Mémoires Sculptées: Commémorer l'Abolition de l'Esclavage en France Métropolitaine à travers le Monument, 1998-2012.
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Khadraoui, Sophia Gaelle
- Graduate Program:
- French
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 04, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Jennifer Boittin, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jennifer Boittin, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jonathan Eran Abel, Committee Member
Vincent Bruyere, Committee Member
Benedicte Marie Christine Monicat, Committee Member
Willa Zahava Silverman, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Memory
Monuments
Slavery - Abstract:
- April 24th, 1998: without legal authorization and proper administrative documents, a two-meter-high statue of a slave raising his hand to the sky as he breaks free from his shackles was secretly erected overnight on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes, France’s leading slave port in the 18th century. After the city refused to install a plaque commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, Mémoire d’Outre-Mer, an association that promotes the memory of overseas French departments in continental France, decided to commission this statue to Liza Marcault-Derouard, a young student at the École des Beaux-Arts. The sculpture was inaugurated on April 25, by municipal and regional authorities who did not know of the clandestine status of the project. Eight days later, on May 2nd, after 5,000 people had already praised and applauded the statue during its inauguration, the sculpture was amputated and toppled overnight. The perpetrators were never found. By taking nine local instances of commemoration such as Nantes, the aim of this project is to discover the motif(s) underlying the process of the memorialization of the abolition of slavery through sculpture (statues) and monuments erected since 1998, year of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in metropolitan France. Within this artistic context of public memory, my thesis unveils the various social, political and aesthetic dynamics at stake in the making of these monuments and exposes the various facets of how a nation, a community or an association narrates its own pasts. I argue that the question of slavery, this not so remote past, and its artistic representations, are intimately tied to current debates about race, identity and immigration in France. In the memory of slavery and its abolition, there is constant violence as individuals and communities debate not only what to remember, but also how, where and why. This dissertation reveals the underlying processes of silencing, burying, selecting, and revising that are at the heart of these monuments. With the 2005 riots and a current political climate highly charged with debates surrounding questions of national identity - “What does a national identity mean?” and “Who is French?” - French society is still clearly grappling with the effects of both colonial (including slavery) and postcolonial immigration. My dissertation contributes to the larger and more than ever contentious debate over the question of memory and its place in French national history.