Nidhal Chamekh Nos visages, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage

Decolonizing Knowledge and the Power of Becoming Common: An Interview with Seloua Luste Boulbina

Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian
Seloua Luste Boulbina is a philosopher. For many years, she has been developing thought related to decolonial becoming by focusing on the processes of (de)subjectivation, be they political, artistic, or literary, as well as on the role of creative indetermination, which provokes the emergence of subjectivities. In her resolutely transdisciplinary critical practice, she proposes new ways of addressing and thinking the postcolony, which, following Edward Said, she considers a polyphonic space or “interworld.” Luste Boulbina’s prolific theoretical writings have helped shed light on the postcolonial question, both epistemologically and methodologically, by elaborating approaches based on specific contexts (Kafka’s Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa, trans. Laura E Hengehold (Indiana University Press, 2019); Les Arabes peuvent-ils parler? (Payot, 2011); and L’Afrique et ses fantômes: Écrire l’après (Présence africaine, 2015).
From 2010 to 2016, Luste Boulbina headed the Décolonisation des savoirs program at Collège international de philosophie, Paris, and in 2016 she established “Les artistes parlent aux philosophes,” an experimental laboratory in which I had the opportunity to participate. The laboratory brought together artists, philosophers, and art historians “engaged in the process of decolonizing rationality and the imaginary.” In close continuity with her singular line of thought, in her most recent book, Les miroirs vagabonds ou la décolonisation des savoirs (arts, littérature, philosophie), published in 2018 by Presses du réel, she highlights decolonization processes aimed at dismantling the colonial power matrix by exploring possibilities offered by the arts, literature, and philosophy. She generously agreed to an interview on certain issues examined in the book.  

Mirna Boyadjian : In the first part of your book, which eulogizes disorientation, you say that the decolonization of knowledge constitutes “a rejuvenation of the mind, a way of losing the known world and of finding one’s own world.” Could you explain more about the conditions for emergence of this “rejuvenation”? What does the decolonization of knowledge involve? And how do the arts, in the current global context, participate in this?

Seloua Luste Boulbina : Disorientation is tangible only when it is not effected “at will” through intermittence; it should not be confused with all the borrowings that the “Norths” have transferred to the “Souths.” Here, it’s about the relationship not between the North (global) and the South (global), but between the South and the North. When one is an artist or a writer from the South, how can one escape the norms established by the hegemony of the North? For example, if the works of African artists produced on the continent are sold in Northern countries, if they are discussed and chosen there, then they are oriented. The issue is both material and symbolic. This doesn’t mean that everyone should be isolated in their territory of “origin.” Far from it, for the postcolonial context is the other side of globalization; it’s what makes it possible. It’s a question not just of space but also of time, since those for whom “independence” is relatively recent—the 1960s or 1970s—enter this state overwhelmed with duties: the duty to know, do, and be. Independence is performative: a declaration that transforms a region or country from one state to another. It must then “lose its bearings”—that is, pull away from, evade the hegemonies and other imperialisms imposed by Northern countries, be it symbolically or materially—this is what I mean by disorientation, in a symbolic sense here.

Following independence, decolonization consists of a labour of disorientation, of the abandonment of references imposed by European colonization. A labour of forgetting: not amnesia, but an affirmation unbound from a colonial past and its impositions. From this perspective, decolonization is a metamorphosis facilitated by this active and creative forgetting, a mitigation of sorts—the opposite of a grievance or trial, for recollecting the horrors of the past is not, in the effectiveness of the present, a solution. It’s an abyss. That’s why art is so decisive here. A form of knowledge, it is a way of writing the Afterward. If it depends on the “market” and its institutions, it is less subject to censorship than work produced in universities.   

When Nidhal Chamekh, for example, was working on Nos visages (2019), he cut out and reassembled historical portraits of “natives,” thus breaking with the traditional means of representing the past. It was a way of reversing the images published in Le Miroir, a French magazine founded in 1910, which constituted his archives for this work. A way to put an end to the negation of these soldiers from the past, to aphasia, and to the impossibility of speaking about them. Chamekh thus positively transforms the losers of the victory into the unvanquished. He stresses the Provence landings (so-called soldiers from the Empire) rather than the Normandy landings (North American soldiers). This way, he unravels a heavily oriented narrative, destroying the smoke and mirrors of colonialism by deconstructing the “harmony” of the masks: the false portraits of colonial “archetypes” proposed in the magazine. Nos visages is a series of drawings printed on fabric. Each piece of printed fabric partially obscures another. Europe is erased by Africa, the past by the present. Ours faces are rediscovered in our images, or our images in our faces. It’s a distortion, a gesture that allow us to “forge ahead” without a compass. A rejuvenation of the mind. Especially since the Nos visages exhibition was held in Tunis, not in London or New York. 

Nidhal Chamekh
Nos visages, 2019.
Photo : permission de l’artiste & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage
Nidhal Chamekh
Nos visages, 2019.
Photo : permission de l’artiste & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage
Nidhal Chamekh
Nos visages, 2019.
Photo : permission de l’artiste & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage
Nidhal Chamekh
Nos visages, 2019.
Photo : permission de l’artiste & Galerie Selma Feriani, Carthage

MB : I completely agree with you when you assert that “art cannot constitute a step backwards. It’s a means of writing the Afterward. For art—in this case the visual arts—and literature are less normalized than academic knowledge.” Yet how should we write about art? And for whom? The production of art discourse is itself still dominated by Western thought. You suggest the same about art criticism. Could you clarify this statement a little? How does the decolonization of knowledge relate to the field of research in the arts?

SLB : That’s a very real difficulty. Not only in that no one in the South, and particularly in Africa, is writing or reflecting on the art that is produced and shown there, but there are also considerably fewer people, in general, writing in or about the visual arts than in the North. In addition, the impact of what is written in the South is less than the impact of what is thought, including by Africans, in the North. The hegemony and concentration of all capital—of all kinds—in certain regions creates legitimacy and determines dissemination. Works of art and literature also circulate more easily than do theoretical texts because we can always, in their reception, mitigate certain issues and relegate them to the realms of business or entertainment.

When I analyze a play or a work, or a gesture or an approach, created elsewhere, I’m well aware that, because we don’t inhabit the same spaces, my interpretations inevitably miss certain meanings that they convey relative to the place where they were produced. The cultural space in which I live and work constitutes a bias and inevitably produces a parallax. Globalization is a shared illusion. I don’t think that the “global elite,” who rarely need visas or can at least obtain them easily, should have the last word in this regard, because their movements and overall vision would allow them to contextualize the play or work within a general overview that allows for comparisons and serves to substantiate market estimates. Between global (northern) and local (southern), the former is unquestionably overvalued, and the latter relatively devalued. This is why I insist on disorientation. The global represents a sense of orientation—and, sociologically, of pricing and investment—for Niamey, N’Djamena, Harare, and Algiers are not—yet?—places where prices (material) and values (symbolic) are set in an internationalized neoliberal world.  

The current postcolonial model rests on the distinction between form, in its normativity, and material, notably raw material. It’s the legacy not only of Western metaphysics but also of the colonial partitioning of the world. It’s a type of discourse that, in the case of discursivity, pits those concerned with formal considerations against those preoccupied by material concerns, even when they are creators of artistic and literary forms. Instead, we should be reflecting on the various forms that aesthetic practices can take—and, undoubtedly, considering the fact that practices can take paths other than those determined by discourse, or what I will call theory here. Thought must also be given, in many different areas, to the plural forms that “art criticism” can take. Yet the problem would be only partially resolved: funding, in whatever form, has only ever been a policy that benefits the few, not everyone. Access to information is also decisive: information itself represents capital. It’s impossible not to take the economy of criticism and theory into account.


MB : Decolonization is a labour, not a linear process. This labour entails or, rather, invents processes. In your view, decolonization is also accomplished through creolization. How does that occur?

SLB : Decolonization cannot be considered the objective, except as an ideal. This is why the idea of creolization is interesting, despite it being too widely depoliticized, perhaps under the influence of the person who defended it the most, Édouard Glissant. Creolization, founded on the recognition of an irreducible heterogeneity, is ground for the creative development of new linguistic and cultural forms that preserve it. This heterogeneity is also a rupture or fragmentation, for we commonly think of “culture” as being not only “homogeneous” but also “continuous.” Creolization is experienced as something incomprehensible, unintelligible, or never seen before. Its otherness can be attributed to the fragmentation at its foundations: the pieces or fragments paradoxically hold together. This particularly applies to postcolonial Africa. It resonates in the languages spoken and written there. The coexistence of various languages has effects on each one. Certainly, no culture is impermeable or hermetic. The same goes for theoretical thought. It’s clear that nothing, in this regard, can be calculated or anticipated. Creolization is a continuous act or creation, not a fight against. It’s not enough, particularly with regard to knowledge, to object to or to simply criticize historically constituted knowledge (I include art and literature here). It’s a matter of changing perspectives and the ways that questions are understood by turning away from mutual antagonisms and positional warfare.

Myriam Saduis
Final Cut, 2018.
Photos : Marie-François Plissart


MB : Forgetting is at the heart of decolonization. In the final chapter of your book, you explain the virtues of forgetting. It’s an adventure, a possibility to “remodel the facts and open up new horizons,” notably through artistic research of “restorative significance which begins with the production of a commons, intelligible and shareable by both sides of coloniality.” How can this labour of forgetting be elaborated in contemporary art, as a gesture of resistance against the phantoms of a colonial past and the (symbolic and material) dispossession that it implies?

SLB : Forgetting is not passive. It is neither omission, nor negligence, nor amnesia. It’s not a reactionary position, or, in Nietzsche’s term, reactive. That’s what interests me most in contemporary art. And not just in the visual arts. This also applies to the performing arts. Myriam Saduis’s Final Cut is a moving example.

In this play, the most intimate and personal is tightly interwoven with the highly political and pushes beyond the memorialization of the past, in this case Tunisia’s colonial past. How can we move forward? How can we turn the page on the past? How can we put an end to this history? How can we cut with that which has been cut out, unstitched, dismembered, disassociated, disjointed, separated, severed? And with a single thread, sew back together the separate pieces, the parts that were defeated, the lost fragments. It’s a challenge, indeed, to stage and represent the overlapping and magnified distances, failings, and divides. Saduis proposes an integral disorientation as regards country, language, father, mother, and name. Transformed and whitewashed, what remains of a father (a Tunisian Arab) who disappeared in the madness of his mother (a European blackfoot), except for being captured in the restricted framework of a photographic negative? Almost nothing. An autobiography. Writing, at most. In this work, we see an active and affirmative forgetting, which has nothing to do with former executioners and former victims, or with previous trials or past battles, for times have changed. It is this difference that must be deeply examined. It’s in this sense that a positive (in the photographic sense) emerges from an old negative. The present is thus detached from a past with which it was once connected. 

More generally, practically speaking, I associate forgetting—active and affirmative—with Freud’s essential concept of working through. Freud distinguishes among repeating, remembering, and working through. It’s interesting to note that the last is conceived in relation to resistance. It’s a way of saying that decolonization and forgetting meet with resistance. Formulating the question in terms of political opposition means conceptualizing it on an exclusively discursive level, on a political or philosophical level, without necessarily considering how our practices are less told than they are telling.

Working through, or metaphorization, displacement, transposition, metamorphosis, elaboration. This paves the way for a positive interplay of differences and of multiple and successive differentiations that could put an end to the negative effects of the past (suffering, humiliation, colonial deprivation). This past is a kind of dual raw material, political and psychological, which must be metabolized fragment by fragment. This is what is understood, in the North, when it’s decided to “decolonize” museums, images, bodies, dance, and so on. The rehabilitation of the (once dominated) subject is the key issue. 

The labour of construction, of symbolization, allows us to overcome the difficult and very likely traumatic events of the past. Yet this does not happen alone; it develops through intersubjectivity, through co-construction. Today’s side-by-side replaces the face-to-face of yesteryear’s colonialism. It’s a real step forward, a genuine pas de deux. 

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft

Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian, Myriam Saduis, Nidhal Chamekh
Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian, Myriam Saduis, Nidhal Chamekh
Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian, Myriam Saduis, Nidhal Chamekh
This article also appears in the issue 98 - Knowledge
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