Liminal lieux de mémoire

Abstract

This article examines the representation of postcolonial memory in Tony Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils / Exiles. The constant movement that occurs in the film through travel, music, and dance reinforces the permanent dislocation of the film’s pied-noir and beurette protagonists. The film’s road-movie narrative represents, on the one hand, a gravitational pull away from the French Republican integrationist ‘centre’ towards an increasingly complex and diverse landscape of cultural identities linked by France’s colonial history, and on the other, a sense of nostalgia for an Algeria that no longer exists and may never have existed. In so doing, Exils represents modern metropolitan France as a dynamic and polycentric postcolonial space whose lieux de mémoire can and should be positioned not only in geographical and cultural territories that lie outside its contemporary national borders, but also in the liminal spaces that characterize the migrant experience. In line with the title of Gatlif’s film, the protagonists find themselves in a state of permanent exile, both from Algeria and from France. The ‘destination’ of the return to cultural origin, Algeria, emerges as a fundamental but nevertheless mirage-like lieu de mémoire that, notwithstanding its cultural and geographical significance, serves primarily to facilitate a deeper understanding by the protagonists of their personal and collective identity that has long been internalized in the unanchored liminal space of the postcolonial migrant journey.