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ABSTRACT
The island societies of the southwest Indian Ocean offer rich worlds that reveal shared discourses regarding the natural environment, politics and identity the region. This article draws on anthropological research and in particular, recorded video for its aesthetic analysis of voicework in Mauritius and Seychelles to discuss the role of voicework in revealing cultural regionalization and identity politics. It is proposed that the Sega (a musical genre), its lyrics and performance, foreground shared identity and responses to historical oppression in the region. The songs invoke the islanders' resilience by referring to enduring elements in the natural environment. African descendants in the islands use the Sega and its performance, to locally (and naturally) embody resistance to the historical elite. Following literatures on bodywork in the social sciences, this article offers two concepts: voicework and voicescape. Voicework is multisensory, trans-contextual, impromptu and discursive expression in Sega music. The voicescape refers to the often island-specific political and cultural context generated by voicework. The article emphasizes the embodied nature of voicework, anthropological research experience and embodied social expression in the Indian Ocean region (IOR).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rosabelle Boswell is an anthropologist and Executive Dean of Arts at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. She is also an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on identity and the management of cultural heritage in the islands of the southwest Indian Ocean region. She has done fieldwork in Mauritius, Seychelles, Zanzibar, Madagascar and South Africa. She is author of Le Malaise Creole: Ethnic identity in Mauritius (2006, Berghahn Books); Challenges to identifying and managing intangible cultural heritage in Mauritius, Zanzibar and Seychelles (2008, CODESRIA Press) and Representing heritage in Zanzibar and Madagascar (2011, Eclipse, Addis Ababa). In 2010, she led a research team on behalf of the Truth and Justice Commission to investigate the legacies of racism in Mauritius.

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Sega as voice-work in the Indian Ocean region

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ABSTRACT The island societies of the southwest Indian Ocean offer rich worlds that reveal shared discourses regarding the natural environment, politics and identity the region. This article draws on anthropological research and in particular, recorded video for its aesthetic analysis of voicework in Mauritius and Seychelles to discuss the role of voicework in revealing cultural regionalization and identity politics.

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Indigenous Futurisms: Cultures of Radical Love | Jordan Cocker | TEDxOklahomaCity

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Edward W. SOJA

traduction | translation

Sophie Didier, Frédéric Dufaux

L'expression " justice spatiale " ne s'est diffusée que très récemment et, encore aujourd'hui, géographes et aménageurs ont tendance à éviter l'usage explicite de l'adjectif " spatial " lorsqu'ils analysent la quête de nos sociétés contemporaines pour plus de justice et de démocratie. Soit la spatialité de la justice est ignorée dans ces travaux, soit elle est fondue (et souvent vidée de sa substance) dans des concepts apparentés tels que justice territoriale, justice environnementale, urbanisation de l'injustice, réduction des inégalités régionales, voire plus largement encore dans la quête générique d'une ville juste et d'une société juste. Toutes ces variations sur un même thème sont importantes et font sens, mais elles ont souvent tendance à détourner notre attention de ce qu'une formulation spécifiquement spatiale de la justice peut apporter, et, plus important encore, elles nous privent des nouvelles et nombreuses ouvertures qu'une telle démarche offre à un activisme social et politique qui s'appuierait sur la notion. Les bénéfices ne se comptent donc pas seulement en termes d'apport théorique mais aussi en termes pratiques.

The specific term " spatial justice " has not been commonly used until very recently, and even today there are tendencies among geographers and planners to avoid the explicit use of the adjective " spatial " in describing the search for justice and democracy in contemporary societies. Either the spatiality of justice is ignored or it is absorbed (and often drained of its specificity) into such related concepts as territorial justice, environmental justice, the urbanization of injustice, the reduction of regional inequalities, or even more broadly in the generic search for a just city and a just society. All of these variations on the central theme are important and relevant, but often tend to draw attention away from the specific qualities and meaning of an explicitly spatialized concept of justice and, more importantly, the many new opportunities it is providing not just for theory building and empirical analysis but for spatially informed social and political action.

1. Quel que soit le champ dans lequel on opère, la réflexion ne peut que directement bénéficier d'une perspective critique ancrée dans l'analyse de l'espace. Ce postulat a guidé la presque totalité de mon travail d'écriture depuis quarante ans et constitue la première phrase de l'ouvrage que j'écris actuellement, qui s'intitule À la recherche de la justice spatiale (Seeking Spatial Justice).

1. Whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective. This is the premise that lies behind practically everything I have written over the past forty years and is the first sentence in Seeking Spatial Justice, the title of a book I am currently writing.

" De même qu'aucun de nous ne peut échapper à la géographie, aucun de nous ne peut s'abstenir de lutter contre la géographie. Cette lutte est complexe et intéressante car elle n'engage pas seulement des soldats et des canons mais aussi des idées, des formes, des images et des imaginaires. ".

" Just as none of us are beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. "

4. Les discriminations liées aux localisations ( discriminations localisationnelles), résultat du traitement inégal fait à certaines catégories de population en raison de leur localisation géographique, s'avèrent fondamentales dans la production d'injustice spatiale et dans la création de structures spatiales pérennes, fondées sur privilèges et avantages. Les trois forces les plus connues qui agissent pour produire de la discrimination localisationnelle et spatiale sont la classe sociale, la race et le genre, mais leurs effets ne doivent pas être réduits à la seule ségrégation.

4. Locational discrimination, created through the biases imposed on certain populations because of their geographical location, is fundamental in the production of spatial injustice and the creation of lasting spatial structures of privilege and advantage. The three most familiar forces shaping locational and spatial discrimination are class, race, and gender, but their effects should not be reduced only to segregation.

Ces avancées sur la voie d'une perspective spatiale critique ont été tout à la fois prolongées et détournées par David Harvey dans La justice sociale et la ville (Social justice and the city), publié en 1973. Dans ce livre, comme dans tout ce qu'il a écrit depuis, Harvey a choisi d'utiliser le terme de " justice territoriale " emprunté à l'urbaniste gallois Bleddyn Davies, mais jamais il n'a utilisé explicitement le terme de justice spatiale pour exposer sa théorie de la spatialité de la justice. À travers ses " formulations libérales ", Harvey a fait avancer la conceptualisation de la justice et la perspective qu'il a développée a depuis lors influencé tous les débats anglophones sur la justice et la démocratie. En dépit du fait qu'il a reconnu l'importance de la contribution de Lefebvre à l'élaboration d'une philosophie marxiste de l'espace, le marxisme d'Harvey l'a éloigné des questions de causalité spatiale et de l'importance à accorder à la justice en tant que telle. Il n'a que rarement mentionné le terme de justice territoriale par la suite, quand bien même la notion d'urbanisation de l'injustice a été reprise par d'autres, et bien qu'il ait lui-même très récemment recommencé à écrire sur le droit à la ville.

The trajectory of these developments of a critical spatial perspective was both extended and diverted by David Harvey's Social Justice and the City, published in 1973. Never once using the specific term spatial justice in this book as well as in everything else he has written since, Harvey chose to use the term territorial justice, borrowing from the Welsh planner Bleddyn Davies, to describe his version of the spatiality of justice. In his 'liberal formulations' Harvey advanced the spatial conceptualization of justice and his view would shape all Anglophonic debates on justice and democracy ever since. Despite his recognition of Lefebvre's contributions as a Marxist philosopher of space, Harvey's Marxism moved him away from spatial causality and from a focus on justice itself, and he would rarely mention the term territorial justice again, although the notion of the urbanization of injustice would be carried forward and Harvey, very recently, would write again on the right to the city.

La première mention explicite du terme " justice spatiale " que j'ai pu relever se trouve dans la thèse de Doctorat inédite du géographe politiste John O'Laughlin intitulée La justice spatiale et l'électeur Noir américain : la dimension territoriale de la politique en ville ( Spatial Justice and the Black American Voter: The Territorial Dimension of Urban Politics), thèse soutenue en 1973. La publication la plus ancienne que j'ai trouvée utilisant le terme en anglais remonte à 1983 est un article de G.H. Pirie intitulé " De la justice spatiale " (" On spatial justice "), mais en 1981, le géographe français Alain Reynaud n'en était pas loin avec la publication de son livre Société, espace et justice: inégalités régionales et justice socio-spatiale. Des années 1980 jusqu'au tournant du siècle, l'usage et les nouvelles résonances du terme de justice spatiale ne se retrouvent quasi exclusivement que dans les travaux de géographes et aménageurs de Los Angeles... ce qui m'amène directement à mes conclusions.

The first use of the specific term 'spatial justice' that I can find is in the unpublished doctoral dissertation of the political geographer John O'Laughlin, entitled S patial Justice and the Black American Voter: The Territorial Dimension of Urban Politics, completed in 1973. The earliest published work I have found using the term in English is a short article by G.H. Pirie, " On Spatial Justice " in 1983, although almost there in 1981 was a book by the French geographer Alain Reynaud, Société, espace et justice: inégalites régionales et justice socio-spatiale. From the 1980s to the turn of the century, the use and development of the term spatial justice became almost exclusively associated with the work of geographers and planners in Los Angeles...and this takes me to my conclusions.

Los Angeles a de fait fonctionné comme un centre majeur non seulement pour la théorisation de la justice spatiale mais, plus important encore, pour le glissement du concept et son élargissement des stricts débats académiques aux mondes de l'action politique et de l'aménagement. Je crois pouvoir affirmer, même s'il est impossible de le prouver de manière concluante, qu'une perspective spatiale critique et une compréhension de la production des géographies de l'injustice et des structures spatiales du privilège ont fait leur chemin dans les stratégies et l'activisme des communautés et des travailleurs avec plus de succès à Los Angeles que dans n'importe quelle autre métropole étatsunienne. Les stratégies spatiales ont joué un rôle clef dans l'avènement de Los Angeles au rang de lieu privilégié de l'élaboration de nouvelles formes de lutte pour les mouvements des travailleurs étatsuniens, et l'ont consacré comme l'un des centres les plus dynamiques de l'innovation en ce qui concerne les organisations à base communautaire. De nouvelles idées tournant autour d'un régionalisme fondé sur la communauté, de la discrimination localisationnelle, du redécoupage des districts électoraux, et de la justice environnementale ont propulsé sur le devant de la scène des organisations comme l'Action Stratégique pour une Économie Juste (SAJE), l'Alliance de Los Angeles pour une Nouvelle Économie (LAANE), Justice pour les Femmes de Ménage ( Justice for Janitors), et le Centre Stratégique Travailleurs/Communautés (dont l'un des leaders a écrit sur Henri Lefebvre), toutes organisations au premier plan de la lutte pour la justice spatiale dans la ville.

Los Angeles has been a primary center not just in the theorization of spatial justice but more significantly in the movement of the concept from largely academic debate into the world of politics and practice. I believe it can be claimed, although it is almost impossible to prove conclusively, that a critical spatial perspective and an understanding of the production of unjust geographies and spatial structures of privilege have entered more successfully into the strategies and activism of labor and community groups in LA than in any other US metropolitan region. Spatial strategies have played a key role in making Los Angeles the leading edge of the American labor movement and one of the most vibrant centers for innovative community based organizations. New ideas about community-based regionalism, locational discrimination, electoral redistricting, and environmental justice have propelled such organizations as SAJE (Strategic Action for a Just Economy), the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, Justice for Janitors, and the Labor/Community Strategy Center (one of the leading figures having written on Henri Lefebvre) into the forefront of contemporary struggles over spatial justice and the city.

L'exemple peut-être le plus spectaculaire de l'impact des approches spécifiquement spatiales dans la quête de justice est celui de l'Union des Usagers de l'Autobus (BRU), une organisation au service des travailleurs pauvres et immigrés très dépendants des réseaux de transport public. BRU a combattu avec succès les discriminations localisationnelles de l'Autorité Métropolitaine des Transports Publics (MTA) et notamment leur projet de création très coûteux d'un système ferroviaire en site propre. Ce système aurait servi principalement les intérêts des populations suburbaines aisées aux dépends des besoins plus urgents des travailleurs pauvres de l' inner city, lesquels ont plutôt besoin d'un réseau d'autobus dont la souplesse leur permettrait de se rendre sur leurs multiples lieux de travail dispersés dans l'agglomération. Une décision de justice prise en 1996 a exigé que MTA classe l'achat d'une nouvelle flotte d'autobus comme priorité budgétaire, au même titre que la lutte contre la criminalité aux arrêts de bus, l'amélioration de la desserte et la réduction des temps d'attente. Dans d'autres villes, des cas similaires d'action en justice relevant des droits civiques et concernant la discrimination raciale n'ont pas abouti. À Los Angeles, la notion de discrimination spatiale et localisationnelle, la création de géographies injustes des transports publics, s'est superposée à l'argument de la discrimination raciale et a permis à l'action d'aboutir. L'histoire de ce mouvement est bien sûr plus compliquée que cela, mais au final, ce sont plusieurs milliards de dollars d'investissements publics dans un projet de train qui aurait bénéficié aux riches plutôt qu'aux pauvres (ce qui est généralement le cas dans la ville capitaliste) qui ont été redistribués en faveur d'un projet au service des pauvres plutôt que des riches : c'est presque une première. Aujourd'hui, le réseau d'autobus est l'un des meilleurs du pays et sert de modèle d'efficacité aux autres agglomérations.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the impact of specifically spatial approaches in the search for justice is the Bus Riders Union, an organization of the transit-dependent immigrant working poor that successfully challenged the locational biases of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and their plans for creating a multi-billion dollar fixed rail system that would primarily serve relatively wealthy suburban population at the expense of the more urgent needs of the inner city working poor, who depend on a more flexible bus network given their multiple and multi-locational job households. A court order was issued in 1996 that demanded that the MTA give first budget priority to the purchase of new buses, reduction of bus stop crime, and improvements in bus routing and waiting times. Similar civil rights cases based on racial discrimination had been brought to court in other cities and failed. In LA, the notion of spatial and locational discrimination, the creation of unjust geographies of mass transit, was added to the racial discrimination arguments and helped to win the case. There are many complications to the story, but the end result was a shift of billions of dollars of public investment from a rail plan that would benefit the rich more than the poor, as is usually the case in the capitalist city, to an almost unprecedented plan that would benefit the poor more than the rich. The bus network today is among the best in the country and is being used as a model of efficiency in other cities.

J'espère que par cette contribution, j'ai aidé à expliquer pourquoi, après une mise entre parenthèses de presque trente années, les idées passionnées de Lefebvre sur ont été si vivement réactivées.

I hope I have been of some help in explaining why, after thirty or so years of relative neglect Lefebvre's passionate ideas about le droit à la ville have been so actively revived.

Edward W. Soja, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, "The city and spatial justice", ["La ville et la justice spatiale", traduction : Sophie Didier, Frédéric Dufaux], justice spatiale | spatial justice | n° 01 septembre | september 2009 | http://www.jssj.org

Edward W. Soja, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, "The city and spatial justice", ["La ville et la justice spatiale", traduction : Sophie Didier, Frédéric Dufaux], justice spatiale | spatial justice | n° 01 septembre | september 2009 | http://www.jssj.org

1. D'après une présentation faite lors du colloque Justice et injustice spatiales, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre, 12, 13 et 14 mars 2008.

1. Paper prepared for presentation at the conference Spatial Justice, Nanterre, Paris, March 12-14, 2008.

2. "Just as none of us are beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings." in E. Saïd (1994), Culture and imperialism, Londres, Vintage, p. 7, traduit par nous (note des traducteurs).

3. En français dans le texte (note des traducteurs)

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Edward W. SOJA Sophie Didier, Frédéric Dufaux L'expression " justice spatiale " ne s'est diffusée que très récemment et, encore aujourd'hui, géographes et aménageurs ont tendance à éviter l'usage explicite de l'adjectif " spatial " lorsqu'ils analysent la quête de nos sociétés contemporaines pour plus de justice et de démocratie.

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I choose this for the toolbox options and ease of use - however I am saddened by the photograph of development workers who are white (and happen to have what look like UN logos) and Brown folk who seem to be "recipients"

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It was twelve years ago that Bojan passed out in his English class. It was then that his brain tumour was discovered. Forced to go to Ljubljana to get the treatment he needed, Still Here tells the story of Bojan's surgery and recovery. It also tells the story of Dr Šarkić. Once one of the most-respected doctors at Doboj's hospital, he was expelled during the war because of his faith and ethnic origins. Back in the town today, he still does not practice in the hospital.

A powerful portrayal of two connected lives, divided by differences of ethnicity and religion, Still Here is just one of the 25 digital stories and participatory videos produced through the Citizen Engagement through Visual Participatory Processes project, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

Based on participatory visual methods, the project gave citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) opportunities to tell stories about themselves, their municipalities and the systems which affect their lives. Their stories give powerful and personal insights into the realities of citizenship, participation, democracy and local governance in BiH today. They are useful for future SDC programming, as well as advocacy, activism and the sparking of public dialogues in BiH.

What are participatory visual methods?

Participatory visual methods include different creative forms of communication and expression, such as drama, photography, film, drawing, design, creative writing and music. Using collaborative processes, participants and facilitators work together to produce powerful stories.

Uniquely, this project combined two different participatory visual methods:

Digital storytelling is a learning, creating and sharing experience supported by technology. Using film, animation, photos or audio recordings, participants share aspects of their life story by creating their own short digital media production. In this project, participants used digital storytelling to create short individual narratives, sharing their experiences and views on citizenship, participation and local governance.

Participatory video involves participants learning basic filming skills and working together to agree narratives, and shoot and produce their films. It is an empowering process, enabling people to take action for solving their own problems and communicating this to decision-makers, their communities and the wider public. In this project, a smaller group of participants used participatory video to collectively analyse and synthesise the stories created through the digital storytelling process.

By using participatory visual methods, the project opened spaces for participants to reflect, learn, and talk about issues which are not openly discussed in BiH. It built their skills in technology, communication and visual methods. It encouraged them to be creative and playful, and to put their own experiences, imaginations and emotions into their stories.

By linking individual narratives with collective analysis, the project's combination of digital storytelling and participatory video also encouraged participants to move beyond their own lives to develop shared visions for democracy in BiH.

What did we do?

The project brought together activists, development professionals, civil society organisations, interested citizens and local government representatives in four stages:

1. Training of trainers workshop: a small group of participants were trained in running digital storytelling and participatory video workshops. The group went on to co-facilitate subsequent workshops, helping to form a pool of digital storytelling and participatory video trainers in BiH.

2. Digital storytelling workshops: included 'story circles', for participants to tell their stories to each other, training with computers and other technology, and creative exercises. The digital stories created cover themes such as activism, citizens' initiatives, governance and individual transformation.

3. As a means of involving local politicians, a selection of the digital stories was shown to four local mayors. The mayors were also interviewed about their motivations to enter politics.

4. In the participatory video process, power analysis exercises helped participants to identify the underlying issues in the digital stories, and to identify focal areas for the participatory videos. Over several months, participants then worked in groups to plan, film, edit and produce collective stories about democracy and how change happens in BiH.

The project produced 22 digital stories, three participatory videos and four video interviews with mayors. These have been screened to local government officials, NGOs, activists and the general public, sparking discussion on the successes and failures of citizen participation in BiH.

What did we learn?

The processes involved in participatory visual methods are as important, if not more important, than the final products.

Creative approaches, creative stories

For many participants in this project, being creative was something new. Bosnian society is strongly hierarchical, and being creative has little social value. Incorporating playful and creative approaches into the workshops encouraged participants to have fun and step away from their usual ways of thinking and acting. By doing so, they were able to develop creative and compelling stories, which explored 'hidden' parts of themselves and their societies.

Safe spaces and relaxed atmospheres

Participatory visual methods rely on storytellers putting their opinions, experiences and feelings into their stories. For many participants in this project, learning to tell personal stories was one of the biggest challenges of the process.

For trainers, it was crucial to create a safe space and relaxed atmosphere, with mutual levels of trust between facilitators and participants. This encouraged participants to openly share their experiences, discuss challenging issues and question dominant ways of being.

Working together

The project brought together a diverse group of participants, from different organisations, sectors, religions and ethnic groups. In the Bosnian context, the latter are particularly rigid social categories. By working together and sharing their personal stories, participants were able to interact as individuals, outside of these boundaries, and build ongoing links for the future.

To find out more...

Silence Speaks: http://silencespeaks.org/

The Center for Digital Storytelling: http://storycenter.org/

Visit http://digitalneprice.net to learn more about the project and view the stories.

Visit http://vimeo.com/71412865 to see a powerful digital story about a South African boy's experience of HIV and ways it affects him and his family.

This page draws on two documents: Work with us: How people and organisations can catalyse sustainable change and Unruly politics and methodological mash-ups: visual methods for social justice

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Participatory Visual Methods: a Case Study

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It was twelve years ago that Bojan passed out in his English class. It was then that his brain tumour was discovered. Forced to go to Ljubljana to get the treatment he needed, Still Here tells the story of Bojan's surgery and recovery. It also tells the story of Dr Šarkić.

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In exploring the benefits and potential power of participatory video for emancipatory and advocacy purposes, I am also exploring the other side of the coin and the potential drawbacks of making the invisible visible. I came across this video Manthia Diawara who explains Edward Glissant's right to opacity.

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Manthia Diawara - "Edouard Glissant: A Demand for the Right of Opacity" - 2019-08-04

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There is discussion here on the nuance between transparency before the state and opacity in terms of subjectivity and collective action.

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by Christian Sancto

Fig. 1. We Are Here, Homeless on the street in the cold and rain after the eviction of camp Osdorp, Autumn 2012. Courtesy of the artists' collective.

We Are Here is the vehicle by which a group of Amsterdam-based refugees attempts to make visible the conditions of crisis that envelope its members' lives. The group is comprised of refugees whose applications for asylum in the Netherlands are, for various reasons, no longer in process. Although they remain living in the Netherlands, they have no means of income, since they are not permitted to work. At the same time the government does not provide them with housing, forcing the group to move from squatted building to squatted building, or simply to live on the streets. The refugees formed We Are Here in September 2012 to provide them with a means for having their existence in the Netherlands recognized through collective action. The group's website recounts that it emerged from an impetus to "make themselves visible" by "start[ing] a demonstration." As interest in the group among both refugees and the public quickly swelled, so did the scale of its demonstrations and the intensity of attention it received from the media. In addition to their public demonstrations, We Are Here's activities have included the Here We Are Academy (in which some of the refugees give lessons to members of the public), media training for refugees, the We Are Here soccer team, and a large number of public workshops and talks across the Netherlands.

In their manifesto (available on their website) the group's project is articulated in the following terms:

Here in The Netherlands our existence is structurally denied. But this does not mean that we do not exist. We are here. We are living on the streets or in temporary shelters. We are living in a political and legal vacuum-a vacuum that can only be filled by the recognition of our situation and our needs. Our lives have been put on hold because we don't have papers, but we refuse to have our existence denied any longer. We refuse to remain invisible. We refuse to remain victims. We demand a structural solution for anyone who is in our situation and for all others who might find themselves trapped in the same political and legal vacuum. We demand recognition of our existence. We demand our existence to be acknowledged in official policies and laws. We are here and we will remain here.

To exist but not have that existence recognized by the institutions of law and politics: it is this juridical invisibility that conditions the critical situation in which We Are Here's members are forced to live. As the group's manifesto states, remaining "invisible" is correlative to remaining "victims" of this situation. For this reason, We Are Here's primary objective is to overcome their political and juridical invisibility-they aim "to make the inhumane situation that they have to live in visible, by no longer hiding, but showing the situation of refugees that are out of procedure in The Netherlands."

But the centrality of the need to attain visibility for We Are Here's political project begs the question: What kind of visibility is at stake in this context? According to the group's manifesto, making their critical situation visible is coeval with making its members recognizable in legal and political terms; that is to say, making themselves legitimate claimants of the rights and social protections that they need. Visibility in this context thus appears to connote intelligibility, or more specifically, a degree of compatibility with the forms of intelligibility particular to the spheres of politics and law. The aim of attaining such compatibility is certainly indispensable to the impetus of We Are Here's political activism. But, as an important strain of recent critical-theoretical work has argued, collective political action has the capacity to do more than produce legible and legitimate legal subjects; it can also call attention to the ontological limits of such notions of subjectivity in politically consequential ways. In this article I build on the trajectories of some of this scholarship to argue that the forms of visibility constituted in We Are Here's political activities exceeds any ostensible aim of recasting its members as fully intelligible subjects before the law. Rather, the group's activities index a politically transformative possibility emerging from the crisis of legal (in)visibility that envelopes its members' lives.

My analysis is based on a comparative reading of Judith Butler's theoretical account of collective rights claims and Édouard Glissant's simultaneously ontological and political conceptualizations of transparency and opacity. The terms 'transparency' and 'opacity' have recently been the subject of a great deal of attention in academic discussions across various disciplines. For the most part, they have been applied to discussions centred on critiques of institutional accountability or state-citizen relations. In this paper, however, I use them to make a theoretical sketch of the kinds of visibility that pertain to the relations between collective political action and legal intelligibility in the form of rights. I focus in particular on the resonances of Glissant's syntagma "the right to opacity" with Butler's work on the performative dimension of "extralegal" rights claims. My main aim is to show that by exercising their "right to opacity" We Are Here exhibits a performative power capable of transforming the category of right as a site of the emergence of political subjectivities.
Antinomies of right
What forms of visibility are constituted in collective rights claims? And how do these forms of visibility modulate the emergence of political subjectivities? For Butler, the question of the visibility of political subjects is tied to the relation between two kinds of right. The first is legal rights, meaning rights that are formally inscribed in law and subject to verbal claims by individuals and groups. The second is "extralegal" rights, a term Butler uses to designate 'rights' that are immanent to collective action as such and are exercised by groups that, for various reasons, do not have the means of legitimately claiming the first kind of rights.

For Butler, these two forms of rights exercise correspond to two distinct but inseparable modalities of collective action. Butler argues that the possibility of accessing legal rights depends on a group's ability to delimit itself according to a particular set of predetermined characteristics. In Precarious Life she writes:

When we argue for protection against discrimination, we argue as a group or class. And in that language and in that context, we have to present ourselves as bounded beings-distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law, a community defined by some shared features. Indeed, we must be able to use that language to secure legal protections and entitlements.

But a group's ability to present itself in this way is contingent on the modality by which it exercises "extralegal" rights. Butler describes this second modality in Dispossession ; it consists in a moment when "the uncounted prove to be reflexive and start to count themselves, not only enumerating who they are, but 'appearing' in some way, exercising in that way a 'right' (extralegal, to be sure) to existence." T he distinction between the ways in which legal and extralegal rights can be claimed thus rests on an ontological distinction between the two kinds of collectivity. To make legal rights claims a group has to determine a way of delimiting its boundaries; it is only in this way that it can present itself intelligibly to the juridical institutions through which it can secure legal protections and entitlements. By contrast, 'extralegal' rights do not bear directly on groups characterised by particular traits; instead, these rights are characterised as "plural rights." "[T]hat plurality," Butler notes, "is not circumscribed in advance by identity, that is, it is not a struggle to which only some identities can belong.". It is instead a performative exercise that "seeks to expand what we mean when we say 'we'." In other words, the 'we' manifested in the exercise of plural rights is an entity whose boundaries are dynamic-they "expand"-rather than fixed, however temporarily.

As Karen Zivi notes, this twofold conceptualization of right turns on a parallel distinction between descriptive and performative speech acts. A descriptive notion of rights claims suggests that "to make a rights claim would be to describe something that already exists, to represent the real." But Zivi asserts that, for Butler, such a notion of rights discourse can only offer a partial account of what happens when rights claims are made. This is because rights claims also carry with them a performative dimension. This dimension of rights discourse

"bring[s] into being a set of relationships or ways of being that may not have existed prior to my speaking. I am not simply representing a reality, but actively doing something in the process of making the claim, and doing something more than just making the claim itself."

Zivi observes that the intelligibility of a rights claim rests on the way it remains in close syntactic proximity to pre-existing discursive codes. As such, rights claims cannot but enact "the replication of norms" to the degree that they be intelligible. But the transformative possibility of making rights claims lies in their performative dimension, that is, in the way in which they "do more" than reproduce juridical discourse as it exists prior to its citation in a rights claim. The extralegal 'right' to existence that Butler describes encompasses this performative dimension of rights claims. It is not a right that can be verbally iterated since, residing outside the sphere of formal rights, it cannot be subject to descriptive iteration within legal terms. Rather, the extralegal 'right' to existence is a performative right, since it is by the very exercise of this right that the collective comes to constitute itself and the political subjects that comprise it are produced. As Butler writes, the exercise of extralegal rights can be seen "as a way of producing a political subject, such that the subject is a political effect of this very exercise." The capacity to constitute a collective through the exercise of extralegal rights is thus a necessary condition of any legal, or descriptive, rights claim.

This analysis reveals an irreducible complexity in the modes by which groups like We Are Here attempt to attain legal and political visibility. On the one hand, for the group to effectively stake its claim to legal protections it must delimit its boundaries and establish a means of identifying itself. On the other hand, the "extralegal" rights that the group exercises as it constitutes itself indexes a dynamic form of collectivity in which logics of identity are displaced. In particular, this analysis presents difficulties when it comes to the question of how We Are Here makes itself and its lived conditions of crisis visible. What kind of visibility is at stake when a group's boundaries are both clearly defined, for the sake of legal intelligibility, and dynamic, in the manifestation of plurality? In the following section I attempt to contend with this difficulty by bringing Butler's analysis of rights claims into dialogue with Édouard Glissant's politically-inflected figurations of transparency and opacity.
Transparency and opacity
Glissant develops his notions of transparency and opacity via a critique of the main ways that "the West" has historically come to understand its 'others'. According to Glissant, an imperative for transparency has been the primary condition for making people or things understandable in the West: "If we examine the process of 'understanding' people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought," Glissant writes, "we discover that its basis is [a] requirement for transparency." For Glissant, transparency describes a process of assessing an object according to one's own means of measurement-what Glissant calls "the ideal scale"-in order to render it knowable. It is closely related to the gesture of grasping, which designates "the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves." Transparency thus casts the subject and the object of understanding in an ineluctably hierarchical relation, one that Glissant describes as "enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy."

Glissant's remarks recall earlier poststructuralist critiques of the forms of subjectivity predicated on logics of transparency, autonomy, and self-identity. Jacques Derrida's figure of s'entendre parler ('to hear/understand oneself speaking'), discussed in his Of Grammatology , is one example of such a critique. Derrida writes:

The voice (understood) [...] closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection [...] which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in 'reality,' any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. [...] Within the closure of this experience, the word is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity-and at the same time in the condition of its possibility-as the experience of 'being.'

For Derrida, the "experience" of hearing oneself speak forecloses the excess of signification emerging from the signifier, folding the latter into the self-same subject and, in the same instant, calcifying the uttered word as "a transparent substance of expression." The s'entendre parler is an experiential phenomenon that manifests its subject's "purity" of existence via the "transparency" of its semiotic production to its physical means of enunciation. In this way the phenomenon confers a degree of ontological truth onto the subject's notion that his/her experience is autonomously and self-reflexively produced. Indeed, Derrida has written elsewhere that this " pure auto-affection [...] is no doubt the possibility for what is called subjectivity." Subjective experience predicated on this "transparent substance of expression" is thus coextensive with a sense of coherence within the delimited terrain of one's own being.

Derrida's grammatological program aims to dismantle the basis of the auto-affective subject's sense of coherence by elaborating the ways in which the written mark ( ) discloses difference-or more precisely, différance , meaning both 'to differ' and 'to defer'). In Derrida's argument différance comes to mark the limit of intrasubjective autonomy and, as such, the limit of transparency as a constitutive logic of subjectivity. For Glissant, however, such forms of difference risk being insufficient to the task of overcoming structures of knowledge predicated on transparency. This is because the notion of difference, though "invaluable," continues to partake in processes of epistemological reduction in one's encounters with others: "I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system." While difference implies "upset[ting] the hierarchy" of the scales posited by logics of transparency, it cannot but retain the epistemological functionality of those scales. "But," Glissant continues, "perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of scale." Glissant proposes as a figure, at once ontological, ethical, and political, for approaching such a task.

In contrast to transparency's double movement of reduction and enclosure, opacity designates the imperative to "[d]isplace all reduction" in order to effectuate "subsistence within an irreducible singularity." Opacity's singularity is a form of relation that consists in both the coexistence and convergence of its elements, a characteristic Glissant compares to the weave of a fabric, in which one's attention is drawn to "the texture of the weave and not the nature of its components." Moreover, this notion of Relation, predicated on opacity, attains a dimension of collectivity via Glissant's reconfiguration of the "Western" idea of totality. Glissant writes that the latter presupposes a principle of unity and thus becomes "threatened with immobility." The thought of Relation, on the other hand, cleaves the principle of unity away from totality, thereby effectuating "an open totality evolving upon itself." The opacity that Relation carries thus becomes "the force that drives every community: the thing that would bring us together forever and make us permanently distinctive."

In these passages opacity acts as a largely ontological notion. But opacity is also discussed in explicitly political and juridical terms. Glissant asserts that opacity can overcome the "barbarism" of transparency by making "[e]very Other [...] a citizen and no longer a barbarian." Opacity is thus framed as a condition of a political community to which membership is, in principle, closed to no-one. This assertion appears to present a political variation of the ontological concept of "an open totality evolving upon itself." But Glissant emphasises the political and legal stakes of opacity most strongly with a declaration that begins (in a modified form) and ends his chapter on opacity: "We claim/clamor for the right to opacity for everyone" (" Nous réclamons pour tous le droit à l'opacité .") Curiously, while several of Glissant's interlocutors have noted that the philosopher's figure of opacity migrates across multiple conceptual registers, the repeated framing of opacity specifically as a right that can be claimed has received comparatively little interpretive attention. Why does Glissant so emphatically encase opacity in this legal nomenclature? Gerard Aching asserts that "The Martinican philosopher's concept of opacity is [...] ethical in view of his call for opacity as a human right"; but I want to argue here that Glissant's claim of the right to opacity indicates something more than the sentiment that opacity, because ethical, is something that should be protected by juridical means. To do so I bring Glissant's formulation of opacity into conversation with Butler's elaboration of extralegal rights claims discussed above.

In the preceding section I identified two categories of rights claim in Butler's work. The first is explicitly articulated claims to social protection by appealing to established legal frameworks. Making this kind of claim depends on the ability of a group to identify itself according to a particular set of characteristics in order to present itself to juridical and political institutions. I have referred to such rights claims as 'descriptive' or 'legal'. The second category of rights claim is that which is exercised in the manifestation of a collectivity prior to its making any particular descriptive or formal rights claim. Butler calls this the exercise of a "right [...] to existence," which is by definition an "extralegal" right. Such an exercise was referred to above as 'performative'.

Reading Butler and Glissant alongside one another suggests that the latter's figure of opacity may be mapped onto the performative dimension of extralegal rights claims analysed by Butler. In particular, Butler's description of performative collectivity enacts an imbrication of epistemological and visual registers in a manner very close to Glissant's account of opacity:

[F]or political action, I must appear to others in ways I cannot know, and in this way, my body is established by perspectives that I cannot inhabit but that, surely, inhabit me. This is an important point because it is not the case that the body only establishes my own perspective; it is also what displaces that perspective and makes that displacement into a necessity. [...] In this way, my body does not act alone when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerges from the 'between', a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates.

Similarly, in Precarious Life Butler comments on the opacities that inhere in using the first person plural pronoun:

One speaks, and one speaks for another, to another, and yet there is no way to collapse the distinction between the Other and oneself. When we say 'we' we do nothing more than designate this very problematic. We do not solve it. And perhaps it is, and ought to be, insoluble.

In this passage 'we' indexes a relation in which the reduction of 'the Other' to a given subject's own epistemological schemes-the reduction demanded by the logic of transparency-is interrupted. This interruption foregrounds what Butler, in the first passage cited, calls "the 'between'." This is a space in which the Other and oneself become neither fully separable nor entirely confluent with each other; rather, it is the site of "a relation that both binds and differentiates." This figure of the 'between' might also aptly describe the field of opacities that, in Glissant's words, "would bring us together forever and make us permanently distinctive." Further affinities between Butler's and Glissant's thinking can be found with regard to the latter's notion of totality. The reflexive and dynamic figure of "an open totality evolving upon itself" resonates with Butler's description of collective action as an exercise that "seeks to expand what we mean when we say 'we'."

Moreover, the affinities between Butler's figure of the 'we' constituted through collective action and Glissant's relational opacity are suggestive for considering the specifically political and juridical valences of the latter's syntagma "the right to opacity." Butler describes the appearance of "the uncounted" as they begin to "count themselves" as the exercise of an extralegal 'right' to existence-that is, a performative 'right' whose exercise is a necessary condition for any formal or descriptive rights claim. This mode of appearance is coeval with the exercise of the performative form of right. It is also correlative with the claim to "plural rights" immanent to the emergence of the 'we'. If, as I have suggested above, the 'we' can be said to be constituted by a field of opacities-one akin to Glissant's metaphor of woven fabrics-it can thus be concluded that "the right to opacity" corresponds to the appearance of political subjects as they exercise their extralegal 'right' to existence. In the twofold structure of rights derived from Butler's work, Glissant's claim to "the right to opacity" thus much more strongly resembles the exercise of performative, plural rights than claims to formal, descriptive rights. Furthermore, in this analysis an added weight accrues to the subject pronoun of Glissant's declaration "We claim/clamor for the right to opacity for everyone." The right to opacity is something that "[w]e claim," but we do so not just for ourselves, but "for everyone." Claiming the right to opacity can thus be seen as a movement immanent to any exercise that (in Butler's phrase) "seeks to expand what we mean when we say 'we'." It might therefore be asserted that opacity indexes the relational consistency of collective performative action.
Conclusion: We Are Here and the right to opacity
To conclude I want to outline some of the implications of this analysis for responding to the question that has framed this article's argument: What forms of visibility are at stake in We Are Here's project of claiming political and legal recognition of their situation of crisis? Following the above discussion, it may be concluded that visibility in We Are Here's collective rights claims consists in a double movement: On the one hand, a group presents its own political subjectivity as transparent and autonomous before the law, as it must in order to secure legal protection; but on the other hand, it preserves the element of opacity that makes the emergence of political subjectivity possible beyond the limits of established legal forms of intelligibility. The way in which groups like We Are Here make themselves visible can thus be described as consisting in an indeterminacy between the transparency and opacity of emergent political subjects. By asserting that although their existence is "structurally denied" in the Netherlands, they do, nonetheless, exist, We Are Here locates the precarious situation that its members endure in a space between existence and politico-legal recognition. It is from this space of precarity, too, that the group's imperative to make itself visible emerges.

And yet, as the theoretical trajectory of this article suggests, the visibility of such a group need not be understood solely as a means to the end of legal recognition. This is because, as I have been arguing, this visibility is not equivalent to making the group's individual members autonomous, transparent subjects before the law. This transparency is intertwined with another kind of visibility-the of subjectivities that emerge in the interstices of existence and right, specifically through collective forms of political action. Moreover, it is in this exercise of their "right to opacity" that We Are Here's political activism echoes beyond the group's expressed desire to have its members' existences formally recognized in political and legal frameworks. We Are Here also manifests the possibility of performatively transforming the relation between visibility and right. Thus, the forms of visibility that issue from We Are Here's attempt to contend with its conditions of crisis-its members' legal and political invisibility-are not only directed towards neutralising the effects of those conditions. The opacities that their activist practice weaves also bear witness to a transformative possibility emerging from within that crisis of (in)visibility itself.

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Visibility in Crisis: Configuring Transparency and Opacity in We Are Here's Political Activism

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by Christian Sancto Fig. 1. We Are Here, Homeless on the street in the cold and rain after the eviction of camp Osdorp, Autumn 2012. Courtesy of the artists' collective. We Are Here is the vehicle by which a group of Amsterdam-based refugees attempts to make visible the conditions of crisis that envelope its members' lives.

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Ryink a twé la giny démay mon kozé
Mont a mwin la vérité ousa i lé
E dan sak zafèr mi fé mi trouv a twé an domyélé
Parsk kan mi fé la priyèr sé an kréol
Kan mi plèr mi soupliny sé an kréol
Kan mi kri mon kolèr sé an kréol
E kan mi koz lamour sé ankor an kréol

Mé bana i vé pa vwar ou ni dann biro ni dann lékol
I di ou sé in lang batar ké ou dwa rèst dann fénwar
Né dann malizé lesklavaz
Bana si ou i vé nou tourn la paz

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Retrouvez chaque samedi, un fonkézèr de l'île des poètes.

MON LANG KOZÉ

La di pou mwin giny diplom fo mi aprann koz fransé
Pou mwin giny voyazé fo mi aprann koz anglé
Prèsk an kashièt an misouk pou pa demoun i koné
Ryink dan la kaz ou va giny bat ou lang kozé

Formaté par lékol sanm la sosyété
Mavé presk bliyé mon kisamilé
Falé pas dann malizé
Pou mwin konèt mavé bozwin twé

Lontan mwin la pèrd a mwin
Epi souvan mwin la tromp somin
Falé la fors gard lo kèr sinyé
Kan zétwal la dévir kanot mon déstiné
Ou fini par kashièt dèryèr sèk ou lé pa
Par oubli ousa ou sort é kisa i gid out bann pa

Alor pou mwin géri mwin la parti rod répons dann in ta liv fransé
Hugo, Molière, Verlaine, tout la pasé
Mé sé dann kozé domyèl Danièl, Treuthard, Honoré
Ké mwin la tasmanir sony mon kèr kontkonyé

Ryink a twé la giny démay mon kozé
Mont a mwin la vérité ousa i lé
E dan sak zafèr mi fé mi trouv a twé an domyélé
Parsk kan mi fé la priyèr sé an kréol
Kan mi plèr mi soupliny sé an kréol
Kan mi kri mon kolèr sé an kréol
E kan mi koz lamour sé ankor an kréol

Mé bana i vé pa vwar ou ni dann biro ni dann lékol
I di ou sé in lang batar ké ou dwa rèst dann fénwar
Né dann malizé lesklavaz
Bana si ou i vé nou tourn la paz

Mé zot la pa konpri
Oubli aou sé kom oubli Bondyé
Oubli ousa nou sort é kisa nou lé podvré
E si nout sentyé fénwarsité
Aou mèm i tyinbo nout nièlpou alimé

Alor vyin pa di a mwin ou sé in lang batar
Kan pou mwin ou sé in létandar
Sak mo ti kado a mwin
Sé in fanal si mon somin
E la limyèr ti fé farine si mwin
Sé in lespwar pou mon bann domin

E plis mi aprann konèt a twé
Plis mi koz sanm twé
Sé plis ké mi yèm a twé
Mon kréol mon lang kozé.

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FONNKÈR : "Mon lang kozé" de Karol - Réunion la 1ère

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Retrouvez chaque samedi, un fonkézèr de l'île des poètes.

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Indigeneity in Mauritius, Réunion and Seychelles: Legacies of Métissage and Colonial Rule

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Indigeneity in Mauritius, Réunion and Seychelles: Legacies of Métissage and Colonial Rule

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Indigeneity in Mauritius, Réunion and Seychelles: Legacies of Métissage and Colonial Rule

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The word "indigenous" continues to evoke discussion and scholarship throughout the ages as a highly culturally and politically loaded term that has gained global importance.

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Since 2015, MG has been in collaboration with our friends and comrades in The BlackOUT Collective to create long-term movement strategy and concrete interventions towards Black Liberation, Reparations and Land Reform, rooted in ecological justice and the long history of Black self-determination.

The first phase of that collaborative work was the Black Land and Liberation Initiative . BLLI was an 18 month rigorous vision, strategy and training program for Black organizers from around the country grounded in Black liberation and anchored by Black leadership. A cohort of 35 organizers participated in two national retreats, organized regional trainings where they brought in more folks and experimented with land-based direct actions on Reclaim MLK and Juneteenth.

On Juneteenth, 2017, Black-led organizing around the country took direct action under the frame, "40 Acres, 40 Cities, One Day," to draw the connections between Black Liberation, Reparations, Land Reform and Ecological Justice.

Our aim is to co-create diverse and interdependent strategies that move us away from the current extractive economy which depends on the violent enclosure of land, labor, culture, power, wealth and spirit. At the heart of our analysis is the fundamental right to the resources required for Black people in the US to create their own productive, dignified and sustainable livelihoods through their own free labor and self-governance. Key among those resources is land. We endeavor to co-create strategies for transformation which are grounded in a long-term vision, guided in the resilience, culture, and creativity of ancestry, rooted in sovereignty, and which we can begin putting into place today.

The Initiative is a collaboration anchored by Movement Generation and BlackOUT Collective.

We root the program in exploring and understanding the following principles:

Black Liberation

Land Reform and Reparations

Deep Economic Democracy

Ecological Integrity

Hard Skills in Land-Based Work (including Horticulture and Afroecology)

To read more about the Black Land & Liberation Initiative, visit the website here.

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Movement Generation | Black Land & Liberation Initiative

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Since 2015, MG has been in collaboration with our friends and comrades in The BlackOUT Collective to create long-term movement strategy and concrete interventions towards Black Liberation, Reparations and Land Reform, rooted in ecological justice and the long history of Black self-determination. The first phase of that collaborative work was the Black Land and Liberation Initiative .