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FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES
France’s Colonial LegaciesSeries Editors
Hanna Diamond (University of Bath)
Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University)
Editorial Board
Ronan le Coadic (Université Rennes 2)
Nicola Cooper (Swansea University)
Maxim Silverman (University of Leeds)
Didier Francfort (Université Nancy 2)
Sharif Gemie (University of Glamorgan)
H. R. Kedward (Sussex University)
Margaret Majumdar (University of Portsmouth)
Nicholas Parsons (Cardiff University)
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France’s Colonial
Legacies
Memory, Identity and Narrative
Edited by
FIONA BARCLAY
CARDIFF
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
2013© The Contributors, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material
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patents act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission
to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the
University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff,
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www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 13 978-0-7083-2667-1
ISBN e-book 978-0-7083-2668-8
The rights of the Contributors to be identifed as authors of this work has
been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset by Mark Heslington Ltd, Scarborough, North Yorkshire
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, WiltshireContents
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Foreword ix
Acknowledgements xiii
List of fgures xv
Notes on contributors xvii
Introduction: The Postcolonial Nation 1
Fiona Barclay
Part One: Narrative Gaps
Chapter One: Amnesia about Anglophone Africa: France’s
Rhodesian Mindset, its Manifestation and
Legacies 27
Joanna Warson
Chapter Two: From ‘Écrivains coloniaux’ to Écrivains
de ‘langue française’: Strata of
Un/acknowledged Memories 48
Gabrielle Parker
Part Two: The Algerian War, Fifty Years On
Chapter Three: Conficting Memories: Modernisation,
Colonialism and the Algerian War Appelés
in Cinq colonnes à la une 71
Iain Mossman
Chapter Four: Derrida’s Virtual Space of Spectrality:
Cinematic Haunting and the Law in
Herbiet’s Mon Colonel 90
Fiona Barclayvi France’s Colonial Legacies
Chapter Five: ‘Le devoir de mémoire’: the Poetics and
Politics of Cultural Memory in Assia Djebar’s
Le Blanc de l’Algérie 111
Jenny Mullen
Chapter Six: (Un)packing the Suitcases: Postcolonial
Memory and Iconography 129
William Kidd
Part Three: The Transnational Family
Chapter Seven: Interrogating the Transnational Family:
Memory, Identity and Cultural Bilingualism
in Traoré’s Sous la clarté de la lune 150
Zélie Asava
Chapter Eight: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Family:
Looking Beyond the Post-Colonial in
Claudel’s Il y a longtemps que je t’aime 169
Fiona Handyside
Part Four: Contemporary Commemorations
Chapter Nine: Anti-racism, Republicanism and the Sarkozy
Years: SOS Racisme and the Mouvement des
Indigènes de la République 188
Thomas Martin
Chapter Ten: Playing out the Postcolonial: Football and
Commemoration 207
Cathal Kilcline
Chapter Eleven: Crime and Penitence in Slavery
Commemoration: From Political Controversy
to the Politics of Performance 227
Nicola Frith
Index 249Series Editors’ Preface
This series showcases the work of new and established scholars
working within the felds of French and francophone studies. It
publishes introductory texts aimed at a student readership, as well
as research- orientated monographs at the cutting edge of their
discipline area. The series aims to highlight shifting patterns of
research in French and francophone studies, to re- evaluate
traditional representations of French and francophone identities and
to encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives across a wide
range of discipline areas. The emphasis throughout the series will
be on the ways in which French and francophone communities
across the world are evolving into the twenty- frst century.
Hanna Diamond and Claire GorraraForeword
The Monument as a Space of
Frictions
FRANÇOISE VERGÈS
The notion of a ‘crime against humanity’ in international law after
World War II led to a revision of the reading of genocides,
massacres, mass deportations and dictatorships. The massive destruction
of European Jews and other groups committed by Nazism opened
the way to rethinking colonial slavery, colonial crimes and politics
of segregation within the frame of that notion. There was an
increased need for memorials which honoured the victims and
their suffering, recognised that a crime had been committed and
invited heightened civic awareness and action. The memorial
acquired a new meaning in the public space. It was conceived of as
carrying a double message – ‘Remember’ and ‘Act’.
France has not escaped this movement, but colonial memories
remain a diffcult issue and the place and role of colonisation in
the making of modern France is still marginalised. Accusations of
‘communautarisme’ and of ‘dividing the Republic’ have been thrown
to hinder the revisionist movement that has been launched. The
war of Algerian independence is a case in point, regularly raising
controversies, its fragmented memories producing a continuing
‘war of memories’. Yet, the Algerian war should not mask the other
demands for the recognition of colonial crimes: Madagascar 1947,
Indochina, Cameroon, or the riots of the 1960s in the overseas
departments and, of course, colonial slavery. Although, in the case
of slavery, its condemnation is now largely accepted, questions that
go along with the creation of memorials seem to constitute an
obstacle for a full acknowledgement of its place and role in the
making of modern France. Questions such as, ‘What allowed the x France’s Colonial Legacies
crime to occur? How was consent fabricated? What is our
responsibility long after the crime has occurred?’ still provoke dilatory
answers (‘intra Africa slavery was very bad’, ‘the Muslim slave
trade had more victims’) or an empty rhetoric about the ‘duty to
remember’. Both seek to save ‘France’ from the responsibility
and long complicity in predatory economy, destruction of
indigenous peoples, deportation of Africans during colonial slavery,
conquest of sovereign territories, post-slavery colonial economy
and politics, wars against anti-colonial movements, postcolonial
racism . . .
Yet, since 1998, and particularly following the adoption of the
Taubira law in 2001 that recognised slave trade and slavery as
‘crimes against humanity’, progress has been made in the felds of
education, research and culture, thanks in great part to the work of
associations. The Committee for the Memory of Slavery installed in
2004 in application of the Taubira law lobbied for the installation
of a monument. In 2007, ‘Le Cri, l’Écrit’, by the contemporary
artist Fabrice Hyber, was inaugurated in the Jardin du Luxembourg,
Paris. An image of the sculpture appears on the cover of this
volume. It was a creative interpretation of breaking the chains
which, since Antiquity, has been the metaphor of escaping
servitude and has become with the European abolitionist movement’s
1iconography the hegemonic metaphor of freedom. In the past
decade other monuments and steles have been built in the
Hexagon and the overseas departments, the number of research
theses has increased, galleries in museums and exhibitions
dedicated to slavery have opened and associations of memory have
been very active in the Hexagon and the overseas territories.
Governments since 2001 – Chirac and Sarkozy (it is too soon to
evaluate what François Hollande will do) – have not sought to
directly oppose activities around the memories of slavery, although
under the presidency of Sarkozy, the use of the notion of
‘repentance’ created a context in which a new reading of colonial history
was obstructed. Everyone agreed that ‘slavery was bad’ but the ways
in which colonial slavery had been the matrix of future colonial
politics and practices, the ways in which colonial slavery had shaped
French arts, thought and national identity, and how it had been the
source of anti-black racism were pushed aside. The shadow cast by
slavery upon our times was often ignored. The entrenched
confusion between ‘reparation’ and fnancial compensation has Foreword xi
foreclosed any debate on a politics of reparation that would address
the legacies of colonial slavery.
The necessary move from commemoration to concrete actions
so that the memorial does not become a space of empty rituals
erasing once again the trace of the crime, is yet to be made. This
threatens ‘Le Cri, l’Écrit’. Indeed, a