Post-Colonial Immigration Memory: Social and Academic Resistance to Epistemic Violence

Since the end of the 1980s, French Immigration Memory (mémoire de l’immigration) has gradually become visible in France. As a result of this process, the first immigration museum in France, Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immgiration(CNHI), was inaugurated in late 2007. Immigration Memory, once an almost exclusive topic to the artists and activists born in a migrant family for more than a decade, then rapidly became one of the important objects of study and of public policies through the late 2000s. However, if certain dimensions of Immigration Memory have become visible, the other dimensions, that I would call post-colonial dimensions, have become invisible within the same process.

This paper, therefore, argues the exclusion of Post-colonial Immigration Memory in social and academic spheres as epistemic violence and aims to explore individual and collective resistance against it. The resistance against epistemic violence is practiced by activists and artists with post-colonial backgrounds through Memory Work. Memory Work is cultural and artistic practices of reconstructing certain past stories that they directly experienced or not and they find themselves inherited from. Their positionality and proximity to the past story, depending on their gender, life-course and/or ethno-racial identity, gives a different signification to each Memory Work. Through the analysis of several exemplary Memory Works about “memory of struggles” based on my fieldwork in Lyon, Toulouse and Paris since 2009, I aim to empirically study epistemic violence in order to resist it as a researcher. Post-colonial Immigration Memory, in this sense, is not only an object of study but also a social and academic project to bring normative construction of knowledge and its violence into question.