Transnational

They Will not represent themselves ... 2012

In a transnational approach, the opposition between “Centre” and “Periphery” is not really geographic. The Orient for Saïd “is not an inert fact of nature”, and the same is Occident. The same idea can be translated in Achille Mbembe’s words about the “... globalization as central fact of our epoch, the generalized expansion of the form-merchandise and its grip on the totality of natural resources, of human productions, briefly on the whole living7“. This is to say that criticism, as a lucid thought, is a permanent process of resistance to the malefic will looking for dividing the world in order to reign. Against this crawling beast, the postcolonial studies suggest a serious effort of “de- compartmentalization” against all kinds of forces of differentiation trying to elevate walls of intolerance. Only constructive trans- nationalism is able to theorize the principals of sharing and multiculturalism as fate of the human being. Only this kind of creative criticism can show how the idea of “partitioning” and dividing is absurd. In such an approach, it is not possible anymore to say: “I am the only one who is worth. But I am worth, as I, only if the others, as They, are not worth”. That’s how someone like Dipesch Chakrabarty wants to “provincialize8” Europe by deconstructing the mental schemas of what she calls the “advanced societies” which have nothing else to offer but imperialism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism ...

I could not not think to what Haile Gerima told me about how he feels himself naturally linked to the marginalized persons. The same goes for Abdellatif Kechiche who sees himself in the fight of Sarah Baartman. The first one felt a spontaneous solidarity with the black Americans not so much because they have an African connection but mainly because they were, like him, denied their rights to be considered as equal. The other saw in the story of the Black Hottentot his own frustration. When he started his career as a director, he was refused the ability to be considered like anybody else from the North. I see the intellectual project of the two filmmakers as a demystification of the absurd gap established, against any bon sense, between a so called centre and periphery. Therefore someone like Achille Mbembe is very pertinent. He calls for a re-writing of History as a space of plurality putting together and simultaneously Here and There, because the former is part of the latter and vice versa. This is how he identifies the frame according to which one could look at themes like Integration, Nation, Identity, Citizenship, Emigration, etc9. This was already the idea of Edward Saïd for whom human reality is undividable and its hybridity and heterogeneity is a concrete fact non depending from any political will neither slogan. He emphasizes “... that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other10“.

In this book I want to point to the work of misrepresentation or misinterpretation of the World order producing what Karamchand Gandhi11 called the seductive fable (fable séduisante) whose touchstone is the idea of division, separation... I believe in this process of creativity described by Edward Saïd as unlearning the spontaneous spirit of domination. That’s why I emphasize the work of artists who are fighting against the spread of stereotypes and the loss of authenticity standing against any kind of fatality disabling them of using cinema to represent themselves.