CULTURAL EXTRACTIONS IN THE CARIBBEAN OR THE ATAHUALPA SYNDROME

CULTURAL EXTRACTIONS IN THE CARIBBEAN

OR THE ATAHUALPA SYNDROME

*       *

Plaque / bronze, looted during the punitive expedition of 1897 by the British - Kingdom of Benin : Metropolitan Museum of Art, N-Y

A Decolonial counter-narrative 

The following text bears witness to the institutional violence that took place in Guadeloupe between 2013 and 2017, as part of a project to create an educational resource with the Ministry of Education and the CANOPÉ network on 'The Art of the Caribbean-Americas'. I initiated the project, co-directed it and designed its conceptual framework and main guidelines, only to be abruptly ousted before it was put online on the CANOPÉ website. The events I am proposing to analyse are part of a long history of colonial violence, both physical and symbolic, committed in the 'overseas territories', particularly in the French West Indies, caught in the impasse of unfinished decolonisation. From the outset, the relationship of dependence and subordination between mainland France and these distant territories made them fertile ground for abuses of power. In the present case, this systemic violence has taken the form of the extraction of cultural wealth, the plundering of knowledge, the erasure and invisibilisation of the work of an Afro-Caribbean, and ultimately racial oppression, to the detriment of the young people for whom this educational resource was intended. This text breaks into the interstices of the dominant discourse, which seeks to impose itself as the discourse of truth. This counter-narrative responds to the need to create an archive on the fringes of the truncated official history, a history from which the subalterns are the usual outcasts.

Demons had to be exorcised to bear witness to this 'epistemicide', a specific form of violence perpetrated against knowledge from subalternised cultures. Epistemicides aim to make such knowledge and/or those who produce it invisible, and can go as far as their total and definitive destruction. This is why epistemicides, in times of war as in times of peace, are brigandage, crimes against culture, art and ways of knowing. There is no remedy for the total destruction of an artefact1 and the chain of knowledge to which it is linked, like the Mayan Codexes burnt by the conquistadors in the XVI^th century, but to bear witness to it as accurately as possible. This is the ultimate means of resistance, to give new form to what domination, wherever it comes from, seeks to make invisible.

"To name oneself is to write the world" - Édouard Glissant, The Caribbean Discourse

*

During those three or four years, I was at the heart of a process of extraction. A type of predation which, in this case, involves the appropriation of intangible wealth in the field of knowledge, culture, art and/or aesthetics. These illegitimate appropriations are the work of external predators, and their corollary is the invalidation and erasure of indigenous expertise. These epistemicides2 , which raise ethical questions, are perpetrated within the framework of asymmetrical relations of coloniality of knowledge and power. The archetypal extractivist predator is the "white savior". A messianic "white saviour" who believes he knows better than the subalternised what is good for them, in spite of themselves. Driven by this conviction, he sets himself up as a specialist, decides to act on their behalf and from then on can plunder their productions, erase them and make their work invisible.3 This is how the West creates "New Worlds" in its own image, rather than embracing the extraordinary polyphony of the world. It has created Africanists to invent its own Africa, and Orientalists to invent its own Orient, all distorted doubles in its own distorting mirror.4

The origins of the Art of the Caribbean-Americas project :

Since the mid-1990s, during plenary meetings, I have regularly pointed out to successive Regional Education Inspectors (IPR) for the visual arts in Guadeloupe that the artistic references offered to pupils referred them almost exclusively to a field of Western references. A situation of coloniality of knowledge5 caricatured and alienating for students who are mostly of African descent (and their teachers), living thousands of kilometres from Western capitals. On the other hand, there were no pedagogical resources available for the teaching of the visual arts, highlighting the cultural and artistic context of the Caribbean, which was confined to a zone of relegation. Repeatedly mentioning this situation to the teaching staff (all of whom were French from "metropolitan France") created unease and embarrassment, as it illustrated a typically colonial situation. The violence of this conception of the visual arts had always been imposed on us as the only norm, a kind of terminus that there was no point in going beyond. A norm to which we had all learnt to submit and which, at school, we had to pass on.

September 2012 saw the arrival of a new art Regional Education Inspector who, at her request, will be sharing her responsibilities between France and Guadeloupe. What's new is that she seems willing to listen to the questions I've been asking for a long time in a climate of indifference. In fact, at her first meeting with the island's art teachers, I told her about an article I had just published in Médiapart entitled "Une École pour la République Archipel" ("A School for the Archipelago Republic"), an open letter to the ministers of Culture and Education.6 In it, I wrote about a work that was part of the curriculum for the art option in the Baccalaureate from 2010 to 2012: L'Arbre des Voyelles (a life-size bronze cast of an uprooted oak tree). This work was installed in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris and created by the internationally renowned Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. In it, I pointed out that the link between Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a key figure in the history of colonial slavery, and the site where the work was installed had been ignored by G. Penone, and that this link had also been overlooked in the brochure for secondary school teachers published by the CNDP (now CANOPÉ). The article highlighted the French tradition of a selective vision of history, the failure to take account of extra-hexagonal cultural and artistic realities, and the highly Eurocentric nature of school curricula. The text aroused the interest of the IPR right from our first discussions, and was the trigger for the 'Art of the Caribbean-Americas' project.

The colonial paradigm :

"But we need pedagogies that are free of universalist illusions, fuelling the desire for these skilful forms of predatory continuity, where we "work with minority communities" for example, rather than building the spaces that would eventually enable them to develop their own tools and finally work by and for themselves. The space for an encounter would then become possible, later on, under new conditions, which would be less radically asymmetrical".

Olivier Marbœuf: Suites décoloniales - S'enfuir de la plantation, Éditions du commun, 2022

Totally unfamiliar with Caribbean culture, as she was to confess at a working lunch with the curator of the Schœlcher Museum in Pointe-à-Pitre, the new inspector "assigned" to Guadeloupe said she knew nothing about the archipelago other than what she had read in the "Backpacker Guide" (!).) This is a common occurrence in the "overseas" territories, where "metropolitans", who know nothing about the context in which they operate, are authorised by the positions they hold to take decisions that have a major impact on the native inhabitants of these territories. Colonial power.7

After nourished exanges about my texts and the lack of references to Caribbean art in school curricula, of which France has a monopoly, the IPR proposed me to be the working anchor of an academic project on Caribbean art, aimed at both teachers and pupils. I was to contribute my expertise as an art critic. She also asked me to head up a group called TraAM Arts Plastiques (Travaux Académiques Mutualisés), a national scheme to facilitate the use of digital technology in schools. I agreed to run these two projects simultaneously, on condition that the work of the TraAM8 was aligned with the research of the Caribbean Art group, which was my priority.

Changing the old model:

It cannot simply be a question of adding something to what already exists. It's about profoundly transforming relationships and structures, with ethics as a compass.

Françoise Vergès

I was convinced of the need to move away from what had always been presented to us as the absolute centre: the legend of Western art, its "masters", its "geniuses", their "unmissable" and "universal" "masterpieces", to take an uninhibited look at artists from the Caribbean and the Americas. Looking elsewhere, looking differently at artists who, from the north to the south of the arc of the West Indies, form a large, dispersed family of women and men sharing the terrible legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. These are artists born in a cultural area where planters forbade slaves, for centuries of terror, to create and own works of art because they were linked to demonised African divinities.9 These are artists whose presence in the collections of the great international museums remains, even today, all too marginal. I wanted these minority artists (not the Western artists whose books and museums are overflowing) to be at the heart of our project. That this recognition by a major institution would enable them to become references that students and teachers in the Caribbean and elsewhere could call on.

This ground-breaking project, which originated in Guadeloupe, was intended to contribute to a necessary and long-awaited change. It was intended to help teach the visual arts with a less Cyclopean outlook, a more inclusive vision than had ever been the case in France. I was also aware of the need to rethink the production relationships within the working group itself, which brought together French nationals from mainland France, the bearers of official culture, and Guadeloupeans inhabited by the subalternised culture of the West Indies, with all the implicit elements that the asymmetrical nature of such a situation implies. Although our era is one of unspoken colonialism, which I would describe as "friendly colonialism", it is nonetheless a mutant form of domination. Furthermore, my leadership had to be an instrument to ensure that Guadeloupe was clearly recognised by CANOPÉ and the French Ministry of Education as being the project leader, and translate it into action. This production of knowledge was a way of breaking out of the usual marginal position in which the art world confines us. I saw it as a form of symbolic reparation for a whole past of invisibilisation and erasure in the field of art and history. It was a real challenge that called for a new set of relational ethics between the institution and the Guadeloupeans involved in the project.

Question of "race" - Question of gender:

In the original configuration, the art and history IPRs joined forces to form a heterogeneous group made up of art, history and literature teachers. A composite set with divergent interests. On the basis of the inspections she had carried out, the visual arts IPR had chosen the four teachers in the Caribbean Art group who seemed to her to be capable of producing fact sheets on the works and artists to be selected. Although they were never formally raised during the group's working sessions, questions of gender and race were latent. The IPR distributed the members according to a relative balance. This established numerical equality between: members of the dominant white group (which it is not polite to call that), Afro-descendant Guadeloupeans, men and women. In reality, it was a façade of equality, equality without equity. But the question of "race", walled up in a guilty silence despite the fact that it has long structured our society, was soon to resurface. The question of gender had also silently crept into the heart of the project. Initially, three women (two "metropolitan" IPRs and the Afro-descendant director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe) had administrative power and, in reality, control of the group. After the abrupt departure of the history Inspector, two of them shared it. The national CANOPÉ questioned the IPR about the fact that the Caribbean- American artists I was proposing were all of African descent. Didn't my choices reflect a desire to systematically exclude white artists in favour of black artists? I'll come back to that later.

At the group's inaugural meeting, at which only the two IPRs, the director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe and myself were present, I had to point out that an "Anthology of painting in Guadeloupe"- that the history inspector was proposing as a reference work- was problematic and had to be discarded because an "artist" proposing a revisionist vision of the history of slavery featured prominently.10 The tone was set. I had a clear vision of the path the working group should take, but although I was at the origin of the project whose intellectual architecture I was going to define, I embodied 'the' minority. It was in this climate that, during our monthly meetings at CANOPÉ, I defended the arguments that convinced the group that we had to take our work in the direction I was advocating. The experience I had accumulated over twenty years of publishing put me in a position to propose the main directions of the project.

My recommendations - materiality of plundered wealth :

The cultural extraction I'm talking about here is unique in that it does not concern artefacts with the indisputable materiality of sculptures or painted works, easily and immediately identifiable as values. It is about the production of knowledge, a wealth of an intangible nature. To give you an idea of what predation is all about, here is a table of the recommendations I made (all of which were adopted by the group) and which formed the backbone of this new teaching resource:

1 - I proposed to the group that our work should encompass a geographical area that went beyond the narrow regionalism of the islands of the French West Indies (Guadeloupe and Martinique), adopting the vision of a "Greater Caribbean", following the example of CARICOM.11 A cultural area extended from the Greater to the Lesser Antilles, right up to the mainland. A Caribbean with multiple dimensions: insular and continental, Creole-speaking, English-speaking, Spanish-speaking and French-speaking. Touching in this way on geopolitics, a field that did not seem to concern art, my first proposal provoked debate.

2 - The same was true of my second proposal concerning questions of identity and nationality. I proposed that our work should focus on artists from the Caribbean-Americas, in order to create a tool that would unambiguously highlight these artists, who are usually marginalised and invisible. In addition, I proposed that yesterday's settlers and their works should be excluded, as much as artists who simply stayed in these territories. This approach was opposed by the history teachers, who wanted to include painters involved in the slave trade, such as Augustin Brunias. The disagreement was such that the history-geography inspector, for whom these colonial artists represented important material, abruptly left the group, followed by the history and literature teachers she had teamed with. Similarly, the director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe, who was closely following our work, would have liked us to include colonial works from the Schœlcher Museum in Pointe-à-Pitre, which was one of her partners. But I saw all these works as objects conveying a toxic ideology, a mixture of racism and colonialism, which I wanted to keep at a distance from our research. In my view, so many other works and artists deserved to have a higher visibility, with the legitimacy that an institutional framework can confer.

3 - Given the pedagogical interest of the project and the progress we had made, the French CANOPÉ decided to join forces with CANOPÉ Guadeloupe and to provide the project with substantial funding in order to give it a national scope. But in Paris, CANOPÉ was wondering and questioned the IPR: Why had I excluded Western artists from our research work? Was I motivated by a desire to discriminate against white artists? Was my motive racist? It was a fact: non-white, African or Afro-descendant artists had been absent from French and Western museums, absent from school curricula and massively invisible for more than three centuries, but could we suddenly shine a light on this "third world" of the art world without attacking a bastion of exclusivity, a "white privilege", thus creating an unexpected zone of discomfort? Putting forward the argument of so-called "anti-white racism" when racially discriminated people try to claim their place in a white-dominated society has become a classic defence mechanism of the dominant group when its privileges are threatened. In order to confirm the direction I was proposing, I had to remind everyone of an obvious fact imposed by history: the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, as the main marker linking all these artists from the Caribbean-Americas, explained why they were mostly of Afro-descent.

4 - Once the suspicions of "anti-white racism" had been swept, and with the departure of the literature and history teachers and their inspector, I took on the role of co- director of the group, which was now made up solely of art teachers. I thought we were going to be able to speak the same language. That's when I suggested that we broaden the scope of our research, as it seemed essential to me to be able to include Afro-descendant artists from the United States, Guyana, Surinam, Brazil, etc., continental artists who shared with their Caribbean counterparts the experience of slave domination. Faced with the same exclusion and discrimination, the same racism, the same falsified historical narrative, they are led to share a similar sensitivity and questioning in their artistic practices. I wanted to be able to include Jean-Michel Basquiat, between archipelago and continent, whose Caribbean origins (Haitian father, Puerto Rican mother) run through all his work. And other Americans of African descent: Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker (United States), etc., alongside Caribbean artists Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Julien Creuzet (Martinique), Hervé Télémaque (Haiti), etc. or South American artists such as Marcel Pinas (Surinam), emblematic of these Caribbean/American affinities, whose art has its origins in the apocalyptic genesis in the matrix of the slave ship. Finally, looking to the Americas reflected a desire to extricate Caribbean artists from an overly exclusive relationship with the former European "metropolises". To place these artists in a genealogy, a pan-American filiation, by creating a space for dialogue between Caribbean artists and Americans from North and South. To give the project a more international dimension, one that is both more open and better situated.

5 - With this in mind, the title 'Caribbean Art for Teaching' was no longer appropriate. I proposed that the group should henceforth be called : Art of the Caribbean-Americas, in line with a more ambitious vision (added by the IPR, the subtitle "recognise, share, teach" will contradict itself).

6 - I had drawn up a substantial list of over seventy Caribbean and Afro-American artists (from over a hundred of my references), with the IPR submitting for my approval all the artists proposed by the other contributors to the group. Convinced that we had to produce work that was specifically centred on the visual arts, I recommended that artisanal practices, traditional dance and additions by "amateur painters", which I felt were irrelevant, be excluded. I made sure that we avoided any misunderstandings or gross errors in the texts produced by the group, which could have discredited the whole edifice. The object we were shaping had to have clear, coherent contours and not be open to any kind of condescending look.

7 - As well as updating some of my existing writings, such as a text on the work of Eddy Firmin-Ano for an exhibition catalogue published in 2014,12 I worked on writing new texts, with qualities of form and content that I wanted to be beyond reproach. They concerned some of the best-known international artists on our list. Analyses of the works and biographical notes on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wifredo Lam. There was also the demanding work that Genèses Apocalyptiques (Apocalyptic Genesis) required of me, the introduction that had to set out the singular context and issues of our work.

8 - I also wanted the resource thus produced to be illuminated by other "markers of speech", inspired by the work of these artists. I was firmly opposed to any idea of an overarching voice coming from outside. For me, reclaiming the narrative was a crucial issue, at the heart of a project that was intended to become an inspiring model for young people. No one should speak for us, so that we can embody Aimé Césaire's famous phrase: "specialists in ourselves"! That's why I suggested some voices known for their breadth of vision: Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau (winner of the 1992 Goncourt Prize, who developed a thought on the art of the "détour" of Martinique's storytellers), Guyana's Christiane Taubira (who championed the law recognising slavery as a crime against humanity, 2001) and Françoise Vergès from Réunion (holder of the Global South(s) Chair, FMSH, Paris, who developed a thought on the decolonisation of the arts). At the time I was planning to add the names of Caribbean art critics and curators, not knowing that I would never have the time.

Make it visible here, invisible there!

During our regular debriefings, the IPR, aware that she would be unable to complete the project on her own and wanting to ensure my full cooperation, asked me several times to promise to see the work through to the end. Surprised by her repeated requests, my response was invariable:

1) - aborted projects of all kinds were commonplace here (I knew more than one),

2) - I had given my word and would keep my commitments whatever the difficulties13.

But after working for three years to design, supervise and check the essential content, writing the initial version of the introductory text, doing some of the proofreading of the texts by other members of the group, writing the texts on Lam and Basquiat, the two great artists of the Caribbean-Americas, natives of Cuba and Haiti, hotbeds of the two great victorious revolutions in that part of the world, I was faced with pressure from the IPR and CANOPÉ. Despite the colonial historical context that formed the backdrop to the project, and which made it essential that I be given respectful  control over my views, my texts, which were given to be reread, were subjected to apothecary accounts. I was summoned, by those who still practise policies of control and subordination against us, to hand in my copy according to the strict constraints of 'templates' arbitrarily set from a 'metropolis' accustomed to imposing normative frameworks. The IPR and CANOPÉ, now in possession of all the material I had fed the group over the months, Art of the Caribbean-Americas, was going to go from being a remedial project to a product of predatory extraction. Having become a nuisance (refusing to accept the dominant discourse, and refusing to take up any position assigned to me that I felt suited the project), and before any contract had been finalised clearly establishing the centrality of my contribution after three years of committed work, I was deemed to have 'resigned' (!), removed from the Art des Caraïbes-Amériques group and all my work erased.

"But that's exactly what we don't want. What we no longer want. - We want our societies to rise to a higher level of development, but of their own accord, by internal growth, by internal necessity, by organic progress, without anything external coming in to warp, alter or compromise this growth. Under these conditions, it is easy to understand why we cannot delegate anyone to think for us; why we cannot delegate anyone to research for us; why we cannot accept that anyone, even the best of our friends, should stand up for us".

Aimé Césaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez, 24 October 1956

The Atahualpa syndrome:

When she had just taken up her post in Guadeloupe, I took the French inspector on a tour of the colonial town, introducing her to the island's history. From the colossal sandbox trees (Hura crepitans) planted by Victor Hugues on the Place de la Victoire, where the guillotine cut off the heads of royalist planters after 1794, to the massacre of May 1967 perpetrated by the French gendarmes. I showed him the old-fashioned beauty of the so-called "Creole" houses in the heart of the "imposed city" and the modest huts of the "resistant city", according to the typologies of the town-planning architect Marc Jalet. I was the guide who opened a window on Pointe-à-Pitre carnival for her.

By way of welcome, this introduction to the culture and history of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean was never a licence to plunder!

But from our very first discussions I made it clear that my demand was to respect our island culture, which has been battered by history. But history, stubbornly, was going to repeat itself. My invisibilised work and my knowledge plundered by the French inspector led me to identify a new syndrome that I named ‘‘Atahualpa syndrome’’, after the Inca emperor who unwisely opened his empire to the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro and his pack of conquistadors on 16 November 1532. The conquistadors used their cunning to attack their unarmed hosts with cannon fire and took Atahualpa prisoner, promising to free him in return for a huger ansom. A 30 m room2 had to be filled with gold and silver. From the four corners of the Peruvian empire came priceless riches, precious objets d'art, all melted down into common ingots by the Spanish bribes. Although Atahualpa kept his word, Francisco Pizarro ordered his execution by strangulation. So, in this "Overseas Territory" still regarded as a reservoir from which the dominant French power could draw without limit for its material and immaterial needs, the inspector embodied the ‘‘Atahualpa syndrome’’ almost 500 years after the murder of the Inca.

Large-scale looting in Africa or confidential predation in Guadeloupe remind us of the extent to which the extraction of artistic wealth was a spearhead of colonialism, as part of a strategy of domination and accumulated profits. In his travel diary "L'Afrique fantôme" (Phantom Africa), a famous account of an expedition, the ethnologist Michel Leiris describes the mass looting he took part in during the "Dakar-Djibouti Mission" (1931-1933) led by Marcel Griaule14 . Henceforth, such extractions would also involve intangible cultural riches that could be put to good use. The spirit of the Plantation, which has become widespread, has become a way of inhabiting the world15 , a mode of relationship imposed on the Other that haunts the descendants of the colonists. The settler's reflex: to plunder (cultural treasures), to erase or modify (history), to replace (religions, cultures), to despoil (entire peoples), to exploit (the bodies of non-whites, their labour power, the wombs of non-white women, natural resources), to humiliate (to break down resistance), to terrorise (to make a frightening spectacle of his violence), to control (bodies, minds, initiatives, territories), to dominate (for ultimate profit) ... Contemporary predation of an anachronistic nature at a time when the French state, which has recognised the illegitimacy of the spoliation of cultural property in its former colonies, has embarked on a timid policy of restitution. In 2017, following a commitment made in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a famous report from Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy16 on the restitution of African heritage. Louis-Georges Tin, head of CRAN17 , was the first person in France to raise this issue publicly, in December 2013 in front of the Quai Branly Museum itself.

Epilogue :

Now that it has been 'discovered' that the African-American artistic presence really existed, now that serious studies have stopped silencing the witnesses, erasing their significant place in and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable to simply imagine ourselves and imagine in our place. We have always imagined ourselves (...) We are the subjects of our own narrative, the witnesses and actors in our own experience and, by no means by chance, in the experience of those with whom we have come into contact.

Toni Morrison

On 11 December 2019, in the amphitheatre of the MACTe (Caribbean Center of expression and trade memory of slavery), the art inspector and reader of the Guadeloupe Backpacker Guide, dressed as a "White savior", and the director of CANOPÉ Guadeloupe, who ended her career with this feat of arms, made a grand presentation of "Art of the Caribbean- Americas: Recognise, share, teach", the appropriation of several years' work. An introduction signed by the IPR, enthroned as a specialist in the art of the Caribbean-Americas, replaced and made invisible my text "Apocalyptic Genesis" (which I published on my Blog in July 2019, 5 months before the publication of the resource by CANOPÉ, this in order to prove the precedence of my work https://jocelynvalton.blogspot.com/2019/07/geneses-apocalyptiques.html). My biographies and analyses of works by Wifredo Lam and Jean-Michel Basquiat were not to fare any better. Erased, replaced, made invisible. I was expropriated from the field of my knowledge. Ironically, this erasure occurred just as the Mémorial Acte was hosting the famous The Black Model exhibition in Guadeloupe, which, according to its catalogue, aimed to "give a name and a history to the great forgotten figures of the avant-garde". Denise Murrell, the Afro-American curator of the exhibition, asked "Who are these forgotten protagonists of art history?", asserting that she wanted to "give all these 'black models' a new visibility"18 . It was in this symbolic place that the intellectual plundering and invisibilisation of an Afro-descendant was publicly staged. A spectacularisation reminiscent of the plantation era and the ritual of public punishment inflicted on recalcitrant slaves. Such a feeling of impunity is staggering, but the Caribbean has always been a place of licence where European colonists allowed themselves to do what was forbidden in the so-called "civilised" world. Heterotopia!

The compulsive emergence of a colonial imaginary hidden in the subconscious. Appropriation, expropriation, erasure and invisibilisation reveal how the colonial structure has the power to recuperate for its own benefit and to neutralise what emerges from our struggles and could make us confident and dignified. This online educational resource, which promised to be a creation with restorative dimensions, capable of healing the injustices of a long history of exclusion, has seen its soul lost along the way, becoming nothing more than a deceptive illusion. A new exclusion machine that has sealed the end of the decolonial spirit that was to form the original fabric of Art of the Caribbean-Americas. The spirit that gives us the legitimacy to talk about ourselves, using art and history to produce and share the intimate story of our culture. Our images, our gaze, our words...

In my work as an art critic, from my earliest texts onwards, I have tried to trace the genesis of artistic creation in the Caribbean-Americas, after the shock of slavery. "Apocalyptic Genesis" is a synthesis of these efforts. Those who decided to make me invisible knew very well that they were destroying a moment that was to be the centrepiece of my critic device, the culmination of years of work. So, on the CANOPÉ website, Art des Caraïbes-Amériques is nothing more than an amputated, absurdly mutilated version, the 'strange fruit' of an abuse of power. A version which, in view of the unprecedented symbolic violence it carries and has impregnated its entire texture, raises the question of the context in which knowledge is constructed and the use of such a resource to teach pupils from a slave society. Because school is not just the place where Latin-based words are tamed, it should be the place where we learn to use knowledge to fight racist-based evils. It should be the place where we learn to use our knowledge to fight against the evils of racism, where we learn a sense of ethics, and where the institution should set an example. Here, it singularly forgot to be exemplary. Neutralising the force of a claim to turn it into something poorly granted. Schoelcherism itself, against which I fought so hard! At a time when our demands for reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism have gone unheeded, such despoilment shows how "servants of the State" can remind us that the structures of the Plantation are still standing, who the masters are and in whose (not very virtuous) hands the power lies. But our lives matter, our voices matter, the art we produce matter! We refuse to allow our knowledge and our words to be arrogated to us, this obscure desire to annihilate us by depriving us of the legitimate right to tell the world what we, the "living archives", are the only ones who can bear witness to, by the very fact of being the Caribbean people that we are!

Colonial action": looting, erasing, replacing, despoiling, exploiting, humiliating, terrorising, controlling, dominating, etc.

The definitive warrior's response: think, maroon, resist, bandage, repair...

For the dignity of all my people

© Jocelyn Valton © AICA, November 2019 - June 2023

1 - In my article Broken Fetishes – A long eclipse of the plastic arts in the Caribbean, 1997-2013, (whose title is inspired by the name of Wounded Knee, the massacre of 300 Native American Sioux women, elders and children with Hotchkiss machine guns, perpetrated in 1890 in South Dakota, by the American army), I evoke a radical epistemicide through the burning of a statuette on the orders of Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, to put an end to a healing ritual practised by slaves in the Martinique settlement of Fonds St-Jacques in 1698. https://jocelynvalton.blogspot.com/2013/11/f-e-t-i-c-h-e-s-b-r-i-s-e-s_26.html

2 - If episteme refers to a chain of knowledge in a given era and culture, epistemicide means the intentional destruction, invisibilisation and total and/or partial erasure of this knowledge and of those who produced it. Crimes with a cultural dimension that often take place in situations of colonial domination.

3 - This behaviour is reminiscent of that of the cuckoo, the European bird that practices brood parasitism, where the female lays her egg in the nest of another species before her young throw the eggs and legitimate chicks from the nest overboard to be fed by the colonised species.

4 - Edward W. Said, Orientalism - The East created by the West, Éditions du Seuil, 2004

5 - A coloniality of knowledge that suggests that Caribbean-American artists and their creations are inherently

inferior to those of the Western world, that they are not valid models worthy of study or imitation.

6 - Jocelyn Valton: Une école pour la république archipel, Les invités de Médiapart, July 2012

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/120712/une-ecole-pour-la-republique-archipel

7 - The concept of "coloniality" refers to the work of the Peruvian Anibal Quijano. It is based on the subalternisation of non-Western knowledge and subjectivities, and on the extraction and exploitation of resources and human groups by the Western system of power.

8 - In March 2016, art teachers from various académies came together to work on the new curricula and the use of digital technology. This inter-academy meeting was held at the Lycée Colbert on Rue de Château Landon in Paris, in a "Colbert room" featuring a bust of Jean-Baptiste Colbert... It is perplexing to think that the body of art teachers ('specialists' in the power of images!) should be thinking up syllabuses under the marble sculpture of a figure who wrote the 'Black Code', a collection of racist laws (completed by his son) which regulated the lives of enslaved blacks in the Caribbean-Americas, without any concern on the part of the teachers, the IPR or the Inspectorate General. This quiet indifference extends from the courtyards of secondary schools (several schools bear the name of J-B Colbert, as does an amphitheatre at the INHA - Institut Nal d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris) to the intimacy of the classrooms where the young people of France are taught. To say that racism is "structural" or "systemic" is to talk about its capacity to reproduce itself through a means as effective and redoutable as the educational establishment, without anyone doing anything about it!

9 - This is the subject of my article Broken Fetishes, already quoted.

10 - The problematic book is Anthologie de la peinture en Guadeloupe, des origines à nos jours, Conseil Régional de Guadeloupe, HC Éditions, 2009, whose otherwise questionable content gives pride of place to Nicole Réache, who presented a set of revisionist paintings minimising the crime of slavery in the Mémorielles 3 exhibition, Pointe-à-Pitre 1998, on the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. I denounced this revisionism in the press and in a collective book.

11 - CARICOM (Caribbean Community) was established in 1973 and is an organisation of some fifteen Member States and five Associate States of the Caribbean. Its aim is the social, economic and cultural development of the Caribbean. In 2014, the CARICOM countries presented a "CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reconciliation and Restorative Justice" demanding reparations for the crimes of slavery committed by the former colonial metropolises.

12 - Résistance(s) - Présences marronnes, Eddy Firmin-Ano - Jocelyn Valton exhibition, Musée Schœlcher, Pointe-à-Pitre, 2014. For this exhibition, Firmin-Ano and I designed a collaborative work: the monumental image of an 8 meters high maroon Negro. It was deliberately placed outside the museum, in the courtyard, on a party wall. It towered over a stone bust of Victor Schœlcher. The work, crowning a figure of resistance as well as my text, was a critique of the museum, which makes the struggles of the slaves invisible. These tools, both visual and theoretical, provided a counter-discourse to the official narrative, which emphasised the alleged abolitionist 'generosity' of the French state through the figure of V. Schœlcher.

 https://jocelynvalton.blogspot.com/2014/02/resistances-exposition-firmin-ano.html

 13 - During these discussions, I informed the IPR that in Guadeloupe we had experience of unsuccessful collaborative projects with "Hexagonals" (French). A 1% artistic project with the Ministry of Culture and the DAC Guadeloupe (Direction des Affaires Culturelles) to make the Chapp House (18the century) in Basse-Terre its headquarters. I resigned from the project in 2018 because my recommendations to introduce greater equity for Caribbean artists were rejected. Before me, an architect from Guadeloupe had also had to withdraw from the 1%; similarly, a project for a book on modernist architecture in Guadeloupe had seen a native architect sidelined... and so many others, ostracised as a result of inequitable relations. The country's top experts were to be used as guarantors on the cheap, but they had to know how to "stay in their place".

14 - All means were used: lies, abuse of trust, intimidation, unfair exchanges, theft and repeated desecration of sacred objects (3 thefts of kono masks), etc., to "collect" / extort from the peoples approached during a 20,000 km journey, willingly or by force, the 3,500 pieces (!) brought back to the Musée de l'Homme: sacred masks, statuettes, musical instruments, dolls, everyday objects and other artefacts, precious to the cultures from which they were taken. After the theft of a Kono mask, Leiris said: "My heart beats very fast because, since yesterday's scandal, I perceive more acutely the enormity of what we are committing". This "mission" was the culmination of a French tradition of extraction for "scientific purposes" inaugurated by Bonaparte's "Egyptian Campaign" (1798-1801).

15- In his book Une écologie décoloniale, Éditions du Seuil 2019, Malcom Ferdinand discusses the permanence of the slave Plantation at the root of a disastrous way of inhabiting the Earth.

16 - The publication of the report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy shows the scale of the predations on the African continent. A whole generation of young people, who could have found self-confidence and inspiration there, find themselves deprived of almost all of their artistic heritage, looted to fill Western museums and private collections.

17 - CRAN: Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires (Representative Council of Black Associations).

18 - Exhibition catalogue: Le Modèle Noir, de Géricault à Matisse (The Black Model, from Gericault to Matisse) Flammarion, 2019, pp. 13, 15, 17

Bibliography :

AJARI Norman, La dignité ou la mort - Éthique et politique de la race, Éditions La Découverte, 2019

CUKIERMAN Leila, DAMBURY Gerty, VERGÈS Françoise (ss la dir.), Décolonisons les arts ! L'Arche, 2018

FERDINAND Malcom, Une écologie décoloniale - Penser l'écologie depuis le monde caribéen, Éditions du Seuil, 2019

GLISSANT Édouard, "Poétique et Inconscient", Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), Le Seuil, 1981, p. 276-284

LEIRIS Michel, L'Afrique fantôme, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, p. 103-105

Le modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse, (Paris, Musée d'Orsay, 26 March - 21 July 2019), (Pointe-à- Pitre, MACTe, 13 September - 29 December 2019), Flammarion 2019

MARBŒUF Olivier, Suites décoloniales - S'enfuir de la plantation, Éditions du Commun, 2022

MORRISON Toni, The Source of Self-Love, Christian Bourgeois Éditeur, 2019

SAID Edward W., Orientalism - The East created by the West, Éditions du Seuil, 2004 Dans l'ombre de l'Occident, Black Jack éditions,

SARR Felwine, SAVOY Bénédicte, Restituer le patrimoine africain, Éditions du Seuil, 2018