‘C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe’: Decolonizing plantationocene visualities in Amalia Ramanankirahina’s Le grand couvert | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 25, Issue 1-2
  • ISSN: 1368-2679
  • E-ISSN: 1758-9142

Abstract

This article explores how the installation by Malagasy artist Amalia Ramanankirahina intersects colonial plantations and a French Parisian orchard to decolonize contemporary French ecological thinking. As this article explores how French rural ecologies are embedded within a wider variety of environments and their violent plantationocenic histories, it argues that performs ‘aesthetic marronage’, a form of fugitivity that breaks through ‘traditional’ plantation visual cultures – ones that freeze plantations into a space of leisure and exoticism, albeit a violent one. Tracing the contours of the material, economic and ecological, ‘legacies’ of the plantationocene in and across contemporary France and its overseas territories, this article ultimately demonstrates how helps interrogate what Stephanie Posthumus has called ‘ecological dwelling’, the evolving processes of bodies in and with space. While Posthumus understands ecological dwelling primarily along urban/rural paradigms, Ramanankirahina’s decolonial work injects new perspectives on this concept. In , the plantation bleeds into the colonial space of a former rural space now known as a . At the intersection of the plantation and the banlieue, aesthetic marronage reveals the tensions of dwelling ecologically in sites that racially and economically restrict one’s subjective formation.

Résumé

Cet article explore la façon dont l’installation (2014) de l’artiste malgache Amalia Ramanankirahina entrecroise l’espace de la plantation coloniale et celui d’un verger de banlieue parisienne afin de décoloniser la pensée écologique française contemporaine, dont les courants ont effacé la grande diversité d’environnements plantationocènes en faveur d’une écologie portée sur un monde rural français en extinction. Il propose que crée un «marronage esthétique» qui donne à voir des formes de fugitivité se déjouant des codes visuels des cultures de plantations, tels que le supposé exotisme d’un environnement propice à la découverte, la végétation luxuriante, et les explorations de territoires dits vierges. Dans , l’espace de la plantation s’inscrit dans celui de la banlieue française, elle-même socialement et politiquement marginalisée. Traçant les contours des ecologies coloniales en France et dans les territoires d’outre-mer, cet article démontre comment injecte d’une pensée décoloniale ce que Stéphanie Posthumus nomme ‘ecological dwelling’ (l’habiter écologique). Pour Posthumus, la notion de ‘ecological dwelling’ s’entend principalement autour d’axes urbains et ruraux. A la croisée de la plantation et de la banlieue parisienne, le marronage esthétique du révèle toutes les tensions que soulèvent le concept de ‘ecological dwelling’ dans des espaces dont les dynamiques raciales, écologiques, et économiques, empêchent toute formation de subjectivité individuelle et de groupe.

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2022-09-01
2024-03-29
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): banlieue; Code Noir; ecocriticism; marronage; patrimoine; relationality
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