Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism

2. Object/Subject Migration: The National Center for the History of Immigration

2 Object/Subject Migration The National Center for the History of Immigration The visual discourse of race involves a conceptual and categorical slippage between the body as object and the body as subject. A parallel slippage occurs when the material culture of everyday life, such as artifacts collected in museums of art and anthropology or forms of commodity production and consumption, participate in the construction of race discourse by supporting processes of subjection. Objects come to stand in for subjects not merely in the form of commodity fetish, but as part of a larger system of material and image culture that circulates as a prosthesis of race discourse through practices of collection, exchange, and exhibition. —Jennifer A. González1 Constructed for the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, the Palais de la Porte Dorée has been the home of the National Center for the History of Immigration (CNHI, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration) since it opened in October 2007.2 This site was initially occupied by the Musée Permanent des Colonies and later by the Musée des arts africains et océaniens (MAAO) until it relocated in 2006 to the Quai Branly Museum. The symbiotic relationship between the French State and museum establishments has been clearly established, but little attention has been paid to the various ways in which this relationship has served to perpetuate a transcolonial network of power relations. This interconnectivity has also translated into a tenuous relationship in public discourse in terms of the ways history and memory have been articulated.3 Similar projects are to be found around the world: Centre de Object/Subject Migration 43 documentation sur les migrations humaines (Luxembourg), Museo de la inmigraci ón (Argentina), Immigration Museum and Migration Museum (Australia ), Memorial do Imigrante (Brazil), Kosmopolis, The House of Cultural Dialogue (Netherlands), Museu da Emigração e das Comunidades (Portugal), MhiC—Museo de Historia de la Inmigración de Catalaluña (Spain), DOMiD (Documentation Center and Museum of Migration in Germany);4 many of these institutions, as members of the International Network of Migration Institutions , seek to adhere to the UNESCO-IOM objective of “promoting the public understanding of migration.”5 The press dossier released at the time of the CNHI’s inauguration underscored its close tie with the authorities through its formal affiliation with various ministries. The tie was clear in terms of the actualization and conceptualization of the project and the state-sponsorship institutional partners, whereby the CHNI “is a public establishment financed by the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Ministry of National Education, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development.”6 A consideration of the CNHI’s objectives and mission therefore seems warranted. Civil servant and former Minister of Culture Jacques Toubon was appointed to shepherd the project through to completion; to this end, the Mission de préfiguration du Centre de ressources et de mémoires de l’immigration published by the Documentation Française is a useful document in order to gauge the rationale that informed the project’s organizational principles. “The recognition of the place of immigrant populations in the destiny of the Republic is important,” Toubon explained, “and should help every French person arrive at a more accurate idea of French identity as it stands today, while also reconciling the multiple components that make up the French nation with those values that represent its strengths.”7 The emphasis is placed on the constitutive dimension whereby immigration is to be understood as an integral part of French history. Framing the project around the concept of “French identity” complicated the task of evaluating the history of immigration in France. The notion itself has been contested, and it has therefore proved difficult to build a project around which a lack of consensus has existed from the outset. Let us explore the CNHI’s stated objectives a little further: Under the aegis of its research and cultural project, the public establishment aims to: outline and manage the national museum of the history and cultures of immigration, an original cultural ensemble of a museologic and research nature , responsible for preserving and presenting to the public collections that are 44 Africa and France representative of the history, arts and cultures of immigration; to preserve, protect and restore for the good of the State those cultural objects included in the inventory of the national museum...