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Abstract
In this article, I mobilize the notion of ‘marronage’ to analyze the ways in which specific practices of representation allow us to observe transgeographical practices of expression in the films of Raoul Peck, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Jean-Marie Téno. I suggest that the works of these three filmmakers are not relational and do not attempt to recuperate colonial and imperial experience in Africa as a means to remind us about the ‘efficacy’ (effectiveness) of colonialism and imperialism; rather, Peck, Sissako, and Téno's films are full of subjective ideological ‘énoncés’ (statements), which provoke and incite a complex identity group formation that is ‘affective’ in nature: Africani(city). Indeed, I make the case that Peck, Sissako, and Téno use the medium of cinema to articulate ‘political consciousness’ for the creation of a transgeographical mythology, Africani(city). The representation of this cultural mythology helps us examine the sameness and specificity of cultural genocide in post-independent African nations, because these films re-formulate the meaning of blackness as an uncontested régime of truth that is transgeographical, or a-national, in nature, thus contradicting the colonial fabric of national-African identities. Above all, I make the case that such practices of representation could serve as relevant pretexts helping us to open up and re-think through the theoretical limits of the notions of nation and the transnational.
Notes
1. I expend on these limits in ‘Africanicity in Black Cinema: A Conjunctural Ground for New Expressions of Identity’ (de B'béri Citation2008).
2. For de Lauretis, to affirm an object such as feminism or being a feminist is not about denying women their specificities, but rather about acknowledging the essential differences of feminist thought versus non-feminist thought (1993, p. 308).
3. Originally, I was going to use the term ‘unit’ here. However, Handel Wright, in his edit of this article, suggested this term ‘unit/y’ which captures both the idea of a unit and the idea of unity forged out of difference.
4. Samuel Weber's study of television structures and functions develops a similar argument. For Weber (Citation1996, pp. 111–116), ‘if television thus names ‘seeing-at-a-distance’, what appears to overcome thereby is the body, or more precisely the spatial limitations placed by the body upon seeing and hearing’. I am suggesting here that it is the conjunction of the medium of cinema with the specificity of certain black-African practices of narration that allow us to experience the notion of all-at-oneness (e.g. our ability to see and witness the past and present in the present).
5. Alouette, gentille alouette, je te plumerai! – Lark, sweet lark, I'll fleece [pluck] you!
6. Cornel West (1990) makes a similar argument, reminding us of the complexities of cultural expressions.
7. In his critique of the UNESCO report entitled Our Diversity, Eriksen (2001) sees such cultural analyses to be political, and lacking considerations of human agency. He notes: ‘The report simultaneously emphasizes the right of peoples to cultural self-determination and the need for a global ethics – as if ethics and morality had nothing to do with culture! Of course, cultural self-determination may conflict with a global ethics, since morality is an important component of locally constructed worlds …’ (Eriksen Citation2001).
8. This notion is interchangeable with blackness; with consideration that the suffix ‘city’ stands here for an ongoing process, which is, however, grounded in a specific point of departure (see de B'béri Citation2007).
9. See for instance the New Negro's and the Négritude's activist-literature productions. For the English language see Fire, Crisis, Opportunity and The Negro World (the later was a trilingual journal of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and was banned by the colonial government in Africa). In French see L’Étudiant noir [Black Student] and Le Monde Noir [Black World] which were on the same critical caliber as the three above-mentioned English journals.
10. See Marcuse (1968), quoted by Bennett (1982, pp. 43–44).
11. On similar articulations based on the studies of female modes of seduction, Jean Baudrillard asks if it is not characteristic of the seducer to turn himself ‘into an appearance in order to disturb appearances’. ‘He too turns himself into an illusion in order, to show confusion, but curiously, this illusion is part of a calculation, with finery giving way to strategy. Now if a woman's finery is also strategic, a calculated display, is not the seducer's strategy a display of calculation with which to defend himself from some opposing force? A strategy of finery vs. the finery of strategy’. From this view, the seducer produces an illusion to create the condition for his advantage (see Baudrillard Citation1990, p. 98). Baudrillard's argument is close to the ways in which I articulate the notion of ‘marronage’, because it lies on the conjunction between the notions of resistance and seduction (see also, Cyrulnik Citation1999, pp. 206–207).
12. See the difference Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Citation1989, pp. 49–50) makes of the use of the English language notion of (s)ignification and the black vernacular English use of (S)ignification. Concretely, the (s)ignification operates on a syntagmatic or horizontal axis, whereas Signifyin(g) operates on a vertical chaotic axis in which the meaning is always suspended, and unfixed in one particular signification.