Présentation des sessions > Session 3: Temps et mémoire dans les écotones

Session 3: Temps et mémoire dans les écotones

 Jeudi 22 juin, 15h15-16h45

Animé par : Megan Macdonald

Mara Mattoscio: In Between Consecutive Lives and Co-Existing Spaces. J. M. Coetzee’s and Igiaba Scego’s Transformative Literary Limbos

While political discourses on the current “migratory crisis” often take the language of ecological emergency, depicting Western states as self-sufficient ecosystems put in danger by the “vermin” of external intruders, postcolonial writing proves crucial in pushing the boundaries and reimagining frontier limbos and precarious existences as the originating centres of unprecedented transformations. Such is the case of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013), a dystopian fiction in which the protagonists are strangers recently arrived by boat to a mysterious and apparently posthumous “new” country with a decidedly Beckettian twist. In this new location, every newly-arrived has been shorn of his/her memory, taught the official and only language, and kept in refugee camps and various waiting spaces before being allowed into a “standard” dwelling. Everyone is looked after by a pervasive (though apparently benign) state bureaucracy which allows for no variety, no personal initiative and no irony, so that the protagonists’ yearning for “something more” that is missing will lead them to unexpected consequences. Comparing Coetzee’s novel to Igiaba Scego’s Italian memoir La mia casa è dove sono (2010), which chronicles the Scegos’s diaspora from Mogadishu to Europe as well as her own struggles in growing up a black Italian-born girl in 1990s Rome, I intend to explore two different declinations of ecotones. Whereas Coetzee’s novel focuses on the existential and philosophical limbo of a lost child literally experiencing a new (after)life, Scego’s work deals with specific objects (the home-drawn Rome-plus-Mogadishu map, Bernini’s Roman sculpture of an African elephant) as objective correlatives of complex and transformative collective geographies.

Marie Kruger: The Time of the Ecozone: Urban Landscapes and the Legacies of Apartheid in South African Cinema

Screened at several national and international film festivals, the short film “Meniscus” by South African filmmakers Marc Thomas and Chloe Speller offers a poignant reflection on the physical and social production of space in contemporary South Africa. As the audience follows the journey of a deaf boy from the township to the classroom and the confines of an overcrowded prison, their experience of urban space, the physical movements and social interactions of its inhabitants, is continually re-framed. The sensory and visual experience of the disabled child is privileged throughout the film, thus alienating the viewer from their routine experiences of urban life. Instead, it is the child’s casual movement through overcrowded spaces that offers a compelling commentary on the negotiation of physical boundaries, transient social interactions and personal needs in Johannesburg.

This fragile relationship between “controlled capacity and overflow,” already suggested in the film’s title, acquires an additional historical perspective if one considers the pervasive legacy of apartheid in present-day urban space. From the domestic uniform of the boy’s mother to his residence in Kliptown Township and the brief appearance of Freedom Square, the film’s contemporary landscape is deeply embedded in the country’s history of racial segregation, servitude and resistance. Even more significant is the use of Constitution Hill as a current locale for the prison where the boy’s father finds himself incarcerated. The haunting legacy of Number Four [Constitution Hill] as the city’s most infamous apartheid prison continues to persist as does the disruptive and state-sponsored separation of black families. But even as the film excavates the layers of history that constitute the contemporary urban landscape, it simultaneously disrupts the stereotypical image of black masculinity in the affectionate relationship between the boy and his father, while globalizing the desire for adequate space through repeated references to UN resolutions.

My paper examines the unique cinematic strategies with which the film visualizes the spatial and temporal organization of an urban landscape. While the understanding of “ecotone” often focuses on the configuration of specific ecological spaces and the encounter of diverse populations within such spaces, the film allows me to address not only the social organization and accessibility of urban space (and how a disabled body negotiates physical and social boundaries) but also to consider the layering of different histories in contemporary Johannesburg. Informed by recent approaches in postcolonial and place studies (the space of the city as well as the space of the human body),[1] my paper intends to rethink an urban ecotone as a meeting place of space and time.

1 See, for example, Sten Pultz Moslund, Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place (2014)

Sandra Burchi, Gabriel Tomei: Stratégie d’intégration dans les récits des jeunes migrants qualifiés. Une enquête sur les diplômés de l'Université de Pise en Italie.

La récente crise économique a déterminé une reprise de l'émigration qualifiée à partir de l'Europe Méditerranée (et donc aussi de l'Italie) vers l’Europe centrale et du Nord (Gjergji, 2015; Gropas e Triandafyllidou, 2014). Ce processus concerne différents groupes de jeunes, sélectionnés sur la base de leur disponibilité du capital humain et social, et des réseaux et relations internationales. Les jeunes qui partent sont ceux qui ont une bonne formation universitaire, les jeunes "forcés" à chercher hors de l'Italie un chemin compatible avec leurs études et leur niveau de préparation.

Se référant aux résultats d'une enquête qualitative menée sur 110 jeunes diplômés de l'Université de Pise que dans les cinq dernières années ont émigré à l'étranger, l'article propose une réflexion sur les stratégies individuelles d'intégration dans les pays d'accueil et la dynamique temporelle qui caractérise ces parcours.

Ce qui ressort de l'analyse des récits est un sens double de l'idée de frontière: spatiale et temporelle. Pour un jeune italien qui se déplace dans l'espace européen, le franchissement de la frontière spatiale (géographique ou politique), renvoie à une idée de frontière temporelle qui dévient beaucoup plus problématique. Les subjectivités de ces jeunes migrants ne sont pas marquées par le fait de devenir "étrangers" dans un territoire qui n'est pas celui d'origine, mais plutôt par le fait de ne pas pouvoir décider sur leur vie au delà des limites (administratifs) de leur permanence à l'étranger.

L'idée de "frontière temporelle" introduite dans le débat par Mezzadra et Neilsen (2013) semble particulièrement adéquate pour décrire l'expérience de la temporalité qui caractérise les récits des "migrants qualifiés" que nous avons recueillis.