The Postcolonial Body: Injury, Repair, Recomposition

• In Event: Insurgent Imaginaries

Abstract

In a series of artworks named “The Body’s Legacies” and “Untitled” others, contemporary artist Kader Attia provocatively raises the question of what a postcolonial body means. As an Algerian-French artist, Attia produces deeply political artwork that situates culture as the battleground of the colonial encounter and of ensuing legacies of orientalization, dispossession, and cultural appropriation, on the one hand, and injury, repair, and reappropriation, on the other. The human body is at the center of the battle, both as a weapon and as an object of conquest. His work asks: What remains of the body in the postcolony today from the histories of injury, both visible and invisible, inflicted by colonialism, enslavement, and Western cultural appropriations? How are these remains, overdetermined as they are with scars and disfigurations that suggest how the past is present in a deeply embodied way, reconfigured through processes of cultural repair and reappropriation? How does the ritualized, willful infliction of injury on the body not only graft cultural belonging on individuals but also signal non-Western ways of subjectification through an aesthetics of repair and remaking? In this paper, I analyze selected artworks and writings by Attia, putting them in conversation with Fanon’s analysis of the injurious effects of colonial violence on the body of the colonized, black feminist analyses of the flesh, and critical anthropological research on the somatization of violence. I juxtapose Attia’s cultural account of intentional injury with a political repertoire of self-injurious protest to show the possibilities as well as the limits of using the body as the site and stake of decolonial confrontation. Attia’s conceptual interventions around repair, reappropriation, and resistance, I argue, offer an alternative way of thinking about the postcolonial body and recomposing its violent history in ways that prefigure a different future.

Author

• Banu Bargu, University of California, Santa Cruz