VISUALIZING ROOTS AND ITINERARIES OF INDIAN OCEANIC CREOLISATIONS : Project for a Museum of the Present Transforming Cultures

In this paper, I will discuss the methodological problems raised by the museography of a forthcoming museum on Reunion Island, the Maison des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise. One of the museum’s goals is to retrace visually the itineraries of the processes of creolisation in the Indian Ocean that led to the creation of a singular culture, the Creole indiaoceanic culture. How to visualise the multiple layers of signification at work, the traces and fragments of languages, imaginaries, rituals, practices travelling throughout the ocean, the dynamic of loss, transformation, translation and recreation of forms, rituals, practices in the itineraries of people? I will first present the museum, its context and goals, then suggests ways of “making visual” elements of the Indian Ocean’s long history, and finally, discuss the challenges of imagining a museum of the present in the Indian Ocean world. In 2010, a museum and cultural center, Maison des civilizations et de l’unité Réunionaise (MCUR – House of Civilisations and Reunionese Unity), will open on Reunion Island. The project was launched in 1999 by the left majority in the local Regional Council and has been supported by the French government, the European Community and UNESCO. The MCUR building of 9,000 square metres will host spaces for permanent and temporary exhibitions, a video gallery, restaurants, bars, seminar rooms, school rooms, a museum-nursery, two libraries, a theatre and performance spaces. It will be built in a twenty-two hectares park overlooking the ocean and above Saint-Paul – the site of the first permanent settlement on the island. The architectural design was chosen in May 2007 by an international jury. 1 Françoise Vergès lectures at Goldsmiths College, University of London and writes on slavery and creolization. She was awarded the 2006 Françoise Seligmann Foundation Prize Against Racism for her book La Mémoire enchaînée. Questions sur l’esclavage (Paris, 2006). 2 The team is X-TU, a young French team, and their project can be seen at , page MCUR, where there is a virtual visit of the project. Vergès 169 VISUALISING ROOTS & ITINERARIES Transforming Cultures eJournal Vol. 3 No. 2 © 2 00 8 Fr an ço is e Ve rg ès In this paper, my aim is to not to review the considerable literature that in recent years has rethought the museum, a literature that has been extremely useful to my work. Rather, I want to present the scientific choices that engaged the MCUR in the current conversation on museums, visual studies, representation, history, memory and resistance. In my work for the last three years as director of the scientific and cultural team in charge of setting up the cultural program, I had to reflect on the following questions: how does one imagine a museum without a collection of artifacts, of objects? How does one visualise the roots and itineraries of Indian Oceanic creolisations? How does one show the lives of slaves, indentured workers and poor settlers without simply resorting to a description of suffering and poverty? How does one show the materiality of immaterial culture? With Carpanin Mairmoutou, I wrote the scientific and cultural programme which was adopted by the Regional Council in 2005 as the basis for the orientations of the cultural as well as the architectural programs. In the course of its history Reunionese society has undergone a great many upheavals causing socio-economic turmoil. It has a twofold heritage: one of dehumanisation, contempt, exile, and one of vitality and the will to live and create. The latest upheaval relates to the end of an agricultural and rural world. Faced with new challenges, Reunionese society must offer and pursue a series of reflections based on its cultural assets. They should be repositioned in an approach that takes into consideration social, cultural, economic and political evolutions and transformations on local, national, regional and international levels. Reunion being a French territory, it has to deal with the French resistance to confronting its role in the slave trade and its colonial past. In 2005, the debate on the current traces of the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the controversies that followed (accusations of anti-republicanism, of nostalgia for the past, of dwelling in victimisation, of “communautarisme” i.e. organisation of groups along ethnic lines) highlighted this resistance. It also demonstrated the existence of a blind 3 Among recent works on the museum, let me cite: Bettina Messias Carbonell, (ed.) Museum Studies, London: Blackwell, 2006; George E. Hein, Learning in the Museum, London: Routledge, 1998; Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Sharing of Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1992; Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, (eds) Museum Frictions: Public Culture/Global Transformations, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006; Janet Marstine, (ed.) New Museum Theory and Practice, London, Blackwell, 2006; Richard Sandell and Robert R. Janes, (eds) Museum Management and Marketing, London: Routledge, 2007; Sheila Watson, (ed.) Museums and their Communities, London: Routledge, 2007. This list is far from being exhaustive and does not include the considerable resources on museums found on websites. 4 The full document (200 pages) is available online (French and English) at , page MCUR, where academic references are given. Vergès 170 VISUALISING ROOTS & ITINERARIES Transforming Cultures eJournal Vol. 3 No. 2 © 2 00 8 Fr an ço is e Ve rg ès spot in French thought: the figure of the slave. In textbooks, the slave trade and slavery are barely noted. The academic elite of historians, the mandarins, have disqualified research on these themes and, in public imagination, the “outre-mer” (French territories throughout the world) is totally marginalised if not inexistent. The MCUR project is part and parcel of a movement that is pushing for a revision of the national narrative, claiming that you can be a French citizen and Muslim, and Hindu, and descendant of slave, of colonised peoples, that the debate on democracy and cultural difference is urgent, that the French Republic must rethink its relation with its outre-mer. The term “museum” was chosen knowingly to describe the MCUR. Even though we dispute the classical idea of the museum, we challenged the idea that “cultural centers” are for the “South” or the French overseas and museums for Europe and treasures. True, the museum has become a controversial institution. Its collections, public or private, were largely realised through looting and dubious acquisitions. It has been accused of being reserved for an elite and contributing to the emergence of a modernity, with an educative goal through contemplation of the sublime. This European invention of the 18 century was also a travelling institution. Colonial empires built museums in their colonies as part of their civilising mission. In Reunion, two museums were built under the colonial regime: the Museum of Natural History and the Musée Léon Dierx. The former was built to present the fauna and flora of the region along the scale defined by the science of progress and evolution, with “Man” as its apex; the latter host a small part of the collection of Ambroise Vollard, a famous art merchant and collector of early 20 century Paris who was Reunionese. As a “travelling” institution, for new nation states the museum became a symbol of their independence from colonial power. More recently, the museum has been reappropriated by groups who question its statist character and seek to open the institution to new approaches and methodology. It is within this movement of reappropriation through a series of strategic and tactical moves that the MCUR’s project situates itself. James Clifford’s concept of contact zones (borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt) to portray museums is particularly apt for 5 See for instance, the project on the issues of restitution and the controversy around the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly. 6 See for instance, the objectives of a group of museums at 7 Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge, 1992. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translations in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. The notion of contact zones is from linguistics and the study of creole languages. Vergès 171 VISUALISING ROOTS & ITINERARIES Transforming Cultures eJournal Vol. 3 No. 2 © 2 00 8 Fr an ço is e Ve rg ès describing the MCUR project. Reunion is a contact-zone – its language and culture are those of a contact zone, its location situates the island in a zone of contacts and conflicts between different worlds. Finally, the choice of a museum without a collection inscribes the MCUR in the larger movement of rethinking museums as “sites of frictions” and spaces of exchange. To begin with, a few facts. Reunion has no pre-colonial past – there was no native population. Its population is entirely the product of the French colonial project in the Indian Ocean; it has been constituted of slaves bought in eastern Africa, Madagascar, the Comoros, and in fewer numbers from India and Yemen, of indentured workers from southern India and China, of Muslim migrants from Gujarat, of migrants from France and Europe. Catholicism co-exists with Hinduism, Sunni Islam, Buddhism, AfroMalagasy rituals and, more recently, Protestant evangelical churches, Boras, Shiite and Karane Islam. It experienced two centuries of slavery, a century of colonialism and indentured work and entered postcolonial democracy as a French department barely sixty years. Currently, it has a 30% unemployment rate, a failing sugar industry, a high rate of people on welfare and the highest rate of suicide among French regions.