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Outro. Looking Back, Moving Forward

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Summary

My main concern in this book has been to consider how legacies of colonial displays—institutional spectacles—have cultivated more nebulous ways of looking that continue to inform how national identity, race, and ethnicity are understood in contemporary France. The musical and literary works I have studied in this book ‘look back’ in three interrelated ways to expose the relationships between power, privilege, the gaze, and display. First, they suggest that the present moment is shaped by the histories from which it is born; they therefore ‘look back’—just as this book has done—to trace a historical trajectory of display. This type of ‘looking back’ closely resembles the West African concept of Sankofa (meaning ‘reach back and get it’ in Akan), often represented by a bird that reaches back to grab an egg resting on its back. The symbolism is clear: far from becoming entrenched in old mentalities, turning to the past offers the possibility of rebirth and renewal (indicated by the egg). This is not to suggest, however, that doing so is easy or pain-free; however, the works remind their reader that the discomfort of returning to difficult histories is only temporary. Essomba's Le Paradis du Nord figuratively looks back on how the relative absence of France's colonial past shapes certain narratives about immigrants and their descendants in France today. The characters in Black Bazarespouse radically different visions of colonial, pan-African, and even Black Atlantic history, and disagree on the way to commemorate these histories in the present moment. Personal and collective histories merge in Blues pour Élise, and it is not until Shale discovers the violence of which she was born that she feels at home in her family once again. Devoir d'Insolence, too, positions the act of acknowledging the painful histories of racism and colonization as the catalyst for forward progress.

Second, and more literally, just as the performers in ‘Exhibit B’ (discussed in this book's introduction) lock gazes with their spectators in order to prompt the latter to raise questions about their own gaze and the power and privilege behind it, the works I have studied assert their own gaze, making their audience feel the weight of ‘seeing oneself in the third person’.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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