History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels

CHAPTER NINE: Distractions from History: Redrawing Ethnic Trajectories in New Caledonia

Distractions from History RedRawing ethnic tRajectoRies in new caledonia I. Face-makIng, natIon-makIng, HIstory It is axiomatic for historians that the grand enterprise of nation-making depends upon the commensurately grave enterprise of history-making. In the case of the Melanesian archipelago, dubbed “New Caledonia” by James Cook in  and thereby drawn inevitably into the history of nations, it appears that the incidental gestures of face-making and the landmark feats of history-making are mutually entailed in ways that complicate the nation-making project at those points where representational effects register ethno-racial difference, across the colonial divide. This proposition is notably in evidence where facial representation engages with the marked ethnic politics that have followed since la Nouvelle-Calédonie’s annexation by France in . In its broad form, the proposition may be illustrated by the delicate, red-tone drawing of a “man of New Caledonia,” executed in , in the Balade–Puebo area, by the principal artist of Cook’s second voyage, William Hodges (figure ). More pointedly, it can be shown by a recent New Caledonian instanceofamuchyoungergenrethanportraiture,theblack-and-white bande dessinée comic book by Bernard Berger and JAR,  (figure ). chapteR nine —amanda macdonald 186 187 Redrawing Ethnic Trajectories in New Caledonia As much as these two instances of face-making differ from one another, each acknowledges history while somehow escaping its project, effecting a potent gesture of nation-making that heads away from historicity. Similarly, each of these two modes of face-making acknowledges the documentary function, upon which history depends, while retaining another representational power, a suggestive one. And each face-drawing offers resistance to the contemporary consensus, discernible over the last thirty years in New Caledonian history-making, that the photographic document provides the most potent iconographic instrument of nation-making. Hodges’s drawn portrait, from a first-contact encounter, seems an inaugural , pre-photographic instance of Europe’s incorporation into its own history— notleastthrough documentation—ofasouth-Pacificterritory-cum-population that it names and thereby marks out for national existence. This nearly threequarter -profile bust portrait serves, now, as an affirmation of a beginning for Fig. 1. william hodges, drawing of a man from the Balade–pouebo area in the northeast of the main island of new caledonia, [Man of] New Caledonia, red chalk, 1774 (second cook voyage), bearing the title “new caledonia,” catalog title “[man of] new caledonia,” held by national library of australia, Rex nan Kivell collection (permission granted). 188 Amanda Macdonald the country’s history. Yet the drawing’s tracery effects also render the individual human as ungraspable, suggesting dimensions of character in dispersal beyond history and nation: the extremely soft-edge, individuated portrayal of ambiguously expressive eyes and face, the “crazed,” diffuse qualities of beard, skin, and chest that merge into the ground—so much suggestion and so little affirmation —literally draw the character away from the simply documentary. BergerJAR ’s anti-photographic, bande dessinée personae derive, for their part, from the history of the decisive colonial moment in New Caledonia that was the indigenous insurrection of : in the margins of the documented events, a settlerwhite and a displaced indigenous man spend a night recounting their pasts, pasts that hold no interest for history. Despite the publication of these nationally significant,historicallyloaded protagonistsin ,thefirstand powerfully“historic ” year of New Caledonia’s autonomizaton from France—the year in which this dependency officially becomes a quasi-nation —the “drawn strips” of  manage to steer away from the repetition of history’s ethnic binaries, toward an exploration of potential national character. The Hodges portrait and the BergerJAR strip are both, then, instances of what we can call “facialization”—the representation of human-ness through the face—which, as drawings, establish human character through “line work.” In the exercise of this character-oriented Fig. 2. Frame depicting dying Kanak, Bernard Berger-jaR, Le sentier des hommes, vol. 3: 1878, nouméa: la Brousse en Folie, 1999, p. 35, frames 1–2. 189 Redrawing Ethnic Trajectories in New Caledonia “line work” each image performs a significant cultural operation that is neither documentary nor historical. With Hodges’s high-register portrait in the role of graphic counterpoint, the low-register bande dessinée drawing of  can be examined as a genuine contribution to nation-making, yet one that specifically pulls away from history and its photographic documents in order to open up for new trajectories the racially overdetermined field of (quasi-)national...