand in hand, espe-
cially in the latest controversies pertaining to European museums and
other public reparative actions. What they explore are both individual
projects and collective movements, which have transformed attitudes
toward the colonial past by contesting long-standing categories, familiar
classifications, and outdated concepts. They illustrate solidary relations,
which are committed to making a difference in the afterlives of colonial
victims and the lives of their living descendants.
In Chapter Eight, Reinhart Kössler reflects on German postcolonial

relations with Namibia where researchers directly related to the former
colonial power engage with community partners to pursue postcolonial
justice. Titled “Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German
Memory Politics in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide”, his action-based
research examines moral, ethical, political, and intellectual problems that
arise in such an “outreach solidarity.” He draws upon his personal lifelong
interaction with members of Namibian communities, which seek recogni-
tion, apologies, and reparations from the German government for the
genocide of 1904–1908. As he makes clear, relations of trust and friend-
ship, which seemingly lie outside the purview of scholarship, serve as vital
preconditions for gaining relevant insights into this international negotia-
tion and for bridging the postcolonial gap between researchers and activ-
ists in the aftermath of this historical trauma.
With Chapter Nine, “Postcolonial Activists and European Museums,”
Katrin Sieg guides readers back to European museums where activist
interventions have succeeded in altering museum protocols, structures,
and representations regarding colonial histories. Against the backdrop of
pioneering works during the late 1980s and 1990s that reveal colonialist
practices in European collections, exhibitions, and museums, Sieg offers
the most comprehensive, up-to-date examination of decolonial interven-
tions in several museums of anthropology, ethnology, and history across
Europe. She focuses on evaluating the latest actions taken to make institu-
tional structures more inclusive and to bolster contemporary struggles
against the surge of nationalist, racist, and anti-immigrant movements and
political parties. According to Sieg, museums are not only prime targets
for contesting cherished myths of superior European accomplishments,
but also potential allies in fighting against racial injustice, historical amne-
sia, and political irresponsibility. Activists, as she demonstrates, put pres-
sure on monumental institutions to support minoritized communities
while mobilizing antiracist groups around museums as allies.
In Chapter Ten, “Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter,”
Frieda Ekotto emphasizes the critically future-oriented philosophy that
Négritude intellectuals, particularly Fanon, provide contemporary activists
in their struggle against racism and sexism. At the center of her examina-
tion is the Black Lives Matter movement. She investigates how this mobi-
lization constitutes a collective action, which builds upon one of the most
revered founders—or fathers—of postcolonial patrimony. For her, Fanon’s
seminal text Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is essential for understanding
30 D. D. KIM
the contemporary African American activism. In focusing on Fanon’s call

for an “active consciousness” coupled with an acute attention to the objec-
tification of black men, this chapter explains how we can understand better
the impact that perceptions of Blackness have on American society, as well
as the use of contemporary tools by black activists to combat pervasive
racism. Ekotto sheds light on the difficulty of Fanon’s foundational text in
its paradigmatic effort to develop a language for understanding the human
being in non-colonial, non-racist terms. At the same time, she identifies
how, in demanding black and gay rights, #BlackLivesMatter moves beyond
Fanon’s patrimony. Ekotto indicates how exclusionary, racist practices
remain stubborn legacies of colonial violence, and why established catego-
ries such as identity, rightfulness, and dignity need to be interrogated fur-
ther for the welfare of black and other marginalized communities. Her
study contributes to the ongoing significance of Fanon’s oeuvres for the
latest generation of activists and critics today, as they wrestle with the con-
dition of alienation and social injustice.22
Graham Huggan’s afterword, Chapter Eleven, concludes this book
with incisive reflections on the preceding chapters, and with measured
assessments of the challenges that are associated with connecting critique
to praxis. I feel very fortunate that he has agreed to share his deep knowl-
edge of the field in response to the action captured in this volume, not
least because his essay, which includes an instructive evaluation of action
research, is symbolic of the sort of intergenerational dynamics that I have
hoped to locate at the center of conceptual, methodological, and activist
concerns in postcolonial studies. To reframe postcolonial studies is to
exchange such critical and creative thoughts across generational
perspectives.
Notes
1. Ernst Bloch used this term during the first half of the 1930s when he drew
upon a preceding discussion among art historians and cultural critics about
the relationship between modernism and fascism in architecture to make a
contemporary political point: “Not all people exist in the same Now”
[Nicht alle sind im selben Jetzt da] (Bloch 1962, p. 104). According to
Bloch, people lived in different presents based on different combinations
of age, social class, and geographic location. The reference to Bloch here is
not coincidental because, first, his meditation focuses on a dialectical rela-
tionship between past, present, and future and, second, Bill Ashcroft uses
his notion of utopia in the next chapter to reflect on the futurity of postco-
lonial literatures.
2. According to Benita Parry, postcolonial studies originated as early as the
1970s, but given the transdisciplinary scope of the field today, this time-
frame seems to make sense only in anglocentric terms (Parry 2012, p. 348).
For a more interdisciplinary historicization of the field, see Boehmer and
Tickel (2015).
3. To clarify this thesis, let me mention the most notable names of this gen-
eration. There is the subaltern studies group consisting of Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, and Sumit Sarkar. A far
more dispersed and eclectic group includes, among others, Edward Said,
Bill Ashcroft, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, Mary Louise Pratt, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, and Robert J.C. Young.
4. Graham Huggan offers a detailed and critical account of these two “waves”
of postcolonial criticism, the first one covering “the period between,
roughly, the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s,” the second one following
thereafter (Huggan 2008, pp. 10–12).
5. Edward Said’s intellectual trajectory from Orientalism (1978) to Culture
and Imperialism (1993) is paradigmatic of this disciplinary shift. For
assessments of this change within the boundaries of existing disciplines
other than English and history, see Friedrichsmeyer et al. (1998) for
German studies, Kiberd (1997) for Irish studies, Mignolo (2000) for Latin
American studies, and Lionnet and Shih (2005) for East Asian, transoce-
anic, Caribbean, and South American studies. There is also a huge library
of scholarships that explore questions of comparison and incommensura-
bility. For example, see Melas (2007).
6. For the latest discussion about “the potential exhaustion” of postcolonial-
ism, see Agnani et al. (2007).
7. Ann Laura Stoler uses this term “to capture three principal features of
colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colo-
nial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their
durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements.” She asso-
ciates the word with “durability,” “duration,” and “endurance,” all of
which underscore the importance of revealing “the occluded histories of
empire” in the present moment (Stoler 2016, pp. 7, 14). Here, the histori-
cal referent is also a lively debate among postcolonial critics during the
early 1990s on the term “postcolonial” vis-à-vis “colonial” (McClintock
1992; Shohat 1992). There is no need to revisit this discussion because
detailed summaries are available in several publications (Huggan 2013,
p. 20; Kim 2017, p. 527; Young 2016, p. 57). What I wish to point out is
that, for Ann Laura Stoler, the prefix “post” similarly serves “as a mark of
skepticism rather than assume its clarity,” the reason for this doubt being
32 D. D. KIM
that the historical legacy of colonialism remains traceable today (Stoler

2016, p. ix). She is not suggesting that this postcolonial condition is obvi-
ous somehow. What she is arguing is that it manifests itself in a “refash-
ioned and sometimes opaque and oblique” reworking of past imperial
inequities (Stoler 2016, pp. 4–5). Therefore, she calls attention to “duress”
as a multisensory template for “train[ing] our senses beyond the more eas-
ily identifiable forms that some colonial scholarship schools” have interro-
gated in the past (Stoler 2016, p. 6).
8. The contested arguments over affiliated terms such as “neocolonial,”
“anticolonial,” “decolonial,” “imperial,” and “global” are constitutive of
these inquiries. For a deliberately polemic essay on the meaning of “colo-
nial modernity” in contradistinction to “global modernity,” see
Dirlik (2005).
9. I am fully aware of Arendt’s racist attitudes toward African Americans fol-
lowing the Little Rock Crisis in 1957, as well as the disturbing absence of
Native Americans in her political and philosophical reflections. For my
analysis of these issues, see Kim (2018) and Weissberg (2012).
10. Chantal Zabus has edited a multi-authored volume titled The Future of
Postcolonial Studies (2015). Two of the contributors to this project—Bill
Ashcroft and Graham Huggan—can also be found in the following page,
but one would be incorrect to think that that book engaged with the
future in any sustained terms. The Future of Postcolonial Studies is a retro-
spective tribute to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The
Empire Writes Back (1989) edited by Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and
Helen Tiffin.
11. The binary oppositions include, among others, the colonizer versus the
colonized, white versus black, civilization versus barbarism, nation versus
tribe, and center versus periphery. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal book
Provincializing Europe is commonly cited when scholars of postcolonial
studies describe how key conceptual categories borrowed from European
Enlightenment traditions are of “undoubted international significance,”
but need to be understood within particular historical contexts. Chakrabarty
writes in this regard: “To ‘provincialize’ Europe was precisely to find out
how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one
and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical
traditions that could not claim any universal validity.” Examples of univer-
salized concepts in political modernity include “citizenship, the state, civil
society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individ-
ual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democ-
racy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality” (Chakrabarty
2000, pp. x, xiii, 4).
12. In his 1784 essay titled “An Answer to the Question: What Is
Enlightenment?”, Kant defines this elusive concept as follows:
“Enlightenment is the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred
immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s intellect with-
out the direction of another. This immaturity is self-incurred when its
cause does not lie in a lack of intellect, but rather in a lack of resolve and
courage to make use of one’s intellect without the direction of another”
(Kant 2006, p. 17). Here, immaturity is an inadequate English rendition
of the German word Unmündigkeit, which alludes to the mouth—Mund—
and connotes the ability to speak for oneself in the public sphere. Hannah
Arendt draws upon Aristotle to contrast speech with violence. She argues
that a citizen, “a political being,” is essentially “endowed with speech” and
this communicative capacity is antithetical to “the phenomenon of vio-
lence” (Arendt 2006, p. 9). It is beyond the scope of this essay to take a
careful look at Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s challenging engagement with
the “legacy of the European Enlightenment,” but for more information,
see Spivak (2012, p. 1).
13. We Live in Silence is not alone in this long generational shift. Just to give
an older example from literature, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel
Nervous Conditions tells the “coming of age story of a young Zimbabwean
girl” who “asks readers to engage the history of colonialism, cultural roles
for women, the impact of education, the importance of community, and
the act of writing in their importance for the formation of an African wom-
an’s identity.” This novel has been described as a preeminent novel written
by “a newcomer” who replaces Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the
American curriculum (Willey and Treiber 2002, pp. ix–x).
14. According to George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane, the Zimbabwe African
National Union-Patriotic Front had “inherited an established set of legal
institutions” for which racial difference was an integral component.
Political repression, along with military force, was also a vital part of gov-
ernmentality. As such, the democratically elected government “followed in
the footsteps of its predecessors” by crushing dissenting opinions, crimi-
nalizing political oppositions, and upholding “the legacies of settler rule”
(Karekwaivanane 2017, pp. 162, 185). For more information about land
politics in postcolonial Zimbabwe, see Drinkwater (1991) and
Rutherford (2001).
15. For more information about the Tongva in Los Angeles, see the following
digital humanities project: Mapping Indigenous LA (Perspectives n.d.;
Mapping n.d.).
16. For more information about decolonial movements in American higher
education, see Carp (2018) and Wilder (2013).
34 D. D. KIM
17. Gender inequality among the museum staff has been known for some time,
but the latest available study of diversity among artists in major American
museums clarifies the need to reframe what these institutions do today. Of
the 10,108 identifiable artists whose works have been displayed in 18
major US museums, nearly 76% are white men. Of the individually identifi-
able artists, 85.4% are white and only 12.6% are women. The entire pool
can be broken down further into ethnic groups: 85.4% white, 9% Asian,
2.8% Hispanic/Latinx, 1.2% African American, and 1.5% other ethnicities
(Topaz et al. 2019, pp. 8, 11).
18. It is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter to revisit the long-
established debate on colonial archives, which modify non-European
things into European constructs and organize European systems of knowl-
edge above non-European ones. This analysis necessarily shifts the conver-
sation concerning archives from objects to processes while remaining
critical of empires and nation-states as moral guardians of authenticity, ter-
ritoriality, and truth. For more information about this foundational debate,
see White (1973); Mudimbe (1988); Derrida (1996); Spivak (1999); and
Stoler (2009). As I will show shortly, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book Potential
History is a bold continuation of this investigation.
19. For an incisive reading of Said’s affiliation with Auerbach’s exilic trajectory,
see Mufti (2016, p. 26).
20. Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment meets Kim Watson and Wilder’s
assessment of what is “new” in the field. This award-winning book places
conceptual, methodological, and activist issues center stage while examin-
ing deep historical linkages between the seemingly separate, yet concurrent
anticolonial movements in 1919: the Egyptian Revolution (Saʿd Zaghlūl),
Gandhi’s satyagraha (also Jawaharlal Nehru) in India, the May Fourth
Movement in Beijing (Wellington Koo, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong), and
the March First Movement (Kim Kyusik and Syngman Rhee) in Seoul.
According to Manela, they mark the beginning of a dramatic turning point
in the global history of imperialism. This is not the place to offer a detailed
review, but suffice it to say that Manela investigates what sort of historical
inquiry is able to move beyond the usual framework of national or interna-
tional history, such that those anticolonial national movements following
US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech lend themselves
to one and the same postcolonial narrative. As he explains, histories of anti-
imperial resistance have long been situated within strictly national contexts
as if there were no way of thinking beyond “imperial enclosure[s],” such
that Indian anticolonialism is subsumed under British imperial history or
Indian national history, Chinese nationalism under the rubric of modern
China, Korean nationalism under modern Korean history or Japanese
colonial history, and so forth (Manela 2007, p. xi). The challenge entails
“‘internationaliz[ing]’ the history of the United States” not by document-

ing “how the impact of the world at large has been reflected in American
history,” but by investigating “how the United States has been reflected in
the world, in the histories of other societies,” especially from non-Western
perspectives, whether they are anti-American or not (Manela 2007, p. x).
Thus, Manela reforms the notion of international history by relating the
work of non-Western political agents to that of American counterparts
without placing the center of this historical narrative in the United States
or in Western Europe. At the same time, he consults with the works of area
specialists and emerging fellow global historians to delve both vertically
and horizontally into the eventful years 1918 and 1919 (Bayly et al. 2006).
Reading The Wilsonian Moment a century after its subject of historical
investigation is fascinating because it clarifies even more the limits of our
contemporary postcolonial optic. At a time when the current sitting
President of the United States rubs shoulders with authoritarian rulers
while undoing, for better or worse, the country’s long-standing Wilsonian
commitment to promoting democracy around the globe, it is impossible
not to see some of the latest protests against corrupt, oppressive regimes,
financially exploitative or environmentally unsustainable dealings, and
cruel mistreatments of forcefully displaced or otherwise marginalized per-
sons as prevailing legacies of locally grounded anti-imperial movements.
Since the Iraq War, the crisis in American neoconservatism has opened up
an unprecedented political vacuum where a radically different future is
imaginable again after three decades of “left melancholy,” to borrow
Wendy Brown’s term (Brown 1999).
21. For Azoulay’s criticism of the father, see Azoulay (2019, pp. 13–15). Susan
Slyomovics offers a detailed historical context within which Azoulay’s
argument appears in a very different, problematic light (Slyomovics 2014,
pp. 218–220).
22. For a major publication on Fanon’s enduring importance in this regard,
see Khalfa and Young (2018).
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PART I
Conceptual Vigilance
CHAPTER 2
Unlocking the Future: Utopia

and Postcolonial Literatures
Bill Ashcroft
A significant new frame for postcolonial analysis is the link between post-
colonial writing and the philosophy of utopianism. The gestation of this
link may be traced to the year 1989 when The Empire Writes Back was
published, a year after the Utopian Studies Society was formed. Despite
this coeval emergence, it took several decades before postcolonial critics
began to see the importance of utopian thinking to the insurgent tempera-
ment of postcolonial writers and intellectuals. The future has always been
the abiding concern of the colonized and oppressed because the anticipa-
tion of freedom is the driving force of resistance. Yet, postcolonial criti-
cism has given the concept of future hope—without which political
resistance would have no point—far too little attention. One important
new key to postcolonial criticism, then, is an observation of the ways in
which postcolonial literatures have unlocked a vision of the future.
Literature has a crucial role to play in this regard because imagination
forms the basis of the utopian in literature, and the process of imagining is
key to the utopian in postcolonial transformation.
B. Ashcroft (*)
University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: b.ashcroft@unsw.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_2
44 B. ASHCROFT
Utopia is not a vague wish, but a vision of possibility that effects the
transformation of social life, an imagined future that can be at once oppo-
sitional and visionary. This potential explains the importance of literary
and other creative arts in postcolonial utopianism. The distinguishing fea-
ture of all visions of utopia is the critique of those social conditions that
make utopia necessary. As postcolonial writers demonstrate, the utopian is
grounded in a critique of the present, not just of the colonial past. “Any
utopianism worth the name,” says Zygmunt Bauman, “must engage in a
significant polemic with the dominant culture” (Bauman 1976, p. 47). In
Demand the Impossible (1986), Tom Moylan coins the term “critical uto-
pias,” which “dwell on the conflict between the originary world and the
utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is more
directly articulated” (Moylan 1986, pp. 10–11). In postcolonial writing,
this leads to an inevitable clash with post-independence administrations,
which tend to perpetuate the structures of imperial rule. In other words,
the utopian vision is transformative, its vision of the future a transforma-
tion of the present. Rather than foresee a particular utopia, the function of
postcolonial utopianism is to open up a space for political action that is
buoyed up by the possibility—indeed, the probability—of social change.
The prominent feature of postcolonial utopianism, then, is critique.
The dynamic function of the utopian impulse is not to construct a place,
but to enact the utopian desire for freedom in the engagement with power.
Liberation in this way comes through transformation. However, despite
the ubiquity of future thinking in postcolonial writing, there has been a
persistent failing in postcolonial criticism, namely, a tendency to reduce
postcolonial engagements to a simple dynamic of opposition (and, inevi-
tably, to a history of failure). Resistance has been both central and neces-
sary to postcolonial engagements, but we do well to guard against the
temptation to see resistance as simply opposition. In Dusklands,
J.M. Coetzee alerts us to the problem of force.
The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth
predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of
mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the
myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of new mythology.
(Coetzee 1974, pp. 24–25)
The emancipatory drive of postcolonial discourse, the drive to re-empower

the disenfranchised, is too often conceived in terms of a simplistic view of
2 UNLOCKING THE FUTURE: UTOPIA AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES 45
colonization, but the most successful resistance has been transformative

and the appropriation and transformation of the colonizing language by
postcolonial writers can be taken as a metonym for the creative adaptation
of Western modernity itself. Therefore, the transformation of present
social conditions so central to any utopian vision is achieved in postcolo-
nial literatures by a transformation of the tools of oppression, in particular
the colonizing language. The appropriation of those technologies and dis-
courses employed to oppress the colonized, particularly the English lan-
guage, is perhaps the most radical demonstration of the insurgent power
of the postcolonial (Ashcroft 2001). Resistance without a utopian ele-
ment, a vision of possibility, can never be truly transformative, and trans-
formation is the key to confident postcolonial resistance.
Art and Literature
Ernst Bloch’s magisterial The Principle of Hope (1986) (Das Prinzip
Hoffnung, 1938–1947) serves as the cornerstone of twentieth-century
utopian thinking. Here, art and literature have an unparalleled function
because their very raison d’être is the imagining of a different world. This
is the source of their utopian function—what Bloch calls their Vor-Schein
or “anticipatory illumination” (quoted in Zipes 1989, p. xxxiii).1 The
anticipatory illumination is the revelation of the possibilities for rearrang-
ing social and political relations to produce Heimat, his word for home
that we have all sensed but have never experienced or known: “It is Heimat
as utopia … that determines the truth content of a work of art” (Zipes
1989, p. xxxiii). Heimat becomes the utopian form in postcolonial writing
that replaces the promise of nation. It may lie in the future, but the prom-
ise of Heimat transforms the present.
Indian poet Meena Alexander explains something of the ambivalence of
Heimat. When traveling to join her father, seconded to the Sudan from
India after the Bandung conference, she turned five aboard ship.
I still think that birthday on the deep waters of the Indian Ocean has marked
me in ways utterly beyond my ken. It has left me with the sense that home
is always a little bit beyond the realm of the possible, and that a real place in
which to be, though continually longed for can never be reached. It stands
brightly lit at the edge of vanishing. (Alexander 2009, p. 2)
46 B. ASHCROFT
For Alexander, home is always on the horizon, always up ahead. At the

same time, poetry and place are bound up together. “If poetry is the music
of survival,” she says, “place is the instrument on which that music is
played, the gourd, the strings, the fret” (Alexander 2009, p. 4). When
home becomes detached from place, the implication is that the music of
poetry flourishes by producing different worlds—worlds that offer the
horizon of the future, the horizon of Heimat. As the home we have sensed
but have never experienced, Heimat remains a constant beacon for the
spirit of liberation, even after the goals of colonial independence appear to
have been achieved. Such a vision of Heimat occurs in simple but power-
fully evocative lines from Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho’s “Mythmaker” in
The Harvest of Dreams: “The children will be home … Those children will
/ be home / Some day” (Anyidoho 1984, p. 197).
For Bloch, art and literature offer the most consistent expression of
“the anticipatory consciousness” or “pre-appearance” that characterizes
human thinking (Bloch 1986, p. 215). This is nowhere more evident than
in the writing of the colonized. The future is everywhere anticipated either
in fact or by implication, and this is one reason why I contend that litera-
ture is the seedbed of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial is not after colo-
nialism, nor is it a way of being. It is a way of reading the engagements of
the colonized with power and this is the point at which utopianism and
the postcolonial literatures come together, for literature has power, as
attested by the number of post-independence writers jailed by the state.
Literature is one of the most powerful expressions of what Lyman
Tower Sargent calls “social dreaming” (Sargent 1994, p. 9). At a rally in
support of Salman Rushdie during the fatwa, Ben Okri proclaimed the
following:
Writers are amongst other things the dream mechanism of the human race.
Fiction affects us the way dreams affect us. They share the same insubstanti-
ality. They both have the capacity to alter reality. Dreams may be purer
because they are not composed of words, but when fiction has entered into
us, it no longer exists as words either. (Okri 1990, p. 77)
The power of the dream means that anticolonial rhetoric is just the begin-
ning of the political trajectory of postcolonial creative work.
Postcolonial Utopia and the Nation

There is a certain irony in the existence of postcolonial utopianism today,
since the colonialist ethic is central to Thomas More’s Utopia. In fact, this
story presents the colonial process in microcosm: King Utopus conquers
the land; its name is changed; the indigenous inhabitants are “civilized”;
what was previously a “wasteland” is “cultivated”; and the land is physi-
cally reconstructed. In this respect, Utopia anticipated quite directly the
imperial ideology that would drive England’s expansion. The search for
Utopia was extended in the eighteenth century by the literary imagination
of various kinds of colonial utopias in isolated regions of Africa, the
Caribbean, South America, or the Pacific, with a blithe disregard for the
possible feelings of the inhabitants. In time, imperial expansion itself was
driven by the utopian drive to populate the world with the British race and
to “civilize” the invaded inhabitants.
One of the major exports of this imperial expansion was something
formed in reaction to it: identity, in particular national identity. According
to John Atkinson Hobson, “[c]olonialism, in its best sense,” by which he
meant the settler colonies, “is a natural overflow of nationality” (Hobson
1902, p. 8). He went on to quote historian John Robert Seeley: “When a
State advances beyond the limits of nationality its power becomes precari-
ous and artificial” (Hobson 1902, p. 11). Hobson’s complaint was that
empire-bred nationalism undermined the possibility of a true internation-
alism. Partha Chatterjee, on the other hand, sees nationalism as an impedi-
ment to true decolonization because these countries are forced to adopt a
“national form” that is hostile to their own cultures in order to fight
against the Western nationalism of the colonial powers (Chatterjee 1986,
p. 18). Not only that. Imperialism was really an extension of the sover-
eignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Far
from nation-states freeing themselves from imperialism, the corporate
powers that enacted the spread of imperialism tended to make nation-
states mere instruments to record the flows of commodities, monies, and
populations that they had set in motion.
This is important because nationality and nationalism and their failed
visions of independence are fundamental to the study of postcolonial uto-
pian thinking. The pre-independence utopias of soon-to-be liberated
postcolonial nations provided a very clear focus for anticolonial activism in
British and other colonies. Yet, this appeared to come to an abrupt halt,
once the goal of that activism was reached and the somber realities of
48 B. ASHCROFT
post-independence political life began to be felt. The national form, if we

continue Chatterjee’s terminology, generated a species of decolonizing
planning at odds with the cultural vision of the societies themselves.
The postcolonial nation, a once glorious utopian idea, became super-
seded in the literature, particularly in Africa, by a critical rhetoric that
often landed authors in jail. The concept of the nation, or at least the
nation-state, has been robustly critiqued in the field because the postcolo-
nial nation is marked by disappointment, instituted on the boundaries of
the colonial state and doomed to continue its oppressive functions. This
applied equally to national subjects and the African diaspora. Afro-
diasporic consciousness grew out of the nation-state’s neglects and
exclusions.
The African diaspora’s consciousness of itself has been defined in and against
constricting national boundaries. The derogation of blackness, though var-
ied from nation-state to nation-state, has been and remains global and trans-
national, making Afro-diasporic peoples’ relation to the nation-state
“contingent and partial.” (Gilroy 1987, p. 158)
In Africa, though, writers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o,

and Okri, as well as more recently women writers such as Chimamanda
Ngozi Adiche, Sade Adeniran, and Unomah Azuah have gradually replaced
post-independence despair with a broader sense of future hope.
Postcolonial utopian vision takes various forms, but it is always hope that
transcends the disappointment and entrapment of the nation-state.
Armah is better known for his earlier novels, which are deeply pessimis-
tic about the post-independence African regimes. One example would be
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Yet, that dystopian view of
the present betrayal of Africa by its leaders is closely connected to the uto-
pianism that emerges in his work. Two Thousand Seasons (2003) is an
example of an allegorical rewriting of African history in which a pluralized
communal voice recounts the experiences of his people over a period of
1000 years. In a sense, it is an extension of the critique of his earlier trilogy,
but this time it generates a discourse of possibility. The center of this imag-
inative history is the account of the betrayal of the people by their king
into slavery, the subsequent rebellion against the slave ship, and the choices
offered by the idea of return. The deception of rulers and governments is
a familiar theme for Armah and, in most of his novels, they are given a
large measure of the blame for Africa’s neocolonially dependent state.
Whether kings who have sold their subjects into slavery or political leaders
who have adopted, without question, Western habits and values, the rot
begins with power.
Where another of Armah’s strategies is to interpolate “world history”
with a narrative of the pharaonic past, Okri manages to achieve the sense
of a different kind of history in the language itself, as well as in his narra-
tive. His representation of a fantastically expanded world of experience in
Infinite Riches (1998) conceives the rich horizon of African reality, an
imaginaire that constantly resists the temptation of the Western reader to
appropriate it into a familiar landscape. Thus, Okri does in narrative what
many examples of transformed language do in postcolonial writing—com-
municating and resisting at the same time. This leads to a language that
overlaps with magical realism, a language of excess and accretion, a layer-
ing of experience in which the border between reality and the spirit world
is dissolved.
While pre-independence nationalism saw a utopia in the decolonized
nation, the postcolonial utopian vision expresses itself in a form of hope
that transcends the boundaries of the state and continues to anticipate this
kind of future even in the light of the failure of the nation. The natural
assumption is that utopianism died with post-independence disillusion,
but a utopian view of the future remained essential to the transformative
function of literature (Obiechina 1992). Négritude offers a fulcrum for
this discussion. This deeply influential philosophy—so often depicted as
essentialist, binary, exclusionary, and backward looking—embodies a
vision of the future grounded in a resurgent memory of the past. The kind
of recuperative return we find in African literature offers a strategy that can
harness the dismay underlying the proliferation of political critique.
Future thinking has the effect of pushing liberationist sentiment out-
ward. In Agostinho Neto’s poetry, it is the vision of Africa in the world
and not simply freedom from Portuguese rule that begins to transfer wish-
ful thinking into willful action. When he writes that it is now time “to
march together … to the world / of all men,” he is suggesting something
that comes to be taken up by writers after writers in Africa, the desire to
enter the world of all men, the world of an Africa that is no longer formed
in the imagination of Europe (Neto 1974, p. 3). This is the ultimate
meaning of the poem “Reconquest” where he urges Africa to “go with all
humanity” to conquer the world and bring peace (Neto 1974, p. 40).
Neto is intensely internationalist and, consequently, a key figure in the
African vision of the future. Although profoundly Angolan, profoundly
50 B. ASHCROFT
African, and passionately devoted to political liberty, his poems reach

beyond Africa. In “Sculptural Hands,” he sees beyond Africa: “love
emerging virgin in each mouth” (Neto 1974, p. 49). And further, beyond
the tiredness of other continents, he sees “Africa alive” and the “sculptural
hands” of the strong reaching into the future (Neto 1974, p. 49). In “A
Succession of Shadows,” he celebrates African hands “open to the frater-
nity of the world” united in peace for the future of the world: “For right,
for concord, for peace” (Neto 1974, p. 23). In the poem “With Equal
Voice,” Neto offers a rousing call for reconstruction, for (African) men
who (as slaves) “built the empires of the West / the wealth and opportuni-
ties of old Europe”—people of genius heroically alive “now building our
homeland / our Africa” (Neto 1974, p. 84). The poem calls for Africans
to “re-encounter Africa,” to “resuscitate man,” and to herald a new begin-
ning, an independent people entering the “harmonious concert of the
universal,” as he celebrates “the daybreak over our hope” (Neto
1974, p. 84).
Future thinking may also reconstitute the nativist tendencies of national
thinking. In Malaysia, for instance, one problem for nationalists demand-
ing that literature construct national identity has been the choice by many
Malaysian writers to write mainly of a specific community, as in the case of
K.S. Maniam, Mohammed Haji Salleh, Che Husna Azhari, and Wong
Phui Nam. Although this disrupts the concept of a single national identity,
it represents the actual heterogeneity of the Malaysian nation, and indeed
of all nations. Ee Tiang Hong celebrates this unity in diversity with a com-
pelling image of the tree in Tembusu. Symbolizing the nation as a tree with
its roots deep in the soil, the poet celebrates the great tree, which “still
upholds its versatility … turning and twisting in every limb and fiber,” but
nevertheless resumes “In some quiet hour / Its steadfast / stature”
(Merican et al. 2004, p. 69).
Postcolonial writers’ willingness to foreground the heterogeneity of the
nation beneath the structures of the state suggests a considerable revision
to the now somewhat notorious idea of Frederic Jameson that all Third
World texts are national allegories (Jameson 1986, p. 69). Aijaz Ahmad’s
equally notorious response was to accuse Jameson of turning all Asian and
African critics and writers into mystified “civilizational others” by reduc-
ing all the issues they dealt with to the problem of a nationalist struggle
against colonial oppressors and their postcolonial successors (Ahmad
1987, p. 3). Ahmad underestimated the importance of allegory and the
undoubted prominence of national concerns. But by the same token,
“national allegory” fails to embrace the complexity of the relationship

between literature and the idea of nation. In particular, it “fails to ade-
quately describe the dissolution of the idea of nation and the continuous
persistence of national concerns” (Franco 1989, p. 211). Indeed, we could
also say that the term “nationalism” itself fails to grasp the complexity of
writing that expresses a future hope that in some respects might fall into
the category of national concerns and yet appears to supersede completely
the idea of nation as a failed or at least contested category. Whether
expressing national concerns or not, though, contemporary utopian
thought works beneath, above, or outside the concept of the nation-state.
Memory and the Future
As we see in the work of Armah and Okri, an important phenomenon in
postcolonial utopianism is the role of cultural memory. This can be pre-
carious if it leads to the nostalgic belief in a precolonial cultural perfection,
but the power of memory comes through its capacity to visualize the
future. In fact, utopianism cannot exist without the operation of memory
because the future is always grounded in the past and in a cyclic continuity
between the past and the future through the present. This polarity between
past and future often seems insurmountable in European philosophy.
Bloch asserts that, for Plato, “Beingness” is “Beenness” and he admon-
ishes Hegel “who ventured out furthest” because “What Has Been over-
whelms what is approaching … the categories Future, Front, Novum”
(Bloch 1986, p. 8). The problem with Being or the concept of Being in
Hegel was that it overwhelmed Becoming—obstructing the category of
the future. It is only when the static concept of Being is dispensed with
that the real dimension of hope opens up (Bloch 1986, p. 18). The core
of Bloch’s ontology is that Beingness is Not-Yet-Becomeness.
Thus the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs completely to the Not-Yet-

Become, Not-Yet-Brought-Out, Manifested-Out in the world … From the
anticipatory, therefore, knowledge is to be gained on the basis of an ontol-
ogy of the Not-Yet. (Bloch 1986, p. 13)
We can see why Bloch is disinterested in utopia as location. Utopianism is

fundamental to human consciousness because human beings always strive
forward, anticipating, and desiring. While utopias exist in the future, uto-
pianism, or what Bloch also calls “anticipatory consciousness,” is heavily
52 B. ASHCROFT
invested in the present. In Bloch’s reinterpretation of Marx, the ontology

of becoming has a political, liberatory dimension.
As Chris Abani says in reference to the African in a globalized world,
“identity is a destination” (Aycock 2009, p. 7). The idea of becoming is
critical in the transformative processes of postcolonial cultures. The curi-
ous interrelation between the memory of the past, the anticipation of the
future, and the experience of the present characterizes all future thinking
and nowhere more resolutely than in postcolonial writing. The resonant
and often repeated phrase of Édouard Glissant—“a prophetic vision of the
past”—captures this idea perfectly (Glissant 1989, p. 64). This is the real-
ity that distinguishes utopianism, or social dreaming, from mere wishful
thinking. This characteristic enables the voice from the “Nowhere” of
utopia to speak to the present social conditions. The importance of utopia
being situated “Nowhere” was articulated by Paul Ricœur (Ricœur 1986,
p. 16). His position might best be explained by the fact that “reality” itself
is framed by ideology and that it is impossible for the critic to escape it
(Ricœur 1986, p. 171). Utopia is important for a critique of the present
that originates nowhere. The nowhere of utopia is the only place outside of
ideology from which it can be critiqued.
Bloch’s preference for Becoming over Being anticipates the postcolo-
nial concept of circular time. He is fascinated with the cyclic continuity
between the past and the future in the present, which leads to what we
might call a non-teleological eschatology in which “the drive upwards at
last becomes a drive forwards” (Bloch 1986, p. 1278). The characteristic
of modernity with its concept of chronological “empty” time, dislocated
from place or human life, is a sense of the separation between past, pres-
ent, and future. Although the present may be seen as a continuous stream
of prospections becoming retrospections, the sense that the past has gone
and the future is coming separates what may be called the three phases of
time: past, present, and future. One of the features of postcolonial texts,
particularly those from Africa and the Caribbean, is a transformed concep-
tion of time that sees it as layered and interpenetrating, spiraling rather
than linear. This conjoining of time is related to a radically different epis-
temology—a different way of knowing. This way of knowing is profoundly
utopian because it includes the past and the future in the perception of the
present.
The crucial characteristic of the genre of the novel is its engagement
with time. The telling of stories appeals to us because they offer the prog-
ress of a world in time and can thus become narratives of temporal order.
But magically, by unfolding in time, they take us out of time. It may be

that narrative, whose materiality is isomorphic with temporality, provides
a way (though not the only way) of communicating different experiences
of time. How, then, can the novel convey a different knowledge of time,
specifically knowledge of what has been considered the “broken” time of
the traumatized colonized subject? One way of doing this is through the
circular time developed in oral storytelling. But a more common way is to
convey experience itself as a palimpsest of different phases of time and dif-
ferent orders of reality, as Chinua Achebe does in a scene where elders of
the tribe perform the dance of the egwugwu, or spirit beings, an occasion
in which the ontological distinction between acting and reality, the human
world and the spirit world, dissolves (Ashcroft 2014).
Perhaps the most profound example of the laminating of time can be
seen in the Aboriginal Dreaming. There is a beautiful description of this
sensibility in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell when the narrator goes
with an Aboriginal man to visit his ancestral country, which was still “the
country of his Old People.”
The Old People, indeed, suggested to me another way altogether of looking

at reality and the passage of time than my own familiar historical sense of
things, in which change and the fragmentation of epochs and experience is
the only certainty. (Miller 2007, pp. 233–234)
The Dreaming is the comprehensive demonstration of the infusion of the

present and future with the hope of a mythic past, a fusion of time and
place, because the Dreaming is never simply a memory of the past, but the
focusing energy of the present. The Aboriginal subject is surrounded at all
times with the present embodiments of the antiquity of the Dreaming, a
state that completely subverts linear time. The utopianism in Australian
Aboriginal novels such as those by Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006)
and Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Clouds (1998) owes very little to
the Western utopian tradition; for the Dreaming is a radical infusion of the
present by a myth that encompasses both past and future.
Though in a different way, postcolonial literatures continually affirm
this sense of the future in the past and bring us back to our understanding
of revolution as a revolving or spiraling into the future, as well as a revolt
against the failures of the past. The concept of a spiral into the future per-
fectly captures the utopian hope without which resistance could not take
place. Importantly, it demonstrates the way the future emerges from the
54 B. ASHCROFT
past. The future, or the “In-Front-Of-Us,” is always a possibility emerging

from the past not as nostalgia but as renewal (Bloch 1986, p. 4).
For Caribbean writers and artists who work in the borderland of lan-
guage, race, and identity, the past is a constant sign of the future. One of
the most common and popular examples of this is the limbo dance, a per-
formance of slave history, which reenacts the crossing of the Middle
Passage in a continuous reminder of memory, survival, and cultural resur-
rection. Kamau Brathwaite puts it as follows: “Long dark deck and the
water surrounding me / Long dark deck and the silence is over me”
(Brathwaite 1969, p. 35). The dancer goes under the limbo stick in an
almost impossible bodily position, emulating the subjection of the slave
body in the journey across the Atlantic, going through the limbo of the
Middle Passage but rising triumphant on the other side. The performance
of memory is a constant reminder of a future horizon, a return that per-
forms each time the rising of the slave body into a future marked not only
by survival but also by renewal, hybridity, and hope. The dance is a meta-
phor of slave history that celebrates the present with the continuous reen-
actment of future hope. Brathwaite’s poem reminds Wilson Harris of the
importance of the limbo dance, which leads him to state: “I believe that a
philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of the imagination”
(Harris 2008, p. 10).
So past, present, and future are conjoined in the creative work in the
same way that the dance performs a radical transformation of the reality of
slave exile. The descendants of the slave labor of sugar plantations have
developed a culture that draws its ontological energy from the very fact of
displacement, of homelessness, heterogeneity, and syncreticity. This is not
revolution but transformation, and its relation to time is exactly the same
as that on which revolution depends because the revolt is also a revolving
in which past, present, and future are conjoined and mutually enforcing.
Friedrich Kummel sees this relation between past, present, and future as a
feature of all human life, so that “the openness of future and past is, in
other words, the vital condition for the conduct of man’s life and all his
actions” (Kummel 1968, p. 50). We make the past our own by bringing it
into a free and positive relation with the present. “The natural discrepancy
of future and past constitutes a productive tension, which forms the real
medium for new action and new mediation” (Kummel 1968, p. 50). In
other words, the tension of revolution is rendered productive by its loca-
tion in a spiraling compression of time.
A very clear example of the power of memory to circulate in the present

with a dream of the future can be found in the strategic use of a postcard
called Visit Palestine designed in 1936 by Franz Kraus (see Fig. 2.1).
Palestinian art and literature are important demonstrations of postcolonial
creativity because Palestine is still colonized by an apartheid regime.
The postcard identifies Palestine as a destination—an actually identifi-
able place in the world before the Nakba (the catastrophe)—and out of
Fig. 2.1 Palestine Postcard 1936 (1936)

56 B. ASHCROFT
the reality of the country as a destination emerges the utopian concept of

destiny.2 The postcard operates as a hinge between past, present, and
future by becoming a palimpsest. The postcard also becomes a hinge
between past and present in Amer Shomali’s reproduction of it in Visit
Palestine (2009) in which the border wall testifies to the attempt by the
state of Israel not just to incarcerate the Palestinians, but to wall off the
past (see Fig. 2.2).
Fig. 2.2 Amer Shomali, Visit Palestine (2009)

What the Visit Palestine postcard series reveals is that Heimat can be the
luminous possibility of the present and, in this respect, it is far from static.
It is a dynamic horizon of everyday living. This is particularly significant in
the case of the Palestinian people because the wall has been described as
“an attempt to steal the horizon” (Ashwari 2015). This theft is visual,
political, and spiritual and only a utopian view of the horizon of the future
can offer the prospect of freedom. In Palestine, the utopian impulse
revolves around the reality of a place, but the utopian is enacted in the
engagement with power. The vision of utopia is located in the act of trans-
formation of coercive power, a certain kind of praxis rather than a specific
mode of representation.
This is brilliantly presented in a photographic work, Nation Estate, by
Larissa Sansour (see Fig. 2.3). It represents the Palestinian homeland in
the form of a skyscraper. This also plays upon the Visit Palestine theme.
The artist explains her work as follows:
The idea of “Nation Estate” is that should any future Palestinian state hope
to house the entire population, one would have to think vertically. And
hence the idea of a single skyscraper with whole cities on each floor came
about … The nation state reduced to a building simply became the “Nation
Estate”—a single block of forced migrants. The subtitle of the picture,
“Living the High Life,” expands on the irony. (Sansour 2012)
Crucially, from our perspective, Nation Estate centers on that idea of

place, which remains critical toward any colonized perception of the
future. It is a conception of place that operates within a layered conception
of time in which past, present, and future conjoin as the essential feature
of revolutionary hope. In doing this, Sansour’s utopia avoids the trap of
transcendental abstraction or hopeless impracticality, which comes from
being quarantined in the future.
The imbrication of memory and the future in postcolonial literatures
raise the issue of the function of history in colonization, particularly in
Africa. Since the nineteenth century, Africa’s place in history has carried
the unwelcome burden of an ahistorical past. Hegel’s notorious abolition
of Africa from his Philosophy of History is well known.3 But the conse-
quence of this has been that Africa, like the rest of the world, wants to
enter history, because, as Ashish Nandy puts it, “[historical] consciousness
now owns the globe … Though millions of people continue to stay out-
side history, millions have, since the days of Marx, dutifully migrated to
58 B. ASHCROFT
Fig. 2.3 Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2012)
the empire of history to become its loyal subjects” (Nandy 1995, p. 46).
We have seen how Armah and Okri engage the empire of history in differ-
ent ways. In the case of Armah, we find a history that interpolates the
master discourse of European history. In Okri’s case, we find the positing
of a different kind of history, a history that might disregard the boundaries
between myth and memory, a history that subverts the tyranny of chrono-
logical narrative. This is the history offered by Okri in Infinite Riches.
Both utopian strategies operate in postcolonial literatures and both work

to insert postcolonial reality into the canon of English literature.
In a poetic rendition of the history of colonialism, “Gods of the
Pathways,” Anyidoho observes that Africa stands at the crossroads at
which the ahistorical past can become the new ground for a vision of the
future. “We are standing at The CrossRoads,” says the poet, at the meet-
ing point of “NightMare and DawnDream.” But there are those who still
remember the past and who can speak of “ancient joys long buried /
beneath a topsoil of bad memories” (Anyidoho 2009, p. 140). The mes-
sage is that the topsoil of the bad memories of colonialism can be swept
away, that cultural memory can be the basis of a renewed vision of the
future. In “Gathering the Harvest Dance,” he suggests that the future can
only be realized when “We come today to Stare our History in the Face”
(Anyidoho 2009, p. 142). History is exchanged for the hope produced by
Ancestral Harvest Songs, the vehicles of cultural memory. The writer
apprehends the transformative potential of that past not only to disrupt
the dominance of European history, but also to reconceive of a place in the
present, a place transformed by a vision of the future that fulfills this past.
Modes of Utopian Thinking in Postcolonial Writing

Utopianism drives postcolonial writing in many different ways, as the Vor-
Schein of the transformative text engages in various kinds of social dream-
ing. Four very different examples demonstrate how varied the process can
be: the symbol of Aztlán in Chicano literature, the archipelagic outward-
ness of Caribbean writing, the sense of “Oceanic Hope” in the Pacific
(Ashcroft, 2016), and the aim to establish a better England in early settler
colonial writing.
Chicano Borderlands
The Chicano version of utopian thinking, the Aztlán myth, proved to be
a surprisingly resilient weapon in the Chicano political arsenal because it
so comprehensively united ethnicity, place, and nation. It differs from
other postcolonial utopias because it combined the mythic and the politi-
cal so directly: on the one hand, it was a spiritual homeland, a sacred place
of origin; on the other hand, it generated a practical (if impossible) goal of
reconquering the territories taken from Mexico. But this union of sacred
and political proved to be its secret power. Aztlán, the Chicano utopia,
60 B. ASHCROFT
became a focus for Chicano cultural and political identity and a permanent
confirmation of the possibility of cultural regeneration. For a people dwell-
ing in the cultural, racial, and geographical borderlands, Aztlán repre-
sented its national hope.
At the First Chicano National Conference in Denver in 1969, the con-
ference manifesto, called “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (The Aztlán’s
Spiritual Plan), encapsulated for the first time the hopes, political aspira-
tions, and cultural identity of the Chicano people. It gave birth or rebirth
to the myth of Aztlán, the sacred Aztec homeland, a myth that would
have an incomparable effect on the Chicano sense of identity and national
purpose. Remarkably, although the myth was many centuries old, it had
virtually been forgotten among Chicanos before 1969. A Chicano nation-
state existed “Nowhere” because it could never come about. But the iden-
tification of the myth of Aztlán with both the Chicano people and the
Southwest of the US meant that the concept of an ethnic nation became
prominent in Chicano consciousness. Aztlán occupies a real, although
fluid, site based in the unbounded space of the borderlands. As such, it is
describable by Michel Foucault’s term “heterotopia.” The reality of the
Chicano nation supported as it is by the Aztlán myth offers the model of
a space that, according to Foucault’s sixth principle of heterotopias, has “a
function in relation to all the space that remains” (Foucault 1986, p. 27).
While these may represent the fruits of an imperial utopianism, they greatly
differ from the utopianism that began to be generated in postcolonial
literatures.
The Caribbean
The strategies developed in the Caribbean to reshape self and society,
strategies based on a critique of the history of slavery and its consequences,
offer some of the most powerful examples of utopian thinking by enacting
a belief in radical transformation. This belief results in a demonstration of
political resistance as it has always been most effective in postcolonial lit-
eratures: transformative, innovative, and future thinking. What gives this
transformative urge its force and scope is what may be called an archipe-
lagic consciousness, a sense of the vibrant multiplicity of the region that
embeds itself in every individual cultural production.
Creative expression has had a central role in this process of cultural
transformation. Caribbean literature, owing to its radical creolization of
the English language, has been at the forefront of the innovative
production of Caribbean culture and thus it has been a major factor in the
region’s capacity for future thinking. The anticipatory illumination in art
and literature reveals the “possibilities for rearranging social and political
relations so that they engender Heimat” (Zipes 1989, p. xxxiii), a place
beyond nation, perhaps even beyond time, but a home given its unique
character by the concept of the archipelago.
Archipelagos are not simply the “other” of continents; they challenge
the polarity of “Old World” and “New World,” of land and sea, of island
and continent and, indeed, they go so far as to challenge binary thinking
itself. The salient question here is: how is archipelagic thinking directed
toward the future and how does it generate hope rather than simple oppo-
sition? The utopian dimension of such thinking comes about through the
appropriation and transformation of inheritances of all kinds, both inheri-
tances from colonial culture and those from other islands. Seen in this
light, thinking with the archipelago offers us a clue to the Caribbean
capacity for fluidity, multiplicity, and transformation in everything from
language and literature to history and myth, including practices such as
carnival, politics, religion, folklore, and food. This way of thinking is inevi-
tably transformative, exogenous, and creative, confirming both the hope
for the future and the capacity of that imagined future to critique the pres-
ent. When we see how writers such as Brathwaite, Harris, Glissant, Martin
Carter, and Derek Walcott think with the archipelago, we see how the
transformative processes of creolization and its cultural effects occur.
The Pacific-Oceanic Hope

The Caribbean archipelago has been perhaps the most fertile and resource-
ful generator of postcolonial future thinking. But there is a similar orienta-
tion to the Not-Yet-Become in another island region: the Pacific. The
history of this region differs greatly from that of the Caribbean. Here, the
indigenous people maintain a continuous connection to an Oceanic past
in contrast to the slave society’s severance from an African (or Asian)
homeland. Yet, both share the same need for identification with some-
thing larger, whether geographically, historically, or imaginatively, and this
takes form in both regions in a regional, archipelagic consciousness. In the
Pacific, this utopian dimension has come to be recognized as Oceania, an
ingenious redefinition of the significance of islands that had seemed tiny,
insignificant, and marginal. Oceania is not only itself the name for a uto-
pian formation, but of a particular attitude to time and within which the
62 B. ASHCROFT
remembrance of the past becomes a form of forward thinking that embeds

itself in a vision of the achievable—a concrete utopia. Oceania owes its
very meaning to the persistent reality of the crosscurrents of time and
space in the region.
Albert Wendt’s article “Toward a New Oceania” reads:
I belong to Oceania—or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile part of it and it

nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination …
So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythol-
ogies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an
attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope—if
not to contain her—to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain. I will
not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. (Wendt 1976, p. 49)
For Wendt, it is a vision created and nurtured above all by art and litera-
ture. “In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through
their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania”
(Wendt 1976, p. 60).
Epeli Hau’ofa first picked up Wendt’s vision in 1993 in an essay entitled
“Our Sea of Islands” (1995), which reversed the bleak denigration of
island nations by a simple change of perspective. Rather than islands in a
far sea, they could be regarded as a sea of islands. Island nations may be
tiny, but the history, myths, oral traditions, and cosmologies of the people
of Oceania constituted a world that was anything but tiny; it was a vast
space, a space of movement, migration, of immensity and longevity. The
difference is reflected in the names: Pacific Islands and Oceania. One
denotes small, scattered bits of land, the other “connotes a sea of islands
with their inhabitants,” a world in which people moved and mingled
unhindered by the boundaries of state, culture, or ethnicity (Hau’ofa
1993, p. 92). This moving world, which seems to have been confined,
constricted, and striated by the various boundaries of modernity, is the
world of Oceanic hope, the world of the future.
Settler Colonies: Creating a New World

While utopian communities have been established on various occasions in
the postcolonial world usually based on religious and communitarian prin-
ciples, the settler colonies are distinctive in the utopian drive that pro-
pelled people to settle. Throughout the British Empire, in particular,
settlers fleeing the rigid class structures and economic inequality of Britain
saw the colony offering a new start to free settlers. As one emigrant put it
in a letter home, “eight hours is a day’s work. That is the best of this coun-
try. We go to work at 8 a.m., and leave at 5 p.m. A man is a man, and not
a slave” (Sargent 2001, p. 6). But the escape from class was not matched
by an escape from the civilizing mission. As Thomas Campbell puts it in a
poem from 1828, the immigrant’s anticipation is as follows:
To see a world, from shadowy forests won,

In youthful beauty wedded to the sun;
To skirt our home with harvests widely sown,
And call the blooming landscape all our own,
Our children’s heritage, in prospect long. (Campbell 1874, p. 249)
But if this start was not always as completely utopian as some texts hoped,
it was an improvement for most settlers and settler colonies demonstrated
more purely utopian writing than any other colonized country. In Australia
alone, Sargent lists 243 utopian works—both eutopias and dystopias—up
to 1999 (Sargent 1999).
By the mid-nineteenth century, the dystopian perception of the
Antipodes was strongly augmented by a sense of its potential for the
British race. In 1852, Samuel Sidney wrote as follows:
Australia … a land of promise for the adventurous … a home of peace and

independence for the industrious … an El Dorado and an Arcadia com-
bined, where the hardest and the easiest best paid employments are to be
found. (Sidney 1852, p. 17)
James Anthony Froude, in Oceana or England and Her Colonies, envis-

aged a global commonwealth of English-speaking colonies in which the
words of “Rule Britannia” would come true. Colonists would “become
the progenitors of a people destined to exceed the glories of European
civilization, as much as they have outstripped the wonders of ancient
enterprise” (Froude 1886, p. 429). Consequently, the settler colonies
have never been able to escape the civilizing mission bequeathed to them
by British imperialism.
A disillusion with colonial utopia was bound to the economic inequality
that came with capitalism. William Lane, whose ironically titled The
Working Man’s Paradise (1892) was written to help fund the families of
64 B. ASHCROFT
shearers and bush workers charged with conspiracy after the 1891 shear-
ers’ strike, led a migration to a utopian settlement called New Australia in
Patagonia. Disillusioned and unemployed, many bush workers saw the
strike’s failure as the end of their hopes for an egalitarian workers’ Australia.
When Lane proposed starting anew in South America, over 2000 prospec-
tive colonists signed up immediately. Perhaps the most famous recruit was
poet Mary Gilmore who stayed at New Australia from 1985 to 1902
(Whitehead 2003). But like most utopian communities, New Australia
could not manage the problem of power and collapsed under Lane’s
authoritarian rule. Disillusioned with the class hypocrisy of nationalism,
the utopians left only to be disillusioned in turn by New Australia.
In all these manifestations of postcolonial utopianism, there is a vision
of Heimat that transcends, for whatever reason, the “home” of the nation.
While the initial vision of an independent nation in anticolonial rhetoric
was doomed, the sense of a future that promised the arrival to a home that
was sensed but not yet experienced underpins the continued resistance to
imperial domination. Just as imperialism marries itself more comprehen-
sively to that movement of global capitalism that dwelt at its origins, so
does postcolonial utopianism adapt itself to the changing nature of impe-
rial power. As it does so, the prospect of a future beyond oppression
remains the driving force of the transformative power of postcolonial
literatures.
Notes
1. This is Zipes’s English translation from Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1970).
2. The idea of Palestine as a place with actual inhabitants refutes Golda Maier’s
following notorious statement: “There were no such things as Palestinians …
They did not exist.” It is quoted from Sunday Times (15 June 1969) and
The Washington Post (16 June 1969).
3. “The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely
wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and
morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him;
there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of char-
acter … At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no
historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit”
(Hegel 1956, p. 99).
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Minnesota Press.
CHAPTER 3
On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed

Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian
Public Sculpture
Susan Slyomovics
After the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 and the subsequent subjuga-
tion of large swaths of North African territory into the French metropole
as France’s southern provinces across the Mediterranean, large numbers of
statues and monuments were erected in these newly colonized spaces.1
Such large-scale sculptural presences represented an on-the-ground “stat-
uomania”—to borrow Maurice Agulhon’s evocation of widespread mon-
umental memorializations, which peaked during the interwar period in
France (Agulhon 1978; Sherman 1998, 1999). French statuomania would
also invade Algeria (Jansen 2012, 2013, 2014). Although no legislation
required war memorials, France’s Law of October 25, 1919, to commem-
orate the dead of World War I triggered substantial state subventions for
such statues and monuments in both France and Algeria (Journal officiel
de la République française 1919, p. 11910).
S. Slyomovics (*)
e-mail: ssly@anthro.ucla.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_3
70 S. SLYOMOVICS
According to architectural historian Françoise Choay, the word “mon-

ument” originates in the Latin verb monere, pointing benignly toward
“recall” and ominously toward “warn” (Choay 2001, p. x). Indeed, warn-
ings and threats dominate monuments in the overseas colonies. The sig-
nificance of European settler-colonial implantations of stone statues and
war memorials was well understood by the native Algerian population
given the large number of Algerian Muslim colonial troops who had
fought and died for France in the two world wars (Kidd 2002). By 1912,
a mandatory military service for three years—one more than required of
French citizens in the colony or the metropole—had been instituted for
Algerian Muslim colonial subjects based on the census of eligible males.
Approximately 175,000 Algerian Muslims fought for France during World
War I with estimates between 25,000 and 35,000 killed in battle. During
World War II, Algerian Muslim soldiers made critical contributions to the
liberation of France despite its subsequent collective “colonial aphasia”
about their military centrality (Stoler 2011). Statistics for the year 1944
estimate that half of the 550,000-strong French army came from the colo-
nies: 134,000 Algerians, 73,000 Moroccans, 26,000 Tunisians, and
92,000 from French West Africa (Recham, 1996; Lormier 2006). Frantz
Fanon was right to link French Algeria known for its plethora of monu-
ments and war memorials representative of the larger “colonial world” to
the visible and materialized expressions of colonial occupation and forced
conscription.
A motionless, Manichean world, a world of statues: the statue of the general

who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who constructed the
bridge; a world which is sure of itself which crushed with its stones the backs
flayed by whips; this is the colonial world. (Fanon 1961, p. 53)
The postcolonial afterlives of these monuments inscribe a historical, geo-

political, and affective provenance between Algeria and France. Specifically,
even before Algerian independence from France in 1962, the French mili-
tary in retreat along with allied European settler populations—the latter
numbering over a million people from the total population of nine mil-
lion—removed large numbers of monuments, church bells, and statues, as
well as archival and portable material objects (Slyomovics 2020c). Since
then, this migration, which has also been misnamed the “repatriation” of
cultural and historical treasures from French Algeria, persistently conflates
illegally removed objects with legal designations for the European
3 ON THE WINGS OF THE GALLIC COCKEREL: AHMED BENYAHIA… 71
colonists now living mainly in France. First human beings, then things,
were labeled rapatriés d’Algérie: “the repatriated of Algeria” (Aldrich
2005; Slyomovics 2020a, b). Given that culled material objects were, and
are, both moveable and cherished by France, they, too, departed north
across the Mediterranean along with the people who carried them.
Conversely, the parallel counter-dynamic fates for the remaining French
colonial statues, church bells, war memorials, and monuments in Algeria
varied wildly. Post-independent possibilities have been their preservation,
reuse, appropriation, destruction, and disappearance. To illuminate the
complex histories of these monuments and sculptures, which oscillate
between varied involvements by iconoclasts and iconodules, expansive
meanings for the art historical term “provenance” chart artistic relations
between the French metropole and its former prize colony of Algeria.
Once restricted to documenting and authenticating artworks according to
origins and subsequent chains of transfer, Gale Feigenbaum and Inge
Reist have embedded this concept in anthropological notions, as they are
articulated by Arjun Appadurai concerning “the social life of things”
(Appadurai 1986). Feigenbaum and Reist underscore the connections
between provenance and the anthropology of objects because “[t]he role
of provenance is contingent on the societies, disciplines, and institutions
that make use of its focus of inquiry, tools and records” (Feigenbaum and
Reist 2012, p. 1; Higonnet 2012, pp. 196–209). Thus, provenance writ
large and specific to anthropological methods engages with the imperial
context of artistic removals and exchanges between France and Algeria,
while owing its discursive power as a historically specific tool for Western
domination (Said 1978, p. 2).
The following study of Ahmed Benyahia’s statue demonstrates that in
Constantine, Algeria’s third largest city, postcolonial provenance research
is more than mere physical and legal ownership. It encompasses artist and
object biographies, artwork creativity, entangled shared heritages, and a
global circulation of esthetic symbols in the making of monuments to
glorify both the French and Algerian nation-state (Förster 2016; Hoskins
2006; König 2017).
72 S. SLYOMOVICS
A Case Study in Provenance: Ahmed Benyahia

and the Statue of Youcef Zighoud
In the late 1960s, Algerian artist Ahmed Benyahia (b. 1943), a recent
graduate from the prestigious École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Algiers,
obtained a commission to create a statue of the resistance fighter, hero,
and martyr Youcef Zighoud (1921–1956). Known by his nom de guerre
Colonel Si Ahmed, Zighoud had died in combat in the Constantine region
during the brutal seven-year-long Algerian War of Independence
(1954–1962). He had participated in early revolutionary political party
formations, a series of key successor clandestine organizations and con-
gresses, and spearheaded the struggle in Wilaya II or Zone 2 as head of the
North Constantine region for the main nationalist party of the Front de
Libération Nationale (FLN). He was called “the man of 20 August 1955”
for executing a military confrontation on that date deemed an early turn-
ing point in gaining the population’s support. In the first year of the
Algerian war, his attack on European settlers resulted in murderously dis-
proportional French army reprisals and collective punishments targeting
the surrounding Algerian Muslim population (Horne 1977, pp. 119–123;
Djerbal 2003; Mauss-Copeaux 2013).
The tale of Ahmed Benyahia and his commemorative statue to Youcef
Zighoud unfolds during a riveting video interview, which was conducted
by historian Natalya Vince and filmmaker Walid Benkhaled in 2019.
Entitled “The long history of a short-lived statue,” their interview
launched an important YouTube series visually documenting Algeria’s
“Generation independence, Jil al-istiqlal.” This video shall form the scaf-
folding for this essay as well. Giving full rein to the narrator’s expressive
style, Vince and Benkhaled’s film interview techniques included keeping
the camera close to Benyahia’s face and excising distracting interviewer
questions. For 22 minutes, Benyahia took listeners through the convo-
luted transformations and peregrinations that his statue had undergone
from creation to entombment. More than that, he articulated what post-
colonial provenance research meant for a living Algerian memory of the
French colonial past through his own artistic creativity, which was con-
strained by difficulties in the creation of new public cultures.
Benyahia’s interview begins with the critique of an early statue of the
Emir Abdelkader (ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Muḥyiddı̄n, 1808–1883). It was
commissioned immediately after Algerian independence and Benyahia
takes issue with the poor execution, lack of proportion, and
unconvincingly scaled dimension that depicts the illustrious, emblematic

nineteenth-century hero inadequately. Sculpted by Italian artists, it consti-
tuted the first iteration of numerous reinforcements to the perception that
the ruling post-independence FLN party under President Houari
Boumedienne (1965–1978) had little confidence in the emergent young
and talented generation of Algerian artists (Nimis 2015). In contrast,
Benyahia states, the second and current statue of the Emir Abdelkader
from the 1980s possesses a singular aura attached to an object (Pouillon
2008, p. 166). The second iteration of the Emir on horseback with an
upraised sword represents an equipoised substitution because his
twentieth-century equestrian statue was positioned after 1962 in the same
place where the statue of General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, the Emir’s
nineteenth-century French nemesis, had stood. Both the central Algiers
square that bore Bugeaud’s name and his 1853 statue were French colo-
nial projects to reorganize public space carved out from the destruction of
the urban fabric of Algiers (Çelik 1999, pp. 63–72; Prochaska 1990;
Sessions 2006). Only the Emir’s statue reflects a spatial decolonization
through substitution, since the surrounding streetscape and architecture
have remained unchanged.
According to Benyahia, in order to work on the statue of Youcef
Zighoud, he circumvented authorities to head to the local eponymous vil-
lage of Zighoud Youcef (for the town, the surname precedes the hero’s
first name) where he had gained trust from Zighoud’s local resistance
fighters and combat veterans (mujahidin). While amassing the requisite
clay, he also visited Zighoud’s wife and sister, as well as his military com-
rades, to receive detailed descriptions of the hero’s face. For only a single
photo existed of him (see Fig. 3.1).2
Fig. 3.1 Photo of

Youcef Zighoud, original
sepia-toned, date
unknown (Wikipedia
Commons)
74 S. SLYOMOVICS
As the statue took shape, a local FLN official proudly informed the
regional hierarchy about the project. Benyahia was immediately ordered
to appear in person before various dignitaries, including representatives of
Algeria’s Office of Mujahidin in charge of former combat veterans. They
concluded that the village of Zighoud Youcef was too small for the statue:
“too small even for Constantine, he is a national figure.” The villagers
arrived to battle the authorities in the big city. The matter ended badly,
though. The mayor of the village was imprisoned on fabricated charges
and Benyahia was obliged to continue the work subject to surveillance by
FLN cadres in Constantine.
On August 20, 1970, on the fifteenth anniversary of Zighoud’s daring
military attack and the eighth anniversary of independence, the completed
statue was inaugurated to great fanfare and ceremony. Military escorts in
parade uniforms accompanied the statue, along with Zighoud’s former
comrades-in-arms attired in traditional robes and bearing wartime fire-
arms. Benyahia estimates 10,000 people were in attendance when the
statue was officially placed inside the FLN party headquarters in
Constantine (see Fig. 3.2).
Ten minutes into the interview, Benyahia finally intervenes in
Constantine’s multiple and successive war memorials with a critical
Fig. 3.2 Statue of Youcef Zighoud, August 20, 1970, inauguration in

Constantine (Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia, personal archives of
Ahmed Benyahia)
conception of topics such as provenance, heritage, and the decolonization

of public space. A shattered interwar French colonial “monument to the
dead” (monument aux morts) became not only the material source, but
also the background and condition of possibility for Benyahia’s Zighoud
statue. Benyahia claims that he cannibalized an already deposed French
colonial monument to the war dead of 1914–1918, which had been
erected in Constantine’s central Place de la Brèche in 1922. This monu-
ment comprised a tall column arising from a decorated plinth topped by
France’s emblematic Gallic cockerel, the coq Gallois (“À Constantine”
1922, p. 8). It was officially inaugurated on October 7, 1922, by General
Valentin surrounded by a contingent of French soldiers, the deputy mayor
Émile Morinaud (1865–1952), the bishop of Constantine, and various
colonial municipal officials and dignitaries amid the viewing local popula-
tion. The provenance of the Gallic cock resides in its transformed history
and symbolism, once imported from France to Algeria, for Benyahia’s
statue, specifically for its bronze composition. These aspects become cru-
cial to Benyahia’s capacity to undermine colonial practices and legacies
while keeping them alive.
With regards to provenance, Benyahia becomes the true heir to the
esthetic power of three-dimensional sculptural artforms regardless of their
origin in French colonial monument making. Benyahia’s appropriated
cockerel—more commonly called “rooster” in American English, itself a
euphemism for “cock,” thus overlapping with “penis”—refers to the
young adult male chicken. It is a male gallinaceous bird known by the
Latin tag Gallus gallus domesticus and, of course, it is notorious in French
as the coq Gaulois. France, French-speaking Belgium, Japan, and Portugal
have adopted the rooster as a national symbol, a fighting crowing animal
hierarchically at the top of the pecking order.3 A bronze cockerel statue
from Benin (okukor) attests to the bird’s cross-cultural powers: first looted
by British forces in 1897, then donated to a Cambridge University college
in 1905, it is currently featured in repatriation agreements with Nigeria.
In fact, the bird’s wings were pivotal for Benyahia’s 1970 sculpted oeuvre
(see Fig. 3.3).
When I started to do the bronze part of the statue […], someone said to me:
“There’s the wings of the Gallic cockerel, which have been impounded.”
And I remembered that, in 1962, there had been clashes opposing the army
of the frontiers supported by the Wilaya 1 [of the National Liberation Army]
against the Wilaya II in Constantine—basically, it was a race to take power,
76 S. SLYOMOVICS
Fig. 3.3 The war memorial of 1922, Constantine, Algeria. Caption: “Coq de
la Victoire” (Photo Agence Jomone, Algiers, circa 1957, no. 105, author’s
collection)
and they started killing each other in the city of Constantine. The frontier
army won, they were well equipped and well organized, and they occupied
Constantine. There was a huge crowd, and there was the Gallic cockerel,
and they started shooting at it. Except the Gallic cockerel did not abdicate,
it refused to fall! [Benyahia laughs.] So they brought in a ten-ton truck,
ropes, and cables and they pulled. The column broke into pieces and the
Gallic cockerel fell. The wings and the body were separated. They were
picked up and taken to the pound in the Bardo area of Constantine. When
I went there, I only found the wings, I didn’t find the body of the cockerel.
Since I would have kept it with all I know now about the importance of
memory. But there were only the wings, so I melted them down to mold
part of Zighout Youcef because I wanted to put the statue where the Gallic
cockerel had been. So in some way there is this fusion of history—the past
via the Gallic cockerel and the future by the statue of Zighoud. I made the
statue with the index finger pointing. (Vince and Benkhaled 2019,
10:51–13:13)
Intrinsic to Benyahia’s description of his own statue as a “fusion of his-

tory,” these continuities and ruptures are played out between settlers and
the colonized not only in the immediate aftermath of Algeria’s indepen-
dence but also after the French conquest in 1830. For example, the statue
of St. Augustine still standing in front of the basilica in his birthplace of
Annaba, Algeria, was cast in bronze melted down from the cannons of the
defeated Ottomans.4 To trace the violent fates awaiting some, but not all,
of French colonial statuary after 1962, art historian Nabila Oulebsir calls
for “mirror readings” (lecture en miroir):
A statue or monument collapses and one hundred thirty years of coloniza-

tion thus suddenly disappear. This “cleansing” of the artistic heritage is the
purification of urban space overloaded with traces and signs of an abolished
history, that of French Algeria. It started on the first Independence Day in
the capital through the recovery of former places of power and urban cen-
ters. In that brief breath of freedom granted to the Algerian population, one
of the first acts expressed by the latter to the proclamation of independence
was to march and demonstrate that same day at strategic points in the capital
of Algiers. Spaces and places that are not neutral as in the Place du
Gouvernement or the Boulevard de la République, public buildings like the
Post Office, constituted the urban and architectural scene of freedom
regained. (Oulebsir 2004, p. 310)
Oulebsir alludes to the “cleansing” time when Algerians recovered spatial

freedoms beginning with their first July 5, 1962, Independence Day cel-
ebrations also targeting major French civic and religious monuments: Joan
of Arc statues were famously draped with a veil and Algerian flags.
Algerian independence did not spare the country further battles
between warring factions of the Algerian army, which had carved the
country into six interior autonomous zones (wilaya) plus a separate Algiers
autonomous zone to battle the French army. In July 1962, Constantine as
the capital of the resistance zone Wilaya II was the site of internal struggles
among Algeria’s victors. Benyahia witnessed clashes that erupted on July
25 between the forces of Wilaya I commander Tahar Zbiri who was allied
with the powerful, better-equipped Algerian army positioned on the
Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers (armée des frontiers) against the resis-
tance fighters of Wilaya II from the country’s interior forces who followed
the opposing unsuccessful leadership under the Provisional Government
of the Algerian Republic: 25 people were killed and 30 wounded. A sec-
ond clash in Constantine on August 15 and 16 between the two
78 S. SLYOMOVICS
antagonistic parties claimed 100 additional deaths. Constantine’s local

fighters were on the losing side, which gave rise to repercussions for
Benyahia’s statue. Civil discord and post-independence chaos ensued until
the fall of 1962 when Constantine came under the sway of the army of the
frontiers, and local resistance fighters were sidelined. Algeria’s postcolo-
nial achievement of sovereignty was deeply contradictory, divisive, and
bitterly fought to the finish.
In Constantine, the capacity to enact internecine battles between fac-
tions of the Algerian army after independence devolved into an attack on
the crowing cockerel, the symbol of the departed French colonial military
order that had rendered invisible (or barely acknowledged) the sacrifices
of conscripted Algerian soldiers during two world wars. The French war
monument’s destruction is parsed as a violent form of reclaiming public
space on the part of the formerly colonized, as Oulebsir describes the
means of symbolic, playful, violent, or embodied manifestations of mir-
rored reversals during the early days of independence. Fanon certainly
points to the doubled colonial and postcolonial heritages of violence as an
integral aspect of cathartic emancipatory forces required to free the native
affectively from the status of colonial subject. The Algerian War of
Independence is deemed among the bloodier twentieth-century wars of
decolonization. Consequently, the post-independent period of decoloni-
zation was a ferocious process despite the absence of settlers who had
departed in 1962. More than half of the European settler population left
North Africa between January 1, 1962, and December 1963, a two-year
exodus representing nearly two-thirds of almost one million repatriated
who held French citizenship in Algeria (Choi 2016). Nonetheless, their
enduring and prominent architectural imprints continued to frame the
urban spaces of post-independent Constantine such as the Place de la
Brèche (“the Square of the Breach”) with the material remains of the war
memorial and the surrounding French colonial administrative buildings.
Even before the 1922 implantation of the Gallic rooster crowing
France’s victory over Germany in World War I, a war that had marked the
first time colonial North African troops were conscripted into a European
conflagration, the Place de la Brèche was implicated geopolitically in
France’s 1837 conquest of Constantine. It would result in the massive
reordering of the Algerian urban space into the upper European and lower
“native” quarters.5 Algerian troops and city dwellers under Ahmed Bey of
Constantine fought valiantly against the French invasions during the
1830s, even successfully repulsing the first assault. Only following massive
bombardments of the city were Constantine’s fortifications breached by

Lieutenant Colonel Louis Juchault de Lamoricière (1806–1865). Finally,
he entered the vanquished city at the head of French army troops on
October 13, 1837. Architecturally, his posthumous imprint as an urbanist
determined the shape of many Algerian towns and cities. He designated
separate native Algerian enclaves, the hallmark racial separations of the set-
tler colony: “Natural segregation was increased by the decision of
Lamoricière to confine (cantonner) the Arabs in isolated neighborhoods
that later become ‘Negro villages’ (villages nègres)” (Julien 1964, p. 255).
Lamoricière was a principal architect in every sense of the word of the
1830 conquest of Algeria and the subsequent subjugation of the territory.
In addition to the breach of Constantine’s defenses in 1837, when ele-
vated to the rank of general by 1847, he famously captured Algeria’s great
resistance leader, the Emir Abdelkader.
After the French conquest of Constantine, the city’s redesign pro-
ceeded apace with radical planning to realign and level sections of the
precolonial ramparts, which required eliminating the city gates of Bab El
Oued and Bab Djedid. The year of conquest, Constantine reputedly pos-
sessed some 59 mosques, 35 zaouias (buildings housing Sufi confraterni-
ties), four medersas (school mosques), and nine marabouts (saints’ shrines).
As elsewhere throughout Algeria, a good deal of the native Algerian archi-
tecture was demolished or repurposed (Pagand 1989, p. 124). The
eighteenth-century mosque of Souk el Ghzel (“market of spun wool”)
was transformed into the Catholic church of Notre-Dame-des-Sept-
Douleurs in 1839, consecrated a cathedral in 1876, and reverted after
independence to the mosque of Hassan Bey, the name of its founder-
builder (Boudjada 2003). The twelfth-century mosque of Sidi Makhlouf
was destroyed and replaced between 1849 and 1854 with the seat of the
newly built neoclassical-style prefecture and town hall (Badjadja 2011).
The central Place de la Brèche was created and enlarged by the addition of
three main streets bored through the winding streets of the precolonial
Muslim city known as the medina. These dramatic constructions resulted
in a military version of Haussmanization in the colonies, one that pre-
ceded and was concurrent with Georges-Eugène Haussman’s renovation
of Parisian streets through similar acts of percément, the favored French
planning word for penetrating, regularizing, and “piercing” into the urban
fabric. Whether in Paris, Algiers, or Constantine, military engineering
shaped massive urban clearance and destruction between 1840 and 1870
(Çelik 1997, pp. 26–38).
80 S. SLYOMOVICS
The local population was well aware that the Place de la Brèche marked
the spot where the invasion breached the city’s defenses, and that this
open square was a second breach to separate a new European city from the
Algerian medina. The square, its name, and the built French colonial
architecture laid over the ruins of the former Arab-Berber-Muslim town
reflected the enduring violence that befell the city of Constantine. Entire
Algerian Muslim streets and homes were razed to make way for settler-
colonial architectural structures, including the main square cordoned off
by the surrounding colonial courthouse and post office among which the
people of Constantine still live. The French colonial administration chose
to erect the elongated war memorial, a phallic shaft plus the cockerel on
the site of the breach in the ramparts, which signaled the fall of the city
(Foura and Foura 2003).
Inevitably, Lamoricière, the conqueror of Constantine, was commemo-
rated with a statue in a square of Constantine created through demolition
and named after him. His statue tells another violent story in which the
French Army removed his sculpture mere days after independence. Alain
Amato, a repatriated settler from Constantine to France, was the first to
document the movement of over several hundred significant military and
religious statues from Algeria to France including Lamoricière’s. All of
them were brought to the metropole as part of a so-called salvage mission
of repatriation.
Then came independence, and in one night from July 8th to 9th, 1962, the
statue was toppled and shipped to Marseilles by the French Army Engineering
Corps [le Génie de l’Armée française]. It stayed on the docks of Marseille
until June 1963. It was transferred to Nantes, the Minister of the Armies
having assigned it to the hometown of de Lamoricière. Upon arrival it was
stored in sections in the warehouse of Moutonnerie. About a year later Mr.
Pennetier, Mayor of Saint-Philbert de Grand Lieu and general counsel of
the Loire-Atlantique, learned of its existence and had the idea to claim it for
his town. There is indeed a place called “La Moricière” two kilometers from
Saint-Philbert, from which the family takes its name. Five years would pass
during which Pennetier actively lobbied and on June 29, 1969, rewarded
for his tenacity, he inaugurated the statue in front of two thousand people.
The body of General Lamoricière lies in the chapel of the cemetery of Saint-
Philibert. (Amato 1979, p. 187)
Thus far, moveable French colonial art in public spaces had been violently
implanted over razed Algerian spaces. They would then sustain more
violence through French disassembly (destruction in the form of spolia-

tion on behalf of repatriation), Algerian disassembly (partial demolition),
and ultimately Algerian reuse by Benyahia’s statue.
Commemoration Through Street Renaming

or Statues?
To underscore a theory of provenance that accounts for the improbable

destructive events that overtook his statue, Benyahia narrates in the afore-
mentioned YouTube video interview that the mujahidin (war veterans) at
that time asked why he had created Zighoud’s statue with a pointing
index finger:
And I said, “it’s a composition, it’s just like that.” And they said “No, we
think that you wanted to say to us: “You’ve betrayed the Algerian revolu-
tion, the mujahidin of independent Algeria, or independent Algeria has
betrayed the martyrs.” I said, “That’s your reading!” And I think that’s one
of the reasons—but the fundamental reason was given to me by President
Boumedienne in person, because I met him in 1975 at the Cherchell
Military Academy. He said to me, “Ya fanan, artist, France has left for us
traps, mines. One of them is regionalism and tribalism. If we erect the statue
of Zighoud now, the Kabyles are going to say, why didn’t you do Amirouche
[“Colonel” Amirouche Aït Hamouda, 1926–1939]? And the Chaouia,
why didn’t you do Ben Boulaïd [Mostefa Ben-Boulaïd, 1917–1956]?”
(Vince and Benkhaled 2019, 13:20–14:22)
Benyahia returned to Paris assuming that his work on the statue was com-
plete. However, he learnt afterward that a certain Colonel Abdelghani in
charge of the Constantine military region had ordered his Zighoud statue
to be removed. One midnight in 1972, it disappeared into waiting trucks
never to be seen again until 1986. Thanks to a university conference orga-
nized in Constantine on how to write history, a delegation of administra-
tors requested his statue’s whereabouts in order to reinstall it for the
forthcoming August 20 commemoration of Youcef Zighoud. He informed
them that it was their responsibility to find it:
And when they found it, surprise! The statue of Zighoud Youcef, his sym-
bol, had been guillotined! The body on one side, the head on the other. We
didn’t know what happened. They found it in a garage somewhere, they
didn’t tell me where. So it had to be restored. I got in touch with an old
82 S. SLYOMOVICS
welder from the Bardo area and we did what we could to restore it. Just as
we were going to install it, where the cockerel had been, a telegram arrived
from the offices of President Chadli Bendjedid stating: “Any public installa-
tion of the statue of Zighoud Youcef postponed.” And so for a second time
we couldn’t install it. It stayed like that. We restored it, and we took it back
to its starting point at the headquarters of the party. And it stayed there.
Two years later, there was the revolution of ’88, multi-partyism, the FLN
disappeared. This huge building before becoming the headquarters of the
party had been the Constantine Chamber of Commerce and Industry dur-
ing the colonial period. It’s a very beautiful building and the FLN did not
want to give it back for political reasons. They decided to give it to Justice,
to make it a court. So they had to get rid of the statue. (Vince and Benkhaled
2019, 17:36–21:53)
So where is the statue now, as Benyahia recounts its latest location?
For a good while the building [where his statue was housed] was empty. I
met a friend who was director of the land registry and I said to him that the
statue has been abandoned and he said to me, “I’m going to make it public
property (bien public), so no one can touch it anymore.” It came into public
ownership (propriété public) with a legal existence. It was given an identity.
Because Zighoud Youcef on his own wasn’t enough! Then one day they
decided to decommission the building and reallocate it. I went to see the
FLN, the administration and I said to them, “Listen, this history, this statue
has really had its ups and downs. Either Zighoud Youcef is a hero of the
revolution as we’ve been told and the statue should be installed in public, or
Zighoud Youcef is a traitor and I’m ready to melt the statue down. There is
a third solution, you give it to me and I’ll put it in my garden.” And we left
things like that. Then one day I was at home, and I heard my children say,
“Dad, Dad, your statue.” It was on the news, the Minister of Mujahidin
[war veterans], Mr. Abadou, without asking my opinion or anything, had
decided to install it in the Martyrs’ Cemetery. […] And they made a pathetic
plinth and they installed it any old way and it’s there in the Martyrs’
Cemetery until today. (Vince and Benkhaled 2019, 19:32–21:14)
Benyahia’s statue both reproduces and represents local anticolonial ways

of knowledge unacceptable to Algeria’s leadership in the early decades of
independence. Not only did he restructure unequal relations between the
colonizer and the colonized, but he also acknowledged the colonizers
while subsuming them physically into the sculpture. The relevant back-
ground to Benyahia’s remarkable appearing and disappearing Zighoud
statue is the complementary history of endless, dizzying name changes for
streets, towns, schools, and more, which characterize regime changes in
both colonial and decolonizing historical moments. Acts of conquest,

destruction, settler-colonial land expropriation and appropriation in cities
and the countryside were made material through valorizing the French
settler-conqueror-pioneers’ dominion over the Algerian landscape (Çelik
1997, 1999).
In addition to monuments, French place-names for newly colonized
urban spaces and rebaptized streets were invented from the 1830 con-
quest. Constantine’s legal place-name changes, termed “hommages pub-
lics,” fill file boxes at the colonial archives of the Archives d’Outre-Mer
(ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, France. Records of city council delibera-
tions describe bureaucratically the ways in which the colonial municipality
honored the European, but rarely the Algerian Muslim dead of World War
I (ANOM GGA 6G/2). A high point for changing names was reached
between the two world wars.6 Streets, schools, and squares were dubbed
for prominent settlers, army divisions, generals of the Algerian conquest,
and famous French historical actors such as Joan of Arc. In turn, post-
independence Algerian renaming reversed colonial history, reverting to
precolonial Arab-Berber names or recreating new toponyms and extending
saint names beyond the local shrine. Zighoud Youcef became a frequent
replacement name of an Algerian hero for French colonists and generals.7
In Constantine, the Boulevard Joly de Brésillon is positioned like a sweep-
ing street-cum-promenade overlooking the valleys below, as it descends
into the Place de la Brèche and skirts the 1922 cockerel monument.8 After
independence, Joly de Brésillon was renamed Boulevard Zighoud Youcef,
as was the town of Condé-Smendou where Zighoud was born. The Place
de la Brèche was renamed “the First of November Square” in commemo-
ration of the launch of the Algerian revolution on November 1, 1954. As
with many new name assignments for central city squares throughout
Algeria, Constantine locals have retained the colonial name of Place de la
Brèche, which is emblematic of the population’s resilience in assimilating
and repopulating the former European quarter built on the destruction of
parts of their medina. Former colonial names have often endured through
habit, affection, and rejection of new cumbersome decolonizing rubrics.
To stop Benyahia’s statue from appearing in public, President
Boumedienne intervened through practices of material dememorialization
at the behest of the state with directives against regional heroes in three-
dimensional form. It is noteworthy that Zighoud’s sole photo (Fig. 3.1)
continued to recirculate as sketches and reproductions of the original
image during the annual August 20 memorializing day in the Constantine
region. Boumedienne’s refusal to acknowledge valorous regional actors in
84 S. SLYOMOVICS
sculpture (while promoting place-name replacements) is no longer true.

Since Boumedienne’s death in 1978, commissioned statues of Algeria’s
revolutionary heroes have proliferated, many of which are prominently on
view in nodal urban sites. In some towns, heroic statues adorn traffic
roundabouts as Algeria’s cities expand exponentially outward from their
central core. These commemorative statues are often part of state partner-
ships with municipalities and governorates in the service of public art proj-
ects to decorate or redecorate newer districts as well as colonial urban
cores. For example, the statue of Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–1995) deco-
rates the colonial-era square of Tlemcen city center. It was erected in 2016
to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Ben Bella, Algeria’s first president
from 1963 until 1965, was deposed by Boumedienne, just as the Tlemcen
city square deposed the town’s French colonial war memorial and it was
removed to the French Var town of Saint-Aygulf (Amato 1979,
pp. 177–179). In Oran, Algeria’s second largest city, the statue of the
town’s local resistance hero, Ahmed Zabana, graces a traffic circle along
the extended seaside boardwalk. Both are the works of Algerian sculptor
Mohamed Karoub, but unlike Benyahia’s statue infused with genuine
French colonial bronze, they are burnished with patinated bronze resin or
fake bronze.9 Versions of the Emir Abdelkader on horseback with sword
aloft, itself the Algiers replacement statue for the conquest General
Bugeaud, populate new urban neighborhoods throughout the country.
Anticolonial Sculpture Through the Reproduction

of Colonial Statuary
What are French Algeria’s colonial statues: art in public space, a lament for
a lost French Algerian empire, objects with a soul or a visual record of the
Algerian native and the European settler who died together for France in
two world wars? What national traditions of sculpture do these statues and
war memorials invent and what questions confront the different viewers?
How have European forms of war memorializations, formed from the
Franco-Prussian war and two world wars, emerged in contemporary
Algeria out of interactions with colonization, extended mandatory mili-
tary conscription of the colonized, and Franco-Algerian postcolonial
relationships?
An overabundance of theories and speculative approaches grapples with
these questions. For historian David Prochaska, the same placement and
creation of war memorials, which have proliferated through Algeria since
independence, speak to a “clear-cut case of a cultural pattern which has

been transferred to a different social and historical context and filled with
a different but analogous content” (Prochaska 1990, p. 209). Étienne
Balibar conceives of Benyahia’s statue in ways not otherwise applicable to
Franco-Algerian relations through recourse to division into fractionated
nations: “Algeria, France: one or two nations? Algeria and France, taken
together, do not make two, but something like one-and-a-half. Algeria is
irreducibly present in France just as France is in Algeria” (Balibar 1998,
pp. 73–88).
Alternatively, Benyahia’s monument might be an example of “palimp-
sest memoryscapes”—Paul Basu’s term for monuments erected in Sierra
Leone, a former British crown colony (Basu 2007). Another helpful com-
pound term of his is the intentional “postcolonial pastiche,” in which the
word “pastiche” possesses a positive valence: it is a “collage” never a post-
modern mimetic pastiche or an act of “shallow imitation, forgery and trav-
esty” (Basu 2013, p. 11). It is evident that Benyahia’s statue represents
anticolonial heroism, but at the same time it reproduces colonial statuary
conventions in accordance with French wartime memorialization. Since
Benyahia has witnessed and confronted both colonial and postcolonial
forms of violence in this regard, his statue seems to depict these layered
histories of brutality, all the while encoding meaningful reciprocal
exchanges among at least three warring parties. Moreover, he exemplifies
a certain receptivity to the colonizer’s art in ways that François Pouillon
suggests that Algerian art and art historical processes must pay attention
to “complicities” (Pouillon 2002, p. 142). He describes them as follows:
“internal fissures and the interaction processes that are part and parcel of
all relations, including those between dominating and dominated”
(Pouillon 2002, p. 142). Pouillon goes on to say:
That complicities do exist between them [is] the ransom to be paid for a
history that is never truly heroic. … To put it another way, rather than con-
sidering the tautological art of identity lost and regained, we would instead
be attending to real spaces filled with relational knots that are always difficult
to untangle and that in any case cannot be reduced to a confrontation
between self and other, past and present. (Pouillon 2002, p. 142)
Perhaps, one conclusion is that the history of Algerian conscription and

army service during two world wars is reflected in allegiances to France’s
esthetic objects dotting the Algerian landscape. War memorials possess an
aura that is both national and local, both colonial and postcolonial, not to
86 S. SLYOMOVICS
mention emotionally intense. On occasion, they are shared by natives and

former settlers. This complication involves counterintuitive perspectives
that incorporate traditions of monument making in post-independent
Algeria. Generated from, and generative of, Algerian cultural decolonizing
compulsions in relation to French imperialism and colonialism, the prov-
enance of Benyahia’s sculpture projects past violence onto the experience
of the present. Other features of provenance are that the Zighoud statue
registers endless Algerian deferrals despite Benyahia’s implacable decolo-
nizing project to install a worthy Algerian statue where the Gallic cockerel
atop its column crowed over his hometown Constantine square for forty
years. These anticolonial and postcolonial formations of artistic knowl-
edge speak to the surprising persistence of his statue of Zighoud Youcef,
standing upright with the bronze head reattached to the body, in its latest,
yet perhaps not last, resting place in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery,
Fig. 3.4 Emptied plinth of the French war memorial (Photograph by Ahmed
Benyahia. Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia)
Fig. 3.5 Zighoud Youcef statue in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery, February

2020 (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission of Ahmed
Benyahia)
88 S. SLYOMOVICS
even as the decorated, yet emptied, plinth of the French colonial war
memorial remains in place in the Place de la Brèche (see Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).
Notes
1. Research for this article was funded by the Fondation IMéRA, Aix-Marseille
University, during a fall semester 2019 residency in Marseille, France. I am
most grateful for Ahmed Benyahia’s comments, permissions, archival pho-
tographs, and participation in this essay. I thank Natalya Vince and Walid
Benkhaled for their video, permission to reproduce materials, and readings
of this essay. All quotes in English by Ahmed Benyahia are drawn from their
subtitled video and numbered according to their online time codes.
2. This single known photo of Youcef Zighout is the public domain in Algeria
and the United States at: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zighoud_Youcef#/
media/Fichier:Zighout_Youcef.jpg.
3. Archaeologist Naomi Sykes (2012) understands the global spread of the
chicken (of which the rooster stands as the adult male) into new societies
was more because of cockfighting prowess and less so for meat: “These
introduced animals, so different from the native fauna and coming from
remote realms, were seemingly imbued with cosmological power.
Everywhere the chicken was introduced—Asia, Africa, America and
Europe—it was quickly incorporated into magic and ritual practices”
(p. 165).
4. One of the most impressive equestrian statues erected in Algiers to the Duc
d’Orléans was similarly fabricated from melted-down Ottoman cannons.
Labeled “a neat reuse of imperial booty” by Aldrich (2005, p. 170), it was
removed to France after Algerian independence and eventually re-sited in
the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
5. See “Ordonnance of 9 June 1844”: “Ordonnance du Roi qui règle le mode
d’administration de la ville de Constantine, et régularise les prohibitions
dont sont frappées les transactions immobilières dans cette ville.” Article 1
maps out the urban racial divides: “La ville de Constantine sera divisée en
deux quartiers, un quartier indigène et un quartier européen” (Corps du
droit francais ou recueil complet des lois, decrets, ordonnances 1847, vol. 8,
p. 188). This ordonnance effectively launched the creation of the European
city, allowing settlers to move in, and ended the military jurisdiction over
Constantine which had hitherto prohibited European settlement. See also
Parks (2019, pp. 115–116).
6. All documents for name changes were based on “Ordonnance du 10 juillet
1816” originally requiring ministerial oversight but as of 1920, naming
powers were passed on to the prefecture or local city council, thereby
accounting for the interwar frenzy of new names.
7. Parenthetically in France, battles over street names related to Algeria con-

tinue to beleaguer French municipal authorities faced with public outcries
about removing or restoring a difficult heritage commemorating contested
people or events in Franco-Algerian history. French streets named for March
19, the date of the Evian Accords that signaled the process toward indepen-
dence, are contested. For former settlers and their allied populations both
the street and the date are signs of mourning, not celebration.
8. According to a nostalgic post by a European settler of Constantine, Joly de
Brésillon was an early colonist from the 1850s allotted land for a cotton
concession that never materialized: http://les-quatre-elements.over-blog.
com/2017/05/le-boulevard-joly-de-bresillon-constantine.html.
9. I thank Amine Kasmi, professor in the Department of Architecture at the
University of Tlemcen, for this information.
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———. 2014. Une autre ‘Union Sacrée’? Commémorer la Grande Guerre dans
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début de la colonisation (1827–1871). Paris: Presses universitaires françaises.
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1914–1918 War Memorials. In Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and
Visions of Empire in France, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, 184–194.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Provenance]. Museumsjournal 4: 8–11.
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———. 2008. Les images de l’émir Abdelkader: de l’Algérie coloniale à l’Algérie
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KGfqoHOTAfLY.
CHAPTER 4
Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing
and Defrancophonizing Francophonie
Dominic Thomas
We are in a country that is called the French language…

—Alain Mabanckou, “Interview with Alain Mabanckou” (Manteau
2013, p. 15)
During the first 18 months of his presidency, Emmanuel Macron visited

the African continent on no less than ten occasions, obligatory stops for
every French leader. These visits provide French presidents with the
opportunity to formulate meaningful statements about French-African
historical relations while delineating the contour of future interaction.
Successive leaders commonly seek to demarcate themselves from their pre-
decessors, introducing policies that herald the new turning points in their
affairs with former colonies. Of course, such interventions are not without
controversy. More often than not, they are defined by a disquieting pater-
nalism and a narrow conceptualization of African culture and society, as
evidenced in the speeches of former presidents François Mitterrand,
Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and François Hollande.
D. Thomas (*)
e-mail: dominict@humnet.ucla.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_4
94 D. THOMAS
The concern with maintaining France’s influence in Africa has often

served to explain and underscore “France’s own struggle with ‘modernity
and globalization’ and failure to recalibrate its foreign policy according to
new geopolitical coordinates” (Thomas 2013, p. 104). Indeed, the chal-
lenge has always been to reconcile colonial history with the demands that
come with defining these new alignments. President Macron announced
on November 28, 2017, during his visit to Burkina Faso that “I am from
a generation of French people for whom the crimes of European coloniza-
tion cannot be disputed and are part of our history” (Macron 2017). Of
course, he was not the first French president to acknowledge the criminal-
ity of the colonial enterprise.1 After all, Sarkozy had claimed in his speech
at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, on July 26, 2007, that
“no one can ask of the generations of today to expiate this crime perpe-
trated by past generations. No one can ask of the sons to repent for the
mistakes of their fathers” (Sarkozy 2007).2 President Macron’s angle on
the question was significant because he pointed to the fact that he was the
first French president born after the official end of French colonialism.
This provided a new dimension to the age-old challenge of reframing
postcolonial French-African relations. Therefore, the goal of this chapter
is to explore these considerations, assess their broader implications, and
gauge the credibility of these measures, all the while evaluating what the
multiple responses from intellectuals, scholars, and writers reveal concern-
ing the status of postcolonial studies in France today.
Reframing Diplomacy
The focal point of President Macron’s global diplomatic strategy has been
the promotion of the French language. He took the opportunity to out-
line the framework for this policy objective in his so-called Speech at the
University of Ouagadougou. “The challenge for francophonie,” he said on
this occasion, “is the will to reinvent a happy future in our shared lan-
guage, so that we are not limited to the tragic events of the past” (Macron
2017). I distinctly remember this speech, especially the moment when he
announced—much to my surprise—that he had enlisted Franco-Congolese
writer Alain Mabanckou in this recently unveiled initiative. I knew for a
fact that Mabanckou had not accepted an earlier solicitation to participate
in this state-sanctioned project. Furthermore, a cursory glance at his writ-
ings, social media postings, newspaper articles, and conference interven-
tions provides ample evidence to substantiate a long-standing critique of
4 BIBLIODIVERSITY: DENATIONALIZING AND DEFRANCOPHONIZING… 95
the limitations of institutional francophonie. In his “Open Letter to

Emmanuel Macron” from January 15, 2018, Mabanckou reiterated his
concerns with the latest incarnation of state-sanctioned language policy:
“What has really changed? Unfortunately, francophonie is still perceived as
the logical continuation of France’s foreign policy in its former colonies”
(Mabanckou 2018a). All things considered, then, it seems incumbent on
us to evaluate President Macron’s attempts at appropriating a well-known
francophone writer, all the more so given the complexity of colonial expe-
riences and their historical legacies.
Kenyan author Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o remains the incontrovertible refer-
ence when it comes to assessing the symbiotic connections between impe-
rial motivations and the role of European languages. His writings highlight
the nefarious ways in which linguistic practices strengthen the expansionist
apparatus, most notably in his book of essays Decolonizing the Mind: The
Politics of Language in African Literature. Here, he argues as follows:
The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a
people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social envi-
ronment, indeed in relation to the entire universe … Unfortunately writers
who should have been mapping paths out of that linguistic encirclement of
their continent also came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of
the languages of imperialist imposition. (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, pp. 4–5)
Ngũgı ̃ is forced to conclude as follows:
The language of African literature cannot be discussed meaningfully outside

the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demand-
ing our attention and a problem calling for a resolution. On the one hand is
imperialism and its colonial and neo-colonial phases … But on the other,
and pitted against it, are the ceaseless struggles of the African people to lib-
erate their economy, politics and culture. (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, p. 4)
Consensus has never been reached on this issue. For example, disparities
have been recorded between responses in anglophone as opposed to fran-
cophone circles, with less antagonism in the latter around the question
and greater acceptance of the potentialities of French. Whereas some fran-
cophone writers have experimented with other languages—Senegalese
author Boris Boubacar Diop published the novel Doomi Golo (The Hidden
Notebooks) in Wolof in 2006—the publication of the manifesto “Pour une
‘littérature-monde’ en français” (“Manifesto for a ‘World Literature’ in
96 D. THOMAS
French”) in March 2007 (to which we shall return shortly) summarized

and was indicative of the situation given that some forty-four multina-
tional authors came together to embrace the diversity of the French lan-
guage as a medium for cultural expression. Invariably, though, each
linguistic sphere “came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of
the languages of Europe” (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, p. 5). With this in mind, President
Macron’s statements have breathed new life into this long-standing con-
versation, and reactions have been quite different around the globe. This
can be partially explained by the emergence of a new generation of think-
ers whose work has coalesced around postcolonial issues.
The field of postcolonial studies in France has been defined by suspi-
cion, “rejection,” “reservations,” and “reticence” on the part of the
French academy, a reaction that can be explained by the widely held per-
ception that the critical apparatus comes “from elsewhere,” and that the
critical tools it offers do not somehow apply to France (Coquery-Vidrovitch
2017, p. 249).3 This observation is questionable particularly when one
considers that several key postcolonial theorists—Homi Bhabha, Paul
Gilroy, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty—
have not even been translated into French until very recently. However, as
French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch explains, the locations in
which these “tools” and “apparatus” were first conceptualized is second-
ary to their pertinence to the cultural, political, and social analysis of com-
plex historical relationships.
It is a mode of pluralistic thought that consists in rereading the past and

using it in a present that is swollen with a diverse array of legacies. Colonialism
plays a role and has left a trace on contemporary society. Those traces are not
the same for everyone, and they differ for the formerly colonized, the for-
mer colonizers, and even within those two groups. Such legacies are both
contradictory and inseparable. (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2017, p. 246)
In reality, though, the disparaging reception of postcolonial studies has

more to do with the difficulty that France has in coming to terms with
colonialism itself (Bancel et al. 2017). One indicator of this could be
found in 2005 when the French National Assembly voted on a decree (that
was later abrogated), namely the Debré Bill 2005-158: “Law concerning
the recognition of the Nation and national contribution in favor of repa-
triated French,” which reaffirmed the “positive aspects of the French colo-
nial experience” (Legifrance n.d.). This situation is all the more paradoxical
given the degree to which French and francophone thinkers have infused
the canon of postcolonial thought, as corroborated by the works of Fabien
Eboussi Boulaga, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Frantz Fanon,
Édouard Glissant, Albert Memmi, Valentin Mudimbe, Jean-Paul Sartre,
and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Thomas 2005). Today, many of the most
influential intellectuals, philosophers, and writers concerned with postco-
lonial issues not only write in French but also hail from a broad and diverse
range of geographic regions (Congo, Djibouti, France, Réunion, Senegal,
South Africa, the United States, Zimbabwe, and so on). They include,
most notably, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Elsa Dorlin, Nadia Yala Kisukidi,
Alain Mabanckou, Achille Mbembe, Léonora Miano, Sabelo Ndlovu-
Gatsheni, Felwine Sarr, Françoise Vergès, and Abdourahman Waberi
(Dorlin 2006; Mbembe 2010b; Miano 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013;
Vergès 2019). Together, their pioneering works have set in motion the
process of decolonizing mindsets while revisiting, as Felwine Sarr has
described it, the idea of a colonial library, or the vast historical accumula-
tion of constructs and stereotypes that continue to shape perceptions of
the African continent today. Their works delineate the contours of a post-
colonial world in which cultural, economic, political, and social realities do
not correlate with the monolithic ways in which politicians and policymak-
ers conceptualize the African continent and francophonie.4
A History of Violence
The fundamental point of contention when it comes to the question of
language within the French context has to do with the apparent insepara-
bility between language as a hegemonic tool at the service of nation-
building imperatives and the desire to modify this paradigm. This concern
is expressed in calls for greater bibliodiversity in publishing, distribution,
and translation in line with principles ratified by UNESCO’s 2005
Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural
Expressions: “Bibliodiversity is cultural diversity applied to the world of
books. Echoing biodiversity, it refers to the critical diversity of products
(books, scripts, eBooks, apps, and oral literature) made available to read-
ers” (Alliance Internationale des Éditeurs Indépendants 2018). To this
end, a collective of publishers and bookshop owners published a column
in Le Monde newspaper on February 20, 2018. In response to President
Macron’s project, they stated: “Francophonie must be enshrined in biblio-
diversity, and we are working every day to achieve that goal. This is the
98 D. THOMAS
vision of francophonie we subscribe to, the only one that will make people
more curious, tolerant, and open-minded” (Le Monde 2018).
These debates must be analyzed against the historical backdrop of colo-
nial violence. Achille Mbembe has convincingly demonstrated how “the
various histories of slavery and the history of different forms of coloniza-
tion confirm that these institutions were veritable manufacturers of differ-
ence. In each and every case, difference was the result of a complex process
of abstraction, objectification and hierarchization” (Mbembe 2010a,
p. 119). The French colonial project, bolstered by its mission civilisatrice
and the desire to impart universal values, was necessarily cultural and polit-
ical. Education and language policies furnished the outline of these hierar-
chical arrangements while implementing deliberately mechanisms that
marginalized and subsumed other languages. This dimension has been key
to positions embraced by Ngũgı ̃ and others who ask critically: “What is the
difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperi-
alism and a writer who says Africa cannot do without European lan-
guages?” (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, p. 26).
The logic here is hard to contest. Interesting to ask, then, is why fran-
cophone authors have, for the most part, interpreted this dynamic differ-
ently. For example, the Congolese novelist and playwright Sony Labou
Tansi understood that the relationship was, at the origin at least, defined
by violence, but he was quick to detect the intrinsic vulnerability of the
colonial infrastructure, the futility of its efforts aimed at annexing and
commandeering the “natives,” and in view of that to relinquish any senti-
ment of dependence. In an interview with Ifé Orisha, Sony Labou Tansi
explained this issue as follows:
I write in French because that is the language in which the people I speak
for were raped, that is the language in which I myself was raped. I remember
my virginity … One must say that if between myself and French there is
anyone who is in a position of strength, it is not French, but I. I have never
had recourse to French, it is rather French that has had recourse to me.
(Orisha 1986, p. 30)
These comments are especially interesting when one considers recent sta-
tistics published in a much-cited 2014 report by the International
Organization of Francophonie (OIF) concerning French-language usage:
“The future of the French language (of Francophonie) lies firmly in the
hands of Africans” (OIF 2014). It estimates that by 2050 roughly 80
percent of French speakers would be Africans. It is impossible to ignore

the strategic implications of President Macron’s policy ambitions against
this projection.
The term francophonie was coined in 1880 by the French geographer
Onésime Reclus. The OIF, founded in 1970 in the aftermath of French
colonialism, extends membership to an international community of peo-
ple using the French language. In this case, though, membership essen-
tially replicates France’s historical influence overseas. It has deep
colonial roots.
The International Organization of La Francophonie represents one of the

biggest linguistic zones in the world. Its members share more than just a
common language. They also share the humanist values promoted by the
French language. The French language and its humanist values represent
the two cornerstones on which the International Organization of La
Francophonie is based. (OIF 2014)
Though representing countries and regions that commonly use the French
language, the organization has come under growing scrutiny, since its
implicit verticality toward the French state remains a concern. As we shall
see, the association of humanist value with the French language has also
been contested just like the political role of the organization. The France
Diplomatie website confirms with its statements relating to the role of
francophonie why this distrust is not unjustified: “a bilateral policy which
aims to raise the profile of French abroad,” “a multilateral policy which
aims to bring French-speaking countries together as a political commu-
nity,” and “[t]his institution contributes to peace, democracy, human
rights, the promotion of French and cultural diversity, and the develop-
ment of shared and sustainable prosperity” (France Diplomatie 2019).
Together, these declarations, measures, and statements serve to con-
firm how successive governments had recourse to language policy as an
intrinsic component of diplomacy, as a “the key tool for promoting one’s
civilization” (Védrine and Moïsi 2001, p. 87). Likewise, former Minister
of Foreign Affairs Hubert Védrine once argued: “Globalization develops
according to principles that correspond neither to French tradition nor to
French culture: mistrust of the state, individualism removed from the
republican tradition, the inevitable reinforcement of the ‘indispensable’
role of the United States, and the English language” (Védrine and Moïsi
2001, p. 17). While the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, established in 1959
100 D. THOMAS
under the leadership of the novelist André Malraux, had previously shared
this goal of promoting, protecting, and sponsoring culture in order to
fulfill the Gaullist project of elevating the grandeur, namely “France’s
inordinate soft power,” the imperative today is to “remain relevant, and a
paradoxical embracing of the strategic importance of a global community
of French speakers” (Barnes and Thomas 2017, pp. 1, 4).
Reframing Francophonie
President Macron announced in his welcoming address at the seventeenth
summit of the OIF held in Armenia on October 11, 2018, that “[t]his
language belongs to none of us, it is the property of all, and has today
emancipated itself from its former link with the French nation in order to
welcome all imaginaries”—words that echoed the speech previously deliv-
ered in Ouagadougou (Macron 2018).
I refuse to refer always back to the same perceptions of the past. There has
been fighting, there have been errors and crimes, there have been great
things and happy stories. But I am deeply convinced that our duty is not to
make matters worse, our duty is not to stay in this past, but to live this gen-
eration’s adventure wholeheartedly. (Macron 2017)
President Macron may have embraced a different approach, appointing

the Franco-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani as his personal representative
for francophonie, rather than a civil servant or a politician to what had
previously been a minister or secretary of state-level appointment.
However, the implications remain questionable. In fact, they have been
largely debunked by authors and intellectuals. The deliberate linking of
language with colonial history has ensured that the “language question” is
back front and center in debates pertaining to the postcolonial era. Yet,
this past is certainly not foreclosed, age-old grievances persist, and not
everyone agrees that simple gestures are either adequate or sufficient in
order to turn the page on history. The lack of agreement over the colonial
past means that its legacy continues to haunt contemporary France.
The connection of the French language to colonialism and imperial
ambitions remains an irrefutable fact of history. Linguistic practices find
themselves anchored in mechanisms that operate in such a way as to insti-
tutionalize hierarchical power relations between a center in the Global
North and a periphery in the Global South. The central role ascribed to
language in French foreign policy today, partially as a way to respond to

the imperatives of globalization, is associated as well with alarming
instances of protectionism (in the discourse of the Far Right) and in the
arguments made by advocates of defensive identities (Bancel et al. 2015).
These groups have argued that France is in “decline,” pointing to demo-
graphic changes resulting from immigration and birth rates, a loss of polit-
ical influence, and shifting cultural frameworks, factors that, in their view,
are the result of decolonization and a “reverse colonization,” eventually
culminating in the “replacement” or “substitution” of French citizens of
“pure white stock” as the product of uncontrolled immigration (Camus
2012).5 These issues are relevant to postcolonial questions today and
require new frameworks which are capable of engaging with such danger-
ous arguments. The range of interlocutors in these debates has expanded
tangibly, and a wide range of conclusions have followed suit. For Ngũgı ̃,
the question posed itself initially in terms of the ways in which languages
operated simultaneously as “a means of communication and a carrier of
the culture,” such that accepting European languages contributed inevita-
bly to a “fatalistic logic” that would ultimately subsume other languages
to their imperial conquerors (Ngũgı ̃ 1986, pp. 7, 13).
Today, critics of President Macron’s way of apprehending and present-
ing the issue have fastened upon the expressed desire to “move on.” That
gesture in and of itself constitutes a hierarchical power concession given
that it originates with the perpetrator of colonial maleficence. This history
continues to breathe new oxygen into the postcolonial era, since neocolo-
nial arrangements linger and shape contact with the Global South. This
takes the form of foreign policy agendas that continue to bolster African
dictatorships and corrupt governance as paths to maintaining France’s
global relevance instead of relinquishing neocolonial ties. Analogies can be
made with governmental intervention by the Ministry of the Colonies in
1931, which staged the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris as a way
to rekindle enthusiasm for France overseas. For President Macron, barriers
between different geographic and linguistic spheres are at best “artificial,”
unhelpful if the ultimate goal is to “move on” and relinquish “perceptions
that were, and constructions that must evolve” (Macron 2017). However,
the reality is such that this artificiality is experienced very differently by
those populations impacted by these policies and the broader political
ramifications. Thus, postcolonial theories operate as a counter-discourse
to that of the French state, reevaluating the imbalance between concrete
and imagined centers and peripheries. One may agree with President
102 D. THOMAS
Macron’s conclusion that “Francophonie is a living thing, which extends

beyond our borders and whose heart beats somewhere not far from here …
And this francophonie is not French francophonie, it has long since escaped
France’s control,” but why should it serve as an “instrument for economic
integration,” economic development, or even democratization?
(Macron 2017).
Horizontality: Denationalizing
and Defrancophonizing Francophonie
The symbiotic link between France as a nation and the French language
made headlines in 2007, a major postcolonial turn of sorts, when the sig-
natories of the manifesto for a world literature in French declared the
following:
Let’s be clear: the emergence of a consciously affirmed, transnational world-

literature in the French language, open to the world, signs the death certifi-
cate of so-called francophonie. No one speaks or writes “francophone.”
Francophonie is a light from a dying star … With the center placed on an
equal plane with other centers, we’re witnessing the birth of a new constel-
lation, in which language freed from its exclusive pact with the nation, free
from every other power hereafter but the powers of poetry and the imagi-
nary, will have no other frontiers but those of the spirit. (“Toward a World
Literature in French” 2009, pp. 54–56, translation altered)
For Franco-Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi, the whole point was

precisely to “undo the suffocating knot” of language, race, and nation,
and, as Mbembe argued similarly, to “denationalize the French language”
(Waberi 2010, p. 72; Mbembe 2006). As a statement of ideals and inten-
tions, the choice of words for the manifesto may appear at first glance
somewhat like an oxymoron, bringing together the contradictory terms of
world literature in French. Something was perhaps lost in translation,
since ultimately the purpose of enacting an “equal plane with other cen-
ters” was designed to foster greater horizontality, to decolonize mindsets.
In this way, world literature effectively meant postcolonial francophone
literature, but this center has been displaced, and “its absorptive capacity
that forced authors who came from elsewhere to rid themselves of their
foreign trappings before melting in the crucible of the French language
and its national history” has been weakened (“Toward a World Literature
in French” 2009, p. 54). The manifesto provided the impetus for interna-
tional exchanges and assessments of the state of postcolonial France
(Forsdick et al. 2010). For almost a decade, though, the question had
virtually disappeared from mainstream focus until President Macron
revived it.
The reactions to President Macron’s declarations were almost immedi-
ate and took on new dimensions. Front and center was once again the
need to reframe the debate in such a way as to redefine the place of France
itself—as nation—in broader discussions pertaining to a sense of propri-
etorship over the language in its global diversity. Mabanckou published
the “Open Letter to President Macron,” denouncing the “francocen-
trism” and narrow conceptualization of “francophonie,” and numerous
authors and intellectuals soon joined the fray (Mabanckou 2018a).
President Macron’s speech in Ouagadougou provided an inventory of
what his policy could help combat, including gender equality, terrorism,
healthcare, and climate change. In response, Vergès asked: “We might
wonder in what way the French language is equipped to tackle gender
equality or fight against global warming or digital development? [After all]
women who were enslaved or colonized were able to express their will for
emancipation in their creole of African languages,” observations that are
all the more valid given that “France has yet to fully recognize its respon-
sibility for slavery, colonization, and the role it plays in protecting tyr-
anny” (Vergès 2018a).
The critique focuses on France’s lingering neocolonialism known as
françafrique, a tradition or a system that goes against all principles of
transparency and democracy, fueling inequity and corruption, and safe-
guarding oppressive dictatorial regimes (Verschave 1998). As Mabanckou
reminds us, these are modern-day “monarchs who subjugate their people
in French” (Mabanckou 2018a). Therefore, demands have been made for
nothing short of a “decolonization of the French language,” for “the dis-
course of European supremacy” to be abandoned, and for a concerted
analysis of the surreptitious ways in which President Macron has attempted
to occlude the colonial question (Vergès 2018b, pp. 73, 86). In light of
the oft-cited demographics on the future of French speakers worldwide,
“Paris can no longer decide alone how French should be spoken or writ-
ten” while expecting to “hold onto its role as the enlightened guide it has
bestowed upon itself since it set out to colonize (Vergès 2018b, p. 73).
The discourse of francophonie, as Lydie Moudileno has shown, adheres
overly to a “disturbing nostalgia for empire and what colonial propaganda
104 D. THOMAS
once hailed as Greater France,” almost as if “at this time of declinology it

had become necessary to reaffirm the power of a Greater Linguistic
France … desperately clinging to the canon as Proust once did to his mad-
eleine” (Moudileno 2018). Together, these changes call for a systematic
and ambitious “enterprise aimed at decolonizing francophonie and dena-
tionalizing the French language” (Vergès 2018b, p. 74).
Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi, too, has provided a lucid appraisal of
this situation, emphasizing by what method francophonie actually operates
as a synonym for French soft power. When one looks to the dynamism
displayed in the francophone African and Afro-Diasporic context, ample
evidence exists of the degree to which individual practitioners are “eman-
cipated from French influence,” such that France should “rethink the
terms of its presence on the continent if it wishes to remains a strategic
player on the African continent” (Kisukidi 2018, p. 83). The geopolitical
stakes have not been lost on President Macron, for whom the goal is noth-
ing short of aiming to “rekindle the yearning and longing for a reputation
damaged by the practices of the French State in Africa during the colonial
era and also since Independence” (Kisukidi 2018, p. 84).
Although President Macron may rhetorically claim to “revamp France’s
Africa policy,” this new approach remains only symbolic, since the primary
concern is with leaving “untouched the key characteristics of its economic
and military power on the African continent” (Kisukidi 2018, pp. 85, 86).
President Macron’s eagerness to enlist writers such as Mabanckou can be
explained by his eagerness to legitimize a project that can contribute in
vital ways to the future of French economic and political influence specifi-
cally in its former colonies and more generally on the African continent.
As Waberi concludes, “[President Macron] seeks to conscript them [fran-
cophone writers] under his banner to defend and promote France’s gran-
deur, reenacting historical scenes from yesteryear with the Senegalese
infantrymen” (Waberi 2018). For France to change, a complete overhaul
is needed.
“We Are in a Country That Is Called

the French Language”
For a long time, Mabanckou has encouraged a more inclusive sense of

linguistic ownership. In 2018, he responded to an interview question by
explaining that “[i]n literature, we are in a country that is called the French
language,” and that “the French language cannot be confined by geogra-

phy” (Manteau 2013, p. 54). This is quite a different position than the
one adopted by Ngũgı ̃ or President Macron. The difference can be
explained partially by distinct colonial histories, but the primary reason is
because times have changed. In The Tears of the Black Man, Mabanckou
questions francophone Cameroonian author Patrice Nganang’s proposi-
tion to “write without France” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 53). The latter is a
writer who believes that such a decision would also be helpful to the pro-
cess of “reclaiming the lateral mobility of our forefathers and mothers who
used to move from one country or place to another, and from one lan-
guage to the next, without having to first legitimize their movements”
(Nganang 2007, p. 237). Yet, Mabanckou challenges the logic of such a
scheme by asking: “How does being francophone prevent one from being
a writer? Surely the shadow of France is not so cumbersome that it pre-
vents one from being a writer?” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 53). For more
than half a century, independence from colonial rule has afforded postco-
lonial subjects a certain distance, but also a level of emancipation that
implies liberation from those who define themselves through a particular
language.
The main argument put forward by those who today would prefer to write
“without France” is that the French language is tainted with a fatal, insur-
mountable, unforgiveable flaw: it was the language of the colonizer. That it is
a language that prevents us from speaking with any kind of authenticity.
(Mabanckou 2018b, p. 54)
The point is that literary expression allows for a reclaiming of integrity and
the gradual emergence of a territory of the mind rather than a physical
enclosure or space that contains.
Indications of this newfound reality are plentiful, and writers are
unashamed when it comes to this truth. “I therefore ask myself the follow-
ing crucial question,” Mabanckou writes, “are writers such as V.S. Naipaul,
Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Derek Walcott, and Edwidge Danticat
‘inspired by colonial ideology’ when they reveal the extent of their talent
as writers in the English language?” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 55). Couldn’t
we apply a similar reasoning to that adopted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in
1754 in A Discourse on Inequality?
106 D. THOMAS
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying “This
is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true
founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery
and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled
up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Beware
of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the
earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!”
(Rousseau 1984, p. 109)
There are striking parallels in terms of the attempt to assert the place of
language in the realm of the nation. Those who use language as a tool for
creative expression, in turn, have challenged the need for a border where
one has no business existing.
This transition has to be premised on positioning France itself in fran-
cophonie—in other words, in a constituent component of a broader cul-
tural, political, and social entity. Ivorian novelist Véronique Tadjo has
spoken to this effect when she writes: “the time has come for the litera-
tures of the Global South to be inscribed in the francophone Occidental
imaginary … Literature written in French does not need to claim to be
French to exist. This is the crucial difference that must be celebrated
because that is where true francophonie is to be found” (Tadjo 2018).
This is a prerequisite for a shared linguistic space and relationship. In the
past, as Mabanckou and Mbembe have argued, “‘francophones’ were not
so much those who, though not French, spoke French. They were those
who, above all, were ‘ruled’ by French … and who became the subjects of
a language” (Mabanckou and Mbembe 2018). As such, the two authors
stand “opposed to any definition of the French language founded on a
nationalist ideology” and favor instead a “world-language, a planetary lan-
guage” (Mabanckou and Mbembe 2018). Likewise, francophonie cannot
function as an ideological apparatus or as a geopolitical resource, and
“whether one likes it or not, the French language no longer belongs only
to the French”: “henceforth, the French language is transnational” and
“permission is not needed to inhabit it” (Mbembe and Mabanckou 2018,
pp. 62–63).
As Vergès poses in relation to the debate launched by President Macron
on the future of the French language and francophonie, the central ques-
tion that remains unresolved is whether or not “France is ready to relin-
quish its privileges” (Vergès 2018b, p. 80). In other words, will the process
of turning a page on history pave the way for a meaningful and substantive
reframing of France’s relationship with its former colonies, or will new

mechanisms and devices merely replace older ones and perpetuate postco-
lonial asymmetries? “In our world of hierarchical division,” Mbembe
argues, “the idea of a common human condition is the object of many
pious declarations. But it is far from being put into practice. Old colonial
divisions have been replaced with various forms of apartheid, marginaliza-
tion, and structural destitution” (Mbembe 2017, p. 161). To inaugurate
a new era, one that contributes genuinely to a reframing of postcolonial-
ism, one would need a “new theory of post-francophonie” (Vergès
2018b, p. 80).
A new generation of postcolonial Africans wake up every day, “asking
themselves how they can become what they are not yet” and, in this
regard, “institutional francophonie has nothing to contribute” and “de-
francophonization” is the only way forward, “namely the weaning of lan-
guage policy from French power politics” (Mbembe and Mabanckou
2018, pp. 65–66). Mabanckou reminds us in The Tears of the Black Man
with reference to the Congolese poet and historian Théophile Obenga
who is himself speaking about Aimé Césaire: “The words may be theirs
but the song belongs to us” (Mabanckou 2018b, p. 54).
Notes
1. All translations from French are mine unless otherwise noted.
2. For more information, see Gassama 2008.
3. Also see Bancel 2012; Diouf 2010.
4. This work has taken place alongside that of several scholars working in
French institutions. See Moura 2007; Smouts 2007; Thomas 2017.
5. For more information, see Bancel et al. 2016.
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PART II
Hybrid Methodologies
CHAPTER 5
Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History,

Minor Solidarity, and Transoceanic Empathy
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François
In her opening remarks to a 2008 article titled “Postcolonialism, Language,

and the Visual: By Way of Haiti,” Françoise Lionnet raises the following
question: “Who can rightly claim today the condition of postcoloniality?”
(Lionnet 2008, p. 227). As it brings to the fore a certain challenge of
legitimacy and ethics, her argument considers how the complex expression
of minor and resistant identities—that is, through the circulation of
peripheral literature and cinema in the global cultural market—pushes us
to think “in terms of the more nuanced understanding of postcolonialism
as a humanism,” or rather as a new humanism (Lionnet 2008, p. 228).
While Lionnet’s discussion ultimately suggests in a sense that fiction from
the Global South can perform emancipatory projects by reimagining,
remaking, and transforming human subjects and subjectivities, it further
triggers some methodological questions: if we can ask who can rightly
claim today the condition of postcoloniality, how can we also name and
represent the multiple forms this condition takes from one part of the
globe to another? How do we approach and compare them without
E. B. Jean-François (*)
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
e-mail: ebj2@psu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_5
114 E. B. JEAN-FRANÇOIS
flattening the differences and nuances they foreground, and without mis-
using or appropriating them? How do we respond to creative voices that
imagine the pain or mediate the suffering of others in a movement of soli-
darity that requires them to connect these painful experiences to their own?1
As I began to reflect on these questions and their possible implications
for renewed discussions of postcolonialism, a rather recent Mauritian text
came to my mind. In Tropique de la violence (Tropic of Violence), a polyvo-
cal novel published in French in 2016, Nathacha Appanah alludes to the
realities of the contemporary migration crisis, as it appears in the Comoros
Islands—an Indian Ocean archipelago located in the Mozambique
Channel off the coast of East Africa. Although the novel takes the reader
to a geographical region that is hardly ever cited in news reports regarding
“illegal” migration circuits impacting Europe, it subtly points out that one
of the four islands of the Comoros (Mayotte) is today not only the fifth
Overseas Department of France (with Martinique, Guadeloupe, French
Guiana, and La Réunion), but also the ninth ultraperipheral region of the
European Union (Lionnet and Jean-François 2016). In 1975, Mayotte
decided explicitly to retain its colonial ties to France, whereas the other
three islands (Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli) became indepen-
dent. As of today, the people in Mayotte continue to share linguistic, cul-
tural, and religious practices with the rest of the Comoros, but they
identify themselves largely as Europeans—at least legally and politically
speaking—since they have a European passport, are part of the Euro zone,
and are represented in the European Parliament.
Upon reading Appanah’s novel, I was particularly struck by a passage
where one of the narrators referenced the tragic story of the kwassa kwassa,
the fishing pirogues used by thousands of Comorans over the past two
decades to make the crossing “illegally” from the three independent
islands to the European territory. During the past ten years, more than
20,000 Comorans, including children, have died at sea while crossing the
Mozambique Channel also known as le canal de la mort, the death chan-
nel. While my aim here is not to embark on a lengthy discussion about the
geopolitical issues at stake in Mayotte, I approach this narrator’s particular
comment about the kwassa kwassa as one that metaphorizes the method-
ological and epistemological underpinning of my main argument. In
doing so, I want to show how the transnational intervention of Creole
voices on migration issues across the Global South performs the idea of
postcolonialism as new humanism, as it engages with questions of com-
parative history, minor solidarity, and transoceanic empathy.
5 KINSHIPS OF THE SEA: COMPARATIVE HISTORY, MINOR SOLIDARITY… 115
An old story, heard of a hundred times, and rehashed a hundred times. The
story of a country that glitters and that everybody wants to reach. This
country bears multiple names: Eldorado, mirage, paradise, chimera, utopia,
Lampedusa. It’s the story of these boats called here kwassa kwassa, else-
where pirogues or ships, that have always existed to allow men to willingly
or forcefully cross the waters. It’s the story of human beings who have taken
these boats and to whom multiple names were given, since the beginning of
times: slaves, indentured laborers, plague-ridden, convicts, repatriates, Jews,
boat people, refugees, undocumented aliens, illegal immigrants. (Appanah
2016, p. 53)2
Appanah uses the kwassa kwassa as a point of entanglement for bringing

together the multiple, yet cyclical and ever-repeated, stories of oppressed
peoples, precarious populations, and subaltern groups who—at different
times and in different geographies—have crossed the waters, generating
experiences and trajectories that re-world the world we know by destabi-
lizing the historical, geographical, and cultural divides, as well as the imag-
inaries inherited from colonialism. When I say “re-world the world,” I am
drawing from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of mondanisation or
world-becoming as a way of foregrounding the multiple processes that
account for the ever-changing nature of the world, as the latter encom-
passes a diversity of worlds, a plurality of meanings, temporalities, and
modes of being (Nancy 2007 [2002]). What I am arguing is that Appanah’s
compound image of the migrant’s itinerary further illustrates the transfor-
mative impact a creative work has on our thoughts about so-called discrete
historical mo(ve)ments across time and space, especially related experi-
ences of precarity and suffering.
In the face of the relentless global “migration crisis,” which has seen
the relocation of millions over the past decades, I ask the following set of
questions: how does the creative act of bringing together historically and
geographically distinct narratives of crossings recalibrate our vision of
enduring precarities? And how do the long-standing hybrid and multilin-
gual practice and imaginary worlds of writers and artists from Creole con-
texts extend to contemporary experiences of migration, displaying a
planetary reach that engages more broadly with the idea of humanism
through questions of hope and agency, subaltern solidarities, and ethical
hospitality? Writers and artists from Creole regions have long explored
multidirectional mappings, allowing transcolonial and transnational soli-
darities and conversations to emerge. While colonial imagination has
persistently portrayed island colonies and archipelagoes of the Global

South as vulnerable and fragmented isolates, one only needs to consider
the cultural and literary productions of the Mascarene region and the
Caribbean archipelagoes in order to appreciate how insular histories and
archipelagic voices relate far more to stories of exchange, encounter, and
empathy than one would initially think (Cohen and Sheringham 2008).
By consistently engaging with narratives of migration and displacement
that put diverse peoples, cultures, and languages into close contact over
extended historical periods, Creole literatures and expressive cultures have
trained our minds for the past 300 years to think transnationally. The com-
plex overlapping of universes they portray through cartographies of human
mobility tests our capacity to conceive of world history differently and to
question the colonial taxonomies that have ultimately resulted in the divi-
sion between the powerful North and the “peripheral” spaces of the
Global South.
Transoceanic Dialogues, Subaltern Agencies

The longue durée histories of the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic region, and
the Mediterranean are filled with stories of mobility, networks, and cul-
tural exchanges. As such, when studied through transoceanic lenses and
using comparative frameworks—as in the emerging field of comparative
Creole studies—they provide a rich terrain for thinking more broadly
about “how to capture and represent the history of the people who
breached, bridged and leaked across … materially elusive spaces” precisely
from the perspective of “ordinary people—the seafarers, slaves, soldiers,
migrants and labourers—who move in an often-circular fashion around,
between and across polities, nations, colonies and empires,” rather than
from the perspective of imperial powers or national bodies (Anderson
2013, p. 503).
On the one hand, the journey of diasporic populations and dispossessed
communities presents a valuable counterpoint to some of the surveillance
strategies and scripted political tactics by which European powers—during
the colonial and postcolonial periods—seek to control transnational
mobility, erect borders, and maintain geopolitical frontiers. In addition, as
Lionnet argues, “in the New World of the Western Hemisphere, as in the
Old World of the East Indies, … colonial disruptions undermined existing
institutional and ritual frameworks that authorized specific contexts of
negotiated exchange and interactive universalisms” (Lionnet 2015,

p. 299). On the other hand, Clare Anderson points out the following:
[W]hen empires fractured into independent countries, with decolonization

in the twentieth century, newly established state archives and their docu-
mentary holdings quite naturally became the foundations for the writing of
national, regional (or if you prefer) area studies histories. … [P]aradoxically
enough the rightful democratisation of archives and their geographical
boundedness have worked against the use of this archive and to write con-
nected forms of imperial or colonial history, at least from the perspective of
the Global South. (Anderson 2013, p. 504)
Contesting this very partitioning of geographies and temporalities, of

epistemologies and memories, of state subjects and racialized identities,
Creole literatures and expressive cultures—be they oral, written, or
visual—provide a growing body of works that serve as alternatives to such
lost archives of mobility which colonial regimes have in part erased and
which modern imagined nations have failed to preserve. Through inter-
twined histories of islands and seas, of littorals and archipelagoes, these
works connect minor narratives and subaltern biographies of various pop-
ulations across the plural or “Oceanic South” (Lavery and Samuelson
2018). By engaging with stories of transoceanic routes, they express what
Australian captain, author, and photographer Allan Villiers calls “brother-
hoods of the Sea … giving rise to cosmopolitan populations” (Sheriff and
Ho 2014, p. 4). While I prefer the use of the word “kinship” over “broth-
erhood,” it is indeed through such kinships that creative works address
and contest both what Walter Mignolo describes as “epistemic colonial
difference” and what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls “ontological colo-
nial difference” (Mignolo, 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Undoing the
systems of representation that have been relayed by colonial taxonomies,
linear genealogies, and traditional historiographies about precarious peo-
ples or their ontological state as non-beings in the world, the fictional
worlds imagined by writers and artists of the Mascarene Islands and the
Caribbean offer alternative ways of representing and dealing with the vio-
lent and repressed histories of slavery, indenture, and other forms of coer-
cive displacements that have impacted islands such as Mauritius, La
Réunion, Martinique, and Haiti. They counter the destructive effects of
both coloniality of knowledge and “coloniality of Being” on non-Western
human subjects, all the while displaying ethical solidarity and transmittable
agencies that resist the enduring production of stateless human bodies

across the Global South (Maldonado-Torres 2007).
By refusing the disavowal of subaltern histories in the making of Creole,
cosmopolitan, and global cultures, they foreground what Nancy has
described as être-au-monde or “being-in-the-world” (Nancy 2007 [2002],
p. 44). This way of being—in Lionnet’s words—“[puts] together what …
[has] been divided, or subsumed…, thereby opening spheres of freedom
that offer new potential for the full … deployment of more autonomous
lives connected within large historic patterns of global exchange” (Lionnet
2015, p. 295). By thinking transversally about the multiple experiences of
subaltern and racialized bodies across geographies and temporalities, and
by approaching “transoceanic dialogues” both as a method and as a frame-
work for understanding the esthetics and hermeneutics of creative works
originating from Creole spaces, one can appreciate better how these cre-
ators represent particular ways of this being-in-the-world, which generate
mutual intelligibility and empathy (Bragard 2008). I will return to this
point in the final section of my essay.
Unknown Destinations, Hope-Filled Trajectories

The Migrant’s Tale is an art installation by Nirveda Alleck, an award-
winning Mauritian visual artist (see Fig. 5.1). Her piece was exhibited in
the 2017 Contemporary Cultural Festival, Porlwi, an event held in the
capital port city of Mauritius, Port Louis. Founded and developed during
the eighteenth century by French Governor Mahé de Labourdonnais who
administered the island on behalf of the French East India Company or
Compagnie des Indes orientales, Port Louis is home to a World Cultural
and Natural Heritage site recognized by the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): the Aapravasi Ghat, an
immigration depot established by the British government after the aboli-
tion of slavery, which saw the arrival of almost half a million indentured
laborers from India between 1834 and 1920.3 In fact, one can read from
the UNESCO website that “the buildings of Aapravasi Ghat are among
the earliest explicit manifestations of what was to become a global eco-
nomic system and one of the greatest migrations in history”
(UNESCO 2019).
This third iteration of the festival, subtitled “Porlwi by nature,” invited
attendees to “pause in the midst of [one’s] frantic [life] to reflect on our
relationship with the natural world” (Porlwi 2019). Exhibited right
Fig. 5.1 Nirveda Alleck, The Migrant’s Tale (2017) (Photograph by

Nirveda Alleck)
outside a harbor facility called the Granary, Alleck’s installation showcased

a pirogue, a small fishing boat, which evoked kwassa kwassa in Shimaore,
barques in French, and pateras in Spanish.4 It included an uprooted green
leafy tree standing tall in the middle of the pirogue. In a personal exchange
I had with the artist, Alleck explained that she had “imagined a migrant
(here represented by the tree) on a boat en route for an unknown destina-
tion” (Nirveda Alleck, personal exchange).
In addition to this original scenography of uprooting, movement, and
deterritorialization, Alleck created a 12-minute-long sound recording,
playing in loop, which featured diverse excerpts of Dante’s Divine Comedy,
the fourteenth-century-long narrative poem considered today as an exem-
plar of world literature. Although the poem was originally written in
Italian, viewers of The Migrant’s Tale could hear at the beginning of the
recording an excerpt from the second canto of the first cantica (Inferno)
read out loud in French. This particular excerpt referencing the “dark
woods” was followed by another passage—this time read in English—
from the second canto of the third cantica (Paradise) with the following
opening lines: “All ye, who in small barque have following sail’d, / Eager
to listen, on the advent’rous track” (Alleck 2017). As the two excerpts in
different languages gradually intersected and overlapped with each other,
they were joined by a third voice, quoting this time an excerpt from the
second cantica (Purgatory), which disrupted the original linear chronol-
ogy of Dante’s text so as to render the recording ultimately
incomprehensible.
While Alleck’s act of translation and intertwining of languages remind
us in a unique way how various linguistic systems, cultures, and imaginar-
ies were brutally put into contact both on slave ships and later on planta-
tion colonies, her installation resonates with other creative works such as
Cameroonian Em’kal Eygongakpa’s Gaia beats/bits III-i/doves and an
aged hammock (2017). This artwork, too, skillfully interweaves visual rep-
resentations of oceanic routes with spoken tales of movement and errantry
to contest Western universal teleologies. In her critical review of
Eygongakpa’s installation, Stephanie Hessler underscores the multisenso-
rial dimension of aquatic crossings and their metaphorical link to expres-
sions of solidarity and transversality.
An audio track of poetic tales and rhythmic sounds evokes a linguistic

polyphony of different biographies and destinies, all joined by the sea.
Connected by water and maritime ties, the movements of people, animals,
goods and ideas transcends the biographical and point to global webs of
power and solidarity. The archipelagic thinker, poet, and philosopher
Édouard Glissant metaphorically evoked our common aquatic roots—“that
is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but
extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches,”
resonating with Brathwaite’s assertion that “the unity is submarine.”
(Hessler 2018, p. 43)
This interpretation also applies to Alleck’s use of Dante’s recording. Like

Eygongakpa’s hammock, Alleck’s boat challenges us to approach narra-
tives of crossings from a relational and rhizomatic perspective. Yet, the
spoken fragments from Dante’s poem only seem to provide the migrating
tree with glimpses of its forthcoming adventures into unknown destina-
tions or dark woods—into Hell, Paradise, or even Purgatory—by way of a
linguistic overlap that ultimately becomes almost impossible to unpack.
Alleck describes her work as follows:
It [The installation] addresses the migratory experience of those who set off
to faraway lands, filled with hope; multiple narratives that attempt to recon-
cile language and cultural barriers as experienced by the migrant. It is a
reexamination of our insular identities and histories. Yet the spoken text …
from Dante’s Divine Comedy, … although poetic and evocative, fails to give
any indication as to the destination itself, hence reinforcing the sense of the
unknown destination. (Alleck, personal exchange)
By representing this multidimensional, multidirectional, and unpredict-

able experience of the migrant, Alleck reimagines the disjunctive geogra-
phies and temporalities generated by European empires, along with their
legacy of conquests and the multiple waves of forced migrations that have
transformed islands such as Mauritius into Creole societies. In addition,
the artist extends or connects her representation of the boat and its sailing
tree to more contemporary experiences of migration by alluding to those
who have had to face the unknown, but are nonetheless filled with hope.
Thus, her installation seems to be in direct dialogue with Appanah’s nar-
rative of the kwassa kwassa.
Alleck’s The Migrant’s Tale shares numerous thematic, conceptual, and
esthetic characteristics with another literary text: a long poem titled Ceux
du large (Afloat) and published in 2018 by acclaimed Mauritian writer
Ananda Devi. Written in three different languages—French, English, and
Mauritian Kreol—the text recounts the hardships faced by contemporary
migrants at sea.
The fussy stretch of your fate

The sand at your feet has churned to mud
The sea washes faces and names
…
Nothing awaits absence

Yet belief resists
The sea’s molestation
…
The plop of discarded bodies

Pain-grinned lips
Glue-parched tongues
Salt gritting wounds
On the reverse side
Of the skin
…
Endless exodus
Blind-faithed file
Of blind-led blind
Gibbering steps
Towards a future not yet nuked. (Devi 2017, pp. 35, 38, 52)
Devi’s poem overtly stresses the violence of the oceanic route, “the sea’s
molestation,” “the pain-grinned lips,” and “salt gritting wounds.” The
reality of unknown destinations and the drifting trajectory of migrant
boats are repeatedly evoked by the poet who writes that “South is lost,
north is far; the rest is all guesswork of reefs and receding horizon” (Devi
2017, p. 44). Just like Alleck’s allusions to hope, though, the text refer-
ences belief as a form of resistance and blind faith as the capacity to save
one’s future. While both works are grappling with the global context of
precarity that forces marginalized populations into new departures to try
their fortune elsewhere, the use of the term “adventure” and the image of
the flourishing tree that could be re-rooted elsewhere (in Alleck’s installa-
tion), together with references to belief, faith, and resistance (in Devi’s
poem), confer a strong agency to the migrant.
Examining similar representations from the Caribbean region to discuss
the trajectories of Dominicans relocating “illegally” to Puerto Rico,
Michaeline Crichlow argues that “hope-filled movements … demonstrate
a willful expression of an imagination of new worlds by those seeking
movement and those actually undertaking it” (Crichlow 2012, pp. 114,
118). As such, these trajectories can be portrayed “as mo(ve)ments in a
tragic yet hopeful resistance—an extra-ordinary politics of making place,
of exercising existence of a ‘place’ in the violent mappings of the present”
(Crichlow 2012, p. 118). As Crichlow argues, such representations enable
a “remaking” or a “re-ordering of subjectivities” for those disenfranchised
populations from the Global South that reinvent themselves—their
humanity—by tracing geographical routes and historical trajectories in
non-linear ways (Crichlow 2012, p. 132). While it is clear that similar
representations participate in the decolonial process that challenges “hege-
monic [frames] of self-referencing” and thus serve as the basis for disman-
tling the coloniality of Being, I argue that this kind of being-in-the-world
expressed in the works of writers and artists from Creole regions is achieved
through the expression of transversal solidarity and transoceanic empathy
(Crichlow 2012, p. 133).
Transversal Solidarity, Shared Humanity

In his 2017 poetic essay titled Frères migrants (Migrant Brothers), a text
written in solidarity with migrants across the world today, Patrick
Chamoiseau, one of the authors of the celebrated 1989 manifesto Éloge de
la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), reflects on the state of the world
(Bernabé et al. 1990). For the Martinican author, the uneven process of
globalization in the aftermath of colonialism has deprived oppressed pop-
ulations of their world, causing a reverse migratory flow in which millions
of peoples from the Global South relocate to the Global North. In his
view, this mo(ve)ment of reversal is a way for migrants to reclaim a world
that has been taken away from them. Commenting on the protectionist
attitude of Western nations and empires, and on their obsession with
defending borders and erecting new frontiers, Chamoiseau writes that
“they repress migrants because migrants would not leave the world to them.
Migrants are taking the world back from them … by the infinity of the
word A-C-C-U-E-I-L which they would have us to spell in all the lan-
guages of the world” (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 56).5 The first part of this
quote reiterates Crichlow’s idea that migrants, refugees, and escapees tak-
ing to the sea are not passive subjects but risk-taking agents of change who
engage both willingly and actively in the reversal of their destiny. The
second part stresses the role that hospitality, as it is captured in the refer-
ence to world languages, and ethical empathy play in the enactment of this
reclaiming action.
While the very reordering process involved in such crossings, which
redefine spaces and territories, whether geographical, epistemological, or
racial, reminds one of the dynamics at stake in the processes of creolization
and hybridization, the trespassing of boundaries imposed by both colonial
and modern forms of empires express a shared desire of subaltern peoples
to destabilize the fixity of assigned territories. Therefore, I am suggesting
that the experience and worldview of Chamoiseau as a Creole writer serve
as a basis for engaging in subaltern solidarity and for approaching narra-
tives of crossing from a comparative historical perspective. This perspec-
tive, in turn, envisions stories of migrants not as isolated journeys, but as
parts of a larger history of claiming and reclaiming lands and seas that
allow human beings and subaltern groups seeking to survive across geog-
raphies and temporalities to represent themselves differently and change
their own destiny.
Chamoiseau calls migrants “brothers” before declaring: “Solidarity
imposes itself as principle…. A fervent and multidimensional solidarity”
(Chamoiseau 2017, p. 22).6 Using the kind of rhizomatic ethics at play in
Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, he approaches the world as “poly-
rhythms engendered by differences, whenever these differences attract
each other and find each other, often uniting as much as they repel each
other, while retaining a trace of the memory of the other” (Chamoiseau
2017, p. 73).7 As he situates his philosophical intervention within a bigger

relational scheme that allows him to index the shared humanity of numer-
ous migrants, or what he calls Homo migrator, he establishes the latter’s
performative movement as one that foregrounds a common condition
(Chamoiseau 2017, p. 74). Discussing the link between various forms of
structural precarities made worse by the lack of solidarity, Chamoiseau
ultimately opposes global barbarism to Glissant’s Relation, insisting on
the fact that resistance is fruitless when it is not invested in the work of
Relation:
[This barbarism] ties together our ills and troubles, leading us to examine
our challenges collectively. Everything is linked, everything is entangled! A
fruitless resistance is primarily one that fails to create links … the multiple
worlds that imagine themselves as autonomous and impenetrable exist only
in our stagnant imaginaries. (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 38)8
Arguing that productive resistance is that which functions in tandem with

performative acts of linkages and networks, Chamoiseau—like Appanah or
Alleck—captures the overlapping experiences and knowledges of diasporic
populations across the South as a means to decolonize history, beings, and
imaginaries. Turning this “solidarity between peoples formerly subjugated
by Western imperialism” into the “rhetoric of a new humanism,” he estab-
lishes bridges, connections, and extensions among the numerous faceless
groups who contribute to the dynamics of globalization (Vergès 2003,
p. 243). He draws “an alternative cartography of the human” (une autre
cartographie de nos humanités), which contests demarcated territories,
imposed genealogies, and falsely universalizing epistemologies
(Chamoiseau 2017, p. 59).
Since the establishment of borders and frontiers between geographies,
histories, memories, and epistemologies has proven particularly instru-
mental for justifying fundamental inequalities, or what Mignolo describes
as “colonial difference,” modern Western thinking has long dismissed the
non-essentializing mental and relational geographical frameworks that
could account for the multidirectional crisscrossing of cultural zones and
for the sophisticated or cyclical overlapping of local histories (Mignolo
2000, p. 3). Hence, I would contend that, as they investigate the intersec-
tionalities and border-crossing processes that subaltern perspectives and
“minor transnationalisms” produce, writers such as Chamoiseau, Devi,
and Appanah, and artists like Alleck give voice to powerful relational
imaginaries that reinvest diasporic and transoceanic connections to better

challenge the (neo)colonial divides that have kept minor groups, “periph-
eral migrants,” and subaltern histories separate (Lionnet and Shih 2005).
Offering instead the image of a plural history, which points to the ever-
reiterated structures of oppression across multiple localities, their transfor-
mative readings of colonial and postcolonial histories become the creative
terrain for thinking anew the commonalities between various experiences
of human displacements over time.
Interactive Readings and the Work of Empathy

Let me return to my opening questions. How do we name and represent
the multiple forms of postcoloniality across the Global South today? How
do we connect them without flattening the differences and nuances they
foreground? How do we respond to literary voices that imagine or medi-
ate the suffering of others in a movement of transversal solidarity? Without
reducing the complexity of these interrogations, I suggest that part of the
answer to these issues has to do with the capacity of those creative voices
to feel, express, and inspire empathy with others’ histories, while acknowl-
edging and respecting the opacity—or what Glissant calls the right to
opacity—of these very others (Glissant 1990). Empathy is described by
Suzanne Keen as a “sharing of affect” (Keen 2007, p. 208). For Martha
Nussbaum, it results from an “imaginative reconstruction” of the experi-
ence of others (Nussbaum 2003, p. 302). In other words, the work of
empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of our shared and inclusive
humanity, but one that respects difference and opacity and does not pre-
suppose complete or mutual intelligibility.
Since resonances and echoes between one’s experiences and others’ can
indeed become the creative terrain for writers and artists to draw unscripted
relationships (or mises en relation), their works can give us—as readers and
critics—access to interactive readings, transcultural literacies, and hybrid
methodologies, which navigate across established geographies, histories,
and genres, and which approach the world, including the world of repre-
sentations, in more inclusive terms. According to Chamoiseau, “the unde-
finable relationality among all the living [is what] moves us, affects us….
In the end, it fills us with an ethics that requires no big demonstration”9
(Chamoiseau 2017, p. 55). This explains that the relational nature of cre-
ative representations enables transnational writers to “negotiate the divide
between relativism and moral authority” and to steer “reader’s empathies
toward an ideal of inclusivity” (Lionnet 2015, p. 293). This inclusivity

comes close to what Lionnet describes as “interactive universalisms,” an
expression initially used in the singular form by Seyla Benhabib to theorize
interactive models of universality, but which Lionnet pluralizes to think of
embodied differences and embedded identities as a starting point and a
common ground for nurturing mutual or reciprocal empathy.
Using two literary examples, I want to explain what I mean by interac-
tive readings and transcultural literacies, and how they generate empathies
geared toward inclusivity. In Tropique de la violence, Olivier—both a nar-
rator and a policeman in the text—says the following, as he reflects on the
precarious and disposable lives of dying migrants in the Comoros:
I found myself full of hope, when that episode with the little Syrian boy
washed on the Turkish beach happened. I thought to myself that someone,
somewhere, would remember this French island and say that here as well
children die on beaches … at times, I feel like I am living in a parallel dimen-
sion; that whatever happens here never crosses the ocean nor reaches any-
body. We are alone … Aren’t lives in this land worth as much as all lives
elsewhere? (Appanah 2016, pp. 52–53)10
Upon reading this passage from Appanah’s novel, several readers would
recall the photograph of the drowned Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, on a beach
in Turkey in the summer of 2015—at a time when international media
kept representing growing numbers of families and children dying in the
Mediterranean. Some readers might even recall images of the Calais jungle
in France, or the eviction of more than 6400 “illegal” migrants from this
refugee encampment on 170 buses in October 2016. The wide circulation
of these images has brought global attention to border problems and the
migrant crisis in Europe. Yet, interestingly enough, to give visibility to the
human tragedies happening not in continental Europe, but in the
Mozambique Channel, Appanah draws on these very images to map out a
different geography of the migration crisis—a geography that incorporates
marginal islands—thereby bringing together comparable experiences of
suffering and drowning to denounce better the selective ordering of
human lives.
As he questions the unequal value given to these lives, some of which
are considered grievable, and others not, Appanah’s narrator reminds us of
Judith Butler’s discussion of precariousness, namely when she asks: “Who
counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? and finally, what makes for a
grievable life?” (Butler 2004, p. 20). To these powerful questions, I wish

to add: how does one create ethical conditions under which the thousands
of lost and unknown migrants’ lives become grievable, while also ensuring
that grievability is not just about bearing witness—not just about us, but
also about others? With regard to my argument about transoceanic empa-
thy, it is indeed crucial that the recognition of the other plays a central role
in one’s identification with that same other without seeking to capture the
latter’s being in abstract terms. It is not secondary that Butler draws from
Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical approach to ethics.
Dwelling on the large-scale empathy generated by the photograph of
the drowned child in the Mediterranean, I contend that Appanah’s novel
mediates a form of recognition of unknown (and, therefore, mostly invis-
ible) Comoran migrants in the Mozambique Channel. In other words,
although the narrator points to the fact that their story never crosses the
ocean, the novel bridges what Andreea Ritivoi describes as the critical
“discrepancy between the abstractness of victims as a mass of faceless indi-
viduals and the concreteness of the victim as a single person, particularly
one we know or see” (Ritivoi 2016, p. 57). In addition to transcending
the geopolitical divides responsible for the selective ordering of human
lives and experiences, the transoceanic solidarity displayed by the novel
tactically engages in interactive representations of suffering to trigger
readers’ empathy. While remaining careful not to partake in the facile uni-
versalization of human emotions or reactions, I believe that the capacity to
make sense of a shared tragedy through the exploration of such interactive
universalisms is precisely what gives Appanah’s creative work its ethical
character.
Transcultural Literacy and the Grievable Body

By engendering transcultural literacies, Devi’s Ceux du large uses a differ-
ent, albeit comparable tactic from Appanah’s novel to steer the “reader’s
empathies toward an ideal of inclusivity,” namely by referencing, as Alleck
does with Dante’s Divine Comedy, texts from the European literary canon
(Lionnet 2015 p. 293). In the following stanzas, for instance, the
poet writes:
In the blue meadow sleeps a little shrew

Not far away—
Hardly a few miles—
Under a tired sky

Sleeps a little guy
He’s almost fifteen
He fell down from the sky
Or more specifically
From the landing gear
Of a plane
Frozen and dead after one hour’s flight
He lies, asleep, not far from the little shrew
In the blue meadow
There is a large hole
Where his skull used to be. (Devi 2017, p. 49)
Taking a close look at this excerpt, readers familiar with nineteenth-

century French poetry would most likely recognize the allusions Devi
makes here to Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le dormeur du val” (“The Sleeper in
the Valley”), a well-known sonnet that depicts the tragic fate of a young
soldier during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. There is, of course,
a lot more to say about the intertextual and intersectional elements at
work in this passage, and about the ways in which Devi reworks not only
the content, but also the form and rhythm of Rimbaud’s initial poem.
Within the context of my discussion, though, let me state simply that, as
Devi depicts the fate of migrants, refugees, and escapees, she deploys tac-
tics of cultural mediation that engage with precarity and tragedy by means
of a translation of cultural knowledge. The poet writes that “it’s no joke to
be clairvoyant” (la voyance n’est pas une plaisanterie) (Devi 2017, pp. 22,
48). As such, when representing the painful realities of what Achille
Mbembe calls the “postcolony” for a contemporary Western readership,
she uses transparent references to Rimbaud’s canonical literary patrimoine
so as to address this particular audience directly (Mbembe 2001). Thus,
she does more than simply “write back” to the West, to use the expression
coined by Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffith as early as 1989
(Ashcroft et al. 1989). She performs an act of transcultural representation,
which triggers empathy through a rapprochement of embodied differ-
ences and embedded identities.
Indeed, although the poet never discloses whether or not she is actually
referring to a real event in this passage, her wording evokes an incident in
2015 where a Mozambican orphan, Carlito Vale, wishing to reach Europe
clandestinely, hid in the wheel well of an aircraft traveling from

Johannesburg to London. As the British Airways aircraft was about to land
after having completed its 800-mile-long journey, the frozen body of this
young man, trapped for about 11 hours in an enclosure whose tempera-
ture had plunged to −58F/−50 °C, fell from the undercarriage of the
plane and smashed through the metal panels covering the air conditioning
unit of an office block. His decapitated corpse and body parts were later
found on a roof below the Heathrow Airport flight path. In an article
from The Guardian Weekly, journalist Ben Quinn writes that “while Vale’s
motivation for his desperate gamble of stowing away on the flight will
perhaps remain unknown, his story is one of millions of other migrants. At
its core is the simple dream of a better life elsewhere” (Quinn 2016).
By bringing together the tragedy of the young French soldier and that
of the Mozambican migrant, Devi’s relational approach challenges us to
think of creative works as potential crossroads of historical, cultural, and
racialized traditions. Through a clever intertwining of political imaginar-
ies, geographies, and temporalities, she navigates across literary sensibili-
ties and embodied stories as means of drawing a common ground for
exploring a new expression of humanism. While she uses the allusion to
the “large hole / Where his skull used to be” to refer to the decapitated
body, the literal absence of a face calls for a different approach to questions
of grievability and empathy as opposed to mere recognition and legibility
(Devi 2017, p. 49). Indeed, through the shocking image of a headless
subject, the intertextual human figure staged by the poem distances itself
from the Cartesian subject of Rimbaud’s poetry in order to reimagine the
migrant subject as a crossroad. Devi complicates any attempt to talk about
human rights in merely abstract terms. She asks what constitutes right
human living, for whom, and where. By approaching the sight of a single
dead migrant as one that refers to more than the death of an individual
other (or of individual bodies), one that extends to other deaths, she cre-
ates what Chielozona Eze describes as “an atmosphere of moral urgency,”
“an urgent moral plea” that touches humanity in its plural dimension (Eze
2016, p. 197).
Whereas the uneven process of globalization reinforces logics of
inequality and exclusion and suppresses at the same time the capacity for
human empathy by engendering narratives that dehumanize or criminal-
ize particular racial, cultural, and gendered groups, Devi decenters and
transcends the challenging debates on humanism, human rights, and the
human (Slaughter 2007; Anker 2012). In addition, she forces a
reexamination of the notion of grievability by envisioning recognition

otherwise, namely and paradoxically through the image of a headless fig-
ure. In his book dedicated to ethics and human rights, Eze argues the
following:
The body realizes its existence only in relation to, or in reaching out to the
external world, to other bodies. It touches because it is being touched.
Other bodies make ours perceptible. The disappearance of these other bod-
ies in death is, in tune with the chiasmic structure of bodily existence, the
disappearance of our own bodies. (Eze 2016, p. 199)
If there is grievability here—and I am suggesting that there is—it is because

Devi’s text approaches empathy transculturally. It does so not necessarily
as an immediate response to the death of a migrant, but rather as “the
result of hermeneutical application through narrative understanding,”
which is to say, by means of “an expanded consciousness that goes beyond
a concrete event to a historical set of circumstances and [that] can compre-
hend both their particular meaning and a larger moral, social, or political
significance” (Ritivoi 2016, p. 71).
The creative works of writers and artists from Creole contexts perform
multiple geographical, temporal, historical, and ethical linkages. They
offer new representations of the movement of disenfranchised populations
and plot new cartographies of subaltern agencies, connecting the Middle
Passage, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean. They provide us
with a space for what Seyla Benhabib calls “enlarged thinking” (Benhabib
1992, p. 9). By foregrounding comparative history, transoceanic empathy,
and what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih describe as “minor-to-
minor networks,” these works relocate and recalibrate our vision of dia-
sporic minorities and dispossessed subjects across imperial, national,
linguistic, and historical contexts (Lionnet and Shih 2005, p. 8). As their
imaginative intervention “re-worlds” the world, as we know it, it draws a
“landscape of another world” (paysage d’un autre monde) and helps us
appreciate the border-crossing processes that subaltern realities and minor
transnationalisms have produced (Chamoiseau 2017, p. 134). In bringing
together mobilities, political systems, and cultural experiences located at
the periphery of developed nation-states in the North, their fiction and art
embody and perform emancipatory projects that extend to new ontolo-
gies of place-making as processes that definitively involve the reimagining
and reconfiguring of othered human subjects.
Notes
1. My opening questions were further inspired by an interview with Lionnet.
She pointed out in that conversation: “These are the challenges of our
field: how do we respond to creative voices that imagine the pain of the
‘other’?” (Jean-François 2018, p. 140).
2. The original reads as follows: “Une vieille histoire, cent fois entendue, cent
fois ressassée. L’histoire d’un pays qui brille de mille feux et que tout le
monde veut rejoindre. Il y a des mots pour ça: eldorado, mirage, paradis,
chimère, utopie, Lampedusa. C’est l’histoire de ces bateaux qu’on appelle
ici kwassas kwassas, ailleurs barque ou pirogue ou navire, et qui existent
depuis la nuit des temps pour faire traverser les hommes pour ou contre
leur gré. C’est l’histoire de ces êtres humains qui se retrouvent sur ces
bateaux et on leur a donné de ces noms à ces gens-là, depuis la nuit des
temps: esclaves, engagés, pestiférés, bagnards, rapatriés, Juifs, boat people,
réfugiés, sans-papiers, clandestin.” All translations are mine unless other-
wise stated.
3. There are actually two World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage sites in
Mauritius. The other one is the Morne Brabant, a hideaway mountain for
runaway slaves located on the southwestern coast of Mauritius. For a
detailed presentation of both sites, including pictures, see Lionnet 2015.
4. In an article dealing with “Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the
Spanish-African Border,” Jørgen Carling writes, for instance, that “the
principal mode of unauthorized entry to Spain from Africa has been small-
scale smuggling in wooded boats known as pateras” (Carling 2007,
pp. 319–320).
5. The French original reads that “ils refoulent les migrants parce que les
migrants ne leur laissent pas le monde. Les migrants le leur reprennent …
par l’infini du mot A-C-C-U-E-I-L qu’ils nous forcent à épeler dans toutes
les langues du monde.”
6. “Le solidaire s’impose comme principe … Une solidarité ardente et
multiforme.”
7. “polyrythmies qui naissent des différences quand elles s’appellent et
qu’elles se trouvent, s’accordent souvent, se repoussent autant, mais con-
servent chacune le souvenir de l’autre.”
8. In the original, we read: “[Cette barbarie] lie tous nos malheurs et nous
oblige à considérer ensemble tous nos défis. Tout est lié, tout est noué ! La
résistance stérile est d’abord celle qui ne sait pas lier. … les mondes multi-
ples se percevant autonomes et se croyant étanches n’existent que dans les
stases de nos imaginaires.”
9. “indéfinissable mise en relation avec le tout-vivant du monde nous émeut,

nous affecte … Nous remplit en finale d’une éthique sans grande
démonstration.”
10. The original reads: “Il m’est arrivé d’espérer quand il y a eu le petit Syrien
échoué sur la plage turque. Je me suis dit que quelqu’un, quelque part, se
souviendrait de cette île française et dirait qu’ici aussi les enfants meurent
sur les plages. … j’ai parfois l’impression de vivre dans une dimension par-
allèle où ce qui se passe ici ne traverse jamais l’océan et n’atteint jamais
personne. Nous sommes seuls … Les vies sur cette terre valent autant que
toutes les vies sur les autres terres, n’est-ce pas ?”
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(1): 241–257.
CHAPTER 6
Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy

Humanities
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
Writing in the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by US-led

allied forces, Neil Lazarus and Priyamvada Gopal pointed out the paradox
this historic cataclysm posed to academic postcolonial studies. They wrote:
What we are proposing is that, ‘after Iraq’, postcolonial studies must change
not because the world has changed but because ‘Iraq’ shows that, in quite
substantial ways, it has not changed. This sounds paradoxical, of course.
Why should postcolonial studies have to change if, and indeed because, the
world has not changed? The answer to this question is that up until now,
postcolonial studies, in its predominant aspect, at least, has demonstrated a
notable disregard of what Kanishka Goonewardena and Stefan Kipfer, in
their contribution to this issue, call ‘the contemporaneity of imperialism,
colonialism and capitalism,’ that is, of the deep structural dimensions of the
world system. (Gopal and Lazarus 2006, p. 7)
Such a perspectival lacuna, they suggested, was the result of historical con-
ditions of this scholarly field, which was marked simultaneously by the
U. P. Mukherjee (*)
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
e-mail: u.mukherjee@warwick.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_6
136 U. P. MUKHERJEE
fading of the insurgent energies of anticolonial national liberation move-

ments of the Bandung era and the demise of Soviet socialism. Such epochal
transformations, in turn, gave rise to the misconception, particularly
amongst academics employed in European and North American universi-
ties, that all resistance to the now triumphant status quo of the “Washington
consensus” and “Reaganomics” was not only futile, but also decisively
over (Gopal and Lazarus 2006, pp. 7–8). Therefore, Lazarus and Gopal
argued that, in order to remain “constitutionally, a politically progressive
intellectual field,” postcolonial studies would have to embrace a “body of
work that register[ed] the actuality of the world system and the structur-
ing effects of this system (upon consciousness, culture and experience as
well as upon material conditions of existence)” and “work towards a new
‘history of the present’—a new reading, above all of the twentieth century,
liberated from the dead weight either of the Cold War or of a compensa-
tory ‘Third Worldism’” (Gopal and Lazarus 2006, p. 9).
Such calls for making postcolonial studies more rigorously (historical)
materialist are, of course, not new. Lazarus’s own work—in particular,
Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002) and The Postcolonial
Unconscious (2011), Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist
Critique (2004), Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures
(1992), and Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism
Now (1997) have built in their distinctive yet overlapping ways conclusive
cases for such theoretical, methodological, and ethical reorientations. Yet,
Gopal and Lazarus’s use of “Iraq” as a conjuncture in the Gramscian sense,
in relation to postcolonial studies, seems to me to be appropriate, insofar
it introduces a new paradigm to the field, which may be summoned by a
single word, namely energy.
The Iraq conflict is often referred to as an “oil war.” The evidence in
support of this hypothesis has been amply provided both within the
domain of mass media—famously by luminaries such as former US
Republican Senator Chuck Hegel and former Chair of the US Federal
Reserve Alan Greenspan (Purple 2008)—and in scholarly analyses (Jhaveri
2004; Hurst 2009; Colgan 2013; Muttitt 2018). Here, as Gopal and
Lazarus suggest, Iraq appears merely as a single recent link in the long
historical process of the forcible appropriation of resources on a massive
scale, one that we call imperialism or colonialism. In another sense,
though, it may be that the specific nature of this resource—oil—compels
us to reconsider how we think empires and colonies, and what we thought
we knew about energy and its place in such historical formations and
6 RE-CHARGE: POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES AND ENERGY HUMANITIES 137
processes. For a while now, oil is being acknowledged as the fuel without
which what we consider modernity to be would not have come to pass—at
least not its current configuration. The central role it has played in the
geo-atmospheric event we call “climate change” also urges us to interro-
gate not only the social relationships conditioned by the use of this or that
resource, but also the much deeper histories of energy, climate, and empire
altogether.
This scalar difference and symbiosis between the particular and diverse
forms of energy are precisely what Allen MacDuffie calls the “material and
representational” dimensions of the current “energy problem” (MacDuffie
2014, p. 2). For MacDuffie, the failure to differentiate between energy as
a “usable resource” and as “an ambient agency circulating endlessly
through the world” can, in the final instance, be located in the nineteenth
century, and particularly in the pivotal figure of Robert Malthus whose
idea of a closed system of a “single, inescapable world-environment”
should be seen as one of the most durable interpretative frames deployed
over the past two centuries (MacDuffie 2014, pp. 3–5). The Malthusian
imagination, which should properly be designated environmental, as
classically anthropocentric, since it conceptualizes energy primarily as a
system running on fossil fuels and servicing a particular mode of produc-
tion, industrial capitalism, which, in turn, supports human social relations
marked by growth, consumption, and inequality. It proceeds analogically,
insofar as all other ways of life are subordinated to this logic.
To see the world as a closed system, as a domain in which usable energy is

constantly decreasing, is, in fact, a sign of the way in which urban-industrial
logic surreptitiously comes to structure the representation of everything….
The city, the world, the cosmos—all of these seem analogously “closed,”
with entropy mounting and energy sinking towards zero, because each sub-
sists on a finite supply of resources. (MacDuffie 2014, p. 10)
Although MacDuffie prefers “urban-industrial logic” as a designation, it is

clear that what he is talking about is what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist real-
ism”—the imperative to subjugate, in imagination and in practice, all
Lebenswelten in the interests not of “humans” as such, but humans of a
particular kind: the homo economicus (Fisher 2009).
Thinking about oil and Iraq seriously can then allow us to examine the
close relationship between empire and energy, but not just any kind of
empire. What we are talking about here are modern, industrial, capitalist
138 U. P. MUKHERJEE
empires. Such, indeed, has been the core insight offered by a new theo-
retical paradigm provisionally designated as “energy humanities.”
However, what I am suggesting is not so much that postcolonial studies
should recharge itself by plugging into “energy humanities.” Rather, it
seems to me that the two fields are bound by certain elective affinities that
orient them toward excavating a “history of the present,” as Gopal and
Lazarus put it. By the same token, one critical task at this point may be to
identify such affinities in order to map out a “history of a future” that may
or may not come to pass, but without which we have no chance whatso-
ever of breaking out of the “windless present” (Jameson 2003, p. 76). In
the following pages, I shall be making a necessarily provisional attempt at
such a cartography.
Time, Work, Power

There is no need to limit ourselves to the twentieth century in order to
stitch together such a “history of the present.” One of the signal achieve-
ments of energy humanities has precisely been to deepen Fernand Braudel’s
insight into modernity’s longue durée by suggesting the various forms of
overlapping, interlocking, and contradictory energy regimes as periodizing
devices and structures. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer put it in their
foundational anthology as follows: “To be modern is to depend on the
capacities and abilities generated by energy…. We are citizens and subjects
of fossil fuels through and through, whether we know it or not” (Szeman
and Boyer 2017, p. 1). To be modern is also to inhabit the world made
and unmade by historical capitalism. Therefore, thinking with energy asks
us to revisit how we periodize the history of capital itself not as an exercise
in nostalgia, but in an effort to shape a different future:
The way one establishes epochs or defines historical periods inevitably shapes
how one imagines the direction the future will take. And so it is with the
dominant periodization of the history of capital, which has been organized
primarily around moments of hegemonic economic imperium […]. What if
we were to think of the history of capital not exclusively in geo-political
terms, but in terms of the forms of energy available to it at any given
moment? (Szeman 2017, pp. 55–56)
As Szeman goes on to suggest, one of the things that would happen, once
this question was posed, would be to refine the history of capital as a
single, yet internally and unevenly differentiated world-system: “steam

capital” in 1765, followed by the advent of “oil capitalism” in 1859
(Szeman 2017, pp. 55–56). One of the other things that would happen
when we reordered the history of capitalist modernity thus would be to
make other kinds of periodization, such as that of literary history, imagin-
able. A few years before Szeman, Patricia Yaeger made exactly this sugges-
tion. She asked: “[I]nstead of divvying up literary works into hundred-year
intervals … or categories harnessing the history of ideas…, what happens
if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them
possible?”(Yaeger 2011, p. 305). Note, however, how the question of
empire tends to fade out of view in these proposals for re-imagining histo-
ries, both literary and non-literary. Confined to the category of geopolitics
and economic hegemony, it remains unclear how the energizing of histori-
cal periods might also relate to that of historical formations, of which
empire is but one. We shall return to this issue below.
If re-ordering periodization can thus be thought of as one of the first
achievements of “energy humanities,” the second one has been to restore
the question of labor or work to a position of central importance to any
understanding of capitalist modernity. Strictly speaking, this has been the
contribution primarily of scholars and theorists associated with the “world-
ecology” paradigm, but since their work, and in particular that of Jason
W. Moore and Andreas Malm (despite the energetic debates and disagree-
ments between them), is so obviously invested in thinking seriously about
energy, it can with some justification be included in the domain of “energy
humanities.” Consider the very definition of “world-ecology,” as Moore
proposes it: “the fundamental co-production of earth-moving, idea-mak-
ing, and power-creating across the geographical layer of human experi-
ence,” which is impossible to sustain without a structuring concept of
work/energy—“work/energy helps us to rethink capitalism as a set of
relations through which the ‘capacity to do work’—by human and extra-
human natures—is transformed into value, understood as socially neces-
sary labor time” (Moore 2015, p. 14). That is, “world-ecology” reveals
work/energy as the mediating device that draws all human and non-
human life-forms into a particular kind of social relationship, marked by
the twin forces of appropriation and exploitation (Moore 2015, p. 17). In
fact, the distinction made between appropriation and exploitation may be
particularly suggestive for any postcolonial inquiry that seeks to think
about empire in a new key. If by “appropriation” we understand “those
extra-economic processes that identify, secure, and channel unpaid work
140 U. P. MUKHERJEE
outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital,” and by “exploi-
tation” the extraction of profit from wage labor, it may be that (modern)
empire is the formation and (modern) imperialism the process that sutures
the two together (Moore 2015, p. 17).
Such an understanding of energy as work leads to the third insight
gained by energy humanities—an expansive and sophisticated theory of
social power. Malm notes that despite “the semantic confluence in the
anglophone world, thermodynamic and social power are nearly always
treated as distinct phenomena,” whereas in reality:
No piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans
have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy sub-
sistence needs: fossil fuels necessitate waged or forced labour—the power of
some to direct the labour of others—as conditions of their very existence …
[W]e should direct our attention to power in the dual sense, first of all in the
processes of labour. That is the point of contact between humans and the
rest of nature, where biophysical resources pass into the circuits of social
metabolism. (Malm 2016, p. 19)
This conception of social power turns conventional accounts of the history

of industrialization on its head. The familiar story of “industrial revolu-
tions” tends to privilege technological determinism, where scientific
entrepreneurs such as James Watt appear to respond to solve the structural
crises brought about by a scarcity of resources with their inventions and
thereby chart out a new pathway to “growth.” As Malm’s meticulous
study of the transition from water to steam power in Britain shows,
though, this flies in the face of all available evidence. British industry, in
particular British cotton industry, did not suffer from a scarcity of water or
from a rise in cost of capital outlay in setting up watermills. Rather, the
switch from water to steam—from “flow” to “stock” in Malm’s vocabu-
lary—happened because it better served the interests of capitalists as a class
over those of British workers.1
Capital prevailed over labour in the key industry of the British economy—
smashed the unions, reestablished proper hierarchy, extracted more output
out of fewer workers at lower cost—by means of power, in the dual sense of
the word. Automation drew its force from an extraneous energy source.
Only the mobilisation of that source made it possible for the cotton capital-
ists to begin the process of salvaging profits at the expense of labour … the
power ensured by capital through the technological restructuring of the
cotton industry was summoned straight from power in extra human nature.
(Malm 2016, p. 68)
The key components of “flow” energy like running water, light, and wind
are res communes because they are difficult to appropriate for individual
use. By contrast, “stock” energy such as coal and oil are “piecemeal, splin-
tered, amenable to concentration and accumulation, and divisible” and,
therefore, congenial to the logic of private property (Malm 2016,
pp. 117–119). It is this material logic contained in the “stock” energy
form rather than any techno-scientific invention that makes its fusion with
the social logic of British industrial capitalism both possible and desirable:
The struggle against labor called for machinery, which called for steam
power, which called for growth, thereby coupled to the growth of manufac-
turing. Steam stood precisely in the middle, between the lower and the
upper levels, as the apparatus mobilizing the nether world at the behest of
capital. (Malm 2016, p. 222)
The third gift of “energy humanities,” then, is the insight that social power
is always composed of different kinds of energy resources and that such
energy resources are always already socialized. In the case of capitalism,
commodities are produced for exchange-value only by increasing the rate
at which bio-physical resources are appropriated. Fossil fuel, or “stock
energy,” becomes historically indispensable in this process and should
properly be thought of as what Malm calls “fossil capital”—both a “trian-
gular relation between capital, labour and a certain segment of extra-
human nature” and a “process […] an endless flow of successive
valorization of value, at every stage claiming a larger body of fossil energy
to burn” (Malm 2016, p. 290).
Periodization, labor/work, power—it is not hard to see how each of
these concepts, re-energized, as it were, are valuable devices for postcolo-
nial studies primed to ask the right questions and wrestle for some appro-
priate answers in an epoch defined by the interlinked crises of climate,
capital, and world-hegemony. Earlier, I had spoken of elective affinities
between energy humanities and postcolonial studies. What, then, are the
insights that the latter gifts to the former so that it can continue to deepen
and widen its theoretical and conceptual currents? Part of the answer may
be offered by works in progress at the moment, such as Malm’s own sequel
142 U. P. MUKHERJEE
to Fossil Capital, which is provisionally called Fossil Empire. But as we wait

for the fruition of such scholarly labor, we can readily enumerate some
of them.
“Stock,” “Flow,” “Colonial Difference”

There is no need to rehearse the appropriate criticisms aimed at academic
postcolonial studies—particularly when parading under the sign of “post-
structuralism” or “postmodernism”—for its excessive celebration of “dif-
ference.” Indeed, some of the key works in the field I named above were
written as notes of dissent against this strain. And yet, it is undeniably true
that any analysis of modern imperialism has to investigate the relationship
between the dominant center or core and the dominated periphery (as
well as the mediating semi-periphery) as one characterized simultaneously
by similarities and differences. The most distinctive of histories of colonial-
ism attempt to think dialectically between such similarities and differences
rather than fall into the trap of dualistic interpretation. Such a relationship
is obtainable at every level of empire—political, economic, social, material.
As Sumit Sarkar comments in his definitive overview of modern India:
The capitalist state in Britain had needed to break up the rebellious popular
eighteenth-century cultures and communities of poor peasants and artisans
that derived from customs held in common…. The patterns of colonial
development … were significantly different. Here, too, many solidarities of
resistance, old or new, were sought to be repressed: “thugs,” criminalized
tribes, non-sedentary groups, rebellious adivasis and peasants, and eventu-
ally anti-colonial mass movements. But the tiny foreign ruling elite needed,
always, shifting alliances with more or less privileged indigenous strata.
These would be most useful when they could draw upon reserves of “tradi-
tion” and “community,” whether truly old or freshly minted. (Sarkar
2014, p. 34)
Such political differences were co-produced with economic ones. In a

capitalist world-economy, colonies were compelled by force and collabora-
tion to be the suppliers of food and raw materials to Europe and North
America. Thus, instead of consumption, the majority of agriculture in
India was earmarked for export even or especially in times of scarcity or
famine. Such famine years coincided precisely with transformations in the
world currency markets, when the falling Indian rupee was pegged to
silver, while Britain and many of the other imperial powers moved to the
gold standard (Sarkar 2014, pp. 155–156). Therefore, despite being
“closely tied to […] the country that had pioneered industrialization,”
India did not attract any investment in key sectors such as cotton, steel,
and engineering. Capital was invested largely in transport (railways), tea
plantation, coal mines, and jute mills (Sarkar 2014, p. 199). Finally, in the
face European racist and oligopolistic control of key industrial, indigenous
capital and labor displayed distinctive patterns of diversification. The for-
mer, on the one hand, showed preference for “the pervasive combination
of large factories with putting-out units, small workshops, and petty or
artisanal forms of production”; the latter, on the other, were far less urban-
ized than her metropolitan counterpart, retaining much stronger and
durable connections with villages where she returned periodically while
employed, invested their savings in land, and retired to after the duration
of their employment (Sarkar 2014, pp. 221–222). Such accounts of colo-
nial “difference” serve to remind us that if “fossil capital” came to domi-
nate the energy regime of modern empires, it did, not do so at the same
rate or in the same manner across space and time. It is a confirmation that
at both general and specific levels of the operation of historical capital,
what obtains is what Trotsky had called the “law” of combined and uneven
development.
This acknowledgment of colonial “difference” also has implications for
one of the core problematics of energy humanities that we have already
touched upon: periodization. Of course, the problem of temporality is
already coded into the body of “stock” energy like coal. As the material
form of “past climate, past metabolism, past topographies, all gone for-
ever,” cut off from “diurnal, seasonal, historical, even civilizational time,”
coal outstrips any time-scale perceptible to its human users (Malm 2016,
p. 42). Undoubtedly, it is this uncanny and ghostly eruption of the past
that was crucial in the making of the powerful cultural expressions of
“steam fetishism and steam demonism” in the nineteenth century: “In a
sense, the combustion of fossil fuels is material necromancy: the conjuring
up of dead organisms, reawakening their vital forces to steer the actions of
the living” (Malm 2016, p. 2019). Over the same period, in a colonial
possession such as India, the energy regime was even more unevenly struc-
tured—with wood, water, and coal being used extensively together and no
marked transition between one and the other occurring at least until the
middle of the twentieth century, despite the relatively early operation of
coal mines in Raniganj in 1814 or the discovery of the rich seams in Jharia
144 U. P. MUKHERJEE
in the 1890s (Sarkar 2014, pp. 229–230). The social relations co-produc-

tive of such a mixed energy regime also confirmed scrambled temporalities
and historical periods. The most “advanced” collieries ran on a “semi-serf
system reminiscent of Scottish mines in the eighteenth century,” while the
Indenture Act of 1865 and the “Indigo Terror” of the 1850s and 1860s
revealed an entrenched plantation system in sectors such as tea and indigo,
which was akin to the slave states of the American south or the Caribbean
islands. It is with some justification, then, that social relations in colonial
India, and particularly in rural colonial India, have been called “semi-
feudal,” marked by what Jairus Banaji has called a “formal,” and not the
“real,” subsumption of labor (Patnaik 1971, pp. 123–130; Bhaduri 1973,
pp. 120–137; Banaji 1977, pp. 1375–1404). The co-existence of wood,
water, and coal and that of feudal, mercantilist, and industrial capitalism in
India account for an unsettling presence of the past and the pastness of the
present, in turn, was registered in a whole variety of literary and cultural
forms—from the famous colonial gothic mode of a Rudyard Kipling to
speculative fiction of Durgacharan Ray (Debganer Martye Aagaman,
1880) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Sultana’s Dream, 1905). Thus, the
problem of historical temporality and periodization, coded in the material-
ity of “fossil capital” was sharpened in the colonies and registered in a
cultural mode often called the “postcolonial uncanny” (Gelder and Jacobs
1998; Obert 2015). This relationship between time, periodization, and
literary-cultural forms of registration is the second of the gifts offered by
postcolonial studies to energy humanities.
This brings me to my third point. Energy humanities, by definition,
accord a central importance to literature and culture. If a central task of
the field is to “reimagine modernity,” this can only be achieved by reveal-
ing “the energy dimension of the ‘spontaneous consent’ of hegemony”
(Szeman and Boyer 2017, pp. 3–4). And in the revelation of this “energy
unconscious,” literature is assumed to play a key role (Szeman and Boyer
2017, p. 8). But what exactly this role entails is far from settled. It is strik-
ing that some of the most notable commentaries, which have emerged
thus far, are often concerned with the absence or lack of literature’s regis-
tration of matters energetic. Thus, Amitav Ghosh laments the lack of a
“single work of note” about the “oil encounter” and blames it variously
on the “professionalization of literature,” American imperial insularity,
and the “conventions of naturalistic dialogue” and “monolingual
speech communities,” which he believes are typical of the novel form
(Ghosh 2017, pp. 432–433). There are things to be said about Ghosh’s
conclusions regarding both literary history and the conventions of the

novel form. But perhaps the most important lesson in this regard may be
drawn from what Neil Lazarus has observed about the curious disjunction
between postcolonial literatures and postcolonial theory—that not only
scholars associated with the latter domain have tended to work within an
extremely restricted body of works, but they have also tended to ask the
same questions, deploy the same methods, and arrive at the same answers
at the cost of ignoring what the vast and varied literatures they are suppos-
edly working with actually has to offer (Lazarus 2011, p. 19). Preeminent
among these ignored or forgotten offerings are “representational schemas
that are pervasive, very widely distributed, often cardinal, and even defini-
tive,” and which allow us to see not any “fundamental aliennes”’ between
societies and cultures, but “deep-seated affinities and community athwart
and across the ‘international division of labour’” (Lazarus 2011, p. 19). As
with the “postcolonial unconscious,” so with the “energy unconscious.”
Decoding it means not only moving beyond a handful of “oil novels” or
“energy lyric,” but also letting go of what we think we know about the
novel form’s alleged monolingualism or proclivity for “naturalist dialogue.”
With this in mind, I wish to turn in the final section of the essay to two
literary works of nineteenth-century colonial India. Despite (or perhaps,
because of) their diverse formal and generic affiliations, not only do they
register affinities and communities across colonial and imperial (and there-
fore, international) divisions of labor, but they also illustrate simultane-
ously the energy dispensations that are co-produced with them and sustain
them. These texts are fairly well-known in postcolonial studies, but read-
ing them together as registrations of colonial energy regimes may allow us
a glimpse of postcolonial studies in a new key. In one sense, Dinabandhu
Mitra’s play Neel-Darpan (1861) and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge-
Builders” (1898) can be gathered under the rubric of what Tabish Khair
has, in another context, called “Babu fiction” (Khair 2001). That is, they
all dramatize the affinities (and competitions) across racial lines between
men who are simultaneously privileged and dominated (economically,
politically, culturally), and who put forth, in the final instance, their claims
to be what Tithi Bhattacharya has felicitously called “sentinels of Culture”
(Bhattacharya 2005). Such shared affinities may in part explain their can-
onization, to varying degrees, within postcolonial studies. As Ranajit Guha
shrewdly notes about Neel-Darpan, at the time of its publication, Mitra
was “one of those young men […] who managed to have some bad prose
and worse verse in Sambad Prabhakar between 1853 and 1856” (Guha
146 U. P. MUKHERJEE
1974, pp. 1–2). The play itself received indifferent critical reception; the
topic, which involved the tyranny of European indigo planters, was hardly
a revelation. And yet, a luminary like Sibnath Shastri could pronounce that
Mitra’s play had spoken for their generation. Guha’s explanation is that it
is only when the Indigo planters decided to sue it for libel, the literati of
Calcutta (both Indian and European) decided to rally behind the play, and
in the process, turned the text into a
pre-text—for the fabrication of a nice little middle-class myth about a liberal

Government, a kind-hearted Christian priest, a great but impoverished poet
and a rich intellectual who was also a pillar of society—a veritable league of
Power and Piety and Poetry—standing up in defence of the poor ryot.
Coming when it did, this myth did more than all else to comfort a bhadralok
conscience unable to reconcile a borrowed ideal of liberty with a sense of its
own helplessness and cowardice in the face of a peasant revolt. (Guha
1974, p. 3)
What Guha calls “a borrowed ideal of liberty” stitches the three texts
together, albeit with some significant differences. Most notably, of course,
Kipling’s short story appears anxious to disassociate this ideal from the
Indian babu, and even from imperial governance altogether. My sugges-
tion here is that “liberty” in this literature is tightly associated with a vari-
ety of competing energy regimes on which its articulation and activation
depends. All the types of energy identified by Malm—“stock,” “flow,” and
“animate power”—are at play here, and without them none of the key
narrative claims can be mounted.
Bhadralok, Ryot, Coolie

Neel-Darpan’s bhadralok (“gentlemanly”) credentials are paraded in a
series of prefatory remarks before the action of the play begins. The real
risk of pauperizing the “Bengal ryot, a peasant proprietor,” to the condi-
tion of a “serf”—so we hear—is that it dooms imperial efforts to “develop
the resources of India” to failure (Mitra 1861, p. 10). France, Switzerland,
Holland, Belgium, and other “advanced” European nations are said to
have statistically proven that the well-being of the social comfort of this
class renders “people averse to revolution, and friends of order” (Mitra
1861, p. 10). Queen Victoria is imagined as “the mother of the people”
who has “now taken them on her own lap to nourish them” and she has
dispatched many “great men” who will “very soon take hold of the rod of
justice in order to stop the sufferings which the ryots (peasants) are endur-
ing from the great giant Rahu, the indigo planter” (Mitra 1861,
pp. 15–16). Such antiradical reassurances, however, can only be secured in
the play through a staging of a conflict between the metabolic imperatives
of “animate power” and that of water-borne “flow” energy harnessed in
the interests of colonial capital.
The indigo plant is the source of the blue dye (still) used extensively in
cotton textiles, and as Guha and Sarkar have both shown, the “indigo
rebellion” of 1860 was a response to a constellation of national and inter-
national crises: a slump in London indigo prices, the Union Bank crash in
Calcutta, the consequent squeeze put on the more modest planters by the
sector’s big beasts, which meant that the cultivators were increasingly ter-
rorized into growing a crop that was economically unviable for them
(Guha 1974, p. 1; Sarkar 2014, p. 123). Like other tropical plants, indigo
thrives in relatively high soil temperatures (18–20 °C) and high volumes
of water are required for washing away any residual salinity (around
1000 m3 per hectare). If planted as a “cash crop” alongside a “food crop”
like rice, it can lead to a competition for “energy flows” to the detriment
of the latter. In Mitra’s play, the global crises of falling profit rates in colo-
nial agri-business can only be shown through a specific local conjuncture,
where soil water, air, and other forms of energy flows are directed away
from the subsistence needs of the cultivators to the planters’ economic
priorities. Hunger, therefore, appears as the most recognizable sign of this
conjuncture. Goluk Chunder Basu laments in the opening moments of
the play, Svaropur “is not a place where people are in want—it has rice,
peas, oil, molasses […] vegetables in the field, and fish from the tanks—
whose heart is not torn when obliged to leave this place?” (Mitra 1861,
p. 22). Thus, we understand that the scarcity, which compels the “big”
and “small” ryots to migrate is artificial, engineered by the practice of loans
forced on them by the European planters in order to divert their land and
labor to indigo cultivation. Hunger also affects the people disproportion-
ately. It is much more acute for tenant farmers like Sadhu Charan or
Torapa than for landowners like Goluk Basu and his family. The latter’s
claim to “gentlemanliness” in the play is secured not only, as Guha rightly
argues, through the possession by the men of a certain amount of cultural
capital—the ability to access colonial law courts, their familiarity with
Shakespeare (whose works in translation is cited by Bindu Madhab, one of
Goluk’s sons, in his letter)—but also via their voluntary subjection to the
148 U. P. MUKHERJEE
affliction of starvation in solidarity with their tenant farmers. Bindu

Madhab underscores this point in the Third Act of the play where he
explains that the Basu family has “other ways of living; the loss in Indigo
for one year or two might stop feasts and religious ceremonies, but they
will not produce want of food” (Mitra 1861, p. 120). But since that is not
an option for the “smaller” ryots, they risk an open legal confrontation
with the planters Wood and Rose. When Goluk loses his case and is jailed,
he fasts for four days before committing suicide. His death brings the ryots
on the brink of insurgency, but the moral fiber of “gentlemen” requires
their refusal to turn their self-sacrifice into a trigger for radical action:
“Two hundred ryots with clubs in their hands are crying aloud […]. I told
them to go to their houses, since if the saheb gets the least excuse, he will,
[…] burn the whole village” (Mitra 1861, p. 170).
Mitra’s gentlemen-farmers accrue a liberal sensibility through a conflict
between “flow” and “animated” energy forms where the former is diverted
from the latter through an act of colonial and capitalist fiat. But we can go
further than this. What is often overlooked in discussions of Mitra’s play is
how sexuality and religion are integrated within this matrix of interplay
between energy forms not only to indigenize liberalism, but also to recast
it in a conservative Hindu mold. The planter’s outrage lies not only in the
forcible appropriation of the Basu’s lands, but also in the process that
encroaches upon the sexual claims of the family’s patriarchs on women.
Such claims are typically coded as “honour,” as Goluk demonstrates:
“What honor remains to us now? The planter has prepared his places of
cultivation round about the tank […]. In that case, our women will be
entirely excluded from the tank” (Mitra 1861, p. 23). The “dishonour-
ing” of indigenous patriarchy culminates in the rape of women like
Khetromoni who interprets her violation by the planters as an assault not
against herself, but against her husband (Mitra 1861, p. 106). What is
especially notable is that such violence is presented, above all, as the colo-
nial appropriation of a definitive form of gendered “animate energy”—
sexual reproduction and motherhood. The suffering of Khetromoni after
her rape is likened to that of still birth or abortion, and her final, anguished
plea is to be turned on her bed “to my father’s side” (Mitra 1861, p. 172).
The play ends with the figure of Sabitri, Gokul’s widow, cradling the dead
body of her eldest son Nobin, while attempting in vain to force her breasts
onto his mouth. Bindu, her surviving son, arrives to find another dead
body, that of Nobin’s widow Sarolata, who has been killed by Sabitri: “As
the mother, having destroyed the child whom she was fondling for making
it sleep on her lap, on awakening will go to destroy herself, so wilt thou”

(Mitra 1861, p. 187). The colonial appropriation of the Basu’s land, hith-
erto reserved for the modesty and “honor” of their women, sets the stage
for an equally violent appropriation of their bodies, which in the play have
no meaning outside that assigned to them by patriarchy.
Such “honor” is also distinctively Hindu not only because it is drawn in
contrast to European women such as the planter’s wives, whose “shame-
lessness” is exhibited in their public appearances on horseback (Mitra
1861, p. 61), but also because it is Muslim men like Amin who as the
planters’ agents, are directly responsible for its negation. Drawing on the
hoariest and crudest Islamophobic stereotypes, Mitra draws Amin as a cor-
ruptor of the proper channels of “animate (sexual) energy.” He has served
up his own sister to his master’s pleasures in order to further his career,
and his very body is seen as anathema to Hindu sensibilities: “Oh, the
beard! When he speaks, it is like a he-goat twisting about its mouth […].
fie! fie! The bad smell of onions” (Mitra 1861, p. 54). He is the “degener-
ate” who is instrumental in Khetromoni’s rape, the force who is “ruining
the country” to the extent that his religious marker—“Musulman”
(Muslim)—is used as a term of abuse among the Hindu ryots. Amin’s
graphic violence against the peasants is of a piece with his sexual violence
against their women, he is the Other against which the moral credentials
of a Hindu liberal order, and of a liberal ordering of energy, are secured
by Mitra.
Written nearly four decades after Mitra’s play, Kipling’s “The Bridge-
Builders” is often correctly read as the paradigm of a muscular imperialism
that presents work/labor—in particular “men’s work”—as the raison
d’être of empire. But comparing it to Mitra’s play, and keeping in mind
some of the interpretative protocols of energy humanities, we are able to
offer a slightly different conclusion: that, for Kipling, true “liberal” values
are only realized through material labor/work; that this labor/work is
racialized and gendered insofar that only some (white, European) men are
able to perform it properly, while it behooves upon other (non-white,
non-European) men to follow the examples of the former; and that this
idealized brotherhood is achieved by a balancing out of the forces of
“flow” and “stock” energies, which are brought about by a judicious use
of “animate power.”
The story begins with the engineer Findlayson surveying like a sover-
eign the imminent completion of his good work: the great Kashi bridge
being thrown across the river Ganges. Such work demands simultaneously
150 U. P. MUKHERJEE
the mastery of the aquatic forces of the river, the entropic drag of state
bureaucracy and tropical diseases, as well as the “animate power” of the
colonized humans and beasts under his charge. In general, the latter can-
not really be distinguished from each other—the one “crawling […]
climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below,” the other “by the hun-
dred swarmed about the lattice side-work” (Kipling 1987, pp. 5–6). But
there is an exception. The foreman of the human workers, Peroo, who
“was a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar, familiar with every port from
Rockhampton and London, who had risen to the rank of a serang on the
British India boats, but wearying of routine muster and clean clothes had
thrown up the service and gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure
of employment” (Kipling 1987, pp. 8–9). Peroo’s familiarity with the
“flow” energy of the sea; his expertise with the “tackle and handling of
heavy weights”; the authority he wields over the laborers in the name of
“honor”—all these things make him more than an invaluable assistant to
the British engineers Findlayson and Hitchcock. They are virtually co-
authors of the civilizing imperial mission. Kipling serves this “liberal”
assumption of (qualified and precarious) equality with an expert dose of
irony. While Findlayson smiles paternalistically at Peroo’s proprietorial
behavior toward the bridge, the readers are invited to smile back at the
Englishman’s easy assumptions of racial superiority through accounts of
Peroo’s heroism that “saved the girder of Number Seven Pier from
destruction when the new wire jammed in the eye of the crane, and the
huge plate tilted in its slings” (Kipling 1987, pp. 8–9).
Peroo’s instinct for water compels him to warn Findlayson that the
river is bound to react unfavorably to being “bitted and bridled” by the
bridge, since “she is not like the sea, that can beat against a soft beach”
(Kipling 1987, p. 11). The engineer is skeptical, since Peroo offers this
insight in the distinctly non-secular language of Hindu cosmogony. The
bridge, we are told, was meant to undergird the secular triumph of fossil
(“stock”) energy—steam railways—over that of the “flow” of the Ganges.
For Findlayson, the railway bridge stands for militarized imperial order
“loopholed for musketry and pierced for big guns” and signifies the
pukka—permanent—nature of empire (Kipling 1987, pp. 5–6). But it is
Peroo’s understanding that proves to be superior (“The bridge challenges
Mother Gunga […], but when she talks I know whose voice will be the
loudest”), as unseasonal rainfall upstream results in a flood that threatens
the bridge, and along with it, the “honor” of imperial work.
As was the case in Mitra’s play, “honor” here is a key component of

patriarchy. Peroo urges his workmen to “fight [the river] hard, for it is
thus that a woman wears herself out”; and even as the flood threatens the
destruction of countless (Indian) lives and property, it is his own “honor”
that Findlayson is most worried about—“Mother Gunga would carry his
honour to the sea with the other raffle […]. Government might listen,
perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood or
fell” (Kipling 1987, pp. 17–18). At this critical juncture in the tussle
between “flow” (the river) and “stock” (the railway bridge), a particular
kind of indigenized “animate power” intervenes. As the exhausted work-
ers watch the flood water creep up the bridge, Peroo offers some opium
pellets to Findlayson which he claims are “meat and good toddy together,
and they kill all weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have
eaten nothing else at all […] clean Malwa opium” (Kipling 1987, p. 19).
Much like indigo, opium was an essential “imperial cash crop” insofar
the profits accrued from its export from India (most famously, to China)
were essential for maintaining a favorable balance of trade and geo-political
power, and its cultivation diverted massive amounts of land, water, and
labor that would otherwise have been expended on subsistence agriculture
(Trocki 1999; Brook and Wakabyashi 2000; Baumler 2001; Melancon
2003). In making it the drug of choice of the Indian laborers who use it
to fend off the effects of their depleting metabolic reserves caused by a
lack of food, as well as that of the English engineer, who dulls the anxiety
caused by his impending loss of honor, Kipling reveals uncannily accurate
picture of both the political- and energy-unconscious of modern
imperialism.
With a striking flick of the narrative switch, the ingestion of opium
famously takes us from a realist to a “critical irrealist” register (Löwy
2007). Instead of firing up his capacity to keep up his vigilant work on the
bridge, the opium activates a dream-work in Findlayson which holds the
key to solving the stand-off between empire’s “flow” and “stock” ener-
gies. Findlayson dreams of the Hindu gods debating the fate of the bridge,
and by extension, that of British empire in India. When Ganges, in the
shape of a crocodile, complains about the bridge builders taming her, she
is answered by Ganesh (the elephant god) and Shiva (the bull) that it is the
coal-powered railways that had ushered in the era of the “fat money-
lenders,” since “all the towns are drawn together by the fire-carriage, and
money comes and goes swiftly, and the account-books grow as fat as
myself” (Kipling 1987, p. 26). On the one hand, this dream-work justifies
152 U. P. MUKHERJEE
empire through the hegemony of a class-fraction. It is assumed that what

is good for the “fat money-lenders” is good for everyone. On the other
hand, it reverses or at least modifies Findlayson’s hitherto militarized
vision of imperial work; no musketry loops or gun-ports here disturb the
steady accumulation of wealth. It falls to Krishna, one of the original
Hindu trinity, to pronounce judgment on the epochal nature of “stock”
energy that drives the railways:
Great Kings, the beginning of the end is born already. The fire-carriages
shout the names of new Gods that are not old under new names. Drink now
and eat greatly! Bathe your faces in the smoke of the alters before they grow
cold! […] As men count time the end is far off; but as who know reckon it
is to-day. (Kipling 1987, pp. 32–33)
The peace between the “flow” of the Ganges, and the “stock” of the rail-
way bridge is then brought about by the opium fuelled metabolic surge in
the “animate power” of imperial workers. This balancing act between the
material forces of empire is replicated in its ideological domain. If
Findlayson enters the non-secular world of Peroo through the opium
smoke, Peroo travels in the reverse direction, as Findlayson emerges from
his reverie. He relates to the Englishman what his near-death experience
during a sea-storm on board an English ship has taught him:
If I lose hold I die, and for me neither the Rewah nor my place by the galley
where the rice is cooked, nor Bombay, nor Calcutta, nor even London will
be any more for me. “How shall I be sure,” I said, “that the Gods to whom
I pray will abide at all?” (Kipling 1987, p. 35)
Peroo’s work on the English steamship, in this respect, confirms the judg-
ment of Krishna that Findlayson witnesses.
Postcolonial scholarship tends to read Kipling and Mitra in opposi-
tional terms—one as an arch imperialist, the other as a radical nationalist.
But by paying attention to how their texts respond to various forms of
energy that charges the everyday life of empire, we detect the currents of
mutual interest that binds them almost despite themselves. Their invest-
ment in a specific, even peculiar, kind of liberalism—class-bound, gender-
and race-inflected, yet marked by a temporary and precarious masculine
fellowship, if not equality—makes visible the contradictions that run
through every level of modern capitalist imperialism and colonialism. It
allows us to pitch postcolonial studies in a new key for an era that is hotly
tipped to signal the end of the “capitalocene.”
Note
1. Malm divides energy sources into three main types. “Flow” signifies those
like wind and water that are solar in nature and can be directly collected or
concentrated by prime movers. “Animate power” signifies the kind condi-
tioned by metabolism embodied in living creatures. “Stock” refers to the
kinds like coal, which are highly concentrated, cut off from weather fluctua-
tions or metabolic demands, and require intricate chemical and technologi-
cal processes to be converted to mechanical energy (Malm 2016, pp. 39–42).
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CHAPTER 7
From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till:

Postcolonial Dilemmas in Visual
Representation
Afonso Dias Ramos
Censorship is to art what lynching is to justice.

—Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Gates 1990, p. 23)
This chapter considers two of the most contested and covered polemics in
the current struggle to decolonize urban environments and visual cultures
around the globe: the campaign to remove Cecil Rhodes’s statue in Cape
Town in 2015, which led to the largest protests in South Africa since the
fall of apartheid rule, and the dispute over the exhibition of a painting by
a white artist in New York—the most talked about controversy of the art
world in 2017—that showed the lynched black body of Emmett Till.1
These events instantly became the most salient campaigns in targeting
symbolic markers of colonialism and white supremacy in- and outside the
museum. By echoing and catalyzing similar actions across the world, they
generated a massive cultural footprint in the form of mass rallies, protest
A. D. Ramos (*)
Institute of Art History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: a.ramos.11@alumni.ucl.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_7
158 A. D. RAMOS
art, public talks, academic events, online exchanges, op-eds, essays, and
monographs.2 It seems fair to say that they have come to define the con-
temporary discourse on memory and visual politics.
However, it is difficult to navigate, let alone arbitrate, the richness of
arguments and opposing factions that are at stake in these emotionally
charged disputes, especially given the media circus, which flattens them
into caricatures. Although this chapter seeks to advance a revisionist histo-
ricization of these matters and derive their theoretical implications for the
current debates, any comprehensive overview lies beyond its purview. My
goal is to throw instead the two concurrent polemics into a productive
dialogue for the first time. On the one hand, I want to examine the chal-
lenges with sanitizing colonialism and racism, as they are embodied by
monuments outside the museum. On the other hand, I wish to consider
the reasons for not displaying any explicit representation of historical vio-
lence inside the museum. In a more general sense, I am interested in
exploring why the fate of monuments and pictures has become the prime
issue of public history today. What does it mean to have a statue and a
painting acting as the flashpoints in the ongoing row over cultural appro-
priation, identity politics, political correctness, and free speech? What criti-
cal implications does this triumph of material and visual cultures hold for
the very future of postcolonial studies?
In March 2015, a student named Chumani Maxwele carried a bucket
of human waste from the township of Khayelitsha and dumped it on the
statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. A wave of demon-
strations ensued around this monument. It gave voice to a dispossessed
majority that felt deprived of basic sanitation, national resources, and a
decent education. It denounced the failed project of the rainbow nation.
A month later, the statue was removed amidst widespread protests, public
debates, and violent clashes, and this event sent shockwaves across South
Africa, as dozens of other monuments were targeted by attacks and white
civilian militias rushed to public statues in order to prevent and protest
against their defacement. As this movement expanded to take on broader
social and economic issues, its ripple effects traveled across the world,
inspiring similar actions on university campuses in California, Edinburgh,
and Oxford, and global debates on colonial-era monuments reached an
unparalleled momentum.
Two years later, in March 2017, there was an uproar on social media
during the private opening of the Whitney Biennial, the longest-running
and most prestigious survey of American art. The first pictures posted
7 FROM CECIL RHODES TO EMMETT TILL: POSTCOLONIAL DILEMMAS... 159
online revealed the painting Open Casket by white artist Dana Schutz. It
was a depiction of Emmett Till according to a postmortem photograph,
the black teenager who had been lynched in 1955. This canvas had been
shown in Europe before without a backlash, but when curators Christopher
Lew and Mia Locks placed it on display in New York, it drew protests
against their complacency toward, as well as complicity in, racism. They
were accused of tone-deaf artistic appropriation and profiteering of black
death, and this dispute bitterly divided the art world, crossing over into
mainstream culture and tangling up in an already heated debate over the
destiny of confederate monuments.3
Judging from the furor on both sides of the Atlantic, these artistic
objects tread upon the cultural fault lines and political divides of our time.
But what time would this be after all? There is a newfound impetus around
colonially minded notions of reparation, repatriation, restitution, and res-
toration. Yet, this is matched by a rise in intolerance, nationalism, xeno-
phobia, populism, and identitarianism. It is a time of unparalleled idolatry
due to the proliferation of images, an increased preservation of heritage,
and a visual turn in the humanities. It is a time of unrivaled iconoclasm, as
tens of thousands of public symbols are being removed from former social-
ist countries.4 Are these paradoxes and contradictions the makings of a
richly agonistic democratic society or the stirrings of a collapsing social
consensus, a foretaste of some cultural civil war?
It seems to have gone unnoticed that the culture war once fought over
the literary canon, great books, and university curricula has become mostly
image-driven today, playing out across visual pictures and urban land-
scapes. Art and heritage, in other words, have now come to lead public
conversations over whether to redress, and how to address, contested and
grievous pasts. This shift mirrors a broader development in contemporary
society and is meaningful in and of itself, as visual modes of political pro-
test and historical narration gain unprecedented urgency. But, at the same
time, as Jacques Derrida warned, our predicament is that we still remain
“by and large in a state of quasi-illiteracy with respect to the image”
(Derrida and Stiegler 2002, p. 59). In many ways, and this is the crux of
this chapter, postcolonial scholarship has become emblematic of this
impasse. Once forged out of literary studies, this field is yet to come up
with capacious theoretical models and a language complex enough to deal
with images and the specific challenges that art and heritage raise in pro-
tests today, namely, the anxieties concerning the representation of colonial
violence and the violence around the representational structures inherited
160 A. D. RAMOS
from the colonial era.5 There is much to learn from contemporary contro-
versies inside and outside the space of the museum and about our obsti-
nate inability to view them as being mutually implicated. With identity an
increasingly fevered focus for conflict in politics and culture, art and heri-
tage could offer a prism to refract debates that too often remain reductive.
The two contestations over a monument and an image resulted in swift
and strong political reactions. In cultural discourse, one of their primary
effects is to have overinflated the currency of the idea of decolonization,
making the term postcolonial recede precipitously into the background.
This is a perplexing development. On the one hand, the term decoloniza-
tion is fraught with definitional ambiguities and risks being rendered
meaningless now by overstretch, overreach, and overuse. On the other
hand, it signals the potential failure of the postcolonial project at large:
both in the political sense that the promises of independence were unful-
filled, as inequalities have outlived the legal eradication of racism and seg-
regation, and colonial logics are still at work, and in the epistemic sense of
a critical body of work that has either exhausted itself or has been given up
on—as we increasingly lose sight of its foundational critiques of binary
representations and drift away from its theoretical models that privileged
appropriation and ambivalence, hybridity and negotiation—and lies in
dire need of experimental methods and methodologies to deal with and
work through the present-day quandaries. At this juncture, one should
turn to these controversies around built environments and visual images.
They configure a creative experimentation with theory, politics, and activ-
ism, which productively interlaces the museum, the university, and the
streets. They also bring together material histories and affective communi-
ties in ways that urgently require new conceptual protocols and cognitive
modes. A rethinking of postcolonialism must tend to this magma of criti-
cal energy, interconnecting art, activism, and academia, and according to
visuality the primacy that it has hitherto been denied.
In what follows, I will reframe the recent episodes as part of long-
burning debates rather than spontaneous outbursts, underscoring how
they always cut across nation-specific contexts of race politics. I focus on
South Africa and the United States aware of the Anglophone hegemony in
postcolonial studies, but also insistent that both countries are singularly
productive sites from which to think through dilemmas of race and repre-
sentation due to their privileged role in global anti-racist discourse and
stand as symbolic benchmarks for the extremes of ethnic segregation and
racial terrorism. I do so by interweaving the stories of two historical
figures: Cecil Rhodes as the embodiment of white imperial domination,

and Emmett Till as an icon of racial injustice. Their lives spanned two dif-
ferent centuries of white supremacy and black subordination within a sys-
tem that tied three different continents. They have also been targets of
intense artistic, academic, and activist production in the past four decades.
We must historicize such contemporary disputations to envision alter-
native relations to the colonial past and to redefine the terms and condi-
tions of this renewed engagement. Hence, I want to move away from the
points that have vitiated the discussion into a stalemate and break free
from the roundabout nature in which some conversations have been con-
ducted. One must resist the media coverage that abusively frames them as
a split between left and right or between black and white, couching the
complex formal, affective, political dilemmas in limited and limiting terms.
These public quarrels over monuments and markers involving histories of
racial conflict throw a light on the quickly transforming ethics of visuality
in civil society and harp on issues at the forefront of contemporary art
scholarship like debates on the materiality, agency, and temporality of
objects, the curation of difficult knowledge and traumatic memory. Instead
of rushing headlong into the politics of indignation, it is necessary to con-
sider how they generate insightful responses in art and criticism and com-
pel institutional reforms, as well as renewed public debates on what spurs
the making and unmaking of monuments, what visual symbols represent,
what models of memory they imply, and whose archives they shape.
The Story of Emmett Till

In January 2017, months before the opening of Whitney Biennial, the
incoming Trump administration invited black British singer Rebecca
Ferguson to perform at the inauguration. She agreed to do so on one
condition: to sing “Strange Fruit.” First recorded by Billie Holiday in
1939, covered by Nina Simone in 1965, and sampled by Kanye West in
2013, this known anti-racist hymn once shocked audiences for graphically
describing lynched African Americans. The request was denied. So it did
not go unnoticed that country singer Toby Keith took her place on stage
and played a song previously accused of glorifying lynching. On the steps
of the capital, Keith blared out: “Take all the rope in Texas / find a tall oak
tree, / Round up all them bad boys / Hang them high in the street / For
all the people to see.”6 The dissonance of this inaugural act portended a
changing political climate and the deteriorating race relations, especially
162 A. D. RAMOS
following the milestones of Barack Obama’s preceding presidency: the

National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in
Washington a few months before; the first memorial to the 4075 African-
American lynching victims was inaugurated shortly thereafter in Alabama;
and lynching was about to become a federal crime after 200 bills were
voted down over more than 100 years.7 The centrality of lynching is ger-
mane, as the hallmark of American racism, which stands in historically for
all forms of discrimination against the black population.
But one case in particular bubbled up time and again—that of Emmett
Till. In 1955, this black teenager from Chicago was visiting relatives in
Mississippi when he came across Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working
at a local grocery store. Accusing him of wolf-whistling at his wife, Bryant’s
husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milan kidnapped Till from his
uncle’s house at gunpoint at night. They tortured and shot him, strung
barbed wire as well as a 75-pound metal fan around his neck, and dumped
the lifeless body in the Tallahatchie River. The murder trial went swiftly.
An all-white jury acquitted both men. Later, in exchange for money and
protected by double jeopardy laws, the killers confessed the crime to a
magazine without facing legal consequences.8 Till’s body, found three
days later, was so disfigured that it was only identifiable by an initialed
ring. When the casket arrived in Chicago—its lid screwed down and pad-
locked—the mother took it to a funeral home to have it opened. After
seeing her son’s bludgeoned body, Mamie Till Mobley wanted everyone
to witness it. “Let the world see what I have seen,” she famously stated,
insisting on an open-casket funeral—50,000 people showed up—as the
unedited black-and-white photographs of the corpse were published on
the press (cited in Tyson 2017, p. 72).9 These grisly photographs helped
lend momentum to the nascent crusade for the civil rights movement, as
a turning point for changes in race relations.
The ordeal of Till’s lynching returned a vengeance half a century later
when the outrage over police brutality and execution-style shootings
against black men boiled over in the US.10 “What’s happening in our
country today with black men unarmed being shot,” said Oprah Winfrey
during the Black Lives Matter protests, echoing the common sentiment,
“it’s like a new Emmett Till every week” (TMZ 2016). This analogy was
taken up by newspapers and social media, pointing to the age-old stigma-
tization of black men as dangerous, in need of constant surveillance, and
subject to death with impunity.11 In 2017, Till’s case was even reopened,
after news surfaced that the woman who had initially accused him
confessed to fabricating the story and providing false testimony during the
trial.12 But as the media spotlight focused on this story and the violent
confrontations surrounding the removal of statues and flags across the US,
what flew largely below the public radar was the fate of the public sign-
posts in memory of Emmett Till. This is a significant counter-narrative. It
had taken activists more than 50 years of lobbying to put them up. Since
then, though, these markers have repeatedly been stolen, shot at, torn
down, and vandalized by unknown people; they have had to be replaced
on a regular basis.13
Such was the highly charged context within which the 2017 Whitney
Biennial responded to issues of racism and police brutality, by assembling
the most diverse edition of the biennial to date. And yet, no one foresaw
the firestorm caused by Till’s abject naked body and the waltz of protests
and counter-protests that ensued. The black artist Parker Bright fired the
opening salvo with a week-long protest in the gallery, wearing a T-shirt
that read “Black Death Spectacle” and obstructing the painting from view.
He chatted with onlookers, arguing that it was “an injustice to the black
community,” perpetuating “the same kind of violence enacted on Till”
(Kennedy 2017). Another young artist, Pastiche Lumumba, joined in. He
released memes online and adapted one of them in a banner that he hung
next to the museum: “The white women whose lies got Emmett Till
lynched is still alive in 2017. Feel old yet?” Then British artist Hannah
Black posted an open letter online, which has since been deleted, calling
Whitney “to remove Dana Schutz’s painting … with the urgent recom-
mendation that the painting be destroyed” (cited in Basciano 2017). Black
argued that it is “not acceptable for a white person to transmute black
suffering into profit and fun,” adding that “the subject matter is not
Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded
on the constraint of others … The painting must go” (quoted in Basciano
2017). The incendiary letter was signed by artists, critics, curators—all
white co-signers were later taken out—and it bore the brunt of counter-
protests.14 Opposing calls for destroying and removing the work, Coco
Fusco identified in it a “deeply puritanical and anti-intellectual strain” that
put “moral judgment before aesthetic understanding” (Fusco 2017). The
notion, Fusco argued, that “any attempt by a white cultural producer to
engage with racism via the expression of black pain [was] inherently unac-
ceptable foreclose[d] the effort to achieve interracial cooperation, mutual
understanding or universal anti-racist consciousness” (Fusco 2017). The
writer Zadie Smith released a riposte, mocking any claim of ownership and
164 A. D. RAMOS
authority over the representation of a historical event, and asking whether

non-African-Americans could reclaim this icon or how black ought one be
in order to address black pain (Smith 2017). Francis Fukuyama took
Black’s letter as an illustration of an alarming in-fighting among the left,
which has been setting “progressive blacks and whites against one another”
(Fukuyama 2018).15
As the dispute escalated, the curators stood by their decision, claiming
to have sought “empathetic connections in an especially divisive time”
(cited in Carissimo 2017). Unknown parties hacked into Schutz’s private
email and used it to submit a fake apology published by Huffington Post
and New York Magazine. The artist followed suit with an official statement
clarifying that the work had been made in response to anti-black violence
and that it would not be sold. She added: “I don’t know what it is like to
be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother” (quoted
in Basciano 2017). Some saw this identification as the proof of Schutz’s
cluelessness on racial issues and a hollow excuse; for even if the painting
was not sold, a career bump would surely ensue. A group of artists then
called the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston to cancel
Schutz’s subsequent solo show there, even though the offending painting
was not featured. It accused the ICA of “condoning the coopting of Black
pain and showing … perpetuating centuries-old racist iconography that
ultimately justifies state and socially sanctioned violence on Black people”
(cited in Voon 2017). In response to this organized boycott, a coalition of
over 80 high-profile figures from the art world—Marina Abramović, Kara
Walker, Glenn Ligon, Cindy Sherman, among others—signed an open
letter of “unequivocal support for Dana Schutz” and the ICA for refusing
“to bow to forces in favor of censorship or quelling dialogue.” It asked
fellow artists not to “perpetrate upon each other the same kind of intoler-
ance and tyranny that we criticize in others” (Neuendorf 2017).
As this shock battle blew up, the two sides of the barricade became
clear. One opposed trespassing of the perceived red line of censorship and
free speech, detecting therein a nasty form of identity politics, which
espoused moral posturing, esthetic literalism, cultural essentialism, and
racial particularism. Not only did they point out that the same biennial
included a graphic painting by Henry Taylor (titled “The Times They Ain’t
a Changing, Fast Enough!”) based on a video still of Philando Castile
being shot by the police, but they also often made the analogy with the
Mirth & Girth crisis of 1988 when a portrait by a student of the Art
Institute of Chicago depicting the recently deceased African-American
mayor in women undergarments led black aldermen to confiscate it with

the police and threaten the institution with cutting public funds. The
opposing side pointed to a long genealogy of artists, curators, and institu-
tions invoking free speech in the interest of entrenching whiteness in an
art world, which despite its vocal insistence on diversity and inclusivity
failed to represent truly, do justice and reckon with black humanity, privi-
leging instead white gatekeepers and white-centric approaches to race.
Consequently, neologisms as “white-peopleing” or “whitewalling” were
coined (Harriot 2017; D’Souza 2018). They pointed out that Schutz’s
previous work had never dealt with race issues. In addition to being
accused of opportunism, it recalled the controversy at the 2014 Whitney
Biennial when one of the few black female artists, Donelle Woolford, had
turned out to be a fictitious character by white male artist Joe Scanlan.
These were the general terms of the debate, but conversations broke down
along specific fracturing lines.
In retrospect, most objections to the painting boiled down to three
basic dilemmas: first, a political dilemma over whether black pain is off-
limits to whites, raising issues of cultural appropriation and identity poli-
tics, and the differentiation between the right to or of representation, and
between speaking as and for; second, a moral dilemma over the ethics of
representation—whether explicit images implicated in political violence
ought to be withheld or broadcast, how to weigh the trauma they perform
against the one they represent, and what is the capacity of art to produce
and reproduce pain; and third, the esthetic dilemma, dealing specifically
with the choice of medium in relation to the subject matter, the differen-
tial values accorded to the languages of abstraction and figuration, and the
particular work that painting does in relation to the photographic archives.
Thus, unlike their cartoon depictions on the media, these three dilemmas
bred fruitful and often surprising disputes and should warrant thorough
and nuanced investigation.
I want to frame this problematic as an examination of graphic images of
racial terrorism inside the museum, and of public markers that commemo-
rate white supremacy outside the museum in which the vandalism to Till’s
signposts is included. One can then engage more productively with actions
that exceed the parochialism accorded to such matters by the US media,
since these disputes are transregional in scope and scale, as they are also
apparent in recent events in Senegal, Belgium, India, Ghana, Portugal, or
the UK. It is worth pointing out that within the US context the debate
began in earnest in 2015, one month after Rhodes’s statue had been
166 A. D. RAMOS
removed in Cape Town, South Africa, when the white supremacist terror-
ist Dylann Roof opened fire in a historically black church in Charleston,
South Carolina, killing nine people in response to the Black Lives Matter
movement. These racially motivated murders set off rallies across the
country. Many demanded the immediate removal of confederate monu-
ments and flags from public spaces. Only weeks after the massacre, activist
Bree Newsome led the charges by scaling the flagpole outside of South
Carolina’s statehouse and removing the confederate flag. Alabama and
South Carolina hauled down their own emblems from state capitol
grounds and similar actions were taken in Columbia, New Orleans, and
Baltimore. The debate has raged on ever since, with the toppling of mon-
uments and the erection of new ones on private land. A slew of rallies and
counter-rallies led up to the tragic incidents of Charlottesville, Virginia, in
2017 when a man rammed a car into the crowd of peaceful protestors.
Those in support of preserving monuments included people who claimed
that they ought to be kept intact on purely historical grounds, often
because these could be read against the grain, since statues sent mixed
signals and took on different hues for various constituencies. There were
also far-right groups, which openly praised white supremacy and slavery.
Then, there were others who wanted the monuments to be abolished.
They argued that these markers commemorated slavery and white suprem-
acy, that they were blind glorifications of the past and needed recontextu-
alization, relocation, or destruction.
The tension between the whitewashing of the past as enshrined in the
urban environment and the vexations of a visual culture, which explicitly
exposes violence, is far from being an American preserve. One such clue
can be gleaned from the widely distributed picture of Dylann Roof. Here,
he is wearing Confederate symbols and the flags of the two last white
minority states in the world: Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa. In
addition, Roof’s website was called The Last Rhodesian, a cause célèbre for
white supremacists throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the civil rights
movement in the US won historic victories.16 The resurgence of this
mythology today is confirmed by a boom in online sales in US apparel
marketing specializing in Rhodesian-themed memorabilia. This trend
reminds us that, when the first iteration of the current culture wars took
place, the last bastion of white minority rule—South Africa—was largely
intact still due to the support of the US. The cult of Rhodes has also come
to the forefront in the present culture wars due to student movements in
South Africa, as they struggle with issues akin to the ones in the US.
Cecil Rhodes
A notorious aspect of the campaign galvanized by the removal of Rhodes’s
statue is how it has mobilized tools of visual activism and contemporary
art. Take the millions of selfies taken on site and the contagious live
streaming of events on social media, as well as the protest of black youth
marching around it masqueraded as slaves. There is more: the perfor-
mance of Sethembile Msezane posing as a Zimbabwe bird statue rising, as
the crane lifts off Rhodes, and the shadow of Rhodes’s statue painted in
black on the ground, after it is lifted off. These representations exemplify
that the destruction of images can also be an event full of images (Wendl
2019). It shows that esthetic questions are at the core of how the colonial
past is currently being curated, mediated, and negotiated. The backlash
consisted of the same accusations leveled against the removal of colonial
statuary everywhere: a random, anachronistic, and biased act in nature,
the removal is deemed a way of judging history by today’s standards, an
attempted erasure of the past, and the blank-slating of what happened.
Some of these recurrent criticisms show that the more polarized and divi-
sive the political climate becomes, the more consensual the past is made
out to be.
Why Cecil Rhodes? There is perhaps no other figure who has been
considered around the globe more an embodiment of white supremacy
within the colonial context than Rhodes. A close second is King Leopold
of Belgium, whose statues have also been contested.17 Contrary to popular
opinion, this is no anachronism. The perception of Rhodes as an unscru-
pulous imperialist and a ruthless expansionist was one of his time, and he
died a highly controversial figure. The animosity during Rhodes’s lifetime
had been immortalized by Mark Twain in a tongue-in-cheek comment:
“He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of
Charter-Christian applause for it … I admire him, I frankly confess it; and
when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake” (Twain
1897, p. 483). Although Rhodes was not hanged, the obituary in the
Guardian pulled no punches, remarking that “the judgment of history
will, we fear, be that he did more than any Englishman of his time to lower
the reputation and impair the strength and compromised the future of the
Empire” (Guardian 1902).
Criticisms never stopped reigning in even after his death, contesting the
means and ends of his supposedly humanitarian mission. The extent of this
divisiveness seems to have evaporated today, as any trace of dissent in the
168 A. D. RAMOS
past can simply be discredited in one fell swoop as political correctness,

social justice, and ideological revisionism. Rhodes was one of the first cases
in the recorded history of an academic community protesting en masse
against his honorary degree. In 1892, some dons objected when Oxford
considered doing so. When this was overturned in 1899, the inauguration
of Rhodes as an honorary doctorate of civil law became a scandal, as many
scholars failed to understand how a man perceived to have incited war to
further private profit could be honored thus (Maylam 2015). Even as
Rhodes walked across Oxford University to receive the degree along with
Herbert Kitchener, the officer who had instituted concentration camps in
South Africa, the latter shouted audibly before the crowds: “Remember,
Mr. Rhodes, that if any one attacks you, I wear a sword at my side to
defend you” (Oxford Magazine 1900, p. 254). It was that night in Oriel
that Rhodes is said to have first found out about the college’s poor finan-
cial situation and offered to leave it £100,000 in his will—£40,000 to
finance a building, the rest for fellowships for students from Germany, the
US, and the British colonies. The donation was commonly perceived as a
public relations stunt by a man who had fallen from grace, a man who used
his personal fortune to buy back social prestige and immortality. Some
newspapers made this clear by telling readers that “if many things can be
proved against Cecil Rhodes, much must be forgiven him, because he
loved Oxford much” (Saturday Review 1902, pp. 453–454). At the
unveiling of a memorial tablet at Oxford in 1907, in a widely reprinted
speech, former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery proclaimed:
In South Africa, that region of perplexity which will, at any rate, remain for
all time a monument of British generosity … the name of Rhodes will always
be preserved … But is it not after all in this University of Oxford that his
fame is most secure? (Proceedings at the Unveiling of the Rhodes Memorial
Tablet 1907, p. 8)
These anxieties are telling. They deserve to be reconsidered in the midst

of the most systematic campaign to topple Rhodes-related symbols in
South Africa nowadays, and the related movement at Oriel College in
Oxford to bring down Rhodes’s statue.
The debates have, in effect, failed to recall the scorn that ensued, after
the city of Kimberley in South Africa had announced its intention to build
one of the first statues in honor of Rhodes during his lifetime. A reaction
of disbelief quickly followed in France. Some newspapers declared that
“mud and blood are the only materials fit for such work” (Saissy 1990).
The poet Galimafré contributed a ballad to the occasion: “If you want to
glorify / Murder, rapine and looting, / So erect, o English people, / A
statue to Cecil Rhodes!” (Galimafré 1900). Cartoonist Henry Paul pro-
jected a monument with his bust above the inscription “To Cecil Rhodes—
The 10,000 Casualties of the British Army,” the whole piece encircled by
fences. There was such incredulity that, even on his death in 1902, some
front pages declared point-blank: “There is already talk of building a statue
to Rhodes. It is unlikely that a man who started a cruel war … will ever
have a statue. The five million he added to the national debt ought to
serve him as a lasting monument” (Le Matin 1902). In Rhodes’s time,
many doubted that he would ever have a statue. It was only after his death
that this occurred in significant numbers, and most of them were paid with
donations from the company he had founded. This benign posthumous
fate was satirically captured in a literary parable of 1928 by the Belgian
magistrate Jules Leclercq, an emissary of King Leopold who had had deal-
ings with Rhodes. In Leclercq’s short story, Rhodes did make it to heaven
after all to everyone’s surprise. Only this was not on account of his good
deeds. After a life of terrestrial expansionism, ruthless profit-making, and
war goading, he was deemed so big a sinner that the devil himself was
forced to recognize that there were no gates or windows in hell wide
enough to let him in (Leclercq 1926). Rhodes’s death eventually allayed
such resentments, especially after the will had been made public. It secured
his reputation as a benefactor or a philanthropist mostly through the
scholarship scheme, although it did not go unnoticed that one of the
wealthiest men in history, the president of the largest corporation in the
world, died without leaving a penny to charities.
Despite the onslaught of laudatory biographies, an analysis of the stat-
ues built in his honor reveals that they were mostly belated and short-
lived, attesting to their controversial status and contested legacy. The
commemorative wave only began in earnest in the thick of decolonization
and the civil rights movement during the 1950s. The 1948 election of the
National Party in South Africa and the creation of the Federation in 1953
spurred the embrace of British heritage and the Rhodes myth with fresh
urgency, offsetting the rising anti-imperial sentiment.18 This development
peaked in the centenary of Rhodes in 1953 when the British Queen, after
unveiling a memorial tablet at Westminster Abbey in England, traveled to
Rhodesia on a pilgrimage to Rhodes’s grave in Matopos, attended the
Rhodes Centenary Exhibition in Bulawayo and signaled London’s
170 A. D. RAMOS
approval for the Federal venture. Even in 1960, as white settlers fled from
the Congo, Queen Elizabeth went to Lusaka (today’s Zambia) and threw
a party for the unveiling of a brand-new statue of Rhodes, using the occa-
sion to grant that town the status of a city. These symbolic gestures were
not lost on the population. When Zambia’s independence was declared
four years later, someone immediately covered with tar the sign of a major
thoroughfare: Cecil Rhodes Drive. A few days later, the city council voted
to remove Rhodes’s statue. Out of courtesy, it was dismantled and shipped
to Rhodesia at a time when freedom fighters were gaining ground there.
Indeed, shortly thereafter, Rhodes’s statue on Jameson Avenue in Salisbury
(now Harare) would be bombed, which led to the killing of black pedes-
trians in Kopje and Harari by white civilian militias in retaliation. In 1962,
a year after Robert Mugabe declared that “Rhodes had stolen the country
from Africans and that he would dig up Rhodes’s Grave and send it to
England,” a petrol bomb would be thrown at his grave (quoted in Maylam
2015, p. 38).
There were countless other incidents, which placed this historical figure
at the symbolic core of the white order. In 1968, after Rhodesia had left
the Commonwealth, the first new flag was raised to great fanfare in front
of Rhodes’s statue. Conversely, when Ian Smith struck a deal with the US
in 1976, a group of settlers left a white wreath at the statue’s feet along
with a card that read: “In memory of independent Rhodesia” (Moorcraft
1979, p. 52). In 1980, crowds rushed to this spot to celebrate the nation’s
independence, as authorities employed a crane to topple the enormous
bronze statue of Rhodes. Then, a playful sign was placed on that empty
pedestal. It advertised the space for rent.
In the two countries named after Rhodes, present-day Zambia and
Zimbabwe, the statues were toppled when white minority rule regimes
were deposed. However, South Africa held onto them. Although activists
and academics expressed contempt for the untouched permanence of
these statues, they were perceived as touchstones of a gentle transitional
process led by Nelson Mandela, of a negotiated settlement as opposed to
a violent rupture.19 But when younger generations grew tired of waiting
patiently for the fruits of democracy, this agreement became less clear.
Consequently, the statue has been a consistent target of protest over the
last decades (already in the 1950s), with Afrikaner students standing
against British expansionism.
In 2014, when a Rhodes statue was defaced in response to the killing of
the Marikana mine strikers, the activist collective Tokoloshe released a
manifesto declaring the failure of the postcolonial project and populariz-

ing the slogan: “coz 1994 meant fokol.” This has been part of a series of
searing indictments of a political vision that did not significantly move
beyond the structures of separatism and segregation of the past in a sup-
posed postcolonial present. This rallying around the statue also coincided
with the outrage over a program of academic scholarships, which were set
up through the symbolic partnership of “Rhodes-Mandela.” It was to
many an outrageous alliance, since the latter was the emblem of the new
Africa, whereas the former was the ur-symbol of imperialist Africa. Once
caught on camera wagging a finger at a statue of Rhodes, Mandela
quipped: “Cecil, now you and I are going to work together” (Nyamnjoh
2016, p. 110). Later, in a press conference, Mandela went on to say: “We
are sometimes still asked by people how we could agree to have our names
linked…. To us the answer is easy … for us to come together across his-
torical divides to build our country together” (Nyamnjoh 2016, p. 110).
In the afflicted rainbow nation, though, impatience with reconciliatory
measures was palpable. As hopeful optimism turned into restless frustra-
tion, students started asking questions about the enduring presence of this
colossal statue erected in an everlasting gratitude to the most spectacular
of modern empire-builders, a man who had once fought hard to deny
votes to black subjects, a man who had stated his intention to build a uni-
versity “from the kaffir’s stomach” (quoted in Magubane 1996, p. 108).20
Rhodes’s belief in racial superiority was not uncontentious during his
lifetime. As early as 1899, Booker T. Washington released inflammatory
editorials, accusing Cecil Rhodes of being “directly responsible for the
killing of thousands of black natives in South Africa” (Washington 1899).
For Marcus Garvey, too, Rhodes was the epitome of white exploitation
and should be a leading target for the global anti-racist struggle. On June
6, 1928, he declared in a rousing speech before a crowded Royal Albert
Hall in London:
The consumptive Cecil Rhodes went to Africa, we treated him with kindness
and consideration. What is the result? They have made Rhodesia so that a
black man cannot walk on the sidewalks of that country. That is not a fair
return for all that we have done. We have laid our hearts and our souls bare
before you … we are only asking you now for a reasonable consideration of
our case. (Hill 1990, p. 203)
172 A. D. RAMOS
This critical strand would gain—not lose—momentum through the ages.

Even decades later, in 1968, Stokely Carmichael blasted how the attempts
to erase imperialist bloodshed or black debasement with a gesture of char-
ity managed to spin history’s judgment:
You see, because you’ve been able to lie about terms, you’ve been able to
call people like Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist, when in fact he was a mur-
derer, a rapist, a plunderer and a thief […] And that was called philanthropy.
But we are renaming it: the place is no longer called Rhodesia, it is called
Zimbabwe […] Rhodes is no longer a philanthropist, he’s known to be a
thief—you can keep your Rhodes Scholars, we don’t want the money that
came from the sweat of our people. (Carmichael 1969, p. 155)21
These quarrels over Rhodes’s afterlife have been continually actualized in

Zimbabwe where the flurry of activist interventions in the sites built up
after him remains nonstop to this day. But as the protests in South Africa
inspired hundreds of similar acts elsewhere and moved on to larger eco-
nomic and social issues, one of the underreported spin-offs of the move-
ment turned to art collections on the grounds of the University of Cape
Town. It had come full circle in terms of renegotiating the bind between
the blind glorification of white supremacy outside the museum and the
instances of visual representation of violence on their walls.
It is pertinent at this point to revisit the most damning piece written
against Rhodes in his lifetime, one specifically designed to offset the flood
of hagiographic accounts, namely, Olive Schreiner’s novella Trooper Peter
Halket of Mashonaland (1897). This exposé—intended to break “the
nightmare power which Rhodes has exercised over the country”—
described extra-legal killings by white soldiers in land-grabbing ventures
by placing a graphic photograph of three Mashona rebels lynched by
Rhodes’s men in Bulawayo as frontispiece (quoted in Maylam 2015,
p. 87).22 This picture—the original one had been found on display in a
hairdresser’s shop window in Kimberley—provoked such a scandal that it
was removed from all future editions until 1974.23 This censorship is of
the utmost importance to current disputes in that it testified to the unique
visceral effect that photographs had in dissolving romanticized claims as
well as flat-out denials, and in trumping the power of words. It was like-
wise proof that European empires engaged in practices that tried to con-
vince the public of the absence of real racism in their overseas colonies. In
fact, when Schreiner died, her mother sought to repair Rhodes’s name.
And this is the most telling point: she decided that the best way to coun-
teract the damage done by a damning photograph was to use all of the
proceeding book royalties to build him a statue.
In this sense, one can read the lynching of Blacks as a necessary coun-
terpart to the monument of white domination. Images and statues should
then be analyzed together as deeply interrelated phenomena not least
because only a few journalists covering Till’s trial in Sumner, Mississippi,
failed to notice that, while awaiting verdict, the white audience sat on the
benches outside the court, while the black audience was sitting outside on
the lawn under a Confederate statue built in honor of those who had
fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy. During the Jim Crow
laws and the civil rights protests, confederate monuments such as Rhodes’s
statues were placed strategically to inspire fear into the black population.
As Till’s killers later admitted, they had lynched the schoolboy to send a
message to the black community. Therefore, it was no accident that the
peak of such monuments coincided with that of public lynching. Both
enforced the same ends by different means: white superiority and black
subordination. The photographic medium was deeply implicated in these
operations. It amplified the warning as an image-transmission device. It
ensured that the message was replicated, transmitted, and broadened for
viewers beyond local communities. Violent images and sanitized monu-
ments always exist in a dialectical tension, and the contemporary contro-
versies are at pains to resolve this conundrum.
What was so specific, then, about the picture of Emmett Till? How did
it manage to flip the historical script? And why is this of contemporary
relevance? When Till’s mother insisted to have unedited photographs
taken of the disfigured body, she turned the lynching tradition against
itself by documenting her protest against racial violence. As Jesse James
evocatively put it, she “turned a crucifixion into a resurrection” (cited in
Harold and DeLuca 2008, p. 265). In fact, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had already been fighting
lynching by using pictures by racists against them, but she displayed her
son’s mangled body to encourage national grief. That is the reason why,
for many, Till’s murder is seen as the precursor of current efforts to record
visually every instance of police brutality against African Americans.
Private grief is turned into political gesture, the covered casket is made
available to the eye. No longer a souvenir of collective action, the perpe-
trator image became the victim image. This sent powerful shockwaves,
which many saw as having jumpstarted the civil rights movement. The
174 A. D. RAMOS
shock tactics accounted for their transformative power in the collective

imagination, but it also came at an exceedingly high emotional price.
There was an endless list of black authors who vividly recollected the life-
changing distress of first encountering the pictures: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
James Baldwin, Elridge Cleaver, Joyce Ladner, Audre Lorde, Anne Moody,
and so forth.24 Miles Davis recalled that “that shit was horrible and shocked
everyone in New York. It made me sick to my stomach. But it just let black
people know once again just how most white people in this country
thought of them. I won’t forget them pictures of that young boy as long
as I live” (Davis and Troupe 1989, p. 194). Muhammad Ali stated that no
public figure had ever affected him more than Till, and that the visceral
punch of looking at the newspaper pictures with friends led them to van-
dalize a rail yard in blind rage (Ali and Durham 1975).
While this historical image has called the public to moral consciousness
and political transformation, one must not forget that its rhetorical power
was and remains uniquely traumatic. There is perhaps no single picture in
America that spells division in quite the same way. The most highly charged
photography in African-American history, its prominence has to do with
the fatal strike it has blown against white supremacy, and the stakes are
understandably high when it is appropriated, remediated, and repurposed.
Of course, whites were also instrumental in mobilizing this story to sup-
port the civil rights movement. Bob Dylan’s first protest song was about
the murder and trial of Till and William Faulkner received death threats
for speaking out against this injustice. Historically speaking, then, the
insinuation that the subject has been a taboo for whites does not hold up
to scrutiny. By the same token, the embrace of Till in popular culture is
dogged by misappropriations by African Americans. The use of Till’s name
by Bill Cosby’s publicist and wife to discredit dozens of female accusers of
sexual assault led to media reproach in 2018 (Victor 2018). Rapper Lil
Wayne flippantly alluded to Till’s beaten face as an analogy for rough sex
in a 2013 song and it led to protests, calls for boycott, and the loss of
sponsor deals (Michaels 2013). What is striking, then, is that, contrary to
music and literature, the work of images seems to be much more complex
in this regard, partly because their unsettling and affecting agency makes
it exceedingly difficult with finding any ground rules for use and interpre-
tation, and with mapping out its complex associations with history, mem-
ory, experience, and identity. These crucibles cut to the heart of current
postcolonial disputes. After all, practices of appropriation and remediation
have been continuous since Till’s death in 1955, the year when David
Driskell painted Behold Thy Son, and the painting was followed by a stream
of visual takes on the corpse (with no shortage of dubious or gaudy artistic
adaptations). Therefore, the crux of the matter lies in the inadequacy and
shortcomings of any postcolonial theory attuned to the vexed interface
between visual culture and critical race theory, the want of a methodology
that reconciles an ethics of disturbing photographs with the differential
treatment of black lives.
On the one hand, the racialized economy of looking is a complicated
one especially in regards to these photographs because Till’s alleged
offense was that of “reckless eyeballing”—a criminal act of looking across
the color line during the Jim Crow era, connoting an underlying menace
or illicit desire that authorized fatal violence in response, and a carryover
of what was known under slavery as “eye service,” the punishable offense
of an enslaved man looking at his overseer (Mirzoeff 2018). On the other
hand, the decision to publish the images, however they transformed his-
torically, was a deeply contentious one and divided the editorial board at
Jet magazine. By the 1950s, the New York Times had refused to print
lynching pictures, fearing that they would inspire—not denounce—similar
acts. Such arguments against a public showing of graphic material had
been around for decades.25 In the same vein, the Emmett Till Interpretive
Center in Sumner, Mississippi, decided not to have the open casket images
on display. Conversely, the infamous Black Male exhibition at the Whitney
in 1994 showed those graphic photographs, alongside the video of the
Rodney King beating, and it was criticized for buttressing a visual legacy
fixated on abject states. Consequently, where Till’s casket lies at the
National Museum of African-American History and Culture is the only
room where no pictures are allowed.
Context and narrative are everything, but there is ultimately no safe
way to control an image. Theorists as Fred Moten have recently used Till’s
photographs to rehash the now well-rehearsed trope that we need to look
at them, and look again, but what they also suggest is that the classic
model of opposition between visibility and invisibility—a framework so
dear and foundational to certain strands of postcolonial criticism—has col-
lapsed (Moten 2003; Azoulay 2008). It fails to do the job. Things are no
longer as simple as making something invisible visible. The nexus between
visual culture and violence is infinitely more ambiguous, nuanced, and
complex. It requires us to ask other and new sets of questions: who is
being looked at, and who does the looking? To what ends and by what
means? Who gets to decide who looks at whom? Aren’t there dangers in
176 A. D. RAMOS
exposure? Are images only produced by violence or are they also produc-
tive of violence? What is one’s investment in or position on pictures? Can
one apprehend photographs sonically, not visually? What modalities of
experience are encoded in them? And what is the social agency of these
prints? How does one solve the dilemma of curating classificatory tools
that are also technologies of memory?
As the representation of Till’s body became a focal point in this discus-
sion, it signaled the urgency of a critical reflection on the visual representa-
tion of historical trauma. It made clear how scarce scholarship was on this
subject, and the extent to which it played a marginal role in postcolonial
studies. We should remember that, after a moratorium of over eight
decades, images of lynching only began to be parsed and studied system-
atically in the twenty-first century. The ground-breaking event took place
in the museum as part of a touring exhibition in 2000 called Without
Sanctuary and based on the lynching photographs and postcards once
taken as souvenirs. Here, the reckoning with historical events was done
through images. Although the viewing engendered impassioned contro-
versy, resistance, and contestation, it placed lynching back in public con-
sciousness, thereby prompting a renewed debate on how lynching was to
be remembered and how artifacts of atrocity should be presented.26
We must challenge some of the nostrums we have developed to talk
about race and representation. The priority seems to lie with cultural ele-
ments that are driving the polemics today: the urban environment and
visual images. In fact, it has been overlooked that the foundational texts of
photographic theory came into being against the backdrop of decoloniza-
tion they nonetheless refuse to acknowledge. Georges Bataille’s founding
essay on extremely violent photographs, The Tears of Eros (1961)—banned
by André Malraux—for instance, is oblivious to the fact that its images of
Chinese torture were largely staged for the camera by French photogra-
phers, and used by colonial propaganda to justify European rule.27 Roland
Barthes’s case is even more paradigmatic. While he laid down the classic
model for deconstructing visual culture in support of imperialism—the
known critique of the image of a black boy in uniform presumably saluting
the French flag on the front cover of Paris Match on June 25, 1955, the
year Till was killed—, he dismissed brutal images of repression in Guatemala
as meaningless because they were over-constructed (Barthes 1979). In
another instance, Barthes famously demolished the photo-exhibition “The
Family of Man” for its universalizing rhetoric, using Till’s example to
undermine the argument, but at no point did he address or acknowledge
the photographs that had thrust the case into relief. Neither did Susan
Sontag, one of the most formidable early critics of photography, who
wrote on the waning impact of images as colonial empires invested inordi-
nate funds in propaganda campaigns based on atrocity photographs to
sway the public opinion, and as Till’s image proved to be the most conse-
quential photograph for African-Americans rights in the US. This indi-
cates the stunning ineptitude to handle images of colonial and racial
violence within the dominant critical framework, but it also thrusts into
relief the fundamentally unresolved tension in postcolonial studies between
deconstructionist and materialist approaches.28 Similarly, the most author-
itative study on the history of the destruction of art and heritage, Dario
Gamboni’s The Destruction of Art (1997), traces a genealogy of these
manifestations back to the French Revolution, but reserves a meager nine
pages to colonial and postcolonial contexts in a chapter revealingly titled
“Outside the First World.”29 This concerted inattention to the long and
rich record of these cases, and the central role which they have always
played in enforcing and contesting imperial power, shows the lack of a
contextualization that would not only account for their robust comeback
today but help us make historical and political sense of them. Among post-
colonial theorists, Paul Gilroy’s work stands out most ominously in this
regard. Tirelessly celebrated for such foundational studies as There Ain’t
no Black in the Union Jack (1987) or The Black Atlantic (1993), the pro-
vocative follow-up book Against Race (2002) faced a wall of resistance
and left a cold trail in its wake. Gilroy argued that divvying humanity into
different identities based on skin color distorted the best promises of
democracy. Warning against the coming peril of ethnically absolutist
groups or essentialist categories, he advocated the need to think of history
transnationally, and to consider conceptual and perceptual ways of devel-
oping cosmopolitan responses to race-thinking. The ways in which such a
prophetical call was snubbed and rebuffed in the midst of a rigidification
of identity lines should warrant close attention. But the same study is also
relevant in that it postulated that the triumph of the image had spelled the
death of politics, reducing people to mere symbols. This privileging of
literature and music as the conduits to think through the present-day
conundrums is significant since it fails to acknowledge that the visual has
been the locus in which these conflicts have played out in inventive ways.
As Hannah Arendt once astutely pointed out, “Half of politics is image-
making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image”
(Arendt 1972, p. 8).
178 A. D. RAMOS
Conclusion
The accumulation of controversies continuously swirling around modes of
addressing the colonial past ensures that any serious discussion about the
ethics or politics of visual representation is bound to be a minefield. It is a
precondition of thought, and therefore, it should not fall into a set of
prescribed responses; rather, it should embrace the sort of open-endedness
that is proper to every profound dilemma. Schutz’s critics have rightly
pointed out that a fixation on censorship and free speech forecloses any
deep conversation catalyzed by polemics. In fact, only a tiny minority signs
in on calls to destroy or proscribe her work.30 They contend as well that
censorship requires a top-down action, and that free speech is only used as
a ruse to normalize hate speech against minorities and shut down any
legitimate response to it. As David Priestland notes, no one raises issues of
free speech when thousands of statues of Lenin are taken down across
Eastern Europe (Priestland 2016). Indeed, there is an urgent debate to be
had about the postcolonial politics of memory and the symbolic realm.
Yet, if the issue of free speech and the red flag of censorship are used to
suck up all oxygen, it must also be said that the insistence on these points
has been used to mask an unwillingness to oppose the removal or burning
of the painting in clumsy attempts that reinterpret and relativize such calls,
and in an authoritarian impetus to dictate who does what on which terms.
Toxic strains in identity politics must be addressed, as they are always slip-
pery slopes.
A cautionary tale can be found in South Africa, which serves as a coda
to this chapter. In an unsettling development after the removal of Rhodes’s
statue, one group took to the art collection on university walls. As part of
the student actions against objects said to perpetuate colonial oppression,
they set 23 artworks on fire. In addition, a self-appointed committee called
for the museum on campus to investigate any artworks, which depicted
black bodies in dehumanizing ways or were perceivable as being offensive.
Seventy-five were removed from public sight.31 Among the works deemed
problematic were those of anti-apartheid photographers. They had been
celebrated the world over for having thrown the South African struggle
into the media limelight, for revealing and denouncing the inequities of
racial segregation. However, that was precisely what some students
rejected. They argued that the protest photographs showed whites and
blacks living in separate worlds, the former as overlords and the latter as
second-class citizens. Thus, these images peddled a stereotyping that was
hurtful to those born after the apartheid era and complicit in upholding
institutional racism. Once again, the gist of the argument was that the
images enacted and prolonged the violence they depicted, that their per-
formative excess trumped their representational function.32
Therein lies the rub of representation and its postcolonial discontents
today. As David Joselit has recently argued in reference to portrayals of
blackness: “We need to be more skeptical of the ideological promises of
representation” (Joselit 2015). What have we come to expect from art and
heritage, and from the ways in which they mediate and curate the past?
Are they to reflect a time to come? Have the production and reproduction
of historical violence been thrown into a feedback loop? Has the docu-
mentation of violence been superseded by the violence of documenta-
tion?33 Is this part of a necessary shock to the system, one that will make
clear that decolonization is not an institutional tool, nor a harmless set of
virtue-signaling, open-ended questions, but rather, as Frantz Fanon puts
it, “a program of complete disorder,” one that “sets out to change the
order of the world” and does not involve “a friendly understanding”
(Fanon 1968, p. 35)? Indeed, at stake in these controversies is the media-
tion and curation of colonial history. This comes down to esthetic disputes
primarily waged through the visual sphere in a push-pull between the sani-
tization encoded in the urban landscape, and the contested status of
denunciations of violence. The wager is how to calibrate this representa-
tional problem, which is by necessity always open to accusations of revi-
sionism, bias, amnesia, and exaggeration. There is a marked absence of
expertise especially by visual theorists in this camp. This might be the criti-
cal breakthrough we need with statues as rallying points and images as
lighting rods.
It has become a mantra of our time to call for a conversation, stage
high-profile events, and leave behind a trail of unanswered rhetorical ques-
tions. In this efflorescence of public quarrels over the meaning of colonial
history and racial divisions, there has been no shortage of contenders
speaking at each other, and not to one another. This essay has posited that
at the heart of these controversies lies a meaningful disagreement over
how long ago history was. These dilemmas involve a reckoning with sym-
bols that are remainders of the past for some but still act as reminders for
others. We need to attend to these particular ways in which visual culture
has led to political mobilization and concrete action. If we are to make any
progress in finding new languages and new methodologies, we need to
keep track of the social lives of monuments and images. We can probe the
180 A. D. RAMOS
extent to which their building originates in the advancement of a certain

agenda, how they stand for a particular ideology, and how they are per-
ceived in the constantly transforming configuration of equality and differ-
ence. Given that reparations for colonial abuse and torture are being
litigated in courts, and investigations of provenance and restitution of art-
works are currently on the table, the time seems ripe for a reckoning with
imperial history, since its violence, segregation, and disenfranchisement
are in living memory. But as these conversations easily get jammed into
acrimonious gridlocks, I contend that we need precisely the postcolonial.
What binds these iconoclastic manifestations both in- and outside of the
museum is a creative experimentation with theory, politics, and activism.
So how do we develop periodic outrage into sustained political action?
Artists, writers, and historians ought to follow new intersections of theory
and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers.
With new generations feeling increasingly hemmed in between a grievous
past and the prospect of a catastrophic future, there is a want and dearth
of generative, hopeful, and redemptive comings. Such a counter-vision
requires creative imagination, as well as invigorated discussion, concerning
the enduring violence of the past and the dilemmas it poses. It demands
renegotiating the terms of the contract and brokering new rules of engage-
ment. Hence the pressing need to return to postcolonial theory because it
allows us to talk about the conversation itself in its militant attempt to
dissolve essentialist theories, ethnic absolutisms, and sectarian collisions,
eschewing one-size-fits-all solutions. We need to go back to it and get
beyond it at once.
Notes
1. I am grateful for the opportunity to have shared parts of this essay at
Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, as well as the Forum Transregionale
Studien, Freie Universität, and Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and am
indebted to the insightful interlocutors I found in each occasion. Special
thanks is due to Tamar Garb, without whom this essay would not have
been possible.
2. Attesting to the public interest, one essay by Coco Fusco (2017) reached
over 100,000 views online within three days. So much has been published
in the last four years that a cursory reference list of articles is impossible.
Only a small portion will be cited here.
3. Besides hundreds of impassioned op-eds on mainstream media outlets in

the US, this case made it on daytime television when the popular morning
show The View (March 22, 2017) held a five-minute discussion about it,
with all hosts unanimously siding with Dana Schutz.
4. In Ukraine, for instance, an anti-Soviet initiative made law in 2015 set out
to rid the nation of USSR-era symbols, ordering the renaming of streets
and cities, as well as the dismantling of monuments from public space. By
2017, all 1320 statues to Lenin had been removed. In 2016, the Polish
government urged regional authorities to take down 500 Soviet monu-
ments and compiled a list of 1500 streets and organizations to be renamed.
In the last decade alone, similar cases have been reported in Bulgaria,
Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania,
Moldova, and Mongolia.
5. In a telling admission, the doyen of postcolonial studies, Edward Said,
confessed, “When it comes to the oral and the verbal … I have a very
highly developed vocabulary … When it comes to the visual arts … I feel
somewhat tongue-tied … just to think about the visual arts generally sends
me into a panic” (Mitchell 1998).
6. The hit song “Beer for My Horses,” recorded by Toby Keith and Willie
Nelson in 2003, sparked controversy when the journalist Max Blumenthal
denounced it as “a racially tinged, explicitly pro-lynching anthem”
(Blumenthal 2008). This accusation unleashed a crossfire of defenses and
attacks. Keith himself put out a statement claiming that the song was “not
a racist thing or about lynching” (Fox News 2008).
7. In counterpoint to the current disputes over confederate markers, it is
worth recalling that when Barack Obama stepped into office, he was falsely
accused of having removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the oval
office. This symbolic gesture alone was enough for conservative critics such
as Dinesh D’Souza and Mike Huckabee to accuse Obama of serving a hid-
den anti-colonial agenda that ultimately sought to overturn white power,
downsize America, and affront the UK.
8. On January 24, 1956, four months after their acquittal, Roy Bryant and
J.W. Millan received $3000 to $4000 for sharing their story and admitting
their guilt in Look magazine.
9. On September 22, 1955, one week before the trial, Jet magazine would
publish the close-up photographs of Emmett Till’s mutilated face taken by
David Jackson. It immediately sold out. For the first time ever, Johnson
Publishing Co. did a second printing. When this sold out too, thousands
more copies were run off the press. The Chicago Defender also published
similar pictures two days later.
10. See, for instance, Wilkerson 2016; Hobbs 2016. For an overview, see Gorn
2018, pp. 285–290.
182 A. D. RAMOS
11. To add insult to injury, in 2016 one book claimed that Till grew up in a
single parent home because, a decade before he was lynched, his father
faced a tragically similar end. A black soldier in the U.S. Army during
World War II, he was court-martialed and hung for raping two Italian
women, on trumped-up charges and after an unfair trial. See Wideman 2016.
12. The confession was revealed in Tyson 2017.
13. The first sign was only installed in 2007 after a long and concerted effort
by activists. See Haag 2018. Because of the repeated vandalism, a 500
pound-heavy bulletproof memorial was erected on October 19, 2019.
14. This controversy had endless spin-offs: Parker Bright, the artist whose pro-
test was captured on a widely-circulated Instagram picture, raised money
to stage a protest in Paris after finding out that French-Algerian artist Neïl
Beloufa appropriated it as part of an installation at Palais de Tokyo—the
artist and curator then removed the work from view and issued an apol-
ogy—, and then subsequently painted that picture of himself in a canvas
titled Confronting My Own Possible Death (2018). Somali-Australian artist
Hamishi Farah was also accused of gaining access to Schutz’s Facebook
account to painting a photograph of her child as payback, and then show-
ing this work entitled Representation of Arlo (2018) at the LISTE art fair
in Basel.
15. Siding with Schutz, Francis Fukuyama viewed the incident as “an example
of adopting a stereotyped and vastly over-generalized understanding of an
individual, based on how racial identity supposedly limits her” (Fitch 2019).
16. By 1976, there was a “sprawling proliferation of pro-Rhodesian organiza-
tions in the United States,” Gerald Horne has written, “The transatlantic
question of race was the essential glue that held the lobby together”
(Horne 2001, p. 101).
17. A similar debate blew up in Belgium in 2010. While some were continuing
to honor King Leopold II who had been responsible for the deaths of mil-
lions of Africans in his private colony of the Congo Free State, others
attacked his statues, especially after Louis Michel, former Belgian Foreign
Minister, had spurned the recent scholarship and the heaps of criticism as
nothing but “false accusations” (cited in Mock 2010).
18. The Federation, also known as the Central African Federation, comprised
Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and
Nyasaland (Malawi).
19. Achille Mbembe aptly pointed out: “The debate therefore should have
never been about whether or not it should be brought down. All along, the
debate should have been about why did it take so long to do so”
(Mbembe 2015).
20. “The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise,” Cecil
Rhodes told the house the House of Assembly in Cape Town in 1887.
Then, he said: “We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with
the barbarism of South Africa” (quoted in Magubane 1996, p. 108). Akin
to the n-word in the United States, the k-word is the worst racial expletive
for Blacks in South Africa.
21. In the 1970s, black students started boycotting the scholarships. The ques-
tion of scholarships for women had been raised periodically in different
quarters from the early 1920s, but the first female Rhodes Scholars were
only elected in 1977.
22. Felix Gross, too, stated the following about Schreiner’s novella: “The book
caused a sensation not only because it accused Rhodes of the murder, rape,
theft, and torture committed by Chartered Company troops in
Matabeleland but because of its frontispiece, a repulsive picture omitted in
later editions, of three hanged Natives dangling from trees. It was an
unmitigated condemnation of Rhodes as a man, a politician, and a colo-
niser” (Gross 1957, p. 398).
23. In the run-up to the 1994 elections in South Africa, this photograph was
taken out of the permanent exhibition at the Schreiner House, Cradock,
due to unusual number of young white men rallying around it (Walters and
Fogg 2010).
24. See Moten 2003, pp. 59–76.
25. The NAACP’s The Crisis printed lynching photographs to fuel public sen-
timent. During the 1930s, though, they received letters complaining that
“the printing of such pictures did not aid the fight against lynching, but
served only to create racial hatred.” The editors replied: “the sheer horror
of lynching serves to rouse ordinarily lethargic people to action” (NAACP
1937, p. 61).
26. In terms of the scholarship in this bourgeoning field, the ground-breaking
volume was Allen 2000, followed by Apel 2004.
27. For more on this, see Brook et al. 2008.
28. In the two famous parentheses in Barthes’s essay used to dismantle the
pretence of a grand narratives of humanity, he points to colonial history in
France and racial terrorism in the US: “Go and ask the parents of Emmet
[sic] Till, the young negro murdered by white men […] what they think of
the Great Family of Man” (Barthes 1993 [1957], p. 102).
29. Dario Gamboni himself avowed, “Extending this inquiry beyond its
[Western] limits would represent a much too ambitious endeavour, as the
subject is enormous, and largely—to my knowledge—unexplored. But a
brief glance is at least needed, if only because the destruction of art is so
often interpreted as belonging to stages of civilization supposedly rele-
gated to societies defined successively as ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘devel-
oped’” (Gamboni 1997, p. 107).
184 A. D. RAMOS
30. Christina Sharpe (Mitter 2017) and Aruna d’Souza (2018) were among
the most eloquent critics to point this out.
31. A website called Does This Offend You allowed students to report artworks
which offended them personally. This was then flagged up with a curatorial
team, which had to come to a decision.
32. In 2018, in France, a long-awaited academic survey of the imperial history
of sexual exploitation in visual culture came under fire due to the objec-
tions against the reproduction of such images. The newspaper Libération
received several letters of protest after publishing a special issue on the
publication, and the official book launch would be indefinitely postponed
because of the heated polemic. Pascal Blanchard refused to debate this
issue, using the example of lynching photographs in the US to point out
that the display of shocking images may be contentious but ultimately
sparks a conversation (Blanchard et al. 2018).
33. The Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Max Price, doubled
down on these claims in an op-ed: “Even if you know the historic context
of the photos, a powerful contemporary context may overwhelm this, lead-
ing you to conclude that the photos are just one more indication of how
this university views black and white people” (Price 2017).
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PART III
Action-Based Scholarships
CHAPTER 8
Research in Solidarity? Investigating

Namibian-German Memory Politics
in the Aftermath of Colonial Genocide
Reinhart Kössler
Unsre Herrn, wer sie auch seien,

sehen unsre Zwietracht gern
Denn solang wir uns entzweien,
bleiben sie doch unsre Herrn.
[Our masters who rule us
Hope our quarrels never stop
For so long they split us
they can remain on top.]
—Bertolt Brecht, “Solidaritätslied” (Brecht 1931, pp. 369–370)
Researching a transnational postcolonial relationship that involves a former

colony and its former colonizer poses specific challenges.1 This is especially
true when the researcher happens to be a citizen of the erstwhile colonial
power. Obviously, much of social research in the Global South is still
undertaken within this framework, which involves power differentials,
R. Kössler (*)
Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_8
192 R. KÖSSLER
trauma, and habitual attitudes, which have not been reneged by formal
independence. Still, there are specific considerations when the research
addresses the consequences of state-driven mass crimes such as genocide
and takes up movements and campaigning that revolve around them.
The long-term research project upon which I wish to reflect finds itself
at these precarious crossroads. To a large extent, it has evolved alongside
the very process it seeks to address as a topic of investigation. Inevitably,
this spawns a personal perspective. Therefore, I shall briefly rehearse the
factual background, the genocide of 1904–1908 in German Southwest
Africa (present-day Namibia) and its aftermath, particularly the current
conflicts that center around the quest for closure in the terms of a serious
engagement with the past (cf. Adorno 1963). Along the lines of “working
through” in psychoanalysis, this involves, inevitably, stubborn resistance
(Freud 1991, pp. 135–136). This discussion will lead to a subsequent
reflection on the forms and premises of transnational solidarity in a post-
colonial setting and I will offer concrete illustrations of the Namibian-
German experience. Afterward, I will describe my research from two main
perspectives: first, in regard to the involvement of my scholarly work in the
movement for recognition of the genocide and its reparation and recon-
ciliation; second, in the way such an orientation shapes the scholarly
endeavor. At the same time, the discussion will provide additional insight
into the processes under scrutiny.
Genocide in German Southwest Africa

Between 1903 and 1908, a series of anticolonial resistance wars shook the
foundations of German colonial rule in Southwest Africa. Today, this com-
plex and quite uneven process is known as the Namibian War. The specific
feature that has marked the memory of German colonialism up to the
present is the genocide committed by the German colonial army, the so-
called Schutztruppe, in suppressing those resistance efforts by Namibian
indigenes in central and southern Namibia.
According to the relevant United Nations (UN) Convention, the
notion of genocide hinges on the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (UN General Assembly
1951). Besides outright mass killings, it includes serious bodily harm or
the imposition of life conditions that imperil the survival of a particular
targeted group. In the Namibian case, genocide evolved in three forms
and stages. The first phase began after the decisive battle at Ohamakari on
8 RESEARCH IN SOLIDARITY? INVESTIGATING NAMIBIAN-GERMAN... 193
August 11, 1904. The Schutztruppe pursued the retreating Ovaherero

relentlessly into the waterless Omaheke steppe toward the border with
British Bechuanaland (Botswana). During these weeks, thousands died of
hunger and thirst. On October 2, 1904, the commanding general Lothar
von Trotha issued his infamous proclamation, which clearly stated his
intention to eliminate Ovaherero from Namibia by outright shooting and
by sealing off any retreat from the steppe, such that people died in their
droves from thirst and hunger. In addition, the proclamation declared that
the Ovaherero were “no longer German subjects,” and that they were
now outlaws, so anybody was free to kill them (Zimmerer 2008).2 On
April 22, 1905, Trotha issued another proclamation against the Nama
who had embarked on a fierce guerrilla campaign since October 1904. In
this declaration, he reaffirmed his eliminatory and genocidal intentions.
Survivors were imprisoned in concentration camps. These marked the sec-
ond phase of the genocide. Prisoners included entire “tribes”—women,
children, and the elderly besides active fighters (Zimmerer 2011, p. 158).
Conditions were especially harsh, if not outright lethal, in the coastal
towns of Swakopmund and Lüderitz. Forced labor and inadequate provi-
sion for survival of the prisoners meant “annihilation by neglect” for thou-
sands (Zimmerer 2011, pp. 158, 272). It is estimated that 80 percent of
the Ovaherero and 50 percent of the Nama living in the region prior to
the war had perished by the time the concentration camps closed in May
1908. On their release, prisoners faced the consequences of land expro-
priation and the 1907 Native Ordinances as part of the genocide’s third
and last phase. They were stripped of their livelihoods and regimented
into tightly controlled labor relations (cf. Bley 1996, pp. 170–173;
Zimmerer 2001, pp. 56–109). Wholesale expropriation of the land of
“insurgent tribes” was designed to undercut any possibility for survivors
to rebuild an autonomous communal life. At the same time, this land was
made available for enhancing white settlement. Last but not least, the
Ordinances banned the local population from owning large livestock,
which impinged on Ovaherero communal life centered around holy cattle.
Regimented obligation of wage labor and restrictions against settling in
larger numbers, as well as an early version of pass laws, completed a set of
measures aimed at reducing Africans to an atomized chattel labor force.
One of the unique features of the Namibian War consisted in the
makeup of the German colonial army. In contradistinction to most cases,
including the coeval Maji Maji War in German East Africa, present-day
Tanzania, colonial soldiers in Namibia were overwhelmingly from
194 R. KÖSSLER
metropolitan Germany (Mann 2003, pp. 25–26). Consequently, the death

toll among Germans was much higher than it was in other cases. During
the Maji Maji War, only very few Germans commanded troops recruited
in other African regions. This was the pattern in most colonial wars (cf.
Becker and Beez 2005). The exceptionally high German physical presence
and death toll may account for the unusually high impact the Namibian
War had on the German public. The war was covered extensively in the
press and Trotha’s actions provoked heated controversy, including parlia-
mentary interventions by the Social Democrats and the Center Party.
Political conflict culminated in a snap election in 1907, which was occa-
sioned by both parties’ reluctance to accede to government demands for
further funds to continue the war. A fierce campaign fought by the Right
on the basis of chauvinist and colonialist slogans resulted in a realignment
of German politics through the so-called Bülow Bloc of all parties to the
right of the center (Sobich 2006). The war and the genocide were subse-
quently represented in an avalanche of memory books and novels, which
celebrated the killing of Africans. Moreover, the new communication
medium of the picture postcard was used by soldiers to convey greetings
home, along with harrowing scenes of executions or depictions of the
deportation of human remains. When considering possible lines of conti-
nuity in the history of German violence during the first half of the twenti-
eth century, including the Holocaust, the banalization of atrocity or
inhumanity through mass communication would need to be considered as
a major contributing factor (Kössler 2015, pp. 88–97). In fact, the same
sentiments were carried forward by a vibrant colonial revisionism, once
Germany lost its colonies through the Versailles Treaty in 1919
(Wegmann 2019).
Communal Memory Versus Colonial Amnesia

The considerable attention accorded to the Namibian War and the colo-
nial genocide through 1945 contrasts starkly with the colonial amnesia
that has characterized the (West) German public mind since the defeat of
Nazism. At the turn of the new millennium, not many Germans were even
aware that their country had once been a colonial power, and eminent
politicians proclaimed Germany’s potential as a broker in Africa on account
of its ostensibly light baggage from colonial legacy. Since 2004, the cente-
nary of the genocide, this attitude has changed somewhat mainly through
an evolving relationship between civil society actors on both sides. They
include on the Namibian side, above all, activists from the victim commu-
nities and traditional leaders; on the German side, they are small nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) and more informal networks dedicated
to postcolonial issues—more specifically, the reconciliation with Namibia.
In this exchange, the asymmetrical postcolonial relationship that exists
between Namibians and Germans is inverted (Kössler 2020). Power dif-
ferentials weigh heavily in enabling Germans to ignore both their own
postcolonial reality and the consequences of German colonialism, as they
persist in Namibia today. One may not even talk here of a “strong wish to
forget,” since this would presuppose a stronger awareness than is actually
the case (Assmann 2013, p. 134). On the other hand, the memory of
anticolonial resistance and the genocide has been kept alive over the
decades in Namibia, above all, by the affected communities (Krüger 1999;
Gewald 2000; Biwa 2012; Kössler 2015). Such vibrant memory and cor-
responding performative practices may be considered as vital resources in
the struggle to assert what members of affected communities consider to
be their right, namely adequate recognition and redress.
In spite of heavy strictures that came with colonial rule, these groups
managed to reconstitute communal ties. Oral traditions played a key role
in this process, while memories of the Namibian War and the genocide
were figuring prominently in their communal interactions. However,
demands for German recognition of the genocide, as well as for apology
and appropriate redress, emerged only after Namibia’s independence in
1990. When attempts to approach high-ranking German visitors such as
the chancellor and the president failed during the subsequent decade,
claimants switched to a more confrontational approach, which included
litigation in the US courts and an increase in civil society activity and
mobilization. In 2004, a turning point was reached with the centenary of
the battle of Ohamakari, as thousands of Ovaherero commemorated the
genocide. German Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development
Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul offered a personal, though unofficial, recog-
nition of the genocide and her deep regret. Yet, this foray proved ineffec-
tive in swaying the official German stance of shunning the term of genocide
with reference to Namibia. It did not address the question of reparation
either (Kössler 2015, pp. 251–261).
During the subsequent years, demands for exactly these goals were
taken up on a larger scale. Whereas the movement had focused on
Ovaherero before, now Nama and Damara came to the fore as well. One
important step was a motion passed by the National Assembly with just
196 R. KÖSSLER
one abstaining vote. It called for the Namibian government to facilitate

negotiations about an apology and reparations. There was further agree-
ment between the overwhelming majority of Nama Kapteins and
Ovaherero Paramount Kuaima Riruako to cooperate on this matter. This
alignment left out the Ovaherero Royal Houses in an enduring rift among
Ovaherero. The Namibian government slowly revised its very reticent
approach to the issue of recognition of the genocide, an apology and repa-
rations by Germany (cf. Niezen 2018).
Another important turning point came in 2011 with the first repatria-
tion of human remains, which had been transported to Germany under
the colonial rule. The Namibian government made it possible for a delega-
tion of some 70 people to receive the remains in Berlin. Official German
response was seen as slighting the Namibians and it led to a diplomatic
debacle. At the same time, existing ties with German support groups,
including sections of the Afro-German community, were strengthened
and new ones forged. In Germany, the year 2004 had seen an unexpected
surge of interest in the colonial past occasioned by the centenaries of the
genocide in Namibia and, shortly thereafter, of the Maji Maji War (see
Zeller 2005). Beginning in 2007, the presence of the Left Party (Die
Linke) in the German Parliament (Bundestag) created new openings for
parliamentary initiatives. These moves were largely based on a number of
local postcolonial initiatives with the participation of Afro-Germans mainly
in Berlin. In 2011, members of these small, yet very active communities
formed long-term links with some key members of the Namibian delega-
tion. During the following years, these initial links were consolidated into
lasting relations between civil society actors on both sides. These actors
comprised NGOs linked to victim groups and their traditional authorities
on the Namibian side, as well as more or less informal groups that coalesced
on small activist NGOs on the German side. Meanwhile, some of the
Namibian activists increased public awareness by appearing in traditional
Ovaherero and Nama attire on stately streets of central Berlin and demon-
strating in support of the demands of victim communities.
In 2015, a tentative move by the German government to accede to the
term of genocide opened the way for negotiations, but the modalities of
these talks have raised serious controversies in Namibia (Kössler and
Melber 2017, pp. 84–93). Large groups among victim communities pro-
test vehemently against the fact that they have not been accorded a pres-
ence at these negotiations in their own right apart from being represented
by the Namibian government. This conflict raises sensitive issues about the
writ of the postcolonial state and about the rights of communities who
claim their status as indigenous peoples under the appropriate interna-
tional conventions today (cf. Kössler 2019b). The legitimacy of the
Namibian government to be the sole representative of the victim groups
by virtue of their being citizens of Namibia and on the basis of the prin-
ciple of national sovereignty is challenged on the grounds that not all
communities in Namibia have been subjected to the genocide and, indeed,
to effective German colonial rule (Kössler 2007). Further, it is argued that
partly as a consequence of the genocide there exists a sizable Ovaherero
and Nama diaspora in Botswana and South Africa. According to this rea-
soning, these descendants of refugees from the genocide cannot be repre-
sented by a government whose territory does not include their place of
residence and whom they have not elected. Finally, the Namibian govern-
ment’s legitimacy to represent genocidal victims is challenged by reference
to the relationship based on the protection treaties with the German colo-
nial power. These treaties were signed by leaders of individual communi-
ties and only later was the present territory of Namibia constituted.
The relationships that have been formed between Namibian and
German activists since 2011 comprise by and large groups in Namibia who
oppose the present format of negotiations with groups in Germany.
Inevitably, German activists are drawn into an internal conflict in Namibia,
at least at certain conjunctures. This became particularly evident in late
August 2018 on the occasion of the third repatriation of human remains.
After the confrontative experience of 2011, a second repatriation had been
organized as a surprise action in 2014. This had antagonized victim com-
munities and it was here that the conflict between these groups and the
Namibian government first became evident. The demand for self-
representation found expression in the widely publicized slogan “Not
About Us Without Us.” More than four years later, the two governments
asked for the “good offices” of the Protestant churches in both countries
to avoid another confrontation. However, initial refusal to sponsor travel
to Berlin for dissident communal leaders, including Ovaherero Paramount
Chief Vekuii Rukoro, along with the apparent exclusion of most of the
Berlin-based German activist groups from the central restitution cere-
mony, resulted yet again in heated controversies, which were brought into
the open by a protest vigil in front of the venue at Gendarmenmarkt in
central Berlin. This open conflict linked up Namibian dissidents with
German activists in a very clear way, and in his speech at the church,
Rukoro blamed the Namibian Embassy in Berlin for moving against
198 R. KÖSSLER
German activists who over the years had shown solidarity with the victim
groups.3
Even though the repatriation of human remains was initially presented
by a range of Namibian spokespersons as a purely traditional and, thus,
apolitical affair, the political implications are quite clear now. The same
goes for the overarching issues connected with the consequences of the
genocide, particularly the quest for recognition, apology, and reparation.
Having described the ways in which solidarity work from the German side
has become enmeshed in such politics, I wish to turn now to the question
of how meaningful research can be pursued within this context. Before I
do so, though, a few words on the notion of solidarity are in order.
Transnational Solidarity in Postcolonial Settings

At first sight, the notion of solidarity appears rather unproblematic. It may
be seen as something inherently human, “our essential humanity,” or for
some, as “a grand idea” (Rorty 1989, p. 189; Bude 2019).4 Consequently,
it has been said that as “the epitome of emotive binding forces,” it “is
expected of solidarity that, near and far, it will resolve the most diverse
issues” (Hondrich and Koch-Arzberger 1992, p. 9). In more mundane
terms, solidarity has been seen as “the idea of a mutual connection between
members of one group” (Bayertz 1998, p. 11). While this is evocative of
the catchy phrase “One for all and all for one,” Hauke Brunkhorst also
refers to “the solid” in the word, thus pointing to solidarity as the basis of
the nation-state, as well as to human rights, that is to concerns that tran-
scend the boundaries of the state (Brunkhorst 2002, p. 10). Such a per-
spective was mapped out most spectacularly during the early days of the
French Revolution in 1789, but it still carries meaning in cosmopolitan
concerns today—that is, in terms of mutual recognition as humans
(Brunkhorst 2002, p. 110; Kössler 2018a). For some, solidarity is the
epitome of subalterns, wage workers in particular, standing and acting
together to achieve aims against all odds, as Brecht’s once popular song
quoted in the epigraph conveys. Even then, we can learn from Karl Marx
that such solidarity requires serious effort since initial competition among
workers has to be overcome and the nexus of the organization needs to be
upheld (Marx 1968b [1849], pp. 420–421). This implies strong pressure
for keeping members in line.
Again, scholars of classical sociology link the social nexus to one or
another form of solidarity, in other words, the basic bonds that hold any
society together. Thus, Émile Durkheim (1893) famously differentiated

between “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity. Whereas the former binds
together stereotyped, largely identical “segments” such as clans and lin-
eages of common ancestry, the latter works in a differentiated division of
labor, where all participants depend on each other for their success or even
their survival. This dichotomy is replicated in the influential counterpos-
ing of “community” and “society.” Ferdinand Tönnies (1887) saw the
former as a close relationship based on blood bonds and face to face
acquaintance, whereas the latter term denoted larger and anonymous con-
nections.5 These approaches pinpoint social structure less than action and
they highlight different ways of achieving coherence in society. By doing
so, they underline the fact that solidarity is not easily achieved or under-
stood even in situations of propinquity. More problems arise when we
reflect on forms of solidarity that imply relationships between settings
across large spatial distances, widely divergent living conditions, and life
outlooks. This is particularly true when we turn to the proposition of
international solidarity within a framework of postcolonial asymmetry.
International solidarity is a well-worn and attractive slogan. It is not
only heard in chants at appropriate public manifestations, but it is also
invoked when individuals and communities challenge the political asym-
metry in North-South relations based on differentials in available material
resources and opportunities for people to shape their own lives. This form
of solidarity is expected to join people who live in diverse social settings
whereas the relationship underlying working-class solidarity involves basi-
cally comparable conditions. I designate these two distinct ideal types as
group solidarity and outreach solidarity.
Outreach solidarity comes in diverse forms, which frequently reproduce
the very postcolonial asymmetry its proponents hope to overcome. One
prominent example would be “Third World” solidarity.6 This movement
was widespread globally, particularly in Western Europe and North
America between the 1960s and 1980s. Activities included very militant
action, but they referred mostly in quite abstract ways to struggles of anti-
colonial resistance and national liberation in various regions of the Global
South. Still, this radical left in the North operated with assumptions about
a common project couched in the goal of socialism. Such underlying con-
ceptions disregarded the dimension of nationalism inherent in national
liberation movements. This aspect came to the fore after the victories of
liberation movements in Indochina and southern Africa. In hindsight,
such misconceptions were attributable to a certain disregard for the
200 R. KÖSSLER
partners in solidarity and their actual goals. They originated in a general

attitude of anti-imperialism, which was equated with socialist objectives.
However, national liberation movements of the second half of the twenti-
eth century were states in waiting and acted as such, while they confronted
a violent and warlike stance of persistent colonial powers.
In this essay, I posit a very different relationship. While the goals may
vary between the partners in solidarity, there are common concerns, as
well as more direct exchanges especially in comparison to the former expe-
riences. Important features of this form of solidarity include enhanced
possibilities of communication and travel, which make for much denser
contact and personal exchange than the ones in former relationships
between “Third-Worldist” and national liberation movements. At the
same time, as in the case of Namibian descendants of genocidal victims
and their German partners, both parties may have different outlooks on
various issues of social identity, but they do share a well-circumscribed
common objective, namely an appropriate apology and consequent repa-
ration by the German state on account of the genocide. Both parties of the
relationship see themselves in opposition to their respective governments
and they make use of their civil rights under both dispensations to advance
a shared concern, which is admittedly narrower than the goal of national
liberation or the overcoming of colonialism. However, what is at stake is a
germane dimension of the postcolonial relationship and close cooperation
on this particular issue justifies the designation of this relationship as trans-
national solidarity.
Solidarity in Diverse and Asymmetrical Settings

Still, any rash identification would elide real differences, which are inher-
ent in postcolonial situations and particularly in the aftermath of genocide.
In terms of asymmetry, even where Germans or citizens of any other for-
mer colonial power are prepared to countenance the postcolonial situation
that forms part and parcel of their everyday life-worlds, they are not
prompted to show such awareness in daily experience. In Namibia, though,
reminders of the colonial impact are thrust on members of victim groups
in the form of oral traditions but also on account of their daily environ-
ment—a landscape that testifies to the genocide by being adapted to com-
mercial agriculture after wholesale land expropriation, the layout of towns,
as well as monuments and colonial buildings. On the other hand, Germans
can afford to ignore their country’s past as a colonial power or not even be
aware of it. In this situation, it takes distinct acts on a cognitive as well as

on an emotional level to countenance the actually existing postcolonial
situation and further, to translate such insights into appropriate attitudes
and behavior, including relevant action. For Germans who opt for postco-
lonial awareness, then, their privileged postcolonial position translates into
a challenge for actively engaging with the colonial past and do so as far as
they feel prompted to take up this historical responsibility.7 Outreach soli-
darity hinges on being prepared to acknowledge such responsibility, along
with its consequences on a personal level in regards to behavior and atti-
tudes and on the level of the state in terms of appropriate political action
such as apologizing and reparations. This attitude is a prerequisite for
building trust between the two sides and a form of solidarity that reaches
out in both directions. Exemplified by Rukoro’s intervention on behalf of
German activists, it includes pursuing a meaningful engagement with the
dire past and a genuine effort in reconciliation.
It remains important that the two sides be not collapsed into one.
There exists an incontrovertible difference between the positions of victim
and perpetrator, which in this case have been very clear since the begin-
ning. Given that direct perpetrators or survivors are no longer alive, we
can only talk about positions defined by the past. These positions remain
relevant when one speaks about the genocide and, even more so, when it
comes to the forms of reconciliation: the need to countenance what has
happened, to acknowledge responsibility, and to recognize the need for
redress. Namibians and Germans also act in quite diverse social and cul-
tural contexts. In Namibia, an ethnic dimension of the concern with the
genocide and its aftermath is hard to deny or avoid. This is given by the
very intent to destroy or eliminate a specific group of people inherent in
Trotha’s two genocidal proclamations. By contrast, Germans live mostly
in social contexts that differ greatly from this. For instance, ethnicity in
Germany is linked to regional identification, is only of minor importance
and hardly ever questions the national nexus. Thus, Germans need to
familiarize themselves with the situation of their Namibian counterparts
and develop a measure of empathy.
For Namibians too, it is important to develop concrete ideas about the
situation in Germany. On a very practical level, a clear conception of how
German politics works is needed to operate effectively. Thus, when the
first motion calling for a recognition of the genocide for reparation and
reconciliation was introduced by the Left Party in the Bundestag in 2007,
some Namibian activists were gratified by the contents and believed that
202 R. KÖSSLER
appropriate action would soon follow. I encountered a need to explain the

German party system and the isolated position of the Left within it to
convey a more realistic assessment and enhance an understanding of what
could (and still can) be expected from such an initiative.
Perhaps more importantly, the intricacies of the German federal system
regularly come into play within the context of restitution. Even human
remains are treated as objects or artifacts, which falls short of the under-
standing of victim communities who consider them as ancestors. This
challenge also applies to the recent debate calling for their re-humanization
(Rassool 2015; Kössler 2018b). Restitutions of such human remains
housed in anthropological collections and museums, are treated by the
German side under the sovereign responsibility of the German member
states (Länder) for cultural matters.8 Since foreign policy is a federal con-
cern under the German constitution, the Foreign Office has acted in many
cases as the main negotiator in dealing with the Namibian government.
Further, according to the National Assembly resolution of October 2006
the Namibian government is supposed to act as a facilitator as opposed to
a negotiator (National Assembly of the Republic of Namibia 2006). This
messy institutional setup has led to quite problematic situations. In an
exemplary way, this happened during the first repatriation of human
remains deported from Namibia. In September 2011, the large Namibian
delegation saw themselves slighted by the federal government, which had
led the negotiations to bring about the event. Conditions in Berlin were
such that some delegates even considered returning to Namibia without
the skulls. According to later testimonies, it was vital for at least a good
number of the delegates that individuals and groups of sympathetic civil
society were forthcoming, supportive, and comforting.9 Such experiences
forged personal relationships that went beyond a formal commitment to
solidarity. With visits going back and forth during the subsequent years,
with more Namibians coming to Berlin than Germans going to Namibia,
friendships consolidated as solid bases for trust.
Still, clear asymmetries and disparities persist. They concern access to
information, as well as the unequal frequency with which Namibian and
German members of the emerging network are present on each of the two
poles. Clear differences also continue to exist in the actor constellations on
both sides and in ways the issues are highlighted. Thus, public attention to
issues concerning the genocide and its aftermath remains very uneven
with Namibians being far more educated than Germans on these questions.
Researching and Doing Memory Politics

In an early stage of my research, an eminent colleague told me that he
appreciated what I had in mind, but he asked nonetheless: how do you
want to research this? At the time, around 2002, I thought of looking into
communal commemorations in southern and central Namibia related to
the genocide. The obvious dimension of addressing the German side of
this memory politics only came to the fore in a serious way with the cen-
tenary events of 2004. This event moved me from endeavoring a thick and
certainly sympathetic observation to pursuing a research that clearly went
beyond participant observation. Since then, it has turned out to be a last-
ing part of my life for the past 16 years.
With the rise of the movement that demanded recognition, an apology,
and reparation for the genocide from Germany, a research simply on
memory practices in Namibia would have been untenable. Within the
context of entangled history, it has to be acknowledged that what hap-
pened in Namibia at the beginning of the twentieth century formed an
integral part of German history, which remained indelibly linked to colo-
nialism, in general, and to the Namibian War, in particular (Randeria
2002). It would have been an unsupportable abstraction from these link-
ages just to research Namibian memory practices. Moreover, on a prag-
matic and ethically important level, many doors would have been closed
on me had I not undertaken to place postcolonial entanglement center
stage in my research.
Turning to memory practices and particularly to those that cross-
cultural and national divides carries certain risks. In reflecting the claim of
an academic history devoted to “truth” in contradistinction to “myth”
and “ideology” (Koselleck 2004), Aleida Assmann has pointed to the
much more disorderly field one enters when dealing with the “history of
memory” as an eminently social affair (Assmann 2013, pp. 21–22). Here,
“history” is harnessed to direct political concerns and to construct com-
modified “heritage,” and the consequent contradictions cannot be
resolved by simple appeals to purely academic scholarship since it will not
be possible to preserve such formal purity in the face of popular needs and
practices (Witz et al. 2017). In one way or other, the critical mind has to
countenance “critique in the scuffle” (Marx 1970 [1844], p. 381). In
researching postcolonial Namibian-German memory politics, this entails
also taking sides.
204 R. KÖSSLER
As a researcher, but also as a politically committed person and a citizen,

I consider such positioning to be almost inevitable. From the beginning in
the early 1990s, my research in Namibia has been informed by earlier
commitments within the West German “Third World” movement and,
since the late 1970s, by the broad anti-apartheid movement, which
opposed the illegal occupation of Namibia by South Africa up to 1990
(Kössler 2016).
At first sight, this idea may appear to militate against sterling proposi-
tions for scholarly behavior, which insists on refraining from value judg-
ment. However, even the classical protagonist of this requirement stresses
that the choice of research subject and, thus, the endeavor itself is value-
driven (Weber 1973 [1917], pp. 499–500). Again, there is broad agree-
ment about the need for detachment, or “stoicism,” when it comes to
analyzing one’s findings regardless of sentiments (Marx 1968a [1861],
p. 112). Likewise, more recent interventions in support of “public sociol-
ogy” have strongly upheld a “professional” ethos, which must never be
sacrificed for the intended public impact and advocacy (Burawoy 2005).
Regardless of one’s precise stand on the issue of value judgment, then,
strict scholarship does not clash necessarily with an active commitment to
and on the field of study (Adorno et al. 1969). However, this broad state-
ment addresses a wide range of different research situations and approaches,
all of which beckon to address the balance to be struck between commit-
ment and analytical distance. For one, public sociology is concerned more
with conveying sociological knowledge to a broader, often action-oriented
public than actually involving that public in the research process. Also,
while at least some of the practitioners of public history take very seriously
the intricate issues of orality and the need to respect its practitioners over
and above their role as mere providers of sources, the exact relationship
between these different protagonists seems rather loose.
Demand for professionalism implies not only the application of tools of
the trade but also a certain analytical distance, which is again not to be
confused with disinterestedness. Things get messier and more interesting
when we move to field situations where researchers engage with everyday
situations on a systematic, intense, and long-term basis. Social anthropolo-
gist Gerd Spittler has termed his own approach “thick participation”—a
clear reference to Clifford Geertz’s “thick description”; this approach
radicalizes participant observation and entails “not only interpretative as
opposed to physical participation but also social propinquity” (soziale
Nähe) and life experience (Erleben), involving the full use of the
researcher’s senses, clearly over and above “language-based research”

(Spittler 2001, pp. 1, 19; 2014). From a different angle, these issues are
explored in what may be called off-duty activities of anthropologists if the
field will ever be receptive to such an idea. Convivial drinking emerges as
a little talked about way of relaxing, fostering, and reproducing personal
ties that are vital for successful research. As Steven van Wolputte and
Mattia Fumanti conclude, such forays involve “bodily experience that,
however upsetting they may be, also mark and present the self as a bounded
unit of experience, summarized in Malinowski’s adage ‘I was there’” (Van
Wolputte and Fumanti 2010, p. 280).
For my purposes, the main issue is propinquity, as it entails all sorts of
personal relationships, including friendship. Such friendship may be
instrumental and limited to the research project, as social anthropologist
Sakhumzi Mfecane has explained in reference to his research with HIV
positive men in rural South Africa. Though genuine, the researcher may
avoid becoming “deeply involved with participants’” on a personal level
and also restrict the duration of such friendships to the research process
(Mfecane 2014, pp. 127, 135). Still, such friendships generate demands
and expectations that the researcher might consider questionable or that
overtax their physical and emotional possibilities. In part, at least, this is
precisely because expectations and expected benefits work in two direc-
tions within such contexts, which are again marked by material inequalities
(Pauli 2006, pp. 33–36). Such expectations may also lead to outcomes
and positions that will turn research into a collaborative and partly conten-
tious discursive process (Daniel 2019). Relations of personal trust prove
vital when researching situations that may put both researchers as well as
their partners into jeopardy (cf. Reich 2019). Moreover, thick participa-
tion10 may foster those unexpected situations that prove vital for research-
ing topics that touch on personal sensitivities and hinge on the “building
up of relationships” (Häberlein 2014, p. 138). These brief pointers suffice
to highlight the need and fecundity for messy rather than outwardly
orderly approaches when researchers take account of a complex and disor-
derly reality. To be sure, such messiness needs to be retrieved in the pro-
cess of analyzing data which also involves the researcher to create a distance
from the subject matter, even in spite of personal relations and debts they
may have incurred in the process. I see my own research in a similar vein,
which might be termed as thick engagement. I would like to use the afore-
mentioned experiences to elaborate on this approach.
206 R. KÖSSLER
Although solidarity is not coextensive with personal friendship, the pro-

cess I have outlined above shows the importance of personal encounters
for outreach solidarity. Close long-term contacts have fostered personal
friendships that grow out of solidarity and these have again fed into my
research. My work in Namibia where I have paid many, sometimes pro-
longed, visits for nearly 30 years is driven by the friendships I have culti-
vated with a limited number of key informants among local, mainly Nama,
communities. In my research, which I situate in the intersection of sociol-
ogy, social anthropology, and history, different kinds of communication,
personal, sometimes quite subjective and confidential, were employed
strategically for proceeding, gaining information, and sorting out some of
the confusing conflicts (Kössler 2005, 2015). At first sight, such relation-
ships might appear purely instrumental, even though elements of reciproc-
ity are involved. Thus, many of my interlocutors perceived my research on
communal identities in southern Namibia as an effort to write at last “our
history,” although this was not my intention. Still, I made serious efforts
to accommodate as much of their concerns as possible, resulting in the
book: In Search of Survival and Dignity (Kössler 2005). In terms of
research ethics, I saw a clear obligation to make my research available to
the communities with which I had become involved. The first and vital
decision consisted in publishing my research in English, and not in
German. It was gratifying, then, for me to receive reports and feedback on
my book when talking to one of the communities. There were also indi-
vidual exchanges, as well as signs of appreciation, including the launching
of my book in 2005 by the late Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi.
Almost imperceptibly, this network of contacts and friends transformed,
broadened, and thickened as the issue of the genocide of 1904–1908
gained prominence, both in the public realm, particularly in Namibia, and
in my own research which increasingly became intertwined with activism,
in a way a continuation of my involvement in the struggle against
Apartheid. That might still have been considered in terms of value orienta-
tion, where it was not too difficult to establish or maintain the prerequisite
analytical distance. Such distance became an issue when my research topic
blended with political pursuits in the fields of memory of the genocide and
reconciliation in a way that relationships with many partners in Namibia
were increasingly determined by a common purpose.
As indicated above in connections with forms of solidarity, such com-
mon purpose does not obliterate a whole array of differences in outlook
and everyday life experience. There also remain differences in the forms of
work and action between activists and scholars even with an activist strain.
Still, relationships formed in such contexts and growing into friendships
differ markedly from friendly relationships formed in other fieldwork.
They are decidedly not instrumental since they rely not only on mutual
affection but also on a common concern, on trust and obligation that flow
from its pursuit. The latter aspect came home to me with force and clarity
when I had published Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past (2015).
At the time, I imagined this might be the final step in an effort that had
lasted more than a decade. I felt satisfied in a way and ready for new proj-
ects and challenges. It soon turned out that this was completely unrealis-
tic. The book launch in Windhoek took place some six weeks after the
German Foreign Office had it made known that they would no longer
shun the term genocide in their pronouncements, and negotiations
between the Namibian and the German governments were getting under-
way. So, there seemed to be reason for expecting the issue to come to
some point of closure. Within a few months, new lines of conflict emerged.
As has been shown, in Namibia, these revolve around the demand of large
groups in victim communities to be represented in the negotiations in
their own right; between Namibia (regardless of all differences) and
Germany, disagreement continues around the demand for reparation and
once again also around the verbal recognition of the genocide, and an
appropriate apology. As before, these issues resulted in clear expectations
and requests, not only for active engagement and advocacy which increas-
ingly has included joint action with Namibians in Germany, mainly in
Berlin; similarly, Namibian actors require advice for assessing and navigat-
ing the intricacies of German politics, also to calibrate their own actions.
Meanwhile, the issue of how to deal with the memory of genocide is
clearly far from coming to any form of closure; government negotiations
have been stuck as they are well into their fourth year11; and oppositional
groups of victim communities are campaigning vigorously in both Namibia
and Germany and, at the same time, pursuing a lawsuit in New York.
The need to continue my work both in terms of research and publica-
tion and as a matter of activist participation in Germany and support in
Namibia flows out of the relationships I have cultivated over many years.
It is also closely linked to the obligations that cannot be severed from
these relations of solidarity and friendship. Again, turning to the scholarly
side of this nexus, there remains a fine balance to be struck when it comes
to issues of analytical distance or objectivity. Take the description and anal-
ysis of some of the inter-Namibian contradictions, such as those that have
208 R. KÖSSLER
arisen around the negotiations between the Namibian and German gov-
ernments and the insistence of victim groups for an autonomous role at
the negotiating table. While it would not be appropriate to take sides in
this matter for an outsider and for a German citizen, in particular, existing
personal bonds and obviously quite diverse approaches by Namibian actors
have meant that the conversation with those who stand for an autono-
mous role in the negotiations and oppose the victim groups being sub-
sumed under the Namibian government is much more intensive for the
great majority of German civil society actors, and for scholars immediately
concerned with the issues of the long aftermath of the genocide.
From my own perspective, I can link this apparent bias to some of my
earlier work researching traditional communities in southern Namibia
and, more broadly speaking, to my attempts at understanding the rela-
tionship between such groups and the modern, independent state in other
parts of southern Africa (Kössler 2005, 2011, 2012a). These issues can be
addressed as problems of institutional pluralism. Such pluralism entails
fundamentally different social logics—that of the modern state, on the
one hand, and that of traditional/ethnic communities, on the other. I
suspect that part of the ongoing conflict in Namibia over the modalities of
negotiation with Germany is linked to this institutionally grounded con-
flict (Kössler 2019a). Regardless of personal sentiments, I would argue
that such considerations pertain to the realm of scholarship. They may
inform politics, as any social science analysis might do, but they are not
informed by politics or by demands of solidarity. They give clues to pursu-
ing certain avenues of investigation.
Still, conflicts between scholarly research and solidarity or friendship do
arise. They mostly end in amicable discussions about issues ranging from
factual mistakes to ways of presenting the cause in question. In some cases,
though, the asymmetrical postcolonial relationship, which forms the broad
framework of the entire process, calls for discretion. Longstanding per-
sonal propinquity and friendship have also generated trust on both sides
of the relationship, such that information not suitable for publication, but
essential for mutual understanding are shared regularly. Thus, solidarity,
friendship, and common purpose, also controversy at times, have proven
to be indispensable for the specific kind of research I have addressed in this
contribution, and also for the political interventions this work entails.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at
the University of the Western Cape for the opportunity to present some of
my views in their seminar series on August 8, 2018.
2. The full text appears in English translation in Gewald 1999, pp. 172–173.
Also see https://weareproudtopresent.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/
the-extermination-order/. Accessed June 5, 2019.
3. This information is according to an anonymous newspaper report based on
Nampa news agency, The Namibian (Windhoek), August 31, 2018. Later
developments, including the promotion of one leading Herero activist to
the position of Deputy Minister in the Namibian government in March
2020, demonstrate the fluidity of these processes, as well as the sometimes
surprising agency of participants.
4. For a more extensive argumentation of this issue, see Kössler and Melber
2002; Kössler 2012b.
5. Weber transformed Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft into processual ones, Verge
meinschaftung/Vergesellschaftung, thereby escaping essentialistic implica-
tions (Weber 1985 [1922], pp. 21–23).
6. On the frequently misunderstood, potentially revolutionary meaning of
the term “Third World,” see Kalter 2011, pp. 54–55.
7. It is important to distinguish responsibility from guilt. In the wake of the
Holocaust, a fictitious claim assigning collective guilt to Germans was used
as a ruse precisely to evade such responsibility. See Frei 2012 [1996], 2002.
8. The technical term is Kulturhoheit der Länder.
9. See accounts in Biwa 2012, 2017; Förster 2012, 2013; Kössler 2015,
pp. 289–298.
10. The German originals differentiate between Teilnahme and Teilhabe.
11. At the time of revision of this text, German Ambassador Christian-Matthias
Schlaga, about to leave his post after completing his stint, made it clear that
the negotiation process was not completed yet and stated “we do not have
a timeline” (quoted from an interview in an anonymous newspaper report,
Windhoek Observer, 28 June 2019).
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CHAPTER 9
Postcolonial Activists and European

Museums
Katrin Sieg
Omitting colonial history from the national narrative or depicting colo-

nialism only through a flattering, nostalgic lens used to be the norm in
most European history and art museums until well into the first decade of
this century. Museums of ethnology and natural history exhibited the
results of imperial hoarding, but rarely did they thematize the circum-
stances under which they had acquired human remains and precious arti-
facts. This has changed over the past two decades. Now, many museums
embrace national or European narratives that acknowledge the reality of
cultural diversity and foster more self-reflective approaches to collective
history. They are searching for styles and techniques appropriate for their
new role as “difference engines,” affirming cultural heterogeneity and fos-
tering the qualities and skills required for citizenship in multicultural soci-
eties (Bennett 2006). This identity crisis echoes and even amplifies a larger
social and political contradiction marked by the ubiquity of imperial
remains and the fundamental reluctance to relate built environments,
institutional structures, cultural habits, and structures of feeling shaped by
K. Sieg (*)
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
e-mail: ks253@georgetown.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_9
216 K. SIEG
colonial economies to the global system of conquest, colonization, and

trade. Yet, in a context where colonial history is not consistently inte-
grated into school curricula and public spheres, museums have become
key sites for decolonizing myths of national genius and European superi-
ority. On the one hand, they model newly cooperative modes of storytell-
ing. On the other hand, they help legitimate critical, yet marginalized
perspectives long considered threatening to a consensus-oriented
museology.
In former settler-colonial nations, indigenous communities and descen-
dants of the enslaved have been the main agents of decolonizing muse-
ums. In the past, they have insisted on revising national narratives that
privilege white immigrants. They have challenged institutional authority
in addition to demanding a say in what is shown and how. They have also
won the right to have human remains and sacred artifacts returned. From
James Luna’s Artifact Piece (1987) and Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum
(1992) to Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s The Couple in the
Cage (1992), artists’ performances and installations were key during the
late 1980s and early 1990s in illuminating colonial practices of collecting
and exhibiting, and exploring what these could tell us about whom the
museum constructed as a subject of the gaze and as an object of represen-
tation. Some scholars are being critical of the museological preferences
that have emerged in response to these contestations and expectations,
but museums in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand have pio-
neered inclusive national narratives while altering their institutional struc-
tures and curatorial practices.1
In Europe, too, museums have taken a turn toward decolonizing. The
House of European History (opened 2017) thematizes conquest, slavery,
and colonialism as part of imperialist competition culminating in war and
genocide. Museums of national history in Berlin and Copenhagen have
mounted acclaimed temporary exhibitions in which “voices from the colo-
nies” are incorporated in their permanent exhibitions. Smaller history
museums in Manchester, Hanover, and Flensburg have likewise wrestled
with colonialism in regionally specific ways. Art museums in Eindhoven,
Amsterdam, Dresden, and Bremen have examined colonial and postcolo-
nial imaginaries. The migration museum in Paris celebrates postcolonial
migrations, whereas museums of slavery in Liverpool and Pointe-à-Pitre
set their subject by necessity within the context of circum-Atlantic trade
and plantation economy. Museums of ethnology across the European con-
tinent, quite a few of which have their origin as colonial museums, have
9 POSTCOLONIAL ACTIVISTS AND EUROPEAN MUSEUMS 217
recently rebranded themselves as museums of world culture. A number of

them have undergone extensive makeovers during the last decade, meta-
morphosing behind closed doors.2 Among them are the Royal Museum
for Central Africa (RCMA) in Tervuren, Belgium (reopened as
Africamuseum in 2018), the Troopen Museum in Amsterdam, the World
Museum in Vienna (reopened 2017), and the Museum of Ethnology in
Berlin whose collections have moved to the Humboldt Forum since fall
2019. The Musée du Quay Branly was the first major museum in Europe
built explicitly for a postcolonial age. It opened in Paris in 2006 and, since
then, it has drawn large crowds, albeit with mixed reviews.3 Having assem-
bled substantial parts of their collections in the heyday of the colonial era
and holding material remains of the colonial and precolonial past, these
museums of ethnology seek to reframe their collections now in celebration
of diversity while bringing the institutions into alignment with national
imaginaries, which have accentuated multiculturalism, European integra-
tion, and global connections over the past quarter century or so.
Nonetheless, critics have problematized the museums’ embrace of multi-
culturalism without a concomitant effort to confront past violence, acqui-
sition history, and the institution’s historic complicity with the colonial
project. Without confronting “hard truths,” these museums risk institu-
tionalizing a certain divorce between symbolic and social practices while
positioning world culture museums as expedient fig leaves in fundamen-
tally racist societies.4
European museums were long insulated from the political pressures
experienced by museums in the Anglo-American world not least by a legal
framework that protected them from accountability to indigenous com-
munities. Although the affirmation of diversity had become normative,
the European houses turned deaf ears to the right enshrined in the 12th
article of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People: “the
use and control of [indigenous groups’] ceremonial objects; and the right
to the repatriation of their human remains” (UN General Assembly 2007).
Barricading themselves behind the claim to serve as custodians of human-
ity’s cultural heritage, self-proclaimed “universal museums” were long
loath to entertain requests for returns or harmonize their internal rules
with the code of ethics first passed in 1986 by the International Council of
Museums (and subsequently amended in 2001 and 2004).5 This attitude
has only recently begun to change.6 A report on colonial collections in
French museums, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron and
published in November 2018, epitomizes that shift. Programmatically
218 K. SIEG
titled “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New

Relational Ethics,” it has increased political pressure on museums from the
top.7 The report recommends that museums step up provenance research
and be proactive in the restitution process, and it has made waves not just
in France.8 Moreover, in the eyes of critics, the reluctance of museums to
change is partly a result of their institutional culture and demographic
composition. Like other publicly funded high-cultural institutions in
Europe, the professional staff does not reflect the cultural diversity that
museums are supporting now.
However, the discrepancy between cosmopolitan mission and institu-
tional structures and codes has created an opening for activist groups.
Postcolonial activists have pushed against the conceit of a “universal
museum,” protesting against European museums’ selective adoption of
the new museology, which has emerged since the late 1980s. Their wari-
ness of a facile and safe multiculturalism pushes museums to confront the
uncomfortable truth of colonial violence and their own historic implica-
tion in the colonial project. Activists publicly amplify indigenous requests
for the restitution of human remains and patrimonial objects, and they use
the return of remains as occasions to interrogate neocolonial international
relations. In addition, postcolonial activists in Europe seek to link historic
practices to contemporary struggles against racism, xenophobia, and the
surge of nationalist, anti-immigrant movements and parties. By doing so,
they discover museums not only as prime targets for contesting the cher-
ished myths of European superior accomplishments but also as possible
allies in their struggles for racial justice. They pressure these institutions to
enact support for minoritized communities in tangible ways and mobilize
anti-racist groups that might not have considered museums as allies.
This chapter looks at activist interventions to analyze strategies they
have prioritized to decolonize museums. It also considers how the muse-
ums have responded to them. I begin by examining the protests against
the RMCA in Tervuren by Congolese immigrant associations and against
the Humboldt Forum in Berlin by the activist coalition No-Humboldt 21,
as well as the occupation of the Musée de la Cité de l’Immigration in Paris
by undocumented workers. These actions are primarily aimed at changing
institutional structures of racial exclusion. Afterward, I turn my attention
to the guided walks through museums of history and art in Berlin, Paris,
and London, which interrogate the representation of racialized difference.
After looking back at more than a decade of decolonizing actions in and
against museums, I conclude by asking how museums have redesigned
their exhibitions and whether the institutional relationships they have

struck with stakeholder groups have successfully aligned the museums
with larger struggles for racial justice.
Decolonizing Institutional Structures

Some activist interventions began as protests against a specific museum’s
representation of colonial history. They led to regularized partnerships,
which, in turn, allowed for a revision of the historical narrative. The fierce
protests by the Congolese immigrant community against an exhibition
shown at the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren,
Belgium in 2005 are a case in point. Founded by King Leopold II as a
colonial museum to showcase artifacts from the Congo, the RMCA
became embroiled in public debates about colonial violence perpetrated in
the Congo, and the museum initially took a defensive stance.9 The vigor-
ous protests of Congolese immigrant associations against the exhibition
La mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial (The Memory of the Congo: Colonial
Times) at the RMCA led to the inclusion of Congolese immigrants on the
museum’s advisory council.10 The resulting exchanges with curators sub-
sequently prompted the museum to collaborate with local Congolese in
the critically acclaimed exhibition Indépendance! (Independence!) which,
on the fiftieth anniversary of independence, put a Congolese perspective
front and center in the museum’s recollection of Belgian colonialism and
its assessment of Congolese independence. The curator of that exhibition,
social anthropologist Bambi Ceuppens, is now a permanent member of
the curatorial staff of the recently reopened Africamuseum.11
The cooperation between the RCMA and local immigrants became a
model for reorienting museums of ethnology across the continent. The
museum spearheaded the first of a series of cultural programs and net-
works funded by the European Commission, and by taking on this leader-
ship role, it contributed to the dissemination of this model as a best
practice for emulation elsewhere. From 2007 to 2009, and from 2010 to
2012, five museums of ethnology under the leadership of the RCMA
entered into a two-stage project named READ-ME I + II to exchange
ideas about the role of ethnographic museums and to promote “a new
relation to the ‘Other’, which will also inspire a societal reflection in a
multicultural Europe” (READ-ME 2010).12 Museum professionals at par-
ticipating museums collaborated with migrant and minority associations
on exhibitions that thematized migration and cultural differences. Many
220 K. SIEG
museums of ethnology on the continent have since sought out community

partners for exhibitions or events that showcase the cultural diversity of
cities in which they are located. In 2011, for instance, the Museum of
Ethnology in Hamburg mounted the exhibition Africans in Hamburg:
An Encounter with Cultural Diversity, which presented the results of oral
histories collected from African migrants.13 In 2013, the Überseemuseum
Bremen (Overseas Museum Bremen) celebrated the opening of the new
African section in its permanent exhibition by hosting an African Night
with local associations. Yet, some of the efforts these museums and many
others have made lack permanent cooperative arrangements with local
networks of immigrant residents and institutions. There are several rea-
sons for this disjunction: for one, museums remain committed to showcas-
ing a variety of regions and/or the best of their collections, and curators
are not motivated to nurture community relations when collections do
not align with local demographics (Harris and O’Hanlon 2013). In addi-
tion, Vito Lattanzi notes that there remains a clear asymmetry of authority
and expertise between museums and their partners, as well as a pattern of
involving associations and individuals on an unpaid volunteer basis
(Lattanzi 2013, pp. 231–232). It should not come as a surprise that,
under such conditions, communities are not motivated to donate their
labor to institutions.
Since the early 2000s, the German government’s plan to reconstruct
the former Hohenzollern Palace in the center of the capital Berlin has
generated tremendous controversy. Critics of the plan object to the sym-
bolic restauration of unified Germany’s imperial power, especially in view
of the country’s prominent role in European unification and eastern
expansion. These fears are not allayed by the plan to move the collections
of the Museum of Ethnology—once among the largest in the world—
from the suburb of Dahlem to what is named the Humboldt Forum within
the Palace.14 The project has been touted as one of the largest cultural-
political projects in Europe. According to a concept paper published by
Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Foundation and
one of the trio of directors of the Humboldt Forum, this organization will
bring visitors “in touch with as much of the world as possible” (Parzinger
2011). Parzinger promises that the Forum will turn Berlin into a unique,
internationally distinctive “center for the research of non-European cul-
tures” and establish the German capital as “a leading cultural and museum
city around the world” (Parzinger 2011).
Back in 2007, as soon as the plans for the Humboldt Forum were
announced, they faced fierce criticisms. In 2013, the No-Humboldt 21
coalition of postcolonial, anti-racist, and immigrant associations formed to
stop the construction of the Humboldt Forum and demanded public
debate about decolonization. 82 organizations signed their resolution.
Under the leadership of three organizations—the artist collective arte-
fakte//anti-Humboldt, Berlin-postcolonial (whose mission was to foster a
critical colonial memory culture), and the online media platform Afrotak/
Cybernomads—, the coalition staged public discussions, teach-ins, and
public happenings to call for returns and restitution while confronting
Germany’s violent colonial history. The founding statement of
No-Humboldt21 took issue with Parzinger’s 2011 concept paper: “[T]he
current concept violates the dignity and property rights of communities in
all parts of the world, it is Eurocentric and restorative. The establishment
of the Humboldt Forum is a direct contradiction to the aim [of] promot-
ing equality in a migration society” (No-Humboldt21 2013). The coalition
organized public debates and artistic happenings, which sought to dem-
onstrate the museum not as a legitimate owner of its own holdings, but as
the beneficiary of colonial conquest and coercion. The colonial past should
not be redeemed through a display of ill-gotten treasures, but it should be
confronted head-on, and artifacts should not be used to entrench ideas of
cultural difference and shore up an implicit German-European superior
norm. They demanded that “experts from the countries of the global
south [be] involved in presenting their own works in a way that promotes
equality of opportunity, has an awareness of power dynamics and focusses
[sic] on portraying similarities between peoples” (No-Humboldt21 2013).
For example, artefakte//anti-Humboldt participated in an exhibition
and a conference, titled Art and Jack-in-the-Box, in June 2015. The events
took place at the Kunsthaus Dresden, a municipal art gallery in Dresden,
a city in the eastern German state of Saxony. Art and Jack-in-the-Box was
the last in a three-stage collaborative project, which had taken place over
the course of the preceding year in Cape Town, South Africa and Porto
Nuovo, Republic of Benin. Partners in this international collaboration
came to Dresden. In addition, Afro-German activists from Berlin traveled
to Dresden for the event. The city had achieved notoriety in international
news as the birthplace of a right-wing populist movement known as
PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West). As
Syrian refugees began to arrive in Germany in large numbers that summer,
Dresden became a stronghold of the right-wing party Alternative for
222 K. SIEG
Germany, which held weekly rallies.15 In this charged political situation,

the officials from Dresden University, the Museum of Ethnology, and the
Kunsthaus gallery who welcomed conference participants all expressed
their hope that this final presentation of artistic and activist collaborations
would help to intervene in a racist local public sphere, open people’s
minds, and restore the city’s tarnished image.
Many of the artworks, talks, and performances presented at the
Kunsthaus supported postcolonial countries’ requests for the return of
human remains and contested artifacts. At a more general level, they
sought to deconstruct and dismantle ethnological techniques of othering
in a variety of artistic media and forms. Occupying the entire first room of
the exhibition space, the art installation Columns of Memory by Nigerian
artist Peju Layiwola combined columns made of colored plastic material
with small masks and plaques recalling the famous Benin bronzes and, in
its form and materiality, sought to mark violently ruptured traditions.16
Carted off by the British during a punitive raid in 1897, these valuable
artifacts were later auctioned off in London and the Museum of Zoology,
Anthropology, and Ethnology in Dresden purchased an estimated 10 per-
cent of the more than 2500 bronze sculptures and plaques. Despite
requests by the state of Nigeria, no European museum has returned any of
the bronzes, although two sculptures depicting a bell and a bird, respec-
tively, were returned voluntarily in 2014 by the grandson of a British agent
who had participated in the looting.17 In Layiwola’s installation, birds and
bells were featured on textile wall hangings surrounding numerous col-
umns made of colored plastic, and replicas of the bronzes were attached to
these columns. They recalled museum plinths but offered at the same time
a Benin vernacular version, which reconnected the bronzes to contempo-
rary Nigeria.18 The textile wall hangings, recalling the singular return of
artifacts, assisted the project of restitution. Significantly, Layiwola’s sculp-
tural reparation did not equal the imaginative restoration of Benin art, the
king’s palace, or traditional society; instead, Layiwola emphasized the fact
that she was part of the second generation of women sculptors, altering an
artistic practice previously reserved for men. Today, she is one of the most
outspoken, persistent, and internationally visible advocates of returning
the Benin bronzes, a prolific maker of images and sculptures revolving
around the raid, the organizer of one exhibition on the topic, as well as the
editor of an anthology that discusses this cultural challenge.19
The installation Broken Windows 6.3 by the artist Dierk Schmidt, one of
the members of artefakte//anti-Humboldt, might be regarded as the
German counterpart to Layiwola’s imagined repatriation. It consisted of

empty glass cases bearing etched and scratched markings, which resem-
bled the glass boxes in which two of twenty Herero skulls had been pre-
sented during the 2011 ceremony held at the Charité research hospital on
the occasion of their handover to a Namibian delegation. The numbers
and inscriptions that were often etched and scratched into the skulls or
affixed to them by racial scientists registered the history of their violent
appropriation for scientific purposes and attested to their status as objects.
Schmidt’s empty, scratched boxes preserved that violence, but it refused to
duplicate it by representing the skulls. Instead, the empty boxes evoked
the skulls’ utopian return to the status of the subject and to Namibia. This
aspect became especially palpable in one box, which was scratched from
the inside and punctured. Once displayed inside, the object appeared to
have fled through a hole in the glass.20
In the discussions at the Kunsthaus, participants debated how the proj-
ect of decolonization could best be achieved. Activists of color from Berlin
were among those who most forcefully insisted that institutional change
needed to have priority, that the staff of cultural institutions had to be
made more ethnically diverse and include members of communities of
color before tackling matters of repatriation and restitution and even
before inventing new esthetic practices better capable of capturing cultural
and social diversity.21 By contrast, many other participants believed that
the deconstruction of forms and categories constituted political work on
the imagination, cognition, and feelings that would have further effects on
the institution as well as on the discourses of race and diversity in society
at large. Whereas the former feared a purely symbolic approach to decolo-
nizing the museum (and cultural institutions more generally), the latter
decried the construction of a competition or a hierarchy between esthetic
and institutional approaches to decolonization.
While the collaboration with experts from the Global South was key to
the coalition’s vision of cultural representation in a postcolonial world, the
interventions organized by No-Humboldt21 differed from the protest at
Tervuren and the museum-instigated collaborations noted above in that
they upended, rearranged, and broadened the category of people to whom
museums should be accountable. Among professionals, such accountabil-
ity (when it is recognized) is restricted to the “source community,” namely,
the descendants of the original makers to whom artifacts and collections
may be traced and who may claim ownership and authority (Brown and
Peers 2003, p. 2).22 In effect, the activists of No-Humboldt21 pushed open
224 K. SIEG
the legal concept of filiation, which defined who was deemed legitimate in
filing a claim to restitution. Instead of establishing descent or, at least,
cultural continuity in a limited sense, they called for a broader sense of
affiliation and solidarity.23 Although Namibian immigrant Israel Kaunatjike
and Tanzanian immigrant Mnyaka Sururu Mboro feature prominently in
public discussions about the return of human remains, the organizations
collaborating in No-Humboldt21 comprise black Berliners without a bio-
graphical connection to the former colonies, along with white Germans.24
Therefore, opposition to the Humboldt Forum echoed the shift of post-
colonial politics toward the paradigms of critical whiteness studies in aca-
demia by including immigrants, racialized minorities, and white Europeans
as subjects who insisted on entangled histories and were implicated in
different ways in the work of decolonizing the former metropole. Although
the coalition’s public actions have abated now with the completion of the
Humboldt Forum, its website continues to function as an archive of ongo-
ing debates about the project of decolonizing museums of ethnology. The
Dresden event illustrates the expansion of who has a stake in museum
representations beyond representatives of source communities like
Layiwola, along with the broadening of what counts as political activism
beyond calls for inclusive hiring practices and for the return of contested
collections. It links decolonial activists to anti-racist constituents while
engendering symbolic transformation as well as material, institutional
change.25
Similarly, the occupation of the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration
in Paris from October 2009 until January 2010 by 500 undocumented
immigrant workers (sans-papiers), most of whom were from Mali and
Senegal, expanded the salience of museums’ progressive aspirations to
contemporary European denizens threatened by racialized labor and legal
regimes. It differed from the interventions discussed above because activ-
ists were not concerned here with museum practices of collecting and
exhibiting. Instead, they called out a contemporary museum’s ideological
break with the colonial past and turned the institution into a stage for
public demands for postcolonial justice. Occupiers chose the museum,
which had opened in 2007, to protest their illegalization and discrimina-
tion in France, since the immigration museum sought to redeem the bla-
tantly colonialist murals decorating the Palais de la Porte Dorée in which
it was housed. Not unlike the Humboldt Forum, which seemed to be
interested in redeeming the building’s imperialist envelope through a cel-
ebration of non-European material culture, the Musée de l’Histoire de
l’Immigration occluded its historical origin in the Colonial Exposition of

1931. The four-month-long occupation drew on the pro-immigrant nar-
rative of the museum to call out the government’s lagging implementa-
tion of new guidelines that provided a path to legalization and promised
to protect undocumented migrants against predatory employers.26
Although this activist intervention used the museum merely as a visually
effective backdrop, and not as a means to alter the institutional structure,
it held the museum to its role as a decolonizing agent in order to contest
contemporary structures of racialized inequality and injustice. Even before
the age of Instagram, this was an inspired choice.
Documentary photographer Mathieu Pernot picked up on the rhetori-
cal opportunity this choice of venue afforded. His photograph Sans
Papiers, which hung in the permanent exhibition as a reminder of the
building’s history during my visit in 2015, framed the plight of undocu-
mented workers as neocolonial by using the colonial-era frescoes in this
space as a backdrop. It showed an occupier walking by a fresco depicting
a white-bearded missionary in a white hooded robe, blessing two kneeling
black men dressed only in loincloths and lifting their hands to him entreat-
ingly. One figure was wearing slave shackles around his wrists, suggesting
that slavery was part of a heathen society to which the missionary brought
the promise of salvation. The juxtaposition between the young black man
with an idealized image of France’s mission civilisatrice punctured the
binaries the painting was reinforcing. Whereas the fresco suggested that
vulnerability, dependency, and exploitation were products of an alien and
violent society, this illegalized worker underscored that they were a func-
tion of French laws and policies. The young worker’s white hoodie also
resembled the missionary’s robe, signaling that the postcolonial migrants
who organized the occupation with the support of France’s largest trade
union had assumed the place of the subject-agent of history. Their calls for
justice and equality contrasted with the supplicant position of naked
Africans in the fresco.27
Regretfully, as Sophia Labadi shows in her discussion of the occupation,
the museum ultimately did not live up to its decolonizing mission. On the
contrary, it invoked “security concerns” to expel the activists when the
state refused to accede to their demands. Labadi explains how the museum,
which had made no attempts to empower migrants beyond depicting
migration in a positive light, conformed to the priorities prevailing in the
political realm where the rights of racialized populations are easily subor-
dinated to the “security” of the white majority (Labadi 2018, pp. 120–121).
226 K. SIEG
Together, these examples illustrate that the museum has become a sig-
nificant actor in wider social debates. While interventions are not always
primarily directed at institutional transformation, several of them have
insisted on the institution’s responsibility to model inclusive hiring, staff-
ing, and cooperative practices. For good reasons, activists have prodded
museums to put into practice ideological promises of postcolonial justice,
which often remain at a purely symbolic level of representation. Museums
in Europe and elsewhere have tended to respond to such interventions (or
their prospect) by seeking to transform themselves into postcolonial “con-
tact zones.” The ascendancy of this concept can be traced to James
Clifford’s seminal article, which adopts Mary Louise Pratt’s term of the
colonial contact zone. Pratt defined “the contact zone” as a “space of
colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and cultur-
ally separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing
relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and
intractable conflict” (quoted in Clifford 1997, p. 192). The contact zone
is marked by selective cultural appropriation and improvisation, and by the
“auto-ethnographic” attempts of the colonized—not always received or
heard by colonial powers—to explain their cultural system in terms that
the powerful can understand (Pratt 1991, p. 35). By conceptualizing
museums as contact zones, Clifford called attention to the epistemic vio-
lence lodged in centuries of colonial collecting, in owning the human
remains and material culture of indigenous communities and exhibiting
them in ways that supported ideologies of cultural hierarchy and the civi-
lizing mission. He also pointed out in a more hopeful sense the way to
undo this violence by describing what happened when curators in the
Portland Art Museum invited Tlingit into their basement to share trea-
sured objects from the group’s past with them, listened to the stories,
songs, and memories activated by their encounter with these items, and
grasped them as part of ongoing legal, political, and social struggles over
land and fishing rights. To the Tlingit, their storytelling constituted gifts
of trust that, in turn, incurred obligations on the part of the museum staff:
“We’re telling you these things, [a Tlingit elder] says to the white people
assembled. We hope you’ll back us up” (Clifford 1997, p. 190). Although
Clifford offered this story in a set of cautionary tales about western institu-
tions’ failure to meet indigenous peoples’ expectations raised by such invi-
tations, the idea that museums could be conceptualized as contact zones
quickly caught on as a shorthand for more egalitarian, reciprocal relations
within this context. As Robin Boast pointed out in 2011, a museum
mission statement rarely fails to invoke “multiperspectival representation”

nowadays or acknowledge indigenous authority over an object’s meaning
(Boast 2011, p. 56). What museums hope to accomplish by partnering
with a community is to expand their visitor base and increase their profile
and standing. Yet, many of these collaborative endeavors prove to be not
only temporary but also superficial, as museums spruce up their exhibi-
tions with videotaped testimony while retaining control of the overall
exhibition.
Labadi confirms Boast’s findings. She criticizes museums for inviting
members of source communities to explain an object’s significance, all the
while producing videos that can be integrated into the existing exhibition
as a primary goal. However, Labadi notes that the museums in Manchester
and Copenhagen she has studied are shifting away from such product-
driven projects toward collaborations, which cede more space and author-
ity to immigrants and their representatives. She traces this reorientation
from largely consultative relations and one-off projects with immigrant
communities toward more sustained efforts at immigrants’ capability-
building—for instance, by seeking to overcome language barriers through
language courses and by improving employment opportunities through
professional training.
To sum up, some activist interventions, particularly in the practice of
ethnological collecting and exhibiting, aim to change exclusionary institu-
tional structures by advocating for community involvement, curatorial
partnerships, and international collaborations that would introduce diver-
gent perspectives into the museum, push the museum into different politi-
cal alignments and toward public advocacy for those it represents, and
thereby contribute to the overcoming of racism in European societies.
However, the manner in which museums have interpreted and imple-
mented the concept of the museal contact zone demonstrates that coop-
eration with selected community partners all too easily reproduces the
power differences between racialized people and museum staff. In addi-
tion, it proves that the voices of people of color invited into the center are
subordinated to the museum’s message primarily to enhance its standing
and relevance and that they are tokenized or turned into native infor-
mants, without increasing either their access to the institution or authority
over the stories told in it about violent histories, cultural differences, or
social opportunities. While museums’ facilitation of migrants’ language
learning and basic professional training more directly tackles some barriers
to the goal of social inclusion, these approaches sometimes revise
228 K. SIEG
narratives of colonialism and postcolonial relations, but they do not always

or necessarily do so. Let me now turn to activist interventions that priori-
tize work on perception and the imagination as a precondition for tackling
the structures underpinning institutional authority.
Decolonizing Perception
How do museums shape what we see and, hence, what can be known
about colonial history? In the last decade, a number of postcolonial schol-
ars and intellectuals have prompted visitors to take a more skeptical look
at museums by designing guided walks. These tours range from the proj-
ect “Kolonialismus im Kasten” (Colonialism in a Box), created in
2009–2010 by a collective of German historians in the German History
Museum and still ongoing, and Françoise Vergès’s guided walk “The Slave
in the Louvre” (2012–2013) to Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art
Tours” through several British art museums (since 2018). They offer what
Edward Said calls “contrapuntal readings” of images, artifacts, and elisions
(Said 1993, pp. 66–67). With this concept, Said urged fellow postcolonial
scholars to bring into the foreground the larger historical and political
processes on which seemingly unremarkable, commonplace references are
contingent but remain unquestioned, to give an account of the operations
of power that separate European lifestyle and colonial production site, and
to restore the struggles of the colonized against colonial oppression that
are typically excluded or distorted in a colonialist text. The tours aim to
reveal the museum’s historic complicity with the colonial project and
transform ways of seeing. These projects, which tend to be initiated and
carried out by (art) historians, have contributed greatly to the popular dif-
fusion of reading strategies developed in postcolonial studies, encouraging
those who have signed up for or downloaded tours to adopt a more skep-
tical stance toward the institution of the museum and, more generally,
toward authoritative claims about cultural difference. Although their
methodologies are arguably similar, the three tours take place in rather
divergent contexts. The differences between them return us to the diffi-
culty of linking material and symbolic change and raise intriguing ques-
tions about how the museum may best support the decolonizing of
international economic power relations.
In 2009, a group of young women historians, most of them Ph.D. stu-
dents focusing on various aspects of colonial history, developed a guided
walk through the empire section in the German History Museum. The
tour was part of a larger program of activist events and artistic happenings
around Berlin that commemorated the 125th anniversary of the Africa
Conference and explored the legacies of colonialism. The association
Berlin-postcolonial, which had been founded two years earlier, took a
leading role in coordinating events, and some members of the historians’
collective were actively involved in the association. The historians targeted
the German History Museum because its permanent exhibition, having
opened to some fanfare three years earlier, promised a forthright confron-
tation with mass violence and genocide in Germany’s past, yet squeezed all
references to German colonialism into a single glass box. The museum’s
aspiration to foster a self-reflective stance about national history provided
the historians with a critical opening. They noted that the permanent exhi-
bition presented visitors with a “national history that link[ed] them with
some and divid[ed] them from others” (Bauche et al. 2013). The collec-
tive pinpointed the permanent exhibition’s approach to colonialism as an
emblem of purposely ruptured connections, disavowing entangled histo-
ries, and producing what Ann Laura Stoler described as colonial “aphasia”
(Stoler 2011).28
Not only had the museum unduly compressed colonial history, but it
also suppressed colonialism as a key dimension of worker’s history, wom-
en’s history, history of science, and cultural history during the age of
empire. “Colonialism in a Box” restored these severed linkages and
unpacked the arrangement of objects in the colonial glass case. The
accounts the guides provided often supplemented the information pre-
sented on the museum labels. For instance, they contrasted the museum’s
representation of medical scientific advances through the photographs of
Nobel prize laureate Robert Koch alone in his South African lab, with
stories of his research in South and East Africa (then British and German
colonies), where he collaborated with Africans and used them as medical
subjects. They also told the story behind an oil painting in the “Prussian
myths” section, Prussian Romance, which depicted the black military
musician Gustav Sabac el-Cher in an embrace with a white woman (pos-
sibly his wife, Gertrud Perling). The musician’s father had been “gifted”
to Prince Albert of Prussia by an Ottoman viceroy and worked as a valet at
the Prussian court. While the accompanying label describes Sabac el-Cher
as a “successful black Prussian,” evidenced by his career and marriage to
Perling, the historians referred to his father’s status as a “slave” exchanged
by aristocrats. They further noted the hardening of racial boundaries dur-
ing the colonial era. Viewing Sabac el-Cher’s embrace without knowing
230 K. SIEG
about the harassment of interracial couples, the state’s curtailing of immi-

gration from Africa, and the passing of anti-miscegenation laws during the
colonial era, as the historians explained, the painting and its accompanying
plaque suggested the successful career of a model migrant while bolster-
ing—instead of interrogating—the myth of Prussian cosmopolitanism and
tolerance.29
The historians’ commentaries about the objects displayed in the colo-
nial box were particularly rich. At a time when the German government
and the museum staff studiously avoided the term genocide to refer to the
mass violence that German soldiers had committed in Southwest Africa
(today’s Namibia), the historians refrained from using euphemisms. They
included mass violence and extermination in the story of German colonial-
ism illustrated by such innocuous objects as cocoa tins, an oil painting of
the Kilimanjaro, and the uniform of colonial troops. In addition, they
raised crucial epistemological and ethical questions. A photo album
belonging to a colonial soldier, which included images of an execution,
catalyzed reflections on how museums were to deal responsibly with
objects that reinscribed the (murderous or exoticizing) perspective of the
colonizers. Drawings of anonymous black women prompted them to ask
how museums were to cope with the absence or dearth of objects that
could tell alternative stories of colonization from the perspective of the
colonized. What to do when museum collections lacked objects that testi-
fied to the reality and agency of the colonized vis-à-vis colonial domination?
“Colonialism in a Box” called out the museum for its insufficiently
critical representation of the past, introduced competing perspectives, and
situated its project in anti-racist, decolonial counterpublics. The collective
collaborated with actors of color in Berlin’s anti-racist and postcolonial
circles to record the recontextualizing narratives they had researched, and
in 2013 it launched a website, which included an audio guide that could
be downloaded for free. It alerted visitors to the politics of museological
choices by confronting visitors with discordant visual and aural tracks, by
asking them to veer off the prescribed path, and by revealing the implica-
tions of spatial layout. It thereby encouraged them to be more astute read-
ers of authoritative historical narratives and institutional truth claims. The
collective seized the opening created by the museum’s aspiration to foster-
ing self-reflective democratic citizenship through an unsparing confronta-
tion with past violence. However, the collective refuted the museum’s
assertion that Germany has completed the labor of mourning required to
achieve an anti-fascist, non-racist identity. “Colonialism in a Box”
underscored the need to change institutional codes as a condition for

overcoming crucial barriers to democratic participation.
As part of the 2012 Paris Triennial, postcolonial theorist Françoise
Vergès curated guided walks through the Louvre called “The Slave at the
Louvre: An Invisible Humanity.” It bore similarities with “Colonialism in
a Box,” but it was specifically tailored to the genre of the art museum. The
Louvre was a willing partner in the tour. Since 2000, the museum has
showcased non-European masterpieces in its Pavillon des Sessions (now
renamed the Department of the Arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the
Americas) to counter the charge of Eurocentrism and to refute the impli-
cation that only European art is worthy of that designation, whereas non-
Europeans merely create “artifacts.”30 The revision of esthetic categories
evidenced by such institutional changes served as a critical opening
for Vergès.
Art historian Carol Duncan has referred to the Louvre as the first “truly
modern art museum” (Duncan 1991, p. 88). When in 1793 the French
revolutionaries designated the royal art collection as a public museum,
they signaled the political virtuousness of their own government. By con-
verting treasures, which had enhanced the king’s standing or had under-
scored the legitimacy of his rule, into evidence of individual and national
genius, the Louvre powerfully dramatized the epochal turn. Duncan char-
acterizes the function of the western art museum typified by the Louvre as
that which makes the modern state look good: “progressive, concerned
about the spiritual life of its citizens, a preserver of past achievement and a
provider for the common good” (Duncan 1991, p. 93). At the same time,
Duncan argues, the art museum provides a narrative of the history of art
that not only flatters nationalist narcissisms (the Louvre popularized the
periodization of art history into distinct national schools, with French art
at its apex), but also purges art history of “social and political conflict, and
distills it down to a series of triumphs, mostly of individual genius”
(Duncan 1991, p. 94). It presents as national or universal very particular
class and gender interests. Moreover, its idealization of active contempla-
tion affirms a form of engaged citizenship without the need to redistribute
any real power. Finally, the Louvre’s seemingly neutral tracking of the
evolution of forms and techniques from Egyptian and Greek antiquity via
the Renaissance to European modernity exemplifies the Enlightenment’s
enshrining of scientific truths, empiricism, and reason in secular rituals,
which usurp the authority of religious belief they purport to supersede.
Duncan’s analysis suggests a number of promising entry points for the
232 K. SIEG
project of decolonizing the art museum. Vergès’s guided walk builds upon
some of them.
Born in Paris, raised in the French Overseas Department La Réunion,
and educated in Paris and Berkeley, Vergès serves as Chair of the
Postcolonial Studies department in the Sorbonne’s College of Global
Studies. She is also an active public intellectual in colonial memory politics
outside of academia, serving on the committee of the Memorial for the
Abolition of Slavery in Nantes and chairing the French National Committee
for the Memory and History of Slavery.31 The framing dates of the
Louvre’s collection (1793–1848) hold special significance in the history of
slavery since the first refers to the first abolition of slavery after the Haitian
Revolution and the second to the abolition of slavery in all French colo-
nies after Napoleon had reintroduced the practice in 1802. Vergès did not
seek to shed light on depictions of slaves in the exhibition or in the depot,
as the walk’s title seemed to suggest; rather, she invited curators and artists
to join her in historicizing selected paintings in the galleries and use them
as prompts for thinking about race and colonialism today. The invited art-
ists were sent an inventory of paintings beforehand, an inventory that
ranged from still lives of objects that had been brought to Europe through
trade and from plantations to mythological depictions such as Théodore
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Vergès’s introduction to the walk alerted
visitors that she would contest the focus on individual genius and elision
of social and political conflict in art history. It was the role of curators to
provide biographies of objects such as cowrie shells, tobacco, sugar, and
tea, which had arrived in European households, and place them within the
colonial economy, which had remained outside of the frame. Examining a
canonical painting such as François Auguste Biard’s Abolition of Slavery,
27 April 1848 prompted Vergès to ask how freedom came to be icono-
graphically associated with whiteness, and blackness with servitude, and
contrast the privileging of white freedom-lovers in abolitionist paintings
such as this one with the historic centrality of the enslaved in struggles for
freedom. Vergès’s walks employed the method of contrapuntal reading,
which Said had developed for literary criticism, and which art historian
Julie Hochstrasser had adapted to postcolonial art criticism in her seminal
study Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (2007). In this book,
Hochstrasser employs as her main critical methods historicization, denatu-
ralization, and revisionism driven by the perspective and historical experi-
ence of the colonized. They allow her to conclude that the alluring painted
objects in Golden Age still lives function as commodity fetishes disavowing
the excruciating and violent conditions under which colonial products

were made, traded, and transported to Europe. Vergès shared
Hochstrasser’s conclusion that rendering the labor and humanity of the
enslaved invisible naturalizes the gap between “consumers and producers
in a society learning new ways to live in luxury” (Vergès 2016, p. 11).
Both critics help to clarify the relevance of historicizing artistic representa-
tions of slavery for people today. Whereas Hochstrasser directs her critique
to art history, Vergès addresses hers to the museum.
While docent tours are common in art museums, they tend to shore up
the idea of artistic genius. By contrast, Vergès has promoted an approach
to artworks that is conversational, critical, and creative. Participating art-
ists are invited to associate freely with a painting of their choice and draw
connections to the present, to politics, or to another artform.32 For
instance, black British filmmaker Isaac Julien reflected on the drowned
African migrants on the shores of the island of Lampedusa, as he stood in
front of The Raft of the Medusa. The same painting, and the legend
depicted in it, inspired Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé to “develop a
theory of literary cannibalism” that would devour metropolitan tropes
and traditions (Vergès 2016, p. 11). The tour’s open, improvisational style
of conversation aimed to puncture the secular rituals enacted at art muse-
ums where individual strolls or docent tours insulated a glorified cultural
heritage from historical or political inquiry. While “The Slave in the
Louvre” did not find as extensive an audience as “Colonialism in a Box”
had, the postcolonial artists and intellectuals who serve as guides resem-
bled the Berlin collective by modeling a similarly skeptical and interroga-
tive mode of citizenship.
Six years later, Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art Tours” through six
museums in London, including the British Museum, aroused considerable
attention in the press, social media, by politicians, and among museum
scholars. In addition to supplementing the portraits of prominent national
figures with information about their significance for colonial history, the
art historian introduced listeners to a range of topics that were relevant for
decolonizing the museum—beginning with the question of returning sto-
len objects and considering the ethics of displaying sacred artifacts. The
tabloid Daily Mail and the London Times criticized the tours, and a
Member of Parliament denounced them as “sensationalist” (quoted in
Procter 2018). Unintimidated by the initial shrill attacks, Procter took the
opportunity to explain her approach and objectives in the opinion pages
of the Guardian and subtly steered traffic toward her website The
234 K. SIEG
Exhibitionist where tickets and “Uncomfortable Art” merchandise such as

buttons and postcards can be purchased (see Figs. 9.1 and 9.2).
The guide’s short bio can be found on her agency Greene & Heaton’s
website. Greene & Heaton frame Procter, an Australian who lives in
London, as an enterprising millennial: unable to find a job after complet-
ing her degree as an art historian, the young “museum enthusiast” began
to podcast reviews of exhibitions and museums, before finding notoriety
and success with Uncomfortable Art Tours (Greene & Heaton). An article
in the Guardian that secured Procter’s reputation condenses the tours
into unabashedly provocative questions: “Was Lord Nelson a white
supremacist? Was Queen Victoria a thief?” (Minamore 2018). The text is
accompanied by illustrations that superimpose the terms “Slaver!” and
“Invader!” over portraits of Queen Elisabeth I and Lord Nelson, graffiti-
style. Guardian reporter Bridget Minamore has characterized Procter’s
audience as typically white, young, and female. She goes on to note that
Fig. 9.1 TheExhibitionist.org website banner

Fig. 9.2 TheExhibi-

tionist.org web-
site banner
there is little discussion during the tour because participants broadly agree
with Procter’s narrative. The reporter remarks as well that she finds the
tour both entertaining and educational. According to Procter, museum
professionals are studying her tour as a model for how to design similar
walks through their houses as well. By 2018, the project of decolonizing
the art museum has turned mainstream and profitable.
Whether they target history or art museums, the three tours share the
contrapuntal approach developed by Said and Hochstrasser: they set
exhibited objects within a larger material history that subtends representa-
tion but is elided by it; they restore histories of imperialist violence effaced
by the museum’s focus on artists, collectors, national schools, and formal
properties; they contrast the colonialist perspective encoded in what is
shown and how with stories that center on the agency of the colonized;
and they draw lines between historical colonialism and contemporary neo-
colonial practices of consumption in- and outside of the museum. Whereas
“Colonialism in a Box” supplements museum displays with object biogra-
phies that restore the imperialist power relations in which the acquisition
of ethnological artifacts takes place, Vergès and Procter identify and criti-
cize specifically the art museum’s historic support for colonialism. By fos-
tering a stance of uncritical contemplation, it helped mystify the process of
236 K. SIEG
dehumanization and exploitation as a civilizing mission and rendered the

humanity of distant workers invisible. All of the institutions targeted by
the three interventions tolerated the tours or even cooperated with the
guides. While all tours cultivated a contrarian and subcultural rhetoric
(which was, in turn, commodified in the form of political messaging but-
tons by Procter), only the “Colonialism in a Box” tour managed to hack
the museum enduringly on behalf of postcolonial, anti-racist
counterpublics.
The sustained interest generated by the tour, the audio guide, and the
careful updating of the website likely contributed to the museum’s deci-
sion to organize a temporary exhibition “German Colonialism” (October
2016–May 2017), which garnered wide critical and popular acclaim.33 It
remains uncertain, though, whether the show—presented during a transi-
tional moment of the museum’s history—will infuse the museum’s perma-
nent exhibition with a contrapuntal, multiperspectival museology
championed by the historians’ collective.34 At every single public discus-
sion that was part of the event program accompanying “German
Colonialism,” audience members asked the museum staff how the objects
and ideas of the special exhibition would be incorporated into the muse-
um’s narrative of German history. I heard these questions as signs of a
desire to lock in the anti-racist consensus they saw expressed in the exhibi-
tion and make it durable, shortly after a right-wing party had won seats in
parliament for the first time since WWII. The AfD (Alternative for
Germany) party amplified the volume of anti-immigrant, overtly racist lan-
guage in the public sphere. It also challenged the prospect of decolonial
reframing of exhibited ethnological objects while questioning the need for
provenance research (Schulz 2018). While the “German Colonialism”
exhibition raised the matter of violent acquisition processes and debates
about provenance research and restitution of artifacts, it made scant efforts
to include African perspectives on these questions or collaborate with
experts from countries in the global South, as the No-Humboldt21 activ-
ists had demanded. Although the exhibition furnished in many ways a
model of anti-racist pedagogy supported by community collaboration, the
preponderance of black voices and faces in the exhibition and the online
materials complementing it obscured the museum’s scant attention to
international relations, and to the claims of African, rather than Afro-
German, stakeholders. The museum positioned Black Germans as the
main agents of decolonial work: it framed them as contemporaries who
continue to be mortgaged to racist perceptions, beliefs, and feelings that
thickened as an effect of colonial interactions and predations. It also pro-

vided Black German anti-racist activism with a heroic lineage going back
to anti-colonial struggles. The centrality of a Black German perspective on
German colonialism and its afterlife was signaled by the museum’s invita-
tion to Sharon Otoo, a Berlin-based Black writer who had recently been
awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize for literature delivered
the welcome address to the assembled cultural luminaries and political
dignitaries at the festive opening of the exhibition. As Otoo was speaking,
a group of Herero activists stood in silent protest outside the museum doors.
While some protesters belonged to the Berlin-postcolonial network,
others traveled from Namibia to attend the first congress “Restorative
Justice after Genocide” in the German capital to reiterate their call for an
official apology and for reparations. Their protest threw into relief the
exhibition’s neglect of the question of how to decolonize international
relations. It also highlighted that mobilizing domestic anti-racist initia-
tives for postcolonial politics may conflate both agendas and falsely sug-
gest that the solutions to anti-racism also solve the problem of international
power differences. To the Herero protesters outside the opening night
party, the genocide and negotiations surrounding apology and reparations
highlight persistent inequalities within multiethnic postcolonial nations
and in the global political economy.35 These cannot be solved through
practical solutions offered within the exhibition, which advocated for the
removal of colonial traces from everyday language and street signs, and for
the return of artifacts and human remains.
The other, rather obvious point driven home by the Herero protesters
is that the activist interventions should not be measured by how effectively
they compel museums to adapt their practices of collecting and exhibiting.
Instead, they aim to draw museums and the people who visit them into
larger political struggles about race, justice, and representation. They
reveal that museums have long served to naturalize partisan interests and
agitate the institution to realign its allegiances. They seek to change the
way museums represent the colonial past in order to open a space for
imagining more equitable modes of metropolitan conviviality. Where the
three projects differ is the degree to which they prefigure such conviviality
in their very process, and thereby avoid confining social transformation to
the symbolic realm.
The prominence of intellectuals and artists in interventions that priori-
tize symbolic practices have provoked accusations of individuals profiting
from the work of postcolonial critique, while racist and exclusionary
238 K. SIEG
practices are persisting. For instance, the project “Plantation Congolaise”

(CATPC) has criticized postcolonial artists on that count. It targets muse-
ums as places where the divorce of critique from social transformation
becomes institutionalized. CATPC proposes to repatriate the profit gener-
ated by the sale of Congolese chocolate sculptures on the international art
market back to the plantation and support its transformation into a
worker-owned cooperative. The video documentation of this project on
the walls of the white cube, and the names of the two internationally
renowned artists who have also sponsored the project, Sami Baloji and
Renzo Martens, on the plaque next to it mimic the familiar mode of artis-
tic display and allow the museum to ask wealthy patrons for donations.
Yet, the project’s commodified form of appearance functions now as a
placeholder for economic processes that accord a different position to the
museum in racial justice and economic redistribution projects (Martens
2017). Moreover, it encourages a mode of consumption quite different
from the traditional contemplation of an auratic object through which
cultural capital accrues to institution, patron, and connoisseur. It exposes
processes through which art generates value in international institutional
contexts. Rather than veil socioeconomic and political conflicts behind
esthetic concerns and categories, the CATPC documentary enjoins view-
ers to grapple with the ways in which art is implicated in neocolonial
processes.
Similarly, the local history museum in the Berlin district of Treptow has
integrated since 2017 a community-curated display of a human zoo in its
permanent exhibition. Alongside images and biographies of performers, it
includes documentation of the wide variety of decolonizing initiatives and
activist struggles in Berlin. As in the case of CATPC, the framed “art-
works” on the wall point to political contestations beyond the museum
and invite visitors to join or at least learn more about these struggles out-
side the museum. This approach opens the museum to the concerns of the
local community while impeding the drawing of boundaries around the
past or the political tensions and social inequalities in metropolitan society.
Conclusion
Against museums’ habit to recognize the stakes of source communities
only under very restricted circumstances, postcolonial activists have
asserted the interests of racialized people today, whether they are descended
from the formerly colonized or not, because they are held hostage by
patterns of perception that have become entrenched since the colonial era.
Against museums’ tendency to close off colonialism in the past, they take
issue with neocolonial structures and the racialization of the global econ-
omy. Against the inclination to depict colonialism as something that hap-
pened in another part of the world, they propose the concept of entangled
histories. And against the museums’ documentation of the material cul-
ture and physical anthropology of the colonized, they promote the inter-
rogation of whiteness, of European lifestyles and prerogatives as being
contingent on non-European colonization and exploitation.
Immigrants, people of color, and artists in Europe have developed con-
trapuntal accounts of museums’ implication in colonial economies in order
to contest the myth that Europe’s political and economic achievements
are products of a superior civilization and that migrants and refugees are
now seeking to free-load on these achievements. Historicizing our global-
ized world allows them to show how museums, along with other scientific
and cultural institutions, nurture the delusion that the attainment of
democracy, peace, and prosperity is an autonomous accomplishment.
Juxtaposing hegemonic narratives with the perspective and the struggles
of the colonized allows visitors to grasp deeply entangled, violent histo-
ries, which reveal that European affluence is inseparable from the control
and exploitation of the non-European world.
The interventions I have discussed in this essay target museums that
have already positioned themselves as progressive institutions, which are
attuned to new museological approaches. While some groups have brought
pressure on museums to include experts from countries of the global
South or from immigrant and minority communities in curatorial deci-
sions about what and how to display (or return), others focus their efforts
on raising visitors’ awareness of the epistemic and cultural violence in
which museological choices implicate them. Museums have in turn sought
to strike various compromises in response to demands for inclusion and
revision. Many have embraced the concept of a museological contact zone
by inviting communities into the institution, but they continue to subor-
dinate their contributions to hegemonic narratives and exploit their labor.
Others have begun to acquire works by non-European artists and of
European artists of color to supplement and diversify their collection,
without, however, thematizing how European art has contributed to ren-
dering the humanity and the labor of non-Europeans invisible, and how
the international art market continues to generate value by estheticizing
postcolonial, racialized conflicts. To forestall such compromises, many
240 K. SIEG
activist interventions insist on a two-pronged approach: changing percep-

tions as well as institutional structures and protocols.
Museums have now reopened to the public, most recently, in Vienna,
Amsterdam, and Tervuren. The mammoth Humboldt Forum, protested
so vigorously for nearly a decade, is scheduled to open in stages beginning
2020. While a detailed assessment of the changes they have made falls
outside the purview of this chapter, it seems fair to conclude that, with the
notable exception of the House of European History, the days of master
narratives are over. In Vienna and Tervuren, museums favor a disarmingly
eclectic approach: they document past wrongs, pose questions about the
ethics of exhibiting, teach new ways of seeing, and offer more critical
accounts of colonialism than before. They still strive to introduce their
visitors to a specific part of the non-European world through artifacts or
visual media, but often in partnership with immigrant communities and
sometimes by hiring curators of color. Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art
Tours” fit into such an approach, as museums seek to combine safe-space
multiculturalism with unsparing confrontations with the colonial past.
Few postcolonial or anti-racist activists will be satisfied by such eclecticism,
but it is hard to imagine that they will protest these new museums.
Notes
1. Just to give two examples: Silke Arnold-de Simine criticizes the premise
that empathy with suffering produces a greater sense of social or political
solidarity; Margaret Werry expresses skepticism toward the style of “soft
belonging” enacted at the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum in New Zealand
Aotearoa (Arnold-de Simine 2013; Werry 2012).
2. For an overview of the debates that accompanied these transformations,
see the section on Ethnographic and World Culture Museums in Peressut
et al. (2013). This is one of the capstone volumes published online as an
open access document from the multiyear research cluster on Museums in
the Age of Migrations (MeLa) with support from the European
Commission. See Plankensteiner 2018.
3. See Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Diaz 2008.
4. For instance, Sally Price notes the museum’s decontextualizing, estheticiz-
ing framing of non-European artifacts (and artists). The fetishizing, depo-
liticizing gaze at difference cultivated in the permanent exhibition, she
charges, not only contributes little to an understanding of postcolonial
conflicts in France, but harnesses art to compensate for racist discrimina-
tion and state violence against postcolonial communities (Price 2007,

p. 128). Nelia Diaz arrives at a similar judgment (Diaz 2008).
5. See Simpson 2001. Price captures the initial resistance of the Musée du
Quai Branly (MQB) to Maori demands for repatriating human remains in
Paris Primitive. The MQB has since then changed its stance. By contrast,
neither the British Museum or the Humboldt Forum have budged much
so far. See the comments by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy,
about her reasons for resigning from the advisory council of the Humboldt
Forum (Savoy 2017, p. 9).
6. In France, years-long negotiations resulted in the return of the remains of
Sara Baartman to South Africa in 2002. In Germany, small groups of
human remains from the erstwhile colony of German-Southwest Africa
(present-day Namibia) have been returned from institutes in Berlin and
Freiburg since 2011, and in 2019, two objects belonging to the Nama
leader Hendrik Witbooi were returned from the Linden museum of eth-
nology in Stuttgart. Austria repatriated the remains of a San couple to
South Africa. New Zealand has successfully repatriated many Maori
remains from European museums.
7. The report, authored by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, is available
online. See Sarr and Savoy 2018.
8. In Germany, two university research clusters recently tackled the challenge
of how to decolonize museums. At the University of Tübingen, Thomas
Thiemeyer, professor of cultural and museum studies, ethnologist Gabriele
Alex, and the Linden Museum in Stuttgart collaborated on a research proj-
ect entitled “Difficult Heritage: How to Deal with Colonial-Era Objects in
Ethnologial Museums” (Schwieriges Erbe: Vom Umgang mit kolonial-
zeitlichen Objekten in ethnologischen Museen, 2016–2018). Historian
Bernd-Stefan Grewe at the University of Freiburg directed the research
cluster “Colonial Worlds” (Koloniale Welten, 2015–2018) with support
from the German Research Council. At the transnational level, such inves-
tigations are supported by funding from the European Commission. See
note 2 about MeLa and note 11 about READ-ME I + II.
9. For a detailed discussion of the RCMA’s changing stance, see Bragard
2011; for a more recent and more skeptical assessment, see Goddeeris
2015. For a discussion of public debates about Belgian colonialism follow-
ing the publication of Adam Hochschild’s best-selling book King Leopold’s
Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism, see Castryck 2006.
10. See the interview with Vito Lattanzi on the lessons drawn by European
museum professionals from the Belgian case in Lattanzi (2013).
11. For a discussion of the reopened museum, see Hochschild 2020.
12. See also http://www.africamuseum.be/.
242 K. SIEG
13. The Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg was renamed Museum am

Rothenbaum. Künste und Kulturen der Welt in 2018.
14. For a discussion of the circumstances under which the erstwhile Royal
Ethnology Museum in Berlin amassed its vast collection, see
Zimmerman 2001.
15. The activist group Dresden-postkolonial organized a city walk for confer-
ence participants that took us by the museum of ethnology and a former
exhibition site for human zoos, but also by the courthouse where an
Egyptian immigrant and her husband had been murdered in 2009, and
where a public memorial to these hate crimes, made by a Turkish German
artist, had recently been defaced. To our student activist guide, colonial
history, recent hate crimes, and current xenophobia were linked by racism.
16. For a discussion of the significance of the Benin bronzes for art history and
for the debate about restitution, see Lidchi 1997.
17. See also Layiwola 2014.
18. The kingdom of Benin, where the raid occurred, is located in today’s
Nigeria. It is not to be confused with the contemporary Republic of Benin,
called the kingdom of Dahomey, during the colonial era.
19. See Layiwola 2010.
20. Schmidt’s interest in reparative justice goes back to his cycle of abstract
paintings about the Herero genocide, titled Die Teilung der Erde—
Tableaux on the Legal Synopsis of the Berlin Africa Conference, 2005–2011.
It was exhibited at documenta XII (2007). In 2018, a retrospective of his
work was shown in Madrid. See Schmidt 2018.
21. Discussions about diversity—and lack of it—in media and the arts had
become more prominent since 2010, in response to the use of blackface in
German theater. For a discussion of that debate, see Sieg 2015.
22. British museum scholars Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers, in their anthol-
ogy Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader (2003) apply
the term “source communities,” sometimes called “originating communi-
ties,” to “groups in the past when artifacts were collected, as well as to
their descendants today.” Against critics’ charge of an asymmetrical, preda-
tory, and extractive relationship signaled by the term “source community,”
Brown and Peers offer the term to recognize “that source communities
have legitimate moral and cultural stakes or forms of ownership in museum
collections, and that they may have special claims, needs, or rights of access
to material heritage held by museums. In this new relationship, muse-
ums … acknowledge a moral and ethical (and sometimes political) obliga-
tion to involve source communities in decisions affecting their material
heritage” (Brown and Peers 2003, p. 2). Note, however, that these claims
and obligations are not legally binding.
23. James Clifford notes the legal negotiations necessary for the return and
burial of the remains of Ishi in 2000 (Clifford 2013). The legal broadening
of the terms “filiation” and “source community” was also fought for by
Native American groups who in 2007 sued the University of Michigan
Museum of Anthropology for the return of unidentified human remains.
For a discussion of that process, see Lonetree 2012. However, the revision
of the Native American Graves and Repatriations Act in order to accom-
modate the return of unidentified remains, or of remains of individuals
(like Ishi) whose community of origin has no contemporary descendants,
differs from the shift I discuss in Europe, where postcolonial activists have
identified racialized communities as proper stakeholders of museum prac-
tices regardless of descent.
24. The same was the case in Vienna, where Black Austrians opposed the exhi-
bition Benin—Kings and Rituals at the Worldmuseum (2009) and sup-
ported the Nigerian state’s request for the return of looted masks and
sculptures. However, despite the presence of Nigerian refugees in Vienna
at the time, that group was not the main driver of the protests and public
discussions; conversely, the Black Austrians who engaged with the museum
did not claim direct filiation with the makers of the prized artifacts, but
rather understood themselves as being in solidarity with Nigerians. These
discussions are documented in Kazeem et al. (2009).
25. For a discussion of several of the events organized by artifakte//anti-
Humboldt, see the special issue “Afterlives” on the online journal darkmat-
ter (November 2013).
26. In June 2010, the French government had adopted “New Guidelines on
Regularization Through Work,” which promised legal status to undocu-
mented migrants with a full-time work contract for 12 out of the previous
18 months.
27. For a detailed discussion of the occupation and its outcomes, see
Labadi 2018.
28. For a detailed reading of “Colonialism in a Box” as an attempt to undo
colonial aphasia, see Sieg forthcoming.
29. See also Pieken and Kruse 2007.
30. James Clifford (1988) spelled out the value hierarchy contained in these
terms in “On Collecting Art and Culture.”
31. From 2003 to 2010, Vergès was part of a group that sought to develop
plans for a museum on La Réunion, plans that ultimately failed to come to
fruition. She tells the story of the Maison des civilizations et de l’unité
réunionnaise (House of Civilizations and of La Réunion’s Unity) in
Vergès (2014).
32. Vergès described the preparation of the tour as follows: “An inventory of
the paintings or objects exhibited in the galleries and that made reference
244 K. SIEG
to slavery was sent to people that I had invited: Shuck One, the graphic
artist; Leonora Miano, the writer; Carpanin Marimoutou, the poet and
professor of literature; Isaac Julien, the visual artist; and Maryse Condé,
the writer. Each person chose one of the inventoried objects. On the day
of the tour, the visitors were welcomed by three people: Laurella Rinçon,
a Conservateur du patrimoine; by one of my guests; and by me. I intro-
duced the visit, first explaining the role and the place of colonial slavery in
the culture and history of European society and the importance of its heri-
tage for the contemporary world, Laurella Rinçon presented the artists,
and the invited guest was given carte blanche to speak either about the
work or the place of slavery in his or her own work, or about anything that
the painting or the object brought up in his or her mind” (Vergès 2013).
33. For a detailed reading of that exhibition, see Sieg forthcoming.
34. The exhibition ran after Alexander Koch had resigned as the DHM’s direc-
tor (summer 2016) and before his successor Raphael Gross assumed the
post (2017).
35. The slogan “About us without us is against us” on the signs refers to the
negotiations between the German and Namibian governments, which nei-
ther—in the estimation of many Herero and Nama activists—sufficiently
includes the voices of affected communities, nor represents the interests of
Herero dispersed by the genocide to neighboring countries, whose gov-
ernments are not party to the negotiations. For a detailed discussion of the
controversial negotiation process, see Kößler 2015.
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CHAPTER 10
Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives

Matter
Frieda Ekotto
What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon 1967, p. 17)
Frantz Fanon is regarded by many as one of the greatest revolutionary
thinkers of the twentieth century.
—Teodors Kiros (Rabaka 2015, p. 251)
Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after Barack

Obama’s presidency and in the era of Donald Trump, after the violent
events of Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, and as we
watch the rise of white nationalism in Charlottesville, Virginia, and
Christchurch, New Zealand, to name just a few places, racial politics
remains entrenched in American life.1 In addition, as the refugee crises,
the impending withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European
Union, and the 2019 parliamentary elections in Europe have shown,
reverberations of the colonial past are palpable in contemporary upheaval,
discord, and violence. These societal ills all have their origins in colonial
F. Ekotto (*)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
e-mail: ekotto@umich.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_10
250 F. EKOTTO
history and memory, origins that have often been overlooked, if not
erased, even as they continue to affect our contemporary world.
To address this history alongside current events, this chapter reads
Black Lives Matter together with Frantz Fanon’s work on the struggle for
the dignity of Black people around the world. It demonstrates how, in
addition to the work of Négritude thinkers (Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar
Senghor, Léon Damas, and W.E.B. Du Bois), Fanon’s writing offers the
historical background necessary for understanding the Black Lives Matter
movement and, more broadly, the Black American experience during the
second decade of the twenty-first century. Fanon was among the first to
articulate enduring questions about the Black condition in the world, and
his theoretical insights establish why there will be no peace as long as the
dignity of Black men, women, and children are ignored, their lives crushed.
Fanon’s seminal articulation of how colonialism produces trauma,
chaos, and loss only grows in importance as time passes. In his work, he
confronts the disturbing ways in which racial violence is repeated due to
its entrenchment in the cultural imaginary and despite Black subjects’
efforts to speak out against domination. In this chapter, I will focus on
how his work can help us to understand better the Black Lives Matter
movement, which has undertaken the recuperative work of exposing vio-
lence against Black people by bringing attention to whiteness and the
White gaze. I give particular attention to Fanon’s insights into the vio-
lence of the Black condition and how Black people must transform this
violence into acts of resistance. I begin by discussing a formative moment
in Fanon’s text Black Skin, White Masks (1952), when he first felt con-
sciously compelled to transform the violence of the White gaze into action.
I then describe how the Black Lives Matter movement has channeled quo-
tidian violence against Black Americans into a powerful movement. I fin-
ish by reflecting upon the continuity between Black Lives Matter and
previous American movements, even as I consider how its unique qualities
appear to be shaping new modes of representation in mainstream media.
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

As a young man, Fanon embraced Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “commit-
ted literature” and, at the age of 26, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks with
a clear purpose: to identify racism, its societal underpinnings and function-
ing, its effects on Black men such as himself, and, most importantly, the
necessity of action in the face of discrimination.2 Despite Fanon’s clear
10 FRANTZ FANON IN THE ERA OF BLACK LIVES MATTER 251
purpose in writing the book, though, the complexity of his conceptual

work, as well as the nature of his prose, results in a text that is extremely
difficult to read. The text moves continually between medical terminology
and poetry, between analysis of historical texts and novels. As his biogra-
pher David Macey writes, the book “is difficult to categorize in terms of
genre” (Macey 2000, p. 161). Yet, this methodology is essential to Fanon’s
task of developing a non-colonial, non-racist notion of the human being.
It refuses to compartmentalize racism and its effects. It seeks to under-
stand racism as a “sociogenic” force that “emerges from the social world—
that is, the intersubjective world of culture, history, language, and
economics” (Gordon 2015, p. 22). This force, Fanon demonstrates,
affects Black individuals in innumerable ways: first, in the direct violence
to which they are frequently subjected, whether physical or emotional;
second, in the resulting effects of this violence on individuals’ self-regard;
and third, in their social relations.
In his work as a psychoanalytic theorist, Fanon powerfully evoked the
ongoing traumas of racism and the therapeutics of psychic and social
change. Psychoanalytic treatment, according to Fanon, can save the indi-
vidual psyche from “disintegration” under the impact of racism and its
production of “inferiority complexes,” but the traumatic neuroses of sub-
jects objectified by racism—and I would add, of subjects differently and
concurrently subjected to sexism, homophobia, and class oppression—are
not curable by psychoanalytic treatment alone (Fanon 1967, pp. 99–100).
The pathology of oppression calls for “combined action on the individual
and on the group,” and for the opening of psychoanalytic witnessing into
the field of social change: “my objective, once [the patient’s] motivations
have been brought into consciousness, is to put him in a position to choose
action … that is toward the social structures” (Fanon 1967, p. 100).
Fanon foregrounds the moment he sought to transform this violence
against Black men into action in the opening lines of “The Fact of
Blackness,” a critical chapter in Black Skin, White Masks. There, he recounts
two overwhelming and emblematic verbal attacks on his personhood,
which he endures as a Black man living in France. They are, first, the com-
mon epitaph “Dirty nigger!” and, second, “simply,” as Fanon puts it, a
young boy’s casual remark to his mother, “Look, a Negro!” (Fanon 1967,
p. 109).3 These remarks, by being both extraordinary and quotidian, bring
Fanon to reflect upon the paradox of living as a Black man in a racist,
colonial society.
252 F. EKOTTO
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my
spirit filled with desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found
that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others.
Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded
into nonbeing endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought
lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. (Fanon
1967, p. 109)
Raw and paralyzed by objectification, Fanon finds himself being restored

to the world by the attention of others—the very liberating and vital atten-
tion of witnessing—only, and almost immediately, to “[fumble] … the
movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other [fixing] me there…”
(Fanon 1967, p. 109). Thus, he begins to present a paradox, which is the
key element of his work: the fact of being both seen and not-seen. One
generally feels that, in being seen, one is given value, and thus one seeks it
out, but what Fanon realizes is that, as a Black man, he is fundamentally
not being seen; he is only present as an object. This moment is of pivotal
importance because the realization it provokes compels Fanon to take
action to transform a White imaginary that insists on the objectification of
Black men.
As a psychologist, Fanon was well aware of the internal suffering
inflicted by a continually racialized existence. However, he also believed
that being aware of this suffering was not enough. One must actively resist
its perpetuation by bringing attention both to blackness and whiteness.
Fanon underlines this in Black Skin, White Masks, where he argues black-
ness is dialectically inextricable from whiteness. He also claims with much
controversy that blackness—as most Blacks live and experience it—is actu-
ally a creation of, and a reaction to, whiteness, white history, and culture,
as well as white racial and colonial imaginaries.
#Black Lives Matter

In exposing the fact that most Black lived experiences have been and
remain constructed (or deliberately destructed) by Whites, Fanon seeks
not to devalue the Black experience but to foster an anti-racist and, ulti-
mately, revolutionary-humanist, active critical consciousness among Blacks
(as well as among other non-Whites and Whites). This active conscious-
ness is what makes Fanon’s work key to contemporary anti-racism
movements such as Black Lives Matter. His call resonates, for example,
with that of Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter
movement. In October 2014, she issued the following “her story”:
Black Lives Matter is about: how do we live in a world that dehumanizes us

and still be human? The fight is not just being able to keep breathing as a
human. The fight is actually to be able to walk down the street with your
head held high—and feel like I belong here, or I deserve to be here, or I just
have a right to have a level of dignity. (Garza 2014, n.p.)
In her articulation of a right to live in the world with dignity, Garza directly
engages Fanon’s experience with the young boy who so casually remarks
on Fanon’s blackness. For Garza, this fight for dignity is urgent. In con-
temporary America, boys can carry guns and casual racism can too fre-
quently turn fatal. It is for this reason that Black Lives Matter demands
that Americans draw their attention to the relationship between casual,
unexamined racism, the frequent deaths of Black men, and the equally
frequent acquittal of White perpetrators. Since George Zimmerman, a
white vigilante, was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin in 2012, Black
Lives Matter has insisted that Americans face the fact of brutality against
young Black men. Even more, it has asked for action to recognize holisti-
cally the reasons for, as well as the results of, systemic racialized violence.
In the United States, recurring violence is incurred, in part, because of
persistent clichés about young Black men, clichés that continue to feed the
imagination of some police officers as well as the public. This appears
starkly in the words of Darren Wilson, the police officer, who shot Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In an interview that appeared in The
New Yorker a year after the shooting, Wilson is quoted as saying:
We can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago … We have to
fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to
delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a
certain way, in a certain moment. (Quoted in Halpern 2015)
Here, Wilson suggests that racial violence has nothing to do with him.
Rather, he identifies the problem to be with “people’s life-long history.”
In doing so, he indicates that even a year after the event, when he could
have had the opportunity to reflect upon his actions, he still maintains that
America’s racialized history is not his own, and that other people—Black
254 F. EKOTTO
people—need to figure out how they feel, or rather how not to feel, the
effects of a racist police state upon their daily lives. Then, he can go about
his job.
As Wilson’s case so starkly demonstrates, this denial of the importance
of history and the refusal to examine one’s own perception continue to
inflict violence upon citizens in the United States (and around the globe).
It also brings us back to Fanon who insisted that we do feel and even
more, that we act. The “universe” into which Blacks find themselves is
anti-Black, racist, and white supremacist. It is not a world that Black indi-
viduals have created or constructed. Thus, Fanon argues that we “must be
extricated” from this inhospitable universe because Black individuals are
not and cannot truly live, in any sense of the word, free, proud, and pro-
ductive human lives in this current world.
Wilson’s suggestion that he is not implicated in conditions of blackness
is not a new one. Over the past one hundred years at least, Black writers,
thinkers, and artists have documented similar refusals to confront this
reality.4Yet, it remains invisible because its perpetuation is controlled by
dominant discourses. (Wilson’s comments make this point clearly enough.)
One of the innovations of the Black Lives Matter movement is its use of
social media to shift the focus of the gaze from Black bodies to the vio-
lence itself. This, in itself, is not new. We find the same idea, for example,
in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus.” Writing from the
perspective of a Black man, he challenges his readers “to feel, as I, the
sensation of being seen. For the White man has enjoyed for three thou-
sand years the privilege of seeing without being seen” (Sartre 1948, p. 7).
He continues: “Today, these Black men have fixed their gaze upon us and
our gaze is thrown back in our eyes” (Sartre 1948, pp. 7–8). Yet, the Black
Lives Matter movement returns the White gaze with an important differ-
ence. It uses social media as a platform to demand that Black people be
treated as human beings and unalienable citizens. This, in fact, is an
important intervention in the history of the White gaze. Today, anyone
can snap a picture that has the potential to circulate globally. As accessibil-
ity and ubiquity have made images of violence commonplace, Black Lives
Matter creates a model for how to use technology to continue the fight for
Black dignity.
Drawing from this important contemporary intervention, Black schol-
ars are increasingly vocal in their insistence that White individuals examine
both their own behaviors, as well as their adherence to abstract ideas of
nation, country, and justice. As with Fanon, they are asking for a holistic
examination of how institutions perpetuate and even enforce racial injus-

tice that affects the well-being—and indeed, the very lives—of Black
Americans. In his opinion article for the New York Times, “Sacrificing
Black Lives for the American Lie,” Ibrahim X. Kendi compellingly
responds to a Minnesota jury’s decision, which places the responsibility for
Philando Castile’s death not on the police officer who shot him, but on
Castille himself despite the video evidence to the contrary. Kendi argues:
This blaming of the Black victim stands in the way of change that might
prevent more victims of violent policing in the future. Could it be that some
Americans would rather Black people die than their perceptions of America?
Is Black death more palatable than accepting the racist reality of slavehold-
ing America, of segregating America, of mass-incarcerating America? Is
Black death the cost of maintaining the myth of a just and meritorious
America?
This is not just the America people perceive. This is the America people
seem to love. And they are going to defend their beloved America against all
those nasty charges of racism. People seem determined to exonerate the
police officer because they are determined to exonerate America.
And in exonerating the police officer and America of racism, people end
up exonerating themselves. Americans who deeply fear bodies, who think
their fears are sensible, can empathize when cops like Officer Yanez testify
that they feared for their lives.
To diagnose police officers’ lethal fears as racist, juries and prosecutors
would also have to diagnose their own fears of Black bodies as racist. That is
a tall task. It may even be easier to get a racist cop convicted of murdering a
Black person than it is to get a racist American to acknowledge his or her
own racism. Racist Americans keep justice as far away from Black death as
possible to keep the racist label as far away from themselves as possible.
But this can change. Killing the post-racial myth and confessing racism is
the first step toward antiracism. Police officers can recognize that label as the
start of their better selves instead of the end of their careers. Americans can
recognize that label as an opening to a just future. (Kendi 2017)
Kendi’s call echoes Fanon’s: to make claim to the validity of perspectives

that come from the very experience of suffering, and the importance of
fighting against forces that have created, perpetuated, and hidden the
depths of this systemic racism.
256 F. EKOTTO
Intersectional Solidarity
Black Lives Matter continues the struggle for dignity, which Fanon and
other thinkers demanded in the early twentieth century. Fanon’s work was
rooted in the complex history of blackness and anti-colonial struggle.
Black Lives Matter engages with similar conditions with the current situa-
tion of police brutality. But there is one issue in which I find the leaders of
Black Lives Matter have moved beyond Fanon’s own limitations. By
bringing their own diversity of background and experience, they have
expanded the range of people for whom it is essential to fight.5
Garza and the movement’s co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Opal
Tometi are not only feminists and members of BOLD (Black Organizing
for Leadership and Dignity), but they are also active and vocal in their
fight for LGBTQ rights. For example, Garza has openly confronted the
fact that, although their movement has been created by feminists and les-
bians (Patrisse Cullors is openly gay), patriarchy—Black as well as White—
continues to usurp their voices. Garza writes:
Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer

Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charis-
matic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a
different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently
within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy.
(Garza 2014, n.p.)
That is why, for Garza, Black rights must converge with those of other
groups, particularly gay, trans, and disabled people who are oppressed in
their own Black communities. Each of these groups has had significant
and unique experiences, and they often draw from these experiences in
their calls to action. Indeed, Black Lives Matter goes beyond divisions that
can be found within some Black communities, which call on Black people
to love Black, live Black, and buy Black and which keep straight Black men
in the front of the movement, while sisters, people who identify as queer
and trans, and disabled folk are given background role or are not acknowl-
edged at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans
folks, disabled folks, the undocumented, individuals with records, women,
and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.
The co-existence between Black and gay rights is an important part of
American history. It is one of the greatest alliances, a true legacy. I am
thinking here of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Bayard
Rustin—all central figures in the civil rights movement who were publicly
and politically gay. These leaders have helped to interrogate the impact of
exclusions that accompany acts of categorization and to engage with the
experiences of marginalized subjects in their multiple facets in order to
demonstrate the dysfunction of categories. As with these figures, the Black
Lives Matter Movement does not display Black men walking next to those
whom they victimize merely to create divisions. They do this to acknowl-
edge that racism, sexism, and homophobia together continue racist and
colonial iterations of otherness.
Conclusion
In the end, the fact of blackness remains the bedrock of historical reality for
Black people around the world, even as the communication of this trauma
entails a psychosocial compromise formation that necessitates a careful
titration of these truths. I would contend in accordance with Audre Lorde
that “it is not difference which immobilizes us but silence” (Lorde 1984,
p. 144). Given that sexism, racism, and homophobia are “real conditions
of all of our lives in this place and time,” our responsibility for the oppres-
sion of others (even as we are oppressed ourselves) requires that we “reach
down into that deep place of knowledge inside [ourselves] and touch that
terror and loathing of any difference that lives there” in order that we
“[s]ee whose face it wears” (Lorde 1984, p. 113). In the work of survival,
we must break silences and respond to others, to make what Lorde calls
poetry: the “revelatory distillation of experience” (Lorde 1984, p. 37). It
is here that we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival, heal the
devastating rifts between subjects produced and multiplied by trauma, and
address oppressive and hierarchical constructions of difference in the psy-
chosocial spaces (and there are no other) where communication and com-
munion take place (Lorde 1984, p. 37).
This work is continuing and even gathering momentum in such main-
stream forums as Netflix, which in summer 2019 released the series When
They See Us about the infamous, false convictions of five men of color—
Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and
Raymond Santana Jr.—on charges of a violent assault and rape, which
occurred in New York’s Central Park in the spring of 1989. The expressed
purpose of this series is to expose the way racial perceptions continue to
allow these kinds of gross injustices to occur. In an interview, director,
258 F. EKOTTO
co-writer, and executive producer Ava DuVernay describes why she wanted
the series to be called When They See Us rather than “Central Park Five,”
which had been the series’ working title. She explains:
“Central Park Five” felt like something that had been put upon the real men
by the press, the prosecutors, by the police. It took away their faces; it took
away their families; it took away their pulses and their beating hearts. It
dehumanized them. They are Yusef, Antron, Kevin, Raymond and Kharey,
and we need to know them and say their names. (DuVernay 2019, n.p.)
This act of revising history and making claims to names is just another way
that contemporary Black activists are forcing discussions of whiteness into
contemporary American discourse. They are insisting that Americans reas-
sess their assumptions about how Black people are seen in contemporary
American society. When They See Us recounts the complex racial circum-
stances that brought these boys to prison for the crime of being Black or
Latino. Along with other Black activists, it asks us to consider the loss of
dignity, of freedom, even of life, that, as Claudia Rankine writes in her
book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), continues to be inscribed upon
Black bodies and Black skin. Until this memory, this history, and this pres-
ent moment are seen, acknowledged, and honored, until White police
officers can no longer off-handedly remark “Look, a Black man” and pro-
ceed to arrest or shoot him, the violence inflicted upon Black bodies will
continue, and the dignity due to Blacks will be denied.
Notes
1. This essay is dedicated to Daniel Maka Njoh.
2. Littérature engagée, articulated by Sartre in “Qu’est-ce que la littérature.”
For Sartre, to write was to take action.
3. The original expressions read “Sale nègre” and “Tiens, un nègre.”
4. The Congolese philosopher Valentin Yves Mudimbe beautifully articulated
that memory as part of history in The Idea of Africa. See Mudimbe 1994.
5. We find in contemporary readings discomfort with Fanon’s apparent disre-
gard for women. This is perhaps most clearly manifested by the fact that he
never directly cites his engagement with the work of Simone de Beauvoir,
which is certainly important to the development of his ideas. As displayed in
the film Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask by Isaac Julien (1995),
Fanon was also homophobic.
References
DuVernay, Ava. 2019. Opra Winfrey Presents: When They See Us Now. Netflix
Interview.https://www.netflix.com/title/80200549.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans.Charles Lam Markmann.
Grove Press.
Garza, Alicia. 2014. A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alica
Garza. October7. https://news.northseattle.edu/sites/news.northseattle.
edu/files/blacklivesmatter_Herstory.pdf.
Gordon, Lewis. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life
and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press.
Halpern, Jake. 2015. The Cop. The New Yorker,August3. https://www.newy-
orker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop.
Julien, Isaac, dir. 1995. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask.
Kendi, Ibrahim X.2017. Sacrificing Black Lives for the American Lie. The New York
Times, June24.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/
philando-castile-police-shootings.html.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
Macey, David. 2000. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. Verso.
Mudimbe, Valentin Yves. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Rabaka, Reiland. 2015. The Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas,
Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and The Evolution of An Insurgent
Idea. Lexington Books.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Orphée noir. In Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et
malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sedar Senghor. Presses universitaires
de France.
CHAPTER 11
Afterword
Graham Huggan
Postcolonialism has been pronounced dead so many times that its body
should by now be reeking, but it always manages to find new ways of res-
urrecting itself. Some of these lives are neither as new nor as miraculous as
they seem, and postcolonialism today probably stands most to gain by
being more attentive to its own origins—to the anticolonial sentiments
that gave rise to it in the first place, and to the liberation movements to
which it gave full-blooded intellectual and, in some cases, material support.
It is therefore probably wise to be skeptical of the latest attempts to
“reframe” postcolonial studies, as the editor of this collection, David Kim,
seems to be suggesting here. That said, postcolonial theories and meth-
ods, while the core principles associated with them remain more or less
unaltered, have always moved—sometimes all too quickly—with the times.
There is thus something to be said for revisiting key terms and adapting
them to new contexts. And there is something to be said as well for recog-
nizing the limitations of previous approaches: text-based criticism, for
instance, though literature and literary criticism continue to play a useful
role in a field that is less non-discipline-specific than it sometimes claims to
G. Huggan (*)
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
e-mail: g.d.m.huggan@leeds.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6_11
262 G. HUGGAN
be, and that remains broadly cultural, even culturalist, in its methodologi-
cal orientation despite its collective commitment to material change.
Postcolonialism’s greatest limitation to date has been its obsession with
critique, which continues to have its place, but as Rita Felski argues, has
become so “powerfully normative” within the Western academy that any
attempt to question it is automatically seen as “a reactionary gesture or a
conservative conspiracy”—as if oppositionality were in itself the hallmark
of intellectual rigor, and as if the only possible critique of critique is that it
is not oppositional enough (Felski 2015, p. 8). It is true that postcolonial
critique, over time, has produced some remarkably banal readings of liter-
ary and other cultural texts that, even when pursued with sensitivity and
nuance, risk being reduced to “either heroic dissidents or slavish syco-
phants of power” (Felski 2015, p. 191). And it is also true that certain
lines and angles of pursuit have become all too predictable, and that the
postcolonial field, without necessarily straying into self-parody, has become
somewhat ossified in its thinking and axiomatic in its approach. My own
view—one apparently shared by the contributors to this volume—is that it
is vitally important to hold onto critique as a catalyst for transformation,
but not to assume that its moves are always radical, still less to claim a sepa-
ration of “critical language” from “everyday language,” thereby widening
what Felski calls, melodramatically no doubt, the “great divide between
[sophisticated] critique and [naïve] common sense” (Felski 2015, p. 138).
Perhaps the most damning criticism of postcolonialism is that it has
long since lost the “real-world” applicability it had in its first phase, when
anticolonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon doubled as academic schol-
ars and revolutionary activists, putting their bodies on the line as well as
their theories to the test. In the kinds of qualitative and interpretive
approaches that generally pass for postcolonial criticism today, the empha-
sis has tended to be on representations of the world rather than action
within it (Greenwood and Levin 2001). This emphasis has not necessarily
changed with the much-vaunted shift from “postcolonial” to “decolonial”
critical practices that, despite having emerged from different intellectual
traditions, are more entangled with one another than is frequently sup-
posed (Bhambra 2014). It is significant that some of the language I am
using here is borrowed from the domain of action research, a broadly con-
ceived field of inquiry that has been defined in terms of “a participatory
process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of
worthwhile human purposes,” and that seeks to “bring together action
and reflection, theory and practice, in the pursuit of practical solutions to
11 AFTERWORD 263
issues of pressing concern” (Reason and Bradbury 2008, p. 4). Action
research takes many different forms, by no means all of which are associ-
ated with a more popular and harder-edged term, “activism,” but it shares
activism’s broad desire for people to “work together to address key prob-
lems in their communities or organizations—some of which involve creat-
ing positive change on a [local] scale, and others of which affect the lives
of literally millions of people [across the world]” (Reason and Bradbury
2008, p. 1).
Examples of action research are few and far between in the postcolonial
field, although it has long been acknowledged that one of the primary
purposes of postcolonialism is to bridge the gap between theory and prac-
tice—to make meaningful interventions into the social world, both past
and present, that it seeks to describe. It is difficult to disagree with Robert
Young’s longstanding view that “our responsibility as [postcolonial] aca-
demics, writers and intellectuals […] is to link our work to the many issues
of injustice and inequality operating in the world today” (Young 1999,
p. 30). However, it seems a stretch to claim, as Young then does, that the
field’s “intellectual engagement will always be activist”—as if activism
were the most apposite term for “engaged academic and intellectual work”
(Young 1999, p. 34). While allowances can and should be made for differ-
ent forms and definitions of activism, few practitioners of postcolonialism
today can stake a genuine claim to the kinds of direct social and political
action that are usually associated with activist campaigns. There are nota-
ble exceptions, of course—Edward Said’s life-long support for the
Palestinian cause, or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deeply committed lit-
eracy work in West Bengal—but postcolonial scholars, by and large, have
been significantly less interventionist than they claim to be, and more
likely to support the general move toward the decolonization of knowl-
edge than to lend their active support to social and political movements of
different kinds. They have been more likely, too, to work individually than
to perform the sorts of collaborative work that bring academics and non-
academics together as “co-researchers” and open up communicative
spaces in which different forms of authority are recognized, and people
who have been spoken for by others are empowered to speak for them-
selves (Reason and Bradbury 2008).
This is the kind of “bottom-up” engagement with scholarship that Kim
encourages in this volume, sitting alongside its valuable reconceptualiza-
tion of terms, its productive engagement with cross-disciplinary methods,
and its welcome insistence on a multisited, multilingual approach to a field
264 G. HUGGAN
that has long since ceased to be the glorified branch of English literary
criticism that it once was. Whether this aim is achieved is another matter.
Perhaps the closest we come to this effort is found in Reinhart Kössler’s
fine essay on the legacies of genocide in Namibia, which urges us to rethink
solidarity and resistance—foundational postcolonial categories—in unfa-
miliar, emotionally charged contexts. Kössler’s essay is the one here that
most obviously pursues an action research agenda in which “co-
participants” get a say in the knowledge that is produced about them,
although other essays such as Katrin Sieg’s are certainly interested in
building broad coalitions of academics, artists, and activists that provide
the material and epistemological basis by which colonial representational
legacies may be transformed.
The essay that strikes the most contemporary chord is Afonso Dias
Ramos’s elegant piece on the fate of monuments (Cecil Rhodes) and por-
traits (Emmett Till) in public history, recent incidents around which he
sees as “flashpoints in the ongoing row over cultural appropriation, iden-
tity politics, political correctness and free speech.” “Row” is the right
word and, as Dias Ramos pointedly asks, this and numerous other con-
temporary examples enjoin us to think about how we might “develop
periodic outrage into sustained political action”—very much a question
for our times. The empty moralism that has often surrounded such heavily
mediated campaigns as Rhodes Must Fall and Why Is My Curriculum
White? is a case in point here; not that these campaigns are not worth
pursuing, but they illustrate the stranglehold of the media (especially new
media) over public discourse in an increasingly attention-seeking age.
They are also potentially signs of what Richard King, pulling no punches,
calls a coming together of “narcissism and allegiance” in which “smug
self-righteousness […] passes for real political engagement,” and politics
itself risks becoming a “matter not of reasoned argument but of identifica-
tion,” a public opportunity for personal self-display (King 2013,
pp. 190–191).
King goes too far in claiming that “political engagement is on the
wane,” and that it has effectively been replaced by “displays of personal
awareness” (King 2013, p. 191). Most of the most prominent social and
political movements of our times—from the Arab Spring to Extinction
Rebellion—are clear demonstrations of both. The key question remains of
what difference postcolonialism makes, and what particular strategies are
available, borrowing from Young again, to “foreground [the]
11 AFTERWORD 265
accountability [of academic work] by forging links with the lived politics
of the social world” (Young 1999, p. 29).
Some of these strategies are outlined in the essays in this volume. One
strategy seems to be to invest in new areas of inquiry, as in Pablo
Mukherjee’s Marxism-inspired essay on the energy humanities, which he
sees as part of a larger political drive foreshadowing the end of the
“Capitalocene” and, with it, a fossil-fuel-dependent world. Another strat-
egy is to insist, as Frieda Ekotto does, on alternative epistemologies from
the Global South, which remain criminally neglected in a field supposedly
dedicated to celebrating them; or to find exciting new ways—as Bruno
Jean-François, Susan Slyomovics, and Dominic Thomas do—of reflecting
on the colonial past in the wake of the by now well-established transna-
tional and memory “turns.”
All of these strategies, to a greater or lesser extent, confirm the value of
postcolonial criticism as a vehicle for “social dreaming,” Bill Ashcroft’s
resonant term for the utopian thought at the heart of anticolonial/anti-
capitalist action. Such thinking is urgently needed at a time when the capi-
talist world-system is more entrenched than ever, and colonialism’s
discrepant pasts find ever-new ways of secreting themselves into the pres-
ent, even as they continue to be wilfully neglected, strategically misrepre-
sented, or ideologically outflanked. As I argued several years ago,
“postcolonial studies will continue to be relevant as long as colonialism—
multiple colonialisms—exist in the current world order, even if the field’s
remit is, paradoxically, to play its utopian part in making colonialism and
the imperialist ideologies that drive it a thing of the past” (Huggan
2013, p. 22).
I still hold to this observation, but I am worried. One source of anxiety
is my perception that the postcolonial field, even though it is gaining new
ground, continues to be forced back on the defensive, still fending off
attacks that it is “ensnared in an increasingly repetitive preoccupation with
sign systems and the exegetics of representation,” and still accused of lack-
ing social relevance at a time when “relevance” is increasingly dictated by
the various government institutions that see fit to regulate our intellectual
lives (Parry 2004, p. 12).
I see the relentless search for “new postcolonialisms” as part of this
defensive reflex, which is driven in my own country (the UK) by an unsub-
tle coupling of research and innovation (all research must be “innovative,”
but in ways that the government wants, and all research must have
“impact,” but in ways that the government prescribes). These are minor
266 G. HUGGAN
worries perhaps, but in my view, they hide a major one: my possibly coun-
terintuitive fear that postcolonialism is vulnerable to criticism because it
really is less relevant than it claims to be, and that its commitment to the-
ory is not necessarily matched by a commitment to practice on either local
or global scales. This depends, of course, on what “practice” is taken to
mean: in collaborative fields such as action research, “practices” are gener-
ally understood in terms of individual behaviors and actions that are also
collectively constructed, leading to an emphasis on participation as the
process by which research participants are given the chance to become
researchers themselves (Kemmis 2008, p. 125). As noted above, this
model remains under-used in the kinds of research that are associated with
postcolonialism, although social scientific approaches to the social and cul-
tural practices of Indigenous peoples are sometimes postcolonial (or deco-
lonial) in their implications, even if these terms are rarely used by
Indigenous peoples themselves.
With that in mind, I want to close by taking the liberty of referring to
an essay that is not included in this volume, namely Colin Salter’s excellent
article “Intersections of the Colonial and the Postcolonial: Pragmatism,
Praxis and Transformative Grassroots Activism at Sandon Point.”
Published in the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies in 2014, this article
documents an early twenty-first-century community campaign in the
northern suburbs of Wollongong (in New South Wales) to protect the
ecologically rich area of Sandon Point from a proposed residential estate,
which was discovered to intersect with Aboriginal claims for the same area
as a major cultural meeting ground and spiritual (Dreaming) site. The two
struggles merged, and shared stories of the area’s past came to lay the
foundations for what Salter calls a “politics of experience” that would
eventually lead to “decolonising work” (Salter 2014, n.p.). The article
traces a shift from “speaking for” to “speaking with,” which is characteris-
tic of action research (Salter 2014, n.p.). Drawing on Simone Bignall’s
work, it also charts the process by which a collaborative struggle, fusing
two different kinds of social activism, may be seen as providing the basis
for “an emergent collective ethos of postcolonialism” itself (Bignall 2010).
It is tempting to see this as a model for the kind of activist work that
Young and others have long been calling for, in which academic scholar-
ship, while not directly activist itself, supports the activist struggles that are
part of its own intellectual domain.
This is hardly postcolonialism “reframed,” and in many ways it goes
back to the field’s anticolonial and liberationist origins, updating these by
11 AFTERWORD 267
insisting on (a) the authority of experience, (b) the value of collaborative

engagement, and (c) a participatory approach. At their best, the essays in
this volume support this approach, enriching a field that can certainly be
relevant if it wants to be, and that continues to generate new knowledge
through experience and action, which are very much part of intellec-
tual life.
References
Bhambra, Gurminder. 2014. Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues. Postcolonial
Studies 17 (2): 115–121.
Bignall, Simone. 2010. Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenwood, Davydd J., and Morten Levin. 2001. Pragmatic Action Research and
the Struggle to Transform Universities into Learning Communities. In The
SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, ed.
Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, 1st ed., 103–113. London: SAGE
Publications.
Huggan, Graham, ed. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kemmis, Stephen. 2008. Critical Theory and Participatory Action Research. In
The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, ed.
Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, 1st ed., 121–138. London: SAGE
Publications.
King, Richard. 2013. On Offence: The Politics of Indignation. Melbourne: Scribe.
Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London:
Routledge.
Reason, Peter, and Hilary Bradbury, eds. 2008. The SAGE Handbook of Action
Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. 2nd ed. London: SAGE
Publications.
Salter, Colin. 2014. Intersections of the Colonial and the Postcolonial: Pragmatism,
Praxis and Transformative Grassroots Activism at Sandon Point. Journal of
Settler Colonial Studies 4 (4): 382–395. https://www.tandonline.com/doi/
abs/10.1080/2210473x.2014.911654/. Accessed 2 March 2020.
Young, Robert J.C. 1999. Academic Activism and Knowledge Formation in
Postcolonial Critique. Postcolonial Studies 2 (1): 29–34.
Index1
A Ahmad, Aijaz, 50, 136

Aapravasi Ghat, 118 Alabama, 162, 166
Abani, Chris, 52 Alexander, Meena, 45, 46
Abdelkader, Emir, 72, 73, 79, 84 Algeria, 16, 22, 23, 25, 26, 69–72,
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 174 75–86, 88n2, 89n7
Aboriginal Dreaming, 53 Alighieri, Dante, 119, 120, 127
Abramovic, Marina, 164 Divine Comedy, 119, 120, 127
Achebe, Chinua, 33n13, 53 Alleck, Nirveda, 27, 118–122,
Action 124, 127
activism, 3, 5, 9, 15–17, 21, 24, 26, The Migrant’s Tale, 118, 119, 121
28, 30, 47, 160, 167, 180, Alternative for Germany (AfD),
206, 224, 237, 263, 266 222, 236
research, 30, 262–264, 266 Amnesia, 29, 179, 194–198
Adeniran, Sade, 48 Anderson, Clare, 116, 117
Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi, 48 Anyidoho, Kofi, 46, 59
Adorno, Theodor W., 192, 204 Apartheid, 55, 107, 157, 179, 206
Africa anti-apartheid, 178, 204
German Southwest Africa, Appadurai, Arjun, 20, 71
192–194, 241n6 Appanah, Nathacha, 27, 114, 115,
history, 6, 14, 57 121, 124, 126, 127
literature, 48, 49 Tropique de la violence, 114, 126
Afrikamuseum, see Royal Museum of Arendt, Hannah, 4, 5, 9, 32n9,
Central Africa 33n12, 177
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52726-6
270 INDEX
Armah, Ayi Kwai, 48, 49, 51, 58 Bülow Bloc, 194

Artefakte//anti-Humboldt, Butler, Judith, 126, 127
221, 222
Ashcroft, Bill, 24, 25, 30n1, 31n3,
32n10, 45, 53, 59, 128, 265 C
Assmann, Aleida, 195, 203 Calcutta, 146, 147, 152
Azhari, Che Husna, 50 Cape Town, South Africa, 157, 166,
Aztlan, 59, 60 182n20, 221
Azuah, Unomah, 48 Capitalism, 63, 64, 135, 137–139,
141, 144
Caribbean, 3, 16, 27, 31n5, 47, 52,
B 54, 59–61, 116, 117, 122, 144
Bachir Diagne, Souleymane, 97 archipelago, 61, 116
Baldwin, James, 174, 257 Carmichael, Stokely, 172
Banaji, Jairus, 144 Central African Federation, 182n18
Bandung, 4, 19, 45, 136 Césaire, Aimé, 97, 107, 250
Bauman, Zygmunt, 44 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 27, 97,
Benhabib, Seyla, 126, 130 122–125, 130
Bennet, Tony, 215 Frère migrants, 122
Berlin-postkolonial, 237 Charlottesville, 166, 249
Biard, François Auguste, 232 Chatterjee, Partha, 31n3, 47, 48
Abolition of Slavery, 27 April China, 19, 34n20, 151
1848, 232 Chirac, Jacques, 93
Black, Hannah, 163, 164 Chiurai, Kudzanai, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 24
Black Lives Matter, 17, 29, 30, 162, Choay, Françoise, 70
166, 249–258 Christchurch, 249
Black Organizing for Leadership and Clifford, James, 226, 243n23, 243n30
Dignity (BOLD), 256 Climate change, 19, 103, 137
Bloch, Ernst, 2, 21, 24, 25, 30n1, 45, Coetzee, J.M., 44
46, 51, 52, 54 Colonialism
Botswana (British Bechuanaland), colonialist ethic, 47
193, 197 colonization, 45, 57, 77, 84, 94, 98,
Boyer, Dominic, 138, 144 101, 103, 216, 230, 239
Brathwaite, Kamau, 54, 61, 120 colony, colonies, 9, 25, 26, 47,
Braudel, Fernand, 138 62–64, 70, 71, 79, 85, 93, 95,
Brecht, Bertold, 6, 198 104, 107, 116, 120, 136, 142,
Bremen Overseas Museum, 220 144, 168, 172, 182n17, 191,
Brennan, Timothy, 136 194, 216, 224, 229, 232, 241n6
Bright, Parker, 163, 182n14 settler colonialism, 14
Britain, 12, 63, 140, 142, 143 Comoros Islands, 114, 126
British Airways, 129 Mayotte, 114
Brown, Michael, 253 Constantine, 26, 71, 72, 74–81, 83,
Bugeaud, Thomas Robert, 73, 84 86, 87, 88n5, 89n8
INDEX 271
Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 96 Energy, 16, 27, 28, 53, 54, 135–153,

Cotton, 89n8, 140, 141, 143, 147 153n1, 160, 265
Creole, 27, 103, 114–118, power, 140, 141
121–123, 130 Enlightenment, 6, 9, 32n11,
Mauritian Kreol, 121 33n12, 231
Crichlow, Michaeline, 122, 123 Equality, 8, 32n11, 103, 150, 152,
Crow, Jim, 173, 175 180, 221, 225
Cullors, Patrisse, 256 Ethics, 22, 47, 113, 123, 125, 127,
130, 161, 165, 175, 178, 206,
217, 233, 240
D Europe
Damas, Léon, 250 the European Parliament, 114
Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 33n13 European Union, 114, 249
Danticat, Edwige, 105 the Euro zone, 114
Davis, Angela, 174, 257 Eygongakpa, Em’kal, 120
de Labourdonnais, Mahé, 118 Gaia beats/bits III-i/doves and an
Debré Bill, 96 aged hammock, 120
Decolonization, 2, 8, 12, 20, 25, 47, Eze, Chielozona, 129, 130
75, 78, 101, 103, 117, 160, 169,
176, 179, 221, 223, 263
Democracy, 4, 8, 19, 21, 32n11, F
35n20, 99, 103, 170, 177, 239 Fanon, Frantz, 17, 29, 30, 35n22, 70,
Democratic Republic of Congo 78, 97, 179, 249–258, 262
(DRC), 97, 170, 219 Faulkner, William, 174
Devi, Ananda, 27, 121, 122, Felski, Rita, 262
124, 127–130 Ferguson, Rebecca, 161, 249, 253
Ceux du large, 121, 127 Fisher, Mark, 137
Diaspora, 48, 197 Fossil fuel, 137, 138, 140, 141
Dorlin, Elsa, 97 Foucault, Michel, 60
Dresden Ethnology Museum, 222 Françafrique colonialism, 103
Du Bois, W.E.B., 250 France
Duncan, Carol, 231 Franco-Prussian War, 84, 128
Dylan, Bob, 174 French East India Company, 118
Overseas Department of
France, 114
E Freedom, 8, 43, 44, 49, 57, 77, 118,
Eboussi Boulaga, Fabien, 97 163, 170, 232, 258
Ee Tiang Hong, 50 Free speech, 158, 163–165, 178, 264
Egypt, 19, 22 Froude, James Anthony, 63
Empathy, 27, 116, 118, 123, Fukuyama, Francis, 164, 182n15
125–130, 201, 240n1 Fumanti, Mattia, 205
transoceanic empathy, 27, 113–130 Fusco, Coco, 163, 180n2, 216
Empire Writes Back (1989), 32n10, 43 The Couple in the Cage, 216
272 INDEX
G Hau’ofa, Epeli, 62
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51,
4, 34n20 57, 64n3
Ganges, 149–152 Heimat, 25, 45, 46, 57, 61, 64
Garvey, Marcus, 171 Herero skulls, 223
Garza, Alicia, 253, 256 History
Geertz, Clifford, 204 entangled history, 203, 224,
Genocide, 16, 29, 191–208, 216, 229, 229, 239
230, 237, 242n20, 244n35, 264 history of the present, 31n7,
Namibia, 29, 195–197, 201, 203, 136, 138
206, 230, 237, 264 Hobson, J.A., 47
Géricault, Théodore, 232 Hochstrasser, Julie, 232, 233, 235
Raft of the Medusa, 232, 233 Hollande, François, 93
Germany Holocaust, 2, 4, 194, 209n7
German Center Party, 194 Homo economicus, 137
German East Africa, 193 Hondo, Med, 13
German Left Party, 196, 201 House of European History, The,
German Parliament 216, 240
(Bundestag), 196 Human Immunodeficiency Virus
German Southwest Africa, (HIV), 205
192–194, 241n6 Humanism, 3, 114, 115, 124, 129
Gandhi, Mahatma Humboldt Forum, 217, 218, 220,
Ghosh, Amitav, 144 221, 224, 240, 241n5
Gilmore, Mary, 64
Gilroy, James, 3, 20, 48, 96, 177
Glissant, Édouard, 52, 61, 97, I
120, 123–125 Independence, 4, 9, 10, 12, 13, 25,
Gomez-Pena, Guillermo, 216 46, 47, 63, 70, 72, 74, 77–80,
The Couple in the Cage, 216 82, 83, 85, 88n4, 89n7, 104,
Gopal, Priyamvada, 135, 136, 138 105, 160, 170, 192, 195, 219
Gordon, Lewis, 251 India, 19, 28, 34n20, 45, 118,
Grievability, 127, 129, 130 142–146, 151, 165
Griffiths, Gareth, 32n10 Indian Ocean, 45, 114, 116, 130
Guadeloupe, 114 Indigo, 144, 146–148, 151
Guha, Ranajit, 31n3, 145–147 Indochina, 199
Industrialization, 140, 143
the industrial revolution, 140
H International Colonial
Haiti, 117 Exhibition, 101
Haji Salleh, Mohammed, 50 International Organization of
Hamburg Ethnology Museum, 220 Francophonie (IOF), 98–100
Harris, Wilson, 54, 61, 220 Iraq, 135–137
INDEX 273
J Liberation, 8, 20, 44, 46, 70, 105,

Jameson, Frederic, 27, 50, 138 136, 199, 200, 252, 261
Jansen, Jan, 69 Ligon, Glenn, 164
Julien, Isaac, 233, 244n32, 258n5 Lil Wayne, 174
Limbo dance, 54
Lionnet, Françoise, 31n5, 113, 114,
K 116–118, 125–127, 130,
Keen, Suzanne, 125 131n1, 131n3
Kendi, Ibrahim X., 255 Literature, 3, 17, 18, 25, 27, 33n13,
King Leopold of Belgium, 167 43, 45–46, 48–51, 53, 55, 57,
Kipling, Rudyard, 28, 59–62, 64, 95, 97, 102, 104,
144–146, 149–152 106, 113, 116, 117, 119,
Kisukidi, Nadia Yala, 97, 104 144–146, 174, 177, 237,
Kolonialismus im Kasten (Colonialism 244n32, 261
in a Box), 228 literary canon, 127, 159
Korea, 19 Longue durée, 116, 138
Koselleck, Reinhart, 203 Lorde, Audre, 174, 257
Kössler, Reinhart, 29, 194–198, 202, Lumumba, Pastiche, 163
206, 208, 264 Luna, James, 216
Kraus, Franz, 55 Artifact Piece, 216
Kummel, Friederich, 54
Kurdi, Alan, 126
Kwassa kwassa, 114, 115, 119, 121 M
Mabanckou, Alain, 94, 95,
97, 103–107
L MacDuffie, Allen, 137
La Réunion, 114, 117, 232, 243n31 Macey, David, 251
Labadi, Sophia, 225, 227 Macron, Emmanuel, 26, 93–97,
Lamoricière, Louis Juchault de, 79, 80 99–106, 217
Landscape, 3, 49, 63, 83, 85, 130, Maji Maji War, 193, 194, 196
159, 179, 200 Malawi, 182n18
Lane, William, 63, 64 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 117, 118
Lattanzi, Vito, 220, 241n10 Malm, Andreas, 139–141, 143,
Layiwola, Peju, 222–224 146, 153n1
Lazarus, Neil, 8, 20, 135, 136, Malraux, André, 100, 176
138, 145 Malthus, Robert, 137
Legacy, 2, 5, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, Mandela, Nelson, 170, 171
30, 32n7, 35n20, 75, 95, 96, Manela, Erez, 34n20, 35n20
100, 121, 169, 175, 194, Maniam, K.S., 50
256, 264 Mannoni, Dominique-Octave, 8
Lenin, Vladimiv Ilylic Ulyanov, Martinique, 117
178, 181n4 Marx, Karl, 52, 57, 198, 203, 204
274 INDEX
Mascarene islands, 16, 27, 117 Musée du Quay Branly (MQB),

Mauritian Kreol, 117, 118, 217, 241n5
121, 131n3 Museum, 3, 157, 202, 215–244
Mauritius, see Mauritian Kreol
Maxwele, Chumani, 158
Mbembé, Achille, 13, 97, 98, 102, N
106, 107, 128, 182n19 Naipaul, V.S., 8, 105
McClintock, Anne, 11–13, 15, 31n7 Nama, 193, 195–197, 206,
Medina, 79, 80, 83 241n6, 244n35
Mediterranean Sea, 130 Kaptein, 196
Memmi, Albert, 97 Namibia, 230
Memory Namibian National Assembly, 202
memorialization, 69, 84, 85 Namibian War, 192–195, 203
politics, 29, 191–208, 232 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 115, 118
Mexico, 59 Nandy, Ashish, 57, 58
Mfcane, Sakhumzi, 205 Nation, 6, 10, 12, 16, 20, 25, 26,
Miano, Léonora, 97, 244n32 32n11, 45, 47–51, 57, 59–61,
Middle Passage, 54, 130 64, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 158,
Mignolo, Walter, 31n5, 117, 124 171, 181n4, 254
Miller, Alex, 53 nation-state, 26, 34n18, 47, 48, 51,
Mission civilisatrice, 98, 225 60, 71, 130, 198
Mitra, Dinabandhu, 28, 145–149, National Association for the
151, 152 Advancement of Colored People
Mitterand, François, 93 (NAACP), 173, 183n25
Monument, 14, 15, 17, 25, 26, 28, Nationalism, 2, 16, 17, 34n20, 47, 49,
69–71, 75, 77, 78, 83, 85, 86, 51, 64, 159, 199, 249
158–161, 166, 168, 169, 173, Nationality, 47
179, 180, 181n4, 200, 264 National Museum of African
Moody, Anne, 174 American History and Culture,
Moore, Jason W., 139, 140 162, 175
More, Thomas, 25, 47 Native Ordinances in Namibia
Moten, Fred, 175 (1907), 193
Moudileno, Lydie, 103, 104 Nazism, 194
Moylan, Tom, 44 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, 97
Mozambique, Channel, 114, Negritude, 3, 29, 49, 250
126, 127 Neocolonialism, 10, 103
Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, 34n18, Neto, Agostinho, 49, 50
97, 258n4 Newsome, Bree, 166
Mugabe, Robert, 10, 12, 170 New York, 28, 157, 159, 174, 207,
Mujahidin, 73, 74, 81, 82 249, 257
Musée de l’Histoire de New Zealand, 216, 240n1,
l’Immigration, 224–225 241n6, 249
INDEX 275
Nganang, Patrice, 105 Paris, 79, 81, 88n4, 101, 103,

Nigeria, 75, 222, 242n18 216–218, 224, 232
No-Humboldt21, 218, 221, 223, Parry, Benita, 20, 31n2, 31n3,
224, 236 136, 265
North, 71, 116, 122, 130 Parzinger, Hermann, 220, 221
“Not About Us Without Us,” 197 Peripheral cinema, 113
Nussbaum, Martha, 125 Pernot, Mathieu, 225
Phui Nam, Wong, 50
Place de la Brèche, 75, 78–80, 83, 88
O Plato, 51
Obama, Barack, 162, 181n7, 249 Politics
Obenga, Théophile, 107 identity politics, 158, 164, 165,
Obiechina, Emmanuel, 49 178, 264
Oceania, 61, 62, 231 memory politics, 29, 191–208, 232
Ohamakari, 192, 195 political correctness, 158, 168, 264
Okri, Ben, 46, 48, 49, 51, 58 Porlwi, 118
Omaheke steppe, 193 Postcolonial
Open Casket (2017), 28, 159 literature, 25, 31n1, 43–64, 145
Opium, 151, 152 memory, 51, 57
Organization of the United theory, 3, 25, 46, 96, 145, 175,
Nations (UNO) 180, 261
UN Declaration on the utopianism, 25, 44, 47, 51, 64
Rights of Indigenous Postcolony, 9, 10, 13, 128
People, 217 Pouillon, François, 73, 85
UNESCO (World Cultural and Pratt, Mary Louise, 31n3, 226
Natural Heritage site Primrose, Archibald, see Lord Roseberry
recognized by the United Procter, Alice, 228, 233–236, 240
Nations Educational, Scientific Protest art, 157
and Cultural Puerto Rico, 122
Organization), 118
UNESCO Convention on the
Protection and Promotion of Q
the Diversity of Cultural Queen Victoria, 146, 234
Expressions, 97
Orisha, Ifé, 98
Oulebsir, Nabila, 77, 78 R
Ovaherero, 193, 195–197 Railway, 143, 150–152
Randeria, Shalini, 203
Rankine, Claudia, 258
P Rassool, Ciraj, 202
Pacific region, 47, 61 Reagan, Ronald
Palestine, 22, 23, 55, 57, 64n2 Reagonomics, 136
276 INDEX
Reclus, Onésime, 99 Schutz, Dana, 28, 159, 163–165, 178,

Recognition, 13, 14, 19, 29, 96, 127, 181n3, 182n14, 182n15
129, 130, 192, 195, 196, 198, Schutztruppe, 192, 193
201, 203, 207 Seeley, John Robert, 47
Reconciliation, 3, 11, 19, 192, 195, Segregation, 79, 160, 171, 178, 180
201, 206 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 97, 250
Reparation, 3, 10, 17, 19, 21, 29, Sherman, Cindy, 164
159, 180, 192, 195, 196, 198, Shih, Shu-mei, 3, 31n5, 125, 130
200, 201, 203, 207, 222, Shomali, Amer, 56
237, 243n32 Sidney, Samuel, 63
Repatriation, 3, 19, 25, 70, 80, 81, Simone, Nina, 161
159, 196–198, 202, 217, 223 Slimani, Leïla, 100
Responsibility, 14, 15, 81, 103, 201, Smith, Zadie, 105, 163, 164
202, 209n7, 226, 255, 257, 263 Solidarity
Rhodes, Cecil, 28, 157–180, 264 group solidarity, 199
Rhodesia, 12, 166, 169–172, international solidarity, 199
182n18 outreach solidarity, 29, 199,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 128, 129 201, 206
Riruako, Kuaima, 196 Third World solidarity, 199
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 105, 106 working-class solidarity, 199
Royal Museum of Central Africa South
(RMCA), 218, 219 Global South, 19, 100, 101, 106,
Rukoro, Vekuii, 197, 201 113, 114, 116–118, 122, 123,
Rushdie, Salman, 46, 105 125, 191, 199, 221, 223, 236,
Rustin, Bayard, 257 239, 265
Oceanic South, 117
South Africa, 97, 157, 158, 160, 166,
S 168–172, 178, 183n20, 183n23,
Sabac el-Cher, Gustav, 229 197, 204, 205, 221, 241n6
Said, Edward, 17, 18, 21, 31n3, 31n5, South America, 47, 64
34n19, 71, 96, 181n5, 228, 232, Spittler, Gerd, 204, 205
235, 263 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 31n3,
Salter, Colin, 266 33n12, 96, 263
Sansour, Larissa, 57, 58 Stoler, Ann Laura, 3, 4, 26,
Sargent, Lyman Tower, 46, 63 31–32n7, 70, 229
Sarkar, Sumit, 31n3, 142–144, 147 Szeman, Imre, 138, 139, 144
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 93, 94
Sarr, Felwine, 97, 241n7
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 97, 250, 254 T
Schmidt, Dierk, 222, 223, 242n20 Tadjo, Véronique, 106
Schreiner, Olive, 172, 183n22 Tansi, Sony Labou, 98
INDEX 277
Tanzania, 193 Utopia, 14, 24, 25, 31n1,

Terror 43–64, 115
terrorism, 19, 28, 103, 160, Utopia (1516), 25, 47
165, 183n28 Utopianism, 16, 25, 43, 44, 46, 48,
Thick engagement, 205 49, 51–53, 59, 60
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 48, 95 utopian thinking, 43, 45, 47,
Tiang Hong, Ee, 50 59, 60
Tiffin, Helen, 32n10, 128 See also Postcolonial, utopianism
Till, Emmett, 28, 157–180, 264 Utopian Studies Society, 43
Tometi, Opal, 256
Tongva, 33n15
Troopen Museum, 217 V
Trump, Donald J., 9, 249 van Wolputte, Steven, 205
Trump administration, 161 Védrine, Hubert, 99
Twain, Mark, 167 Vergès, Françoise, 97, 103,
104, 106, 107, 124, 228,
231–233, 235, 243n31,
U 243–244n32
Überseemuseum Bremem, see Bremen Versailles Treaty, 194
Overseas Museum Vienna World Museum, 217
Ukraine, 181n4 Villiers, Allan, 117
United Kingdom (UK), 12, 63, Vince, Natalya, 72, 76, 81,
140, 142, 143, 165, 181n7, 82, 88n1
249, 265 Virginia, 166, 249
United States of America (USA), 9, von Trotha, Lothar, 193,
11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 34n17, 194, 201
34–35n20, 60, 88n2, 88n3,
97, 99, 136, 160, 162–166,
168, 170, 174, 177, 181n3, W
181n7, 182n16, 183n20, Waberi, Abdourahman, 97,
183n28, 184n32, 195, 102, 104
216, 253–255 Walcott, Derek, 61, 105
University Walker, Kara, 164
Oxford University, 158, 168 Weber, Max, 204, 209n5
University of California, Weller, Archie, 53
Berkeley, 6, 158 Wendt, Albert, 62
University of Cape Town, 28, 158, West, 50, 128, 221
172, 184n33 Western nations, 123
University of Edinburgh, 158 West, Kanye, 161
UNO, see Organization of the White supremacy, 28, 157, 161,
United Nations 165–167, 172–174
278 INDEX
Whitewashing, 8, 15, 166 Y

Whitney Biennial of Art, 28, 158, 161, Yaeger, Patricia, 139
163, 165 Young, Robert J. C., 4, 31n3,
Wieczorek-Zeul, Heidmarie, 195 31n7, 263–266
Wilaya, 77
Wilson, Fred, 216
Mining the Museum, 216 Z
Witbooi, Hendrik, 206 Zambia, 170, 182n18
Witz, Leslie, 203 Zighoud, Youcef, 25, 72–88
World War I, 69, 70, 78, 83 Zimbabwe, 9, 10, 12, 13, 33n14, 167,
World War II, 70, 182n11, 236 170, 172, 182n18
Wright, Alexis, 53 Zipes, Jack, 45, 61, 64n1

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Reframing

“This timely volume confronts the legacies of post-colonial thinking as a set of

“The attention of postcolonial studies has moved to decolonizing the colonial

ISBN 978-3-030-52725-9 ISBN 978-3-030-52726-6 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Getty / Stephanie Nnamani

Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the product of an intensely collaborative

May 2020 David D. Kim

1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial

Part I Conceptual Vigilance 41

2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43

3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia

4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing

Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111

5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor

6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135

7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial

Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189

8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German

9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215

10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249

Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, a founding exponent of

on two major projects, one of which explores the notion of beastly

such as New Global Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Object,

University Press, which focuses on translations of African literature into

…the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something

Which understanding of our postcolonial patrimony is calling us to

© The Author(s) 2021 1

in the field between Marxist “revolutionary” thinkers and poststructuralist

enhanced by professional organizations, libraries, and other university-led

Postcolonial Patriarchy, Inclusive Patrimony

In the summer of 2019, my home institution—the University of California,

believers in a voodoo-like ritual; a black man with a gun in hand chased

As the title of this video installation indicated, silence was determined

Enlightenment by asserting that their fault lies in being unmündig—hav-

variable in ongoing postcolonial action. To put it differently, We Live in

Here, McClintock condensed into one single paragraph a great deal of

partly grounded in the preservation of gender inequality (McClintock

historical guilt, social inequality, and political responsibility, especially with

senses and reconceptualize non-Western works of art as things that were

Regenerating the Future of Postcolonial Studies

action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimenta-

demands for reparation, scholarly investigations, and private friendships

“continuity” in resemblance of “biological procreation” (Said 1983,

A new generation of critics and activists is increasingly interested in issues

This new generation, the co-editors suggest, can be differentiated from

only vaguely in our shared postcolonial ethic. My own essay in The

targets of her critique include “‘archive,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and

The second section of this book is dedicated to methodological chal-

understand how empire and energy are intricately interconnected. Based

In Chapter Eight, Reinhart Kössler reflects on German postcolonial

the contemporary African American activism. In focusing on Fanon’s call

that the historical legacy of colonialism remains traceable today (Stoler

“‘internationaliz[ing]’ the history of the United States” not by document-

Ashcroft, Bill. 2017. Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. New York: Routledge.

Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York:

Manela, Erez. 2007. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the

Scott, David. 2005. The Social Construction of Postcolonial Studies. In Postcolonial

Willey, Ann Elizabeth, and Jeannette Treiber. 2002. Introduction. In Negotiating

Unlocking the Future: Utopia

© The Author(s) 2021 43

The emancipatory drive of postcolonial discourse, the drive to re-empower

colonization, but the most successful resistance has been transformative

For Alexander, home is always on the horizon, always up ahead. At the

1 Introduction: Action! On Reframing Postcolonial

Part I Conceptual Vigilance 41

2 Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures 43

3 On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed Benyahia

4 Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and Defrancophonizing

Part II Hybrid Methodologies 111

5 Kinships of the Sea: Comparative History, Minor

6 Re-charge: Postcolonial Studies and Energy Humanities135

7 From Cecil Rhodes to Emmett Till: Postcolonial

Part III Action-Based Scholarships 189

8 Research in Solidarity? Investigating Namibian-German

9 Postcolonial Activists and European Museums215

10 Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter249

Thus the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs completely to the Not-Yet-