Can the Subaltern Stream?: Trauma, Intersectionality, and Netflix
Résumés
Dans cet article, j’examine les façons dont l’histoire coloniale croise différentes manifestations de la mémoire subjective et narrative dans le présent. J’aborde deux séries originales de Netflix pour retracer le développement de réponses contemporaines aux traumatismes intergénérationnels et intersectionnels. Black Earth Rising, du réalisateur britannique Hugo Blick, dépeint un Rwanda vivant sous la domination de forces à la fois domestiques et internationales. Le pays essaie de se confronter à son histoire traumatique : la politique intérieure corrompue d’une république reconstruite et le pouvoir d’organisations qui effacent les détails d’un passé lourd de complexité, tout en cherchant à obtenir l’approbation d’un public mondial. Dans Lupin de George Kay, le réalisateur crée le personnage d’Assane Diop pour explorer les effets persistants d’un traumatisme explicitement colonial, ainsi que les multiples manières dont il continue à se manifester à travers les politiques raciales et les divisions sociales – tout en ayant recours à une figure bien connue de la littérature populaire française d’une autre ère. Parallèlement à l’étude du temps, de la mémoire, et du traumatisme représentés dans ces deux séries, je traite de la politique problématique du « streaming ». Même si ce dernier prétend approfondir les torts causés par les puissances coloniales aux pays en voie de développement, le « streaming » donne néanmoins la priorité aux récits du Nord global dans sa représentation des nations en développement, au point de limiter l’accès aux plateformes de streaming qui prétendent leur offrir une visibilité globale.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Netflix, streaming, traumatisme collectif intergénérationnel, colonialisme, Rwanda, Sénégal, Arsène LupinKeywords:
Netflix, streaming, intergenerational trauma, collective trauma, colonialism, Rwanda, Senegal, Arsène LupinPlan
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Introduction
- 1 “Streaming” dans ce contexte fait référence à la diffusion en continu qui permet de regarder des sé (...)
- 2 Part 2 of Lupin was released on 11 June 2021. The second season amplifies both Assane Diop’s relian (...)
1Two recent dramas, available for streaming1 on Netflix, address the complex relationships between 21st-century Europe and its imperial past. Black Earth Rising (BBCTwo, 2018) delves into Rwanda’s tangled politics, showcasing a genocide survivor’s investigation into her identity and her nation. Lupin (Netflix, 2019) draws on France’s fraught relationship with its former African colonies2. In both series, colonial inheritance weaves past traumas into present subjectivities, to forge a new narrative that confronts the haunting legacies of European imperialism – or the absence of recognition of those legacies – in Africa. At the heart of each drama are complex convergences of race, class, memory, and politics. Each series uses formal intersections as well, overlaying disparate genres to narrate and excavate the histories of colonialism, thus demonstrating the lingering relevance of the literary and imperial past. In this article, I focus mostly on the pilot episodes of the two series, for the purpose of both space and narrative construction.
- 3 The Rwandan population is divided into three major ethnic groups: Hutu (85%), Tutsi (14%), and Twa (...)
2Black Earth Rising (BER), directed by Hugo Blick, begins with an animated sequence: a wide-eyed child is lifted from darkness. When the image pans out, a man cradles the child on his lap amid a heap of corpses. We learn the child’s identity: Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel), survivor of the fatally targeted Tutsi people in the Rwandan civil war of 1994.3 The series’ periodic animation narrates her memory of early childhood. After her rescue, Kate was adopted by Eve Ashby (Harriet Walters), who would later become a barrister for the International Criminal Court (ICC). When Eve is murdered before a trial involving a controversial Tutsi war hero, Kate pieces together fragments of post-independence politics in a native country she has never known, with help from Eve’s boss Michael Ennis (John Goodman) and other helpers – including fellow traumatized Rwandans who validate her search and offer her a “village” she has never known. The trail from London to Paris to Kigali leads Kate into a labyrinth of political deception, a complex plot that shakes her understanding of her mother, her nation, and herself. Kate’s investigation reveals ugly intersections between Africa and Europe, present and past, truth and falsehood. Carcinogenic European racism and native tribalism, and the corrupt negligence of the international community, are all laid bare.
- 4 Young Assane played by Mamadou Haidara, adult by Omar Sy.
- 5 Later in my article I will examine another literary antecedent for Kay’s series, and discuss the Po (...)
3On its surface, Lupin reworks history more lightheartedly. Director George Kay bases the tone of his series on Maurice Leblanc’s popular Arsène Lupin. Beneath the humor, however, run deep veins of injustice, betrayal, and violence. Like BER, Kay’s series anchors its principal plot line in a painful past. Senegalese immigrant Babakar Diop (Fargass Assandé) finds work as the chauffeur for Parisian media tycoon Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre), who soon accuses him of stealing a priceless necklace. Babakar confesses under duress, is convicted of theft and imprisoned, then found dead in his cell. Before his arrest, however, he leaves his son Assane4 an invaluable inheritance, a book – Arsène Lupin, gentleman cambrioleur. In Leblanc’s first collection of stories, the eponymous aristocratic burglar displays a cunning, mastery of disguise, and irresistible charm that have seduced generations of readers since his literary début in 1905. Kay’s series reimagines Leblanc’s Lupin as a guiding model, rather than an actual character: the complicated protagonist not “Arsène Lupin” but Assane Diop, played by Omar Sy. The book itself subtends Assane’s entire adult life and quest, since Babakar took the book (with permission) from Pellegrini’s own library, and annotated it for him, with clues to help Assane decipher the truth around both Babakar’s conviction and the necklace. Assane uses the disorder of a disordered world to create, or re-create, order: an order French colonial history purloined and rerouted.5
- 6 In De l’esprit des lois, Baron de Montesquieu famously elaborates on the “geographical temperaments (...)
4Both series are intensely political. Both condemn the disastrous legacies of Empire and borealism, a racism rooted in Montesquieuian ideas about the supremacy of northern countries and races (and, by extension, the inferiority of people from the global south).6 Slick’s series scathingly indicts Europe’s criminal non-involvement during the Rwandan genocide; Kay’s uses humor and pathos to decry France’s transposition of colonial attitudes onto the immigrant citizens of its former colonies. They both rely on cultural and national memory as an artifact, communal trauma as part of their central mystery-devices, and the necessity of intersectionaland intergenerational detection to seam together the broken edges of the past and restore, if not order, at least ontology. BER’s layered visual-narrative techniques expose the disastrous ethnic and political consequences of global neglect; Lupin’s polysemous literary allusions advance the series from one cipher to the next. In each case, their streaming on Netflix both participates in the stories’ unfolding (allowing viewers to decode the long-lasting ripple effects of history) and brings underrepresented histories to a global audience with an accessibility that previous platforms (optical devices used for data storage, paid subscription cable channels, commercially interrupted network television showings) have not featured.
Enfants de la patrie
- 7 Newman, Jason, “The Good Thief of ‘Lupin’.” Rolling Stone, online, 19 April 2021.
- 8 Vincentelli, Elizabeth, “In ‘Lupin,’ Omar Sy Puts a New Twist on a Classic French Tale.” New York T (...)
- 9 Motamayor, Rafael, “Lupin Pulls an Adaptation Heist on Its Audience.” Vulture, online, 10 February (...)
- 10 Episode 1, 25:18-25:24”
5Lupin directly quotes Leblanc’s novels, yet the series is no mere adaptation: its approach is subtler and more nuanced than simply renaming the protagonist and making him Senegalese. Indeed, “Kay used Leblanc’s books more as inspiration than blueprint, weaving their themes into Diop’s life.”7 Director Louis Leterrier explains the show’s political undercurrent in an interview: “I wanted to subvert [the ‘gentleman thief’ aspect] … I found the idea of a 6-foot-2 Black man sneaking around in both high society and the underworld interesting.”8 Arguably more than just “interesting,” the subterfuge intentionally undermines a comforting story France has told about colonial history and decolonization – namely that the first has definitively ended, while the second has offered resolutions and reparations for the first. Kay’s is not the dashing, moneyed “gentleman” of the early 1900s. Lupin plays on the intersections of high society and low – and the cultural paradoxes that established those categories in the first place –, of literary and lexical fields, the visible present and the invisible past. Sy’s Assane possesses both grit and elegance and deploys these qualities cannily as a situation requires. So, when the opportunity arises to re-appropriate the necklace that caused his father’s descent into ignominy and death, he relies on (and manipulates) France’s racism to serve his own ends: “Assane [is] … often the only Black man in the room, and he uses … his adversaries’ assumptions and biases against them.”9 The iconic Arsène of the novels sports a monocle and glossy top hat. Assane on the contrary blends into the b(l)ackground along with the other custodial staff in the janitor’s costume he dons in Episode 1, his drab beanie a marked contrast to Lupin’s flamboyant haberdashery. For Assane, passing imperceptibly through (white) French society means cloaking himself in signs which that society lacks the capacity and willingness to interpret. The round vowels and rolled r of his intentional accent, plus his shabby overcoat and work garb, make him part of a labor underclass invisible to the Louvre auction attendees. (Later, Assane uses the ubiquitous orange cross-body of a bicycle delivery guy to disappear in plain sight.) They also allow him to dupe those same people, who can’t see him as anything but a janitor, such that he can round a corner, doff the coverall, emerge in a fancy tuxedo and enter the winning bid for the necklace. “I will admit, I was not expecting a purchaser like you,” the auction curator tells Assane suavely. “Like me? Meaning?” “Well, so … young.”10
- 11 John Powers studies Kay’s contemporary adaptation of Leblanc’s character in “The Most Wanted Man In (...)
6Assane’s propensity for disguise, which makes for great fun, is hardly unique, either to him as a character (“One reason Arsène Lupin became popular in the first place is that he’s an enjoyable fantasy of shapeshifting brilliance”11), or to the detective genre in general. Beyond the examples of Sherlock Holmes, Rocambole, or Simon Templar, Lupin invites us to think about disguise and identity fragmentation from a socioracial-colonial perspective as well. This phenomenon has received critical attention from many scholars, from Frantz Fanon to Ibram X. Kendi. Achille Mbembe, for example, discusses the polysemous identities former colonial subjects must adapt.
- 12 Mbembe, Achille, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” in Africa: Journal of the International Afr (...)
the postcolonial ‘subject’ has had to learn … to manage not just a single identity for themselves but several, which are flexible enough for them to negotiate as and when required.12
- 13 Episode 3, 30:37”
- 14 Powers, op.cit.
7In the quest to avenge his father’s false conviction and fulfill the legacy Babakar left him, Assane navigates identities throughout the series. His capacity for disguise mystifies the police investigating the diamond necklace heist. “Wait, what are you suggesting? These three guys, you think they are all the same person?” demands Belkacem, the policière whose patience for her colleague Guédira’s “Arsène-Lupin theory” has worn thin.13 But Guédira knows, from his own detection using Leblanc’s novels as a guide, that the identity of the man they seek constitutes a seam where a literary blueprint “for fun” meets a serious history of colonial exploitation and corruption. Thus: when Assane needs entry to the Louvre, he shifts into immigrant parler; to “pass” at the auction, he employs the fluid eloquence of expensive elocution lessons; to extract information about his father’s death, he impersonates a socially awkward IT tech and kidnaps the police commissioner. Belkacem accuses Guédira of using a faulty computer program to create a facial composite (“Your program is messed up!”), but her frustration merely reveals the poignant success of Assane’s invisibility (“They are four different people!”). Assane’s déguise-pertise is both a seam and a fissure, a crack in the illusion of francité (a certain illusion of French identity, what Powers calls “a patriotic foundation that supposedly champions multiculturalism”14) that people like Pellegrini want to maintain.
- 15 See the link.
- 16 Bawa, Aisha Balarabe, “From Imperialism to Diplomacy: A Historical Analysis of French and Senegal C (...)
- 17 Mbembe, Interview with Christian Höller, 2002, quoted in Tembo.
8The Diop family story is a scar that subtends Lupin: a mother’s death, a father’s grief, the loss of a homeland. And though the show takes place almost entirely in Paris, the shadow of Africa hangs over every episode. The occupation of Sénégal entailed the displacement and murder of countless natives as more and more of the country got swallowed in an expansionist land-grab that multiplied France’s commercial and agricultural revenues.15 Aisha Balarabe Bawa details the specific stakes of economic colonialism: “The real aim … was to control the people’s wealth: what they produce, how they produced it, and how it was distributed: to control in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life.”16 Mbembe describes “the figure of the African subject [as] a victim without the capacity to create his/her world.”17 Indeed, colonial history is based on economic exploitation: even after abolition officially ended France’s participation in the West African slave trade, France mined its colonies for agricultural crops and expanded trade routes into the interior, effectively coopting the whole continent for European commercial advantage.
9By the time Babakar would have left Senegal for France, of course, the country had achieved independence under Léopold Senghor (president 1960-1980), and a second presidential administration under Abdou Diouf (1981-2000), a duration worth keeping in mind as it illustrates the lasting damages colonization inflicted. Indeed, more than three decades after the colonial relationship ended, its survivors still suffer. Kay situates his series at the intersection of colonial history and literary mystery, using Leblanc’s debonair “gentleman” to unsettle French society and enact vengeance for the wrongs colonial occupation inflicted on indigenous populations and their descendants. Assane, a second-generation post-colonial, enjoys a privilege Babakar did not: he dismantles and recreates his world repeatedly, in an attempt to repair the damage both colonialism and post-colonial reality did to his father. He nonetheless remains an economic victim of Pellegrini’s, as does the journalist he joins forces with, Fabienne Bériot. Lupin’s adaptation of the Queen’s Necklace drama explicitly plays on this history.
- 18 Sara Maza compellingly studies this scandal in her Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Cél (...)
- 19 Le Collier de la Reine was serially published in 1849-1850 and almost immediately translated into E (...)
10From its beginnings, the Diamond Necklace Affair has challenged French social structure, jurisprudence, and detection.18 To this day the details of the necklace’s disappearance and dismantling remain encrypted. Alexandre Dumas père re-traces the story of the necklace in his novel of 1850.19 For Dumas, the former necklace – taken apart and sold off piecemeal – becomes an object of abjection, the guilty Other of a bygone regime. Lupin redraws the anxiety around national structure into the trauma of colonial history. Babakar Diop’s arrest for stealing the necklace brings back both the jeweled artifact and the wounds of a failing regime in which the disenfranchised offspring of impoverished titled families sought recognition as worthy heirs of their fathers’ names. Maurice Leblanc’s version of the story, in the Arsène Lupin novels that form Assane’s inspiration, casts this need for recognition, and the failures of a hierarchical class structure, into an early-20th century context in which the fading aristocracy clings to the last vestiges of a lost inheritance. In Leblanc’s 1907 story, the “Queen’s Necklace” is composed almost entirely of fake diamonds; only the original setting remains, and its theft both creates and resolves an unjust insinuation of burglary against a lower-class woman (Henriette) and her son (Raoul). In both Dumas and Leblanc, the necklace’s value is linked indelibly to its glittering jewels – and those unpriceable diamonds are long gone.
- 20 Jeremy Popkin discusses such political attacks on Marie-Antoinette in “Pamphlet Journalism at the E (...)
- 21 After the Queen’s double – Jeanne de la Motte – made off with the famous necklace, she and her husb (...)
- 22 Pellegrini’s daughter, whom Assane has known since childhood in the Pellegrini household.
11If the necklace, which cost millions of francs at public expense, no longer holds the valuable jewels, does it still hold the same significance in French history and lore? In the historical record, the fabled necklace never, in fact, reached the Queen; Dumas makes the necklace-thief a sort of Marie-Antoinette simulacrum whose public behaviors damage the real Queen’s reputation even beyond what the 1780s’ scandalous pamphlets achieved.20 In Dumas’ detailed backstory, the necklace triangulates contention between the King, the Queen, and the people; it constitutes an extravagant expense at a time when the nation suffers famine and extreme inequity. Its dismantling21 prefigures the Revolution itself, from the bricks of the Bastille to the philosophical underpinnings of the nation’s identity, system of government, and relationship to history – not to mention the King’s and Queen’s bodies themselves. Leblanc draws the emptiness of the signifier out even further, questioning the worth of a false artifact (the enigmatic chevalier Floriani announces, “fake or real, the necklace was above all an object for show, a symbol”). And then Assane brings it full circle, in a way, a “purloined choker” whose staged theft incriminated an interloper into French society. (Kay also shows the cyclical nature of wrong-righting: Assane’s child, himself “stolen” in the final episode of Season One, bears the name Raoul.) But Lupin suggests a different route for the object: “it was never taken apart,” adult Assane says, confronting adult Juliette;22 “it never left your father’s safe.” Kay changes both the necklace’s narrative and the present-day possibilities for decrypting a traumatic past.
- 23 Katie Kilroy-Marac, An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a (...)
- 24 Ibid.
12All detection involves following traces. But those traces themselves can present complications: as Katie Killroy-Marac points out, “calling something a trace … assumes correspondence and connection, but [the trace] always stands apart from its referent; there is always a gap.”23 She continues, “a trace always marks the absence of a presence, but it is also always an object in itself.”24 Lupin the series offers a post-colonial context for this assessment. On the story’s surface, the necklace is the trace. It was always already stolen, always already dismantled. Leblanc’s 1907 story suggests a different proposition: the victim of the theft, the rather nasty comtesse de Dreux-Soubise, counters the revelation of paste substitutions with a reply worthy of Derridean analysis: “‘It was still the Queen’s Necklace, Sir,’ the countess said haughtily, ‘and that, it seems to me, is what Henriette’s son could not comprehend’.” But in Lupin the Queen’s necklace takes a novel itinerary: if it was always in the safe, it was never stolen; if never stolen, there was never a trace to follow, never a crime. Or else the crime was never what it appeared to be.
- 25 Powers, op. cit.
- 26 Leblanc names the necklace “Le collier en esclavage de la Reine” (emphasis added), which I cannot a (...)
13Lupin invites its viewers to reconsider the infamous crime, less around the physical artifact of the necklace itself than what it signifies for the different players in the story. And, as John Powers points out wryly, “Lupin embraces the irony that, in their love and knowledge of France’s great gentleman thief, [this cultural outsider is] actually more French than the French. And in what may be an even more revealing irony, it’s the Black Lupin who the world now knows.”25 Netflix, streaming what became the first French series to make the platform’s top five shows in the USA, gave its 70-something million viewers a story previous adaptations had accepted as irrelevant: that is, the access of the public-at-large to French history, including ugly truths about colonialism, slavery, and exploitation.26
- 27 “French down to the roots” – the expression is often used to distinguish between those born in metr (...)
14Pellegrini casts Assane’s father as “an ape” who provides the perfect profile for his own criminal narrative. “Get rid of this …” Pelligrini growls at the police investigator, Dumont, after accusing Babakar. “This –?” Babakar demands. “This what?!” The unspoken epithet hangs in the air like a suspended poison dart, its potential far worse than any actual spoken word. For even a racial slur would acknowledge the inequities Babakar faces, and which Pellegrini’s society prefers to sweep under the rug. For Pellegrini, Babakar represents the worst results of decolonization – the dignified Black migrant threatens the stability of an establishment comfortably “Français de souche.”27 Babakar thus also makes the perfect fall guy: a single father, living in the projects, can be read as easily tempted by his boss’ wealth and the possibility of giving his own son a better future. Pellegrini uses racist stereotypes to frame Babakar and bribes Dumont to go along with the scheme, earning himself an insurance payout that, in turn, enables him to assure Dumont’s financial future. Even years after independence, under the guise of polite society, France continues its economic exploitation of Senegal, killing off natives who resist cultural stereotyping.
- 28 “J’Accuse!” is the title of Émile Zola’s 1898 letter to the French president Félix Faure, accusing (...)
- 29 “children of the fatherland … drench our furrows.” These are lyrics from the first and last lines o (...)
15Lupin is the heir of antecedents featuring mistaken identities, visible thefts, undercover operations, and networks of criminal activity that elude detection. The identity shapeshifter is always Assane: the diamond heist acts to restore order to his own origin story, stolen by the society that entrapped his father; the undercover operations and networks are products of his own alliance with a class of “invisibles” who move beneath the radar of a stagnated illusion of what “France” is and means. We see this ambivalence in the episode involving the embittered journalist Fabienne Bériot, as well: Bériot resists a dominant narrative that chooses exclusion and erasure over an honest reckoning with the past. Her dog, J’Accuse, provides a welcome chuckle and a nod to the journalism of protest.28 White society’s refusal to confront a population whose citizenship came about through domination and subjugation does not remove that population: both Babakar and Pellegrini are “enfants de la patrie,” after all, though only Babakar’s blood “abreuve nos sillons.”29
- 30 Nadege Beausson-Diagne, in Noire n’est pas mon métier. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2018. Quoted on Fr (...)
- 31 “the good old days”
16On a practical level, 17 of Lupin’s 35 cast members are of immigrant origin, most from West and North Africa. The police officer (Guédira) who cracks Assane’s “Lupin code” is Moroccan. The show’s casting foregrounds what its bourgeois post-colonials attempt to erase. Given the challenges that still face actors from the former colonies, the casting represents a dramatic swell in opportunities for non-white actors in France. Just a few years before Lupin dropped, in 2018, a group of Black female actors published Being Black is Not My Job, a book in which they document the “everyday racism” they have experienced at work. Examples range from racial typecasting (cleaners, prostitutes) to blatant ignorance (“‘Do you speak African?’ ‘You can’t play her, she’s a lawyer’”) and outrageous arrogance (“for a Black, you are really very intelligent. You should have been white”).30 As the necklace theft in Dumas foreshadows the un-making of national political identity and its inequalities, the theft in Lupin suggests a reckoning on the horizon – Assane, smilingly defrauding a smug bourgeoise of a diamond-encrusted Fabergé egg, sardonically refers to the period of colonial diamond-mining as “days old good the”.31
17The final object Assane convinces this elderly woman to give him is a pair of elegant diamond earrings. When leaving a sometime lover, Assane grasps the sides of her head for a long moment then chastely kisses her cheek. Left alone, the woman absently reaches up to discover these earrings on her own lobes. This woman is Juliette Pellegrini, daughter of the villainous tycoon, whose perplexing relationship with Assane dates to their first meeting as adolescents. The currency and complex history of exploitation pass from generation to generation, perpetuating the colonial imbalance. In Paris’ (sub)society of former colonials and the post-colonized who live alongside them, the central question truly is one of “family jewels” and the legacies of trauma they conceal and reveal.
History on trial
18Where Lupin is reminiscent of the French roman policier, Black Earth Rising employs a more stream-of-consciousness approach to the mysteries it unveils: plot lines interweave, one story (incompletely) covers another, and each episode adds new entanglements to the web until we cannot be certain which end of the thread we are holding or what kind of labyrinth it leads through.
- 32 Episode 1, 1:36”-2:12”
19In the series’ opening scene, a bespectacled student interrogates Eve Ashby, barrister for the International Criminal Court: “What motivates you to vomit up all this neocolonialist bullshit?” Eve’s response, “I’m motivated to see justice done, wherever the crimes took place,” earns his swift retort: “And it just so happens, all these crimes, they take place in Africa?” This exchange lays the groundwork for BER’s focus on the systems that penalize peoples for whom colonial occupation(s) and war cast long and lingering shadows. The student confronting Eve Ashby further provides ICC statistics: “There are at least 40 individuals being prosecuted … right now, and each and every one of them are Africans. Black Africans,” he finishes.32
- 33 Episode 1, 27:44-27:47”
20Shortly after Eve’s humiliation in the lecture hall, Kate learns that her mother will be prosecuting Simon Nyamoya, whom the ICC has charged with war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She is appalled that her mother would agree to prosecute Nyamoya – a war hero, a Tutsi instrumental in ending the genocide. Eve explains that putting Nyamoya on trial is “the right thing,” but Kate cannot accept this possibility: “There are still men in the Congo responsible for the genocide, Mum,” she reproaches; “You want to do the right thing, prosecute them.”33 She cannot reconcile “war hero” with “war criminal,” and in her mind Nyamoya’s ethnic identity automatically makes him an ally. BER, however, refuses this simplistic association, and every nugget of information Kate discovers problematizes her understanding, adding layers of complexity and nuance.
- 34 Cf. André Bazin on the “sublime” nature of white screens : Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? (Paris: Éditio (...)
21This problematization occurs at the level of narrative as well as thematic content. Kate’s memory exists in a liminal space; she is aware of neither its reach nor its details. Kate’s memories appear in graphic animation that punctuates the series’ overall narrative with black and white pencil-strokes, highlighting the discrepancy between Africa and Europe, the discrepancy between dominant and minority narratives, and the disjunction between mundane present and traumatic past. The difference between animated figures and live actors – and the link between them – is highlighted as early as the first scene. When the child is rescued from the pile of corpses, a man holds her tenderly; a blank void stretches out beyond them, like a screen of forgetting [Figure 2]. The camera lens (or mind’s eye) pulls back and gives more context: brown bodies, some pregnant, some broken, some children, some aged, are piled all around the girl and the man; the white screen of aesthetic sublimation34 is gone, and the only white in the frame is the man’s t-shirt [Figure 3]. The white screen returns just seconds later, two decades and a continent away: Eve Ashby sits silhouetted facing her interviewer, the transition from 1994’s killing fields to 2018’s lecture halls abrupt yet clear, the quarter-century between events projected onto another pair of bodies made distinct by contrast [Figure 4].
22The contrast is not accidental. Blick’s cinematography for both animated past and live-action present highlights the confusing unsettled-ness, the un-resolvedness of Kate’s history and Rwanda’s future, insisting that the series’ viewers keep whole sets of complexities always before their eyes. In the first episode alone, the prosecutor Eve, during the process of preparing for her momentous war-crimes trial, is herself screened as an interrogation suspect before a hostile audience. In the meantime, interleaved scenes of legal detective and war-crime survivor Kate bookend Eve’s experience: her child self receives rescue while her adult self undergoes interrogation by a psychiatrist. The juxtaposition of Kate’s gruesome survival with Eve’s public dressing-down and then grisly murder creates visual effects that bleed the two events together. The narratives of collective trauma, we see even as early as five minutes into episode one, cannot be withstood or comprehended by outsiders – even those who come as allies or rescuers, and who bear the scars of their own traumas. Eve, who is white and British – one of the rare Europeans who did come to help in Rwanda – will never fully understand Kate’s gut-wrenching need to unearth her truth. The past overlays the present, then a new version of the past overlays that, and that overlay is complicated by a contradicting continuation that questions origin, method, and bias. Tellingly, the final episode of the series returns to the idea of layering: Kate, in Rwanda, makes her way to the grave site of the camp where she was rescued. Identity, the visual narrative tells us, is a palimpsest, even when official versions of history would prefer a monodimensional truth.
- 35 Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U (...)
- 36 online, op. cit.
- 37 Van der Kolk, Bessel A., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma ( (...)
- 38 Deleuze, op.cit., p.99.
23In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze formulates a crisis in time, studying neorealist filmmakers’ “treatment of limit-situations which pushes them to the point of dehumanized landscapes, of emptied spaces that might be seen as having absorbed characters and actions, retaining only a geophysical description, an abstract inventory of them.”35 As Deleuze discusses further, the new mode(s) of realism after the Second World War bring polar extremes into direct contact, bending the traditional rules of representation. Subjective experiences are externalized, made into objects – the angry scar Kate bears on her torso, for example, literally maps traumatic experience across her body, which becomes an object, an artifact of trauma. She does not remember the experience itself, but her body manifests its connection with the time of the genocide and the damage wrought on her people and herself. Her scar is one sign; another surfaces when she travels to Kigali. Surrounded by the whole tactile and sensory experience of her native land, she leaps from her taxi to vomit. “The physical body remembers, even if the afflicted person won’t,” explains one reviewer.36 In Bessel van der Kolk’s magnetizing work on the somatization of trauma, the author explains, “The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. [The body is] constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to ignore these processes, [trauma survivors] often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings … they learn to hide from themselves.”37 To cite Deleuze again: “What happens when we search for a recollection? We have to put ourselves into the past in general, then we have to choose.”38 As she begins to recognize the contours of a past that has been an external object until now, Kate navigates the memory that ultimately leads her to the specific site of origin of her trauma. Over the course of BER’s eight episodes, she has to put herself more and more into the past. Untangling her mother’s life and death demands her full intellectual engagement, but even more, Kate has to plunge her whole body into the earth that spat her out 25 years earlier. She has to face the buried truth of her identity, a truth that shakes her (and the series’ viewership) to the core, and reincarnate every painful memory her journey to Kigali reveals. As in Lupin, the shadows of a past that remains broken indicate a bigger questioning of “truth” about how survivors of collective trauma put their stories back together, how they remember or remake the “truths” that represent their own personal or community narratives. The subjective experience of genocide becomes objective, geographically concrete, and in the series’ final episode Kate stands in the well of a mass grave, digging bare-handed as the dark earth yields its gruesome (re)collection.
From dis-mantling to re-membering: putting it together
- 39 Note: Spoiler! The camp Kate excavates did not shelter persecuted Tutsi, but rather Hutu refugees w (...)
- 40 BER, episode 8, 44:42”-45:05”
24Kate does not dig alone, and not for the sake of her own identity as a trauma survivor. The grave site is not what she thought it was.39 Kate’s work in digging up a painfully revelatory past reflects what is happening on the political front, as national hero Alice Munezero – in opposition to the new Rwandan president who prefers to smooth over the still-raw weal of the past “for the good of the country” – stands before a tense crowd, brandishing a small cassette tape that contains proof of the genocide’s real complexity. She defies the government’s policy of silence, ready to lose her life for the sake of establishing a true and full narrative of the nation’s history. To her dismay (if not surprise), the tape has been erased. Munezero is humiliated and jailed, but her work offers a beacon of hope for the future of Rwanda – and for the survivors of the past. “I am confident that acknowledging our whole past allows us to move forward together,” we hear her say, as the radio broadcasts her words upon leaving prison; “stronger than before. There is much work to do. Hurt and divisions to be healed. Justice to pursue.”40 And indeed, the final episode of BER shows a greater process of un-imprisoning the uncomfortable facts about history, memory, trauma, and identity.
- 41 Kilroy-Marac, Katie, An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a (...)
25Mbembe theorizes the postcolony as “enclos[ing] multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelop one another” (2001: 14). The work of memory – of re-member-ing, putting a body of history (or the history of a body) back together – happens not in a linear way but through “an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures, that retain the depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones” (16).41 Both BER and Lupin expose the challenges of living with(in) history, phylogenic and ontogenetic – the objective narrative of the past and the individual story of people carrying its filaments and fragments forward as a creative act. Assane Diop’s postcolony-al creativity reconstructs his father’s memory, reclaiming Babakar’s history from the story imposed over it and offering his own son a life in which his identity as a former subject becomes a source of strength and affirmation, rather than shame. In the process, the series queries the ideological underpinnings of France as a nation whose foundational myths need re-evaluation. The allusions to objects lost in a regime overhaul (diamonds, monarchs, human value, artifacts of memory) expose an ongoing evolution of citizenship, personhood, and national identity. In the process of recollecting his father and seeking the truth that will restore order to history, Assane also pre-collects a new possible history for his son. The jewels Assane steals – and the act of exposing and punishing his father’s accusers – will allow Raoul access to ways of being French that neither Assane nor Babakar could envision.
- 42 Powers, John, “Black Earth Rising is a Fascinating, if Clunky, Take on the Rwandan Genocide” (Fresh (...)
26For Kate Ashby, confronting her trauma involves reconstructing a narrative so troubling that those who love her the most have shielded her from it all her life. As one reviewer puts it, BER reminds us (repeatedly) that “history is vast, messy and ever-changing.”42 In Episode Six, Kate visits the little church we saw in the pilot. Each pew is piled high with physical traces of the genocide: blankets, coats, shoes, shirts, handbags, blood-spattered stockings. The walls and ceiling of the church bear bullet-marks. A statue of the Sacred Heart stands headless, one hand raised in unheard blessing. Kate walks silently through the chapel as Jeanne Lee sings “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” in a mournful a cappella, the unaccompanied voice as raspy and pained as the untouched remnants of stolen lives Kate passes to reach the altar. Pivoting and walking quickly back to the entry door, she folds into sobs in the arms of Florence Karamera (Emmanuel Imani), the ally-cum-hired assassin who has not yet chosen a side. “A long way from home,” the song moans, as Kate collapses, faced with the remnants of a trauma she can only barely remember and which no one has bothered, in twenty years, to clean up. This church houses only abandoned traces of the dead, reduced to textile patterns in a worn, bone-colored sanctuary. And Kate’s predicament in this scene is especially poignant; she is, indeed, a motherless child, twice over now. She does not know, yet, where to find her dead, and the past so long buried will soon vanish into a hole in the ground. Kate has to dive into the mess itself, combat institutional resistance in order to access the documents that prove this ugliest of truths, then confront local reluctance to unearth a past so horrifying no one can bear to acknowledge it. But as she digs, watering the earth with her tears, she finds solidarity and community with hesitant villagers who, one by one, silently and solemnly approach the grave and begin digging with her. The earth releases their shared history, a heartbreaking – senseless, unjust, unspeakable – narrative of murder, desperation, and loss. A story told in relics their hands free, bone by bone. It is not, can never be, resolution. But it is release.
27Back in London, Michael Ennis sits with his own daughter, Hana, whose series-long coma shows no signs of improving. Michael’s friend Harper sits reading a novel out loud. “Whatcha reading?” Michael asks. “Oh, The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne – very good,” Harper replies. —“What about?” —“It’s set in Morocco, a bunch of white people failing to understand the world in which they find themselves.” Michael’s quick retort, “Oh my God, am I in it?” seals both the aptness of the literary reference and the tangled politics of the ICC’s work around Rwanda, war crimes, the search for the truth, and the desire to fill out a narrative which omits the most uncomfortable details.
28At the center of Osborne’s novel is a British couple travelling to a villa in the Moroccan hinterland, guests at a swanky party. The novel follows David and Jo on their road-trip from Tangier to the desert ksar, a tense journey in an already strained marriage. Two youths appear suddenly in the road, and David steers straight into them, killing one boy while the other runs off. David and Jo, at the beginning of a culture-clash nightmare, pile the dead boy into the back of their car and continue on to the ksar.
29In Osborne’s novel, all misunderstandings begin with the language of assumption. David assumes the boy he has killed is a thief, a “nobody” from “nowhere.” When the boy’s father arrives at the villa to collect his son’s body, David grumblingly offers the grieving man financial compensation, as if the life of this Moroccan child might be purchased by the rich, unrepentant westerner who killed him. He assumes the boys were waiting by the roadside to rob him; in truth, they were on the lookout for obvious tourists to whom they might sell fossils. These exotic souvenirs are the object of an illegal trade practice, lucrative enough for rural peasants who have limited means to improve their economic situations. Tellingly, the fossils also symbolize the act of digging up the place’s history and transmitting it to, usually, a wealthier curator. These are not blood diamonds mined as part of a European exploitation, but concrete remnants of a place-specific past. The allusion to this particular novel in BER’s final episode provides several ironic nudges: Michael recognizes the feeling of being lost in a strange world, but not the choices and actions that got him there. The youths’ fossil-peddling parallels the ugly underside of Kate Ashby’s search for the truth of her own past. And Harper’s toned-down explanation of the novel deliberately glosses over the havoc David and Jo wreak in Morocco, as if their crime is the fault of a developing nation and not their own prejudice and privilege. Hugo Blick’s choice to include this novel reflects much of what Kate Ashby discovers in her pursuit of details about her own life and her adoptive mother’s. Finally, to return to the interrogating student from the pilot episode, Osborne’s novel highlights the lingering fractures when a European power steps in to qualify the real narrative of a former colony’s trauma.
- 43 Pahl, Ronald H., “The Image of Africa in our Classrooms” in Social Studies 86, no. 6 (1995: Nov./De (...)
30Both Black Earth Rising and Lupin represent a Europe haunted by, and forced to come to grips with, the consequences of its misdeeds in Africa. “What is neglected or ignored in the reporting on Africa are the issues that have caused these problems for the African nations,” wrote Ronald Pahl in 1995.43 Over two decades later, BER and Lupin bring post-colonial Africa to international attention, by holding colonial Europe responsible for its former atrocities. Both series feature the voices of people who have fought to speak, rejected the “white masks” of assimilation policies and insisted on the value of their places of origin in history. The fact of their recent release testifies, I believe, to a global consciousness of the importance of revising the stories we have traditionally told ourselves about ourselves.
31The streaming of these two series in the early-21st century repairs a lacuna from the late-20th: making such narratives available to a global public changes the way history is viewed. A pragmatic change to the act of viewing happens too: freed from the necessity of DVDs and desktop computers or working DVD players, Netflix series can be viewed on any device, from smart TVs to mobile phones to backseat car screens, and the platform gives their stories both broader reach and the capacity for instant rewind and replay. They can stream into classrooms, home projectors, iPads, Chromebooks, and smartphones; viewers can create “watch parties” and, even separated (by, for instance, a pandemic), craft a sense of community through viewing the same moments on their different devices. Rather than being the limited property of one person, the series belong to anyone with (access to) an account. They are documents of the specific stories they tell, and of an era when cultural perceptions of personal property is constantly evolving.
- 44 I am thinking specifically of Anthony Minghella’s feel-good No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series (2 (...)
- 45 See online.
32Then, too, the two shows have, cathartically and pointedly, forced viewers from around the globe to pay attention to dramas they may never have seen otherwise. A subscription fee provides access to a whole world of stories, told from multiple perspectives. Entertainment is no longer the purview of only those who possess the means to attend formal performances or schedule specific outings around a film schedule; at a basic level, a person does not have to arrange childcare or factor in the costs of petrol, parking, and popcorn. Their global release matters as well. These series represent specifically African stories, without the stereotypical trappings of narratives designed to make audiences from the global North comfortable.44 Plus, series like BER and Lupin break ground for more complex, more independent shows. “The reality of the marketplace has changed,” announces Hollywood Reporter business writer Scott Roxborough: “Netflix, whose service accounts for more than half of the continent’s streaming subscriptions, debuted its first African originals in 2020.”45
- 46 A Reddit thread from August 2021 laments the absence of servers for Sub-Saharan Africa, where the i (...)
- 47 See online.
- 48 See online.
33Still, partnerships for series creation are one thing; streaming within the countries where they are produced is another. African cinema and drama series face three major challenges. First, even with Netflix available in all 54 African nations, Internet infrastructure and data-plan pricing pose significant challenges to streaming, as does the dearth of servers available to cache the data necessary to stream. In March 2016, all of sub-Saharan Africa had to rely on servers from elsewhere, meaning that e-sports, online gaming, and entertainment experienced significant delays and “traffic jams” while streaming their content.46 By means of comparison, the UK with 12.75 million Netflix subscribers in 2021, and France with 8.37, count over 250 servers between just those two countries, whether through Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).47 Subscriptions from the entire African continent, however, while reaching over 2.6 million by the end of 2021, rely on only 8 servers, all located in Johannesburg, South Africa.48 Broken down, these numbers mean that the UK and France alone have one server for approximately 84,480 Netflix subscribers, while across all of Africa one server supplies about 325,000 subscribers.
34Then there is the element of device availability and access. Groupe Spéciale Mobile calculates that “about 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa had connectivity to the Internet via their mobile phones in 2020 (up from 120 million, or 13% of the population), in 2014.”49 Further, “only 28% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa had mobile internet connectivity in 2020, compared with 49% of people globally.”50 The World Bank has pointed out that Internet infrastructure in Africa is a long-overlooked investment opportunity with huge potential for economic improvement: Boutheina Guermazi, regional-integration director for sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region, remarks, “Digital transformation is a unique opportunity for countries in Africa to boost economic growth and create jobs through innovative industries and more efficient, scalable and affordable solutions across sectors.”51 Numbers of smartphone users with Internet connectivity are expected to increase dramatically in the years to come, especially given the statistical youth of Africa’s population, a general trend of demographic urbanization, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic that has sent even remote places online. Nonetheless, “the huge improvements in mobile connectivity … have been achieved through the involvement of the private sector without government help or development finance.”52
- 53 The site Beebom lists the price of Netflix subscriptions for every country in which the platform is (...)
- 54 Salary data from Take-profit.org.
35The third challenge involves the cost of the subscription. In both Rwanda and Senegal, Netflix bears a monthly cost equivalent to $3.99 USD.53 This seems minuscule from a European or United States perspective, but we have to consider the average income of a Senegalese or Rwandan person living in an area with Internet access that is sufficiently stable to stream Netflix. The average monthly income in Senegal hovers around 382,000 CFA (roughly $653 USD); in Rwanda, one of the 20 poorest countries in the world, the average salary is around 581,000 RWF ($563 USD) – for a high-skills wage job.54 In rural areas people live on much, much less. The “trivial” cost of a Netflix subscription actually represents a significant monthly investment. Ironically, it is easier for Europeans to watch series about the wretched fates of their former colonies than it is for people who live in those countries.
36On an economic level, therefore, Netflix’s accessibility as a platform for rewriting the histories of “subaltern” places appears to mirror the “neocolonialist bullshit” Eve Ashby faces in BER’s opening scene. Even the Netflix logo (Figure 5) begins as an almost indistinguishable play of white on white, the letters shaded at a darker angle underneath. Like the two series studied in this article, the “North” of streaming access is writ large in clear white letters, a long shadow trailing behind. Media production today, like agricultural and textile production in the 19th century, represents its own kind of empire, dominated so far by white men who recognize the appeal of subaltern stories.
37Netflix viewers can, and should, question who is telling the stories and how. That said, even as uncomplicated mirrors for traditional narratives in familiar genres, I submit that their popularity among Netflix shows reveals an important fact about contemporary viewership. In many postcolonial literary traditions, the pioneer texts had to be composed in the language of the colonizer, despite the internal complexity and paradox of this choice. They had to rely on the structures and traditions of a culture that had dominated them in order to be read, or heard, and in order to establish their own place within a literary canon. The same is true for streaming series, of which BER and Lupin are among the first. Even if these two series represent merely inroads for releasing or wresting (hi)story from the sole proprietorship of imperial powers, they remain important cultural artifacts as Europe and Africa navigate a path out of the past. The history of colonial trauma and the messiness of the postmemory postcolony find expression here in both new subjectivities and new forms of narration – even when those are (as in these two cases) modeled explicitly on subjectivities and narratives from the past. Their integration into how we take in a revised canonical history allows us to reread memory, race, culture, and identity and to pry open the scars, cracks, and intersections where history really resides.
Note de fin
1 “Streaming” dans ce contexte fait référence à la diffusion en continu qui permet de regarder des séries ou films sur son ordinateur, son smartphone, ou sa tablette, et non seulement à la télévision en temps réel. À travers des plateformes telles que Netflix, Amazon vidéo, Hulu, etc., on peut donc regarder l’intégral d’une série au lieu de regarder un épisode à la fois, de semaine en semaine.
2 Part 2 of Lupin was released on 11 June 2021. The second season amplifies both Assane Diop’s reliance on Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories and the ways in which Asssane’s adversaries learn to decode his Lupin references and become detectives of his activity. Black Earth Rising was a limited series, with only one season. Translations are my own unless otherwise specified.
3 The Rwandan population is divided into three major ethnic groups: Hutu (85%), Tutsi (14%), and Twa (1%). The Tutsi herded cattle, while the Hutu farmed crops; the Tutsi thus became an economic elite. Over time, unrest fomented and economic came to be seen as ethnic differences. The last national census taken before the genocide recorded 596,400 Tutsi; at the annual population growth rate of 3%, there would be 650,900 by the time of the genocide in 1994. In July of 1994, the refugee camps counted 100,000 Tutsi remaining in Rwanda; an addition 25,000-45,000 had fled the country. I offer these figures with the caveat that Rwanda’s civil war (1990-1993) had already begun when the 1991 census was taken, and that an “undetermined number of Tutsi registered as Hutu,” in order to avoid discrimination or reprisals. Additionally, some critics of Habyarimana’s government claim an under-recording of the Tutsi population, in order to justify reducing government aids to the communes in which they were more numerous. If the census and population-growth figures are accurate, 77% of the Tutsi population in a little over three months. Rwanda had been in a state of civil war for three years already (1990-1993) when Hutu President Habyarimana was assassinated. Habyarimana’s supporters blamed the Tutsi and sought to avenge their president’s death. From 7 April to 15 July, 1994, the Hutu majority in Rwanda carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, exterminating the Tutsi minority. Estimates put the death toll upwards of 800,000, including both Tutsi and moderate Hutu; the genocide lasted just one hundred days. Though aware of the killings, international powers did not intervene. (On the demographics and census in Rwanda just prior to the genocide, please see Verpoorten, Marijke. “The Death Toll of the Rwandan Genocide: A Detailed Analysis for Gikongoro Province.” Population, vol. 60, no. 4 (2005), 331-367.
4 Young Assane played by Mamadou Haidara, adult by Omar Sy.
5 Later in my article I will examine another literary antecedent for Kay’s series, and discuss the Poe-esque presence/absence of the necklace, a signifier for injustice and change in French history.
6 In De l’esprit des lois, Baron de Montesquieu famously elaborates on the “geographical temperaments” of peoples from cold and warm climates: “the cowardice of the peoples of warm climates has almost always made them slaves, whereas the courage of the peoples from cold climates has kept them free. It is an effect that derives from its natural cause” See Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Roger Caillois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 194, 2:523. His “scientific” work on differences between north and south laid the groundwork for generations of Eurocentrism and imperial racism.
7 Newman, Jason, “The Good Thief of ‘Lupin’.” Rolling Stone, online, 19 April 2021.
8 Vincentelli, Elizabeth, “In ‘Lupin,’ Omar Sy Puts a New Twist on a Classic French Tale.” New York Times, online, 14 January 2021.
9 Motamayor, Rafael, “Lupin Pulls an Adaptation Heist on Its Audience.” Vulture, online, 10 February 2021.
10 Episode 1, 25:18-25:24”
11 John Powers studies Kay’s contemporary adaptation of Leblanc’s character in “The Most Wanted Man In France Is Invisible,” review on NPR’s Fresh Air, 11 June 2021.
12 Mbembe, Achille, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 62, No. 1 (1992).
13 Episode 3, 30:37”
14 Powers, op.cit.
16 Bawa, Aisha Balarabe, “From Imperialism to Diplomacy: A Historical Analysis of French and Senegal Cultural Relationship,” a paper presented to the Art as Cultural Diplomacy Conference. London, August 2013 [online], p.3.
17 Mbembe, Interview with Christian Höller, 2002, quoted in Tembo.
18 Sara Maza compellingly studies this scandal in her Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
19 Le Collier de la Reine was serially published in 1849-1850 and almost immediately translated into English and several other languages. Dumas’ wild romp through the last days of the ancien régime also features a corrupt cardinal, a conspiring alchemist, a fake Portuguese embassy, and an uncanny resemblance between the Queen and the thief. See Peters, Rosemary, “Reading Royalty in Dumas’ Le Collier de la Reine,” in Textual Practice, Volume 26, Issue 2 (2012), pp. 181-217.
20 Jeremy Popkin discusses such political attacks on Marie-Antoinette in “Pamphlet Journalism at the End of the Old Regime,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 22, No. 3, Special Issue: The French Revolution in Culture (Spring, 1989), pp. 351-367. In addition, Jeniffer Llewellen and Steve Thomson have put together an impressive study of anti-Antoinette pamphlets in their “Libelles and Political Pornography,” Alpha History, 06 October 2020 [online].
21 After the Queen’s double – Jeanne de la Motte – made off with the famous necklace, she and her husband took it apart diamond by diamond and sold the jewels off, in Paris and London. The necklace as a whole object was never seen again, and even the information about what happened to the diamonds remains unverifiable.
22 Pellegrini’s daughter, whom Assane has known since childhood in the Pellegrini household.
23 Katie Kilroy-Marac, An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), p.19.
24 Ibid.
25 Powers, op. cit.
26 Leblanc names the necklace “Le collier en esclavage de la Reine” (emphasis added), which I cannot avoid reading in the light of revelations about “blood diamonds” and the ruinous mining of African spaces for the wealth of occupying nations.
27 “French down to the roots” – the expression is often used to distinguish between those born in metropolitan France and those who have immigrated to the country, especially from former colonies.
28 “J’Accuse!” is the title of Émile Zola’s 1898 letter to the French president Félix Faure, accusing the government of anti-Semitism and political conspiracy in the unlawful imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus.
29 “children of the fatherland … drench our furrows.” These are lyrics from the first and last lines of the most famous stanza of France’s national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Babakar’s blood “drenches the furrows” of France after decolonization when he is framed for theft and then either commits suicide or is killed in prison.
30 Nadege Beausson-Diagne, in Noire n’est pas mon métier. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2018. Quoted on France 24.
31 “the good old days”
32 Episode 1, 1:36”-2:12”
33 Episode 1, 27:44-27:47”
34 Cf. André Bazin on the “sublime” nature of white screens : Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? (Paris: Éditions du cerf, 1958).
35 Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.6.
37 Van der Kolk, Bessel A., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, Reprint Edition, 2015), p.97.
38 Deleuze, op.cit., p.99.
39 Note: Spoiler! The camp Kate excavates did not shelter persecuted Tutsi, but rather Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda for Zaïre (now the DRC). In the penultimate episode of the series, Michael Ennis reveals to Kate that she was in fact a Hutu – a member of the ethnic group enacting the genocide against the Tutsi. She was rescued from this camp, a grim place populated with wounded people. Not violent entities seeking destruction of a neighboring minority population – just sorrowful, starving people struggling to survive. The revelation that Simon Nyamoya, the Tutsi war hero, engineered the massacre at the Hutu refugee camp explains Eve’s insistence on prosecuting him, as well as the new Rwandan government’s desire to bury his role(s) in the war. Upon leaving Rwanda in 1994, Eve gave Kate a Tutsi identity, in order to facilitate her integration into life in England. Finally, we see the locus of Kate’s trauma: not the genocide itself, but the silence around an even more painful truth: that is, that persecuted people also commit atrocities. The murderous Hutu population (as she has always reviled them) included innocents who also suffered, and the reality of the ethnic-cleansing enterprise went both ways, creating a national disaster with no simple answers. Fifty thousand Hutu refugees were murdered in this camp in the DRC, three years after the Tutsi genocide, hunted and killed by the people Kate has always been proud to defend.
40 BER, episode 8, 44:42”-45:05”
41 Kilroy-Marac, Katie, An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), p.24.
42 Powers, John, “Black Earth Rising is a Fascinating, if Clunky, Take on the Rwandan Genocide” (Fresh Air, online, 30 January 2019).
43 Pahl, Ronald H., “The Image of Africa in our Classrooms” in Social Studies 86, no. 6 (1995: Nov./Dec.), p. 247.
44 I am thinking specifically of Anthony Minghella’s feel-good No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series (2008), but stereotypes can be found in other not-so-quaint series as well: Beasts of No Nation (2015), Blood and Water (2020), The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980, plus 3 sequels over the following 13 years). Stories known as “African” tend to fall into 2 categories: (1) Africa is corrupt, dangerous, and perpetually war-torn, or (2) Africans are simple, rural, and happy. Both of these categories reduce the continent to a single character, and its people to one-dimensional figures written to reassure white audiences.
46 A Reddit thread from August 2021 laments the absence of servers for Sub-Saharan Africa, where the issues of connectivity and accessibility are most pronounced (see online).
51 See online, citing data from the GSMA.
52 Ibid.
53 The site Beebom lists the price of Netflix subscriptions for every country in which the platform is available.
54 Salary data from Take-profit.org.
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Légende | Figure 1. Black hands, white gloves: Assane and the Queen's necklace |
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Légende | Figure 2. A child rescued |
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Légende | Figure 3. Alive among the ruins |
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Légende | Figure 4. Screening postmemory: Eve Ashby interrogated |
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Légende | Figure 5. Netflix logo |
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Rosemary Peters-Hill, « Can the Subaltern Stream?: Trauma, Intersectionality, and Netflix », Mise au point [En ligne], 16 | 2022, mis en ligne le 27 janvier 2023, consulté le 04 novembre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/map/5960 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/map.5960
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