In February 2021 I attended a conversation between Felwine Sarr, a musician, economist and scholar, and Thierry Grillet. The talk was hosted by Columbia Global Centers Paris. Some of Grillet’s questions included: “Where are the places of healing? Where do we digest colonial histories?” These questions, in some sense rhetorical, ask us where—they ask us to think about the location of healing.
At the beginning of their conversation Sarr reflects on the European episteme—constitutive of European identity—as a techno-scientific one. He says that this form of reasoning objectifies all things living, shaping a society of “singularities.” These singularities in turn shape the institutions— cultural, political and economic— that govern the current world order. Singularity is a word seldom used to describe individualism. Perhaps my translation sees things that aren’t there, but singularity implies something odd (or off) about the systems of European hegemony. It also implies a kind of seclusion, an aloneness. In a world governed by singularities, “Where are the places of healing?”
In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler writes that space “[…] lies ‘between the people,’ which means that as much as any action takes place in a located somewhere, it also establishes a space that belongs properly to alliance itself” (73). In other words, for Butler, the association between people carves out a space, a “somewhere,” that is more affective than it is material. This place “between” people is not a place of singularities, but rather a place of collectivities, of connections. This conception of affective space brings to mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s term of “re-membering the dismembered.” If we think of colonialism as an act of dismembering— a mutilation— then, to re-member is to “see ourselves clearly” (wa Thiong’o cited in Mbembe). Where do we see ourselves clearly?
Towards the end of his conversation with Thierry Grillet, Sarr says “Europe’s archive has guided the world, but this archive is tired, it’s worn out.” We maybe catch glimmers of ourselves in the archive, half-stories, dismembered stories. We do not see ourselves clearly. We piece together shreds of a history that’s been taken away—set in glass display cases. We do not see ourselves clearly in the archive, or the museum. But maybe, these pieces we stitch together help us see the absence, the holes. What narratives disappear in the archive? And then, once we’ve taken in the dismembered story, maybe we can turn to each other, find Butler’s place of alliances and collectivities, and re-member.
