Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts And

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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School

DECOLONIZING REFUSE: ECOLOGIES OF WASTE IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS

AND LITERATURES

A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Aurélie Matheron

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2020 ii

The dissertation of Aurélie Matheron was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Jonathan P. Eburne Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Charlotte Eubanks Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies Head of the Department of Comparative Literature

Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François Marian Trygve Freed Early Career Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature

Jennifer Boittin Associate Professor of French, Francophone Studies, and History

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ABSTRACT

Decolonizing Refuse: Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts and Literatures explores how literary, visual, and plastic artworks use waste to address issues of ecology, environmental justice, and human rights violations in environments ravaged by colonization, neocolonization, and globalization. From the earliest period of colonization throughout the Global South, extractive economies have relied on human trafficking in the form of slavery and indentured labor; they have also left in their wake the toxic remnants of massive deforestation, intensive industrial agriculture, or of the petroleum industry, all of which have used up natural resources without replenishing them. Such extractive economies have been sustaining and sustained by imaginaries in which subaltern populations and environments become disposable, as resources to be used, exhausted, and discarded. In environments exploited for the military, economic, and cultural expansion of Western imperialism, the populations who still live under devastating extractive economies are subjected to displacement, unregulated labor conditions, and the contamination of their own resources. Decolonizing Refuse investigates how visual and literary artists from the Francophone Global South as well as from European sites of colonial struggles both face up to this history of human and ecological waste and reclaim the objects, histories, and living systems it has ravaged. As they reclaim waste in its literal and metaphorical forms, they envision it as an aesthetic medium and practice through which alternative epistemologies of the environment emerge. These epistemologies put in relation what global capitalism separates – the human and the non-human (understood here as populations and environments made disposable).

This project features the photographic images of Senegalese artist Fabrice Monteiro, the paintings of Mauritian artist Nirveda Alleck, the writings of Malagasy novelist Jean-Luc

Raharimanana and Spanish novelist Andrés Sorel, the imprints of Danish visual artist E.B. Itso iv and the street art of French visual artist Mathieu Tremblin. Their works address climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, the environmental militarization of the Indian Ocean, the current trans-

Mediterranean refugee “crisis,” and banlieue uprisings in France. In their artworks, waste is one of the living and ever-changing sets of organic and inorganic materials through which indigenous environments and populations rendered disposable by colonial modernity and contemporary global capitalism regain agency, sovereignty, and self-determination. What links the artists’ projects is less their critiques of the ongoing impact of French colonization alone than their creation of what I term “decolonial ecologies of waste.” These decolonial ecologies of waste are the discursive and aesthetic processes through which artists recast waste – what global capitalism has considered as inherently disposable through global industrialization, environmental militarization, and cultural assimilation – to form visions of the world that challenge extractive economies.

The extractive economies of global capitalism have created their own ecologies, ones that consider waste as the end product of a production-consumption pattern. The decolonial ecologies of waste I look at reverse such teleological understandings of waste as valueless residue. Rather, they envision waste as part of a larger network of subaltern histories, cosmologies, and epistemologies of the environment. What connects these histories, cosmologies, and epistemologies is a shared appeal for imagining futures that are more equitable. The works create collective memories, demystify the Global South as a space of suffering, pollution, and poverty, and call for transnational solidarity in the face of ongoing extractions. Grounded in the speculative, the abstract, and the mystical, the ecologies of waste I study are all geopolitically situated but intersect through their interests in addressing and redressing the historical erasures of

French imperialism. v

I ground my project at the intersection of decolonial theories and ecocriticism, two frameworks which investigate the formation of identity, history, and memory across a joint study of literature and the environment. Looking at Francophone productions from an ecocritical and decolonial angle, I explore how literary and visual arts question, create alternatives to, and sometimes perpetuate the legacies of modern/colonial structures of power. More particularly, I challenge the misconception that a decolonial art, and in turn a decolonial ecology, emerges from and circulates across the Global South only. Decolonizing Refuse demonstrates how decoloniality addresses the concern of any society living under or perpetuating the extractive economies of Western colonial modernity. Most of the artists whose works I explore were born in former colonial spaces from Sub-Saharan Africa. However, they are nevertheless outsiders to the situations they address. Living and working in Western Europe, they enjoy economic, social, and cultural privilege. At the same time, their works have been subjected to the racialized and racializing politics of museums, galleries, and publishing houses.

Decolonizing Refuse addresses how the positionality of these outsiders – at the intersection of the local contexts they address and the global circulation of their works – has entailed forms of negotiations which, at times, have erased the decolonial and ecological nature of their works. Ultimately, Decolonizing Refuse seeks to dis-essentialize “the” decolonial project as a project unifying nations of the Global South towards a joint resistance to histories of imperialism. Instead, it demonstrates how “decoloniality” is a process of constant negotiation at the intersection of local contexts and the exigencies of global markets.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... viii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Decolonizing Refuse: Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts and Literatures ...... 1 Waste, Coloniality, and Decolonization ...... 8 Decolonizing Ecological Imaginaries ...... 16 AestheSis as Reconnection...... 27 Towards a Decolonial Ecocriticism ...... 32 Outline of the Dissertation ...... 37

CHAPTER ONE: DECOLONIZING CLIMATE CHANGE: THE PROPHECY AND FABRICE MONTEIRO’S VISIONARY ECOLOGY ...... 44 Abstract ...... 44 Introduction ...... 46 The Prophecy: Aesthetic, Political, and Humanitarian Responses to Climate Change ...... 54 Creating Local Alternatives to Global Capitalism: the Baye Fall Sect ...... 69 The Prophecy’s Visionary Ecology and Afrofuturism ...... 76 Conclusion ...... 83

CHAPTER TWO: ECOLOGY AS HISTORY-MAKING PRACTICES IN INDIAN OCEAN IMAGINARIES ...... 86 Abstract ...... 86 Introduction ...... 88 Female Bodies and Militarization in Nirveda Alleck’s Continuum Chagos ...... 95 Land, Motherhood, and Indigenous Ecologies in Nour, 1947 ...... 115 Conclusion ...... 137

CHAPTER THREE: ECOLOGIES OF THE ABYSS IN THE TRANS-MEDITERRANEAN REFUGEE CRISIS ...... 140 Abstract ...... 140 Introduction ...... 142 vii

A “Crisis of Representation”? ...... 149 Salvaging the Debris of Migration: Las Voces del Estrecho ...... 158 Towards Despectralization ...... 164 From Spectralization to Abstraction: Constructing the Abyss in E.B. Itso, Sheddings ...... 183 Conclusion ...... 192

CHAPTER FOUR: WRITING ON THE WALL: TAG CLOUD’S ECOLOGY OF SAMENESS IN FRENCH BANLIEUE...... 195 Abstract ...... 195 Introduction: An Invitation to Share Powers? ...... 197 Banlieues and Tags: an Ecological Imaginary ...... 205 “Repairing” French Visual Culture ...... 213 Recovering Mobility and Making Space ...... 223 Going Viral: Tag Cloud and the Internet ...... 226 Conclusion ...... 232

CONCLUSION ...... 236

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 240

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would never have been possible without the constant support, mentorship, and generosity of my advisor Dr. Jonathan Eburne. When I started my Ph.D. program as a student trained in French academia, I suddenly had to adjust to the American academic system. Thanks to Jonathan, I have reconceptualized my entire way of thinking and worked on different projects that have crystallized into this dissertation. With his encouragement,

I have been able to grow and embrace the status of a “scholar.” Thank you for everything,

Jonathan.

I want to thank the members of my committee for their support and generous feedback.

Dr. Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François read many versions of the same chapters and helped me improve them significantly. Our seminar discussions have allowed me to reconsider my own position on many topics and grow as a scholar. Dr. Charlotte Eubanks’ advice, support, and listening have tremendously shaped my intellectual trajectory. Dr. Eubanks’ years as the Director of Graduate Studies also gave me the strong structure of support essential to any writing project.

I am grateful for Dr. Jennifer Boittin’s constant encouragement and advice throughout these years. Dr. Boittin’s seminar on Francophone Cultures in my first year was one of the reasons I chose to specialize in sub-Saharan Francophone literatures and visual cultures.

I am also indebted to the artists whose works I explore in this dissertation and want to thank them for giving me the opportunity to interview them. Fabrice Monteiro and Mathieu

Tremblin, notably, have helped me enrich my work with their own perspectives.

I would like to thank the Africana Research Center for its support, which enabled me to go to Senegal for my research. I am also grateful for the support of the Pennsylvania State

University RGSO Grant, thanks to which I was able to work on my project. ix

My Ph.D. years in the Department of Comparative Literature at Penn State were exceptional. I am grateful to all my colleagues who made the graduate student community a strong and supportive one. Special thanks to Ivana Ancic, Irenae Aigbedion, Elizabeth Liendo,

Merve Tabur, and Jonathan Correa for all the good memories.

Writing this dissertation would not have been possible without the support and love of my best friends. To my bougresse in crime, conference partner, La Rochelle and Indiana fellow traveller, Marie Paillard: thank you for all these years. Our friendship has been crucial to my well-being throughout this process. I look forward to many more adventures and good times.

Certainly not “as a footnote,” I would like to thank Tim Valentin for the indispensable coffee breaks, jokes, and superb collages. I have been lucky to have Mery Guzman and Lubna Safi as my closest friends. Coming back to a home filled with their joy warmed up my heart more than once and helped me keep my sanity. A big thanks to my friends in France, Delphine Pubert,

Charlotte Maury, Edith Torres, and Aurore Caignet, for their constant support.

To those closest to my heart, my mother Marie-Christine, my brother Baptiste, and my partner Shakil: thank you for your love, encouragement, and patience. You have constantly reassured me during my “but-what-if” scenarios and I am extremely thankful for this.

A few months before I started writing my dissertation, Ophélie, one of my best friends, passed away. I struggled for months to see the relevance of my work. Ophélie’s kindness and resilience have pushed me to go beyond my initial hesitations and fears. I have learned to live and love in her absence, and for this I am infinitely grateful.

A mon grand-père, Jean-François

INTRODUCTION

Decolonizing Refuse: Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts and Literatures

In Decolonizing Refuse: Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts and Literatures, I explore how artists from Senegal, Madagascar, Mauritius, Spain, Denmark, and France revalue the environments to which the legacies of global capitalism, colonization, and neocolonization have laid waste. Such environments are the aggregate of entire populations, histories, cultures and ecosystems. Yet they have been rendered disposable by the massive extraction of natural resources from communal lands, the expropriation and forced displacement of communities for the expansion of the global military-industrial complex, and the socio-cultural and racial assimilation such displacement entails. Critiquing the human and environmental disposability at the core of global capitalism, the visual and literary artworks I discuss in this dissertation recirculate what and whom have been used up, ruined, wasted, into what I term “decolonial ecologies of waste.”

Whereas an ecology is a network of relationships sustained by agents which are living and non-living, human and non-human, organic and inorganic in a shared environment, an ecology of waste envisions the remnants of global capitalism– in its human and material forms alike – as part of a larger network of interactive relations between animate and inanimate things.

Under such conditions waste, rather than designating an end product, takes on new forms through sculpture, paintings, photography, and novels. Insofar as these artist-initiated ecologies of waste foreground the non-human, the inorganic, and the inanimate, they inaugurate ways of thinking about and living in contemporary environments that the industrial and colonial projects have considered as inherently passive, exploitable, and unagentic. Upcycling materials such as plastic cups, or refugees’ t-shirts, such artistic projects repurpose the environmental residues of 2 global capitalism – and thereby look to create strategies for recovering agency, self- determination, and sovereignty even from the midst of obliterated indigenous histories and visibilities.

The artistic practices and discourses at the core of such creations foster imaginaries that foreground indigenous memories, cosmologies, and epistemologies of the land, notably by revaluing the living systems (human and non-human) onto which modernity has cast an industrial and colonial imprint. By recirculating waste through circuits alternative to global capitalist economies, the artists I study envision modes of reoccupying exploited landscapes, and subverting US- and Euro-centric forms of culture that contribute to the disposability of these communities and environments. Their ecologies of waste seek to create alternatives to the systems of racial, social, gender, sexual, ethnic, and linguistic differentiations undergirding colonization and its ongoing manifestation through global capitalism. Such systems of differentiations have alimented the global news media industry, which have envisioned indigenous environments as either exotic, folkloric, or in dire need of Western benevolence.

They have also envisioned the Global South as a “dumpster” for countries from the northern hemisphere. For instance, the European Environmental Agency estimates that, in 2013, “between

250,000 tons and 1.3m tons of used electrical products are shipped out of the E.U. every year, mostly to West Africa and Asia.”1 The waste-related pollution in former colonized countries, then, results in a global ecological crisis sustained by a political economy that still very much relies on colonial hierarchies and ecologies.

The literary and visual artworks I explore challenge such misconceptions of indigenous environments and reclaim the presence of indigenous voices in knowledge production systems,

1Vidal, John. “Toxic 'e-waste' dumped in poor nations, says United Nations.”December 14, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/dec/14/toxic-ewaste-illegal-dumping-developing-countries 3 thereby affirming their visibility in mainstream news media, but also in the political and humanitarian platforms that have otherwise excluded or reduced these voices.

By doing so, these artists construct ecologies of waste that are emphatically decolonial in their methodology and political intentionality alike. I understand decolonial ecology as a set of discursive and material practices that reveal how human-environment relationships are embedded in an anthropocentric, androcentric, a racialized, and a class-based hierarchy of power and of knowledge. A decolonial ecology, it follows, is a relational system that both “lives” and

“thinks,” not only constituting but also redefining epistemologies of the environment, the

Anthropocene, or global warming, from the perspective of indigenous communities who have been the most subjected to its consequences. A decolonial ecology of waste is a material practice and a discourse about such ecosystems that involves artistic processes of reusing and upcycling the remnants of colonization and global capitalism into the creation of cultural imaginaries alternative to those sustained by these two systems. In the works of the visual and literary artists

I discuss in this dissertation, the populations, histories, cultures, and ecosystems to whom artists give visibility include the communities affected by climate change in Senegal, the landscapes extracted and exploited for colonization and militarization in the Indian Ocean, the refugees of the Mediterranean Sea, and third-generation immigrants living in France. Each of the artworks I explore reimagines such situation by recasting the objects, landscapes, and people that such conditions of emergency have devastated and erased. What global neoliberalism and capitalist expansion have rendered disposable, the artworks I examine have sought to reimagine not only as visible but as constitutive of forms of survival excluded from capitalist and colonial histories of progress, rationality, and modernity. The sets of relations that each artwork foregrounds 4 reconnect what or whom was marginalized to the historical realities from which they were excluded.

These artists unveil how the remnants of colonization have lingered on in environments that are still being exploited economically, socially, and historically. These remnants are what has been refused and cast aside – entire ethnic and racialized communities, and environments depleted of their extracted resources. At the same time, by reclaiming waste as part of an ecological process which revalues the devalued, these artworks do more than pointing out how global capitalism thrives on human and environmental exploitation, extraction, and disposability.

Beyond the critical functions that their artistic processes of reuse entail, that of indexing and challenging the ongoing consequences of global capitalism, there is also the necessity to create ecological circuits inclusive of what global capitalism has othered. More than a sublimation, or even a fetishization, of waste, these artists point out what the artistic sublimation of waste has overlooked: relations between entire communities and their environments.

The alternatives proposed by the ecologies of waste I look at in this dissertation are relational as the artworks put in relation what global capitalism conceives of as essentially separate, such as the human and the non-human, the material and the immaterial, the living and the dead. For colonization and global capitalism have their own ecologies of waste too, ones which treat waste as part of a system categorizing and differentiating the normative from the disposable. Such system relies upon a hierarchy and separation between the normative and the disposable, the valuable and the invaluable. This hierarchy extends to the environments as well.

Colonialist and capitalist ecologies – whose remnants we see today in the deforestation of the

Amazon, in politicians’ indifference towards the refugee crises in the Mediterranean or in 5

Bangladesh, or the privatization and monetization of South Pacific islands for militarization – have created their own systems of waste.

Challenging the conception of waste as a system, the artists featured in this dissertation recast waste as part of a network, a rhizomatic web of interconnected nodes in which art revalues and recirculates the devalued through methods of recuperation, salvaging and upcycling. In such networks, waste is a concrete, physical, and material phenomenon that results from a rhetoric of disposability. Waste does not happen on its own. Waste points to a process of wasting by an agent, such as the State. Ultimately, the networks at the core of these artworks’ ecologies of waste, and their imaginaries, all seek to create visions and practices of the environments that are inclusive of what and whom is too often considered as “naturally” disposable by global capitalism. In the context of the current global rise of right-wing nationalisms and white supremacies, the strengthening of border policies, the militarization of strategically located spaces, and the escalation of irreversible climate change, it has become crucial to address what happens to displaced communities, depleted landscapes, and so-called disposable people— and thus to rethink how to account for the casualties of global capitalism.

Each chapter of this dissertation explores an ecology of waste that is particular to the artwork(s) examined. My first chapter looks at the artwork of Fabrice Monteiro, a photographer working on climate change in Senegal. Registering the impact of pollution, deforestation, or erosion, onto the urban and rural environments of Senegal, the artist creates what I term “a visionary ecology,” one which challenges materialistic and secular Western understandings of climate change and that reenvisions the ecological futures of Africa. My second chapter explores how the works of Mauritian visual artist Nirveda Alleck and Malagasy novelist Jean-Luc

Raharimanana reenvision the role played by the Chagossian women fighting for their legal return 6 to the Chagos islands, wherefrom they were expelled by the British in the late 1960s. It also explores the roles played by the indigenous communities killed by the French during the 1947

Malagasy insurrections. Envisioning indigenous ecologies as history-making practices, Alleck and Raharimanana create cultural imaginaries that call for transnational solidarity. In my third chapter, I analyze how Spanish novelist Andrés Sorel and Danish visual artist E.B. Itso recuperate the remnants of the trans-Mediterranean refugee crisis to create knowledge from the depths of the sea but also from the void left by global news media’s refugee representations – lives, trajectories, and memories that are too often erased for a homogenous image of “the” refugee as a universal construct. My last chapter examines how French street artist Mathieu

Tremblin creates what I call an “ecology of sameness” that works through and challenges the center/margin hierarchy on which French society and history rely. This ecology offer the possibility for counter-hegemonic visual artworks of banlieues (“ghettos”) to emerge and make space in urban environments that exclude them.

By exposing the ravaged landfills of Senegal, the militarized landscapes of the Chagos

Islands, the disposal of human lives in the cemetery of the Mediterranean Sea, or the erasure of an entire suburban visual culture in France, the artworks I study interrogate the system of waste of global capitalism. Such systems work “toward making the planet into a global market”

(Mignolo, Local Histories 21) thereby envisioning certain environments as monetized commodities which, just like anything that is bought, are inherently valuable and disposable. In other words, the extraction, colonization, destruction of environments rest upon the idea that such environments can be wasted because they are inanimate, non-human, and therefore unagentic, resources on which former colonial powers can expand their financial and cultural empires. The value-system of colonization and global capitalism has created ecologies which 7 have also fueled colonial imaginaries by envisioning entire populations, environments, and cultures as naturally extractible, exploitable, and disposable. It is in reaction to the subalternization of people, cultures, and environments, that the ecologies created by the artists of this dissertation put in relation what capitalist and colonialist ecologies have conceived of as inherently hierarchized and exploitable : so-called subaltern people or natural environments.

In the wake of anthropologist Mary Douglas, scholars have often understood waste as what creates fundamental dualisms between the self and its other. In Purity and Danger (1966),

Douglas connects the concept of waste to the birth of Western modernity, which, she argues, is based on a separation between the pure and the impure.2 Douglas focuses mostly on Western

European formations of modernity, and reflects “on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death” (6). Insisting on separation, Douglas demonstrates how the modern categorization of waste into pure/impure paradigms short-circuits any attempt to create a relational ecology. But by exploring how dirt/purity paradigms define Western modernity alone, Douglas overlooks how the classification of waste as dirt/purity was also part of the modern/colonial machine. As numerous scholars have noted, the colonial project was framed by a rhetoric of waste justifying the separation and hierarchization of the “dirty” and the

“pure” as immutable categories. Stephanie Terreni Brown, for instance, argues that the modern/colonial discourse of waste helped justified the development of sanitary infrastructures in India (“Planning Kampala” 71-90).3 The rhetoric of waste employed by colonial authorities has contributed to the expansion and consolidation of colonial empires in the name of “progress” and “modernity.” Thus if Douglas understands waste as a product of modern societies and as a category separating the modern and the pre-modern, the civilized and the barbarian, waste as

2 Also see Susan Morrison’s 2015 study on the ecopoetics of waste in early modern Europe. 3 Also see Jewitt 608-626. 8 rhetoric is also foundational to the ongoing modern/colonial project, as it categorizes and essentializes bodies, languages, and environments. Thinking waste decolonially, then, allows to conceive of epistemologies of waste as relational instead of in binary terms.

Waste, Coloniality, and Decolonization

To understand how artists foreground waste as a process constitutive of relational ecologies, it is necessary to examine how the modern/colonial rhetoric of waste has been at the core of the colonial project and global capitalism. The spread and consolidation of global capitalism in all aspects of human life has made certain populations more vulnerable than others in the face of exploitation, dispossession, and marginalization. For sociologists Zygmunt

Bauman, Kevin Bales, and Henry Giroux, the global scale of late capitalism (particularly since the 1970s) has intensified the political-economic conditions that seeks to transform all things— including human labor, human bodies, human lives — into resources for capitalist production.

The result, however, is the concomitant exhaustion of resources, whereby human beings, too, become social waste. Bauman, Bales, and Giroux state the extent to which global capitalism has thrived on what Bauman calls wasted lives, that is the human lives imperiled by economic systems of profit and human exploitation.

Nowadays, the rhetoric of waste of the colonial machine pervades what Bauman sees as

“an acute crisis of the human waste disposal industry” (Wasted Lives 6). Such industry affects human beings and entire historical and cultural frameworks categorized as less valuable and valid than others. Although not named as such, these human beings, cultures, and histories, are treated as waste by right-wing world leaders and global news media. In 2018, for instance, Italian

Prime Minister Matteo Salvini forbade the Aquarius rescue ship to disembark the 630 migrants on board on grounds that their clothes were infected with diseases such as HIV, meningitis and 9 tuberculosis (Stone).4 The ship’s crew was then investigated for “trafficking and illegal management of waste” (Stone). In a more explicit way, Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama denounced Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s idea of building expulsion centers for rejected asylum seekers, which would mean "offloading desperate people some place or other, like toxic waste no-one wants" (“We Can Do It Alone”). Thus lives are wasted on grounds that they are wasteful, or rather excessive to the good functioning of Western European societies.

Such rhetoric of waste, applied to human beings, is one that understands the displacement and disposal of refugees, for instance, as a phenomenon linked to recent wars or recent climate change consequences. One of the contentions of decolonial thinking, and likewise of the works of art I study in this dissertation, is the urgent necessity of acknowledging that the current situation of disposable populations is rooted in the earliest days of colonization. In 1781, for instance, the British-owned Zong slaveship threw overboard the 130 slaves it was transporting from Accra, Ghana, to Jamaica in order to collect the money of the insurance put on the slaves.

Zong is only one example of the atrocities committed during the Atlantic slave trade, but it does point out the system of value implemented through slavery and colonization. From the Middle

Passage to the colonial plantations, such system of value turned human lives into assets and commodities sellable, resellable, and disposable. Thus acknowledging the fact that the current situation of disposable populations dates back to early colonization days shifts the way that the global human disposal industry has been considered so far by world leaders – as the result of the incapacity of the Global South (understood then as a homogenous bloc) to manage itself, its production, its consumption, and its waste.

4 As Jon Stone recalls, “the US Centres for Disease Control says that “it takes close or lengthy contact” such as kissing to spread meningitis bacteria, while tuberculosis “is transmitted through the air, not by surface contact” and “you cannot get TB from someone’s clothes.” The idea that HIV can be spread through clothing is also a myth. […] Clothing categorically is not, and has never been, an HIV transmission risk. (Stone) 10

The industry of human disposability goes hand in hand with what Walter Mignolo terms

“modernity/coloniality,” particularly as such industry relies on colonial difference. Colonial difference, for Mignolo, is “the classification of the planet in the modern/colonial imaginary,

[…] an energy and a machinery to transform differences into values” (Local Histories/Global

Designs 13). The two sides of the same coin, “modernity/coloniality” suggests that so-called notions of Western progress and rationalism have also been accompanied by a darker side – the exploitation, extraction, and eradication of histories, cultures, environments, and populations deemed less valuable than a supposedly universal Western Cartesian subject. If such classificatory system marked the birth of European modernity as Europe started consolidating its nations and colonizing the world, then, the modern/colonial classifying paradigms of race, gender, sexuality, still exist today in the extractive forces of global capitalism.

The artworks my project examines decolonize the Western rhetoric of waste by addressing and redressing the economic, social, political, environmental, and historical injustices and erasures faced by disposable populations living in/originating from former colonial spaces in the early twenty-first century. The term “decolonial” is more than an adjective qualifying ecologies. For Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo, decoloniality is a project emerging from the margins modernity/coloniality, one of “constructing paths and praxis towards an otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing, and living” (On Decoloniality 4). Such path and praxis “name the empowerment and affirmation of those dignities wounded under racial classification, under the logic of disposability of human life in the name of civilization and progress” and offer possibilities for “healing” (Mignolo and Vasquez). While I agree with

Mignolo and Walsh that decoloniality gestures towards “an otherwise of thinking,” I do yet believe that the decolonial process of “empowerment and affirmation” is shortcircuited by the 11 constant reminder of a “wound,” the wound created by modernity/coloniality. It is crucial for decolonial thought to acknowledge, register, explore, and mourn such wound; but I would also argue that decoloniality is about actively creating alternatives to such wounds.

In that sense, decoloniality goes beyond “unveiling the logic of coloniality” (Mignolo and

Vasquez) and the registration of the violent consequences of colonization and global capitalism.

Envisioning decoloniality simply as a mourning process simplifies any attempt at creating modes of self-determination, sovereignty, and agency; it perpetuates the modern/colonial vision of marginalized people as inherently suffering subjects waiting for an external “healer.” In this dissertation, I seek to challenge the optics through which Walter Mignolo critiques

“coloniality/modernity.” By doing so, I want to demonstrate how these artists do more than

“just” point out a supposedly shared colonial past. What links the projects of all these artists is certainly a critique of the ongoing manifestation of modernity/coloniality in all aspects of life, labor, education, or politics. However, instead of “naming” empowerment and affirmation of wounded dignities, the artworks I explore perform such empowerment and affirmation through decolonial philosophical and aesthetic practices of upcycling waste in order to create mindsets, ecologies, and economies alternative to modernity/coloniality.

In the Francophone context, decolonial thinkers such as Françoise Vergès, Felwine Sarr,

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Malcom Ferdinand, for example, have recently reinvigorated approaches to environmental concerns through questions of race, gender, and sexuality. Despite their many differences, they agree on at least one point: in order to decolonize ecology, it is also necessary to decolonize economy, politics, and culture. For Felwine Sarr, for instance, decolonizing Francophone Africa in the twenty-first century entails the creation of an

“Afrotopia,” an alternative Francophone Africa that refuses to abide by the exigencies of 12

“charitable” institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Afrotopia, then, describes primarily an economic project, one that is supported by, and that in turn creates, decolonial forms of arts and ecology. Ecology and art, then, are relegated to a second order of things. They are most often part of the final chapter of works exploring new decolonial trajectories in Francophone Africa.

I have chosen to foreground both points in my comparative study of Francophone decolonial ecologies precisely because I believe that art and ecology do more than simply support the decolonial project: they instantiate it as both practice and discourse. The artists whose works I look at create aesthetic strategies for grappling with the toxic remnants of colonization on both fronts. Such aesthetic practices involve speculation, abstraction, irony, and subversion of the modern/colonial ideologies. These methods seek to delink what modernity/coloniality has constructed as binaries: the dirty as the reverse side of the pure, the human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate, nature and culture. By creating cultural imaginaries that disentangle the “natural” binaries on which modernity/coloniality has thrived, the artists under study connect what has been treated as essentially separate and even antithetical. For instance, photographer Fabrice Monteiro animate piles of garbage to propose speculative, metaphysically-charged visions of global warming, so far understood by most

Western ecologists as a purely secular phenomenon in opposition to religious fundamentalism; novelist Jean-Luc Raharimanana imagines the Malagasy land as an old and decaying female body to represent indigenous cosmologies of the land. The idea of “virgin” land has fueled and justified the heteropatriarchal logic of sexual conquest adopted in the service of extractive capitalism, seen as an extractible resource by US mass militarization. By contrast,

Raharimanana’s Nour, 1947 novel deconstructs Western misconceptions of a supposedly 13

“virgin” precolonial Madagascar. His novel suggests a multitude of ecologies, cultures, and ethnicities which have all constructed the history of Madagascar long before it was colonized.

Decoloniality, then, has to do with creating cultural imaginaries which reclaim the past, present, and futures of the populations, environments, and cultures that were/are still living under modern/colonial ideologies. Such imaginaries challenge the unilinear and teleological grand narratives of colonization and global capitalism. Grounded in visionary, mystical, spectral, mythical, and in virtual imaginaries, the decolonial ecologies of waste I explore in this dissertation create ways of looking at the world, of knowing the world, and of being in the world that remap what Edward Said calls the “imaginative geographies” of modernity/coloniality (369-

376). Sustaining the modern/colonial territorial expansion and its subsequent exploitation of environments, imaginative geographies intersect space, power, and knowledge to construct misperceptions of a given environment. These three poles of control create a narrative that justifies the domination and appropriation of colonized environments (i.e., their peoples, cultures, and histories).

For Mignolo, modernity/coloniality has sustained a racial, economic, and material system of classification that has transformed the planet into a commodity. Yet as Said suggests, such system of classification also affects cultural imaginaries, produced mostly by Anglo-American and Western European colonial powers. Imaginative geographies have their own ecologies, which, as “imaginary” as they are, translate into a concrete separation of the human and the non- human, the valuable and the disposable. Imaginative geographies conceive the world in categories justified by Eurocentric, rational, Cartesian, and scientific logics; such categories are built not only on separation but also on an essentialization of what is categorized in terms of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. 14

The ecologies I look at in each chapter disentangle the complex imaginative geographies sustaining and sustained by such essentializations. As Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano have pointed out, modernity/coloniality have “subalternized,” i.e. classified as inferior, ways of thinking the world alternative to Western Eurocentric mindsets. For Quijano, such subalternization takes the forms of new material relationships as “with America, an entire universe of new material relations and intersubjectivities was initiated” (547). The subalternizing processes at the core of modernity/coloniality have created ecologies sustaining and sustained by the relations between such power, knowledge and human beings. The new material relations and intersubjectivities mentioned by Quijano take place in specific spaces, affecting people, and their cultural, historical, and natural environments. It is precisely these environments that the artists in this dissertation seek to reinhabit, in order to reclaim past, present, but also future indigenous sovereignties, agency, and self-determination.

For Achille Mbembe, the decolonial project is one that strives towards the “elimination of this gap between image and essence. It is about the “restitution” of the essence to the image so that that which exists can exist in itself and not in something other than itself, something distorted, clumsy, debased and unworthy” (“Decolonizing Knowledge” 3). If the artworks I explore problematize and seek to “eliminate” the gap between image and essence, they do yet not seek to “restitute” another essence, one that existed before the modern/colonial machine started.

This would simply mean to essentialize again, yet in a different way. On the contrary, Monteiro,

Alleck, Raharimanana, Sorel, Itso, and Tremblin, suggests that going back to a pre- modern/colonial past is impossible, as the subjects of their representations already live in a globalized world. The work of dis-essentialization differs from one context to the other, depending on the geopolitical situation of each artist. For instance, Fabrice Monteiro’s dis- 15 essentialization of “Africa” (an essentializing concept in itself) as a polluting country radically differs from Mathieu Tremblin’s dis-essentialization of French banlieue visual culture as dirty.

The scope, the task, the consequences, point to different exigencies. What links all these artists together, then, is less the construction of a dis-essentialized subject than the process through which such dis-essentialization occurs. Such processes aim to construct alternative ways of conceiving the self, history, environments, and ecologies, ones that are born in the remnants of modern/colonial essentializing paradigms.

In this dissertation, I look mostly (but not exclusively) at Francophone productions from

Sub-Saharan Africa, Francophone spaces from the Indian Oceanic region, and hexagonal France to demonstrate how they question, challenge, and create alternatives to the modern/colonial history and ideology of French imperialism. Exploring the formation of decolonial ecologies of waste in Senegal, Madagascar, the Chagos Islands, and France, I show that what links these ecologies is less a shared colonial past than their visions of alterity, futurity, and solidarity. The ecologies of waste they create certainly unveil how French and, to a larger extent, European modernity/coloniality has created systems of categorization and classification marginalizing entire histories, cultures, languages, aesthetics and peoples from notions of progress, rationality, taste, beauty, and subjectivity.

As I explore Francophone ecologies of waste, I ground my approach at the intersection of the Francophone and Latin American decolonial frameworks. These theoretical frameworks point to very different experiences of colonization, systemic racism, and gender oppression.

They also create different processes of decoloniality. The framework of decoloniality is certainly not applicable from one region, country, or continent to another – which would presuppose a universal model of decoloniality. A decolonial ecology emerging from a landfill in Mexico does 16 not translate across other geopolitical contexts. Yet I argue that thinking about Francophone ecologies of waste through a decolonial lens proves crucial because it pushes against the limits of the modern/colonial imaginaries perpetuated through global capitalism. Thinking decoloniality at the intersection of the Francophone and Latin American frameworks allow to think with and through the exigencies, limits, and impasses of both. For instance, thinkers such as Mignolo and

Diagne, although from different geographical, historical, and social contexts, have understood decoloniality as an all-encompassing project that glosses over the particularities of the countries forming Latin American or Francophone African. Calling for a decolonial project unifying these countries through a common history of suffering and a shared project of emancipation, their theories have paradoxically created other forms universalisms that they denounced otherwise in the modern/colonial project. The term “decolonial,” then, flattens out the multitude of artistic and literary possibilities that all point to different contexts, understandings of history, subjectivities, and knowledges. The colonial histories of Senegal, Madagascar, Mauritius, or the Chagos

Islands, refer to very different processes of environmental extraction and exploitation.

The decolonial ecologies of this dissertation form points of philosophical and aesthetic relationality in a vaster network that intersects with other ecologies. By creating such ecologies, the artworks I study here revise imperialist French narratives of colonization, which foreground supposedly universal notions of progress, enlightenment, and freedom. Their relational decolonial ecologies revisit decoloniality as a network in which knowledge and power are shared among the ecologies’ participants.

Decolonizing Ecological Imaginaries

To demonstrate how the artworks under study decolonize modern/colonial ecological imaginaries to create their own ecologies of waste, I approach the concept of waste as both literal 17 and metaphorical. Waste, simply put, is any thing that has been discarded because of its use value, expiration date, and obsolescence. Such definition already entails questions of agency and subjectivity, as it implicitly seeks to pinpoint who throws away waste and who decides what waste is. In addition to tracing a backwards trajectory from waste to the systems that produced it,

I want to explore what waste offers in terms of forming other relational patterns, and secondary economies inscribed within capitalism. Understanding waste as a relational and ecological process, I argue, informs how decolonial ecologies push against ongoing modern/colonial understandings of waste as dirt, impurity, obsolescence.

Waste is also what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls imperial debris – the populations, cultures, and histories rejected by global capitalism (191-219). As each of my chapters will detail, such imperial debris are closely linked to the creation of ecologies that reinvest exploited environments with relations between the human and the non-human. In this dissertation, waste is inscribed in dynamic, articulated, and process-oriented understandings of ecology. Such understandings of ecology radically contrasts with the traditional notion of ecology as “habitat” to which the etymology of the word points (ecology comes from the Greek oikos, house). Understanding ecology as “habitability” reiterates understandings of the environment as oikos, as an environment that is a property to be inhabited by humans. As the artworks I explore suggest, the earth is not to be a territory to be conquered, colonized, and inhabited. The earth that vomits its dead in Raharimanana’s fiction, or the one that reclaims its own ecological future in Monteiro’s photography, point to conceptualization of the environment as agentic. An ecology is more than what is “out there” and seemingly happens on its own.

Ecology, as I understand it, is a network proper to human and non-human species, but also the system organizing their relationships. In this network, waste forms itself, dissolves, and 18 constantly creates relations, which challenges Bauman’s and Stoler’s conceptions of waste, or imperial debris, as static and unagentic.5 Waste branches out and connects what modernity/coloniality separates. An ecology of waste implies a set of aesthetic, philosophical, and discursive articulations set forth by an agent – in these cases, the artists. Ecologies of waste put in relation entities (human and non-human, living and dead, organic and inorganic) that influence each other in a shared environment.

While for Lawrence Buell and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ecology is only a discourse on the nature of habitats, I align my own understanding of the term “ecology” with the research of

Verena Andermatt Conley and Stephanie Posthumus. For Andermatt and Posthumus, particularly as they conceive of “ecology” as a space-making practice of habitability. Drawing on Greg

Garrard, Posthumus argues that ecology is the “long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work” (Posthumus 267; Garrard 52). Ecology, then, is more than just a system encompassing all living and non-living things together. It is both a discourse and a space-making processes evolving through time and across different cultures and histories.

Contrary to French philosopher Luc Ferry’s claim that ecology is anti-humanist (because it supposedly values nature more than humans), ecology is inherently about integrating the human and the non-human together; as a consequence, a non-anthropocentric ecology is not antihumanist, since it is inclusive of all things without erasing any subjectivity and identity.

Rather, ecology is about understanding how such subjectivity and identity are constructed both in nature and culture. Registering the importance of ecology in terms of subjectivity formation,

Felix Guattari understood ecology as “ecosophy,” that is “an ethico-political articulation between

5 For Bauman, who focuses particularly on refugees, “these creatures in drift and waiting have nothing but their naked life, whose continuation depends on humanitarian assistance” (77). 19 the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity)” (The

Three Ecologies 28). Already in 1989, Guattari sought to disassociate the term from stereotypes of “the image of a small nature-loving minority or [from] qualified specialists. Ecology [...] questions the whole of subjectivity of capitalistic power formations, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue as it has for the past decade” (52).

Guattari’s definition of ecology is anchored in a specific moment of history – the end of the USSR and the consolidation of US imperialism. As the two superpowers were being deconstructed, it was fundamental to account for an ecological revolution that “must not be exclusively concerned with visible relations of force on a grand scale, but will also take into account molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire” (28). For Guattari, in 1989, paying attention to the “molecular domains of sensibility” meant understanding the human and environmental leftovers of global capitalism. However Guattari did not frame his revolutionary approach to ecology in decolonial terms. While he talked about “components of subjectification, each working more or less on its own” (35) rather than a more universal Western “subject,” his deconstruction of subjectivity into molecular domains did not account for the historical, social, racial, economic, and political interconnectivity between the “components of subjectification.” In that sense, while Guattari’s ecological subject is not universal, the system in which it is inscribed presupposes a universal pattern that does not account for differences and obstacles.

To define “ecology,” I draw on Posthumus and Guattari on at least two points. On the one hand, ecology is a discourse and a practice of space, time, history, and the environment

(Posthumus). On the other hand, I adhere to Guattari’s bringing together of multiple entities in relational and rhizomatic systems. Yet I also depart from Posthumus in Guattari in my decolonial approach to ecology. The ecologies I explore in this dissertation are profoundly decolonial in 20 nature, as they foster spatial and temporal cosmovisions, which are multilinear, multicultural, multilingual, and multidimensional. For Malcom Ferdinand, “l’écologie décoloniale ébranle le cadre environnementaliste de compréhension de la crise écologiste en incluant dès le départ la confrontation à la fracture coloniale du monde et en pointant une autre genèse du souci

écologique” (“decolonial ecology shatters the environmentalist understandings of ecological crisis by including from the start the world’s confrontation to the colonial fracture and by pointing to another genesis of ecological thought.” 370). Thinking ecology decolonially, then, means including all that which has been excluded by Western ecological thinking – entire racialized communities and their histories. As decolonial ecologies are not predicated upon a single ecological model – which would defeat the very purpose of fostering relations between cultures, worldviews, epistemologies and ontologies – decolonial ecologies dialogue, include, and challenge the very systems that have othered them as folkloric or subaltern.

In this dissertation, I use decolonial concepts and methodologies, such as relationality, borderland and coloniality, to rethink the Francophone modern/colonial ecologies of waste I examine. These concepts help think of former colonial spaces as multiple, as diverse in their local cultures, cosmologies, beliefs; they account for how these local cultures define themselves in political, philosophical, and aesthetic modes that cannot possibly be subsumed within a single category. It is in that sense that they foster relationality. For Walsh and Mignolo, relationality is

“the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos” (1). Relationality, I believe, does more than just being aware of interdependence. It is a dynamic network of relationships that is constantly reactivated through the mutual recognition of all living and non-living things.6

6 Relationality as a concept is, however, not the sole prerogative of decolonial thinkers. What Mignolo sees as an “integral relation and interdependence” has already been theorized by the New Materialists as “network.” Borrowing 21

I also understand relationality as what Edouard Glissant terms “opacité.” Opacity, for

Glissant, respects one’s fundamental right to difference. Opacity is decolonial as it seeks to delink one’s existence from the norms at the basis of a “scale” of values. As Glissant recalls,

Accepter les différences, c’est bien sûr bouleverser la hiérarchie du barème. Je « comprends » ta différence, c’est-à-dire que je la mets en rapport, sans hiérarchiser, avec ma norme. Je t’admets à existence, dans mon système. Je te crée une nouvelle fois. – Mais peut-etre nous faut-il en finir avec l’idée même du barème. Commuer toute réduction. (Poétique de la Relation 204)

[Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh. But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction.] (Poetics of Relation 190)

The right to difference is relational and should not be understood as an affirmation of a self/other binary. Rather, “difference” partakes in a system in which one’s difference is not defined by non- normativity. Understanding relationality in terms of opacity, I believe, helps push further some of the limits of the decolonial framework, particularly its insistence that decolonial geographies, histories, cultures, can be remapped through decolonial aesthetic strategies. What opacity entails is that ecologies of waste retain their own uncertainties, that they cannot be pinpointed as

“either” decolonial “or” not decolonial; rather these ecologies are opaque, in that they do not abide by the norms that decoloniality paradoxically imposes on decolonial artworks.

Because relationality challenges the notions of a static system in which peripheries revolve around a center, it also pushes against the concept of a border as a straight line separating countries, cultures, and people. Borders are sites of encounters, which, as violent as they might

from Bruno Latour, who coined “actor-network theory,” a system of thought according to which all living and non- living things are connected nodes in a shared network, the New Materialists insist particularly on the power of materiality (such as waste) to change things. However, I prefer aligning myself with a decolonial framework rather than a New Materialist one precisely because decolonial thought interrogates the causes and consequences of networks and the relations they foster (which New Materialism does not automatically do). As Walsh and Mignolo recall, thinking of relationality in decolonial ways helps “cross geopolitical locations and colonial differences, and contest the totalizing claims and political epistemic violence of modernity” (1). 22 be, create relations. A “border,” for Gloria Anzaldúa, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (25). Anzaldúa’s own borderland is the US-Mexican border. Her border is a “herida abierta” (“open wound”), a wound of constant suturing and reopening between the modern/colonial order and its debris. Such wound reveals other experiences, worldviews, and beliefs that are alternative to modern/colonial narratives of conquest of progress. These wounds are the ones of the uprooted Chagossians now living in the United Kingdom, historically abandoned by the successive British governments since their eviction, and who are forming transnational bounds of solidarity for reclaiming their islands. They are the wounds of the trans-

Mediterranean refugees finding themselves in a juridical and historical limbo after leaving their countries and being met with hostility in Western Europe. These wounds are also those of the banlieues, located in France and yet still very much regulated by modern/colonial forms of control.

Thinking of the banlieue as a wounded border that is the direct product of modernity/coloniality, I argue, helps understand how the decolonial framework goes beyond

Latin America and the Global South at large. For decolonial thinkers such as Quijano or

Mignolo, decoloniality is a philosophy of Latin America because it was born there in reaction to the pervasive modern/colonial dynamics that still regulate social, labor, political relations at the core of the plantation systems in Guatemala, the toxic oil extraction industry in Peru, or the mining industry in Argentina. However, as Anzaldúa and Maria Lugones have suggested, decoloniality goes beyond Latin America. Lugones’ analyses of gender and sexuality in African-

American and Chicanas communities in the United States, for instance, demonstrate the growing necessity for a decolonial thought to emerge in former colonial powers too (186-209). In other 23 words, decoloniality is a project that is not circumscribed to the Global South but that touches every society living under or still perpetuating modern/colonial structures of power.

In the Francophone context, decoloniality is still regarded as a radical project. In France, for instance, decoloniality is associated with the aspirations of the Indigènes de la République movement. Founded in 2005 as a reaction against racist and religious discriminations in public media, political spheres, the workplace, and education, this movement defines itself as

“décolonial.” Since then, the movement has gained more and more presence in French media, vocalizing concerns around issues such as the French identity debate. However, its strong rejection of Zionism has led mainstream news media and right-wing politicians to categorize the movement as radical and dangerous for the cohesion of the French nation. While the Indigènes de la République movement emphasizes decoloniality, it is only a facet of a larger Francophone decolonial project. Because Francophone decoloniality is still at its beginning, it is necessarily traversed by different, even opposed, trajectories and outcomes. In the Senegalese context, for instance, the decolonial works of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and of Felwine Sarr resonate with different understandings of how to conduct a decolonial project – through a universalization of decolonial paradigms applicable to all African countries or through an attention to the cultural, political, social, and financial particularities of each of them. Understanding decoloniality as primarily economic, however, has limited the scope of what the decolonial project can do to address the modern/colonial fracture at the core of historical, social, and environmental injustices.

Thinking decolonially proves crucial for Francophone artists to construct ecological relationships that challenge the separations at the core of modernity/coloniality. For Aníbal

Quijano, the modernity the West knows today has risen upon its underside, coloniality, to deny 24 the existence of other types of knowledge, of being, of conceiving of time and space. Coloniality is not a thing of the past – its after-effects still linger everywhere and in everyone. Coloniality is the residue of a brutal past that still justifies land dispossession in Madagascar in the guise of mass tourism; it also underlies the non-recognition of alternative worldviews in the management of climate change in Senegal. Because coloniality presupposes a center of reason originating from European and American Enlightenment, it is crucial for decoloniality to precisely interrogate such mode of reasoning from the margins. Mignolo, Anzaldúa, and Quijano call for delinking from Eurocentric reason “and rewriting from the colonized, erased histories and ways of knowing to bring forth other possible points of departure” (Mignolo and Vasquez).

The process of delinking has been central to Latin American and Francophone decolonialities. However, it has been understood as a process logically emerging from former colonized spaces only, carried out by politicians, thinkers, academics, and artists, living in these spaces. While it is undeniable that the decolonial project emerges from the margins, limiting the process of delinking to former colonized spaces only overlooks the complexities of decoloniality as a concept that transcends geographical boundaries. It does also overlook the fact that decoloniality as theory and praxis has circulated across the globe, both in the Global South and the Global North. In that sense, it has acquired different meanings, methods, and objectives. In other words, I believe that the geographical limitations of decoloniality have contributed to essentialize this project as one that pertains to Global South nations only, thereby excluding all the other forms of decolonial resistance to Western imperialism born in Western Europe itself.

Whenever decolonial thinkers and academics have brought attention to European artists, they have not problematized their positionality as outsiders to the situations they address. In this project, I focus on decolonial productions about/born in African diasporas (in Western Europe) 25 because it helps dis-essentialize the decolonial project, and decolonial ecologies, as unified towards a common goal. Most of the artists and novelists whose works I explore are either outsiders to the situations they address or diasporic subjects originating from, yet not directly targeted by, the systems they bring attention to. Although the majority of them were born in former colonial spaces, they have been living and working on and off in Western Europe. They have also been published in European publishing houses and exhibited in European cultural venues. The positionality of these “outsiders” is crucial to their projects, as it entails a constant negotiation between the local contexts they address and the global reception of their works. It also complicates the knowledge they produce about these environments. Their works have sometimes gained international success that has erased the decolonial aspect of their ecologies.

My aim is to understand how their creative strategies grapple with, and sometimes reproduce, the modern/colonial power relations and hierarchies their works seek to denounce.

In the vein of Stuart Hall’s works on cultural identity and diaspora, scholars who have engaged with diasporic circulation of arts have underscored how the position of diasporic artists, novelists, and academics living in “first world global cities” entails forms of complicity with global neoliberalism. For Gayatri Gopinath, for instance, the construction of what she terms “a queer diasporic subject” models a complicity with both nationalisms and globalization (Gopinath

2005). For Ronak Kapadia, the artists’ “more privileged transnational art activist careers [...] are paradoxically upheld by U.S. empire in global cities” (37), and are sustained by “structural complicity.” Reflecting on his double artist-academic status, Allan DeSouza recalls that all art is

“produced by socialized individuals who are located through histories and cultural geographies”

(28). The socialization of these individuals, in my project, is one that happens through 26 encounters between artists, institutions of art such as museums and galleries, and audiences.

Such socialization, however, also happens in virtual spaces such as the Internet.

As Gopinath points out, diaspora is “the dispersal and movement of populations from one particular national or geographic location to other disparate sites. [Its value] lies in the critique of the nation form on the one hand, and its contestation of the hegemonic forces of globalization on the other” (6). Such critique, in a decolonial approach, creates forms of delinking. Yet, as the works of art in this study suggest, delinking from Eurocentrism does not automatically entail delinking from Eurocentric norms of production (of space, politics, cultures, arts, literature). As I look at the decolonizing works of outsiders, I seek to understand how their projects complicate the very notion of delinking at the core of decoloniality. Exploring how their diasporic artworks are enmeshed within the very colonial/modern matrix they yet critique helps understand points of friction inherent to the decolonial project. One such point of friction, for instance, is the artists’ use of waste to create decolonial ecologies that are more inclusive of the people and environments that modernity/coloniality has erased. Using waste to represent entire communities can pass for an act of appropriation and exploitation.

In that sense, it is crucial not only to look at what these artists represent but also how they do so. For these artists create imaginaries that recast the remnants of colonization in ecologies of the environment that purport to be more inclusive of what/whom has been forgotten. Throughout the project, I investigate how these outsiders and artists from the diaspora challenge what

Mignolo calls decolonial “aestheSis,” that is literary, visual, and political strategies that delink from Enlightenment-inherited aesthetics which have hierarchized artistic productions along immutable paradigms of beauty. 27

AestheSis as Reconnection

Across the four chapters, I demonstrate how the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the decolonial literatures and arts of outsiders create ecological imaginaries alternative to the modern/colonial ones. I analyze closely how the aesthetics of each artwork perform strategies that complicate the process of “delinking” from a supposedly dominant canon, such as France’s ideal of Fine Arts. For the decolonialists, the creation of decolonial aesthetics does not mean a total refusal of coloniality’s canon either. While they acknowledge that coloniality/modernity has played a fundamental role in shaping a normative canon excluding other aesthetic forms and practices, they also see that “Western thought is part of the pluriversal” ideal set forth by decoloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 3). In order to dialogue with and challenge the Enlightenment- inherited norms shaping the supposedly universal aestheTics of the West, understood as a set of universal criterion of beauty, taste, and judgment, Mignolo and Vasquez propose what they term

“decolonial aestheSis.” Decolonial aestheSis, they argue,

Is a movement that is naming and articulating practices that challenge and subvert the hegemony of modern/colonial aestheTics. Decolonial aestheSis starts from the consciousness that the modern/colonial project has implied not only control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also control over the senses and perception. (“Decolonial AestheSis” Section II)

Decolonial aestheSis, then, is about forming ecologies that take into account the remnants of colonization, which affect all areas of life.

As decolonial aestheSis takes into account such remnants, it does so in order to problematize the modern/colonial “control over the senses and perception” and to create alternative methods, strategies, practices of feeling, sensing, living within a decolonial world.

Thus if for Mignolo and Vasquez, decolonial aestheSis point to “the critique and artistic practices that aim to decolonize the senses, […] to liberate them from the regulations of modern, postmodern, and altermodern aesthetics,” then there is then more in decolonial aestheSis than 28 just “disobeying” the rules established by Eurocentric aesthetic canon. Decolonial aestheSis, I believe, goes beyond the aim of creating “sadness, indignation, repentance, hope, and determination to change things in the future” (Mignolo and Vasquez). Indeed, if one of the aims is to change things in the future, then what does it mean to articulate change in terms of sadness or indignation? If the aim of a decolonial artwork on the refugee crisis, for instance, is to create sadness, then how does such artwork move away from representations of refugees as either threat or victims?

Decolonial aestheSic present paradoxes relevant to my dissertation, as I also seek to interrogate who is entitled to aestheSis. Can anyone be aestheSic? For Pedro Lasch, aestheSis paradoxically perpetuate inequalities which stem from the values attached to socio-cultural capital: “While often using humor as a culture device against the force of colonial rationalism, the tragic conditions of the colonial subject rarely allows for the detached irony so prevalent in the elite circuit of specialized contemporary art” (“Propositions for a Decolonial AestheSis”).

Indeed, as Chapter Four will demonstrate, French communities of taggers do not enjoy the same privileges as Mathieu Tremblin when it comes to making their aestheSic practices visible. The cultural capital of the artist who creates aestheSis does not bear the same weight as the taggers’ communities, which mainstream French visual culture has associated with the “dirty” space of the banlieue.

In that sense, it is also important to understand how each artwork is embedded within larger networks of production and circulation. The ecologies of waste I study do not position themselves against global capitalism. Although they critique its consequences on indigenous environments, they operate within global capitalism, they interrupt, intersect, interfere with, but are also embedded within the very ecologies of global capitalism, thereby suggesting that 29 decolonial ecological networks are far more complex than a simple “opposition to” global capitalism. In that regard, it is worth recalling that waste is not free. It is part of constant economic transactions evaluating its worth in local and global markets, as landfills are often privatized by waste-management companies that sell salvaged objects to other countries. As we shall see in Monteiro’s work, the Mbeubeuss landfill (Senegal), one of the largest open-air landfills in West Africa, has been privatized on and off for the past thirty years, jeopardizing the informal trash-picking economy sustained by its 1,200 unregulated workers.

Creating a decolonial and relational ecology, especially when one is an outsider to the situation they address, does not go without issues. As these artists’ ecologies de-verticalize the colonial production of knowledge as a hierarchy between “advanced” nations and “the third- world,” they account for the difficulties, obstacles, and paradoxes of coming to terms with the modern/colonial ideologies that still permeate the reality they live in. For instance, Jean-Luc

Raharimanana’s work on the 1947 massacre of “insurgent” populations in Madagascar performs a collective memory that seeks to repair France’s and Madagascar’s collective amnesia around this historical event. Grounded in indigenous myth, the collective memory created by

Raharimanana intertwines the living and the dead, the sacred and the secular. But

Raharimanana’s work also points to the difficulties of creating a decolonial ecology in the current political context of “Françafrique,” a context in which France still retains its economic, political, and military ties with its former colonies.7 The geopolitical situation, then, informs each of the artworks I explore, especially because it directly impacts the global literary and artistic markets within which these artworks circulate.

7 Françafrique, a compound between “France” and “Afrique” does more than recall the ongoing consequences of colonization in Africa. It does also create an imaginative geography of its own, one in which the continent of Africa is absorbed in the nation of France. With Françafrique, Africa becomes an appendice to France, an extension through which the French empire perpetuates itself. 30

Creating a decolonial and relational ecology is not without paradoxes either. In each chapter, I explore how apparatuses of knowledge – state-sponsored museums, the Internet, the literary market, the networks of NGOs – challenge the decolonial projects of these artists.

Oftentimes, such apparatuses push them to accommodate to the modern/colonial exigencies of global capitalism. If such accommodation imperils the project of these artists, I believe that there is yet more to see than simple “surrendering” to global capitalism; these artists dramatize their own contradiction in order to demonstrate that the decolonial ecologies they create are still constrained by the exigencies of global capitalism. The creative process points to the long and ongoing process of wasting cosmovisions, histories, groups from colonization onwards. Just like it takes up to a thousand year for a Coke plastic bottle to decompose, creating decolonial ecologies also involves time, effort, and challenges. For instance, what does it mean to reclaim modes of visibility and agency through objects that point to degradation and may therefore reinscribe pervasive modern/colonial racial, social, gender, linguistic classifications and hierarchies? From Anglo-American and European perspectives, an artwork that “uses” waste as an “object” is often celebrated for what it yet seeks to denounce – the supposed inaction of

Global South people against climate change, for instance.

In each chapter, I look at how the artists position themselves vis-à-vis the environment that conditions and/or restrains their creation – the geopolitical site where they are inscribed, the

(urban management, museum, or sea regulation) policies to which they create alternative, their reception by local and global audiences, and their circulation in museums, galleries, the Internet, and global literary markets. All of these factors into the creation of ecologies and often challenges the artists’ reclaimings of agency, sovereignty, and self-determination across local and global contexts. 31

The decolonial artworks that I explore envision aestheSis as a practice instead of simply understanding it as an adjective. Each different ecology of waste is part of a relational network of which aestheSis also takes part. Aesthesis constantly constructs and deconstructs itself, and is not a fixed set of checkboxes to tick across different contexts. The aestheSis at work in Fabrice

Monteiro’s visionary ecology, articulated through Afrofuturistic imagery and animism, form an ecological network differently than Sorel’s ecology of spectrality, which foregrounds abstraction and irony. In these ecologies, waste is an aestheSis practice, and aestheSis is waste: performing decolonial aestheSis in an ecology of waste means that such aestheSis is ultimately contingent on the exigencies of waste.

The ephemerality of waste suggests that the aestheSic of the work will degrade and recycle again into other economies. AestheSis, then, has its own temporalities. Fabrice

Monteiro’s creations made of plastic cups and other objects, for instance, no longer exist, except as photographs. As the viewer sees the finished product of the photograph, they may not necessarily wonder about the processes at work behind its production. But while the picture may put some distance between the finished product and the process, it does still mediate an ecology of waste. It is not because the material of waste disappears that the ecology of waste and its aestheSis have disappeared. They have simply transformed into something else and have recirculated into other economies. In Chapter Two, the female figure of Madagascar motherland performs waste as process in order to recirculate the colonized people killed and discarded by the

French regime into other ecologies. As she reduces their bodies into a potion made of vomit, pus, blood, and dead skin, she creates a collective myth for the island. In chapter Three, Sorel and Itso present the trace of waste in the form of discarded clothing and haunting, thereby suggesting that ecologies of waste can survive beyond the degradation of materials. In Chapter Four, the viewer 32 of Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Cloud does not see original tags but the trace of their erasure. Social waste has been effaced and yet, the original tags’ ecology is still present.

Towards a Decolonial Ecocriticism

As I explore how artists recirculate waste to create relational ecologies, I position my intervention in the field of ecocriticism from a decolonial perspective. A term first coined by

Cheryll Glotfelty in 1996, ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (xix). Since the late 1990s to nowadays, ecocriticism has shifted its focus from wilderness as a refuge from British and Northern American industrialization to questions of indigeneity, race, colonization, and environmental justice. The first wave of ecocriticism (from the early to the late 1990s) explored how the Transcendentalist and Romantic writings of

Emerson and Thoreau laid out questions of nature preservation in specific regions of Northern

America, with an additional focus on nature and industrialization in eighteenth-century England.

The second wave of ecocriticism, by contrast, sought to redress the historical erasures of the first one. As Rob Nixon argues, the first-wave ecocriticism suffered from a “spatial amnesia” vis-a- vis the precarious populations that were displaced and exterminated in order for the myth of

American wilderness to flourish (233-251).

From the early 2000s to around 2011, in the wake of postcolonial studies’ growing awareness to environmental issues, the second wave of ecocriticism integrated questions of land theft, dispossession, and exactions imposed on indigenous populations, particularly in Canada,

India, the USA, and Australia.8 The findings of Greg Garrard, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George

B. Handley, Rob Nixon, Karla Armbruser and Kathleen R Wallace, among others, have shed

8 As Lawrence Buell argues,“The prioritization of issues of environmental justice—the maldistribution of environmental benefits and hazards between white and nonwhite, rich and poor—is second-wave ecocriticism’s most distinctive activist edge, just as preservationist ecocentrism was for the first wave” (96). 33 light on how an environment-focused study of postcolonial literature develops ecological literacies of queerness, feminism, and indigeneity in postcolonial spaces.9 By doing so, they have also sought to redress the pitfalls of both postcolonial and ecocritical studies. More particularly, they have proposed to decenter environmental epistemologies towards postcolonial spaces, subjectivities, and identities, of the Global South, while eschewing a stereotypical representation of these spaces. As DeLoughrey and Handley warn,

Certainly postcolonial ecology must engage the complexity of global environmental knowledges, traditions, and histories in a way that moves far beyond the discourse of modernization theory on the one hand, which relegates the global south to a space of natural poverty, and the discourse of colonial exploitation on the other, which relegates the global south to a place without agency, bereft of complicity or resistance. (19) I agree with DeLoughrey and Handley that the second-wave of ecocriticism has redefined ecocritical approaches to postcolonial literature – particularly by overcoming the limits of the modernization theory typical of first-wave ecocriticism. Yet I believe that second-wave ecocriticism is limited too, in at least two ways.

On the one hand, and despite its claim of shifting away from US-centric ecocritical epistemologies, the knowledge emerging from such shift is about these spaces, rather than from these spaces. In that sense, second-wave ecocritical studies of postcolonial literature still contribute to put these spaces at a historical, geographical, and critical distance. For instance, the postcolonial individual is still understood according to Western paradigms defining subjectivity and identity. On the other hand, as Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers argue in

“Environment at the Margins : Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa,” second-wave ecocriticism has certainly brought attention to postcolonial literature beyond Northern America

9 For DeLoughrey and Handley, “Adopting one genealogy of ecocriticism as the normative one that is blind to race, class, gender, and colonial inequities tends to marginalize the long history of precisely this critique articulated by indigenous, ecofeminist, ecosocialist, and environmental justice scholars and activists, who have theorized the relations of power, subjectivity, and places for many decades” (9). 34 and Great Britain;10 but it has done so primarily in the context of Anglophone literature.

Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone literature, however, have largely been overlooked.

Exploring the ecocritical stakes of Francophone literatures and visual arts can help further the discussions about the ongoing impact of colonization on environments in ways that also encompass questions of indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. Over the last ten years, scholars such as Stephanie Posthumus, Daniel Finch-Race, Nathalie Blanc, and Thomas

Pughe, have laid the foundation for what it still an emerging trend – French ecocriticism.

However, to the exception of Richard Watts’ study of Patrick Chamoiseau, such ecocriticism has been Franco-centric, with little to no regards for former postcolonial spaces. Former colonies from Africa, for instance, have been underrepresented in such studies.11

Decolonizing Refuse: Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts and Literatures has two principal and interlocking aims. Expanding on ecocritical conversations on Francophone literature and art, this dissertation approaches ecocriticism from a decolonial perspective and methods. Not all ecocriticism – and not all postcolonial ecocriticism – is decolonial. I prefer the term decolonial to postcolonial because decolonial thought helps challenge the limits posed by postcolonial studies.12 Decolonial and postcolonial thoughts unite in their joint effort to

10 See for instance the work of Anthony Vital on South-African writer J.M. Coetzee (“Waste and Postcolonial History : an Ecocritical Reading of JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron”) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s study of Postcolonial environments: nature, culture, and the contemporary Indian novel in English.

11 Caminero-Santangelo and Myers warn against the “geographical delimitation [of] postcolonial ecocriticism. Is there an African ecocriticism? If so, what is its relationship with the broader field? There has not been as much explicitly ecocritical work on Africa as there has been on, for example, Caribbean literature, and prior to this book there have been no published edited volumes or full-length studies” (140).

12 While the main difference between postcolonial and decolonial thoughts has been understood in terms of geographical location – decoloniality emerges from Latin America while postcolonial thought from India – there are other fundamental differences between the two terms. For Achille Mbembe, Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Mignolo, and Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith, decoloniality is first and foremost a project rather than an immutable framework of thought sustaining aesthetic and ethical paradigms of subjectivity and identity. As a project, then, decoloniality is in constant evolution and is open to all kinds of strategies, resources, and methodologies. 35 challenge Euro-American cultural and historical hegemony and to shed light on how the literary and visual productions of former colonial spaces address questions of self-sovereignty and self- determination. Yet postcolonial studies have created a framework that is almost immutable,

“postcolonial ecocriticism,” to think mostly about questions of hybridity (in language, selfhood, spaces). Decoloniality, by contrast, intersects methodologies, concerns, and resources in a more relational way than postcolonialism. Decoloniality is fundamentally about “an epistemology of the exteriority” (Icaza), rather than being only a discursive practice that studies postcolonial spaces, peoples, cultures, and environments, at a critical distance. Decoloniality is also about updating one’s research methodology by opening up institutions such as the university (Mbembe,

“Decolonizing Knowledge”) to more relational, intersectional, interdisciplinary, and intermedial practices of literature study.

A decolonial ecocriticism, then, is one that focuses on the relationship between literary and visual production and environmental practices, and that addresses questions such as: how does literature engage with environmental questions in relational ways that take into account who and what inhabits the cracks of the modern/colonial project? How does such relationality help shape news political, ethical, aesthetic relationalities that emerge from the margins (rather than just producing knowledge about these margins)? To what extent does a relational environment-focused approach to postcolonial literature create identities, cosmologies alternative

(but not “opposed”) to Western epistemological paradigms of ecology, subjectivity, and identity?

The second aim of my intervention is to create a decolonial ecocriticism that is grounded in practices of the environment. French ecocritical debates have tended to understand questions of ecology and environmentalism from an abstract point of view.13 I align my work particularly

13 For instance, they have focused on the differences between ecocriticism and ecopoetics, the former supposedly being about environmental politics and therefore not attuned to the aesthetic qualities of the latter. For Nathalie 36 with Stephanie Posthumus’ research on what she terms “ecological subjectivity” and “ecological dwelling” (Finch-Race and Posthumus 264) with yet a decentering on Francophone sub-Saharan

Africa, Francophone spaces of the Indian Ocean, and the banlieue in metropolitan France. As

Posthumus suggests, ecological subjectivity and dwelling are not immutable categories to think the human and environment:

There is not a universal set of ethics and politics that a French écocritique seeks to apply to literary and cultural texts. The meaning of the adjective ‘ecological’ is constructed and deconstructed through the interpretive process, revealing a micro-politics of diverse encounters and orientations.” (269-270)

Such diverse encounters and orientations, I argue, need to be more inclusive of literature from former colonial space in order to understand how the word “ecological” is more than an

“adjective.” It is also a practice of the environment that accounts for the human and non-human remnants of colonization, remnants that constitute, challenge, and inhabit Francophone relations between former colonies and hexagonal France.

To speak of a Francophone decolonial ecocriticism is a delicate matter in French academia, which has not been especially receptive to American postcolonial, gender, or queer approaches to literature and visual arts so far. Yet I would argue that this is a much needed project for developing understandings of how contemporary French hegemony still thrives on colonial amnesia, and an orientalization of its former colonies. Orientalist conceptions of a supposedly “other” subject, I believe, continue to haunt the French imaginary, but also the knowledge produced in French educational institutions such as the University. It is such

Blanc, Thomas Pughe, and Denis Chartier, to think of literature from an ecocritical standpoint means to overlook the artistic sensibility and intimacy that the author constructs. However I do not believe that ecocriticism and ecopoetics mutually exclude each other. On the contrary, the aesthetics of the studied text/visual art partake also participate in the politics of the text and the ecocritical debates it sets up. 37 conceptions that still contribute to exclude former colonial spaces from environment-focused studies of literature.

Consequently, adopting a decolonial ecocritical approach to literature and visual arts can help decolonize the epistemologies of postcolonial environments emerging from these institutions. For Mbembe, the decolonial shift calls for the recognition and the creation of self- ownership, a self-ownership that requires epistemic disobedience (Mignolo and Vasquez). A decolonial ecocritical study of literature and art, then, necessitates more inclusivity of other worldviews, other ecologies, other cosmologies. Adopting an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and intermedial approach to the literature and visual arts around issues engendered by modern/colonial appropriation and objectification of former colonized spaces, I argue, is one way that Francophone decolonial ecocriticism can gesture towards such inclusivity.

Outline of the Dissertation

This dissertation explores decolonial ecologies of waste across Senegal, the Chagos

Islands and Madagascar, the Mediterranean Sea, and France. It demonstrates how such ecologies recast cosmovisions erased by the modern/colonial machine and create relational networks of solidarity grounded in inclusivity, in reclaimings of the past, present, and future of environments and history currently still living under modern/colonial systems. As I start my project with

Senegal, I explore how Fabrice Monteiro grounds his decolonial ecology in local practices and beliefs, particularly those of the Baye Fall community, in order to create visions of climate change alternative to secular and materialistic ones. Issued in 2015, Monteiro’s The Prophecy is a series of photographs on issues of climate change in Senegal, with a particular focus on deforestation, pollution, erosion, and drought. Monteiro’s creatures are made of garbage, collected from landfills and repurposed into futuristic creations that give a glimpse of the 38 consequences of climate change in former colonial spaces. The Prophecy performs what I call a

“visionary ecology,” that is a historical and speculative revision of climate change, one that accounts for both the long-lasting impact of colonization on colonized environments and for the future of these environments. Monteiro’s visionary ecology is a relational space-making practice, but also a time-making practice that dis-essentializes European constructions of “Africa.”

Recirculating what has been refused, The Prophecy sets up alternatives to the pre-established scenario of misery, poverty, and need that Enlightenment-inherited European ecologies have constructed.

The Prophecy has circulated on a global scale and has attracted the attention of global news media, which, to a few exceptions, have understood the work only as a representation of apocalypse and as a “confirmation” of the fact that Africa is a polluting continent. Such interpretation imperils the decolonial project of The Prophecy, because it perpetuates modern/colonial visions of Africa as a continent in need of help. It does also trigger important questions for any decolonial project that seeks to create alternatives to modern/colonial legacies.

As the work is inscribed in the larger global art market, and benefits from the visibility granted by such market, to what extent does its visionary ecology truly challenge the exigencies of such market? Monteiro’s work, as we shall see, reflects an ambiguous relationship with the aesthetic, political, and humanitarian responses to climate change sustained by such market. The Prophecy contains ambiguities which are part and parcel of the decolonial project, as it suggests that to be decolonial also means to grapple with the paradoxes decoloniality entails – giving visibility to local communities and formatting such visibility for global audiences.

In Chapter Two, I explore the role of indigenous women and female entities in the context of the militarization of the Chagos lslands (1960s-2010s) and the 1947 Malagasy 39

Insurrections. More specifically, I look at how Mauritian visual artist Nirveda Alleck’s

Continuum Chagos (2011) and Malagasy author Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s Nour, 1947 (2001) dramatize female embodiments of militarization and violence, and envision indigenous ecologies as a history-making practice. As they foreground the role played by women in both historical instances, they revalue what such history has left out: the female Chagossian activists instrumental to the Chagossians’ struggle to return to their native island and, in the case of

Madagascar, female narratives of the land that have conditioned the post-independence birth of the island as a nation. I argue that, by positing women and/or female entities at the heart of their ecological works, these two figures also resist any essentialization of the land and women as exploitable and disposable by a white, male, European central subject. By doing so, they challenge Western teleological and heteropatriarchal histories and their colonial and neocolonial ecologies which have precisely posited women and nature as equally passive. They propose indigenous modes of recording history that are multilinear, multidimensional, and that inscribe each subject in a vaster relational ecology that destabilizes Western hierarchies between humans and nature.

Chapter Two pushes against some other limitations of decoloniality, particularly as it is understood by Mignolo. Decoloniality over-relies on land attachment, without yet discerning the different kinds of land attachments (in terms of practices and occupancy) from one Global South space to the other. It also paradoxically tends to encapsulate all Global South spaces within a common history, without yet differentiating how experiences of the environment are also conditioned by questions of gender. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s own conception of female indigeneity, and adopting a decolonial ecofeminism, I seek to address these pitfalls. This chapter proposes to understand how Raharimanana’s, and Alleck’s portrayals of marginalized women 40 work towards the economic, cultural, and environmental female sovereignties of Global South nations in the specific Francophone regions of the Indian Ocean. The various trends of ecofeminism have demonstrated how “female solidarity” challenges the masculine and capitalist logics of globalization. A closer examination of Raharimanana’s and Alleck’s transnational bounds of female solidarity helps understand how these authors resist a vision of the Global

South women as 1) victims of patriarchal capitalism, 2) universally unified against globalization.

At the same time, this chapter problematizes the ecofeminist label as one that is imposed from the outside by many US and European ecofeminist activists. Alleck and Raharimanana give ways to other forms of activism that do not call themselves “feminist,” let alone “ecofeminist,” but that envision female entities as part of a larger ecology of the land traversed by centuries of historical exploitation and oppression.

Chapter Three is about Spanish novelist and activist Andres Sorel’s Las Voces del

Estrecho and Danish visual artist E.B. Itso’s Sheddings. It explores their artistic response to the transmediterranean refugee crisis. Giving visibility to the lives lost in the sea crossing, by recirculating the lost bodies (Sorel) and refugees’ belongings (Itso), these two works create what

I call “an ecology of the abyss.” For Glissant, who wrote in particular about the Middle Passage, the abyss (“le gouffre”) is the belly of the Atlantic, of the slave ship, but also the absolute unknown that slavery produced. The abyss is “l’image renversée de tout cela qui a été abandonné” (“the reverse image of all that has been left behind”; Poétique 19; Poetics 7). Sorel and Itso complicate how such “image” is reversed by articulating modes of reclaiming subjectivity, history, and memory that are often at odds with their own projects. Sharing similar decolonial aspirations as the artists and novelists of Chapters One and Two, Sorel’s and Itso’s ecologies differ in terms of what is wasted (both objects and human lives), and of what is 41 created. They create an archive of undocumented past stories, one that is located in the irrecoverable abyss of the Mediterranean Sea, a space traversed and mapped by the interlocked histories of French, British, and Portuguese colonization.

Both Chapters One and Two are located in moments of crisis – environmental and humanitarian. In The Prophecy, wasted objects, marginalized cultures, and ostracized socio- religious groups are spectralized by global capitalism. Chapter Three examines how the global news media ecology relies on a spectralizing stigma of refugees and ostracizes refugee personhoods, identities, histories, and memories. The process of spectralization, I contend, extends to both neoliberal economy and art. For if I understand art as one way to “despectralize” marginalized subjects by giving them more visibility, I am also aware that artistic forms of representation such as literature and photography, for instance, do paradoxically engage with a process of spectralizing refugees too. What does it mean to give visibility to refugees by presenting them as waste, as excess? Such paradox, I argue, becomes a narrative and visual strategy for Sorel and Itso. Indeed, as they are well aware of their own incapacity at “truly” grasping the atrocities of the refugee crisis, they mobilize such failure in their ecologies of the abyss to precisely account for what cannot be accounted for.

Chapters Three and Four mark a geographical shift from former colonial spaces in East and West Africa to Western Europe. Exploring the works of Itso and Sorel, an artist and a novelist whose socio-cultural capital is more privileged than the subjects they represent, demonstrate that their decolonial ecologies work through an effort to decolonize hegemonic

European thought and representation. Such thought and representation has created an entire imaginary fueled by global news media and right-wing politicians. Whereas the exigency—and insight—of decolonial ecocriticism springs from, indigenous people, women of color, and 42 nonwestern subjects, the works of Itso, Sorel and, as we shall see, Mathieu Tremblin, suggest that its field of relevance is planetary and finds resonances even in former colonial spaces. As these chapters complicate the idea that a decolonial thought springs only from the margins, they also analyze the role played by cultural capital in forming decolonial ecocriticsm. Can anyone be decolonial, including artists who enjoy social, racial, economic, and cultural privilege?

In Chapter Four, I conclude my dissertation by exploring the ecologies of tags in Mathieu

Tremblin’s Tag Cloud. I show how his work performs what I call an “ecology of sameness” in order to satirize French politics of cultural assimilation. Tremblin erases old tags on urban walls and rewrites the same words in more legible letters. I argue that Tag Cloud perpetuates

(ironically) the politics of cultural assimilation that the French Republic has been enforcing since the wave of immigration from Northern Africa to France in the 1960s. The ecology of sameness

Tag Cloud implements, then, gestures back at the authoritarian French politics of visuality that allows certain subjects to be visible while others are considered as inherently “averse” to mainstream models of ideal French citizenship. This chapter considers the tag as a production embedded in a network of human beings (passersby, other street taggers), urban environments

(the banlieue, the city-center), the legal apparatus framing urban visual culture (the prohibition of acts of “vandalism” such as tagging). If Tremblin has interpreted his own work as a satire of mass consumption, then, I do believe that there is more to see than that. It can be argued that Tag

Cloud further jeopardizes the already precarious social ecology of tags and of their banlieue environments, because it erases a visual production associated by the media and politicians with banlieues.

Such erasure reproduces visual sanitization precisely in order to satirize the politics and aesthetics of French visual culture in urban settings. Erasing and writing over tags in a legible 43 font, I believe, asks one to challenge the way tags have been perceived as a problem demanding a “solution.” If French visual culture has problematized tags as infringements to the kind of beauty and taste sanctioned and legitimized by the French state, urban policies, state-sponsored museums, and mainstream media, then, I contend that such problematization is also one that has to do with socio-racial issues. Tremblin’s satire of the politics of visual assimilation is not without any issue. Indeed, although the artist has shared his work publicly on his own website, and although he has gained attraction on himself, it is noteworthy that he has not been fined for tagging walls. Such difference in the treatment of taggers, as we shall see, further problematizes the link between an artist’s socio-cultural capital and their entitlement to be aestheSic. As I look at how Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Cloud erases tags and rewrites them in a supposedly more legible font, I am interested in the stakes of such erasure in the current context of French politics of cultural assimilation. Such politics, themselves the remnants of the French modern/colonial machine, have envisioned the banlieues as a colonial space.

The decolonial ecologies of waste in this project construct transnational bounds of solidarity, visions of alterity, and of futurity moving away from Eurocentrism. What these artists and novelists have in common is not just a shared colonial past and a present marked by imperial debris; all of them reclaim futures and the role they can play on a global scale in terms of cultural formations. In a world in which former colonial powers are constantly seeking to reassert their imperial dominance over the world, albeit in less conspicuous forms than colonization, I believe it is crucial to look at how artists and novelists are setting the ground for other decolonial futures.

CHAPTER ONE: DECOLONIZING CLIMATE CHANGE: THE PROPHECY AND FABRICE MONTEIRO’S VISIONARY ECOLOGY

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore how Benino-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro tackles the issue of climate change in Senegal. Focusing on deforestation, pollution, erosion, the proliferation of trash, and drought across the country, the work has been acclaimed worldly for raising awareness about climate change. Yet The Prophecy is more than an awareness campaign about climate change. The futuristic aesthetics of the images create what I call a “visionary ecology.” Such ecology, I argue, grapples with the remnants of centuries of French modern/colonial exploitation and extraction, which have resulted in environmental destruction.

But it is also an aesthetic, philosophical, political, and ethical site for speculative, spiritual, and invisible forces of nature to reclaim alternative cosmovisions erased by the colonization and neocolonization of disposable environments.

More particularly, I believe that the work reclaims the aesthetics and philosophy of the

Senegalese Baye Fall sect, a marginalized West African socio-religious Sufi movement, in order to reinscribe worldviews, cosmologies, customs, and beliefs historically erased. In its reuse of discarded object, typical of Baye Fall practices, the work creates an alternative economy to capitalism; but the reuse and recirculation of discarded objects into new artistic and economic circuits also gesture towards a historical and speculative revision of climate change as explained by Western science. In that sense, The Prophecy is a reflection on the temporality of climate change. Challenging Western secular, teleological, and apocalyptic understandings and representations of climate change, it reveals a continuum between past, present, and future – what was discarded yesterday is reused today and tomorrow. The Prophecy suggests a mode of foretelling the future passed on from the divine to an individual or a community, and on the 45 imaginary built around that vision. The Prophecy grounds such imaginary in Afrofuturism – an artistic philosophy and methodology exploring how the speculative in technology-saturated environments harbors alternative futures, sovereignties, subjectivities, and histories – and animism in order to rehistoricize what has been universalized as “the” climate change “crisis.”

As I take Senegal as a point of departure in my dissertation, I want to demonstrate how my conceptualization of waste will evolve across the four chapters. In The Prophecy, waste points to both a product and a process. It is a product resulting from patterns of consumption but it is also involved in a process of reclaiming what has been discarded, of reinvesting it with significance which, each of my chapters argues, is social, political, but also historical. Starting with The Prophecy, then, allows me to shift from a literal understanding of waste to a more metaphorical one. Each chapter understands waste as part of an ecology-making process that revises what Western histories of colonization and neocolonization have left out. Such process performs myths of the land for environments made extractible by militarization (Chapter Two); it creates an archive for populations rendered disposable by the refugee crisis (Chapter Three); it becomes a space-making practice for socio-racial minorities to reclaim their own right to visibility and to difference (Chapter Four).

Introduction

The first image of The Prophecy pictures a landfill looming over a forest on fire, where a semi-human creature seems to be the only living being in a landscape ravaged by pollution.14

Made of cans, foil, plastic bags, papers, and other discarded objects, the creature brandishes a doll in a gesture that is more the sign of a threat than of human regeneration. In what seems to be the end of the world, the spirit of the place awakens to warn the humans for their excessive exploitation of natural resources. While the viewer cannot yet detect the geographical environment, they can recognize Western visual tropes of apocalypse – the fiery sky and forest situate the creature in the aftermath of an environmental disaster which has wiped away any sign of human life. In the post-apocalyptic space and temporality of the image, the creature roots its life in objects discarded by humans, now animated with a spiritual force that transcends human control. This image is emblematic of Benino-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro’s series of Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 4 - The Prophecy (2015), by Fabrice Monteiro environmentally focused portraits of these hybrid spirits, collectively titled The Prophecy. A series of thirteen digital photographs staging the impact of climate change in Senegal from 2015 to the present, the prophecies represent polluted African landscapes from which emerge creatures clothed in, or otherwise constituted by, the waste products specific to each site. The images address environmental issues such as desertification, land erosion, garbage proliferation, or toxic e-waste by dramatizing their impact on human and non-human life.

For the past thirty years, Senegal has been facing one of its worst environmental disasters in recent history, between extensive periods of drought that have impacted rural landscapes and agricultural production and unstable adjustments in the management of agricultural and natural

14 See Image 1 of The Prophecy, by Fabrice Monteiro, at https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. All images analyzed in this chapter are from Fabrice Monteiro’s website Fabrice Monteiro Photography, available at https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. For a complete overview of The Prophecy, also see https://perma.cc/AL2U- XJES. 47 resources that have further worsened the situation (Cochrane 10).15 As part of a collaboration with the Africa-based NGO Ecofund, which builds environmental infrastructures respectful of indigenous traditions and cultures, Monteiro’s work has been used in local events in Senegal to introduce children and adults to more eco-responsible behaviors. As the photographer uses the figure of the djinn – well known to the majority of the Senegalese population embracing Islam and animism, he also creates a connection between his art and the local populations that will see his work.

To read the work only for its educative dimension, however, limits analyses of what it does in terms of creating an ecological thought. Endowing the materiality of the waste products of global capitalism and neocolonial extraction with the spirit of a djinn has the effect of grounding his prophetic visions less in the rational than in the mystical. By “mystical,” I understand a worldview based on the belief in transcendental forces opening up onto the invisible and the spiritual in one’s experience of reality. Grounded in the mystical, then, The

Prophecy creates what I call a “visionary ecology.” I define “visionary ecology” both as a way of thinking about and representing the centuries of exploitation and extraction which have resulted in environmental destruction; and as an aesthetic, philosophical, political, and ethical site for speculative, spiritual, and invisible forces of nature to reclaim alternative cosmovisions erased by

15 Although some deforestation-regulation and charcoal-exploitation policies were implemented to preserve natural resources and regenerate overworked soils, such policies have not been carried out in the long term. Parallel to the development of such policies and the reduction of financial budgets allocated to the preservation of natural resources, Senegal has been affected by another major issue – the ever-growing proliferation of trash which saturates landfills and invades rural and urban spaces. As Laura Cochrane recalls, “The increase in trash happened in the 1990s, I am told, when the plastic bag became omnipresent. The environmental and public health toll of this trash is fouled air (as the trash is burned) and increased disease, harbored and fostered by the trash heaps. Repeated cholera epidemics in Senegal have been traced back to trash heaps polluting the water; during the rainy season, they provide standing-water homes for malaria mosquitoes” (10). For Monteiro, the proliferation of plastic bags everywhere in Senegal is also what motivated him to create his prophecies in the first place. While the distribution of plastic bags in supermarkets was banned in 2016, they still circulate in Senegal and pollute its urban and rural landscapes. Created for a single use, plastic bags do not just destroy the fauna and the flora of aquatic and earth grounds; they also reflect a Western capitalistic model of the ever-growing production of trash that accompanies mass consumption. 48 the colonization and neocolonization of disposable environments. Each of the site-specific digital photographs creates its own visionary ecology, which the whole series puts in conversation with each other.

Global news media outlets such as The Guardian have seen in The Prophecy a sensational representation of a post-apocalyptic world, a critique of capitalism and mass consumerism. For Monteiro, waste is indeed symptomatic of dysfunctionalities at the heart of global capitalism, on which many former colonies have modelled their economies. Through the accumulation of wasted objects in each picture, the photographer exposes how capitalist consumerism has rendered objects and environments disposable – that is, both readily available for resource extractions and thrown away when they are no longer exploitable. Monteiro is not the first artist to foreground waste in order to point out the consequences of global capitalism on environments. Artists such as Damien Hirst, Tim Noble, and Sue Webster have also dramatized waste in their works to think about the limits of human subjectivity in a world led by global capitalism. However, for Monteiro, waste is yet more than symptomatic of the role of capitalist consumerism in climate change. In The Prophecy, waste points to a process in which new forms of life, of economies, and ecologies are born. Each picture asks the viewer to look at waste not as inanimate material remnants but precisely as materiality that can still change the historical course of things.

Because Monteiro’s visionary ecology looks at waste as a process rather than a product, it challenges Western representations of climate change as static and teleological. The trash crisis that is currently happening in Senegal, the work suggests, is not historically isolated. Rather it is inscribed in a larger history of European modern/colonial domination, which has imposed consumption patterns of objects, but also lands and peoples from the times of colonization 49 onwards. Monteiro’s visionary ecology proposes many possible futures that account for how different iterations of extraction have affected these sites, peoples, and cultures. Yet, rather than being turned towards a precolonial past, the visionary prophecies of the work are oriented towards the future.

The project’s ethical dimension lies in the salvaging of what has been discarded and erased (objects and socio-religious worldviews) but also in its repurposing in a more inclusive ecology of the future. Such ecology makes space for alternative economies too, ones that rely on the process of upcycling waste. What one cannot see in the picture opening this chapter is the

2,500 men, women, and children who inhabit the Mbeubeuss landfill, Senegal, and who have built up a parallel economy based on waste-picking and recycling.16 Repurposed into art, these objects also suggest that a secondary economy based on waste-picking, collecting, and selling, which runs parallel and intersect with to the economies of global capitalism. By giving another life to each of the discarded object that constitutes the djinn’s attire, The Prophecy also reinvents their function and purpose into art creations that value them exactly for what global capitalism devalues them. The objects in landfills are symptomatic of consumption patterns that negatively impact natural ecosystems, but their repurposing into creations reveals socio-cultural traditions obliterated during colonization and that are still relegated to the rank of “folklore” today.

As Monteiro locates his prophecies in landfills, desertified forests and fields, heavily polluted urban spaces, or even under water, he suggests that these spaces have been appropriated for consumption purposes – colonized again in becoming the trash-heaps for the waste products of capitalist extraction. Since the early days of colonization, Western European interventions in colonies have implemented logics of disposability applicable to lands, peoples, and cultures,

16 Numbers provided by the Environmental Justice Atlas. 50 resulting in and sustaining environmental disposability. By “environmental disposability,” I understand the process through which environments, their human and non-human inhabitants, and their cultures have been polluted by, marginalized by, and discarded from global capitalism.

Environmental disposability is the result of more than four centuries of colonial exactions on

African environments, which European nations have used to expand, consolidate, and aliment their empires.17 Senegal has been independent since 1960. Yet the legacy of the French colonization and overexploitation of agricultural lands on the environments, peoples, and cultures continues to affect the country today. The economic and financial crisis that followed the withdrawal of French authorities in the 1960s and 70s, the failure of socio-environmental plans of adjustments in the 1980s and 90s have all contributed to environmental disposability, manifested through deforestation, the lack of sanitization of polluted waters, and the desertification of agricultural lands.

Climate change is one consequence of environmental disposability and has often been explored by Western environmental scientists as both the cause and the consequence of the rapid industrialization and urbanization of so-called “third-world” countries. There are consequences inherent to this approach, namely the exclusion of alternative worldviews. An art in the service of new ecological formations and relations, The Prophecy addresses environmental disposability by exploring what scientific explorations of climate change have left out – spiritual prophecies instead of data-based predictions grounded in the spiritual;18 ecologically-balanced relationships

17 Already in 1983, historian Alfred W. Crosby explored the construction of “neo-European” landscapes in colonized lands which resulted in the distortion and exploitation of colonized soils; more recently, environmental scientist Joseph Murphy recalled “Western obsession with material mastery and its consequences: pollution, the squandering of finite resources, and the potential for global destruction” (12).

18 Climate change is only one part of environmental disposability, and has often been explored as both the cause and the consequence of the rapid industrialization and urbanization of so-called third-world countries. Organizations such as The World Bank, for instance, have measured climate change in terms of economic loss to countries, regions, and continents; they do yet not show how climate change closely intertwines with environmental 51 between the human and the non-human, rather than the exploitation of natural resources “out there.” Exploring how environmental disposability in Senegal has contributed to the exploitation of lands also helps think about how it has contributed to human and cultural disposability. The creatures in each photograph both mourn and, I argue, incorporate the blighted landscapes they inhabit and reflect. The figures of Monteiro’s Prophecy certainly register the apocalyptic consequences of global climate change— consequences which, as scholars and scientists across innumerable disciplines have pointed out, fall disproportionately on rural, indigenous, and other precarious world populations. These marginalized populations pay the price of climate change.

But because their worldviews are often marginalized on account of their non-conformity to

Western secular, material, and teleological understanding of History, it is also their responses to the current and future manifestations of climate change that have been marginalized and discounted as “folkloric.”19 The title of the series, The Prophecy, suggests a mode of foretelling the future that does not rely on cold facts and statistics, but on the vision passed on from the divine to an individual or a community, and on the imaginary built around that vision.20

disposability in their joint wasting of environments, the people who inhabit them, and the cultures that live there. In West Africa, The World Bank has assessed how erosion, flooding, and pollution affects economic, environmental, and social levels, statistically measuring the financial toll of climate change on the countries’ GDP. Relying on methods such as data collection, hypotheses, and experiments, these statistics predict how future manifestations of climate change will affect lands and peoples. Reading climate change only through statistics, then, does not reveal its impact on environments, human lives and cultures.

19 Which is not to say that all Western ecologies are human-oriented, teleological, or blind to “alternative” worldviews. The work of Timothy Morton on hyperobjects, for instance, i.e. “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (10) has notably contributed to expanding epistemologies of global warming. By taking into consideration the relation of climate change, pollution, the melting of the icecap and environmental disasters into assemblages of interconnections Morton’s study of hyperobjects also demonstrates how these phenomena can be studied outside an anthropocentric gaze.

20 It is important to state that Monteiro has given neither title nor chronological order to his images, which prevents a linear exegesis of his work. Far from being oriented towards an ineluctable end of humanity, a vision of global warming which Western literary and visual productions have often mobilized, the work of The Prophecy is less a series than a juxtaposition of images with no beginning or end. 52

This chapter explores how, by proposing a “visionary ecology” through the artistic repurposing of waste, The Prophecy grounds its project and methodology in an ecocritical framework that seeks to de-link its knowledge production from universalizing paradigms of truth on climate change. Giving primacy to invisible forces such as the djinn, and recirculating what was discarded, the work performs decolonial ethics and aestheSis, “constructing paths and praxis towards an otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing, and living” (Mignolo and Walsh 4).

Although international news outlets such as The Guardian have read The Prophecy along

Western aestheTic paradigms (that is, readings of the work as an apocalyptic vision of climate change), I contend that the work is aestheSic. It unveils the logics of modernity/coloniality and proposes alternative cosmovisions of the human and the non-human in relation rather than through Cartesian dualisms and separation.

In its aestheSic forms and methods, the work challenges what Walter Mignolo and

Catherine Walsh posit as “re-existence” at the core of decoloniality.21 I contend that The

Prophecy articulates less modes of reexistence than of existence. The djinn is not a manifestation of life being redefined or resignified by an Afro-European artist, whose cultural capital allows him to endow others with signification. Rather, the layers of waste that form each djinn point to what was there before and has been made invisible – cultures, customs, and worldviews which have long existed. In that sense, I believe that the work is more about historical revision than reexistence. I understand “revision” in a different way that Achille Mmembe’s “restitution.” For

Mbembe, “decolonization is the elimination of this gap between image and essence. It is about the “restitution” of the essence to the image so that that which exists can exist in itself and not in something other than itself, something distorted, clumsy, debased and unworthy” (“Decolonizing

21 Or what they otherwise term “the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity” (Mignolo and Walsh 3). 53

Knowledge” 3). What The Prophecy restitutes, then, is not a pre-colonial past. It is the right to visibility for entire frameworks of thought that have been devalued by colonial and neocolonial ideologies, one’s right to self-sovereignty over their own past, present, and future. Because the work is inscribed within the larger global art market, it also intersects its ideas, approaches, and methods with the aesthetic, political, and humanitarian responses to climate change proposed in global and local artistic practices, environmental discourses and policies. Waste, I argue, becomes the crux for the formation of decolonial thought too. It harbors a multitude of possibilities, of reconfigurations of the human and non-human roles and place in the environment and society.

At the intersection of the global and the local, Monteiro seeks to delink his work from the exigencies of global art markets to account for artistic practices of upcycling performed by local art communities in Senegal. But as The Prophecy has become a worldwide artistic phenomenon, its global circulation and reception have resulted in readings that gloss over the particular exigencies of the work in its geographical, historical, and social context. For instance, the nightmarish aesthetics of the work seemingly reinforce Western pre-established scenarios of chaos that confine “Africa” (understood then as a monolithic bloc) to perpetual victimhood.

Rather than understanding such paradox as an obstacle, I want to explore how it offers points of reflection for thinking about environmental disposability, and ecological sovereignty in an age of global climate change. Ultimately, such paradox is crucial for The Prophecy’s visionary ecology to decolonize climate change discourses and the responses to it.

In order to decolonize such discourses and answers, I demonstrate how The Prophecy performs the philosophy and visual codes of the Baye Fall sect, a West African socio-religious

Sufi movement which praises humility towards nature and Allah, charity actions and a 54 detachment from materiality. This community has been marginalized from the rest of the Murid

Brotherhood, in particular for its non-application of the sharia law. Reclaiming the visual codes of a marginalized socio-religious group, and in particular its use of discarded objects, The

Prophecy connects the spiritual and the human to restore historically erased worldviews, cosmologies, customs, and beliefs. As The Prophecy reclaims the aesthetics and philosophy of the Baye Fall to construct its visionary ecology, it intertwines them with Afrofuturism – an artistic philosophy and methodology exploring how the speculative in technology-saturated environments harbors alternative futures, sovereignties, subjectivities, and histories– and animism, in order to rehistoricize what has been universalized as “the” climate change “crisis.”

With Afrofuturism, the work opens up non-linear spaces and temporalities, and explores formations of more balanced man-nature ecologies that give sovereignty to marginalized communities.

The Prophecy: Aesthetic, Political, and Humanitarian Responses to Climate Change

Exhibited in museums, galleries, and public venues all over the world, from Gabon to the

US, from France to China, and circulating through the Internet, The Prophecy is a social dialogue with the people directly affected by the consequences of climate change. Such participatory art work points to methods and objectives that reveal and create other types of knowledge born out of collaborative approaches to resource and land preservation, the recognition and respect of indigenous cosmologies, worldviews, forms of memory-making and of writing history. As the work brings people’s attention to the power residing in the materiality of their surroundings, and in particular of wasted objects, it generates forms of active spectatorship that also create social change in turn. By suggesting that everyone can change the course of events through simple gestures such as recycling, it actively appeals to the viewers’ own way of consuming things. It is 55 in this active engagement with the audience that the work already creates relationality between the artist and the audience members. Monteiro’s practice of recuperating objects for an aesthetic, ethical, and social project becomes the project of all for countering climate change.

The active collaboration The Prophecy engages with its audience is in line with the contemporary Senegalese art scene, which calls for collaboration with, and inclusivity of, its audience members, of other artistic practices, methods, and objectives. In particular, the “Village des Artistes” collective, founded in the 1980s in reaction to the post-independence cultural and nationalistic legacy of Négritude poet and President Leopold Sedar Senghor, proposes artworks advancing environment-friendly projects.22 Senghor’s project was oriented towards the political and social reconstruction of post-independence Senegal, and insisted on the nationalistic nature of art. Contemporary Senegalese artists, by contrast, mobilize their artistic resources and energy towards the construction of ecological networks that will sustain human and non-human relationships in the long term.23

Seeking to involve the audience more directly and actively into both art and their own environments, the artists from the Village have employed techniques such as recuperation – that

22 For Elizabeth Harney, the legacy of Senghor “casts a long shadow over debates about the role of the artist, the structure of the art market, and the relationship between formations of identity and artistic practice” (In Senghor’s Shadow 5). More than fifty years after Senegal became independent, more and more artists of the new generation have found less and less affinities with Senghor’s nationalist cultural ideals and practices. While the new generation does not mark a total rupture with the Ecole de Dakar either, they emphasize other concerns such as ecological solidarity among African nations, which was underrepresented in Senghor’s Dakar school.

23 Thus, if their work is as political and collective as Senghor’s Ecole de Dakar was, it also redefines Senegalese arts in relation to other artistic practices, methods, and traditions from West Africa. In 2002, for instance, Senegalese visual artist Mansour Ciss Kanakassy created “the Laboratory of Deberlinization,” in reference to the 1884 Berlin Conference, which legitimized the colonization of Africa by European nations. The Laboratory of Deberlinization encourages African and non-African artists to create artistic practices that resist Western cultural imperialism and challenge socio-cultural assimilation. One particular aspect of the Deberlinization project is the creation of the Afro currency, a utopian currency that – were it to become implemented one day – could take down the CFA franc, the currency used in Francophone West and Central African nations and one of the remnants of colonization. Formerly the acronym for “Colonies Francaises d’Afrique” (African French colonies) and then renamed “Communauté Financière Africaine” (African financial community), the CFA franc is a direct product of colonization. It is still being printed in France, and does still circulate in Francophone African spaces. 56 is, the recycling of discarded objects into other objects for aesthetic and functional purposes. For instance, the rusty-ironed sculptures of Senegalese artist N’Dary Lo expose the socio-racial dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade.24 Repurposing the material that shackled millions of slaves, these sculptures become resilient figures marching forward in history.25 Beyond the repurposing of objects into artworks, recuperation also allows Monteiro and other Senegalese artists to explore social, racial, environmental and artistic questions of the early twenty-first century. The prophecy of the Mbeubeuss landfill photograph, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, for instance, suggests how the landfill is a site of socio-racial, environmental, political, and economic struggle. On the one hand, the poor, marginalized populations that inhabit this space have formed an economic network of waste-picking labor; on the other hand, such economy is threatened by the international investment companies seeking to privatize the waste accumulated there for generating electricity (then sellable to consumers). By recuperating objects from a space threatened of privatization, Monteiro decolonizes wasted spaces (and objects), engaging an artistic practice that calls for people’s sovereignty over their own environments, as polluted as they are. Decolonizing one’s approach to subaltern environments means more than

“just” representing other forms of life style and worldviews; it also involves obtaining the consent of people who have been living in these sites (legally or not) and for whom a world of trash has become the daily reality.

24 For a more complete overview of N’Dary Lo’s work, see Cena.

25 While recuperation allows artists to materialize such conceptual questions as freedom and oppression, it also opens up a dialogue with the spectator who can now participate to the process of creation. Born out of waste, the artwork is no longer separated from the spectator by a vitrine like in a museum or a gallery. Instead of being fixed in time and space, art bears in itself the past and present processes that are all part of the final creation – buying, using, discarding, recuperating, repurposing, and reusing again.

Recuperation also reasserts the necessity for West African artists to create an art whose forms, content, methods, are alternative to the aestheTics of European arts. As art historian

Joanna Grabski recalls in “Urban Claims and Visual Sources in the Making of Dakar's Art World

City,” the discursive power of recuperation is predicated on reversing the order of things:

Because recuperation typically takes the form of sculpture, assemblage, or installation, historically underrepresented art forms in Dakar, it unsettles the hierarchy of materials and distinctions between art and craft underpinning Dakar's art scene. [...] Using materials from the city further distinguishes them from their predecessors and the persistent identification with nationalist projects by emphasizing that anything (objects, visual propositions, and national or cosmopolitan identity) can be reimagined, reused, or reinvented from below.” (14)

Monteiro and other contemporary Senegalese artists such as N’Dary Lo embrace eco-friendly artistic practices that trigger people about how they consume and discard products. But they are also inventing forms of archiving the modern/colonial and decolonial histories of Senegal precisely through what cannot be archived, collected, and preserved – waste. Thus if Grabsky considers that the artists’ grassroots approaches perform a reconstruction of the history of the arts of Senegal, I would also argue that such grassroots approaches also reconstruct the very history of Senegal from its discarded human and material debris. It is in the reconstruction of the arts and history of Dakar and Senegal that these artists also work towards the creation of an African future. Such future plays a role on the global scale, refuses the imposition of Western cultural hegemony, deconstructs the African “essence” invented by the West, and decolonizes the artistic capital of African countries in global art markets.

As these works propose new ecological formations that account for either discarded or speculative worldviews, they also decolonize a global art market that has for a long time labelled

“the arts from Africa” under the broad-encompassing umbrella of “Primitive Art.” Their works reveal and challenge what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial formations,” that is, 58 the relations of forces that “harbor political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights” (193). More concretely, imperial formations arise from imperial ruins, sites that have been left over by, and still bear the violent trace of, colonization. The global art market, I contend, is one such site of colonial formation, as it arranges relationships between artists, institutions, galleries, and the audience.

As Stoler recalls, “ruins are made but not just by anyone, anytime, or anywhere. Large- scale ruin making takes resources and planning that may involve forced removal of populations and new zones of uninhabitable space, reassigning inhabitable space, and dictating how people are supposed to live in them” (202). The Prophecy’s landscapes of waste take the notion of ruin in its most literal sense and pushes further Storel’s concept of imperial formation. While Stoler pays attention to the materiality of waste in what she terms “ecologies of remains” (203), her concept of imperial formation is yet limited to tracing the relationships between human beings and their ruined environment. It overlooks the possibility for reinhabiting these imperial formations with alternative knowledge, subjectivities, and practices. Yet, instead of simply being oppositional to the imperial ruins of colonization, these artists propose to reoccupy ruins in order to create other ways of being, of existing in the world, of recovering sovereignty and agency. In

The Prophecy, reinhabiting the ruins means more than metaphorically occupying landscapes colonized for capitalist extraction. Inhabiting the imperial ruins of colonization means living in houses with no running water, or living in landfills where toxic vapors emerge from the burning of trash. Reinhabiting imperial ruins involves an embodied experience of spaces left over by capitalist exploitation and from which there is nothing to extract anymore; reinhabiting imperial 59 ruins means to address and redress the living, working conditions of those who have been left over.

As The Prophecy adopts a site-specific approach to climate change, it preserves the surrounding environment of the djinns as it is rather than “cleaning up” each space to facilitate the viewer’s gaze. To the exception of some artificial effects, the staged nature of The Prophecy was achieved without altering the landscapes through softwares such as Photoshop. In the image of the Mbeubeuss landfill, for instance, the smoke that surrounds the djinn results from the toxic vapors emerging from bundles of waste on fire. These toxic vapors reveal human and non-human presences that would otherwise be invisible to the viewer, or what Macarena Gomez-Barris calls

“submerged perspectives” (xvi), i.e. lifestyles, beliefs, and worldviews alternative to extractive capitalism and colonization. They also suggest the toxic nature of the remnants of these two systems of economic and ecological exploitation. The toxicity of colonization and capitalism is long-lasting and permeates all aspects of domestic, working, religious, social, and ecological life.

A vision of the future rather than of the end of the world, The Prophecy not only accounts for a world in which colonization and capitalism did happen, but also for a world which cannot undo centuries of exploitation.

Monteiro’s work has attracted global attention because of its circulation on the Internet, in galleries, and museums. The circulation of the work and its recontextualization in different galleries offer readings that either explore the “Africanness” of the work or that insist on the

“global” phenomenon of climate change. These two broad categorizations offer readings that overlook the specificity of the work and the fact that Africa and the Global South have been polluted for much longer than Northern nations, from the early days of colonization onwards.

Rather than opposing these different worldviews, I believe that The Prophecy understands them 60 in a dialectical movement. A reflection on climate change, environmentalism, and traditional culture, The Prophecy performs paradoxes in the experience of Africa in the twenty-first century.

Still considered in the historically “not there yet,” 26 Africa is asked to adapt its local cultures, traditions, ecologies, and economies, to the exigencies of global capitalism and neoliberalism.

In the fifth image of the series,27 for instance, Monteiro locates the djinn in the urban and secular setting of Dakar, recognizable thanks to the license plates of the car and the urban scenery, thereby suggesting that this traditional and religious figure is not incompatible with the idea of modernity that capitals connote. The position of the djinn as the vanishing point of the shot, coupled with the hyperfocal distance that foregrounds its visibility to the viewer, contributes to make this marginal figure almost the center of a space that is precisely at the heart of the country. In that regard, the bike reflectors that compose the dress are significant as they precisely allow the viewer – who is put in the position of a driver among others – to see the djinn and arrest their motion so as to circulate around the figure. The slight decentering of the djinn towards the left, however, helps resist any interpretation of The Prophecy as an artwork that centers, or give primacy to certain worldviews. The highly staged nature of the photograph facilitates the intrusion of the djinn in this urban setting, and blurs the boundary between fiction and reality. What some would consider “fictional” (the djinn’s presence) is the living reality of others, and these two experiences of the djinn share a single space. Fixed in time, the djinn is able to disrupt capitalist circuits, represented here by the two vehicles. The Senegalese flag on the truck suggests that if there is a nationalistic dimension to the project, The Prophecy

26 See for instance Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 Dakar address in which the then presidential candidate to the 2007 French elections declared that “l'homme africain n'est pas assez entré dans l'Histoire.” (“The African man has not entered History yet.”) 27 See Image 5 of The Prophecy, by Fabrice Monteiro, at https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. 61 associates this dimension with an ecological one which thinks the human and the material, the visible and the invisible together.

The inscription of Monteiro’s prophecies in modern settings such as landfills or downtown Dakar makes the work comparable to other African contemporary fictions that recall the impact of global capitalism on subaltern nations. For instance, the murderous and revengeful nature of The Prophecy is also the one of Nigerian author Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

(1991). In The Famished Road, Okri develops the story of an abiku child, a “spirit child” who lives between the world of the invisible and the visible, the spiritual and the material. The novel dramatizes the impact of global capital on landscapes, which become revengeful, angry, and develop an insatiable hunger for human lives. For writers such as Ben Okri, African cosmologies are in direct contrast and struggle with an ever-growing capitalism that is spreading through

Africa and negatively altering the nature of economic and human exchanges. For Aníbal

Quijano, coloniality culminates in global capitalism and creates “an entire universe of new material relations and intersubjectivities” (547). Because such universe is organized around a

European center, it does not allow the margins to make space for themselves. For Monteiro, however, there is no direct confrontation but rather a reoccupancy of the remnants left by modern/colonial capitalism by African cosmologies. Departing from Quijano’s Marxist determinism, Monteiro suggests that the margins of European centers can shape alternative perceptions of the world, other identities, and more balanced relationalities between man and nature. It is precisely in this refusal of dualisms such as urban/rural, modern/primitive, refusal which decolonity sees as characteristic of the experience of modern globalization in the Global

South, that The Prophecy roots its visionary ecology. Accounting for global climate change and creating an alternative historicity that accounts for Africa’s cosmologies and mindsets (religious 62 and secular), The Prophecy constructs other spaces, other temporalities, and other ontologies that dis-essentialize “the African subject” as primitive and stuck in the colonial past.

Any work of dis-essentialization involves decolonizing people and their relationship with the environment. But it does also involve decolonizing the very methods that serve to essentialize in the first place. Joni Adamson and Salman Monami argue in their introduction to

Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies (2017) that, “indigenous practices have often been sidelined as ‘superstition’ by those who consider mainstream Western sciences ‘objective’ and superior”

(9). If Western sciences have relegated indigenous cosmovisions to superstition, then it is also crucial to interrogate the methods employed to categorize cosmologies as “valid” and “non- valid” epistemological frameworks, as these methods have built up the global archives of climate change. These archives store data collected in the forms of maps, graphs, and charts, which leave out human and non-human experiences, alternative worldviews and ways of life, and create forms of knowledge imposed from the outside.

In that sense, as The Prophecy gives visibility to the invisible, it decolonizes the methods of archiving climate change for the past, present, and future generations. The Prophecy is not a work fixed in time and space, but it is in constant evolution, as the series has not been finished yet. The open-ended nature of the work, coupled with the making of each image, suggests a process more than a finished product. The methods and objectives of The Prophecy are very different from one image to the other, as each image dramatizes climate change in its own way, and has its own specific production. The making process takes into account and is also conditioned by the environment itself whether, be it natural (as in the weather conditions) or social (as in the legislation surrounding the use of such and such environment). It is from the specificity of each particular environment that other forms of knowledge emerge, inherent to the 63 land rather than from “outside.” Because the environments in which Monteiro grounds his work are subjected to natural or human alteration, they constantly change one’s experience of the site of knowledge they create.

De-linking from Anglo-American and European art and ecologies, the work also seeks to de-link from the humanitarian and political responses to climate change that have contributed to ostracize “subaltern” cultures from history. In particular, Monteiro is critical of “most Western

NGOs” which, he argues, “disregard local cultures. These NGOs come here with preconceived ideas that people do not understand and that do not resonate with them” (Niedan). As well- intentioned as these NGOs’ initiatives might be in improving the well-being of local populations supposedly ill-equipped to face global warming, these organizations still perpetuate former colonial ideas and ideals of “benevolent” rich nations rescuing Africa (and the Global South, more generally) from its predicament.28

However, Monteiro’s criticism of NGOs is at odds with his own collaboration with the

NGO Ecofund. This collaboration has been successful on a local scale as it has attracted the donations of individuals (up to 13,917 dollars have been collected). But it is noteworthy to point out that Ecofund never mentions the visionary ecology that The Prophecy celebrates. Nor does it open a conversation onto the consequences of centuries of environmental disposability. In fact, the website of Ecofund has used Monteiro’s images as illustrations to scientific captions

28 In “The Disillusions and Scars of the Exotic. Everyday Cultural and Touristic Immersion in Senegal,” Helene Quashie recalls that despite rejecting colonialist attitudes and mindsets in the European tourists, Senegal is still stigmatized and exoticized, and European tourists are still considered the benefactors of local populations. According to Issa G. Shivji, “the NGO discourse, or more correctly the non-discourse, is predicated on the philosophical and political premises of the neo-liberalism/globalization paradigm” (“The Silences in the NGO Discourse” 22). For Sean Hanretta in “Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community,” other paradigms that characterize Western NGOs’ intervention in Africa is the dichotomization between secular and religious, the factually-evidenced and fabulation. Rooted in colonial ideology, such worldviews understand the socio-religious beliefs of the colonized subject as non-Western ‘folklore,’ which disregards the local cultures, history, and religious beliefs of ‘subaltern’ groups. 64 detailing the consequences of climate change on Senegalese environments, often without any historical contextualization. These captions provide charts and statistics to explain the danger of deforestation, oil spilling, among other things. While they reveal facts about Senegalese environments that local populations or Western tourists attending the presentation would perhaps not know, these captions do not foreground the local cultures, traditions, and beliefs that are inherent to the knowledge created by The Prophecy.

Indeed, their scientific nature erases the particularities of the local cultures they yet represent, as there is no mention of animism or Islam, which were yet central to Monteiro’s appeal to the people. The reduction of the djinn to an “African supernatural genie” (Ecofund), for instance, homogenizes the perceptions of this figure, which varies from one African country to the other. Because these captions explain the present situation in Senegal, they overlook the history of the environments they depict, the dynamic relationships between the people and the lands, and the legacy of colonization in terms of pollution. Grounded in the present, these captions address the necessity to change things, without yet taking into consideration the past and the future of Senegal and Africa at large.29

In that regard, it is noteworthy to mention that each image was sold in donor contests to finance the creation of The Prophecy. Since the Ecofund website does not mention the geographical origin of all the winners, it is unsafe to assume that the donors come from the

Global North or elsewhere. However, the fact that the creation of The Prophecy should rely on financial investments suggests an imbalance in the participatory nature of Monteiro’s art. Donors are “rewarded” by a dedicated print and see their names on the website; the locals, by contrast,

29 Ecofund’s introduction of Monteiro’s series reads as “The Prophecy photo series includes researchers, activists, artists, local citizens and political decision makers on a participatory and collaborative approach to create accessible, but scientifically based, photo-legends.” 65 are taught how to change their way of life, work for their own future reward, which they will not see immediately – the improvement of their environments. Monteiro’s attack on consumerism thus takes a paradoxical turn, since it empowers those with greater financial capital with the capacity to change the situation without yet altering their lifestyle.

Monteiro is aware of the impact of colonization and neocolonization through Western interventions on African environments and ecologies.30 Yet, as the artist calls for the recognition of alternative ecologies, he paradoxically opposes them to Western “progress,” which contributes to reinforce the enlightened West/primitive Africa that he yet seeks to challenge:

Because of slavery, and then colonization, this continent has had to work for modernism and productivity when it didn’t have the tools. People didn’t get a chance to integrate progress naturally in their culture, and the West became their reference for what the standard was. And with globalization, everybody is looking to the United States, but they don’t really consider that these people have a lot to give to the world because of their traditions, because of their strong culture, and because of the values that they used to have and don’t anymore as times have changed. That is something that is very particular to Africa—colonization was a rupture in the natural progression of the continent. I really feel it in everyday life, and that is why I think education is so essential in Africa, because people are just not aware of it. They don’t see things, and if you don’t tell people, it doesn’t come naturally. (Stoddard)

Monteiro’s acknowledgment of the “strong cultures” and “values” of African people is overshadowed by his statement that African ecologies have somehow failed at integrating

Western progress (symbolized by ideals of “modernism” and “productivity”), and at exporting these cultures and values abroad. The evasive allusion to African “values,” which remain undefined as if from time immemorial, creates a melancholy for the loss of a pre-colonial

African past supposedly ill-equipped for Western progress. The very idea of “integrat[ing] progress naturally” suggests that such a teleological and integrative process is smooth, which

30 “One of the mistakes a great majority of NGOs make in their awareness campaign,” Monteiro recalls, “is that they disregard local cultures. These NGOs come here with preconceived ideas that people do not understand and that do not resonate with them.” (Niedan) 66 masks the violence of imposing cultural and economic hegemony onto nations considered subaltern.

Indeed, to what extent is such artwork exempt from reproducing what Rob Nixon has theorized as “slow violence” (17), that is the slow and invisible process of exploiting the natural, historical, social resources of people by imposing an “official map” that “writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental”?

For instance, rather than detailing how colonization impacted natural environments and pre- colonial African societies, Monteiro insists more on the supposed blindness of African peoples

(“They don’t see things”) and essentalizes them as naturally unable to think eco-friendly and act accordingly. As he denounces the cultural imposition of Western NGOs and seeks to challenge slow violence in Western Africa, he is yet also reproducing infantilizing discourses teaching

Africans on the management of their own resources.

Monteiro’s collaboration with Ecofund as well as his ambiguous statements about one’s responsibility to counter climate change certainly cast another light on his work, one that reveals a potential gap between what the artist says about his work and what the work does. Rather than considering these paradoxes as obstacles, I want to look at them as complications necessary for decolonial projects and epistemologies of environment to move forward. Indeed, the work reveals the difficulty that an artwork purporting to be decolonial in its practices, objectives, and outcomes, faces. It is the very notion of “delinking,” central to Walter Mignolo’s definition of decoloniality, which The Prophecy problematizes. For Mignolo, the practice of delinking emerged from a post-WWII context. Delinking, for the non-aligned nations, meant an alternative to imperialist capitalism and communism, a “third option” that would actively promote self- 67 sovereignty, transnational economic cooperation, and solidarity bonds within and across the

Global South.

Exhibiting his work in the early twenty-first century, Monteiro lives in a world in which the geopolitical contours of this “third option” have been redefined since WWII. With the growth of xenophobic nationalism across Northern America and Western Europe, the ongoing extractive business operations in former colonies (such as the offshoring of labor to Bangladesh or India, for instance), and the task of “cleaning up” the leftovers of colonization and capitalism, the thinkers, artists, organizations, and politicians of today face the necessity to come up with political and aesthetic strategies that engage with questions of self-sovereignty, the recognition of indigenous rights, visibility, and agency, as well as the right to protection against environmental disposability. For instance, how is one to attract global financial investment for developing a project outside mainstream commercial and business avenues? How may an artwork preserve its site-specific exigencies when its global circulation entails constant reinterpretation? Is it possible to completely “delink” from hegemonic forms of economic, environmental, cultural, and artistic power? Does delinking entail a rupture with these forms of power?

In The Prophecy, this “third option” relies on an inclusivity of worldviews at odds with each other but that do not cancel each other out. On the contrary, it is in the creation of a third space, that of the visionary ecology, that The Prophecy establishes a complex aesthetics of defiance towards European and American cultural hegemony, as the sixth image of the series suggests.31 Beyond metaphors symbolizing nature’s regeneration, this image mobilizes the visual codes of pan-african solidarity, which grounds Monteiro’s aesthetics into transnational histories

31 See Image 6 of The Prophecy, by Fabrice Monteiro, at https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. 68 of Black activism. The clenched fist recalls US civil rights movements advocating Black power, such as the Black Panthers. In that sense Monteiro revisits a gesture of resistance to white hegemony, and encompasses the struggle of Africans into a larger, US-centric history of Black activism; while this activism acknowledges and celebrates its African cultural roots, it does also homogenize the experiences of all Black people of the African diaspora, encompassing different movements and methods into a global phenomenon. However, as he uses a well-known gesture of resistance and solidarity, he is also ensuring that his global audience will identify the message of The Prophecy. The green leaf reorients the message of civic equality and empowerment towards an expression of green solidarity. Such solidarity goes beyond questions of whom has access to decent environmental conditions in terms of housing, or work. It is also about recognizing the past, present, and future influence of Africa in global ecologies.

Because The Prophecy embraces both the traditional and the modern, both spirituality and materiality, it proposes a third way of seeing things (rather than a happy middle between these poles) that delinks from these forms of power. The work stitches together what modernity/coloniality conceives of as essentially separate (the “traditional” and the “modern,” the spiritual and the material). It is precisely in the encounter of dualisms such as urban/rural, modern/primitive, which characterize the experience of modern globalization in the Global

South, that The Prophecy roots its visionary ecology. Accounting for the global environmental crisis and creating an alternative historicity that accounts for Africa’s cosmologies and mindsets

(religious and secular), The Prophecy constructs other spaces, other temporalities, and other ontologies that de-essentialize “the African subject” as primitive and stuck in the colonial past. It is particularly in the combination of the Baye Fall aesthetics and ethics with waste, I argue, that

The Prophecy’s visionary ecology resists the imperatives of global capitalism. But the work does 69 more than “just” point out the economic methods and capitalist circuits of production and consumption. As it recuperates waste into aesthetic creations, The Prophecy partakes in networks alternative to the cultural production and consumption of global art markets, thereby redefining the contours of contemporary African art on national, transnational, and continental scales.

Creating Local Alternatives to Global Capitalism: the Baye Fall Sect

In order to understand how The Prophecy performs the Baye Fall aesthetics and ethics, it is crucial to trace the Baye Fall genealogy in the Senegalese Murid Brotherhood. Created in the late 19th century, the Murid Brotherhood is a West African socio-religious Sufi movement which renewed islamic traditions and practices in response to colonization. Growing out of the necessity to create networks of solidarity, particularly among farmers, facing slavery and socioenvironmental exploitation by the Europeans, the Murid Brotherhood gradually acquired a solid reputation as it gained more and more self-sovereignty and political agency.32 As the French presence rapidly expanded and consolidated across the regions of West Africa, centering around the figure of Senegalese religious leader and Murid Brotherhood founder Amadou Bamba, so did the influence of the Brotherhood in local villages. However, while the Brotherhood started out as a reaction against colonization, its various leaders have maintained ambiguous relationships towards colonial authorities. At times they were defiant, at others complicit with the colonial exploitation of natural resources. While colonial authorities accused the Murids of being socio- political agitators, the Brotherhood was a key agent in the colonial socio-economic structuration.

As historian Cheikh Anta Babou recalls,

Murid farmers soon became major pillars of the colony's economy as they made a substantial contribution to the production of millet and of peanuts, the single colonial cash crop, in Senegal. By 1912, the French had worked out a policy of accommodation

32 See the works of historian Cheikh Anta Babou on the Baye Fall sect, in “Educating the Murid: Theory and Practices of Education in Amadu Bamba's Thought.” 70

with the Murids, as they understood that the cost of suppressing the organisation far outweighed the benefit they could earn by establishing stable and peaceful relationships with Bamba and his disciples. By the end of 1912, the Muridiyya had gained some recognition from the French although its leaders had remained under close surveillance. (312)

Such compromise appeased economic relationships. It yet did not reconcile the two sides on a fundamental disagreement: by bringing to West Africa Western notions of so-called progress and modernity, the colonizers also instituted a lifestyle deeply anchored in the material instead of the divine. For the Murids, and in particular its Baye Fall branch, the material served as a gateway towards a transcendental Being. By improving their material environments, Murid practitioners were taking care of Allah’s creation. However, the implementation of Western capitalist mass production and consumption systems, and the circulation of primary resources from Africa to

European capitalist markers, suddenly disconnected the material from any divine purpose. At the beginning of the twentieth century, then, the Murids had already abandoned their conception of material connection between the human and the divine, and focused on foundational Islamic teaching to connect Murid practitioners with spirituality (Cochrane 7).

Born out of the Murid Brotherhood, the Baye Fall community observes the same distrust towards the capitalist conception of materiality. Created at the end of the nineteenth century by

Ibrahima Fall, a disciple of Bamba, the Baye Fall movement grounds its ethics and practices into humility towards nature and Allah, charity, and hard work, ultimately seeking to detach human beings from material dependence. In Diazbul Mourid writings (ca. 1890-1900), one of the rare primary sources establishing the principles of the Baye Fall community, Ibrahima Fall makes of humility a religious value and practice embodied in the believer: “Let it be known that those who seek wealth or who wear coats will see that their own body, bones, arteries, and enveloping skins will end up below the earth because of the vicissitudes of existence” (Fall, Diazbul Mourid). For 71

Fall, the dependence on materiality and the artificiality of vanity form an obstacle not only between the human and the divine but also between human beings among themselves. The

“coats” of wealth become an impediment to the ideal of social justice and equality. While the rest of the Murid Brotherhood and the Baye Fall community share a common devotion to and love for God, the two traditions nevertheless radically contrast with each other when it comes to applying Coranic principles onto real life – such as the sharia principles and the five pillars of

Islam. If these principles regulate the relationship of devotion between believers and Allah, they also regulate social relationships. Cochrane recalls that it is for this reason that the Baye Fall community has been devalorized as pagans, caricatured as beggars, and delegitimized on both religious and social levels within the Murid Brotherhood and Senegalese society (792).

Despite its distrust for the material, the rapid growth of colonial economic systems across

Senegal in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of industrial exploitation of the environment through the twentieth century, have led the movement to a renewed attention to material preservation.33 Recycling objects into clothes, then, illustrates how, still in the twenty- first century, the movement continues to adapt Muridism to the ever-changing social, economic, and natural environment, rather than being grounded in immutable principles. Using a social movement that has been marginalized by Western cultural hegemony and an ever-more global and neoliberal world, The Prophecy links the historical and social erasure of the Baye Fall to the erasure of the environmental question from corporations exploiting the resources of the Global

South. Significantly, The Prophecy recovers the ethics of a movement that has been doubly marginalized to articulate its visionary ecology, thereby inscribing its visionary ecology in the

33 “Using materials wisely,” Cochrane specifies, “has become a moral, spiritual, and environmental imperative, as well as a business strategy. Taking care of God’s creation is motivation for recycling [...], combining a basic tenet of Islam with the Baye Fall dedication to labor” (12). 72 margins of the margins. If the Baye Fall movement is not explicitly concerned with environmental questions, The Prophecy shows how the ecologies of the twenty-first century are also a social and cultural matter. Monteiro’s series The Way of the Baye Fall34 is one iteration of the Baye Fall fashion style: a patchwork made of different fabrics and materials recuperated from different places and sewn together, the njaaxas (the Baye Fall way of dressing), reflects an embodied practice of unity. If this unity does not translate through a coherent mix and matching of colors and fabrics, it is precisely the very difference of materials, fabric, and colors that the

Baye Falls ground their inclusivity. Such inclusivity of various things in the creation of one piece of clothing ultimately creates an intimacy between the self and the other, between the human and the non-human.

But in The Prophecy, revaluing waste into artistic creations goes even beyond the idea of a more inclusive relationality. By creating their own clothes, the Baye Falls do not depend on capitalist circuits of production and consumption. Rather than purchasing goods produced elsewhere and imported through these circuits, they create their own clothes by revaluing the discarded material. The notion of value is central to the Baye Fall ethics as the community precisely seeks to dismantle any kind of hierarchy between human beings and the natural elements constituting their environments. While capitalist consumerism relies on programmed obsolescence, devaluation, and the constant necessity for novelty, the Baye Falls bring an alternative to such production-consumption circuits by revaluing what has precisely been left over.

The Prophecy pushes even further the Baye Fall connection between self and other by including dead elements – both metaphorically and literally – and nuances the movement’s

34 See https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. Also available at https://perma.cc/858Q-WBH2. 73 distrust of the material as a gateway to the divine. It is through the material, and in particular through discarded objects and even formerly living creatures, that The Prophecy seeks to decolonize the intrusion of global capitalism in African environments. In particular, The

Prophecy salvages garbage into a process of making which connects a multitude of past lives within a single present creation, thereby countering the finitude at the heart of object design.

Rather, the work insures the recirculation of objects into alternative patterns of production and consumption. In the third image of the series, the djinn is surrounded by animal waste – the skulls and blood of dead animals.35 Shot near the Sogas slaughterhouse on the shores of the Bay of Hann, North-East Dakar, this photograph dramatizes the long-lasting impact of pollution on marine environments, and addresses particularly the dangers of shedding the hundreds of blood liters directly in the Atlantic Ocean on a daily basis.

Dressed in leather, the djinn is here appearing as an animal-human hybrid, through the skin of an animal that is yet taking an anthropomorphic shape. Juxtaposed with skulls and blood, the leather material reduces the animal to its material envelope, now processed into an object of consumption and fashion. As the tentacles of the hybrid creature exceed the frame, they point out the incommensurability of the consequences of blood-shedding the ocean. The pollution represented here affects more than the immediate environment framed in this photograph. Just like the volatile and toxic vapors of the Mbeubeuss landfill can infect anyone in the vicinity of the landfill, the water polluted by the blood of animals fed with GMOs can also contaminate the aquatic flora and fauna beyond the frame of the photograph and in the long term.

Besides connecting the human and the non-human, or sensitivizing the viewer to more eco-friendly relationships with animals, then, I believe that The Prophecy recalls that what the

35 See Image 3 of The Prophecy, by Fabrice Monteiro, at https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/. 74 exploited resources taken for granted, such as animals and more broadly speaking nature, can come back and change the course of things. Critiquing Western consumerism, the work also gives access to what global capitalism has marginalized. What was marginalized gestures back at the capitalist markets that rendered it invisible, and is revalued economically and artistically.

Endowing waste with animist forces, the work’s visionary ecology conjures up the collective force of human beings but also that of objects that redefine the relationship of men to their material environments.

As Nurit Bird-David argues, animism is more than ‘‘the belief, common among many pre-literate societies, that trees, mountains, rivers and other natural formations possess an animating power or spirit’’ (67). Indeed, animism forms what she terms “a relational epistemology” which understands

being in-the-world with other things, making one’s awareness of one’s environment and one’s self finer, broader, deeper, richer, etc. Knowing [...] grows from and is maintaining relatedness with neighboring others. It involves dividuating the environment rather than dichotomizing it and turning attention to ‘‘we-ness,’’ which absorbs differences, rather than to ‘‘otherness,’’ which highlights differences and eclipses commonalities. Against ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’ stand ‘‘I relate, therefore I am’’ and ‘‘I know as I relate.’’ Against materialistic framing of the environment as discrete things stands relationally framing the environment as nested relatednesses. (71)

According to Bird-David’s definition of animism as “relational epistemology,” animism is a system of knowledge born out of and sustaining encounters with all things in the world. This definition of animism as environmental relationality calls for sharedness and the recognition of pluriversality. Yet Bird-David’s definition of animism is still very much holding to the idea that all modes of being, of relating, and of sharing, should be part of a system. The Prophecy, and the

Baye Fall philosophy on which it draws, I contend, suggest that rather than being a system, animism is a decolonial practice of being in and knowing the world. This practice performs the 75 relationality that Bird-David identifies without yet categorizing it within a system of knowledge working around definite paradigms.

Performing animism as a decolonial practice, The Prophecy reveals the mystical and visionary dimension of ecology, a dimension which most of science-based ecologies deem incompatible with the supposedly secular phenomenon of global warming. The Prophecy seeks to dismantle Enlightenment-inherited binaries such as mind/matter which have informed such scientific frameworks and have been perpetuated by Western environmental NGOs. For Bird-

David, the complex epistemological relationality of animism shapes personhoods that take into account the human and the non-human as entities that all matter in the formation of societies.

Such personhoods, she argues, resist the modern understanding of “person” as “human”, a dichotomy which has served to categorize animism as anti-modern and rooted in folklore. For

Monteiro, however, animism informs less ideas of individual personhood than what collectivities of individuals can do together to create and sustain ecologies, thereby considering animism as part of a social project.

It is precisely in the collective dimension of Monteiro’s project that the artist’s use of animism meets, informs, and is informed by Afrofuturism. A concept first termed by Marc Dery in Black to the Future (1994), who defines it as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century techno- culture” (180), Afrofuturism has gained international attention over the last twenty years, particularly in popular culture. However, and as Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor suggests (Serpell), Afrofuturism is neither a US-only phenomenon, nor is it a new trend; while

Africa has been forgotten from Western science-fiction, Africa has generated a whole genealogy 76 of Afrofuturist artists shaping pan-african aesthetics, subjectivities, and identities, working towards the imagination of a future world in which a modern and technological Africa partakes.

The Prophecy’s Visionary Ecology and Afrofuturism

In The Prophecy, the dystopian landscapes, the hybridization of his djinns as human- garbage, human-animal creatures, as well as the technology-saturated environments strongly recall Afrofuturist aesthetics, most famously epitomized by American musician Sun Ra’s re- imaginings of egyptian mythology in extra-terrestrial landscapes, or in Kenyan artist Wangechi

Mutu’s snake-like female Black bodies intertwined with flowers and seaweed. As Afrofuturism calls for and performs other future potentialities that delink from Anglo-American and Western

European matrices of power, sovereignty, and knowledge, it is crucial to The Prophecy’s visionary ecology. The futuristic imaginary of the work develops what art critic and theorist

Kodwo Eshun terms a “counter-future,” that is a future decolonized from Western cultural, political, and economic influence and in which African nations reclaim historical sovereignty and agency. In “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” Eshun defines Afrofuturism as “a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro- diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (301). As it blends the technology-saturated worlds of science-fiction with African cosmologies and mythologies,

The Prophecy recovers African counter-futures through a reexamination of the colonial past and neocolonial present. Mediating its visionary prophecy through waste, the series reveals what

Western “modern” history has left out – individuals and communities considered disposable by

Western imperialism. As The Prophecy intersects animism with Afrofuturism, it challenges the 77 reduction of Afrofuturism to US-centric paradigms, thereby reaffirming the role of African environments in creating fictional, critical, and historical frameworks.

Connecting the (neo)colonial and (neo)slavery past and present into a vision of the future,

Afrofuturism opens up alternative vision to pre-established global scenario of chaos, which according to Kodwo Eshun, perpetuates the confinement of Africa to victimhood:

If global scenarios are descriptions that are primarily concerned with making futures safe for the market, then Afrofuturism’s first priority is to recognize that Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection. African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiseration. (301)

The first step, then, is recognizing Africa’s own capacity at creating networks of solidarity for a more relational approach to the environment, and for other actions to be taken by African people.

With Afrofuturism and animism, the message of defiance to climate change takes on an

Afrocentric perspective that reenvisions ecology from the angle of African cosmologies and myths.

In The Prophecy, however, the eerie aestheticization of global warming may orient readings that gloss over the social, historical, religious, and racial particularities of each site, and of the Baye Fall philosophy. The forests on fire, the frightening creatures coming out of the sea as living-deads, or the smokey urban settings, recycle visual tropes of post-apocalyptic movies.

Such representation does not resist Western pre-established global scenarios of chaos that confine Africa to perpetual victimhood, and even conforms to the visual expectations of a

Western audience. As Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas point out in The Fourth Eye,

Thus, representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures by colonial and neocolonial media are in the main seen to have little to no cognizance of the Indigenous epistemologies being represented and are, moreover, driven by imperial ideology, perverted by racialized ideologies of subjugation. In Hegelian terms, representations of 78

Indigenous subjects by colonial and neocolonial media mirror a will to synthesize Indigenous worldviews into meanings understandable to the Western world. (xxi)

Yet I believe that as The Prophecy mobilizes such visual tropes, it does also expose the difficulty to fully delink from hegemonic forms of knowledge production. These tropes stigmatize Africa as a continent of suffering and impossible change, and are the ruins on which Western exceptionalism has thrived for centuries. Delinking from these tropes, then, also means resignifying them with indigenous sovereignty, agency, and visibility. In that sense, the work performs what Hokowhitu and Devadas see as essential to “the politics of appropriation,” as it disturbs “the relationship between those who have the authority to fix the meaning of a sign and those who seek to appropriate signifiers for their own ends through transforming the signified to create other meanings, alternative identities, and new forums for recognition (17).

Approaching climate change through Afrofuturism, The Prophecy suggests that thinking the future automatically entails thinking about its past, about Western impositions of knowledge production and circulation, and the entire histories of human and environmental exploitation which have conditioned what former colonies are today. According to Mignolo and Walsh, decoloniality opposes, but also works with, the totalizing claim of eurocentric US and

Anglophone intellectual legacie: “In fact, Western thought is part of the pluriversal” (3).

Rejecting Western thought from decolonial thinking would indeed contradict practices of inclusivity and relationality. However I would also contend that incorporating Western thought perpetuates the position of this hegemonic thought as the referential background against which decolonial epistemologies stand, thereby reproducing a West/Other dialectics that the decolonial project yet rejects. Incorporating Western thought in a decolonial framework also means incorporating an entire epistemological system legitimizing the oppression and exploitation of indigenous populations and worldviews. 79

The Prophecy exposes such conundrum in its Afrofuturistic aesthetics and philosophy. In order for the work to propose visions of the future, it is necessary to address how such visions are constructed on epistemic forms of power and violence accumulated over centuries. In The

Prophecy, the fact that Western thought should partake in the decolonial project, then, does not entail undoing the colonial past. Rather, the presence of Western history helps resignify the colonial past, neocolonial present and future. Thus, if Mignolo and Walsh argue that the process of delinking is embedded in a geopolitical place (namely the former colonies from which decolonial thought emerges), thereby grounding the project primarily in space, I believe that a work such as The Prophecy demonstrates the necessity to also consider delinking as a chronopolitical project.

This chronopolitical project works within and across past, present, and future visions of indigenous subjectivities and knowledges. At the intersection of the colonial past, neocolonial present, and decolonial future, Afrofuturism challenges and reconciles the social, political, and historical forces which have formed subjects and their environments. More than creating other spaces where the invisible, non-human, and immaterial meet, The Prophecy proposes a vision of temporality that challenges Western linear and end-oriented conceptions of time. Instead the artwork creates alternative temporalities that conflates past and present into a vision of the possible future of Africa, thereby extending its conceptions of time and space into the not-yet and the hypothetical.

The inscription of subjects in Afrofuturistic environments ravaged by industrial and neocolonial powers brings them back to the collective trauma of colonization, but also allows them to overcome any determination by the environment. As Elizabeth C. Hamilton recalls,

Afrofuturism’s 80

insistence on materiality, rather than a nebulous reliance on concept, is remarkable in Afrofuturist works. The material does not by any means subordinate the subject, but it is significant to the understanding of each work of art. The transformative nature of Afrofuturist art addresses not only the subject, but also the audience. Afrofuturist art is a mechanism for understanding and making meaning for audiences—transforming them in the process is its goal. (20)

In The Prophecy, the “transformative nature of Afrofuturist art” mobilizes animism to perform a relationality that would otherwise perhaps not exist. According to Rosemary Jolly, it is precisely in such relationality that “the post-Cartesian inability of English in practice to render “matter” and “spirit” simultaneous” is challenged (168). The Prophecy’s post-apocalyptic landscapes give the impression that such simultaneity has become an impasse for the Senegalese people. Yet when matter, spirit, and the relations that they form all join together, they not only suture different spaces and temporalities together but let the viewer see through the seams of this suturing – the past and current violence of colonization and neocolonial environmental exploitation.

The vital force that animates The Prophecy, then, is not that of a malevolent nature asking retribution for ecological disasters; it is also a social and historical force reinvesting

Western African, and to a larger extent, environments that are being re-colonized after centuries of domination. Southern geographies still suffer from the extractive economies of colonization and global capitalism, particularly as these economies continue to pay the political and environmental price for their own industrialization, as they are made responsible for the pollution generated in such process. The Prophecy expands its geopolitical and temporal framework to explore how questions of race and ethnicity intertwine with social and environmental injustice in the Global South at large. For Monteiro, The Prophecy is not what Senegalese visual artist

Mansour Ciss would call “une affaire de Noirs,” a black-only matter; African art and its 81 afrofuturistic tendencies should cross geographical, socio-racial, and ethnic barriers not only to reach a broader audience, but also to build networks of environmental solidarity across the globe.

Climate change, Monteiro states, is the concern of all. In 2018, for instance, Monteiro released his thirteenth and latest prophecy so far.36 Entitled “Chòco,” this image reveals the necessity to extend the visionary ecology of The Prophecy to other parts of the world whose economies still rely on extracting and further polluting the environmental, human, and cultural ruins of colonization. Here, the work explores the condition of indigenous minorities in

Colombia, where rivers are polluted by the mercury used in the extraction of gold. Because the djinn does not geographically or historically belong to Columbia, it is no longer the center of the photograph. Instead the photograph foregrounds the pre-Columbian zipo – the human chief of the native indigenous people “Muisca” and also messenger to the Gods. Once again, the photographer exposes the socio-cultural and spiritual worldviews that secular and materialist ecologies would perhaps qualify of “pre-modern.” Focusing on the plight of Afro-Colombians, the descendants of slaves shipped from Africa during the Spanish colonial era in the 1600s, the work reveals the perpetuation of social injustice and human exploitation in the gold mining industry in the Chòco region of North-West Latin America, a sector permeated by issues of drug and gold trafficking, indentured labor (including children), and socio-political corruption.37 The masks worn by the people, the scales, as well as the flower necklaces all point to objects used during ritualistic ceremonies pertaining to a ceremony during which the Zipo crosses a sacred

36See Guerrero.

37 In a 2017 study on Colombia’s gold supply chain, The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development stated that “war crimes and serious violations of international humanitarian law are not a new phenomenon in Chocó. For decades, the region has been at the heart of Colombia’s civil conflicts, suffering massacres, high levels of homicides, and displacement. Illegal actors have continued to strengthen their hold over Chocó, financed in no small part by illegal gold mining. Violence against the indigenous and Afro communities has also continued unabated” (4-5).

82 lake to offer gold to the Gods, in return of which the zipo’s society will be protected. With the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, the sacred expenditure of the zipo rituals gave sort to an entirely different type of expenditure – one in which the gold is recuperated at the cost of the environment, and recirculated into European trade markets. While this image does not foreground wasted objects as the other photographs of The Prophecy, the mercury dripping down the zipa’s dress dramatizes the deprivation of sacredness and spirituality that the water was previously endowed with. It reduces water to a polluted and exploitable material.

The last prophecy of the series so far, the Chòco photograph helps reframe the artist’s project in an entirely new light. Not only does it explore another relatively unknown site of capitalist extraction and pollution; it does also point to a system of belief and a worldview that is different from Western secular ecologies, but also very much different from the ones in Senegal too. The first nine images of The Prophecy suggested a world ruled by animist forces, invisible energies and entities. With Chòco, however, The Prophecy gives light to a worldview based on human hierarchy. Indeed, the zipa, albeit inferior to the Gods it serves, is superior to the rest of the population that it rules over. In that sense, Chòco poses the question of the relevance of a hierarchical worldview in a decolonial project. As any hierarchy presupposes a form of systemic violence, and vice-versa, to what extent is Chòco proposing a relationality that is inclusive and oriented towards justice for all? I would argue that while Chòco reveals a world that is still hierarchical, such hierarchy is less grounded in the exploitation of humans by other humans than in the structuring function of the myth – namely that of El Dorado, here. Myth, Chòco suggests, not only structures social relationships between the zipa and the community; it does also become a form of history which allows the zipa and, in another context, of the djinn, to create their own cosmovisions and ecologies. Located at the margin, or even at the liminal border space that 83

Gloria Anzaldúa sees fundamental for understanding relationships between dominant and dominated societies, myth articulates the passage between the secular and sacred and makes them cohabit together instead of separating them.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have traced the complex exigencies, outcomes, but also impasses, of The

Prophecy’s visionary ecology, particularly as it relates to decolonial ecocriticism. As The

Prophecy creates ecologies alternative to colonial and neocolonial environmental policies, its ecological imaginaries challenge the dominance of American and European epistemologies of ecological thoughts. To do so, it calls attention to the role of waste in disentangling long-held

Cartesian dichotomies separating man from the material environment. But The Prophecy also contributes to decolonial ecocritical debates for the questions it does not answer. Indeed, despite the fact it creates networks that challenge Cartesian dualisms, The Prophecy does yet not create viable ecological alternatives to globalization; nor does it bring any solution to the issues it addresses. It would indeed be naive to expect of an artwork to counter the consequences of climate change. Yet, as the work borrows from marginalized worldviews and fosters collaborative artistic practices with local fashion designers and NGOs, it performs a relational and inclusive practice of art.

It is also important to recall that Monteiro has encountered difficulties in financing his project. As he resists business sponsorship, Monteiro demonstrates that it is still possible to export alternative ecological visions from a local to the global scale, albeit at the expense of formatting “subaltern” visibilities. These visions form local, national, transnational networks that intersect and dialogue with Western hegemonic ecological models. Participatory in nature, these 84 projects create ecologies of the twenty-first century that invest the spectators in the past histories of African countries and projects them in counter-futures.

In that sense, Monteiro and the artists of his generation perform what Edouard Glissant calls “an aesthetic of the earth” in Poetics of Relation. Advocating self-sufficiency (but not isolation), Glissant foregrounds the importance of connecting translocal, regional, and international networks of solidarity across the Global South to challenge the imposition of a dominant culture and economy. Such connections are also crucial for the nations of the Global

South to create forms of resistance that will reassert their historical, economic, and cultural independence:

Esthétique de la terre ? Dans la poussière famélique des Afriques ? Dans la boue des Asies inondées ? Dans les épidémies, les exploitations occultées, les mouches bombillant sur les peaux en squelette des enfants ? […] Oui. Mais esthétique du bouleversement et de l'intrusion. Trouver des équivalents de fièvre pour l'idée "environnement" (que pour ma part je nomme entour), pour l'idée "écologie", qui paraissent si oiseuses dans ces paysages de la désolation. Imaginer des forces de boucan et de doux-sirop pour l'idée de l'amour de la terre, qui est si dérisoire ou qui fonde souvent des intolérances si sectaires. (Poétique 165-166)

[An aesthetics of the earth? In the half-starved dust of Africas? In the mud of flooded Asias? In epidemics, masked forms of exploitation, flies buzz-bombing the skeleton skins of children? […] Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion. Finding the fever of passion for the ideas of "environment" (which I calI surroundings) and "ecology," both apparently such futile notions in these landscapes of desolation. Imagining the idea of love of the earth – so ridiculously inadequate or else frequently the basis for such sectarian intolerance – with aIl the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup. Aesthetics of rupture and connection.] (Poetics 150)

For Glissant, the “love of the earth” seems little in comparison with capitalist exploitation of nature. His call for an aesthetics of rupture and connexion finds an answer in The Prophecy, an answer which transcends geographical, political, social, racial, and artistic boundaries.

Glissant’s aesthetics of the earth poses a crucial question: in a world led by global capitalism and structured by neoliberalism, how can people, nations, continents, let alone 85 marginalized communities, find modes of resilience and resistance to the ever-lasting impact of colonization, global warming, structural poverty, and environmental violence? The answer, The

Prophecy suggests, is perhaps that there is no solution on the horizon. But while The Prophecy does not propose any solution, the work resists any melancholy representation of Africa as an eternal victim of white imperialism. Working through the modern/colonial binaries undergirding global capitalism (such as modern/traditional, empowered/disempowered, agency/passivity), The

Prophecy recalls that African ecologies of the future will also face dialectical complexities. The answer to such an impasse is not to be found in a “happy middle” between these paradoxes.

Rather, such answer is located in the networks formed by African ecologies and the relationalities they offer.

CHAPTER TWO: ECOLOGY AS HISTORY-MAKING PRACTICES IN INDIAN OCEAN IMAGINARIES

Abstract

The previous chapter of this dissertation explored how art creates visionary ecologies in the context of climate change in Senegal. In this chapter, I explore the role of indigenous women and female entities in the context of the militarization of the Chagos lslands (1960s-2010s) and the 1947 Malagasy Insurrections. More specifically, I look at how Mauritian visual artist Nirveda

Alleck and Malagasy author Jean-Luc Raharimanana dramatize female embodiments of militarization and violence to create ecologies of resistance to the ongoing and simultaneous dispossession of women and nature. I analyze how Continuum Chagos (2011, Alleck) and Nour,

1947 (2001, Raharimanana) construct ecologies that explore the role played by women in both historical instances. They revalue what such history has discarded, i.e. the history of female

Chagossian activists who have been instrumental to the Chagossians’ struggle to return to their native island and, in the case of Madagascar, female narratives of the land that have conditioned the post-independence birth of the island as a nation. I argue that, by positing women and/or female entities at the heart of their ecological works, these two figures resist any essentialization of the land and women as exploitable and disposable by a white, male, European central subject.

By doing so, they challenge Western teleological and heteropatriarchal histories of modernity and their colonial and neocolonial ecologies, which have precisely posited women and nature as equally passive. They also propose modes of recording history that are multilinear, multidimensional, and that inscribe each subject in a vaster relational ecology that destabilizes

Western hierarchies between humans and nature. In that sense, Alleck’s and Raharimanana’s 87 projects perform decolonial works that seek to address and redress the erasures of Western history. They posit indigeneity as a history-making practice.

Moving from Senegal to the Chagos Islands and Madagascar, I demonstrate how the visionary ecology of Chapter One and ecology as indigenous history-making practice in Chapter

Two connect beyond their shared appeal to create alternatives to French and European modernity/coloniality. By shifting from West to East Africa, I want to suggest that the ecologies of each work create relational modes of belonging, of understanding, and of making history.

Registering these alternatives to the ecologies and economies of modernity/coloniality, I believe, is crucial to a decolonial approach to Francophone decolonial ecocriticism, as it dis-essentializes

Francophone spaces as united only linguistically and through a shared colonial past.

Introduction

In her paintings Continuum Chagos (2011), Nirveda Alleck exposes the situation of individuals uprooted from their native Chagos Islands, with a focus on the women born on and expelled from the islands. Considered as “British Indian Ocean Territory” since 1965, the

Chagos Islands form an archipelago located in the north of the Indian Ocean and have served as a US-owned military zone since the early 1970s. When Alleck exhibited her work in 2011, the

Chagos Islands were still disputed between the United Kingdom and Mauritius. The thousands of

Chagossians displaced in the 1960s were still not allowed to come back to their native soil. A tribute to displaced individuals, families, and communities, but also to their descendants,

Continuum Chagos proposes a reading of the Chagossian history based on indigenous embodiments of historical trauma by women.

Continuum Chagos mobilizes indigenous women to question capitalist patriarchy,38 which militarization and environmentalism are reproducing on both women and landscapes. Her portrayals of disposable female indigenous lives intersect with the work of Malagasy novelist

Jean-Luc Raharimanana. In Nour, 1947 (2001), Raharimanana traces the ongoing consequences of slavery and colonization in Madagascar, at a crucial moment of the island’s history – 1947, the year when the Malagasy anti-colonial uprisings were brutally repressed by the French. A polyphonic novel intertwining the voices of white missionaries, indigenous rebels, and mythological creatures, Nour, 1947 also accounts for the ethnic diversity and conflicts in

Madagascar. The work deconstructs the colonizer’s unilinear historical narrative and creates its own myth – that of a new nation rising up from centuries of oppression. The myth of

38 As Karen J. Warren recalls in Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000), “the term capitalist patriarchy stresses the ways in which capitalism, as one version of the gender division of labor, gives men control over, and access to, resources not given to women” (26). 89

Madagascar, in this novel, is the indigenous myth of the witch Konantitra, the ancient mother/land who birthed the island and its enslaved children. Konantitra, the woman-water, embodies the land of Madagascar. Because she embodies the island’s memory, she offers counter-histories to Western narratives of civilization, progress, and enlightenment.

Focusing on the condition of Chagossian women evicted from the Chagos Islands in the early 1970s for UK-US militarization purposes and on the Malagasy female myth of the

Mother/Land around the 1947 anti-colonial insurrection, I explore how Alleck’s and

Raharimanana’s works construct ecologies revaluing the role played by women in both historical instances. They revalue what Western histories of colonization and neocolonial militarization have left out, i.e. the history of female Chagossian activists who have been instrumental to the

Chagossians’ struggle to return to their native island and, in the case of Madagascar, narratives of the land that have conditioned post-independence birth of the island as a nation. I argue that, as they posit indigenous women and/or female entities at the heart of their ecologies, they perform a decolonial work that resists any essentialization of the land and women as exploitable and disposable by a white, male, European central subject. By doing so, they challenge Western teleological and heteropatriarchal history and their colonial and neocolonial ecologies which have precisely posited women and nature as equally passive. Alleck’s and Raharimanana’s works suggest practices of time and space that construct other histories intersecting within, against, or at the periphery of Western history of colonization. Because the female body serves as a locus for rewriting history from an indigenous perspective, it also suggest that indigeneties are embodied history-making practices that can challenge Western heteropatriarchal writing of colonial and neo-colonial history. 90

Exploring the roles performed by indigenous female figures in Alleck’s and

Raharimanana’s works, I believe, also helps resist homogenizing representations of Global South women as all united against the ongoing consequences of global capitalism. To resist such homogenization, I analyze their works from a decolonial ecofeminist perspective. Ecofeminism, a termed coined in 1974 by Françoise d’Eaubonne, is an activist political movement whose philosophy rests on the basic premise that both nature and women have suffered from what sociologist Maria Mies and Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva call “the capitalist patriarchal world system” (2). But when ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s, it did not yet address the concerns of all women. The displacement of thousands of Chagossians from their native island, and the protests organized by Chagossian women in particular, found little echo in an ecofeminism that was mostly (though not exclusively) white, middle-class, and Anglo-

American. Although d’Eaubonne was aware of the plight of what she called “third-world women,” her text Feminism or Death glossed over the particularities of Global South women, who were just like women in northern societies – the victims of global “gynophobia” (22). The concept of “female solidarity” emerged as an all-encompassing term that would unify all women together, regardless of their race, sexual orientation, economic background and other discriminating factors.

In line with the more recent trends of decolonial ecofeminism, led by Shiva and Mies, I demonstrate how Alleck and Raharimanana mobilize indigenous female figures to challenge the debris left by French and British colonial regimes and the neocolonial US military industry. I intervene in ecofeminist critiques of capitalism and globalization, which, I contend, have created 91 a romanticized Global South united through an ideal of “female solidarity.”39 As I foreground the roles played by indigenous women in the delinking from French, British, and US imperialisms, I also explore how these women create alternatives to what Quijano terms “coloniality.” For

Quijano, coloniality operates through racial classification. Quijano’s notion of coloniality focuses on the material and economic relations that such classification entails for racialized subjects. While Quijano mentions gender briefly in his study on coloniality, I believe that works such as Nour, 1947 and Continuum Chagos demonstrate the urgency to tackle the question of coloniality from a gender and environmental perspective. Decolonial thinkers such as Gloria

Anzaldúa and Maria Lugones have explored how coloniality affects “third-world” women in the context of Latin America. I believe that such approach is also useful in a Francophone scholarship that is opening up to a more inclusive decolonial thought too.

My intervention in decolonial ecofeminism is therefore intersectional in that it seeks to understand how the alternative relationalities constructed in Raharimanana’s and Alleck’s works are complicated by gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic particularities. Be they the reverse side of heaven-like postcards or mythical spaces, Alleck’s and Raharimanana’s alterglobal indigenous ecologies manifest differently, adopt different trajectories, but share a common goal of challenging all-encompassing categories that erase the particularities of the Global Souths. In

Continuum Chagos and Nour, 1947, the female indigenous body becomes an environment that challenges the limits of what Edward Said calls “imaginative geographies.” Crucial to the writing of Western colonial history, “imaginative geographies” intersect space, power, and knowledge to construct mis-perceptions of a given environment. These three poles of control create a narrative

39 The recent publication of Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion (Eaton and Lorentzen, 2003) has also proved seminal in redirecting postcolonial ecofeminist debates on the issues faced by indigenous women throughout the world. 92 that justifies the domination and appropriation of colonized environments, i.e., their peoples, cultures, and histories. Imaginative geographies, then, have influenced the ways Global South environments such as Madagascar and the Chagos have been constructed through a Western lens, and how they perceive and represent themselves today. In addition to mapping these environments as wild, exotic, and exploitable, I would further argue that the imaginative geographies of Global South spaces have also defined certain notions of indigeneity, stripping indigenous populations of their right to self-representation – in other words, of their own cultural, literary and visual sovereignty.

As Alleck and Raharimanana foreground female indigenous experiences from which counter-geographies and counter-histories emerge, they create alterglobal imaginaries that disentangle questions linked to global indigeneity. In “L’Alter/mondialisme: Imaginaire mauricien et solidarités transnationales,” Kumari Issur recalls that contemporary Mauritian literature is oriented towards the present and the future, and promotes solidarity in a world organized by liberal economy and neocolonialism. For Issur, alterglobalization means

un monde organisé autrement, qui résisterait à l’ordre international de l’économie libérale et du néocolonialisme. Cette écriture nourrie par l’empathie se préoccupe du devenir d’autres peuples avec lesquels elle établit des ponts de solidarité dans la souffrance. (24)

[a world organized in other ways and that would resist the international order of liberal and neocolonial economy. [An alterglobal] writing is one of empathy and is concerned with the becoming of other peoples with whom it builds up bridges of solidarity through suffering.]

While I believe that there are other factors than suffering through which solidarity can emerge

(such as artistic, ecological, and social forms of partnership), I find Issur’s concept of

“alterglobalization” very appealing when it comes to indigenous histories, ecologies, and cosmologies. The “other world” that Issur delineates points to other ecologies that are more 93 inclusive of peoples, environments, histories, and cultures left out from the making of Western history and economy.

Built upon alterity, the “other world” is not a world that defines itself only as “othered by” or “other than.” It is a world that is always “other” only because it does not conform to a single pattern of relationality. It is a world that constantly regenerates itself by imagining, reshaping, and constituting new forms of relationship between the self and the other, between man and woman, between human beings and nature. In that sense, what Issur calls “other peoples” is instrumental for understanding how these other worlds are constructed and what identities they construct. The “other peoples,” according to Issur, are the “démunis/subalternes”

(“dispossessed/subalterns”; 21). Alleck’s Chagossian women, and Raharimanana’s motherland are such examples of other peoples, dispossessed and subaltern. As people who have been othered, they help interrogate how alterity and indigeneity are constructed. More specifically, their literary and visual constructions question the idea that alterity, indigeneity and bonds of solidarity are constructed through common oppression, common suffering, and common exploitation in the face of global capitalism.

In this chapter, I investigate how Alleck and Raharimnana actively construct indigenous ecologies and cosmologies that challenge the notion of a universal indigenous subject and the notion of a unilinear Anglo-European history. Alleck’s and Raharimanana’s works are neither the sole works addressing such concerns, nor are they exemplary of a type of literature/art that resists the universalization of indigenous people. Yet, their works intervene at a crucial moment in the histories of indigenous people. In 2007, the United Nations issued the United Nations

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.40 This document “establishes a universal

40 Subsequently referenced as “UNDRIP.” 94 framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the indigenous peoples of the world and [...] elaborates on existing human rights standards and fundamental freedoms as they apply to the specific situation of indigenous peoples.” In a context of increased discrimination against indigenous peoples from Brazil, Northern America, or Australia, such declaration harbored the promise of a fairer treatment, recognition, and inclusivity of indigenous populations by nation-states. Yet, because the Declaration did not define the term “indigenous” and understood it as a self-evident category, it created a “global indigeneity” (Merlan 306), i.e. a label to be applied onto all indigenous peoples without distinguishing them. Such label overlooks the complex political, social, racial, ethnic, and gender-related entanglements at the core of

“indigeneity.”41 As the UNDRIP proposes a model of global indigeneity, I believe that it extends the stereotypes associated with colonial imaginative geographies to their occupants too.

While the UNDRIP understands indigeneity as a label and a juridical status, this chapter takes on a different approach to the term. Rather than looking at indigeneity as a status granted upon indigenous peoples from above (i.e. from governments), it understands indigeneity as “a way of being in the world” (Herman 14)42 a practice of space, time, and being, arising from specific sites that all create their own indigeneities. As Lindsay Skog argues in “Thinking With

Indigeneity: Imperatives and Provocations” (4-8), the concept of indigeneity has too often been broadly understood as a label stamped on communities reclaiming their rights to their native

41 The loose understanding of the term also left the door open for future problems. If a nation-state such as the USA or France does not recognize the indigeneity of certain peoples, then it can also deny them the rights they should be granted by the Declaration (such as historical reparation or access to lands and resources).

42 Although I agree with Herman that indigeneity performs ways of being in the world, I distance my own understanding of the term from his on at least one point. For Herman, “being indigenous to a place means having a depth of knowledge, understanding, and connection to that place” (14). Such definition of the term, I believe, restricts indigeneity to a matter of place. While it is true that indigeneity has to do with land management and sovereignty, this definition leaves out people who have been displaced and who have yet formed other relationships with in-between, inhabitable spaces. One may think for instance about the Mediterranean Sea for the refugees (cf. Chapter Three) or the urban walls of the banlieue (cf. Chapter Four). 95 lands, and calling for more equitable relationships with the State.43 Rather than understanding

“indigenous” as an adjective defining, and therefore enclosing, human beings and environments,

Skog calls for another use of the term, one that is more dynamic and that envisions indigeneity as a performance more than a state of being. Key to this chapter, I argue, is that indigenous ecologies engage history-making practices that point to the obliterated indigenous sides of colonization and neo-colonial militarization.

Female Bodies and Militarization in Nirveda Alleck’s Continuum Chagos

In 2011, Mauritian painter Nirveda Alleck exhibited Continuum Chagos, a series of four paintings portraying women, men, and children clothed in dresses made of past and present photographs of the Chagos Islands and its people.44 Calling for US and British authorities to face their own responsibility in the uprooting of thousands of Chagossians, Continuum Chagos reveals how the ongoing impact of Cold-War militarization of the Indian Ocean affects indigenous female bodies. When the United Kingdom leased the Chagos Islands to the United

States in 1966, thousands of Chagossian families were forced to leave their native soil for

Mauritius and the Seychelles. The uprooting operation cleared up space for the United States to implant its military base on the island of Diego Garcia, supposedly for the preservation of global security. The base would later play a major role in the Cold War, the Gulf War, and the war in

43 As Charlotte Eubanks and Pasang Yangjee Sherpa argue in “We Are (Are We?) All Indigenous Here, and Others Claims About Space, Place, and Belonging in Asia,” indigeneity” has often been understood around issues of recognition. This conception of indigeneity assumes a common state of structural oppression from a dominant ethnic group vis-a-vis a dominated one. There are also questions of state violence. It is a rights-oriented framework that circulates globally. Therefore it tends to overlooks the particular conditions of experience of indigeneity” (vi).

44 Displayed in artistic venues in Denmark, South Africa, and Mauritius, Continuum Chagos is part of a larger project entitled Continuum Series, which addresses the ongoing precarious situation faced by various countries in the aftermath of colonization across the globe (such as Mauritius, Mali, or Lebanon). What unites the Continuum series across the Chagos Islands, Mali, the USA, Mauritius, and Lebanon, is a sense of unbelonging arising from centuries of colonization and dispossession. For a complete overview of Alleck’s work, see http://www.imaaya.com/portfolio/nirveda-alleck/. 96

Afghanistan. Today the Chagossians are still not allowed to return to their native islands, living in poverty and exclusion in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and England. In Continuum Chagos, as some of the dresses worn by the women are painted photographs of nineteenth-century missionary schools, local indigenous populations, they visually contrast with the other dresses representing more contemporary images of the Chagos Islands – military bases bereft of human presence. The juxtaposition of these different landscapes suggests that the past is embedded in the present, thereby accounting for the ongoing trauma of dispossession on generations of

Chagossians.

In Island of Shame, The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, one of the rare works on the case of the Chagos militarization, historian David Vine suggests that the

Chagossians were considered as “temporary workers” (21) and therefore not ancestrally linked to the land. The Chagossian history started at the end of the 18th century, when the French and the

British imported workers from Africa and India and reduced them to slavery in coconut plantations. Today’s Chagossians are the descendents of these imported slaves, as Chagossian activist Aurélie Marie Lisette Talate (1941-2012) recalled: her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and herself, were all born on Diego Garcia (Pilger). Yet, neither she nor her ancestors benefited from the rights granted by the UNDRIP, partly because they are not considered indigenous and therefore entitled to indigenous rights. Thus while the UK-US authorities deny an indigenous status to today’s Chagossians, on claims that they are not ancestrally linked to the land, the entire Chagossian history challenges the definition of “indigenous” as a matter of land attachment.

In 1966, forty-five years before Alleck exhibited her work, the UK and US made the

Chagos and its inhabitants disposable. In the words of Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at 97 the UK Foreign Office, it was necessary to “be tough about this. The object of the exercise [i.e. the forced displacement of the Chagossians] was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a Committee (the Status of Women does not cover the rights of Birds)” (Norton-Taylor). Gore-Booth’s intertwining of disposable landscapes and disposable indigenous female struggle points to the necessity to investigate how indigenous women have been constructed as naturally disposable in the imaginative geographies of colonization; his insistence on women and indigenous populations also calls for a reflection on how the concept and practices of female indigeneity may challenge the concept of global indigeneity within the context of the Chagossian history.

Gore-Booth’s correspondence foregrounds two aspects of the Chagossian affair. The first one is the uprooting of an entire population from their native soil, the stripping of their human rights, and the non-recognition of the Chagossians as “indigenous” to their land. Such non- recognition was instrumental to the UK-US privatization and militarization of the Chagos Islands in the late 1960s-early 1970s. The second one is the treatment of Chagossian women as comparable to birds and therefore unworthy of being recognized as human beings. Gore-Booth suggest a rhetoric of waste applicable to both environments and human beings. The Chagos inhabitants, carefully NOT designed as indigenous, are just tossed aside, evicted from history.

By not granting an indigenous status to the Chagossians, the UK-US manoeuver insured that the ilois, the islanders, would not be able to claim any right to their island.

As Alleck’s paintings superimposes past and present Chagossians on a common surface – the dress worn by the contemporary Chagossians – they create temporal continuity between ancestors and descendents, thereby challenging the UK refusal to call the Chagossian

“indigenous” because of their supposedly lack of historical and temporal grounding in the island. 98

The colonial photographs used in these paintings create an after-image which grants the

Chagossian ancestors a visibility in a history that has largely forgotten them. Superimposed on the bodies of contemporary Chagossians, the colonial photographs also bring the proof, if it was needed, that twenty-first century Chagossians are indeed entitled to an indigenous status that would secure their right to their own land.

The first image to the series captures Alleck’s project to create a Chagossian transhistorical visual narrative.45 It also epitomizes her attempt at visualizing “the body as a site of memory and memory itself as being a physical space” (Alleck 35). In Continuum Chagos, it is indeed bodies that bear within themselves the indigenous ecology created by the work; because these bodies are memory, they reveal sides of Western histories of colonization that were hidden.

In that sense, the painter’s mobilization of Chagossian people and of their bodies point to a practice of history that is multidimensional and multilinear. While the viewer’s eye immediately sees four women and one man in the foreground, all sense of perspective is annihilated by the white background. As in all the paintings, this white background gives a sense of spacelessness that reproduces the historical, geographical, and cultural uprootedness of the Chagossian people.

The white background creates the “continuum” of the series, as background and foreground merge together into the physical bodies. The people portrayed in this series are live embodiments of the past, as they wear dresses of what seems to be “typical” ethno-photographs, i.e. visual representations of indigenous populations attired in the clothes traditionally worn on coconut plantations.

45 See Alleck 41. For a more detailed version of this image, see Alleck 42. All images analyzed in this chapter are available at http://www.imaaya.com/portfolio/nirveda-alleck/

Occupying a liminal space between past and present, the bodies in the photographs and those that wear the photographs merge together, so much so that it becomes impossible to distinguish foreground and background. Such a merging, or blurring, of temporal and body boundaries, I believe, suggests a commentary on the making of “official” history, which categorizes and hierarchizes historical events according to an order of importance. In Continuum

Chagos, the “small narratives” which were silenced now occupy the foreground, thereby acquiring as much importance and presence as the colonizer’s History.46 As the present embodies the past, the past also steps into the present. Indeed, some parts of the photographed bodies are not printed out on the dress but are directly inscribed in the space of representation occupied by the Chagossian descendants. Such confusion of foreground and background, past and present, accounts for the historical, geographical, but also the judicial limbo in which these subjects still find themselves.

In 2011, it was all the more necessary to address the urgent need to repair the Chagossian history. A year before Alleck exhibited her work, the UK authorities stroke the final coup de grâce as they justified their plan of non-return by converting the Chagos Islands into a natural reserve supposedly threatened by human presence. However, such greenwashing of US military presence aims less at environmental protection than at preserving a strategic positioning in the

Indian Ocean. Besides preventing the Chagossian people from going back home, and in addition to classifying the Chagos Islands as a protected natural reserve, the British and American authorities’ military manoeuver also re-imagined these islands as a virgin paradise untouched by

46 The formation is “smaller narratives” is also reinforced by the anonymity of the individuals represented (except for activist Ferdinand Mandarin). Each painting was made after the artist took pictures of random people in the streets. Significantly, it is once again women who fall in historical oblivion. While the artist could have represented female activist such as Charlesia Alexis, as Mauritian novelist Shenaz Patel had done in Le silence des Chagos (2005), she instead chose a masculine figure. I would argue that such choice consciously and ironically reenacts the precarious visibility of female subjects in their historical and environmental struggles in order to signify the double impact of colonization and militarization on Chagossian women. 100 human presence. The Chagos Islands became terra nullius, nobody’s land. The fact that the militarization of the Chagos attracted little to no attention in the 1960s and 70s – as global media were focusing on the Vietnam War – has also contributed to the historical erasure of an entire people under colonialization and military environmentalism.

But the erasure of the island as a blank soil also contributed to rewrite the colonial and military narrative as Western pro-environmental initiatives. Insisting on the necessity to preserve the pristine nature of the Chagos, an impossible mission given the extant colonial and neocolonial military infrastructure, the greenwashing of the US military actions in the Indian

Ocean creates a complex entanglement between colonization, militarization, and environmentalism. While imaginative geographies are imposed on geopolitical spaces, they also affect their inhabitants, thereby also reorganizing social and environmental relationships. If the

US military can work on the islands, and live there, the native Chagossians are considered as worse than intruders – they become polluting agents endangering archipelagic nature (Milmo).47

In many ways, then, the 2009 decision to convert the Chagos Island into a natural reserve displayed a rhetoric of waste similar to Gore-Booth’s own words in 1966.

I would argue that, as Continuum Chagos challenges and resists the imaginative geographies of the colonized and militarized Chagos Islands, it re-occupies the imaginative geographies created by and sustaining what Macarena Gomez-Barris names “extractive zones.”

For Gomez-Barris, an extractive zone is predicated upon

an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources. [...] Extractive

47 In “Ecofeminist Natures and Transnational Environmental Politics,” Noel Sturgeon recalls that “Like the hegemonic discourse about democracy, the hegemonic discourse of global environmentalism can also be used to impose unjust conditions on the poor and the colonized, who are often represented in this discourse as part of the environmental threat. In some ways, the development of southern environmentalism is a strategy precisely to resist these uses of global environmentalism, in recognition that the environment is now an important terrain of transnational political struggle.” (in Eaton & al. 137)

101

capitalism, then, violently reorganizes territories as well as continually perpetuates dramatic social and economic inequalities that delimit Indigenous sovereignty and national autonomy. (xvii)48

What Gomez-Barris views as a “reorganization” of social ecologies operates here through a conversion of the Chagos Islands, its geographies, and its inhabitants, into commodities and liable assets. Such conversion devaluates humans as non-humans and environments as resources to be exploited. It relies on an economy of space arranging social and ecological relationships along a boundary separating inside and outside, pure and spoiled, past and present, habitable and non-habitable, colonizer and colonized. It is this boundary, marked in UK and US law, that has defined the Chagos Island as a space closed to the rest of the world, except the United States.

It is precisely this space of enclosure that Continuum Chagos reinvests with the presence of the Chagossian past and present history. While Gomez-Barris does not make the link between extractive economies and indigenous memory erasure, the case of the Chagos Islands suggests that extractive militarization, just like colonization, also performs an erasure of the past and communities’ collective memories so as to wipe out entire geographical territories as historical blanks. Extractive militarization, is anchored in imperialist ideology which constructs its own history at the expense of the “smaller narratives” of the ilois. For centuries, the French and

British empires built their colonial projects on the extraction of lands and on the erasure of anything that could constitute collective memory (such as indigenous languages, rituals, social organization). In the second decade of the twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first century, it is no longer colonization per se but US global militarization that performs such erasure. As Vine points out,

48It is important to specify here that Gomez-Barris writes about Latin America, which has its own forms of extractive capitalism that may not apply in the context of the Chagos. Nevertheless, I believe that her concept of “extractive zone” proves useful when it comes to understanding the complex relationships between other forms of land thieves such as the militarization of the entire space of the Chagos Islands. 102

Today [in 2009] the United States has what is likely the largest collection of military bases in world history, totaling more than 5,300 globally and an estimated 1,000 bases outside its own territory of the 50 states and Washington, DC. Slowly, awareness has been growing about this massive deployment of U.S. forces on the sovereign territory of other nations. Many have started referring to the United States as an “Empire of Bases.” (42)

In 2009, Vine was not yet aware of the Wikileaks revelation on the UK-US strategy of converting the Chagos into a marine reserve bereft of “Man Fridays” (Wikileaks). The “empire of bases” Vine defines here, I would argue, has thus also resorted to a greenwashing of the military operations in the Chagos, an operation which has also endangered the flora and fauna of the islands.49

Alleck’s art revisits the extractive conversion of colonization and militarization and revalues what has been devalued – indigenous people, landscapes, and the collective memory that inhabits both. Because Alleck’s women occupy a liminal space between past and present, foreground and background, their bodies become sites of collective resistance and memory capable of challenging what Robert Marzec terms “environmentality.” In the introduction to

Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State, Marzec defines environmentality as

The name for a militarized mentality, one that commandeers a consciousness to wholly rethink and replace a rich, complex, multinarrative environmental history with a single ecosecurity imaginary for the post-Cold War, post-9/11 occasion. It is a pattern of thought that seeks to justify increases in national and civilian security by generating increased amounts of insecurity. [...] Environmentality is essentially environmentalism turned into a policing action. (4)

As Alleck paints colonial photographs over the body of uprooted Chagossian women, she suggests the possibility for these bodily sites to counter historical erasure and regain historical

49 Ironically, as The Independent revealed in 2014, “the American military has poured hundreds of tons of human sewage and waste water into a protected coral lagoon on the British-owned base of Diego Garcia over three decades in breach of environmental rules.” 103 visibility. It is in that sense that the ecology of this work – relational in terms of spaces and temporalities – points to a history-making practice, a practice that is multilinear. Ultimately, as she revisits the imaginative geographies of the extractive zone of the Chagos Islands by salvaging the debris of colonization and militarization, Alleck is not proposing a return to a pre- colonial past in which peaceful peoples would inhabit a pristine nature. This would simply reproduce the greenwashing dynamics of the “environmental” military US project. Rather,

Alleck posits these female bodies as sites of violence that harbor possibilities of historical, social, and ecological regeneration.

For Alleck, Continuum Chagos is a tribute to the Chagossians, and is part of “a larger

‘diasporic’ state of being, almost a conceptual family” (3). As she whites out the background of each photorealistic painting, she renders an uprooting effect that places her subjects in a spatial and temporal void, as it were. In the artist’s statement to the Continuum Chagos series, Alleck claims that

By erasing and whitening out of the background of these paintings (and videos), the immediate visual context is negated. But by the same token, this augments the sense of the presence of these subjects, who are fixed on the surface of the canvases. [...] A mock- anthropological thoroughness in referencing the photographic material that I use as source ensures that there is no sentimentality. The portraying of these subjects eschews a colonial gaze, refuses a rapport de force, revealing instead, the invisible forces that give shape to subjectivities. (3)

While I agree with Alleck’s claim that Continuum Chagos gives shape to subjectivities, and that the work refuses sentimentality or pathos, I want to question her statement that she eschews the colonial gaze in her work. Rather, I believe that she precisely reproduces and redirects the colonial gaze in order to better expose the (non)consideration the world has had for the

Chagossian people. Rather than making the Chagossians an object of scrutiny, she orients the colonial gaze towards marginalized histories. The colonization of the Chagos Islands is not over 104 yet, Alleck’s work suggests, and the Chagossian people are still very much waiting for historical repairing of past atrocities.

Because the Continuum series forms what Alleck sees as a transcendental diasporic state of being, it does yet also run the risk of defining indigeneity only through a collective history of suffering.50 In that sense, then, the transcendental diasporic state of being is similar to “the” indigenous subject of the UNDRIP. It becomes a universal subject uprooted from particular conditions of its emergence. While it is indisputable that suffering is one facet of what unites all these people together historically, I would yet also argue that what unites all the subjects of the

Continuum series is less suffering than the emerging possibilities of an alter/global world in which new subjectivities, new indigeneities, merge. In this alterglobal world, these possibilities create bounds of solidarity in the face of ongoing colonization in the guise of global militarization.

In Continuum Chagos, it is striking to see that these other subjectivities and indigeneities emerge precisely from colonial photography, a tool used to build up and circulate an entire imaginary about the French and British empires. As Alleck states,

In the case of the exiled Chagossian people, I incorporated images based upon photographic memorabilia that the inhabitants left the island with over 40 years ago when forced by the British to vacate the island in exchange for Mauritius’s independence. These visual narratives have given rise over the years to a sort of existence in limbo, belonging to no place, except in the memory of a space. I have treated the body as a site of memory and memory itself as being a physical space. (35)

In a sense, Alleck reproduces the colonial gaze in order to better address and redress the historical erasure of colonization and militarization. Through a “mock-anthropological” gaze (3),

50 As Sandra J.T.M. Evers and Mary Kooy argue, “the image of a group of displaced exiles, locked in a perpetual cycle of liminality and poverty while dreaming of their homeland, is common to most descriptions of refugees. However, there is something both passive and violent about the eviction of the Chagossians. Uprisings, battles and conflicts did not precede the turn of their fate. Chagossians were essentially dealt away with at the global poker table. Having lost their land, they identity was denied to them a posteriori” (2). 105 as she defines it, the artist excavates and reenacts colonial archives in her rewriting of the

Chagossian history. As the individuals pose like their colonized ancestors, they make the past present, and inscribe themselves in the continuum of a history of oppression, dispossession, and extraction. But the continuum is also one of spectatorship. Using colonial photography, the work also implies transhistorical forms of spectatorship – some fueled by colonial fantasies for an ailleurs, an elsewhere full of possibilities, others nourishing fears of global insecurity in a world divided by Cold War tactics.

What the artist defines as a “mock-anthropological” gaze suggests a scientific mode of recording human cultures and documenting their interactions in the construction of the archives of the Empire. As Terence Ranger recalls in “Colonialism, Consciousness and the Camera,” the camera plays a central role in colonization:

In recent work on the imperial ‘othering’ of subject peoples, photography has taken pride

of place. Nothing, it is argued, could better exemplify the intrusive colonial gaze in

Africa than the camera. A triumph of Euro-American technology [...] able to capture –

and at the same time to rearrange – the appearance of exotic environments and peoples;

the camera played many roles. It created ‘landscapes’; it constructed the idea of

‘wildlife’; it produced stereotypical illustrations of ‘tribe’ and ‘race’; it identified

criminals in ‘mugshots’; it gratified colonial desire with soft pornographic postcards of

naked African women. (203)

The “landscapes” that Terence Ranger alludes to, are the postcard images of supposedly

“paradisiac” islands, but also imaginative geographies of exclusion distinguishing the colonized ones from colonizers. Photography performs a conversion of these environments and people into fixed representations alimenting and justifying past and present imperial projects. 106

In that sense, Alleck’s recourse to colonial photography operates a rupture with her land- reclaiming message. For Gomez-Barris, “if we only track the purview of power’s destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalizing viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and finds forms of resisting and living alternatively” (3). So, why mobilize the visual “imperial ruins” of colonization in order to rupture with such colonial past?

How does using the colonizer’s tools help imagine future possibilities and ecofeminist indigeneities? How does she strategize her use of colonial visual propaganda and militarized landscapes without yet limiting the presence and visibility of Chagossian women to a history of suffering?

One possible answer is situated in Alleck’s use of what Karina Eileraas calls “creative negotiation.” In “Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist

Resistance,” Eileraas sees creative negotiation as a strategy for “occup[ying] imagery in order to contest symbolic erasures and violations of difference” (811). Creative negotiation works through stereotypical and reductive representations of colonized subjects, and proposes visualities of “un-othering,” as it were. By doing so, this negotiation process layers up written and visual representations with double (or more) meanings, thereby deconstructing a single visuality of formerly colonized peoples. Key to Alleck’s creative negotiation, I believe, is her use of irony in her recourse to colonial photography. Using colonial photography ironically, Alleck reveals the delayed immediacy of ruins, and violently deconstructs the entire imaginary attached to them, particularly exposing its impact on women. Alleck’s ironic use of photography is close to Debarati Sanyal’s definition of the term as “a performance that preserves the contestatory force traditionally attributed to this trope” (322).51 Alleck’s use of irony harbors the struggle

51 Sanyal proposes “a distinction between irony as a mode of (self) representation doomed to its own cognitive unravelling, and irony as a performance that preserves the contestatory force traditionally attributed to this trope.” 107 between both the contestatory force that Sanyal mentions and the violence that these forces contest.

Continuum Chagos places its strategic negotiation of colonial imagery directly in “the physical as well as the spiritual violence of photography” (Ranger 203). But rather than using these photographs as visual evocations of the past, or than suggesting that the dispossessed

Chagossian people can reappropriate colonial photography as a self-empowering tool, I would argue that Alleck translates the invisible violence that still affects the production of contemporary indigenous visual culture. She exposes how the visual colonial archive still participates in – and is even a form of – human and environmental extraction. If the colonizer is seemingly absent from these paintings, the “rapport de force” Alleck mentions is very much present. This rapport de force is as much about the land that is militarized as it is about the ongoing visual cosmography of this land. In these visual cosmographies, the absence of the colonizer suggests the violence of the colonizing process and methods, but also of its enduring legacy even forty years after.

In the second image of the Continuum Chagos series,52 for instance, the physical violence of dismemberment of the previous painting is no longer present. If the bodies of the colonized and uprooted Chagossians previously merged together, thereby preventing any dissociation, this painting rather suggests a form of distanciation. In the foreground, a woman is wearing a dress on which is painted the photograph of what is most likely a missionary school. While this

Envisioning irony as an agentive force, Sanyal reveals the potential revolutionary force in this trope. As Johan Geertsema recalls, “after all, agency is exactly the purpose of a literature of combat, and irony is not ordinarily associated with committed revolutionary struggle. Indeed, to cite the example of one revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, irony is not something one would readily associate with him. [...] For a long time (at the very least since Hegel) there has been widespread suspicion of irony, a suspicion partly founded on the assumption that irony disables agency, and that it is therefore irresponsible” (752).

52 See Alleck 41, available at http://www.imaaya.com/portfolio/nirveda-alleck/. 108 painting does not immediately reveal the physical violence of colonial extraction, it leaves to the viewer the task to imagine the violence surrounding the construction of the education infrastructure in colonized spaces, as well as the violence of what is taught in these educative settings – of which historical, linguistic, and collective identity erasure is only one example. If

Karina Eileraas defines creative negotiation as contestation, then I would also argue that

Continuum Chagos goes beyond resistance to symbolic erasures and violations of difference.

Alleck’s women are produced by but also resist the extractive economy of colonization and militarization; but they also find in such economy the possibility to create social ecological networks of solidarity among women.

In Continuum Chagos, it is indigenous women who embody the trauma of land theft.

While most of the pictures also portray a man – Chagossian activist Ferdinand Mandarin – it is predominantly women that occupy the space of the painting. The erasure of the island’s history, both in the words of Gore-Booth (“the Status of Women does not cover the rights of Birds”) and in the 2009 greenwashing manoeuver, contributes to minimize the role played by Chagossian women in reclaiming their land. As Vine points out, Chagossian women have always played an important role in the Chagossian society and history as they have politically organized the

Chagossians, have taken activist measures such as hunger strikes to protest the dire working conditions in Mauritius, and were jailed for resisting British authorities.53 As the primary caregivers of their family, they have also occupied a major role in labor organization. The organization of the Chagossian women eventually led to the formation of the Chagossian

53 The Chagossian women’s activism eventually conditioned the British authorities to give more compensation to the islois in 1979. However, few of the Chagossians were aware that to claim such compensation they would have to thumb-print a renunciation form (Vine 167). 109

Refugees Group by two major female figures of the movement, Charlesia Alexis, Aurélie Marie-

Lisette Talate, and Rita Elyse Bancoult.

Because Continuum Chagos is inscribed in a longer genealogy of female resistance to militarization, and because it is indigenous women who wear and embody the imaginative geographies of the Chagos Islands, it is important to explore how the work envisions the female body as a space of contestation, resistance, and occupancy. During the 2017 art exhibition Ethics in a World of Strangers, which featured Alleck’s work, art curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C.

Nzewi commented that

In Alleck’s Continuum, the individual body operates as part of a network of other bodies. Subjectivity in relation to space is an important aspect of Alleck’s picture making process. With human forms occupying parts of otherwise sparse surfaces, suggesting an unending loop of human connections across societies and national boundaries, Continuum also begs the question about Alleck’s position as a foreigner among local people… (in “Nirveda Alleck, Eric Van Hove : Une attitude et une curiosité cosmopolites”)

That Continuum forges relationships across different parts of the world, different histories, and different subjectivities is undeniable. In Continuum Dakar, or Continuum USA, for instance, people of different ethnicities and economic background cohabit together in a space of multicultural encounters. But unlike the other Continuum paintings, Continuum Chagos suggests isolation rather than “an unending loop of human connections across societies and national boundaries.” Such isolation, I believe, reflects the ongoing marginalization of Chagossians displaced to Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom. As Evers & Kooy pointed out in 2011,

Currently, about 750 of the 1,500–2,000 evicted islanders are still alive. It is estimated that 4,000 Chagossians and their descendants dwell in Mauritius, about 550 in the Seychelles and about 1,000 in the UK [...]. They occupy the lowest rung of these societies, where their lot is one of impoverishment, discrimination, high unemployment, degrading housing conditions, ill health, and educational difficulties. The Chagossians blame lamizer—their misery—on being dérasiné, literally ‘uprooted.’ They nurture the 110

memory of a recently lost utopia, where food is abundant, with free housing, education and health care, and where a sense of community prevails. (2)

As Continuum Chagos portrays past and present generations of Chagossian families, it also recalls the historical isolation of the Chagossians over the last fifty years. The work puts in conversation three very specific historical moment – the colonization of the Chagos in the 19th century, the military occupation from the late 1960s to nowadays and the current ongoing state of dispossession of the Chagossians in 2011. These three moments are marked by the exclusion of the Chagossians from the construction of Western History and visual culture. While the US anti- military and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s oriented their gaze towards

Vietnam, the Chagos fell into historical oblivion.54

If the plight of the Chagossians was not foregrounded by global news media, it also found little echo in the US or South-African civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s. Laura Jefferey recalls that, overall, little concern was expressed for the Chagossians, except in the Mauritian wing of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the MLF, i.e. Muvman Liberasyon Fam (Jeffery).

Working closely with Chagossian women in 1980-81, the MLF brought to the fore the involvement of Chagossian women in the liberation of women from economic, health, living, racial, ethnic, and gender precarity. As recent studies have shown, Chagossian female deportees and their descendants have fallen in precarious situations since their forced removal in the 1960s.

In Dérasiné: The Expulsion and Impoverishment of The Chagossian People, David Vine, S.

Wojciech Sokolowski, and Philip Harvey recall that, in 1980, “53.8 percent of families depended on women as the primary money earner and 62.8 percent of women were unmarried” (54). As a result, many Chagossian women fell in economic precarity, often resorting to prostitution as a

54 With the exception of John Pilger’s documentary Stealing a Nation (2004), the visibility of the Chagossians is still very limited on a global scale. 111 source of income (157).55 If the mass deportation from the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, the

Seychelles, and the UK has inflicted trauma on all the Chagossians, economic and sexual precarity has touched mostly Chagossian women. In “Muvman Liberasyon Fam: Women’s

Struggle, Class Struggle, and Antimilitarism in Mauritius” (1989), the MLF collective recalled how the involvement of the Chagossian women in their anti-patriarchal struggle:

Since their arrival in Mauritius, the women islanders, who are the leaders in their community, have started a long and hard struggle to win their basic rights for a decent living in Mauritius as well as to demand the ousting of the U.S. base from their island and their right to go back there and live there. [...] Their struggle has been very important in the fight for demilitarization, but it also has brought many developments in the women’s movement. (Vine 120-121)

The joined efforts of the MLF and of the Chagossian women led up to initiatives such as hunger strike (1978), which led to financial compensations for Chagossians. Yet the MLF and the

Chagossian women did not achieve the demilitarization of the Chagos Islands; nor did they succeed in their attempt at repatriating all Chagossians to their homeland.

However, they revealed the necessity for Western feminist and environmentalist discourses to open up to more inclusive approaches to militarization, colonization, and gender oppression, approaches that would recognize the plight of and role played by “third-world women.” At the intersection of environmental extraction and patriarchal capitalism, the case of the Chagos Islands calls for a redirection of postcolonial ecofeminist discussions on social, economic, environmental and historical oppression of women all over the world. The ecofeminism of the 1970s was produced by and talked to women living predominantly in white,

55 “With women especially limited in opportunities to earn income, prostitution appears to have been a particularly acute problem in Mauritius. Botte’s 1980 study of Chagossian women found at least 23 Chagossian women engaged in prostitution. Although prostitution is not a subject that most Chagossians are eager to discuss, our research found (in Mauritius) that prostitution remains a realm of employment for some Chagossian women” (54). 112 middle-class, Euro-American environments. In that sense, Alleck’s Continuum Chagos call for more diversity and inclusion in global ecofeminisms.56

As Heather Eaton and Lois Ann Lorentzen have pointed out in their introduction to

Ecofeminism and Globalization, the consequences of colonization, militarization, and Western environmentalist initiatives in the Global South fall mostly on women. If ecofeminist scholars have focused predominantly on precarious indigenous communities in Asia, South America, and

Africa, then, exploring the case the Chagos Islands in the work of Nirveda Alleck helps disentangle the complex relationships between colonization, militarization, and environmentalism. While the work of Nervida Alleck has not yet attracted the attention of scholars, its engagement with issues of indigenous belonging, uprooting, and the trauma linked to forced displacement and impossible return is crucial to contemporary global ecocritical debates. The work’s focus on the ongoing militarization of subaltern environments points to the necessity to consider spaces that are still being occupied for imperialistic purposes. Its insistence on female bodies echoes ecofeminist discourses on the relationship between female oppression and the extraction of natural environments for global financial profit. Because it links past and present, it does also point to a relationality that, over the last twenty-five years, has become central to ecofeminism, which is now more inclusive of unseen, unheard of, and unrepresented spaces of oppression such as the Chagos.57

56 In “Gender and the Environment”, Mary Mellor points out that “although more recent ecofeminist thinking around the issues of gender and the environment has taken into account the experience of women in the so-called developing countries, most of the early ecofeminist writing was based on an analysis of gender division in Western society. There was a tendency to generalize from the experience of white, Western, middle-class women and their préoccupations or at least to speak of “women’ in undifferentiated terms” (in Eaton & al. 43).

57 The redirection of ecofeminism and ecocriticism at large towards more inclusivity and relationality, I argue, intersects with the major preoccupations of decoloniality. See for instance the way Mies and Shiva define ecofeminist, with a vocabulary that echoes directly decolonial philosophy: “An ecofeminist perspective propounds the need for a new cosmology and a new anthropology which recognizes that life in nature (which includes human beings) is maintained by means of co-operation, and mutual care and love. Only in this way can we be enabled to 113

Alleck does yet not define her work as feminist or ecofeminist. Nor does she explicitly mention militarization as a threat to local populations and cultures. Rather, she defines her art as working towards the definition of a global village encompassing all human beings without any ethnic, racial, religious, or gender differentiation. This statement may hold true for the other

Continuum series, which portray male and female individuals in Lebanon, Mali, and the United

States without foregrounding gender inequality specifically. However, I would argue that

Continuum Chagos disentangles the artist’s creation of a “global village” inhabited by a

“diasporic state of being” (Alleck 3). Instead, it foregrounds an ecofeminist solidarity revaluing indigenous historical visibility and the role played by Chagossian women in the anti- militarization struggle in the Indian Ocean. Significantly, the militarized landscape of Diego

Garcia is occupied and shared by the bodies of young and older women, which points out the necessity for transgenerational female solidarity. Just like, historically, it is through the female body that the colonizer has appropriated lands, here it is through the female body that one can overcome geopolitical, historical boundaries.

But what Alleck’s embodiments of militarized landscapes also suggest is that the woman’s body is more than a vehicle for a national imaginary. Continuum Chagos offers possibilities for female networks of transhistorical and transgenerational solidarity to emerge and challenge the geopolitical boundaries created by Western militarization of the Indian Ocean. Her work seeks to preserve indigenous collective memory in the age of globalization, to challenge environmental destruction by capitalism, to counter the erasure of indigenous visibilities by global news media, and to recognize the mobilization of women in the Chagossian struggle. It

respect and preserve the diversity of all life forms, including their cultural expressions, as true sources of our well- being and happiness” (6). 114 partakes in ecofeminist efforts to take down a whole system that values warfare over human lives and their environments and that is based on social, racial, and gender inequality.

Twenty-first century ecofeminism has highlighted the role played by indigenous women in anti-military campaigns across the globe, often insisting on causes such as the Green Belt movement led by Wangari Maathai. These movements have often been cited as examples of how ecofeminist projects improve the lives of women in precarious working and living conditions.

The case of Chagossian women could yet be just another example of how patriarchal capitalism has structured extractive economies and relationships between environments and people. Yet I think that this case pushes even further current ecofeminist discussions on globalization, environmentalism, and women’s rights. What is so particular about the Chagos Islands is that the

Chagossians no longer inhabit their native land and their struggle does not address issues of land management (as in getting financial help for developing farming devices, for instance), control of resources, or local infrastructures. Their struggle addresses questions of land ownership and the necessity to resist the military enclosure of the Chagos Islands, but such resistance is organized outside the island. While most postcolonial ecofeminist works explore the effects of militarization on precarious communities living under war-torn or heavily-militarized zones, there has been no war in the Chagos, and the Chagossian inhabitants are not currently living in a heavily-militarized environment (simply since they do not live in the Chagos). Thus as ecofeminist works tend to conceive of militarization as a physical force imposed on people, the case of the Chagos Islands begs the question of the ongoing effects of militarization, decades after entire families were displaced.

In Continuum Chagos, then, Alleck demonstrates the possibility for a displaced community to resist the enclosure of its own island from the outside, but also to involve younger 115 generations supposed to fight for a land they have never known. Conceiving of art as a space of geopolitical and historical encounter, Alleck suggests that the Chagossians can re-occupy the imaginative geographies of their colonized and militarized Chagos while also defining strategies of transnational, transgenerational solidarity in the face of “global environmentality.” A response to the ongoing militarization of the Chagos Islands, Continuum Chagos creates indigenous ecologies focused on feminine embodiments of warfare and reveals how the Cold War division of the world still affects the construction of indigenous female identities in the twenty-first century. Yet this series is less about women suffering than it is about women striving for the recognition of their past and present condition, for fairer compensation, and for access to the right of returning to their native land.

Land, Motherhood, and Indigenous Ecologies in Nour, 1947

Nour, 1947 engage with indigenous ecologies as history-making practices. As it focuses on one indigenous myth of Madagascar, and as it explores its resonance across the variety of ethnicities throughout Malagasy history, Nour, 1947 also further complicates the question of global indigeneity. Both Continuum Chagos and Nour, 1947 explore different facets of the condition of indigenous women in the Global South. According to Anne Garland Mahler, the term “Global South” supposedly underscores the sharing of a “common” history of oppression and of transnational solidarity (99-123). Yet, ecocritical discussions on the Global South – paradoxically ecofeminist discussions – have tended to homogenize Global South indigenous women as a single “third-world” individual regardless of geographical, economic, historical, ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual backgrounds. Because Nour, 1947 and Continuum Chagos were published/exhibited at different times, and because they point to different indigenous ecologies, they automatically render different experiences of concepts such as freedom, justice, 116 oppression, or memory. The second part of this chapter explores how Nour, 1947 mobilizes these concepts and complicate global indigeneity through what I call indigeneity as a “history-making practice.”

In Nour, 1947, Malagasy novelist and poet Jean-Luc Raharimanana explores the

Malagasy uprisings of 1947 during which the indigenous population of Madagascar tried to overthrow colonial authorities, gain independence, and achieve political sovereignty in a newly configured post-WWII world. The female indigenous character Nour, whose name means “light” in Arabic, excavates indigenous histories of the land to precisely shed light on an event that is still unknown today. In “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa: The United States, France, and the

Madagascar Revolt of 1947,” for instance, historian Douglas Little argues that “Madagascar, like the rest of Africa south of the Sahara, was overshadowed during the late 1940s by more pressing concerns in Central Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Far East” (528). Just like the

Chagos Islands two decades later, then, the 1947 Malagasy uprisings did not benefit from the same Western media coverage and world leaders’ attention as other cases of brutal decolonization (such as India, or, later, Vietnam).58

Yet the uprisings lasted two years and it is estimated that about 90,000 Malagasy civilians and combatants died. From March 29, 1947 to December 1948, the uprisings raged throughout the island, only to be brutally repressed and defeated by the French. Despite the significance of the 1947 Malagasy uprisings in the context of colonization, then, the task to unveil the atrocities of the massacre to the public eye still remains to be done. As Valerie

58 For Little, “the abortive Malagasy uprising has received little attention in the English-speaking world, largely because scholars have focused on other more successful anticolonial struggles in South and Southeast Asia” (528). To the exception of few scholars such as Little, Valerie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo and Jennifer Cole, the 1947 Malagasy uprisings have not been sufficiently documented in contemporary research either. 117

Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo suggests in “Madagascar, 29 mars 1947: Tabataba ou parole des temps troubles,” much of what is known today about this historical event comes from French official narratives, whose archives were for a long time unopened to the public.59 The Malagasy version of the event, by contrast, has been circulating mostly through orality, hence the difficulty to collect testimonies. Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo points out France and Madagascar’s collective amnesia – in other words, both sides either ignore or misremember the event and its implications for past and present Madagascar. If contemporary governments fail to recognize the impact of the uprisings on today’s Malagasy collective memory and history,60 then, a piece such as Nour, 1947, suggests that art and literature can dig out the uprisings from historical oblivion by mobilizing the other sides of French colonial history – those of indigenous peoples.

Published ten years before Continuum Chagos, Nour, 1947 addresses the urgency of a whole nation facing decades of economic insularity in a world that has become more and more globalized. When the novel was published in 2001, Madagascar was undergoing tumultuous presidential elections, which harbored the (short-lived) promise of positive changes in terms of economy, tourism, and social relationships. Scholars such as Patricia Pia-Celerier have explored how Raharimanana’s plurivocal narration delineates "un nouveau temps, un nouvel espace et un

59 It is only around 2005, when former France President Jacques Chirac initiated a repentance movement about the atrocities of colonization, that these events became more and more known the public (Magdelaine- Andrianjafitrimo). In many ways the scarcity of archives around the 1947 events is similar to that of the slave industry of the Mascarene region in general. For historian Richard B. Allen, “if the history of silence' that surrounds slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean is not nearly as deafening as it once was, our understanding of the traffic in chattel labor in this part of the world nevertheless remains far from complete. This state of affairs stems partly from the relative scarcity of archival sources on slavery and slave trading in the Indian Ocean compared to those that exist for the Atlantic” (47).

60 As Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo suggests, it is not only French colonial authorities and successive governments who have occulted the events of 1947. Marc Ravalomanana, the former President of Madagascar (2002-2009) declared “little interest” for the history of the 1947 uprisings, preferring to look towards the future of the nation. But as both Raharimanana and Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo point out, Ravalomanana sought to maintain good relationships with France still in the framework of what is called “Françafrique” (an Africa that is still very much regimented by French economic and political structures). See Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo. 118 nouveau découpage” (“a new temporality, a new space, a new fragmentation” ; 117). Veronique

Braggard recalls that Raharimanana’s corpus often translates a “genocidal writing” which accounts for the violence of colonization in African countries and the urgent necessity for transnational solidarity (101-116). Such writing has inflected a new direction in trans-Indian

Oceanic literature. For Kumari Issur and Bruno Jean-François, the intersection between the local and the global through representations of alterity (2) is precisely what is at work in contemporary

Malagasy and Mauritian literature. It helps understand the formation of anti-hegemonic identities but also to invent spaces that foster encounters between the national and the transnational, past and present, thereby challenging boundaries that seek to fix identities and communities into rigid categories. It is through the creation of these spaces that authors such as Raharimanana have resisted the injunctions of many publishing houses capitalizing on the “exotic” aspect of

“subaltern” literatures (Jean-François and Lionnet 1228). Rather, Raharimanana’s works occupy these spaces with multiple points of view, individual trajectories, and many possibilities of forming transnational points of intersection and solidarity.

Raharimanana intersects the 1947 uprisings with the period of colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries and the introduction of Islam by Muslim tradesmen in the 16th century. In that sense, his novel deploys a multiplicity of spaces, temporalities, and voices that all create a fragmented vision of the Malagasy history. As the narrators all develop a different facet of

Malagasy indigenous history, knowledge, and subjectivity, one factor yet unites them in these diverse historical moments – their relationship with the land. At times sacralized and/or deified by locals’ myths, at times hypersexualized and perceived as a feminine threat by the colonizers, the land is an ever-shifting ground for indigenous ecologies to emerge. In either case, however, the land is a murderous or a grieving mother. 119

The feminization of the land as a maternal figure emphasizes how the colonization of

Madagascar goes hand in hand with the oppression of indigenous women. As numerous ecofeminists have noted, the land/woman association has become commonplace in colonial and neocolonial ideologies. It is even problematic as it essentializes women as inherently connected to nature (and therefore exploitable and extractible). To a few exceptions, the recent trends of ecofeminism, although concerned with indigenous systems of beliefs, have dealt with the notion of the land through questions of access, enclosure, and mobility. The indigenous myths, beliefs, and rituals associated with colonized and neocolonized lands are often mentioned as immutable, universal among indigenous communities. Oftentimes, the myth of the land as a mother is invoked by ecofeminists as “a wholesale regression to infancy, when mother seemed omnipotent” (Rose 91). Such a reduction of the land as a mother is problematic as it perpetuates

Victorian-inherited stereotypes – because women are supposedly inherently connected to nature, then their sole purpose is to procreate.

In works such as Nour, 1947, the land carries other functions than procreation and complicates the mother/land relationship. Raharimanana challenges such reading of the mother/land as a trope of infantile regression, which perpetuates the essentialization of women and nature as intrinsically linked, and therefore passive and exploitable. Nour, 1947 decolonizes the history of Madagascar through a multiplicity of female viewpoints, thereby resisting the colonizer’s unilinear and, more often than not, male-centered narrative of conquest and civilization. Because history is made by or filtered through the lens of indigenous female figures, it creates an alternative history of its own. The mother/land, i.e. a land that is inherently conceived of as an indigenous female entity, becomes a space where imagined counter- geographies constantly redefine indigenous ecologies and epistemologies of the land. These 120 indigenous female epistemologies and ecologies, however, are eventually co-opted for nationalistic purposes. The myth of a pre-colonial mother/land as “sainte! Libre! Souveraine!”

(“holy, free, and sovereign,”; 31) becomes a useful tool for creating another myth – that of a postcolonial and independent Madagascar, a mother/land as a repository of its own memory and history.

“Nour avait vingt ans quelle elle fut ‘requise’ par le ‘Maitre’, riche planteur de café, riche exploiteur des terres! ‘Effort de guerre, ricanait-il, la France a besoin de l’aide et de la participation de ses colonies!’” (“Nour was only twenty when her Master – a wealthy landowner and coffee trader – required her services. “It’s a war effort! France needs help and participation from its colonies!” he said, laughing.”; 77).61 Nour, 1947 tells the story of Nour, a young runaway female slave whose father was enslaved, and who works on the colonial plantation of a

French landowner. As Nour experiences dispossession, rape, and human servitude, she joins rebel factions fighting for the country’s independence. She is eventually murdered by the French army. Nour the runaway is a marrone. In a land controlled by colonial authorities, marronage entails remapping a space, typically that of uncharted nature, with unauthorized and unrecognized mobility and self-sovereignty. It also entails belonging to illegal communities. As

Adam Bledsoe argues in “Marronage as a Past and Present Geography in the Americas,”

Maroon communities, during the reign of chattel slavery, were those settlements established by runaway slaves, who sought to escape their condition as fungible, accumulated property. Marronage was and is typified by maroons “cultivating freedom on their own terms within a demarcated social space that allows for the enactment of subversive speech acts, gestures, and social practices antithetical to the ideals of” marginalizing agents.” (31)62

61 All translations are mine.

62 Bledsoe quotes Roberts’ Freedom as Marronage (3). 121

In the context of Nour, 1947, I would argue that marronage is more than just a space-making practice that redefines the enslaved character’s relationship with the land. Marronage becomes a decolonial history-making practice that challenges the linearity and uni-dimensionality of

Western categories of time and space. As Nour and the other marrons inhabit counter- geographies of colonization (that is geographical spaces and environments that have fallen out of the control of colonial authorities), they occupy these spaces with counter-histories. In these spaces, different temporalities and spatialities cohabit together towards a more inclusive history of Madagascar, a history that confronts Western unilinear and teleological history of colonization.

Marronage, in Nour, 1947, occupies spaces and tools of conquest used by the colonizers.

This is particularly the case in the use of railways, which served to expand the colonial presence from the capital Antananarivo towards the East of the island. As historian Philippe Leymarie points out in “Painful memories of the revolt of 1947: Nationalism or survival?,” railroads and railway lines have a particular significance in the history of the 1947 Malagasy uprising. Indeed, the railway lines were often cut off and removed by insurgents, and some of the insurgents imprisoned were also killed by the French while being transported by train to the east of the island (Leymarie). In the novel, the railway becomes a space of marronage that connects not only different spaces, but also different temporalities and histories together. It particularly connects the story of Tsimosa, Nour’s father, and Nour. Once a slave, Tsimosa was then freed, only to find himself imprisoned for insurrection and sent to work for the construction of the railroad implemented by the French authorities. However, while the railroad means spatial connection for the French, and the facilitation of trade routes, it only means death for Nour’s father:

Tsimosa reprit vers l’est quelques années après l’inauguration de la ligne. Il n’eut pas le courage de monter dans les trains. Suivit les rails pendant des semaines. Chercha le long 122

des voies à retrouver les tombes de ceux qui s’étaient effondrés. Sa quête s’apparentait à la recherche de sa propre tombe. Lui, l’esclave qui n’avait droit à aucune sépulture !

[Tsimosa marched towards the east a few years after the railroad inauguration. He just did not have the courage to hop on a train. He followed the railways for weeks. He searched the sides of the railways for the graves of those who had fallen. In his quest, he was actually searching for his own grave. He was a slave, he was not entitled to a grave!] (123)

Pointing to the margins of the railroad, the sides of the railways also point to the margins of the history-making process of Madagascar as a colony. The railroad, even in the eyes of Tsimosa, is a tool that suggests a teleological narrative oriented either towards “progress” (for the colonizer) or ineluctable death (for Tsimosa). For Tsimosa, the railroad signifies another history, one of suffering and of brutally repressed insurrections. For Tsimosa’s daughter, however, the railroad becomes a tool of empowerment that allows her to create history-making practices addressing the major gaps of official narratives on colonization. As Nour escapes her master for a free life, she follows the railways at night, which eventually lead her to a group of rebels.

Characterizing an in-between space connecting the here and there, but also the past and present, the railway lines become a liminal space in which the official history of colonization and indigenous counter-histories cohabit and even collapse together:

Ombres. Les rails scintillaient dans le noir. Des rails couleur de lune qui disparaissaient, qui réapparaissaient. Entre les rochers. Entre les arbres. Des rails couleur de sabre qui tranchaient dans l’obscurité de la terre.

[Shadows. The railway lines were shining in the dark. The railway lines and their moon- like color were disappearing and appearing again. Between the rocks. Between the trees. The railway lines had the color of a saber and they were cutting in the darkness of the earth.] (134)

A few pages before, Tsimosa was searching for the graves of the rebels on the sides of the railways. As the saber-like railway lines of the railroad cut in the darkness of the earth, by extension they do also cut in the very history of indigenous repression in Madagascar. If the 123 railroads were constructed for the so-called progress of the civilizing mission, then, Nour suggests that such progress has been at the expense of other indigenous histories, now literally and metaphorically buried in the land. The land is history in Nour, 1947 and can be recovered only through marronage. It is marronage that gives to Nour a connection with the land, from which she was unattached before (despite seeing other indentured slaves working in the fields).

Before her marronage, Nour’s own relationship with the land was one of uprooting:

Aussi loin que remontait sa mémoire, Nour était toujours esclave. « Mainty », disaient les hommes de ce pays, noir, un être sans importance, sans terre de son vivant, sans tombeau où se reposer après sa mort. Dans l’au-delà même, l’esclave n’a pas de monde où se trainer ! Il n’est rien!

[As far as Nour could remember, she had always been a slave. Mainty, the country men would call her. A black, unimportant, and landless being, with no grave where she could rest after she dies. Even in the hereafter, slaves have no world to wander in! They are nothing!] (71)

Landless because of her race and ethnicity,63 Nour mobilizes marronage as a tool for empowering her indigenous self and for recovering other temporalities and other spatialities. The land, which had previously constricted her moves and freedom, becomes a site for counter- histories to emerge. A martyr and symbol of post-WWII indigenous struggles for independence,

Nour is associated with the land, united as they are through suffering and oppression. Just as

Nour’s “services” are required by her Master, the whole island of Madagascar was stolen for resource extraction, but also as a strategic commercial positioning in the Indian Ocean. Nour,

63 As Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo suggests, “il existe en effet deux Noro dans la mythologie malgache, la Ranoro qui appartient à la mythologie fluviale des hauts plateaux, la sirène mère mythique, et la Noro d’Ethiopie, noire. En faisant de sa Nour une esclave et fille d’esclave noir, Raharimanana transgresse l’un des grands tabous malgaches : il désacralise le symbole de la noblesse en lui donnant une ascendance servile.” (“There are two Noros [Nour] in Malagasy mythology: Ranoro, the mythical mother-mermaid who belongs to maritime mythology from the highlands; and Ethiopian Noro, who is Black. By making Nour both a slave and the daughter of a black slave, Raharimanana transgresses one of the major Malagasy taboos. He desacralizes the symbol of nobility by giving it a servile ascendency.” 24). 124

1947 closely intertwines the colonized female body and natural landscapes. The land is an entire character in itself, embodied by different women.

Significantly, all these women are figures of motherhood. Nour is yet not a mother. She is a daughter, the daughter of the monstrous, mythological mother Konantitra, the water-woman who salvages the bodies of slaves drowned at sea, of the children who commit suicide from the cliffs of the island to escape a future of servitude, and of the rebels murdered by the French army. Konantitra, the goddess who opens the gates of the realm of death, points to polytheist and cyclical worldviews based on rituals and sacrifices. As she reworks the “leftovers” of the dead bodies she salvages into magic potions, including Nour’s, and as she forces one of the narrators to drink the beverage, she reveals an ambivalent type of motherhood – one that feeds and nurtures but with poison.

It is precisely in this ambivalent figure of motherhood that the text deconstructs the notion of “Mother Nature” as essentially benevolent, nurturing, and protective of its children. In

Nour, 1947, the indigenous land is embodied by an old woman, who eats and vomits its dead as a way of grieving. Her old age and decaying body reveal the decrepitude of the Malagasy land marked by slavery, ethnic rivalries, and colonization, a land that no longer generates life:

Une vieille. Nue. Des seins qui tombent jusqu’au ventre, un ventre qui plisse à n’en plus finir, des jambes qui n’ont plus qu’une peau molle sur les os, un sexe que ne recouvrent plus que quelques poils blancs, un sexe aux lèvres desséchées.

[An old woman. Naked. Her breasts are sagging below her navel, her belly is infinitely wrinkled, her legs are only a soft skin on bones, her sex is covered by only a few white hairs, her sex has withered labia.] (51)

Challenging the stigma associated with the body of old women as no longer performing motherly functions (such as reproduction or breastfeeding), the description of the old woman’s body also plays with hypersexualizing tropes of colonized women. Rather than being the lascivious and 125 sexually-free indigenous woman portrayed in orientalist writings, the colonized woman here becomes a witch-like figure whose reproductive organs no longer harbor the promise of lust and fertility – only degradation.

Konantitra, one of the main indigenous female figures of the novel, embodies the making of history in her decaying flesh. She points to another imaginative geography of Madagascar, one in which images of death, skulls, urine, skinned animals, and corpses reveal the other décor of

“Western dreams,” that of “une terre libre, juste et féconde” (“a free, just, and fertile land”; 89).

In such a dream, the mother/land of Madagascar has become the extension of a rival mother/land

– France. The children of France, colonizers of Madagascar, are entitled with different human rights granted by the 1789 Declaration of the Right of Man and of the Citizen, which does not extend to French colonies. Born in a French-controlled territory, the colonized populations yet do not enjoy the legal prerogatives tied to the French jus soli. Excluded from the French nation, the colonized populations of Madagascar are chained to the new land imposed by colonization – one that transforms what was institutionalized slavery into other forms of servitude such as indentured labor, sexual slavery (in the case of Nour) and forced enrollment in the French army.

Thus if the mother/land of France does not grant her “children” the rights given by the 1789

Declaration of the Rights of Man or the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it still finds some ways to incorporate its children into its labor economy. In other words, it includes its children into its body-land while excluding them from its history.

The mother/land of Madagascar, by contrast, can only create beings that are “noirs et miséreux” (“black and poor”; 75). This begs the question of one’s relationship with an enslaving mother/land. For Benja, Nour’s brother, who has been enrolled in the French army as an infantryman to fight against the Germans during WWII, the question of one’s belonging to a land 126 is also a question of belonging to a state and of enjoying the rights and privileges granted by one’s citizenry. Benja now finds himself on the Malagasy rebels’ side, fighting for a land that has yet excluded him from basic human rights, such as the right to belong to a nation:

« Quelle est ma terre? murmurait Benja. Je suis né ici. Entre ces collines. Entre ces mille collines. Né esclave. Né apatride. Pourtant, je defends cette terre contre les coloniaux. Mais si je meurs, si une balle rompt le souffle de ma vie, où ensevelirai-je mon corps? Entre ces mille collines qui m’ont vu ramper aux pieds de mes maitres ou bien profond dans le ventre d’un chien ? »

[“What is my land? Benja whispered. I was born here, between those two hills, between those thousands hills. I was born a slave, I was born as a stateless person. And yet I am fighting for this land against the colonizers. But if I die, if a bullet stops my breath, where will I bury myself? Between those thousands hills that saw me crawling at my masters’ feet, or deep in the belly of a dog?”] (113)

Born a slave in what was considered to be French territory, Benja does not enjoy the rights and privileges of French citizens. Regulated by the Code de l’Indigénat, the Code of the Indigenous

People punishing colonial subjects disobeying the French colonial rule, Benja finds himself in a limbo, being stateless and rightless.64

As historian Gregory Mann points out, “Not only was the indigénat as a set of sanctions central to the day-to-day operations of colonial rule but, more abstractly, it also marked the boundary between the statuses of subject and citizen that provided its logic” (343). In Nour,

1947, the boundary between these statuses, marked by the law, is inscribed in the mother/land.

While France does not grant its colonized subjects the right to mobility, for instance, Konantitra the mother/land guarantees her dispossessed subjects the right to move beyond French-controlled lands “vers un monde anarchique où plus rien n’est sacré, où plus rien n’est plus puissant que soi” (“towards an anarchist world where nothing is sacred anymore, where nothing is more

64 In “Ecopoétiques malgaches: Michèle Rakotoson et Raharimanana,” Célerier points out that Banja and Nour are andevo – descendants of enslaved parents – which confers to them a socially, racially, and historically marginalized status (49). 127 powerful that oneself.”; 67). Konantitra reinvests the French-controlled territory of Madagascar with another landscape – one in which one’s subjectivity is no longer defined by the French

Republic and its values inherited from the Enlightenment. Layering up the French-controlled landscape of Madagascar with a landscape of death, Konantitra opens up possibilities for reclaiming what France has taken away from its colonies – a right to the land and to self- sovereignty.

As she reclaims motherhood from France, Konantitra also creates a cosmological system of beliefs that challenges the monotheist, secular, and linear worldview of the colonizer. In this matriarchal cosmology, unlike in the Christian bible, it is a woman who gives birth to the world:

Te rappelles-tu cette histoire? Te rappelles-tu cette femme, Dziny, que l’on nous raconte née des lumières, surgie de l’horizon, fille de l’eau et du soleil ? L’ombre, créature de la terre et des profondeurs, a enflé son ventre et nous a créés noirs et miséreux. L’ombre, dis-je, a enflé son ventre pour que sur cette ile elle mette au monde le premier homme.

[Do you remember this story? Do you remember this woman, Dziny,65 that was born in the horizon light, daughter of the water and the sun? The shadow, creature of the earth and the depths, swelled up its belly and created us, all dark and poor. The shadow’s belly, I am saying, swelled up so as to give birth to the first man on this island.] (75)

Born between what is divided (dark/light, water/sun, earth/sea), Konantitra embodies a liminality between what is separate and incompatible in Christian theology. Konantitra’s pregnancy is the manifestation of such liminality, as the first man lives in the world and yet is still in the womb of his mother. Konantitra is in charge of creating humankind, but does not create nature. Unlike

Christian cosmology, this divine entity only populates an already-existing earth with men and women.

In that sense, Konantitra’s cosmological myth does not grant man mastery over nature, thereby delegitimizing colonial projects. As Dizny, the children, listen to the “story” of their

65 Malagasy for “children.” 128 mother/land, they are also listening to the history of Madagascar. Indeed, in the question “Do you remember this story?,” the word “story” (“histoire”) can also translate as “history” in

French. The mother of her land, Konantitra embodies and creates an alternative history to the colonial narrative of France. But she also embodies one of the many untold and unheard indigenous stories dismissed from colonial grand narratives. It is in the female body, the old yet pregnant female body, that Malagasy history gestates, waiting to be born. Particularly relevant to

Konantitra’s cosmology is the trope of water, which conditions her pregnancy. It grants fluidity and mobility between different spaces, temporalities, and narratorial spaces but also between history and myth, between colonial policy and indigenous rituals. It is in the formless shape of water, in its liquidity and mutability that the author grounds two conflicting worldviews.

For the locals, water is holy; for the missionaries, water carries diseases and is a threat to the establishment of the colony: “La pluie. Toujours cette pluie. Elle apporte la fièvre. Elle apporte la maladie,” (“Rain, that rain again. It brings fever, illness.”; 156) says Father Sosthene before adding that rain is what destroys his handwritten diaries (157). The constant washing of the rain, of the mother-water Konantitra, impedes the good functioning of the colony, but also the recording of colonial history in written form. Significantly, the female force of Konantitra the mother/land erases masculine forms of conquest over lands and over the history of these lands. In

Nour, 1947, cosmology, history, memory, and land are feminine, which does not yet mean that such cosmology renounces any form of violence, as the testimony of Father Armand attests in

1836:

Tandis que les portes cédaient sous l’eau, nul parmi [les nouveaux convertis] n’avait ressenti le besoin ni le courage de venir à notre aide. L’eau s’engouffrait dans l’église et nous ne pensions qu’à protéger les saintes portes. L’eau, en effet, en s’y déversant, avait acquis de la force et de la puissance. Elle avait agi comme une vague furieuse et nous avait projetés contre l’autel.

129

[As the doors were breaking under the force of water, none of our [newly-converted believers] had the courage or the need to come rescue us. The water was flooding the Church and all we could think of was to protect its holy doors. Indeed, the water had gained strength and power. It had acted like a furious wave and had projected us against the altar.] (175)

The violent water disrupts the bourgeois myths associating mothers with submissiveness, which, as Ellen Cronan Rose points out, 19th-century Victorian ideology perpetuated (151).66 As water destroys and occupies the missionaries’ Church, it is attacking an architectural symbol of institutionalized sexism and misogyny that has also legitimized the conquest of nature by Man.

Rather than finding sacredness in holy temples and churches, Konantitra digs into what is invisible to humankind to build up her land. It is in water that she finds the possibility for another land to emerge, a land hidden by the maps of colonization, by the arrested mobility of locals by slave-owners and colonial authorities: “Notre ile n’est qu’un simulacre de terre, émergence des profondeurs, parcelle de l’ombre! Notre continent est là, sous la mer! Il nous faut les abîmes…”

(“Our island is just a simulacrum of earth emerging from dark depths! Our continent is out there, under the sea! We need the abyss…”; 169). The abyss, the deepest point of the sea, suggests that the island-continent of Madagascar arises from a womb-like environment, from the invisible matrix of the earth. Konantitra’s matrix is located in the sea, but it is not an uncolonized space either, as the sea was also appropriated by the colonizers and mapped according to maritime trade routes. The sea is also where thousands of slaves were thrown overboard (28) and salvaged by Konantitra.67 The sea, a space of transience, of constant movement, and where it is impossible

66 Although Ellen Cronan Rose does not mention how the Victorian separation of gender roles in public and private sphere extends beyond the historical and geographical context of Europe, more recent ecofeminists have demonstrated how such bourgeois ideology also permeated colonized spaces. If women were treated as submissive and as reproductive tools, then indigenous, colonized women suffered from an exacerbated oppression.

67 As Raharimanana salvages the stories of the thousands of slaves thrown overboard, he also demonstrates how literature responds to the rallying cry of contemporary historians for a more inclusive account of the casualties of the Middle Passage. For historian Edwards Alpers, “the sea voyage from Africa west to the Americas or east across the Indian Ocean was only one leg of the traumatic journey that forcibly removed free Africans from their homes in 130 to write one’s story forever, becomes a space where collective memory and histories build up an alternative archive to the colonial history.

Alternativity is what drives the entire narrative, as the text gives presence to various worldviews, without yet opposing or hierarchizing them. As Nour, 1947 intersperses the story of

Konantitra with the journal entries of male missionaries from the 17th and 18th centuries, it conflates two worldviews, two conceptions of space and of temporality that yet do not clash with each other. Rather they merge together in the historical blindspot of the 1947 Malagasy uprisings. As each journal entry is dated, the text retains a sense of chronological order (already present in the division of the novel in seven days), which yet harbors within itself the possibility for alternative temporalities to cohabit. Pointing to the fracture of history, and to a potential opening up of a unilinear temporality to a multidimensional one, neither of these different temporalities harbors in itself the totality of history, as the missionaries often skip days between their journal entries and as Konantitra’s cyclical temporality constantly loops back on itself, in the form of repetitions.

As the novel oscillates between these different forms of temporality – linear and cyclical

– without yet choosing one over the other, it shuffles different historical periods together, juxtaposing events that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Such shuffling, I would argue, recalls the necessity of looking at the present through the lens of the past, but also of looking at “official” History through the lens of marginalized indigenous histories. Salvaging

(fictional) testimonies from the missionaries and the indigenous myth of the mother/land,

Africa to their ultimate destinations. Indeed, I believe that it is a mistake to restrict analyses of the middle passage only to oceanic passages, assuming that enslaved Africans embarked from the African coast as though they were leaving their native country, when in fact their passage from freedom into slavery actually began with the moment in which they were swept up by the economic forces that drove the slave trade deep into the African interior.” (qtd. in Christopher 20-21) 131

Raharimanana’s text intervenes in a historical moment that is crucial to Madagascar – the 2001

Presidential elections that would remove the country from decades of economic insularity – but also to the global scale. In a world that was to be redefined by global terrorism, Nour, 1947 explores the necessity to be looking at the past in order to address and redress the issues of the present.

As Nour, 1947 does not equate Konantitra with a pre-colonial past, in which nature was supposedly “virgin” from humankind, it also refuses to essentialize this female figure as inherently ahistorical. Konantitra is not just an anthropomorphic manifestation of a nature exploited by men. As the text abounds in images of cavity, holes, and crevices, it creates an imagery that points back to the mother’s womb and asks the diverse characters to go back to the moment of origin, when the first men settled on the island and when the history of oppression started. The womb, visualized as the earth, becomes a repository of collective indigenous memory throughout time. But if the earth-womb gives birth to children, it is also envisioned as a grave for all the marooned slaves, rebels, and political opponents who defied tribal and colonial authorities:

Un village. Surgissant de la terre. Sombrant dans les brumes et les nuages. Des brindilles mortes dans la boue. Des cadavres encore. D’enfants. De chiens. Des ventres ouverts et des cervelles que lavent la pluie. Une epaisse couverture de feuilles jaunies et lacérées. Dessous, lambeau sans pudeur, une peau nue de bras arraché. La pluie s’acharne dans les arbres et entraîne dans sa chute les vieilles feuilles. Linceul encore. Linceul.

[A village. Rising up from the earth. Sinking in mist and clouds. Dead branches in the mud. Corpses, over and over again. Corpses of children. Of dogs. Bellies and brains, opened. A thick blanket of yellowish cut leaves. Under the blanket, without any modesty, the naked skin of a torn arm. The rain beats the trees and drags down old leaves. Once again, a shroud. Shroud.] (195)

The womb-grave of Konantitra, the only repository for the deaths that have never been grieved for, animates the still corpses with a force that marks their return into a history that had forgotten 132 them. It does provide a grave for the thousands of Malagasy who were massacred during the uprisings and whose bodies were disposed of in a collective grave. The rhythm of the short sentences recreates the stupefaction of the viewer facing the leftover of a massacre, and recreates the stillness to which these bodies have been left to for centuries. Once again, the only element that gives life back to these people is the rain, which both reveals and shrouds the casualties of colonial history.

As Jennifer Cole remarks, “the trope of ‘ancestral land,’ which occurs repeatedly in people's testimonial narratives of 1947, is translated by the word tanindrazana. For many

Malagasy groups the tanindrazana refers to the place where one's ancestors are buried; for many people the highest moral injunction is to protect and care for the land in which one's ancestors are buried” (123). In Nour, 1947 the tanindrazana becomes a site where the thousands of corpses resurface to reconstruct the untold side of the Malagasy uprisings. The debris of colonial history, now finding the possibility of regeneration in the womb of Konantitra, recall how the contemporary history of Madagascar finds in its own ancestral and indigenous strata the conditions for a collective memory to emerge.

In that sense the text gives visibility to individuals and communities that have otherwise been marginalized and marooned from history:

Ils sont là. Femmes. Enfants. Vieillards. Ils sont là dans la boue. […] Ils dévorent les vers. Ils ont fui, Dziny ! Fui les conquérants. Fui les princes et les souverains. Mais survinrent les esclavagistes. Mais survinrent les coloniaux. Depuis des siècles, ils n’ont cessé de fuir.

[They are all here. Women. Children. Old ones. They are here in the mud. [...] They eat the worms. They all ran away, Dizny! They ran away from the conquerors, the princes, the kings. Then came slave-owners. Then colonizers. They have not stopped running away, for centuries.] (197)

133

The ghosts of the marooned slaves, colonized and/or indentured individuals, haunt the past and the present of the island. The dead recover forms of historical agency, particularly as Konantitra relocates them not only in her womb but also in the stomach of the living. When Nour dies, for instance, Konantitra creates a potion out of her body, which she then forces the narrator to drink.

The narrator becomes the grave of Nour, digesting her memory as a form of grief. In Nour, 1947, history and memory are both tangible and intangible elements that are to be digested by the humans, metaphorically and literally.

Tangible memory, in the form of writing for instance, does not guarantee the durability of this memory throughout time. For instance, Father Sosthène, one of the fictional missionaries, writes in one of his journal entries that its pages are covered with mold originating from the heavy rains. For Célerier, the presence of mold in Raharimanana suggests “un pourrissement géographique, social, politique, extérieur et intérieur aux personnages” (“geographical, social, political, external and internal” forms of rotting; 52). I believe that, in this text, rain is more than a projection of socio-political degradation. Rain, one of the manifestations of the mother/land, is the force that imperils the colonizer’s history. The mother/land erases the history of the colonizer to reinvest the space left empty with its own perspective on and experience of events. She gives mobility back to a history that was arrested by the colonizer.68 In that sense, it is not only a female figure that writes history but an indigenous female figure, now brought back from the margins of history and literature, and reinvesting these spaces with her own voice.

68 “L’irruption de l’autre a faussé le cours de notre histoire et bousculé – que dis-je? détruit, oui – notre vision du monde.” (“The intrusion of the other has falsified the stream of our history and has disturbed – or rather destroyed – our worldview.”; 28). 134

Refusing the blind spots of Western history of slavery and colonization, Konantitra reinscribes the untold histories of Madagascar on the skin of zebus, an animal sacrificed to the gods in exchange of wealth:

Je marche sur du sol qui s’effondre. Je m’y enfonce, en retire des peaux de betes que Konantitra coud à meme ma peau. Elle y inscrit nos douleurs. Elle y inscrit nos souffrances, notre histoires…

[I am walking on the collapsing ground. I am sinking in the mud, and take out some animal skins that Konantitra stitches on my skin. She is inscribing our sorrows on it. She is inscribing our sufferings, our history…] (83).

Here the mothering gesture of Konantitra towards the individual narrator layers up with another type of mothering – one that is collective and that insures the passing of memory onto future generations of dispossessed communities. As Konantitra becomes a scribe, she is constructing an archive of the past and the present as an alternative to the missionaries’ own testimonies. It is noteworthy that the original text does not use the verb “to write” (écrire) but “to inscribe”

(inscrire), which suggests another form of recording history that is not based on written language and therefore cannot be validated by the Christian missionaries or colonial authorities as a source of “History.” Inscribing one’s myth does not mean writing history. Nour, 1947 reflects the difficulty for female myth to enter and occupy masculine history, that of the man-conqueror and winner. For Raharimanana, the masculinization of history does not just apply to the colonizer, as he is equally aware of the limits of the writing of Malagasy history of independence.

Konantitra’s myth, which has occupied a large portion of the text, is suddenly reappropriated by men towards the end of the novel:

Nour me raconta comment, la première fois, ils entendirent parler des trois députés. De Ravoahangy. De Raseta. De Rabemananjara. Des trois piliers de la nation. Si Ravoahangy était le pilier central qui supportait la maison, Raseta et Rabemananjara étaient ceux du nord et du sud. Ravoahangy allait rétablir les lustres d’antant. Ravoahangy allait chasser les coloniaux. Et notre terre redeviendrait sainte, libre…

135

[Nour told me when they first heard of the three deputies: Ravoahangy, Raseta, and Rabemananjara.69 The three pillars of the nation. If Ravoahangy was the central pillar supporting the foundations of the house, Raseta and Rabemananjara were those of the North and the South. Ravoahangy was going to reestablish the aeons of the past. Ravoahangy was going to kick out the colonizers. And our land would become holy, free again…] (185)

Significantly the appearance of the three male deputies also signals the disappearance of

Konantitra, only evoked in the last sentence as the mythical “holy” and “free” land. In the deputies’ reconstruction of Madagascar, nature is absent. Instead the land has become a house- nation constructed by the three men and from which the historical presence of the female mother/land has been erased. While Konantitra is only alluded to in an elliptical way, the presence of the words “holy” and “free” suggests that she is still a driving force behind the history of Malagasy independence – albeit invisible and silenced.

In Raharimanana’s matriarchal cosmology, the return to the maternal womb is yet not the same as a return to a pre-colonial past. Nour, 1947 does not glorify the past by opposing it to a present suffering from the consequences of colonization and imperialism. On the contrary, the text points out the rivalries between pre-colonial ethnic tribes, which fragmented the land. Pre- colonial times, the narrator recalls, were also based on racial hierarchy:

Konantitra me raconte que Ceux-de-la-cité-bénie furent les premiers. Konantitra me raconte qu’ils avaient dépouillé leurs âmes pour revivre cette ile, dépouillé leur âmes de la langue du Prophète et n’avaient gardés que quelques souvenirs de leurs dieux. Ceux- des-cendres étaient leurs esclaves. […] Konantitra me raconte que Ceux-de-la-cité-bénie furent les premiers, les premiers à vendre la Grande Terre […] et ont conclu avec ses souverains pactes et chaines a enrouler autour de nos cous… Roches et vagues. Ondées et éclats minéraux. Fosses ou terre fendue. Là furent entassés les esclaves.

[Konantitra tells me that Those-of-the-holy-city were the first ones. Konantitra tells me that they had gotten rid of their souls to live again on that island, that they had gotten rid of the Prophet’s language to keep only some memories from their own gods. Those-of- the-ashes were their slaves. [...] Konantitra tells me that Those-of-the-holy-city were the first ones to sell the Great Land. […] They made pacts with the lords and put chains

69 All three real historical figures are foundational to the short-lived Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache (MDRM) which promoted Malagasy independence, autonomy, and sovereignty. 136

around our necks. Rocks and waves. Rain and minerals. Graves and split earth. This is where the slaves were packed.] (88)

Between the Muslim conquest, the repossession of the island natives, the fragmentation and selling of the lands for slaves to diverse powerful ethnic tribes, colonization, and the brutal repression of the 1947 attempt to reconquer the mother-land, Nour, 1947 suggests the fragility of community-building against external forces that seek to recuperate the land for profit.70 Because of the ethnic heterogeneity of Madagascar, the work also suggests that there is no such thing as a single Malagasy indigeneity. If the novel challenges the notion of a global, universal indigeneity, then, it does also imply that what could be called “Malagasy indigeneity” is a multitude of different indigenous cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies which do not always cohabit peacefully. Such indigeneities are situated in particular contexts, may not have the same conception of time, space, and history, and engage in different patterns of migration. They may intersect but they cannot be reduced to each other. More often than not, as this excerpt suggests, the various ethnic groups conflict with each other, resulting in tribal wars over lands and power.

Refusing to choose between tribalism and nationalism, both detrimental to the Malagasy communities, one of the narrators suggests the difficulty in reconstructing a land, a people, and history into a new nation after post-colonial independence: “Je refuse, Konantitra, de perpétuer une doctrine de pouvoir pare-delà même ma mort! Je n’ai aucun désir de lutter contre les coloniaux si c’est pour instaurer de nouveau le pouvoir des rois […]” (“Konantitra, I refuse to perpetuate a power doctrine even when I am dead! I have no desire whatsoever to fight against the colonizers if it is to establish again the rule of the kings [...]”; 68). The idea of a “holy, free, and sovereign” land embodied by a mythical mother, then, dissolves in statism and tribalism. But

70 As the text is published in 2001, one can also see in the mass tourism facilitated by globalization one of these moments of conquest and reconquest. 137 if the myth of the mother/land dissolves in the face of statist colonialism and fragmented tribalisms, then it also finds other ways to reinvest itself in the reconstruction of the history of

Madagascar. In particular, the rebels recuperate the mother/land myth in their attempt at creating and consolidation an independent nation. As Nour, 1947 decolonizes the history of Madagascar through the female body, its indigenous epistemologies of the land are eventually co-opted for nationalistic purposes. They become a tool for creating another myth – that of a postcolonial independent Madagascar, a mother/land as a repository of its own memory and history.

When Nour, 1947 was published in 2001, the idea of a sacred mother/land, especially as it relates to politics, was already long gone. The industry of mass tourism, the increasing poverty of the local population, the extraction of natural resources for touristic purposes (as the construction of hotels, for instance), the unregulated labor of children working in stone quarries, all contributed to desacralize the land and to view it rather as an exploitable resource. As Nour,

1947 reanimates indigenous beliefs in a mythical mother/land, it also asks for another relationship with natural environments. Yet the novel does not envision the mother/land only as a transcendental entity that overcomes spatial and temporal boundaries. Rather, it explores how different moments in history have affected the mother/land through exploitation, rape, death, and grief, thereby inscribing the mother/land in a history that has viewed it as a passive object.

Conclusion

This chapter has traced how Alleck and Raharimanana construct indigenous ecologies as history-making practices that revalue the influence of indigenous women on the making of their own history in the context of colonization and neocolonial militarization. Here, forgotten, un- grieved, and torn bodies dejected from the colonizer’s archives, school books, settlers’ narratives, and government reports carve in spaces for alternative histories and memories to 138 emerge and fill the gaps of official narratives of slavery, colonization, and neocolonization.

Alleck’s and Raharimanana’s alter/global ecologies of female solidarity account for the difficulty of coming to terms with modern/colonial histories and ideologies. They also account for the necessity to recognize how spaces and bodies, in particular female and indigenous ones, have been forgotten from a more general history of Southern resistance to globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Alleck and Raharimanana account for poverty, sexual exploitation, gender oppression, and socio-political corruption, they also reveal that some lives are more wasted than others, thereby accounting for multiple Global Souths that still struggle to overcome inequalities.

Exploring Alleck’s Continuum Chagos, and Raharimanana’s Nour, 1947 as trans-Indian

Oceanic and Global South productions, then, also complicates questions of indigenous female resistance to neocolonization. If ecofeminists tend to encompass indigenous women as commonly united against a single identifiable force (such as patriarchal capitalism), then these two works suggest that resisting this force is far from being a unified process. The mobilization of female characters and landscapes complicates the romantic notion of one Global South unified against a common history of suffering. In that sense, these three works also resist a unifying model of transnational solidarity. The ecofeminist nature of these works, although not explicitly labelled as such by their respective authors, does more than demonstrate how the extraction of nature and the oppression of women go hand in hand; these works also recall the urgency for ecofeminist environmental discourses to be more inclusive of indigenous women, as workers, mothers, daughters, but also myth-makers. As they construct female subjectivities grappling with and challenging patriarchal capitalism in all its forms, and throughout time, they propose a discourse of female indigeneity that accounts for women of the Global South without yet 139 essentializing them as a single, transcendental being. Challenging the concept of “global indigeneity,” these authors/artists also redefine concepts of indigeneity by accounting for, and differentiating, the challenges faced by Global South women. As they invoke questions of race, gender, sexuality, language, and ethnicity, their understandings of indigeneity offer an intersectional approach to the recording of history.

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CHAPTER THREE: ECOLOGIES OF THE ABYSS IN THE TRANS- MEDITERRANEAN REFUGEE CRISIS

Abstract

This chapter explores the trans-Mediterranean refugee crisis in the works of Spanish novelist and activist Andres Sorel (b. 1937) and Danish visual artist EB Itso (b. 1977), two

European artists who seek to address and redress the representations of refugees by mainstream global mass news media, humanitarian discourses, and right-wing world leaders. As they salvage the debris of migration (in the form of ghostly voices and discarded clothes), Sorel and Itso reimagine the Mediterranean Sea as a space of encounters and relations between the living and the dead, the self and the other. Sorel and Itso both reclaim and subvert what I call “spectralization”, that is, a representational strategy used by global news media, humanitarian discourses, and right-wing politicians that erases the personhoods, identities, histories, and memories of individual people. By doing so, they create what I term “ecologies of the abyss,” to use

Glissant’s expression, ones that envision the Mediterranean Sea as a space and a process through which refugees recover forms of agency over their own narratives. Through their ecologies of the abyss, the works challenge the fixed archives of migration estbalished by global news media and right-wing political discourses of target nations. Such archives of migration have created “the” refugee as a transparent figure categorized as either a threat to Western European values or as victim.

Performing dematerialization, disembodiment, and abstraction, Sorel and Itso reclaim spectralization as part of the de-spectralization process through which refugees regain their right to opacity, that is the respect of one’s right to non-transparency. By doing so, they reveal the dynamic, relational, and transhistorical ecologies of the Mediterranean Sea as a space of encounters rather than separation. Conceptualizing an ecology of the “abyss,” i.e. the space of 141 the absolute unknown and “l’image renversée de tout cela qui a été abandonné” (“the reverse image of all that has been left behind,”; Glissant, Poetics 7) Sorel and Itso complicate how the

“image” is being reversed by articulating modes of reclaiming subjectivity, history, and memory that are often at odds with their own project of de-spectralization. The present chapter examines how Sorel’s and Itso’s repertoire of the refugee crisis perform a process of despectralization to counter the erasure of refugee memory from the archive created by global news media but also by global art markets regulated by neoliberal economic exigencies.

If Sorel and Itso are Spanish and Danish, the stories they create are grounded in a larger history of European and French imperialisms. Most of Sorel’s characters, for instance, are from former French colonies and protectorates. This chapter, however, analyzes Sorel’s and Itso’s creations for something else than their common point of reference (the French colonial past). As

I investigate their literary and visual strategies for creating other refugee visibilities, I ultimately seek to understand how their decolonial ecologies challenge European artistic and literary markets, which have often presented refugees through sensational accounts. But if Itso and Sorel challenge the exigencies of such markets, they are still the products of a cultural elite and do enjoy the capital that goes with it. In that sense, their position as artists working about the margins (and not from them) addresses questions central to decoloniality. Can socially, culturally, racially, and economically privileged subjects working in former colonial powers claim decolonial philosophy and aestheSis? In what follows, I problematize such paradox in order to understand how their decolonial approaches work through an effort to decolonize hegemonic European thought and representation.

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Introduction

In 2015, the world reacted with shock to the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old

Syrian refugee whose body was washed ashore on the beach of Bodrum, Turkey. This image quickly became symbolic of the human tragedy occurring in the Mediterranean which, according to the 2015 year statistics from the United Nations Refugee Agency, 1,000,573 refugees crossed in order to reach Europe. Out of this number, at least 3,735 were declared missing or dead. The circulation of the image of the dead toddler ignited global indignation against the inhuman treatment of refugees by Western European nations.71 Yet while the public has responded with empathy toward this tragedy, right-wing Western European populist parties and global news media have continued to present refugees from Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa as a threat to the European economy, to national identities, and to Judeo-Christian social, cultural, and religious values.72

Global headlines and Western European far-right politicians have created a transnational rhetoric of fear sustained by a discourse of spectrality to tackle the refugee crisis. Spectrality results from what I call spectralization, that is, a process of stereotyping, caricaturing, and representing refugees’s identities, histories, and memories through the erasure of personhood in

71 The recent Aquarius controversy too has demonstrated the extent to which European border reinforcement has made it increasingly difficult for refugees to seek asylum in Europe. In Summer 2018, the charity rescue boat Aquarius was denied permission to dock in most European ports (Italy, Malta, and France being among them), wandering in the Mediterranean Sea for seven days until Spain eventually agreed on opening its maritime borders to the 630 refugees onboard. As this controversy was heavily mediatized, it also revealed the impact of global news media on Western spectators’ perception of refugees.

72 In that regard, it is noteworthy to recall that right-wing politicians and Western global mass news media have tended to present refugees as an Islamic threat, given the pervasive misconception that all refugees are Muslims. Such an association partakes in the xenophobic anti-immigration rhetoric that has been sweeping through Western Europe particularly after 9/11. As Vijay points out in The Fourth Eye, “the media practice of visualizing terror, while intensified post 9/11, has a much longer history. Edward Said’s Covering Islam, for instance, documents the extent to which the Western media, particularly the press, invoked and perpetuated specifi c racial and cultural ste reo types of Islam and the Muslim world” (8).

143 favor of a homogenized representation of individuals and communities. If such process formats the representation of refugees on a discursive level (of images and texts), it does nevertheless materializes through practices of social exclusions. For example, global news media documentaries on migration reduce the experience of migration by focusing more on the challenges that refugees supposedly pose for Western European nations than on experiences of migration. Envisioning refugees as an issue, these documentaries certainly point to a material reality, one in which Western nations supposedly face a sudden “threat.” This reality, constructed through the spectralization of refugees, erases other realities – ones that account for the experiences of crossing the desert, the sea, or of trading one’s body for survival. The images circulating stereotypes of destitution, misery, threat, and fear, all document an archive of migration which points to, and sustains, a modern/colonial ideology that constructs refugees as essentially inferior to a universal Western subject. In other words, refugees become an ahistorical body that serves as a repository of fear and threat for so-called developed nations.

At the intersection of the global news media, far-right political discourses, and humanitarian discourses,73 such archive of migration constructs refugees as a specter, that is an indistinct mass of bodies deprived of agency, sovereignty, and mobility. Because these discourses often elude where and from what conditions the refugees are fleeing, they extend their spectralization of refugees to a virtual erasure of the historical and geopolitical realities surrounding them as well. Representing refugees as a threat to the values of Western European nations, or as what Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini recently called the “migrant menace”

(Lorenzo), these spectralizing discourses have constructed a whole ecological imaginary around

73 For instance, in November 2017, an article from the Financial Times referred to “the specter of immigration [that] spark[ed] a rightward turn in Italy” while Euronews also used the term “specter” to define the influx of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in 2018 (Politi). Qualifying refugees as “specters” objectifies them as an indistinct mass of bodies and purges human beings of their material and spiritual substance. 144 what they call the “crisis” of migration in Europe.74 Such an imaginary has redefined refugees as an aggregate object of a broad spectrum of affective and ideological responses, whether pity, fear, or the need for protection. The sensational representations of refugees in the print press, in

TV media, and on mainstream Internet websites has tended to homogenize refugees as an indistinct and threatening formless specter, without differentiating their political, social, religious, economic, and racial backgrounds, or their motivations for leaving their countries.75 In

The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (2014), Esther Peeren recalls the genealogy of the terms “ghost” and “specter” and their modern application onto migrants and refugees. “Ghosts,” according to Peeren, are “unwelcome reminders of past transgressions, causing personal or historical traumas to rise to the surface and pursuing those they hold responsible” (2).76

In this chapter, I argue that the homogenizing global news media discourse on refugees has posited a universal and transhistorical subject uprooted from a specific historical, social, religious, and personal background. This subject is a “specter” because it has become a body reduced to the mere idea of a physical manifestation; anything that would individualize this subject is erased. The spectral refugee is a universal non- or quasi-subject, typically singularized

74 This even despite United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres’ call to recognize “the positive contributions that refugees and migrants make to the societies in which they live and also honour core European values: protecting lives, upholding human rights and promoting tolerance and diversity.”

75 One such example of mediatic sensationalism dates back to November 2018, when Malian refugee Mamoudou Gassama rescued a baby from falling down the balcony of a building. The video footage recording Gassama’s saving of the baby went viral and in September 2018, Gassama was naturalized French on grounds of his bravery. Many have commented on the implications of such naturalization, calling into question what refugees should do to be taken into consideration by the French government. In other words, the heroic action of Gassama set the bar high for refugees to be accepted, naturalized, and integrated into the target nation.

76 Peeren also recalls that these terms have designed individuals and/or groups marginalized from social “norms.” Specters are “produced by liberal-democratic capitalism [...] to render the unemployed, the homeless, exiles and migrants obscure in their growing segregation from everyday life. The spectral metaphor marks these groups as vulnerable and marginalized” (16). 145 as “the” refugee. Spectralization constructs “the” refugee as an immediately recognizable figure of threat, pity, and fear. As refugees are not tolerated in their differences, then, they are essentialized as hostile to the Western values that modernity/coloniality presents as universal. In global news media and right-wing political discourses, the refugee is the barbarian invading a place of progress and order that “foreign” values jeopardize. Spectralization thus works through perpetuating the trope of refugees as disempowered, passive, and helpless figures, thereby leaving little to no space for other narratives to emerge and counter this kind of representation.

Because such representations narrow down the visibility of refugees, their spectralizing logic is what Edouard Glissant would define as “transparent” (Poétique189-190): the refugee specter is it is constructed as different, as always other than a Western subject. The difference upon which the refugee specter is constructed and accepted, then, is fundamentally hierarchical in that it relies on a binary between self and other, civilized and barbarian, normative and marginal, worthy and disposable.

As a consequence, the spectralizing rhetoric of global news media has created an archive of the refugee crisis. For Diana Taylor, an archive is a repository of materials selected for creating memory around material objects supposedly immutable (19). Such materials intersect far-right political discourses envisioning refugees as a threat, but is also fueled by a growing body of literature and arts that sustains the exigencies of global arts and literary marketplaces which often present the figure of the refugee transparently – as dispossessed, passive, or heroic – to account for the trauma of migration.77 These novels and artforms create an aesthetics of

77 In 2016, for instance, British novelist and journalist Emma Jane Kirby published her novel Optician of Lampedusa, which develops the story of an Italian optician on vacations near Lampedusa heroically rescuing hundreds of migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. More recently, French detective fiction writer Olivier Norek published Entre deux mondes (2017), a novel following the adventures of a Syrian refugee in the Calais Jungle, and his quest for revenge as his wife and daughter were killed by human smugglers. While these two recent novels have given visibility to the refugee crisis in ways that global news media may not have, they have also 146 spectralization which either disempowers refugees as victims or romanticizes them as individuals endowed with mobility and agency. Such representations of refugees, I would argue, are in direct line with the logics of global capitalism, particularly because they rely upon a system of exchange: the diverse experiences lived by refugees are exchanged for homogenizing and sensationalizing representations. Such representations, as fictional as they might be, still do perpetuate the system of value at the core of the modern/colonial ideology sustaining Western

European mediatic, political, and humanitarian discourses.

Although an archive still allows material objects (such as maps or literary texts) to move in and out of itself, it does still a place of “syntactical arrangement” (Taylor 19), one that sustains established forms of power. The constructed images and caricatural discourses of fear by right- wing world leaders, then, create an archive of migration through which refugees are spectralized and envisioned as an object put at a critical distance. Yet, as abstract as a specter might be, it does not exist outside reality. A specter does not exist without a spectator, or, in the case of the refugee crisis, without a witness of what is happening. Such witness is the spectator behind their screens but also, fundamentally, the very person who filters “raw” reality into images. Global news media often do not problematize these aspects of archive-making, as they present readily available images as a ready-made spectacle for an audience. Because the refugee crisis has been primarily filtered through and represented by images, I believe it is necessary to interrogate how such images are constructed, for what audiences, and to what extent they reinforce or remove the social, cultural, historical, and political agency and sovereignty of refugees.

In this chapter I explore how the works of Spanish activist and novelist Andres Sorel and

Danish visual artist E.B. Itso are instrumental to such an interrogation, as they problematize the

portrayed the refugees themselves as either passive (The Optician) or heroic (Entre deux mondes), two opposed visions that are unrealistic in many aspects. 147 construction of “the” refugee as a spectral figure in contemporary mediatic, political, and artistic landscapes. More particularly I investigate how Sorel’s Las Voces del Estrecho (2016), and in

Danish visual artist E.B. Itso’s Sheddings (2017) challenge the process of spectralization at work in media ecologies through the creation of repertoires of migration. For Taylor, a repertoire is an embodied memory that connects the viewer in the present moment, rather than establishing a physical and temporal distance between them and the archived object. The material artforms

Sorel and Itso use could well belong to Taylor’s concept of the archive. A novel about the ghosts of refugees who died during the transmediterranean crossing, and a series of impressions of migrants’ t-shirts on blank canvas, Las voces and Sheddings document the refugee crisis by materializing and dramatizing what mainstream archives of migration leave out – the sea journey, the experience of migration, and the trauma of leaving one’s life behind. However, as

Sorel and Itso ground their projects in the spectral, the abstract, and the dematerialized appearances of refugee ghosts (albeit mediated through the materiality of a written novel and painted impressions), they despectralize mainstream archives on refugees in order to create their own repertoires of migration, ones that subverts the material limits of the archive and that are unbound.

Abstraction and spectrality, for Sorel and Itso, are not end-results but processes that challenge the transparency at the core of mainstream archives of migration. To do so, they push spectrality and abstraction to extremes. With spectralization and abstraction, they reach the end of representation and articulate their own limits at representing the irrepresentable. With spectralization and abstraction, what one sees is what one gets (a blue ink blot on canvas, for instance). These two processes point to socio-political realities, ones in which the existence of refugees is conditioned by the material environments that surround them. Sorel and Itso, 148 reaching the limits of representation, move backwards from such limit in order to reveal how spectralization is constructed and how the socio-political environment has enabled such construction.

Because such repertoire does not seek to claim ultimate authority upon the refugees’ experience, it relies on what Edouard Glissant terms the “le droit à l’opacité” (the “right to opacity”; Poétique 203; Poetics 189-194). For Glissant, the right to opacity is the right for any subject to remain unknowable, ungraspable, and different. An opaque subject is other because of their fundamental right to difference; they are not other than, which would simply define them according to a norm. If global news media have often presented refugees as transparent specters different from a Western subject, then Sorel and Itso enact the right to opacity in order to destabilize the fixed refugee identities, subjectivities, and histories created by global news media and right-wing political discourses. In that sense, the opacity at the core of Sorel’s and Itso’s repertoires performs what Glissant theorizes as “le gouffre” (“the abyss”; 8) in Poetics of

Relation. For Glissant, the abyss is “the absolute unknown” (Poetics 8) that lies at the core of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a space where absolute knowledge is located and irretrievable as it dissolves in the waters of the ocean. The abyss is that of the boat “swallowing” human lives; it is also the depth of the ocean. However, as Glissant suggests, the abyss is also “l’image renversée de tout cela qui a été abandonné, qui ne se retrouvera pour des générations que dans les savannes bleues du souvenir ou de l’imaginaire, de plus en plus élimés.” (the “reverse image of all that had been left behind, not to be regained for generations except-more and more threadbare-in the blue savannas of memory or imagination.”; Poetics 7) The abyss is the irremediable gap left by the experience of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, irrecoverable. Sorel’s and Itso’s repertoires of the abyss complicate what Glissant calls the “reverse” image of what was discarded through in the 149 abyss. Consciously mobilizing and subverting the material processes at work in the spectralization of refugees, these two figures perform the abyss as a space and process of relation, one through which refugees come in contact with each other, share their own experiences, and advocate their own right to opacity. In this abyss, the ghostly and abstract remnants of refugees do more than create relation; they also create entire cultural imaginaries that deconstruct the abyss of the Mediterranean sea as a singular space.

A “Crisis of Representation”?

As we will see in what follows, Sorel and Itso are certainly not the only contemporary artists who have taken up the apparatuses of refugee spectralization as the basis of their works.

Following up on the death of Aylan Kurdi and the world-wide wave of indignation towards the treatment of refugees across the world, the artistic world was questioned for its representation of refugees’ predicaments. In September 2015, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s photographic imitation of the picture of the three-year old boy raised many ethical questions of exploitation.78

Reproducing the image as a consciousness-raising gesture, the artist created a spectralization of refugees as inherently passive, suffering, and objectified. In this image, spectrality means transparency. The spectator gets what they see: a child that is still today remembered as nothing else than a debris of migration, without any consideration for his own background and personal trajectory. The child is, and will remain, the embodiment of the other crossing the sea for a better life in Europe. The transparency of this image, to take up on Glissant’s words, forbids the right to opacity, that is, as Glissant defines it, “that which cannot be reduced” (Poetics 191).79 This

78 See Ai Weiwei’s picture at https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/20160215-ai-weiwei-tribute- to-syrian-refugee-aylan-kurdi-828413-2016-02-03. Picture from Jayaraman. 79 “If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to 150 image has been mapped and remapped through so many discourses (mediatic, political, artistic, humanitarian) that it becomes impossible for it to recover any sense of opacity.

However, in a way, Weiwei’s image suspends the transparency of the original image and redirects the spectator’s gaze towards what cannot be looked at. What the spectator sees in

Weiwei’s photograph is no longer a child drowned at sea but an artist who is not dead. A black and white shot of the artist laying on a desert beach of Lesbos Island, where Weiwei works with refugees, the picture strikes the viewer for its immediate resemblance to the image of the young toddler. Weiwei adopts the same pose, his arms laying close to his chest, his face buried in the sand and slightly turned towards the spectator. More than an artistic representation of the young boy’s death, Weiwei’s picture reenacts the spectator’s shock to the death of the child while drawing attention to the impassivity of European leaders on issues of migration. In the words of the artist, “to be in the same position [as Kurdi’s], is to suggest our condition can be so far from human concerns in today's politics” (Malm). Weiwei’s reenactment of Aylan Kurdi’s death, then, was meant to awaken spectators inured to the daily predicament of refugees and migrants, but also to reassert the relevance of conceptual art in a contemporary history of human tragedies.80

While Weiwei has been applauded for his photographic and filmographic works on migrants and refugees,81 themselves constitutive of a refugee repertoire, this picture has generated debates among spectators and public intellectuals.”82 The self-reflexive nature of the

measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.” (Poetics 189-190) 80 Hamid Dabashi asks “what does it exactly mean when a world renowned artist, a rather portly middle-aged man, poses as the malnourished dead body of a Syrian refugee child washed ashore as he and his family were trying to escape the slaughterhouse of their homeland?” (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Boy.”)

81 See his 2016 “Human Flow” documentary about a world’s history of forced migration.

82 For Sandy Angus, co-owner of India Art Fair (Delhi, India), “the image is haunting and represents the whole immigration crisis and the hopelessness of the people who have tried to escape their pasts for a better future” (Lakshmi). 151 image and the recuperative aestheticization of a toddler’s death ignited the fieriest discussions.

For Hamid Dabashi, Weiwei’s gesture calls for a reflection on the limits of conceptual art in times of human tragedies. Despite the fact that Weiwei foregrounds the predicament of thousands of refugees and calls for international human solidarity, his picture indeed poses ethical challenges when it comes to representing the suffering of migrants and refugees. Does

Weiwei’s own background as an exiled Chinese dissident allow him to appropriate the death of a three-year old Syrian refugee, transform it into a self-centered piece, and circulate it in artistic venues?

Weiwei is not just embodying a little boy drowned at sea; the Chinese artist is a symbol of resistance to artistic censorship, and he is embodying yet another symbol of human oppression in his own persona. The different symbolic values attached to Weiwei and to Alan Kurdi are conflated into one body – Weiwei’s – which almost makes one forget about the child. Instead of paying tribute to the young boy, the self-reflexive nature of Weiwei’s picture undoes the work of memory the image is supposed to perform, and makes us wonder what we are looking at: a spectral portrait of the young toddler, absent and yet symbolically represented through the body of the artist? A self-portrait of the artist as the young toddler? A masquerade suggesting that through art’s infinite possibilities of creation and imagination, one can put themselves in the shoes of refugees and migrants? Should we only see in Weiwei’s appropriation of the toddler’s death an attention-seeking act of self-promotion that passes for an ethical reflection on the impassivity of European political leaders?

Instead of calling into question the oppressive nature of such systems, art pieces such as

Weiwei’s appeal to sentimentalism and pity and resort to spectralizing tropes of suffering, resulting in a homogeneous vision of migrants and refugees. But, as it does so, the image also 152 engages with the processes of spectralization themselves. Looking at and aestheticizing the wound, instead of interrogating what created the wound, it focuses on the symptomatic aspects of the migration crisis. In a world saturated with images of migrants’ shipwreck, imprisonment in camps, and police violence against their persons, one may reflect on what Weiwei’s art really gives to see, the kind of ecology of migration it creates, and how such art may perpetuate what it seems to be critical of – the objectification of refugees in media and the inhumane political treatment from target countries.

The debates questioning Weiwei’s initiative to represent refugees and migrants have tended to categorize the artist’s project as either recuperative by nature or as a truly ingenuous attempt to capture the plight of migrants and refugees. By choosing between these two alternatives, however, one runs the risk of overlooking more significant questions about the role of art in the contemporary context of trans-Mediterranean migration: how can art create other refugee visibilities, identities, and histories? The recuperation of the Other’s suffering automatically entails the exploitation and the spectralization of the suffering subject. How can artists simultaneously mobilize and subvert spectralization to prevent such exploitation? How can the artist transform human suffering and empathy into a political gesture that empowers the disposable subject and generates political conversations?

The works of Sorel and Itso, I believe, help answer questions of appropriation, exploitation, and to understand how art participates in the dynamics of spectralization. These two artists stand out precisely because they dramatize their own failure at representing human tragedy. Sorel and Itso problematize how art imagines alternatives to political, economic, social, forms of power that participate in the disposability of entire populations. Grounded in the relational and the respect of one’s opacity, these alternatives may not do anything against these 153 forms of power but they generate frameworks for thinking about the refugee crisis. In a society ruled by utilitarian capitalism, these artworks do not serve the purpose of resisting the policies leading to the refugee crisis. For Dabashi, art’s incapacity at resisting such policies point to a failure. Weiwei’s photography, Dabashi argues, is symptomatic of the crisis of Western art, and of its impossibility to account for a world that perpetuates human atrocities. The horrors of the migrants and refugees crisis, irrepresentable by any means, call for a silence in which “the quiet cry is the loudest scream” (Dabashi).

While I agree with Dabashi’s critique of the exploitative nature of Weiwei’s photograph,

I am yet more interested in exploring his accusation of the failure of Northern American and

Western European artists to account for, represent, and salvage experiences of migration in the context of the current trans-Mediterranean migrants and refugees crisis. Taking the notion of artistic failure as a point of departure – rather than a conclusion – to investigate the ethical challenges of human and cultural appropriation in contemporary art helps understand how the artistic process of salvaging lost lives, voices, and memories, can redefine the ethical and aesthetic parameters of contemporary art in the age of global migration. Dramatizing the processes and effects of spectralization and abstraction, Sorel and Itso perform the failure of their own art at creating an indisputable archive of migration for past, present, and future refugees.

Instead, they create narrative and visual strategies that seek to grapple with how to ethically and aesthetically challenge issues of forced displacement, the trauma of the journey, difficult cultural integration, and the loss of socio-cultural, racial and religious identity. As such, then, their ecologies of migration constantly gesture towards their incompleteness, their own incapacity to represent the experience of trauma. 154

In Las Voces del Estrecho, Spanish novelist and activist Andres Sorel explores the current trans-Mediterranean refugee crisis through the posthumous stories of eleven fictional refugees drowned at sea. The narrative salvages and mourns the lost lives of men, women, and children fleeing gender, sexual, racial, and economic violence in countries such as Senegal,

Libya, and Morocco, and it re-historicizes the refugee crisis in a larger history of dispossession inherited from colonization and its aftermath. It also makes visible their ghosts to the reader, who becomes a witness by proxy of entire communities stuck between the world of the material and the spiritual. Caught in the liminal “al-bazzah” world, that is, the universe observed between the world of formless entities and the world of bodies in Islamic theology (15),83 the dead refugees of Las Voces occupy a space between life and death, an intra-diegetical repository for their own memories their pasts, and their current states of being as well. Framing the refugee crisis through the fictional invocation of ghostly figures, the narrative challenges the global news media and humanitarian discourses on the refugee crisis, which have mapped out human loss through statistics, rather than revealing the human lives behind these numbers.

Sorel’s work of salvaging lost lives connects to Itso’s own initiative to foster new refugee visibilities as both works reclaim spectralization and abstraction in order to build a repertoire of the refugee crisis. “Sheddings” (2015-2017) is a series of eleven mixed-media imprints. 84 As

Itso recuperates the t-shirts shed behind by migrants on the shores of Lampedusa Island, Italy, he dips them in blue paint and presses them onto a blank canvas, leaving an indexical impression of

83 As one of the epigraphs reads, “cuando los espiritus vuelan al mundo al-bazzah, continuan en posesion de sus cuerpos y estos adoptan la forma sutil en la que uno se ve a si mismo en suenos. Pues el otro universo es una morada en la que las aparencias cambian de continuo, del mismo modo que los pensamientos fugitivos en la dimension interior de este.” (“When the spirits fly to the al-bazzah world,” one of the epigraphs of the text reads, “they keep their bodies and these bodies adopt the subtle shape of one’s dreams. Well that other universe is a dwelling in which appearances keep changing, a dwelling similar to the fugitive thoughts in the inner dimension in this world.”;15; all translations from Sorel are mine) 84 For a more complete overview of the series, see artsy.net, https://www.artsy.net/search?term=sheddings. 155 their (absent) form. The result is an abstract blot which represents less the refugee crisis itself than the material and human debris left behind and which are typically represented in print press or TV media through and as statistics. Echoing the haunting that Sorel dramatizes in Las Voces, the abstraction of the work also evokes the dehumanizing social experiences lived by refugees in

Denmark, especially with regards to the Danish “Jewellery law” controversy. In 2016, the

Danish parliament approved a law allowing police forces to seize the migrants’ valuable assets

(over $1,450) from any refugee entering the country, in order for them to pay for accommodations in refugees centers. Items with an emotional value (such as wedding rings), however, should not be confiscated.

Itso’s blue ink blots inevitably and perhaps even obviously recall the sea, seen from a distance as if they were from a geographical map. The depth of the sea is measured by the intensity of a darker blue, which contrasts with the more porous and ill-defined borders that point a contact of water with the land. The blots, then, perform a double gesture: they recall the geographical mapping of water spaces but they also envision such spaces as an abyss, one in which the boundlessness of the sea, and of the knowledge it contains, escapes any sense of commensurability. However, Sheddings does not present the sea as bounded by natural or geopolitical limits. On the contrary, the ink blots live on their own, outside any form of circumscription. Only the wooden frame – itself made of driftwood collected on the shores of

Lampedusa – brings a sense of limitation that the blot yet overcomes as it spreads across both panels. Thus the piece reflects on the how material forces, represented here through the imprint, that is the trace, of the t-shirts and the wood, condition the experience of migration but do not determine the “afterlife” of refugees’ lives. As framed as it might be, the blue blot still suggests 156 the possibility to reoccupy the space of mediatic representation, itself framed by political and social exigencies.

As they develop ecologies of the abyss, ones in different histories and memories constantly intersect, Sorel and Itso offer a water-based approach to a crisis that has so far been understood mostly through a land-based angle. For Elizabeth DeLoughrey,85 the wasted lives of colonization, slavery, and indentured labor have been traced mostly through archives dedicated to the land (703-711); the relevance of the sea in histories of colonization and slavery, by contrast, remains to be explored.86 The sea, as DeLoughrey suggests, is not aqua nullius. As

Sorel’s narrative and Itso’s imprints suggest, it is transhistorical space in which measuring human losses in terms of number is challenging: the loss of bodies from visible surfaces implies a loss of data which can yet be recovered poetically. If the poetic reconstruction of the refugee crisis cannot fully rendering the experience of forced migration, then it does not abandon the project of representing it either.

For Sorel and Itso, haunting and abstraction interrogate how the experience of forced migration can be retraced. Haunting and abstraction are yet multivalent. As Sorel and Itso reclaim spectralization, even in order to denounce it, they also ultimately resort to the same tropes of suffering and of pity that global news media and other literary and artistic representations have used. In that sense, their works pose the following question: how does the

85 Also see Meg Samuelson on “Oceanic Histories and Protean Poetics: The Surge of the Sea in Zoe Wicomb’s Fiction,” and Samuelson and Lavery on “The Oceanic South.”

86 When the sea as a historical space has been documented, Samuelson argues, it is often about the Atlantic slave trade. The oceanic South, by contrast, remains “the most neglected of oceans” in spite of its epistemological richness: “The nature of this ocean – simultaneously roiling and hostile, fecund and unbounded, suggests ways of redrawing the contours of the South and engaging both its troubled surfaces and its lively depths. Because it uniquely flows into the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, the Southern Ocean opens up possibilities for tracking the intersecting currents and itineraries that compose the oceanic South. It enables us to sketch out the oceanic South as a category that draws together the dispersed landmasses of the settler South, the decolonized and still colonized South, the “sea of islands” comprising Indigenous Oceania, and the frozen of Antartica” (38). 157 reclaiming of spectralization and abstraction reinforce, remove, or challenge the social, cultural, historical, and political agency of refugees? I would argue that, for Sorel and Itso, abstraction and spectralization are the processes through which they problematize and dramatize the failure of art, particularly when it works through the economy of global art marketplaces such as state- sponsored institutions, to represent the irrepresentable. But if this failure cannot possibly give agency back to refugees in concrete ways, then I would also argue that it does still help construct cultural imaginaries of migration that account for more inclusive representations of refugees.

Haunting and abstraction are more than aesthetic tools to reflect the lost lives of refugees. They also create repertoires of migration that are open-ended and grounded in the imaginary. Such repertoires, I contend, offer an alternative to the factual, political, aesthetic and ethical parameters of mainstream archives on migration, such as the ones presented by the United

Nations Refugee Agency (whose archive is mostly statistic-based) or non-governmental organizations like The International Rescue Committee. Sorel and Itso mobilize haunting and abstraction to distance their own repertoires of migration from the teleological and “authentic” testimonies required from refugees by the authorities “welcoming” refugees in Western Europe.

Framing their conception of “the refugee” around the 1951 Refugee Convention,87 the legal authorities deciding whether refugees may stay or not have understood the refugee as a universal subject who may “earn” the status of refugee only as they check specific and exclusionary criteria boxes. By recuperating and dramatizing the human debris of the refugee crisis, Sorel and Itso push against the strict definition of “refugee” by the Convention, account for other refugee visibilities, and create other modes of recording their stories. These modes

87 According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the Refugee Convention is grounded in the Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which grants the right to seek asylum from persecution in other countries and seeks to ensure that the rights of refugees are respected and protected internationally.

158 entail the (literal and metaphorical) recuperation of migration debris, from which Sorel and Itso reconstruct the trajectory of refugees from the point of arrival to the point of departure. Rather than envisioning refugees solely as refugees, they interrogate the conditions that created refugees by going backwards temporally and spatially.

Salvaging the Debris of Migration: Las Voces del Estrecho

Sorel published Las Voces with Akal, a Spanish publishing house which was founded in

1972 in reaction to the cultural establishment of the global literary market. Originally published in 2000, Las Voces was reedited in 2016 with an additional preface the author wrote about the relevance of his work in the current context of the trans-Mediterranean refugee crisis. When

Sorel reedited Las Voces, it is estimated that 281,740 migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea and that 4,176 were declared either missing or dead.88 On average, eleven men, women, and children died every day between North Africa, Spain, and Italy in 2016. Las Voces del Estrecho recovers these lost lives and unfolds stories of specters haunting the shores of Southern Spain and condemned to relive the traumatic moment of their own death eternally. The novel recounts the stories of, among others, Romeo “El Africano” who lived in poverty in Morocco and wanted to secure a better future in Europe; the “headless woman” who fled her oppressive family for

Europe but was decapitated by the propeller of the boat transporting her; or Khadija “la gran ramera” (“the great whore”; 149), forced into prostitution after her family disowned her because of her sexual orientation. Sorel’s polyphonic narrative, then, narrates the experiences of men, women and children, from different countries, ages, religions, genders, and sexual orientations,

88 See International Organization for Migration. 159 who all crossed the Strait of Gibraltar because of the oppressive socio-political regimes of their countries.

Sorel’s stories are primarily sea-based testimonies that develop the perspectives of refugees. Most of what is known about the refugee crisis comes from maps with arrows pointing a trajectory from Africa to Western Europe. In these maps, the hardships of crossing of the

Mediterranean (such as the journey conditions on the boats) are erased, thereby not accounting for the trauma associated with forced displacement. Sorel’s sea-based project is transhistorical as it connects different stories from different historical times within one space, that of the

Mediterranean Sea. While the Mediterranean Sea is too often considered as a one-dimension surface by such maps, more and more artists such as Sorel have sought to recreate the experience of spatial and temporal disruption that forced migration entails. In Ceux du large (Afloat, 2017), for example, Mauritian novelist Ananda Devi imagines the experience of migration, drowning, loss, and death in the Mediterranean. As the poem is published in French, Mauritian Creole, and

English (all in the same edition), Ceux du large challenges linguistic, ethnic, racial, and national borders in its appeal for global solidarity with the refugees. The work becomes a repository for refugees’ memories, beliefs, histories, and aspirations. Las Voces and Ceux du large share the same commitment to make the debris of migration resurface from the cemetery that the

Mediterranean has become for many. These works despectralize the refugees and call for their right to opacity.

In a different context, such initiative was already present in the work of NourbeSe Philip, the author of Zong! (2008), a long poem that salvages the voices of the 130 slaves thrown overboard from the British-owned Zong slaveship during the Atlantic slave trade (1781).89 The

89 During the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, 130 slaves were thrown overboard from the Zong slave ship in order for the British to claim the insurance on the slaves. 160 poem Zong! is a series of words written across blank pages, which renders the illusion of bodies drowning in the sea. Yet the poem resists the gravitational movement of the words sinking to the bottom of the sea, as the reader could also interpret the words of the poem as resurfacing poetically and historically. As the words materialize the lives of refugees on paper, they render apparent but also suspend the process of spectralization. These words fill the absence of lives in the abyss, they also point to an exchange, one that makes present again, in a poetic form, the lives that were lost at sea. Such exchange works through a different economy that the financial and human transactions at the core of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which is based on a system of values determining how much one life costs and weighs. If, for Ian Baucom, the exchange at the core of Zong! points to an exchange and even a gain, 90 then I seek to explore how Sorel and

Itso reflect on the processes at work in the transformation of the nature of exchange in their respective works, particularly as it relates to forming repertoire of migration.

Las Voces salvages the debris of migration from oceanic depths. Imagining the lost stories of dead refugees, painter Abraham (Sorel’s fictional avatar) experiences the trauma of migration through Ishmael, the sole survivor to a shipwreck transporting migrants and now the cemetery grave-digger.91 The beginning of the novel, which recounts the first interaction

90 “For if, in this context, exchange suggests not merely a formal, Marxian, logic of dematerialization, a stripping away of the ‘‘exceptional’’ quality of things in their transit from use values to exchange values, but an absolutization of such dedifferentiating protocols, an apocalyptic stripping away of the exceptional quality of persons in their transit from humanness to money, then, however counterintuitive this might seem, what Glissant suggests is that exchange must be apprehended, in precisely such moments, not only as a word for loss but as a word for gain. Exchange, in this sense, once more names a form of substitution, though here what replaces exceptionality is not fungibility but relation, where relation is a word for an antimelancholic politics of memory, and a word for those new forms of culture, identity, and solidarity that emerge from even this most violent scene of Atlantic exchange” (Baucom 67). 91 Although an analysis of the characters’ names exceeds the scope of this chapter, it is noteworthy that Sorel should inscribe his only two living characters, painter Abraham and refugee and shipwreck survivor Ismael in the Abrahamic tradition. Focusing on the Islamic tradition, Sorel transforms Abraham the Patriarch into an authorial figure who is also a powerless spectator to human tragedies created not by a divine entity but by global capitalism; Abraham’s bastard son Ishmael, who was sent away by Abraham on the command of his wife Sarah, now becomes the narrator of his own shipwreck. Through the figure of Ishmael, Sorel draws an analogy with the “Moors” who 161 between the two protagonists, marks the ambiguity of Abraham’s narratorial authority over the refugees’ stories. The opening line “me dijeron se llamaba Ismael” (“I was told he was called

Ishmael”; 16) immediately brings to mind the “Call me Ishmael” of Melville’s Moby-Dick, another story of the sea. This sentence does also immediately problematize erasure and resist erasure. The passive structure Sorel employs to introduce Ismael deprives the latter from speech and the possibility to tell his own story. But as the narrative opens up on Abraham’s first vision of Ismael, it also immediately shifts the narratorial voice to Ismael and the ghosts who tell their own stories. The beginning of Las Voces is as much about the past of the migrants as it is about the present and future of those who now live with the trauma of migration and who work towards the preservation of migrants’ memories.

Opening his narrative on the incipit of Moby-Dick, Sorel displaces the sea narrative in the current context of forced migration. Las Voces questions Melville’s romantic vision of nature and displaces sublime horror into capitalist economy, which seems as uncontrollable as Nature.

Whereas the end of Moby-Dick conjures up the Romantic imaginary of an individual struggling against Nature, Ismael’s story is less anchored in poetic sublimation than in the will to recreate the violent experience of drowning. It is violence that creates relations:

La más temida, la madre de todas las olas, la que invade, arrasa, la que no sólo toma en volandas tu cuerpo sino que al tiempo golpea tus miembros, tu rostro, tu hígado, como podrían hacerlo los punos de un ejército de boxeadores al unísono, te atraviesa de oído a oído, ciega tus ojos, sella tu boca, percute tu pecho con un gope último, seco y definitivo, que te desgarra, desclava tus pies de la madera, eleva tus brazos hacia el cielo en inútil súplica protectora del vacío por el que ya vuelas y te arroja al fin en el lecho que momentáneamente ella, tu asesina, había abandonado. (19)

were expelled from Spain at the end of the Al-Andalus period (8th-15th century), and who come back at the dawn of the twenty-first century as migrants and refugees; but he also short-circuits xenophobic metanarratives that call for Spain’s resistance to what has been called “the Moorish invasion” of modern times (also see Linhard). Ismael the shipwreck survivor does not embody the threatening migrants portrayed in populist discourses, i.e. the one who takes advantage of social health care benefits and seeks employment opportunities; he becomes the gravedigger of all the migrants drowned at sea. 162

[The scariest one, the mother of all waves, invades and destroys you, she makes you explode but also punches your limbs, your face, your liver, just like boxers’ fists would. She pierces your ears, blinds your eyes, seal your mouth, hits your chest in a final, brutal blow that rips you up, unties your feet from the ropes, lifts your arms to the sky for its protection from the sea vacuum whereto you are already flying; and finally your assassin throws you on her bed that she had yet forgotten for a moment.]

Through the present tense and the jolting rhythm of punctuation, Sorel recreates not only the brutality of the shipwreck but also erases the distance between the event and the moment of reading, thereby reenacting the violence both in Ismael, the listener Abraham, and the readers.

Ismael’s shipwreck is not a moment isolated in history but is connected to the present through its violence and its material effects on bodies. This moment, as well as the narrative at large, recreates the violence of the drowning while also envisioning the sea as a space for other relationships between the living and the dead to emerge.

It is through such violence, I would argue, that Sorel dramatizes the failure of spectralization at the core of global news media’s representations of refugees. Violence is that through which the abyss materializes, as it creates relationalities between the drowned refugees but also between them and the reader. For DeLoughrey, such violence points to “heavy waters,” which “rupture the naturalizing flow of history, foregrounding a now-time that registers violence against the wasted lives of modernity in the past and the present” (704). Although DeLoughrey writes primarily about the Atlantic Ocean as a space of modernity, her notion of heavy waters as a marker of rupture (between the normative and the disposable) is relevant in the context of the transmediterranean refugee crisis. More particularly it helps project the refugee crisis as the continuation of a larger series of crises, rather than a singular event that happens only once in history: the sea that rages against Ishmael, recounted in the present tense to a general “you,” repeats itself perpetually, thereby creating a cycle of violence in which refugees have found, still find, and will find themselves. Thus if violence is also present in Weiwei’s art, it does not 163 register the series of crises through which refugees have found themselves. Rather, Weiwei spectralizes violence by making it an immediately graspable object of study that is limited by the frame of the picture. The drowning of Aylan Kurdi is presented as a moment out of time historically disconnected from other cycles of violence.

In Las Voces, violence is what conditions the afterlife of refugees in haunted spaces. It is also what conditions the visible emergence of refugee ghosts, their stories, and the relations they create. As Ishmael introduces Abraham to the realm of the dead, he opens up a space where the invisible and immaterial spirits of the refugees take precedence over the material and the visible, bodies of the living. For Ishmael, the refugees are now “sombras. Fantasmas que vagan por el cielo impulsados por los vientos, sombras que buscan sus cuerpos. Hasta que los encuentren no pueden descansar” (“Shadows. Ghosts that wander in the sky, propelled by the winds. Shadows that are looking for their bodies. They will not be able to rest until they find their bodies”; 22).

While Ishmael uses “shadows” and “ghosts” as synonyms, the alternation between these two different terms destabilizes the identity of the refugees. It points out how refugees, as figures of displacement and exile, are constrained to recalibrate their own visibility according to where they find themselves. The recalibration of their physical selves entails a shift in their modes of appearance. On the one hand, a “shadow” – which I connect to the word specter here – presupposes a material body against a source of light; on the other hand, a “ghost” is not a material, tangible, body but an ungraspable entity. From the very beginning of the novel, then, the narrative sets up a constant oscillation that dissolves the material boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, which opens up possibilities for occupying the border between these two worlds. It is precisely by opening up such possibilities that the work despectralizes global news media’s representations of refugees. 164

Towards Despectralization

However, the specters of the refugees do more than just embodying the collective historical trauma or the fear of a nation towards foreigners. As Sorel dramatizes how the specters of the refugees inhabit the al-bazzah world, he develops new refugee identities, visibilities, and histories that all form relations in an open-ended, mutable, and dynamic repertoire of migration.

In that sense, while scholars such as Raquel Vega-Durain and Irene Andres-Suarez have read Las

Voces as a tool for redefining hispanidad, i.e. Spanish identity, I believe that the novel performs the exact opposite. It decenters the European “benevolent” gaze on migrants and refugees, thereby moving away from a Hispanocentric perspective. Sorel’s voices depart from Gibraltar and branch out towards the African continent, its cultural and demographic heterogeneity, as well as its past and present traditions. Rather than attempting to redefine contemporary European national identities, Las Voces documents the refugee crisis for past, present, and future generations. In that sense, it rehistoricizes the crisis in a larger history of dispossession, and challenges representations that dehumanize refugees and function according to “boundaries erected between the normative and the disposable” (DeLoughrey, Postcolonial Ecologies 74).

In the preface to the second edition to Las Voces, Sorel calls for a more humanistic approach to the refugee crisis, one that particularly calls out the treatment of refugees as financial assets, a description that is reminiscent of what Zygmunt Bauman otherwise terms the

“neoliberal human-waste industry”:

Junto a la imagen del nino ahogado, catapultada hacia la vision de los espectadores y asesinos […], se ofrecen cifras que, si se rellenaran de contenido humano, podrian componer mil y una noches de relatos y ocuparian los espacios que dia a dia nos atosigan con las informaciones bursaltiles en los periodicos y televisiones de todo el mundo.

[Along with the picture of the drowned child, thrown at the eyes of the spectators and murderers [...] are numbers. Were these numbers replaced with human content, they would compose one thousand and one nights of tales; these tales would occupy the spaces 165

that the newspapers and televisions of the entire world have otherwise invested with stock-market information.”] (11)

Sorel’s humanistic approach to the question of representing the migration crisis is overall coherent with his broader call for solidarity with subjects considered disposable by Western

European immigration policy and for a fairer sharing of the space of representability in mass media and literature. Spectralized through numbers, refugees recover visibility through imagination and fiction. Yet, as Sorel seeks to replace numbers with personal stories, his comparison with the “one thousand and one nights of tales” also raises questions about the aesthetic parameters of such representability. While the designated literary framework of the

Arabian Nights identifies storytelling practice as a mode of survival, it also orientalizes migrants and refugees and perpetuates visions of a constructed “Other” as inherently violent, lusty, and exotic. For a narrative that purports to give back their individuality and dignity to human beings, the choice of a Western canonical narrative based on the essentialization of the Other seems contradictory.

Yet I would also argue that Sorel is aware of such reductive representations and uses them ironically to point out how the modern/colonial literary industry has nourished the colonial and neocolonial cultural imaginary while purging the (former) colonized subjects of substance.

His fictional avatar Abraham, for instance, knows Tangier, Morocco, only through the orientalist novels of American author Paul Bowles; he imagines Tangier as a space of laziness and leisure occupied by snake-charmers wearing turbans and belly-dancers covered in gold (71). Abraham’s lengthy descriptions of an exotic and out-of-time Tangier provides a familiar perception of

Morocco as seen through Hollywood productions. Yet Sorel also exposes the ignorance of his character and of himself about the reality of structural poverty in Morocco. Abraham’s imaginary 166 space of Tangier92 perform an erasure of both the people and spaces they inhabit, an erasure that

Sorel seeks to counter through the narrativization of experiences of such spaces.

Las Voces revisits, remaps, and reinhabits those imaginaries with what has fallen out of mediatic and literary representations – the unseen human subjects whom precarious socio- cultural and geopolitical structures have rendered invisible. As the narrative updates the Arabian

Nights to the imperatives of the early twenty-first century, it offers a collection of fictional tales in which political systems inherited from colonization replace supernatural evil forces, in which flying carpets become drowning pateras (“dinghy”; 86), and in which negotiations for human survival no longer rely on magic but on illegal transactions – drug trafficking, slavery, and prostitution – which are themselves invisible to Western audiences. For Sorel, what is lost materially is regained spectrally and poetically.

Using the Al-Bazzah world, the in-between space between the living and the dead, as both a framework and a metaphor for the narrative, Sorel runs yet the risk of romanticizing the death of migrants by presenting ghostly subjects caught in supernatural forces that transcend spatial and temporal boundaries. The chapter “El eterno navigante” (“The Eternal Sailor”), epitomizes Sorel’s vision of spectral boundlessness as the character, an unnamed violinist, plays a song for all those who suffer from marginalization: “Era un canto que, de mar a mar y de desierto a desierto, intentaba unir a todos los exiliados del mundo, a los peregrinos sin tierra, a sus hermanos, tuvieran el color que tuvieran y hablasen la lengua que hablasen” (“It was a song which, from sea to sea, from desert to desert, meant to unite all the exiled people in the world, the landless pilgrims and their brothers regardless of their skin color or language.”;185). A

92 “Y las calles serpenteaban entre imágenes de cabarets y hoteles de luces semiapagadas, con mujeres envueltas en vaporosos tules, tumbadas displicentemente en la cama….” (“streets meandering between softly lit hotels and cabarets, with women shrouded in sheer tulle insolently laying down on their beds…”; 71) 167 moment of poetic reenchantment in a world marked by global injustice and human rights violations against disposable subjects, the eternal sailor’s song suggests that forced migration is a phenomenon that exceeds sensible reality. This song neither performs the abyss nor does it emerge from it. This song is the abyss, as it transcends time and space and creates a form of transnational solidarity that overcomes geopolitical boundaries separating nations.

In a current context of mediatic representation of refugees as specters haunting Europe, understanding forced migration as a transcendental phenomenon may further desensitize one to migration issues, which are detached from the spectator’s reality. What is even more problematic perhaps is the figure of the violinist itself, which Sorel uses across his novels as emblematic of human suffering and misery. In Ultimo Tango en Auschwitz (Last Tango in Auschwitz, 2013), for instance, Sorel develops the story of a violinist struggling for survival in the camps. Ultimo

Tango in Auschwitz was published after Las Voces, and therefore does not play into the author’s choice of the musician figure. Sorel does yet draw explicit comparisons between the Holocaust and the refugee crisis throughout Las Voces, thereby amalgamating different sufferings from different historical circumstances. Taken holistically across all his works, the figure of the musician paradoxically imperils Sorel’s project of accounting for different sufferings and restoring the voices of all. Applying the same figure from one novel to the next, Sorel risks essentializing all victims of human atrocities and of erasing their individuality.

Thus the mobilization of spectralization holds a multivalent position in the narrativization of refugee stories – it contributes to erase the refugees’ identity but also paradoxically creates a ghostly realm full of possibilities for reconfiguring the refugees’ visibilities (yet constrained by a supernatural and unrealistic aspect). What links these two aspects of spectralization together is their shared appeal to boundlessness as a challenge to geopolitical boundaries that limit refugees’ 168 mobility across the Mediterranean. It might then seem counterintuitive that Las Voces should use spectral metaphors. Yet for Sorel, humanizing refugees does not equate incarnating voices through the reconstruction of bodies. On the contrary, humanizing refugees works through dematerialization and disembodiment, which suggests that, unlike their body, the survival of the refugees’ memory no longer depends on the contingency of material environments.

In Las Voces, bodies recall the horrors of forced migration; nearly all chapters end with gruesome depictions of bodies torn apart, suffocating in the sea waters, or cut in half by boat propellers. “Dejé de recordar cuando naufragamos. Luego fuisteis vosotros quienes me informasteis de que la hélice de un barco partío en dos mi cuerpo y de que todavía no ha aparecido mi cabeza,” says one of the ghosts whose body was recuperated by rescuers (“I stopped recording my story when we capsized. Then it was you who found me and told me that the boat propeller tore my body in half and that my head was still missing. My soul cannot find peace.”; 125). It is also quite significant that her memory should stop recording events exactly when the boat capsized; while the woman’s ghost identifies death as what ultimately fails her own recording system, Sorel also recalls that refugees are dispossessed of their post-mortem memories by global news media. These media take on the task of erasing these memories to focus solely on masses of undesirable bodies, which becomes markers of what is supposedly wrong in Western Europe. While mediatic narratives on refugees tend to take death as a point of departure, Sorel disrupts this backwards chronology to inscribe his ghosts in the world of the living.

I would argue that it is precisely in this chronological disruption that Sorel’s use of spectralization takes a fundamental turn in redefining the visibilities of what Angela Naimou terms debris, “a fractured legal identity, scattered and not always apparent, but shaping the 169 spaces in which the legal person dwells” (7). Recuperating the material and spiritual debris of the refugee crisis, Sorel reimagines the history of this crisis as a ghostly journey whose temporality is not teleologically oriented towards the drowning moment, but constantly loops back on itself.

The cyclic temporality of the narrative, as well as the fragmented spatiality each testimony entails, I argue, open up alternative ways of documenting and archiving the refugee crisis. Global news media, political and humanitarian discourses, have documented the refugee crisis through stories following a departure and an arrival point. Ultimately, the refugee’s journey ends either in death by drowning or in refugee camps, with little space left for exploring refugees’ lives, persons, and identities.

In the narrative, the abrupt temporal shifts offer alternatives to Western chronological perception and construction of History, which erases the temporalities of trauma experienced by the victims of forced migration. Sorel’s archive of the refugee crisis is an accretion of various temporalities grounded in key historical events of the non-Western world, such as the 1981

Moroccan state repression of dissidents. The narrative is a space where the West and its spectralized “Other” collapse together into a collective history which loops back on itself, thereby undoing the linearity of the refugee crisis as recounted in media and literature. As “el viejo de la montana,” the old man of the mountain, suggests, time “era como todo es, ilusión, sensación” (“everything else – illusion, sensation”; 90). The old man of the mountain is yet not a refugee of contemporary history; his story goes back as far as 1612, when the last descendants of

“Moors” were being expelled from Spain, regardless of their conversion to Christianity. The story of the old man not only helps perceive Western and non-Western encounters as a history of territorial and cultural conquests between civilizations; it does also recall that it is through such encounters that borders have been defined and that the West has constructed itself as a center 170 creating marginal peripheries. A story of racial, ethnic, and religious, exclusions, the old man’s testimony also reflects on how modern Europe has been, is, and will keep being partitioned and bordered:

Existió un tiempo, y con la ayuda del Todopoderoso ese tiempo volverá a existir, en que nuestros pueblos, Arabia, Iraq, el Magreb, eran el centro del mundo, a la menera que lo fue el Mediterráneo para los griegos, o los son los Estados Unidoes de América para el mundo actual. […] Y en aquel tiempo nuestro, concluido por divisiones y rebeliones contra Dios, el más grande, no existia Medina y Zahara era un desierto, un arenal como su nombre indica. Lo fue desde lo que llaman Edad Antigua, sin presencia del Estrecho, cuando nuestra tiera era un vergel, antes de la gran sequía y de que las aguas separaran y dividieran las tierras.

[There was a time, and with the Almighty’s help this time will come back again, when our people, Arabia, Iraq, Maghreb, were the center of the world, just like the Mediterranean was for the Greeks, or the United States for the contemporary world. [...] And back then, in that time of divisions and rebellions against the Almighty, there was no Medina and no Zahara. Zahara was a desert, as its name suggests. It had been a desert since Antiquity, the strait was not even a thing, back when our land was an orchard, before the great drought and before the waters rose up to separate and divide the lands.] (90)

A “natural” demarcation between Africa and Europe, the Strait of Gibraltar was a space of connection and cultural encounters before being a space of exclusion and fortification between

Western civilization and “barbarians” from North Africa. Mourning a past when borders were natural instead of geopolitical, and in which mobility was not yet constrained, the old man’s melancholy for a long-lost Arabic world celebrates boundlessness and timelessness as modes of spatial and temporal occupancy free from racial, ethnic, and religious, partitioning. Created by such partitioning, which eventually led to their death, the refugee ghosts mobilize their own spectrality to overcome geopolitical and cultural boundaries.

As Sorel relies on a cyclical temporality, he thus envisions the ecology of the

Mediterranean abyss as non-linear, non-teleological, one that leaves space for the thousands of human lives that were lost to forced migration. Salvaging testimonies from beyond the grave, 171

Sorel makes visible the invisible imperial structures of power that still remain and actualizes what Achille Mbembe theorizes as “death-world.” In “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the

Fiction of Amos Tutuola,” Mbembe defines “death-worlds” as “extreme [...] forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that confer upon them the status of living dead (ghosts)” (1). Mbembe’s concept of “death-world” is useful for understanding how Sorel mobilizes spectralization to reconstruct communities of belonging. The death-world allows disempowered ghostly subjects to violently push against the spatial, temporal, and political, boundaries of ruined spaces.

Sorel’s death-world, I would argue, push against the limitations of Mbembe’s. For

Mbembe, as the death-world abolishes the linearity of time, it also prevents the creation of a stable collective memory for its ghosts, who are constantly reliving the moment of trauma. The ghostly realm

constantly spills out over its assigned time and space. It is a scene where events continually take place that never seem to congeal to the point of consolidating into history. Life unfolds in the manner of a spectacle where past and future are reversed. Everything takes place in an indefinite present. Before and after are abolished, memory is destabilized, and multiplication reigns. There is no life but a life that is fractured and mutilated. (“Life, Sovereignty, and Terror” 6)

Just like the fragmented temporality of Mbembe’s ghostly realm prevents the ghosts from moving forward into a future that is yet past, Sorel’s ghosts too remain in an eternal present, retelling the same stories night after night. Mbembe’s concept of the death-world differs from

Glissant’s abyss. While both concepts of the death-world and the abyss foreground the formations of relationalities, the outcomes of such processes differ radically. Mbembe’s concept of the death-world does not eventually “consolidate into history”, i.e. Western official history. In the abyss, however, there is the possibility of constructing forms of history, which are all fragmented and challenge any type of consolidation into a singular modern/colonial history. For 172

Sorel, the ghosts’ memories certainly condemns the ghosts to relive traumatic experiences of their past, but these moments all form a counter-history that gives precedence to smaller narratives.

Such counter-history is inscribed within the larger “grand” narrative of Western history, exploring and occupying its nooks with smaller narratives. One such nook, I believe is the chronotope of the haunted, ruined hotel, which the ghosts of Las Voces occupy. Once a bunker given by Franco to Nazi soldiers, this place was then repurposed as a hotel, which was unfinished and then abandoned (22). The hotel of Las Voces is not Sorel’s fictional invention, but a historical artifact that, still today, tourists can see at Zahara de los Atunes (Andalusia), a military beach where thousands of refugees arrive after crossing the Mediterranean.93 Interlacing the real and the imaginary through the use of historical objects that do exist in the readers’ time and space, Sorel defamiliarizes a touristy setting and asks one to reflect on the historical continuity in the Western history of human atrocities – from the Holocaust and the expansion of the Axis powers across Europe to what he calls “genocide” (7) – the refugee crisis.

A cross-border zone, the military beach harbors the ghostly presence and memory of those who would precisely disturb the socio-cultural order of a Western Europe undergoing trends of xenophobia and nationalism. Originally designed to protect oneself against the

“invasion” of foreigners, and to demarcate national identities, the hotel is more than a liminal space that would challenge dualities such as the living and the dead, material and immaterial,

Europe and Africa, past and present. Located in a space of exclusion, the hotel has become a counter-space, in which a new inclusive and cosmopolitan polis is established for the stateless

93 A point of entry for refugees, Zahara de los Atunes became infamous in 2000 for a picture portraying a couple on the beach, with a refugee body in the background; more recently, a video footage showed refugees arriving by boat on the shores of Zahara de los Atunes, and running among tourists to escape police forces. 173 and the dispossessed. Ironically, it is in the architectural remnants of a totalitarian regime based on racial supremacy that Sorel recreates ecologies of belonging. A shared space of spectrality, of communal storytelling, of mourning the material lives of the refugees, particularly of their body, the haunted hotel pushes against the linear temporality of Western History.

Thus in addition to being a historical artifact enabling systemic oppression, xenophobia, and violence, the bunker-hotel is a death-world that deconstructs the current history of the refugee crisis. The bunker-hotel accounts for what has exceeded the contours of social, political, cultural, and racial discourses forming human subjects as refugees. When the bunker was sold to the Nazis, it then emblematized an instance of state exception justifying historical violence for the supposed benefit of European nations; in Las Voces, however, it becomes the space in which ethical modes of accounting for the refugee crisis are born, namely through story-telling, unrestrained spatial occupancy, and geopolitical boundlessness. An underground shelter hiding its occupants, the bunker-hotel is what reveals the unheard stories of refugees. It becomes a tool for sovereignty over one’s own testimony. Such sovereignty is visual – as the refugee ghosts get to represent themselves – and narratorial – as they reclaim agency over their own stories.

These stories unravel how what is commonly termed the “refugee crisis” is not just a global phenomenon affecting all refugees equally. Sorel’s repertoire of the refugee crisis is one that seeks to complicate the simplification of the refugee crisis in global headlines; it is as much about the life of migrants and refugees as it is about the political and socio-cultural structures that create them as migrants and refugees. In Las Voces, the refugee crisis is understood as racialized and gendered, for instance, which deconstructs the homogenizing discourses around the refugee crisis. In the chapter “La Mujer Sin Cabeza” (“The Headless Woman”), migration is envisioned as a gendered phenomenon resulting from patriarchal oppression: 174

“Sí, tradicionalmente son los hombres quienes emigran, pero ahora nos toca a nosotras hacerlo para buscar el sustento de nuestras familias cuando no existe otra manera de conseguirlo, para sobrevivir cuando nos convertimos en un estorbo, en una carga que nadie quiere.”

[“Yes, it is typically men who migrate. But now, we women have to do it too, because it has become the only way for us to support our families, our only chance of survival when we have been turned into a nuisance, a burden no one wants”] (123-124).

As Sorel intersects issues of gender and sexuality in experiences of migration, he reveals the gendered violence that is silenced, inextricably linking sexual violence and migration:

La agarró por el cuello, doblando su cuerpo, arrodillándolo. “Como grites, te mato,” le dijo, y, aunque ella no entendiera sus palabras, comprendía su significado. Cerró los ojos. Notaba cómo el miembro del policía se insertaba en su boca, profundizaba en su garganta. Luego ya todo fue un movimiento continuo, como el de la patera que en la noche la había desplazado a la Península.

[The police officer] was holding her by the neck, bending her body and making it kneel down. “If you scream, I’ll kill you,” he said. Although she did not understand a word, she knew what he meant. She closed her eyes. She noticed how the officer’s member inserted itself in her mouth, deeper in her throat. Then it was a continuous movement, just like the patera that had displaced her to the peninsula that night.”] (52)

These descriptions verge on voyeurism. Indeed, to what extent does such graphic depiction counter the media’s representations of refugee stories? I would argue that, beyond exposing the predicament of the refugees, Sorel purposefully insists on the graphic violence of such situation to suggest how sensational refugee stories mask the other realities of migration, such as the process of transforming human lives into commodities. This description certainly mimicks the methods of “the photojournalistic imagery of refugees, which seeks to portray the raw truth of their destitution, and their lack of voice, which defines their identity as primarily bodies devoid of political subjectivity” (Chouliaraki 15). But instead of portraying migrants as an indistinct mass of bodies, of “boat people” stuck in the perpetual present of media representation, Sorel explores how these bodies have been dispossessed and have become exchangeable commodities for negotiating survival over time. The body of the woman, in this instance, is no longer that of 175 the threatening alien invading and destabilizing the socio-political order of Europe; the violence imposed on her body reveals that the migrant’s body is subjected to constant physical intrusion and violence. In that sense, the association of the patera journey with sexual violence, bridged by the physical and temporal “continuous movement,” duplicates the body of the woman as both an object that takes space on the boat, and a space that is objectified, invaded, and sexually colonized by the police officer.

Be it in the unregulated sea space of the Mediterranean or in an institutional space of authority and law such as the police station, Las Voces reveals routes of migration that account for other spaces invisible to global news media, as the character Ahmed Sufat suggests when he recounts his escape from Niger through Ivory Coast:

Nací en Niger. Huí con mi hermano menor de la casa de mis padres y con otros dos compañeros embarcamos en el puerto de Abidjan en un carguero que tenía una bandera de colores azules y amarillos. Nos escondimos en el castillo de proa. Lo único que sabíamos de aquel barco, que portaba un cargamento de chatarra, es que se dirigía a España. […] Lo último que recuerdo es el frío del agua, como esquirlas de hielo incrustándose en mis huesos. […] Huimos nosotros. Nadie sabe el tiempo que pudimos caminar, alimentándonos de lo que pillábamos, sintiéndonos acosados, perseguidos. Cruzamos países distintos, escondiéndonos de día, caminando en la noche, durante días, semanas. Corríamos, corríamos hasta el límite de nuestras fuerzas, y al fin llegamos a aquella playa, y luego al puerto, y escondidos en la caja de un camión, esperamos la ocasión de subirnos al barco.

[I was born in Niger. I fled from my parents’ house with my younger brother and two other friends. In the port of Abidjan, we boarded a freighter with a blue and yellow flag. We hid on the upper deck. The only thing we knew was that the boat was shipping some metal scraps and that it was going to Spain. [...] The only thing I can remember is how cold the water was, like iron shards penetrating my bones. [...] We fled. No one knows the time we spent walking, eating only whatever we could get, feeling accused, persecuted. We crossed different countries, hiding by day, walking by night, during days and weeks. We ran till we reached the limit of our strength, and we finally arrived at the beach, and then at the harbor; we hid in the load of a truck, waiting for the moment when we could climb up the boat in it.] (197-198)

Going back and forth between Niger and Abidjan, between the moment of escape and of drowning, the narrative layers different spatialities and temporalities so as to account for 176

Ahmed’s fractured experience of migration. Rather than marking unidirectional movements from a point of origin to a point of arrival, the map becomes here a narrative tool for reconfiguring refugee’s memory and trauma, thereby pushing mapping practices beyond geospatial trajectories.

Ahmed does not justify his choice of crossing Ivory Coast instead of Algeria or Libya, which would have been more direct. Yet such journey is not unexpected given the reinforcement of state borders, and given that Libya has become the most dangerous portal to Europe, as recent stories of human trafficking and slavery have shown. The freighter, itself a signifier of transoceanic mobility, suggests that for the refugees to be shipped abroad, they have to occupy the same space and function as what is being shipped – metal scraps, discarded materials that will be reprocessed into something else. The mention of the metal scraps, along with objectifying refugees as the world’s leftovers, poses a question of value. Because metal scraps have a use- value, they can be shipped to Spain without any obstacles; refugees, on the other hand, supposedly do not have any function in Western European populist discourses, and their mobility is therefore reduced, if not completely arrested.

For Sorel, revaluating discarded human lives takes the form of a collective memory that redresses the erasure of these lives from official archives of migration. Such historical erasure takes the form of an irreversible sacrifice in which both human lives and their socio-cultural identities are traded for the perpetuation of global capitalism. For Abraham, the refugee crisis is inscribed in a long history of sacrificial rituals, which originates in Ancient Greece through animal slaughtering for deities, and is perpetuated through the early twenty-first century in the form of human loss in the Mediterranean. It is particularly the patera, the dinghy boat of refugees, that emblematizes such sacrifice:

La seconda patera, azul, aparecía prácticamente desguazada, metrps más arriba, cerca del pequeño hotel de Mariano […]. Allí va muriendo lentamente. Presos sus ocupantes, 177

requisado su motor. Y en el transcurso de los días, las gentes arrancaron gran parte de sus tablas. La quilla apenas es ya el es esqueleto óseo en el que asoman un puñado de clavos oxidados sobre los restos de las tablas y vigas que conforman su armazón. Ningún nombre la idenfica. Todos son simplemente pateras del exilio, el naufragio y la muerte. Y leyo Abraham en un diccionario: ‘Patera: plato de poco fondo que se usaba en los sacrificios antiguos.’

[The second patera, blue, was almost entirely broken up, a few meters above, close to Mariano’s small hotel. [...] There it was, slowly dying, its passengers imprisoned, and its engine stolen. As days went by, people took away most of its boards. Its keel already turned into a bony skeleton where a handful of rusty nails appeared over the rest of the beams and boards that formed its frame. There was no name for the boat. These boats are simply called boats of exile, shipwreck and death. Abraham read in a dictionary: “Patera: a shallow plate used in ancient sacrifices.”] (86)

The patera boat has become the symbol of migration tragedies, not only because it signifies displacement, but also because it has become an object of transaction between lands, between the

South and the North, and between different socio-cultural and economic systems. An object of transportation, the patera becomes a fetish revalued by people who dismantle it. While the “bony skeleton” of the patera recalls the anatomy of an animal washed ashore, it is significant that there should be no living body in this description, the “passengers imprisoned” being the spectral remnants of migrants who once occupied the patera. Dismantled until there is nothing left but a carcass, the patera acquires more value than the people it once transported.

While Abraham anecdotally reads the dictionary definition of the patera, I would argue it is at this moment that the narrative gestures towards a reflection on sacrifice as an overarching concept in the whole text. For Sorel, it is not just human lives that are sacrificed by the global human-waste industry. It is also their stories, which are being recuperated, exploited, and sacrificed for financial profit. Particularly critical of the literary and artistic industry, which exists according to financial exigencies, Sorel seeks to challenge what he calls “la literatura de la frivolidad, literatura concebida como mercancia y envuelta en la publicidad” (“frivolous 178 literature,” that is “merchandise wrapped in advertisements for the benefit of its apparently aseptic publishers”;12). Sorel attacks

los ensayistas y academicos, tambien los politicos, (que) prefieren que, en vez de hablar de vidas humanas, se haga de cifras, numeros. Les molesta el pesimismo que pueden mostrar la historia, las voces, y la vida de los asesinados por ellos – los duenos de los Mercado, que tambien mandan en la literatura, la publicidad, la socieda del consumo

[Writers, academics, and politicians [who] do not like history’s pessimism, the voices and lives of those killed by the masters of the markets who also control literature, advertisement, consumption society.] (12)94

As such, then, Sorel’s despectralization of refugees also extends to contemporary debates on the autonomy of academia from a neoliberal ideology which transforms everything into valuable assets. As Sarah Brouillette points out in “Academic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of Autonomous Work,”

Autonomization, defined as the struggle to develop and secure the means for articulations of creativity that are separable from capital in some authentic measure, is an urgent concern for the university today. It is urgent precisely because neoliberal ideologies and practices draw so much from the history of thought about aesthetic acts and the motives behind them. (3)

While Brouillette does not mention how the privatization of knowledge also affects emerging epistemological frameworks such as the decolonial one, I believe that, read together, hers and

Sorel’s critique of academia echo each other in their joint attack on the neoliberal aesthetics of knowledge production, which spectralizes disempowered subjects too. In the case of the artist

94 Here Sorel echoes Spanish fiction writer and essayist Juan Goytisolo, whom he also quotes in one of his epigraphs. For Goytisolo, the function of artists is to embrace selflessness during moments of historical crisis in order to represent the people. He recalls that “if we analyze literary history, we will find the alternation between periods in which the individual expression of the artist predominates with others in which literary works reflect rather unanimously what Lukacs has called with keen insight the “social charge” of a period. In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates, the writer functions totally in unison with society, and expresses society’s feelings, beliefs, and hopes in perfect harmony” (Ortega). 179 and the academic, knowledge should be “packaged” in an attractive way so as to attract investment. 95

In addition to suggesting that the literary industry has become a business exploiting the phenomenon of forced migration, Sorel recalls that most of literature on migration produced in the West perpetuates cultural imperialism through artworks that sensationalize the suffering of others while acknowledging the “generosity” of the West towards foreign populations.96 One may see, in such a context, how adopting a decolonial approach to the refugee crisis both in art and in academia is challenging. For as the decolonial approach presupposes the emergence of

“smaller” narratives and personal testimonies of refugees to occupy the archives of migration, such an authorial shift in the making of the history of the refugees compromises the position of the artist and the academics as “the” source of knowledge reflecting the values and exigencies of their respective institutions.

95 “Packaging in an attractive way,” particularly in the literary and artistic market, means resorting to spectralizing aesthetics that format the object of study according to specific criteria of refugee representation. One way of packaging knowledge, for instance, is to empower the source of knowledge production as a powerful actor intervening on the forefront of the problems denounced. For Sorel, for instance, migrant literature relies on “la farsa caritativa”, i.e. charity farce (9), or what Chouliaraki has otherwise called “playful reflexivity” (21), that is artistic initiatives that exploit human suffering in the guise of sentimental pity and indignation against human rights violations. Aware that his works is going to neither empower nor fully account for the memory and identity loss of the refugees, Sorel dramatizes and challenges what Lilie Chouliaraki calls “ironic solidarity,” a self-fulfilling solidarity that is less about helping the other than aggrandizing their own public image. As Chouliaraki argues, current public discourses on the migrant crisis have constructed refugees as figures of pity and threat, at times disempowered and passive, at others as agentic social beings. Looking particularly at the spheres of humanitarianism, journalism, and policy-making (14), Chouliaraki concludes that, to a few exceptions, the actors of these spheres elaborate a politics of pity that entails issues of political and personal recuperation of the suffering of others. Chouliaraki calls for a “reflexive solidarity” in which “the refugee should be portrayed as having a voice of his/her own” and in which s/he“is represented neither through stereotypes of destitution, as in traditional portrayal of poverty as famine, nor through stereotypes of individual sovereignty, as in positive, yet misleading, representations of self-determination” (29). While Chouliaraki examines journalism, documentaries, and independent films as fit candidates for reflexive solidarity, I believe that art plays a fundamental role too when it comes to rehumanizing migrants and refugees with neither complacency nor pity. While the contemporary art sphere might seem abstracted from such urgent issues, it sets up critical platforms for thinking about the refugee visibilities in public discourses in order to reshape Western European collective imaginations around the “threat” of migration. 96 One should yet not ignore initiatives, such as Wolfgang Bauer’s Crossing the Sea With Syrians on the Exodus to Europe reportage (2016), which have documented the perilous journey of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in addition to exploring the systemic issues at the roots of migration. 180

Las Voces de-hierarchizes knowledge production from the bottom up and reveals the extent to which literature can push against the limits of the refugee novel market. The imaginative power of literature gives to the reader more than the possibility of imagining themselves in the shoes of suffering subjects. Beyond the urgency to expose human tragedies, such as a pregnant woman who dies in childbirth on the patera boat and whose body is emptied out and then stuffed with drugs (49), the author insists on fiction’s power to reconstruct an obliterated side of contemporary history out of the debris of migration. Yet, if Sorel denounces the recuperative and exploitative nature of the literary industry, one may wonder to what extent

Las Voces is not recuperative in nature too. Indeed, is the critique of exploitative artwork enough for absolving Sorel from appropriating refugees’ voices and imagining their experiences?

I would argue that not only is Sorel very much aware of the recuperative, and to some extent spectralizing, nature of his work, but that he also subverts it in order to explore the limits of poetic recreation of trauma. Aware of the potential critique against lack of authenticity,

Abraham, both a story-teller and a painter, as well as the main authorial figure of the text, brings attention to the artificiality of his art, emphasizing the creative power of fiction rather than mimetic reproduction:

Abraham, en cuanto se encerraba en su habitación, siempre la número siete del hotel Luna de Zahara, abría el cuaderno de páginas en blanco y sobre él vertía sus voces, su lenguaje adaptado al del propio Abraham : le importa más el significado que el significante, el relato, el hilo de la historias escuchadas que la repetición mimética de lo que le dijeran. Buscaba recrear, transmitir. Llenaba aquellos cuadernos con sus palabras, argumentos, para su posterior recreacion poetica. Instalaba el caballete en el balcon, frente al mar, a los escasos paseantes de la playa, la mayor parte de los dias invernales desierta, y allo componia, dandole color, desfigurando los rostros, insinuando interiores, envolviendo paisajes con la bruma de la siluetas que por ellos se movian, el gran mosaico de aquella tragedia en la que confluian el desierto y el mar, la miseria y la opulencia, el amor y la crueldad, el medio y la ambicion. Era, imaginaba, la gran Europa bombardeando con invisibles armas las aguas del Estrecho, y era la corriente de sangre de sus aguas quien hilaba, en aquel lugar, Zahara de los Atunes, el pasado con el presente en 181

un unico momento, magico para el arte, sublime para la reflexion, abismalmente cruel, como siempre lo habia sido, para el ser humano.

[Whenever Abraham was in his room, always number seven at the Luna de Zahara hotel, he would open the blank pages of his notebook and fill them with his voices, in the own language of Abraham: what mattered for him was more the signified than the signifier, the tale; it was more the thread of the stories he listened to than the mimetic repetition of what was being said. He wanted to re-create, to transmit things. He filled these notebooks with his own words, ideas, for his future poetic re-creation. [...] He would create colorful, disfigured, and intimate faces. The fog surrounding the body silhouettes would shroud the landscapes in which they moved. The great mosaic of this tragedy blended desert and sea, misery and opulence, love and cruelty, fear and ambition. He imagined that all of this was the great Europe bombarding the seas of the Strait with invisible weapons. In these waters, in Zahara de los Atunes, the flow of blood connected past and present in one singular moment which was magical for art, sublime for reflection, an abyss of cruelty, as it had always been for humankind.] (84)

Conflating the geopolitical space of Europe and the personal, imaginative, space of art onto his white canvas, the painter eschews a faithful mapping of the former on the latter; instead he reclaims the gap between reality and its artificial reconstruction to embrace not only artistic incompleteness but also a vision of reality that only art can achieve – magical and sublime. What

Dabashi sees as failure becomes here an imperfect and open-ended mode of recording and transmitting the migrants’ memory for future generations. In the original Spanish, “his future poetic re-creation” reads as “su posterior recreacion poetica”, the word “posterior” suggesting a temporal delay between the moment of recording and that of creating, as well as the idea that

Abraham’s art is intended for future generations.

The poetic recreation of the knowledge production surrounding the refugee testimonies certainly loses major aspects of the refugees’ stories. As Las Voces relies on the appearance of woman cut in half, or the haunting song of a sailor, it creates a narrative less grounded in a realist mode than in the supernatural. As a consequence, the narrative redefines the literary genre of the refugee testimony, thereby challenging the way refugees subjects have been epistemologically and ontologically constructed. According to Anthea Vogl, in “The Genres and Politics of 182

Refugee Testimony” (2018), the literary genre of the refugee testimonies follows a specific teleological pattern: refugees arriving in Europe and other “welcoming” lands, are required to mode their own testimonies in the fashion of the Bildungsroman. Adopting a one-person narrative voice, developing their story according to an Aristotelian structure, and evidencing facts in a plausible and coherent manner “from hardship to new citizenship and personal success or fulfillment” (Vogl 82), for instance, is required of refugees in order to become refugee citizens. Sorel’s testimonies, by contrast, verge on the irrational, the fantastic, and the mystical

(through the inclusion of Islamic mysticism in the framing epigraphs), and would not be considered valid sources for legally “upgrading” refugees to a citizen status.97

While narrating one’s testimony in the fashion of the Bildungsroman may certainly empower refugees with the possibility of accessing the desired legal status, it does also constrain refugees to present themselves according to predefined and stigmatizing visions of themselves as suffering subjects seeking the protection of a benevolent country. In all cases, these persons find themselves in legal, social, and human situations that are still precarious. The Bildungsroman genre, which becomes a format when it comes to deciding over the fate of refugees in a given country, is asking them to reinvent themselves as fully disempowered beings existing and motivated by nothing else than the sheer need to survive, which, if it is a major part of their stories, is not the only constituent of who they are.

To think that art, literature, or even academia, can provide the agency that legal institutions do not give to disposable subjects would be naive. Yet, while Las Voces does not empower its refugee ghosts with any other agency than narratorial authority over their own

97 One may also see how a poem such as Zong! redefines the conventions of the refugee testimony genre, by dramatizing gaps, blanks, incompleteness rather than recounting exhaustively the hardships of migration and integration to other societies. 183 stories, it does nevertheless open up a reflection on what other literary and artistic genres can offer as testimonial forms. Imagining the refugee crisis as a collection of tales similar to The

Arabian Nights, Las Voces is asking the readers to think about the affordances of the fantastic in the fictional representation of human tragedy. Indeed why not ask refugee survivors to narrate their own stories in a realist fashion? Why dramatize the voices of bodiless specters rather than human beings made of flesh, as Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid did in Exit West (2017)? I believe that resorting to a fantastic literary genre for recounting refugee testimonies allows multiple alternative identities, subjectivities, histories, and modes of recording to emerge and challenge the strict rationality that the refugee testimony as a genre imposes on its subjects. In that sense, the supernatural and the fantastic eschew strict-defining representations and categorizations of refugees as precarious subjects. Rather than being appropriative or exploitative, spectralization becomes a conscious and ethical choice for recovering and imagining the refugees figures, their past, and their memories.

From Spectralization to Abstraction: Constructing the Abyss in E.B. Itso, Sheddings

From 2015 to 2017, Danish visual artist E.B. Itso exhibited “Sheddings,” a series of ten imprints made of impressions of migrants’ t-shirts on canvas. The artist salvaged discarded t- shirts from the shores of the Italian island of Lampedusa, after newly-arrived refugees left their belongings behind to start another life in Europe. Each imprint is framed by driftwood collected in the waters surrounding Lampedusa. On sale for up to $10,000 then donated to refugees organizations, Sheddings gives to refugees a visible and material presence in a Europe that is often unwelcoming of them. Overall, Sheddings reflects Itso’s general work, as the artist claims an interest in marginal milieux, in the “underworld elements” and in “that which goes 184 unnoticed.”98 His work seeks to sensitize audiences to “wasted lives” that have been rendered disposable by global capitalism and neoliberalism (Bauman 6), or misrepresented by political, humanitarian, and global news media discourses (Chouliaraki 12).

While Itso conceives of his art as social critique, Sheddings is nevertheless problematic when it comes to spectralizing refugees, particularly as it shuffles together their material belonging, removes them from their particular historical contexts, and erases the trauma of refugees. Not only does the piece appropriates and aestheticizes objects that once belonged to disempowered subjects, but it does so during the Danish “Jewellery law” controversy.99 It is indeed difficult to see how Itso’s Sheddings gives refugees their dignity, let alone any historical agency. Sheddings seemingly exploits the material belongings of refugees and reproduces what

Peter Gatrell has termed “an iconography of predicament”; the work dematerializes the violent experience of forced migration into abstract ink blots, thereby dehumanizing its subjects. It overlooks the historical and material forces intersecting in the construction of refugees, such as the everlasting impact of colonization or civil wars. In that sense Itso’s artistic approach to the refugee crisis is symptomatic of what scholar Hamid Dabashi views as “a critical crisis of artistic representation - the fundamental failure of conceptual art as we know it today to come to terms with realities that have trespassed national, regional, or imaginative geographies of representation.”

Yet I would argue that it is precisely in the abstraction of his work that Itso challenges the rhetoric and aesthetics of spectralization of policy and global news media, and that he stages his

98 See Itso’s biography at ocula.com.

99 In 2016, the Danish parliament approved a law allowing police forces to seize the migrants’ valuable assets (over $1,450) from any refugee entering the country, in order for them to pay for accommodations in refugees centers. Items with an emotional value (such as wedding rings), however, should not be confiscated. 185 own failure at representing the refugee crisis. In art’s failure at representing the refugee crisis,

Sheddings suggests, there is space for thinking about what art can and cannot do; art’s failure at representing the refugee crisis counts towards a repertoire of migration too. Because no artist can account for the atrocities of forced migration, and for the irrecoverable abyss of the sea journey, abstraction is the only means through which they can perform their own incapacity at representing the unrepresentable. Thus, while I agree with Dabashi about the failure of contemporary art to represent experiences of the current trans-Mediterranean refugees crisis, I want to go beyond this moment of artistic failure. Artistic failure is not the final stage of artistic representation; on the contrary, it is the first step in the process of accounting for the impossibility to represent the unrepresentable. In this section, I explore how an artwork like

Sheddings creates its own refugee repertoire from the debris of migration (namely, from refugees’ t-shirts) and how such repertoire creates refugees visibilities. Such visibilities, I argue, map onto and disrupts the spectralizing aesthetic and rhetorical refugee visualities of global news media and anti-refugee policies. If Dabashi’s claim that “silence is the loudest scream,” then

Sheddings suggests that such silence still needs to be shown in order to challenge the politics of global art markets which often perpetuate the exploitation of human misery they seek to denounce. Such silence points to an opacity in representing refugee lives. As seen in literary works such as The Optician of Lampedusa, global artistic and literary market strives towards transparency in representations of refugees. An artwork such as Sheddings disrupts the need for transparency and values opacity instead. Refugees are not represented as “other than”; what

Sheddings is ultimately about is how refugees make space for themselves in a geopolitical context that is hostile to their presence. 186

In that sense, Itso’s own project is similar to Sorel’s, in that the two artists resist the exigencies of global news media, anti-refugee policies, and of global literary and artistic markets.

Besides offering other visibilities to refugees themselves, Itso and Sorel also offer other ways of understanding the refugee crisis to spectators on a global level. Mindful of the historical context surrounding the production of Sheddings and of the academic debates on the relevance and limits of contemporary art in the current humanitarian refugee crisis, I believe that Sheddings is aware of its own recuperative nature, which it complicates in order to problematize the relationship between contemporary art and European politics of migration and dispossession. It creates a repertoire of migration alternative to the archives of global news media and anti-migration

European policies, one that ultimately calls for, without yet authoritatively claiming, refugees’ right to opacity. By doing so, the work performs abstraction as a form of artistic negotiation for retrieving “what has been left behind” in the abyss of the Mediterranean Sea (Glissant, Poetics

7). Abstraction is opaque in that it does not seek to assimilate refugees as part of a system that would still ostracize them. By using wasted t-shirts, the artwork creates a countervisual practice that accounts for the role of art in short-circuiting the economic systems of value that make entire communities disposable. Ultimately, Sheddings raises the question of art’s autonomy from the systems of production, circulation of ideas and materials which exist in the world.

At first glance, the abstraction of Sheddings seemingly contradicts Itso’s conception of art as “a complex and often open-ended social critique that puts forward a voice that is far too frequently left mute.” Indeed the piece strikes for what it does not visually represent – human beings, bodies, and lives; instead it conjures up the evocative power of objects to visualize an absence in shapeless blue stains.100 Pushing artistic abstraction to an extreme, Itso removes

100 See Image 1 of the series at https://www.artsy.net/search?term=itso. 187

Sheddings from the reality of what has been one of the deadliest humanitarian crises of the early twenty-first century. Anticipating questions of mimetic representation (“what does the blue stain stand for?”), the piece almost gives the answers straight away. The shedded t-shirts help visualize lives that are too often made disposable by global neoliberalism in general indifference; the blue color recalls the space of the sea; the driftwood frame signals the displacement of uprooted bodies and floating identities within geographies that are constantly redefined through new territorial laws and border practices. These practices create conditional spatialities “that exist only for some categories of mobile people or that are accessible to some only at some intervals” (Tazzioli). As the split frame points to the geopolitical bordering of the Mediterranean

Sea, they do also suggest that there are forms of mobility in the work. The ink blot bleeds through both panels an circumvents any sense of fixity and immobility.

Past these evidences, and once the viewer’s expectations and questions have been met, the work does more than “just” metaphorically represent the refugee crisis. Sheddings bears within itself an awareness of the limits and possibilities of abstraction in terms of recalibrating refugee visualities and of recovering that which has been lost in the abyss of the refugee crisis. It asks to explore the way color and forms occupy the space of representation, and to extend this reflection to the way an art on refugees may resist representational spaces in humanitarian, public, political, and artistic discourses. As Lilie Chouliaraki argues, such discourses portray refugees either “through stereotypes of destitution, as in traditional portrayal of poverty as famine,” or through “stereotypes of individual sovereignty, as in positive, yet misleading, representations of self-determination” (29). It is precisely because of such stereotypes, I would argue, that these mediatic representations of refugee spectralize individuals and entire communities. 188

Beyond its provocative abstract nature, Sheddings visualizes the violence of displacement across the Mediterranean and of the erasure of refugees’ voices from public discourses. In that regard, it is significant that the piece should be an imprint rather than of the t-shirts themselves.

Constructed through images and discourses, an impression is a perception created at the intersection between a surface of projection and the surface of the object dipped in paint. The first records the mark of the other. An impression is therefore a trace, which in this case demands close attention to bodies, people, lives that are too commonly disregarded. In Sheddings the undefined porous outline of the blue stain opens up the contours of the refugees’ visibility to the invisible, to what has been deliberately excluded from representation. The trace does yet go beyond accounting for the absent presence of refugees from mediatic and political discourses. As the blue impression on canvas recalls the refugee as a constructed figure, the erosive

“nothingness” of the surrounding white space can be reclaimed to articulate new refugee visibilities. Taken together, the porous borders between the white and blue surfaces sutures two constructions of refugee visuality, which are in friction against each other. One is constructed from the outside, as in public discourses; the other resists such identification as victim or threat and retains a portion of unsaid and irrepresentable.

In that sense, if the viewers see in the t-shirt impressions the most evident manifestation of “sheddings”, then they might also consider the white surface as constitutive of such sheddings.

It is in this white surface, I propose, that Sheddings presents possibilities to occupy and circumvent the limits of the imaginative geographies created by global news media, political and humanitarian discourses. Working within and against the aesthetic parameters of such imaginative geographies, the work reveals the ruins of what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial formations.” In “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Stoler 189 argues that turning our attention to “the ruins of empire,” what remains from colonial and neocolonial systems of dispossession and disempowerment, goes beyond “memorialized and large-scale monumental ‘leftovers’ or relics” and helps explore “the aftershocks of empire, the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things” (194). For Stoler, “the focus is not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration” (194), since only their refiguration can articulate what she terms an “ecology of remains.” In Sheddings, however, it is the focus on both inert remains and on their vital refiguration through art that accounts for discarded refugee visualities. The imprints of the wasted t-shirts articulate the ecology of remains by threading the valuable and the valueless together into a relational network that overcomes the hierarchy of value between what has been discarded and de facto considered useless and what is still valuable.

Itso could have chosen to tackle the Danish Jewellery Law by photographing jewels, like

Australian jewel designer Susan Cohn did in her 2018 Meaninglessness performance to expose the arbitrariness of Danish authorities in deciding the meaningful or meaningless nature of a jewel. 101 Putting jewels in sealed plastic bags with “meaning approved” and “meaning denied” tags, and accompanying them with video installations, Cohn’s performance mediate relations between refugees and exclusionary spaces and seeks “to open up a conversation with [her]

Danish counterparts using the meaning of jewellery as a departure point to question the situation and how we can change it by altering the way we act, behave and value." Challenging the Danish authorities’ notion that the supposed intrinsic financial value of objects should dictate social behavior and refugees’ mobility, Meaninglessness articulates a critique of Western European late capital responses to the refugee crisis which understand refugees as redundant, as excess

(Bauman 80).

101 See Fairs. 190

Itso takes the notion of excess in its most literal sense as he chooses material debris to create new refugee visibilities. Whereas Cohn’s jewels still retain more or less value to push against the capitalist system they are inscribed in, Itso’ wasted t-shirts fall out of such system.

Sheddings certainly suggests that it is easier for objects (even wasted) to circulate across geopolitical boundaries than for human beings to do so. Yet, because these objects are shedded, they lack the financial value necessary to bargain one’s entry into Denmark and cannot possibly be used to negotiate access to the supposedly universal and unconditional human right “to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” (article 14 of the 1948 Universal

Declaration of Human Right). In the current context of ever-growing nationalisms across

Europe, such right has become an exchangeable commodity. By reclaiming wasted materials like refugees’ t-shirts, then, the work not only points out what global capitalism has dehumanized through othering practices, and literally and metaphorically discarded. Because Sheddings recirculates what has been excluded, it suggests that, contrary to Dabashi’s assumption that art is irrelevant in humanitarian crises, art becomes a platform which allows the wasted material (and, by extension, human lives) to gesture back at the system that produced it, and to reinfiltrate its networks.

While the use of waste in artworks is usually read for its symbolic representation of social, economic, racial, and gender inequalities, one may still question the concrete relevance of the artistic reclaiming of waste especially when it comes to reclaiming or advance human rights.

In other words, what does an artwork such as Sheddings do to empower refugees against the new legal apparatus that reinforces Danish borders and prevents them from being sheltered? The answer, perhaps, is nothing. Exhibiting his art in private galleries, limiting his visibility to

Denmark, and selling his pieces for charity purposes, Itso certainly bypasses the sellable 191 exigencies of global art markets, and does not (a priori) seek to perform “ironic solidarity,” a self-fulfilling solidarity that is less about helping the other than aggrandizing their own public image (Chouliaraki 14). Yet, and because he still sells his art and acquires the symbolic capital of fame from a relatively safe, privileged position in a first-world country, his art is still very much imbricated within the capitalist systems of production, consumption, disposal, of ideas, materials, and human lives, that it seeks to denounce.

If the autonomy of art from capitalist markets and their spectralizing logics seems impossible – and even naive – it does not mean that all possibilities of resistance to the human disposal industry is vain. By repurposing waste into art, Sheddings stitches these two networks into one single, broader ontology. Waste becomes art and art becomes waste, thereby blurring any sense of monetary value and creating a rhetorical persuasive force that accounts for possibilities of resilience. If this force cannot change the current situation of the refugee crisis, it can still perform “countervisuality,” that is the methods and means by which one may counter the “unreality created by visuality’s authority while at the same time proposing a real alternative.

It is by no means a simple or mimetic depiction of lived experience but one that depicts existing realities and counters them with a different realism” (Mirzoeff 485). Working within and yet subverting dominant forms of refugee visualities (as seen in political or global news media discourses), Sheddings does not so much articulate its autonomy from such dominant discourse than the necessity and responsibility of contemporary art to create ethical countervisualities that construct alternative ecologies of the refugee crisis, ones which value other forms of power and knowledge.

“There are moments that only superior artists can realise,” Dabashi argues, “when the mourning must remain in blinding darkness, where in silence the quiet cry is the loudest scream, 192 the harshest explosion of the fact that something is horridly amiss about the world.” For Dabashi, the unrepresentability of the “blinding darkness” locates the horror of the refugee crisis outside of any tangible reality, which art cannot possibly (and should not) recreate. For artists like Itso, however, the point is exactly to recover what has been lost through such blinding darkness through more inclusive representational practices. Rather than generating stigmatizing discourses of pity and fear, or promoting the artist as an empathetic and benevolent figure, such practices produce refugee countervisualities that challenge and reclaim the aesthetic parameters of mainstream politico-mediatic refugee visuality.

As Sheddings revalues and recirculates waste through abstract art, it symbolically, but also materially, repurposes the violence of discarding practices (such as confiscating belongings) and exclusionary spaces (through borders), which are not always represented in public discourses. At the intersection of the harsh reality of the refugee crisis and the comfort of an elite artworld that can afford a $10,000 piece, Sheddings performs yet more than an encounter between two worlds, one that is dispossessed, the other that acquires. It reassesses the relevance and responsibility of contemporary art whose abstract, conceptual, yet participatory nature can still impact social behavior and contribute to create networks of humanitarian solidarity.

Conclusion

Through the repurposing of what the trans-Mediterranean refugee crisis has wasted

(refugee lives, voices, and visibilities), Sorel and Itso create repertoires of migration alternative to the mainstream archives constructed at the intersection of political, academic, artistic, global news media, and humanitarian discourses. By doing so, they create ecologies of the abyss that challenge the boundaries between self and other, living and dead, normative and disposable. 193

Their textual and visual productions overcome more than geopolitical boundaries; they also gesture towards alternative epistemologies of the refugee crisis, ones which transcend borders between life and death, or European self and “threatening Other.” Such epistemologies of the refugee crisis are not defined by anti-migration European policies, by the supposed benevolence of Western European nations, or even by art itself. Sorel and Itso precisely suggest that art is unable to represent the plight of refugees but that it can resist global news media’s call for transparency, that is the reduction of a so-called “other” by the reductive norms of a subject living in a hegemonic system of thought, of knowing, and of being. Itso’s and Sorel’s repertoire of migration are necessarily opaque in that they refuse to ascribe refugees to categories and modes of beings that envision them only as refugees.

Sorel and Itso published/exhibited their works around a crucial moment in the becoming of Western European contemporary art, one that precisely threatened such representational space. In 2016, facing the alarming growth of xenophobic nationalism across Europe, and following up on public intellectuals’ and academic lead, the European Commission created the

European Expert Network on Culture and Audiovisual.102 As the EENCA seeks to improve cultural and audiovisual policy development in Europe and to address the question “How can culture and the arts help to integrate refugees and migrants?”, it gestures towards the recognition of contemporary European arts that account for experiences of cultural, geographical, and identity uprooting inherent to migration. The report explores “how culture and the arts can bring individuals and peoples together and increase participation in cultural and societal life.”

Understanding “participation” as “integration” to the socio-cultural fabric of the

European cultural values and traditions of the country-host, the report yet proved problematic in

102 Subsequently referenced as “EENCA.” 194 its effort to destigmatize displaced populations. As it asks the migrants to embrace artistic forms and traditions supposedly facilitating their integration, the report emblematizes the double attitude of European political leaders towards the migrants crisis, between the humanitarian drive to help migrants and refugees and the rejection of values and customs foreign to Europe.

According to the EENCA, art is as much a factor of integration as it is of social exclusion. As the report specifies, “the close character of the formal Western art world and the potential lack of social and cultural capital of refugees and migrants further decreases their chances to enter the art and culture scene, leaving them at the margin of cultural life.” Beyond the fact that this definition perpetuates Eurocentric models of art and leaves refugees and migrants at the

“margins” of validated artistic spheres, it is also problematic to consider that refugees and migrants lack social and cultural capital. While the report advances cultural encounters as a rich benefit of migration, the very notion of a single, acceptable cultural capital over other traditions defeats the idea of multiculturalism inherent to what contemporary Western Europe looks like today. By branching out towards the historical past of African refugees, and by suggesting possibilities for refugees to make space, Sorel and Itso eschew the “identification [of refugees] with the destination country,” which, according to the EENCA, is a prerequisite for “the cultivation of heritages, traditions, customs, and cultures of the origin country” Such an identification has more to do with social, cultural, racial, and political, “assimilation” than

“integration,” which is yet another way of recolonizing the memory, culture, and history of refugees.

195

CHAPTER FOUR: WRITING ON THE WALL: TAG CLOUD’S ECOLOGY OF SAMENESS IN FRENCH BANLIEUE

Abstract

This chapter explores how French street artist Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Cloud challenges mainstream French media’s and far-right politicians’ representations of French banlieue, i.e. the marginalized areas surrounding big cities. Since the 2005 banlieue riots, right-wing politicians, mass news media, and urban policies have associated the banlieue with criminality, communitarianism and religious extremism. More particularly, it has become the symbol of the presence of third-generation descendants of immigrants, largely from former French colonies and overseas territories, and often labelled as ‘Arabs’ despite their French citizenship. The media’s and politicians’ amalgam of banlieue with immigration, violence, and poverty, extends to banlieue visual culture and, more particularly, to tags. As the association of tags with banlieue, criminality, and immigration, still permeates the French imaginary, I believe it is crucial to explore what tags do to the public eye and what Tag Cloud entails in such context.

As Tag Cloud erases and writes over tags in more “legible” font, I argue that it satirically challenges how French visual culture is predicated upon what Wendy Brown terms an “economy of sameness.” For Brown, an economy of sameness entails the process of formatting different cultural, racial, and political identities into a unique model of citizenship. Drawing on Brown’s ideas about the economy of sameness, I explore how Tag Cloud satirically performs an ecology of sameness to reveal how the perniciousness of sameness affects banlieue environments and their visual culture. Tag Cloud’s ecology of sameness both relies on and subverts French authoritarian politics of visuality that allows certain subjects to be visible while others are considered as inherently “adverse” to mainstream models of ideal citizenship. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the assimilationist policy at the core of the French modern nation-state 196 regiments not only the space of the banlieues and the bodies inhabiting it but also its visual productions.

The first three chapters of my dissertation focused on humanitarian, environmental, and cultural crises in Senegal, Madagascar and the Chagos, Spain and Denmark. By shifting from

West Africa, East Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, to metropolitan France, I investigate how a larger history of dispossession by European modernity/coloniality, predicated upon such dirt/purity paradigms, continues to affect former colonial spaces, including those located within former colonial powers. As I close my dissertation on this chapter, I ultimately want to demonstrate that, contrary to the assumption that a decolonial framework springs from and circulates across and within the Global South only, the field of relevance of decoloniality extends beyond former colonial spaces to former colonial powers themselves. As Tremblin writes about the margins and not from them, his work complicates the decolonial framework by interrogating who exactly is entitled to perform decolonial aesthesis, that is the practices that challenge and subvert the hegemony of modern/colonial aestheTics. Tremblin’s cultural capital as a French, white, male artist offers him a position of social, racial, economic, and cultural privilege that the taggers whom he is erasing do not necessarily enjoy. This chapter investigates the significance of using one such cultural capital to perform decolonial aestheSis in order to speak about the margins.

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Introduction: An Invitation to Share Powers?

In 2016 the Internet celebrated French street artist Mathieu Tremblin for his Tag Cloud project. 103 Covering old tag signatures with white paint and rewriting the same thing in a uniform font, Tag Cloud renders tags supposedly more aesthetically pleasant to the public eye.

According to an anonymous Internet user commenting on Tag Cloud, “graffiti can be beautiful or ugly, but when it comes to tagging – everyone would agree that it’s the most hideous type of street art. And what’s even more annoying – it’s almost always illegible” (Vareikaite). The categorization of the tag as a hideous visual production suggests that urban culture fails to reach supposed universal standards of beauty institutionalized by successive French Ministries of

Culture. By pointing out this aesthetic shortcoming, this commenter presupposes that the tag is a cultural production that does not fit into the traditional culture française, which is protective of the standards of beauty and taste regimented by the Academy of Fine Arts (les Beaux Arts); but also by the ideal of belles lettres, which promotes refined aesthetic linguistic qualities.

Tremblin has worked in many French cities, including Rennes, where he co-founded “Les

Frères Ripoulain” group with David Renault. This group aims at exploring and revaluing the

“littered” spaces of cities (Tremblin, Demo). Defining himself as an “artiste-chercheur, directeur artistique, graphiste indépendant” (“An artist-researcher, artistic director, and independent graphist.”), Tremblin reclaims artistic methods such as détournement (“diversion”) in order to account for, but also distance his work from, the legislations surrounding the individual’s experience of the city.104 On his own website, Tremblin presents his work as a tribute to tags

103 For a complete overview of Tremblin’s Tag Cloud, see demodetouslesjours.eu. 104 According to article 257 of the Code Pénal, which regulates French criminal law, “whoever intentionally destroys, mutilates, or degrades monuments, statues, and other objects destined to utility and public decoration […] will be punished by jailtime (from one month to two years) and by a fine ranging from 44 to 50,991 dollars.” (My translation).

198 inspired by “anonymous, autonomous, and spontaneous practices and expressions in urban space.

These practices perform simple and funny actions to question the systems of legislation, representations, and symbolization of the city” (Tremblin, Demo). Thus, interpreting Tag Cloud as visual sanitization shifts such questioning – if Tremblin is simply cleaning “the most hideous type of street art,” then he is supposedly no longer engaging with and challenging the systems that design and implement the legislation, representation, and symbolization of the city. Rather, he is reproducing politics and aesthetics of visual sanitization.

Interpreting Tremblin’s work as visual sanitization only, I believe, misses the point he attempted to make. As the artist states, such comments turned him into “the emissary of a solution against graffiti, whereas [his] intent was actually totally the opposite” (Gillepsie).105

Rather, Tremblin, has interpreted Tag Cloud (and his larger work in general) as a satirical critique of mass advertising which entails “a cruel loss of visual alterity for our urban surrounding.”106 But if Tag Cloud critiques the standardization of life through mass advertising, then, I would also argue that the work goes beyond a critique of capitalism. Indeed, the “cruel

105 It is noteworthy to point out that, in his overall artistic project, Tremblin consistently seeks to challenge urban policies – be they social, cultural, or artistic. Such challenge often takes the form of parody and satire born directly out of the urban context. For the artist, parodying such policies is a political gesture: “Je suis attaché à la notion d’urbanité Libre, convaincu que la pratique de la ville devrait relever de l’exercice de liberté. […] Du geste citoyen spontané et/ou involontaire au geste politique et/ou artistique intentionnel, c’est plus que l’expression d’un contre- pouvoir dont il est question, une désobéissance civile légitime et nécessaire à même de Et de produire un dépassement de l’horizon fonctionnaliste de la ville et/ou un renversement symbolique en regard du sur- investissement des espaces par la communication visuelle institutionnelle, signalétique publicitaire ; puisqu’en en proportion, les espaces d’expression libre dans la ville sont minoritaires en regard de la densité de population et de la prégnance des autres formes d’expression régulées.” (“I am attached to the notion of free urbanity, because I am convinced that practicing the city is a matter of freedom. […] From the spontaneous or willful citizen’s gesture to the intentional political and/or artistic one, it is more than the expression of counter-power that we are talking about. It is civil disobedience, legitimate and necessary for overcoming the functionalist horizon of the city and/or a symbolic overturn of spatial over-investment by institutional and publicitary visual communication. The spaces of free speech are minor in the city, when compared to the population density and the other forms of regulated expressions.” (Interview with De Dominicis)

106 “There are less and less tags in France, because nowadays most of the cities are tending to adopt a zero tolerance policy on graffiti which is paradoxical as none of those cities (except one) are adopting the same policy about advertising. This is a cruel loss of visual alterity for our urban surrounding.” (interview with Takamichi) 199 loss of visual alterity” points to a standardization of French urban visual culture that formats cultural, social, and racial heterogeneity into a single model of visibility. It is undeniable that Tag

Cloud erases tags to write over them in more legible font. Yet I would argue that such erasure performs visual sanitization precisely in order to satirize the politics and aesthetics of French visual culture in urban settings.

In order to demonstrate the limits of these politics and aesthetics, it becomes necessary for Tremblin to perform what he denounces. As Tag Cloud seemingly erases tags, and thus the visibility of taggers’ communities, it also asks the passerby to reflect on the process of erasure, on what was there and is no longer present in its original form, and what such erasure entails for the passerby’s own gaze. Erasing and writing over tags in a legible font, I believe, asks one to challenge the way tags have been perceived as a problem demanding a “solution.” If French visual culture has problematized tags as infringements to the kind of beauty and taste sanctioned and legitimized by the French state, urban policies, state-sponsored museums and galleries, and mainstream media, then, I contend that such problematization is also one that has to do with socio-racial issues.

Indeed, if the original tag strikes the Internet user quoted above, it is not just for its supposedly unrefined and aggressive visual aspect. In French urban visual culture, tagging is also associated with the marginalized and decaying social environment of the banlieue. Originally designed for workers commuting everyday from the periphery of large cities, the banlieue epitomized modernity, technology, and above all, mobility. Over the last thirty years, however, right-wing French politicians and media have associated the banlieue with immigration – particularly from Northern Africa –, crime, and poverty. According to these discourses, banlieues are typically anti-French because of their reluctance to embrace secular, Republican values, as 200 well as their supposed rejection of “French culture.” From the immigration wave sixty years ago to the recent urban riots in 2005, the banlieue has become an overdetermined symbolic site for the ‘other France,’ much like the so-called ‘inner cities’ of the United States. This other France is seldom portrayed by the media for something else than scenes of violent riots or drug trafficking, and supposedly presents limited hopes for personal and professional development. In such a context, French mainstream TV media and press have increasingly associated banlieue visual culture with violence and vandalism. Street art, and in particular tags, have often been considered as background elements to banlieue stories. The news archives from the early 1990s often portray the living conditions of banlieue population with tags in the background. The association has been done so perniciously that the tag has become a visual trope of banlieuescape for over thirty years now.107 Thus, regardless of the social, racial, and economic background of taggers, tagging has been racially marked as a visual expression of banlieue crisis, an association which essentializes tags as well as taggers.

Mindful of the socio-cultural and racial associations of tags with the French banlieues in media representations and political discourses, this chapter investigates the questions of legibility and aesthetic judgment posed by Tremblin’s work, insofar as his work appears to “beautify” the suburban scrawl it both erases and enshrines: to what extent does Tremblin’s Tag Cloud format the urban visual culture of the banlieue to the exigencies of more “legitimate” French visual culture? What does this erasure tell us when it comes to a visual production associated with a

107 I would argue that such stigmatization and stereotyping of tagging as an act of vandalism dates back to 1991. On May 1, 1991, some taggers painted their art on the walls of the Louvre-Rivoli station in Paris. As David Fieni argues, the media reacted vehemently towards the “degradation” of the subway station, while the Paris police made the connection of the “crime” with banlieue youth. For Fieni, “at the same time that this new insistence on protecting the city center against the so-called contagion of what was perceived as uncivil behavior, French urban policy also turned its attention to the banlieue as a “troubled” locale in need of special attention from the technocratic penal state” (295).

201 social, economic, and racial group long considered as anti-French? To answer these questions, this article takes as a point of departure Tremblin’s claim that Tag Cloud is “an invitation to share powers […] that makes the city playful, poetic and open to appropriation” (Byrnes).108

Tremblin has not connected his own work to banlieue visual culture. Yet I believe that it is crucial to consider for whom the city becomes playful, poetic, and open to appropriation.

French media and political imaginary has associated the tag with banlieue; such association, I argue, invites another reading of Tag Cloud, one that explores how its satire of mass consumerism also performs visual sanitization to reveal the ongoing process of masking, of erasing, banlieue visual culture. More particularly, I argue that Tag Cloud relies on and subverts what Wendy Brown calls “an economy of sameness” (Brown 2006), the process of formatting different cultural, racial, and political identities into a unique model of citizenship. This economy of sameness also touches on deeper issues of racial and class identity. In Tag Cloud, the economy of sameness satirically relays the politics of cultural assimilation promoted by French authorities since the first wave of immigration from Northern Africa in the 1950s.

In this chapter, I trace the notion of sameness as a critical reflection on the stakes of contemporary French visual culture of the banlieue. Rather than studying the tag as a finished product, this chapter looks at the conditions of emergence and erasure of tags in French banlieue to determine how the ecology of tags abolishes the geographical, historical, and social boundary separating banlieues and urban centers. Questioning the association of tags, banlieue, and

108 In this sense, Tremblin also aligns his work with the 1960s avant-garde Situationism movement, for whom the city was an open space of play and appropriation, as he declared in an interview: “These theories and operational concepts have greatly influenced my look at and my practice in the city, for example through the will that I share with other artists to produce forms that are already there, which are not recognizable as art . It’s a way to increase the life and transform our world, contributing to an urban imaginary that goes beyond appearances produced by consumer society” (Interview with Street Art Paris). Yet, while the Situationists intended to defamiliarize the city, and allowed everyone to express themselves regardless of their social, economic, racial, or religious background, Tremblin performs the exact opposite, by ‘normalizing’ visually aggressive tags, as it were.

202 violence, I explore how the materiality of each tag participates in French society, history, and politics, while also redefining the contours of the aesthetic visibility of French banlieues. I seek to go beyond interpretations of tags as the expression of banlieue malaise, which overlook what tags can offer in terms of agency, mobility, and relationality. In this process, I consider the spatial and temporal particularities of the tag’s environment in order to challenge essentializing definitions of tags. As metaphors and associations have constructed and sustained the ecological imaginary of the banlieue, it is all the more important to see how the materiality of tags can help us to understand and overcome the reduction of the tag as essentially violent, dirty, and “anti-

French.”

As Tag Cloud’s reliance on the economy of sameness asks one to reflect on the process of cultural and visual assimilation, I propose that it ultimately calls for recognizing the taggers’

“droit à l’opacité” (“right to opacity”; Glissant, Poétique 190), i.e. their right to refuse to conform to French visual culture norms and therefore to be read transparently. For Edouard

Glissant, the right to opacity is predicated upon one’s fundamental right to difference. Such difference, however, should not be understood as a self/other binary. Rather, “difference” partakes in a system in which one’s difference is not defined by their non-normativity. Opacity, then, is as much an ethical stance as it is an aesthetic one. Illegible, leaky, porous, undefined, tags refuse to be formatted according to a set of criteria defining a supposed universal ideal of beauty and taste. In that sense, they challenge any universalizing understanding of art, measured through standards of transparency (which posit “correct” art forms opposed to “incorrect” ones).

The gesture of erasing tags, as problematic as it may be in terms of “cleaning up” banlieue visual culture, satirizes the tendency to consider tagging as inherently different and adverse to French republican values. By erasing tags, Tag Cloud simultaneously performs and criticizes French 203 politics of cultural assimilation through an economy of sameness that removes any right to opacity. Thus if Tremblin’s erasure of tags seemingly gestures towards transparency, then I would argue that such transparency becomes a vehicle for making visible, ironically, the opacity of tagging.

Tracing the perniciousness of “sameness” as a critical reflection on the stakes of the contemporary French visual culture of the banlieue, I explore how Tag Cloud performs an ecology of sameness to reflect on how French politics of cultural assimilation has affected banlieue environments, visual culture, and social relationships. Tag Cloud’s ecology of sameness relies on and subverts the metaphorical association of tags, banlieues, and their inhabitants with dirt and violence. Wendy Brown does not approach the politics and aesthetics of “sameness” through an ecological lens. Yet I believe that such framework proves useful for understanding how the economy of “sameness” implemented by French right-wing politicians and mainstream media simultaneously relies on and performs an essentialization of “true” French citizens as

“pure,” disciplined subjects living in a similarly pure and disciplined environment. Key to my argument is that the ecology of sameness is deeply rooted in the idea that one’s French citizenship – which I understand here in terms of participation to the political, social, and cultural dynamics underpinning the French nation-state – is conditioned by a visual formatting.

Such formatting obeys rules of transparency and does not tolerate one’s right to opacity, one’s right to refuse a dominant culture, and one’s right to participate to French visual culture differently.

As I explore the material culture of banlieue, I also want to push against one of the limits of decoloniality. For Mignolo, decoloniality emerges from postcolonial spaces located in the

Global South. The attachment of decoloniality to specific spaces overlooks major shifts that a 204 work of art such as Tremblin’s can bring to the decolonial picture. Exploring the relevance of the material culture of tags in French and Francophone cultures, I hope, will also help challenge and come to terms with a paradox of the decolonial thought. As writers such as Mignolo have geographically circumscribed the decolonial project to the Global South, they have paradoxically countered their very own project of inclusivity and relationality. Writers, artists, and social figures from former colonial powers such as France, for instance, have been marginalized from decoloniality. Exploring Tag Cloud’s ecology of sameness and its visual formatting, then, entails a process of “decolonizing the senses” (Mignolo and Vasquez) that resignifies the material culture of banlieues with other meanings. Rather than being essentially a visual nuisance to the passerby, tags become an active space-making practice that redefines French urban ecologies and relationalities.

This is not to say that Tremblin’s project is decolonial in nature. As Tag Cloud erases a form of art associated with decay and seemingly promotes an aesthetics of sameness that disrupts relationships with and between banlieue communities, it contributes to ostracize an entire visual and material culture. Besides, Tremblin has not connected his work to the racialized environment of the banlieue. But as Tag Cloud transforms the tag into a thing deprived of the agentic capacity to shock the passerby, it does also document how urban policies, mainstream media, and right- wing politicians have posited tags and their writers as unwanted. As I explore the decolonial stakes of Tag Cloud in contemporary French culture, then, I seek to demonstrate how the debris of French imperialism still lingers on, not only in former postcolonial spaces such as Mauritius,

Madagascar, and Senegal, but also at the very core of France. Paying attention to the materiality of Tag Cloud, its position on the wall, its font, I explore how Tremblin’s work pushes to an 205 extreme the economy of sameness at the heart of French visual culture and reveals how such economy marks a rupture of affect between tags and passerby.

If Tag Cloud “sanitizes” tags as object of visual consumption and seemingly short- circuits any attempt to disrupt the hegemony of French visual culture, then such sanitization verges in what decolonial thought terms aestheSis. “The critique and artistic practices that aim to decolonize the senses, that is, to liberate them from the regulations of modern, postmodern, and altermodern aesthetics” (Mignolo and Vasquez), aesthesis reveals the wound of modernity/coloniality in the banlieue and creates an ecology of sameness that asserts taggers’ right to opacity and difference. In this chapter, I investigate the stakes of Tremblin’s aestheSis practices, while keeping in mind the challenges that Tremblin’s privileged position as culturally and racially empowered artists also create. As Tremblin takes “Tag Cloud” in its most literal sense – as a digital chain of key words one would find on the Internet, I also seek to extends the discussion on tags to the ecological spaces of the Internet. In that sense, I want to explore whether (and how) the Internet dissolves the racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, economic, and performative implications of Tag Cloud.

Banlieues and Tags: an Ecological Imaginary

In order to understand how the French cultural imaginary has amalgamated tags and banlieues, it is important to introduce a brief history of French banlieues. From the immigration wave sixty years ago to the recent urban riots in 2005, the banlieue has become another France which is seldom portrayed by the media for something else than scenes of violent riots or drug trafficking.109 In response to insurgencies, the state reinforced police presence in the “quartiers

109 As Stéfanie Peeters argues in “La couverture médiatique de la « crise des banlieues » : métaphores, représentations et l’apport indispensable du cotexte,” many newspapers from a diverse political spectrum have used the word “crisis” to refer to the banlieue riots, structural poverty, and racial issues from 2005 to today. In all cases, 206 difficiles” (difficult neighborhoods) and implemented a series of measures in education meant to channel youth energy into after-school programs, sports and cultural events. Despite these initiatives, however, banlieue populations are still being stigmatized as undesirable, often being considered as “racaille” (“scumbags”).110

Located in France, the banlieue is a postcolonial space and is subjected to the same issues of spatial, social, historical, and even geographical marginalization as former colonies. In Algeria in France (2004), a year before the banlieues riots revealed the French identity crisis, anthropologist Paul A. Silverstein already recalled that the production of ethnic difference between a “pure” French citizen and the barbaric Other dates back to colonization and is perpetuated in the metropole:

While maintaining an explicit republican ideology of universal citizenship, the French state during the colonial and postcolonial periods thus abetted the production of ethnicity within and among its colonial and later immigrant populations. In the process, it established certain parameters outlining the “right to difference,” parameters that effectively categorized particular cultural features as commensurable or not with the French nation-state. (40)

Peeters argues, the word “crisis” is used either as a victimizing or as a blaming tool. For a more complete overview of how French TV media and press have reduced the banlieue to a space of violence, and of how they have also associated tags with the environment of the banlieue, also see Laura Costelloe’s extensive study on Reading the Riots: Newspaper Discourse on French Urban Violence in 2005.

110 That the banlieue is a space that escapes disciplinary control is not new to French and Francophone scholarship. Nor is the fact that immigrant populations should be coerced to assimilate to French secular and republican values a new claim. In Les questions identitaires au coeur des fractures françaises (Identity Questions at the Core of French Fractures, 2014), Christophe Guilluy and Annick Steta recall that the insecurity of banlieue has been the object of numerous theses, articles, books for decades; most of these studies do yet perpetuate enduring clichés of the banlieue as a violent, poor, dirty and hopeless environment. As important as these readings may be to understand the contemporary dynamics of banlieue in early twenty-first century French history, they do yet perpetuate the idea that banlieues are a non-French space; rather they form an imaginary third space, halfway between France and its former African colonies. Recently, however, French and Francophone scholars have adopted a revisionist approach to banlieue studies and have explored the ongoing consequences of the French colonial past on the banlieue environments and populations. Victor Collet, for instance, recalls the particular impact of the Franco-Algerian war on banlieue families from Algerian descent, bringing attention to their constant stigmatization as violent and resentful enemies of the French Republic. Such studies have not only been disrupting the political, mediatic, and oftentimes academic, consensus on the banlieue as an environment that needs attention but that cannot evolve; they also shake to the core the attitude of a France that is still very unapologetic of its colonial past.

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The colonial spatialization of power perpetuates the ecological imaginary of the banlieue, and replicates what France has sought to silence for decades – the structures of racial, ethnic, and religious differentiation on which it has built its Republican, secular, principles and values.

In “La photo volée. Les pièges de l'ethnographie en cité de banlieue” (“The Purloined

Picture: Ethnographic Dead Ends in Banlieues”), David Lepoutre recalls that the racialization of banlieues in the French imaginary is deeply rooted in the orientalization of former colonies – often viewing local natives as inherently violent and lascivious. Banlieues, Lepoutre argues, have become another space for the projection of desires of alterity responding to a fascination for what is different from so-called Frenchness. I would further argue that, in addition to the exoticization of banlieue inhabitants, the ecological imaginary of the banlieue also translates through a rhetoric of dirt and impurity inscribed in the environment, its bodies, and artistic productions. One may still recall former president Jacques Chirac’s words during a visit to a “difficult neighborhood” in

1991 – according to him, the immigrant family’s “noise and smell” supposedly deprived “the

French laborer” of decent living conditions.111 Intervening in a banlieue riot site in November

2005, former Secretary of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy also infamously declared his intention to

“clean out the cité (the buildings of the banlieue) with a power washer,” thereby associating banlieue youth with dirt.

As anthropologist Mary Douglas recalls, “dirt is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, insofar as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (36). The reduction of banlieue to dirt and waste affects more than a model of sociality; it does also affect bodies and practices of banlieue spaces. As Douglas argues, differentiating the dirty from the clean creates a

111 See Chirac's and Nicolas Sarkozy's interventions at ina.fr.

208 hierarchy between the barbaric and the “civilized.”112 Such statement could be made of any city in the world. Relegating poor populations, and in particular minorities, to the outskirts of the city is quite common and, more often than not, unquestioned. French banlieues, however, have occupied a special place in the French history and imaginary for half a century now, emblematizing either utopian nostalgia for the “grands ensembles” of the 1960s, or fear and rejection of the immigrant Other. In 2007, for instance, French journalist Thomas Bronnec, depicted the Clichy-sous-Bois banlieue as a wasteland grieving its lost grandeur:

“Partout on ne voit qu’elles, les barres HLM des cités aux noms aussi peu poétiques que leur architecture : les Bosquets, la Forestière, Bois-du-Temple. Ces îlots de béton, c'est tout ce qui compose Clichy-sous-Bois, une ville sans âme où le RER ne passe pas, une ville qui, malgré elle, a déjà marqué l'histoire triste des banlieues françaises.” (61)

[You see them everywhere – the HLM buildings whose names are as poetic as their architecture. The Woods, The Forest, Bois-du Temple. These clusters made of concrete are all that make the landscape of Clichy-sous-Bois, a soulless town through which the local train no longer runs. It is a town which, despite its efforts, has already marked the sad history of French banlieues.] (My translation)

Bronnec’s elegiac description of Clichy-sous-Bois banlieue calls less for a much-needed financial investment in banlieues than for a poetic re-enchantment of these “soulless” spaces.

One could argue that the names of banlieue buildings matters less than the living conditions these buildings offer. For Bronnec, however, the value of these buildings is attached to their very names. Besides deploring the supposed failure of banlieue to encourage interest in and knowledge of French culture, then, Bronnec’s comment also points out that the functional

112 For Douglas, the rhetorics of dirt and purity marked the birth of Western modernity, when the first sewage systems were implementing to clean cities. She recalls that “eliminating [dirt] is not a negative movement but a positive effort to organize the environment” (2). Douglas did not yet have in mind how the rhetorics of dirt and purity would also affect the environment of colonial and postcolonial spaces, including in metropoles. In the case of France, the “positive effort to organize the environment” relies on the idea that the banlieues are inherently “backward” and refuse to embrace values linked to modernity, such as secularism, or to belong to the “one and indivisible” French nation. 209 architecture of banlieue is profoundly tied to the cultural capital of French literature.113 Yet, despite the fact that banlieue towers are given names anchored directly in canonical French literature, French banlieues are marginalized from such culture.

While it has become easier for banlieue youth to access publishing houses,114 banlieue visual arts have been more and more considered as anti-French and excluded from French visual culture. Street art, and in particular tags, has often been considered as a mark of vandalism, and as the background elements to banlieues stories. In that regard, it is noteworthy that French mainstream media are not the only ones to stigmatize tags as vandalism. Popular culture too has played a major role in building up such association. Fieni points out that the movie Banlieue 93, for instance, “mainly uses graffiti as a backdrop that signifies crime, lawlessness, and a dystopian future.” (297) In the “classic” banlieue movie La Haine (1995), for instance, one of the

113 More often than not, it is very common for banlieue buildings to be named after canonical figures of French culture. In the recent movie Intouchables (Olivier Nakache, 2012), which confront a youth from banlieue with a wealthy Parisian musician, the naming of banlieue buildings even becomes a running gag. When the musician claims he is an expert in Berlioz, the young banlieue man asks “Oh yeah? Which building is that?” To a certain extent, the botanical naming of the banlieue buildings also participates in the exclusion of banlieue populations from French culture. It puts banlieue on the margins of French official geography and history. The “bosquets” (“copse”), the “forestière” (“forest”), suggest a natural, even unruled, space that outcasts banlieue from the more “civilized” space of the city. Rather than mapping the reality of banlieue, such naming reflects how French collective imaginary functions on an inclusion of French canonical figures and an exclusion of what does not pertain to French culture. As such, then, the banlieue occupies an ambiguous space in French history and sustains an ecological imaginary that envisions the banlieue as a barbarian, uncivilized, anti-French space. Recently, the banlieue even became a non- space, as Fox News declared it a “no-go zone” in the wave of populist fears of religious extremism in Western Europe. This non-space, I would argue, has created and been sustained by an ecological imaginary predicated upon an essentialization of the banlieue population, history and culture as different and profoundly hostile to “French values.” Such ecological imaginary relies on racial, cultural, historical, religious, ethnic sameness which marginalizes what is viewed as inherently incompatible with the well-being of the nation.

114 However, it is still today difficult for them to be published for something else than sensational accounts of life in marginalized banlieues.One may think in particular of the success of Faiza Guene, who published Kiffe Kiffe Demain (2004), a novel about the growth of a young French Muslim girl in the suburbs of Paris, and who was interviewed on her opinion on the Islamic veil or riots in banlieues instead of the content of her novel. Over the last thirty years, studies on banlieue culture have mostly explored beur (Arab) literature as individuals’ narrativization of banlieue trauma. According to such readings, banlieue literary and visual cultures seldom express anything else than violence, revenge, and even nostalgia for the bled (the land of origins that most of third-generation descendant of immigrants do not even know). At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I would argue that banlieue literary and visual productions call for new readings that emphasize less the victimization of banlieue populations than their contribution to contemporary French literary and visual culture.

210 characters sprays a tag over an advertisement slogan transforming “The world is everyone’s” in

“The world is ours” (“Le monde est à tous”; “Le monde est à tnous”).

Taking its origins in the American hip hop culture, the tag appeared in France in the

1970s but was not associated with the banlieue until the mid-1990s. While the tag already bore political implications before the 1990s, it was not interpreted as a racial production yet. French documentaries and news from the early 1990s indeed still looked at the tag from a sociological perspective, exploring taggers’ socio-economic background and own motivations.115 The tag was seen as an artistic initiative seeking to break down social barriers between urban centers and their periphery. However the rise of the extreme right wing – the Front National party – in the 1980s and the banlieue riots in the early 1990s shifted the perception of the tag. No longer viewed as the artistic expression of a youth challenging the aesthetic rigidity of the French Fine Arts

Academy, the tag was then associated with rebellious defiance to French Republican values. A decisive factor in this shift of perception was the emergence of the rap band and tag collective

Supreme NTM.116 Famous for its anti-racism and anti-authoritarian positions, Supreme NTM used the tag as a medium for giving visibility to banlieue youth. The banlieue riots in 2005 sealed the reputation of the tag as a form of rejection of French values, as the media abounded in shock images of tagged cars and walls.

For sociologist Michel Kokoreff, for instance, the tag is the manifestation of a desire for visibility, rage, and a “challenge” to authorities (27). In his attempt at understanding the relatively new phenomenon that was the tag in 1991, Kokoreff does yet connect this visual art to the rise of violence in urban banlieues, clanic masculinity, and drug use. Taken from his article

115 See for instance the 1990 documentaries “En banlieue parisienne”and “Rap et Tag,” both available at ina.fr.

116 NTM is the acronym for “Nique ta mère” (“Go fuck your mother”).

211

“Tags et Zoulous,” the following quote reflects the perception of the tag in French 1990s visual culture:

Pour la plupart des citadins, les tags sont des hiéroglyphes urbains qui salissent. Ils sont de l'ordre de l'innommable — ça —, à la fois hors-sens et hors-langage, en ce qu'ils court- circuitent la réciprocité de l'échange. Pour leurs auteurs, le tag est une signature stylisée. Il s'agit de surnoms ou de pseudonymes qui sont décodés au sein de leur communauté comme la marque (le logo ?) d'une personne d’un groupe. On a donc affaire à une forme d'expression de soi non verbale, implicite, ritualisée, fondamentalement ambivalente en ce qu'elle oscille entre la provocation ostentatoire et le désir de destruction. Une forme d'expression qui se rapproche autant du happening que du cri de détresse ou du hurlement graphique. Paradoxe de notre « ère de la communication » : les tagueurs déclarent qu'ils n'ont rien à dire, ils cherchent juste à faire voir qu'ils existent. (27)

[For most city inhabitants, tags are urban hieroglyphs staining the city. They belong to the unnamable, the “it” – both out of meaning and language. They short-circuit any reciprocal exchange. For their authors, tags are a stylized signature. Tags are nicknames, pseudonyms encoded within their community. They are the brand (or logo) of a person or a group. What we have here is the non-verbal expression of oneself, a form of expression that is ritualized, implicit, and fundamentally ambivalent as it oscillates between shocking provocation and the desire to destroy. This is both a happening and a cry for help. A graphic shouting. This is the paradox of our contemporary times. Taggers claim they have nothing to say but they want to show they exist.] (My translation)

Besides the problematic conclusion that tags are objects of provocation and/or destruction,

Kokoreff does not explain why taggers would “want to show they exist.” The graphic shouting is here reduced to a visual phenomenon that is not specifically grounded in anything else than the mere wish to provoke or destroy, which offers a reductive and dualistic approach to an artistic production that is yet far more complex. For Kokoreff, the tag cannot be named because it locates its meaning beyond transparent communication. Yet it is precisely because it cannot be named that the tag creates a conversation with the passerby, and hovers between two discourses

– one that is looking for sense, the other that marks its refusal to make sense and to be read transparently through illegible signs.

Most of journalistic, media, political, or even academic, reflections tend to see the tag as either vandalism, or as the desire of banlieue youth to “mark their territory” on spaces that are 212 not accessible to them, or even to express banlieue angst (Sylvain Boyer 1996). Yet, if considered without its environment, the tag in itself does not indicate any explicit anti- authoritarian message. Nor does it indicate the social origins of its tagger, as it is most often anonymous. A “stylized signature or logo unique to each graffiti writer” (Lachmann 236, each tag is different from another and does not demonstrate any affiliation with a social, political, or religious group. Using different colors, font, names, the taggers use the surface of the wall more as a shared artistic platform than a territorial space. However, over the years, the tag has become essentialized as a form of vandalism and crime. As Faye Docuyanan recalls, graffiti and tag opponents tend to consider unauthorized writing on public walls as “destructive, disrespectful, disruptive, prone to violence, and detrimental to the interests of the community.” (Docunayan

104)

Considering the tag as a threat to public order, these definitions reduce tags to products fixed in time and space, thereby overlooking each tag’s particular story and conditions of emergence. More than a simple visual object on a wall, the tag is the result of a process involving the taggers’ motivation and their socio-economic background. Because it is a process and not just a finished product, the tag does not exist only by itself but is in relationships with other factors, such as the location of the wall, or the moment of the year when it was written. As recent studies have shown, there is yet more to see in tags than just territory-marking practices, sheer violence, angst, or vandalism. Tags perform an erosion of French urban visuality. Two visual discourses conflict with each other, thereby creating a constant dialectics of space that decenters authority. Just as the tag erodes a public wall, banlieue visual culture destabilizes the preservation of a white, secular, and classical culture, as it were. Because it simultaneously gives 213 visibility to tags while also erasing them, Tag Cloud works through such erosion of French culture, at times cutting it, at others perpetuating its hegemony.

“Repairing” French Visual Culture

Tag Cloud inherits a historical genealogy of the tag informed by reductive definitions.

Defining himself as “pro-tag,” Tremblin offers a visibility to an urban form of expression categorized as vandalism; yet this visibility is conditioned by a formatting of the original tags.

The “Rue Jules Ferry” image117 exposes the consequences of this formatting process. While the original wall displays illegible writings and leaky tags, the “new” wall, by contrast, is free of any visual constraint which slows down one’s reading. Tag Cloud involves a conscious process of masking what was there in the first place and is no longer visible in its new form. Such process documents mainstream French visual culture’s work of erasure by transforming the original tag into a sanitized, legible, and transparent trace of itself.

In that sense, the process of masking original tags is paradoxical. It works towards the very opposite of preservation of the distinctness of individual texts; it impacts not only the tags but also the very identity of the taggers. Because their authentic signatures are formatted in a uniform font, the taggers are grasped as a homogeneous bloc. The work seemingly disregards taggers’ own individual motivation, artistic trajectory and their right to opacity.118 It accepts their

117 See Tremblin, www.demodetouslesjours.eu. 118 While it is impossible to account for the individual motivations of all taggers, considering most of them are anonymous, some of them have discussed their artistic choices either in their own websites or in interviews. In Rennes, where Tremblin works, street artist Zilda paints classical artworks on urban walls, thereby “uproot[ing] them from their background – museums, closed places where they can’t breathe anymore.” (Zilda). MioShe, another street artist, seeks to reflect on the entanglements between art and urban environments (MioShe). Arthur-Louis Ignoré paints ornaments to “reveal the cultural mixing of our contemporary cities but also produce a contrast with the aesthetics of the modern city” (Ignoré). When asked about her own motivation, Malice, who features in Tag Cloud, suggests that, coming from the banlieue, she enjoyed “appropriating the walls of the city.” (“Interview #ELSE”). Moner, who also features in Tremblin’s work, foregrounds “the principle of writing [his] name, of being a member of a particular movement and of asserting [his] existence” (“Hello my name is: Moner”).

214 difference but only because such difference is now formatted in a transparent and legible way. At the same time, however, Tag Cloud reveals how the new tags, now fully legible to the passerby, point to the process of gentrification, sanitization, and assimilation that goes on whenever tags get painted over and are viewed as pollution.

It is on such paradox, I believe, that the work plays: Tag Cloud pushes to an extreme the aesthetics of “proper” French visual culture and suggests the limits of such culture when it comes to making space for subaltern art forms. The work both mobilizes and debunks what Nicholas

Mirzoeff calls “the right to look” which defines who can speak and who cannot, who is represented and who is not entitled to visibility.119 The right to look is an authoritarian force legitimized through institutional apparatuses such as the police force or the media. This right to look empowers some groups while silencing or stereotyping others in order to perpetuate hegemonic models of culture, identity, and politics. In Tag Cloud, the font becomes this apparatus of control and visibility. Changing the font might seem insignificant; yet this gesture bears socio-racial implications in the French banlieue context. This homogeneous font has the advantage to be readable but it renders invisible inscriptions which required more engagement from the spectator.

Because Tremblin writes over the tag, a visual form of urban culture associated with the banlieue, he appropriates an art form that precisely seeks to resist appropriation. While

Tremblin’s idea of “sharing powers” suggested a form of negotiation with other taggers, his erasure of tags points to the very opposite of negotiation. In Tag Cloud, tags become a formatted

119 For Mirzoeff, “the right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity. [...] It means requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place from which to claim a right and to determine what is right. It is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable. The right to look confronts the police who says to us, ‘move on, there’s nothing to see here.’” (473-474) 215 and standardized object reproducible on any wall. Yet I would argue that such gesture of erasure and standardization of the original tags points out a critique of mainstream French visual culture, whose policing extends to urban settings. Understanding tags as vandalism, such policing removes them from an independent and multicultural artistic circuit to an economy of sameness.

Tag Cloud works through what Wendy Brown terms a visual economy of sameness. This economy of sameness does not tolerate difference and hinders the cultural expression of banlieues subaltern groups. While some people (such as commissioned street artists, for instance) are accorded civic rights to alter the walls with their writing, others are condemned to anonymity and to express themselves only through transgression. For Brown, the right to look is granted through the concept of “tolerance” which, she argues, relies on a hierarchy between a tolerating dominant group and tolerated individuals, groups, and entire communities. “An antagonism toward alterity as well as the capacity for normalization” (Brown 26), such tolerance regulates who can speak and who cannot, who is entitled to a visibility and who is not. As Brown recalls,

an object of tolerance analytically divested of constitution by history and power is identified as naturally and essentially different from the tolerating subject; in this difference, it appears as a natural provocation to that which tolerates it. (15)

Viewed as profoundly adverse to the values of the culture shared by the tolerating group,

“tolerated” individuals are constructed as an obstacle to the well-being of the dominant group.

Paradoxically, however, this obstacle is necessary for the tolerating subject to exercise their supposedly “liberal” value of tolerance. In the particular context of France, the state and mainstream media’s “tolerance” vis-a-vis the banlieue community, in particular from Northern

African descent, perpetuates the “we vs them” dynamics instrumental to the essentialist construction of a French subject. This tolerance does yet more than ontologically differentiate who is French and who is not. In the particular context of twenty-first century French banlieue, 216 such tolerance perpetuates the unstable dynamics between race, economics, and the socio- geographical environment of the banlieue.

In Tag Cloud, Tremblin takes on the role of the tolerating subject. In particular, what he tolerates is an art form historically categorized as a provocation to French cultural hegemony.

Yet what does it mean to take on the role of the tolerating subject, even ironically, when one is already empowered by their socio-cultural capital? So far, Tremblin has not been subjected to law sanctions, even though he has tagged walls without any authorization from the cities where he works. The fact that he should not be exposed to public backlash points out a major difference in treatment of street artists. While some are granted the right to tag and, in this case, to format the right to look of passerby, others are not. As Tremblin erases tags and rewrites over them, he lends a hyper visibility to the original and opaque tags: the passerby simultaneously sees their absence and become aware of their erasure. By lending visibility to art forms that do not attract much attention from the public otherwise, except for their condemnation, he triggers a reflection on who can ironize on French politics of visuality.

For Pedro Lasch, irony is the privilege of “the elite circuit of specialized contemporary art.” Tremblin is a prime example of such privilege. A product of the Fine Arts Academy, he certainly enjoys the comfort that goes with originating from a state-sanctioned artistic background. However, I would argue that he is precisely mobilizing such cultural capital, and the privileges that accompany to satirize mainstream French visual culture’s dissociation and polarization of acceptable and unacceptable aesthetics. Tag Cloud foregrounds how tags are essentialized as naturally antagonistic to more ‘French looking’ cultural productions. Such polarization perpetuates the binary notion of a center and its margins, and further stereotypes banlieue minorities on a more structural level. As Tag Cloud presents a homogeneous picture of 217 urban visual culture, I believe that it suggests how the anti-banlieue campaign of the media carries over to banlieue visual culture. Unlike Nicolas Sarkozy, Tremblin is not using a “power- washer” to clean the walls of banlieue; nor is he whitewashing banlieue populations, although he uses white paint to cover the tags. Yet, working on his Tag Cloud project from 2010 until today,

Tremblin could not possibly ignore the socio-racial issues which permeated the 2012 electoral campaign largely dominated by debates on national identity, security, and secularism. On the contrary, I would argue that, as his work intervenes in such socio-political context, it problematizes and interrupts the ongoing stigmatization of banlieues in mainstream French media and politics. Tag Cloud intervenes in a context in which French assimilationist identity politics mask deeply rooted socio-racial tensions under a model of citizenship that fails to account for multiculturalism.

Such assimilationist policy, I would argue, is one that is social, racial, political, but also linguistic. In a written culture regulated by the norms of the Académie française, and in which a single typo indicates a low socio-economic milieu, the tag immediately shocks the passerby. Yet

Tremblin does not change the typos of the original tags; on the contrary, he preserves the phonetics and orthography of these tags, which creates a rupture between the new legible font, supposedly more acceptable than the original one, and the content of the tag. In the “Rue Jules

Ferry” image, the name “Kanser” phonetically reads as “Cancer”; as Tremblin preserves the original orthography of the word, he allows it to retain its right to not make sense to urban policies and French visual culture. But if the word does not make sense to some, Tag Cloud suggests that it makes sense for other, namely the network of taggers behind these productions.

The linguistic rupture between the legible font and the “incomprehensible” meaning, then, points to two different systems of signification which come in contact. 218

Instead of erasing each tag, Tag Cloud refamiliarizes them into writings that do not require any technical reading skills from the passerby. In order to refamiliarize what otherwise disrupts one’s vision and a style that is considered not French enough, Tremblin changes the visual aspect of the tag but also the genre and discourse associated with it. In the “Rue de

Gaillon” image,120 for instance, the red crown at the top-left of the wall has disappeared and only a sad smiley face replaces a signature difficult to decipher. The sad smiley face shifts the type of discourse: Tag Cloud is no longer about urban visual culture but about standard text communication coded through emoticons. The smiley face is used in communication everyday; however, as Tremblin transforms the original discourse into a standardized communication genre, his Tag Cloud reveals how such visual standardization defeats the very purpose of the emoticon – to communicate and exchange information between a sender and a receiver.

Turning the genre of the tag into standard text communication, Tag Cloud also adapts the tag to the written conventions of newspapers. Transformed into Helvetica or Times New Roman, the unpolished font of the tag is now legible and formatted to the standard font of a newspaper article. Tag Cloud does not ask to look at a tag but to passively see it just like one would absorb the content of some article. Rather than engaging a dialogue with the tagger, the viewer now focuses on the plastic qualities of what seems to be just random words on a wall. In that sense, I believe that the work is critical of how French newspapers – typically right-wing ones – have been presenting banlieue situations through decontextualized images of crisis. In such accounts, the banlieue has become a signifier whose signified can only be crisis. Similarly, tags have become signifiers whose signifieds are vandalism, crime, violence, and immigration. Each tag becomes a visual indication of the presence of banlieue, its supposed violence and criminality

120 See Tremblin, www.demodetouslesjours.eu. 219 too, in the city center. Because these words are isolated from each other, although they share the same writing surface, they do not form a coherent communication. In the original tagged wall, one could visually “read” a narrative in which one person tagged a wall and another added their own production later. The faded green writing in the middle of the wall, for instance, suggests that this tag was written before the others. The quality and durability of the sprayed paint establishes a temporality which is not present in the new tag. Rather than engaging with the past- ness of the tags, or their complex intertwined temporalities, Tremblin satirizes the ways mainstream French media and politics have envisioned tags – as a product to be consumed here and now.

Such presentness is after all not surprising if one thinks about the principle of a Tag

Cloud. In the Internet jargon, a Tag Cloud is a visual representation of text data, which selects the most prominent and recursive words in a given text. A Tag Cloud is usually determined from a finished work, after one runs a quantitative analysis of the text. While a Tag Cloud has the advantage of grasping the main words and themes of a text at once, such an analytical approach fails to seize the dynamism at the core of tags production. Just like one can get the themes of a novel by looking at a Tag Cloud, the passerby can see Tag Cloud without having to read the former tags it covers. The consumerist aspect of a Tag Cloud, then, is debunked by Tremblin through a larger parody of mass consumerism which transforms urban spaces into asepticized sites of consumption – what one sees is what one gets, and there is nothing beyond that. With a

Tag Cloud, there is no need to read a novel, since the work is presented as a series of words ready to be consumed. The ‘final product’ and disembodied temporality of Tag Cloud contribute to perceive the tag as an object fixed in time and space, and whose aesthetics do not differ from 220 one tagger to the other.121 Because of the fixed representation of the tag, the viewer’s perception is fixed too and fails to grasp the making process behind each production.

As Tag Cloud virtualizes tag signature on material surfaces, it also disrupts the relationships of the passerby and the original tags. At the same time, however, the passerby’s attention focuses both on what was there before and is no longer – an entire network of communication, signification, and relationality. As Jennifer Edbauer recalls,

When we encounter writing, it not only signifies to us, but it also combines with us in a degree of affectivity. […] More than figuration, the street tag is also an experience of a strange figure. It strikes you in its obtuse contours that refuse to be/come part of the story. […] Here we begin to see a tension at work between signification and the erratic, obstinate, live operation of affect. (151)

For Edbauer, the tag is not a discrete object; it is through the inter-affective relationship between the tag and the viewer that the tag comes to life with the full capacity to impact one's environment and raise social consciousness. Whether these responses were strong disgust or even anger towards the tagger, they still demonstrated the impact of the material presence of the banlieue population on the center's inhabitants. “You do not view a tag but you suffer it”

Edbauer recalls (140). While the word “suffering” connotes physical or emotional pain inflicted from an external or internal source, it does also embrace the idea of an experience between the one who suffers and the source of pain. The corporeality of such experience confronts the viewing subject with the necessity to either accept or reject the tag, in other words to react to its visual presence. Tag Cloud performs what the economy of sameness does to French visual culture: a removal of affect and a rupture of dialogue between the former and new tag. In the

121 The disembodied temporality of Tag Cloud goes hand in hand with the atemporality of banlieues in media representation. Indeed, over the last 30 years, French mainstream media have represented the banlieue not just as a space of violence, dirt, and anti-Frenchness. They have also constructed an image of the banlieue that never changes and that is stuck in time, as it were. The media’s representation of banlieue is a spectacle in the most Debordian sense of the term. For Guy Debord, the spectacle is a succession of images that do not refer to any reality but construct a hyperreality out of time and disjointed from what it is supposed to represent. In the banlieue spectacle, the banlieue is out of history, out of reality. 221

“Cour des 50 Otages” image,122 the left picture is so saturated with tags that it becomes impossible to read them; the “new” tag, by contrast, is by contrast free of visual constraint.

Puzzled by this contrast, one Internet user asked “why didn't he fix those on the wall?” as if the tags were some sort of defective decorative layer on the wall. The necessity to homogenize the site is not just a concern for a more aesthetically pleasing art form; the erasure of the original tags suggests that the social fracture should become invisible to the naked eye, erased from the visual urban and political landscape. However the erasure of the social fracture is replaced by the hierarchy between visual art forms. Instead of continuity and cohesion, Tag Cloud performs a visual hierarchy between the original tags that surround the door and the new tag, to which the eye is immediately drawn. The original tag becomes secondary in the order of things, despite the fact that it still occupies more than 50% of the space. It is thus not because the new tag is superior in terms of quantity, or quality, that the viewer is attracted to the central Tag Cloud, but because of the recognition it entails. Trained to recognize a uniform font used on the Internet, newspaper, text messages, or any other textual supports, the viewer's eye now differentiates and rejects the former tag. While the original tag covered both the background and foreground of the picture, the new Tag Cloud is on the door, which now appears in recess. Yet, it is visually brought to the foreground, almost operating an optical illusion.

Tag Cloud is not just both foreground and background at the same time; it is not seen through but as perspective, relegating the former tag to a mere framing function. Such relegation,

I believe, gestures towards the critique that mainstream French visual culture, legitimized by institutions such as the Fine Arts or urban policies, is predicated upon a center and its margins.

What is left to the background becomes gradually blurry, and is eventually too opaque to be read.

122 See Tremblin, www.demodetouslesjours.eu. 222

As Tag Cloud purposefully standardizes tags into a homogenous and legible font, it implicitly asks the viewer to reflect on their own perception of tags and to question the ways they react to the opacity of such artform.

Without giving any instruction to the viewer, Tag Cloud creates a visual stimulus that associate the tag's word-image with preconceptions that only lead to either rejection and/or a rupture of affective relationships between the artwork and the passerby. In that sense, Tag Cloud works on two levels: it formats the tags themselves but also the perception of the viewer, by seemingly wiping out any affective responses that would engage a dialogue between them, the taggers, and banlieue. According to Kelly Oliver, such affective relationship is achieved through perception, which is trained to recognize what is culturally and socially acceptable:

Vision, like all other types of perception and sensation, is just as much affected by social energy as it is by any other form of energy. This is why theorists can talk about the politics of vision or the visibility or the invisibility of the oppressed. […] All human relationships are the result of the flow and circulation of energy. Social energy includes affective energy, which can move between people. (14)

As Tag Cloud changes the tag and satirically sanitizes it, it parodies the efforts of institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts to maintain urban visual culture, and in particular the banlieue one, at the margins of French visual culture. The work formats tags into a supposedly more acceptable type of visibility filtered through legible writing. What Oliver terms “social energy” is here seemingly suppressed, as if the flow of communication and exchange between different socio-racial categories had been stopped.

Rather than being fixed on a wall, the tag (in its original form) entails a process of mobility that takes the shape of physical displacement from the periphery to the center; this mobility also marks a displacement of socio-racial discourses which intersect with each other.

Contrary to Gross's assumption that “tagging maintains an essential element while ignoring 223 borders, power, hierarchy, social status and other influences” (Gross 275), the original tags

Tremblin writes over interweave social, racial, economic, and linguistic discourses that are very much aware of these borders. These discourses bridge the borders of power and hierarchy between urban centers and their ostracized banlieues periphery. As taggers use tags as a space- making practice in environments wherefrom they have been marginalized, they create artworks that resist the ecology of sameness implemented by urban policies. If one is to read tags as a racialized production emerging from banlieues, as mainstream French media and right-wing politicians have, then, the practice of tagging challenges the ecology of sameness on an additional level. In addition to making space for taggers, tags do make space for racial minorities who, more often than not, are confined to spatial and social immobility.

Recovering Mobility and Making Space

The displacement (and visibility) of an art form associated with the marginalized site of the banlieue towards the city center is thus short-circuited by another art form that conditions its existence through a unique and more tolerable typographic font. According to Emmanuelle

Santelli, the banlieue is characterized by a lack of social and spatial mobility (Santelli 2012).

Constrained by high dropout rates in education, low skills levels and occupations, the constant expectation of assimilation, the young adults of Maghrebi origins in the banlieue cannot strive towards better living and working conditions. Very often they remain where they grew up, ostracized from the rest of society. In addition to blurring the frontier between public and private, center and margin, inside and outside, tagging the walls of a city center allows socio-racial minorities to make space in sites that do not account for them. For Doran, writing on a public wall is a “place-making activity” that resists the visual aesthetics of the media. Because the tag visually disrupts the French cultural homogeneity and hegemony, it becomes “a strategic and 224 functional tool used to construct an alternative social universe, a third space” (Doran 498).

Although Doran does not apply her argument to tags or banlieue visual culture, her analysis of youth language in French banlieues nevertheless helps to understand how a visual production associated with this type of language operates a spatial breach within French ecology of sameness. This breach reveals alternative socio-economic and racial discourses. She also recalls that

male minority youth tend to be singled out as the source of disturbances, depicted as members of a delinquent street culture that wears 'ghetto' fashions (baggy jeans, Adidas, Nike, etc.), engages in criminal activities like vandalism, graffiti […] and shows resistance to assimilating the mainstream French cultural values. (Doran 498-499)

One is yet to wonder what form(s) this third space is taking. For Italia Vitali, it is constructed through “identity evolution, the complex movement of attraction and repulsion between two languages and cultures, which multiplies narrative and stylistic situations” (181). However this space is not grounded in a physical location; nor does the banlieue language and visual culture empower its population with physical mobility. Yet the displacement of an artform associated with this marginalized site does operate a reclaiming of inaccessible locations such as the city center, and a re-encoding of its visual aesthetics.

I would argue that the tag actualizes what Anne Fournand calls “la carte mentale” of the banlieue. This mental map, Fournand specifies, “est une représentation de l'espace vécu, perçu voire rêvé ou imaginé de chaque individu” (“a representation of a space that is lived, perceived, dreamt or imagined by each individual”; 538). The mental map that Fournand identifies becomes a process of mental mapping in which taggers create a third space that produces meaning. More than a location physically defined by borders, the third space constructed by the tag is performed through the encounter between the tag and its supporting media, the wall, which the tag repurposes as a dialogue screen. Because Tag Cloud disrupts this dialogue and imposes a 225 singular version of tags, it destabilizes the space created by taggers. More than wiping out this space, Tag Cloud absorbs it, as it were. Layering a public wall with a marginalized visual art form deepens the material surface with the symbolic inscription of otherwise unseen – or stereotyped – populations. Tags are more than a reclaiming of space; they reclaim the right to visibility through the medium of the wall, which is precisely meant to separate, divide, and conceal. The wall becomes the material apparatus that materializes socio-political policies; yet it is reclaimed by those who are behind it. This reclaiming takes the form of a certain defiance towards authorities who built these material and symbolic walls for the purpose of society ordering, but also towards anyone who is complicit with preserving social barriers.

For Tremblin, Tag Cloud does not prevent taggers from reclaiming the space of the wall:

“I expect people at least to notice or even destroy my work because vandalism is in itself a way to make (destructive) conversation” (Byrnes). The words “destruction” or “vandalism” situates the taggers in a discourse that reproduces enduring clichés of banlieue violence which is not far from what Kokoreff identifies as “rage.” Is there really a conversation between Tremblin and the

“other taggers,” then?

Two years after Tremblin wrote over the tags, his Tag Cloud was covered again with signatures, leaky marks, drawings, until a new and bigger tag hid Tremblin's work entirely. No matter how much it is erased, or written over, the tag strikes back. Displaying the “new” tags on his website, Tremblin demonstrates that Tag Cloud is not just about his own tag but about the entire production, what was there before and what now replaces it. More than a static visual inscription on the wall, Tag Cloud thus opens a breach onto the past and future artistic initiatives reclaiming the wall. Because Tag Cloud can be written over by taggers, I would argue that, despite its own erasure of former tags, it still allows tagger to reinscribe their own right to 226 opacity. Unlike a “sanitized” repainted wall, Tremblin’s work registers the trace of what has been “sanitized” through graphic languages of “correction.” The work certainly erases tags. But as it makes space for other visibilities to emerge, it also challenges the hierarchy between the normative and the marginal at the heart of the economy of sameness promoted by French politics of cultural assimilation.

For Tremblin, however, formatting tags in a uniform font has less to do with resisting a racial economy of sameness than resisting mass consumerism, particularly exacerbated by the

Internet. Because Tremblin relies on the space of the Internet to make his work circulate, and because he has explained Tag Cloud as a direct comment on the virtual dynamics of street art, I believe it is important to explore what the shift from IRL to the virtual entails when discussing the socio-racial dynamics of Tag Cloud. More particularly, I believe that the circulation of the work on the Internet, and the dematerialization of the work, further problematize the question of mobility and banlieue ecology. To what extent does a virtual space of infinite connection and circulation allow banlieue visual culture to emerge, consolidate itself, and interrupt the hegemony of French visual culture?

Going Viral: Tag Cloud and the Internet

In Tremblin’s view, the Internet is more than a digital replication of urban spaces. It has its own structuring, its own policy and above all, its own ecology. What endangers the fragile ecology of the Internet space, then, is capitalist corporations regulating the individual’s experience of online surfing and information sharing. For Tremblin, Tag Cloud enables a new form of literacy practice that helps circumvents the pervasiveness of mass consumerism in one’s life. Such form of literacy practice allows the spectator to make space in the material space of the 227

city and the virtual space of the Internet. Claiming his work was drawing on the Internet word cloud, Tremblin argued that Tag Cloud reconciles the virtual and the actual:

Tag Cloud’s principle is to replace the all-over of graffiti calligraphy by readable translations like the cloud of keywords which can be found on the Internet. It shows the analogy between physical tag and virtual tag, both in the form (tagged walls compositions look the same as Tag Cloud), and in substance (like keywords which are markers of net surfing, graffiti are markers of urban drifting). (Gillepsie)

For Tremblin, writing on urban walls constitutes a practice of urban “drifting,” a term that directly recalls the 1960s avant-garde Situationism. Ironically, however, the Situationists’ rejection of capitalist values such as art commodification and bourgeois spectatorship could not be more at the antipodes to Tag Cloud’s apparent “chosification” (thing-making) of urban visual culture. Tremblin has explicitly aligned his work with Situationism, for which the city was an open space of play and appropriation, as he declared in an interview:

These theories and operational concepts have greatly influenced my look at and my practice in the city, for example through the will that I share with other artists to produce forms that are already there, which are not recognizable as art. It’s a way to increase the life and transform our world, contributing to an urban imaginary that goes beyond appearances produced by consumer society. (Interview with Street Art Paris)

In that regard, it is noteworthy to recall that Tremblin’s original goal was not to defamiliarize tags, but to defamiliarize and satirize the industry of advertisement. Indeed, the artist has not made a link between his work and banlieue visual culture, and has not commented on his defamiliarization of tags as a critique of socio-racial dynamics in France. Tremblin’s focus on mass consumerism, particularly as it relates to the Internet, I believe, overshadows the larger stakes of his work. Reducing his work to a critique of mass consumerism points to a significant omission of what Tag Cloud entails when it comes to the visual culture it pays tribute to, and the environment of the banlieue with which such culture has been associated by media, pop culture, and politicians. 228

But if the work is to be read as a commentary on virtual/real life dynamics, particularly as they relate to mass consumerism, then how does such reading complicate, challenge, or reinforce

Tag Cloud’s implicit critique of visual sanitization of banlieue visual culture? Although

Tremblin has not commented on Tag Cloud and banlieue visual culture, I believe that his own reading of Tag Cloud as a commentary on the Internet helps disentangle questions of banlieue mobility, banlieue ecology, and of relationships created and sustained in virtual spaces. When read together, Tremblin’s last two statements trigger a reflection on the stakes of the virtual in what he calls the “urban imaginary.” If the urban imaginary materializes through practices of tagging, what kind of discourse does it offer once it is dematerialized on the Internet?

According to artist and scholar Janice Rahn, extending the visibility of urban visual culture through the Internet can only have positive consequences, notably in terms of networking. Publishing Painting Without Permission in 2002, when having the Internet in domestic spaces was not so common as today, she argues that

the graffiti community is a huge network that has become even more global and extensive through the World Wide Web. The Web broadens the community and allows the sharing of knowledge beyond regional enclaves. It will be interesting to observe whether computer networking will dissolve differences and move the community toward a more universal global culture. […] For the first time, youth can exchange stories, images, and music without the mediation of publishers and the recording industry. However, social participation in cyberspace may take away from the material exchanges of tools, language, skills, fashions, and political attitudes that spawned regional identities and innovations of specific groups and individuals who learned hip-hop on the streets. (141)123

Rahn’s last point on material exchanges is precisely what characterizes the downside of Tag

Cloud when it comes to the online exposure of the work. The Internet has facilitated the

123 Rahn’s statement corroborates what DSTRBO, a Canadian street artist she interviews, also deplores: “The increased proliferation of graffiti in magazines and on the Web has caused a phenomenal awareness of graffiti by youth. This has caused a wave of copycats who think it is “cool” to tag their names on public property, but who do not learn the ethics, skills, and codes acquired through community involvement” (139). 229 mediation and circulation of Tremblin’s work well beyond the boundaries of French cities and

France itself. However, it has also contributed to erase the local specificities of the tags over which Tremblin writes. A tag sprayed on a wall in Rennes, France, just becomes any tag, regardless of its creator(s) and of its geographical locale. While the Internet has given taggers more visibility, since their work circulate online, the digitalization of their work also cancels out such visibility. The internet has also diminished the significance of how Tremblin’s erasing and rewriting gesture satirizes French visual culture. In addition to erasing the local particularities of the tags (in terms of the process of their production, their geographical settings, their historical resonance), the dematerialization and circulation of these tags on the Internet have reinforced universally accepted visions of tags as naturally “ugly.” The Internet responses to the work of

Tremblin have contributed to further marginalize these visual productions. In “real life,” Tag

Cloud performs an economy of sameness in order to subvert it and to create a space for a banlieue ecology to emerge. Working through a palimpsestic process of erasure and rewriting, such ecology accounts for the larger network of taggers, the temporality of past and present tags, the immediate response to passerby, and the mobility from banlieues to city centers. When circulating on the Internet, particularly in other countries whose concept of the banlieue is different from France’s, the ecology of sameness does not carry the same implications. The responses of many Web users to Tremblin’s work, for instance, do not take into account the fact that the tags he writes over are located in France. Instead they focus only on the prettification of former tags and on the fact that they are now more visually acceptable. In that sense, these comments work within a conception of tags as universally ugly, dirty, and marginal.

The material exchanges that Rahn points out goes beyond “tools, language, skill, fashions, and political attitudes that spawned regional identities.” Their exchanges also take 230 place in specific spaces. Tags acquire their specific signification through the material environment that surrounds them. But when an artwork circulates online and is decontextualized from its original material environment, then, how does it develop a dialectical relationship with its virtual surroundings? In the specific context of Tag Cloud, how does the process of visual sanitization translate from an urban space to a virtual one?

The dematerialization and online circulation of Tag Cloud change the ecology of tags in the context of French cultural assimilation. Indeed the dematerialization and circulation of Tag

Cloud in countries beyond France help rethink Brown’s concept of tolerance in other social and transnational contexts. The digitalization of material tags offers experiences of space no longer regimented by the implicit separation of French urban centers and their periphery. But the erasure of such boundary also entails the erasure of geographical, historical, social, economic, and racial discrimination. In other words the prejudices that accompany tags IRL do not necessarily follow them URL. In both cases, they are considered as a hindrance to mainstream

French visual culture. But on a virtual platform, Tag Cloud loses any potential critique on the

French socio-racial dynamics and politics regimenting banlieue visibility.

For Tremblin, the digitalization of tags ultimately allows taggers from all over the world to share their creations and gain more visibility online. In a sense, then, the digitalization of tags lets tags circulate across the Web while also changing the face of the Web. The online content of

Tag Cloud becomes a shared space in which each Web citizen may enjoy freedom of speech, as

Tremblin stated in a 2016 interview:

The initial idea came from the awareness that mass access to the internet in the beginning of the 2000s permitted a lot of street writers living away from the main cities in Europe to share their work in the way they wanted to, on homemade websites and CMS blogs that used Tag Cloud. […] In 2000, we would physically encounter work and then spread it digitally. Now we are mostly experiencing online documentation of real life graffiti before we can encounter it physically. Tag Cloud was initially about this balance between 231

the IRL and URL experience of tagging. Formerly, Tag Cloud were still the main way to draw personal paths through contents, websites and blogs in 2010. […] Now, we are in the post-Snowden era that’s ruled by big corporations—Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook—who are orienting through algorithms the content we can access and opinions we can develop. Reception is filtered. The internet used to be an open source space when I started to use it in 1996. Now internet users are not considered as responsible citizens— but rather potential consumers. (Gillepsie)

Mentioning open access to the Internet, surveillance societies, and the shift from the material to the digital, Tremblin reorients the scope of Tag Cloud as well as the debates surrounding his creation. Reaching out to small European locales, the work calls for the inclusivity of geographically remote taggers. Tag Cloud is no longer attached to the French context, but becomes a transnational – if not trans-continental – professional network, and a refuge for artists marginalized by their isolating geographical environments.

The perception of tags as dirty, illegible, and as a stain to urban spaces is not limited only to France. In 2006, the European Parliament passed a “resolution on the thematic strategy on the urban environment” to limit the proliferation of graffiti towards a more sustainable urban management. According to the resolution, “more attention should be paid to preventing and removing dirt, litter, graffiti, animals' excrement and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems” (“Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment”). However, nothing suggests associations of graffiti with particular religious or ethnic communities. Rather the resolution only positions graffiti between “litter” and “animals’ excrement.” Animal excrement and litter are natural excess carrying no function whatsoever in the social world. Positioning graffiti between bodily dejections and trash, the resolution of the European Parliament puts on the same level graffiti and the excessive remains of animal and human activity, thereby implying that these are similar kinds of unhygienic expenditures. 232

Litter, excrements, are forms of digestion of human and animal activity. But what are tags the digestion of? Do they simply visually transcribe an individual’s or a community’s thwarted desire to be seen in public spaces? As we have seen, there is more in tags than “just” a symbolization of unbalanced social dynamics. Tags constitute a network between taggers and passerby, and foster forms of encounter between different cultures, different visualities, and different conceptions of French identity. Rather than being “one and indivisible,” such identity multiplies under various facets, tags offering one of them. It is in that sense that the political ecology of tags reveals itself; not just as the manifestation of invisible subjects who claim participation in French politics and democracy, but also as a political object that constantly reinvents itself through erasure and rewriting. More than the desire to subvert, to disrupt, or to vandalize, tagging is a gesture that demands to reconsider social relationships through objects that mediate them, as neglected as they might be.

Conclusion

In 2016, Tremblin declared: “They have turned me into an anti-graffiti messiah while my intention was the very exact opposite – I am pro-tag, since I am a tagger myself” (Gillepsie). Six years after the Tag Cloud project began, Tremblin vehemently reacted against the Internet blogs that praised his work for its anti-graffiti qualities, accusing them of misinterpreting his work as a

“hygienist satire.” While this statement may hold true, it nevertheless radically contrasts with

Tremblin's initial comment on Tag Cloud in 2013:

Tag Cloud removes all alterity or identity and makes it properly decorative and appreciable to any passerby, which is also the purpose of a graffiti fresco, showing technical skills for decorations. […] This work sounds like a kind of oxymoron, you could understand it as a way to make a dirty signature proper as institutionalized visual communication, sterilizing wild graffiti writing by removing all traces of alterity and at the same time giving the opportunity to anybody to be able to read graffiti script and get in touch with it. (Byrnes) 233

Tremblin has not yet explained the reasons for reinterpreting his own work in a new light.

Despite the fact that Tremblin seems very well aware of the potential ambiguity of his own work

– between visual sterilization of tags and open dialogue with taggers – Tag Cloud does not attempt at bridging these two irreconcilable interpretations. Insisting more on the technique of tagging that on the socio-racial and economic implications behind it, Tremblin presents tags as an object of visual consumption that can be altered by other taggers.

It is yet precisely on such paradox that rests the entire irresolvable open-endedness of the work. As the work erases tags and rewrites over them, it paradoxically reconstructs affective relationships between the passerby and the tag. Such erasure partakes in the artist’s initiative to demonstrate how contemporary French visual culture is still predicated upon norms that erase subaltern art forms through appropriation and gentrification. In order to demonstrate the limits of these norms, however, it becomes necessary for Tremblin to perform what he denounces. As Tag

Cloud erases tags, and thus the visibility of taggers’ communities, it also asks the passerby to reflect on what has been erased, what was there and is no longer present in its original form, and what such erasure entails for the passerby’s own right to look.

One may yet wonder to what extent Tremblin’s erasing and rewriting gesture is ironic as to its white-washing consequence. What the passerby is looking at now is certainly polished letters on a white background – but it is still a tag. In that sense, then, Tag Cloud can be interpreted as the artist’s own take on the French politics of visuality. It comments on the fact that the right to write and the right to look, to use Mirzoeff's expression, are not a given for everyone in the French context of the banlieue culture. While they determine who can speak in public, these rights are more about duties than actual empowerment. In order to be recognized as an artist worthy of consideration, one must abide by artistic rules that resists any alteration for 234 fear of wasting French cultural hegemony. It is thus no wonder that the banlieue should not be granted these rights, because of their supposed inherent failure to integrate the French cultural model. Categorized in a perpetual state of crisis and criminality, the banlieue thus becomes responsible for its non-integration, its new forms of art being relegated not even to a subculture, but to an anticulture.

While Tremblin works primarily in France, it is also interesting to recall his work in

Belgium and the Netherlands124 and to investigate the stakes of Tag Cloud beyond the French context. Does the process of visual sanitization, which is French-specific, also apply to these countries, then? Is it transferable from one society and culture to another? Integration, assimilation, the banlieue as a ghettoized and racialized space, are French phenomena. In order to understand the consequences of Tag Cloud in Belgium and the Netherlands, one would have to explore if and how their banlieue-like spaces are environments of historical, racial, social, and ethnic discrimination. A deeper study of Tag Cloud in these countries would also need to account for the politics of visuality that is proper to each of them, in order to determine how the tag is considered there. If one follows Daniel Gross's assumption that “tagging as an international discourse features opportunism, social struggles, and points of tension” (283), then Tremblin's exportation of Tag Cloud abroad still entails a socio-racial commentary. While losing its

'frenchifying' aspect, Tremblin's Tag Cloud in Belgium and the Netherlands still satirize homogenizing social dynamics, yet in different geopolitical contexts.

Writing over the signature tags in a legible font partakes in an aesthetics of French assimilation that, when exported across national boundaries, might simply become 'white-

124 This study remains preliminary, given the limited available amount of images taken in the Netherlands and Belgium. Tremblin's own website shows only one image for each country, which is not sufficient to draw conclusions. 235 washing.' Such white-washing is not too far from the “green-washing” of militarization I analyzed in Chapter Two. Entire populations are being denied access to spaces, be they representational (as the wall) or occupational (as the Chagos Islands and the banlieue). These populations emerge from postcolonial contexts and are in the process of decolonizing their self- perception and self-representation. One main difference between white-washing and greenwashing processes, in these two specific case studies, is that Tag Cloud leaves open the possibility for racialized and ostracized populations to emerge and counter the act of white- washing (as taggers can, simply put, reinvest the space of the wall with their own tags). In the case of the Chagos Islands, there is little to no possibility for displaced Chagossians to reclaim and reoccupy their native soil, other than through art and activism.

236

CONCLUSION

In Decolonizing Refuse: Ecologies of Waste in Contemporary Arts and Literatures, I have argued that the ecologies of waste under study create ecological imaginaries alternative to the modern/colonial extractive economies and ecologies of colonization and global capitalism.

These imaginaries, articulated through the speculative, abstraction, myth, and erasure, seek to go beyond the geographical, historical, racial, and social boundaries of the ongoing modern/colonial machine. Looking mostly at Francophone environments, but also at spaces traversed by a history of French imperialism and colonization, my project has demonstrated that what links these ecologies of waste is less the critique of modernity/coloniality than the urgent necessity to create decolonial futures grounded in networks of solidarity.

The principal aim of Decolonizing Refuse has been to expand on ecocritical conversations on Francophone literature and art, by approaching French ecocriticism from a decolonial perspective; by doing so, my project has gestured towards a Francophone decolonial ecocriticism, therefore contributing to the recent scholarly openings of French ecocriticism to spaces that had so far fallen out of ecocritical consideration. Exploring the ecologies of waste in formerly colonized spaces (Senegal, the Chagos, Madagascar), spaces between European colonial powers and their former colonies (the Mediterranean Sea), and in a colonial power itself

(France), I have also sought to demonstrate how envisioning these spaces from a decolonial ecocritical perspective helps rethink the center/periphery binaries of what is commonly called

“the Francophone world.”

As each of the chapters has shown, decolonial ecologies of waste manifest differently in the contexts of global climate change, the militarization of the Indian Ocean, the refugee crisis, and the banlieue situation in France. For photographer Fabrice Monteiro, an ecology of waste is 237 one that is visionary and that articulates understandings of climate change grounded in mysticism, animism, and Afrofuturism. As he creates djinn figures out of garbage recycled from landfills across Senegal, he ultimately challenges not only Western secular understandings of climate change but also the pre-established scenario of an Africa in need of Western benevolence. For Mauritian visual artist Nirveda Alleck and Malagasy novelist Jean-Luc

Raharimanana, an ecology of waste is one that revalues the indigenous cosmovisions erased by

French, British, and US imperialisms. As Chapter Two demonstrates, they revalue the roles played by indigenous women in reclaiming access to the Chagos Islands and sovereignty over the history of Madagascar. By doing so, they reveal how indigenous ecologies also become history-making practices. Shifting from sub-Saharan (continental and insular) spaces to the

Mediterranean Sea, Chapter Three has explored how Spanish novelist Andrés Sorel and Danish visual artist E.B. Itso create an “ecology of the abyss.” As they salvage the human and material debris of migration, Sorel and Itso reconstruct trajectories and relations between the refugees, whom Western European populist leaders often consider as undesirable. Their ecologies challenge mediatic and political de-historicized representations of “the” refugee as a single figure. As the artists work through the waste of migration (in the form of ghosts and discarded t- shirts), they branch out towards the past of the refugees and reimagine the Mediterranean Sea as a multidimensional and multilinear environment. Chapter Four, located in the context of the

French banlieue, has offered a study of French street artist Mathieu Tremblin’s “ecology of sameness.” The gesture of erasing tags and writing over them in a more legible font, my chapter has argued, satirizes French politics of cultural and racial assimilation targeting the banlieue racialized populations since the 1990s. 238

As Decolonizing Refuse has explored a variety of ecologies of waste across four different

Francophone and Francophone-related contexts (such as the trans-Mediterranean refugee crisis in the works of Spanish and Danish artists), it has attempted to trace the emergence of a

Francophone decolonial ecocriticism. As I intervene in a French and Francophone scholarship that is currently opening up to decolonial ecocritical issues, I have limited my visual and textual analyses to Francophone artworks from sub-Saharan Africa, France, and the “abyss” of the

Mediterranean Sea. A longer study would investigate how Francophone decolonial ecocriticism emerges from other environments such as Quebec, whose ecocritical literary productions have been largely absorbed by larger US-Canadian ecocritical frameworks. A longer study would also include South-East Asia, which French ecocriticism has limited to the writings of Marguerite

Duras. Expanding the scope of Decolonizing Refuse to more Francophone authors, I argue, gestures towards the creation of a more transnational and interconnected decolonial ecocriticism.

In addition to salvaging the peoples and environments refused by global capitalism, their relational decolonial ecologies create an ever-expanding “constellation,” one that constantly works towards articulating imaginaries and artistic practices of agency, sovereignty, and self- determination.

In my exploration of sub-Saharan and Western European ecologies of waste, I explicitly chose artists who are outsiders to the situation they address. Some of them were born in former colonial spaces, while others were born in Western Europe. Almost all of them have been living and working in the Global North, wherein their works have circulated and gained cultural and commercial success. Choosing to explore the works of these artists living in a certain degree of economic and social privilege begs the question: can the subaltern not speak? My project recognizes the importance of exploring the role performed by decolonial artists and novelists 239 from the Global South, especially in times of ecological disasters when communities facing the consequences of fossil fuel extraction, carbon emissions, or flooding, are more and more silenced. These voices are fundamental to the decolonial discourses that address such challenges.

However, my aim has been to demonstrate what the inclusion of these outsiders’ voices in the decolonial discourse reveals about the objectives, methods, and impasses of its project(s) and philosophies. Understanding “decoloniality” as a project emanating from and circulating within the Global South only limits forms of knowledge born in the colonial/ruins of the very matrix of decoloniality itself – Western Europe, for instance. Yet these forms of knowledge have informed, and been informed by, decolonial discourses emerging from Global South spaces, sharing projects similar in terms of objectives but with varying methods and outcomes.

Key to their decolonial projects is an understanding of how art and ecology inform and inflect each other towards the construction of more environmentally, socially, and politically sustainable futures.

240

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VITA AURELIE MATHERON

EDUCATION Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature 2020 M.A. Université de Rennes 2, Anglophone Literatures & Cultures, France 2012 B.A. Université de Rouen, Anglophone Literatures & Cultures, France 2008

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

“Performing Waste, Wasting Performance: the Ecology of Fluxus.” Published in Resilience: a Journal of the Environmental Humanities 6.1 (Winter 2018). “Writing on the Wall: Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Cloud and Politics of Cultural Assimilation.” Published in French Cultural Studies 3.4 (November 2019). “Crise environnementale au Sénégal : Fabrice Monteiro et l’écologie visionnaire de La prophétie.” Forthcoming in Nouvelles Etudes Francophones (2019).

SELECTED HONORS, GRANTS, AWARDS Prix Jeune Chercheur, Conseil International d’Études Francophones 2018 Africana Research Center Humanities Research Fellow, Penn State 2018 The Liberal Arts Research and Graduate Studies Dissertation Award, Penn State 2018 Samuel P. Bayard Award. Outstanding Graduate Student in Comparative Literature, Penn State 2018

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS “Occupying Island Imaginaries: Nirveda Alleck’s Continuum Chagos and 2019 Global Environmentality.” Association for the Studies of the Arts of the Present, Baltimore, MD. “Crise environnementale au Sénégal: l'écologie mystique de Fabrice Monteiro.” 2018 Conseil International d’Etudes Francophones, La Rochelle, France. “Battlegrounds of Terror: Mystical Afghan Landscapes in Neither Heaven nor Earth. 2018 Modern Language Association, New York City, NY. “Writing on the Wall: Visual Sanitization in Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Cloud.” 2017 Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts, Baltimore, MD.

SELECTED TEACHING EXPERIENCE FRENCH COURSES FR351 Introduction to French Literature I (Penn State) 2017-2018 FR 3 (Penn State) 2015

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE COURSES CMLIT108 Myths and Mythologies (Penn State World Campus) 2019 CMLIT143 Human Rights and World Literature, LEAP Pride (Penn State) 2018 CMLIT010 WEB Introduction to World Literature (Penn State World Campus) 2017 CMLIT143 Human Rights & World Literature (Penn State) 2016