New home for the research blog

I have moved my research blog, which documented my PhD research fieldwork  in Paris from 2005-7, to a new location.The posts on this site will remain available as an archive resource for anyone interested in the project for the French national museum of immigration (Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration) and the debates that surrounded it at the time. There is also information there about the process of doing a PhD which some readers may find helpful.

The research blog will not however be further updated although no doubt some of the issues it raises will occassionally find echoes in my posts on this site. To find out more about this site see the About me page.

First Sunday of the month: the best and the worst of the Louvre and a suggestion for solving the free entry dilemma

National museums in France are free on the first Sunday of the month. (Incidentally, this could be set to change: extending free opening was one of Sarkozy’s manifesto promises. But the government has clearly got cold feet about this and for now it looks as if it may only be extended to 18-26 year olds [France 2]). And since this was my last ‘first Sunday’ in Paris (for a while at least) I felt there was nothing for it but to head for the Louvre.

I like the Louvre. I genuinely think it probably houses the finest collection of Western art across a vast range of periods of any museum in the world. But I still find it a bit intimidating. Where to start?

In one sense there is an easy answer to this question: the ‘Porte des lions’, the entrance to the ‘Pavillion des sessions‘, the Quai Branly’s annexe in the Louvre. Most people don’t seem to know there is an entrance here so you can almost always get in without queuing. I was also glad of the opportunity to revisit some of the items in this section; although I came here several times when it opened in 2000 I had not been back since, despite my interest in its politics. Housed at the end of a wing I couldn’t help feeling that lots of visitors seemed to have stumbled across it a bit by accident and were wandering round looking lost and bemused. And no wonder. None of the works on display carry labels; instead you have to look around to find the bare minimum of information on a nearby wall. The consequence is that visitors simply do not know what they are looking at, and on a busy day they don’t take the time to find out. When Kerchache was imagining the aesthetic awe that these works were supposed to inspire he clearly didn’t imagine doing so in the company of the camera-wielding 3-kids-in-tow masses. In these conditions the display does not do the works ‘justice’ (in Kerchache’s terms), it does them a grave disservice.

Yet in a funny sort of way I can’t blame him for not considering the needs of the public. A visit to the Louvre on a Sunday is enough to make you throw all your egalitarian visitor-as-expert ideas out of the window. Especially if the one flaw in your queue-dodging plans is that to get to the rest of the stuff you want to see you have to negotiate a passage past both the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. After today I completely understand why the staff complain of stress [previous post]; they are simply overwhelmed and have to spend all day tackling visitor idiocy. There were camera flashes going off all over the place, for example. One section, housing a magnificent collection of late 18th century Spanish and Italian sketches, including incredibly rare and fragile works by Goya, has huge signs at the entrance in at least ten languages saying no photography at all. And that still didn’t seem to stop people. Elsewhere I saw someone coming dangerously close to elbowing a 2nd century BC statue of the god Pan, not to mention actually prodding a 3,500 year old carved inscirption in the near eastern antiquities section. We all know that museums should not expect to command too much respect – that way they become unapproachable and elitist – but once certain works become just the next stop after the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe everything else seems to me to get treated with a carelessness that borders on scorn.

Whilst visitor behaviour was bad the Louvre management was arguably even worse. About an hour into my visit the security alarm went off and a message came over the tannoy asking visitors to vacate the building by the nearest exit in both French and English. I began to make my way to follow the instructions but soon noticed that no one else seemed to be paying the announcement any attention. I stopped to question a member of staff. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you can continue your visit until one of my colleagues directs you to leave.” So what was the point of the alarm? And what would happen if they really did need to evacuate. Most visitors clearly seemed to think it didn’t apply to them (rather like the “no flash photography” and “no touching” notices). Shortly afterwards the confusion generated did create a mass movement towards one exit. At a crush in a doorway a member of staff told the assembled crowd to retrace its steps, yet her colleague would not let anyone leave by the opposite exit. There were probably 200 people momentarily trapped in a single gallery. Not an ideal way of managing visitor flow, especially in the context of a security alert.

But… even on the busiest days you can make new discoveries and see wondrous things, especially if you take your chances with the more obscure sections. I had printed out an itinerary, that led me round a series of 17th century French ‘painters of reality’. A wise choice; French painting up on the second floor was much calmer. And whilst the tone of the guide was odd – it certainly assumed a higher level of knowledge of French art history than I possess, and I suspect I could probably count myself amongst the better informed category of general visitor – I took me into areas I had never previously explored (despite what I estimate must be at least 10 visits over the course of the last 10 years). This picture (‘The cheat’) by Georges de la Tour is definitely a new favourite and if you can face the trek across to the opposite wing it makes a wonderful pair with Caravaggio’s equally mischevious Fortune teller.

In short, however frustrating the Louvre can be, it never disappoints, if you approach it with a strategy. The problem is that the museum does little to help its estimated 5 million overseas visitors every year. The itineraries are a good idea, but they are only available in French and they’re not terribly user friendly.

I do wonder what the impact of free entry would be too. Ticket sales fo the permanent collections bring in a much-needed €40 million to the Louvre and I understand they’re reluctant to sacrifice this. I know that the main reason I haven’t been to the Louvre more often this year is because I am reluctant to pay; given the choice I’d always rather spend my money on a temporary exhibition somewhere else. But then I’m already part of the captive audience and the Louvre is right in thinking that there’s no particular good reason why the state should subsidise my leisure activities. If the Louvre were free all the time then I don’t think you would get the absurd crush I saw today. And whilst becoming free isn’t necessarily the magic solution for attracting new audiences having to pay is definitely a serious deterrent. If I were in charge I’d consider solving the problem by introducing a camera fee equivalent to if not higher than the current entrance price, €10 for example. So that those who just want to snap themselves in front of the Mona Lisa still have to pay for the privilege. Some of the shortfall from ticket sales would probably also be made up by increased postcard and catalogue sales.

The Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration will not be free (see entrance fee policy here). I have to say I think this is an error. You can’t set out to change people’s attitudes and then expect them to pay for the privilege. And it certainly wont’ help attract that elusive new audience. By all means charge for shows, screenings and performances but for the permanent exhibition? Madness.  

‘My compliment, my enemy, my oppressor, my love’: Kara Walker at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris

A couple of weeks ago I went to see this exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. Kara Walker’s work explores the constrution of black identity in the US at the intersection of race, gender and history.  Visting the exhibition I was struck by the extent to which it was rooted firmly in an American collective imaginary which neither I, nor I imagine the majority of visitors to this exhibition, share, apart from in a superficial manner through books and films. So I found it difficult to engage fully with the work that revisits specific episodes of the American civil war, for example, since to my shame, I don’t know one civil war battle from the next and have only the vaguest notion of the key protagonists.

Nevertheless, visually the work is very powerful. The silhouette technique seems to operate on the level of the uncanny; Walker’s cut-out figures re-populate colonial era America with the ghosts public memory has often excluded. For (very much as in France) a narrative of liberty, democracy and rights has been underpinned by a sexualized, racialized violence that Walker succeeds in making ever present.

Much has been written about Walker’s work and indeed her practice is accompanied by a rich theoretical discourse; I have little to add. However, reading Thomas J. Schlereth’s essay ‘Collecting Ideas and Artefacts: Common Problems of History Museums and History Texts’ in ed. Carbonell, Museum Studies: an Anthology of Contexts (2004) [Amazon] I was struck by the extent to which Walker’s artistic practice seems to me to be an excellent example of how art can be used to reveal and attack the ’six historical fallacies’ that Schlereth identifies as characterizing (US) history museums. These are: that history is progressive, patriotic, nostalgia, consensus, simple and money. Whilst Schlereth could be accused of at times confusing the practice of history with history in the sense of the past, Walker’s work, by gnawing away at the core narrative and images on which much American collective self-identity has been founded, seems to me to be doing for history what Fred Wilson (whose work I admire greatly) has done for museum ethnography. How fabulous it would be to see Kara Walker as an artist in residence somewhere like the V&A where her work could be shown alongside the decorative arts whose idiom it borrows and undermines.

Towards conviality? Re-imagining community in the UK and France

A headline grabbing figure on the front page of this Saturday’s Guardian: according to the Office of National Statistics one in four babies born in Britain have at least one foreign parent. Leaving aside the hysterical doom-warnings of Migration Watch (“Many people simply don’t understand how this could have happened without anyone being consulted” (panic!) “I imagine people just got on with it,” remarked a friend (with foreign born parents) laconically, reading the same article, “that tends to be how babies happen”) the article is measured in tone and breaks down the figures carefully.  The article concludes with a comment from Rick Muir (a name that some readers of this blog may recognise), research fellow at the ippr:

“One thing the government has failed to do is to tell a story about the kind of society that we are today…which is one of multiple cultures and identities.

“Britain is now a place with diversity at its heart. With a few exceptions, it doesn’t necessarily think of itself in that way. But that is what we are.”

This is interesting because recent ippr reports (such as this one again by Rick Muir), funded it should be noted by the HLF and the National Museum’s Directors Conference, make the case for greater state involvement in the construction of a civic framework that ‘makes shared identification among its citizens possible’ (p.17). Whilst the language is cautious (and intelligent, seeking a balance between symbolic and concrete measures to encourage social cohesion) the report does sketch out an active role for the state:

[The state] should ensure that our national symbols, rituals and the civic calendar reflect our cultural diversity and include the culturally diverse narratives that make up Britain’s history. It should seek out new sources of national identity around which British citizens of all backgrounds can share some common ground. (p.17)

Is the ippr starting to prepare the ground for a museum of immigration in the UK? Certainly, it would be consistent with their arguments. I shall be watching the public reception of the French project carefully.

Meanwhile, the Guardian also included an upbeat comment piece by Robert Winder (‘Brazil but for the sunshine’). Winder also seems to be to be arguing for a concept of national identity based on cosmopolianism. One of the most consistent and forceful advocates of this approach is Paul Gilroy, who makes the case for the concept of ‘convivial culture’ in After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia (2004) [Amazon]. I was reminded of this reading this article from 2005 by Achille Mbembe, recently republished by ldh-toulon, which seems to me to be ploughing the same furrow as both Gilroy and the ippr. According to Mbembe,

Mais pour bâtir une nation conviviale, symbole d’une véritable « cité universelle », il faut que soit mis fin à la crise de la mal-représentation qui frappe toutes les institutions de la vie publique française [...].

Some of the measure Mbembe calls for, such as a diversification of the French elite, seem already to be underway. Others have little chance of being taken up (such as positive discrimination, although his version is probably more nuanced than the name suggests, corresponding more to the ‘tactical universalism’ (Rosello) of the ZEPs and the ZUPs than any sort of quota policy). But the key point, developed through a reading of Glissant amongst others, is this:

[Le choix pour le gouvernement] est d’embrasser politiquement le caractère désormais pluri-culturel, pluri-racial et pluri-religieux de la nation et d’ouvrir ainsi la voie vers une société véritablement cosmopolite, qui se définit explicitement comme telle, et qui cherche à traduire cet idéal dans ses institutions, ses politiques et sa culture.

Mbembe remains a marginal figure in French thought because of his espousal of an explicity postcolonial perspective. But nevertheless, his arguments could certainly be used to support a museum of immigration, so long as it avoids placing the emphasis on an assimilationist concept of integration. The question for the CNHI remains whether it is ready to overcome the cultural and institutional obstacles associated with the workings of state bureaucracy in order to make cosmopolitan conviviality (or ‘the new identity politics’ in ippr’s terms) a material reality. Which is also the (well, a) big question for my thesis.

Liverpool International Slavery Museum opens: the view (or silence) from France

Yesterday, on the international day for the remembrance of the slave trade and its abolition, the International Slavery Museum opened in Liverpool. Ceri has posted a useful round-up of the press coverage on the Attic (thank you!).

I was having coffee yesterday with a French friend/informant who wanted to know whether and how attitudes towards the colonial past were different in the UK. I was able to use the example of the slavery museum as evidence of the fact that yes, I thought they genuinely were. In France the Comite pour la memoire de l’esclavage looks no nearer to achieving the creation of a ‘Centre national pour l’Histoire et la Mémoire de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et leurs abolitions’ as its 2006 report makes clear. In addition its calls for ‘la réalisation d’une exposition nationale sur l’esclavage, la traite négrière et leurs abolitions dans un musée national majeur’; even this modest call (for a temporary exhibition) looks improbable, particularly in the current political climate. Interestingly, I can’t find any evidence of French media coverage of the Liverpool opening.

There are myriad reasons why the situation in France is different; most of them have to do I would suggest with the weight of the inheritance of the Enlightenment tradition that a) cannot accept that such things were done not just in spite of but often in the name of reason and b) denies the expression of collective identities (particulary when these are felt to be based on ethnic/racial categories). So giving credence to the idea of a black collective memory of slavery is seen as encouraging social segregation. Although this is just my opinion, I don’t think the evidence from the UK bears out this fear at all. Rather than the black population becoming more alienated through the public recognition of the memory of slavery if anything the opposite is true; it is easier to build a community if we share ownership of the past and everyone’s story has a place.

The slavery museum’s motto appears to be ’setting the truth free’. Such broad-brush statements make the postmodernist in me wince (much like the CNHI’s ‘devoir de verite’). I have recently been reading some of the original documents relating to the creation of the ‘Musee des colonies’ in 1931, a salutary reminder that what passes for ‘truth’ at one time may look a lot like prejudice through the lense of history (such as the ’scientific’ proof of racial hierarchies, with which the documents abound). But still, I am heartened by Tristram Hunt’s remarks in the Guardian:

This progressive, rigorous approach to the past has led the debate away from the dead end of apologies and guilt. While the media has obsessed about the precise wording of the government’s “expression of regret”, community groups and educational workers have got on with explaining the history and its meanings.

I’m all for less ‘truth’ and more rigour. And pleased that at the grassroots this would appear to be precisely what’s happening. I probably won’t get to visit Liverpool until some time next year, but I’m looking forward to it. Before that though I very much hope to have the opportunity to discuss all these issues with my friend/colleague Narguesse Keyhani (forthcoming paper for the 2007 congress of the Association francaise de sciences politiques here) who’s currently in Liverpool conducting fieldwork around the museum. There is so much potential for some really interesting comparative work here.

[Image copied from http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/graphics/ismbanner.jpg]

Updates

I’ve been a bit silent on this blog for the last little while. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m starting to move into the final phase of my thesis; it’s more a question of trying to synthesize everything I’ve learned over the last three years, than investigating new angles. So perhaps I’m naturally a little less curious – for now – about what’s going on around me in France too. I do intend to keep on posting, but it may be a little less regularly.

Even during the slow month of August the debate has continued around Sarkozy’s comments in Senegal and his memory policy generally (see Philippe Bernard in Le Monde).  Ldh-Toulon has been the most useful feed here not least because it also monitors the Algerian paper El Watan. Hence it has followed up the excellent article by Coquery-Vidrovitch, Manceron and Stora in Liberation with the view from the other side of the Mediterranean and an interview with Stora. Gilbert Meynier has asked whether a collective public reaction from historians would be appropriate: ‘un appel invitant les responsables politiques à reconnaître publiquement les responsabilités de la puissance publique française dans les traumatismes qu’a générés la colonisation.’ In many ways it is remarkable how many times over the last two or three years historians have taken a public stance (over the law of 23 February 2005, through the CVUH and the collective that emerged from the CNHI historians after the creation of the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity), using their professional capital in order to create a public debate. I do not see it happening here however, partly because there is as yet to single act to rally around (such as a law, or the creation of a Ministry) and there might be many who would feel that to renew the public controversy (‘for’ or ‘against’ colonialism) might actually be to the detriment of serious research.

Sarkozy and the rehabilitation of colonialism: the debate continues

Sarkozy may be off on his hols (at the expense of his anonymous ‘friends’) but the debate around his speech in Dakar continues. Achille Mbembe’s vigorous and thoughtful critique is now available in English [Africultures]. In the interim he seems to have got more angry, as this most recent article shows [Africultures]. He summarizes Sarkozy’s ‘memory policy’ in the following abrupt but pertinent fashion:

 Pour le néoconservatisme français, la manipulation de l’histoire nationale passe par trois voies : la récupération de certaines figures emblématiques de la gauche (Jaurès, Blum, Moquet), le procès intenté à la culture et à la pensée dite de “Mai 68″, et pour ce qui nous concerne directement, la réhabilitation du colonialisme (qui va de pair avec la persécution des étrangers dans l’Hexagone).

But he also dismisses the notion of ‘repentance’, as, he notes, do many of his peers:

Par ailleurs, beaucoup d’entre nous, de Frantz Fanon à Françoise Vergès (La république coloniale), avons toujours dit que la repentance et la réparation produisent des victimes. La vulgate de la repentance perpétue l’image de l’autre comme corps non parlant, comme corps sans énergie ni vie. Et cela, ce n’est pas nous. Car nous ne sommes pas seulement des victimes de notre propre drame. Nous en sommes également des acteurs et des témoins.

A useful corrective to all those who accuse the ‘post-colonialists’ of cultivating their victimhood. Recognition = recognition as actors, not as victims. (Indeed, as I noted in my article for ‘Museum and Society’ the status of victim is often now more important to the ex-colonizer than to the ex-colonized).

This summary article form [ldh-toulon] is also very useful.

Museum archives…?

I was talking yesterday to someone working in a museum but who also has extensive research experience about studying museums. In his view it’s much easier to work on museums from, say, the 1930s than it is now, because the archives are so rich. Now discussions between curators, designers and other staff members all take place by email and are rarely archived. So future historians will have their work cut out. Obviously the problem of archiving digital materials is not unique to museums, but I was interested that institutions dedicated to conserving and communicating the past might have such a cavalier attitude to their own material traces. Certainly, when I approached a small museum requesting access to materials documenting the preparation of a 1998 exhibition they were happy to help, but could only dig out 4 small files, amounting to a stack of paper not much more than 15cm high. How common is this I wonder and is it symptomatic of the disconnect between researchers and practitioners (who are too absorbed in day-to-day decision-making to recognise its eventual interest and implications)?

Travail de fourmi…

I am currently going through the several different versions I have of the exhibition scenography. I have three versions of a long text with changes a few weeks apart, plus one detailed earlier version, plus three different versions of the design in plan form. All very useful material for my thesis but a complete headache to work through. In several instances I only have a hard printed copy and nothing on file. So I can’t use qualititative data analysis software, such as NVivo. And anyway, I’d probably spend more time coding stuff than I really want to. So as a consequence I’m reduced to going through everything page by page with a big spreadsheet. Very very boring.

Thinking the current debate on national identity through Gupta & Ferguson

I have been doing my filing this afternoon. Not my favourite of tasks, but the advantage of allowing a large pile to accumulate is that when you come to sort it all out it often contains things you’d almost forgotten about. So it was this afternoon when I came across a print out of Gupta and Ferguson’s classic article from 1992: ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference’ (Cultural Anthropology 7.1: 6-23 and widely reproduced in readers). Gupta and Ferguson were amongst the first to draw on the insights of deconstruction to consider how anthropologists were responsible for producing the concepts they were trying to study, and notably the idea of distinct cultural spheres. In their view, the innovations of theory force us to reconsider the idea of discrete cultures. This has significant consequences for our own constructions of identity. As they wrote provocatively:

“Englishness,” for instance, in contemporary, internationalized England is just as complicated and nearly as deterritorialized a notion as Palestinian-ness or Armenian-ness, since “England” (“the real England”) refers less to a bounded place than to an imagined state of being or moral location. (10)

This idea precedes Aftar Brah’s influential (at least in the British context) concept of ‘diaspora space’ by a few years.

Their argument, it seems to me, has major repercussions for the current French debate. In their view, the more uncertain identities become (through processes of migration or other forms of rapid socio-economic change), ‘ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become ever more salient’ (10) or in other words, communities tend to turn in on themselves, to look for something to cling to. This made me think of this recent article by the Immigration Minister in Liberation. Hortefeux juxtaposes a idealized (and now lost) past with the uncertain present in order to justify his decision to impose an official vision of national identity. Leaving aside the flagrant contradictions in his arguments (‘La fin de l’évidence du sentiment d’identité nationale a au moins pour vertu qu’être Français se vit désormais comme un choix plus que comme une condition. La France suscite l’adhésion plus que la soumission’  – but if this ‘choice’ is a good thing, why deplore the wide range of identities individuals can choose from two paragraphs above? And why try to impose criteria to which new arrivals will be forced to ’submit’?), I am unconvinced of the empirical basis for his arguments i.e. that what being ‘French’ meant used to be self-evident: it has always been an imagined concept and hence imagined differently by different groups.

The main thrust of Gupta & Ferguson’s argument is to rail against the ‘naturalism’ (“being French used to be evident” i.e. natural) that charaterizes vision such as Hortefeux’s, which they see, quite rightly, as the means to maintain a segregated society:

For example, the area of immigration and immigration law is one practical area where the politics of space and the politics of otherness link up very directly. [...] If we accept a world of originally separate and culturally distinct places, then the question of immigration policy is just a question of how hard we should try to maintain this original order. In this perspective, immigration prohibitions are a relatively minor matter. [...] If, on the other hand, it is acknowledged that cultural difference is produced and maintained in a field of power relations in a world always already spatially interconnected, then the restriction of immigration becomes visible as one of the main means through which the disempowered are kept that way. [...] The anthropological task of de-naturalizing cultural and spatial divisions at this point links up with the political task of combating a very literal “spatial incarceration of the native” (Appadurai 1988) within economic spaces zoned, as it were, for poverty [...]. There is room, for instance, for a great deal more anthropological involvement, both theoretical and practical, [...] with the political and organizing rights of immigrant workers, and with the appropriation of anthropological concepts of “culture” and “difference” into the repressive ideological apparatus of immigration law and the popular perceptions of “foreigners” and “aliens. “  (17)

Fortunately, the Association française des anthropologues (AFA) is also now broadly of this view.  See this statement.