Podcasts from the bagne
By Ayshka Sené and Sophie Fuggle
Podcasts from the bagneJan 07, 2021
5. Dr Claire Reddleman
The podcast where we discuss disease, contagion, confinement and isolation in France’s overseas penal colonies. This podcast is part of the Postcards from the bagne research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R002452/1). Have a look at our project blog, follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
In today’s episode I interview Dr Claire Reddleman. Claire currently teaches in the Digital Humanities department at King’s College London, working on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art. Prior to this she carried out postdoctoral research on this project ‘Postcards from the bagne’, using visual research methods to engage with the history of France’s penal colonies. Claire’s PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, focussed on Marxian theory, mapping and contemporary art. Claire previously gained a MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and a BA in History of Art from the University of Reading. She is also a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com and on Twitter @reddlemap. An online viewing room of 'Collages from the bagne' will also be appearing on Claire's website this month.
Claire discusses her work as part of the Postcards from the bagne project focusing especially on methods used to document the sites, displays and material encountered on fieldwork in French Guiana and New Caledonia. Digital photography is used fairly extensively throughout and an archive of all of these images is freely available on figshare (search for 'Postcards from the bagne' for all folders). I particularly enjoyed listening to Claire talk about experimenting with other methods including plant collecting, flower pressing and cyanotypes. More information about these approaches can be found on the project blog. We also reflect on islands as spaces of quarantine, both during the current Covid-19 pandemic and as part of the penal colony in French Guiana. I hope that you enjoy the episode!
4. Emmanuelle Eriale
The podcast where we discuss disease, contagion, confinement and isolation in France’s overseas penal colonies. This podcast is part of the Postcards from the bagne research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R002452/1). Have a look at our project blog, follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
In today’s episode we’re joined by Emmanuelle Eriale who is Director of the Site Historique de l’Île Nou, the historic site/s of the French penal colony in Île Nou, New Caledonia. Emmanuelle works for the Association Temoignage d’Un Passé, an organisation which, since 1975, has sought to preserve the remains of the New Caledonian bagne and present them to the public. She has introduced various initiatives including pedagogical activities to educate young people about the history of the penal colony and numerous online resources where visitors can virtually discover historical buildings linked to the bagne. Emmanuelle has pioneered projects working with members of the New Caledonian public descended from those living and working in the penal colony and has also collaborated with numerous scholars, including historian Louis José Barbançon, and Dr Briony Neilson, our guest from last week.
New Caledonia is a French Overseas territory in the Pacific that was used as a penal colony by the French between 1864 and 1897. During these 33 years, over 20 000 convicts were sent to the territory. In this episode, Emmanuelle discusses the historic site in Île Nou which she describes as ‘the heart of the penal colony’ and explains how she has worked with local families, students, regional associations and government organisations to preserve and present this network of historical sites. She describes how New Caledonia has been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and the ways in which the museum has been forced to adapt in 2020. I was particularly interested to hear about the exhibition on health and nutrition in the penal colony ('Nourrir et soigner au bagne de l'Île Nou’) curated by Emmanuelle, which was combined with a guided visit at the site of the former hospital. This week's episode is in French.
3. Dr Briony Neilson
The podcast where we discuss disease, contagion, confinement and isolation in France’s overseas penal colonies. This podcast is part of the Postcards from the bagne research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R002452/1). Have a look at our project blog, follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
In today’s episode we’re joined by Dr Briony Neilson from the Department of History at the University of Sydney. Briony is a specialist in the history of nineteenth-century criminal justice in France and in the history of the New Caledonian bagne. Her work has appeared in various academic journals, including the International Review of Social History and Crime, History & Societies and she has lectured in History and Criminology at various universities in Sydney. She maintains links with colleagues in France at the CNRS lab 'The Centre for the Digital Humanities and History of Justice' where she has been an invited scholar, and in 2020 she received of a grant from the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Embassy of France in Australia for research into the history of the New Caledonian penal colony and its connections to Australia
New Caledonia is a French Overseas territory in the Pacific that was used as a penal colony by the French between 1864 and 1897. During these 33 years, over 20 000 convicts were sent to the territory. In this episode, Briony places disease firmly at the heart of the New Caledonian penal colony and outlines how religion, race, morality and colonialism all intersected with the notion of disease and contagion. When Briony recorded this episode, I was struck by the similarities between historic and present-day discourse regarding disease management, including questions around border policing, poverty, and racial inequality. It’s a fascinating episode and I hope you enjoy listening to it.
Briony is on Twitter @Briony_Neilson.
2. Prof Charles Forsdick
Today's guest is Professor Charles Forsdick who is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. Since 2012 Charles has been AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures'. He recently led an international project on '"Dark Tourism" in Comparative Perspective: Sites of Suffering, Sites of Memory' which included fieldwork in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam. He has published widely on travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial literature, comics, penal culture and the afterlives of slavery. Charles’ article, ‘Postcolonializing the bagne’, published in 2018 analyses ‘new critical and aesthetic approaches to the penal colony’ (Forsdick, 2018: 237). The article is open access.
It was a pleasure to record Charles in late November and I found his discussion of contagion and disease in representations of the bagne in popular culture absolutely fascinating. In the episode, Charles discusses his recent project on dark tourism and heritage, how this led to an interest in visual representations of these sites in popular culture, especially in films and bandes dessinées (French comics). He explores how these forms of popular culture draw on tropes of confinement, contagion and the dehumanisation of the incarcerated body. I particularly enjoyed his comments on the grammar of confinement, how contagion is used to drive ahead the narrative in these visual forms and the role of the hospital in representations of the bagne.
In the episode, Charles mentions two comics entitled Paco Les Mains Rouges, by Fabien Vehlmann and Eric Sagot.
Charles is on Twitter @charlesforsdick.
1. Dr Sophie Fuggle
The podcast where we discuss disease, contagion, confinement and isolation in France’s overseas penal colonies. This podcast is part of the Postcards from the bagne research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R002452/1). Have a look at our project blog, follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
Dr Sophie Fuggle is Associate Professor in Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Heritage at Nottingham Trent University. She is an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow and her current research specialises in recent and contemporary continental philosophy, ecocriticism and representations of incarceration. In January 2018, she was awarded funding for this project looking at multisite carceral heritage in French Guiana and New Caledonia. Sophie is also working on a monograph entitled This is not a camp: The Suicide Window at the Camp des Milles memorial. The book explores the possibilities and limitations for ethical spectatorship amongst visitors to sites such as the recently inaugurated Camp des Milles memorial museum located in a former tile factory turned deportation camp in the town of Les Milles just outside Aix-en-Provence.
French Guiana is a French Overseas territory in the Pacific that was used as a penal colony by the French between 1852 and 1938. During this period, 70,000 convicts were transported to the bagne in French Guiana which finally closed in 1946. In this episode, Sophie focuses on a letter she discovered in the archives during fieldwork last year. The letter is from a libéré who suffers from leprosy and is quarantined on an island. From this correspondence, Sophie elicits important questions about the role of the witness during periods of disease and contagion, both in the penal colony and now, during this global pandemic. She points out that some of those most badly affected are perhaps the least able to provide us with their testimonies.
Sophie is on Twitter @fuggbug.
Welcome to Podcasts from the bagne
Welcome to ‘Podcasts from the bagne’ the podcast where we discuss disease, contagion, confinement and isolation in France’s overseas penal colonies.
This podcast is part of the Postcards from the bagne research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R002452/1). I'm Ayshka Sené, a postdoctoral researcher on the project, and I work with Sophie Fuggle who is the lead researcher on the project.
In this short series of podcasts, we will be inviting various academics and heritage professionals to discuss the history of disease in French Guiana and New Caledonia, two of France’s overseas penal settlements. The current global context of the Covid 19 pandemic has provoked various comparisons with past pandemics and there are insights to be gained by looking at the management of these outbreaks as well as their effects. Perhaps more interestingly, we feel there has been less comment on the highly racialised stakes of the pandemic and the question of which lives we value and why. Here we can draw comparisons with historic epidemics in France’s penal colonies. We’ll question how pandemics reinforce existing divisions within societies and explore how those suffering from disease in penal colonies experienced a sort of double exile and double forgetting as their stories have faded away whilst others have dominated.
You are warmly invited to join us as we explore these themes. Have a look at our project blog, follow us on Instagram and Twitter to find out more and we will be back with episode 1 very soon.