Representations of the past linked to colonialism have been disseminated through a wide variety of media,1 including artefacts, texts, still photographs and films, buildings, sites, performances, speech, and sounds. Since the colonial empires ended, these representations have been reevaluated and appropriated They are often contested, contradicted, distorted, and sometimes ignored, whether implicitly and uncritically or by taking a well-reasoned critical distance. This collection in Passés Futurs2aims to explore the ways in which the colonial past has been recaptured and the many issues in play. Published in two parts, it examines scholarly works in ethnology, historiography, and museum studies; artistic creations in literature, the visual arts, and cinema; and tourist- and heritage-related mainstream cultural productions characterising past and present uses of a history put to the test of postcolonial times. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers to the movement away from colonialism, that is, from the colonial period and the colonial experience; these are indeed the two matrices that shaped the ways of doing and thinking of both colonised people and their colonisers, and can only be transcended through a critical re-examination of their legacies.

There is a complex genealogical connection between the colonial and the postcolonial which the individuals, groups, and institutions at the centre of the case studies presented here make use of. This connection is still at work in the attachments, denials, and antagonisms that bring into the present the now bygone era of colonialism, one that still continues to affect subjectivities, practices, and bodies. The collection of essays pays special attention to memory productions, artistic creations, and cultural appropriations that repeat, transform, or subvert narratives inherent in a past interpreted not only as a context generating social and political changes, but also as a repertoire of symbols and signs that are sorted, selected, manipulated, and exhibited in public spaces for specific purposes.

The narratives conveyed by the different ways of interpreting the colonial legacy are drawn from the sources and material traces it left behind and reflect the emergence of contemporary quests and questioning. They express a particular condition, one made up of both continuity with a bygone era and non-contemporaneity, or even performative anachronisms – in other words they consist of visions that enact a posteriori the elapsed time of European domination in a present in which this domination has taken on new forms and meanings. These narratives are voiced by individuals or networks of actors and organised according to intentions that need to be studied in depth to understand their political and social effects as well as their potential emanicipatory potential with respect to past violence. It is nevertheless important to keep in mind that the colonial invention of Africa entails constantly keeping inventories and re-assembling fragments (through what we can call bricolage practices) of the past in the fields of cultural heritage, museography, and the arts, which are distinct, but communicate with one another.

The aim of this two-volume collection is precisely to carry out such a study through cases that vary over time and space. Focusing mainly on Africa, the articles explore novels, films, rituals, temples, museums, and exhibitions, among other examples, to reveal the reactions they arouse and what they tell us about the postcolonial recovery of the colonial past. In many instances, the upheaval in ways of living and thinking and the deterioration of socio-cultural contexts caused by European imperialism have become – in many situations – the matrix of a search for origins intended to explain and overcome the aspects of colonialism still present in contemporary societies. To expand this hypothesis, which runs through our special issue, we have included case studies outside of Africa – in India and Mexico – to show the diversity of the relationships with the colonial experience as well as the successive positions that such a relationship brought about.

To clarify the approach at the core of our collection, we will begin by distinguishing between the postcolonial situation, postcolonial studies, and the postcolonial relationship.3The postcolonial situation in Africa can be defined as the temporal period that began at independence, when colonial empires, founded essentially on military, administrative, and commercial domination, officially recognised the sovereignty of African countries. This period was characterised by the succession or cohabitation of political, economic, cultural, and religious powers in the former colonial territories that had become nation-states, as well as at lower levels of governance that sometimes straddled national borders, such as kingdoms, regions, and communities. However, the prefix ‘post’ should not suggest that African societies swept away every trace of their colonial legacy in the wake of independence. On the contrary, memories of colonialism continued to shape local African contexts as well as the former metropoles and the movements laying claim to a diasporic identity.4

Postcolonial studies refers to the critique of an episteme – in the Foucaldian sense of the expression – that produced a notional and representational heritage of ethnocentrism, logocentrism, and phallocentrism in scientific, intellectual, and artistic fields. This epistemic heritage has been addressed and criticised using the notions of ‘colonial library’5 or ‘orientalism’.6 It  was an outgrowth of relations of domination and of different governementality regimes, and was also transmitted by the narratives of travellers, historians, and philosophers beginning in Ancient Greece, and more particularly after the sixteenth century.7 According to this critical perspective, such a discursive formation played a role in fabricating empirical realities which had been collected, selected, classified, organised, divided up, and mapped. Thus, according to the philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, ‘Africa’ became the idea and the name of a whole set of ‘fantasies’ that hid its reality:8  It was (or was held to be) the expression of exotic primitiveness and immobility, frozen in the repetition of traditions, ahistorical, and a reservoir of labourers and raw materials.9 Caught up in ‘unitary substantialism’,10 even today’s Africa tends to be reified as a sociocultural, chromatic, and geographical unity – a kind of insular continent bordered by oceans. At once the producer and vector of this discursive and physically concrete violence, such a colonial heritage is still at work in the current asymetrical access to historiographic sources that allow histories of African societies to be written.

Finally, the postcolonial relationship identifies the ‘after’, but above all the still-in-progress becoming of a multifaceted connection between colonised and colonisers and between their true or presumed descendants in Africa or elsewhere. Naturally, the subjection suffered in the past and perpetuated after independence has taken on different faces depending on the specifities of each ‘colonial situation’.11 Imposed socioeconomic transformations shaped a historical moment marked by power relationships that interfered with bodies and sensibilities. Of course, such subjection did not take place without ambiguities, resistances, or politicial protests, nor without accomodations and cultural appropriations. Indeed, it has constantly adapted as circumstances changed and ties between former colonial metropoles and their dependencies were broken or restored. In this sense, we think the postcolonial relationship can best be understood as a phenomenon in which the critique of submission or of the political and notional subalterne condition – resulting from European domination – communicates with the intentional uses or implicit projections of the past by scholars, institutions, and ordinary actors.

In this collection, we take a particular interest in how the postcolonial relationship appears today and the ways in which it was profoundly shaped by a historical experience of imposed domination, whether the domination was directly lived, imagined or retold. This shared experience is the object of both ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory, to use historian Jan Assman’s categories.12

When applied to the study of colonialism, this distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory enriches our understanding of the constant reworking of memory-based fragments of the past or of partial attempts to create inventories. It also makes it possible to explore how such processes contribute to power relationships at work in the specific contexts in which they develop. Postcolonial studies have had a crucial impact on researchers studying African societies. They drew in particular from the Subaltern Studies, an Indian historiographical school that advocates writing the history of dominated groups based on their actions and viewpoints, which are considered irreducible to Western-centred statements and to their concrete ideological control over the formation and justification of colonial empires. Thus, in his introduction to L’Historiographie indienne en débat [Indian History in Debate], the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf, building on the lessons of Subaltern Studies, asks how to exit from the ‘colonial library’ and transposes the question to Africa:

To borrow Chakrabarty’s superb expression [re: concerning Indian historiography], is it possible to write a history of non-Western societies, particularly former colonised societies, by ‘provincialising’ Europe? In a context profoundly influenced by the overwhelming presence of the ‘colonial library’, what does this provincialisation mean with regard to attempts to unveil African history? Or again, how can one avoid the epistemic inventions of orientalism as a representation, construction and/or invention of the Other that accompanied the military, administrative, and commercial bricolage by colonial empires?13

The articles in this series complement and extend Diouf’s questions. Their primary aim is to reflect on the heterogeneous uses of a ‘library’ that oscillates between two extremes: on the one hand, its recurring invocation as if the library were an inescapable foundation, and on the other, its perception as an oppressive matrix.14 Integrating other voices – described elsewhere as a way of ‘being by oneself and for oneself’15 or as ‘African self-writing’16 – can support such a line of thought. However, it is also crucial to analyse how those voices propose narratives that proceed by successive alterations of objects, notions, and images that are central issues for the contributors to this collection. Like Mudimbe, Edward Said acknowledges that, although the critical work of postcolonial authors from Africa, the West Indies, and the Arab world relies on ‘mainstream Western discourses’, in his view their work is ‘only apparently dependent (and by no means parasitic)’, since ‘the result of its originality and creativity has been the transformation of the very terrain of the disciplines’17 and make [the discourse of Europe and the West] ‘acknowledge marginalized or supressed or forgotten histories’.18

In the last few decades, debates have arisen over mediations of the colonial past in Africa – as well as in other regions of the world – in connection with ceremonies and commemorations, museums and memorials, politically committed essays and literary publications, as well as art scenes, performances, and films. All of these media are ‘narratives’ that revisit colonial classifications, invent new aesthetics, and call into question accepted identity categories such as ethnicity, race, gender, and class. Through the prism of a subaltern condition that is ongoing and/or yet to be transcended, these narrative forms and practices are meant to reproduce the actions and viewpoints of previously dominated groups, who mobilise various media (objects, texts, images, or words) taken from the colonial past but reinterpreted and recombined, ‘remixed’,19 distorted, or parodied. ‘Archival art’,20 for example, illustrates artistic ways of using archives to weave ‘a new relation with objects and documents of the past’.21

These items from the past never provide transparent access to the historical period in question; instead, they are integrated into new approaches and new discourses. With this in mind, they constitute a potential space to recreate and fictionalise memory. Some of these fragments may have been forgotten without being lost, and can be reactivated, reread, and reconfigured – yielding what Aleida Assman calls a ‘memory-archive’.22 The same is true of the well-known work of the visual artist Sammy Baloji on dioramas and certain collections of colonial photographs of Katanga at the Turvuren Museum, which the visual artist recomposes to produce artworks that denounce or imagine a way out of foundational colonial violence against cultural intimacy.23

Other examples of these forms of memorial re-creation, stemming from studies in social anthropology and art history, are presented in the edited volume entitled Reclaiming Heritages. Alternatives Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Based on his research in Sierra Leone, Paul Basu shows how several ‘mnemonic worlds’ 24 can cohabitate, be layered, and negotiated without necessarily creolising memory. The other contributors to this volume examine the various pasts of slavery, colonialism, ancient cults, along with civil or ethnic wars and question the institution of West African cultural and commemorative heritages in which several historical periods and interpretive perspectives combine and interact in an undertaking that deliberately or unconsciously re-semanticises heterogeneous materials.25

More broadly, media that are reworked, transformed, and inserted into contemporary artwork or according to a social rationale of cultural re-appropriation involve a variety of forms and discursive registers. Unearthed boxes of glass plates, photographs, and films are preserved in heritage institutions or end up in private collections, as well as texts of all kinds – (‘ordinary’26 and ‘domestic’ writings, personal journals and diaries, travel accounts, memoires, letters, administrative documents, etc.), sounds recorded in the field, and radio programmes. A mass of scanned documents and other digital content detached from their original material formats circulate on the Internet and social networks. Sometimes classified and inventoried but often unsorted are available for use depending on the interests of the moment. The media used to recapture the colonial past are intertwined and can fuel each other, taking on new forms through multiple back-and-forths, combinations, and interactions’.27 The recollection and appropriation of the past and its scholarly, artistic, or political reformulations are caught up in a web of reciprocal overlapping: speech is reworked through writing and images; writing through speech and images; and images through speech and writing, to the point where the very nature of the document is altered.

What are now commonly referred to as ‘colonial archives’ are the primary source of the material selected for these efforts to reclaim the past. They are considered to be carriers of ethnocentric and racist biases, paternalistic views, and the stench of male chauvinism, all of which must be unveiled for all to see. Colonial archives are diverse and they can serve many purposes. For example, they may be used in a normative sense to refer to the archives of colonial states kept in the National Archives of former colonised countries or former colonial homelands. As products of a policy of control and surveillance, these archives are traces of the various forms of governmentality and colonial violence.28 All the same, the term ‘archive’ has been increasingly diverted from its traditional meaning conferred by institutions, archivists, and historians. The notion has expanded ultimately to designate any type of material that can become food for thought and action, including private and family documents that may offer a different way of looking at history and elicit new forms of rereading and criticism. When employed generically in the singular, the term ‘archive’ encompasses a wide range of media and documents that individuals or groups can access or use to express ideas about the past and subsumes the very system of reordering traces and memory, with its qualified actors, procedures, and institutions.29

Naturally, in order to analyse the various postcolonial ways of recycling the colonial past, it is necessary to avoid formalist and internalist pitfalls: One should not study the different approaches to mediation of the past or the ways in which they are reassembled today without considering how and why they are being produced, altered, remediated, and transformed, the contexts in which they are re-narrated and circulated, and the individuals that appropriate and use them. These actors, whom we see as creators of narratives and memory smugglers, have diverse sociological profiles: They may be artists, cultural or historical and memory brokers,  militants and entrepreneurs of causes, erudites, amateur or self-taught and vernacular intellectuals (also called ‘homespun intellectuals’30), and occasionally scholars and academics, particularly historians and anthropologists.31 Some of them blend materials from the past into argumentative formats that imitate forms of scholarly production. In so doing, they produce a history that might be labelled ‘mock history’, with their own publishing houses and broadcasting channels, and construct their legitimacy ‘by imitating the dominant historical universe from which [they are] in fact excluded’.32

Recalling a historical period that is prolonged through erudite, amateur, revelatory, polemical or creative practices helps to fabricate a sense of belonging by encouraging identification with hereditary lineages, victims, heros, resistants, and ‘intellectuals in the diaspora’.33 As is true of every narrative, be it a foundational myth or a justification for change, the search for stories of origin shapes the image that modern-day men and women have of themselves and inspires both their consciousnesses and their conducts. At times, such orientations may rely on the memory of a past conceived of as being – or having to be – radically different from the present ‘in order to conjure up a past that stands in sharp contrast to the present – a time of liberty and self-determination’34 that could be restored in the near future. In this case, memory is the vector of a condition of ‘nonsimultaneity’ that should enable ‘the possibility of living in two times’35: that of the past to be recovered before (or during) colonisation or that of the period that came afterwards, the end of colonisation, and therefore the future yet to be affirmed. In this conjonction of temporalities, the rhetoric of a recovered memory, a restorative againt self-forgetting, plays a crucial role. In the words of Jan Assmann, it is through ‘a forgotten truth’, one that “had come down untarnished through the ages’,36 that a rhetoric of memory makes it possible to recognise spaces presumed to be authentic that colonisers, as ‘intimate enemies’,37 would not have harmed and which could be sovereignly reclaimed. Forgetting may have somehow protected the descendants of the former colonised by having become ‘others’ themselves.

The interest in the contemporary cultural institution of the colonial past has been one of the key areas of our collective reflection. The actions, creations, and discourses explored in this series connect diverse forms of ‘restorative’ fabrication of a period not entirely bygone with the bricolage-inspired search for references and sources capable of imagining as well as explaining both the genesis of the present and the artistic, scholarly, or political postcolonial reactions in response to it.

Having laid the foundations in this introduction, the articles in this special issue explore simultaneously the local or contextual specificities of their case studies and the ways in which these case studies relate to  a globalised movement calling into question the perpetuation and the present-day transformations of the former expansionist powers. For this first issue, we have opted for a resolutely non-linear itinerary. It begins by immersing the reader in Marcel Griaule’s ethnology in the Dogon region of Mali and in the invention of a traditional society impervious to the contemporary political and tourist practices promoted by pseudo-scholarly approaches in the past (Anne Doquet & Éric Jolly).  This is followed by the inspiration that the novelist Gauz, from France and Côte d’Ivoire, found in the late nineteenth century archives and explorers’ narratives to create literary fiction (Ninon Chavoz). The third article explores an African interpretation of Aeschylus’ play, the Oresteia, and its transposition into a film shot by provocative intellectual, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini at the moment of African political independences (Anne-Violaine Houcke). The last article of the African series takes us from the history of heritage-making of the so-called traditional art in Gabon to its contemporary political instrumentalisation by the Gabonese state as stereotyped emblems of identity (Maxime de Formanoir).

In a comparative contrepoint to these four articles addressing the history of representations of African worlds, a fifth article deals with India and analyses the contemporary development of artistic activism through the History Project installation by Vivan Sundaram in 1997-1998 inside the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta (Nicolas Nercam). Mexico, a country that experienced domination before African and Indian societies, is at the heart of the sixth and last article. It focuses on the figure of María Sabina, an Amerindian ‘priestess’, drawing attention to how she became the incarnation of a continuing ancestral world that is said to have escaped five centuries of colonial domination (Magali Demanget). These two contributions on India and Mexico were selected to expand and enrich our reflection with a view to decompartmentalising cultural areas and interconnecting (post)colonial genealogies through discourse analysis and the study of social practices.