Imagining the Nation: Independence Ceremonies under Rebel Domination in Northern Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

We would not expect insurgents to celebrate the very state that they combat at all costs. In northern Cote d’Ivoire, however, the rebel movement of the Forces Nouvelles, the “New Forces,” not only engaged in a sustainable provision of public goods, they also created new modes of representation that on the one hand built on the former experience of the state but simultaneously developed a sort of draft of how the nation should look in the future. Both the iteration of the past into the present and the imagination of a promising future with a better state were less the subject of a closed discourse but much more at the center of highly attractive if not seductive performances. The nation as an imagined community (Anderson 2006, Hansen and Stepputat 2001) and its imaginary (Castoriadis 1998, Taylor 2003)—that is, the normative expectation how its members should live together—were themes that pervaded many ceremonial events staged by the rebels and their allies. Almost all ceremonies in the rebel-held part of the country rotated around this theme that had become more and more problematic over the past two decades: the Ivoirian nation. The inauguration of the monument for the unknown rebel soldier was one such occasion to make claims to its past, present, and future; another was the construction and opening of a cultural center (Forster in press). Probably the most impressive were, however, the festivities on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of independence on August 7, 2010. The inherited images of the state were transformed into something different: into an image how a new Ivoirian nation could re-emerge after the end of the old nation-state (Fig. 1). The imagination of the past was not a given but much more the outcome of the changing relationships between the different actors: “We must not think of imagination as a simple power but as a complex series of processes” (Klein et al. 1983:15). Imagination is best conceptualized as a social practice that is an essential part of the actors’ agency (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). The rebel movement and in particular its strongmen had a say in it, but it was much more shaped by the interaction between them and other actors, who articulated their claims and interests by how they engaged in the performances or abstained from them. These deeply political interactions shaped the images of the past and produced images of and for the future. As a social practice, imagination links the images of the past to the images of the future and vice versa. Images have a mental character, but they stimulate or lead to “real, material” pictures (Mitchell 1992) that the spectators saw when they attended the event. How these pictures looked, how they were embedded in the overarching ceremonial performance of what is perhaps best and paradoxically called a post national nationalism, and how that worked on the social imaginary is the subject of this article. By showing how remembrance and projectivity together shape the production of images of the past and the future, I hope to address two weak points at opposing ends of the more theoretical literature. First, Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on the state as an imagined community (2006) adopts a narrow, Foucauldian understanding of discourse as a sequence of written or oral enouncements that relate to each other and frame what can be said and thought about a particular signifier, in this case the nation.1 Such an understanding of discourse largely ignores nonverbal statements and says virtually nothing about the power of images and pictures in the discursive formation of nationalism. At the other end of the theoretical landscape, post-Marxist discourse analysis takes all possible expressions—written, oral,