ABSTRACT In June 2022 a new public statue was unveiled in New Caledonia. The new statue, erected in the Place des Cocotiers in central Nouméa, depicts the famous handshake between Kanak separatist leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and loyalist Caldoche leader Jacques Lafleur that had sealed the French-brokered Matignon Accords, bringing years of violent conflict between Indigenous and settler communities to a close. The inauguration of the new monument, 34 years to the day since the signing of the agreement, comes at a time of considerable uncertainty in terms of New Caledonia’s relationship to France. In some ways, the monument’s appearance signals a major shift in the memoryscape of the archipelago generally and Nouméa in particular. But at the same time, the new statue is less progressive than it might at first appear. Indeed, its significance rests not only in what it represents but also in what it effectively obscures. This article offers an account and analysis of the erection of the new Tjibaou–Lafleur statue, positioning the monument both within a historical context of public statuary in New Caledonia and the contemporary context of evolving relations between Kanak and non-indigenous populations.

ABSTRACT From 1987 to 1994, a period that overlapped with his move to France in 1989, Huang Yong Ping washed texts in washing machines as part of his ‘damp method’ series. His objective was to ‘cut off the tongue’ by destroying certain classics, while at the same time ‘nurtur[ing] the tongue’ by turning to other classics. This paradoxical strategy epitomises his practice and philosophy of art which privileges creation through destruction and showing over describing by questioning the possibilities of communication, whether within or across cultures. This article analyses three of Huang’s artworks that are inspired by texts (books, journals, newspapers, scripture) and their relationship to water and endings, whether linguistic, material, metaphysical, aesthetic or ecological. It focuses on his transformation of two-dimensional texts into three-dimensional structures which draws attention to the mediation of culture and knowledge. It also considers how these artworks resonate with Arne Næss’s concept of deep ecology and their correspondences with Bruno Latour’s concept of modes of existence, those networks of associations in which human and nonhuman entities are actors with agency in the processes of redistribution.

ABSTRACT This article examines innovative forms of museography and their relationship to national narratives involving history, memory and locality. It seeks to assess how definitions of culture have shifted towards world culture and to what extent it can be argued that a radical approach to the anthropology museum or musées de société (also known as world culture museums) has emerged. The discussion is centred on recent exhibitions and iconic objects displayed by the Musée des Confluences in Lyon and the cultural imagination they seek to promote with both local and international visitors. New avenues in creating cosmopolitan civic forms of memories disconnected from colonial legacies will be examined.

ABSTRACT Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives (1979) is a short film which interrogates the exclusion and marginalisation of immigrants in postcolonial French society by highlighting the hidden labour of Black sanitation workers in Paris. Alice Diop has described Les Mains négatives as ‘the entire subtext’ for her film Nous (2020), a documentary about people living in the suburbs of Paris. At once documents of social reality and experimental meditations on representation and filmmaking, both films examine the entanglements of viewing relations and social exclusion, and interrogate the moving image’s capacity to remedy the ‘invisibility’ of certain lives. This article brings the two films together in order to probe the ethical and political stakes of their strategies of representation, drawing on recent criticism at the intersections of postcolonial theory, and film and visual culture scholarship. This critical lens highlights the political force of the films’ experimental form. Yet bringing the two films into dialogue also allows productive frictions to emerge, exposing in particular the challenging aspects of the representation of Black subjects in Les Mains négatives, which stand uneasily alongside the film’s message of inclusion and recognition.

ABSTRACT This article explores the links between creative imagination and extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This question has an undeniable memorial dimension, for extraction, as a crucial point of entry into Congolese historical consciousness, allows for a multi-perspectivist examination of the way in which the memory of the past has been archived, experienced, and (mis)interpreted. As a key term to understand Congo’s geopolitical position since colonial times, extraction offers a rich array of tropes and ideas to assess culture from the DRC and the Congolese diaspora. First, I reflect on the notions of extraction and extractivism; secondly, I analyse how they form the basis of Sammy Baloji's multi-media work in Mémoire (2006) and Mémoire/Kolwezi (2014); then, I turn to La Danse du vilain (2020) and Tram 83 (2014) by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, first to assess how extraction is employed in these novels, then to conduct a reflection on ‘necropolitics’, and reveal little-known aspects of diamond digging during the Mobutu era. I will also show that Baloji’s and Mujila’s creative trajectories have been enriched by dialogues with Filip De Boeck, the Belgian social anthropologist and specialist of the DRC.

ABSTRACT First as candidate and then as President, Emmanuel Macron has elevated colonial memory policy as a key site for the performance and enactment of the dual values of rupture and reconciliation that underpin his broader programme. While this has led to significant symbolic shifts in the French state’s narrative of its colonial history, this article argues that this memory policy cannot and should not be disaggregated from his wider neoliberal project. Through a detailed contextualisation and analysis of President Macron’s interventions in the field, I contend that colonial memory policy simultaneously reflects, legitimises, and constitutes the ‘neoliberal political rationality’ his administration seeks to perpetuate. Under Macron, a limited recognition of France’s responsibilities for colonial violence has been accompanied by an effort to neutralise the political potency of the past, obscure its enduring legacies, assign authority over it to designated experts and delegitimise those who contest this logic. The article illustrates how memory policy has become a means of sublimating contemporary political demands, arising in part from historic structural injustices, into the manageable and managed process of consensus-making that is the hallmark of neoliberal governmentality.

ABSTRACT After decades of collective forgetting, heritage initiatives have resulted in the restoration of sites linked to France’s former penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia which operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both territories, museums dedicated to the history of the ‘bagne’ have been created in buildings once used as kitchens and bakeries. However, as with other forms of penal heritage, the opportunity to create more nuanced and sustained narratives around the lived experience of food insecurity for those sent to the penal colonies remains subordinated to more sensationalist accounts of physical constraint and corporal punishment. This article analyses existing narratives and museography at the two sets of sites, identifying potential for further memory and interpretive work around food, nutrition, and sustainability. The article explores convict memoirs and correspondence that emphasise the ‘slow violence’ of malnutrition resulting from poor-quality produce and unequal distributions of rations amongst convict populations. The wider intention is to consider how historical narratives of food insecurity can be developed at sites of former penal heritage to foster awareness and empathy around contemporary forms of food poverty, emphasising that food insecurity is still used as a form of control within spaces of confinement.