Colonial Amnesia Research Articles

Albert Camus and (Post)colonial Amnesia

Albert Camus and (Post)colonial Amnesia Amar Acheraiou Albert Camus is one of the most controversial twentieth-century literary figures, whose works have been the subject of heated debates for decades. His position towards French imperialism, in particular, has been at the heart of these controversies, eliciting both admiration and bitter criticism from scholars in France and elsewhere. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who both supported the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), were among the first French intellectuals to criticize Camus for his ambivalence toward French colonialism in Algeria. Both authors saw Camus’s outright condemnation of the Algerian War as an unequivocal endorsement of the French imperialist government. Sartre was particularly astringent with Camus: as he inveighed against his fellow existentialist writer’s complicity in French colonial politics, he also vigorously attacked colonialism and urged French intellectuals to support the Algerians’ struggle to destroy the colonial system in order to establish new relations between “a Free France and a liberated Algeria” (47). Since the 1950s, several scholars have followed in Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s footsteps and further indicted Camus’s collusion with French colonialism, highlighting the limits of his universalist ethics within Algeria’s conflicted colonial context. In his influential monograph Camus, published in 1970, Conor Cruise O’Brien was among the earliest scholars to point to Camus’s Eurocentrism and to see him as an apologist for French colonialism. Later, postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Nicholas Harrison, and myself have elaborated on Camus’s ethnocentric tendencies and complicity with French colonial politics to question the still-widespread view of Camus as a radical anti-colonialist figure. Many other scholars, including David Carroll and Ena Vulor, have instead emphasized Camus’s humanist outlook, arguing that his opposition to colonial oppression and injustice in Algeria is sufficient proof of his anti-colonialism. Camus’s writings contain enough of both colonialist and anti-colonialist [End Page 158] statements to fuel each side of this critical divide. This demonstrates the difficulty of defining Camus in binary terms, as neither of these labels, colonialist or anti-colonialist, can fully account for his elusive approach to French colonialism and Algerian colonial identities. My argument is that Camus is more fittingly defined as a para-colonialist writer, much in the tradition of western humanist and neo-humanist writers such as François Rabelais, Bartolomé de las Casas, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and André Gide, who criticized colonial atrocities in the European colonies without contesting the legitimacy of colonization itself, which paved the way for these atrocities. This article examines Camus’s relation to French colonialism in his final, uncompleted novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1994) and Noces (Nuptials, 1938) and shows how his para-colonialist outlook is articulated, in large part, through the prism of amnesia, a key colonial trope that is often overlooked in postcolonial discussions of Camus’s writing. In both works, Camus uses the trope of amnesia as a dramatic device to tackle the vexed issues of identity, colonial guilt and trauma, and cultural and class divisions, in ways that reveal the intricate connections between amnesia and imperial ideology, identity and nationhood, and ethics and aesthetics. Amnesia refers to the deterioration of memory caused by a traumatic accident, old age, or an illness such as dementia. Few of Camus’s characters suffer directly from these physical, clearly identifiable amnesiac symptoms, whereas almost all his European settler characters in Le Premier Homme and Noces display signs of cultural and historical amnesia that alienates them from their surroundings. Catherine Cormery in Le Premier Homme is certainly the character who most distinctly illustrates Camus’s profound engagement in his fiction with memory and amnesia. Modelled on Camus’s own mother,1 Mrs. Cormery suffers from a permanent memory disorder, combined with a speech impediment and impaired hearing caused by typhoid she contracted in her youth. Although it is not explicitly stated whether typhoid is the main source of Cormery’s amnesia, this disease may have, nevertheless, led to further deterioration of her physical and mental faculties. The narrator declares with compassionate sarcasm: [Jacques’s] mother, who had no idea what history and geography might be, who...

Ethical Contemporary Art Therapy: Honoring an American Indian Perspective

As a profession that formed in relation to larger forces within science, psychology, and more, the field of art therapy is not immune to the systems of oppression woven throughout Western culture and has incorporated practices that, even unwittingly, perpetuate the oppression of American Indian peoples today. This article contextualizes the U.S. art therapy field within the larger legacy of historical, systematic efforts to eradicate Native sovereignty in the United States, questions the subordinate position of Indigenous peoples, and critically examines and deconstructs the continued oppression of American Indian peoples today through situated and subjugated knowledge, cultural appropriation, cultural genocide, and colonial amnesia.

Visualizing Protest: African (Diasporic) Art and Contemporary Mediterranean Crossings

Author(s): Finley, Cheryl; Raiford, Leigh; Raphael-Hernandez, Heike | Abstract: For Bisi Silva (1962–2019) Abstract This essay surveys a number of contemporary artworks that address the recent migrations and perilous water crossings of African people to Europe, made by artists of the African diaspora. Paying specific attention to the deployment of photography, time-based media, and installation, we argue that artists like Isaac Julien, Alexis Peskine, Romuald Hazoume, and others disrupt the photojournalistic portrayals of African migrant–refugees crossing the Mediterranean in overloaded small rafts and makeshift boats circulated by the international media. While the UN and its High Commissioner for Refugees have tried for years to call international attention to the situation of these migrant–refugees in Libya’s camps and those camps’ catastrophic violations of human rights, it has been only recently that public attention and discourse have begun to recognize these crossings as a “crisis,” primarily because a growing number of African migrant–refugees have succeeded in reaching Fortress Europe via Spain or Italy. The artists of the African diaspora considered in this essay have attempted to intervene in these public debates by offering counternarratives to often sensational and dehumanizing depictions of specifically Black migrant–refugee lives. In focusing on these counternarratives, we demonstrate how artists connect this contemporary mass migration from African countries to a longer history of forced migrations over water in the African diaspora. Artists have returned continually to the “chronotrope of the ship,” following Paul Gilroy, and have drawn on this long memory as a means to convey the contemporary crisis, thus addressing the sorts of “colonial amnesia” that conveniently ignore any prior entanglements.

German entanglements in transatlantic slavery: An introduction

ABSTRACTThis essay aims at bringing together research on Germany’s colonial past and imperialist endeavors with current trends in scholarship in Atlantic history and slavery studies. While scholars of German history have begun to challenge what Jürgen Zimmerer has called the “colonial amnesia of Germans,” the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery have rarely been included in discussions about national commemorative cultural debates because Germany, it is claimed, has never directly and profitably participated in the economies of slavery. For the longest time, Germany has entertained the notion that the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery involved only other European players such as England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Denmark, and indeed, it seems plausible that for its own history, Germany is able to claim non-participation. Yet, the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery were part of the earliest economic enterprises that embodied and inherently relied on global networks of trade that uprooted and relocated people in unprecedented numbers. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Klaus Weber, Eve Rosenhaft, Felix Brahms, and Mischa Honeck, this essay re-charts the various routes of German participation in, profiteering from, as well as showing resistance to transatlantic slavery and its cultural, political, and intellectual reverberations. The essay thereby seeks to interrogate historical processes (or fantasies) of empire-building, colonialism, and slavery which, according to public memory, seem to have taken place in isolation from each other; yet, we claim that they should be regarded as part and parcel of a narrative that ingrained colonialism and slavery in German cultural memory and identity to a larger extent than has been illustrated and admitted so far in general discourses in contemporary Germany.

Open ‘Hearing’ in a Closed Sea

In the early 2000s migration towards Italy, both as a destination and transit country, was on the rise and gained increasing importance on the political agenda. In this context, enhanced security measures of border control in the Mediterranean became a priority. Meanwhile, new forms of postcolonial resistance have emerged as Italy has been compelled to face its long-standing colonial amnesia. The 2012 documentary film Mare Chiuso (Closed Sea) captures a slice of the entangled discourses, politics and practices in the Mediterranean. It recounts the story of boat migrants who set off from Libya in May 2009 and were forced back to their point of departure by Italian authorities. Engaging with the testimonies of the migrants involved, as well as with the legal discourses surrounding the case, Mare Chiuso brings to the fore the emerging contradictions at play in dominant discursive practices. The film offers alternative perspectives from the margins, problematizes official narratives and instigates fruitful debates on the Mediterranean as a geopolitical and cultural site. Traversing postcolonial and cultural studies, political science and law, this essay proposes an analysis of Mare Chiuso as an instance of postcolonial resistance. Independent and separate disciplinary approaches have failed successfully to map and investigate complex phenomena such as migration; thus, this essay brings into contact cultural theory and legal discourses with the aim of better understanding the burgeoning postcolonial phenomena in contemporary Italy.

Transgressive Adoptions: Dakota Prisoners' Resistances to State Domination Following the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War

Transgressive AdoptionsDakota Prisoners’ Resistances to State Domination Following the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War Christopher J. Pexa (bio) The best way to civilize Indians is to imprison them. Major Thaddeus Bradley of the Seventh Minnesota Infantry RESISTANCES UNTHOUGHT AND UNINTELLIGIBLE In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel Trouillot describes the “erasure and banalization” that characterize historiography of the Haitian Revolution. In a chapter titled “An Unthinkable History,” he observes how the tropes of modern history writing are identical to figures of discourse in the late eighteenth century, arguing persuasively that these historiographical tropes take two forms. On the one hand, “some narratives cancel what happened through direct erasure of facts or their relevance,” while on the other hand, some “narratives sweeten the horror or banalize the uniqueness of a situation by focusing on details.”1 The combined effect of these tropes or formulas is “a powerful silencing” of nondominant narratives, one that renders them, and questions about them, “unthinkable.” An analogous erasure surrounds the aftermath of the U.S.–Dakota War between United States and Minnesota militia and Dakota warriors reluctantly [End Page 29] led by the Mdewakaŋton chief, Little Crow (Ta Oyate Duta, or “His Red Nation”). The war itself is a little-known event in the history of U.S. colonization, despite how white Minnesotans at the time called it a “second Civil War” and how contemporary Dakotas assert that it was a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.2 In an article that recently appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dakota activist Waziyatawin points out that the sesquicentennial of the war calls up the violence of a past that has been sanitized within settler society, arguing that “Dakota people paid a terrible price so that white Minnesotans could claim this beautiful and bountiful land.”3 To recall the human costs of the war for Dakota, in other words, is to conjure what has been previously unthinkable within settler society: the recognition of moral obligations involved in commemorating a Minnesota statehood born of genocide. Such an act of recollection is especially important now, for at the time of this writing, the state of Israel has justified its invasion and killing of over 1,400 Palestinians in militaryoccupied Gaza following the kidnapping and killings of three Israeli teenagers in June 2014.4 This disproportionate response recalls that of white militia in the Dakota people’s “beautiful and bountiful land” who, after the killing of five whites in Acton, Minnesota, on August 17, 1862, engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, spurred on by the infamous call of Governor Alexander Ramsey, in a special session of the Minnesota legislature convened on September 9, 1862, for “the Sioux Indians of Minnesota” to be “exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”5 As Waziyatawin notes, what followed from that pronouncement reads as a clear indictment of the genocidal campaign waged by the settler state: “The hangings, the concentration camps and forced imprisonments, the forced gender segregation, the punitive campaigns into Dakota Territory to hunt down and terrorize those trying to flee, the bounties on Dakota scalps—all are examples of how Ramsey’s plan was successfully implemented.”6 This campaign culminated in the punitive expeditions of General Alfred Sully and General Henry Sibley into western Minnesota and Dakota Territory, to which some 5,000 Eastern Dakota, fearing punishment for an involvement in the war that most of them simply did not have, fled from the thousands of amassed Union and state troops.7 Few scholarly works have addressed the colonial amnesia surrounding the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War, and fewer still have explored how Dakota experienced and resisted state power in the concentration camps8 that were created shortly after the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23, 1862, and the surrender of Dakota at “Camp Release”9 a few days later, on September 26. This obscurity has been slowly lifting, though, with scholarly and public discourses beginning to proliferate in light of the 150-year anniversary of the war in 2012.10 This essay contributes to that body of work by examining an understudied [End Page 30] archive of Dakota voices that...

Untaming the Mild Frontier: In Search of New Midwestern Histories

This historiographical article addresses the Midwest as a cultural geography of colonial amnesia, explores the relationship between the Midwest and the field of U.S. western history, and calls for historians of the Midwest to substantially revise regional narratives in much the same manner that new western historians did during the 1980s and 90s.

Who is Not Coping with Colonization? Laying Out the Map for Decolonization

This paper explores reasons for using decolonization as a method for improving Indigenous health status. Decolonization is a method required to shift the current paradigm of Western dominance and colonial amnesia that constructs and maintains Indigenous poor health status. Decolonization requires every Australian to examine the impact colonization has upon their past and present in order to formulate a future that does not reinstate the past. To take these steps requires a balance of histories, informing our current political and social context, critical reflexive practice and open communication with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.