Responses to a call to action: new directions and directives in memory studies in the French-speaking world

In January 2020, the publication of Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France (Achille, Forsdick, and Moudileno, Liverpool University Press, 2020) launched an important call to action to scholars working in languages, memory studies, history and beyond to systematically postcolonialise and unsettle Pierre Nora’s well-established lieux de mémoire. The volume’s editors urge us to make visible the traces of the colonial in France’s heritage and to encourage new readings of the past by anchoring the legacies of colonialism in collective memory. This special issue of Modern & Contemporary France has been produced as a response to those calls. We have brought together scholars working at the intersection of French history, literary and cultural studies and anthropology who explore a range of memory practices. The articles span contemporary theatre, political discourse, visual arts, literature, memorials and museums. Across this range of genres, we aim to highlight the ways these practices interact with France’s official narratives of its national and global past. The question that underpins the majority of the work carried out here is: how do public spaces, museums, and artistic and textual practices align with or counter the attempts in the political sphere to acknowledge the legacies of colonialism in modern and contemporary France?

The collection of commissioned articles in this special issue probes the inherent dialectical relations between specific memory practices, some systematic but also others more spontaneous, and national or international directives. Institutions and governments the world over are playing catch up to projects of decentring and decolonising, which have been undertaken for decades by artists, activists and scholars. We understand the call in Postcolonial Realms of Memory as one of acknowledging legacies. What emerges in the articles and interview gathered here is a range of more or less explicit ways in which the processes of curating memory work are shaped by national and international political priorities; the entanglements of those processes in global circulations of money and materials makes this contingent. As some of these articles’ discussion of public engagement highlights, the specific circulation of each form of memory work necessarily influences its sphere of influence. What is revealed by each of the authors included here is the incisive relevance of this work for the politics of contemporary France and the French-speaking world.

The call to postcolonialise France’s realms of memory is already being taken up in the academy, as attest special issues published in, for example, Francosphères (2021 edited by Jonathan Lewis and Antonia Wimbush) where the collection of articles draws attention to multiple traces of the colonial, from Nora’s seminal work to the place of the bande dessinée in commemoration, and the depiction of Algeria as a lieu de mémoire in contemporary cinema. In 2020, Modern Languages Open published the Collection ‘The global crisis in memory: populism, decolonisation and how we remember in the twenty-first century’ Forsdick et al., 2020. Its editors situate the crisis of the liberal memory paradigm in the 2010s and present a series of responses to it from across the political spectrum. The collection of articles features three with an explicitly francophone focus, by Sarah Arens, Paul Max Morin, and Giorgos Noussis, across political discourse and visual culture in the form of a bande dessinée. Their concern with the political importance of the roman national underscores what can happen when this is appropriated for short-term political gains, and how our understanding of that kind of contested past can be built through a range of genres and styles. Published earlier this year and edited by Brett Kaplan, Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2023) foregrounds many of these concerns, including the urge to slow down our memory work and pursue what Stef Craps names ‘ecological mourning’ (above volume). The volume’s scope is far and beyond the French-speaking world, but the editor draws nonetheless on the literature of Marcel Proust and the defining role of involuntary memory. In drawing together multiple disciplines and an exciting array of creative work, Kaplan demonstrates that to ‘pull one back [to the past] without any ability to resist’, we must keep visiting what he calls ‘the pluralistic space of fiction’. Most recently, and perhaps of most relevance to scholarly moves to postcolonialise memory work as it relates to the French-speaking world, is the publication of Colonisations. Notre Histoire (Seuil, 2023). Coordinated by Pierre Singaravélou, Arthur Asseraf, Guillaume Blanc, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Mélanie Lamotte, the volume presents work from over 250 international authors. This monumental collection opens up French memory studies to the global transformations of a violent and complex colonial history.

This special issue of Modern & Contemporary France is a convergence of work from different disciplinary perspectives, crucially as diverse starting points from which to come to memory studies. The commissioned articles and interview ask similar questions of very different materials and approaches, and we hope in part by doing this to probe what might be the future of French-language memory studies. This future will necessarily be inflected by theoretical developments in memory studies and many of our authors are contributing to debates in the field by applying, testing and developing these theories in relation to different case studies. These developments and debates are crucial in establishing a critical apparatus which is helpful in understanding and analysing the often messy and slow processes involved in memory work across the world. We include a brief overview of what we consider to be some key contemporary critical frameworks below. Our undergraduate students have also engaged with this critical apparatus in an Honours module, ‘Past Imperfect: Memory Cultures in the French-Speaking World’, that we co-taught for the first time at the University of Stirling in the academic year 2022/2023.

Max Silverman draws on the idea of the palimpsest to bring together memories from multiple and different contexts, and to see individual and collective memories, and the local and the global, as travelling between and overlapping with one another. These interactions are able to both reveal and obscure. In Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn, 2013), he explores a range of twelve films and literary texts using the idea of palimpsestic memory. Younger scholars are already building on this exciting and productive theory, developing ideas around the ‘palimpsestic life narrative’, for example, Nicola Pearson, ‘Palimpsestic life narratives in French by women from contemporary Tunisia’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bristol, 2022).

Michael Rothberg’s work on multidirectional memory (Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation, Stanford University Press, 2009) and the implicated subject (Implicated Subjects: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford University Press, 2019), which shatters any neat perpetrator-victim binary, are particularly pertinent when addressing and acknowledging colonial legacies. In the former, Rothberg argues against the idea of competitive victimhood, where a hierarchy of suffering may be established. Events are remembered in relation to other events and these connections are vital in how we make sense of the past. Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen’s agonistic memory (2016, On Agonistic Memory, Memory Studies 9 (4): 390–404), with its focus on deep contextualisation, also helps to make sense of complex subject positions and the importance of multiperspectivity including the accommodation of different, conflicting and even irreconcilable perspectives within a ‘conflictual consensus’.

Our special issue examines the articulation of memory studies in the French-speaking world, analysing diverse discursive forms as well as more activist ways of ‘doing’ memory and their moments of crossover. The articles and the interview contained in this issue are inscribed in the global francosphere, moving beyond the roman national (national narrative) and extending beyond mainland France, through the repatriation and circulation of peoples, objects and texts. The issue is divided into three sections: France narrating its (relationships to its) past; (Post)Museum and heritage spaces; and Remembering slow violence: malnutrition and extractivism.

Section 1: France narrating its (relationships to its) past

This section begins with a focus on the Republic and its gatekeepers of national memory. The articles and interview here include discussions of access to archives, the role of politicians, and the political stakes of making artistic decisions about history.

Fiona Barclay’s article, ‘Contesting the end of French Algeria: cultural memories six decades on’, presents a complex picture of France’s ‘highly fractured memorial landscape’ as regards its long relationship with former colony Algeria. Against this backdrop, Barclay presents theatre as a potential site for moving away from competitive memory and towards an agonistic framework (after Chantal Mouffe) that opens up space for multiperspectivism and democratic dialogue. One of the plays in question is Et le cœur fume encore (2019), written by Alice Carré and Margaux Eskenazi, in which it emerges that both memories and allegiances evolve and shift dramatically over time. Audiences are confronted with the need to reconsider their expectations of pathos, support, disapproval and solidarity with and for characters occupying a broad range of subject positions, which themselves evolve and shift too. In Les Pieds Tanqués (2012), a one-scene comedy by Philippe Chuyen, characters rely on humour as common ground in the boulodrome. This playful take on revisiting the contested history of Algeria sees a Provençal, a pied-noir, a Beur, and a Parisian visitor touch on both latent and historic divides in France as they play pétanque. These creative productions are examined, among others, in particular for their potential to provoke a more comprehensive and inclusive memory of the end of French Algeria than the monolithic narrative so defended in France’s guerre de mémoires. For Barclay it is in the audience’s confrontation with discordant and disarming performance that an opportunity lies: to take up the responsibility for synthesising and producing meaning in relation to this most complex of colonial pasts.

In his article, ‘Rupture and reconciliation: the neoliberal logics of Emmanuel Macron’s colonial memory policies’, Dónal Hassett shines a light on the memory politics that the French President has engaged in when it comes to France’s colonial past. Many have seen Macron’s pronouncements on France’s past as a step in the right direction but Hassett clearly demonstrates how this work is connected to a broader neutralising neoliberal agenda. Building on the work of scholars at the cutting edge of memory studies (for example, Sarah Gensburger, Sandrine Lefranc, Cristian Cercel and Itay Lotem), Hassett deftly demonstrates through close analysis of Macron’s speeches and interventions in Burkino Faso, Rwanda, Algeria and Cameroon how he de-politicises the past and particularly any French involvement in it. Through this discussion, Hassett makes us think more broadly about the ‘function’ that memory plays for the images and imaginaries of the state. Although not the explicit focus of his article, he brings a sustained focus to the question of how the past is considered by politicians, as definitely ‘over’. This idea has important political implications and is a disciplinary area where research in memory studies has much to bring. France’s colonial past continues to be considered over, but is in fact experienced as persisting in systemic injustice. Hassett’s article explores how the gap between this consideration and actual experience is smoothed over by Macron’s ‘neoliberal political rationality’.

This section closes with an important interview of Pascal Convert by Nigel Saint, preceded by a short introduction by Saint which offers vital contextual information about Convert’s artistic practice for those less familiar with his work. Pascal Convert’s sculptures, films and writings deal with memory, forgetting, reconstitution and representation (as critique). His (counter-) monument to the hostages and Resistance fighters who were shot at Mont Valérien during the Second World War raises significant questions around official memory and commemoration practices. This interview pursues the discussions about the poetics of memory and the politics of history that Saint and Convert have been engaged in for some years now.

Section 2: (Post)Museum and heritage spaces

This section examines specific examples of museum and heritage spaces as materially defined places, which are openings onto France and Belgium’s global history.

Marion Demossier tackles the question of the role of the anthropology museum in the challenging context of decolonising approaches in her article, ‘Experimenting with museography: the Musée des Confluences in Lyon’. Through analysis of various recent exhibitions and objects as well as interviews with key stakeholders involved in running this innovative museum, Demossier explores how museums belonging to this new wave of contemporary museography are moving away from national narratives towards world cultures often by quite radical and experimental means of discontinuity and rupture. She demonstrates how this successful museum, unusual in the French context, seeks to engage international and local visitors’ cultural imaginations in order to create new forms of cosmopolitan civic memories.

Briony Neilson’s article, ‘Power, pacification and legacies of French colonialism in New Caledonia: public statues and Nouméa’s memoryscape’, takes our special issue to New Caledonia and addresses the very topical question of public statues and their potential toppling, urban fallism, which is of course far from particular to the French-speaking world. Neilson’s discussion and analysis of the recent erection of a public statue depicting the handshake between Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Jacques Lafleur at the time of the Matignon Accords in 1988 clearly engages with a current shift in the memoryscape of New Caledonia and, in particular, Nouméa, demonstrating what this statue has replaced and what it has hidden. What do these recent events suggest about how colonialism and its vestiges are negotiated in contemporary New Caledonia? Through close examination of the historical context of public statuary in New Caledonia and the French-speaking world, and also beyond, Neilson is able to offer commentary on a contemporary context where a No vote has been heard in three successive independence referenda and where the centrality and primacy of Kanak presence and influence in New Caledonia, foregrounded in the Matignon Accords, have been neglected, underlining ultimately the importance of presence in the public space in unsettling rather than conciliatory terms.

Section 3: Remembering slow violence: malnutrition and extractivism

The third section of the special issue explores two examples of systemic violence, memorialised in bagne spaces and in exhibitions and texts from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here we engage with Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence (2011) and memory work that accounts for the kinds of environmental and systemic damage that continues to engender endings of all kinds: livelihoods, species, cultures. As Jenny Wüstenberg demonstrates (‘Toward Slow Memory Studies’, in Kaplan 2023), these slow-moving phenomena are to be at the centre of research in slow memory, where there is a demand to create transformative practices of remembrance by slowing down our knowledge-building and social remembering. Scholars in the Slow Memory project (slowmemory.eu) are leading research in this area, including in the construction of a collaborative joint bibliography which will only build international scholarship in memory studies.

The final two articles in this special issue open up the argument and analysis to global circulations of memory and of capital. The writers consider how the confluence of economy and art in recent cultural representations sheds light on the systemic injustices of transatlantic slavery and colonialism and their afterlives. Sophie Fuggle’s article, ‘Narratives of food insecurity in the penal colony: Interpreting memories of “slow violence” in French Guiana and New Caledonia’, builds on the focus in Neilson’s contribution on New Caledonia by examining the long-overlooked histories of France’s former penal colonies, both there and in French Guiana. Fuggle argues that more nuanced and sensitive narratives of experiences of these penal colonies is to be found in delving into their histories of food insecurity. Indeed, the slow violence of malnutrition is central to histories of the ‘bagne’, where museums have been created in buildings once used as kitchens. This article sets out both the embeddedness of these sites in global circulations of produce, and the potential for heritage sites to more fully account for the lived experience of food insecurity. There are clear implications for wider understanding of contemporary forms of punishment and poverty that rest on access to nutrition.

The final article in our special issue is ‘Digging holes, excavating the present, mining the future: extractivism, time, and memory in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s and Sammy Baloji’s works’, by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture. Fraiture’s article visits Kaplan’s pluralistic space of fiction in an exploration of work by Congolese artists and writers. He examines how the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s history of extractivism has been represented in visual art and literary fiction. Again, this is set in a context of transnational circuits of capital and slow violence: from Belgium’s colonial extraction to ongoing Sino-Western investor interests. The article demonstrates how the physical ground of the Congolese subsoil, whose scars of extractivism shape contemporary life there, has been critically framed as it is transmuted in multimedia work by Sammy Baloji and fiction by Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Fraiture reflects on ‘artivism’ as a capacious mode of response to the diamond-hungry necropolitics that leaves regions of the DRC as a zero-world, dug into with ‘des crevasses, des gouffres et des tunnels’ (Mbembe 2014). In its rich and interdisciplinary sources, Fraiture’s article sets up a dialogue between historians, literary scholars, artists and anthropologists that mirrors the very reconfiguring of borders his analysis unpacks. Just as cityscapes and national frontiers are reimagined by Baloji and Mujila, so Fraiture prompts us towards further cross-disciplinary conversations for memory work in the French-speaking world. His recourse to the motifs of the hole and the subsoil, as sites of both absence and potential transformation, encapsulates the rich potential that scholars of memory studies continue to find in difficult histories.

The aims of this special issue are therefore to investigate contested narratives and the role of spokespeople and authority in memory work in the French-speaking world, whilst paying heed to the very real risk of perpetuating Nora’s omissions and blindspots. How does a devoir de mémoire operate, in alternative spaces, to unsettle and contest hegemonic memory accounts? These articles and interview demonstrate how such memory practices are entangled in global, material systems, and argue for the need for globally inflected memory practices. Through this memory work on representations but also practices, we aim here to extend the conversation at the intersection of memory studies and postcolonialism and reflect on the future of francophone memory studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.