International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 15, Issue 3-4, 2013

The trauma of the Algerian War and of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s triggered a new awareness in France, which, building on the thought of Camus, Sartre and M. Merleau-Ponty emerging from the experience of World War II and the division between East and West, contributed to a questioning of humanist thought. The work of the French poet Jean Sénac, who was born and lived in Algeria after independence, and who was assassinated in 1973, bears witness to this profound crisis in humanism in a decisive moment in history, philosophy and poetry. The poems published by Camus from 1954 onwards, together with the unpublished tragedy Le Soleil interdit, written between 1954 and 1958, represent the collapse of the humanist dream to reconcile ‘citizens of beauty’ into an Algeria united by fraternity.

The article proposes a reading of Les Damnés de la terre by F. Fanon (1968a) via its original and compelling conjugation of a revolutionary, anti-colonial humanism. Insofar as Fanon’s is resolutely a humanism to come, a postcolonial ‘invention of a new species’, what I will call Fanon’s inhumanism must be grasped in its fundamentals as a complex and original critique of colonial, and defense of anticolonial, violence. The article proposes that the incommensurability of heterogeneous colonial situations requires not moralistic commentary but the elucidation of the logic of any singular case and of the greater or lesser necessity of violence there within.

Since the 1950s and the period of decolonization, intellectuals in the francophone world have addressed the legacy of humanism. Frantz Fanon, amongst others, wrote on the possibilities of a new humanism and of ‘new man’ in a decolonized world. This humanism to be constructed, this humanism to come, was faced with the difficulty of how to negotiate the legacy of the European tradition of humanism and the conceptually constructed tension between particularizing experiences deemed proper to cultures outside of Europe and a notion of the universal, which, while an abstraction, was also characteristically French. In examining works by two Tunisian intellectuals – Albert Memmi and Hélé Béji – this article analyses what they try to do with the term ‘humanism’. It is clear that both intellectuals advocate a better world and an end to human suffering, but their principal weapon– humanism – lacks sharpness and the kind of political edge (dialectical) that characterized Fanon’s notion of ‘new humanism’.

In her 2004 study of gender and sexuality Undoing Gender, Judith Butler examines the uneasy relationship between human rights discourses and certain oppressed minorities, and cites Fanon in order to call for the continued redefinition of the ‘human’ each time the category is invoked. This article seeks to explore this continued process of redefinition by returning to the period of decolonization, specifically by means of a detailed engagement with Kateb Yacine’s poetics of ‘revolution’. Kateb conceives ‘revolution’ not only as the demand for regime change, but also as the broader movement of peoples in relation to one another and to the world, and he understands humanity to be defined by this ongoing movement. Moreover, his works on the decolonization of Algeria, including Nedjma (1956), Le Cadavre encerclé and Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité seek to perform the movement of man by figuring not only a commitment to contestation, but also a call for reinvention that evolves out of a reimagination of the past. Kateb’s humanist revolution is a multidirectional movement that continually seeks out what colonial discourse effaced, not in order simply to re-establish tradition, but to rediscover it repeatedly and remodel it in the service of an open future.

This article demonstrates that the notion of the ‘human’ – ‘man’, ‘anthropos’, ‘muntu’ (and their sub-human opposites: the pagan, the savage, the ‘docile’ body) – has played a crucial role in V. Y. Mudimbe’s work since the 1960s. Indeed, there is in the author’s production a tendency to explore the human sciences and the ways in which they have contributed to the real and imaginary shape, but also obfuscation, of sub-Saharan Africa and its people since the colonial era. From his early writings, Mudimbe, the humanist, the former Benedictine who at the age of 18 was ‘completely Francophonized, submitted to Greco-Roman values and Christian norms’ (Mudimbe 1991: 94), has conducted a systematic critique of humanism in order to identify the reasons behind Africa’s material, political and epistemological dependency on the West, and to envisage routes to its resurrection, a term also used here to reiterate the importance of religion and theology in Mudimbe’s trajectory. The first part of the article focuses on The Invention of Africa and examines Mudimbe’s adoption of a set of analytical models (previously developed by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses) to excavate the discursive orders presiding over the emergence of Black Africans as ‘objects’ of knowledge. The second part of this study registers Mudimbe’s partial dissatisfaction with structuralist anthropology that, although free from former racial prejudices, continues to address other cultures ‘allochronically’ (Johannes Fabian) and often circumvents the human in the name of scientific objectivity. Finally, the study reflects upon Mudimbe’s many attempts – for instance in essays such as Parables and Fables, Les Corps glorieux, Tales of Faith, and Cheminements – to blur the divide between the scholarly essay and the autobiography and to return to his ‘own foundation’ (Fanon) as an African artist and intellectual.

This article examines the place of the human in Hélène Cixous’s work. Taking her extended conversation with Mireille Calle-Gruber (‘Entre Tiens’) as a starting point, the article shows how Cixous employs the word ‘human’ to denominate a transformational, embodied process, directed at an ethico-political becoming, rather than to invoke a differentia specifica vis-à-vis other forms of life. She thereby moves our conceptions of the ‘human’ beyond rational subjectivity and universal humanism, and we find a double investment in the term: Cixous’s ‘human’ takes into account our material existences and affective entanglements with other (human and non-human) beings, but it also invokes our specific capacity as human beings to transform and create ourselves and our environments in unforeseen ways. Such a conception of the ‘human’ is deeply embedded in Cixous’s formative experiences in colonial Algeria, as this article argues with particular attention to Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000) and her writings on Algeria published in Stigmata. Escaping Texts (1998). The article takes two recurring images in these texts as central examples to unravel the links between Cixous’s two strands to her understanding of ‘human’ and her experiences of colonial injustice. After first laying out the two strands, which become explicit in ‘Entre Tiens’, the article subsequently turns to the figure of Fips, the dog of the Cixous family in Algiers, and to the image of closed gates as markers of colonial dehumanization and racialized social inclusion/exclusion. By thinking through these figures, Cixous analyses the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and anti-Semitism and develops her own response to it, arguing for human relationality and affective corporeality, for the human as a specific disposition and responsibility within a larger universe, and she is shown to thus challenge the false humanism of the colonial project.

This article analyses the flux of metamorphosis that is richly evoked in the literary works of the Mauritian-born writer Ananda Devi and that testifies both to the radical positions of alterity experienced by her various protagonists and to the political and poetical possibilities involved in reimagining boundaries between humans and animals. Placing Moi, l’interdite and La Vie de Joséphin le fou (A. Devi) in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of bare life and Judith Butler’s expositions on precarious life, the article explores the multiple tensions at play in Devi’s depictions of the human-animal. Devi’s writing neither exclusively relegates the human-animal to an abject debasement, nor excessively celebrates the hybrid as a revolutionary figure. At times basely stripped of their humanity, at others tantalizingly transgressive, and often both, Devi’s metamorphic protagonists are intricately and subtly bound up with the political layerings and divisions of postcolonial Mauritian society, all the while hinting towards a poetics of reconciliation that emerges in an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability.

Focusing on the 2010 project Congo belge en images, in which the photographer Carl de Keyzer and the historian Johan Lagae exhibited and published a selection of pictures from the colonial archives of the Tervuren museum, this article examines the shifting presence of the human in photographs of the Belgian Congo. Debates surrounding the use of photographic archives have often emphasized the necessity to recover photographs’ original meaning in order to counter their potential instrumentalization. Building on recent interventions such as Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photograhy (2008), this article proposes an alternative approach, in which the tension between photography’s status as historical proof and its openness to reinterpretation is in fact central to the ethical function of the medium. It is indeed through this tension, as this article shows, that Congo belge en images offers a visual reflection that moves beyond previous humanist or humanitarian discourses and interrogates our very ability to recognize the presence of the human.

This article uses writings by the French novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye (born in Pithiviers in 1967) to theorize a very particular kind of postcolonial inhumanness specific to certain ‘hybrid’ subjects. NDiaye’s work revolves obsessively around the psychic (and often fantastically physical) disintegration of characters (coded as a racialized minority) who fail to internalize a sufficiently ‘alive’ imago of their mother (coded as white). The NDiayean protagonist’s sense of herself as a living human being becomes damaged to the point of irreparability, as she drifts between states of blankness, immobility and affective spectralization. NDiaye’s racialization of psychoanalyst André Green’s dead mother complex provides an important psycho-social context for ‘inhuman’ affectlessness. NDiaye’s scenarios show how a certain kind of postcolonial hybrid is doubly ‘orphaned’, not in concrete, provable or representable terms, but via the emotional deadness of her ‘blank’ mother and the unspoken refusal of her only motherland to recognize her as one of its human children. NDiaye’s protagonists in texts such as En famille (1990) and Autoportrait en vert (2005) dwell in non-human half-life and melancholic ghostliness, emotionally evacuated and symbolically castrated by their internalization of the dead white mother(s). If a more recent text like the novel Mon coeur à l’étroit (2007) manages to offer some kind of tentative ‘happy end’, its protagonist Nadia achieving a belated sense of herself as potentially both human and alive when she manages to give birth to the fantastically dead material she has been carrying inside her, this resolution seems to depend on the text’s concomitant insistence that Nadia is not a hybrid, but in fact has two non-white parents who are alive and well and living on a fantasy island. NDiaye’s ‘family romances’ may be becoming more optimistic, then, but their dream of a postcolonial new human appears to necessitate the foreclosure of the old non-human’s original, messy mixedness.

This article examines incarceration and socialization as depicted in Jacques Audiard’s film Un Prophète (2009). The postcolonial prison in the centre of the nation, called ‘Centrale’, is a site where postcolonial humanism is pushed to its limit. A close reading of the film reveals currency and mobility working in tandem, as illustrated by the appearance of a 50-franc bill depicting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince in the opening and closing scenes. The main character of the film negotiates how to stay alive in prison, and how to get ahead on the outside. As insides and outsides are governed both by surveillance and the bio-political in the postcolonial nation, it becomes increasingly clear that the nation itself is its own prison.