The Postcolonial Museum

The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History

Iain Chambers, Alessandra De Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317019626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Museumswissenschaft

This book examines how we can conceive of a 'postcolonial museum' in the contemporary epoch of mass migrations, the internet and digital technologies. The authors consider the museum space, practices and institutions in the light of repressed histories, sounds, voices, images, memories, bodies, expression and cultures. Focusing on the transformation of museums as cultural spaces, rather than physical places, is to propose a living archive formed through creation, participation, production and innovation. The aim is to propose a critical assessment of the museum in the light of those transcultural and global migratory movements that challenge the historical and traditional frames of Occidental thought. This involves a search for new strategies and critical approaches in the fields of museum and heritage studies which will renew and extend understandings of European citizenship and result in an inevitable re-evaluation of the concept of 'modernity' in a so-called globalised and multicultural world.

PART I Global Migrations, Transcultural Heritage

Chapter 1 A Museum Without Objects

Françoise Vergès

DOI: 10.4324/9781315554105-2

This is the history of a project and of its defeat. The project: the Maison des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise (MCUR), a museum in a French postcolony of the Indian Ocean, Réunion Island, launched in 2000 by Réunion Regional Council.¹ The defeat: the end of a utopia, a Museum Without Objects. In April 2010, the local Conservatives came to power in Réunion Regional Council. One of their first acts was to put an end to the MCUR project and to disband its team. The decision meant that the project was killed, since two thirds of its funding came from the Regional Council (the French state and the European Community sharing the rest of the 60 million euro budget, covering studies, building and museography).

In this chapter, I will explain how and why the notion of a museum without objects was chosen and why I think today that the notion of creolisation that was central to the project needs to be revisited. In my conclusion, I will suggest new ways of developing the notion of a museum without objects and why the notion can still be useful. In the text, I use large excerpts from the scientific and cultural programme I wrote with Carpanin Marimoutou in 2004 and which became the basis for planning the architecture, the exhibitions and the different spaces of the museum. It was for this programme that I developed the notion of the museum without objects – neither a virtual museum nor a museum of images and sounds, but a museum that would not be founded on a collection of objects, where the objects would be one element among others, where the absence of material objects through which to visualise the lives of the oppressed, the migrants, the marginal, would be confronted. We would not seek to fill up a void, to compensate for the absence, we would work from the absence, embracing it fully, for we understood that this absence was paradoxically affirming a presence. To us, the accumulation of objects destined to celebrate the wealth of a nation belonged to an economy of predation, looting defeated peoples or exploiting the riches of others. It belonged to an economy of consumption that invested the object with narcissistic meaning, making visible one’s identity and social status. We turned to small objects, objets de rien, devoid of economic value in the market economy – objects that had a biography and had travelled.

In recent decades, a vast and diverse literature has been produced on the museum. We benefited greatly from this debate, though most contributions were critical appraisals of projects and few were written by people who had built a museum and who openly discussed the problems raised by building a postcolonial museum. The dominant position was how to create a museum with the Western museum as a counter-example. The Western model remained the reference. We wanted to question the logic both of inversion and of catching up. Both could reinforce the hegemonic position of the West. Could we take the Western model as one among others, neither imitating it nor fully rejecting it? Could we take it as a proposition that could be mixed with others, playing freely with its modes of presentation? We also benefited from our encounters with museum professionals we met in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. We learned a lot from the conversation we had following the presentation of the project at colloquiums in Japan, the USA, Italy, France, Germany, India and South Africa, as well as from our visits to museums. But our first reference was the people of Réunion to whom we presented the project as it moved along. We discussed it with local artists and with cultural associations. We tested our choices during the cultural manifestations we organised: the annual ceremony honouring Zarboutan Nout Kiltir, women and men who had safeguarded and developed vernacular knowledge and practices, the series of conferences with international scholars on the history and culture of the Indian Ocean and on contemporary issues – climate, economy, geopolitics, the work we did with schools, the seminars we put together, the meetings with our Scientific Council – Marc Augé, Achille Mbembe, Simon Njami and Germain Viatte, the work we did with the architects Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Démazières, whose project had been chosen following an international competition, and with the team which was developing the permanent exhibition.²

What Kind of Museum?

In France, museums are top-down affairs. Whether private or public, they are a fait du prince. The polemics and controversies surrounding the building of I.M. Pei’s pyramids for the Louvre, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration and the Musée du quai Branly did not stop their completion. They were projects carried out by a President of the French Republic, who remained in power long enough to see their opening, ensuring they received the financial, administrative and political support they required. The MCUR project was a regional affair, and as such it sought to work with the local terrain. Seminars were organised with artists, associations and researchers in 2000–2001. What emerged from these meetings was a conception of the island’s history divided into ethno-cultural chapters. The participants, who had all been educated through the French system, imagined a succession of ‘houses’: ‘House of Africa’, ‘House of India’, ‘House of China’ and ‘Creole House’. What was remarkable was the absence of France, whose role could not be ignored, and of Madagascar, often forgotten. The narrative was one of linear progress, from slavery to integration within the French Republic. There was much talk about ‘identity’ and safeguarding ‘tradition’. The ways in which the restaurant was imagined embodied the idea of creolisation as offering a series of coexisting forms: a buffet with ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Creole’ food. The team in charge of turning the conclusions of the seminars into a programme proposed to follow the timeline of French colonisation through a series of chapters that would visualise the transformations of Réunion society with regard to events in France.

During these seminars, we measured the weight of the French policies of assimilation. A few of us defended an approach designed to emancipate the island’s history from the temporality and spatiality imposed by French colonialism. We suggested that Réunion’s history was the history of the unexpected (Creole language and culture), of the intangible, of sorrows and struggles. Few objects had survived that would testify for the lives of women and men brought to the island since 1663. Official history did not record their lives. To recover this past, we had first to acknowledge an absence, an unknown past. To Walter Benjamin, the recovery of the unknown past – ‘the awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been’ (Benjamin 1999, 458) – is the battlefield where the future is decided. What would produce a shifting of the gaze, what small displacement would open up new vistas? The map drawn by the Arab geographer Abu Abdullah Ibn Idrisi in the eleventh century was an inspiration. In accordance with Arab convention, the north was at the bottom of the map and the south at the top. This convention transformed the ways in which French schooling has imposed the cartography of the world; as a device, it helped us suggest that, living in an island on an African–Asian axis, we could question the notions of North, South, West and East.

Where did we start? With the island, with the physical territory: an active volcano, a small island on an African–Asian axis. It was known to Arab navigators, identified by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century as a place to replenish ships with fresh water. It became a colony by accident in 1663. The French were looking for a port of call on their journeys to India. They were unable to conquer Madagascar, but there were two islands without a native population, offering fresh water, great forests, and one of them natural harbours, so the French took possession of these. They were called Bourbon (present-day Réunion) and Île de France (Mauritius). The latter had been abandoned six years earlier by the Dutch, who had colonised the island following a decision taken by the directors of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – VOC) in 1637. But in 1657 the company decided to dismantle Mauritius’s garrison and abandon the island. The country was no longer viable. No precious metals had been found in its soil, and the ebony forests were almost completely depleted. The French took over, and soon populated both islands with settlers and enslaved labour from Madagascar and Africa. France ‘lost’ the colony of Mauritius in 1815. In Réunion, slavery was abolished in 1848: out of a population of 100,000, some 60,000 were enslaved. They became citizens, but remained under colonial status, which was abolished in 1946 when it became a French department.

After 1946, local struggles for social equality led to the emergence of a middle class. Four generations have had access to education. The development of public services offered jobs to the children of people who had often been poor. Since in the overseas departments all civil servants benefit from privileges inherited from colonial times – higher salaries and lower taxes than in France for the same jobs, as well as other important benefits inherited from colonialism – private property and other forms of consumption became accessible. Consumption and assimilation to whatever was fantasised as ‘being like the French’ were now the goals of the middle class. Within a few decades, the island went from being dominated by an economy inherited from the plantation economy where sugar cane reigned supreme to an economy of services with an unemployment rate of 36.5 per cent (the female rate was nearly five points higher than the male rate), and with 60.8 per cent of under-twenties being unemployed. Exports were less than 10 per cent of imports. The population tripled while the economy crumbled. The rate of unemployment has stayed around 37 per cent for decades (60 per cent among the young); 21 per cent of the population is illiterate; the island imports more than 3 million tons of goods from France and exports 300,000 tons, mostly of sugar. It is highly dependent on France; more than 50 per cent of the population live below the poverty line (800 euros per month in an island where the cost of living is equal to that of Paris, the most expensive city in France). People travel abroad more and more, and an important middle class has emerged which sends its children to universities in France and elsewhere. Few graduates want to come back. The signs of the politics and culture of consumption abound: commercial malls, cars, cell phones; the island has its own celebrities, its own gossip, its own social networks, its own private radios. Many worlds cohabit, often blind and deaf to each other.

New cultural identities have been reclaiming the colonial categories to transform, subvert and modify them to their own ends. These new identities serve to diversify the nomenclature of society by calling for a unique origin and a special place in the historical narratives of Réunion Island and its contemporary society. To be of African (Kaf), Indian (Malbar), Chinese (Sinwa) or European (Pti Blanc) descent takes on a new dimension, with each ethnic group laying claim to its own history as part of Réunionese history, recalling the impact of slavery and of the colonial orders in their lives.

The Object of the Intangible

The history and culture of the vanquished and the oppressed is rarely embodied in material objects. They bequeath words rather than palaces, hope rather than private property, words, texts and music rather than monuments. They leave heritages embodied in people rather than stones. Songs, words, poems, declarations, texts often constitute the archive through which to evoke their past. Their itineraries retrace the history of struggles, of migrations, of the global organisation of the workforce rather than the accumulation of wealth. It is a world of the intangible, of the unexpected, of what has been untimely, sorrowful, hopeful.

The ideological fabrication of the noticeable and unnoticeable, of the visible and the invisible, of what matters and does not matter, obeys rules and laws that are constantly being elaborated, reconfigured, deconstructed, reconstructed. Narratives become significant when they enter a field of recognition, constructed through a series of legitimised gestures (grants, works by ‘recognised’ authors, conferences, construction of a vocabulary that acquires prestige and wide currency – such as hybridity, in-between, creolisation). Marginalised groups have always understood the importance of making their vision of the world, rituals, traditions, practices, noticeable. Scholars have explored the processes whereby continents, regions, practices, groups are ‘discovered’, questioning the very notion of discovery in the humanities and social sciences. What is discovered? What makes the gesture of unmasking, unveiling so attractive? Can we read in the continuous use of the notion of ‘unmasking’ the desire to unveil a ‘true core’? What can we learn from the representation of the explorer? The gesture of ‘discovery’ remains a potent trope and has gained new value in what Barbara Christian has called the ‘race for theory’.

Hence we asked how practices and processes that belonged for the most part to ‘immaterial’ or ‘intangible’ culture could be expressed visually without falling into a reductive ethnology. How could the maps of exchanges, contacts and conflicts in the Indoceanic world, where seven worlds converged (African, Chinese, European, Indian, Muslim, and Malagasy and Comorian), render the contact zones, the cultural interactions, the modes of interpenetration, diffusion, dissemination and dispersion? How could the processes and practices of creolisation at work in the creation of Réunionese unity be expressed visually? How could yesterday’s routes of slavery and indentured labour and today’s migrations, power relationships, inequalities, discriminations be depicted, concurrently with the resistances, struggles and collective imaginations? How could we make the museum a space of discussion open to reinterpretations, to local and global ...