‘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 [...]

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!) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]