Unsettled Belongings: Poetics of Objects in Migration Narratives of France and the Francophone African Diaspora

Abstract

This study illuminates the constructs of “nation” and “diaspora” as employed by artists, scholars, and state institutions that attempt to articulate a sense of belonging for the contemporary sub-Saharan African diasporas and the French nation-state. It is motivated by the following research questions: (1) How do material objects participate in telling stories belonging to a nation or to a diasporic community? (2) In what ways, if any, do the material objects’ participation in such narratives enable more inclusive forms of belonging? (3) How might turning attention to material objects in the scholarly analysis of narratives of belonging transform current models of human agency and subjectivity? Previous literature on France as a multicultural nation drew on theories of migration rather than diaspora. Meanwhile, literature on the African diasporas predominantely draws on Anglophone sources and focuses on transatlantic slavery as its foundational framework. Even though material objects and material history are crucial to both these literatures, there are few forays into theories of materiality that speak to a more-than-human agency. This study reaches across these gaps, braiding together relevant threads from each field. To explore these ideas, Unsettled Belongings begins with the National Museum of the History of Immigration [Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration] located in Paris, France, reading this space with the work of Sara Ahmed’s migratory skin memories and Jane Bennett’s material agency in mind. Through an analysis of the material objects in the museum’s Gifts Gallery, I demonstrate how these objects subvert the museum’s narrative of colonial citizenship as the path to national belonging, as well as subvert a human-oriented understanding of agency. The next chapter investigates the kinship of humans and material belongings in two novels: Fatou Diome’s Kétala (2005) and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2005). The material objects in these novels, I argue, enable queer diasporic desires that enact the texts’ resistance to heternomative framings of diaspora and also invite a readerly empathy based not on shared identity but on a common materiality. The third chapter compares representations of slavery and colonialism as presented in Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B, performed in Paris, France in 2015, and the Cape Coast Castle Slavery Memorial site in Cape Coast, Ghana. This chapter contends that a more productive engagement with collective histories is made possible when visitors are invited to remember such traumas via the multisensorial, non-visual qualities of material environments. The final chapter—influenced by Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation and Françoise Lionnet’s work on métissage—analyzes the multimedia work of Julien Creuzet, arguing that his use of personal belongings and his attention to the tactile relations of material objects produces an aesthetics of diaspora that invites solidarities while keeping, rather than erasing, differences. These findings prompt a rethinking of the relationship between nation and diaspora as collective identities, and a rethinking of the human and the nonhuman as actors vs. objects. My findings suggest, instead, that these two pairs are engaged in a process of ongoing, overlapping, and mutual constitution—that they are parts of a whole, rather than opposing constructs. Ultimately, this dissertation deepens our understanding of human practices of belonging, and challenges some foundational assumptions about nation and diaspora as collective identities. Moreover, this project makes a case for an interdisciplinary approach to Francophone narratives that combines museology, queer diaspora studies, affect theory, and object-oriented analysis.