ReSignifications: Black Bodies, French Gaze and Noirs
BLACK PORTRAITURES II: Imaging the Black Body and Re-Staging Histories
(This essay is based on remarks made by Professor Francois Verges as a panelist in ReSignifications: Black Bodies, French Gaze and Noirs at the Black Portraitures II: Imaging the Black Body and Restaging Histories Conference in Florence, Italy on May 29, 2015)
The toll in human suffering among African migrants that is currently on view in the Mediterranean Sea and to a lessor extent in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, makes rethinking the meaning of the Black Body “as a signifier of both racial capitalism and emancipatory politics and restaging the story” a very urgent task. The necessity for a new strategy seems evident from the incoherent and confused response by the European countries to the desperation shown by the tens of thousands of immigrants who are stranded on the borders of Europe today. In attempting to escape the unimaginable horrors imposed upon them in their homelands in Africa and the Middle East they risk their lives and the lives of their children seeking safety among their former colonizers in Europe. All of the chaos, death, and destruction in their native lands can be traced back to two sets of agreements made by the Europeans among themselves entirely for the benefit of themselves.
1. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 which led to the eventual partitioning and colonizing of 90% of the African continent by European countries
2. The agreements made among the European Countries governing the control of the Middle East, including Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, from the beginning of World War I.
The world is now well aware of the disastrous consequences of these agreements to the indigenous peoples in each of these countries. The people from these countries are the refugees that wait at the borders of Europe today.
In her opening remarks Professor Francois Verges argues
that emancipatory politics as a tool to free the emancipatory figure i.e. the woman, the gay, the queer, the worker, and the colonized, is being rendered less effective today by several extant factors.
Among these factors are:
1. Consumerism that has evolved the capacity to both absorb and reject the notion of the “emancipatory figure” as previously defined.
2. The rhetoric of emancipation proposed by the new technology that borrows from the emancipatory discourse of the 1960’s (the USA) and that promotes individual rather than collective participation and pluralism. “Be All You Can Be” the kind of Google dream of emancipation which permits a limitless expansion of self – free of constraint i.e. the emphasis on individual freedom rather than social justice and equality for all.
3. The new politics of dispossession and colonization.
4. The new politics of precariousness and disposability that permits a large part of humanity to be defined as surplus.
The Notion of Post Colonization
Professor Verges takes the view that the site of post colonization today is Europe. It seems therefore that in order to find just and durable solutions to the problems created by Europe in Africa and the Middle East it is important to study the impact on Europe, i.e. the post colonial site, today of decisions made by the generation of Europeans who made the decision to colonize.
1. What is the impact on the descendants of the colonizer of the crime of colonization?
2. What is the impact of the crime on the criminal?
3. What is the impact of the crime on the descendants of the criminal?
4. To what extent are the descendants culpable?
5. How does one distinguish legitimate inheritance from the ‘receipt of stolen goods’?
6. What retribution does the descendant of the criminal owe to the victims of the crime?
These are the fundamental questions that sleep at the foot of the European problem today.
The Notion of Forgetfulness
Professor Verges makes a very important observation during her talk at the Black Portraitures II Conference.
“Freud wrote that forgetfulness is not left to psychic arbitrariness but that it follows a lawful and rational path. Forgetfulness is founded on a motive of displeasure. The capacity of the repressed to express itself is part of this mechanism. Forgetfulness is defined in the space between lives that matter and lives that do not matter and is always racialized. The strategy to combat forgetfulness has long been to challenge hegemonic representation of the lives of the forgotten. This strategy is implemented by making the invisible visible, recording in absence… giving voice to the voiceless. This strategy remains urgent and necessary. But can this strategy radically challenge the fabrication of forgetfulness? How can the practice of addition – adding a forgotten chapter or filing a gap – avoid being contained within the European ethical frame?
There is a reason that the Europeans and the West want to forget various aspect of their collective past. Discourses on slavery and colonization are primarily the preoccupation of the people most affected by these institutions and who still suffer in their aftermath. The descendants of the slave masters and the colonizers have little interest in resurrection those memories. Forgetfulness is convenient and necessary to justify their status quo. The victims however, can never forget, especially as long as they continue to suffer the consequences of the victimization. In the meantime hundreds of thousands, to ultimately become millions, of victimized people with their children, are at the door! The European problem will escalate. The return of the oppressed is inevitable and will continue indefinitely until retribution is made. The time has come for the descendants of the criminal and the descendants of the victim to reconcile and end this cycle.
