National Heterologies: On the Materiality and Mediality of Flags—Mali 2013

Named after a breed of small cats native to Africa.

For a helpful overview of the situation in Mali at the time of the intervention, see Stephen Smith, “In Search of Monsters: On the French Intervention in Mali,” London Review of Books, February 7, 2013.

See Forum pour un Autre Mali (FORAM), “Mali: Chronique d’une recolonisation programmée,” April 6, 2013, Afrik.com →; John Ahni Schertow, “No to the Recolonization of Mali,” Intercontinental Cry Magazine, March 4, 2013 →; Alexander Mezyaev, “Military Intervention in Mali: Special Operation to Recolonize Africa,” Global Research, January 14, 2013 →; “France and the Recolonisation of Mali,” Revolutionary Communist Group—Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! no. 231 (Feb.–March 2013) →.

See Joe Penney’s personal website →. For a wider selection of his articles, see the website Pass Blue: Covering the UN, maintained by the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY Graduate Center, New York →.

Joe Penney, “Mali’s War: Far From Over,” Photographer’s Blog, Reuters, March 22, 2013

John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Vintage, 1982), 83.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 260.

Ibid., 260.

Ibid., 261.

Barthes didn’t pay attention to these details, which are available on the cover and inside the issue of Paris Match. Several gaps and blind spots in his analysis have been pointed out over the last few years. Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, noted that the Paris Match cover had an eerie resonance with a practice of the anticolonial FLN in Algeria: the FLN photographed captured sub-Saharan soldiers—recruited by the French to implement colonial oppression—after their execution, doing precisely the same flag salute (See Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 244.) Canadian artist Vincent Meessen tried to locate Diouf Birane, the adolescent on the Paris Match cover, for his video project Vita Nova(2009). He discovered that Birane had died in Senegal in 1980. But in the course of his research in Ouagadougou, he happened upon one of Birane’s comrades, who also attended the 1955 event and was also depicted in the famous issue of Paris Match. He also discovered something that was missing from Barthes’s biography and accounts of his anticolonial engagements: one of Barthes’s grandfathers, Gustave Binger, had been a high-ranking French colonial officer in West Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. (See T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).)

In the past few years, young migrant activists have brought the Vichy poster back from the archives, reappropriating and defacing it to recode the national project and promote a tolerant, anti-Islamophobic, and antiracist society. (See PIR, “Rebeus, Renois, tous solidaires… Et vous?,” Les Indigènes de la République no. 8 (November 2010) → and “Mois du graphisme à Echirolles,” Le Blog de guy, December 20, 2012 →.) This reference to the Tricolour and its critical rededication is problematic in itself. The national symbols, particularly the republican connotations of the Tricolour, merit a discussion of their own today—even if they have received one before. In 1968, for example, the French Left vehemently discussed these questions. (See Le Rouge, the short ciné-tract that painter Gérard Fromanger produced in 1968 with Jean-Luc Godard, which shows the color red pouring over the white and blue parts of the Tricolour →. The repression of colonial history has recently lead to a widespread academic and pop cultural discourse in France. The highly successful feature film Indigènes by Rachid Bouchareb, for example, which thematized the forgotten and ignored role of North and West African soldiers in France’s World War II efforts, incited a firestorm of discussion. Revisionist histories of French colonialism emphasize the significance of the flag in this context. Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire’s Culture impériale, 1931–1961 (2011), for example, focuses on another of the Vichy government’s propaganda images featuring the Tricolour; incidentally, they also show a film poster for Indigènes intended for the international market, which concentrates the film’s plot into a blue-white-red fog (even here, the motif of the Tricolour is used for atmosphere’s sake.

It is worth noting that Rouch’s 1955 Les maitres fous, which documents (and stages) the dances and rituals of the Hauka religion in British-colonized Niger, shows a Hauka flag parade, which is of great structural importance to the film. This parade, in turn, references a British flag ritual called “Trooping the Colour”; see Erhard Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven: Weltliteratur und Ethnologie (1870–1960) (Munich: Fink, 2005).

Émile Durkheim, Die elementaren Formen des religiösen Lebens (1912), trans. Ludwig Schmidts, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).

Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

See Urte Evert and Daniel Hohrath, “Die Zeichen der Krieger und der Nation: Fahnen und Flaggen,” Farben der Geschichte. Fahnen und Flaggen, ed. Daniel Horath in cooperation with Urte Evert and Steffi Bahro, commissioned by Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin 2007, 17. In the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher said: “A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.”

Durkheim, Die elementaren Formen des religiösen Leben, 326.

The motif is also of interest to ambitious photographers like Seth Butler; see Tattered: Investigation of an American Icon, 2010 →.

Robert Davoine, Tombouctou. Fascination et malédiction d’une ville mythique (Paris: Harmattan), 2003.

Stephane Jourdane, “Sticker à l’effigie de François Hollande, le 21 mars 2013 au marché Dabanani de Bamako,” DirectMatin.fr, March 22, 2013 →.

“La France hisse le drapeau au mali—Les guignols de l’info du 29/01/13.”

For a further explanation of some of the positions around “Francophile Fever.”

Manthia Diawara, “Ce qui serait arrivé si la France n’était pas intervenue au Mali,” Slate Afrique, February 6, 2013 →.

Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Toward a Social Critique of Humor (London: Sage, 2005).

Michel Foucault, “Von anderen Räumen,” Dits et Ecrits. Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 931–942.

See the picture a Reuters photographer took on January 24, 2013 of tailor Abdoulay Cissuma sewing a flag in Bamako’s central market →.

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 183.

Ibid., 296.

In connection with a politics of affects, new sociopsychological and neurological studies on the effect of seeing a flag should be undertaken. Their empirical results may offer revelations about the transformation of political space in a pre- and post-discursive affect-public. See Ran R. Hassin, Melissa J. Ferguson, Daniella Shidlovski, Tamar Gross, "Subliminal Exposure to National Flags Affects Political Thought and Behavior," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol.104, no.50 (December 11, 2007): 19757-19761; Laura Cram et al., Strathclyde University "Mood of the Nation Quiz — A Survey with a Twist," 2012 → and Guido Michels, "Neuronen für Deutschland. In Berlin vermessen Forscher die Bundesbürger bei der Produktion des Nationalgefühls," Der Spiegel, June 25, 2012.