Mythologies postcoloniales. Pour une décolonisation du quotidien ed. by Étienne Achille and Lydie Moudileno (review)

In 1957, as the French empire was nearing its end, Roland Barthes published Mythologies, a collection of essays that was to become a touchstone and inspiration for literary and cultural critics for decades to come. Prompted by what Barthes described in the preface to the first edition as a feeling of impatience with the common sense values being purveyed by both the arts and the booming mass media industry of his era, Mythologies approached the cultural artifacts of daily life—from the theatrics of wrestling matches to Billy Graham's evangelizing, from French eating habits to detergent advertisements—as signifying texts participating in the naturalization of bourgeois ideology. In taking semiology to everyday living—to the dinner table, to the streets, to the movie theater—Mythologies aimed to counter specific repressive effects of ideology and also showed interpretation to be both political and accessible.

That Mythologies still resonates today, beyond the borders of France and over sixty years after its initial publication, owes in large part to the appeal of its goals and its adaptable methodology. The activity of myth-making, that process of signification in which objects and practices take on meaning and mystifying force, evolves and outlives the specific myths and the artifacts attached to them in any given historical moment. At the same time, as the co-authors of Mythologies postcoloniales note, beyond the "impressively efficient critical apparatus" his work still provides us today, Barthes also laid important groundwork for a critique of colonialism—an ideology that, long after French imperialism formally dissolved, nevertheless "repeatedly resurfaces" in France today (13; all translations from the French are my own). Building on this foundation, and drawing from other theorists of the everyday and its oppressions, Étienne Achille and Lydie Moudileno flesh out Barthes's ancillary concern for colonial ideology, incisively demonstrating its vital and pernicious role in a contemporary French Republic that purports to have left such thoughts behind.

Mythologies postcoloniales carries out close and lucid analyses of seven judiciously selected phenomena. Ranging from place names to popular films, chocolate pastry displays, and media coverage of the "Je suis Charlie" movement following the 2015 terrorist attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, this varied but limited selection allows the authors to pan the cultural landscape while also delving deeply into a number of facets of contemporary daily life in which (post)colonial myths operate. If the quotidian character of these myths makes their harms harder to identify, they are nonetheless "anything but anodyne" (35), in the etymological sense of painless (12)—an important point Achille and Moudileno rightly insist on throughout this volume. For, as they write, "if it is reassuring to recall, with Michel de Certeau, that everyday life reaffirms subjects' capacity for resistance, the everyday is also a site of violence, where insults, stigmatization, interpellation, and discrimination constitute weapons that may operate on a micro-level, but that do so with devastating efficiency" (11–12). This awareness of the pain wrought by postcolonial myths gives to the volume its urgency and purpose as a response, in the strong sense of an ethical and political responsiveness to those touched by these phenomena and responsibility to those who will read this critique. To refuse to call out the "semiological and ideological manipulations" at the root of such violence, Achille and Moudileno argue, would, in fact, "be irresponsible" (47), and the volume aims not simply "to hold a mirror up" to society, but rather to contribute to decolonizing it, "to help transform reality and the ways in which all of us experience everyday life" (130).

This understanding of responsibility underpins the care Achille and Moudileno take to probe from several angles the phenomena that call out to them. Each chapter teases apart the multiple causes producing and sustaining myths, as well as the varying effects they produce on the people of different ages, classes, genders, and other social categories who experience them. This awareness of the heterogeneity...