Paper short abstract:

The House of Slaves is a memorial to the slave trade. Commemorations of the slave trade recall its horrors, but also speak to the potential of repair in our post-slavery era. Using the fabric of the House of Slaves, impersonators who embody local forms of racialization enact racial reconciliation.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, the commemoration of slavery has taken on a global reach. The long-awaited recognition for the horrors of slavery seems now achieved in a formal sense – although the consequences of the slave trade and the traumas it has generated are still part of our present. Whilst claims for reparation payments are debated, racial reconciliation remains yet to be achieved.

This paper looks at the temporalities, materialities, and performativities of repair in the House of Slaves in Senegal. The House of Slaves is a museum that was established under French colonial rule, but gained its global significance due to curator Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, resulting in its inscription as UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978. The House of Slaves was originally built in the 18th century at the height of the slave trade. Its owner belonged to a class of mixed-race women who were implicated in the slave trade and funded their luxurious lifestyles with their profits from it. Today, the historical inhabitants of the island are invoked by impersonators who are asked to perform at commemorative events.

This paper focuses on the embodied performances of these impersonators to visualize and enact racial reconciliation in a museum setting. Extending the performativity of impersonators to wider political discourses on mixed-race, the paper explores to what extent re-enactments of the past contribute to racial repair.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores practices of urban repair by entrepreneurs opening new restaurants in Gela, a Sicilian city marked by pollution and unauthorized urban development. It reads repair of the downtown as a way to redeem Gela’s stigma, reinvent its past, shape subjectivities, create potential futures

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores practices of urban repair by entrepreneurs opening new restaurants in Gela, a seaside city in Sicily. In the 1960s, a large petrochemical plant developed in Gela, conveying promises of modernization into a largely peasant society. The plant shut down in 2014, causing a surge in unemployment, emigration, deaths from cancer, the absence of future and a stigma on pollution and unauthorized urban development. Considered among the unsightly cities in Sicily, Gela is characterized by incomplete sewage systems, unfinished buildings, lack of running water, industrial ruins, abandoned historical downtown and archaeological sites.

My ethnography focuses on entrepreneurs who repair buildings and streets of the downtown to open restaurants hoping for the development of tourism. Their repair is an actualization of a local nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial golden age rather than a recovering of spaces’ original function. This repair is a reinvention to redeem Gela’s industrial past and link the city to the imaginary of Sicily, based on artistic beauties, sea and good food. It embodies the gaze of a global tourist that perhaps will never reach Gela and uses it to redeem the city from its role in the symbolic map of Sicily. This repair connects place-making and self-making and is made in opposition to Gela imagined “normal” inhabitants who stereotypically disregard public spaces. By intertwining the aesthetics of the city (beauty) and the ethics of healing spaces (goodness), these repair practices turn private business into an act on the commons and, thus, create potential futures.

Paper short abstract:

Regarding the practices of repair in the post-mining era, this study compares convergence and juxtaposition as two configurations of temporal multiplicity by two case studies of repairing with/in plants, namely reforestation with acorns in Ashio and reedbed management in the Watarase wetland.

Paper long abstract:

After the Ashio copper mine was closed in the 1970s, various grassroots environmental initiatives were formed to “repair” polluted regions along the Watarase river in Japan. This study examines the reflexive relations between different tenses of pollution and the emerging futurity of recovery through multi-sited ethnography. It compares convergence and juxtaposition as two different configurations of temporal multiplicity in repair by two case studies, repairing with acorns in Ashio and repairing in reeds in the Watarase wetland.

Reforestation in Ashio was referred to as “reviving the green”. “Green” was a symbol for regional hydrologic connectivity and thus a metaphor for reconciliation between the mining town and the polluted downstream. Local volunteers regarded planting acorns as an obligation to past destruction so they left part of the barren mountains as its evidence. The future of revived “green” converged to and enacted an encompassing reference point of ongoing and unresolved pollution.

Reeds, compared to acorns, were not planted by humans but grew by themselves on the downstream ruination. It supported the growth of the local manufacturing industry that practised mowing and burning to maintain the quality of reeds. When a wetland registration movement started later, mowing and burning became practices to maintain the habitats for Ciconia boyciana and other species. While planting acorns and managing reeds are both engagements with multispecies temporalities, practising repair in reeds did not converge to or enact a single reference point. Rather, the temporalities of industrial ruination juxtaposed those of the industry and those of flagship species.