New Generation Thinkers: Colonial Papers

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris 1956 staged debates about colonial history which are still playing out in the protests of the Gilets Noirs. New Generation Thinker Alexandra Reza leafs through the pages of the journal Présence Africaine, and picks out a short story by Ousmane Sembène, tracing the dreams of a young woman from Senegal. Her experiences are echoed in a new experimental patchwork of writing by Nathalie Quintane called Les Enfants Vont Bien. And what links all of these examples is the idea of papers, cahiers, and identity documents.

Producer: Emma Wallace

Alexandra Reza researches post-colonial literature at the University of Oxford. You can hear her in a Free Thinking discussion about Aimé Césaire https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nmxf

She also appears alongside Tariq Ali and Kehinde Andrews in a discussion Frantz Fanon's Writing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tdtn And in a Free Thinking episode looking at the fiction of Maryse Condé https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v86y

She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics to turn their research into radio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. Welcome to the
0:32.5	Arts and Ideas podcast. I'm Alexandra Reza and this is my essay, Colonial Papers. On a warm July day in Paris in
0:42.1	2019, hundreds of people occupied the pantheon, the symbolic heart of the French Republic.
0:48.2	They ran through the gates, up the steps, through the massive marble columns and into the nave.
0:52.9	Papers for all, they demanded.
0:55.1	Liberté, egalit, regularised. Freedom, equality, documents. They were the Gillesne
1:03.2	a movement that emerged in 2018 in the aftermath of the Gilles-Jolene. They are sans-papier,
1:10.7	undocumented migrants, waiting for papers.
1:13.6	Most are from African countries, former European colonies.
1:18.6	Last year, they launched a journal, The Papier, the paper. It includes political manifestos, photographs, interviews and poetry.
1:28.8	For the most part, we don't have our French papers, it announces, but we have this paper to fight with.
1:35.0	The texts are written in French and translated into many different languages.
1:39.6	In my research, I have spent years folding through the pages of journals published in Paris in the years around decolonisation. In September 1956, one of those, the literary journal
1:50.9	Presence African-held its own iconoclastic conference, occupying in a different tenor, France's
1:57.4	oldest public university, the Sorbonne. It was one of those bright, warm days, the American writer James Baldwin, who was living in Paris and went to the conference, later wrote,
2:09.6	Everyone and everything wore a cheerful aspect.
2:13.6	The conference, the first Congress of Black writers and artists, became an important milestone
2:19.5	in the history of anti-colonial thinking.
2:23.0	Intellectuals from across the Black and African world attended, and delegates called for
2:26.4	revaluation and resuscitation of African cultures and excoriated the colonial world order. The French authorities were unsettled. On the first day,
	...

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