Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism

1. Museology and Globalization: The Quai Branly Museum

1 Museology and Globalization The Quai Branly Museum Almost nothing displayed in museums was made to be seen in them. —Susan Vogel1 The history of European nation-building and identity formation is inextricably connected with complex display practices in which the lines of demarcation between human and material entities have become indistinct, yielding as a consequence an apparatus of signifiers relating to objectivity and subjectivity that require examination and scrutiny.2 The study of exhibition sites in Europe during both the colonial and postcolonial eras provides an opportunity to engage in comparative historical analysis and to improve the contextualization of the official and public discourse they have triggered. Europe and other regions of the world are symbiotically linked through a long history of contact informed by slavery, colonialism, immigration, and a multiplicity of transnational networks and practices. In recent years, these factors have informed both national and pan-European debates concerning the legacies of these encounters and their current reformulation with regard to transhistorical phenomena that impact ethnic minorities and immigrant populations. These concern a broad set of cultural, economic, political, and social factors that include reflection on the limits and pertinence of reparation and restitution, the study and reassessment of colonialism, the role and instrumentalization of memory, the status of postcolonial subjects, and ultimately the parameters of a multicultural Europe.3 Numerous new museums have appeared on the European landscape, altering and in some cases dramatically reconfiguring its topography. From the Museology and Globalization 15 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain) to the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (Finland), and from the Tate Modern in London (UK) to the Kunsthaus in Graz (Austria), new display practices have been experimented with and in some instances even been eclipsed by the spectacular architecturalprojectsthatcontainthem .4 Theroleof Europeannationsinthe slave trade and in colonialism has been acknowledged, although the assessment of the respective roles played by these nation-states remains contested; nevertheless , this history has been explored in a multiplicity of ways throughout Europe in such diverse spaces as the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (UK), the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium), and the Tropenmuseum (Netherlands), all of which have undergone elaborate and of course expensive refurbishment in recent years. Alongside these, the Quai Branly Museum (MQB, Musée du Quai Branly) and the National Center for the History of Immigration (CNHI, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration) in France have made significant additions; the International Slavery Museum (Liverpool, UK), the Hackney Museum (London, UK) and the National Maritime Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands) held special exhibits. As Carol Duncan has argued, “As much as ever, having a bigger and better art museum is a sign of political virtue and national identity—of being recognizably a member of the civilized community of modern, liberal nations.”5 Naturally, these early twenty-first-century transformations happened together with a transition in European demography, the emergence of new political constituencies, and geopolitical alignments, but there are antecedents that make such investigations all the more interesting, particularly when one considers that these mutations have occurred in some instances within the very structures (such as the Palais de la Porte Dorée in eastern Paris) initially built for ideological and propagandist ventures. Panivong Norindr has underscored this point: Spatial reterritorialization of indigenous buildings and monuments produced a particular understanding of the French colonial empire. Native architectural space was altered to make way for a transfigured vision of indigenous buildings that conformed better to French aesthetic and political ideals. In the 1930s, architecture was elevated to the rank of “leader” among all artistic expressions because as art total it was said to embrace, and even subsume, all arts. During the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, architects were invested with the authority and power to promote l’idée coloniale. The palais d’exposition was conceived as an architectonic colonial manifesto , a public and official display of French colonial policies, which determined its discourse, circumscribed its space, and revealed its ideology. Significantly, all 16 Africa and France of the buildings constructed for the exposition were temporary pavilions not designed to last beyond the duration of the fair, with one notable exception, the Mus ée Permanent des Colonies, which still stands today.6 Suchobservationsnaturallyrequireadditionalhistoricalcontextualizationgiven the role these institutions played as propagandist mechanisms for furthering imperial expansionist objectives, for according them legitimacy as a humanitarian undertaking, and in fostering public support for the enterprise; (this was certainly the goal of the International...