CULTURAL EXTRACTIONS IN THE CARIBBEAN – A DECOLONIAL COUNTER-NARRATIVE
Plaque / bronze, pillée lors de l’expédition punitive de 1897 par les Britanniques - Royaume du Bénin : Metropolitan Museum of Art, N-Y
The following text bears witness to institutional violence which was committed in Guadeloupe between 2013 and 2017, as part of a project to create an educational resource with the Ministry of National Education and the CANOPÉ network on “ Art of the Caribbean-Americas”. Initiator of this project, I co-directed it, designed its conceptual framework and its main orientations, only to be brutally ousted before it was put online on the CANOPÉ website. These facts, of which I propose an analysis, are part of a long history of colonial violence, physical or symbolic, committed in the "overseas", particularly in the French West Indies, stuck in the impasse of unfinished decolonization. . From the outset, the relationships of dependence and subordination between mainland France and these distant territories make it a fertile breeding ground for abuses of power. In the present case, this systemic violence took the form of an extraction of cultural wealth, a pillage of knowledge, the erasure and invisibility of the work of an Afro-Caribbean, ultimately oppression racial, to the detriment of young people for whom this educational resource was intended. It is by breaking in that this text takes its place in the interstices of the dominant discourse which wants to impose itself as a discourse of truth. This counter-narrative responds to the need to create an archive on the margins of the truncated official history, a history whose subordinates are the usual excluded.
Demons had to be exorcised to bear witness to this “ epistemicide ”, a form of specific violence exercised against knowledge from subalternized cultures. Epistemicides aim to make this knowledge and/or those who produce it invisible, and can go to the extreme of its total and definitive destruction. How epistemicides, in times of war as in times of peace, are brigandages, crimes against culture, art and ways of knowing. No remedy for the total destruction of an artifact [1] and the chain of knowledge to which it is connected, like the Mayan Codex burned by the conquistadors in the 16th century , but bear witness as precisely as possible. This is the ultimate means of resistance to give shape to what domination, wherever it comes from, wanted to make invisible.
“To name oneself is to write the world” - Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais
During these three to four years, I was at the heart of an extraction process . A type of predation which in this case relates to a logic of appropriation of intangible wealth in the field of knowledge, culture, art and/or aesthetics. These illegitimate appropriations are the work of exogenous predators, their corollary is the invalidation and erasure of indigenous expertise. These epistemicides [2] which raise ethical questions are perpetrated within the framework of asymmetrical relations of coloniality of knowledge and power. The archetype of the extractivist predator is the '' white savior ''. A messianic “white savior”, who believes he knows better than the subordinates, what is good for them, despite themselves. Inhabited by this conviction, he poses as a specialist, decides to act for them and from then on, can plunder their productions, erase them, make their work invisible. [3] This is how the West creates “New Worlds” in its image, rather than welcoming the extraordinary polyphony of the world. He created the Africanists to invent his Africa, the Orientalists to invent his Orient, so many distorted doubles in his distorting mirror. [ 4]
The origins of the Art of the Caribbean-Americas project:
From the mid-1990s, during plenary meetings, I regularly pointed out to the Regional Pedagogical Inspectors (IPR) of plastic arts who succeeded one another in Guadeloupe, the fact that the artistic references proposed to the students, referred them in an almost exclusive to a field of Western references. A situation of coloniality of knowledge [5] that is caricatured and alienating for students of majority Afro-descendants (and their teachers), living thousands of kilometers from Western capitals. On the other hand, there were no educational resources located for the teaching of visual arts, promoting the cultural and artistic context of the Caribbean confined in a relegation zone. The repeated mention of this situation to the IPR (all French from the ''metropolis''), created discomfort and embarrassment as it illustrated a typically colonial situation. The violence of this conception of the plastic arts has always been imposed on us as the only norm, a form of terminus that there was no need to exceed. A standard to which we had all learned to submit and which at school we had to pass on.
September 2012, a new IPR of plastic arts arrives which will ensure, at its request, a shared mission between France and Guadeloupe. A new development is that she seems willing to listen to these questions that I have been asking for a long time in a climate of indifference. Indeed, from his first meeting with the island's plastic arts teachers, I told him about an article: " A School for the Archipelago Republic ", which I had just published in Médiapart . [6] In this text, it is about a work included in the program of the plastic arts option of the Bac from 2010 to 2012: The Tree of Voyelles (life-size bronze casting of an uprooted oak tree). A work installed in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris and created by the internationally renowned artist, the Italian Giuseppe Penone. I underlined that the link between Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a key figure in the history of colonial slavery and the site where the work was installed, had been ignored by G. Penone and that this link had also been overlooked. silence in the brochure published by the CNDP (current CANOPÉ) intended for high school teachers. The article highlighted the French constant of a selective vision of history, the failure to take into account extra-French cultural and artistic realities, as well as the very Eurocentric nature of school programs. The text aroused the interest of the IPR from our first discussions and was the trigger for the “ Art of the Caribbean-Americas ” project.
The colonial paradigm :
“But we need pedagogies free of universalist illusions, fueling the desire for these clever forms of predatory continuity, where we “work with minority communities” for example, rather than building the spaces which would, in the long term, allow it is up to them to develop their own tools and finally work by and for themselves. The space for a meeting would then become possible, later, under new conditions, which would be less radically asymmetrical. »
Olivier Marboeuf: Decolonial Suites – Escape from the Plantation, Éditions du commun, 2022
Totally foreign to Caribbean culture, as she had to confess during a working lunch with the curator of the Schœlcher museum in Pointe-à-Pitre, the new inspector "missioned" to Guadeloupe, said she did not know anything about it. archipelago than what she had read in the " Routard's Guide " (!) A customary fact in the "overseas" where "metropolitans", ignorant of the context in which they operate , are authorized by the functions they occupy to make decisions that have a strong impact on the native inhabitants of these territories. Coloniality of power. [7]
After extensive discussions around my texts and the absence of Caribbean artistic references in the school programs of which France has a monopoly, the IPR offered me the role of being the linchpin of an academic project on the art of the Caribbean, intended for both teachers and students. I had to bring my expertise as an art critic to it. She also suggested that I lead a TraAM Plastic Arts group (Shared Academic Work), a national system to facilitate the use of digital technology in schools. I agreed to lead these two projects at the same time, on the condition that the work of TraAM [8] was aligned with the research of the Caribbean Art group which was my priority.
Change the old model:
It cannot simply be a matter of adding something to what already exists. It is about profoundly transforming relationships and structures with ethics as a compass.
Françoise Vergès
I was convinced of the need to move what had always been presented to us as the absolute center: the legend of Western art, its 'masters', its 'geniuses', their 'chefs-d' essential and "universal" 'works', to take an uninhibited look at artists from the Caribbean-Americas. Look elsewhere, look differently at the artists who, from north to south of the arc of the Antilles, form a large scattered family of women and men sharing the terrible legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Artists born in a cultural area where planters prohibited slaves, during centuries of terror, from creating and possessing plastic works because they were linked to demonized African deities. [9] Artists whose presence in the collections of major international museums remains, even today, too largely marginal. I wanted these minoritized artists (not the Western artists whose books and museums are overflowing) to be at the center of our project. May this recognition by an important institution allow them to be references that students and teachers from the Caribbean and elsewhere can call upon.
Unprecedented, this project born in Guadeloupe, had the ambition to contribute to a necessary and long-awaited change. It was supposed to make it possible to teach the visual arts with a less cyclopean outlook, a more inclusive vision than it had ever been in France. The other necessity of which I was aware was to rethink the relations of production within the working group itself, which brought together French people from France carrying official culture, and Guadeloupeans inhabited by subalternized West Indian culture, with all the implicit implications of the asymmetrical nature of such a situation. Although our era is that of a colonialism that goes unspoken and that I would describe as '' friendly colonialism'' , it nonetheless remains a mutating form of domination. Furthermore, my leadership had to be an instrument so that Guadeloupe was clearly recognized by CANOPÉ and National Education, as being at the initiative of the project and that this was translated into action. This production of knowledge was a way to escape the usual marginal position in which the art world confines us. I conceived it as a form of symbolic reparation for an entire past of invisibility and erasure in the field of art and that of history. A real challenge which required a new relational ethic between the institution and the Guadeloupeans involved in this project.
Question of ''race'' - Question of gender:
In the original configuration, the IPRs of visual arts and history joined forces to form a heterogeneous group made up of teachers of visual arts, history and literature. A composite group with divergent interests. On the basis of the inspections it had carried out, the IPR of plastic arts had chosen the four teachers from the Caribbean Art group who seemed capable of producing files on the works and artists to be selected. Although they were never formally asked during the group's work sessions, questions of gender and race were latent. The IPR had distributed its members according to relative balance. Thus establishing numerical equality between: members of the dominant white group (which it is not appropriate to call this way), Afro-descendant Guadeloupeans, men and women. In reality, it was a facade of equality, equality without equity. But the question of "race", walled in a guilty silence even though it has lastingly structured our society, would soon resurface. The question of gender had also silently crept into the heart of the project. Originally, three women (two “metropolitan” IPRs and the Afro-descendant director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe), had administrative power and in reality, control of the group. There will be two of them to share it after the sudden departure of the IPR of history. The CANOPÉ national questioned the IPR on the fact that the artists from the Caribbean-Americas that I proposed were all of Afro-descendants. Did my choices not reflect a desire for systematic exclusion of White artists in favor of Black artists? I will come back to it.
From the inaugural meeting of the group, where only the two IPRs, the director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe and me were present, I had to indicate that an " Anthology of painting in Guadeloupe " - that the history inspector would proposed as a reference work - was problematic and had to be excluded because an ''artist'' proposing a revisionist vision of the history of slavery figured prominently. [10] The tone was set. I had a clear vision of the path that the working group should take, but although I was at the origin of the project whose intellectual architecture I was going to define, I embodied ''The'' minority. It is in this climate that, throughout our monthly meetings at CANOPÉ, I defended step by step the arguments which convinced the group that we had to carry out our work in the directions that I recommended. The experience accumulated over twenty years of publications put me in a position to propose the main directions of the project.
My recommendations - materiality of looted wealth:
The cultural extraction that I evoke here is distinguished by the fact that it does not concern artifacts having the indisputable materiality of sculptures or painted works, easily and immediately identifiable as values. It aims for the production of knowledge, wealth of an immaterial nature. So that we can take stock of the object of predation, here is a table of the recommendations that I made (all adopted by the group) and which constituted the framework of this new educational resource:
1 - I proposed to the group that our work encompasses a geographical area going beyond the narrow regionalism of the French West Indies islands (Guadeloupe and Martinique), adopting the vision of a ''greater Caribbean'', like that of CARICOM. [11] An expanded cultural space from the Greater to the Lesser Antilles, up to the continental area. The Caribbean with multiple dimensions: island and continental, Creole-speaking, English-speaking, Spanish-speaking and French-speaking. Thus touching on geopolitics, an area which seemed not to concern art, my first proposal caused debate.
2 - My second proposal concerning questions of identity and nationality did the same. I proposed that our work focus on artists from the Caribbean-Americas, in order to create a tool that unambiguously highlights these artists who are usually marginalized and invisible. In addition, I proposed that yesterday's settlers and their works be excluded, as well as artists who had simply stayed in these territories. An orientation opposed by history teachers who wanted to include painters involved in the slave system such as Augustin Brunias. The disagreement was such that the history and geography inspector for whom these colonial artists represented important material, abruptly left the group, followed by the history and literature teachers with whom she had surrounded herself. Likewise, the director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe, who closely followed our work, would have liked to see us integrate colonial works from the Schœlcher Museum in Pointe-à-Pitre, which was one of her partners. However, I considered all these works as objects conveying a toxic ideology, a mixture of racism and colonialism, which I wanted to keep away from our research. In my eyes, so many other works and artists deserved to have better visibility with the legitimacy that an institutional framework can confer.
3 - In view of the educational interest of the project and our progress, the CANOPÉ hexagonal made the decision to join forces with the CANOPÉ Guadeloupe and to provide the project with substantial funding in order to give it a national scope. But in Paris, CANOPÉ questioned itself and questioned the IPR: Why had I excluded Western artists from our research work? Was I guided by the desire to discriminate against white artists? Were my motivations not based on racism? It was a fact: non-white, African or Afro-descendant artists were absent from French and Western museums, absent from school curricula and massively invisible for more than three centuries, but could we suddenly highlight this ''third world'' of the art world, without attacking a bastion of exclusivity, a ''white privilege'', thus creating an unexpected zone of discomfort? Putting forward the argument of so-called "anti-White racism" when racially discriminated people try to claim their place within a society dominated by Whites, has become a classic defense mechanism of the dominant group when he feels threatened in his privileges. In order to reinforce the orientation that I was proposing, I had to remind everyone of an obvious fact imposed by history: the transatlantic slave trade and slavery , as the main marker linking all these artists from the Caribbean-Americas, explained that they are predominantly Afro-descendant.
4 - After having brushed aside the suspicions of '' anti-White racism '' and with the departure of the literature and history teachers and their inspector, I ensured the co-direction of the group now made up only of plastic arts teachers . I thought we would be able to speak the same language. It was then that I proposed to broaden our scope of research because it seemed essential to me to be able to integrate Afro-descendant artists from the United States, Guyana, Surinam, Brazil, etc., continental artists sharing with their Caribbean counterparts, the experience of slave domination. Being confronted with the same exclusions and discrimination, the same racism, the same falsified historical narrative, they are led to share a similar sensitivity and questions in their artistic practices. I wanted to be able to integrate Jean-Michel Basquiat, between archipelago and continent, he whose Caribbean origins (Haitian father, Puerto Rican mother) run through all of his work. And other Americans of African descent: Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker (United States), ..., alongside the Caribbean Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Julien Creuzet (Martinique), Hervé Télémaque (Haiti), ... or South America like Marcel Pinas (Suriname), emblematic of these Caribbean / America affinities, whose art takes its origins from the apocalyptic genesis in the matrix of the slave hold. Finally, looking towards the Americas reflected a desire to free Caribbean artists from an overly exclusive relationship with the old European “metropolises”. Include these artists in a genealogy, a Pan-American lineage by creating a space for dialogue between Caribbeans and Americans from the North and South. Give the project a more international dimension, both more open and better located.
5 - With this in mind, the title “Caribbean Art for Teaching” was no longer appropriate. I proposed that the group should henceforth be called: Art of the Caribbean-Americas , in accordance with a more ambitious vision (added by the IPR, the subtitle “ recognize, share, teach ” will contradict itself).
6 - I had drawn up a substantial list of more than seventy Caribbean and African-American artists (among more than a hundred of my references), the IPR submitting for my approval all the artists proposed by the other contributors of the group . Convinced that we had to produce work specifically focused on the visual arts, I recommended that artisanal practices, traditional dance and the addition of 'amateur painters' which seemed irrelevant to me be excluded. I made sure that we avoided any misinterpretation, any gross error in the texts produced by the group and which could have discredited the entire structure. The object to which we were giving shape had to have clear and coherent contours and not be open to any sort of condescending gaze.
7 - In addition to updating some of my existing writings, such as a text on the work of Eddy Firmin-Ano for an exhibition catalog published in 2014, [12] I was working on writing new texts, with qualities in form and substance that I wanted to be impeccable. They concerned some of the best-known international artists on our list. Analyzes of works and biographical sketches of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wifredo Lam. There was also the demanding work that Apocalyptic Genesis asked of me , the introduction which had to situate the unique context and the challenges of our work.
8 - I also wanted the resource thus produced to be illuminated by other 'word markers', inspired by the work of these artists. I firmly opposed any idea of overbearing words coming from the outside. Reappropriating the narrative represented in my eyes a crucial issue, at the heart of a project which aimed to become an inspiring model for young people. No one should speak for us so that we can embody Aimé Césaire's famous formula: to be ''the specialists of ourselves''! This is how I proposed voices known for their level of vision: the Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau (Goncourt Prize 1992, who develops a thought on the art of the "detour" of Martinique storytellers), of the Guyanese Christiane Taubira (who introduced the law recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity, 2001) and the Réunionnaise Françoise Vergès (holder of the Global South(s) Chair, FMSH, Paris, who develops a reflection on decolonization of the arts). I then planned to add names of Caribbean art critics and curators, unaware that I would never have time.
Make it visible here, make it invisible there!
During our regular debriefings, the IPR, aware that it would be incapable of carrying out the project on its own and wanting to ensure my full cooperation, had asked me several times to promise to go until the end. end of the work undertaken. Surprised by his repeated requests, my response was invariable:
1) - aborted projects of all kinds were customary here (I knew more than one),
2) - I had given my word and would keep my commitments whatever the difficulties [13] .
But after having worked for three years to design, supervise and verify most of the content, wrote the initial version of the introductory text, ensured part of the proofreading of the texts of other members of the group, wrote the texts on Lam and Basquiat , the two great artists of the Caribbean-Americas, originally from Cuba and Haiti, homes of the two great victorious revolutions in this part of the world, I was confronted with pressure from the IPR and CANOPÉ. Despite the colonial historical context which constituted the backdrop of the project, and which made it essential that I be given respectful control over my words, my texts given for rereading were subjected to apothecary accounts. I was ordered, by those who still practice policies of control and subordination against us, to submit my copy according to strict constraints of "templates" arbitrarily set from a "metropolis" accustomed to imposing normative frameworks. The IPR and CANOPÉ, now in possession of all the material with which I had fed the group over the months, Art of the Caribbean-Americas , was going to go from a project with a restorative aim to a product of predatory extraction. Became embarrassing (refusing any docility in the face of the dominant discourse, as well as any place assigned to occupy the one that seemed to me in agreement with this project), and before any contract was finalized, clearly establishing the centrality of my contribution after three years of committed work, I was considered “resigned” (!), removed from the Art of the Caribbean-Americas group and all of my work erased.
“But that’s exactly what we don’t want. What we no longer want. - We want our societies to rise to a higher level of development, but of their own accord, through internal growth, through internal necessity, through organic progress, without anything external coming to distort this growth, or alter it. or compromise it. Under these conditions we understand that we cannot delegate to anyone to think for us; delegation to search for us; that we cannot now accept that anyone, even the best of our friends, will stand strong for us. »
Aimé Césaire , Letter to Maurice Thorez, October 24, 1956
Large-scale pillaging of Africa or confidential predation in Guadeloupe remind us how the extraction of artistic wealth was a spearhead of colonialism, in a strategy of domination and accumulated profits. In his travelogue “ Ghost Africa ”, a famous expedition story, the ethnologist Michel Leiris reports a real mass pillaging in which he took part during the “Dakar-Djibouti Mission” (1931- 1933) directed by Marcel Griaule [14] . From now on, such extractions also concern intangible cultural wealth which we know how to take advantage of. The spirit of the Plantation, which has become widespread, has become a way of inhabiting the world [15] , a mode of relationship imposed on the Other which haunts the descendants of the settlers. The '' settler's reflex'' : plunder (cultural treasures), erase or modify (history), replace (religions, cultures), despoil (entire peoples), exploit (the bodies of non-Whites, their labor force, the stomachs of non-White women, natural resources), humiliate (break down resistance), terrorize (make their violence a frightening spectacle), control (bodies, minds, initiatives, territories) , dominate (for ultimate profit) ... Contemporary predation with an anachronistic character even though the French State, which has recognized the illegitimacy of the spoliations of cultural property in its former colonies, has initiated a timid policy of restitution. In 2017, after a commitment made in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron commissioned a famous report from Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy [16] on the restitution of African heritage. A question that Louis-Georges Tin, head of CRAN [17] , was the first to ask publicly in France, in December 2013 in front of the Quai Branly Museum itself.
Epilogue:
Now that we have “discovered” that the African-American artistic presence really existed, now that serious studies have stopped silencing witnesses, erasing their significant place in American culture and their contribution to it, it is no longer acceptable to simply imagine ourselves and imagine in our place. We always imagined ourselves. (…) We are the subjects of our own story, the witnesses and actors of our own experience and, by no means by chance, of the experience of those with whom we have come into contact.
Toni Morrison
On December 11, 2019, in the amphitheater of the MACTe (Caribbean Center for Expressions and Memory of Trafficking and Slavery), the IPR of plastic arts, reader of the Guide du Routard Guadeloupe , dressed in her clothing ''White savior'' and the director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe who closed her career with this feat of arms, presented with great fanfare " Art of the Caribbean-Americas : '' recognize '' , share, teach ", appropriation of several years of work. An introduction signed by the IPR, a specialist in the art of the Caribbean-Americas, replaced and made invisible my text '' Apocalyptic Genesis'' . My biographies and analyzes of works by Wifredo Lam and Jean-Michel Basquiat could not have had a better fate. Erased, replaced, invisible. I was expropriated from the field of my knowledge. The height of irony, this erasure occurred even though the Mémorial Acte was hosting in Guadeloupe the famous exhibition Le Model Noir which wanted, according to its catalog: “to give a name, a story to the great forgotten in the history of the avant-gardes ". Denise Murrell, the African-American exhibition curator, asked: “Who are they, who are they, these forgotten protagonists of the history of art? » claiming to want: “to provide all these 'black models' with new visibility” [18] . It is in this symbolic place that the intellectual pillaging and invisibility of an Afro-descendant was publicly staged. A spectacularization reminiscent of the plantation era and the ritual of public punishments inflicted on recalcitrant slaves. Such a feeling of impunity displayed is astonishing, but the Caribbean has always been an area of license where European settlers allowed themselves what was forbidden in the so-called 'civilized' world. Heterotopia!
Compulsive emergence of a colonial imagination hidden in the unconscious. Appropriation, expropriation, erasure, invisibilization, reveal how the colonial structure has the power to recover for its own benefit and to neutralize what emerges from our struggles and could make us confident and dignified. This online educational resource which promised to be a creation with restorative dimensions, capable of healing the injustices of a long history of exclusion, saw its soul lost along the way to become nothing more than a deceptive illusion. A new exclusion machine which sealed the deviation of the decolonial spirit which wanted to constitute the original framework of Art of the Caribbean-Americas . This spirit which gives us every legitimacy to speak about ourselves by summoning art and history, in order to produce and share the intimate story of our culture. Our images, our gaze, our words, …
In my work as an art critic, from my first texts, I have tried to go back to the genesis of plastic creation in the Caribbean-Americas, after the slavery shock. Apocalyptic Genesis is a synthesis of this. Those who decided to practice my invisibility knew very precisely that they were reducing to nothing this moment which was to constitute a centerpiece in my critical system, the culmination of years of work. Thus, on the CANOPÉ online site, Art of the Caribbean-Americas is only an amputated version, absurdly mutilated, ''strange fruit'' of an abuse of power. A version which, in view of the incredible symbolic violence that it carries within it and has permeated its entire texture, raises the question of the context of the construction of knowledge and the use of such a resource to teach students from a slave society. Because school is not only the place where words with Latin roots are tamed, it must be the place where we learn to fight through knowledge, against evils with racist roots. Where we should learn the meaning of ethics, what the institution should be exemplary in. Here, she singularly forgot to be. Neutralize the force of a claim to make it a poor granted thing. Schoelcherism itself, against which I fought so hard! While our demands for reparations for slavery and colonial crimes remain dead letters, such spoliation shows how "servants of the State" can remind us that the structures of the Plantation are still standing, who are the masters and between in whose (unvirtuous) hands power lies. But our lives matter, our voices matter, the art we produce matters! We refuse to allow our knowledge and our words to be appropriated, this obscure desire to annihilate us by depriving us of the legitimate right to say in the eyes of the world what we, "living archives", are the only ones able to bear witness to, by the very fact of being the Caribbeans that we are!
''Colonial action'': pillage, erase, replace, despoil, exploit, humiliate, terrorize, control, dominate...
The response of the definitive warrior: think, brown, resist, (oneself) bandage, (oneself) repaired…
For the dignity of all mine
Jocelyn Valton, AICA, November 2019 – June 2023
[1] - In my article Fétiches Brisés - A long eclipse of the visual arts in the Caribbean, 1997-2013, (the title of which is inspired by the name of Wounded Knee, the massacre of 300 Native American women, old men, Sioux children at the Hotchkiss machine gun, perpetrated in 1890 in South Dakota, by the American army), I evoke a radical epistemicide through the destruction by burning of a statuette on the orders of Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, to put an end to a ritual healing practiced by slaves from the Martinique Habitation of Fonds St-Jacques in 1698. https://jocelynvalton.blogspot.com/2013/11/fetichesbrise-s_26.html
[2] - If epistemerefers to a chain of knowledge in a given era and culture, epistemicide means the intentional destruction, invisibility, total and/or partial erasure of this knowledge and those who use it. have produced. Crimes with a cultural dimension which often take place in situations of colonial domination.
[3] - A behavior reminiscent of that of the cuckoo, the European bird which practices brood parasitism, and whose female lays her egg in the nest of another species before her young throws overboard , eggs and legitimate chicks from the nest to be fed by the colonized species.
[4] - Edward W. Said, Orientalism - The Orient created by the West , Éditions du Seuil, 2004
[5] - A coloniality of knowledge which suggests that artists from the Caribbean-Americas and their creations are by nature inferior to those of the Western world, that they are not valid models deserving to be studied or imitated.
[6] - Jocelyn Valton: A school for the archipelago republic , The guests of Médiapart, July 2012 https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/120712/une-ecole-pour -the-archipelago-republic
[7] - The concept of “coloniality” refers to the work of the Peruvian Anibal Quijano. It is based on the subalternization of non-Western knowledge and subjectivities, as well as on the extraction and exploitation of resources and human groups by the Western power system.
[8] - In March 2016, visual arts teachers from various academies came together to work on new programs and the use of digital technology. This interacademic grouping was held at the ''Lycée Colbert'' Rue de Château Landon in Paris, in a ''Colbert room'' where a bust of Jean-Baptiste Colbert sits... We remain perplexed by the idea that the body of plastic arts teachers ("specialists" in the power of images!) can think about the programs, under the marble sculpture of a character who wrote the "Code Noir", a collection of racist laws (completed by his son) which regulated the lives of enslaved blacks in the Caribbean-Americas, without this calling into question either the teachers, the IPR or the General Inspectorate. A quiet indifference is present in the courtyards of middle and high schools (several schools bear the surname of JB Colbert, as does an amphitheater of the INHA - National Institute of Art History in Paris ) until the intimacy of the rooms where the youth of France are taught. To say that racism is "structural", "systemic" is to speak of its capacity to reproduce itself by a means as effective and formidable as the educational institution, without anyone moving!
[9] - This is the subject of my article Fétiches Brisés, already cited.
[10] - The problematic work is the Anthology of painting in Guadeloupe , from the origins to the present day , Regional Council of Guadeloupe, HC Éditions, 2009, whose otherwise questionable content makes room for Nicole Réache who presented in the Mémorielles 3 exhibition, Pointe-à-Pitre 1998, a set of revisionist paintings minimizing the crime of slavery, during the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Revisionism that I denounced in the press and a collective work.
[11] - CARICOM (Caribbean Community) created in 1973, is an organization of around fifteen member states and five associated Caribbean states. Its aim is the social, economic and cultural development of the Caribbean. In 2014, CARICOM countries presented a “CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reconciliation and Restorative Justice” that demands reparations for slavery crimes in former colonial metropolises.
[12] - Exhibition R ésistance ( s ) - Présences maroons , E ddy F irmin- A no - J ocelyn V alton , Schœlcher Museum, Pointe-à-Pitre, 2014. For this exhibition, Firmin-Ano and I designed a collaborative work: the monumental image of a brown Negro 8 meters high. Deliberately placed outside the museum grounds, in the courtyard, on a common wall. It overlooked a stone bust of Victor Schœlcher. The work, crowning a figure of resistance as well as my text, criticized the museum which makes the struggles of slaves invisible. These tools, visual and theoretical, opposed a counter-discourse to the official narrative emphasizing an alleged abolitionist "generosity" of the French State through the figure of V. Schœlcher.
https://jocelynvalton.blogspot.com/2014/02/resistances-exposition-firmin-ano.html
[13] - During these exchanges, I informed the IPR that in Guadeloupe we had the experience of unsuccessful collaborative projects with ''Hexagonaux''. A 1% artistic project with the Ministry of Culture and the DAC Guadeloupe (Directorate of Cultural Affairs) so that the Maison Chapp (18th century ) in Basse-Terre becomes its headquarters. I resigned from the project in 2018 because my recommendations to introduce more equity for Caribbean artists were being rejected. Before me, an architect from Guadeloupe also had to withdraw from this 1%; similarly, a book project on the modernist architecture of Guadeloupe saw an indigenous architect sidelined… and many others, ostracized within the framework of inequitable relations. The best expertise in the country had to serve as a cheap guarantee, but knowing how to “stay in their place”.
[14] - All means will be good: lies, breach of trust, intimidation, unfair exchanges, theft with repeated desecration of sacred objects (3 thefts of kono masks ), etc., to "collect" / extort from the people approached during a journey of 20,000 km, willingly or by force, the 3,500 pieces (!) brought back to the Museum of Man: sacred masks, statuettes, musical instruments, dolls, everyday objects and other artifacts, precious for the cultures from which they are torn. After the theft of a Kono mask , Leiris will say: “ My heart is beating very hard because, since yesterday's scandal, I perceive more acutely the enormity of what we are committing. » This ''mission'' completes a form of French tradition of extraction with ''scientific aims'' which had been inaugurated by Bonaparte's ''Egyptian Campaign'' (1798 - 1801).
[15] - In his book A Decolonial Ecology , Éditions du Seuil 2019, Malcom Ferdinand evokes the permanence of the Slave Plantation at the origin of a disastrous way of inhabiting the Earth.
[16] - The publication of the report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy makes it possible to measure the importance of predations on the scale of the African continent. An entire youth who could have found self-confidence and inspiration there, finds itself deprived of almost all of its artistic heritage, plundered to fill Western museums and private collections.
[17] - CRAN: Representative Council of Black Associations.
[18] - Exhibition catalog: The Black Model, from Géricault to Matisse , Flammarion, 2019, pp. 13, 15, 17
Bibliography :
AJARI Norman, Dignity or death – Ethics and politics of race, Éditions La Découverte, 2019
CUKIERMAN Leila, DAMBURY Gerty, VERGÈS Françoise (dir.), Let's decolonize the arts! The Ark, 2018
FERDINAND Malcom, A decolonial ecology – Thinking about ecology from the Caribbean world , Éditions du Seuil, 2019
GLISSANT Édouard, The West Indian Discourse, Le Seuil, 1981
LEIRIS Michel, Phantom Africa, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, p. 103-105
The black model, from Géricault to Matisse , (Paris, Musée d'Orsay, March 26 - July 21, 2019), (Pointe-à-Pitre, MACTe, September 13 - December 29, 2019), Flammarion 2019
MARBŒUF Olivier, Decolonial suites – Escape from the plantation, Éditions du Commun, 2022
MORRISON Toni, The source of self-love, Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 2019
SAID Edward W., Orientalism - The Orient created by the West , Éditions du Seuil, 2004
In the Shadow of the West , Black Jack editions, 2011
SARR Felwine, SAVOY Bénédicte, Restoring African heritage , Éditions du Seuil, 2018