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Introduction

Appropriation, Provenance, and Restitution: The Case of Verbal Arts

Irene Albers et Éléonore Devevey
Traduction de Julia Mc Laren
Cet article est une traduction de :
Appropriation, provenance, restitution. Le cas des arts verbaux [fr]

Texte intégral

1Stuttgart, 2021: The publishing house Reclam brings out a gift book titled The Most Beautiful Tales from Africa. It is clear from a glance at the list of sources, which refers, among other things, to the anthologies of Carl Meinhof (1917), Leo Frobenius (1923), and Carl Einstein (1925), that the book is a compilation of texts from older collections (Fig. 1), which were themselves put together from the collected texts of ethnologists, administrators, and missionaries. No mention is made of who uttered these words, or who transcribed them, or when and under what circumstances this occurred. At a time when museums are providing more and more information on the provenance of the items they exhibit, Reclam presents the “tales” as timeless works whose genesis can be ignored. The very idea of a book of this kind shows the publishers paid no regard to the debates on what lies behind colonial collections and how they should be treated, an attitude that is symptomatic of the persistent lack of concern shown toward the status of non-European oratures.1 The recent reissue, in facsimile form, of Blaise Cendrars’s Petits Contes nègres pour les enfants des Blancs, a “treasure from 1929 kept in the Rare Books section of the National Library of France,” demonstrates the same lack of concern. Illustrated with fifty original woodcuts by Pierre Pinsard, this collection, as the publishers explain, seeks to “take children to the heart of Africa, to a world of legends steeped in age-old wisdom.”2

Fig. 1. Carl Einstein, Afrikanische Legenden (1925), here in a 1989 Reclam reissue (Leipzig).

Fig. 1. Carl Einstein, Afrikanische Legenden (1925), here in a 1989 Reclam reissue (Leipzig).

Fig. 2. Die schönsten Märchen aus Afrika (2021).

Fig. 2. Die schönsten Märchen aus Afrika (2021).

Fig. 3. Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs, original edition from 1929, published by Au Sans Pareil.

Fig. 3. Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs, original edition from 1929, published by Au Sans Pareil.

Fig. 4. Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs, new edition published in 2016 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Albin Michel.

Fig. 4. Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs, new edition published in 2016 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Albin Michel.
  • 3 On this character, see Devevey 2019.

2Paris, 1968: Seuil publishes Le Devoir de violence by Yambo Ouologuem. This work, translated into English by Ralph Manheim as Bound to Violence and published by Penguin Books in 1971, tells the story of the Saïf dynasty, which reigns over the Nakem, an imaginary West African empire. In this novel, Fritz Shrobénius, a German ethnologist as foolish as he is rapacious (and whose name is an obvious allusion to Leo Frobenius), stops in the Nakem in 1910. The main aim of his visit is to acquire local artefacts to sell to European museums, but he also tries his hand at ethnography, and “spouted myths for a whole week” (Ouologuem 1971, 87)—myths which in turn would feed “the Shrobeniusologists,” who “with their shrewd mixture of mercantilism and ideology, had watered at the mouth over the splendors of black civilisation” (ibid., 165). With perfect cynicism, the sovereign collaborates in this “harvest,” but at the same time he toys with the ethnologist: “Saïf made up stories and the interpreter translated, Madoubo repeated it in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of Shrobénius” (ibid., 87). Ouologuem makes Shrobénius the representative of a predatory primitivism that exploits local culture while simultaneously enshrining it.3 This art of fabrication, employed by both the informant and the ethnologist, echoes Ouologuem’s poetics, which is based on widespread textual borrowings. Fifty years later, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr recalls this in La plus secrète mémoire des hommes through the character of T. C. Elimane, an “accursed writer” inspired by Ouologuem. Accused of plagiarizing both the mythology of a Senegalese people and the authors of the European canon (as Ouologuem himself was), Elimane replies that “literature is a game of plunder” (Sarr 2021, 232): a way of claiming an equal right to appropriation.

  • 4 Letter dated August 11 and diary entry August 14, 1931 (Leiris 1996 [1934], 172, 175); Leiris 2017, (...)
  • 5 LESC, Fonds Marcel Griaule, fmg_C-B-02_01.
  • 6 See in particular Leiris 1996 [1934]; Leiris 2017; Sarr and Savoy 2018.

3Paris, 1938: Marcel Griaule publishes “Histoires Wolof” in the Cahiers du Sud (Fig. 2). These were stories written down in a notebook by Mamadou Vad, a twenty-six-year-old informant who for four months was part of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition as an interpreter. Michel Leiris described him in his correspondence as “a sort of poet who is never dull” and who “meticulously records some good story in the little notebook Griaule gave him”4 (in Wolof, which he transcribed not only into French writing but also into Arabic script). Putting a notebook in the hands of a literate informant already made for a change from older transcription methods and was in line with Marcel Mauss’s methodological precepts: “The ideal would be to transform the natives not into informants, but into authors” (cited by Debaene 2019, 279). Unfortunately, Mamadou Vad’s notebook has not been preserved. The archives only contain a notebook in which Griaule himself copied the French versions.5 Despite Mauss’s recommendations and the subtitle “[stories] told by Mamadou Vad,” the “native” who “provided the texts” (Mauss’s words again) does not become an “author”: in accordance with widespread practice, it is Griaule who “signs [. . .] stories that he has simply copied out [. . .]” (Jolly 2015, 228). The Dakar-Djibouti expedition not only collected and circulated over three thousand items for French museums, using practices that were often questionable,6 but also collected and circulated “intangible cultural goods”—the entire Dogon oral corpus found in the works of Griaule and Leiris. This fact, however, has so far scarcely been taken into account in the discussion of colonial plunder.

Fig. 5. Marcel Griaule, « Histoires wolof », Les Cahiers du Sud 208, Aug-Sept 1938.

Fig. 5. Marcel Griaule, « Histoires wolof », Les Cahiers du Sud 208, Aug-Sept 1938.

From objects to texts

  • 7 For a definition of this concept, see Guidelines for the Care of Collections from Colonial Contexts (...)

4The question of the provenance, acquisition, and restitution of cultural heritage appropriated in a colonial context7 is not a new one, but for some years now it has been the subject of intense discussions, scientific work, political gestures, and artistic research. In France, Germany, and Switzerland (the three countries of origin of most of the contributions in this issue), the debate is far from over. A recent issue of the journal Allemagne d’aujourd’hui (2022) compared the way in which cultural goods from colonial contexts are managed in France and Germany. It emphasized the conceptual and institutional foundations of “provenance research” (Provenienzforschung), which, in Germany, was developed after the Washington Declaration (1998) for works of art looted by the Nazis. With modifications, it is now being used in postcolonial provenance research (postkoloniale Provenienzforschung) to deal with the challenges of Germany’s colonial legacy. In France, five years after work of this kind got underway with the publication of the Sarr-Savoy report (2018), a recent issue of Cahiers d’études africaines, “Retours de restitutions” (The Return of Restitution) (2023), called for an inventory of the operations already carried out or ongoing, in an effort to correct the overrepresentation of Western viewpoints, starting, in particular, with the enquiries undertaken by the ReTours collaborative research program (2020–25). Although Switzerland was not itself a colonial power, its part in the colonial establishment, the economic benefits it derived from that involvement, and the cultural goods it acquired through suspect channels (Brizon 2023), are all now being reassessed and Swiss museums are also engaged in restitution initiatives.

  • 8 In Germany, see, among others, “In_Context: Colonial Histories and Digital Collections,” accessed J (...)
  • 9 The question has given rise to a bibliography that is primarily North American. See, for example, Z (...)
  • 10 Consider the controversy surrounding the young persons’ novel Alma: le vent se lève by Timothée de (...)

5While the work in this area was initially focused on museums, it has extended recently to include libraries and research into the provenance of their collections of manuscripts, books, and photography.8 What is the status in this debate of intangible cultural heritage and, more specifically, of verbal arts? Can the oratures collected in colonies and then qualified as something else, before they were disseminated and exploited by so many twentieth-century writers—can they also be considered “colonial loot,” as a recent exhibition at the Philological Library of Berlin’s Freie Universität has suggested? (Fig. 3) Although the question of “cultural appropriation” of intangible goods and practices by a “dominant”9 culture has gained prominence in the media, among activist groups and in academic circles since the 1990s, it has so far prompted little debate in Europe in relation to literary material. When discussions relating to this material have taken place, they have focused overwhelmingly on fiction (the possibility of telling a story that is not one’s own) or translation (the possibility of translating an author without sharing certain aspects of that person’s experience).10

Fig. 6. La Villemarqué transcribing a poem performed by an old singer. Engraving (detail) after a drawing by Ernest Boyer, published in Barzaz pe gannaouennou Breiz, Paris, 1845.

Fig. 6. La Villemarqué transcribing a poem performed by an old singer. Engraving (detail) after a drawing by Ernest Boyer, published in Barzaz pe gannaouennou Breiz, Paris, 1845.

Collection particulière. Mellac.

Fig. 7. Leo Frobenius in 1929 during the 1928–1930 expedition to southern Africa, at Rusapi, then part of British Southern Rhodesia, transcribing tales: “Mawudzi, the prince of the Barozwi, tells a story.”

Fig. 7. Leo Frobenius in 1929 during the 1928–1930 expedition to southern Africa, at Rusapi, then part of British Southern Rhodesia, transcribing tales: “Mawudzi, the prince of the Barozwi, tells a story.”

Frobenius-Institut, Fotoarchiv : FoA 09–10137.

Fig. 8. Lydia Cabrera working under a tree with an informant. Undated.

Fig. 8. Lydia Cabrera working under a tree with an informant. Undated.

The Cuban Heritage Collection, Special Collections, the University Archives, University of Miami Libraries.

Fig. 9. Literatur als koloniale Beute? Provenienzgeschichten 1910-2021 (« Literature as colonial loot ? Provenances histories 1910-2021 »), exhibition at the Philological Library of the Freie Universität Berlin (spring 2023), resulting from the work of a group of students, under the supervision of Irene Albers and Andreas Schmid.

Fig. 9. Literatur als koloniale Beute? Provenienzgeschichten 1910-2021 (« Literature as colonial loot ? Provenances histories 1910-2021 »), exhibition at the Philological Library of the Freie Universität Berlin (spring 2023), resulting from the work of a group of students, under the supervision of Irene Albers and Andreas Schmid.

The titles of the display cases were as follows: recording, extracting, collecting, anonymizing, copying, rewriting, circulating, returning.

Photo : Bernd Wannenmacher.

  • 11 This is one of the aims of the University of Geneva’s FNS project “La parole ‘indigène’ entre litté (...)
  • 12 See the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003, art. 2, as well (...)
  • 13 Here we concur with Coleman et al. (2009, 176).

6This issue of Gradhiva makes the case that these different concerns, which relate to both tangible and intangible goods and the challenges surrounding cultural representation, should be considered together. It argues that the transformation and adulteration of indigenous verbal arts when appropriated by European literate culture deserve specific examination.11 Some important work (Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini 2015) has been done in relation to “art in transfer” and the logic of appropriation to which artistic works and practices are subjected, but this work does not usually deal with verbal arts. It is important today to consider what happened to “oral literatures” that were produced in a colonial context and, where necessary, to ponder the effects of their inclusion in the “colonial library” (Mudimbe 1988) and of their transfer to the European literary scene. Although these “literatures” are part of the so-called “intangible” cultural heritage (which, according to UNESCO, includes “oral traditions and expressions”),12 studying their transformation cannot pursued without considering material practices and devices, since their transfer involves recording techniques such as written transcription, a phonograph or a tape recorder, as well as the use of storage devices and the publication of printed editions. These corpora thus require the combination of “art history provenance research, on the one hand, which tends to be interested in what is material and historical, and the critiques of cultural appropriation, on the other, which tend to be interested in what is immaterial and relates to contemporary questions of identity” (Albers and Schmid 2023, 1008). The point is not to condemn the appropriation of indigenous verbal arts in general13 but to study the cases in which violence was used (symbolically at the very least) and which allow us to think about the power dynamics as well as the dispossession resulting from these transfers.

The fabrication of “oral literature”

7Since the nineteenth century, “oral literature” in the colonial context has attracted the research interest, and sometimes covetousness, of missionaries, administrators, ethnologists, and linguists. Under the guise of “salvage ethnography,” an extremely vast corpus of songs, tales, myths, proverbs, riddles, and ritual texts was put into writing.

8The business of what has been called “the hunt for tales” (Jedamski 1996) can be traced back to the Herderian concept of language and literature as a “mirror of the people” (Casanova 2008 [1999], 119) and to the collections of European “folklore,” which, from their very beginnings, were used to affirm a collective or national identity (Thiesse 1999). For some time now, this field has been overlaid with debates about the authenticity of the material collected and how much was invented by the collectors. Recent research on the Brothers Grimm has shown that they misrepresented their own collection practices, and that they visited libraries more than villages (Martus 2010, 208). Their informants were often the well-educated wives of their friends. They said nothing about the role of these women and their social status, and instead attributed the tales to the “spirit of the people” (Volksgeist). One can also think of La Villemarqué’s Barzaz-Breiz (1839) (Fig. 4), based on songs he himself collected and edited, and the controversies over its authenticity, from the 1860s until Donatien Laurent’s genetic study of the work, based on La Villemarqué’s handwritten notebooks, which were found almost a century later (Laurent 1989).

9The enthusiasm for these undertakings gave rise to a distinct publishing phenomenon. In France, major collections began to appear, which combined texts gathered by folklorists in European countries and their far-flung and rural regions (often construed as internal otherness) with non-European texts, in such a way that Littérature orale de la Haute-Bretagne (Paul Sébillot, 1881) could be found alongside Traditions indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest (Émile Petitot, 1886) and Contes populaires d’Afrique (René Basset, 1903), as well as Portuguese, Berber, and Scandinavian tales, etc. In 1912, to celebrate the centenary of the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the German publisher Eugen Diederichs launched the “Märchen der Weltliteratur” collection (“Popular Tales from World Literature,” with a sub-series edited by ethnologists titled “Tales of Primitive Peoples”). This collection was aimed at the general public and was soon imitated by other publishers; by the time it came to an end (in 2002) it amounted to one hundred and sixty-five volumes, and these were often reprinted.

  • 14 The concept has been used in linguistic anthropology since the 1990s. See Bauman and Briggs 1990; S (...)
  • 15 As shown, for example, by a scene described in L’Afrique fantôme (October 26, 1931, Leiris 1996 [19 (...)
  • 16 : Hampâté Bâ 1973. On the role of intermediaries, see Ivanoff 2020; Debaene 2019.

10There is even more unevenness in a colonial context, as the collections of orature bring together not only “people” and literate “elites,” but also “indigenous people” and colonizers. The methods used to entextualize14 and edit oratures vary widely—from the most faithful transcription and translation possible to free adaptation, from carefully annotated interlinear translation to re-creation of the narrative—but there are also great variations in the conditions under which they are collected, from willing collaboration and the creation of a space for dialogue (Diagne 2022), to unequal or even forced relations, which led to misunderstandings15 or the use of certain ruses.16 It follows that what is recorded is never an “original” (if that term has any meaning at all). The players involved in these processes—storytellers, interpreters, ethnologists, and all kinds of intermediaries or “fixers”—all had an influence on the text and could have omitted or expanded certain parts or adapted them to meet the expectations of their interlocutors or public tastes. Such alterations can be seen as the necessary and potentially beneficial effects of establishing a relationship (ibid.) or as distortions inherent to the act of translation (Okpewho 1992, 9; Samoyault 2021).

11Missionaries and colonial administrators in French West Africa thus collected various utterances “from the natives’ own mouths” (Van den Avenne 2017). These sometimes served as linguistic examples, or at other times as indications of a culture or “mentality,” and they were soon grouped together under the banner of “oral literature.” As shown by the documents linked to the linguistic activities of the French-speaking Swiss mission in Africa and put together by Jehanne Denogent in this issue, the mission not only promoted literacy and the translation of the Bible into local languages, but it also encouraged the collection of stories. By looking at how “a Tsonga literacy was invented,” Denogent sheds light on the material conditions necessary for the circulation of intangible goods, underlining both the local effects of promoting Tsonga over other languages and the unique future this corpus had in Switzerland (where it was adapted for the local theatrical scene and taken up by Blaise Cendrars).

  • 17 Boas in the preface to Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America, quoted by Jo (...)

12It was within the discipline of ethnology in particular that collecting and publishing methods gradually began to be formalized, through the use of philological procedures and new technical media. While precursors can always be found (Déléage 2017; Laplantine 2023), the figure of Franz Boas stands out as both a point of reference and an exceptional case (Joseph and Kalinowski 2022). His editorial work, which consists of thousands of pages, attaches the utmost importance to collecting the material firsthand, “from the mouths of the Indians,”17 and to transcribing it into the original language, followed by a literal translation, and then occasionally by a less literal, “free” translation. He made a major contribution to standardizing the methodology in this field, while sometimes altering the traditional scientific division of labor in the collecting work: some corpora were collected by “indigenous” (or mixed-race) collaborators and sometimes translated by them, in ways that blurred the dividing line between informant and collector.

  • 18 This does not rule out the possibility that they may have been harmful; see Coleman et al. (2009), (...)

13The methods of Boas (and his followers), which were underpinned by a radical distrust of interpretation, seem exemplary in their rigor.18 Leo Frobenius’s collections of oral literature, on the other hand, stand out for their uncertain, equivocal nature. Over the course of the twelve expeditions he led in Africa between 1904 and 1933, this self-taught ethnologist, in the tradition of Herder, constantly presented orality as the expression of an Urkultur. He published his collected tales, with commentary and historical reflections, in twelve volumes titled Atlantis – Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas (1921–1928). Although, in terms of quantity, Frobenius’s collections are without equal, his methods and “philological incompetence” were sharply criticized early on: long before Ouologuem, his contemporaries (such as Mauss) reproached him for not recording the tales in their original language and for only publishing translations of them. Frobenius did not know any African languages, so he depended on local interpreters to give him a version he understood (in English, French, or German), and then he wrote it down in German in his notebook (Fig. 5). He was aware of the limitations of this approach and made up for it with his own creativity.

A “stolen heritage”?

  • 19 It was reprinted in paperback in 1969 in a collection of erotic literature and adapted as a film in (...)

14Whatever methods are used, once the utterances have been written down, they elude the people who produced them, who can no longer rectify any errors of transcription or translation, while the stories themselves begin to circulate in ways that are out of the hands of their creators and often labelled as “exotic” or “primitive.” In 1910, when Frobenius published Der schwarze Dekameron, what he wanted to do was promote the stories he had collected in a “book of knights and minstrels,” reminiscent of Boccaccio. The reception to the collection reveals its uncertain, equivocal nature. On the one hand, the Spanish translation (El Decamerón negro, 1925) inspired certain (Euro-)Cuban writers such as Emilio Ballagas and Lydia Cabrera (who wrote Contes nègres de Cuba in 1936) and spurred them into setting out in search of Cuba’s Black literary heritage (see Ugalde Quintana 2017) [Fig. 6]. On the other hand, the collection came to be exploited by publishers and filmmakers who gave it an erotic angle19 without any regard for the material collected. It is easy to understand why the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o considered “oral literature” to be a “stolen heritage”: “orature becomes a stolen heritage alongside other legacies, economic, political and cultural” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1998, 127).

15While most orature collections were only received in academic circles, some of them came to be regarded by the avant-garde as poetic models, indeed, as remedies that could regenerate a European literature in crisis. Yvan Goll, in a German review of Jean Paulhan’s Les Hain-teny mérinas (1912), is rapt by this unexpected manna from heaven, and lets slip, in passing, the extractivist mindset that underpins the enterprise: “To find a purer lyricism, then, we must return to the primitive sources. [. . .] Among N*****, among Indians, there are sources of poetry as rich as the sources of petrol” (Goll 1927). By analogy with the discourse surrounding the history of art, can we really characterize the literary projects of Tristan Tzara, Cendrars, or Einstein as “primitivism”? Erhard Schüttpelz, in an important article dedicated to literary primitivism (and translated in this issue), emphasizes how important the circulation of non-European oratures was for a “modernity in the mirror of the primitive,” and underlines how the “primitive” served as a “model” that “promises a more universal insight than that of our own particular tradition”. He offers a way of reading oral literature that brings out the voice of the informant and sometimes can reveal a sort of “inverted anthropology.” But this approach can hardly be applied to works that, like Cendrars’s anthology, are made up of second-hand material. An analysis in terms of “literary primitivism” fails to account for the fact that Cendrars not only copied the authors cited in his bibliography but also that “[by publishing them] he appropriated [. . .] to himself the authorship of these tales, thereby stealing them from their real authors, the African storytellers” (Maccotta 2011, 46).

  • 20 See the article by Éléonore Devevey in this issue.
  • 21 On this subject, see Coleman et al. 2009, 200.

16In a similar vein to what Tzara and Cendrars did, members of the American ethno-poetics movement, starting with Jerome Rothenberg (who died in the spring of 2024), exhumed and “reworked” some of the texts collected by Boas and his followers in the 1960s, producing retranslations of them that were inspired by the formal procedures invented by the avant-garde poets (Déléage 2016). One of Rothenberg’s aims was to combat the “cliché of tribal anonymity” (Rothenberg 1992, 69), and yet his landmark anthologies (The Technicians of the Sacred, 1985 [1968]; Shaking the Pumpkin, 1972) continue to be associated above all with his name and authorial style. As soon as they were published, they gave rise to pointed criticism, which was conveyed by indigenous newspapers.20 “Cultural appropriation,” however, was still not an issue at that time. In 1990, in The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s most prestigious daily newspapers, the Anishinabe writer and journalist Lenore Keeshig-Tobias wrote an opinion piece entitled “Stop Stealing Native Stories” (Fig. 7), in which she condemned the “theft of voice” underway in the North American cultural industry and urged “non-native” Canadians not to use First Nation’s peoples’ “stories”—that is, both their narratives and their experiences—in a heedless way. In her view, this material is not “free” for anyone to take up or rework in their own way. The literary and cinematic uses that white Canadians make of this material have the effect of dispossessing First Nations people, who, after being forbidden to speak their own language and marginalized in the cultural domain, are now deprived of the opportunity to tell their own stories themselves. The article prompted an indignant response from Alberto Manguel: “No one can ‘steal’ a story because stories don’t belong to anyone. Stories belong to everyone” (Manguel 1990). His universalist defense of the free circulation of stories across space and time is directed against globalization as commodification, which threatens the last reserves of common goods—he wants to preserve stories from commercialization—but he does this by holding up Greek myths as models and thus overlooks the fact that stories and their dissemination are, in some cultures at least, protected by law.21

Fig. 10. Lenore Keeshig Tobias, « Stop stealing native stories », The Globe and Mail, 26 January 1990.

Fig. 10. Lenore Keeshig Tobias, « Stop stealing native stories », The Globe and Mail, 26 January 1990.

17A number of scholars have since adopted a similar position to Keeshig-Tobias’s (Simon 1993; Hearne 1999; Coleman et al. 2009), in ways that reflect the situation of specific former settler colonies. This debate contributed to a shift in the connotations of the term “appropriation”: until then, it was perceived as a neutral concept, or valued because it was associated with subversiveness on the part of the dominated toward the dominant culture, but it gradually came to be associated with the idea of predation—so that its axiological meaning seems to be reversed, depending on which direction the transfer is going in (Coombe 1998, 208ff.; Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini 2015, 11–13). The point of these criticisms was to interrogate and reorient current practices; however, they also called for a reconsideration of the works of the past and the very idea of “world literary heritage,” which, to this day, is split in two by the “great divide” between literatures and Literature, orality and writing, the arts and Art, folklore and Culture.

Extent and limits of a comparison

18The aim of this issue is to explore the parallels between the capture of museum artefacts and that of verbal arts by focusing on three aspects in particular: the forms and systems of appropriation; the methods and significance of provenance research; and the forms of restitution that might apply to both kinds of material. By highlighting the relevance and limits of the similarities between the two, we hope to renew the ways in which we think about the terms of the problem—in particular, in relation to authorship, intellectual property, cultural belonging, modes of transmission, and policies of re-appropriation or the sharing of knowledge.

Systems of appropriation

19Is it possible to think of the appropriation of verbal arts in the same terms as that of artefacts? The analogy between “bodies of words” and “fetishes,” which also enrich European cultural institutions, was already made twenty years ago by Kasereka Kavwahirehi in an article which draws heavily on Michel de Certeau’s reflections on the “scriptural economy” (2004, 801). At first glance, Western uses of verbal arts do not seem to dispossess the people who produced them of all their rights. Since these arts are “non-rival” property (property which can be used simultaneously by several people), Western uses of them do not prevent their perpetuation at a local level. Nevertheless, the people who produced the verbal arts may feel cheated by the translation process, or consider their traditions devalued by their circulation, a fortiori, when sacred or secret texts are involved, as Robert H. Lowie had already shown in an article of major significance on immaterial property (Lowie 1928). In the cases Lowie cites, ownership is linked to the sacred nature of the words, which is why their use and dissemination are limited, and their circulation may cause them to lose their value and effectiveness. Similarly, Elizabeth Coleman, Rosemary J. Coombe, and Fiona MacArailt have shown that a clash between unequal parties regarding two different conceptions of music can cause significant harm: in the one, music can be decontextualized and is abstract and available, while on the other, it forms the very basis of customary law. When songs function as a set of laws, their use for aesthetic or scientific purposes is not “non-rival” (Coleman et al. 2009,195) and it strips them of their performative value.

20In some respects, the transfer of verbal objects, even if they are immaterial, involves similar operations and processes to what occurs in the transfer of artefacts: forced collection; erasure of the individual who produced them; promotion of the ethnic representativeness of the items rather than their creative singularity (in contexts where this notion is relevant); allochrony; decontextualization and loss of performance value; the persistence of an exotic and/or racist primitivism at the very heart of a desire to promote cultural otherness. The texts being transferred are also reclassified in an aesthetic sense, in the same way that artefacts are (from tool to piece of art, from ritual chant to poem, for example), and the procedures follow the same lines, turning the object, whether material or textual, into something else, saying and doing things other than what it was saying and doing in its original environment—in a way that, more often than not, has no regard for indigenous ideas and practices.

  • 22 Dorugu points out: “Gold is valuable, but what are words worth? [. . .] Tomorrow morning, if I get (...)

21In this respect, it is instructive to observe what the “informants” thought and said about collection practices. There are several examples which show that they were aware of the economic value of their stories, but also of the “unequal exchange” that this value was part of (Kramer 2021, 30)—from the Hausa Dorugu, who spent some time in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, dictating his life to the linguist and missionary James Schön,22 in keeping with the payment practices mentioned by Amadou Hampâté Bâ in his autobiography (1991, 346). But does this mean that once the tales are “bought” they now belong to the collector, who can use them as he or she sees fit? Lisa McNee, in an article on the intellectual property regime among the gewël, the Wolof griots (storytellers) of Senegal, summarizes the issue:

Griot art can be paid for but cannot be bought. This paradox reveals the depth of the differences between the capitalist system of the Western art world and the Wolof system of copyright. (McNee 1998, 3)

22Soraya de Brégeas’s article in this issue highlights a similar phenomenon by comparing the “traditional Martinican system of authorship, based on the quality of the performer” with the “modern French system of authorship, based on individual ownership,” and by analyzing the acts of appropriation of Creole tales by writers of “Creoleness” who enjoy a readership in mainland France and beyond. As in the case of the Brothers Grimm and La Villemarqué, the appropriation of Creole tales was not carried out by foreign players who knew nothing of the local culture but by people who, both symbolically and economically, were able to benefit more than the Martinican storytellers, some of whom “felt they had been robbed.”

A plea for philological provenance research

23Provenance research in relation to museums aims to bring to light the conditions in which objects were acquired and the genesis of the collections, institutions, and knowledge, by taking account of the colonial context, including its violent aspects and “the multiplicity of appropriation processes,” without presupposing that this context inevitably amounts to a wrong that requires restitution (Deutscher Museumsbund 2021, 29ff.). This kind of research can also establish whether the way the museum has interpreted an object is different from its original purpose, or irrespective of the legality of the way it was acquired.

24How and why should such investigations into verbal corpus proceed? By bringing to light the first transcriptions of the texts, and by retracing the chains of their transmission, their trajectories (Latour and Lowe 2011), and the editorial practices to which they were subjected, it is sometimes possible not only to contextualize the original collecting gesture, to rescue the creators or narrators from anonymity, but also to rectify errors of attribution or translation. Provenance research also allows for assessment of the changes made to a text each new time it was re-used, as well as the resemantization produced by the change of cultural and editorial context. When applied to texts, it politicizes the fundamental practices of philology; it acknowledges the fact that immaterial goods are not opera nullius: they have a creator or owner, and they are not freely available, waiting to be “given a value” by the first person who comes along.

25Andreas Schmid, who retraces the course of the Ronga tale “Le Gambadeur-de-la-Plaine,” combines provenance research and philological criticism: eschewing a hermeneutic approach to the tale, he compares the different states of the text. Starting with its appearance in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s novel Ti Jean L’horizon (1979), he goes back over the various versions that can be found in the anthologies of African tales edited by the linguist and Africanist Carl Meinhof (1917), then by Carl Einstein (1925) and Blaise Cendrars (1921), which were themselves conceived in an avant-garde spirit. His reading of Henri Junod’s works, the “source” for these three authors, looks at the context in which they were written and, in the process, brings to light the (female) storyteller, Chiguyane, whose name and identity, but also what might be called literary theory, disappeared with the anthologists’ “purification” practices.

26Even though—or, especially if—there is no concrete proof that material was collected under duress and with violence, it is important to reconstruct as accurately as possible the (colonial) structures that made collection possible. Vincent Debaene reveals the original circumstances in which a Baulé “war chant” was uttered and how the blotting out of this information affected a series of published reuses. This chant was reproduced for the first time in Essai de manuel de la langue agni (1900), after being transcribed originally by the young Maurice Delafosse, at the time of the brutal suppression of a revolt in Baoulé territory, when he was the commander there; its transformation into a linguistic sample removes all trace of the violence of the supposed “pacification” exercise. The reappearance of the chant in L’Âme nègre (1922) further contributed to its aestheticization. When Senghor and Damas in turn took it up again in two anthologies of négritude, published in 1946 and 1948, they ignored the context of how it was initially captured. The “warlike ardor” that the chant was supposed to illustrate in L’Âme nègre took on a completely different meaning under the pen of these two authors. While it cannot, strictly speaking, be considered a “reappropriation,” what they did had obvious political significance at a time of decolonization.

  • 23 To cite just one example, Ida Halpern collected morethan four hundred songs from the 1940s onward a (...)

27The case of the Baoulé war chant—which leads to “salvaging the salvage anthropologists” (Warren and Barnes 2018), that is, taking up and giving a second life to collections inherited from “salvage ethnography”—involves differentiating between the ways of responding to reappropriation, as suggested by Kramer: with regard to communities whose traditions have been lost or destroyed, he distinguishes between those who will “reconstruct their literature in part from ethnographic sources” and “resume their recitation” and those who will have “recourse to ethnographic sources to invent traditions and organize a culture of resistance” (Kramer 2021, 31). These possibilities of “revitalization”23 transform collected goods acquired in colonial contexts into a means of reparation for past operations which aimed to destroy cultural memory, and even into mechanism for “the emergence of other futures” (Coleman et al. 2009, 176).

Methods of restitution and collaborative research

  • 24 For an example, see Bensa et al. 2015.

28How, then, can we devise and implement methods of restitution adapted to the nature of the verbal arts? Unlike objects, the verbal arts cannot be assigned to a place—a song cannot be moved in the same way as a reliquary; it cannot therefore be returned in the same way. Moreover, as in the case of material goods, the idea of returning verbal arts to the people who produced them quickly comes up against a number of practical and theoretical obstacles (such as the presupposition of historical continuity between the community’s former state and its present form, or the risk of imposing on a community a property regime that is alien to it). But the underlying ethical concern for redressing the balance can, in itself, act as a guiding principle. Ethno-musicology in this respect can be a precedent and source of inspiration. Because the music industry has sometimes treated the rights of indigenous creators and performers with contempt (Feld 2004 [2000]), and because this discipline is also concerned with giving material form to intangible goods, ethnomusicology might help us in thinking about possible forms of restitution of verbal objects, as shown by the four “Scientific Chronicles” attached to this issue, which provide an overview of recently completed or ongoing initiatives. Similarly, in the case of literary material, the push for restitution, which is not so much material as symbolic, necessarily takes other forms than in the case of artefacts. It involves, first and foremost, the removal of structural obstacles, for example, the decision to make the archives not only accessible in theory but also available in practice. This is a prerequisite for collaborative research, which must not turn indigenous players into instruments to prop up European readings, but rather give them the opportunity to work on historical distortions and to re-appropriate these corpora for their own purposes.24

  • 25 Currently being prepared by Les Cahiers.

29For the purposes of a new edition of Poèmes africains et océaniens,25 Stefan Schawe uses philological provenance research—he goes back to the notes of the English ethnographer Edward Shortland—to retrace the history of “Toto-vaca,” a Māori song still in circulation today as a sound poem supposedly created by Tristan Tzara. The rectification work required in this case would have been impossible without collaboration, something which is still not very common in literary studies. While this is not a genuine “return” project, the collaboration with Te Kahautu Maxwell (Waikato University) not only allows us to better understand the history from which “we” come and the misrepresentations that were ours, but also ensures that a Māori representative’s (indignant) reaction to how this song was received by Europeans is heard.

30Surprising as it may seem, restitution can also be considered a relevant perspective even for goods that have not been plundered. This is what is demonstrated by the case of forgery presented by Éléonore Devevey: the Walam Olum, a manuscript invented in the 1830s by the French-American scholar S. C. Rafinesque and attributed to the Lenape, enjoyed a long life as a publication not only in the United States but also in France, where it was included in the anthologies of Benjamin Péret, then Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud. However virtuous an act it may have seemed at the beginning, this forgery is, nonetheless, a “theft of voice,” as Keeshig-Tobias puts it, which can have perverse effects over time: namely, in this case, on the right to self-representation. Acknowledgement of the forgery, which was exposed by David Oestreicher in collaboration with Lenape speakers, allows us to put an end to the perpetuation of an abuse of power at the same time that it highlights the limitations of an essentialist approach.

31Restitution then must be understood in a broader sense: not only must we recognize the decisive contribution of non-Western verbal arts to modern European literature and their place in world heritage, but we must also ensure, above all, that the communities that produced these arts are able to have access to these corpora and do something about the distortions to which they have been subjected. The longstanding practices of collaborative research or self-publishing on the part of indigenous communities are ways of restoring this power to act and regain a “sovereignty of interpretation.” This does not mean that there is an endogenous privilege in matters of interpretation, or that the right to interpret should be restricted. Rather, depending on the case at hand, it involves identifying and putting a stop to the forms of circulation inherited from the colonial library and its media, abandoning the Western interpretive stranglehold on these appropriated texts, and paying close attention to the voices that are not the heirs of colonial domination.

This text has benefited from suggestions and proofreading by Vincent Debaene and Andreas Schmid. Our warmest thanks to them.

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Notes

1 The notion of orature, used notably by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1998, 103–28) as a counterpart to literature to refer to speeches, tales, and other oral genres, seeks to correct the biases perpetuated by the “great divide” between orality and writing.

2 Accessed July 08, 2024, http://editions.bnf.fr/petits-contes-n%C3%A8gres-pour-les-enfants-des-blancs.

3 On this character, see Devevey 2019.

4 Letter dated August 11 and diary entry August 14, 1931 (Leiris 1996 [1934], 172, 175); Leiris 2017, 135–36 and 138.

5 LESC, Fonds Marcel Griaule, fmg_C-B-02_01.

6 See in particular Leiris 1996 [1934]; Leiris 2017; Sarr and Savoy 2018.

7 For a definition of this concept, see Guidelines for the Care of Collections from Colonial Contexts produced by the German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund 2021, 29ff.).

8 In Germany, see, among others, “In_Context: Colonial Histories and Digital Collections,” accessed July 8, 2024, https://in-context.sbb.berlin/?lang=en. In France, see the restitution of the Korean Royal Manuscripts (2011).

9 The question has given rise to a bibliography that is primarily North American. See, for example, Ziff and Rao 1997 or Coombe 1998.

10 Consider the controversy surrounding the young persons’ novel Alma: le vent se lève by Timothée de Fombelle (2020). This book tells the story of a young African girl enslaved in the eighteenth century, and its translation was rejected in English-speaking countries. There is also the “Amanda Gorman affair” (2021), which drew attention to the question of the choice of translators for translating into European languages the poem “The Hill We Climb,” written and spoken by the young African-American poetess at Joe Biden’s inauguration.

11 This is one of the aims of the University of Geneva’s FNS project “La parole ‘indigène’ entre littérature orale et culture lettrée (2022–2026),” directed by Vincent Debaene, accessed July 8, 2024, https://www.unige.ch/parole-indigene/. See also Debaene 2024; Devevey 2024.

12 See the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003, art. 2, as well as the Bangui Agreement (adopted in 1977, revised in 1999 and 2015), and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). It can be argued, however, that the international legal framework is not a solution to these debates but rather part of the problem, especially insofar as it encourages commodification. This is one of the reasons why Coleman et al. argue for an approach that is more ethical than legal (2009, 177).

13 Here we concur with Coleman et al. (2009, 176).

14 The concept has been used in linguistic anthropology since the 1990s. See Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Barber 2007. Entextualization designates “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting” (Bauman and Briggs 1990, 73) and allows us to consider the ways in which the processes of decontextualization and resemantization in connection with power relations are intertwined.

15 As shown, for example, by a scene described in L’Afrique fantôme (October 26, 1931, Leiris 1996 [1934], 242ff.; Leiris 2017, 195ff.), whereby Leiris understands that he does not conceive of translation in the same way as his Dogon informant, Ambibè Babadyi. See Devevey 2021.

16 : Hampâté Bâ 1973. On the role of intermediaries, see Ivanoff 2020; Debaene 2019.

17 Boas in the preface to Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America, quoted by Joseph and Kalinowski 2022, 31.

18 This does not rule out the possibility that they may have been harmful; see Coleman et al. (2009), 191, on Ida Halpern.

19 It was reprinted in paperback in 1969 in a collection of erotic literature and adapted as a film in 1972 by Piero Vivarelli.

20 See the article by Éléonore Devevey in this issue.

21 On this subject, see Coleman et al. 2009, 200.

22 Dorugu points out: “Gold is valuable, but what are words worth? [. . .] Tomorrow morning, if I get a lot of money, I’ll tell you many stories.” Cited in Kirk-Green and Newman 1971, 27–101, 93.

23 To cite just one example, Ida Halpern collected morethan four hundred songs from the 1940s onward among the Kwakwaka’wakh, some of which were linked to potlatch ceremonies that had been violently annihilated (Coleman et al. 2009).

24 For an example, see Bensa et al. 2015.

25 Currently being prepared by Les Cahiers.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Carl Einstein, Afrikanische Legenden (1925), here in a 1989 Reclam reissue (Leipzig).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 732k
Titre Fig. 2. Die schönsten Märchen aus Afrika (2021).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 836k
Titre Fig. 3. Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs, original edition from 1929, published by Au Sans Pareil.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 364k
Titre Fig. 4. Blaise Cendrars, Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs, new edition published in 2016 by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Albin Michel.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 444k
Titre Fig. 5. Marcel Griaule, « Histoires wolof », Les Cahiers du Sud 208, Aug-Sept 1938.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 476k
Titre Fig. 6. La Villemarqué transcribing a poem performed by an old singer. Engraving (detail) after a drawing by Ernest Boyer, published in Barzaz pe gannaouennou Breiz, Paris, 1845.
Crédits Collection particulière. Mellac.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 604k
Titre Fig. 7. Leo Frobenius in 1929 during the 1928–1930 expedition to southern Africa, at Rusapi, then part of British Southern Rhodesia, transcribing tales: “Mawudzi, the prince of the Barozwi, tells a story.”
Crédits Frobenius-Institut, Fotoarchiv : FoA 09–10137.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 188k
Titre Fig. 8. Lydia Cabrera working under a tree with an informant. Undated.
Crédits The Cuban Heritage Collection, Special Collections, the University Archives, University of Miami Libraries.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 316k
Titre Fig. 9. Literatur als koloniale Beute? Provenienzgeschichten 1910-2021 (« Literature as colonial loot ? Provenances histories 1910-2021 »), exhibition at the Philological Library of the Freie Universität Berlin (spring 2023), resulting from the work of a group of students, under the supervision of Irene Albers and Andreas Schmid.
Légende The titles of the display cases were as follows: recording, extracting, collecting, anonymizing, copying, rewriting, circulating, returning.
Crédits Photo : Bernd Wannenmacher.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 500k
Titre Fig. 10. Lenore Keeshig Tobias, « Stop stealing native stories », The Globe and Mail, 26 January 1990.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8631/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 728k
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Irene Albers

Institut de littérature comparée et Institut de Philologie romane
Université libre de Berlin
ialbers[at]zedat.fu-berlin.de

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Éléonore Devevey

Département de langue et de littérature françaises modernes
Université de Genève / FNS
eleonore.devevey[at]gmail.com

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