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Michelle Bumatay, "On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power" (Ohio State UP, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gina Stum, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama. And today I'll be talking to Professor Michelle Boumite about her book Blackbone Destine and Transcolonial Power, out this year from the Ohio State University Press. Michelle Boumete is the assistant is Assistant professor of French at Florida State University. With research interests including African and diasporic literatures, Band Destine and Other Visual Culture, Genocide studies, and migration studies. She has published numerous journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, including most recently Framing France in the Indian Ocean, of Shipwrecks and Fertile Women in Graphic Narratives of Advocating for Representation and Social justice in French Language and the Feminine Plural in Africa and the Quartets of Women in Aya Deobo and La Vie des Benduta in Drawing in the Feminine Ban, Destiny and Women. Thank you so much for being with Ushal.
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C
Yeah, thanks for having me and for the invitation.
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B
So I would love to start with your title, as you do in your introduction. Transcoloniality may be a new concept for some readers, but even the other two terms, black and ban, are more complex than they might appear at first. Can you unpack some of that complexity for us and explain why it's important to you to use these Terms.
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C
Right. So I guess I'll start with bondesigne. So it's the French term for comics. It's an umbrella term and it means drawn strip. So it's a much more technical term than something like comics or funnies. And there are lots of people who've written about this. And I chose it in part because what I'm looking at is very much staunchly indebted or embedded in French and Belgian comics. And then I could have used comics. But because of what I'm looking at, it really is related to the French and Belgian versions of comics as a cultural field. So I'm kind of thinking about Ann Miller's book reading Bandissine. So for this project in particular, I wanted to keep the term bondesine because it's very integral to the work that I'm looking at, the corpus that I've chosen for this. And part of it is looking at how France and Belgium, to a lesser extent, but very much France, how France uses soft power by coining something like bon designe and terming it the ninth art. So everything that might fall under that. Since the 1960s, this term has been in circulation to raise this medium to high art. And they use it as a form of imperialism, soft power still to this day. And a lot of the artists that I'm looking at come from or grew up reading a lot of the French and Belgian classics and were trained in those styles. And part of what they're doing is very much in that context or in dialogue with that context. And so if I just use the term comics, the English term comics, it wouldn't make as much sense for this project in particular. There are other times for brevity or for opening up what I'm working on to a larger audience. Well, I'll just use the word comics or comics in French. But again, even those terms are nebulous and change. And I do point that out in the book as well, that even in France, what they say is Bondesine can be much different. I mean, all different kinds of objects. So it could be an editorial cartoon, it could be a newspaper strip, it could be a weekly publication or graphic novel. And so I really wanted to problematize or at least reveal the underpinnings of the umbrella term itself in a French language context, but highlight its relationship or its influence in the kind of post colonial context that I'm looking at for the artist that I'm considering. And then for the term black, again, it's a floating signifier to an extent. And I wanted to bring that to the surface. And of course, my work is informed by other scholars, literary, cultural studies and historians who work on contemporary France. And so books like Dominic Thomas, Black France, the collective anthology, Black Europe, the book, the anthology as well, it's called Black France, France Noir. And it purposefully asks why these different terms and why black France is more in common parlance. And the reason I use it and why a lot of these historians and other scholars use the term black in English is because France prides itself on being colorblind and not seeing racism a category. Even though it's a social construct, it gets used politically as well. And so by insisting on the English term, we allow for the kind of discourse that's been developed in the United States and kind of Anglo American scholarship about race and racialized difference and how it operates in the world. And so actually, something like Achilles Bemby's critique of black reason is a great broadening of that scope beyond just the national framework of France or even just in Europe itself. And so by juxtaposing these two terms, black and bon desinee, I'm bringing all of that into play. And for me, it's not that I'm delineating a subcategory of comics, but rather thinking of these concepts as floating signifiers, but as crucial to understanding the work that's been done by the art artists that I look at. Great.
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B
And can you walk us through a little bit how you arrived at this project and how you chose this corpus?
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C
Yeah, originally I knew that I wanted to research comic books, and when I started graduate school, that wasn't as common. Comic studies itself was very new when I first started graduate school. So just to start a project on comics itself was somewhat novel. But within my first year of graduate school, I knew that I wanted to work on African comics in French. I didn't know that there were such a thing. And so I initial project was to find out everything I could about them, to get my hands on as many of them as I could to read them. And so my questions were, who's producing what, where, and for whom? Who's reading them? How are they distributed? So initially I thought it was going to be more of a prescriptive project. And very quickly I realized that in order to understand what the artists are doing, I needed to understand them in context. And each artist, each publication is different. And that's what my project tries to highlight. And so originally I was looking at African comics, but actually what I'm looking, looking at are comics produced by different artists of African descent, because they don't. You know, different artists grow up in different places. They have different cultural references. But all of what they're producing is informed by kind of Franco, Belgian visual imperialism. And then the power systems, the colonially inherited kind of network of publishing houses, distribution models. All of that informs the decisions that are made by the cartoonists themselves. And so to understand what the cartoonists are doing in their work and with their work, I needed to understand the bigger picture.
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B
And how did you choose these authors in particular?
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C
Yeah, that's a great question. I've been asked this question lots of times, and there's so many different ways to answer it. I guess part of it was accessibility. So there are lots of comics that I wanted to get my hands on, but I couldn't, in part because I applied for funding to physically go to these, to go to different countries in Africa to look at archives. But a lot of what was produced on. On the continent, kind of from the late 1960s until the 2000s, is very ephemeral. And it's hard to get copies of that or even access to those archives. And then the distribution for those kinds of objects is limited to large cities. So usually metropolitan cities, the capitals in a lot of these countries. And so actually, I ended up going to France to do a lot of this research because that's. They had copies there, or at certain festivals, I could actually meet the authors and buy their copies from them. So originally, I was looking at something much more broad. But in putting this project together and thinking about what certain artists do with this medium, I narrowed it down to the kind of themes and materiality for the four chapters. And so I kind of approached it thematically, but also in terms of looking at what do certain comics and artists do and have them be illustrative of larger practices by other cartoonists as well. So it's not exhaustive. Obviously, I wanted it to be really targeted. But I'm hoping that my chapters help others do more research on the large archive that is out there.
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B
And in the introduction, you say that your project will help us unpack the complex relationship between counter visuality and materiality. Could you explain what you mean by this relationship and its implications for your goals with this volume?
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C
Yeah. So thinking about counter visuality, a way to not necessarily write back to the center, but a way to disrupt existing visual discourses. So in terms of French and Belgian bond destiny, this is a visual discourse that grew up with colonialism. They went hand in hand. So a lot of early French and Belgian comics were about the other and elsewhere. And so because of the visual economy of caricature and stereotype, they helped solidify certain cultural and racial stereotypes. And so by looking at what cartoonists do, cartoonists from Africa and African descent, looking at what they do with their own art, looking at how they adopt this medium but also make decisions for themselves, is a form of counter visuality in their work. But in order to understand that and their choices, we also have to look at the materiality of their cultural objects as well. So where are they producing? What are they producing? Who has access to it? Because a lot of the time, the European standard for Bond dessine is a cultural object that ends up being a luxury item for lots of people, actually, not just in Africa, but in lots of places. It's hard. Bond dessinee are not cheap. They're cultural objects. They're hardback books. And so looking at how an artist's approach to materiality informs their decisions, the level of content and form, I think is really important. And my main goal was to bring these artists who've been doing this work for a very long time to a larger audience. And so for comic studies, they're underrepresented and understudied because they're in French. And then in French comic studies, they're underrepresented because they're texts from Africa or by artists of African descent. And the mainstream is very strong. There's even a Cameroonian artist, Simon Pierre Mbumbo, who says that Haya de Yopugon by Marguerite Abouet is the tree that hides the forest. She's the standout. She's the one that has been promoted for so long, even though generations of cartoonists have been working for decades long before her, and are overlooked. And so part of what my project tries to do is, is bring that to the larger audience and have more people looking at what these cartoons have been doing for a long time and are continuing to do today. Thank you.
- [12:37]
B
And in your first chapter, what you call a tale of two Kinshasas, or the plurality of everyday colonialism, plurality here refers not only to the diversity of Kinshasa's population, but also a methodological approach by two Congolese bdaist in particular, how do the two authors you've chosen enact a kind of plurality in your view? And why is this important?
- [12:59]
C
Yeah, I wanted to start the book with Kinshasa and cartoonists from Kinshasa because it's been such a hub of comics production, French comics production in Africa, and there are lots of artists that come from Kinshasa. So I focused on Bali Bahuti, who's one of the standout artists. He's been producing since the late 70s. And then I wanted to contrast him with Papun Fay Mueto, who was producing war in the 1990s and early 2000s, because they come from the same context, so to speak, but have wildly different projects. So part of what I wanted to do with this chapter is demonstrate how each cartoonist, each project, deserves its own set of methodological tools to look at it, but that we should be reading it within a broader context. So, for example, the Fond Destiny that I look at by Bali Baruti is a hardback Bond dessune that was published in the same standard as a Tintin album or an aesthetics album. It's the same number of pages, it's got the hardback outer cover, but he does lots of different things inside of it. He weaves together different mediums. So he references music throughout. It's actually Bond Destiny about Papa Wemba, the Rambo star. He references cinema and music and then art as well. And he kind of in the same self styling of La Sape, which Papa Wamba was a huge proponent of, Lessep in Kinshasa, the artist himself, Bani Bhagouty, also does that. And so I read the Bond desine as a form of self styling. So Bani Bharouti is writing a story about Papa Wemba's self styling. But then through his knowledge of how films are made, how to make good art, how to make a compelling bond desinenet, Bali Bahuti also displays himself as a kind of supper or someone who can get by. And then this is similar to Papun Vaymoyto in the sense that he's also self styling in every text that he does. But wildly different from Barli Babouti's Bon Desine, that is for a general audience. The hardback book can be picked up anywhere at the time and can be read by anyone because it's in French. It does have a lexicon at the back for local terms. In contrast, Papangpay Muito's self titled magazine that he produced himself and that he photocopied himself and distributed himself to his local audience in Kinshasa is much different. It's this outpouring of production and every single page, the outer covers, every single inch of the pages themselves become a site for self styling. And so he's also influenced by music, he's also influenced by getting by. The two of them have this notion of sedes Prigue. So in kind of the notion of the Francophone post colony in the way that Achille Mbembe wrote about it in the early 2000s, these two artists make their own way and cobble together whatever influences they have around them and make wildly different texts. Whereas Bali Bahuti's is made for a broader audience. Like I said, Papua Famoeto has incorporated a technique from Congolese music where you shout out the names of your patrons. And so in his Bondesine he actually writes the names of his readers in the margins. And so it kind of creates this feedback loop between the local audience and the producer themselves and they recognize themselves for their self styling. And so it's this celebration of an engagement with the local audience. So the strategies in his series are much different than something that's going to an international audience that happens to also speak French. So I wanted to make sure that when I was reading both of them, I used to kind of historians and anthropological works from the region or about the region that helped me read what these two cartoonists were doing in each of their texts.
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D
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E
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B
So you've already evoked the idea that bans desines are part of the Franco Belgian soft power in the area. And in both your introduction and in this first chapter you evoke the complicated relationship these Bonnes destinees have to infamous. How does this colonialist document continue to cast a shadow?
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C
I think Nancy Hunt, the historian, she's written about this and her work is very helpful. She actually went and did field work in Kinshasa to look at how does Tintin in the Congo, how does its afterlives impact the local art scene and local comic books? But I think that it's Tintao Congo is a striking example of how visual imperialism continues to have an influence. This text is still reproduced today. You can still buy it. Publishing house is still making profit off of it. And there's a fraught relationship. Sometimes there's a sense of pride that Tintin went to Congo and so there's recognition there. And then at other times, the caricatures, the visual caricatures that Angers does in Tintin and the Congo and the paternalism of the story itself are definitely perpetuating kind of an anti black ideology. So in my research, looking at what cartoonists do and how they respond to this, to something like the clear line aesthetic that developed alongside other cartoonists at the time, that has a certain simplicity but also a readability built into it, that the world was readable and knowable and therefore transmissible, is very much caught up with a modernist ideology. So, yeah, in my research, looking at what different cartoons have done, there are some cartoonists that take up this style unproblematically. It's just a means of self representation. Although their versions of how they draw themselves is much more nuanced than obviously what did. So it's just a form of visual storytelling for some cartoonists. For others it's caricature. And there are certain cartoonists like Pahe, who's from Gabon. He makes fun of this in a lot of his work. He will vary his artistic style from very caricature to more realistic at times, to kind of unpack or unveil the embedded racial hierarchy of such a text like Tantao Congo. But it's still important. It's still a historical document. I think that it's important not to censor it. I think that we should not necessarily circulate it widely and continue to make money off of it. But I don't think that it should be cordon dot. I think that it's important to see it as a historical document, to see how different artists engage with it or don't engage with it. But one thing that I have noticed is that a lot of the cartoonists from Kinshasa, so someone like Bali Bhouti and someone like Pat Masoni specifically, because that's where Tintin in the Congo is set. It's set in the Belgian Congo, not in the French Congo. A lot of the artists from that region tend towards verisimilitude in their artwork. A lot of them use watercolors. A lot of them are very much. It's kind of a response to the pared down visual style of. By insisting on place by insisting on the indexicality of Congo and of the people who are there. And so there's much more detail in a lot of their work because it's the exact opposite of something like Tintino Congo.
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B
You've already brought up the dominance of Marguerite Abutet, who's one of the most successful African or Afro diasporic Middle east. In your second chapter, which you call this the Aya effect with Aya in capital letters. And here you're talking about, I would say, series Aya de Yopugan and the enthusiastic welcome it's received in the global North. How do you problematize this reception?
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C
By putting in the context. So in order to understand why she's so not, not why she's so popular, but kind of the success of it, a lot of people overlook this and I think it's extremely important because it's very much linked to France's soft power in the 21st century. And so I try to situate her original series, give it back its historicity, so that we can understand how and why she's become so successful. And then also what she's done with that. Because decontextualized, you actually lose how subversive her work is. And so I'm trying to recontextualize it in order to do that, it's situating her work within the larger publishing landscape of France. So there's a lot of new research or recent research that helps with this. But specifically, kind of the. The fabrication of something like La Francophonie or La Reiner Internationale de La Francophonie in the 70s is a pivot after decolonization, or at least after independence is when the French empire was waning. This notion of La Francophonie, this organization of French speaking nations held together in large part by France and backed up by French institutions, promotes a kind of French universalism threaded through with the French language. And then those of us who study contemporary France and postcolonial French relations, we know that the French language itself was kind of internally imposed on the French people themselves and then exported as well, and imposed on others. So the language and its use as political power cannot be overlooked. And so something like La Francophonie helps us understand that, but also the kind of development of the categorization of the African Francophone novel. So thinking of it as a genre and how certain authors become emblematic of entire countries, even though they're one person writing. And here, obviously I'm thinking of someone like Adam Aboucou is a perfect example of this. You can see how French institutions, especially the largest publishers, mobilize diversity as a way to maintain French language primacy. So what people who don't study this context don't understand is that what gets translated from French into English pretty much comes from only three publishers in France and there's a huge monopoly. And so Marguerite Abouet's very first graphic novel, the very first volume of Hag Dieu Bougain was published in 2005 by Galimard. And Galimard hadn't even stepped into the Bond dessine realm yet. And this was its first foray with Johannesvaard as the editor of this new series, this boutique series that Marguerite Abouet launched with the first issue. So her very first book coming out with one of the most prestigious publishers in France means that it was already going to succeed in a way that cartoonists who've been self publishing or publishing with smaller publishers couldn't, they just couldn't compete. And so in the wake of something like Marjane Sav Trappe's Persepolis and its international wide recognition, she published with La Sociation again, an important publisher for changing comic studies in the 1990s, or comics in France in the 1990s and 2000s. Her book was translated and it kind of created this pipeline for something like Ayod Yupo to be translated into English. And so within the first couple of years, the first volume was already translated into English, whereas it wasn't until I think it was 2013 that anything by Bonnie Baruti was translated into English, even though he's been publishing since, like I said, the late 1970s, early 1980s. So Marguerite's awareness, the awareness of Marguerite at the international level was much larger scale already from when she first started than other cartoonists. And so, I mean, that's part of it. Another part of it too was France wanting to demonstrate itself as open to multiculturalism. So this is the same era as when people like Ana Maku, Abdurrahman Labafi, Kalings, Biala Besara, all of them are winning literary awards, prestigious literary awards in France. And so for Gagimel to take a risk on something like this wasn't really a risk, it was a calculated decision on their part. And so in the chapter I talk about how this new sub series by Jean Svart launched Galibald into the Bondissines realm for literary production. And Marguerite Abbeway with her series, kind of made it much more mainstream.
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B
However, you don't see Aboue herself as being confined by this reception and could you tell me a little bit about how she exceeds these confines?
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C
Right. So the chapter I kind of the Aya effect that I'm talking about, other scholars have pointed to the Ayah effect. They call it Aya with lowercase just demonstrating that other voices can be admitted into the kind of mainstream or that the mainstream is willing to admit other voices. But I have Aya and capital letters because it's really the branding that Gadimat has done for her and her success and that she's done for herself and her success as well, that allow her much more flexibility in terms of intellectual and artistic license and creativity that other artists don't necessarily have. So the all capitals refers to how on the outside cover of every volume since the first volume, Ganima puts a sticker on the outside that says by the same author, Aya d'. Youvogant. And Aya is always in capital letters. And Aya is the name on the front cover of the very first volume. And it's this softer version of Francophone postcolonial Africa. It's female, it's not male. There's a collapse between the main character and her name, even though the main character, Aya, is not the main character of the series, really. It's all of her friends and the city itself. And then Abouay in her marketing, there's a collapse between Aya, the character, her main character, that's not autobiographical, and Marguerite Abbeway. So the Aya character who never leaves the Ivory coast in the series becomes a stand in for Marguerite Abouet herself, who lives in France and has lived there since she was 12 and is the success story. So the two of them collapse into one. And Marguerite Abouet's success in France is kind of this poster child for successful immigration into France, a successful blending of cultures that's non threatening her. Aya's image was used on the poster for an exhibition at the Museum of the History of Immigration in France for its rebranding in 2012, 2013. And it's funny because like I said, Aya herself never leaves the Ivory coast and she never wants to. Immigration is more Marguerite Abbeway's story herself. And some of the characters do immigrate, but there's this collapse, this purposeful collapse that Marguerite Aboy herself has perpetuated. And so it's always Aya, the character's name that stands in for her and the success but she's garnered in the.
- [30:17]
B
Next chapter, which you call Reframing migration in the 21st century, you make the most explicit connections between Black Bede and Ashin Mbembe's necropolitics. And you show how the authors you focus on reveal what you call, following Mbembe, intolerable fictions about migration. What do you mean by this?
- [30:36]
C
Right, so intolerable fictions actually comes from Dominic Davies. He's a comic scholar, but he's building on Jacques Ranciere's notion of an intolerable image from the emancipated spectator. So yes, I do talk about Chimbembe's necropolitics and the kind of spectral reality of lots of people in the 21st century, those who are trying to migrate or not, the ones who are stuck in filtering systems, detention centers, borderization as a process that turns the people who are implementing it and going through it into spectral images, our spectral beings. So the interoperable fictions comes from Dominic Davies writing about refugee comics. And he and I both think that a lot of the comics that deal with this issue, the issue of migration, the issue of people moving from one place to another, it's not necessarily about humanizing the people. It is that there's no question that that's the case. But there's so many of these comics in these Bondesigne that are wrapped up with veracity and authenticity to verify the witnesses statements to an extent so that we care about them. But actually what's also happening, if we only focus on how Pondesign comics give a human face to migrants, we lose sight of the other critiques that these texts are doing. And so Dominic Davies points to interrable fictions and how the system of comics itself helps unveil the fictions that are in circulation and provides a space for us to think through them. And so that really is a guiding principle for me for this chapter is to think through how different Bondissenier about migration since the early 2000s do this. And when we look at them in that light, we start to see the necropolitics of borderization in play, but also the discourses around migration in the 21st century that purposefully frame it as ahistorical and therefore not linked to colonialism and its after effects.
- [32:44]
B
And also the frame that you refer to in the chapter's title is not just the perspective that we bring to the issues around migration, but also specifically to the frames of a comic book panel. Could you give an example of the use of framing and layout to portray the experience of migration?
- [33:00]
C
This is central to what I'm doing in this chapter, I think, reframing how we understand migration in the 21st century. But also how these comics themselves are, in a sense, essays about this. If we read them as essays, they're very powerful. One example of this is at the End of an Eternity in Tangiers. One of the earliest about migration from Africa to Europe. The last page is three horizontal panels. That purposefully blur the lines between the past and the present. To underline the colonial relationship. Between processes of extraction. From during colonialism to contemporary forms of borderization. The first panel is a line of people in Africa. Who are porters for raw materials. That are being extracted. Under the watchful eye of a European colonizer. The middle horizontal panel is an offshore drilling site. And then the last panel shows the main character, Gawa. Who's been stuck in Changiers at the threshold of land and sea. So he's outside of Tangiers, and he's standing there. At the threshold between the land and the sea. The threshold between North Africa and Europe. But he's always at the margins. And so people who are stuck, these spectral figures. Can only ever travel at the margins. And right behind him we see seagulls who are in flight. And who can travel wherever they want. Because migration is part of being alive on the planet. It's the artificial borders that have been in place. And their enforcement. That is actually a part of the violence. And so he's stuck at this threshold moment. But the offshore drilling and the raw materials. Can go to Europe without any question. But people can't. And then it also. Kind of. A lot of these comics also raise the question. Well, how is it that the European colonizers. And then people today at the embassies. What is their jurisdiction to physically be in a place? Who gave them the right to be there? Right. That's always one of the underlying questions as well.
- [35:20]
B
That actually leads us nicely into your last chapter. Which is talking about this kind of extractive economy in a lot of ways. The title of the chapter is Black Bond Desine and Decolonial Ecocriticism. And could you explain a little bit about what decolonial ecocriticism is? Which is. It's a term that's based in Malcolm Ferdinand's decolonial ecologies. And maybe talk a little bit about how bejet. Are especially adapted to perform it. Or to be subject to this kind of analysis? Right.
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C
So, yeah, Decolonial ecocriticism. So a form of ecocriticism that looks at the environment, Destruction to the environment. But that's predicated on an understanding of colonial systems. At the center of what's happening. In the world today. So obviously thinking through something like Rob Nixon's slow violence and how these bondes dene can make that palpable. So one of the things that Nixon talks about and why it's so hard to make slow violence urgent is because we have to give shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across time and space. And sometimes that's really hard. And so through fiction, this is helpful. Authors can create stories where these slow effects are more palpable. But one of the reasons why I think Bond destiny and comics are so good at this, and Hilary Shoes pointed to this, is that you have the co presence of the past and the present and the future on the pages themselves. So when you turn the page and you're reading a comic, you see all of that all at once. And there's a correlation there. Just through page layout, you can evoke certain things through braiding. As Terry Groenstein talks about it too. You can draw connections across time and space more. More effectively. We see this too in something like Jessica Huglier's Tropique Toxique. The effects of Chlorcone in the Caribbean. The French Caribbean. Using infographics on the page, while weaving in different narratives can allow for the human connection with people in the region, but also an awareness of effects over time. And so I think that the Bondissonnaire really well suited for this. And Jessica Oubliet talks about this as well in her introduction to an anthology about Sargassum, the kind of waves of algae washing ashore in the Caribbean and South America. But yeah, how comics can help us chronicle changes over time, but then also create a space of multiple times all at once and a flexibility, a plasticity of using diagrams or narrative or photos or any kind of mix of multimodal representation to help us understand what's happening.
- [38:09]
B
In your chapter, which deals largely with Japhet Miergotar's Cargassin Martel Abidjan, you talk about how it uses allegory to enact what you call symbolic justice. Could you unpack this a little bit for us?
- [38:24]
C
Right, so this Bon desinee deadly cargo in Abidjan is a retelling of an actual event that took place in 2006. It was a scandal. There was an international shipping company that dumped toxic waste in Abidjan. The ship docked for only 24 hours and offloaded lots of toxic waste. And it was dispersed throughout the city. And then within a couple days there were people who were suffering health issues because of it. And ultimately, I think about two dozen people died as a result of the exposure to toxic waste. In the wake of that, different people tried to bring lawsuits against the trading company, against the shipping company, against the local officials that helped disperse it. But ultimately the only people that kind of had to spend any time in jail or have any repercussions were the local ovarian employees that helped disperse it. There was no international justice, essentially, for those who were in charge of it. And so in the retelling of it and in the allegory of it in the Bond Dessine Miu Guitar, he creates this new character. Originally, she looks like an African woman. She's a secretary. She also is carrying a baby on her back and wearing a pen. But it turns out that she's a vengeful African spirit. And she methodically assassinates those who are responsible for the. The shipping that allowed for the dumping of the toxic waste in Abigen. And then she goes and she threatens new people who are trying to plan a similar scheme. And the text ends with her holding someone in her clutches, saying that this cannot ever happen again. So there' sit's very interesting too, in the bandissonne because most of the bandesign is very rectilinear. And then when she turns into the spirit, she is shapeless and formless, and she can change shape. And she's very fluid. And there's lots of wavy lines to denote her. And so this kind of does bring up Rob Nixon's notion that we have to have these kinds of stories that make this urgent for us. She disrupts the entire diegesis of the comic, which is great, but so for the real victims there wasn't a kind of justice. But through this bon desinee, Jeff Emil Guittar is trying to draw attention to this and punish those who were responsible for, even if symbolically, but also bring that kind of justice and closure for the real victims.
- [40:54]
B
And finally, and to bring us a little bit full circle back to the reference to. In the beginning, you identify two significant intertexts or European intertexts here. And perhaps more surprisingly, Picasso's Demoiselle d', Avignon, both of which you interpret as enacting colonial violence, including ecological violence. Why are these important points of reference for this volume?
- [41:21]
C
Right. So others have pointed to the inner text with Anger's Coconstock, but just visually. And then that's it. I think Adam Heiseau mentions that there's a strange relationship between the cargo and both ships. So in Coconnstock is one of Angers Tintin albums. And the English translation of the title is the Red Sea Sharks doesn't have anything to do. I mean, it does with the story, but the real story is that Tintin unveils or uncovers that there are those in the Red Sea who are trafficking West Africans who are on their pilgrimage to Mecca. They're capturing them and then selling them. So slate of trade in the Red Sea. And this was based on a real story that read in the News in the 1950s and 60s, and he wanted to do a story about it. And so Cocon stuck is the code that the shippers would use to tell other ships that they have human beings in the ship's hold to purchase. And what I point out is that other people's. Other people who've written about me and Guitar's text is that this direct correlation between Cocol stock, which is a euphemism for black bodies, and a source of fuel, if you will, through manpower, Cocolstock is a euphemism for that. And then the toxic waste that was on board the Proba Koala, which is the real ship that dispersed its toxic waste in Ibjan. What they had on the ship itself was coker naphtha that they processed. And it was the byproduct of that process that they're dumping. And so coker is also a form of cheap fuel. In both cases, there are euphemisms for cheap fuel that have to do with the color black and that also spell black death for Africans with slavery at the center of this. And so Malcolm Ferdinand's book and the notion of whole politics central to both colonial extraction and then toxic dumping, they're two sides of the same coin, right? They're linked. And then for the lesser obvious or the part that's less obvious, the relationship to Picasso's demo design and d', Avignon. What Neil Guitar uses for his inspiration in terms of his artistic style are African sculptures and masks and statues. But in particular, for this comic book, he uses Fang art and masks. And these are objects that were extracted during colonial extraction as well and brought to Europe and foundational to Picasso's move towards Cubism. And in particular, Demoiselle d'. Avignon. Suzanne Bleyer has a great book where she picks apart how Picasso went about making that painting in particular. But what Simon Gikande, the African art historian, has pointed out is that there was a violence done to these objects in order for European modernity to happen. And it was an extraction of the original artist's name, of their talent, of everything that goes into Making that object for European modernism to use it, they needed to decontextualize it. And so there's a violence done to these objects. In part, some of them were reliquary statues that were attached to a box and so they were ripped from the box. Sometimes they were also disfigured or disformed, added to. But it's more so the ideological evacuating of the original person who made it that they have any value whatsoever that Picasso is eplimatic of in the early 20th century. It's that evacuation and then the toxic dumping of this ideology that says that European artists are the ones who know what this art should be used for in this kind of decontextualized way that is part and parcel of the same kind of ideology that you can extract humans and then have labor from that as well. So the two go hand in hand. And so reading Coconstock by with Picasso's Dumois Aldevignol helps us understand the complexity of what Miu Guitar is doing in his Bondissigny. There's a kind of restitution of African art, if only virtually. And there's a kind of symbolic justice going on for the real victims of the toxic dumping itself.
- [45:57]
B
So as we come to the close of our time here, are there any other projects that you would like to tell our listeners about?
- [46:04]
C
Right. Well, you mentioned them in your introduction. I do think that the new anthology Graphic Narratives of Advocating for Representation and Social justice in French Language, Bondissine that just came out with Edinburgh University Press, is really exciting. There are lots of different scholars contributing to this. I think comic studies is going in new directions and I think this is a great example of that. So my chapter in there that's on the Indian Ocean and definitely looks at kind of transcolonial relationships through shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean. There's that one. I'm also working on a co edited volume or, sorry, a co edited issue of the journal Franco Sferre that should come out next spring on Afrotopias. And so Falween Saar is one of the co authors of the report on the restitution of African Cultural heritage. But in 2016 he wrote an essay entitled Afrotopia. And so I had a conference recently looking at different Afrotopias. And so I'm putting together an edit or co editing an issue of Francospheres that should be out in the spring. And there are articles on literature, poetry, Afrofuturists, Pondesine, all kinds of things. So those are some upcoming projects that's really exciting.
- [47:29]
B
So thank you so much, Michelle, and thank you for your wonderful and thoughtful answers today.
- [47:35]
C
Yeah, thanks for having me. Limu Gameo.
- [47:51]
A
And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [48:06]
C
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [48:09]
A
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [48:10]
C
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty, Liberty.
- [48:14]
B
Liberty.
- [48:15]
C
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