Postcolonializing the bagne

In Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire project, there are no obvious references to the bagne. The omission is surprising, for this institution has long played a significant role in the French imagination. It persists in the French language in several prominent expressions, and continues to be associated with key national symbols such as the bonnet phrygien. This silencing is associated with representations of the penal colony in popular culture and in heritage practices, both of which tend to associate the bagne with ‘dangerous’ white French bagnards, failing accordingly to recognize the wider impact of the institution on colonized spaces. The article draws on a corpus of postcolonial representations or discussions of the bagne to propose a new, more enabling way of exploring (and memorializing) this essentially nineteenth-century phenomenon. Analysis of texts by Léon-Gontran Damas, Kateb Yacine, Leïla Sebbar, Anouar Benmalek, Mehdi Lallaoui, and Patrick Chamoiseau suggests that this ‘postcolonialization’ of the penal colony through new forms of creative engagement allows the recognition of transcolonial axes of penal transportation, exemplified by the banishment of Kabyle rebels to New Caledonia following their revolt against the impact of French occupation in spring 1871. The article concludes by drawing on recent postcolonial engagement with concepts such as ‘legacies’ and ‘ruins’—particularly in the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Chamoiseau—to suggest that alternative narratives, and new critical and aesthetic approaches to the penal colony, have begun to emerge.