Policing Exhibit B in St Denis and Paris

Abstract

This article will consider the protests against Brett Bailey’s 2014 performance installation Exhibit B at the Théâtre Gérard Philippe (TGP) in the Paris suburb of St Denis and at the Espace Centquatre within Paris itself. Rather than focusing on the ethical and political questions raised by the piece, I will analyse how in the first instance the deployment of police highlighted the specific importance given to the theatre within French state cultural policy. Following this, I will analyse how this incident exemplified a distinct manifestation of an imperial ‘afterlife’ of the French state. Building on Kristin Ross’ work as well as Laura-Ann Stoler’s elaborations on French colonial aphasia (active forgetting), I aim to tease out how the heavy-handed deployment of the police at the specific location of the TGP and the softer strategy deploying an ‘exclusion zone’ around the Espace Centquatre exemplified the persistent continuation of France’s imperial policies as they are applied to racialised populations within its own ‘metropolitan’ territory. This will lead me to question some of the spatial and temporal assumptions underpinning some of the causal narratives regarding contemporary racism in France, grounded in assumptions that the brutal facts of colonialism happened on far away continents, or to use Anne McClintock’s formulation, ‘over there’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thank you Bryony White and Savannah Whaley and to Trish Reid, Christina Delgado and Julia Boll for letting me give separate versions of this paper in London and Shanghai. Thank you to Andy Lavender for eagle-eyed editing as well as Julia Peetz for giving me the opportunity to see this published. I am also very grateful to Faisal Hamadah for telling me about Stoler’s invaluable work. Eternal thanks to Sita Balani and especially Charlotte Floersheim for years of listening and advice on the topic of theatre and the banlieues on top of exceptional friendship.

Notes

1 BLM protests have been intermittently occurring since 2014. One notable action was the blocking of a road leading to Heathrow in August 2016 (see Jeffery 2016). I would, however, also draw attention to the much longer-running United Friends & Family Campaign (UFFC) set up against deaths in custody in the UK context, who have organized a march to Downing Street every October since 1997 demanding justice from the British state: https://uffcampaign.org/.

2 It is hard here not to be reminded of the euphemism ‘The Troubles’, which similarly obscures both the anti-colonial nature of the conflict and the role of the British state and its military in enacting violence in Northern Ireland.