Véronique Bragard

Uncouth sounds of resistance : Conradian tropes and hybrid epistemologies in Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale

Published a century after Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) raises the question of how interpretations of alterity and hybridity have developed. Reading Melville’s provocative text as a creative response to Conrad’s portrayal of the “uncouth sounds” of babbling Africans, I investigate how Melville both complicates Conrad’s tale of imperial incursions and reverses the Conradian journey into mysterious darkness, revealing a visionary approach reminiscent of Wilson Harris’s cross‐cultural imagination. Finally, I argue that Melville challenges both Conrad’s vision of the site of darkness as well as recent critical interpretations of hybridity.

Museum practices and the Belgian colonial past : questioning the memories of an ambivalent metropole

Abstract This article questions the traces left by colonialism on Belgiums museums. Adopting a comparative approach to specific museographic representations of Belgiums colonial past, we examine the images they convey of this period. Museums directly concerned with Belgian colonisation are analysed (the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the Musée Africain de Namur, and the Musée Belvue). This discussion is framed within the context of past exhibitions, but also by a consideration of more recent temporary exhibitions which express the need for Belgium to confront its colonial legacy in more complex and creative terms. The task of confronting the past and of assessing the role which colonialism played in glorifying the Belgian nation reveals the uniqueness of the ‘postcolonial’ Belgian context in which this problematic history has been debated within a broader national identity crisis that has put into question the very future of the country itself.

Reclaiming the future: (In)visible dirt borders in Sammy Baloji’s mining photomontages

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how Baloji’s photographic work Essay on Urban Planning and Mémoire/Kolwezi rely on the dialectic of visibility/invisibility of mining dirt to reveal similarities as well as discrepancies between past and present in capital and labour flows. Conflating archives of humans on display and photographs of abandoned mining sites, Baloji’s figurations of mining dirt unravel how perceptions of dirt were used by the colonial system to impose geographies of exclusion that have become invisible. While they expose how postindependence Congo has failed to appropriate its resources, Baloji’s images of artisanal miners working with mining dirt further epitomise how the disposable objects (often dematerialised via the web) consumed in rich nations involve the disposable lives of workers in the Congo within material dirt borders one can no longer see.