When the Past Poses Beside the Present: Aestheticising Politics and Nationalising Modernity in a Postcolonial Time

Abstract

This article focuses on the Tunisian government's tourist promotion policies during the 1990s. It takes a Deleuzian perspective, using the notion of crystalline narration developed by the author of The Time-Image. I will emphasise the idea of coalescence between past and present as revealed in the advertising images of the period where heritage objects appear among other contemporary objects. In fact, I will draw on a corpus of short films and commercials produced by the Tunisian tourism bureau to be broadcast both inside and outside the country. My analysis will focus on the ways in which actors in the fields of politics and tourism use these objects for media purposes, targeting both Tunisians and foreign tourists to whom they strive to hold up a crystal-image of Tunisia. This image is shored up by a political discourse put forward by a state that wishes to appear both to its citizens and to others as reconciling past and present. The crystal metaphor evokes a narrative mode in which heritage is likened to the glittering of scattered crystals and Tunisian identity seems to emerge from the ‘mists of time’ with sparkling refractions on ‘tips of the present’.