Visualizing Roots and Itineraries of Indian Ocean Creolizations: Project for a Museum of the Present

In this paper, I will discuss the methodological problems raised by the museography of a forthcoming museum on Reunion Island, the Maison des civilisations et de l'unité réunionnaise. One of the museum's goals is to retrace visually the itineraries of the processes of creolisation in the Indian Ocean that led to the creation of a singular culture, the Creole indiaoceanic culture. How to visualise the multiple layers of signification at work, the traces and fragments of languages, imaginaries, rituals, practices travelling throughout the ocean, the dynamic of loss, transformation, translation and recreation of forms, rituals, practices in the itineraries of people? I will first present the museum, its context and goals, then suggests ways of “making visual” elements of the Indian Ocean’s long history, and finally, discuss the challenges of imagining a museum of the present in the Indian Ocean world

Foreword

Françoise Vergès, ‘Foreword’, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), p. vii-xix <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-27_0

Toutes les féministes ne sont pas blanches.

En partant de l’émergence de groupes afro-féministes, de féministes musulmanes, en analysant le rôle des femmes dans les actions contre la violence policière, le racisme et l’Islamophobie, l’auteure revient sur l’histoire des luttes des femmes et propose une autre périodicité et spatialité que celles du récit féministe français dominant. Elle questionne un féminisme blanchi et national et défend un féminisme radicalement antiraciste, anti-impérialiste et anti-capitaliste.The author looks at the emergence of Afro-feminism, Muslim feminism, associations against police violence led by women of color, of Black and Arab women fighting against racism and Islamophobia, which are redefining the cartography of feminism in France and reconfiguring the anticolonial feminist struggles in the 1960-1970s. They are challenging a French white feminism which uses the notion of women’s rights to further racial and imperialist politics. Vergès argues for a rewriting of feminism that questions the periodicity and spatiality of the French feminist narrative, for its denationalization and for a feminism that will be clearly antiracist, anti-imperialist and anticapitalist

Mémoires visuelles et virtuelles à l’île de la Réunion

Dans les sociétés issues de l’esclavage, le musée est envisagé comme une des formes de réparation où le « devoir de mémoire » serait mis en scène, le crime dénoncé et la résistance des esclaves commémorée. Dans cet essai, l’auteure revient sur la relation entre mémoire et représentation. Elle tente de répondre à la question : le musée est-il le meilleur espace de représentation de la mémoire de l’esclavage ? L’espace muséal lui-même, qu’il présente une lecture pédagogique ou une mémoire plus populaire, est-il l’espace de représentation le plus adéquat pour représenter « les mondes » de l’esclavage, les mémoires croisées et multiples et les processus de créolisation à l’œuvre ? Pour répondre à ces questions, l’auteure s’appuie sur l’exemple de l’île de la Réunion, ancienne colonie française esclavagiste sans population native et où les processus de créolisation ont profondément modelé la société et la culture. Au-delà de cet exemple, l’essai pose la question de la représentation d’un système qui perdure où le corps humain est transformé en matière brute à exploiter, annihiler et trafiquer.Visual and Virtual Memories in Réunion. – In the societies that have emerged out of slavery, museums are seen as a form of reparations, where the “duty to remember” is presented, crime denounced and the resistance of slaves commemorated. But is a museum the best place for presenting the memory of slavery, whether in an educational or more popular way? Is its space best suited for presenting the “worlds” of slavery, mixed and multiple memories, and the creolization processes under way? The example of Réunion is used to answer these questions. This former slaveholding French colony had no native population; and creolization has deeply modeled society and culture on the island. Beyond this example, the question is raised of the presentation of a system that still exists where the human body is changed into a raw material to be exploited, annihilated and traded

A 36 ka environmental record in the southern tropics : Lake Tritrivakely (Madgascar) (Un enregistrement de l'environnement depuis 36 ka en zone tropicale sud : le lac Tritrivakely (Madagascar)).

The upper 13 m of a 40 m-long sedimentary profile core taken in a crater lake on the Malagasy Plateau reveals 36,000 yrs of hydroclimatic evolution. A shallow lake occupies the core site from ≃35 to ≃19 ka BP under climatic conditions cooler than today. The water table is very low and biological productivity extremely reduced during the Last Glacial Maximum. A large warming was initiated at ≃14.5 ka BP. The modern bog establishes about 4 ka ag

Fanon's Letter Between Psychiatry and Anticolonial Commitment

The name of Frantz Fanon has become a symbol of anticolonial militancy and the struggles of national emancipation against colonial rule. However, Fanon was also a psychiatrist, who never abandoned clinical practice even after resigning from his post in colonized Algeria in 1956. The coexistence, in Fanon, of medicine and political involvement represents one of the most productive and contradictory aspects of his life and work. Fanon was highly critical of colonial ethnopsychiatry, but never abandoned his commitment to improving the condition of psychiatric patients. After his escape from Algeria, he wrote extensively for El Moudjahid, the journal of the anticolonial resistance, but also practised in the hospital of Charles Nicolle in Tunis. In this essay I propose a new assessment of the relation between psychiatry and politics by addressing Fanon's influence on Franco Basaglia, leader of the anti-institutional movement in Italian psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s. Basaglia was deeply inspired by the example of Fanon and the contradictions he had to confront. Rereading Fanon through the mirror of Italian anti-institutional psychiatry will define a new understanding of Fanon as committed intellectual. Indeed, this may suggest a new perspective on the function of intellectuals in contexts signed by the aftermath of colonial history, drawing on the example of two psychiatrists who never ceased to inhabit the borderline between the clinical and the critical, medicine and militancy, the necessity of cure and the exigency of freedom

La Réunion : un modèle de vivre ensemble

Vergès Françoise. La Réunion : un modèle de vivre ensemble. In: Hommes et Migrations, hors-série novembre 2008. L'interculturalité en débat. pp. 20-29

Talk

Françoise Vergès, Talk at the workshop Affective Ecologies, Anarchic Fragments: Documenting Militarized Worlds, ICI Berlin, 1 July 2019, video recording, mp4, 40:30 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e190701_1

« Un souffle venu des ancêtres »

Dans la seconde moitié du xxe siècle, le mouvement de décolonisation et les mouvements sociaux ont renouvelé la problématique du patrimoine. Née en Europe, rapidement liée à la construction de la nation, la notion de « patrimoine » a été largement adoptée dans un processus de réhabilitation, de réparation, de restitution et de valorisation de cultures, de mémoires et d’histoires qui avaient été niées ou marginalisées par les États impérialistes ou les États-nations. De nouveaux enjeux sont ap..