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Quel est le jeune qui n'ambitionne pas d'aller en France? Hélas! Les jeunes confondent vivre en France et être domestique en France. Nos villages sont voisins en haute Casamance... Là-bas, on ne dit pas comme "chez vous," que c'est la clarté qui attire le papillon, mais le contraire; chez moi, en Casamance, on dit que c'est l'obscurité qui chasse le papillon.
Ousmane Sembène ("La noire de..." 162)
In the postcolony, magnificence and the desire to shine are not the prerogative only of those who command. The people also want to be "honored," to "shine," and to take part in celebrations. . . . in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology.
Achille Mbembe (131-33)
The Post(colony) and the Metropole
When one thinks of various colonial centers and the respective architectural and geo-political spaces that constituted the peripheries of Empire, associations with France remain indissociable from its capital city Paris.1 The focus of this essay is provided by a discussion of the symbiotic relationship between Paris as a narrative construct in the minds of its former colonial subjects, and the complex manner in which urban spaces and narrative productions are simultaneously reconfigured according to the cultural, political, and sociological agendas of cultural practitioners. Throughout I argue for the necessity of analyzing the complex and complicated dynamic that is contained in the process of demystifying various narrative mechanisms associated with thinking about the particularities of the diasporic experience in the hexagon. These fundamental questions are explored through specific reference to Alain Mabanckou's 1998 novel Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, while extending the argument to issues of immigration and transnationalism and establishing points of commonality with similar phenomena in other socio-cultural contexts.
Recent critical approaches in the social sciences have provided useful paradigms and contextual frameworks for exploring these occurrences. Jean-Loup Amselle's book, Branchements: Anthropologie de l'universalité des cultures, offers a framework that allows us to adequately assess the complex manner in which populations and histories have become imbricated. The implications of this recontextualization are tremendously helpful in delineating and illustrating how this theoretical apparatus could be put into practice in order to understand the dynamics of colonialism, immigration, and transnationalism. Amselle's objective consists in...