Sites of Memory, Sites of Ruination in Postcolonial France and the Francosphere

Abstract

Tensions between French national memory and afterlives of empire are evident in the work of Pierre Nora. This chapter identifies colonial blind spots in Les Lieux de mémoire and suggests that a focus on ruination provides an alternative means of rethinking the dynamics of postcolonial memory. The Jardin d’agronomie tropicale in Paris is a telling illustration of such an approach, emblematic of the fragile dynamics of forgetting and remembering empire. The chapter concludes with a second illustration of these phenomena, the ruins of the penal colonies of French Guiana and New Caledonia. Highlighting the entangled histories and transcolonial mobilities that underpin these sites, the chapter identifies the emergence of alternative narratives associated with new critical and poetic approaches to the traumas of the colonial past.