The Cultural Trauma Of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees In The National Imagination 3030270246, 9783030270247, 9783030270254

Table of contents :
Series Editor Preface......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Contents......Page 12
Notes on Contributors......Page 14
1 Introduction......Page 17
Decolonization as Cultural Trauma......Page 22
The Cultural Trauma Process......Page 25
Decolonizing the Metropole......Page 27
The Colonial Returnees: Successful Integration, Difficult Trauma Dramas......Page 31
References......Page 37
2 Italian Decolonization: Multidirectional Migrations, Multidirectional Memories......Page 42
Gaining and Losing an Empire......Page 44
Coming Home? Decolonization at the Time of Events......Page 50
Remembering Empire, Settlers, and National Refugees......Page 58
The Politics of Public Memory and Commemoration......Page 63
References......Page 67
Introduction......Page 71
Japan’s Incursions into Manchuria, 1932–1945......Page 75
Japan’s Agrarian Settlements in Manchuria, 1932–1945......Page 76
Japan’s Loss of Colonial Empire and Flight from Manchuria, 1945......Page 77
The Heterogeneous Narratives of Cultural Trauma, 1950s–1970s......Page 78
Defining Repatriates as Victims: Compensation Claims in the 1950s and 1960s......Page 79
The Colonists as Heroes: The Memoirs of Repatriate Elites in the 1950s and 1960s......Page 80
Colonists as Perpetrators: Epic Novels and Films About Manchuria in the 1950s and 1960s......Page 82
Repatriated Heroes in Epic Novels: The Barren Zone (1973, 1976, 1979 and 2009)......Page 83
The Trauma Drama of Repatriation: Coalescing Victim Narratives in the 1980s–2010s......Page 84
The Trauma Drama of Orphans Left in China: The Visible Victims of the 1980s and 1990s......Page 85
Extending the Victim Narrative of Repatriation: Epic Novels and Films in the 1990s......Page 86
Extending the Memories of Suffering: The Personal Testimonies of Repatriates, 1980s–2010s......Page 87
Institutionalizing Cultural Trauma: Repatriation Memorial Museums in the 2000s......Page 89
Manchuria Reconsidered: Questions by the Postwar Generation in the 2000s......Page 90
Looking for Closure: Litigation by the Returnees from China in the 2000s and 2010s......Page 91
Carrying the Torch: The Second Generation of Returnees in the 2000s and 2010s......Page 92
Conclusion......Page 93
References......Page 95
4 Trauma and the Last Dutch War in Indonesia, 1945–1949......Page 98
Dutch Colonialism, Colonial Society and Decolonization......Page 99
“Repatriates” and Soldiers......Page 103
Trauma Narratives and Claim-Making......Page 105
Political Responses......Page 110
Postcolonial Trauma in the Wider Society?......Page 112
A Generational Transfer of Memory and Trauma?......Page 116
Postscript......Page 119
References......Page 121
5 Beyond the “Trauma”: Legitimization and Revenge of the “Anciens du Congo” (Belgian Congo 1908–1960)......Page 123
From the Congo Free State (1885–1908) to the “Model Colony”......Page 124
Settlers and Colonials: Usefulness and Marginalization in the Belgian Colonial Model......Page 126
From Colonial “Ordinariness” to the Trauma of Decolonization......Page 130
The “Colonial Drama” and the Escape of the Rapatriés......Page 133
Trauma-Payback-Narration: From Disavowal to Conflict......Page 137
Disavowing/Repositioning … Trauma and Memory......Page 140
Conclusions: The Anciens and the Past-Future of the Colonial Memory......Page 142
References......Page 144
6 Pied-Noir Trauma and Identity in Postcolonial France, 1962–2010......Page 148
Pieds Noirs as Repatriates: The Battle for Indemnities and the Decade of Recovery......Page 158
A Shared Culture in Peril: Pied-Noir Identity in the Making......Page 164
Maintaining Unity and Staying Relevant: Sharing the Stage with the Harkis......Page 167
Historiography Over Memory: The Post-Trauma Politics of the Pieds Noirs......Page 173
Conclusion......Page 174
References......Page 177
7 Trauma and the Portuguese Repatriation: A Confined Collective Identity......Page 179
Late Portuguese Colonialism......Page 180
Revolution, Decolonization, and Repatriation......Page 185
Integration in a Changing Society......Page 189
An Early Political Narrative of Victimization......Page 197
The Late Retornados Literature......Page 202
Counter-Narratives and Identity Conflicts Over the Colonial Past......Page 205
Conclusion: The Scope of Retornados’ Collective Trauma......Page 208
References......Page 210
Why These Six Cases?......Page 214
Decolonization as Collective Trauma......Page 217
Trauma and Symbolic Opportunity Structures......Page 219
A Comparative View......Page 223
Decolonization and National Catastrophes......Page 231
References......Page 234
Index......Page 238

Citation preview

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination Edited by Ron Eyerman · Giuseppe Sciortino

Cultural Sociology Series Editors Jeffrey C. Alexander Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA Ron Eyerman Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA David Inglis Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology University of Exeter Exeter, Devon, UK Philip Smith Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA

Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant areas of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the proposition that deep meanings make a profound difference in social life. Culture is not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for the weak, or a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just practical knowledge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates how shared and circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapably penetrate the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons, rituals and representations, these culture structures drive human action, inspire social movements, direct and build institutions, and so come to shape history. The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the humanities, but insists on rigorous social science methods and aims at empirical explanations. Contributions engage in thick interpretations but also account for behavioral outcomes. They develop cultural theory but also deploy middle-range tools to challenge reductionist understandings of how the world actually works. In so doing, the books in this series embody the spirit of cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14945

Ron Eyerman · Giuseppe Sciortino Editors

The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination

Editors Ron Eyerman Center for Cultural Sociology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA

Giuseppe Sciortino Dept Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale Universita degli Studi di Trento Trento, Italy

Cultural Sociology ISBN 978-3-030-27024-7 ISBN 978-3-030-27025-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Orbon Alija/E+/gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor Preface

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

Why are these words from Tennyson so often quoted? Written for his requiem elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, like all great poetry they speak to more than just the particulars of one case. They invoke experiences and choices both universal and common: The reckoning of past with present, and joy with sorrow, and the risks of affective engagement to people, places, things, even life. And so they come to mind, often. Tennyson’s poem speaks with peculiar force to the interrogative thrust of this volume: How was that which was lost experienced? What evaluations, memories and considerations were conjured in thinking things through? Of course decolonization was a triumph for those fighting oppression, seeking autonomy and hungry for the freedoms that only self-determination could bring. Yet for the former rulers at home and in the colonies it was a collective loss of something valuable that could only be deeply reflected upon. Contra what most social theory might predict these subsequent regrets and meditations were not particularly themed on the economic flows of raw materials or the logics of geo-power. Indeed as the editors point out the major powers ‘got over’ these issues surprisingly quickly. Life went on as usual with the same economies and political operators controlling the world in more or less the same pecking v

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order. There was even a plus side. Gone were the hassle, stress, embarrassment and expense of holding down a discontented empire. The loss experience was all about meanings and identities. Most obviously the decline of empire during the twentieth Century challenged entrenched visions of national destiny and superiority back in the metropole. Much has been written on this theme over the years. It remains a standard talking point for both second-rate and high-quality commentators, historians and political scientists as they seek to explain somewhat puzzling moments of present-day gunboat diplomacy, or the rise of the far right and hostility to immigration. Images are sometimes invoked of the nation lashing out, attempting to conjure ghosts, pulling up the drawbridge, or living in denial. These generally appear when the expert does not approve of the thing they are explaining. The colonial stain is polluting. It discredits and leads inexorably to the denunciation of what are cast as irrational thoughts, deeds and policies. By drawing upon cultural trauma theory this book helpfully moves beyond such a speculative, moralistic or tendentious substitute for rigorous intellectual inquiry. It engages in a systematic comparative and historical cultural sociology of the ways that colonial decline was understood. The case studies indicate the surprising variety of pathways and multiple structuring contingencies that shaped just how decolonization was managed practically and understood imaginatively in various imperial centers. The postcolonial meanings uncovered in this text are visible and discursive; the sound bites few and far between. The sign on the door might say: No psychobabble required. With nearly all attention going to the colonial center and its accommodations to a new world order, too often forgotten in scholarship are the “villains” of the piece. Colonial settlers tend to be seen today, especially in movies and on radicalized campuses, as exploitative elites living off the fat of the land and the sweat of the colonized body. We can effortlessly conjure images of privileged country club memberships, boorish landowners, and patronizing, benevolent but still racist administrators. It seems hard to really care for this cast of characters or believe they could undergo a “real” cultural trauma. Their discontents might be dismissed as self-indulgent suffering or as a problem of the privileged. But this volume shows the demographic and social composition of the colonists was far more diverse than we might commonly imagine. They did not all live on Easy Street. And perhaps no one else experienced the loss of empire more palpably. The studies presented here display them

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feeling betrayed and abandoned. Some fled in terror of lawlessness and reprisals. Others might be bankrupted, their property unsalable. Back in the motherland these people who only half-belonged could easily become stigmatized or a national embarrassment. Often deeply attached to their colonial territories, to farms, businesses and institutions built up over the generations, many had truly loved and lost. Whether we like it or not theirs was a cultural trauma too. Indeed, it is an important one for cultural trauma theory to consider at this particular moment in its own evolution. In recent years the literature on cultural trauma has amply testified to the collective process through which suffering is constructed. This involves narratives, gestures, intellectual work and social organization. None of this is to say that death, violence, injustice and degradation are not real. However, the push has been to uncover the mechanisms through which all these realities have been made socially visible and consequentially relevant. There has been a cost to the choices made. A focus on groups generally considered as victims of history and hierarchy, or on assassinations, atrocities and natural disasters has not helped the constructivist cause of the cultural trauma paradigm. A parallel choice to focus on eventually successful cases rather than on permanently repressed evils or failed mobilization has compounded things. There is a sense of suffering that just needed a voice, that just needed time, and that would eventually bubble to the surface and become known. The truth will out, the lazy reader might conclude, and so real trauma gives birth to cultural trauma, eventually. In this collection, we move away from familiar territory and so help further decouple the ontological reality of suffering from the collective representations through which it becomes known and, also in some ways, experienced. We also winnow away our confounding gut feelings about the worthy and unworthy. Here we have a book that considers those who might be considered by some to have a lesser right to cry, mourn, feel outrage or claim to have experienced injustice. The volume also considers many failed efforts to obtain compensation, or to be formally recognized as disposed victims of history and policy. Even at the time of regime change few had much sympathy or interest in what the erstwhile colonists had to say. They might have been talking but often nobody was really interested, really listening. Some claims never made it off the launchpad. By pushing cultural trauma theory into this new, slightly uncomfortable territory and by looking at failed or ambivalent

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trauma many of the studies presented here best display the cultural constructivism and normative neutrality that is at the core of the cultural trauma paradigm. The documentation of claims-making activity is more clearly differentiated out from themes of advocacy and historical witnessing that we find in parallel literatures. The trauma paradigm serves more visibly and accurately as a tool for a generalizing comparative cultural sociology. It is shown to offer a way of explaining and interpreting, not implicitly or unintentionally congratulating, commiserating or cheering on as the scholarly narrative unfolds. We tell our students that the explicans should not become the explicandum. But here is a case that tests the rule: Looking to the cultural trauma of decolonization helps us better understand the essence of cultural trauma theory itself. Oxford, UK July 2019

Philip Smith

Acknowledgements

The idea of this volume formed while Giuseppe Sciortino was Willy Brandt Visiting professor at Malmo University, one of the cities Ron Eyerman claims as his own. Many discussions in Malmo paved the way to this project. Subsequently, the idea grew and evolved through two intensely stimulating workshops. The first, held at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS), was partially funded by the MacMillan Center. The second was hosted by the International Migration Laboratory of the Università di Trento. We would like to acknowledge the generous support afforded by these institutions, which included the exemplary hands on organizing of the secretarial staff and the guiding imagination of Nadine Amalfi. The essays here published were presented in rough form at our first meeting and then, more than a year later, as nearly completed final drafts at the second. We are very grateful for the discussions and critical comments that occurred during these face-to-face meetings and then over the internet as authors and editors shared their ideas. We are grateful to all members of our crew for having accepted to participate in this project. Even more for the scholarly skills and intellectual curiosity they have provided. Their willingness to apply specialized knowledge in new ways and engage in a comparative, interdisciplinary project is an exemplar of the academic ideal. Thank you all. Some colleagues have been quite helpful along the way helping us with ideas, bibliographic references and comments upon our drafts. Among them, we wish to thank Martina Cvajner, Mario Diani, Johanna Esseveld, Nicholas Harney, and Peter Kivisto. Dr. Todd Madigan worked ix

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on the final editing as he completed his Ph.D. and graduated from Yale University. Bravo, Todd! We also acknowledge the support given by our editors at Palgrave, Mary Al-Sayed and Linda Braus, as they guided us through the final stages of preparing the manuscript. Mary’s enthusiasm for the project was a constant source of energy.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Giuseppe Sciortino and Ron Eyerman 2 Italian Decolonization: Multidirectional Migrations, Multidirectional Memories 27 Pamela Ballinger 3 Japanese Narratives of Decolonization and Repatriation from Manchuria 57 Akiko Hashimoto 4 Trauma and the Last Dutch War in Indonesia, 1945–1949 85 Gert Oostindie 5 Beyond the “Trauma”: Legitimization and Revenge of the “Anciens du Congo” (Belgian Congo 1908–1960) 111 Rosario Giordano 6 Pied-Noir Trauma and Identity in Postcolonial France, 1962–2010 137 Sung-Eun Choi

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7 Trauma and the Portuguese Repatriation: A Confined Collective Identity 169 Rui Pena Pires, Morgane Delaunay and João Peixoto 8 Conclusion 205 Ron Eyerman and Giuseppe Sciortino Index 229

Notes on Contributors

Pamela Ballinger is Professor of History and the Fred Cuny Chair in the History of Human Rights at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton University Press, 2003), La Memoria in Esilio (Veltro Editrice, 2010), and The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2020). She has published on the topic of Italian settler returns in journals that include Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Contemporary History, and Journal of Refugee Studies. Sung-Eun Choi  is Associate Professor of History at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is the author of Bringing the Settler Colony Home: Decolonization and the French of Algeria, published in 2016 with Palgrave. Morgane Delaunay is a Ph.D. candidate at Université Rennes 2 (ARÈNES) and at ISCTE-IUL with the support of Région Bretagne. She has a Master degree in Contemporary History and International Relations (Université Rennes 2) and also in International Migrations (Université de Poitiers). She is studying the Portuguese repatriated population from the decolonization of Portuguese Africa, comparing its integration process in Portugal with the French case of Pieds-Noirs from Algeria. She is the author of “La question des retornados dans le débat parlementaire portugais 1975–1976” (Portuguese Studies Review, 27, 1, 2019, Summer). xiii

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Ron Eyerman is Professor Emeritus at Yale University. He has published many books on cultural trauma including, Cultural Trauma Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001), The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination (2011), Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma (2015), and Memory, Trauma, and Identity (2019). He divides his time between Malmo and Amsterdam. Rosario Giordano is Professor of the History of Africa, Università della Calabria (Cosenza, Italy). Publications: 2008. Belges et Italiens du Congo-Kinshasa. Récits de vie avant et après l’Indépendance. Paris: L’Harmattan; with B. Jewsiewicki and D. Dibwe Dia Mwembu (ed.). 2010. Lubumbashi 1910–2010. Mémoire d’une ville industrielle. pref. V. Y. Mudimbe. Paris: L’Harmattan; whit E. Quaretta and D. Dibwe dia Mwembu (ed.). 2019. « L’expérience fait la différence ». Dynamiques sociales et représentations en RD Congo et dans la diaspora, postface N. R. Hunt. Paris (in press). Director of the series « Mémoires lieux de savoir » and « La Région des Grands Lacs Africains—Passé et Présent » (Paris, L’Harmattan). Akiko Hashimoto received her B.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. After working at the United Nations University in Tokyo, she taught Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh for 25 years and is now Visiting Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Portland State University. She is author and editor of volumes on cultural sociology and comparative sociology, focused on social constructions of reality in varied cultural settings. Her latest volume is The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2015) which has also been translated into Japanese and Chinese languages. Gert Oostindie is Director of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden, and Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History at Leiden University. Among his many publications relevant to this volume is his book, Postcolonial Netherlands. Sixty-Five Years of Forgetting, Commemorating, Silencing (Amsterdam University Press, 2011). João Peixoto  is Professor at the School of Economics and Management (ISEG), Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, and researcher at SOCIUS/ CSG—Research Centre on Economic and Organizational Sociology. He studied sociology at ISCTE, Lisbon, and obtained a Ph.D. in

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Economic and Organizational Sociology at ISEG. His main research areas are international migration, demography and economic sociology. He has published in international and national journals and he is author and co-author of diverse books, including Migrações e Sustentabilidade Demográfica: Perspetivas de Evolução da Sociedade e Economia Portuguesas (Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, 2017). Rui Pena Pires is Professor at ISCTE, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal, and researcher at CIES-IUL, Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from ISCTE. His interests include international migration and sociological theory. He is the author of several papers and books, including “Portuguese emigration today” (in New and Old Routes of Portuguese Emigration, Springer, 2019). Giuseppe Sciortino teaches sociology at the Università di Trento. He has published extensively both on international migration and cultural sociology. He is the author, with Gianfranco Poggi, of Great Minds. Encounters with Social Theory (Stanford UP) and the editor, with Peter Kivisto, of Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation (Oxford UP).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Giuseppe Sciortino and Ron Eyerman

There was a time, not so long ago, when empires roamed the earth. Imre Ferenczi, a well-known demographer working at the International Labor Organization, estimated in 1938 that nine countries, covering just 14% of the world’s surface and comprising only 23% of the world’s population, controlled 42% of the world’s population and 66% of planet’s landmass. Relatively small countries could rule over enormous territories: the surface area of the United Kingdom was only 0.8% of the territory ruled by the British empire, metropolitan France represented only 4.5% of the territory of the French empire, and the Japanese islands were less than one fifth of the territory controlled by the Japanese empire. According to Ferenczi’s estimates (circa 1930), fewer than four million “whites” were settled in

G. Sciortino (B) Università degli studi di Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] R. Eyerman Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_1

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these large overseas territories.1 They were everywhere a minority in comparison to the indigenous population. In fact, they were actually a tiny minority, comprising between 0.5 to 8% of those territories’ inhabitants (Ferenczi 1938). Ferenczi, albeit critical of colonialism as a solution for demographic pressures, did not present his findings as particularly shocking or surprising. The very same word “decolonization,” coined by Moritz Bonn only a few years before, was rarely used for several decades.2 Today, eighty-one years later, only 17 territories—with an overall population of less than 2 million—are defined by international law as nonself-governing territories.3 Their very existence is somewhat troubling for the current international order: the United Nations has even instituted the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (abbreviated in C24). This committee is entrusted with regularly reviewing the situation of these territories and publically disseminating information on decolonization to their populations. In 2005, the UN introduced an annual “solidarity week” in support of the people of non-self-governing territories. The world has definitely changed. As is the case with most political forms, empires believed themselves eternal. When the idea of “decolonization” started to circulate, it was often ridiculed (Betts 2012). A few decades later, decolonization appears to have been inevitable, brought about by all-powerful “winds of change,” to use Harold McMillan’s 1960 statement (Cooper 2005). Still, the speed and scope of the process often surprised even the most knowledgeable observers. Decision makers who could once scarcely consider self-rule as even a distant possibility found themselves discussing it as occurring in a matter of weeks (Van Reybrouck 2014). The United Nations admitted eighteen new members in 1960 alone. Less than forty years after the publication of Ferenczi’s paper, the empires he had studied had all vanished. Crucially, they had brought with them the very idea of empire as a political form; not to mention the legitimacy, previously taken for granted, of racial 1 As his focus was on «whites», Ferenczi did not count in his estimate the sizeable number

of Japanese colonists in Asia. His paper just listed the 684 white residents in the Japanese empire (Ferenczi 1938: 230). 2 Moritz Bonn coined the term in 1931, and used it extensively in his monograph on the impending break up of empires a few years later (Bonn 2017 [1938]). On Moritz Bonn and his analysis of imperialism, see also Gordon (2013) and Hacke (2015). 3 https://www.un.org/en/decolonization/nonselfgovterritories.shtml.

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hierarchies as legitimate foundations for the international order (Jansen and Osterhammel 2017). The speed and scope of such transformations of the world are difficult to overestimate. The League of Nations was founded at the end of World War I by thirty-two sovereign states. Only three of them were Asian (China, Japan, and Siam) and a mere two were African (South Africa and Liberia). A truly sovereign African state, Abyssinia, joined the League only three years later. At the apogee of its glory (1934–1935), the League of Nations still counted only fifty-eight members, more than four-fifths of which were European (or European settler states). The situation was not much different when the United Nations was founded. The original members numbered fifty-one, only two of which were located in sub-Saharan Africa. By 1960, however, the UN already counted ninety-nine members, twenty-one of which were in Africa. A decade later, the number of members was 127. In 1976, when the last European empire crumbled, membership in the United Nations skyrocketed to 147 (Etemad 2007). Membership today stands at 193. Not too bad for a political form, the nation-state, whose death has been celebrated at regular intervals in the academic literature. In a matter of only a few decades, a world openly and institutionally dominated by European and Japanese empires has transformed itself into a horizontal community of formally independent nation-states, a majority of which are ruled by members of ethnic and racial groups that would have been, only a few decades ago, deemed unfit for office. Such a radical transformation of world society has influenced the social dynamics of the contemporary world in a myriad of ways, many of them not yet adequately appreciated (Steinmetz 2014). We definitely live in a postcolonial world whose trends and strains can be understood only by taking into account the economic, political, social, and cultural legacies of decolonization (Thomas and Thompson 2018). This book is an attempt to explore in depth one such consequence: the social and cultural impact of the traumatic “return” or “repatriation” of colonial populations to their “homelands.”4 In fact, decolonization was 4 Terminology here is particularly slippery. In many cases, to talk of “return” is appropriate, as large sectors of the “returning” population had been born and educated in the homeland and had spent a relatively limited span of time in the colony. In fact, one of the main paradoxes of decolonization is that the settler populations had generally expanded noticeably on the eve of decolonization, as a consequence of the attempts to “save” the colonies modernizing and developing them (Osterhammel 2005). On the contrary, other sectors of the colonial populations, particularly in some settler colonies, had been there for multiple generations.

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often (but not always) accompanied by the shrinking—if not the utter disappearance—of the “colonizing” population from the former colonies. The circumstances of such disappearance have been diverse. In some cases, it was an atomized and largely peaceful movement toward the metropole or toward other countries offering better opportunities. In the six cases studied in this book, however, substantial portions of the colonial population moved out of the decolonizing countries under traumatic circumstances (although as we will show, they did so in different ways and for different reasons). Sometimes, as was the case of the Japanese in Manchuria, it was a hurried flight under the pressure of an advancing army. Sometimes, as was the case for many Belgians in Elizabethville and many Portuguese in Luanda, it was an emergency evacuation to escape violence and rioting and was motivated by the fear of retribution. Among the French population in Algeria and the Italian population in Croatia, many interpreted the occurrence of violent events—such as the Oran massacre and the Vergarolla attack—as what would have happened had they stayed. Still in other cases, such as those of the remaining Italians in the Libya of the 1970s and the Dutch population in Indonesia in 1957, it was a formal decision made by the new authorities to expel and confiscate the colonists’ property. In any case, the “returns” we study exposed many of the returning persons to considerable duress. Even those who repatriated safely experienced a traumatic change of psychological and social status that was compounded by the loss of most, if not all, their property (Smith 2003; Buettner 2018). The impact of their repatriation for the former metropoles was equally wide and deep. For Japan and Italy, mass repatriations took place in the context of defeated and destroyed countries with weak institutions and very limited resources (Hashimoto 2015; Audenino 2016). The Netherlands received hundreds of thousands of returnees during a period when the government was busy promoting the emigration of their “surplus” citizens (Oostindie 2011). Portugal, a poor country that had just completed a (largely) peaceful revolution, faced in a very short span of time an increase of its population of more than 6% (Pena Pires et al. 1984). For France and Italy, witnessing such “returns” was also a living reminder of the loss of territories that had been considered for decades—or centuries— an integral part of the “national” body (Ballinger 2003; Shepard 2008). Already in 1938, as example, 80% of the European residents in French Algeria had been born in the colony. Equally problematic is to classify the “return” of the colonial populations as «coerced/forced» or «voluntary» . On this point, see Smith (2009) and Talbot (2011).

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Belgium, which had had a relatively small settler population (and consequently received a relatively small number of returnees), had to deal with its own responsibilities in the Congolese quagmire and was held responsible for the circumstances in which the flight had taken place (Goddeeris 2015). The fact that their mass “return” was followed by what might be considered a relatively peaceful and successful incorporation into the new Western European order is one of the facts the studies included in this book seeks to explain. Nor should it be forgotten that the “reflux” phase included the first settlement in Western Europe of non-European populations.5 The Algerian Harkis, the Dutch Indisch, the former Moluccan soldiers of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, and the former colonial subjects all settled in the metropole, and in addition, some of the colonies’ mixed children were allowed to settle Western Europe as well.6 Even larger numbers of colonial and postcolonial subjects arrived in Western European countries as workers, both before and after independence. To do so, they used the possibility of free mobility that many colonial states had granted their former colonial subjects as part of their attempt to transform their colonial empires into transnational unions (Peach 1997; Buettner 2018). Their arrival was accepted only very reluctantly and was accompanied by a large dose of denial and delusion. Mixed individuals were often mistreated and faced with intense discrimination. Still, their settlement represented the first break between the association of Europeanness and Whiteness, the seed for the increased racial and ethnic diversity of the subcontinent (Bosma et al. 2012).7 In this book, we analyze how such traumatic experiences were narrated, ignored, debated, and contested in the former colonial metropoles, and how they interacted with the process of shaping the new postcolonial identity and collective memory. Using the theory of cultural trauma (which we summarize in the next two paragraphs), we will explore the ways in which

5 The only sizeable antecedent in modern times had been the presence of colonial troops

during the two world wars. Besides the war climate, such presence had been surely more strictly regimented, highly controlled and openly temporary. Even so, the presence of «colored» troops had raised across the political spectrum a strong level of anxiety and prejudice, best exemplified by the schwarze Schande (Lebzelter 1985; Wigger 2010). 6 See Bosma et al. (2012). For other country cases, see Deplano (2017) and Labanca (2017). 7 For an interesting comparison with the Japanese experience, see Sharpe (2014).

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the experiences, grievances, narratives, and claims of the returnees have succeeded or failed in gaining public recognition for the repatriates.

Decolonization as Cultural Trauma The idea of analyzing decolonization as a trauma-inducing event is definitely not new, although the theory has been utilized mostly to analyze the traumas of the colonized and only very rarely those of the (former) colonizers. In cases of the latter, they are technically called “perpetrator traumas” (Tsutsui 2009; Kalter 2016). Still, many analyses of the decolonization process have relied on the concept of “trauma” to understand the experience of being colonized as well as the ordeals accompanying independence (Bogaerts and Raben 2012). Actually, the vision of the colonial situation as inherently pathological and necessarily involving a traumatic experience of alienation and objectification is at the core of the classic works on anticolonial thinking, from Octave Mannoni to Frantz Fanon. Inspired by an original synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism, these authors have described the colonial situation as marked by a systematic and endemic trauma experience, one that the colonizer must impose on the colonized in order to naturalize the presumption of her inferiority (Ward 2013; Combres 2016). In part drawing on their work, a growing number of postcolonial authors have recently challenged the (at-the-time) dominant frameworks used to analyze trauma-inducing historical events (Erikson 1994; Caruth 1995). They openly criticized such frameworks for their emphasis on trauma as a consequence of specific, overwhelming events by arguing that such frameworks cannot account for the traumas caused by enduring, systematic, and pervasive structures of oppression, such as slavery or colonization (Craps 2013). Alternatively, they advocated for a radical “decolonization” of the notion of trauma (Nikro 2014; Andermahr 2015). A problematic weakness, however, is that their perception of decolonization maintains a vision of trauma as involving concrete individuals and groups, whose experiences are self-evidently, objectively, and naturally traumatic.8 The selectivity and agency involved in the transformation of individual (and group) concrete experience of evil in collective narrations endowed with a degree of public recognition beyond the boundaries of the traumatized group have been largely neglected or reduced to a matter of sheer power (Alexander 2009).

8 For one exception, see Visser (2015).

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A strong rationale for the present book is that the theoretical resources for a different and more sociologically sophisticated understanding of the consequence of traumatic events are already available. Over the last two decades, a group of scholars has developed a distinctive research perspective to deal with the cultural dimension of what they call “cultural traumas” or “trauma dramas” (hereafter: CTP). Drawing on the resources made available by collective memory research and the “strong program” in cultural sociology, CTP scholars have criticized any factualist treatment of evil (Alexander 2013; Eyerman 2019; Sciortino 2019). They argue that even extreme forms of suffering become traumatic only if they are interpreted and made meaningful to an audience in terms of wider symbolic structures (Alexander et al. 2004; Eyerman et al. 2011). Even to acknowledge that evil and suffering have occurred is never simply a cognitive operation. There are many documented cases of collective injury and suffering; few, however, are transformed into socially shared and emotionally charged referents that demand narration. Only when this narration happens does collective suffering become emotionally and intellectually significant for members of a collectivity, including those that may never have actually experienced it (e.g., subsequent generations). Only in this case does the recollection of horrendous events and private suffering become a cultural trauma, a break in the continuity of collective identities (and a public claim to recognition and respect). The main tenet of the CTP is that social trauma is the outcome of a process of signification and narration.9 The meaning of events, and the associated feeling (or lack thereof) of solidarity with the victims and of indignation toward the perpetrators, is never a direct consequence of the actual suffering. Such an outcome is a cultural achievement, one that requires establishing a story that successfully defines the nature of the victims and the extraordinary guilt of perpetrators. Such a story must have the capacity to demonstrate that the narrated suffering has wide meaning, commanding enough emotional and moral energy to trigger some form of vicarious

9 CTP provides consequently some clear definitions of trauma as culturally constructed. See as example the one provided by Neil J. Smelser: «a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect; (b) represented as indelible; and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions» (Smelser 2004: 44)

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traumatization among members of the collectivity who never experienced the suffering, and even among those who do not belong to the victimized group.10 Analyzing the features of the trauma process, trauma scholars have advanced a second, equally controversial claim: the transformation of collective suffering in social trauma is never determined by power alone. When scholars and activists are confronted with the selectivity of the trauma process—when they must recognize that many hideous events fail to command the sympathy they deserve—they often react by adopting the Humpty Dumpty philosophy of history: to determine why certain events trigger indignation, while others are considered unfortunate collateral damage, is simply a question of knowing “who is the master – that is all” (Carroll 2014 [1871]: 364). In the CTP, however, the success of collective memories is never simply the outcome of political expediency, nor does it reflect the strength of group interests. CTP scholars do not deny that money, political power, and social prestige offer sizeable advantages in the trauma process. They do claim, however, that these can never be the only ingredients in the recipe. Trauma claims establish themselves, or fail to do so, not only based on their capacity to mobilize money and power, but also based on the quality of the narrative itself and the performative skills of its proponents and adversaries. A third element of the CTP perspective is the collective definition of trauma. CTP claims that social traumas are not generated by individual experiences of evil. On the contrary, it is the existence of a socially shared process of signification that makes it possible for individuals to give form to

10 CTP militates against the widespread modern tendency to treat evil cognitively, but also against the widespread view that questioning the self-evident, factual, nature of evil is both an offense to the victims and a possible apology for the perpetrators. In a world where even those who deny the Holocaust or Soviet crimes are increasingly outspoken, to deny the facticity of evil may easily be construed as an irresponsible attitude. Still, CTP is adamant in dismantling what they call the «naturalistic fallacy,» the tendency to attribute cultural traumas to actual events and to evaluate the events only in terms of truth-criteria (Alexander 2004). It does not imply the obvious importance of historical research and forensic science. It means to stress that narrations, not actual events, are the stuff of which cultural traumas are made. In order to become socially shared, events are to be believed and represented. They need names, contexts, and attributions of guilt and presumptions of innocence, heroes and villains. They need symbolic anchors and powerful analogies. The representation of the harmful events requires a specific form of cultural imagination that selects, shapes and condenses any element of actual experience. To acknowledge this cultural imagination does not imply an «anything goes» attitude.

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their personal suffering as part of a larger and compelling cultural pattern of societal significance (Sciortino 2012). Neither remembrance nor claim making is an individual pursuit.11

The Cultural Trauma Process The core of the CTP is the analysis of the symbolic processes through which suffering—real or perceived—is inscribed with compelling meaning. Following Turner’s dramaturgical model, most CTP scholars refer to such process as a “trauma drama.” Attempts at establishing the extensive meaning of a traumatic experience are usually highly contested, with a variety of actors competing both to establish their own narrative and to capture the attention of an already taxed audience. The original model for trauma drama has been presented in Alexander’s seminal paper, where he highlighted a set of elements defined as necessary for any trauma process (Alexander 2004). The first is a claim (made on behalf of a group) that some fundamental injury has occurred. Such a claim is advanced by a so-called carrier group—such as the associations and groups of colonial returnees analyzed in this book—a group or network of agents who have, besides both material and ideal stakes in the process, at least some capacity to produce and circulate meaning in the civil sphere. These carrier groups articulate their claim and address a wider audience, a universe of potential listeners rhetorically described as homogeneous and well intended, but in reality, often socially fragmented and distracted. The main aim for the carrier group is to project its claim onto the audience—an

11 Ron Eyerman’s seminal work on the memory of slavery in the US is a good example: without denying that slavery is an obviously traumatic experience, he shows how the claim that the historical experience of slavery is the basis of a collective, unified, identity—something able to transcend all other cleavages within the emerging African-American community— appeared only after the Civil War, when slavery had been abolished. It was a creative action of a large network of intellectuals and professionals, who had never been slaves themselves. It required overcoming the feeling of shame for the degradation endured by ancestors, as well as the resistance of the many people convinced that it was time to forget and «move on.» It required forging a narrative that could challenge the dominant view of slaves as hapless persons who had been «liberated» by magnanimous Northern whites, making them instead part of a heroic tale of resistance. Their narrative achievement was not fixed once and for all. It was reconstructed by subsequent generations, each one appropriating it in its own terms, thus reproducing the feeling of a common past. Although significant within the boundaries of the African-American community for most of its history, such collective memory in recent decades has also acquired a wider audience, and a more inclusive meaning (Eyerman 2001).

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audience composed of putative members of the victimized group, sometimes by wider social sectors or even an entire society—triggering a process of vicarious traumatization. To do so, they must provide a narrative, one charged with emotional energy that addresses at least four issues: the nature of the pain, the nature of the victim, the similarities between the victim and the audience that facilitate identification, and the allocation of responsibility to perpetrators. Eventually, there is the situation, the set of material, institutional, and symbolic structures that enable and constrain the given trauma process. According to Alexander, the successful combination of these elements will determine if, and when, a given claim will become a master narrative capable of sealing a given interpretation of the event in collective memory. This rudimentary model has subsequently been expended and refined, as part of the development of a systematic theory of social performance (Alexander et al. 2006). Trauma dramas have been investigated as performances intended to achieve effective re-fusion of representation, affect, and widely shared cultural scripts. Such theoretical developments have been sustained by a rich wave of case studies. Some of them have highlighted the importance of the frequent “latency phase” in which the events—already felt as traumatic by individuals and groups—still lack any publicly accepted standing. Politically repressed memories, for example, may be preserved, as in the memory of the Katyn forest massacres in Communist Poland, in local, family rooted, circles to be mobilized later when the context allows it (Bartmanski and Eyerman 2011). Others may be represented and memorialized in popular culture, which—given the lower entry barriers—more easily incorporate controversial memories and counter-narratives (Hashimoto 2015). Still others may, as postcolonial trauma theorists have suggested, turn out to be traumatic not because of their novelty, but because they reproduce an offensive continuity of treatment at a time when the expectation of the group has been changing (Onwuachi-Willig 2016). Through several waves of case studies, CTP scholars have been able to explore in detail the cultural dimension of trauma, as well as progressively improve a performative model intended to explain how claims about collective victimhood are constituted, promoted, defeated, transmitted, and fought over (Sciortino 2019). It is surely one of the research programs of cultural sociology where a certain sense of cumulative development may be observed. However, as with most research programs based on case studies, the development of CTP has encountered two debilitating weaknesses.

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First, it is disproportionately based on studies of “successful” trauma dramas, even if it theoretically acknowledges that most trauma claims are likely to fail to receive the attention they deserve and desire. Case studies can rarely account for the dog that did not bark. This makes the study of the cultural trauma of colonial returnees particularly interesting, as their stories and narratives—often relatively similar across the different western countries—have been able to gain very different amounts of recognition and respect in the various countries and periods. In some places,—such as in France—their claims have been able to coalesce in a relatively stable collective identity, while in most others places colonial returnees, no matter how hard they have tried, have been unable to leave the realm of private and semi-private memories. Second, the development of CTP requires the adoption of a more systematic comparative framework. Only through comparison does it become possible to focus on which factors—including narrative styles and semiotic structures—might be influential in determining a given outcome or in producing particular narrative shifts. The possibility of studying colonial returnees in several countries offers an opportunity to take a first step in this direction.

Decolonizing the Metropole Unsurprisingly, the dissolution of empires has generated a remarkable body of international scholarship (Betts 2004; Rothermund 2006; Bogaerts and Raben 2012; Jansen and Osterhammel 2017). Such literature has paid great attention to the process through which the former colonies have become— or failed to become—new nations. Many studies have chronicled the postindependence lives of the new nations, the challenges they faced, and the ways in which they succeeded in gaining—or failed to gain—an autonomous position in the world order. Less attention has been paid to the impact of the loss of empire on the metropoles and the challenges posed by the transformation of the former imperial centers in territorially compacted nation-states. The imbalance stressed by Seton-Watson has been redressed only partially in the subsequent four decades (Seton-Watson 1980). The reasons for such imbalances are easy to understand. The challenges posed by independence to many of the new states were (and still are) enormous. The new leadership had to manage and (try to) reform economic systems that had been designed specifically to satisfy the economic interests

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of the colonizers. They had to design and implement the whole infrastructure of a sovereign state during a period in which such states were expected to cater to an expanding set of exigencies. They had to build a “nation” out of a disparate set of ethnic and regional loyalties, often previously heightened and empowered for decades by the colonial authorities. These tasks had to be accomplished in a context marked internationally by the Cold War and internally by poverty, the lack of trained personnel, and civil distrust. In many (although far from all) new states, early independence involved wars, bloody civil conflicts, forced mass migration, and extensive famines.12 Such challenges were compounded by the fact that “flag independence”—the international recognition as a sovereign state—did not necessarily imply an actual degree of control over the country’s economic and social dynamics. Decolonization quickly turned out to be not an event, but an apparently never-ending process (Thomas and Thompson 2018). For many in the former colonial territories, the colonial experience remained a ubiquitous reference for most practical action and the very same grammar of collective imagination (Mbembe 2009). On the contrary, the process of decolonization seemed to have been much easier and smoother for the former metropoles. The loss of the colonies and the conflicts that surrounded the withdrawal quickly disappeared from the headlines of political discourse. Given the speed of most of the instances of decolonization, this pacified disappearance is quite surprising (Betts 2004). Before and during decolonization, colonies had been considered by many as vital to the material and symbolic existence of the core countries. The “loss” of the colonies had been highly feared by sizeable sectors of the public and by some powerful interest groups, of which the French parti colonial is likely the best-known example. In many colonies, vocal groups of settlers—supported by wide sectors of public opinion in the metropole—tried both to resist decolonization and to denounce the metropolitan elites as traitors.13 On the other side of the political spectrum, Marxists claimed that colonies were indispensable to the survival of capitalist relations in the metropole, thus predicting decolonization would bring with it radical change. Many of the decolonizing imperial centers had never actually been nation-states before; they had to learn how to be so only 12 Decolonization produced such a large volume of international refugees that a new international regime had to be designed for them (Loescher 1996). 13 Although they were usually unsuccessful, settlers could rely on the example of Rhodesia to highlight the potential damages that their action could impart to their homeland prestige.

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after the loss of their colonies. Nor had the colonial experience been a late addition to an already culturally shaped national society. Colonialism had been integral to the definition of their social discipline, their understanding of modernity, and their codes of inclusion and exclusion (Stoler and Cooper 1997). It had influenced the development of important notions of the proper private life and even shaped forms of desire (Stoler 2002). Before and during the decolonization process, metropolitan newspapers could rely on an abundant supply of apocalyptic prophesies catering to the anxiety market. For this reason observers were puzzled by the relative ease with which the public in former imperial metropoles resigned itself to the loss of empire. As John Darwin wrote concerning the British Empire, the long-term consequences of the end of European and Japanese empires were—with the important exceptions of France and Portugal, where decolonization implied or required regime change—“surprisingly undisruptive” (Darwin 1991: 2). Even in France and Portugal, where decolonization was accompanied by heated political strife, these conflicts failed to coalesce into long-term political cleavages. Decolonization appeared even simpler and relatively un-dramatic in economic terms. Contrary to all the prophesies of doom, metropolitan economies withstood quite well the economic consequences of the loss of their colonies. It quickly turned out that the metropolitan disinterest made good economic sense. On the cost side, the last phase of colonialism had become more and more expensive as imperial states had involved themselves in a variety of modernizing/developmental projects in order to bolster their legitimacy. This had increased the costs of the imperial projects (and the size of the settler population). On the other side, it was quickly realized that the resources that were traditionally extracted from the colonies could still be acquired from the former colony or from alternative channels. The robust development in international trade among industrialized countries was now much more important for the former imperial economies than any foreign trade secured through colonial means. Japan found that a strong orientation toward western markets could easily compensate for the loss of Asian colonies. The construction of the European common market had been originally thought, inter alia, as a way to protect the existence of Western European empires in Africa (Hansen and Jonsson 2014). It quickly became an explicit economic alternative (Baudet 1969; Jansen and Osterhammel 2017). With the help of Les Trente Glorieuses, the years of European unprecedented economic growth, former metropolitan centers grew fully independent of their colonial traditions.

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In the aftermath of decolonization, the colonial past of each metropolitan center enjoyed a form of consensual silence that helped to weaken and dissolve its potential for cultural conflict. Colonialism was suddenly confined to the past, placing it beyond the realm of current political judgment (Rothermund 2006). Colonial cruelties and inequalities were denied or seen as marginal, while the “good deeds” of the system were, although softly, still occasionally mentioned. In Japan and Italy the loss of the colonies was quickly absorbed into the much larger frame of the tragedy of fascism, war, and military defeat. Whatever had been evil or criminal in the colonial experience was imputed to the defeated fascist regimes, thereby sapping much of colonialism’s contemporary specificity and urgency (Hashimoto 2015; Labanca 2017). In Portugal, colonialism was associated to the overthrown regime, thus making decolonization a mere sideshow in the process of democratization and full integration in the European community. Across Western Europe, the public—even in the sectors that had supported or benefited from colonialism—quickly accepted its end as a fait accompli and moved on. Very quickly the imperial past became something rarely evoked in the public memories of the former colonial centers, bound to reappear only occasionally more as a nostalgic yearning than a political claim. The pace with which empires were forgotten or marginalized inspired a reconsideration of their own historical importance: against the thesis of the “maximum impact” of colonialism for European societies (a thesis paradoxically shared by colonialists and their Marxist critics), a “minimal impact” thesis has become popular, particularly (but not exclusively) among historians of the British Empire. According to the minimal impact theorists, decolonization had such a small impact because empires had always been the preserve of a few interest groups and small cliques of bureaucrats, while the majority of population paid them only superficial curiosity. However, the acknowledgment that metropolitan centers have been by and large able to “decolonize” relatively peacefully does not imply that colonialism is void of consequences on contemporary European and Japanese societies. It might be argued, in fact, that the colonial past is still (selectively) very much alive (Ward 2001) and still defining a significant dimension of the European national imagination. As such, it is a ubiquitous element in the main meaning structures of the civil spheres of the former metropoles, sometimes openly, but more often through a glass, darkly (Buettner 2016). It still defines parts of the collective memory and the national heritage— not to mention the landscape itself—of the major European states (Aldrich

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2005). As the studies in this book document, the “silence” phase has nearly everywhere paved the way to an unstable situation. Absent from collective consciousness for long spells of time, colonial histories and icons may suddenly take center stage and trigger heated controversies that bring to light the enduring existence of polarized memories and divisive rhetorical cleavages (Rothermund 2015). Last but not least, the colonial experience plays an enduring role in framing issues of globalization, international migration, and ethnic diversity within all former colonial societies. Even in the many cases where contemporary immigrants have nothing to do with the territories of the former colonies, their settlement constantly evokes colonial-era tropes, attitudes, and fears (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1982; Bosma et al. 2012). As the studies in this volume document, the memory of decolonization in the former imperial centers has not yet turned into history.

The Colonial Returnees: Successful Integration, Difficult Trauma Dramas Studies of decolonization have until recently paid little attention to the colonial population, its internal variety, their colonial role, or their lifestyle. On the other hand, studies have insisted on the internal variety of its composition (colonial agents, settlers, and military personnel), as well as the differences among colonies. Some communities, for example, had been rooted in the colonized territory for centuries, while others had been present for only a few decades. Some had generated a sizeable population of mixedrace individuals who had acquired a specific role in the social stratification of the colony, while many others had rigorously policed the legal separation of colonizer and colonized. Moreover, the professional and demographic profile of the colonial population was markedly different in the case of exploitation colonies versus settlement colonies (Osterhammel 2005). For the purpose of this volume, and as a background to the study of the trauma of returnees, it is important to highlight two common elements among the cases considered. Besides shaping their everyday experiences, the shared qualities of the cases below have been fateful for the subsequent developments. The first of these is demographic. Contrary to the earlier settler societies of the New World and Oceania, colonial populations in our six cases were always, even including the racially mixed part of the population, a small minority, both in relation to the “homeland” and to the colonial territory, itself. Contrary to

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the idea of colonization as an alternative to emigration, the size of the colonial population has always been limited. Even in the cases of areas—such as French Algeria, Italian Libya, or Japanese Manchuria—that were explicitly designed for intensive settlement, the European colonial population has always been a marked minority in comparison to the native population.14 Not only was settlement usually limited, but also colonial administrators quickly realized that any increase in the number of settlers required significant investment with very dubious returns. The cost of settlement for the colonial states created an endemic tension between settlers and colonial elites, in which the former were often highly visible as the coryphaei of colonial order without, however, having any real say in its management (Jerónimo and Pinto 2016). Such conflict was bound to escalate during decolonization when settlers faced the loss of their property (property that was to a large degree immobile), while administrators could expect a softer landing in the bureaucratic structures of the metropole. The second common element concerned the ethno-cultural regulation of the colonial order. Contrary to the delusions of the colonial elites, colonies did not have a homogeneous elite or a shared culture. Rather, they were plural societies where the majority indigenous society and the minority society of colonial rules and settlers were kept together only by the presence of the colonial state (Osterhammel 2005). In contemporary returnees’ memories, the colonial encounter is often described as hybrid, open, and creolizing. Returnees remember their previous lives as marked by frequent and relatively free social intercourse with the members of the indigenous populations, at least with those that had completed their “assimilation” (the so-called Evolué in the French and Belgian empires and the Assimilados in the Portuguese empire). In reality, the relationships between the plural societies were rigidly regulated by a systematic social and ethnic distance, protected and enforced by the legal order of the colony. The boundary between colonial and indigenous population, moreover, became increasingly rigid during the last century. What makes more evident such extreme degrees of separation is precisely the fact that, 14 Going back to Ferenczi’s (1938) study, around 1930 «whites» (a category in which Ferenczi included statistically many mixed-race individuals that were not considered white in administrative practice) were only 6.2% of the population of the Dutch colonies and 2% in the Portuguese and Italian ones. In the Belgian Congo, they were only 0.5% of the population. The French empire was the only one having a sizeable colonial population overseas, particularly in Algeria, that his study considered as a colony rather than an overseas department (Ferenczi 1938).

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scarcely any social disentanglement was required when the exploitation colonies were later decolonized. The European, American, and Japanese colonial rulers packed their bags and vanished, leaving only a collection of architectonic shells—public buildings, villas, monumental cemeteries, memorials, entire townscapes. (Osterhammel 2005: 85)

Only in some entrenched settlement colonies, such as in Algeria, did the breaking of the colonial domination turn out to be violent. Taking into account these two features, we might understand why settlers and colonial personnel were surely important (and highly visible) actors in the decolonization process, but hardly ever the determinant ones (Elkins and Pedersen 2005; Jansen and Osterhammel 2017). Even in cases such as France, where the colonists could send their own representatives to parliament, their voices, numbers, and political weight remained marginal throughout the decolonization process. Such tension often revealed their symbolically ambivalent status: if some saw in the colonial populations the brave pioneers of civilization, many others thought of them as adventurers or profiteers of the colonial state. Still others saw them as somewhat tainted by their contact with the “natives.” Once decolonization had begun, they were often accused of being the actors most responsible for the conflict: the ways in which settlers had behaved in their everyday lives had been oppressive and shortsighted, thus angering the native population. On the contrary, in claiming recognition for their trauma, returnee groups tended everywhere to describe themselves as ignored—if not betrayed—by the colonial state. This claim is a key element of their narrative of victimhood and is rooted in the endemic experience of this structural tension (Kahler 2014). If the colonial population has traditionally received only limited attention, the circumstances of their “return” and “re-integration” have been explored only very recently (Etemad 1998; Smith 2003; Sharpe 2014; Borutta and Jansen 2016; Buettner 2016, 2018). This neglect is somewhat surprising given the sizeable nature of the “return” flow during decolonization; it is currently estimated between 3.5 and 4.3 million for the five European countries here considered, and up to 3.1 million for Japan (Etemad 1998; Smith 2003). The returnees—together with the German Vertrebiene—marked an important phase of the migratory history of Western Europe, turning the quintessential emigration subcontinent to a place of immigration. They represented, in Peach’s felicitous wording, the phase of European “reflux” (Peach 1997).

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We must add that the circumstances of such “returns” were highly visible. The airlifts organized by the Belgian and Portuguese airlines were still celebrated decades after the fact as major accomplishments (and feats of organization, technology, and motivation). Hundreds of thousands of repatriated families arrived—often in dire conditions—in the harbors and airports of countries that were often themselves in difficult conditions, if not in utter ruins. What’s more, their arrival typically created enormous financial, administrative, and often political challenges. Given the condition of the metropolitan centers, it was also no mystery that the authorities were not particularly keen on their return. In many instances authorities openly tried to stop the arrival of former settlers, or at the very least slow it down significantly. Once “repatriated,” the former colonial population was often included in the “surplus population,” the spectra of each of the governments during reconstruction. As for other segments of the surplus population, many governments tried to persuade them to emigrate again to other countries. Repatriated groups established dense networks of associations, committees, and local centers upon arrival nearly everywhere across Europe. Their “return” created an opportunity for contentious politics, often triggering mass demonstrations and sometimes violence. The request for compensation become the totemic claim through which the repatriated from different colonies—and in different times—could find a symbolic unity as victims whose pains had to be recognized and addressed. For a brief moment, they seemed to be able to mark the identity of some with their presence and issues, usually rightwing, part of the political spectrum (Buettner 2016). In 1969, a European-wide umbrella organization, the Confédération européenne des spolìes d’outremer (CESOM) was established in Paris with the goal of representing the repatriated of all the former empires. These campaigns, however, failed to coalesce into a sustainable coalition, remaining residual to the main political cleavages of the receiving countries. After a few years, repatriated contentious politics declined significantly, and many local leaders were integrated into the national party system. Sometimes repatriated populations remained for a time significant constituencies regionally, but they largely failed to constitute a key interest group at the national level. The ambition to become prime political actors was quickly dashed, surviving only in restricted circles. Revanchist actions—or even revanchist temptations—turned out to be remarkably rare and weak.

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The main reason why repatriated groups failed to capitalize on their plight is that Western European and Japanese governments made substantial efforts to stabilize their returning colonial populations, at least in its “white” segment. Although they had often underestimated the volume of repatriation, the studies in this volume document how many governments granted their repatriated citizens public subsidies, preferential access to a variety of social programs, easy re-integration as public servants in the metropolitan bureaucracies, reserved quotas for public service, and other important social policy measures. In many cases, they were granted (partial) reparations for the losses they incurred during decolonization. The former colonials were able to enjoy the expansion of the contemporary welfare state, both as a work opportunity and as clients of their services (Smith 2003). However, social policy was only one ingredient, and perhaps not even the most important, of the unexpectedly quick and successful socio-economic integration of the repatriated former colonials. An important element was the booming European and Japanese economies that provided for many years an abundant supply of stable and well-paid jobs. What had been seen as a problematic “surplus population” turned out to comprise much-needed workers. The second key element was what Oostindie has called a “postcolonial bonus”: in the highly dynamic market of the Trente glorieuses, the repatriated enjoyed a set of features—the citizenship of the “home” country, fluency in its language, the ability to mobilize kin relations within the metropolitan population—that allowed them to overcome many of the difficulties associated with their emigration (Oostindie 2011). The repatriated story turned out to be a quite successful one. The successful socio-economic integration and the weakening of radical politics, however, do not imply the disappearance of the elements of a trauma drama centered on the repatriated population. On the contrary, these processes have been intertwined with many attempts to maintain, also thanks to the resources made available by the successful integration, a distinctive identity centered on the trauma of the destruction of the colonial world (Buettner 2018). Across Western Europe there are similarities in the literature produced by “repatriated” authors and the large production of memoirs often sponsored by organizations speaking on behalf of the former colonial population (by now often staffed by their descendants). The general theme emerges in which the current, postcolonial, lives of the repatriates are always devalued in comparison to their previous lives in colonial circumstances. Such accounts are hardly ever centered on the smooth

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socio-economic integration of the repatriated. The dominant frame of the narrative is nearly always tragic, a story of irredeemable loss. Even when (likely due to the passing of generations) the need to “defend” the colonial experience has become less pressing, imperial themes are substituted by a wider nostalgia for a lost socio-economic lifestyle (Lorcin 2018). With some variations, the trauma experienced is presented as double-faced: colonists have been victimized by the loss of the colonies and by the humiliation and lack of sympathy experienced upon their arrival in the “homeland.” The lack of symbolic recognition and emotional support is considered much more important than the substantial material help received upon arrival. The claim to trauma is rooted in the indictment of their fellow citizens for having transferred the social disdain they felt for their colonial legacy to the former colonists themselves (Dembour 2000; Onvalle-Bahamòn 2003). The repatriated, in their own accounts, feel they have found themselves often to be the “living embodiments of a history repudiated around the world” (Cooper 2003). For many of them a further humiliation derived precisely from their being constrained to participate, as part of their own socio-economic integration, in the conspiracy of silence about the colonial experience. They felt (or so they remember) they could be accepted as full, bona fide, members of the evolving postcolonial society only by keeping the memory of their previous lives—as well as of their traumatic ends—strictly private. Decade after decade the dominant narrative of a repatriation trauma (unfair loss plus humiliating acceptance) has assumed many forms and variants throughout the former imperial centers. The narrative has been preserved through the weak but diffuse associations of former members of the colonial populations that have progressively given up on their political aspirations, compensating that loss with the increasing role of communities of remembrance. The solidification of such narratives has meant, of course, that it has also become a cliché from which many repatriated—and their offspring—have been happy to detach themselves. For many, the memory of the colony has become less and less a political or social claim and more an open, inclusive ingredient in the overall recipe of market-based cosmopolitanism. The diffusion of former-colonial elements of material culture—the so-called colonial chic or, more critically, imperial debris —as resources for a sophisticated taste has pacified these memories of colonialism, and at the same time rendered them more accessible (Durmelat 2015; Coelho 2019). This has happened largely independently from the

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activities and practices of the repatriated communities (although it may have enlarged the market for some of their institutions, such as restaurants). There are consequently few doubts that the passing of time is doing its job. Most repatriated communities seem to have failed in their chance to develop a recognized social identity able to command a crosscutting solidarity with their trauma. Even where, as with the pieds noirs in France, a consistent social identity has indeed developed and where this has meant institutional and social recognition, their narrative has always remained contested and, at least partially, symbolically polluted. That said, our studies show that it would be a mistake to assume that the memories of colonialism and repatriation are now fading away. On the contrary, it can be seen that—at least at certain critical junctures—the alleged spokespersons of the repatriated groups (and/or their immediate descendants) are still able to play important roles in mnemonic controversies, often carrying the debate in unexpected directions (Rothermund 2006; Buettner 2016). In many other cases—in certain places more than in others, in certain times more than in others—the memories and trauma claims of the “repatriated” still play a role in the national imagination. Some repatriated claims (sometimes even radical ones) still find ways to obtain a sudden visibility that resonates with the culture wars of the former imperial centers. There are still claims for recognition to be made, claims that will in turn be strongly contested. The reports of the death of decolonization dramas seem to be greatly exaggerated.

References Aldrich, R. 2005. Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France. London: Palgrave. Alexander, J.C. 2004. Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. C.J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, J.N. Smelser, and P. Sztompka, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alexander, J.C. 2009. Postcolonialism, Trauma and Civil Society. In Conflict, Citizenship and Civil Society, ed. P. Baert, S.M. Koniordos, G. Procacci, and C. Ruzza, 221–240. London: Routledge. Alexander, J.C. 2013. Trauma: A Social Theory. New York: Wiley. Alexander, J.C., et al. (eds.). 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alexander, J.C., et al. (eds.). 2006. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andermahr, S. 2015. “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism”—Introduction. Humanities 4 (4): 500–505.

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Lebzelter, G. 1985. Die “Schwarze Schmach”. Vorurteile–Propaganda–Mythos. Geschichte Und Gesellschaft 11: 37–58. Loescher, G. 1996. Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press. Lorcin, P.M.E. 2018. The Nostalgias for Empire. History and Theory 57 (2): 269–285. Mbembe, A. 2009. The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share. In Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. E. Boehmer and S. Morton, 25–54. London: Blackwell. Nikro, S.N. 2014. Situating Postcolonial Trauma Studies. Postcolonial Text 9 (2): 1–21. Onvalle-Bahamòn. 2003. The Wrinkles of Decolonization and Nationness: White Angolans as Retornados in Portugal. In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. A. Smith, 147–168. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Onwuachi-Willig, A. 2016. The Trauma of the Routine. Sociological Theory 34 (4): 335–357. Oostindie, G.J. 2011. Postcolonial Netherlands: Sixty-Five Years of Forgetting, Commemorating, Silencing. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Osterhammel, J. 2005. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Peach, C. 1997. Postwar Migration to Europe: Reflux, Influx, Refuge. Social Science Quarterly 78 (2): 269–283. Pena Pires, R., et al. 1984. Os retornados. Um estudo sociografico. Lisboa: Instituto de Estudos para o Devenvolvimento. Rothermund, D. 2006. The Routledge Companion to Decolonization. London: Routledge. Rothermund, D. (ed.). 2015. Memories of Post-Imperial Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sciortino, G. 2012. Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreigness and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions. In Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. J.C. Alexander, R. Jacobs, and P. Smith, 365–389. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sciortino, G. 2019. Cultural Traumas. In Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. L. Grindstaff, M.-C. Lo, and J.R. Hall. London: Routledge. Seton-Watson, H. 1980. Introduction to the Special Issue “Imperial Hangovers”. Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1): 1–4. Sharpe, M.O. 2014. Postcolonial Citizens and Ethnic Migration: The Netherlands and Japan in the Age of Globalization. Palgrave: Basingstoke. Shepard, T. 2008. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Smelser, N.J. 2004. Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. C.J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, J.N. Smelsen, and P. Sztompka, 31–59. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Smith, A.L. 2003. Europe’s Invisible Migrants. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Smith, A. 2009. Coerced or Free? Considering Post-Colonial Returns. In Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World, ed. R. Bessel and C. Haake, 395: 395–414. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steinmetz, G. 2014. The Sociology of Empires, Colonies, and Postcolonialism. Annual Review of Sociology 40 (1): 77–103. Stoler, A.L. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stoler, A.L., and F. Cooper. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Talbot, I. 2011. The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration: Some Comparative Case Studies. In Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, ed. P. Panayi and P. Virdee, 28–50. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, M.G., and A. Thompson (eds.). 2018. The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsutsui, K. 2009. The Trajectory of Perpetrators’ Trauma: Mnemonic Politics Around the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Social Forces 87 (3): 1389–1422. Van Reybrouck, D. 2014. Congo: The Epic History of a People. London: Fourth Estate London. Visser, I. 2015. Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects. Humanities 4 (2): 250–265. Ward, S. 2001. British Culture and the End of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ward, A. 2013. Understanding Postcolonial Traumas. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 33 (3): 170–184. Wigger, I. 2010. ‘Black Shame’: The Campaign Against ‘Racial Degeneration’ and Female Degradation in Interwar Europe. Race & Class 51 (3): 33–46.

CHAPTER 2

Italian Decolonization: Multidirectional Migrations, Multidirectional Memories Pamela Ballinger

Both popular national narratives and the historiography of modern Italy rest upon a view of Italian exceptionalism. This notion of an Italian anomaly is invoked to explain a wide range of historical processes: the peninsula’s “late” unification and statehood in 1861; the country’s descent into fascist authoritarianism; its ambiguous status as Allied co-belligerent between 1943 and 1945; and “the relative singularity” of post-1945 Italy’s complex and shifting party system (Parker 1999: 251; see also Sassoon 2013), among other topics. The positing of exceptionalism within putative genealogies of European and Western historical development has, not surprisingly, also characterized assessments of Italy’s colonial engagements and their ending. In such accounts, Italian colonialism figures as belated, brief, and its legacies limited by comparison with those of its European counterparts. One strand of debate has centered upon the question of whether Italians were uniquely humane colonizers, a claim to virtue that almost all colonial

P. Ballinger (B) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_2

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powers have made in justifying their governance (Said 2003: xvi). Another strand has focused on the peculiarities of Italian colonialism after it entered its imperial phase under fascism (1922–1943). Even the paucity of scholarship on Italian colonialism and its conclusion has, at points, appeared to reinforce these claims to their exceptionalism. Whereas from the 1980s on scholars increasingly turned their attention to Italian colonialism, Italian decolonization—which occurred de facto between 1941 and 1943 as a result of Italian military losses during World War II—remains understudied.1 Scholars have not hesitated, however, to conclude that Italy’s empire ended with a whimper, rather than a bang, contending that a resulting lack of trauma distinguishes Italian decolonization from many other cases. In this essay, I explore the complex and multidirectional migratory flows of Italian settlers from Italy’s lost territories in the Balkans and Africa, which included Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, the Dodecanese Islands, Albania, and the eastern Adriatic areas of Venezia Giulia ceded to Yugoslavia. I do so to interrogate and question claims about the exceptional ease and speed with which decolonization was effected and its status as “non-event” both at the time of events and in subsequent decades. Admittedly, the numbers of such Italian repatriates and national refugees were relatively modest when compared to cases like that of the 6 million Japanese repatriated at war’s end, explored in this volume by Hashimoto. In addition, figures for migrants out of Italy’s former territories remain imprecise. A 1951 Preliminary Report of a Survey of the Refugee Problem published by the United Nations, for instance, offered a number of 400,000 repatriates from Italy’s African colonies, when formal decolonization had not yet concluded (Vernant 1951: 238). In her pioneering work on settler returns, Andrea Smith estimates that between 480,000 and 580,000 Italians migrated to the Italian peninsula from Africa and the Balkans (Smith 2003: 32). The figures given for displacees from the areas of Venezia Giulia ceded to Yugoslavia between 1947 and 1954 range anywhere from 188,000 to 350,000. A publication commemorating the work of the Opera per l’ Assistenza ai Profughi Giuliani e Dalmati e Rimpatriati offers much higher figures, asserting that 1,089,516 migrants from Venezia Giulia and the former colonies received assistance in the fifty year period between 1947 and 1997 (Istituto Regionale per la Cultura Istriana 1997: 5). It is likely that 1 Comparative assessments of colonialism and empire often omit modern Italy altogether, though whether for its perceived oddness or insignificance is unclear.

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these expansive figures include Italians who left other decolonizing states, like Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria, and similarly received assistance from the Italian state. The relatively modest dimensions of these returns or reverse migrations to the Italian peninsula prompted by decolonization have reinforced a conventional view that—at least in comparison to cases like the French in Algeria or Vietnam—Italy’s decolonization resulted in little trauma, subsumed as it was in the larger catastrophes of World War II and the defeat of fascism. The useful notion of a “trauma drama,” however, opens up the possibility of understanding how various events resonated deeply at the time—not just with Italian nationals leaving former territories, but also in the wider metropolitan population. As processes of decolonization stretched out over more than a decade, the movements of Italian nationals out of and sometimes back to the former possessions proved highly, if selectively, visible. Likewise, the traces left by these migrations—particularly in the cultural realm—continue to remain selectively visible into the present moment. Admittedly, however, the colonial repatriates failed overall to create sustained or coherent collective narratives possessed of continuing resonance within wider frames of Italian public memory and commemoration.

Gaining and Losing an Empire In formal terms, Italian colonialism lasted roughly seventy years, from the 1880s to 1951 (with the independence of Libya), or, alternatively, to 1960 (with the end of Italian UN trusteeship administration over Somalia). Another interpretation could date its conclusion to 1970, when Gadhafi expelled the remaining Italian community (an estimated 20,000 individuals) from Libya. At its maximum extent in 1940, the Italian empire included a wide swathe of territories with distinct juridical statuses: formal colonies (Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, after 1936 joined as Africa Orientale Italiana or AOI); departments (the Dodecanese Islands, Libya); and protectorates (Albania). In addition, some integral provinces of the Italian state—including those of Pola, Fiume, and Zara—had only become part of Italy as a result of the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo that awarded Italy a range of lands formerly incorporated in the Habsburg Empire. (The former citystate of Fiume became Italian in 1924.) After fascism’s defeat these eastern Adriatic lands would be lost along with the colonies. Italian colonialism first took shape in East Africa as the Compagnia Rubattino secured a lease on the port of Assab on the Red Sea coast in

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the decade following Italian unification. This focus on the African Horn followed out of the frustration of Italian aspirations in Mediterranean North Africa, where there lived significant populations of Italian migrants in the areas of what would become French Tunisia and Algeria and British Egypt. In an unexceptional pattern similar to that of other European powers for whom commercial concessions preceded and provided the basis for subsequent direct colonial rule, the Italian government assumed control over the area around Assab by 1882. Three years later, the Italian military occupied Massawa. These acquisitions provided the foundation for Italy’s first formal colony: Eritrea. Similarly, by 1893 the Compagnia Filonardi and its successor the Società Anonima Commerciale del Benadir obtained concessions over territories that would later become part of Italian Somalia: Obbia, Majerteen, Barawa, Merca, Mogadishu, and Warsheikh. By 1905, the Italian state began to directly govern Somalia. Italian colonization remained halting, however, particularly as Italian overreach into Ethiopia led to humiliating military defeats at the hands of Ethiopian soldiers at the Battle of Dogali in 1887 and Adwa (Adua, Adowa) in 1896. The loss at Adwa constituted a “trauma drama,” a process of “acting out (in both a psychological and social sense) and a working-through” (Eyerman 2012: 577) of a deep sense of collective failure and shame on the part of Italian military and political leaders. One scholar of Italian colonial literature has gone so far as to contend that it “began with a trauma. In the last years of the 19th century, the defeats at Dogali and then at Adwa created in the conscience of the new nation a profound malaise that linked the theme of the missing conquest of African territories to the disappointments of Unification (the Risorgimento)” (Tomasello 2004). In this, Italy’s colonial experience does prove an exception in that one of its signature “traumas” occurred in the attempt to establish, rather than dismantle, it—that is, Italian colonialism’s originary trauma resonated as much as its terminal ones. While the question of whether the average Italian experienced these military setbacks as traumatic on the individual level proves impossible to determine, these losses—constituting the first major defeats of a modern European state army by an African one—temporarily empowered critics of the colonial enterprise. In particular, Adwa led to the political downfall of Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, who had seen in African colonies the solution to Italy’s longstanding problems of surplus population, as well as the “Southern Question.” In the aftermath of Adwa, liberals like Luigi Einaudi promoted an alternative colonial solution to the mass emigration that Crispi

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and others saw as both symptom and cause of national weakness. Between 1876 and 1976, some 27 million individuals departed the Italian peninsula in the largest single voluntary migration in global history (Fiore 2017: 4, 8). Einaudi argued that the informal or “expatriate” colonies formed by such Italian migrants to third countries like Brazil and the United States were better vehicles for promoting Italian interests abroad than costly colonies of direct domination. Statistically, Einaudi’s logic proved incontrovertible, as the migrations of Italians to Italy’s own imperial possessions represented a meager 2% of those who left the peninsula (on Einaudi, see Choate 2008: 48–52). Though many more Italians settled in the colonies of other European powers such as French Tunisia or British Egypt than ever came to reside in what became known as Italia Oltremare or Overseas Italy, settlers in Italian possessions acquired an outsized ideological significance. There existed a third variant of Italian enlargement informed by the claim that territories and cities with historically sizable Italian-speaking populations such as Nice, Trentino, Trieste, Istria, and Dalmatia needed to be redeemed and joined to the madrepatria. In contrast to colonial visions, this irredentism rested upon claims to autochthonous and longstanding Italian populations. Nonetheless, like colonies of direct domination, irredentist territories joined to Italy after WWI became sites of directed settlement from the old Regno. More extreme activists even conceived of these newly “redeemed” territories as battlegrounds of nationalization from which all non-Italians should be expelled or, barring that, assimilated (Pergher 2018: 61). Whereas the objects of Italian irredentism and colonialism would become increasingly fused in some nationalist and fascist visions, Einaudi’s model of expatriate communities as colonies lost political appeal after Italy acquired the former Ottoman territories of Libya and the Dodecanese Islands in 1912 as the result of the Italo-Turkish War. Arguably, all three versions of Greater Italy embodied a particular form of settler colonialism,2 one that relied upon both agrarian and industrial workers. The symbolic or rhetorical privileging of Italian agriculturalists characterized Italian colonialism until its conclusion, even if agrarian settlers always constituted a minority of Italians resident in the overseas colonies. This was true even in Libya (Labanca 2010: 3), where organized and highly publicized campaigns of so-called “demographic colonization” in 1938 and 2 Noting the distinctiveness of Italy’s “state-driven settler colonies,” Ertola has pointedly asked, “Were they ‘settler colonies’ or just ‘colonies with settlers’?” (Ertola 2017: 340).

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1939 brought settlers to rural villages and farms constructed by the fascist regime at great expense. With the rise of the fascist regime, the strain of militant nationalist expansionism given earlier expression in the Italo-Turkish War became increasingly pronounced. On the one hand, the regime set about consolidating Italian control over its overseas territories; this led to genocidal “pacification” operations in Libyan Tripolitania and Cyrenaica from 1922 to 1932 and, from 1936 on, aggressive Italianization and fascistization campaigns in the Dodecanese Islands. It also made for Italianization policies in the newly redeemed territories annexed to Italy after World War I, such as Alto Adige and Istria, in projects that constituted a form of internal colonization (Pergher 2018). On the other hand, the regime acquired new territories. Following Italy’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia, in May 1936 Mussolini triumphantly declared, “Italy finally has its empire.” He added “A fascist empire.” In this, Mussolini sought to distinguish Italian empire from what he saw as “capitalist” colonialism (Podestà 2011: 42), reinforcing the notion of Italian exceptionalism. Apart from those territories occupied during World War II, Italy acquired its last imperial possession with the 1939 invasion of and “union” with Albania. In light of the top-down nature of fascist imperialism, a sizable percentage of Italian citizens in these territories were state functionaries (administrators, those employed in land reclamation and infrastructure projects, teachers), as well as soldiers/military personnel. An older elite dating to the liberal pre-fascist era in places like Eritrea and Libya often looked down on the newcomers as rude parvenus. The African colonies in particular boasted many more Italian men than women, though the regime sought to attract Italian families through agricultural schemes and by legislating against miscegenation from 1937 on. In contrast to the parts of Venezia Giulia later ceded to Yugoslavia—the provinces of Pola, Fiume, and Zara, all former irredentist territories incorporated directly within the Italian state—in all of its colonial possessions Italians represented a small minority compared to the local, indigenous populations. Unlike in Venezia Giulia where a claim (however contested) to the Italianness of many of its residents could be made, Italian justifications for its colonies and protectorates instead rested upon a mix of paternalist racism, the belief that colonial possessions defined a Great Power in the international arena, and demands for spazio vitale or vital space (similar to the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum) that would render productive Italy’s surplus population. The notion of an Italian fascist empire as a new Roman Empire

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that would improve its subjects’ lives through superior governance, technology, and culture reconfigured the early idea of a missione civilizzatrice or civilizing mission that underwrote Italian colonialism in its pre-1922 phase. Added to this was the notion of a historic right to lands, like those comprising Libya, once incorporated into ancient Rome’s Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). Racialist thinking and hierarchies informed both these pre-fascist and fascist imperial projects. This was reflected most directly in the distinct juridical statuses of colonial peoples. In the first two decades after Italian Unification, the terms used to refer to Italian citizens included cittadini (citizens), sudditi (subjects), and regnicoli (subjects of the realm). Such vocabulary might be used interchangeably, a situation that changed in the 1880s and 1890s once Italy acquired its first colonial territories. With the acquisition of Eritrea and Somalia, the term suddito, or “subject,” became reserved for native peoples in the colonies and cittadino, or “citizen,” for the Italian in the metropole or colony (Donati 2013: 122). The degree and type of citizenship accorded to a territory and its residents ultimately mapped onto their perceived racial and cultural proximity. Although individuals resident within the territories redeemed to Italy after the Great War became Italian citizens, some remained marked as allogeni (ethnic minorities) and alloglotti (linguistic minorities). As Europeans, they could potentially be assimilated as Italians. In the protectorate of Albania, native Albanians did not acquire full-fledged metropolitan citizenship, but nonetheless enjoyed “the unprecedented introduction of equality of certain rights between them and the Italian metropolitans” (Donati 2013: 200) that reflected Albanians’ status as fellow Europeans, albeit ones belonging to a “small race” of noble warriors (Semizzi cited in Pisany 2007: 202). Elsewhere in Italy’s overseas Balkan territories, subject peoples in the Dodecanese Islands—ethnic Greeks together with Muslim “Turks” and Levantine Jews—could attain a kind of demi-citizenship known as the cittadinanza italiana egea. Colonial subjects in Italian Libya—generally Berbers or Arabs who figured in racial schema as poised between white Europeans and black Africans—might potentially achieve cittadinanza italiana libica. At times, this status was referred to as piccola cittadinanza, or “little citizenship,” in recognition that it carried neither political rights nor the obligation of military service. By contrast, natives of Italian East Africa or AOI could not attain Italian citizenship but remained colonial subjects, owing to their racial otherness and position at the bottom of the Oltremare’s racial hierarchy.

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Only in exceptional circumstances might East Africans of mixed ItaloAfrican parentage be recognized as Italian citizens. These meticci, or “mixed race” children (similar to the Spanish term mestizo), had to have been recognized legally by their Italian fathers, something many Italian men would not or could not do. After 1937, however, Law n. 880 of April 19, 1937, made relations of a “conjugal” nature in AOI a crime punishable by between one and five years of prison and denied Italian citizenship to mixed-race children. Within two years, the regime had also begun to apply this to mixed Italo-Libyan couples (Martone 2008: 67).3 By contrast, mixed unions between Italian citizens and residents of either the Aegean Islands or Albania were permitted, in recognition of the shared “whiteness” of those territories’ inhabitants and their Italian rulers. It is important to note that these anti-miscegenation laws for the colonies preceded the Racial Laws promulgated in 1938, underscoring how homegrown understandings of race in the colonies predated the anti-Semitic legislation and policies in the metropole that some scholars have attributed solely to the deleterious influence of the alliance with Nazi Germany. Even well into the decolonization era, meticci would struggle to win Italian citizenship. For the most part, “Italians” repatriated back to the peninsula after the end of the empire would be white Europeans, not former colonial subjects. Nor have the majority, or even a sizeable minority, of Italy’s contemporary immigrants come from its former territories. This has led some scholars to add Italian postcoloniality to the list of “atypical” aspects of the Italian colonial experience (Fiore 2012: 73; on “indirect postcoloniality,” see also Lombardi-Diop and Romeo 2012: 4). Italy’s imperium reached its maximum size just a year before Italy entered the Second World War on June 10, 1940. On the eve of Italy’s participation in the conflict, there had already begun compulsory repatriations of as many as 13,000 Italian settler children from Libya to the Italian mainland. Italy’s hold over its empire unraveled quickly. By late November 1941, all of AOI had fallen under British control in the form of a British Military Administration (BMA). One year later, the British had secured Cyrenaica and, soon after, Tripolitania after two years of back and forth fighting in Libya. With temporary BMA established over Italy’s African

3 On the Libyan case, see Donati (2013: 191).

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territories,4 Italian settlers in those territories sought to adapt themselves to changed circumstances and wait out the war. In July 1943, Mussolini was ousted from the Grand Fascist Council in the aftermath of the Allied invasion of Sicily and on September 8 the acting government under Pietro Badoglio declared an armistice. These events would prompt the collapse of the Italian military, the occupation of northern and central Italy by German forces (effectively dividing the country and precipitating a civil war), and the disarming and capture of many Italian military abroad by their former German allies. As a result, German forces occupied the Dodecanese Islands and Albania, as well as Istria. By 1944, the communist regime of Enver Hoxha had assumed control in Albania, and at war’s end BMA oversaw the Aegean islands. The area around Trieste and Istria instead remained contested between Italy and the fledgling socialist Yugoslav regime under Tito, with the final disposition of the territory only resolved de facto in 1954 by a Memorandum of Understanding and de jure by the 1975 Treaty of Osimo. The rapidity with which Italy lost de facto control over its possessions and northeastern provinces, and the reality that this loss proved bound up with the broader traumas of World War II and fascism’s defeat, has often led scholars to characterize Italian decolonization as abrupt and precocious—that is, as a “third-party decolonization” that entailed no real struggle between native independence movements and the metropolitan power and, accordingly, left little “imperial hangover” (Seton-Watson 1980; see also Dubois 1993). Such assessments, however, belie not only the complex and often protracted negotiations over the formal transfer of sovereignty of the Italian possessions, but also the multidirectional flows of “repatriation” both to and from these former possessions.

Coming Home? Decolonization at the Time of Events The loss of Italian colonies, departments, and protectorates became inextricably entangled with the fate of the territories on the eastern Adriatic ceded to Yugoslavia, both in terms of the complex diplomatic wrangling over the disposition of these lands and the flows of and assistance to so-called

4 Ethiopia proved an exception, as Emperor Haile Selassie returned to power there in May 1941.

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“national refugees” out of the lost possessions (Novati 1994: 371–372).5 Ultimately, many individuals who migrated out of the African colonies, the Aegean Islands, Albania, and Istria/Dalmatia came to share the same juridical status as Italian refugee. Worked out in practice from 1942 on, the status of profugo was codified with Law n. 51 of March 1, 1949, and Law n. 137 of March 4, 1952. The Italian state thus recognized migrants out of the lost possessions as (national) refugees entitled to state assistance. Despite the fact that in most instances these individuals did not satisfy the emerging criteria for international refugees eligible for assistance from the UN, the relevant agencies (first the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, or UNRRA; then the International Refugee Organization, or IRO; and finally the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, or UNHCR) were repeatedly asked to help Italians in and from the colonies and the eastern Adriatic territories. UNRRA, for example, played an important role in the actual transport and repatriation of Italians from both Albania and the Dodecanese Islands in the period between 1945 and 1947. This reflected the Italian state’s reduced capacity as a result of both the devastation of the war and Italy’s semi-sovereign status until the 1947 Peace Treaty (Kogan 1953: 348). Although the 1947 Peace Treaty with Italy disavowed Italian claims on its African and Balkan territories, it left their actual disposition ambiguous. The Treaty thus gave not only Italian officials in Rome, but also some Italians in those territories hope that Italy might hold onto them in some form, such as a trusteeship. Together with delegates from the contested Julian lands, groups of settlers from Italy’s African possessions had lobbied to make their voices and wishes heard at the 1946 Peace Conference, presenting memoranda in English and French, as well as Italian. While organizations for displacees from the eastern Adriatic territories (such as the Associazione Nazionale Venezia Giulia e Dalmazia, Unione degli Istriani, Associazione delle Comunità Istriane) and for African repatriates and veterans (e.g. Associazione Nazionale Reduci e Rimpatriati d’Africa) exist today, many more such associations appear to have left little trace beyond their efforts in the period immediately following the war. Among the numerous organizations sending declarations and telegrams to the Italian government concerning the peace negotiations, for example, were the Associazione Coloni d’Africa e Colonizzatori, Associazione Nazionale

5 On the entanglement of the colonial question with that of Venezia Giulia, see Rossi (1979).

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Profughi della Libia, Associazione Nazionale Profughi Africa Orientale, Unione Profughi, Unione Nazionale Profughi Africa Orientale, Comitato Profughi Libici, Società Africana d’Italia, and Associazione fra le Imprese Italiane in Africa.6 While the existence of so many lobby groups likely created a sense of pressure at the Peace Conference, it also created a problem of fragmentation—one that would ultimately contribute to a fragmentation of memory. Some officials in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs doubtless encouraged these groups in their efforts, seeing in them, “the best instrument, given their essentially humanitarian character, with which to keep alive in Italian public opinion the Italian colonial question, and which therefore should be encouraged.”7 Not coincidentally, voices of colonial displacees also helped drown out those of the former colonized and occupied from Ethiopia to Yugoslavia calling for the prosecution of Italian war crimes. Despite this intense lobbying, the Peace Treaty’s outcome—which renounced Italian claims to AOI, Albania, the Dodecanese Islands, and large parts of Venezia Giulia—occasioned protest in Italy over what many perceived as a forced and humiliating settlement. The moment of the treaty’s signing in Paris on February 10, 1947, prompted protest and anger. Flags were lowered, a siren wailed and then gave way to a moment of silence, veterans gathered in front of national monuments, and the Constituent Assembly suspended its session (Lorenzini 2007: 107). The treaty’s passage thus engaged the Italian public at the time as a highly visible “trauma drama.” The fates of Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia would only be settled years later after the visits of both Four Power and UN Commissions designed to resolve these diplomatic impasses. In the inquiries these commissions held in the former colonies, just as at the Peace Conference, Italians and pro-Italian groups numbered among those presenting their views. In many instances, the Ministry of Italian Africa provided financial backing to colonial intermediaries testifying to their support of Italy. Associations of former 6 See, for example, Mémorandum présenté par le Comité des réfugiés de la Libye, de l’Erythrée et de la Somalie sur la question des Colonies Italiennes/Memorandum presented by the Committee of the refugees from Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia on the Italian Colonial Question. Contained in Archivio Storico Diplomatico Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASDMAE) Affari Politici (AP) 1946–1950 Italia b. 53, fasc. 1. See also ASDMAE AP 1946–1950 Italia Ex Possedimenti Parte Generale b. 2, Feliciano Bianchi to De Gasperi, June 1, 1946. 7 ASDMAE AP 1946–1950 Italia Ex Possedimenti Parte Generale, b. 4, “Promemoria sulla questione delle colonie,” June 19, 1945.

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settlers also lobbied both the Italian government and the UN, organizing a series of refugee congresses between 1947 and 1949 (Morone 2016: 130–132; see also Ballinger 2018).8 As this suggests, settlers and former settlers assumed a public and visible role in contentious political debates over the future of Italian possessions. These settler associations focused first on the possibility of their return to an Italian Africa and, when this was no longer feasible, on questions of reparations, assistance, and reintegration into the madrepatria (Vigo 2016: 40–41). Although the suspicion of fascism clung to colonial settlers, even antifascist leaders of the Christian Democrats, like Alcide De Gasperi, argued that Italy should be permitted to keep its pre-fascist colonies, highlighting how the question of the colonies complicated (if it did not quite transcend) divisions between left, right, and center in Italy. Yet unlike the concentrated flows of Algerian pieds-noirs to southern France that constituted an emergency for the French state, there was no single event or moment of settler repatriation that either galvanized Italian public opinion or came to symbolize the broader process of empire’s end. Rather, repatriations of such settlers occurred at many different moments, sometimes prompted by a dramatic episode—such as the anti-Italian riots in 1948 that left 52 Italians dead in Mogadishu, or the terms of the Peace Treaty that awarded Pola to Yugoslavia and precipitated a rapid, mass migration out of the city—or by a government decree, as occurred when the Ethiopian government expelled 80 Italian industrialists in 1946. In Libya (which became independent in 1951), for example, bilateral accords with Italy in 1956 set the terms for the future of the Italian agricultural settlements built under fascism. The agreement established a February 1960 deadline by which the work of state-sponsored agricultural colonization begun in 1938 was to be completed, with land fully amortized and in the hands of either their Italian owners or Libyans to whom they had been sold. In 1960, the Libyan government passed legislation permitting land ownership only to Libyan citizens; the majority of those few Italians who still remained on their farms chose to retain Italian citizenship and left either for Tripoli or Italy, triggering another wave of repatriations. Not surprisingly, then, Italian migrations out of such territories ebbed and flowed with the sometimes-tortuous diplomatic negotiations and politics within the former territories, as well as the exigencies of the Cold War. 8 On the specific efforts by Cyrenaican refugees during and after the UN negotiations, see Ballinger (2018).

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In Eritrea, temporary British governance only ended in 1952 with the advent of federation with Ethiopia. Somalia, by contrast, would remain under a UN trusteeship administered by Italy until 1960. In reality, then, Italy’s African territories did not attain independence during or even in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Contrary to claims about the “precocious” nature of Italian decolonization, it actually does not prove an exception (at least de jure) within the general chronology of European colonial exit (Morone 2016: 130). What does prove surprising and perhaps even exceptional, however, is the multidirectional nature of repatriation. During the war, a series of largescale, state-sponsored evacuations of Italian civilians to the Italian peninsula occurred from the various possessions. The initial occupation of the Dalmatian city of Zara and of Istria by Yugoslav forces in 1943, for example, led many Italian state functionaries to repatriate to the peninsula. Yugoslav executions of both civilians and military personnel in the karstic grottoes known as the foibe prompted additional waves of migration. Perhaps the most highly publicized wartime repatriations were those of the so-called navi bianche or “white ships.” In three missions carried out between 1942 and 1943, a fleet of four ships carried 27,778 Italian women, children, elderly, and infirm from AOI to Italy. Humanitarian in nature, the voyages took place under British naval escort and with assistance from the International Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross. In the face of military defeat, the Italian regime nonetheless insisted that such movements were temporary until Italians could return to their homes in Africa. Many wives and children left Africa with heavy hearts owing not only to the uncertainty of their futures, but also because husbands and fathers (whether soldiers or civilians) had been interned in British imperial possessions, notably Kenya and India. Likewise, parents in Libya who were separated from their children sent to the mainland in 1940 received little word as their progeny were shuttled between religious and state institutions on the peninsula over many long years. At war’s end, parents who remained in the former colonies were eager for their children to rejoin them; in many instances, too, their labor was crucially needed to keep family businesses and farms afloat. Some adults who had been evacuated or interned/imprisoned during the war likewise hoped to return to their homes and livelihoods in AOI or Libya or, to a lesser extent, the Dodecanese. In all of the former Italian territories administered by the British, the respective BMA struggled with insistent requests by Italians to “repatriate” back to their homes abroad. In the context of ongoing debates over the

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future disposition of those territories, and the real fear that Italian “returns” could inflame local sentiment, BMA officials sought to tightly restrict Italian entry back into the possessions. In Libya, a brisk trade in clandestine immigration arose in 1946 and 1947, with small fishing boats ferrying Italians (many of them young people evacuated in 1940) to isolated spots on the Libyan coastline. When intercepted by the British authorities, these illegal migrants faced deportation. Although the numbers of Italians requesting repatriation to the Aegean Islands or AOI were smaller than in Libya, they nonetheless created a similar political and humanitarian dilemma for the respective BMA. These Italians also made frequent appeals to the Vatican and international organizations like the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the hopes that they would intercede on their behalf, reminding us of the ways in which the displaced themselves sought to exert agency within a highly constrained field of action. Whereas the British did not look upon Italian returns to former imperial lands favorably, the Italian government did not initially welcome the prospect of large-scale returns of impoverished settlers into a metropole devastated by five long years of warfare. In particular, in the period leading up to the 1947 Peace Treaty, the Italian government hoped to keep in place its citizens who remained in the possessions (or to encourage repatriation back to them) in order to buttress demographic arguments about Italy’s right to retain some territories. The still fragile Italian republic also had to contend with many other displaced persons, including sinistrati (metropolitan Italians who had been “bombed out” of their homes) and foreign refugees, predominantly from Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, military personnel and ex-POWs took priority over civilians in organized repatriations. Individual applications at war’s end from Italians seeking repatriation from the ex-colonies reveal the grounds on which the Italian government initially approved such requests: humanitarian reasons, work related to Italian reconstruction, or state employment on the peninsula. The Italian government had the final say in deciding repatriation back to the peninsula. Critical for a positive decision was assured employment, a place to live in the metropole, and a written guarantee (usually by a relative) that transportation costs would be covered.9 In 1945, this led to friction with the British authorities in Libya, who Italian authorities claimed were

9 ASDMAE AP 1946–1950 Ex Possedimenti Libia b. 10, April 10, 1946.

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sending shiploads of Italian repatriates from Libya without notice or authorization.10 Even after the ratification of the 1947 Peace Treaty and the dimming of hopes that Italy might retain some possessions, Italian authorities sought to monitor, regulate, and slow the flows of return migration from Africa. In places like independent Libya, for example, into the late 1950s the administrators of the Italian settlements overseen by the Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale (INPS) maintained that the significant investments made in those projects could be protected only if Italians would remain. A 1957 memo to INPS’s president, Angelo Corsi, for example, diagnosed a “true and proper ‘psychosis’ of exodus from the farms of Tripolitania, with the [unrealistic] aim of finding an optimal placement and easier living in the Patria.” The danger lay, warned the letter, in encouraging colonists to repatriate rather than defend the fruits of their labor—“fruits which should not be undervalued.”11 Just a few years earlier, colonial expert Armando Maugini had cautioned about the potential negative effects in the metropole of such mass repatriations. “Such a repatriation,” he mused, would give rise to political speculation; the colonists would find defenders in the unions and political realms and could easily fall prey to subversive propaganda. It’s important to note that many colonists are ready to launch an offensive against the colonial entities.12

Such comments reveal that Italian officials worried about the insertion of repatriates into the peninsula’s complex political scene, rejecting facile assumptions that colonists supposedly inculcated with fascist values would inherently vote center-right or prove immune to the promises of the Italian communist and socialist parties. During the early 1950s, the same period in which Maugini fretted about mass returns from Africa, a wave of new migrants from Venezia Giulia created by the reopening of the citizenship option stipulated in the Peace

10 ASDMAE AP 1946–1950 Italia Ex Possedimenti Libia b. 10, Memorandum, November 21, 1945. 11 Archivio Storico (AS) Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale (INPS) b. 130, fasc. 515, Raccomandata of February 15, 1957. 12 AS INPS b. 62, fasc. 259, Armando Maugini, “Relazione sulla colonizzazione contadina della Tripolitania,” May 1953, 17.

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Treaty led officials in the Ministry of the Interior to warn would-berepatriates from Libya that refugee camps on the mainland were “overcrowded.” “In such circumstances it seems evident that this Ministry, despite all good intentions, confronts the absolute impossibility of accommodating to any greater degree the already numerous requests for shelter on the part of refugees from Africa.”13 By contrast, the threat posed by communist regimes in the Balkans led the Italian government to facilitate migration out of both Yugoslavia and Albania much more quickly than from Africa. In the closing months of the war, the new Albanian government had confiscated much of the property of Italian firms and arrested and executed a number of Italian civilians charged with sabotage (Benanti 2003: 199–203).14 With little progress made on repatriation, in March 1945 Italian undersecretary of war and member of the Italian Communist Party Mario Palermo journeyed to Albania. The result was the Hoxha-Palermo Accord, five of whose twelve clauses dealt with repatriation. The agreement recognized the urgent necessity to repatriate all Italians who wished it, whether military personnel or civilians, and put the responsibility for carrying out such repatriation in Italian hands. Although the Albanian government reserved the right to retain temporarily Italian specialists deemed necessary for reconstruction projects, in reality some of these Italian nationals would never be permitted to leave Albania (Stallone 2003: 697–698). Only with the collapse of state socialism in Albania in 1992 did the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs undertake Operation CORA (Comitato Operativo per i Rimpatriandi dall’Albania), in which the Italian military repatriated approximately 80 individuals and their families to Italy. As these comments suggest, the means, moments, and circumstances in which Italian nationals migrated from the lost possessions to the Italian peninsula varied greatly and stretched over a long time span. Some of these migrations had highly visible outcomes, such as the Italian state-run camps housing those individuals who did not have relatives or homes to which to “return” in Italy or guaranteed work (as for state employees). As with repatriation, the Italian state sought to discourage long residence

13 ASDMAE AP 1950–1957 Libia b. 830, “Ricoveri in centri di raccolta di rimpatriandi dall’Africa,” September 18, 1951, 1–2. 14 Also refer to ASDMAE AP 1946–1950 Albania b. 10, “Nota Verbale,” March 11, 1946.

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in the camps, providing financial incentives to those who left them voluntarily. By 1952, as state-sponsored housing for refugees became available, the Italian state began to restrict residence in refugee camps to 18 months (Ertola 2018: 62–63). In some instances, concentrated refugee resettlements and refugee neighborhoods arose, sites that provided the conditions for a potentially durable identity as refugees of decolonization. Although settlements like that of Gebelia (near Anzio) for Italians repatriated from Cyrenaica were created in the 1950s, the majority of such refugee quarters housed Italians displaced from Venezia Giulia. Nonetheless, in spaces like the Villaggio Giuliano Dalmata in Rome or Fertilia in Sardinia—projects begun as architectural showpieces of fascism and instead completed after the war as neighborhoods for national refugees—repatriates from Italy’s African colonies sometimes came to live alongside refugees from the eastern Adriatic. A common juridical status as national refugees, as well as experiences living together in refugee camps and refugee housing projects, however, did not necessarily translate into collective political or cultural solidarity. Though migrants from all of these lost territories could potentially receive recognition and state assistance as national refugees, those from the Julian lands sat atop a hierarchy of national refugeedom, as suggested by the Ministry of the Interior’s warning to repatriates from Libya that the needs of Julian refugees outweighed their own. This failure of a larger narrative of repatriation and national refugeedom to coalesce made for fragmented and selectively visible narratives of decolonization, producing separate circuits of memory and commemoration.

Remembering Empire, Settlers, and National Refugees Both scholars and journalists writing on Italian colonialism and its aftermath frequently resort to the language of “amnesia,” “silences,” and “forgetting” to postulate a void left by decolonization in the Italian metropole. In the previous section, I have demonstrated that at the time of events, decolonization did produce traumatic effects—or at the very least, triggered a series of public trauma dramas that registered far beyond those most directly impacted by them: repatriates and national refugees. The question remains, however, of whether the multiple trauma dramas that attended the decolonization process possess(ed) durability at a collective level. Although those who personally experienced the dramatic effects of

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decolonization formed associations, published memoirs, and lobbied the Italian state for continued resources, they have been largely unsuccessful in constructing broader, shared narratives of loss. At the same time, their stories of bearing the costs of decolonization have run in parallel, and only occasionally have intersected with, broader accountings in Italian popular culture of empire’s end. Viewing decolonization in this way, then, complicates any facile reading of Italian public discourse about colonialism as either merely amnesiac or absent traumatic traces. But what do we mean when we refer to trauma? Recently, Joshua Pederson has turned to clinical studies of trauma to critique the model of literary trauma made famous by Cathy Caruth. Drawing upon psychoanalytic readings, Caruth treats trauma as a rupture or trace that becomes largely unspeakable. For Caruth, literature functions to “‘speak’ trauma when normal, discursive language cannot.” Pederson, by contrast, contends that trauma may result in both “augmented narrative detail” and temporal distortions (Pederson 2014: 334, 339), something I argue is characteristic not only of those individuals who suffered breakdowns and psychic disturbances, but also of a number of artistic attempts to come to terms with Italian decolonization. In reality, both understandings of trauma appear at work in representations of decolonization in Italian popular culture. Most scholars have argued that Italian films, as well as novels,15 produced in the immediate postwar period fail to deal directly with decolonization. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s landmark study of a distinct genre of what she calls “empire cinema” under Italian fascism offers an important exception. Many of the films falling under this rubric were long ignored or dismissed by film scholars and critics alike, despite the fact that they gave expression to the fantasy of “an imperial-diasporic nation that encompassed Italians in the colonies, the metropole, and in Italian communities abroad” (BenGhiat 2015: xvii). The lack of critical attention hitherto paid such films reflects not only their association with fascism, but also the fact that the majority of them deal with war and, as such, they enact Italian “dramas of defeat” (Ben-Ghiat 2015: 5)—to be precise, the defeats of decolonization. Films such as Giarabub (1942) tell the fictionalized stories of Italian civilians who fled the defeat in East Africa for Libya, whereas 1943’s Bengasi deals with the experience of those Italians in a Libya now under British occupation. Produced in the moment during the war when Italy’s de facto

15 Ennio Flaiano’s novel Tempo di Uccidere (1975 [1947]) remains a notable exception.

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decolonization had begun, some of these films saw reissue in edited form in the 1950s, as Italy’s de jure decolonization dragged on. Although BenGhiat cites such re-editions as a form of imperial haunting (a ghost implying the postmortem state of empire), she also recognizes that they encode a “sense of an Italian imperial history that had been suspended or interrupted, rather than concluded” (Ben-Ghiat 2015: 305). Daniela Baratieri makes a similar point in her analysis of the 1955 reissue of Bengasi (Baratieri 2005: 75–98). Such films thus signal the protracted and (then) ongoing nature of decolonization, as well as the existence of an Italian audience for such decolonization dramas. Applying Caruth’s concept of trauma here, such films—which “‘speak’ trauma”—point to an uneasy or even possibly traumatic decolonization at a broader level. The readings of Ben-Ghiat and Baratieri stand in sharp contrast to most analyses of early Italian postwar film, which instead posit an explicit silence about imperial defeat and repatriation that instead become displaced onto other themes. Noa Steimatsky, for example, has detailed how Cinecittà— the grand film studio built in 1937 as fascism’s answer to Hollywood— became a temporary camp after World War II for both foreign refugees and Italians from the lost territories.16 Neorealist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini employed the Cinecittà refugees as extras to work on rubble films such as Germania Anno Zero, thereby avoiding a direct confrontation with Italy’s own devastation and refugee problems and instead displacing that experience onto defeated Germany. Likewise, Karen Pinkus interprets Antonioni’s 1962 film L’Eclisse—set in EUR’s postwar palazzi and featuring a character who had returned to Italy from Kenya—as symbolic of the displacement of memories of colonialism onto Italy’s postwar “conquest” of its urban peripheries (Pinkus 2003: 300). In the most obvious sense, Steimatsky and Pinkus are correct: in the decades during which Italy’s long decolonization unfolded, these events found relatively little overt trace in Italian film or literature. In a deeper sense, however, films like L’Eclisse stand as explicit testaments to decolonization. The Roman EUR neighborhoods where Antonioni filmed L’Eclisse had become home to many Italians displaced from the expossessions. Furthermore, Antonioni famously employed the device of temps mort, in which the gaze lingers on a non-narrativized space in which 16 Those Italian refugees housed in Cinecittà included Istrians and young people eventually repatriated back to Libya. See the footage in the film by Marco Bertozzi and Noa Steimatsky, Profughi a Cinecittà (2012). Turn also to Noa Steimatsky (2009).

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action no longer occurs. Might not Antonioni’s use in L’Eclisse of these discontinuous and jarring temporalities—so often taken to symbolize alienation from modern society, but also characteristic of the temporal distortions Pederson identifies as key manifestations of trauma—be read as a story of a past that is also and always present, of a fragmented narrative about an imperialism that is not so much displaced in the psychological sense but, rather, incomplete and yet proximate? Focusing on displacement in its most literal meanings—the visible migrations of repatriates, settlers, and refugees from the lost territories who came to inhabit zones like that of EUR, site for the Villaggio Giuliani Dalmata—steers us away from facile claims of a missing or sublimated consciousness of decolonization and its population movements in the Italian case. Let us (re)examine a critical scene in L’Eclisse. The female protagonist, Vittoria, visits her neighbor, Marta, an Italian expatriate recently returned from Kenya. Marta voices her love for Kenya and her feeling of belonging to the place together with her racist hatred for its black inhabitants. Most commentators on this scene highlight the shock for the viewers as Vittoria “plays Negro” by dressing up in blackface and Masai clothing. One can easily perceive in the racisms of Vittoria and Marta a displaced critique of Italy’s colonial ventures. Yet this scene also explicitly references the Mau Mau political rebellion in Kenya, as Marta voices her fear that the white minority there will be extinguished. Again, the most obvious reading takes this as a displacement of anxieties created by Italian decolonization. I would argue, however, that the reference to Italians living in other decolonizing territories also directly comments upon Italians from “expatriate” colonies—that is, Italian communities in third countries of the sort Einaudi promoted so long ago— migrating to Italy as refugees alongside those from former, formal possessions. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952, Tunisian independence in 1956, and the Algerian War all prompted sizable flows of Italian nationals migrating out of those territories to the Italian peninsula. Recognized as refugees by the Italian state, some of these displacees lived in camps alongside Italians from the ex-possessions and others, especially those who arrived in the 1960s, inhabited those camps previously occupied by Italian repatriates from Africa and refugees from Venezia Giulia. The fears of Italians from Kenya like Marta were thus shared by Italian communities in other parts of Africa undergoing decolonization, which in turn echoed those of Italian decolonization proper. Such anxieties also found expression in other Italian films, such as the 1957 Sotto la Croce di Sud, whose Italian

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protagonist follows her humanitarian mission through both Italian controlled territories (Somalia) and those of other European powers (Kenya and Tanganyika); in particular, this film lingers on the violence exacted by the Mau Mau (Zinni 2017: 72, 77). The 1966 Africa Addio instead trades on deep Italian nostalgia for a colonial Africa that has disappeared in the face of Africans’ supposedly “unwarranted, racial hatred against white people” (Giuliani 2017: 100). Re-reading such cultural artifacts raises the possibility of what Michael Rothberg has deemed the work of multidirectional memories, “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (Rothberg 2009: 3). Writing specifically of the Holocaust, slavery, and colonialism as “singular yet relational histories,” (Rothberg 2008: 225). Rothberg argues that, “experiences of particular suffering can be brought into dialogue with each other” (Rothberg 2001: 185). Rather than treat a film like L’Eclisse as telling a story of an absent or amnesiac Italian decolonization, then, we instead may see it as encoding multidirectional memories: of fascism, of Italian colonialism, of the experience of Italians in other powers’ colonies, of Italian mass emigration, and so on. Whereas psychological displacement implies a unidirectional movement as uncomfortable ideas or images about a subject are moved into a more acceptable realm, the multidirectional concept allows us to recognize and acknowledge a wider play of associations and connections. Beyond these multidirectional accountings of decolonization, it should also be noted that the end of Italian colonialism did register directly in a range of media other than film, including television and ephemera like trading cards and comics already in wide circulation by the 1970s (Farnetti and Novelli 2017). Since the late 1990s, the collective of authors known as Wu Ming has been producing best-selling novels that create uncomfortable and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions that highlight, among other things, Italy’s fascist and colonial pasts. Hybrid texts like Point Lenana (2013) and Timira (2012) mix archival documents and real lives, history and fiction, in service to romanzo meticcio (literally “mixed-race novels”). Point Lenana, for example, takes as its starting point the heroic exploits of Felice Benuzzi, an Italian prisoner of war who escaped his English captors to climb Mount Kenya and then returned to camp once he had completed the task. The novel intersperses Benuzzi’s real-life experiences with episodes set in Italian Cyrenaica, Trieste and broader Venezia Giulia, and Kenya in the period of the Mau Mau Rebellion.

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The narrative hybridity of such works, I suggest, gives expression to what Rothberg deems multidirectional memory. Among the most significant aspects of this memory-work, perhaps, has been the role played by Wu Ming in reminding readers of the entangled experiences of Italia Oltremare and the eastern Adriatic territories. The popularity and generally positive critical reception of this genre of literature within Italy thus points to the ways in which Italian colonialism and its legacies have increasingly been inserted into other contexts and circuits of contested Italian memory since the 1990s.

The Politics of Public Memory and Commemoration As I have argued, images of empire and its endings have proven selectively visible in popular culture since the early postwar period—signaling a reverberation, if not necessarily a full blown traumatic response. Alongside the novels and films discussed previously has been the proliferation of memoirs, diaries, and novels published by former residents of Overseas Italy or their descendants narrating their experiences with the end of empire. In most cases, small presses with small print runs issue these works, which bear titles such as Tripolitanian Reminiscences, Diary of a Refugee, Out of Ethiopia, From the Po to Albania, 1943–1949, and The Seed and the Grain. The interested reader searching for these titles will likely have the most luck at the libraries of a repatriate organization like the Associazione Italiani Rimpatriati dalla Libia (AIRL) in Rome or may find a notice in an associational bulletin like Il Reduce d’Africa, suggesting that the audiences for these works remain specialized and limited. A few exceptions do exist, though, such as the commercially and critically successful novels of Eritrean-born Italian author, Erminia dell’Oro. Her 1988 Asmara Addio, first published by a small editing house in Pordenone, achieved such success that it saw reissue with publishing giant Mondadori in 1993. Based on the experiences of its mixed-race Italo-Eritrean protagonist, dell’Oro’s 2006 L’Abbandono (published with Einaudi, a prestigious trade press) similarly achieved mainstream success. A number of soldiers’ memoirs recounting the end of Italian Albania or the experience of children on the navi bianche have also seen wider release through publishers like Ugo Mursia. Nonetheless, these are

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the exceptions that prove the rule that the personal narratives of repatriates, veterans, and former refugees tend to find limited reception beyond the relevant communities.17 At the level of political discourse and broader public commemoration, the associations representing these former residents of Italy’s lost territories have succeeded in inserting their stories into broader narratives only at moments of particular political change or friction. In this, they “extrude”—however briefly and uncomfortably—into public consciousness.18 Here I will offer just a few telling examples of how the lasting effects of decolonization irrupt into public debate, but often with limited political success. At the end of August 2008, then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi offered Libya a formal apology for the suffering inflicted by Italy during colonialism. Berlusconi backed his apologies with tangible compensation, pledging five billion US dollars to be paid out over the next 25 years. Representatives of associations of Italians from Libya, most of them from families expelled in 1970, reacted angrily, declaring that their demands for compensation and an apology from Libya were ignored.19 The interests of the Italian state, then, ultimately trumped those of the repatriates. This also occurred in the negotiations over the entrance of the Yugoslav successor states of Slovenia and Croatia into the European Union, when the question of the Julian exiles’ lost properties was sacrificed to the political necessities of enlargement. The voicing of these calls for restitution nonetheless demonstrates how geopolitical shifts create spaces in public discourse for former settlers to seek larger audiences for their claims and their stories. When the Italian military helped evacuate 100 Italians resident in Libya threatened by ISIS in February 2015, for example, Giovanna Ortu—President of the Associazione Italiani Rimpatriati dalla Libia— declared, “Seeing the [repatriating] Italians on that ship made me relive my drama.” Ortu did not waste this opportunity to remind fellow Italians of

17 For the memoirs, refer to Roberto Nunes-Vais (1982), Fabio Chiodi (2004), Danilo Bizzarri (2009), Maria Rita Bruschi (2013), and Luisella Carosio (2014). 18 For more on such “extruded histories,” see Ballinger (2012). 19 Trattato Italia-Libia—Approvato dalla Camera tra le proteste il ‘risarcimento per danni

coloniali.’ www.magdiallam.it/node/9173. On efforts at inserting a clause about indemnities for Italian properties into the Treaty, refer to: http://www.informazione.it/c/c6a598d2612b-4664-84b7-0b1103cd4faf/Italia-Libia-il-consiglio-comunale-di-Roma-impegna-ilsindaco-Alemanno (accessed February 20, 2009).

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the trauma those Italians expelled from Libya had experienced 45 years earlier.20 Like the “Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya” (invalidated with the fall of the Ghadaffi regime), public monuments commemorating the imperial past have also occasioned controversies in which veteran and repatriate associations, as well as former colonial subjects, have participated. The Axum (Aksum) Obelisk, taken as war booty by Italians in 1937 and erected in Rome near Circus Maximus, was returned to Ethiopia only in 2005 after decades of acrimony (Pankhurst 1999). Responses like an editorial in the veterans journal Il Carrista d’Italia, with its rejection of Ethiopian claims, proved common: “Frankly, after the passage of more than 60 years one doesn’t understand the reasons for this restitution … . It appears that we are the only country in the world to behave in such a [beneficent] manner” (2003: 6). Such debates reflect the unsettled status of imperialism and its aftermath, as well as the durability of the myth of Italians as good colonizers, rather than their complete unspeakability or unthinkability. Nonetheless, there remains a persistent diagnosis of either amnesia or repression about both Italian colonialism and the fate of the former Adriatic irredentist lands. Those individuals who migrated to Italy in the wake of fascism’s loss often trade upon this notion of repression or forgetting in advancing their claims. That is, whether accurate or not, the claim to have been neglected provides critical moral capital. In my earlier work on memory practices of the Italian “exodus” from Istria and Dalmatia, I stressed that contrary to the exiles’ contentions that they and their histories had been “submerged,” their histories had been known and speakable but had found little audience outside of the immediate border region in the years between the territorial resolution and Yugoslavia’s breakup (Ballinger 2003). In and around Trieste, a series of factors absent elsewhere in Italy among communities of former national refugees—highly concentrated resettlement, strong and vocal associations, and the proximity of the lost Adriatic territories themselves—enabled an obsessive politics of memory to operate at the regional level. The collapse of

20 “Giovanna Ortu, espulsa dalla Libia nel 1970: ‘Gli italiani sulla nave mi fanno rivivere il dramma’.” Rai News. http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/articoli/Giovanna-Ortu-espulsadalla-Libia-nel-1970-Gli-italiani-sulla-nave-mi-fanno-rivivere-tutto-410653b0-9731-4f428b9a-642953e9c067.html (accessed May 1, 2018).

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Yugoslavia in the 1990s then provided a compelling new conceptual framework—that of “ethnic cleansing”—in which to emplot these narratives and claims for restitution and reach new audiences outside of the eastern border area. Equally crucial, however, was a seismic shift in Italian politics as the 1992 collapse of the postwar First Republic brought to power a centerright coalition that included the reformed neofascist party. Although by no means did all Julian exiles or former colonial settlers necessarily vote for the far right (indeed, the centrist Christian Democrats had provided these and other migrants from the lost possessions with the most tangible benefits during the Cold War era), there remains a pervasive view that these populations are still sympathetic to fascism. What is undeniable, however, is that the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, its successor Alleanza Nazionale, today’s Fratelli d’Italia, and their partners in the more centrist Forza Italia party founded by Silvio Berlusconi in 1994 claim(ed) to represent the interests of these “forgotten” and victimized groups. A 2018 feature in Il Giornale, a conservative newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, denounced what it contends is a growing minimization and even outright “denial” (negazionismo) of the violence of the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus (Biloslavo 2017: 1–2). As such language suggests, the trope of amnesia is, above all, a claim to political authority and representation. Ironically, however, of the various groups who migrated out of former Italian possessions in the wake of fascism’s defeat, those from Italy’s lost territories on the eastern Adriatic have enjoyed the greatest visibility in public debates in Italy both during the “long decolonization” and in the aftermath of the First Republic’s demise. Of course, these lands—“redeemed” after one world war and then lost after another—were never colonies, and the associations of these esuli have worked hard to distinguish their experience from that of settler repatriates. Whereas a scholarly discussion that puts these experiences into dialogue has only just begun, official memory practices—whether those sponsored by the state or by associations of repatriates and Julian exiles—have yet to recognize either the entangled nature or the multidirectionality of memories and experiences of those who “came home” from Italy’s lost possessions. In 2004, representatives of the Julians-Istrians-Dalmatians succeeded in a long-desired goal: a national day of recognition. The Italian government proclaimed February 10—the date of the signing of the 1947 Peace Treaty with Italy—a day of official remembrance of the “exodus” of Italians from the Adriatic territories ceded to Yugoslavia. As we have seen, the Peace

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Treaty also gave up Italy’s rights to its African colonies, as well as the Dodecanese Islands and Albania. Nevertheless, the Giorno del Ricordo exclusively commemorates the experience of Italian exiles from the Julian lands. Whether the memory practices around that day will become more inclusive—thereby escaping the confines of what Rothberg calls “competitive memory — as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources”—remains to be seen (Rothberg 2009: 3). As repatriates, former settlers, and exiles have stressed the uniqueness of their experiences as Italians from Libya, Italians from Rhodes, or Italians from Istria, for example, they have failed to make common cause or to produce shared narratives about the dramatic losses that reconfigured Italy. Regardless, these experiences continue to percolate and echo within mainstream Italian literature and films produced, for the most part, by those with no direct involvement in Italy’s long decolonization.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have argued against commonplace scholarly assumptions about both Italian imperialism and its ending(s), particularly the presumed speed and ease with which decolonization occurred. In doing so, a series of facile diagnoses such as amnesia, or even trauma/non-trauma, have also been questioned. Rather, the events surrounding the loss of a wide range of Italian territories in the wake of fascism’s defeat resonated at the time—at moments even constituting trauma dramas—and have continued to do so, albeit in fragmentary or episodic fashion, in succeeding decades. Finally, I have cautioned us in the use of labels such as “exceptional.” While this volume importantly brings together comparative perspectives that highlight both similarities and divergences across a wide range of cases, we must beware that claims to exceptionalism have played an integral and unexceptional role in the fashioning of colonial identities and attendant memories of empire’s end.

References Ballinger, Pamela. 2003. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ballinger, Pamela. 2012. Entangled Histories or ‘Extruded’ Histories? Displacement, Refugees, and Repatriation After World War II. Journal of Refugee Studies 25 (3): 366–386.

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Ballinger, Pamela. 2018. Caught in the Double Bind? Italian Settlers and Refugees from Cyrenaica, 1943–1960. Archivio storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana 14: 68–82. Baratieri, Daniela. 2005. Bengasi-Bengasi anno ’41: The Evidence of Silences in the Transmission of Memory. In Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, 75–98. New York: Peter Lang. Benanti, Franco. 2003. La Guerra Più Lunga, Albania 1943–1948. Milan: Mursia. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 2015. Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bertozzi, Marco, and Noa Steimatsky. 2012. Profughi a Cinecittà (film). Rome: Istituto Luce. Biloslavo, Fausto. 2017. La memoria sfregiata. Su foibe e esodo avanza il negazionismo. Il Giornale (February 10): 1–2. Bizzarri, Danilo. 2009. Il seme e la gramigna: Storia di una famiglia trucidata in Libia. Reggiolo: E. Lui Tip. Bruschi, M.R. 2013. Dal Po all’Albania, 1943–1949. Un medico mantovano tra guerra e prigionia. Verona: Scripta Edizioni. Carosio, Luisella. 2014. Via dall’Etiopia: Diario a due voci. Rivoli: Neos Edizioni. Chiodi, Fabio. 2004. Diario di un profugo. Pontedera: Tagete Edizioni. Choate, Mark. 2008. Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. dell’Oro, Erminia. 1988. Asmara addio. Pordenone: Edizione dello Zibaldone. dell’Oro, Erminia. 2006. L’Abbandono. Turin: Einaudi. Donati, Sabina. 2013. A Political History of National Citizenship and Identity in Italy, 1861–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dubois, Colette. 1993. L’Italie, cas atypique d’une puissance européenne en Afrique: une colonisation tardive, une decolonisation précoce. Materiaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 32–33: 10–14. Ertola, Emanuele. 2017. ‘Terra Promessa’: Migration and Settler Colonialism in Libya, 1911–1970. Settler Colonial Studies 7 (3): 340–353. Ertola, Emanuele. 2018. Orfani dell’impero: L’assistenza pubblica ai profughi dall’Africa Orientale Italiana, 1942–1956. Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana 14: 58–67. Eyerman, Ron. 2012. Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration. In The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith, 564–582. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farnetti, Paola Bertella, and Cecilia Dau Novelli (eds.). 2017. Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in the Italian Media. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fiore, Teresa. 2012. The Emigrant Post-‘Colonia’ in Contemporary Immigrant Italy. In Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, 71–82. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Fiore, Teresa. 2017. Pre-occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies. New York: Fordham University Press. Flaiano, Ennio. 1975 [1947]. Tempo di uccidere. Milan: Rizzoli Ed. Giuliani, Gaia. 2017. The White Male Gaze in Italian Cine-Reportage: Masculinity and Otherness Between Colonialism and Decolonisation (1960s–1970s). In Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in the Italian Media, ed. Paola Bertella Farnetti and Cecilia Dau Novelli, 95–113. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Istituto Regionale per la Cultura Istriana. 1997. Esodo e Opera Assistenza Profughi: Una Storia Parallela. Trieste-Roma: IRCI. Kogan, Norman. 1953. Revision of the Italian Peace Treaty. Indiana Law Journal 28 (3): 334–353. Labanca, Nicola. 2010. The Embarrassment of Libya: History, Memory, and Politics in Contemporary Italy. California Italian Studies 1 (1): 1–18. Lombardi-Diop, Cristina, and Caterina Romeo. 2012. Introduction: Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy. In Postcolonial Italy, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, 1–29. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorenzini, Sara. 2007. L’Italia e il trattato di pace del 1947. Bologna: Mulino. Martone, Luciano. 2008. Diritto d’Oltremare: Legge e ordine per le colonie del Regno d’Italia. Milan: Giuffrè Editore. Ming 2, Wu, and Antar Mohamed. 2012. Timira: Romanzo meticcio. Turin: Einaudi. Ming 1, Wu, and Roberto Santachiara. 2013. Point Lenana. Turin: Einaudi. Morone, Antonio. 2016. Quando è stato archiviato il colonialismo italiano? From the European South 1: 129–137. N.A. 2003. La storia. Il Carrista d’Italia. (9/10–11/12): 6. Novati, Giampaolo Calchi. 1994. Italy in the Triangle of the Horn: Too Many Corners for a Half Power. The Journal of Modern African Studies 32 (3) (September): 369–385. Nunes-Vais, Roberto. 1982. Reminscenze tripoline. Tripoli: Edizioni Uaddan. Pankhurst, Richard. 1999. Ethiopia, the Askum Obelisk, and the Return of Africa’s Cultural Heritage. African Affairs 98 (391): 229–239. Parker, Simon. 1999. The End of Italian Exceptionalism? Assessing the Transition to the Second Republic. The Italianist 19 (1): 251–283. Pederson, Joshua. 2014. Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory. Narrative 22 (3): 333–353. Pergher, Roberta. 2018. Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922–1943. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinkus, Karen. 2003. Empty Spaces: Decolonization in Italy. In A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo, 299–320. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Pisany, Valentina (ed.). 2007. La Difesa della Razza: Antologia 1938–1943. Milan: Bompiani. Podestà, Gian Luca. 2011. Emigrazione e colonizzazione in Libia e Africa Orientale. Altreitalie 42: 36–48. Rossi, Gianluigi. 1979. Trieste e colonie alla vigilia delle elezioni italiane del 18 aprile 1948. Rivista di studi politici internazionali 182 (2) (April–June): 205–231. Rothberg, Michael. 2001. W.E.B. Du Bois in Warsaw: Holocaust Memory and the Color Line, 1949–1952. The Yale Journal of Criticism 14 (1): 169–189. Rothberg, Michael. 2008. Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response. Studies in the Novel 40 (1–2): 224–234. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism [with new preface]. London: Penguin Books. Sassoon, Donald. 2013. The Italian Anomaly? Comparative European Politics 11 (3): 280–295. Seton-Watson, Christopher. 1980. Italy’s Imperial Hangover. Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1): 169–179. Smith, Andrea. 2003. Europe’s Invisible Migrants. In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea Smith, 9–32. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Stallone, Settimio. 2003. Gli accordi del 14 marzo per il rimpatrio degli italiani dall’Albania. Clio: Rivista trimestrale di studi storici 39 (4): 687–701. Steimatsky, Noa. 2009. The Cinecittà Refugee Camp (1944–1950). October 128: 22–50. Tomasello, Giovanna. 2004. L’Africa tra mito e realtà. Storia della letteratura coloniale italiana. Palermo: Sellerio Editore. Vernant, Jacques. 1951. The Refugee in the Post-War World: Preliminary Report of a Survey of the Refugee Problem. Geneva: United Nations. Vigo, Alessandra. 2016. Rimpatriati d’Africa: Assistenza, associazioni e reintegro tra storia e memoria (1939–1952). Padua: Scripta Edizioni. Zinni, Maurizio. 2017. Entertainment, Politics and Colonial Identity in Post-war Italian and British Cinema (1945–1960). In Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in the Italian Media, ed. Paola Bertella Farnetti and Cecilia Dau Novelli, 67–80. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

CHAPTER 3

Japanese Narratives of Decolonization and Repatriation from Manchuria Akiko Hashimoto

Introduction In August 1945, World War II ended in total and bitter defeat for Japan. It was a devastating national collapse in the wake of a war that killed 60 million people worldwide, 20 million in Asia alone. Millions more were injured, maimed, and displaced as countless homes and livelihoods were ruined by violence. No one had ever seen or experienced this magnitude of death and destruction. It was not surprising, then, that in its wake a multitude of trauma narratives emerged in an effort to fathom and reckon with this indelible experience. The horrific memories of World War II in Japan include not only the brutal experiences of the battle and home fronts, but also the evacuation from the colonies that collapsed when Japan’s empire dissolved. Defeat meant forfeiture of overseas colonies and occupied territories in Korea, Taiwan, China, Sakhalin (Karafuto), the Kurile Islands, the Pacific Islands,

A. Hashimoto (B) Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_3

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and Southeast Asia, including Vietnam and Indonesia. As part of decolonization, millions of Japanese who lived and worked in these regions began their arduous and chaotic journeys of evacuation back to the homeland in 1945. In total, 3.2 million Japanese civilians returned as repatriates from East and Southeast Asia. This number is almost as high as that of the 3.7 million demobilized military personnel who were also repatriated from those regions (Conrad 2014: 14). The repatriates, referred to as hikiage, are a diverse population who returned after the surrender on August 15, 1945. On the civilian side, they were Japanese colonial administrators, professionals, businessmen, merchants, teachers, skilled workers, farmers, and families who had settled in the occupied territories of East and Southeast Asia; on the military side, they were demobilized soldiers of the Imperial Army and Navy, a proportion of whom would be incarcerated as POWs in China, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Some managed to return to Japan relatively early, but others—such as those held in Siberian labor camps, as well as women and children stranded in China—could not return for decades. Because ultimately 95% of the disarmed, dispossessed, and displaced Japanese citizens returned to the homeland, it would seem at first that Japan’s post-imperial repatriation was a relatively smooth operation. Yet this statistic belies a deep trauma of escape and dislocation that followed Japan’s troubled legacy of colonization (Etemad 1998: 468; Yamamuro 1993; Watt 2009; Tamanoi 2009). This chapter explores the discourses of repatriation that emerged in postimperial Japan, surveyed from the 1950s through the present day. I will review the diverse repatriate narratives that arose in the first few decades after the war (through the 1970s) and the most salient narratives that have taken root since the 1980s through today. I will consider how some representations—especially the cultural trauma of stranded Japanese families in Manchuria—emerged as a symbol of defeat and failed colonization and assess their significance in the context of the broader geopolitics of East Asia. Memories of wars, massacres, atrocities, invasions, and other instances of mass violence and death become significant referents for subsequent collective life when people choose to make them especially relevant to who they are and what it means to be a member of that society. We tend to see some events as more significant than others because we manage to make them more consequential in later years for our understanding of ourselves and our society (Alexander 2004; Eyerman 2004, 2008; Smelser 2004).

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The cultural trauma discussed in this chapter applies this idea to the discourses of colonists’ repatriation in postwar Japan. In the following pages I examine their narratives of return that would come to illustrate a cultural trauma of decolonization in a nation eagerly seeking to heal and find closure from defeat. I trace the trauma narratives of repatriation in different realms of everyday life over time: from legal designations and compensation claims to national media coverage, bestselling novels, television and feature films, personal testimonies, museum exhibits, and representations in history textbooks. My analysis shows that over the decades diverse narratives of repatriation coalesced into prototypical tragic stories of abandoned peasant families in Manchuria attacked by the Soviet army, rendering them the public face of Japan’s arduous decolonization process. Illuminating how this emphasis on certain victims came about, and how their stories spread to a receptive audience as the chosen cultural trauma of repatriation, is the subject of this chapter. These mnemonic trends did not emerge in a political vacuum. The discussion of these trauma narratives must therefore be contextualized in the geopolitical landscape of Japan’s postwar period and the larger national trauma of defeat (Hashimoto 2015; Conrad 2014; Koshiro 2013). The onset of the Cold War meant that establishing normal relations with China (PRC), the Soviet Union (USSR), and North Korea (DPRK)—where most of Japan’s colonies were located—was impeded for years and decades in a U.S.-centric world order. Discursively, this meant that memories of Japan’s colonialism and war crimes in what became the communist bloc would be marginalized in Japan’s postwar recovery in the Western capitalist orbit. In this context, the Soviet assaults on Japanese colonists and their harsh detention of Japanese soldiers in labor camps were readily villainized, while, by contrast, the American responsibility for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would remain minimized. As the Cold War escalated into an intense nuclear arms race—sparking successive hydrogen bomb tests—Japan’s national narrative of war and defeat came to engender its nuclear victimization (Saito 2006). It was within this growing, larger national discourse of victimization that Japan added more victim narratives—such as those of peasant families stranded in Manchuria—to its corpus of war memory. Japan’s fateful imperial history began with victories in three international wars waged at the turn of the twentieth century, each of which extended Japan’s territorial reach beyond the homeland for the first time in its history. After the Sino-Japan War (1895), Russo-Japan War (1905), and World

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War I (1918), Japan formally colonized large regions of East Asia as part of the postwar settlements. The colonization of Taiwan began in 1895 and lasted for 50 years; it was followed by the colonization of Sakhalin (Southeast Russia), which started in 1905 and lasted for 40 years; then came the colonization of Korea, which started in 1910 and lasted 35 years. Then in 1931 Japan seized military control of Manchuria (Northeast China) following the Mukden Incident, nominally to “protect” its territorial assets and fuel its modernization. It was a move that tripled the size of territories under Japan’s imperial control. Japan then installed the pro-Japanese puppet state “Manchukuo” that remained under Japan’s political and economic domination for 14 years. By 1945, Manchuria had been settled by 1.55 million Japanese (as well as 2.16 million Koreans). These Japanese immigrants vastly outnumbered those in Taiwan (400,000), Sakhalin (400,000), and Korea (900,000).1 Because Japan’s occupation of Manchuria (1932–1945) was of a much shorter duration than its colonization of Taiwan (1895–1845), Sakhalin (1905–1945), and Korea (1910–1945), it may be surprising that the stories of repatriation from Manchuria stand out more visibly in the popular imagination today. While repatriates everywhere experienced personal loss and displacement, those escaping Manchuria are remembered for fleeing a particularly belligerent and deadly environment. Their harrowing escape while being hounded by different military forces (Soviet and Chinese communists) was traumatic and exceedingly violent by any standard, and it was this story of dramatic escape that would shape the public perception of these particular repatriates as victims rather than accessories/enablers of Japan’s colonization. This perception would find traction in a receptive community that was anxious to overlook the perpetrator side of Japan’s imperial past. Japanese colonizers in Manchuria came from a range of occupations and social classes. Some were government and military elites sent by the state to build, administer, and police the colonies. Others were corporate elites sent from Japan’s key business sectors to develop mining, railway, transportation, finance, and heavy industries. Many more moved to booming towns and cities in search of middle- and lower-class jobs—as merchants, entrepreneurs, engineers, managers, teachers, hospital medical staff, shop keepers, service sector employees, and skilled workers. 1 At its height in 1942, Japan’s empire encompassed territories spanning over 7.4 million square kilometers (Conrad 2014: 9).

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Also, a sizable proportion of colonists were peasant-migrants who had moved to rural settlements to cultivate the vast swaths of land that had been forcibly appropriated from the local inhabitants. All told, Japanese colonists made a good living, protected by the state and the military and privileged by a racial hierarchy that made them the dominant class over Korean and Chinese immigrants and Manchu inhabitants.2 However, this repressive social order and worldview would be turned upside down as the empire collapsed, rendering the erstwhile colonists into fugitives.

Japan’s Incursions into Manchuria, 1932–1945 Located geographically at the intersection of Russia, China, and Korea in a region of 1.3 million square kilometers, Manchuria was a “cradle of conflict” coveted by ambitious surrounding powers (Yamamuro 1993). Japan’s claim to preeminence in Manchuria began after its victories in the Sino-Japan and the Russo-Japan wars, when Japan gained jurisdictional rights and control over vital enterprises in the region, including the South Manchurian railways. This incursion into Manchuria gave Japan significant access to rich mineral resources (coal, oil, iron, etc.), access that spurred military-industrial projects and hundreds of booming businesses. Those projects secured a significant economic foothold for Japan’s industrial development. For the Japanese military, Manchuria was also of vital strategic importance in fending off perceived threats from Chinese nationalism and the Soviet Red Army. When Japan’s military contingent in Manchuria (Kwangtung Army) succeeded in a reckless ploy to take over the region (“Mukden Incident”) in 1931, Japan’s domination of Manchuria was complete. Japan dominated Manchuria’s industries and businesses through the South Manchuria Railway Company, known by its abbreviation Mantetsu. Japan’s equivalent to Britain’s East India Company, Mantetsu masterminded Manchuria’s industrial development by building mining and heavy industries, as well as manufacturing sectors and engineering projects. As key industries developed—from coal, steel, iron, and shale industries to chemical, glass, ceramics factories, and transportation—so too did other facilities for Japanese colonists such as warehouses, hotels, schools, libraries, hospitals, and public utilities. Mantetsu, owned and operated jointly by

2 The largest contingent was the Chinese immigrants who numbered 30 million in 1930.

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the Japanese state and business, became the largest and most profitable Japanese corporation at that time, employing over 100,000 people. The Manchurian project was immensely profitable undoubtedly because Japan held the political power to seize property and silence opposition through connections to the totalitarian military leadership. Japanese administrators coerced Chinese and Korean farmers to sell their land in order to settle the Japanese agrarian emigrants. The Japanese emigrants, in turn, were promised free allotments of fertile land to farm, land that was supposed to yield vast riches. The Japanese in Manchuria, therefore, were people who moved to the continent with high hopes and aspirations for a kind of “Promised Land.” In the 1930s this “utopian” joint project of state, business, and agrarian emigration rendered what Louise Young (1998) calls a “total empire,” existing not only in the colony itself, but also imagined in the heart of metropolis Japan. Manchuria offered the lebensraum for surplus labor and new economic opportunities for a nation that aspired to become as rich and dominant as the Western powers. It was a foray that would last for 14 years, from 1932 to 1945.

Japan’s Agrarian Settlements in Manchuria, 1932–1945 Japan’s grand scheme to dominate Manchuria extended to a strategic disbursement of populations to rural areas. The colonial project thus recruited peasants from rural Japan to relocate to agrarian settlements in northern Manchuria. These pioneer-migrants (approximately 270,000 settlers) comprised 14% of the total Japanese population in Manchuria (2.5 million) at the time (Etemad 1998: 468; Young 1998: 411). They were impoverished but experienced farmers who were enticed to emigrate by guarantees of land and exemption from the draft. As in many settlement projects, the policy was intended to alleviate poverty in the homeland and exploit agricultural resources of the occupied territories. But in Manchuria, the policy was also intended to place human settlements in strategic locations for military defense near the Soviet border. Those settlements were to become a strategic buffer zone, and the settlers were to become the human shield against Japan’s foremost hypothetical enemy the Soviet Army (Koshiro 2013). In the end, these settlers were among the first to suffer furious assaults from the Red Army, assaults they would recount as a deep and bitter trauma. Despite extravagant promises, northern Manchuria turned out to be tough and arid terrain. The emigrant Japanese farmers found the actual

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hamlets so difficult to cultivate that they needed the help of the Chinese and Korean farmers they had displaced to obtain their knowledge of the local crops, climate, irrigation, and cultivation methods suitable for the terrain. Under these exploitative conditions, it is not surprising that the relations between colonist-settlers and local Manchurians were enormously fraught. The colonists exuded an “imperial consciousness” that presumed the locals to be inferior, dirty, and backward (Narita 2010: 260–264). They never intermarried with locals, and brides were recruited from the Japanese homeland to marry the men in the settlements (Yamamuro 1993: 355). A purist racial order placed the Japanese at the top, followed by the Koreans, the Chinese, and at the very bottom, the Manchurians. It was a racial hierarchy that represented both a chauvinistic ideology and a cover to conceal the equality of social class between Japanese and Chinese peasants (Young 1998).

Japan’s Loss of Colonial Empire and Flight from Manchuria, 1945 On August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union began its massive military assault on Manchuria after “suddenly” declaring war on Japan. It was an assault that came only three days after the Americans had dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and on the very day they dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki) and barely five days before Japan capitulated to the Allies by accepting the Potsdam Declaration. Despite their brief entry into the Asia-Pacific War, this Soviet involvement in the endgame had far-reaching consequences for the dismantling of Japan’s empire. While Japan’s military administrators had anticipated this contingency, the Japanese agrarian settlers residing along the border were blindsided by the Soviet attack (Koshiro 2013). Japan’s Kwantung Army chose to retreat in response to the attack, callously abandoning the civilians in their settlements. Thus, many settler-colonists, placed in the path of the Red Army by Japan’s master planners, were stranded with no military or police protection. Many paid for that scheme with their lives: of the 180,000 deaths of repatriates, 80,000 (45%) were agrarian settlers of Manchuria (Yamamuro 1993: 339; Young 1998). By the time the Soviet attacks began, the agrarian settlers were in no position to mount any resistance of their own since all men of working age had been mobilized to serve in the Japanese Army. The fleeing families consisted mostly of women, children, youth, and the elderly.

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Some families and village communes took their own lives in mass suicides, preferring death to being shamed at the hands of the Red Army. Those who escaped did so mostly on foot, enduring exhaustion, starvation, disease, robbery, and more. Some young women were raped or sacrificed by their compatriots to sexually placate the Soviet soldiers. Other young women married Chinese farmers for their survival. It was also not uncommon for babies or small children to be abandoned or sold to Chinese families. These accounts of families stranded in China during the escape would become widely known decades later when the stranded women and children finally returned home; they came to represent the public image of the hikiage (Sakabe 2008; Tamanoi 2009: 64). All in all, the repatriates from Manchuria—whether they returned early or late—suffered a great deal of hardship and experienced a profound trauma stemming from their betrayal, abandonment, guilt, and shame, and they carried it all through their later years. These experiences would also engender a strong sense of having been victimized by the Japanese state and military that betrayed and abandoned them, the Soviet Army who assaulted them, and the Chinese inhabitants who took revenge on them. On their return, the repatriates from rural Manchuria found themselves unwelcome in their homeland where they were often humiliated and regarded with suspicion (Watt 2009). Those from “backward” regions like rural China, unlike those from urban Taiwan or Korea, were considered unhygienic and contaminated. When they disembarked in Japanese ports, they were deloused and quarantined on suspicion of being diseased and constituting public health hazards. Women repatriated from the continent were suspected of being loose and polluted and were presumed to have been violated by Soviet soldiers. The social impetus was to marginalize those repatriates as downtrodden misfits who were poor, dirty, and uneducated—the very terms of opprobrium the repatriates-as-colonizers had applied to the colonized local population. Their degradation from prosperous colonists who had enjoyed privileged lives on the continent to poverty-stricken refugees who lost everything would remain a deep source of resentment for decades (Tamanoi 2009).

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The Heterogeneous Narratives of Cultural Trauma, 1950s–1970s The elites connected to the Mantetsu conglomerate and the peasant migrants in the rural settlements took different paths to postwar repatriation and social mobility. As colonists they had experienced Manchuria from different vantage points, so after their return they also harbored different sentiments for the failed Manchurian project. The elites experienced Manchuria as sojourners with a foothold in the homeland and were well-positioned to rebuild their lives and careers on their return. By contrast, workers and peasants who experienced Manchuria as emigrants found themselves with limited choices for work and few social connections with which to rebuild their lives in the homeland. These circumstances meant that they espoused regrets, nostalgia, grief, and anger in different measures. While some continued to see themselves as heroes who had fearlessly ventured overseas to aid a poor country, others saw themselves as abandoned victims who had lost everything in the colony and endured unspeakable trauma. Still others candidly saw themselves as the perpetrators of an unjust colonization project, one that they were complicit in carrying out (Hashimoto 2015). These different views would, at different times over the decades, eclipse one another in postwar Japan. The dominant narrative of the repatriates today assumes the victim perspective, a perspective consonant with the larger victim narrative of Japan’s war memory. In the immediate postwar years, the repatriate narratives were circumscribed and subject to censorship. The American occupation (1945–1952) banned accounts that were critical of the United States and its Allies in the media, arts, politics, and religion (Dower 1999: 411). In this milieu, accounts of the colonists’ lives, flight, and starting over focused selectively on the flight portion, such as Fujiwara Tei’s Nagareru hoshiwa ikiteiru (A Memoir of the End of War and Beginning of Peace, 1949), a bestseller that chronicled the author’s harrowing escape from Manchuria with three small children and her return to the homeland barely alive. Reproduced as a feature film (1949), her story would become well known in the popular culture and set the trajectory for the “harrowing escape” (colonist=victim) genre in Japan’s repatriation literature.

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Defining Repatriates as Victims: Compensation Claims in the 1950s and 1960s On returning to the homeland, Japanese repatriates from the former colonies organized themselves into numerous groups that helped them rebuild their lives and gain a footing in the postwar economy. An early organization for repatriates was called Zenren, the National Federation of Repatriate Groups (Hikiagesha Dantai Zenkoku Rengokai), and it leveraged the repatriates’ collective electoral strength—3 million votes—in their negotiation for reparations from the government. As a result, state reparations materialized in two phases—1957 and 1967—and shifted the official definition of “repatriates” along the way. While repatriates in the first phase (1957) were considered indigent persons in need of welfare support for rehabilitation, by the second phase (1967) they were understood to be persons of any income level who deserved official recognition for their service and their losses overseas, losses that were pointedly blamed on the implementation of state policy. Therefore, twenty years after decolonization, the government conceded that the repatriates should be designated as victims of national policy. As a result, the repatriates’ claims became a political rather than a welfare matter (Orr 2001: 139, 150, 175; Watt 2009: 14, 177). This shift in the repatriates’ status owed much to Zenren’s ability to apply political pressure and develop a strong pipeline to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that governed throughout the postwar decades. Ultimately, Zenren prevailed in claiming that the Japanese government was culpable of negligence in involving its citizens in a disastrous war and that it was morally responsible for the repatriates’ losses (Orr 2001: 162). However, their claim neither referred to Japan’s culpability as a colonial power, nor recognized that the repatriates’ material losses were part of a bungled process of decolonization. In the realm of state compensation, therefore, repatriates were now recognized as sufferers from war and defeat rather than participants in (de)colonization per se. As Japan’s former antagonists in the communist bloc were outside the realm of decolonization discourse at the time, it was quite feasible for Japan to designate the former colonists as “victims” without international repercussions.

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The Colonists as Heroes: The Memoirs of Repatriate Elites in the 1950s and 1960s The elite returnees reentered mainland Japanese society in positions of greater power than those of the agrarian settlers. After lying low during the U.S. occupation, these elites resurfaced readily in public life as the occupation and purge came to an end in 1952. Thereafter, through the 1960s, many of these elites were recruited to the task of reconstructing Japan’s government and businesses and to leading the postwar economic recovery. As often happens in defeated nations, the well-established circle of educated elites in prewar Japan played a key role in postwar reconstruction, and that included the elite who returned from Manchuria. For example, former Mantetsu staff came back from Manchuria with crucial skills to devise, implement, and oversee large-scale economic plans that were critical in organizing and fueling the accelerated industrial development in Japan. Business elites who had been the driving force of Manchuria’s economic boom now entered key positions in Japanese politics, ministries, and businesses and drew on their colonial experience in managing strategic industries to help lay the foundation of Japan’s double-digit economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s (Kobayashi 2005; Young 1998). Some have observed that the network of old Manchuria hands—in government, bureaucracies, businesses, universities, and the judiciary—seemed to redirect their ambition for the “Manchurian dream” to Japan’s postwar reconstruction (Kobayashi 2005). Their memories of the failed Manchurian project seemed infused with regret not for wrongful colonial domination, but for the loss of a utopia that might have been. Kishi Nobusuke, the architect of Mantetsu’s industrial planning in the 1930s (who subsequently became Japan’s Prime Minister in the late 1950s), articulated this sentiment of a lost utopia in 1960: [We carried out] a rightful, extraordinary project of modern nation building, aspiring to achieve the shining ideals of unifying the [Asian] races and building a utopia (minzoku ky¯ owa and ¯ od¯ orakudo). People espoused great hopes and devoted fervent passion, with the support of both Japanese and Manchurians. … Manchuria was the hope of all Asia.3 (Kobayashi 2005: 159)

3 Kishi Nobusuke is the maternal grandfather of Japan’s current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.

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In the same vein, Hoshino Naoki, the former secretary of state council in Manchuria and a member of the T¯oj¯o administration—who was subsequently indicted as a Class A war criminal (and later became a successful business leader)—claimed that their colonial administration was fair, noble, and just: Under Japan’s leadership, and supported broadly by the people of East Asia, [Manchuria’s] blessings and fruits of development were distributed equitably to all races. Japanese youth came to Manchuria eagerly to build a paradise. Their passion, devotion, and diligence will be remembered proudly and forever by the Japanese people. (Kobayashi 2005: 159)

It was perhaps not surprising, then, that the elites who led the colonization in Manchuria would build on these heroic memories to advance their postwar careers. Colonists as Perpetrators: Epic Novels and Films About Manchuria in the 1950s and 1960s Around the same time, a generation of veterans and survivors began writing about their experiences of colonization, war, and escape from Manchuria, rendering them into epic stories popularized in public culture. These soulsearching, semi-autobiographical stories sold phenomenally well among postwar readers starved for firsthand accounts. One of them was Gomikawa Junpei’s The Human Condition (1958),4 a six-part novel about the fate of an idealistic Japanese colonist in Manchuria. This work is a classic and the most compelling account of the Japanese occupation. It sold 2.4 million copies within a few years of publication and was reproduced almost instantly as a major film trilogy (1959–1962). Deeply critical of the war and colonization of Manchuria, the novel represents the author’s belief that any sense of integrity and righteousness is doomed in a military empire that renders everyone complicit in its oppression. It traces the protagonist Kaji’s ill-fated life journey from being a conscientious, humanitarian labor supervisor determined to do good for his Chinese subordinates to a broken-hearted soldier who is defeated in his hapless resistance against the brutal military war machine. The story resonated with millions of readers and moviegoers, perhaps articulating their 4 Gomikawa, Junpei. Ningen no joken 1958 (1978). Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo.

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doubt that good ever triumphs over evil in an unjust war. It was a war, moreover, to which they had acquiesced, themselves. It is not surprising, then, that the protagonists of the story are multidimensional characters. They are portrayed as perpetrators in Japan’s colonization, acquiescing to the brutal exploitation and violence of Japanese imperialism; compassionate heroes who shielded Chinese laborers from torture; and at the same time, victims who ultimately lost everything, crushed by the military state (Orr 2001: 116–129). For authors like Gomikawa, colonial Manchuria had been seen up close and personal. He was born and raised there, and he also served in the Kwantung Army. Gomikawa’s probe into the complexities of politically irresponsible behavior in the colony was based on firsthand experience. While The Human Condition directly addressed the questions of Japanese complicity in an unjust war, its program of colonization, and its subsequent moral breakdown, not all epic novels did so. Abe K¯ ob¯o’s Wild Beasts Seek Home (1957), for example, questioned colonization only indirectly, as a problem of moral and social identity for people who fled from it (Watt 2009: 151). Victims of Decolonization: Memorials of Manchurian Settlements in the 1960s and 1970s In the next decade, the repatriates from Manchuria began to build memorials to commemorate their ill-fated settlements. For the most part, they articulated their collective sense of pride and loss, as well as their individual trauma, while remaining less sanguine about the colonization that preceded it. Their experiences of displacement and loss were undoubtedly tragic and fed into their enhanced sense of victimization. In their view, it was the Japanese state that had been most duplicitous, misguiding them to migrate to the settlements then abandoning them without protection as they were set upon by their enemies. This sentiment of cultural trauma was etched in the cenotaphs of the memorials. Of the 52 cenotaphs surveyed in central Japan (where many returnees resettled), most (n = 32) describe the settlements as innocent ventures promoted by government policy, ventures the émigrés faithfully carried out (Sakabe 2008: 109). In the cenotaph inscriptions, the colonization and decolonization of Manchuria are not explained; it is as if the repatriates’ adversities fell from nowhere (Young 1998: 411). In any case, the memorials focus on loss, especially the death of half of all settlers.

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Repatriated Heroes in Epic Novels: The Barren Zone (1973, 1976, 1979 and 2009) Military officers who waged the lost war with China also had their stories of repatriation told in popular culture. The 1970s saw the emergence of epic novels that served to rehabilitate disgraced military elites who were responsible for the war strategies. In their fictive reincarnation, these individuals are depicted as tenacious, principled, and patriotic men who had dedicated the best years of their lives to the empire, and who had then redirected their considerable talents to national recovery. One such drama was Yamasaki Toyoko’s Barren Zone (1973),5 a four-part novel that sold 4.5 million copies and was turned into popular feature films in 1976, 1979, and 2009. It is a story of a brilliant, tough, and loyal former military officer Iki who returned to Japan after being held captive as POW for 11 years in torturous Soviet labor camps. On his return to the homeland, he devotes himself selflessly to rebuilding Japan’s industries in the cutthroat world of international trading. Repatriate stories such as The Barren Zone paralleled Japan’s ongoing economic recovery in the popular imagination at the time. The nation had invested a great deal into training military elites to become expert strategists, and now the payoff was to be reaped through their pivotal leadership during Japan’s postwar economic growth. It is not an overstatement to say that it sanitized the colonial, military past by showing the protagonists defeat a new set of enemies in the new war called international trade. The soldiers who returned from captivity in Soviet labor camps or Manchuria far outnumbered the returning agrarian-settlers. As many as 600,000 men were sent to Siberia, and of them, 60,000 died (Yamamuro 1993: 370, 385). But as we will see in the next section, the narratives of POWs would, over time, be eclipsed by the narratives of colonist-settlers in the public memory of Manchuria. Next, I illustrate the crucial trauma drama of the 1980s and 1990s that reshaped the trauma narrative of Manchuria, which in turn would eclipse the colonial legacy, itself.

5 Yamasaki Toyoko. 2009. Fum¯ ochitai [The Barren Zone], vols. 1–5. Tokyo: Shinch¯osha Publishers.

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The Trauma Drama of Repatriation: Coalescing Victim Narratives in the 1980s–2010s The story of Manchuria that captured the national attention in the 1980s and 1990s was about a large group of Japanese from the former colonial settlements in northern China who as children had been stranded during their escape in 1945. These two thousand small children and young girls were adopted by, sold to, or married into Chinese families, often under difficult and harsh conditions. They were stranded with no prospect of return to Japan until diplomatic relations between the two countries normalized in 1972 and the Treaty of Peace and Friendship finally concluded in 1978. Now in their middle age, many were determined to reunite with their Japanese families and visited Japan in organized groups to search for their relatives. In this section I illustrate the drama surrounding the returning orphans as a turning point in the public image of colonial repatriation and consider its social consequences. These orphans’ stories would have a large influence in shaping the public consciousness that Japan’s defeat/decolonization was still an unfinished business. Then in subsequent decades, the orphans’ stories would come to eclipse both the stories of patriotic heroes and those of colonial perpetrators in representing the face of Manchuria’s legacy. The Trauma Drama of Orphans Left in China: The Visible Victims of the 1980s and 1990s Raised and living in China for 40 years, the orphans spoke only Chinese, had assimilated to Chinese ways of thinking, and had become culturally Chinese (Watt 2009: 184–185). Now in their middle age, many wanted to reunite with their Japanese families and visited Japan in groups to search for their relatives. There would be more than 30 such delegations visiting from China over a twenty-year span in the 1980s and 1990s. These extraordinary visits were highly publicized as government projects. National newspapers devoted entire pages to the orphans—disseminating pictures, identifying physical markers, providing information about where they were lost, and any available memories that the orphans had of their original families—to help locate their relatives. Television news and features publicized both the dramatic reunions and the disappointments of mistaken identities. Often during these segments there was not a

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dry eye in the newsrooms. These compelling stories of families torn asunder were sensationalized through national headlines for weeks and months, and thereby etched in public memory. The “return” of these orphans and women searching for their long-lost family shocked many who had been largely unaware of the thousands left behind in Manchuria. The stories were gripping not only because of the tragic twists of fate for the individuals, but also because they provoked questions about what the Japanese had done in the past and who they had become today. These stories of orphans and young girls revealed that the Japanese army had mercilessly and undeniably abandoned the Manchuria settlers in retreat and that the settlers, as a result, endured unspeakable hardships in their unassisted efforts to escape, mostly on foot and without any food or supplies. A new generation of Japanese people at home learned also that in dire straits it was not uncommon for settler groups to commit mass suicides rather than risk capture or violent abuse. The escaping colonist-settlers, in turn, would abandon or sell their own children, while marrying off young girls to Chinese farmers for survival. These stories of broken families and crude acts of self-preservation called into question the collective sense of loyalty, decency, duty, national identity, healing, and belonging that had come to be taken for granted in the affluent postwar society. The social drama of returning orphans had become not only a symbolic representation of the war’s tragedy, but also a question of moral responsibility raised at the national level—of Japan’s military, emigrants, adoptive parents, and postcolonial Manchuria. As we will see in the following pages, many orphans relocated to Japan after their visits, but adaptation to the homeland has proven difficult. Today, many remain unemployed or are forced to rely on welfare, harkening back to the predicament of the early repatriates in the 1950s (Araragi 2009, 2013; Ide 2004). Extending the Victim Narrative of Repatriation: Epic Novels and Films in the 1990s Around the same time, Yamasaki Toyoko—who had penned the popular The Barren Zone in the 1970s—now returned to the center of the repatriate discourse by publishing a monthly serial and bestselling four-part

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novel called Child of the Continent (1988–1989, 1991, 1994).6 It is a story about a Japanese orphan raised in Manchuria. The brilliant Yamasaki, arguably Japan’s answer to James Michener with his formidable talents for breathing life into history, tells the story of Matsumoto/Lu, a child separated from his colonist-settler family in the confusion at the end of the war (Watt 2009: 163). This protagonist grew up to be an engineer in northern China after much hardship, having been nurtured by kind Chinese parents who raised him as their own. The story takes Matsumoto/Lu through the dramatic trials and tribulations of the Cultural Revolution, deception, punishment, and harassment for being Japanese in postwar and post-revolutionary China. Bright, tough, and persevering, the protagonist overcomes these hardships with tenacity and tact. But as the plot develops, he must finally decide between his love for his adoptive parents in China and his biological father in Japan and choose where he belongs. The popularity of Child of the Continent reached an all-time high in 1995 when it was shown on television as a seven-part mini-series for the 50th anniversary of the end of war. As the curious audience pined to find out which country the protagonist would finally choose as his own, the last episodes of Child of the Continent garnered extraordinary ratings that reached 20%. Juxtaposing the generosity of Chinese adoptive parents with the total collapse of Japanese colonies, the moral lessons of this story raised high hopes for reconciliation in Sino-Japan relations. Extending the Memories of Suffering: The Personal Testimonies of Repatriates, 1980s–2010s While the social drama of Manchuria’s orphans unfolded in the popular media, early repatriates also began writing about their war experiences, abetted by a burgeoning oral history movement. These memoirs of the aging repatriates were meant for the next generation and succeeded in reaching a general audience through newspaper columns, monthlies, and collected volumes that were made available in libraries and archives (Hashimoto 2015). These testimonies of the early repatriates testify to their lingering sense cultural trauma. Their accounts of the return journey are vivid and candid: being robbed by “Manchurian bandits” or saved by “local Chinese 6 Yamasaki Toyoko. 1994. Daichi no ko [Child of the Continent], vols. 1–4. Tokyo: Bungei shunj¯u Publishers.

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farmers”; witnessing group suicides in which women and children killed themselves with cyanide; being betrayed and abandoned by the Kwantung Army; witnessing rapes, injury, and deaths; suffering from diseases (typhoid, measles, dysentery, diphtheria, cholera, and tuberculosis); and separated from family members (Tamanoi 2009: 64). An annual collection of personal memories called Testimonies for Our Grandchildren (1987–2017)7 —which regularly devotes a special section to the hikiage experience—is typical of this genre. Over the last thirty years, most entries in this section of the series have been devoted to refugees’ flights from China and Korea. A few trends stand out in this “harrowing escape” genre: (1) The entries tend to focus on the repatriates’ the experiences of August 9, 1945 and the aftermath, while referring only cryptically to the prior life of colonial privilege; (2) This focus on personal experience and their own suffering—their exposure to danger, death, disease, and betrayal for self-preservation—eclipses their culpability as enablers of imperial domination and implies an “instant decolonization” (Conrad 2014); and (3) Their suffering is blamed on three villains: the invading Soviet soldiers who assaulted the settlements, the “Manchurian bandits” preying on fleeing Japanese colonist-settlers, and the callous Japanese Kwangtung Army who abandoned them. The first two appear as perpetrators of violent assaults such as robbery, rape, mobbing, mugging, lynching, and murders. The last villain, the Japanese military, appears as “shadow” perpetrators who cruelly betrayed the emigrants (Hashimoto 2015). For example: …[Manchuria] was a wonderful place with lush green around the lake. Our father’s agricultural work was going well, and my brother and I spent happy days fishing. Then in August 1945, the Soviet Army invaded, and our life turned upside down…. But the Kwantung Army abandoned us as they retreated, so our roads were now controlled by the Soviet Army. (2009: volume 22: 119) Manchuria collapsed from the futile, useless war. Citizens who emigrated there believing in the state colonial policy were thrust into a miserable fate. I feel for the repatriates from Manchuria, especially the settlers who escaped northern Manchuria. These people were abandoned by the commanders responsible for security, the Kwantung Army. … I am living witness to that ruthless, callous abandonment. (2009: volume 22: 102)

7 Fukuyama Takuya. 1987–2017. Magotachi e no Shogen [Testimonies for our Grandchildren]. Osaka: Shinp¯u Shob¯o.

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At the station, we pushed and shoved to get on the overcrowded train…I couldn’t stop crying from fear and relief…. But we were stranded … when trains to Changchun were bombarded. In all the heat and tension, people yelled at crying babies…. In Changchun, we stayed in empty houses left by evacuees, so we had a roof over our heads. But as fall set in, the daily diet of porridge and pickled vegetables took its toll; many died from malnutrition and sickness. My children Kumiko and Hisako died…. (2009: volume 22: 165)

None of these testimonies offer a heroic image of colonialism, even if narrators do describe some nostalgia for their old “home.” However, many still carry an imperial consciousness about their colonial life, especially in making racialized references to the local inhabitants. For them, repatriate life was marked with hardship and stigma; they typically also end their testimonies with a vow never to go to war again. Beneath those formulaic vows, however, are suggestions of anger and resentment toward the state that waged a losing war and lost the empire. Institutionalizing Cultural Trauma: Repatriation Memorial Museums in the 2000s In 2000, a nationally funded memorial museum for soldiers, detainees in Siberia, and postwar repatriates opened its permanent exhibit in central Tokyo.8 Years in the making, the facility was established as a repository of war memory, particularly for unpensioned veterans, returning POWs, and repatriates from the continent. In this museum, colonists, emigrantsettlers, veterans, and incarcerated POWs are represented as a relatively homogeneous hikiage group whose wretched experience is displayed so that future generations could “remember the misery of war” (The Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation, n.d.). The display consists of dramatic renderings of people packed in trains, displacement centers, and evacuation ships. It also presents artifacts such as tattered clothes, meager possessions, ration cards, certificates of repatriation, and other ephemera that document the dislocation and distresses of evacuees in the 1940s. But any documentation of Japan’s imperial expansion that precipitated the “misery of war” is hardly visible, any more than

8 The facility is officially called Exhibition and Reference Library for Peace and Consolation [Heiwa kinen tenji shiry¯okan]. http://www.heiwakinen.jp/english/index.html.

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the traces of occupation and colonization in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. In the decades leading up to the establishment of this national museum, regional memorials and other museums of repatriation had been established in cities such as Maizuru, Sasebo, Kure, and Hakata, cities that served as ports of disembarkation for the returnees.9 By institutionalizing repatriate history in these facilities, the state had begun to shift its stance from paying compensation and recognizing the suffering, to bringing closure (Watt 2009: 178, 184). As some observers point out, the nationalization of undifferentiated repatriate memories also served to obscure the imperial prelude to this history (Narita 2010: 261). Notwithstanding the emergence of these memorial museums, the repatriates’ story would never become the most dominant victim narrative of the war in national memory. That status undeniably belonged to the erstwhile residents of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the hundreds of thousands who were fire-bombed in the homeland by the U.S. military. The latter was the pre-eminent national cultural trauma, experienced by millions of people, documented in countless photos, described prominently in textbooks, and visited by children on school trips. Compared to these catastrophes in the homeland, Manchuria was across the sea, tucked in the far corner of a communist country that people had no relationship to. The repatriates did not rank particularly high in the hierarchy of victims in postwar Japan. Manchuria Reconsidered: Questions by the Postwar Generation in the 2000s Pushback against the dominant victim narrative of Manchuria came from an unexpected source during the politically turbulent 2000s. At a time when Japan’s war memory problem was thrust onto political center stage

9 Maizuru city established the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum [Maizuru hikiage kinenkan] in 1988 along the harbor where the Imperial Navy had operated one of its largest ports. Around 660,000 people disembarked here on their return from China, Korea, the Soviet Union and other places between 1945 and 1958. Renovated in 2015 for the 70th anniversary of the end of war, the port and the memorial park (originally opened in 1970) have been designated in UNESCO’s Memory of World Registry. https://m-hikiage-museum. jp/index.html. Other ports of disembarkation for repatriates also built memorial museums in the 1980s, such as the Uragashira Hikiage Peace Park and the Memorial Museum [Uragashira hikiage kinen heiwa k¯oen/shiry¯okan] in Sasebo, Nagasaki in 1986. https://www.city.sasebo. lg.jp/siminseikatu/simian/uragashira.html.

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amid deteriorating relations with China and the Koreas (Hashimoto 2015), a popular manga (comic) artist of the postwar generation, Motomiya Hiroshi, began a graphic novel series on Manchuria called The Country Burns.10 It was an epic historical drama that offered a serious social commentary on Japan’s history of aggression in Manchuria, framed in terms of Japan’s greed and rural poverty of the 1930s. The protagonist Honda is an elite bureaucrat at the Ministry of Trade who goes to Manchuria on an assignment for Mantetsu, then dedicates his career to developing the colonist-settlements. Just like the ill-fated protagonist of The Human Condition, Honda is a well-intentioned, idealistic Japanese colonist and a humanist devoted to helping the emigrant-peasants realize their dreams in Manchuria. In volume after volume, Honda clashes with the sinister, greedy colonial upper brass, and against all odds tries to win resources to improve the conditions of the settlers. But Motomiya’s ambitious attempt to explore questions about Japan’s colonization of Manchuria came to a sudden end when his publisher canceled the series half way through the plot (Telegraph 2004). Although the original plan was to cover the entire Manchurian enterprise from nation building to its collapse and repatriation, The Country Burns ended abruptly when the colonist-settlements had just taken off in the late 1930s. The publisher had pulled the plug when the series was caught up in a furor over some errors in illustrating the Nanking Massacre. In the wake of Iris Chang’s controversial indictment of the Japanese military in her bestselling book on the topic, the radical right was in no mood to forgive Motomiya’s oversight. Thus, The Country Burns became a casualty of political pressure from the neo-nationalist media, which aggressively sought to thwart any debate that showed the Japanese military in a negative light. Few artists have since ventured into social commentary or tackled political topics that provoke public discussion (Hashimoto 2015).11 Although over a dozen famous manga artists have written about their childhood in Manchuria, their commentaries have generally remained nostalgic, antiwar, and hardly critical of colonialism (Akatsuka et al. 1995).12

10 Motomiya Hiroshi. 2003. Kuniga moeru [The Country Burns]. Tokyo: Sh¯ ueisha. 11 The exceptions are Kobayashi Yoshinori and Kariya Tetsu. 12 Akatsuka Fujio et al. 1995. Bokuno mansh¯ u – mangakatachino haisen keiken [My Manchuria – Manga Artists’ Experiences of Defeat]. Tokyo: Aki Shob¯ o.

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Looking for Closure: Litigation by the Returnees from China in the 2000s and 2010s In the meantime, the state’s relationship with the returnees from China began to sour as the feel-good story of the “good return” unraveled. In fact, their resettlement in Japan proved complicated and difficult. Most returnees brought their children, grandchildren, and Chinese relatives to resettle in Japan, thus swelling the number of people that needed accommodation. Typically, returnee families did not speak or write Japanese, which relegated them to the ranks of unskilled laborers with low pay. They encountered serious challenges in adapting to the new environment that was, for them, a completely foreign country. Many relied on welfare; indeed 70% of the returnees and their families lived below the poverty line. ¯ However, public support proved fickle (Okubo 2009a: 288). Some young members of the families refused to integrate and settled into a pattern of anti-social behavior. The public’s sympathy began to erode when news of “fake” returnees swindling welfare checks spread through the media (Araragi 2009). In this environment, the aging returnees decided to join forces in starting a reparation movement and sued the government to attain social security and health care beyond welfare benefits. As many as 90% of the returnees participated in this movement, claiming that they merited special status as victims of state negligence and abandonment (Ide 2008: 206). After a series of complicated litigations, they reached a settlement in 2007 when new legislation granted them more financial assistance and health insurance (Ide 2008: 205–208). No longer designated “orphans,” the returnees and their families were now treated as “foreign migrants” (Watt 2009: 187–188). Carrying the Torch: The Second Generation of Returnees in the 2000s and 2010s The reparation movement of the 2000s was supported by a new generation of civic-minded Japanese supporters and volunteers who forged an active ¯ social network (Araragi 2009: 36–38; Okubo 2009b: 367–368). One of the new voices to emerge was a widely acclaimed, bestselling non-fiction work called Far Away from the War (2007, 2009, 2012),13 a book written by 13 Kido Hisae. 2007, 2009, 2012. Ano sens¯ o kara t¯ oku hanarete: Watashi ni tsunagaru rekishi o tadoru tabi [Far Away from the War]. Tokyo: Bunshun Bunko.

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Kido Hisae, the daughter of a returnee from China. The author’s authentic account of ambivalent dual identity and the strained family ties with her returnee father won accolades and awards, and as a popular television miniseries succeeded in raising public awareness about the challenges of being a returnee. Kido wrote about her journey to embrace her father’s dual family history, as well as her and her father’s feelings about the Chinese through all the political challenges of communist education, bureaucracy, and the Cultural Revolution. She travels to China to retrace her father’s childhood as an orphan growing up in Manchuria, his good relationships with his adoptive parents, and his bad experiences of being harassed and discriminated as Japanese. He had managed through sheer determination to locate his family in Japan and made a miraculous return in the 1970s. Kido’s story also added a candid account of her father’s strained relationship with his biological father who had been a career officer of the Japanese Army in Manchuria. Far Away from the War offers a rare insider’s view of a returnee’s life with all its attendant complexities, and it succeeded in demystifying the returnees’ experiences for its Japanese audience. In her personal, nonfiction accounts, Kido’s insights are deeply persuasive: there is no happy ending to the “good return.” The second generation, like Kido, will continue to carry the torch, to speak on behalf of the aging returnees who find their homeland to be cold and unwelcoming.

Conclusion As we have seen, many different narratives of decolonization and repatriation emerged in Japan over the postwar decades. In broad strokes, they can be classified into three categories: Japanese repatriates as heroes, victims, or perpetrators. These narratives co-existed, competed, contradicted, overlapped, and eclipsed one another, recounting the past from different perspectives (Hashimoto 2015). Over time, it was the victims’ narratives that came to supersede the others in representing the face of the repatriation experience and in shaping the institutional memory of repatriation. Along the way, the repatriates’ “harrowing escape” became the chosen memory integrated into the larger cultural trauma of Japan’s war and defeat. This representation of repatriates as victims of Japan’s imperial war also complemented the foundational narrative of postwar Japan. Insofar as this foundational narrative emphasized Japan’s defeat as the tragic referent of

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postwar identity, it was the memory of suffering that was most congruent with the re-narration of the nation’s collective identity. As the stories of repatriates’ suffering were told and retold in the popular media, they blended seamlessly with the stories of other victims’ suffering—such as the atomic bomb survivors, the air raid survivors, the homeless and displaced, the injured and disabled—and helped to motivate the national recovery from a disastrous national collapse. As Eyerman and Sciortino (Introduction) suggests, how we remember the repatriates’ trauma is deeply intertwined with the cultural work of re-narrating the nation in postcolonial times. Japan’s trauma narrative of the failed war and national collapse comprises an array of victim groups, but they do not all carry the same symbolic weight. Japanese children learn in school that remembering the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an eternal moral responsibility, but the same does not apply to the victims of Manchuria. The imperial era depicted in textbooks emphasizes the utter destruction caused by the atomic bombings and air raids more than the aggressive colonial legacy.14 The nuclear destruction and victimization are directly linked to the nation’s pacifist identity today, universalized and elevated to global significance, but the failed imperial project evokes no profound meaning except as an unwelcome reminder of national disgrace. The public memory of Manchuria, therefore, does not suture the national past and present to a coherent story of collective identity. Scholars of Japan’s decolonization have pointed to the many failures of resolution that have had significant implications for the East Asia region (Koshiro 2013; Yoneyama 2016). Current territorial disputes with China, South Korea, and Russia, for example, originate directly in such failures of postcolonial settlements. Compensation claims for Asian forced laborers in imperial Japan and the comfort women have, far from fading away with time, intensified since the 1990s. As we have seen in this chapter, possible resolutions for these and other unfinished business of empire had been mostly frozen in time during the Cold War structure that shaped the

14 Coverage of the Manchurian legacy in recent history textbooks includes Japan’s military

occupation, the puppet state Manchukuo, the emigration of pioneer-settlers, the biological experimental unit 731, the abandonment of settler families, as well as the postwar incarceration of the Kwangtung Army soldiers in Siberia. This coverage is less prominent than what children learn about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the air raids of Tokyo and other cities, as well as the Battle of Okinawa.

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political contours of the region. These conditions, in turn, had also significantly circumscribed the trauma narratives of repatriation that emerged in postwar Japan. At the same time, we have yet to see the emergence of significant trauma narratives from the Chinese inhabitants and the descendants of former Manchukuo. What we know of the way the Japanese occupation is commemorated in former Manchuria seems to evolve on three fronts: memorializing the resistance fighters, preserving the sites of massacre, and establishing museums. However, such commemoration has been complicated by the fact that three different military forces (communist, nationalist, and Soviet) had occupied different parts of Manchuria until the Chinese revolution in 1949. Telling stories about how people lived under Japanese occupation was also tricky during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, as they would come under suspicion of collaboration with the Japanese. Under these circumstances, few people volunteered information (Sakabe 2008: 137–167). Without a sense of definite closure, it is possible that Chinese trauma narratives of Manchuria will emerge in the coming decades. An emergence of such narratives of painful history would seem to depend on the state of geopolitics in Sino-Japan relations, and the efforts toward reconciliation. Japan’s reckoning with the failures of its colonial past will remain incomplete until these processes can be worked out.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Araragi, Shinzo. 2009. Kadaitoshiteno ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u nihonjin. In Ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u nihonjin toiu keiken: “Mansh¯ u” to nihon o toitsuzukete, ed. Shinzo Araragi, 17–70. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan. Araragi, Shinzo. 2013. Mansh¯ u hikiagesha no raifu historii kenky¯ u no kan¯ osei. In Sens¯ o shakaigaku no k¯ os¯ o: Seido taiken media, ed. Y. Fukuma, 139–171. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan. Conrad, Sebastian. 2014. The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan. Comparative Studies in Society and History 56: 4–33. Dower, J. W. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Etemad, Bouda. 1998. Europe and Migration After Decolonisation. Journal of European Economic History 27: 457–470. Eyerman, Ron. 2004. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jefferey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 60–111. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eyerman, Ron. 2008. The Assassination of Theo van Gogh: From Social Drama to Cultural Trauma. Durham: Duke University Press. Hashimoto, Akiko. 2015. The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan. New York: Oxford University Press. Ide, Magoroku. 2004. Owarinaki tabi: “Ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u koji” no rekishi to genzai. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Ide, Magoroku. 2008. Ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u h¯ ojin: Okisarareta 60yonen. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kobayashi, Hideo. 2005. Mansh¯ u to jimint¯ o. Tokyo: Shinch¯osha. Koshiro, Yukiko. 2013. Imperial Eclipse: Japan’s Strategic Thinking About Continental Asia Before August 1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Narita, Ry¯ uichi. 2010. “Sens¯ o keiken” no sengoshi: Katarareta taiken/sh¯ ogen/kioku. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ¯ Okubo, Akio. 2009a. ‘Ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u koji’ no imeji to hy¯ osh¯ o. In Ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u nihonjin toiu keiken: “Mansh¯ u” to nihon o toitsuzukete, ed. Shinzo Araragi, 353–369. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan. ¯ Okubo, Maki. 2009b. Ch¯ ugoku kikokusha to kokka baish¯o seiky¯ u sh¯ udan sosh¯o. In Ch¯ ugoku zanry¯ u nihonjin toiu keiken: “Mansh¯ u” to nihon o toitsuzukete, ed. Shinzo Araragi, 285–315. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan. Orr, James. 2001. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Public Foundation for Peace and Consolation. n.d. Exhibition and Reference Library for Peace and Consolation: Remembering the Misery of War. Tokyo. Saito, Hiro. 2006. Reiterated Commemoration: Hiroshima as National Trauma. Sociological Theory 24 (4): 353–376. Sakabe, Sh¯ oko. 2008. “Mansh¯ u” keiken no shakaigaku: Shokuminchi no kioku no katachi. Tokyo: Sekaishis¯osha. Smelser, Neil J. 2004. Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jefferey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 31–59. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tamanoi, Mariko. 2009. Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. The Telegraph. 2004. Comic Bows to Japan’s Nationalists. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/12/wcomic12.xml&sSheet= /news/2004/11/12/ixworld.html.

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Watt, Lori. 2009. When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Yamamuro, Shin’ichi. 1993. Kimera: Mansh¯ ukoku no sh¯ oz¯ o. Tokyo: Ch¯ uo¯ k¯ oronsha. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham: Duke University Press. Young, Louise. 1998. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 4

Trauma and the Last Dutch War in Indonesia, 1945–1949 Gert Oostindie

Throughout the 1940s the Netherlands was at war and was thrice humiliated and defeated.1 Within a few days in early May 1940, Nazi Germany crushed the Dutch army and started a five-years’ occupation. Early in 1942, it took the Japanese only a few weeks to defeat the Dutch army in the Dutch East Indies and take control of the vast colony. And in spite of years of brutal warfare alongside protracted negotiations after the Japanese capitulation in 1945, the Dutch had to accept the independence of Indonesia in 1949.2 Neither this, nor the first round of postcolonial migrations to the 1 I am deeply grateful for the comments made on previous versions of this paper by

the participants in the Yale and Trento workshops, and especially to Ron Eyerman and Rémy Limpach for their critical reading of the last version of this paper. 2 Excluding Dutch New Guinea, which was only ceded in 1962. G. Oostindie (B) Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden (KITLV), Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_4

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Netherlands that accompanied “the loss of the Indies” had been seriously anticipated in the 1930s. All of this caused trauma at the collective and the individual level, both during these years and decades after. But as this chapter attests, there is little evidence that the various actors in this history produced coherent discourses of cultural trauma that resonated both inside and outside of their communities. Rather than experiencing cultural trauma over the ending of some 350 years of colonialism, Dutch society by and large seems to have moved quickly into a mode of glossing over their colonial past. First it was the unexpected legacies of colonialism that needed to be dealt with: decolonization and postcolonial migrations. While in the immediate post-World War II years cultural trauma was associated with the five years of Nazi occupation, it would take a half century longer before Dutch society hesitantly engaged in debates about its own past as an active agent of colonialism, and hence, racism.

Dutch Colonialism, Colonial Society and Decolonization Starting with high ambitions in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch colonial empire was literally all over the globe in the early modern period. After the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain confiscated a significant part of the empire, leaving the Dutch with some minor Caribbean colonies plus the archipelago that would eventually become the Republic of Indonesia, which today, with some 270 million, is the world’s fourth most populous nation. Whereas in earlier centuries the actual Dutch presence in the archipelago had been limited to specific economically attractive cities and regions, in the century after 1815, Dutch “pacification” policies ended up subjugating virtually all of the peoples of what became an embryonic Indonesian state. Pacification was a brutal affair. The 1825–1830 Java War possibly cost some 200,000 Indonesian casualties, and the Aceh Wars fought between 1873 and 1914 cost well over 100,000. In between these wars there were many other smaller colonial wars alongside an aggressive policy of coopting local aristocrats to accept the expansive colonial regime. Whoever or whatever stood in the way was removed in order to secure the stability and profitability of the colonial state. This, indeed, was classical colonialism and made the Dutch East Indies a massively profitable colony to the Dutch.

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Around 1900, an “ethical policy” was introduced akin to the French mission civilisatrice or British ideas about the white man’s burden. This turn did not detract from the foremost significance attached to the colony: its contribution to the Dutch economy. On the eve of World War II, many in the Netherlands still thought of the colony as “the cork that keeps our economy floating.” That claim was exaggerated, but surely the vested interest in the colony was serious. With the expansion of the colonial state came significant migration. A migration circuit emerged in which increasing numbers of Dutch and other Europeans settled in the colony to work in colonial businesses, the state bureaucracy, or the colonial army, while others returned home, possibly to enjoy the fruits of their colonial ventures even if many others ended up just as poor as they had been at the start of their colonial adventure. But what was “home,” really? Some of these repatriates were indeed firstgeneration settlers, but many others had a generations-long pedigree in the colony. The Indisch community that developed from the later nineteenth century onwards in cities such as The Hague—acquiring the epithet of “widow of the Indies”—was creolized to a degree that locals found remarkable, if not despicable. Colonial society was highly segregated and the colonial state secured the legal foundations of this segregation. The population was divided into three segments: European, Foreign Oriental, and Native. Whereas legislation in 1838 had bequeathed the entire population of Dutch citizenship, this was restricted soon after, in 1850/1854, to Europeans. The European share in the overall population was extremely low—below one percent. This segment consisted not only of first-generation immigrants and their immediate offspring, the so-called totoks , but also a majority of people of mixed European-Asian descent. Within the latter group, some came from families with roots dating back to the seventeenth century, whereas others had a pedigree in the colony of only two or three generations. This “IndoEuropean” group, often simply designated as Indo, was highly diverse in terms of class (income, education, command of Dutch), more so than the on average middle- or upper-class totok group. Consecutive governmental rulings (1854, 1892, 1910) defined all members of this group as Dutch citizens. This European group was mainly Christian, in a colony where 90% was Muslim. The unapologetically Eurocentric category of “Foreign Orientals” included Arabs, Indians, and most of all Chinese, both the large numbers of peranakan Chinese that had roots in the colony dating decades and

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even centuries back, and recent arrivals. Dutch citizenship was taken away from this group in 1892. Only the Japanese were subsequently “promoted” to the category of Europeans (1899). In 1910, the remaining Foreign Orientals were collectively designated as Dutch subjects, but not Dutch citizens. Within the category of Foreign Orientals, apart from ethnic divisions, there were again major class divisions. The final category of Natives (Inlanders ) included the overwhelming majority of the population, and an ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and of course geographically highly diverse one at that. Islam was one cultural element shared by the greater majority. Also, most of them were poor, even desperately so, and politically powerless. But within this category, we also find sometimes extremely rich local aristocracies that could wield considerable local power as long as they did not obstruct colonial policies. Like the Foreign Orientals, the Natives were explicitly denied Dutch citizenship after 1854—they were subjects, not citizens. This legal compartmentalization of colonial society—even if it allowed for some fluidity in practice—corresponded with a broader policy of imposing difference, a policy that would deeply influence both decolonization and postcolonial migrations. The entire educational system was organized along ethnic lines, with the range and quality of schools varying with the targeted segment. Here the picture becomes a bit more fluid again, even fuzzy. The overwhelming majority of the population received very little formal education in the first place, and nothing in the Dutch language. The colonial state organized Dutch-language primary education for the European population, but in the early twentieth century also agreed to the establishment of elite Chinese-Dutch and Chinese-Indonesian primary schools that gave access to ethnically integrated secondary and tertiary education. The result was paradoxical, though not surprising from a comparative perspective. The Dutch language and Dutch culture writ large were peripheral in the lives of most Indonesians—the cultural legacies of centuries of Dutch colonialism would later be aptly characterized as a mere “scratching the surface.” So on the eve of World War II, probably only one percent of the population had gone through Dutch-language education, and the greater part of these belonged to the European segment. And yet, a growing number of Chinese and Indonesians went through the Western educational system and even made it to universities in the Netherlands. Among the Chinese this was not translated into political engagement, but among the (other) Indonesians it certainly did, as the political leadership

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of the Indonesian Revolution was partly recruited from within this native intellectual elite. A nationalist movement emerged in the early twentieth century, but met with unrelenting repression by the colonial state. The Japanese occupation heralded the end not only of Dutch rule, but also of whatever had been present of Dutch culture in colonial times. The Dutch language was forbidden and all Dutch colonial symbols and monuments were torn down; the totok population was interned and the Indo population isolated. For the European community, postcolonial trauma thus emerged in the dying days of colonialism. And yet, when Japan capitulated on August 15, 1945 and Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the independence of Indonesia two days later, the great majority within the European segment seriously underestimated the strength of Indonesian nationalism and believed that colonial order would be restored. So did most politicians and ordinary citizens in the Netherlands. Both the fact that things took a completely different turn and the later realization that these earlier expectations had so little footing in Indonesian reality would add to Dutch postcolonial trauma. What actually happened may be easily summarized. Prior to the war, there had been little serious consideration of colonial reform in the Dutch political arena, and the thought of independence a no-go area in Dutch politics except for the radical left, mainly the Dutch Communist party. Dutch elites concurred that the colony was simply too important to lose. Apart from the economic argument, there was the geopolitical concern that without this colony, “the Netherlands will descend to the rank of a country such as Denmark.” And there was the argument of a civilizing mission: there was still so much to accomplish there, and Indonesians supposedly appreciated the Dutch guidance with its promises of stability, development, and gradual reform. During the war, the Dutch government exiled in London was forced nonetheless to consider colonial reform and started promising the colonies “autonomy” within a semi-federal Kingdom of the Netherlands; by then, Indonesia had some seventy million inhabitants, the Netherlands only nine million (and the Caribbean colonies taken together less than half a million). After the German—and next, Japanese—defeat, the first Dutch priority in Indonesia was to reinstall its rule and work toward colonial reform from there. It soon became clear, though, that Indonesian nationalism was far stronger than had been anticipated, and Dutch politicians came to realize that a return to the pre-war status was inconceivable. By late 1946, the Dutch government seemed to acknowledge that Indonesia would become

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an independent state rather soon. For all kinds of reasons, however, it would take another three years of endless negotiations, ruthless warfare, and international pressure on the increasingly isolated Dutch leadership before the transfer of sovereignty was officially signed on December 27, 1949. By then, the position of the European segment of the population had become fragile. By the mid-1950s, virtually all totoks and the great majority of the Eurasian Indo’s had settled in the Netherlands. They could do so without legal restraints as they all held Dutch citizenship and hence the right of abode.3

“Repatriates” and Soldiers Initially, these orphans of colonialism were designated as “repatriates.” That made increasingly less sense. Of course, totoks really returned home, most of them deeply affected by years of Japanese internment, some also by the experience of subsequent anti-colonial resentment and violence, but in the end, they were fairly well prepared. Their lives in the colony implied a broadening of horizons, but much of their privileged expat life in the colony had been characterized by a continued orientation toward Dutch culture, language, institutions—schools, churches, and government—and leisure activities. Repatriation meant the loss of this often-luxurious expat life, which often included a host of servants, and for many also a decline in social status. Most endured significant material losses. But in the end, they were returning to a known world, could reconnect with families and social networks, and there were no strong obstacles to successful reintegration. For most of the Eurasian migrants, forming probably two-thirds of the entire European repatriate group, “repatriation” was an inappropriate concept. Only a small minority had ever been in the metropolis before. Judging from the great number of memoirs, novels, oral history projects, and studies produced over the decades since their first arrival, the Netherlands was a disappointment to most of them: a small country, cold and rainy, narrow-minded and even bigoted, surely not rich, and neither generous 3 There is a vast body of literature on Dutch colonialism and the final war of decolonization that is not referenced in this chapter. Gert Oostindie (2011) offers an overview and analysis of postcolonial migrations and their impact on Dutch society and Dutch understandings of the colonial dimension of their history and nation; much of this chapter builds on that book and on my article “Ruptures and Dissonance: Post-Colonial Migrations and the Remembrance of Colonialism in the Netherlands” (2015a). Elizabeth Buettner (2016) provides a comparative perspective with ample space for the Dutch case.

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with material help; a country also without the extensive family and broader social networks that had been available in the Dutch East Indies; and a place where many endured status degradation, suffered from an insufficient command of Dutch and, as “mixed-race” immigrants, were confronted with xenophobia and racism. Overall, the migration of these two categories of “Europeans” amounted to some 300,000 people. But migration from the Dutch East Indies did not stop there. From the upper segment of “Foreign Orientals” there were Chinese immigrants numbering in the tens of thousands. This was a highly untypical group with a migration history characterized primarily by educational and economic motives. Their overall profile was—and still is—defined as highly educated, economically successful, Christian, wellpositioned, and successfully integrated locally while having maintained strong intra-group networks. At the other end of the spectrum, a group of some 12,500 Moluccans arrived in the Netherlands in 1951. As unprivileged “natives,” they would not have qualified for entrance, but an exception was made as the male core of this group consisted of roughly 4000 soldiers who had all served in the Dutch colonial army and had since embraced the cause of an independent Moluccan republic outside of the Indonesian Republic. Some of these groups also became involved in armed actions against the new Republic and were therefore in a highly precarious situation in Indonesia. They were ordered to board for the Netherlands, and much to their dismay were demobilized as soon as they set foot in the Netherlands. Their group characteristics foreboded a difficult integration process: low educational levels, little command of the Dutch language, and a strong social and political identification with the Moluccan islands rather than with the country of arrival. It did not help a bit that the Dutch government decided to provide housing in isolated camps and through a series of measures actually discouraged integration in Dutch society. As we will see, several traumas would come to characterize this community. The story of repatriation does not end here. Over a four-year period, the Dutch government recruited 160,000 Dutchmen, most of them young conscripted soldiers, to serve in its army in Indonesia. A few thousands died, a few stayed in or around Indonesia, but the overwhelming majority were repatriated and demobilized in the Netherlands. On average, they had been away for over two years, missing out on some developments in the Netherlands and for better or worse taking aboard their Indonesian experience. Upon their return they reintegrated and talked—or rather remained

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silent—about the impact of these years in their own life. But they also added their narratives to the ongoing national debates about colonialism, Indonesia, the war, and the politicians that sent them there.

Trauma Narratives and Claim-Making The history briefly recounted above had a deep and for some traumatic impact, not least of all in Indonesia, itself. The Japanese occupation had resulted in a death toll of some four million Indonesians, but its end also ushered in the founding of an independent republic. The return of the Allied forces—first the British, next the Dutch—resulted in a long war in which over 100,000 Indonesians fell victim to Dutch warfare, not counting the number of civilian deaths due to starvation, intra-Indonesian violence, and the like. Of course, families of Indonesians killed or abused by Dutch soldiers continue to feel the pain to this very day, and recent reports indeed convey traumatic memories. But remarkably, there is hardly any evidence of a rhetoric of loss and suffering in contemporary Indonesia. The death toll is widely seen as the price that had to be paid for a higher cause. As a young Indonesian historian recently remarked, “For us, the period starting on August 17, 1945 is a positive one, a period of construction, and that is what matters to us!”4 This chapter does not discuss the damage, loss, and possible trauma inflicted upon the victims of Dutch colonialism, but rather focuses on the postcolonial migrants and returnees from Indonesia who settled in the Netherlands, and on Dutch society and politics at large. Neither will there be an extensive discussion of the legacies of Dutch Atlantic colonialism. In the field of Atlantic history, narratives of colonization, the extinction of Native populations, the African slave trade, and slavery in the Americas, and also themes such as past and present racism, are often framed using concepts referring to deep personal and collective suffering, as well as, increasingly, trauma. This framing is largely absent in Indonesian renderings of the colonial past—an observation that immediately begs other questions that will not be pursued here. Following Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman, the concept of cultural trauma is employed as a sociological paradigm focusing on collective experiences and behavior rather than on individual suffering and trauma as a 4 At a workshop at the Department of History, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, November 28, 2017. See also Immler (2018).

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psychologist would do.5 In Alexander’s definition, “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel that have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander 2004: 1). Eyerman proposes to use this concept in analyzing the implications of postcolonial migrations set in motion by (violent, one presumes) decolonization: “The impact of such loss [by individuals who are forced to leave long-established ways of life] is only intensified when experienced through markers of collectivity, such as ethnic and national identification […]. Cultural trauma refers to a discursive and dialectical process whereby the fractured foundations of individual and collective identity are re-narrated in attempts at repair.”6 We are thus at once talking about collective suffering as a result of decolonization and the ensuing postcolonial migrations; about painful collective memories that run so deep that we may think of collective trauma as being deeply engrained in the collectivity’s identity; and about the construction of a redemptive narrative that helps to overcome this trauma. Cultural trauma theorists also emphasize its performative nature. Only well-articulated, consistent, and persuasive discourses of collective trauma have a chance of first becoming a leading trope for particular communities and next acquiring a significant appeal in wider circles (e.g., national and perhaps international). This short chapter does not allow for a serious analysis of the ways the various communities have framed their particular interpretations of the (post)colonial past, but there is a growing body of scholarly literature looking into this.7 How does the cultural trauma approach relate to the history summarized above? We first need to differentiate between the various collectivities and their possibly diverging points of view. We may focus on the various categories of “repatriates” and soldiers introduced above, but we can take one more step and provide a fuller picture, at least of the Dutch scene. This means also looking at Dutch politics and, even if this is a highly diverse entity, Dutch society at large. (Specific institutions such as the Dutch press, academia, or churches could also have been singled out as actors, but this is

5 For a recent overview, see Sciortino (2018). 6 Ron Eyerman, ‘Post-Colonial Trauma: A Comparative Study of Return’, position paper. 7 Unfortunately, most of this literature is in Dutch. See however Bosma et al. (2012) and

particularly Bosma (2012).

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all beyond the reach of the present effort.) Second, we should define what exactly each of these collectivities defines as the basis for its trauma, and to whom responsibility is allotted. And finally, there is the question of what redemptive narratives each collectivity develops. In all of this, we should also take into account changes over time; not only because of aging and the changing of generations, but also because of broader political and intellectual developments in any given society, memories, convictions, narratives, and frames are in constant flux. We may start with the Dutch totok repatriates. This group’s foremost trauma narrative has centered on their suffering in the Japanese internment camps, for which primarily the Japanese were blamed. However, subsequently the Dutch government was also included in the narrative of blame both for not extracting more recognition, apologies, and indemnification from Japan and for early on reestablishing cordial bilateral relations with the offending nation. A second bone of contention, which only intensified over the decades, is colonial government employees’ frustrations over salaries and pensions lost because of internment during the war. Here the Dutch government came under increasing attack for not providing “back pay,” which was perceived as a lack of recognition and respect. As for the independence struggle and the Dutch decolonization policies, no matter how strong this group may have resented the end of the colonial era, this has never been a dominant theme in collective organizing. Even less prominent has been the process of repatriation and integration in the Netherlands—most likely because this group had the best options and networks for successful integration. In all, then, this group did produce an abundant corpus of memoires about their suffering under the Japanese, but it did not develop an internally consistent grand narrative that might serve to bind its members into a self-identified coherent community, much less one characterized by cultural trauma. There is some convergence, but also clear contrasts, with the Eurasian “ Indo” group. Only a minority in this community was interned during the Japanese occupation, hence the internment camps do not figure prominently. Nonetheless, there is hatred toward the Japanese for brutally ending their way of life, and hatred toward Indonesian militants for inflicting brutal violence in the early Revolutionary bersiap period, violence that was

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directed against alleged pro-colonial ethnic groups.8 Japan and the Indonesian nationalists are blamed for breaking up what in retrospect becomes a kind of paradise, the inherent racist character of which is forgotten or downplayed. A new trauma for this group then becomes the passage to the Netherlands and what today has become canonized as the “chilly” welcome given by the Dutch to these “repatriates.” Here, there are stories of racism and xenophobia and indignation about the Dutch lack of knowledge and interest in their colonial background. There is overlap with the totok insistence on back pay and their criticism of the Dutch government’s perceived overly conciliatory stance toward both Japan and Indonesia. But in all of this, there is also a strong redemptive narrative: “With little Dutch governmental support and in spite of wide public animosity, we smoothly integrated, simply by outward accommodation.” Coupled to this narrative is a seemingly paradoxical sequence: “And no matter how much we pretended to become Dutch all the way, deep down we fooled them by keeping to our very own Indo culture, which today everyone in the Netherlands appreciates!”9 Perhaps this mixture of resentment of the chilly welcome and pride in group achievement has elements of a cultural trauma—but then again, it seems that this group’s diversity in pre-migration characteristics and post-migration experiences, coupled with high levels of exogamy, precluded an enduring communitarian identification through the prism of collective trauma. Moving to the Chinese-Indonesian community, there simply seems to be no trauma, no anger, no collective organization for anything but intragroup reminiscing and networking. In contrast to the great number of Indisch organizations founded by totoks and Indo’s alike, there is little organizational effort in the Chinese-Indonesian community, no political fervor, no collective trauma and hence no need for a redemptive narrative. The well-attended annual meetings of a recently established Chinese Indonesian Heritage Centre are celebrations of colonial nostalgia and past and present success stories rather than reflections on loss or injustice.10

8 A late 1945, early 1946 phase in the Indonesian Revolution characterized by outbursts of violence directed against ethnically defined victims, including Europeans, Eurasians and Chinese. 9 A personification of this Indo pride was the creative maverick and community leader Tjalie Robinson. See Willems (2008). 10 http://cihc.nl/.

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The contrast with the Moluccan community, today probably comprising some 50,000 people, is poignant. This is a community marked by a long military history in the Dutch colonial army, even considered a “martial race” by the colonial authorities. The group’s leading narrative is not about this lost war per se, but on the proverbial Moluccan support for Dutch colonialism and the postcolonial betrayal by these same Dutch. This betrayal is seen in the breaking up of the colonial army and the concomitant dismissal of the Moluccan soldiers; the failure to back the Moluccan struggle for an independent Moluccan republic (Republik Maluku Selatan, RMS); and the assumed Dutch responsibility for the faltering Moluccan integration in Dutch society. The trope of Dutch betrayal indeed may be considered the leading element in a Moluccan narrative of trauma. It is dubious, however, whether this trauma is recognized at all, let alone accepted, beyond the Dutch-Moluccan community. Ironically, the struggle for RMS has remained a powerful redemptive narrative: while in the 1970s violent actions (hijackings of trains and the occupation of schools and the Indonesian embassy) resulted only in defeat, the responsible youth still have a kind of hero status in the community for daring to pursue militant ideas. The Moluccan identification with the identity-building pursuits of the other postcolonial Indisch communities seems slight.11 The Dutch veterans are mainly a single-generation collectivity, now quickly fading away. During the war and its immediate aftermath, only a low proportion of all military men were reported to suffer from war-related trauma. In the decades after, until today, veterans continue to report their experience of individual trauma, yet this is not the central trope in the veterans’ narrative. Rather, the focus is on anger and frustration directed against partly overlapping parties. Not surprisingly, the actual enemy was the main target of anger during the war, but there was also frustration about “weak” Dutch politicians failing to withstand international public opinion, the United Nations, and so on, and refusing to give the military commanders full powers to crush the enemy. During and particularly after the war, the Dutch government gradually became the main culprit for sending young and naïve soldiers to a war that was increasingly framed as “wrong” in the first place, as well as failing to both assist veterans with their reintegration into Dutch society and shield them from mounting accusations of war crimes. As the latter subject became a recurring theme in public

11 On the Moluccan community, see Steijlen (2012).

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debates—and around 2010 even in Dutch court rooms—the veteran community also targeted the Dutch press and researchers for failing to understand how difficult their situation had been during the war and for refusing to believe that the soldiers had just done their duty in a professional way. While the dominant veteran narrative gradually allowed for more critical perspectives on the war, the redemptive narrative remained the same: “We were just sent there, we did our best to act humanely, only a few among us committed war crimes, we loved the country and its people, minus the ‘terrorists.’” Yet, while resentment remained quite clearly a central element in veteran expression and lobbying, it would be an overstatement to say that these feelings were really constitutive for an endurable community based on shared trauma. The great majority simply moved on with their lives and were only belatedly given some sort of collective recognition by the Dutch state (Oostindie 2015b; see also Oostindie 2011: 88–91). In all of this, the communities discussed above have addressed victimhood in highly selective ways. While they have been increasingly successful in their claim for proper commemoration of the Japanese occupation and the ensuing decolonization war, none of these collectivities has ever seriously proposed that the time might have come to also commemorate the far larger numbers of Indonesian military and civilian casualties of this period. Neither has the Dutch government, which has long prefered to keep a low profile. Instead, the government reacts to postcolonial migrants’ claims only when such reaction is inevitable, rather than initiating engagement itself and thereby running the risk of divisive discussions about this episode in (post)colonial history. An analysis of colonial/postcolonial monuments in the public space erected by the Dutch state or cities since the 1950s provides a telling illustration. While dozens of such monuments were erected in memory of the European victims of the Japanese internment camps, of Dutch military casualties, and of the Moluccan soldiers of the colonial army, there is not one monument honoring the Indonesian victims of either the Japanese occupation or the ensuing war of decolonization. The only monuments explicitly denouncing Dutch colonialism deal with Dutch Atlantic history and target the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Caribbean slavery (Oostindie et al. 2011).

Political Responses It has become a cliché that the Dutch political response to the loss of empire was evidence of deep trauma. Political scientist Arend Lijphart introduced

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this concept half a century ago in The Trauma of Decolonization (Lijphart 1966). Against strong opposition by the Indonesians, and notwithstanding reactions in international politics ranging from harsh criticism to friendly advice to give in, Dutch politicians continued to exclude New Guinea— today, Indonesian Papua—from the transfer of sovereignty. Nonetheless, in 1962 this last Asian territory was ceded after a tense period bordering on war in which a Dutch government unwilling to give in spoiled the sympathy even of its Western partners. Why this struggle for a lost cause, a former part of the colony that in itself had little substantial economic or geopolitical value? Perhaps there were minor strategic arguments, a vain hope of resettling the Indisch population there rather than in the Netherlands, and a belated sense of duty regarding the Papuan populations. But with compelling arguments, Lijphart maintains that the Dutch government, backed by broad segments of its population, reacted irrationally because of the deep humiliation caused by the loss of its colonial empire and harsh international criticism. Political trauma stood in the way of rational decision-making. The Lijphart thesis has remained the leading paradigm since it was first argued, and it is often broadened to explain why it took Dutch politics, and society at large, many decades more to improve bilateral relations with Indonesia and to critically reflect on the entire process of decolonization— let alone colonialism—and specifically its own warfare in these years. And while there has been some revision of the Lijphart thesis lately, its overall validity still seems widely accepted and on solid ground (Stol 2017). Indeed, it took the passing away of the entire generation of responsible politicians before the Dutch cabinet could declare—sixty years later, in 2005—that from 1945 to 1949, the Dutch had fought “a war on the wrong side of history.” And it took another decade before the Dutch government decided to generously finance an extensive research project on mass violence during the war, a decision reflecting the hesitant recognition that the Dutch army had been responsible for war crimes on a far more extensive scale than had hitherto been acknowledged.12 Ironically, deep-seated embarrassment over the way their predecessors had handled the decolonization of Indonesia would guide the way in which a subsequent generation of Dutch politicians managed the decolonization of the two last Dutch remnants of empire, both in the Caribbean. Suriname became independent in 1975 after negotiations in which Dutch

12 https://www.ind45-50.org/en.

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leniency reflected a longing to make up for the previous fiasco and to accomplish a “model decolonization” instead. The fact that the six small Dutch Caribbean islands are still part of the Kingdom reflects both their own refusal to embrace the risky choice for full sovereignty and Dutch politicians’ awareness that they cannot unilaterally impose independence. However, trauma about loss of status and economic and geopolitical riches is not the whole story, nor are the later attempts to cover up the failure (or worse) of political and military leadership. Dutch debates and official gestures also, and increasingly, aim to respond to the sensitivities of the various “repatriate” communities. Initially, the Dutch government had no intention of developing such policies of reconciliation and inclusion. Both the Indisch community and the veterans were simply supposed to quickly (re-)integrate into Dutch society, to assimilate and to forget about the Dutch East Indies and the uncontrolled and violent ending of this history. But as collective organizing and lobbying within, and at times between each of these communities became successful after the 1970s, successive Dutch governments could not but respond. Financial concessions were made alongside symbolic gestures and national commemorations. The list is long and the compromises were uneasy, with the Dutch government affirming time and again that “this time” all accounts were settled, while community organizations were not satisfied and prepared for new rounds of lobbying. In these ongoing contestations, Dutch politicians were repeatedly reminded that the colonial past could not be shelved so easily.13 It has often been observed that colonial repatriates tend to lean toward rightist political parties and media in the metropolitan states. Thus, large segments of the repatriate French-Algerian pied noir community were sympathetic to, and even constitutive of France’s Front National. In the Netherlands too, both the Indisch community and the veterans have encountered more sympathy from right-wing political parties and media and, conversely, have directed their lobbying activities predominantly at these institutions. Again, this is in stark contrast with the Caribbean communities that traditionally linked up more with leftist political parties.

13 This process is analyzed at length in Oostindie (2011).

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Postcolonial Trauma in the Wider Society? Do such governmental gestures imply that society at large was reacting in one way or another to decolonization and its aftermath? Do debates about colonialism and its legacies matter in narratives of the Dutch nation? And does the concept of “trauma” help us to understand such debates in Dutch society? None of this is immediately evident, and the theoretical concept of cultural trauma was not really developed with a view to understand or frame entire societies in the first place. Even so, thinking in terms of trauma might be helpful for analyzing what transpired in Dutch society over the past seventy years. It should first be noted that while the Netherlands of the first half of the twentieth century may have been strongly divided among religious and political lines, it was a nearly all-white society with little immigration. Migration became an issue in the immediate postwar years for two contradictory reasons. Reasoning that the war-wrecked country was too densely populated, the government actively developed migration schemes for its own population, eventually helping some 300,000 emigrants to settle overseas in the first postwar decade. Roughly in the same period, a similar number of “repatriates” were allowed entry into the Netherlands. While the government felt that the arrival particularly of non-white migrants “rooted” in the tropical Indies was inopportune and should not be stimulated in any way, the official policy was that these migrants, as Dutch citizens, had every right to settle and should therefore be welcomed. Something quite similar would transpire in the 1970s with Surinamese migrants “voting with their feet” against the independence of their country, and from the 1980s onwards with Antilleans taking advantage of their continued Dutch citizenship to settle in the metropolis. In all of these cases, there were strong behind-closed-doors doubts in Dutch politics and open misgivings and resentment in society. Be that as it may, a governmental framing that underlined the rights of these new immigrants as Dutch citizens prevailed. These were citizens that, unlike other immigrants, not only had the right of abode, but also could rhetorically claim, “We are here because you were there.” In the end, even if they were confronted with xenophobia and racism, these migrants from the former empire benefited from what may be defined a “postcolonial bonus” (Oostindie 2011: 45–47). This bonus gave them an edge over other migrant communities developing over the same period, particularly those from Morocco and Turkey.

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Between 1945 and today, the Dutch population increased from 9 to over 17 million, some 12% of this increase comprised first-generation “nonWestern” migrants and their children, either with a colonial background or from places such as Morocco, Turkey, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. As elsewhere in Europe, migration, race/racism, and Islam have become markers of contemporary debates in society and politics alike, and these phenomena and the underlying forces of globalization have had a deep impact. Perhaps we may indeed speak of traumatic changes here— though we should be extremely cautious in using such strong terms. Some perceive the influx of immigrants, the consequent development of a multicultural society, and the presumed evaporation or even loss of Dutch national identity as disruptive to the point that one might use the adjective “traumatic.” At the opposite pole, there is deep frustration over the loss of what was once heralded as the liberal and progressive tradition of Dutch society—ironically, a flattering self-framing overlooking, inter alia, a long history of racism and violence in the colonies. And between these poles there is an increasing debate raging as to what contemporary Dutch identity is and how colonial history fits with issues of migration, Islam, and race (e.g., Besamusca and Verheul 2014: 133–143). But back to our initial questions: Did inclusive political gestures to the repatriates from the Dutch East Indies imply that society at large was reacting in one way or another toward decolonization or postcolonial migrants? This is not evident at all. Politicians may have felt the weight of responsibility to make up for failing politics, but judging from the collective memory of the so-called “Indisch generation,” both repatriates and veterans, public interest was never particularly high. Most Dutch apparently have no clue and simply do not care. No interest, no sense of loss, no need to come to terms. It is as if colonialism had not happened at all. There is a growing body of scholarly literature dealing with what historian Ann Stoler—speaking of France in her specific case—refers to as “colonial aphasia,” the incapacity of a former colonial state and society to speak of colonial history and to accept it as part and parcel of its own past.14 In the Netherlands too, not only activists, but also scholars have pointed out the apparent unwillingness or incapability to recognize and internalize the idea that colonialism, and hence racism and violence, is an integral part 14 “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence. Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things” (Stoler 2011: 125).

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of Dutch history since its establishment as an independent state (c. 1600) (e.g., Bijl 2012; Schulte Nordholt 2002). Why this should be so in the Dutch case is a matter of debate. Clearly all nations tend to downplay their own historical wrongs. But for the Netherlands, there is also this particular dominant narrative in which the nation understands itself both as an early-modern beacon of democracy and toleration, as non-belligerent and neutral in European wars ever since 1815, and as a twentieth-century victim of Nazi brutality. Neither narrative sits well with the historical realities of Dutch colonialism and of Dutchmen not only as victims, but also equally as perpetrators of violence. In recent years there have been fierce indictments of the incomplete and distorted character of the hegemonic narrative, and with some exaggeration one might even say that coming to terms with this inconvenient truth is something of a traumatic process for many Dutch participants in these debates, including institutions such as politics, academia, and the media. So far, if Dutch politics at least has produced a “perpetrator trauma” with the corresponding narratives of guilt and remorse, this is related more to the historically distant centuries of the African slave trade, Atlantic slavery, and Dutchmen whom nobody remembers, than to the more recent period of warfare in Indonesia, in which a whole generation of identifiable Dutchmen was drawn into a colonial war—which included war crimes that make a mockery of rosy ideas about Dutch exceptionalism (Eyerman 2019). Whether we should understand this process of colonial amnesia as the result of conscious politics or of a more opaque, subconscious process is, again, a matter of debate. When it comes to the issue of Dutch war crimes during the 1945–1949 war and the responsibility of the Dutch military, judicial, and ultimately political leadership, it is becoming increasingly clear that during and immediately after the war there was a deliberate policy of covering up in order to protect both direct perpetrators and those higher up. The emerging Cold War only stimulated this process—the Dutch Communist Party had been the only political party staunchly attacking colonialism, the war itself, and particular war crimes. It is also likely that after the traumatic “loss” of the Dutch East Indies, Dutch politicians did help to relegate colonialism and decolonization to the margins of Dutch educational and cultural policies. The Netherlands reinvented itself as simply European, erasing the chapters on the colonies from its youth’s history and geography textbooks, and ultimately working to “move on.” In this context, postcolonial migrants were unexpected and barely welcome reminders of a colonial history that was no longer seen as heroic and

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should better be forgotten. Again, judging from what might be defined as the cultural repertoire of the Indisch community, this was the second traumatic experience after the unwanted departure from the colony: the encounter with a metropolis that not only did not seem to care, but also refused to acknowledge its colonial past. A similar complaint would later be voiced by postcolonial migrants from the Caribbean, all descendants from either enslaved Africans or Asian indentured laborers once brought to these colonies by the Dutch. In reaction, postcolonial communities formulated counter-memories and advocated their inclusion in the narrative of the Dutch nation. The past two decades or so have witnessed a return of colonial history and its legacies in political and public debates, mounting interest in the fields of education, the mass media, museums, and the arts, and a series of governmental monuments, commemorations, and gestures. We may debate to what extent all of this reflects a growing general interest in colonialism, but at least there now seems to be more willingness in government, academia, and the media to face up to this past. And all of this is powerful enough to have provided a serious chauvinistic backlash over the past few years. The rediscovery of colonial history is also part of a broader phenomenon of postcolonial communities’ identity politics. Very crudely, in accordance with memory claims of repatriates, emic postwar imaginings of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia long referred to a paradise lost. Trauma was associated not with colonialism, but with the loss of colonial life and forced repatriation. Consequently a critical stance toward the Dutch decolonization policy and war was long marginalized. In contrast, memory claims from the Dutch Caribbean community with their focus on the trauma of racial slavery and its presumed legacies produced a totally different counter-memory. In official parlance and gestures, such highly contradictory memory claims were, and are, mostly simply juxtaposed without serious attempts to bring these various narratives into conversation. This falls short of taking colonial history and its contemporary legacy serious (Oostindie 2011: Ch. 5).

A Generational Transfer of Memory and Trauma? Today’s postcolonial communities are not the same as they were seventy years ago, and neither is Dutch society at large. The passing of generations deeply impacts all communities, adding to the diversity that already set them apart from one another in the first place. Consistently high levels of exogamy reinforced the progressive integration of the various postcolonial

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communities in Dutch society. Integration does not equal assimilation, and it may even be argued that successful integration was key to making Dutch politics and media sensitive to colonial history and postcolonial identification and cultures in the first place. At the same time, Dutch society became ethnically and culturally more diverse, enabling a more open perspective on Dutch identity but also sparking more exclusionary discourses on national belonging. Where is this process heading? We may start answering this question by looking at the broader societal context. Like all former European colonial powers, the Netherlands has experienced a contradictory process in which hegemonic national narratives have become more inclusive of postcolonial migrants and hence colonial histories, while such narratives are at the same time unsettled by exclusionary “patriotic”—and sometimes racist— narratives. However, in contrast to the United Kingdom and even more so France, there is little overlap in the Netherlands between the “postcolonial” and “Muslim” communities. This is significant in the sense that Islam and (anti)colonialism are perceived as separate entities, which is quite remarkable if we bear in mind how crucial religion actually was all along. Indeed, debates about colonial history sidestep this presently volatile issue. In short, not being Muslim and not having to talk about Islam makes it easier for postcolonial migrants in the Netherlands to articulate claims about colonial history as an integral part of national history. In the Dutch case, talking about one’s own or one’s forebears’ colonial history and emphasizing one’s postcolonial identity seems to be more about choice, increasingly so with the passing of generations, and even more so as these generations are becoming more diverse through exogamy. Choice, in other words, in being able to decide for oneself to what extent (post)colonial roots are crucial to one’s identification. This room for choice seems rooted in place, but there is an important caveat here, which is the significance society allots to “race.” It seems that with regard to the Indisch community this is less of an issue than for the predominantly Africanoriginated Caribbean community that did produce a resounding narrative of slavery trauma and indictments of colonialism, racism, and “white innocence” (Wekker 2016).15 15 The Netherlands has long preferred to think of itself as a colorblind society, and even when second thoughts on this became increasingly appropriate over the past decades, xenophobia was usually linked to aversion to Islam rather than to racial issues. But lately, precisely in reaction to Caribbean Dutch actions denouncing racist elements in Dutch popular culture

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As for the successive generations within the Indisch postcolonial community, one might assume a decreasing importance of personal trauma, if any at all. The first generation went through the ordeal of the Japanese occupation, the violence of decolonization, an undesired “repatriation,” a chilly welcome, and a difficult start in the Netherlands. Many of the memories and artistic renderings of the second generation deal with their parents’ pain and grudges and the impact this burden had on them—and in both generations, trauma is implicitly part of this experience. But by now the first generation is dying out, and we are already looking at the fourth and fifth generations. Personal trauma seems less likely here, even if there may be strong identification with the loss experienced by the first generations. At annual commemorations of the war in Indonesia that started it all, one may observe many young Indisch people accompanying their grandparents, but in their own lives the colony seems to live on highly eclectically and in a festive way rather than in a mode of anger or even redemption. Within the much smaller and more tightly knit Dutch-Moluccan community, collective memory and trauma seem to be more present and more actively transferred across the generations. While there is no narrative of return within the Indisch community, Moluccans still cling to their annual ceremonies commemorating the unwanted landing and demobilization in the Netherlands, the proclamation of the RMS, and the rendering of homage to the young militants who had engaged in armed political struggle during the 1970s. All of this speaks of deep trauma and a self-identification across generations, factors indicating that the transition from colonial to postcolonial is the central episode in their collective history. One wonders how this will develop in a context in which the Dutch and Indonesian governments alike have long ceased to address claims for an independent RMS seriously and in which contemporary Moluccan frustration feeds just as much on faltering integration within the Netherlands. The veteran community went through its most active time as a commemorative community in the past few decades. Self-organization became more important since the 1970s and eventually forced the Dutch government to develop a veteran policy. Trauma at an individual level referred mainly to

such as Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), social media in particular have aired a highly disturbing avalanche of anti-black racism. In much the same vein, a critical take on the Dutch slavery past is denounced as unpatriotic in these circles. It is highly unlikely that this attitude will be picked up in government, but the message such bigotry sends is appalling and may well feed frustration and even feelings of trauma within the Caribbean community.

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classic post-combat stress, often experienced many decades later. At a collective level, trauma was expressed rather more in reaction to debates about the war and particularly war crimes. There was deep frustration about recent debates incriminating the veteran community for war crimes, but equally about the perceived lack of government leadership and support, both during the war and in its aftermath. Throughout its active existence the veteran community was successful in making itself heard in debates about the war, but now this unique generation is dying out. While there is some interest in the second and third generations to keep their story alive, this is afar afield from the emotional investment evident in the Indisch and Moluccan communities.

Postscript Communities remember and make memory-claims in order to express their existence as a separate group, while at the same time affirming that their histories have a right to full representation in the wider entity they belong to, usually a state that somehow is a nation too—an entity made up of narratives that should bind even if they might just as well divide. This chapter is mainly about the diverse community of “repatriates” and demobilized Dutch veterans that made the transition from the former Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands in the mid-twentieth century. The present analysis remains somewhat detached, discussing the contours of a history stretching back at least some seventy years without discussing in any depth the piles of memoirs, archives full of interviews, and scores of films, novels, and other works of art covering similar ground with more nuance and emotion. But even so, this chapter gives an idea of how these groups articulated their own, sometimes traumatic experiences of loss and exclusion and how they claimed a place in the wider narrative of Dutch identity and history. This claim did not rest easily with a tendency—in Dutch society at large and specifically in Dutch politics—to simply forget about colonial history altogether. And so new debates about colonialism, its place in Dutch history, and its legacy in the contemporary Netherlands emerged. This debate can only be properly understood in the broader context of the subsequent postcolonial migrations from the Dutch Caribbean; other non-colonial migrations; the transition of the Netherlands toward a multicultural society that for decades refused to understand itself as such; and the faltering process of European unification.

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This chapter illustrates that successful claims to a fair share in the narrative of national history is contingent upon serious organization and lobbying. Recognition may alleviate the sense of being a victim of (post)colonial history, while the lack of such recognition may spark or strengthen feelings of being victimized and left out. But claims need not hinge on victimhood exclusively, or at all. Postcolonial migrants may also choose to emphasize their ancestors’ strength and creativity in overcoming the constraints of colonialism, thus constructing a narrative of redemption and contribution to diversity instead of victimhood. While the Dutch case has all kinds of ideographic detail, there is an obvious wider European dimension to this debate. Many former European states face the challenge of dealing with their colonial past and their own past and present record of racism. This in itself is a painful process, for as Aleida Assman writes, “For post-imperial nations the fall from greatness and power is difficult, because a self-celebrating narrative also functions as a protection screen against uncomfortable memories and questions” (Assman 2015: 178). Difficult or painful as it may be, this need not be traumatic. There is always the reassuring option of refusing to look back or recognize the colonial past for what it was—or to simply conclude that those were different times and different co-patriots with whom we cannot share responsibility today, let alone guilt. This seems to be the dominant perspective in Dutch society, an antidote to any cultural trauma that might arise should we link centuries of colonialism to the core characteristics of Dutch culture. Those states that experienced the postwar settlement of substantial postcolonial migrant communities have generally been slightly more forthcoming in acknowledging and rethinking colonialism than former colonial states without significant postcolonial communities. In all cases, the openness of the former metropolitan societies to postcolonial claim making changed over time, and this process most likely will not proceed in a linear or identical fashion in all places. It falls upon postcolonial states to assure that open spaces for debate about the inconvenient realities of colonialism and its canonization are maintained somewhere between the poles of extreme chauvinism and the memory wars that lead to a balkanization of memory (Buettner 2016; Oostinde 2011: Ch. 7; Rothermund 2015).

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References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Assman, Aleida. 2015. Memories of Post-Imperial Nations. In Memories of PostImperial Nations: The Aftermath of Decolonization, 1945–2013, ed. Dietmar Rothermund, 171–180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Besamusca, Emmeline, and Jaap Verheul (eds.). 2014. Discovering the Dutch: On Culture and Society of the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bijl, Paul. 2012. Colonial Memory and Forgetting in the Netherlands and Indonesia. Journal of Genocide Research 14: 441–461. Bosma, Ulbe (ed.). 2012. Postcolonial Immigrants and Identity Formations in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bosma, Ulbe, Jan Lucassen, and Gert Oostindie (eds.). 2012. Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Buettner, Elizabeth. 2016. Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eyerman, Ron. 2019. Perpetrator Trauma and Collective Guilt: My Lai. In Trauma, Memory, and Identity, 167–194. New York: Palgrave. Immler, Nicole. 2018. Narrating (In)Justice in the Form of a Reparation Claim: Bottom-Up Reflections on a Postcolonial Setting—The Rawagede Case. In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling, ed. Nanci Adler, 149–174. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1966. The Trauma of Decolonization: The Dutch and West New Guinea. New Haven: Yale University Press. Oostindie, Gert. 2011. Postcolonial Netherlands: Sixty-Five Years of Forgetting, Commemorating, Silencing. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Oostindie, Gert. 2015a. Ruptures and Dissonance: Post-Colonial Migrations and the Remembrance of Colonialism in the Netherlands. In Memories of PostImperial Nations: The Aftermath of Decolonization, 1945–2013, ed. Dietmar Rothermund, 38–57. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Oostindie, Gert. 2015b. Soldaat in Indonesië. Getuigenissen van een oorlog aan de verkeerde kant van de geschiedenis. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Oostindie, Gert, Henk Schulte Nordholt, and Fridus Steijlen. 2011. Post-Colonial Monuments in the Netherlands. Leiden: KITLV Press. Rothermund, Dietmar (ed.). 2015. Memories of Post-Imperial Nations: The Aftermath of Decolonization, 1945–2013. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Schulte Nordholt, Henk. 2002. A Genealogy of Violence. In Roots of Violence in Indonesia, ed. F. Colombijn and J. Th. Lindblad, 33–62. Leiden: KITLV Press.

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Sciortino, Giuseppe. 2018. Cultural Traumas. In Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. John Hall, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-Cheng Lo, 135–143. London: Routledge. Steijlen, Fridus. 2012. Closing the “KNIL Chapter”: A Key Moment in Identity Formation of Moluccans in the Netherlands. In Postcolonial Immigrants and Identity Formations in the Netherlands, ed. Ulbe Bosma, 117–134. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Stol, Bart. 2017. Een goede kleine koloniale mogendheid. Nederland, NieuwGuinea en de Europese tweede koloniale bezetting in Afrika en Melanesië (ca. 1930–1962) (Unpublished PhD thesis). Utrecht University. Stoler, Ann. 2011. Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture 23 (1): 121–156. Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press. Willems, Wim. 2008. Tjalie Robinson. Biografie van een Indo-schrijver. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

CHAPTER 5

Beyond the “Trauma”: Legitimization and Revenge of the “Anciens du Congo” (Belgian Congo 1908–1960) Rosario Giordano

The Belgian-Congolese colonial past, long removed from Belgium’s public memory and neglected by historians, reemerged at the end of the twentieth century, raising controversial questions accompanied by appeals for justice, reconciliation, and truth (Jewsiewicki 2004). Following the loss of their colonial world and the legitimization coming from a national past, the Anciens du Congo (hereafter Anciens ), as the Belgian citizens from the colony were called, gradually became significant players in the process of recollection, publicly sharing their memories and their trauma of loss.

This chapter has been translated from the Italian by Alessandra De Marco (Ph.D. American Studies, University of Sussex, UK). R. Giordano (B) Università della Calabria, Cosenza, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_5

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The present chapter analyzes the relationship existing between Belgian settlers and colonials from a past-present-future perspective. First, it considers trauma diachronically in order to investigate settlers and the colonial practices of dissimulation, disavowal, and the overcoming of trauma aimed at repositioning themselves in contemporary society. Furthermore, it examines the question of memory in relation to the different experiences characterizing individual and collective subjectivities, networks of friends, and interest groups that made up the social fabric of the Belgian (and European) colony. The present discussion draws on the existing literature, on a selection of informal sources (periodicals and memorials), and on a number of autobiographies of Anciens recorded during the 2000s.1

From the Congo Free State (1885–1908) to the “Model Colony” The construction of the Congo Free State was the outcome of Leopold II’s ambitious political and diplomatic initiative at the end of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). There, exploiting the rivalries between the great European powers, he managed to obtain an enormous territory, about eighty times larger than Belgium, and to create a unique state. This was a financial, military, and mercantile entity; an anomalous colony with no mother country, conceived of as the kind of personal possession that finds its definition in the absolutist Ancien Régime model, but with the distinctive traits of contemporary totalitarianism (Arendt 1951). The Congolese imaginary was built around the pivotal concept of violence: first, the disruptive effects of the “Arab” slave trade and of the ivory trade; second, Leopold II’s prolonged conquest campaigns; and finally, the

1 Several studies on the oral memory of the Anciens have been conducted by scholars from various fields and by journalists in the 2000s: Dembour (2000), Gillet (2008), Giordano (2008), Helbig (2005), Licata and Klein (2005), Rubbers (2009), and Verlinden (2002). A brief overview is available in Giordano (2008: 12–17). An innovative, constant work on the Belgian-Congolese memory was carried out in the years 2000–2010 by Projet Mémoire de Lubumbashi, led by Bogumil Jewsiewicki (Univ. Laval, Québec—Canada) and by Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu (Univ. de Lubumbashi, Congo RD), whose most significant results have been published in the series “Mémoires lieux de savoir—Archive congolaise”, Paris, L’Harmattan.

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atrocities and the traumas caused by the predatory “red rubber” regime.2 In the early years of the twentieth century, Edmund D. Morel (Congo Reform Association) led a fierce anti-Congolese press campaign, recognized today as the first international campaign denouncing crimes against humanity. The serious accusations made by the British consul Roger Casement compelled Leopold II to set up an International Committee of Inquiry to investigate on the infamous “Congo atrocities.” The outcome of the inquiry, proving the accusations, forced the sovereign to cede the colony to Belgium (1908). In the following decades, the Belgian administration mitigated the violence and the abuses of the past, drawing inspiration from a paternalistic governmental model. Overall, there were many significant elements of continuity which led to a stern regime, the expression of a hegemonic block marked by a closely knit group of public and private actors and interests (Jewsiewicki 1983; Vellut 2017: 95–113). The state held a share of private capital and used an apparatus of control to plan specialized productive areas to share or grant as concessions. The great companies controlled fundamental sectors of the economy, first and foremost the mining sector, which served to curb the entrepreneurial efforts of the middle class, both local and colonial. Catholic missions were responsible for the basic educational, cultural, and pedagogical training of the “colonized” in order to provide the colony with the necessary auxiliary personnel. The absence of a cultural elite capable of leading the Belgians in the administration of the colony was one of the structural traits of this model. In 1959, a year before Congolese independence, the three upper ranks comprised 4875 Europeans and only 3 Africans. Instead, in Ruanda-Urundi, a more radical and coherent system of “ethnic racialization” had been introduced, imposing the dominion of the Tutsi minority (assimilated to white people) (Chrétien 2000). These former German colonies were administered “under the tutelage” of Belgium with a mandate first by the Society 2 At the beginning of the 1890s, Leopold II established the State monopoly on the rubber and ivory trade, violating the Berlin Conference which contemplated free trade and free navigation of the Congo river. The State granted concessions to some companies who could exploit and manage entire regions: these were subject to violent predatory system functional to the rubber production and trade. The red rubber regime was founded on forced labor and unheard-of abuses, such as dismembered limbs, women and children taken into hostage, punitive expeditions, resulting in entire villages razed and whole areas depopulated. The AngloBelgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) was one of the concessionary companies infamous for the terror regime it established (Marchal 1996; Vangroenweghe 2010 [1985]).

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of the Nation (1919) and then by the UN. During the decolonization phase, the Belgians supported the Hutu majority, laying the ground for the subsequent conflicts (leading to the 1994 Tutsi genocide).

Settlers and Colonials: Usefulness and Marginalization in the Belgian Colonial Model The formation of a settler colony was never the actual objective of the colonial hegemonic block; in fact, it tried to avoid its formation on several occasions. The European presence in the Congo originated in some European states supporting Leopold II’s enterprise, through the work of several Italian, Scandinavian, and Swiss civil servants, technical personnel, militaries, magistrates, and veterinarians (about 2900 in all, 1700 of whom were Belgian) (Salmon 1994: 192). Migration autonomously began around the 1910s. Members of the petite bourgeoisie and of the working class (Belgians, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, British, Americans, and Germans), urged on by their search for an income or adventure, were attracted by the opportunities arising from work in the Katanga mining region and in the Leopoldville province (Giordano 2008, 2016). Kivu became the area of the great plantations, the privileged destination for an elite immigration and incentivized by the concession of land for coffee farming (Giordano 2016). Only when the presence of foreign colonists was increasingly perceived as a threat were Belgian settlers encouraged to migrate. Initially, this occurred shortly before the First World War, when the influx of migrants coming from South Africa to Katanga led authorities to fear the British influence in the area (Vellut 2017: 139ff.). Later, in the 1920s, another wave of immigration to the Kivu region was encouraged to counteract the success and dynamism of Italian settlers (Giordano 2016: 321–322). The marginal role that governmental policies assigned to Belgian and European communities in Congo and the lack of recognition of their collective identity was first coherently defined in the 1920s. The discourses on the “quality” of the white individual affirmed the principle whereby the prestige of the race in the colony had to be kept high. Thus, the arrival of uneducated lower-class individuals (i.e., those who performed menial jobs) had to be prevented so as not to tarnish the “image of the White people” in the eyes of the indigenous population (Vellut 2017: 115ff.; Rubbers 2009: 46).

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Nonetheless, most European immigrants to the Congo until World War II were considered petits blancs (an expression defining the lower classes). Structural instability and precariousness characterized the social, economic, and cultural configurations of the Belgian colonial model. In contemporaneous accounts, work emerges as a central element of subjective history: people often had to start from scratch, to prove themselves by accepting new challenges, and to be mobile and flexible, especially in such a vast and varied territory. In the years following the Great Depression, living conditions were particularly uncertain for many Europeans (Giordano 2008: 52ff.). The Second World War marked a watershed. Following the Nazi occupation of Belgium, the colony’s heightened role in the production industry led to a phase of growth with new opportunities and scenarios. In the postwar period, with its incipient “modernity” and “development,” a change in the way of living and of representing the Congo’s transformations occurred. Families experienced the differences existing between their country of origin, marred by poverty and war (as in the case of some Italian regions), and the prosperity of some colonial cities. In some cases, an inversion occurred between the developed and the underdeveloped world. The positive economic juncture of the 1950s granted both older settlers and newcomers stability as the demography of the European population exemplifies, with a significant increase in the number of women and children (Giordano 2008, 2016). The colony was no longer perceived as a “heart of darkness,” but rather as a new El Dorado, an attractive destination for small and medium investors despite the predominance of the big companies. The European minorities had more or less integrated in the Belgian-Congolese colonial world, which was swept by the optimism characterizing l’âge d’or, “the golden age” of the colony, and had a new outlook on the cultural and political ties with Europe. Families were given the opportunity to climb the social ladder and their children received secondary education. An emergent middle class experimented with new work activities, new and original lifestyles, and behavioral models. Social and interest networks, appropriate to the colonial reality, fostered a stronger sense of belonging. Life histories (Giordano 2008) testify to a climate of collaboration and comparison with the évolués,3 the Congolese middle class that shares with 3 The évolués were a heterogeneous group of people with higher education and Christian values. They lived close to the Whites, for whom they served as auxiliaries. Others had gained significant social and economic positions in the colony thanks to their resourcefulness. They

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the Anciens the memory of the colonial age d’or and the decline of the postcolonial era, marked by disorder and violence (Ndaywel è Nziem 2005). The ways in which settlers interacted with the indigenous population are instead narrated in rather paternalistic tones: the affective ties with the ‘boys’, the servants, the workers and their families. However, the daily interactions occurring inside the homes clearly conformed to and legitimated the “color bar” that structured the public sphere. Generally, in the decade following World War II, Belgian politics was quite parochial, in spite of the dynamism of the European communities. First of all, arrival and settlement in the colony had to follow strict contractual rules. A 50,000 Franc deposit, as a guarantee against forced repatriation, was owed the government to work or settle in Congo (Giordano 2008: 83). Therefore, at the beginning of the 1950s, settlers became manifestly intolerant and autonomous of Brussels, whose general indifference, if not hostility toward their cause, they criticized (Jewsiewicki 1979: 565; 1983: 97). In several provinces of the colony, settlers and colonials created a number of associations that joined into a federation, the Fédération congolaise des classes moyennes (FEDACOL), to promote European development and to defend the social, economic, and political rights of the “middle classes” in Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi (CRISP 1959). This program, drawn up “in Congo for Congo,” rejected racial discrimination and wished to open itself to the “indigenous middle classes”; it also aimed to defend the colony against “the Administration, trade unionism, and the big companies” (CRISP 1959: 8, 11). The identity question, and the attendant relationship with Belgium, was particularly felt in the Katanga region. Here, the European community was the largest of the colony and contributed to constructing a dynamic and culturally lively region. Its major expression was the cosmopolitan city of Elisabethville, the provincial capital. Many veterans considered themselves “Congolais à part entière” (“fully Congolese”), often defining themselves as “White Africans” or even “White Congolese” (Mutamba Makombo Kitatshima 1998: 157ff., 278ff.). In 1953, they also tried to be recognized as

saw themselves as “réussi” (successful people), “dark-skinned Europeans” who tried to distinguish themselves from the indigenous by adopting “civilized” behaviors and lifestyles. Since 1945 they have demanded an official recognition of their status (Ndaywel è Nziem 1998: 451–464; Mutamba Makombo Kitatshima 1998: 157, 278ff.). At the end of the colonial era, the estimated number of évolués for the whole Congo was less than 200,000.

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“indigenous people” (“natural inhabitants”) “following the Charter of the United Nation” (Jewsiewicki 1979: 568). The European inhabitants of Belgian Congo and of Ruanda-Urundi in the post-World War II period were a considerably diverse group. Among the “independent” settlers, and in addition to the traditional settlers (a limited number of plantations owners), were numerous small entrepreneurs operating in the service, transport, construction, and retail businesses, as well as technicians, craftsmen, and other workers. Besides these were the so-called “colonials,” civil servants, and employees of the big companies. In 1959, the Congolese European community amounted to 115,000 individuals (and growing, compared to the previous years). A quarter of these were not Belgian. Almost 60% of the residents were labeled as “sans professions ” (“unemployed”) and were mostly women and children. The previous year, the active population fell within four groups: over twenty thousand employees in the private sector, almost ten thousand settlers and their employees, an equivalent number of civil and military servants, and more than seventy thousand missionaries (Salmon 1994: 194ff.). Almost half the Europeans lived in two provinces, Katanga (33,918) and Léopoldville (31,887). Finally, in the territories under the Ruanda-Urundi tutelage, the number of white people came to 7976 (6064 of whom were Belgian). The rigid structures of the Belgian system relegated most Europeans to the role of auxiliaries, to the detriment of the most resourceful settlers. The latter, as Bogumil Jewsiewicki affirms (1983: 89–90), were reduced to the condition of “retirees” in an economic system and “prisoners” of a political one. At the same time, the Europeans in the colony adopted a racist paternalistic attitude, promoting the systematic separation (color bar) between Europeans and indigenous people. The sexual exploitation of the so-called menagères (“concubines”) (Lauro 2005) was the distorted expression of such a racist attitude and system of domination. These women were victims of domestic violence at the hands of mostly white men who had migrated to the colony without their families (the great majority until at least the 1930s). The mixed-race—or as they were called then, “mulattoes”—were considered almost as “natural children,” as they were not usually recognized by their white fathers (Jeurissen 2003). After all, intermarriages were prohibited, since sexual intercourse with indigenous women was considered immoral and unfitting of the superiority of the white race. The mixedrace children were often taken from their mothers and brought to the orphanages run by the missionaries, who educated them. Their mixed-race

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condition was not officially recognized.4 Therefore, they were doubly discriminated against, usually living in segregation. They had been taught to regard themselves as different from the blacks, but at the same time they were not recognized by the whites. On the eve of World War II, there were approximately 5000 under-aged mixed-race individuals in the Congo.5

From Colonial “Ordinariness” to the Trauma of Decolonization In the 1950s, while decolonization had an extraordinary effect in Asia and Africa, there was a vague attempt to form a Belgian-Congolese community, despite the inertia characterizing the colonial circles and despite the fact that independence appeared as only a remote possibility. The most optimistic hypothesis foresaw the emancipation, not independence, of Congo and of Ruanda-Urundi within a broader federal union with Belgium within the following thirty years. The first significant sign of change appeared in 1956 when a nationalist manifesto was published. The following year, the year of the first administrative elections, the first political parties were formed, including the ABAKO, led by Kasa-Vubu (with a strong identity and federalist character), and Moise Tshombe’s KONAKAT. These were followed by many other ethnic and regional formations, such as Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement, which had a nationalist and unitarian program (Ndaywel è Nziem 1998: 499–610). In 1958, at Brazzaville during the Algerian

4 A commentary by Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (1998: 462) clearly explains the working of the racial system in everyday life. The boats that sailed along the rivers had four classes: the first for the Whites, the second for the Asians, mulattoes, Black priests and seminarians; the third for the évolués; the fourth for the “indigenous.” 5 The figure is provided by the Belgian journalist Colette Braeckman (Les métis, enfants oubliés de la colonisation belge, in Le carnet de Colette Braeckman, July 21, 2014, https:// blog.lesoir.be), in a text summarizing her preface to a testimony denouncing the mixedrace segregation and ensuing tribulations (Budagwa 2014). The issue has recently received attention, especially involving the Catholic Church for its treatment of the mixed-race children in the religious institutions in Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. The Belgian media released many autobiographical testimonies, documentaries and news. The episode involving 20,000 mixedrace was considered a “matter of State”, unacknowledged history. In April 2017, the Belgian Catholic Church formally apologized to the mixed-race children born during the colonial period. Cf. Métis/Enfants oubliés de la colonisation, https://information.tv5monde.com; Ni noirs, ni blancs, les enfants métis durant la colonisation belge, https://rtbf.be.

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“dirty war,” De Gaulle spoke in favor of the French colonies’ independence, legitimizing similar expectations in the nearby Belgian colony. At this point the political climate rapidly changed, precipitating a severe international crisis. Lumumba’s request for independence (December 1958) had disruptive effects: the strong and powerfully performative words with which it was pronounced struck a chord among the masses that were experiencing serious social problems in the urban areas (Ndaywel è Nziem 1998; Young 1965). As the people became increasingly aware of their condition, turmoil erupted in the capital and in other cities: rage led to acts of violence targeting the Europeans (acts that were severely repressed), resulting in the first conspicuous wave of returns to Europe.6 Independence suddenly became a central issue in the discussion about the future of Belgian Congo: the transition was negotiated during the famous January–February 1960 Table ronde in Brussels that set the date for the declaration of independence on June 30 of the same year. The Belgians of the colony were not involved in the initial decolonization process, but subsequently they became highly invested in the grave crisis that broke out regarding independence. In general, the expressions of dissent toward the Belgian government were quite improvised and never turned into an actual political agenda. In effect, as Jean-Luc Vellut observes “the settlers’ isolation was total, in the Congo and in Belgium, on the left and on the right” (Vellut 2017: 113). During the decolonization process, settlers aimed at safeguarding their specific interests and their life experiences on the African soil, seeing independence as part of their continuity. In 1959, given the “calm” and the “ordinariness” characterizing the colony, the settlers manifested their will to abandon all uncertainty and demand immediate independence (Stengers 2007 [1989]: 284). The illusion of a negotiated transition, that is, one led by their mother country, had granted support to the governmental status quo; however, the political climate would shift rapidly toward an extremely severe crisis. The rupture occurred during the independence ceremony on June 30, 1960, and is linked to Lumumba’s memorable speech. To Westerners, and to many Congolese politicians, the tone of his speech and its denunciation of Belgian rule were an “offense” against King Baudouin (who attended the ceremony). By contrast, to the most radical part of the Congolese people, 6 Colonel Vanderstraetens’ research (1985: 475; Balace 2012: 137) indicates that 8150 women and 9850 children left the colony before the independence and mutiny.

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the speech marked a moment of truth, dignity, and empowerment. In the short run, independence became a missed opportunity, a shift highlighting all the violent contradictions and imbalances of the vastly (self)-celebrated Belgian model. The “ordinariness” of the colony, or rather its political atrophy, was in fact based on paternalistic racism, on color bar policies, on the separation between white neighborhoods and cités indigènes (Jewsiewicki et al. 2010). In addition, a repressive apparatus of social control, imposed by “A Nervous State” (Hunt 2016), had suffocated both social demands and “traditional” forms of resistance and had caused the discontent of the salaried workers. A few days after independence, riots animated by long-repressed frustration broke out following the mutiny of the Congolese military, which was still under the command of Belgian officers. The brutality against the whites was extreme; depredation and inexcusable violence against women hurt and humiliated the settlers, causing the former mother country to shudder (Balace 2012: 136ff.; Vanderstraeten 1985: 475ff.). Within such a tumultuous context, the internal conflicts and disputes with Belgium had disruptive effects during the Cold War (Carbone 2016). The pervasively interdependent character of the process governing the international market for mining resources, and the centrality of the Congo in it, eventually led to the secession of Katanga, the main mining and industrial area, and of South Kasai. The economic and financial powers that had dominated the colonial economy played a decisive role in this occurrence. They now worked to make independence a purely formal act, in order to preserve their actual exploitation of the country. Settlers and colonials were involved (in various measures) in the brief existence of the state of Katanga (1960–1963), until they bore the brunt of the defeat in the conflict against the independent Congo. After the mutiny the crisis quickly escalated, with different segments of the European community sharing the same fate. Violence brought panic and collective trauma and led to a mass exodus. This flight from Congo was largely facilitated by an airlift7 that lasted around 20 days and repatriated 7 The “extraordinary enterprise” was made possible thanks to the commitment of the national Belgian airline, Sabena. Two ex-flight attendants, in an autobiographical memoir recently published, still enthusiastically speak about it (De Mets 2017: 162ff., 178ff.). The memory of the “painful” condition of the rapatriés and of the violence endured, visible in their eyes, is still alive. The editor of the volume also stresses the figures that marked, “the most important humanitarian airlift in history”: number of people saved, of flights operated, of total flying hours (Id.: 189).

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over 44,484 (more than 80% of the Belgians), mostly women and children (Salmon 1994: 193–194; Vanderstraeten 1985: 475). Several mixedrace individuals were excluded: those whose mothers were Congolese and whom the Belgian authorities considered “Congolese citizens who preferred remaining in Congo” (Salmon 1994: 196). Many of them, especially girls, were the victims of violence and the object of solidarity in Belgium. Indeed, in 1961, the Association pour la Protection des Mulatres transferred about 200 mixed-race individuals to Belgium (Salmon 1994: 197). This sad and “hideous” experience would not take place in Ruanda-Urundi, from where hundreds of children and young girls were brought to Europe before 1962 (given the independence of the two territories) to be given into custody of Belgian families. Other repatriations would follow this inflow, first coinciding with the end of the Katanga secession (1963), then with the crisis and the conflicts that ravaged Congo, and finally after Mobutu’s definitive rise to power (1965).

The “Colonial Drama” and the Escape ´ of the Rapatries Independence, riots, violence, and the resulting need to leave the country brought the various European settlers together. The indignation for the abuses and rapes suffered by white women constitute a significant aspect of the “trauma” experienced by the rapatriés (repatriates), an aspect that has not yet been properly addressed. The Congolese crisis quickly became a colonial drama (Piniau 1992: 209ff.) that upset the reality and the imaginary of the Belgian-Congolese relations; as a result, the pathological condition of the “colonial situation” (Balandier 1951: 88) became manifest. In his accurate reading of the crisis, Pedro Monaville (2008) affirms that the conflict and the discourses arising from the violence against white women highlight the relationship existing between the different notions of gender and race elaborated during the colonial period. For the sake of our argument, we shall focus on the ways in which the Belgians living in Congo were seen in the mother country. First of all, while initially receiving considerable coverage in the Belgian media, and evoking feelings of horror and deprecation, the topic of the rapes was removed from the news in a sort of “active silence” (Monaville 2008: 89). The press would offer vague descriptions and definitions that brought back the ghosts of “African savagery” (Piniau 1992: 234–243). Reporters would not give voice to the victims. The latter were allowed to

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tell their experiences through a commission appointed by the Belgian government with the task of gathering “information.”8 In effect, the role of the commission was purely political and aimed at justifying the intervention of a Belgian military contingent in Congo, but the discourse about violence gained strategic importance. In the Commission’s report on the rapes, these are described as part of a broader system of violence defined as “sévices habituels ” (“ordinary acts of violence”) (Monaville 2008: 98). The value and meaning of each individual testimony, coming from both the anonymous victims and the witnesses, is thereby lost as it is conflated in a collective denunciation of the violation of the white body. Consequently, what the Congolese appear to have violated is the idea of racial superiority established by the colonial order. The Belgian army intervention in the Congo restored the colonial sexual and racial barriers that had been overcome, emerging as “the necessary reaffirmation of white men’s virility” (Monaville 2008: 100; Piniau 1992: 216ff.). In any case, one could safely hypothesize that the memories of the rapatriés were initially belittled or even subject to a campaign of silence in order to protect the prestige and dignity of the nation. Conflict animated the relationship between the rapatriés and the metropolitan Belgians during the crisis: some witnesses explicitly affirmed that military intervention was the necessary consequence of the colonials’ “laxity” and “cowardice,” as they had contributed to precipitating the former colony into chaos. From an opposite perspective, in the Congo people blamed Belgium’s “foolish and destructive” management of the colony for the chaos into which the country had been thrown, as opposed to the work of the independent pioneers, the “true men” who had run the country before the Second World War (Balace 2012: 136ff.). In fact, the mother country had developed a negative image of the Belgians who had settled in the Congo. In the 1950s, the Belgians in the Congo were the epitome of success and richness, filling the metropolitans with envy of the “petit blanc”-turned-“grand blanc,” especially because settlers loved to display their wealth and lavish lifestyle during their stay in the mother country. As a result, the colony was imagined as a new El Dorado filled with every godsend. The more hostile metropolitan voices defined the Belgians living in Congo as being “from the margins,” uncouth and exploitative adventurers 8 The Commission report: Congo Juillet 1960. Témoignages, Ministère de la Justice, Bruxelles, 1960.

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who had made a fortune. Other prejudices and stereotypes persisted that dated back to Leopold’s period, when, as Francis Balace contends (2012: 136), the myth of the Têtes brulés, those who had gone to Africa to expiate “a murky existence of women and gambling debts,” became popular. Later on it was common among metropolitan families to lower their voices when speaking of “the black sheep who had left for Congo after shaming the family.” In an article that appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique in September 1961, the Belgian journalist Pierre De Vos described the experience of the rapatriés as an “ordeal.” In addition to the trauma of violence and escape, disillusionment and difficulties marked their return home. An initial, consistent solidarity campaign (including food and clothing campaigns, accommodation, and money donations) was soon followed by general indifference and, later, outright hostility. From a broader perspective, the ideas that circulated around the enfranchisement of the oppressed people led to the belief that settlers and colonials had no place in history, to the extent that a Manichean vision opposing the “open and sympathetic” metropolitan Belgian to the “bad colonials” took hold (Balace 2012: 136). A photograph of the time eloquently shows the mood of the rapatriés and their relationship with the Belgian society: on July 11 in Brussels, a protest rally took place during the most acute phase of the crisis and attendant exodus. Among the demonstrators, a banner stands out claiming, “the Congo is being ravaged,” while in the foreground a young boy holds a sign that reads, “the decadents gave us away to the savages” (Verlinden 2002: 177). The relationship between metropolitans and the rapatriés from Katanga was especially fraught with conflict. Here the Europeans had first backed the Federalist choice and then the Secessionist option, claiming Katanga’s historical and cultural uniqueness. The region was seen as “enclosed” within a geopolitical construction deemed artificial and arbitrarily imposed during the colonial division of the territories. Several titled colonials and settlers who benefited from the support of the Belgian authorities took part in the secession, at times officially as counselors to the Tshombe government.9 During the years of the secession, Katanga became a “safe” destination for many Europeans leaving the Congo. In addition to people returning to the region, there were also many new arrivals, as civil servants, officials, and 9 Mario Spandre, lawyer and Tshombe’s counselor, narrates the events of those turbulent days (Giordano 2008: 106–147). A recent volume of a famous protagonist of the secession: Brassinne de la Buissière (2018).

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settlers mass migrated there. The number of white people in Katanga was higher than during the colonial period (Salmon 1994: 196; De Vos 1961: 4). Those returning from Katanga regretted the failure of the secession, which they saw as “the betrayal of the Belgian authorities.” In reply to the shameful accusations circulating in Europe about their being mercenaries, some witnesses affirmed the legitimacy of the settlers’ and colonials’ contribution to the Katanga cause, as they were the “children of the country” (Giordano 2008: 172ff.). Resentment surrounds one particular episode that characterized the isolation experienced during those tragic days. It concerns the controversial behavior of some UN contingents that intervened in the region, committing prevarications, looting, exactions. Two Indian (UN) blue helmets also killed two young Italians, thinking they were “mercenaries,”10 a fact that caused shock and pain. The different interests and demands of the various groups of rapatriés must be taken into account when analyzing the repatriation process. The officials who had mostly served the colonial administration first, and that of the independent Congo afterwards, were interested in preserving a good relationship with the metropolitan authorities in the hope of being employed as civil servants back home. The Belgian government had promised the “compénétration,” that is, the relocation of civil servants from Congo with the same functions and levels. Metropolitan officials saw this measure as a privilege. Most requests were generally granted (De Vos 1961: 4); a new migratory flow of colonial agents toward Central Africa began in the 1960s, where they hoped to find a new occupation in the cooperation for Belgian development (Salmon 1994: 201). Settlers had a much harder time returning to Belgium due to their bad reputation back home. In a published memorial, the colonial magistrate J. L. Libert (1991: 460–461) reports some dramatic cases of old plantation settlers who considered the Congo their “country”; he underlines that back in those days, people would call them exploiters, which was a “disgusting lie.” Numerous settlers, therefore, did not like the new reality of the mother country and refused to adjust to it, as the memory of Belgium’s betrayal was still fresh. The government indemnified them for the material losses they had undergone in an act of “national solidarity.” However, the complexity of the clauses in the compensation claim greatly limited the efficacy of the measures adopted. 10 46 hommes en colère. Les 46 médecins d’Elisabethville dénoncent les violations par l’ONU au Katanga, préface de M. Paul Struye, Président du Senat de Belgique, s.n., 1962.

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In 1960 and the following years, the Belgian government committed itself to finding adequate solutions to their difficulties and general unease: it facilitated many families’ migration to Brazil and Australia; it also made an effort to find them jobs in Belgium (De Vos 1961: 4). During the years of the return and in the subsequent decades, several settlers autonomously moved to other destinations, mostly South Africa (Salmon 1994: 198). Their memories of those experiences long remained silent in a country that wanted to forget after the crisis of the 1960s (Bobineau 2017; Goddeeris 2015; Monaville 2015; Rosoux and Van Ypersele 2011; Van den Braembussche 2002).

Trauma-Payback-Narration: From Disavowal to Conflict The historical memory of the Anciens reemerged in the mid-1990s, reanimating the complex but lively process of recovery of the colonial and postcolonial Belgian-Congolese past. The debate on memory in Belgium originates in the drama of the Ruanda genocide in 1994, which called into question the Belgian colonial and postcolonial history. A parliamentary committee of inquiry was appointed following the public’s incredulity toward the tragic killing of ten paratroopers and the withdrawal of Belgian forces. The Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt publicly apologized after some serious accusations were proven to be true. At the same time, the publication of Ludo de Witte’s book (2001 [1999]) on Lumumba’s assassination drew attention to the disavowed question of Belgium’s responsibilities, so much so that a new parliamentary committee of inquiry was nominated. This encouraged the controversial positions of certain groups linked to the colonial milieu (who had similar tones and opinions to those used during the campaign against Lumumba in the 1960s) (Halen and Riezs 1997). On the other hand, a progressive current and a republican Flemish one that were animated by different purposes and expectations emerged and brought the national political divisions into the debate. The colonial history of Belgium gained new media attention with the emergence of the “Congo atrocities.” The American journalist Adam Hochschild (1998) was the first to publicly accuse Leopold II of what might have actually been the first genocide of the twentieth century. The same accusations were made in a BBC documentary directed by Peter Bate, broadcast in 2004 on two national Belgian TV channels. In this rereading of history, the colonial phenomenon was to be condemned. This was the time

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of a morally engaged revision of history, a revision produced by a growing international political sensibility toward the controversial historical and juridical issue of contemporary Western crimes against humanity. Thus, in a very short time, the logic, practices, discourses, and silences around the issue of violence were decontextualized and connected to emblematic images, numbers, and definitions: the amputated hands, the ten million dead, and the terms “genocide” and “holocaust.” On their part, the Anciens had long been engaged in preserving and divulging the memory of the colonial history through several magazines, leaflets, and books, distributed within small circles, where they would not re-elaborate and exchange information but only reaffirm their positions.11 During the debate, the narration tended to vindicate the past, driven by the accusations against the red rubber regime. The Anciens perceived such accusations as an arbitrary criminalization of the colonial experience directly involving them (Giordano 2008: 18). The problematic encounter between researchers and witnesses during the debate years would give the Anciens a new awareness. Several inquiries on colonial memory were launched, some of which were backed by public institutions. In particular, the Anciens association, Mémoire du Congo et du Ruanda-Urundi, devised a project to gather numerous testimonies, which led to the collation of a vast corpus of autobiographies recorded on audiovisual supports.12 Their intent was blatantly provocative as they sought to react to the fact that the anciens coloniaux and colonialism had “gotten bad press”; they therefore felt “compelled to explain future generations what the Belgian colonization of Congo really amounted to.”13 Similarly, they explicitly aimed to manage the collection and conservation of these memories so as to save them from any external intervention. The release and distribution of a series of thematic DVDs (territorial administration; veterinarians and agronomists; education and missionary work) was an equally relevant part of this project. The DVDs

11 I refer in particular to the following journals: Kisugulu, périodique trimestriel des anciens étudiants du Congo, Bruxelles, 1982–2008; Sous les Palmes, Bruxelles, Association des Anciennes IMJ. 12 Information and data on the association available at https://memoiresducongo.org. 13 Kisugulu, 78, 2002: 18; Pour la Vérité sur la Colonisation Belge, s.d., https://

infotervuren.be/colonisation.htm.

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reproduce excerpts from the collected autobiographies, functioning as thematic chapters of the “colonial history.”14 Overall, although individually the testimonies are descriptive in nature and shed considerable light on various aspects of everyday life, the introductory and concluding sections offer a benevolent reading of the colonial enterprise. Stereotypes and clichéd descriptions emerge that are deeply rooted in the colonial discourse. They extoll the “extraordinary civilizing mission” of colonialism and the myth of “small Belgium” creating the “great Congo.” These readings tend to codify a collective memory that should be used as the interpretative paradigm for the published volume edited by the Union Royale Belge pour les pays d’Outre Mer (UROME 2004),15 which combines twenty-nine minor associations. The intent of the volume was clearly militant: it wanted to enter the debate, not simply as a repository of memory, but as a counter-history. This militant attitude still animates the association’s rich website, today.16 The issue of the relationship between individual and collective subjectivity is also central to the analysis of the work of the Anciens ’ memory. In particular, an intermediate stage concerning what Paul Ricoeur (2000) called the “proches,” that is, those bound by close relations, should be considered. Individual memories lead to the belief that the rapatriés have subjectively elaborated the “drama” of their return: their retrospective reading of their memories is not relayed with melodramatic, self-pitying tones, resentment, or claims; rather, it focuses on the life choices they made to guarantee themselves a future elsewhere, sometimes in another wave of migration to a new world. As regards the collective meaning of the colonial past, there is no trace of imperialist myth or ideology: it emphasizes the centrality of European action in the Congo on “our” (or multiple) subjectivities that emerged out of colonial society.

14 Mémoires du Congo et du Ruanda-Urundi, Le Service Territorial. Témoignagnes, DVD, s.l., s.d.; Id., Agronomes et Vétérinaires. Témoignagnes, DVD, s.l., 2006; Id., L’Enseignement au Congo Belge et au Ruanda-Urundi. Témoignages, DVD, s.l., 2008; the fourth volume is dedicated to Father Raphaël, missionary of the Scheut Mission, who lived in Congo in the years 1917–1956: Id., Tata Raphaël. Témoignages, DVD, s.l., s.d. 15 A more recent volume deals with the issues of “manipulated” history and of the “denied counter-truths” (De Maere d’Aertrycke et al. 2015). Other books are available in the Livres section at https://memoiresducongo.be. 16 https://urome.be.

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By contrast, these numerous projects for the recuperation and preservation of the colonial memory in many ways document a homogeneous and consistent set of recollections that is self-referential and impervious to other points of view (and even apologetic at times). The individual memory, or that of the proches, appears to have been assimilated by a “guided” collective memory that somehow leads to psychological forms of self-censorship. These in turn prevent the individual from relaying his/her memory and instead entrust someone else with the task of writing those memories (Giordano 2008: 90).

Disavowing/Repositioning … Trauma and Memory The initiatives undertaken by many associations in their efforts to collect the memory of the colonial past (during the second half of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s—or later) aimed at offering a public representation of the Anciens as the custodians and protagonists of national history during a time that came to be known as the “age of the witness” (Hartog 2003). The creation of the “great Congo,” when compared to the “small Belgium,” is to be considered in the wake of Leopold II’s great enterprise: “our king,” a recurrent emphatic expression among my interlocutors, identifies, and legitimizes the group in the history of the “génie,” of the “batisseur” (the builders, the founders), due to their participation in his great design. Privation, difficulties, losses, and conflicts are (re)read in the light of this artificial constitutive element of memory, weaving together a rhetorical narrative meant to represent the nation. The Anciens claim a univocal vision idealizing the founding state, the drive toward the modernization (“civilization”) of colonial society, whose settlers were the dynamic operational arm (e.g., construction, agriculture, commerce, transport, craftsmanship, and industry). The “little Belgians” (Halen 1993) took full part in this process together with the great founders of the colony who occupy a place in the pantheon of the nation (e.g., military, administrators, clergymen, financiers, and tycoons). The trauma of loss appears to be diminished, if not eliminated, whenever the need for “historical truth,” a counter-narrative, is called for in a context where Belgian colonialism is strongly criticized. The collective memory of the Anciens is (re)codified according to this perspective, whereas individual memory functions as a choice to redefine one’s positions. The critical views of the past concerning the Belgian state or the colonial administration remain in the background, or even unmentioned. The object of such

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criticism was the apparatuses and logics that had penalized the pétits blancs (Giordano 2008: 47ff.). The work of memory is governed by a prioritizing logic dictated by a superior order: the former colonial administrative and bureaucratic elites that lead and represent the most important associations of the Anciens (UROME and Mémoire du Congo et du RuandaUrundi). They promote publications, conferences, blogs, and political and commemorative initiatives.17 The elaboration of the colonial past does not benefit from the dialectical confrontation between the “high” and “the low,” although some significant testimonies and initiatives emerge from this perspective.18 “Loss” and “the memory of trauma” are relegated to the space of subjective memory, the private sphere, the sphere of family and friends; in other words, to small groups of people united by their colonial life or by common experiences. As in the past, these people organize meetings and social gatherings where acts of commemoration are performed. These encounters are marked by the exchange of personal experiences, the exhibition of photographs and memorabilia, and meetings with their descendants. A few 17 Some more ambitious Anciens are more interested in the writing of “history” rather than the re-elaboration of memory, as they try to fill out the void left by professional historians. However, this is a common interest to the whole group, who is the recipient of published material both online and offline. A grey zone between memory and history has emerged, which is made of silences and implicit discourses, exchanges and meetings between historians and Anciens. This is a theme that has received little attention here, but which I believe is crucial for the events regarding the Anciens in the last decade. This theme affects the legitimation of the colonial experience, the attempt at rewriting the history of the past, and thus at redefining one’s position within contemporary Belgian society. 18 I will briefly provide the example of a rapatrié’ s daughter Martine Decol, editor of a digital Bulletin Périodique (https://congo-1960.be). Her interest in the past arises from watching a documentary on a Dutch TV channel in 2002 by the journalist Verlinden, the author of two volumes on the rapatriés (Verlinden 2002). There, the reporter talked about the existence of a un “rapport de recherche” on Congo rapatriés, an investigation on the violence suffered by white women in 1960 and “accurately silenced by the Belgian government.” Surprised by the news, and with her mother’s stories still fresh in her memory, Mrs Decol decided to act. She created a website in her mother’s honor: “To elaborate the trauma that invested our family, writing becomes therapeutic.” She recounts that her mother was embittered by the lack of understanding following her return, and her regret at failing to talk about “the greatest trauma of her life.” The bulletin publishes autobiographical memoirs, documents and photos. The title and the presentation of one collection of 16 autobiographical testimonials (in a hesitant French) passionately evoke a painful past “Darkness, the Black Heart of Africa. Sixteen Testimonies Collected by the De Post Journalist Gust Verwerft, Translated from the Dutch, Published for You, so that the Life of the Anciens and the Exodus of All the Belgians May Not Be Forgotten!”.

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magazines and leaflets acted (and still act) as efficient means of communication, as showcases for, and actual lieux de mémoire (places of memory) where the act of remembering is dialogical rather than militant, as in the years of the debate (Giordano 2008: 81ff.).

Conclusions: The Anciens and the Past-Future of the Colonial Memory The public debate on the Belgian-Congolese past seems to have petered out without having effectively led to an agenda or a methodology for a shared work of remembering between the Anciens , the Belgian society, and the Congolese. If the 2005 Tervuren exhibition on “colonial time” (Vellut 2005)—organized to make a first analysis of the debate (Belgium was then defined as positive in a workshop on memory) (Chrétien 2005: 143)—is a turning point, then the divide between the memory of the Anciens and a portion of the progressive Belgian, Flemish society has widened. Within such a context, several individuals and associations work together with the diasporic Congolese community with the aim to question the Belgian-Congolese past starting from present issues. Nowadays, mobility and current migratory phenomena lay new foundations for the questions of confrontation, inclusion, the fight against discrimination, and the prospect of affirming the right to citizenship. Occasionally the colonial past is brought back into the public discourse with strong political and moral overtones (e.g., through Lumumba’s assassination, the theme of acknowledging the Other, and the relation between the violence of the colonial and postcolonial past). The new languages and experimental forms of postcolonial art and literature that challenge the presumed universal Western narrative are extremely significant within such a context. Consider, for example, the controversial reactions to the reprint of Tintin au Congo, the racist comics published in the 1930s; the reactions to colonial toponymy and monuments; and the (at times bitter) confrontation regarding the choices on the renovation of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale.19 Above all, it is the figure of Lumumba who causes embarrassment, controversy, and new rifts. The myth of the leader of Congo and of independent Africa generates conflict and “acid memories” (the reference is to the

19 Among the numerous publications see: Bragard (2011), Ceuppens (2007), Goddeeris (2015), Silverman (2015), Stanard (2012), and Vallet (2018).

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acid in which Lumumba’s body was dissolved) (Mouton and Monaville 2016–2017). This occurred both when there was a proposal for naming a square after him in the Congolese neighborhood of Matongé in Brussel and when the issue of commemorating his death (January 17, 1961) was discussed during an art festival (Congolisation 2015) at the Bozar, one of the country’s most famous cultural institutions. Often the institutions pose obstacles and cause trouble through either some executive or politician whose family history has ties with the colonial past, or some zealous official of the Ministry for Cooperation, with the intent of preserving the prestige of the Belgian institutions and the country’s past (Vallet 2018). The most debated issue today, which concerns the positions held by the Anciens , involves the renovation of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, begun in 2013 and completed in December 2018 with its reopening and a new permanent exhibition. Built after the Universal Expo in 1897, the museum is the most prestigious monumental complex self-celebrating Leopold II’s colonial enterprise. The museum holds several vast collections on central Africa (Art, Natural Sciences, Ethnography) and is the symbol of the imperialistic culture that found expression in the binomial knowledge-power. Until a few years ago, this museum, with its collection set up in 1959, offered a “fossilized” representation of the colonial past. For the Anciens , who have strong ties with its management, the museum is the place of memory par excellence, to the extent that they periodically meet there in a room especially reserved for them. In July 2017, one of the UROME administrators, speaking to the museum managers, voiced his concern over the fact that “the Belgians – and particularly those who once made the Congo one of the most prosperous countries in Africa – are excluded from the Museum’s renovation” (Vallet 2018: 217). Criticism over the museum’s reopening in 2018 appeared on several websites managed by Anciens : They claimed that the exhibition spaces dedicated to the colonial past were insufficient; moreover, they argued that the museum propounded a “revisionist” reading of and “contempt” for the figure and work of Leopold II.20 The new narrative of the colonial enterprise proposed by the associations of the Anciens also considers the issue of the former colonized subject within the national space. Their objective is to make sense of the notion of

20 Africa Museum, L’histoire revisitée à la sauce révisionniste: https://memoiresducongo.be.

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mobility and of the presence of diasporic Congolese or African communities and to read these through a prism that sees the postcolonial period as one of destruction as opposed to the colonial period as one of construction. The presence of the Other in Belgium originates in the civilizing action of the colonial time: this action can also benefit the future of the CongoleseBelgian relations. In other words, colonial paternalism extends its pedagogical function into the future. Thus, one of the UROME webpages affirms that Belgium remains the country of reference for the Congolese people because of the work carried out during the colonial period. Despite all the “despotisms” they had to endure, beginning with independence, and for the subsequent forty years, the Congolese have continued to look up to the “democratic values of Western civilization” that they have assimilated thanks to their contact with “us.” They “have adopted the Christian morals and the secular vision of the civil order; Greek-Latin humanism has grafted onto their proud negritude.”21 The episodes and the issues analyzed here reflect a past that still causes unease. There is anxiety and fear that the public space may be compromised, fear of losing control of “memory” and the discourses of the present, and the strong influence that the idea of a monolithic national history/memory continues to exercise on the public. Within this purview, a gray zone emerges that clouds judgment and frustrates any attempt to move toward a plural Belgian-Congolese memory.

References Arendt, H. 1951. The Origin of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company. Balace, F. 2012. Regroupements et lobbies des agents coloniaux et des colons belges 1960–1962). In Du Congo belge à la République du Congo, 1955–1965, ed. M. Dumoulin, A.-S. Gijs, P.-L. Plasman, and Ch. Van De Velde, 135–146. Bruxelles: Peter Lang. Balandier, G. 1951. La situation coloniale: approche théorique. Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 11: 44–79. Bobineau, J. 2017. The Historical Taboo: Colonial Discourses and Postcolonial Identities in Belgium. Werkwinkel 12 (1): 107–123.

21 UROME, Introduction, par Oscar Libotte, Président Honoraire d’Urome, https:// urome.be.

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Hartog, F. 2003. Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil. Helbig, D. 2005. Paroles du Congo belge. Entretiens et témoignages. Bruxelles: Luc Pire. Hochschild, A. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Hunt, N.R. 2016. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Durham: Duke University Press. Jeurissen, L. 2003. Quand le métis s’appelait ‘mulatre’. Société droit et pouvoir coloniaux face à la descendance des couples eurafricains dans l’ancien Congo belge. Cahiers Migrations 29. Jewsiewicki, B. 1979. Le colonat agricole européen au Congo belge, 1910–1960: questions politiques et économiques. Journal of African History XX (4): 559–571. Jewsiewicki, B. 1983. Capitalisme par procuration et industrialisation sans entrepreneurs: la petite entreprise au Congo belge, 1910–1960. In Entreprises et entrepreneurs en Afrique (XIXe et XXe siècles), vol. II, 81–100. Paris: L’Harmattan. Jewsiewicki, B. (ed.). 2004. Réparations, restitutions, réconciliations. Entre Afrique, Europe et Amériques. Cahiers d’Études Africaines XLIV (1–2). Jewsiewicki, B., D. Dibwe dia Mwembu, and R. Giordano, (eds.). 2010. Lubumbashi, 1910–2010. Mémoire d’une ville industrielle/Ukumbusho wa mukini wa componi. Paris: L’Harmattan. Lauro, A. 2005. Coloniaux, ménagères et prostituées au Congo belge (1885–1930). Loverval: Labor. Libert, J.-L. 1991. Souvenirs, Tribulations et Réflexions d’un Belge Liégeois. Liège: Ed. du Perron. Licata, L., and O. Klein. 2005. Regards croisés sur un passé commun: anciens colonisés et anciens coloniaux face à l’action belge au Congo. In L’Autre: Regards psychosociaux, ed. M. Sanchez-Mazas and L. Licata, 241–277. Grenoble: Presses Univ. de Grenoble. Marchal, J. 1996. E. D. Morel contre Léopold II. L’histoire du Congo 1900–1910. Paris: L’Harmattan. Monaville, P. 2008. La crise congolaise de juillet 1960 et le sexe de la décolonisation. In Colonialismes, ed. A. Lauro, Sextant 25: 87–102. Monaville, P. 2015. A Distinctive Ugliness: Colonial Memory in Belgium. In Memories of Post-imperial Nations: The Aftermath of Decolonization, 1945–2013, ed. D. Rothermund, 58–75. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Mouton, A., and P. Monaville. 2016–2017. Nos mémoires acides. Médor hiver 2016–2017: 23–29.

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Mutamba Makombo Kitatshima, J.-M. 1998. Du Congo belge au Congo indépendant, 1940–1960. Emergence des ‘évolués’ et genèse du nationalisme. Kinshasa: Institut de Formation et d’Études Politiques. Ndaywel è Nziem, I. 1998. Histoire générale du Congo. Bruxelles: Duculot. Ndaywel è Nziem, I. 2005. Le Congo et le bon usage de son histoire. In La mémoire du Congo. Le temps colonial, ed. J.-L. Vellut, 29–35. Tervuren: MRAC; Gand: Snoeck. Piniau, B. 1992. Congo-Zaïre, 1874–1981. La perception du lointain. Paris: L’Harmattan. Ricoeur, P. 2000. L’histoire, la mémoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Rosoux, V., and L. Van Ypersele. 2011. The Belgian National Past: Between Commemoration and Silence. Memory Studies 5 (1): 45–57. Rubbers, B. 2009. Faire fortune en Afrique. Anthropologie des derniers colons du Katanga. Paris: Karthala. Salmon, P. 1994. Les Retours en Belgique Induits par la Décolonisation. In L’Europe Retrouvée: Les Migrations de la Décolonisation, ed. J.-L. Miège and C. Dubois, 191–212. Paris: L’Harmattan. Silverman, D.L. 2015. Diasporas of Art: History, the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium, 1885–2014. The Journal of Modern History 87 (3): 615–667. Stanard, M.G. 2012. Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Stengers, J. 2007 [1989]. Congo. Mythes et réalités. 100 ans d’histoire. Paris and Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot. UROME. 2004. La colonisation belge. Une grande aventure. Bruxelles: G. Blanchart & Cie. Van den Braembussche, A. 2002. The Silence of Belgium: Taboo and Trauma in Belgian Memory. Yale French Studies 102: 34–52. Vanderstraeten, L.-F. 1985. De la Force Publique à l’Armée Nationale Congolaise: Histoire d’une mutinerie, juillet 1960. Paris, Gembloux, and Bruxelles: Duculot, Académie royale de Belgique. Vangroenweghe, D. 2010 [1985]. Du sang sur les lianes. Léopold II et son Congo. Bruxelles: Aden. Vallet, C. 2018. Décolonisation Impossible? Médor Printemps 2018: 102–107. Vellut, J.-L. (ed.). 2005. La Mémoire du Congo: Les Temps Colonial. Gand: Snoeck; Tervuren: MRAC. Vellut, J.-L. 2017. Congo. Ambitions et désenchantements, 1880–1960. Paris: Karthala. Verlinden, P. 2002. Weg uit Congo. Het drama van de kolonialen. Leuven: Davidsfonds. Young, C. 1965. Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Pied-Noir Trauma and Identity in Postcolonial France, 1962–2010 Sung-Eun Choi

On October 3, 2018, France’s high court, the Conseil d’État passed a landmark judgment holding the French state directly responsible for the deplorable conditions in the harki camps, the enclosures that received and held the harkis (i.e., former Muslim auxiliaries of the French army) for decades. Reparations in the amount of 15,000 Euros were recommended as part of the indictment.1 The announcement, more symbolic than anything,

1 http://www.conseil-etat.fr/Actualites/Communiques/Responsabilite-de-lEtat-concernant-les-conditions-de-vie-reservees-aux-familles-de-harkis. 2 https://www.lemonde.fr/emmanuel-macron/article/2018/09/13/guerre-dalgerie-emmanuel-macron-reconnait-le-role-de-l-etat-dans-la-mort-de-mauriceaudin_5354271_5008430.html; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ sep/13/france-state-responsible-for-1957-death-of-dissident-maurice-audin-inalgeria-says-macron; and https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ 2018/09/emmanuel-macron-acknowledges-torture-algeria/570283/.

S.-E. Choi (B) History Department, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_6

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followed on the heels of President Emmanuel Macron’s historic recognition of the state’s use of torture during the Algerian War.2 The news quickly caught on in the international media and elicited positive reactions from even the most diehard critics of the state among French experts on the Algerian War. But as with all other public pronouncements related to the war, these two declarations when placed side by side will appear familiar to experts cognizant of France’s long-standing balancing act between conciliation with the postindependence FLN government in Algeria on the one hand, and the harkis on the other. Admittedly the most radical and progressive set of announcements to date, it remains to be seen whether they will have real impact on the government’s policies and legislation regarding their responsibilities. To put these recent shifts in the language into clearer perspective, we must first interrogate the longer histories of commemoration and trauma as these relate to the Algerian War (1954–1962) and the evolving reactions of the French state to the movements led by those who had the most to lose from independence: the French colonists and the harkis. On December 5, 2002, French president Jacques Chirac personally unveiled the memorial “to the fallen soldiers of the wars in North Africa.” The vagueness of the phrase “wars in North Africa” belied the depth and intensity of the national trauma that followed the bloody eight-year conflict of the Algerian War. The monument, erected along the Quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, consists of three burnished limestone columns, each displaying the names of the deceased in vertically scrolling diodes lit in red, white, and blue respectively. An additional plaque was placed in front of the columns to commemorate “all missing persons and civilian victims who died during the massacres and other acts committed after the Evian cease-fire Accords of 19 March 1962.” It was the most conspicuous monument yet to any decolonization conflict in France, and the first to recognize the tens of European civilian casualties in the wake of the cease-fire. National commemoration to the Algerian War was all but nonexistent until 2002. Even more taboo were the deaths of settlers at the hands of the French army, which had fired upon settler demonstrators in a deadly clash in Algiers on March 26, 1962.3 The 3 In September 2008, France 3 television aired a documentary on the confrontation in Algiers known as the massacre of rue d’Isly. Between June 26 and July 8, 1962, violence erupted in Oran where the ALN (armed wing of Algeria’s National Front) incited antiEuropean violence in the city (see Jean Monneret, La phase finale de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris:

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plaque recognizing the deaths of civilian demonstrators in Algeria was in fact a compromise settled between two divergent historical memories in France: first, of the former settlers from Algeria who had long demanded that the official end date of the Algerian War be modified to include the confrontations in Algiers and Oran in July of 1962, and second, of the French state unwilling to recognize the army’s participation in the brutal suppression of settler demonstrations. The French government has never issued a formal apology to the settler community, and the plaque presently remains the only official recognition of the events. It was apparent that the context of these civilian deaths would be left unintelligible. Three years after the inauguration of the Quai Branly monument, on February 23, 2005, a controversial law backed by the conservatives within Chirac’s center-right government was passed in Parliament to pay homage to the “national contributions” of the French “repatriates” from the “overseas territories.”4 Article 4 of the so-called Colonial Law drew immediate attention as it mandated that all universities and public schools provide historical instruction on the “positive contributions made by the French in the empire, especially in North Africa.” News of the stealth passage of the law stirred the indignation of university faculty members who promptly voiced their opposition to the article and started a campaign for its repeal. Petitions were drawn up to both denounce the government’s encroachment upon the inviolate rights of educators, and protest the repeated omission of the brutal realities of France’s colonial past in national commemorations. In the face of heated opposition, Chirac was forced to withdraw the contentious Article 4, though it took one whole year to do so. The text was otherwise left largely intact, successfully broadening the scope of monetary indemnities for all “repatriates”.5,6

L’Harmattan, 2010); Jean-Jacques Jordi, Les disparus civils européens de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions Soteca, 2011)). 4 “Loi no. 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution

nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés,” in JORF no. 0046 du 24 février 2005, 3128. 5 See Claude Liauzu and Gilles Maceron, dir., La colonization, la loi et l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2006). 6 Liauzu led the protest of academics against Article 4 in 2005 (Claire Eldridge, From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962– 2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 1–2).

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During the campaign against Article 4, protestors in the universities raised issue with radical “pied-noir lobbyists” (pied noir is a term referring to European settlers of various French, Italian, Spanish, and other Mediterranean origins, who were born and raised in Algeria and naturalized as French citizens) whose movement for recognition led to legislation that glorified France’s imperial past.7 Other media outlets also pointed to the pieds noirs as the true behind-the-scenes champions of the law and highlighted their reactionary tendency to paint the French empire in a favorable light.8 As these controversies would suggest for historians Susan Pedersen and Caroline Elkins, the pieds noirs have remained “a lightning rod for debates” related to the commemoration of the Algerian War in France.9 What resulted was a kind of culture war in France, one that was centered on the meaning of France’s colonial heritage and the violent acts committed in the name of empire during the Algerian War. The contention around the 2005 Law of National Recognition soon yielded the so-named “memory wars” in official and academic discourse.10 The term has been used to refer to the competing narratives about the decolonization of French North Africa ever since the French legislature recognized the conflict in Algeria as an actual “war” for the first time in 1999, thereby sparking the public’s imagination.11 The pieds noirs, as focal points in the debates, are central to what Elkins and Pedersen have referred to as the “postcolonial anxieties and dilemmas” in the former imperial centers where “repatriated settlers were often viewed with disquiet as bearers of

7 The precise historical origin of the term “pied noir” is still in dispute. The term was first believed to have circulated among whites in North Africa as a pejorative label for the Arabs. Others believe that it referred to the black boots of the French conquerors. The term resurfaced in the twentieth century during the Algerian War as a derogatory name for the Europeans in Algeria (Daniel Leconte, Les Pieds-Noirs, l’histoire et portrait d’une communauté (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 237–238). 8 Claude Liauzu, “Les enjeux de mémoire,” Libération, février 23, 2005. 9 Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century

(Routledge, 2005), 16. 10 “Memory wars” was adopted in French academic and political discourse since 2005 to talk about a range of disputes surrounding the interpretation of the colonial past. The phrase has since been applied to the debates concerning France’s role in the Holocaust. 11 “Loi 99-882 du 18 octobre 1999 relative à la substitution à l’expression ‘opérations effectués en Afrique du Nord,’ du l’expression ‘à la guerre d’Algérie ou aux combats en Tunisie et au Maroc’.”

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right-wing reminders of imperial enthusiasms many now preferred to forget”.12 But the pieds noirs were also active participants in these debates, provoking public reaction with their own narrative about their past. Today, their accounts of the traumatic personal experiences during decolonization invoke both sympathy and resentment, adding to the multitudinous range of voices that have brought forth conflicting interpretations and memories of decolonization in French society today. If the memory wars of the 2000s indicate an erstwhile lapse in the national expression of trauma that first originated with the loss of Algeria in 1962, this chapter points to a parallel trauma narrative that emerged in the final months of the Algerian War with the mass displacement first of the pieds noirs and later, with the arrival of the harkis. Trauma narratives of displacement and loss became powerful tools for political mobilization for the former settlers after they arrived in France. A binding factor for the former settlers, they helped to retain the notion of a displaced community betrayed by a government preoccupied less with their suffering and plight than with reframing Algeria’s independence as a necessary move toward global progress, and aligned with values better hewed to a modern and progressive world. The tension between the trauma narratives of the French from Algeria and the decolonizing narratives of the French state produced conflicting discourses related to Algeria’s place in France’s national identity, cultural heritage, and moral position in history. This chapter analyzes the making of a pied-noir cultural trauma narrative in order to identify the battle lines that have defined the debates about France’s settler colonial past. The assumption is that in the French case, cultural trauma was conceived as a national issue, one that would affect not just those claiming it, but also the country at large. On the part of the French state, trauma was experiential, as the war resulted in the fall of the Fourth Republic and the rise of the Fifth Republic under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. The French state never explicitly identified the transition as trauma, though invocation of a national crisis generated collective anxieties about the stability of the country. Cultural trauma theory seeks to understand the making of group identities and the collective claims about shared suffering and trauma that ground them. As sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander has explained, “trauma”

12 Elkins and Pedersen, Settler Colonialism, 16.

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becomes evident when individuals find meaningful articulation of their suffering together with others. Only then do their experiences become truly “traumatic”.13 Cultural trauma studies keys into these articulations and the larger set of cultural representations that give prominence to the events as a source of shared suffering. It is the perception and sensibilities that individuals develop with regard to particular experiences that are the object of study rather than the validity of their claims about trauma. In France, trauma narratives became charged political platforms, both for the pieds noirs and the harkis, though much less so for the Jewish North Africans who left Algeria also as naturalized French citizens. Much of the analysis that follows focuses therefore on the political sphere, where issues such as reparations and administrative justice were at play for the pieds noirs and the harkis. In 2005, historian Claude Liauzu expressed frustration with pied-noir lobbyists for actively pursuing legislation for the national recognition of empire and criticized their co-optation of the trauma suffered by others in the community. Liauzu’s ontological approach to trauma misses the chance to examine the process by which individuals tend to ascribe meaning to these narratives. Representatives of the pieds noirs—largely self-designated spokespersons for the community—believed that they were in fact speaking for the community, as historian Claire Eldridge has also shown.14 Even when their primary interest was to keep the associations alive, they were still concerned with drawing consensus from the community at large about what it meant to be a pied-noir. Pied-noir associations had to navigate shifting political contexts in order to tap into the aspirations and imagination of disparate members of the community; sustained investment in the truth of these collective narratives by members of the community was key. I remain attentive, therefore, to the evolving contexts in which pied-noir narratives and identity cohered. The pieds noirs, to be sure, were not the only population to be displaced by anti-colonial independence movements in the French empire. Colette Dubois has cautioned against blotting out other cases of migrations from the ex-colonies in our preoccupation with the exceptional brutality of the 13 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman Bernhard, Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1–30. 14 This chapter takes inspiration from the approach taken by historian Claire Eldridge, From Empire to Exile.

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Algerian exodus.15 7000 French nationals left Egypt during and after the 1956 Suez crisis; 132,000 Europeans—or just over 64% of the colonists living in Tunisia—left for France also in 1956; 54.4% (i.e., 200,000) French nationals left Morocco; and some 11,000 Europeans and Eurasians altogether left Indochina between 1956 and 1962.16 The Algerian War was not the only decolonization conflict for France. The empire had indeed already relinquished control of Indochina in 1954, the two North African protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, Madagascar in 1958, and its sub-Saharan African colonies in 1960, all to formidable nationalist movements. But the postcolonial impact of Algeria’s decolonization stemmed from Algeria’s distinct status in the empire and not just from the brutality of the exodus. Algeria had been constitutionally French territory since 1848, and consequently the most prized possession in the empire. Historically, the collapse of French Algeria would have the most profound and traumatic impact on the French nation. Some may certainly want to compare the war in Algeria to the Indochina War and the deep humiliation that France faced in the 1954 defeat to the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phû. In 1984, a six-part documentary of the war titled Le Vietnam, co-produced with American public television (WGBH), aired on French television. After the third episode, the television network decided to open a forum for debate. According to historian Jean-Jacques Malo, the debate was heated, revealing the unhealed wounds of the Indochina War and the “difficulties that many French had in accepting the loss of the colonial empire”.17 Yet, the momentary interest sparked by the television series never really grew into a prolonged debate. Instead, in 1992, an international production Indochine, directed by Régis Wargnier—an epic tale of romance between a French officer and a young Communist insurgent set against the nationalist movement—drew a much larger audience overseas as well as in France and became the preferred cinematic take on decolonization in Indochina. Malo was right to point to the renewal in Franco-Vietnamese relations in the 1980s as a possible factor in the diminished interest in 15 Colette Dubois, “La Nation et les Français d’outre-mer: rapatriés ou sinistrés de la decolonization,” in L’Europe retrouvée, les migrations de la decolonization, ed. Jean-Louis Miège and Colette Dubois (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 90. 16 Dubois, “La Nation et les Français d’outre-mer,” 91. 17 Jean-Jacques Malo, “Introduction,” in Vietnam War Films, ed. Tony Williams and Jean-

Jacques Malo (Jefferson: McFarland, 1994), xvii.

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Indochina. Vietnam had “won the economic war,” which meant there was little resentment where French relations with Vietnam were concerned.18 As Kathryn Edwards has noted, the Indochina War still remains a “dark hole” in the French national consciousness, and has not yet witnessed the same kind of resurgence as did the Algerian War.19 Only a small coterie of Indochina War veterans went on to create associations, while few have spoken openly about their memories of the war. “Repatriated” Eurasians from French Southeast Asia who came to France after 1956 have remained largely silent about their trauma, making it all the more difficult to distinguish a collective Eurasian or distinctive French-Indochinese repatriate identity. Unlike the Indochina War, which was fought largely by a professional army in a location remote from Europe, the Algerian War relied on a much higher number of conscripts from the metropole and took place on territory only just a short crossing from its southern littoral. At the height of the war, some 500,000 troops were deployed in Algeria; fifteen thousand of these combatants were never to return.20 The Algerian War entailed fundamental changes to the conception of French nationhood and national identity. The apparent support for full independence among Muslims in Algeria, especially in the latter half of the conflict, flew in the face of the notion that the Arab population wished to remain a part of France, as historian Matthew Connelly has also noted.21 The war in Algeria, having resulted in the founding of a new republic, shifted the political system from a parliamentary system to a government driven by a powerful executive authority. With the signing of the Evian Accords in March 1962, the long-standing idea of a multi-continental France straddling the Mediterranean was no longer viable. The conflict in Algeria was supposed to have redeemed the losses in Indochina, but instead ended in the permanent demise of France’s empire and global prestige. Although the pieds noirs were not the only displaced repatriates from the colonies, they were the most prominent in number. According to a 1995 18 Malo, “Introduction,” xxi. 19 M. Kathryn Edwards, Contesting Indochina (Oakland: University of California Press,

2016), 2–3; see also Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001). 20 Metropolitan conscripts made up about half of the combatants in Indochina. 21 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the

Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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report issued by the Office of Repatriate Services, there were 1,483,100 repatriates from the empire living in France, out of which 969,257 were from Algeria; two out of every three repatriates were pied-noir.22 It should be noted that the pieds noirs were not the only group to have been repatriated from Algeria. Some 100,000 naturalized Jews also joined the exodus in 1962. The French Jews from Algeria were primarily of mixed Sephardic and North African origins though a small number among them were descendants of Ashkenazi migrants who came to Algeria in the nineteenth century. Jews in French Algeria had been living among Arabs and Berbers in North Africa since antiquity. Sephardic Jews in Algeria were descended from Spanish refugees who were expelled during the Inquisition in the fifteenth century. All Jews living north of the Sahara were naturalized as French citizens through the 1870 Crémieux Decree. Jewish naturalization reflected the clear intent in Paris to create clearer boundaries between the Muslim and non-Muslim populations in Algeria. Jews from French Algeria did not participate in the making of a piednoir identity. They had lived a different history and trauma. The swift and automatic naturalization of Jews in Algeria never endeared them to Europeans, and the two communities generally lived apart throughout the colonial period. Jewish memories of French Algeria had more to do with the exclusion and discrimination they faced from the European community. They had more than lived their own trauma of anti-Semitism in Algeria throughout the interwar period and again during World War II when the Vichy government repealed their French status.23 On the other hand, a French-Algerian Jewish identity never really took shape in post1962 France, mainly because most of the Jews who arrived in France were received by Jewish organizations that sought to integrate them as French Jews and members of the greater North African Jewish community.24 In addition to the European and Jewish migrants, over 65,000 harkis arrived in France. The category harki was a creation of the Algerian War

22 Service central des rapatriés, Bilan de l’exécution de la loi du 26 décembre 1961 relative à l’acceuil et à la reinstallation des Français d’outre-mer, mai 1996, 4. Cited in Yann ScioldoZürcher, Devenir métropolitain. Politique d’intégration et parcours de rapatriés d’Algérie en métropole (1954–2005) (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2010), 15. 23 For fascism in Algeria, see Sam Kalman, French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 24 See Sarah Sussman, Changing Lands, Changing Identities: The Migration of Algerian Jewry to France, 1954–1962 (Stanford: Stanford University, 2002).

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when Muslim men were recruited to serve in the auxiliary mobile units of the French army.25 Once the war was over, the category became more fluid and was used loosely to include a wider array of Muslim notables, former colonial attachés, North Africans fleeing the FLN, and Muslim veterans of the French army who had fought in other wars. Most of the Muslim migrants faced unspeakable hardship when they arrived in France as they were denied proper recognition as French veterans until 1974. The harkis were denied rights and civil status upon arrival and were forced to live in dilapidated barracks and even barb-wired enclosures located in isolated, thinly populated zones well into the early 1980s. Although the chapter does not devote equal space to the two communities, it is important to note that the harki activists have been entwined in pied-noir politics since the 1980s.26 In the public consciousness, the arrival of the pieds noirs overshadowed all previous migrations from the ex-colonies not only in scale, but also in historical drama. The final year of the war was full of dramatic clashes as settlers engaged in a near civil conflict with the French military and as extremist settler contingents took up arms alongside dissenting French army officers in the secret paramilitary organization known as the OAS [Organisation de l’armée secrète], declaring their intent to defend Algérie française at all costs. Key OAS leaders led a “generals’ putsch” to overthrow de Gaulle but failed miserably and were tried for treason immediately after the war.27 The exodus out of Algeria was also the first real televised “repatriation.” The sudden influx of 679,000 refugees from Algeria within a span of one year and the evacuation of tens of thousands of migrants in the summer months of 1962 produced a whole series of visual images that stayed with the French public, imprinting memories in the national imaginary. In tracing the rise of a pied-noir community in France, this chapter refers to the term pied-noir as a practical category related to the making of a communal identity whose members identified and lay claim to a shared trauma of forced displacement. For the pieds noirs, decolonization was the total dispossession of their fundamental rights and life as French citizens. 25 It is still difficult to know just why some Muslim Algerians became a harki. Most harkis have remained silent about their background and path to recruitment. 26 For a comparative analysis of the pieds noirs and harkis, see Eldridge, From Empire to Exile. 27 For details on the trial of General Salan, see Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 131–132.

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The vast majority of settlers were born and raised in Algeria, and French Algeria was the only homeland they had ever known. As Éric Savarèse has pointed out, the so-called pied-noir identity came into existence after they arrived in France, and only after the migrants began to use the term “pieds noirs” as a counterpoint to the official label “repatriates” assigned to them by government.28 As a result, the questions addressed here are about the cultural and political contexts in which the notion of a pied-noir collective and identity became meaningful for members of the community.

Pieds Noirs as Repatriates: The Battle for Indemnities and the Decade of Recovery In the spring of 1961, as the French delegation sat down to talks with the FLN delegates of Algeria’s provisional government (GPRA) to negotiate the terms of a cease-fire, President de Gaulle persisted in highlighting the judicious decision of granting Algeria its autonomy.29 As de Gaulle argued, decolonization kept in step with the “inexorable tide of history” and the global turn toward decolonization.30 To decolonize was to recognize the ethno-cultural and religious difference of peoples as national differences. As it was the alleged goal of France to stay astride the tide of history, de Gaulle maintained that it was now necessary and right to concede to Algeria’s quest for nationhood. The attendant claim was that Muslim identity was so far from anything French that it was impossible to keep Algeria intact as a part of France.31 Ironically for the French government, this acquiescence to the tide of history and the ethno-cultural understanding of nationhood entailed the repudiation of a shared history of a Franco-Algerian past. The disavowal of Algeria as an integral part of France also meant the rejection of the Fifth Republic’s constitutional clause, which had granted all Muslims in Algeria full French citizens in 1958.32

28 Éric Savarèse, L’Invention des pieds-noirs (Paris: Séguier, 2002). 29 The same language was used to talk about Indochina (Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution,

164, 257). 30 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 82–101. 31 Todd Shepard, “Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité: A History of Ethno-

Religious Nationalisms and Decolonization,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (August 2013): 445–467. 32 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 46, 151.

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In the ethnocentric narrative of decolonization articulated by Gaullist officials in the final year of the Algerian War, the pieds noirs occupied a liminal space. The latter were viewed as sufficiently European, but not quite French. As officials iterated the notion of ethno-nationalist difference, they also introduced such factors as the natural environment that were believed to have shaped national differences. Colonists were hybrids, Gaullist officials argued, products of the natural environment of the colonial territory and as such, a mutated European culture. In the words of Alain Peyrefitte, future Minister of Information and Minister of Repatriates, two posts he would hold in quick succession in 1962, the pieds noirs were much like the Australians who were so far-flung from their home countries in Europe that “they had adapted to the environment no differently from the autochthonous population”.33 Such views did not dissipate overnight, as will be examined in another section with regard to popular understandings of the pieds noirs in the 1980s when surveys of public opinion on immigration included the pieds noirs among those of foreign origins. Throughout the negotiations at Evian, which lasted from May 1961 to March 1962, the French delegation did its utmost to convince the Europeans to stay put. Officials shared the sentiments of Alain Peyrefitte believing that few colons would even want to leave the land they claimed was indelibly theirs. The greater part of the Evian talks consisted of hammering out the fate of Algeria’s European population. The hope among French delegates was that the Europeans would eventually naturalize as Algerian citizens. The early months of negotiation between the French delegates and the FLN members of Algeria’s provisional government centered on the interim rights and privileges of the Europeans who were presumably to stay in Algeria after independence.34 Midway through the talks, however, it became apparent that few colonists would stomach the proposal. With the stark realization that the colonists would leave rather than stay, officials in Paris quickly scrambled to devise a policy aimed at mitigating a potential refugee crisis. Six months into the Evian talks in December 1961, the French Parliament passed the so-called Repatriate Law, which assigned the legal status of returnee to all those leaving the former colonies, including the colonists of Algeria who had begun leaving for France in ever greater

33 Alain Peyrefitte, Faut-il partager Algérie? (Paris: Plon, 1961), 20. 34 Vers la paix en Algérie, les négociations d’Évian dans les archives diplomatiques françaises,

15 janvier 1961–29 juin 1962 (Bruylant, 2003).

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numbers. To classify the French of Algeria as repatriates was to contradict Algeria’s French status at the time the law was being drafted, however. The term was already being used for the French leaving Indochina, Morocco, and Tunisia, but it was not until the French of Algeria began to leave that a universal legislation for all repatriates was jump-started. As the Secretary of State for Algerian Affairs would admit in confidence, it was necessary to prepare for the French of Algeria but “under the guise of operations already underway for other territories” in order to neutralize any political turbulence that might result from a mass evacuation out of Algeria while the cease-fire negotiations were still underway.35 The Repatriate Law purposely stripped any and all references to Algeria’s French status where the pieds noirs were concerned. In effect, the law redefined the identity of the colonists of Algeria as French returnees who were leaving a foreign country to come home. The main intent was to contrive a legal and political framework through which the migrants could interact with the government, including making claims about losses or physical and emotional injury. By removing formal distinctions between originating colonies, the Repatriate Law made it difficult for any group, most of all the pieds noirs, to assert special interests based on their particular colonial origins. Gaullist legislators invoked “national solidarity” as a putative guiding principle to place restrictions on the right of repatriates to make demands on the government, stipulating that all repatriates should be concerned foremost with contributions they might make to the national economy. To fixate on entitlements then, was to contravene the national commitment to solidarity. Within the limits of the law, all repatriates were eligible to submit paperwork for subsidies and temporary financial aid, but they would not be able to demand reparations for losses owed to Algeria’s independence or hold the government accountable for any political decision that might have affected their individual situations. The 1960s were a period of adjustment and recovery for the French migrants from Algeria. Most incoming migrants turned to whatever organizations they could trust to help rebuild their lives. In most cases, this responsibility fell on the repatriate associations. Associations also led the

35 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 146.

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charge against the government’s restrictions on the right to claim indemnities. The National Association of the French from North Africa and Overseas Territories and Their Friends (ANFANOMA) and the National Association of the French of North Africa and Overseas Territories (RANFRAN) were the largest repatriate organizations, and were led by high-profile representatives of the pieds noirs who took on the role of negotiating with government officials. Most of these representatives were former deputies or administrators in Algeria. ANFANOMA, founded in 1956, stood out in particular because it was already a known source of support for repatriates who had arrived earlier from Tunisia and Morocco.36 With ANFANOMA as the representative voice, association adherents converged on the issue of indemnities as the most urgent matter for the community. The immediate need to find housing while locating a source of income preoccupied the repatriates more than any wish to transmit or share memories. As the only available recourse for them was the 1961 Repatriate Law, ANFANOMA was forced to comply with the terms that accompanied the legal category, “repatriates,” if they were to negotiate with the government. With ANFANOMA representing their cause, the pieds noirs put their trust in the association, and subscriptions to the association soared. In 1960 there were approximately 65,000 ANFANOMA members, mainly from Tunisia and Morocco. By 1962, however, enrollment in ANFANOMA ballooned to 250,000.37 Throughout the 1960s, the question of indemnities dominated the agenda of the pied-noir associations and associations used the question of reparations to mobilize a repatriate vote at the polls. Whether repatriates formed a voting bloc or not has been the subject of scholarly debate. The most recent study by Emmanuelle Comtat has concluded that since their arrival, there has been no consistent political affiliation to be found among the repatriates from North Africa.38 The political orientation of repatriates was, as with any other community, swayed largely by the particular timing of the election, issues in their local area, and the perceived profile of the candidates. In the 1960s when most pieds noirs were preoccupied with securing their livelihood, repatriates living along 36 Jean-Jacques Jordi, “Archéologie et structure des réseau de sociabilité rapatrié et piednoir,” Provence historique 187 (1997): 180. 37 Valérie Esclangon-Morin, Les rapatriés d’Afrique du Nord (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007),

155. 38 Emmanuelle Comtat, Les pieds noirs et la politique, quarante ans après le retour (Les presses Sciences Po, 2001).

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the Mediterranean littoral could be seen taking strong interest in candidates who expressed sympathies and interest in their situation. The slogan “anyone but de Gaulle” became popular with repatriate associations in the southern departments. In the 1965 presidential elections, former Minister of Interior François Mitterrand narrowed the gap significantly in the second round as a left-wing candidate precisely in those regions where a large number of repatriates had settled.39,40 Prefects in the southern departments submitted reports about the sudden imbalance in the electorate with the influx of repatriates and warned against the danger of having too many of the pieds noirs concentrated within specific regions or departments.41 RANFRAN, the more radical of the two main associations, held open rallies in the cities where repatriates were concentrated to make their demands for indemnities heard. In one such rally in Toulon, as association leaders called for the full repeal of the 1961 Repatriate Law, they also granted a former OAS member General Edmond Jouhoud the title of honorary president after he had received a death sentence for his part in the treasonous “generals’ putsch”. 10,000 repatriates attended the rally.42 Another RANFRAN rally in Marseilles called for all repatriates to march on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Having witnessed the forceful mobilization among the repatriate electorate largely dominated by the French from Algeria, Georges Pompidou, who had served as de Gaulle’s prime minister, made promises to indemnify the community in the 1969 presidential election when de Gaulle left office. The point then was not really whether a pied-noir voting bloc has ever existed, but rather how associations could persuade members to consider their vote in light of the impact it would have on the pieds noirs as a community. During this first decade after independence, even as the repatriates endured the everyday difficulty of achieving stability in their everyday lives, it was evident that the pieds noirs heeded the associations’ discourse about the injustices inflicted upon them by the Gaullist government, especially with regard to indemnities. By 1974, the idea of a repatriate vote had become sufficiently determinant in the minds of candidates running for public office that ANFANOMA 39 Sung-eun Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 305, 309. 40 For statistical references to the pied-noir population by department, see Pierre Baillet, “L’intégration des rapatriés d’Algérie en France,” Population, 30e année, no. 2 (1975). 41 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria. 42 Esclangon-Morin, Les rapatriés, 156.

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could secure critical promises for the repatriates upon giving one or another candidate its endorsement. ANFANOMA leaders also used the media to announce their support for specific candidates, appearing on television and in the newspapers. Such appearances impressed upon the French public that there was indeed a movement among the pieds noirs to drive the course of national politics. On the part of the pieds noirs who had supported ANFANOMA or RANFRAN, Giscard’s open statement to the repatriates assuring them of his support reinforced the belief among some pieds noirs that only collective action would bear fruit, while for others it fueled a desire to free the community from charitable handouts from the government and dependency on elected officials to keep to their promises. The association RECOURS was an example of the latter, as historian Claire Eldridge has noted. Taking confidence in the number of pieds noirs amassed in towns and cities in southern France where the ratio of repatriates fell somewhere between 6 and 10%, RECOURS leaders sought to direct national politics rather than be directed by it. RECOURS had their say when it decided to rally the pied-noir vote for the mayoral election in Montpellier in 1977, for example. As a result, the candidate of their choosing succeeded in replacing long-term incumbent François Delmas, mayor of Montpellier since 1959.43 It was not until 1978 that Giscard finally passed the legislation on indemnities that he had promised four years earlier. The slow pace telling of the reluctance of the government to deliver quickly on their commitment to the repatriates. The president appeared on television to make the historic announcement. For the first time, a French president had openly declared the Republic’s duty “to ensure that ‘justice be rendered to those compatriots who [had] contributed to the grandeur of France in the course of the past decades’”.44 However, the Law of 1978, from the viewpoint of many associations, including RECOURS, fell short of expectations, and association representatives pressed on with the agenda of obtaining formal compensation for their communal struggle. Giscard’s legislation did in fact assuage enough members of the community that a growing number of repatriates began to seek alternate ways of claiming membership in the community. A movement emerged among repatriates with the goal of forging more affective connections with each other as Eldridge has noted.

43 Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 182; Leconte, Les Pieds-Noirs, 269. 44 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 1.

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These repatriates began to promote a shared French North African culture as the foundational link between members of the community whose shared trauma stemmed from the shock of leaving this culture behind.

A Shared Culture in Peril: Pied-Noir Identity in the Making Throughout the 1970s new associations were created with the explicit agenda of transmitting pied-noir memories. The most prominent among these was the Cercle algérianiste based in Aix-en-Provence in the Bouchesdu-Rhône department where the largest number of repatriates from Algeria had settled. The 1978 Indemnities Law had alleviated concerns over indemnities to a large degree, and associations like the Cercle prompted members of the community to find more sociable and personal ways to connect to their past. The Cercle saw itself as a unifying link [lien féderateur] and encouraged members to come together and reconnect with others from Algeria for the purpose of sharing in each other’s suffering. Association members would invest time into searching for others who might have come from nearby neighborhoods and towns in Algeria, though they might not have ever met in Algeria. Graduates of various high schools and even elementary schools sought out former classmates or alumni and inaugurated reunions. As historian and pied-noir Jean-Jacques Jordi aptly stated, these associations were much more about rebuilding an identity in France than they were about recalling connections that they had established while in Algeria.45 The Cercle’s mission statement is engraved in its emblem, a hamsa wedged between two black feet: “to save a culture in peril.” The manifesto of the association stated its goals in 1973 with the following: To protest the official narrative of the French presence in Algeria, the same proffered by those who pushed us into exile; to deepen our knowledge of the past in order to better know the origins or the culture in Algeria, and to circulate the works of the algérianiste writers; to reinvigorate the community of the French of Algeria, and to renew our faith, we have created the Cercle to safeguard what little remains of our magnificent and cruel past from oblivion.46 45 Jean-Jacques Jordi, De l’exode à l’exil (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 91. 46 http://www.cerclealgerianiste.fr/index.php/le-cercle-algerianiste.

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The narratives of longing for a bygone idyllic past would be interlaced with the traumatic account of leaving Algeria. Such stories of a simpler life had earlier renditions in the work of Jean Pélégri, a pied-noir filmmaker. His book and later the acclaimed film Les Oliviers de la justice recreated the life of a modest and industrious pied-noir family that had owned an olive grove in Algeria. Pélégri played the main character in the film, which recounted his own childhood in Algeria. The film depicted the harmonious relations between the colon and the Muslim farmhand’s son who played together along the furrows of the orchard. They created their own secret caverns, which provided a “quiet peace in the shadows” safe from colonialism and the brutalities of the conflict that went on above ground. For many pieds noirs, memories of childhood were opportunities to reimagine a world of innocence in which hard-laboring colons raised their families and cultivated the land while forging intimate and amicable relations with the Arabs. Pélégri’s work reflected the sensitivity of many pieds noirs to the prominent voices of leftists and progressive intellectuals in the 1960s who condemned France’s brutal suppression of Algerians during the war. Pélégri’s depiction of the colons resonated with many other pied-noir narratives that took issue with the notion that French Algeria exemplified colonial oppression. As reflected in Pélégri’s work, colonialism, as the pieds noirs saw it, was an ill-conceived framework imposed by unknowing metropolitans and was clearly unfounded given the memories of those who had lived this history first hand. For the pieds noirs, true life stories and memories became the main mode of communicating a shared historical past. In this narration of the past, the peaceful and amicable relations between the Muslims and whites had been brutally undercut by nationalist insurgents. Meanwhile, Pélégri’s film was awarded the top prize at the Cannes film festival in 1962 and allowed many in the community to seek solace in the public attention to one of their own. Throughout the 1970s, pied-noir writers took to the publishing houses not only with memoirs and fictional accounts of life in Algeria, but also with testaments to their painful experiences after arriving in France that made them “pieds noirs despite themselves,” to use the words of pied-noir writer Daniel Leconte. Leconte’s Les pieds noirs, histoire et portrait d’une communauté was an example of the search for a common heritage among younger pieds noirs who began to take interest in the Algerian past as adults, often with the loss of older members of the family. Having come to France at the age of twelve in 1962, Leconte explained the pied-noir identity as one defined in reaction to the prejudices held against them and in face of

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the repugnance that the label evoked.47 The experience of being disliked was traumatic and was a key reason that many turned to a past that might help members of the community compensate for their alienation, Leconte wrote. As one reviewer of Leconte’s work explained, the book was for and by a younger generation that now “looked into their history in search of an identity.”48 In 1982, twenty works appeared with “memory” in their titles, all of which spoke to the experience of loss and displacement.49 Such passionate expressions of identity were effectively projected in opposition to the image of a combative community eager to drain the national coffers with their demands for indemnities. Some writers and artists achieved critical acclaim on the national and international stage. A favorite among pieds noirs, writer Marie Cardinal, published her acclaimed work Words to Say It With in 1976 after returning from a visit to Algeria, in which she wrote that, “it was not the houses I lived in that drew me back to Algeria…. No, it was something that came from the land, the sky, and the sea, which made me want to go – something, which for me could only be found in the precious locales of the terrestrial world… I am actually incapable of imagining it ”.50 The message was clear. Only the pied-noir could share in the visceral attachment to Algeria; it was what made them a pied-noir. Efforts to recall that which was at once personal and collective, intensely private and yet universal, were all part and parcel of reinforcing the idea that this was a community that shared something wholly distinct from those who had lived in the metropole. This emotional longing for the Algerian land was a powerful way of transcending and blending together the heterogeneous experiences that were otherwise tied to specific neighborhoods, cities, or regions—spaces that were not shared as a singular site of memory making prior to the exodus. Stories about family experiences during the Algerian War or the injustice inflicted upon the pieds noirs became the staple of pied-noir trauma narratives since the 1980s. As Eldridge has pointed out, the continued silence of the state with regard to the Algerian War between 1962 and 1999 allowed the pieds noirs

47 Leconte, Les Pieds-Noirs, 238. 48 “Un portrait de Daniel Leconte, Les pieds-noirs aujourd’hui,” Le monde, March 4, 1980. 49 For a literary analysis of works by the pieds noirs, see Amy L. Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 50 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 137.

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more room to generate their own narratives about this past and consolidate a pied-noir identity.51 Indeed, life experiences in a warzone provided a powerful foundation for the pieds noirs to identify a collective trauma. Historian and pied-noir JeanJacques Jordi collected multiple interviews in which his subjects repeatedly talked about the emotional and physical reactions to the trauma of departure and displacement. For Jordi, pied-noir trauma stemmed not from the “feeling of persecution” but in fact “real and lived persecution” during the exodus.52 Parents recalled the depression, fevers, and shot nerves of their children who had witnessed violent scenes of killing, while others recounted the constant pessimism, melancholy, weight loss, and insomnia they experienced in face of the miserable and disorderly months of adjustment in Marseille.53 The emotional and human drama of the migration were relayed to convey the shock that many felt because of the disdain and hostility they faced as French citizens in their own country.54 Historians have noted the cultural turn in the pied-noir activism of the 1970s as a strategy adopted by associations to offset the diminished interest in the intense political battles of the previous decade.55 But the cultural turn also occurred in the 1980s when heated debates about the “failed integration” of immigrants began to implicate the pieds noirs as a community that had yet to demonstrate its full integration. Many suspected that the pieds noirs were more interested in their Algerian past than they were in a shared French future. As the next section explains, the 1980s and 1990s brought on new challenges for the pied-noir associations as they struggled for public recognition and relevance in the national consciousness.

51 Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 101. 52 Jean-Jacques Jordi, L’arrivée des Pieds-Noirs (Paris: L’Autrement, 1995), 91–92. 53 Jordi, L’arrivée des Pieds-Noirs, 92. 54 See “Les pieds-noirs,” New Yorker, November 25, 1972, issue, 52. 55 According to Eldridge, the turn toward cultural concerns in the 1970s represented “less

a change in direction than a transfer of existing questions of identity and belonging to a new arena” (Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 66).

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Maintaining Unity and Staying Relevant: Sharing the Stage with the Harkis In May 1981 the Socialist government of François Mitterrand was inaugurated, fully determined to turn the page on the Algerian War and to “efface all types of scars that resulted from the events that tore apart the nation and second, to offer the repatriates a new future”.56 Mitterrand’s resolve during his presidential campaign had already won him the support of the most prominent repatriate associations, many of which expressed disappointment in Giscard’s lightweight repatriate policies during his seven-year term. Mitterrand had served as Minister of Justice during the Algerian War and had imposed a hardline policy against the FLN, which included executions of forty-five Algerians, ingratiating him with the pieds noirs during and after the war.57 In 1965, during the presidential elections, he had shown his mettle as the face of opposition to the Fifth Republic in the eyes of many pieds noirs. Mitterrand’s first three years brought promise for repatriate associations in their ultimate fight to achieve official recognition of the community and their heritage. Mitterrand had already become conscious of the repatriates’ electoral potential when the association RECOURS came out to declare its support for his candidacy. RECOURS had been the most vocal in criticizing the failure of Giscard’s administration to uphold its promise to repatriates.58 Mitterrand’s wish to capitalize on his close relations with the pied-noir associations became particularly acute during the summer of 1981 when Socialists were under-performing in the polls. In August 1981 the president passed a key amnesty law granting pardon for repatriates from Algeria who had been charged with political crimes. In the months that followed, he pressed his own party in order to deliver a controversial revision to the nascent August law in order that further restrictions be lifted on political crimes, including sanctions that were in place for the career reintegration of those affiliated with the generals’ putsch.59 The final Amnesty 56 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 113. 57 Mitterrand later abolished the death penalty as president. For Mitterrand’s role during

the Algeria War, see François Malye and Benjamin Stora, Mitterrand et la guerre d’Algérie (Calmann Lévy, 2010). 58 Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 183. 59 “Loi 82-1021 du 3 décembre 1982 relative au règlement de certaines situations resul-

tant des évènements d’Afrique du Nord, de la guerre d’Indochine ou de la seconde guerre

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Law of December 3, 1982 was a major achievement for Mitterrand and the pied-noir lobby. Mitterrand also reintroduced a cabinet post dedicated to repatriates and inaugurated a new central office in Bordeaux devoted to indemnities while promoting a complete reassessment of the market value of property left behind in Algeria. Mitterrand also took aggressive steps to include harki repatriates in his policies. Here, the president’s repatriate politics were merged with the ongoing socialist experiment with “the right to difference.” It was the first time that the French Republic gave a nod to cultural difference as a positive element in the successful integration of immigrants. The agenda was short-lived as conservatives began to rally against it, but while in place, the right to difference gave momentum to the harkis who began to form their own repatriate associations in greater numbers. To understand how the pied-noir associations began to broaden their agenda to include the harkis in their fight for recognition in the first years of the Mitterrand administration, and to understand why the harkis ultimately rejected the right to difference discourse, it is first necessary to turn to the making of the harki community in France. In the final years of Pompidou’s presidency in the 1960s, former OAS affiliates prodded prominent figures in the Muslim repatriate community who had once served in the administration in French Algeria to take up the cause of the “repatriates of the Islamic faith” in France.60 Gradually these self-designated leaders of the Muslim community from Algeria would connect with the harkis who were living in the camps. Inside the camps, meanwhile, discontented children of harki fathers who endured childhood in the camps were becoming eager recruits to a more radical repatriate activism that had emerged in the early 1970s. The first wave of harki activism began in the wake of the self-immolation of a harki, Laklouf Galhem, in 1971, on a prominent boulevard in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. High-profile Muslim repatriates began to take up the harki cause in the wake of his death, even though few among these self-designated representatives had actually lived in the camps. One ex-deputy from French Algeria, Ahmed Djebbour, played a key role in demonstrating the importance of a unified harki community when the association he led known as the National Front

mondiale.” See also Stéphane Gacon, “Les Amnisties de la guerre d’Algérie 1962–1982,” Revue Histoire de la justice 1, no. 16 (2005): 277. 60 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 105.

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of French Repatriates of the Islamic Faith (FNRCI) mobilized its members in support of Giscard in his run for the presidency. Djebbour was also a close associate of Jean-Marie Le Pen, ex-paratrooper in the Algerian War and founder of the extreme right-wing movement of the National Front. In response to the call of the harki associations, Giscard accorded the harkis official veteran status with full rights to pensions in 1974, moving away from improvised aid to a more formalized system of allocations commensurate with the services provided by the harkis during the Algerian War.61 In June 1975, another harki association known as the Confederation of French Muslim Repatriates from Algeria and Friends (CFMRAA) incited riots inside a major camp in the department of the Gard in southern France. In response to the crisis in the camps, one former Muslim deputy from Algeria stated in an interview that 500,000 harkis were now living in France and lamented that the harkis who had served France enjoyed fewer rights than the Algerian migrant workers when it came to the freedom of movement and right to travel. The harki representative of the CFMRAA implied that the government’s neglect of the harkis could backfire if it failed to consider their potential electoral mobilization.62 1975 saw a wave of protests by the harkis calling for the dismantling of the camps. Owing to the protests the condition of the camps received national media coverage. Le monde referred to them as isolated “ghettos,” while other media outlets exposed their deplorable conditions, including infested living quarters and lack of basic amenities such as private showers and toilets.63 The protests enhanced the public profile of the harkis and gave way to the notion of a French Muslim repatriate community bound together by the hardships endured in the camps.64 By the time Mitterrand became president, there was already a general consensus within the Socialist party that removing the scars of the Algerian War would of necessity include measures to promote awareness of the harki community. The nationwide protests by the harki community and the media coverage of the horrific situation affirmed for Mitterrand that 61 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 104. 62 Choi, Decolonization and the French of Algeria, 106. 63 Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 140. 64 Claire Eldridge has argued that the very term “French Muslim” employed by the spokespersons for the community was a sign of the gap between a leadership interested in the French identity of the harkis one the one side and the harkis on the other interested in retaining the identity of ex-auxiliaries (Eldridge, From Empire to Exile).

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this was no longer a silent community in hiding. The harki voices were not isolated. The Socialist-led government saw that prominent pied-noir associations were also now taking up the harki cause. The Cercle declared, for example, “we are all harkis.” The harkis were still largely invisible to the French public, but a united front of harkis and pieds noirs was sufficient reason for Mitterrand to pay attention. Mitterrand introduced a new initiative that would include the harkis in the “right to difference” program. The Secretary of State to Repatriates Raymond Courrière suggested that the harkis and the second-generation children of Algerian parents or Beurs shared a similar plight of ghettoization. They could in essence be expected to find common ground as French children of shared Algerian origins. The Right to Difference campaign faced opposition, however, when the National Front criticized the Socialists’ comparison of the harkis, who were loyal to France, to the immigrants from Algeria who had supported the FLN’s fight against France. Mitterrand’s government soon folded its multiculturalist platform and publicly acknowledged the harkis and their sacrifices for France as sufficient reason to distinguish them from the rest of the Algerians in France. Not only was this a response to the National Front’s gains in the regional elections, it was also evidence of the effectiveness of the harki activism, which sought to distinguish the veterans from migrant workers who had never made military sacrifices for France.65 Pied-noir associations quickly realized that staying relevant meant harnessing the public attention paid to the harki community and presenting a common plight across all repatriates from Algeria, including the harkis. A united fight for recognition on the legal front did pay off for the repatriates during Mitterrand’s presidency. A new law of indemnities was passed in July 1987, which offered a comprehensive indemnities package for all repatriates, including harkis. As advantageous as the reparations were, the 1987 law also intensified the anxieties among pied-noir representatives that successes achieved in the area of compensation might lessen the enthusiasm among younger members of the community for collective action. In fact, the pieds noirs

65 As Eldridge has noted, part of this success was owed to the fact that many harkis kept quiet about their past as they realized much of the gains they achieved in terms of aid and support was based on the notion of a unified harki collective (Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 160).

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who arrived as children were less enthused about highlighting their piednoir identity and instead aspired to assimilate in ways that were not possible for their parents. Their reservations to join the movement were also a response to the intensifying debate in France about the “immigrant problem” and their resistance to integration. As the pieds noirs would discover, the French public categorized anyone born outside of France, including the pieds noirs, as “immigrants.” One national survey, which asked respondents to rank immigrant groups according to their degree of integration in France, showed the pieds noirs in fourth place behind Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese who had arrived as migrant workers around the same time as the pieds noirs.66 In short, the pieds noirs were considered not only foreign, but also less European than the workers who had never had French status, never lived on French territory, were born on foreign soil, and who arrived from around the Mediterranean. The dilemma of how to proceed in the face of such perceptions generated divisions within the ranks of repatriate association leaders. Associations that sprouted throughout the 1990s responded by emphasizing the collective suffering of the repatriate community and the need to gain recognition and educate the public, while others questioned this strategy. At the same time that the French public expressed anxieties about immigrants, a wave of grassroots movements among minority groups, largely North African by descent, emerged to battle the racism against Arabs and especially Maghrebis in France whom many believed were the most problematic immigrant group. Immigrant activism intensified throughout the 1980s and received considerable media attention, inspiring such movements as SOS-racisme, which gained traction with their slogan “ne touche pas mon pôte”—a protest against police brutality against immigrant activists and minorities. As movements advocating for immigrants became more prominent, pied-noir activists interested in continuing the fight for recognition responded either by promoting the harkis as the forgotten Algerians in France or by criticizing the government for paying too much attention to immigrants at the expense of repatriates—be they Muslim or European.

66 SOFRES. Muriel Humbertjean “Les Français et les immigrés,” in Oliveri, Duporieir Duhamel, Elisabeth Jaffré, Jérˆøme, Bourlanges, Angéline. SOFRES (Société française d’études par sondage), SOFRES, Oopinion publique, Enquêtes et commentaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 79.

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The few pied-noir associations such as Coup de soleil that did try and reach out to find common ground with the North African immigrant community found themselves isolated from the ranks of the pied-noir associations. Between battling prejudices and fighting for recognition as French citizens, newer pied-noir associations that emerged in the 1990s tended to be much more radical and conservative. Some reverted to the language of extremism used during the Algerian War. The association Les Français d’Afrique du Nord and its publication La Lettre de Veritas, for example, returned to the denunciation of de Gaulle as the “totalitarian dictator” who had committed genocide on the French of Algeria while propping up the OAS as a movement of “patriotic resistance”.67 In 1999, a shift occurred in the French commemoration of the Algerian War. The French Parliament formally recognized the Algerian War and incorporated the term in all legal texts to supersede the euphemisms “operations in Algeria.” The national recognition of the conflict would inaugurate an era of commemorations devoted to the Algerian conflict bringing changes to the repatriate platform once again. In this new period of recognition, public interest in the harkis would continue to grow, but not so for the pieds noirs, leading to a fragmentation among pied-noir associations divided by strategies on how to deal with the public’s renewed interest in the war.

Historiography Over Memory: The Post-Trauma Politics of the Pieds Noirs Ironically, the invigorated interest in the Algerian War left the pied-noir movement without a unified course of action or direction.68 As debates about the war intensified in France, historians took on the task of critically engaging the colonial past and assessing the pied-noir impact on postcolonial thinking about Algeria. 1999 enabled new archival research 67 Eldridge, From Empire to Exile, 178. 68 The Papon trial bridged the two dark periods in recent French history. Papon, a former

Vichy official had already participated in the brutal policing of nationalists in Constantine in eastern Algeria before serving as Prefect of Police in Paris in 1961. He oversaw the brutal repression of the North African demonstrators who marched against the curfew imposed on North African workers. Allegedly implemented to control the movement of FLN sympathizers, it restricted all public gatherings and movements of Arabs in Paris. The clash with police on the night of October 17, 1961 led to the tragic drowning of at least 40 victims in the Seine river. Jean-Luc Einaudi, Octobre 1961 (Fayard, 2001).

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of the colonial past as historians reflected upon the deep silence that marked the decades that followed the Evian Accords. Academics preoccupied with unearthing colonial traumas delved into the settler colonial past and the oppressive politics of imperial governance. In the process, historians claimed supremacy over the eyewitness accounts and memories engendered by the pied-noir community. In this shifting terrain, the pieds noirs were catalogued as oppressors and active participants in a political system that privileged Europeans and obversely denied the native Muslim population basic rights. Benjamin Stora, a prolific historian of the Algerian War and a French Jew from Algeria who became a well-known expert on Algeria during the 1990s, explained the arrival of the pieds noirs in 1962 as the “transfer of memory” and the transport of Arab racism of the most vicious kind to France. In his book Le transfert d’une mémoire published in 2000, Stora expounded on the sudisme of the pieds noirs, a racist mentality that prevailed among southern Mediterranean cultures. Stora argued that this sudisme resonated with the slaveholder mentality of southern whites in the United States.69 Such impressions of the pieds noirs continued to raise the ire of piednoir associations, which believed that their living memories were being dismissed and ignored. To the pied-noir mind, historians were indifferent to the lived history in French Algeria and callous toward the pieds noirs who were the living embodiments of a dying past. In many ways, the current state of affairs has pitted history against memory. The fact that the harkis remain more accepted and less controversial during these commemorations is revealing. Pied-noir claims do not configure to an easy understanding of the colonial past. Their memories seem all too human and yet their claims seem historically out of place. If anything, the cultural trauma of the pieds noirs remain caught between evoking empathy and fury, between memories of suffering and a history of colonial oppression, none of which has been resolved in France today.

Conclusion With the 2000s, debates about the remembrance and commemoration of the Algerian War took off with great energy but remained dissonant. No official narrative has ever been clearly given with regard to France’s role

69 Benjamin Stora, Le transfert d’une mémoire (Paris: Éditions Casbah, 2000).

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as a colonial power in North Africa, though President Macron recently in September 2018 acknowledged that France was guilty of torture and the death of Maurice Audin, the French mathematician and anti-colonial Communist activist and partisan of the FLN. Although presidents before Macron have made formal statements about the tragedy of the colonial past for Algeria, they have also continued with the vague commemorations of the repatriates without a full and clear account of how settler colonialism had oppressed native populations or how decolonization forced the migration of over 1 million citizens. The 2002 monument and the 2005 law showed that historical commemoration of France’s intervention in North Africa remains fragmented, ambiguous, and in constant negotiation, leaving multiple memories and historical actors to interpret the past from their vantage point and interest. In 2012, as France and Algeria commemorated the fifty-year anniversary of Algeria’s independence, debates took place in multiple media forums about the conflicting perspectives of different groups in France. Disgruntled pied-noir representatives found the anniversary celebrations partial to the Algerians as victims of colonialism and stayed aloof of the national commemorations with few exceptions, as Eldridge has mentioned. Today, pied-noir and harki associations continue their struggle to establish actual sites of memory that would literally inscribe their version of the past into the national terrain of historical commemorations. Radical associations and right-wing adherents from the pied-noir community have continued to pursue unpopular tributes to former OAS members with steles commemorating their deaths as heroic sacrifices. Others have quietly receded from political activism and have tried to stay the course of cultural fraternity with fellow members of the community. But in instances where memories are mobilized as a lens on the present, the most vocal and right wing among the pied-noir activists are sure to be heard, as was the case in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2017 in France. The cities of Beziers and Fréjus exemplified this media focus on the far right, receiving much attention in the 2017 run-off between Marine Le Pen of the far right and the centrists. The mayor of Beziers, Robert Ménard, was profiled in major media outlets including the New York Times and the Financial Times for his support of Marine Le Pen and his slander against the Arab community in France. Throughout the presidential campaign, he drew on his pied-noir background and experience to appear as an expert on the subject of Arabs. His tribute to the OAS in the heat of the electoral

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contest made him all the more controversial. Reputed journalists thus circled Ménard and reported actively on the connections between figures like Ménard, their colonial past, and their political orientation. Another town, Fréjus, was cast in the New York Times as home to many “Islamophobic pieds noirs” who were behind the National Front candidate. Journalist Amanda Taub reported on the town’s internal division between pied-noir residents and local residents of North African descent, each side drawing on their differing perspectives and communal memories of the Algerian War. This was not the first time Fréjus found itself in the media limelight.70 In 2009, members of a local pied-noir association had pushed for a monument in the town square to honor the memory of the French in Algeria. Fréjus was one of several cities in the south where such projects and museums were being planned at the time. As such, Fréjus witnessed troubling clashes between those wishing to commemorate French Algeria on the one side and those of North African descent who took offense.71 To the outside world, the pieds noirs appear united, vigorous, and active, even though the community itself is the first to worry that their memories are fragmented, and that they will die with them. The fear of oblivion and a sense of collective trauma still connects those who identify as pieds noirs while its force is beginning to dissipate among the younger members of the community. It is perhaps the media that has significantly churned the trauma narratives stemming from the community into something of a radical force, one that surges during elections. As public memories and debates leave room for more interventions, interpretations, and imagination about the past, the pied-noir trauma narrative seems as if it is being reified, turning inward on itself, unable to generate public interest outside of the most provocative versions. In France, it appears that historical research and historians are gaining the day. As we saw with Macron, the time seems to have arrived for making amends rather than highlighting the trauma of the war for the French. I would argue that this is not a win for France so much as the latest in the evolution of how national trauma is handled and packaged. Macron’s discourse reflects where France stands with regard to a war that 70 Amanda Taub, “A Small French Town Infused with Us-vs.-Them Politics,” New York Times, April 20, 2017, 2. 71 Most recently in 2013, one year after the fifty-year anniversary, a new pied-noir archive or Centre de Documentation has been inaugurated in Perpignan, home to a large number of pieds noirs. The center, situated in an old convent has been promoted as a reserve for over 8000 volumes, magazines, and newspapers about French Algeria.

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changed its political course from empire to diminished statehood—it is a thing of the past and France has in fact recovered; the pieds noirs have had their say but given their diminishing numbers, it has become safe for politicians to move away from a promotion of their trauma. The harkis present a different case: they are tied up with the contentious debates about antiArab racism in France, and they do not take recourse in imperial nostalgia. They have served at junctures as token immigrants and citizens. As for the pieds noirs, trauma narratives remain readily available sources to claim a collective identity and the only means to redeem a past of suffering. And while associations might still bank on trauma narratives, they appear to be most effective when less contentious—much like the discourse on Algeria is now becoming for the French Republic, a republic that was in all irony, born out of the support obtained from settlers in the colony.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Baillet, Pierre. “L’intégration des rapatriés d’Algérie en France.” Population, 30e année, no. 2 (1975). Choi, Sung-eun. Decolonization and the French of Algeria. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Comtat, Emmanuelle. Les pieds noirs et la politique, quarante ans après le retour. Les presses Sciences Po, 2001. Connelly, Matthew. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Cooper, Nicola. France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001. Dubois, Colette. “La Nation et les Français d’outre-mer: rapatriés ou sinistrés de la decolonization.” In L’Europe retrouvée, les migrations de la decolonization, edited by Jean-Louis Miège and Colette Dubois. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. Edwards, M. Kathryn. Contesting Indochina. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Eldridge, Claire. From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Elkins, Caroline, and Susan Pedersen, eds. Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century. Routledge, 2005.

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Esclangon-Morin, Valérie. Les rapatriés d’Afrique du Nord. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. Gacon, Stéphane. “Les Amnisties de la guerre d’Algérie 1962–1982.” Revue Histoire de la justice 1, no. 16 (2005). Hubbell, Amy L. Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Jordi, Jean-Jacques. De l’exode à l’exil. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. Jordi, Jean-Jacques. L’arrivée des Pieds-Noirs. Paris: L’Autrement, 1995. Jordi, Jean-Jacques. “Archéologie et structure des réseau de sociabilité rapatrié et pied-noir.” Provence historique 187 (1997). Jordi, Jean-Jacques. Les disparus civils européens de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Éditions Soteca, 2011. Kalman, Sam. French Colonial Fascism: The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–1939. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Leconte, Daniel. Les Pieds-Noirs, l’histoire et portrait d’une communauté. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Liauzu, Claude. “Les enjeux de mémoire.” Libération, février 23, 2005. Liauzu, Claude, and Gilles Maceron, dir. La colonization, la loi et l’histoire. Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2006. Malo, Jean-Jacques. “Introduction.” In Vietnam War Films, edited by Tony Williams and Jean-Jacques Malo. Jefferson: McFarland, 1994. Malye, François, and Benjamin Stora. Mitterrand et la guerre d’Algérie. Calmann Lévy, 2010. Monneret, Jean. La phase finale de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010. Peyrefitte, Alain. Faut-il partager Algérie? Paris: Plon, 1961. Savarèse, Éric. L’Invention des pieds-noirs. Paris: Séguier, 2002. Scioldo-Zürcher, Yann. Devenir métropolitain. Politique d’intégration et parcours de rapatriés d’Algérie en métropole (1954–2005). Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2010. Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Shepard, Todd. “Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité: A History of Ethno-Religious Nationalisms and Decolonization.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (August 2013): 445–467. Stora, Benjamin. Le transfert d’une mémoire. Paris: Éditions Casbah, 2000. Sussman, Sarah. Changing Lands, Changing Identities: The Migration of Algerian Jewry to France, 1954–1962. Stanford: Stanford University, 2002.

CHAPTER 7

Trauma and the Portuguese Repatriation: A Confined Collective Identity Rui Pena Pires, Morgane Delaunay and João Peixoto

In recent Portuguese history, April 25, 1974 marks a radical rupture with durable effects. For the half-million Portuguese living in the colonies, the day represented an even more decisive event, which within a year would

R. P. Pires · M. Delaunay (B) ISCTE, University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] M. Delaunay Université Rennes 2, Rennes, France J. Peixoto School of Economics and Management (ISEG), Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_7

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translate into their mass repatriation to the then colonial metropolis.1 The retornados (returnees), as they would be called, lived individually through a deeply traumatic experience that marked their memories with intensity and longevity. However, the ways in which these individual traumas were translated into a collective identity were variable and confined. In this chapter, we analyze the integration modes of the various segments of the returnees and their impact on identity and identification. With the aid of the results of this analysis and contributions from the theory of cultural trauma,2 we outline an explanation of the reasons why a collective narrative did not emerge from the traumatic experience of repatriation that was shared by the retornados and the general Portuguese population.

Late Portuguese Colonialism The fifteenth century marked the beginning of the Portuguese overseas expansion. With the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, and the maritime expeditions around the world led by Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama (who discovered a maritime route toward India), and Pedro Álvares Cabral (who arrived in 1500 in what later would be called Brazil), Portugal established possessions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. If over the centuries some of these territories were lost to other European colonial powers, the independence of Brazil, in 1822, marked the end of what is known as the “Second Portuguese Colonial Empire.” The “Third Portuguese Colonial Empire” that emerged after this comprised three geographical regions: in Africa, there were Angola, Mozambique, today’s Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde archipelago, and the Sao Tome and Principe One; in Asia, there

1 It can be pointed out that in comparison with other similar process, as the French case of the Pieds-noirs, it still does not exist an extended academic production on the Portuguese retornados . Most important studies with a broad scope include Pires et al. (1987; Pires 2003) and Lubkemann (2002, 2003). However, recently a new enthusiasm emerged. We can cite for example two multidisciplinary research groups that are studying the retornados : Memoirs : Filhos de Império e Pós-Memórias Europeias (coordinated by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, at Coimbra University) and Narrativas de Perda, Guerra e Trauma: Memória Cultural e o Fim do Império Português (coordinated by Elsa Peralta, at Lisbon University). See also Delaunay (2014) and Lourenço (2018). 2 On the theory of cultural trauma, see the 2004 pioneering book by Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (2004) and, in a more synthetic presentation, Eyerman (2012).

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were the territories of East-Timor and Macau; and in India, the territories of Goa, Daman, and Diu.3 Following World War II, Portugal came under attack for its empire in the international arena. In order to resist in the new international context of the Cold War, which tended to favor the right of peoples to self-determination and the end of the colonial system in general, the Salazar regime discovered in the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s luso-tropical theories an ideological, ready-made way of thinking (Léonard 1999b: 37).4 These theories were applied to emphasize the unique nature of Portuguese colonialism, proposing that, “the Portuguese people had a special ability to unite with the tropics with love rather than self-interest, and could build multiracial societies, marked by racial mixing and cultural interpenetration” (Castelo 2007: 108). In practice, however, this discourse produced few politically concrete repercussions (Alexandre 2006: 54). It was only in the context of colonial wars that the New State (Estado Novo) initiated a real reform of its overseas’ policy. In early 1961, a rebellion against Portuguese rule emerged in Angola. In February, in the capital Luanda, prisons were assaulted with the aim of freeing political prisoners. These attempts, claimed by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), led to a violent repression by armed groups of white settlers. However, Portugal and the international community look to March 15 as the official date of the beginning of the colonial war (Pinto 1999: 70), the date when in the North of Angola, the Angolan Peoples Union (UPA) attacked plantations and administrative posts causing hundreds of deaths among the white and African population.5 Two years later, in 1963, the rebellion spread to Guinea, where guerillas were led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC); in 1964, the rebellion reached Mozambique under the command of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) (Pinto 1999: 71). Given this situation, the New State’s reaction wasn’t long in coming. On April 13, 1961, Salazar declared, “to Angola, quickly and with

3 For more information on this period of Portuguese history, Bethencourt and Curto (2007). For an overview of the last hundred years of Portuguese Africa, see Newitt (1981). 4 For more information about lusotropicalism, see Lusotopie (1997) and Castelo (1999). 5 The attacks, that took place until March 18, and the repression from the white population

that followed caused a massive movement of Angolan refugees to Congo and the evacuation through an air-bridge of 3500 settlers to Lisbon. See Castelo (2007: 350).

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strength!” (Pereira 2015: 38) and designed a military, ideological, political, economic, and demographic response. Regarding the military response, Portugal mobilized financial and human resources. Contrary to the expectations of an international community that did not believe the Salazar regime capable of handling the three fronts of conflict, the Portuguese colonial wars lasted until the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974 (that is to say, thirteen years).6 In ideological terms the regime faced the colonial wars by reaffirming its colonial mystique, which presented Portugal as a “pluri-continental and multiracial” nation, against the increasing attacks from the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) (founded in 1963). It was in this context of ideological reaffirmation that Salazar declared on August 12, 1963: “Angola is a Portuguese creation that doesn’t exist without Portugal” and “Mozambique is Mozambique only because it’s Portugal,” thereby reaffirming the unified and indivisible character of the Portuguese nation (Léonard 1999a: 14). Furthermore, the regime’s propaganda developed a discourse to discredit the African liberation movements. For the historian Victor Pereira, the principal aim of the official discourse was to deny legitimacy to the freedom fighters by representing them as “terrorists” acting on behalf of Communism with no support from the local population (Pereira 2015: 37–38). With the beginning of the colonial wars, the New State considered emigration to Africa a “high priority” (Castelo 2007: 376). To encourage the settlement of Portuguese in the colonies was one of the regime’s responses aimed at countering the effects of the wars. The goal was to ensure the survival of Portuguese colonialism (Neto 1997: 346) through “whitening” the population (Wheeler and Pélissier 2009: 278). Between 1960 and 1970, the white population of Angola increased from 172,529 to 280,101; in Mozambique it rose from 97,245 to 162,967 (Cónim 1977: 76). By 1970, whites in Angola and Mozambique represented 4.9 and 2%, respectively, of the population (Castelo 2007: 216). The promotion of emigration was intended to underpin reforms made in colonial policy and, in particular, to attain greater control and integration of African populations through administrative and cultural channels. Since the 1960s there had been a rise in emigration, namely in medium6 According to António Costa Pinto, during thirteen years of war 8300 soldiers lost their lives and 28,000 were injured and disabled (Pinto 1999: 78). For more information about the memory of the colonial war in Angola, see Antunes (2015).

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and high-skilled occupations: civil servants, teachers, doctors, technicians, and business personnel. The intensification and composition of emigration to the colonies in the 1950s—and especially in the 1960s—allow us to explain some of the later observable characteristics of the repatriated population—the predominance of returnees born in Portugal and of young age groups, as well as a higher average school qualification than in the rest of the Portuguese population. However, the most significant part of the New State’s response to the emergence of the war in Angola, besides the military reaction, was political. In fact, the period 1961–1974 was marked by two attempts to reform the colonial policy. The first was conducted between 1961 and 1962 by Adriano Moreira, the head of the Ministry of Overseas and a strong advocate of the luso-tropical theories. For historian Fernando Tavares Pimenta, this reformism, which had as its objective an increasing self-government within the colonies, was “the political response to the nationalist guerillas, but also a response to the white population’s political claims, especially the economic elites” (Pimenta 2008: 279). Salazar was well aware that he had to meet some of their demands in order not to encourage secession attempts by the white population. The creation of the General Studies Program at the University of Angola and Mozambique, announced on July 23, 1962, is just such an example. In order to limit adherence to the liberation struggle by the colonized population, the Statute of the Portuguese Natives of the Provinces of Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique was abolished in September.7 Henceforth, Portuguese citizenship and associated benefits were granted to all residents of the colonies, thereby ending forced labor and compulsory crop submission, among other discriminatory measures.8 On the political front, greater autonomy was afforded to local political organizations. The colonial reforms of the New State also had an economic side. The objective was to promote economic development in the African colonies by increasing public investment, thereby allowing new foreign capital (Pimenta 2008: 284), and by creating a Portuguese Economic 7 Decree-Law n°43893, September 6, 1961. 8 Before the revocation, the so-called “indigenous” could obtain the Portuguese citizenship

if they complied with defined requirements. If so, they belonged to the juridical category called “assimilated.” In Angola, before 1961, they represented less then 1% of the African population, see Léonard (1999b: 48). On the question of forced labor and other discriminatory measures, see Castelo (2007: 283–330).

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Area (Decree-Law n°44016) (Ferreira 1990: 141). In the case of Angola, the period between 1962 and 1973 was marked by remarkable economic growth, including a high average annual growth rate of the GPD (11.1%) and the creation of diversified industries in the colony (Ferreira 1990: 142–143) (through a typical process of import substitution industrialization). This first attempt at reforming colonial policy, and the colonial system in general, was brief, ending in 1962 with the exit of Adriano Moreira at the Ministry of Overseas. This occurred under pressure from the regime’s “integrationists,” who were against giving the colonies greater autonomy. Between 1968 and 1974 Marcelo Caetano, who succeeded Salazar as prime minister, encountered the same problem when he tried to enact a second political reform of the colonial system. His objective was to prepare “independence [of the colonies] controlled by Lisbon and led by the colonies’ white elites” (Pimenta 2008: 315). Although Marcelo Caetano succeeded (over the course of five years at the head of the administration) in enacting several measures favoring greater political and financial autonomy of the colonies, his project ultimately failed due to a lack of support inside the regime (Pimenta 2008: 333). These attempts to reform the colonial system and its most visible effects appeared to the white population of the colonies as indicators—and even as reaffirmation—of the eternal nature of the Portuguese rule overseas. In this way, on October 4, 1964, we could read on the front page of Lourenço Marques’ newspaper, Notícias: “We are here, and we will stay!” (Góis 2017: 85). However, all those changes in the colonial rule during the 1960s and 1970s had limits. If the luso-tropical colonial discourse developed by the New State in the 1950s aimed to distinguish Portuguese colonialism from other European forms by insisting on its supposed humanity and lack of racism, the practices contradicted the myth. In reality, the Portuguese colonies in Africa were characterized by de facto segregation and discriminatory practices. Beyond the spatial discrimination that excluded native Africans from urban centers (which were more and more being reserved for the white population) and the control over (or in some cases the ban on) access to certain places within the cities (Henriques 1999: 220; Castelo 2007: 286), colonial societies were clearly characterized by social segregation based on skin color. The racial barriers established in the colonies (strongest in Mozambique due to the geographic proximity of Rhodesia to the apartheid South African regime) (Castelo 2007: 286) contradicted a central part

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of the colonial vulgate: the affirmation of the unprecedented existence in the Portuguese overseas provinces of a widespread interbreeding, when even the census of the colonies accounted for a “persistently residual” rate of mixed-race individuals (Oliveira 2014: 508–509). In 1960 they represented 1.11% of the Angolan population and 0.48% of the Mozambican population (Castelo 2007: 216). If it is hard to determine to what extent the authoritarian character of the Portuguese regime shaped the relations between the colonized populations and the settlers, this authoritarian characteristic was felt in the colonies. In fact, as in the metropolis, the New State used different methods to exercise control over the respective populations, whether African or white. In this way, the International and Defense Police (PIDE), the regime’s political police force, was present in the African territories from the second half of the 1950s, exercising tight control. The New State also used propaganda and censorship to complete its control over the population and to try to minimize the expression of the contestation of its rule in the colonies. About the authoritarian and colonial nature of the New State, the historian Amélia Neves de Souto successfully pointed out the interdependency of these two characteristics: The imperial mystique, contributing to the consolidation of the Salazar regime, generated a great ignorance of the Empire’s true reality, which the propaganda, the control over the media, the censorship and the repression helped to strengthen, what led the liberal forces only lately to question the colonial policy and above all to recognize the colonial populations’ right of self-determination and independence. (Souto 2007: 359–360)

In sum, although maintaining an authoritarian and discriminatory orientation, Portuguese colonial policy underwent significant changes that underpinned the intensification and transformation of Portuguese emigration to the colonies. Two decades later, those migrants repatriated abruptly and en masse to Portugal in the sequence of decolonization. Both the characteristics of colonial emigration and the conditions of the colonists’ repatriation marked part of both the history of their integration into Portuguese society and the narratives built upon it.

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Revolution, Decolonization, and Repatriation With the change of regime in April 1974, the Portuguese state began a quick and widespread process of decolonization. The abrupt nature with which these changes were unleashed, the context in which they occurred, and the characteristics of the Portuguese colonial system all contribute to the explanation of the rapid and generalized repatriation of the populations of European origin living in the colonies. Decolonization was one of the three stated objectives of the 1974 Revolution: to democratize, to decolonize, and to develop. Known as the “3ds,” these goals enjoyed great popularity. The objective of decolonization was rooted in military pressure to put an end to the colonial war, one of the main reasons for mobilizing the protagonists of the coup that started the Revolution. But it was more than that; it was a response both to popular discouragement with the human costs of colonial warfare and to the growing unwillingness of modernizing elites to accept the channeling of resources necessary for economic development into the war effort.9 That is to say, Portuguese decolonization was not an episode of change that disturbed a stable political system, but one of the components of the radical changes that occurred in 1974. After the revolution, decolonization was thus associated with the identity narrative of the new democratic regime. The decision to decolonize as soon as possible was not unanimous among the leaders of the transitional revolutionary period. However, the combination of internal and international pressures, coupled with the impossibility of maintaining mobilization for the colonial wars (where there was a rupture in the military’s motivation not only to continue the war, but also to remain in the colonies) favored the option of rapid decolonization. This rapidity resulted in part from the practical inability to control the transition processes in the former colonies, which simultaneously accentuated this incapacity. Internal reasons added to the external ones in a process that was quickly internationalized (Pinto 1999: 88–98). In the case of Angola, where the population of settlers was larger, internationalization included external military interventions in the context of a civil war that would last for more than two decades. The abrupt character of decolonization resulted in an abrupt exodus, which is explained in the first place by the institutional ruptures introduced 9 For a comprehensive analysis of the Portuguese decolonization of Africa, see MacQueen (1997).

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into the colonies. The vast and rapid set of changes, and particularly the processes of social disorganization, was experienced by the settlers as disrupting the “sense of continuity and order in events” (Giddens 1991: 215). As emphasized by one of the returnees interviewed in a study conducted in the early 1990s, First, I was not planning to leave. But, after all the intense shooting I decided to leave. Then I had problems with a FNLA sergeant10 : because of a cigarette, he wanted to kill me because of a cigarette! I went to the airport, and I was there for 12 hours waiting for a place. And so I left. There was a lot of insecurity, the problem was not independence, it was insecurity. (Interview 6: Man, b. 1936, Angola [in Pires 2003: 195])

The subjective experience of loss of security was the first factor that contributed to the exodus, which began in late 1974 and progressively accentuated throughout the year 1975 (see Ribeiro 2002).11 In the second place, the reduced ability of colonists to intervene in the definition and management of the transition to independence contributed to the exodus. This incapacity was mainly due to the dynamics of exclusion of political participation that characterized the functioning of the pre-1974 political regime, both in Portugal and in the colonies, as already mentioned. Contrary to what was happening in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), as well as in Namibia and South Africa, in the Portuguese colonies the denial of democracy affected both the colonized and the settlers. Without any experience of political participation, organization, and representation, Portuguese settlers were unable to participate in the negotiation of their role both in the transition to independence and in the new nations. The result of this incapacity was not only the amplification of feelings of everyday insecurity, but also a very rapid reconstruction of its social status as outsiders. 10 FNLA, the National Liberation Front of Angola, was one of the three national liberation movements involved in the war against Portuguese colonialism in Angola. The FNLA was supported by the US administration since 1961 both during the colonial war and, after that, during the civil war. Other Angolan national liberation movements in 1974 included MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), supported mainly by the USSR, Yugoslavia and Cuba, and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), supported in the colonial period mainly by China and then, during the civil war, by the US and South Africa. 11 Although concentrated in 1975, the exodus would continue until mid-1977. According to Ribeiro (2002: 437–438), between January 1976 and May 1977 about 45,000 returnees arrived at Lisbon airport.

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Feeling more insecure, voiceless, and with no loyalty to those who defined them as outsiders, the settlers opted for repatriation. With this choice of exit (Hirschman 1970), they aggravated the conditions that induced it. In fact, not only did the progressive exodus increase their insecurity through the partial collapse of institutions suddenly emptied of most of their organizational agents, but the progressive exodus also gave credibility to their outsider status and the discourses that constituted it. The dynamics of repatriation were thus a typical case of self-reinforcing cumulative causation (Myrdal 1957). Institutional rupture, daily insecurity, lack of voice and loyalty; these were the sources of a concentrated exodus in a short space of time. In less than a year, almost all of the settlers (more than half a million) were repatriated to Portugal, while a small minority (about 60,000) fled to other countries. More than half were established in Angola, having been transported to Portugal by boat and a large airlift. From May 1974 to November 1975, some 25,000 Angolan repatriates were transported by boat and about 280,000 by an airlift that involved more than 1000 aircraft flights by the Portuguese military and 12 airlines from 10 countries (Ribeiro 2002: 377). According to the 1981 census data on the Portuguese population, half a million returnees coming mainly from Angola (61%) and Mozambique (34%) lived in Portugal. The remaining 5% came from the smaller former colonies of Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Príncipe.12 Altogether, they represented 5% of the population of Portugal at the time.13 Not all the settlers opted for repatriation. On the one hand, an unknown number, probably on the order of fifty thousand, remained in the former colonies after their independence. On the other hand, some 60,000 Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique emigrated to third countries, in particular to South Africa and Brazil. Later, a small portion of these (about

12 The data on repatriation used in this chapter do not include the few Portuguese from Timor and Macao (less than five thousand). The decolonization of Timor-Leste was halted by the invasion of Indonesia in 1975 and resumed only in 1999, giving rise to a flow of East Timorese refugees rather than colonists. Macao had a special status as a Chinese territory under Portuguese administration, which also ended in 1999, after a long negotiation with China, which culminated in the definition of a transition process that will last until 2049. The negotiated and prolonged nature of this process did not create a rupture similar to the one that happened in the former Portuguese colonies, reason why did not provoke significant and sudden flows of emigration. 13 All data on the returned population used in sections 2 and 3 are from Pires (2003: 189–252). For a synthesis that includes the most relevant data, see Pires (2018).

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three to four thousand) emigrated to Portugal (Pires 2003: 198–199). This stopover in a third country was in some cases the uncontrolled outcome of the vicissitudes of the exodus, while in others it was an opportunity for the reconstitution of the resources necessary for an easier integration in Portugal. Of those who opted for the repatriation to Portugal, a little more than twelve thousand re-emigrated to other countries in the early 1980s (Ribeiro 2002: 404). It is possible that both emigration to a country other than Portugal and remigration have functioned as a process of filtering of those segments of the colonists less likely to assimilate rapidly in Portugal, as documented in the case of pieds noirs (Leconte 1980: 240–242). Almost two-thirds of the returnees were born in Portugal (63%), although this proportion varied with age: 25% among those under 20 years of age and 84% among those over 30 years of age. This is a characteristic of the repatriated population that proved decisive for the history of its future integration and the origin of their popular designation as retornados (“the returned ones”). The great majority of the adults effectively returned to the country in which they were born. This is contrary to what happened, for example, in the cases of French and Dutch repatriations. This return to the place of one’s origin was in many cases a double one. Not only did the returnees return to the country where they were born, but most returned to the specific region of the country where they were born (about 53%). There they rediscovered their families and former social networks that they counted on to support their integration process in its instrumental, social, cultural, and affective dimensions.

Integration in a Changing Society In the analysis of the integration of the retornados , it is necessary to distinguish the first months after arrival in Portugal, which were dominated by the dramatic stories represented in the most recent novels and journalistic stories (see below), from the longer period of social integration that followed. In the short term, there were reactions against the retornados , who were defined as “outsiders.” These reactions included processes of social blame and stigmatization, actions that subvert a community not through the sheer invention of the outsiders’ alleged faults, but through the selected highlighting of the worst parts of their history (i.e., “of that group’s ‘worst’ section of its anomic minority” Elias 1994: xix) as representative of all outsiders. This history is then contrasted with the “best” history of the

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established peoples. In the case of the retornados , most of these “worst” stories built around cases of the occupation of houses (Lubkemann 2003: 87), which contributed to the credibility of the accusation by some Portuguese that the retornados were stealing houses and jobs in a period of acute economic crisis (i.e., the crisis experienced in the years immediately after the April Revolution).14 However, the scope and impact of these reactions must be qualified. First, the few systematic studies on how the retornados were treated in the leading newspapers of the time concluded that the media were predominantly neutral (see, for instance, Lourenço 2018). Second, even when there was a stigmatizing of retornados as outsiders in the media or in local interaction processes, this had a reduced and temporary impact. In fact, the outsider status was ambivalent and mitigated by the existence of multiple ties between the majority of retornados and the local Portuguese population. So, “the retornados were treated as what Werbner terms ‘internal strangers’ inasmuch as their inclusion as part of the Portuguese civitas […] was broadly acknowledged, while at the same time their membership in Portuguese societas […] was placed in question” (Lubkemann 2003: 76). In the medium term, even the ambivalent status of outsider was overcome and the integration of the majority, if not all, of retornados developed in a logic of assimilation.15 Contributing factors here were the characteristics of the repatriated population and the context of their repatriation, as well as the public policies developed by the governments of the time.16 First, the majority of adult retornados , having emigrated to the colonies in the 1950s and 1960s, either maintained links with the social circles of origin in metropolitan society or were able to easily activate previous links, primarily at the family level. As a result, the retornados were able to construct their social integration not through the densification of intraretornados networks, but through their integration into frameworks of relations with non-retornados (e.g., family members, neighbors, or coworkers).

14 In rural areas, this stigmatization of retornados would have been favored by the contrast between the history of Portuguese emigration to Europe in the 1960s, dominated by a strong ideology of return that legitimized it, and emigration for the colonies in the same period, interpreted as a permanent departure from their local communities, as “a break with home communities” (Lubkemann 2002: 195–196). 15 The term is used herein in the sense given to it by Alba and Nee (2003). 16 The explanation of the integration process of the returnees in Portuguese society pre-

sented in this section summarizes the main conclusions of Pires (2003: 189–252).

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This modality of integration individualized their pathways in a way that disfavored the emergence of a collective identity based on the persistence of intra-retornados ties. Second, repatriation took place in a context of deep and widespread social change. This context of change, very different from those encountered by other European repatriates, conditioned the returnee integration process in several ways. On the one hand, the readjustments in the composition and functioning of the labor market, in particular the growth of the public employment associated with the development of the welfare state, which was particularly intense in the years following the regime change, had a great impact. As this development required levels of academic and professional qualifications more common among the retornados than the general population, it facilitated not only their labor reintegration, but also the resumption of occupational and professional trajectories that had been interrupted by decolonization and repatriation. There was also a retraction of traditional investors that made room for new entrepreneurs, among them retornados . On the other hand, the context of change included a broad recomposition of social hierarchies, which allowed many members of the retornados elite to negotiate their inclusion in the emerging order, minimizing eventual status losses. In other words, members of these elite segments were able to reconstruct their status by participating in such processes of recomposition of hierarchies rather than through the constitution of new places of power in the symbolic and organizational representation of the retornados . The potential for collective action among the repatriated population thereby lost many of its would-be leaders. Therefore, the identity narratives of the retornados lost the main carrier groups and institutional entrepreneurs that could develop them. This is one of the reasons why the organizations, movements, and media identified with the retornados had, in Portugal, a restricted audience and, for the most part, an ephemeral existence. In short, the context of integration favored individualization over collective action. The dynamics of change supported the functioning of two classical integration mechanisms upon which the possibility of individualized assimilation depends: socioeconomic mobility, in general terms, and elite circulation, more specifically. On the symbolic level, the result of this process was paradoxical, with the emergence of a discourse identifying the retornados as active agents in the changes then in progress. In 1984, a television report (later published as a book that met a great success both with

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the public and with the critics) proclaimed that the retornados were changing Portugal.17 In this popularized narrative, the stigma of the defeated settler was displaced by the pride of the innovative agent. The process of integration of the retornados was also the result of public policies formed with this objective. These policies included, first, the granting of state support. Although important, such support was far from the levels of that granted by the governments of other European countries to their repatriated. But be that as it may, Portugal’s state support was still more effective because of the sociodemographic characteristics of the Portuguese repatriated population and the context summarized above. These policies were mainly of two types: emergency support measures and structural measures to promote integration.18 In both, there prevailed the favoring of modalities of individualization. The emergency reception measures had both welfare and administrative components and were defined as temporary.19 All the support granted was defined as exceptional and replaced within one to two years by the inclusion of the beneficiaries in the general social protection system. The support was effective not only in reducing tensions upon arrival, and thus minimizing the alienation of the retornados within the new Portuguese society, but also, and above all, they were effective in avoiding the transformation of short-term difficulties into structural paths and positions of exclusion. The structural measures focused above all on rapid incorporation of the retornados into the labor market, either by the renewal of previous ties as public and private employees or by supporting business creation. In both cases, the creation of opportunity structures prevailed over the institutionalization of mechanisms of positive discrimination. An orientation of favoring the dispersion of the retornados throughout the national territory also prevailed, as explicitly affirmed by those then responsible for these policies:

17 By Fernando Dacosta, a leftist journalist and writer, the book Os Retornados Estão a Mudar Portugal [The Retornados Are Changing Portugal], published in 1984, won the Prize of the Portuguese Press Association. 18 A third type of policy included ad hoc regulatory interventions with the objective of solving very specific problems of integration of specific segments of the repatriated population (see Pires 2003: 243–247). 19 For a more detailed analysis of the implementation of these emergency policies, see Pires (2016).

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in my view, everything should be done to reduce or prevent the emergence of large concentrations of displaced persons, encouraging instead their dispersion throughout the national territory for the desirable integration of all of them into Portuguese society. (Ribeiro 2002: 415)20

Combined with a favorable context and focus on a population with the profile just characterized, these policies reinforced and made possible the individualized integration of the retornados . Unlike in other European countries, the circumstances did not encourage the formation of a collectivity delimited by a stable identity, supported by reproducible forms of representation. However, the vestiges of such an identity were retained in collective memory through the designation of the repatriated as retornados , an appropriate reference to a process that was transitory and inclusive and primarily involved former emigrants who returned to their country of origin. If assimilation prevailed, it also had limits. These limits were associated with one of the main conditions of the effectiveness of the individualization of integration: the fact that the great majority of adult retornados were born in Portugal and, because of this, were able to integrate, in a few years, into the local networks of family and friendship. That is, integration was problematic and followed other directions when this possibility of participation in local networks was more difficult; integration largely depended on race and kinship. First, some 20,000 native Africans who were not recognized as Portuguese nationals also repatriated to Portugal during decolonization. This lack of recognition included not only social rejection by means of “essentializing […] phenotypic difference” (Lubkemann 2002: 201), but also, and above all, changes in citizenship statutes. A set of nationality law changes initiated in 1975 and completed in 1981 replaced the ius solis regime prevailing in Portugal since 1867 by a predominantly ius sanguinis regime, causing nationality to be retroactively lost to almost all born in the former colonies who had no parents or grandparents born in Portugal (Pires 2003: 126–129). Applying clear racial criteria, the legislative change distinguished between retornados and immigrants, delimiting the borders of applying 20 As mentioned in the memoir of the then High Commissioner for the Returnees (Ribeiro 2002), contacts were made and meetings were held with the French authorities to assess the French experience in the integration of pied-noirs. These meetings took place in 1977 on the Portuguese initiative and the High Commissioner concluded that the territorial concentration had been an obstacle to the integration of returnees in France.

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measures of inclusion of the former and discriminating negatively the latter. This legal specification of the retornados marks simultaneously the origins of the immigrant question in Portugal. Repatriated Africans would be radically and definitely excluded from narratives about the retornados and incorporated into the identity space of postcolonial immigration. What’s more, socioeconomic exclusion overlapped with legal exclusion: “Benefiting from fewer kinship networks in Portugal, retornados of African descent were more likely to settle in the peri-urban shantytowns and government sponsored projects that received most of the media’s negative attention” (Lubkemann 2002: 200). This negative attention contributed, in the terms defined by Norbert Elias (1994), to the ethnic stigmatization of African retornados . They were identified as outsiders, as Africans, not as retornados . In the short term, the response to this stigmatization by many African retornados was to use Luso-tropical narratives to claim their designation as retornados (Lubkemann 2002: 206), but with limited success. In the medium term, there was a merging of identities between African retornados and postcolonial African immigrants, as well as the emergence of counter-stigmatization processes that would support the construction of a reactive ethnic identity around the Afro-descendant category. Second, among the adult retornados there were a little more than 38,000 born in the former colonies, and therefore these would in many cases find it more difficult to participate in the individualized processes of integration supported by networks of family ties.21 It was probably among this segment of the repatriated population that the limits of the processes and policies of assimilation described above are clearer. It remains to be studied whether this segment constituted the basis of support for a collective repatriated identity, marginal among retornados yet visible and durable—in fact, still observable today. Among the retornados who shared this minority collective identity, the prevailing discourse focused on the memory of the circumstances that led to the exodus and the conditions under which it occurred. In interviews conducted in the early 1990s, this memory sediment translated into distrustful attitudes toward left-wing political parties, which were identified as responsible for decolonization, and reduced trust in political institutions, which was offset by the predisposition to accept charismatic leadership: 21 With the data available, all retornados aged 30 or more in the 1981 Census were considered as adults. Of these, 14% were born in the former colonies and 86% in Portugal (see Pires 2003: 202).

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it still does not make sense to me today that the individuals who did the 25th of April… and this nonsense of handing Africa over… Anyway, these men, for me, do not count, are not worth anything. I cannot see these people. These people make me angry […]. Mário Soares, Vasco Gonçalves, Costa Gomes…22 I am not a politician nor do I want to know, but with the theme of decolonization I am exalted. (Interview 7: Man, b. 1920, Angola [in Pires 2003: 197])23 We were anti PS and anti PCP and were on the other side [PSD and CDS].24 Decolonization has conditioned our political choices. Mário Soares was condemned because he was associated with the troubled process of decolonization. And Sá Carneiro, we were in agreement with him as not having responsibility in the process of decolonization. […] The attraction for the PSD was due to the charisma of Sá Carneiro, the quietness and security he offered. The CDS tried to recruit cadres and electorate among the retornados , tried to take advantage of their availability, it was not an option of the retornados , and it is not an ideological question. Then, as the PSD is the biggest party and offers better guarantees, by pragmatism, we ended up being oriented to the PSD. (Interview 5: Man, b. 1939, Angola [in Pires 2003: 197–198])

The identity elements built around this common experience of the exodus had the sense of loss as a referent. The constitution of this feeling as a grounding of collective action would mainly be carried out by the 22 Mário Soares, leader of the Socialist Party, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the interim

governments after the April Revolution, was responsible for negotiating the agreements that led to the independence of the former African colonies. Vasco Gonçalves and Costa Gomes, officers of the Armed Forces, were respectively Prime Minister and President of the Republic in the transition period after the April Revolution and were identified as being close to the Portuguese Communist Party. 23 The way the memory of the exodus marked the retornados attitudes coexists with the

memory of colonial everyday life, giving rise to a plural configuration of their dispositions, in the sense in which Lahire (1998) speaks of a plural person. In most of the returnees interviewed in the early 1990s, the right-wing discourse against decolonization coexisted with a liberal discourse on the regulation of personal and family relationships, anchored in the colony’s experience of everyday life. 24 PS (Partido Socialista): Socialist Party, center left, won the first democratic elections

after the Revolution of 1974. PCP (Partido Comunista Português): orthodox communist party, legalized after the April Revolution. PS and PCP were opponent of colonial war and advocates of rapid decolonization. PSD (Partido Social Democrata): Social Democratic Party, center right, liberal-conservative. CDS (Centro Democrático e Social): Democratic and Social Center, right, national-conservative.

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associations of the so-called “dispossessed” from Angola and Mozambique (Aeang and Aemo), which nevertheless never managed to represent more than a small fringe of the returnee population.25 Two fundamental characteristics of their orientation explain their minority status and the inability to broaden their field of representation. First, they maintained an almost exclusive collective referral to the memory of the exodus, which led them to the far right of the political spectrum. This was because they held the left— and in general, all democratic forces—responsible for decolonization and its consequences, in particular, repatriation. In a radically changing country, this meant opposing the winners and supporting the defeated parties of the April 1974 revolution. Second, in defining the central issue of the movement as the compensation for the possessions left in the former colonies, they defined a sense of community among retornados strictly based on what Daniel Leconte has called “solidarity of the dispossessed,” that emerged in the more radical sectors of the pieds noirs (Leconte 1980: 273). This proclamation that opens Aeang’s website illustrates this guideline: Since its foundation, Aeang – ASSOCIATION OF DISPOSSESSED OF ANGOLA – has been a non-profit organization […] since its foundation, sustaining a claim against the PORTUGUESE STATE for reasons of continuous violation of the property rights of the Portuguese citizens who lived in the then overseas province of Angola and who were harmed by the decolonization process that began in 1974. (http://www.aeang.pt/aeang.html, December 2002)

In the discourse of these associations, or of the media that were close to them, there is an explicit refusal of the designation retornados and the assertion of a collective identity as dispossessed. However, the potential drama in the sense of loss that underlined this identity would be erased, on 25 The Association of the Dispossessed of Mozambique (Aemo) and the Association of Dispossessed of Angola (Aeang) were constituted respectively in 1986 and 1987. Both have as their central statutory objective the claim of compensation by the Portuguese Government for the goods lost by their members as a consequence of decolonization, and were affiliated to the Rome-based CESOM (Confederation Europeénne des Spoilés d’Outre Mer). The issue of the recognition of the “returnees” victim status still remains open, in particular regarding the claims for compensation for the goods left in the colonies, presented since 1994 by these associations that, in 2014, accused the Portuguese State of “violation of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

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the discursive level, by the irony of the designation used among the retornados themselves to designate those more radicalized fringes: the “tinhas ” (“those that had”): I had (tinha) a house, I had (tinha) two cars, I had (tinha) a farm, I had (tinha) … This ironic reaction would be fatal, weakening the narration of repatriation as a tragedy. The narrative of loss, of repatriation as a tragedy, was nevertheless the most important manifestation of an identity of the retornados based on feelings of trauma, the contents of which are presented in the next section. It was, however, a narrative that failed to generalize and that, even among the most discontented fringes of the repatriated population, experienced a slow but irreversible weakening. It would be replaced, as will be seen in the following pages, by other narratives in which the trauma of the experience of return was only one of the subjective dimensions taken into account, especially in the new twenty-first-century literature on the retornados . And it would also be challenged by the appearance of counter-narratives about Portugal’s colonial past that rejected the positive image of colonial life associated with the narrative of loss.

Trauma Narratives and Their Limits With the settlement of the retornados and the end of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, new narratives emerged. In the case of the narratives produced by the repatriated population, we will focus on two distinct but complementary types. Far from representing the entire repatriated population, this allows us to have access to a narrative contemporary to the arrival and settlement of the retornados in Portugal and a literary narrative constructed decades after the decolonization process. These two types have coexisted, and at times confronted narratives of the Portuguese colonial past in general. Finally, we make brief reference to the attempts to deconstruct the narrative of the colonial past that emerged in several areas of Portuguese society. An Early Political Narrative of Victimization Soon after the settlement of a large section of the repatriated population in Portugal, a political narrative of retornados emerged in the only journal created by retornados . The Jornal o Retornado (JOR) was a weekly newspaper that was created in October 1975 and distributed throughout the

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Portuguese national territory until 1981. Its goal was to “defend the retornados ’ interests.”26 In the last issue of the journal (March 31, 1981), the editors declared that, in terms of circulation, the first issues of the journal had a print run of 47,700 copies. However, the editors admitted that they lost readers: “this weekly newspaper, except in the early days of its existence, didn’t find in the repatriated population the interest that it deserved,” representing, throughout its existence, a minority of the repatriated population. Its editorial orientation and its journalists’ writing style make it possible to define the journal as belonging to the sensationalist press situated on the right-fringe of the political spectrum, an opinion clearly expressed on June 27, 1978 when the journal changed its subtitle from “Independent weekly newspaper serving the people and the truth” to “Independent and anticommunist weekly newspaper.” The contemporary narrative concerning the arrival and settlement of the retornados in Portugal was one of victimization, supporting the construction of a dispossessed identity. A study of the Jornal o Retornado makes it possible to identify the various components of this narrative, a victimization discourse that can be seen as a leitmotiv. Synthetizing, we can point out various levels of victimhood are established.27 First of all, the retornados present themselves as victims of the Carnation Revolution, which set the decolonization process in motion. In this way, a reader of the journal who lived in Angola for fourteen years presents the retornados as “the martyrs of the precipitated decolonization.”28 There are virulent and violent attacks on the military and political figures considered to be leading figures of decolonization, and consequently, of the situation of the retornados , and calls for their judgment. One can find these in a large number of articles

26 The Jornal o Retornado published 211 issues. For this study were used the issues published between October 10, 1975 (date of the creation of the journal) and November 11, 1976 (that is to say, one year after Angola’s independence), as well as the issues published in the last six months of its existence. A particular attention was given to the correspondence column. All in all, more than 150 articles and 643 letters were analyzed. Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°1, October 10, 1975, p. 1, “Fundo”. 27 Analyzing the letters published in the journal, it seemed interesting to try to determine if the discourse of the readers that identified themselves as born in the then Portuguese colonies was characterized by a higher degree of radicalization than the other letters. After been able to only identify ten letters written by individuals born in Angola and five from Mozambique natives, we can’t say that these letters can be distinguished from the others in terms of degree of radicalization. 28 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°2, October 17, 1975, p. 5.

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and letters published in the journal.29 According to the journal and its readers, decolonization was a “tragedy” and “treason,” exemplified by the sale of Portuguese colonies to the Soviets.30 The retornados are also presented as victims of the different African national liberation movements, which prevented their remaining in the colonies. In this case, one uncovers the same discursive elements found in the colonial propaganda, such as the emphasis on the marginality of these movements or the use of the word “terrorist” for African nationalists.31 Finally, the idea of a lack of interest from political leaders concerning the repatriated population is also part of this victimization discourse. Several articles and letters criticize the political actions and measures taken by the Portuguese government with regard to the repatriated population, and consequently the latter’s difficult living conditions.32 Another characteristic of the victimization discourse is the use of numerous hyperboles, including comparisons made by some readers between the retornados and the Jews during the World War II. Decolonization and the resulting situation of the retornados “is a bigger crime than the one committed by the Germans against the Jews, because it was committed by brothers against brothers and against the homeland,”33 or presenting the retornados as the “victims of the biggest shame of the world history in

29 Between the names of the personalities considered responsible we can find: Rosa Coutinho, High Commissioner of Angola until the signing of the Alvor Agreement, Mário Soares, then Portugal foreign affairs minister, Melo Antunes, a politician that participated in various transitional governments after the Carnation Revolution, or Costa Gomes, nominated President of the Portuguese Republic until the first democratic presidential elections in 1976. 30 See for instance the letter published in the 33th issue, signed “JF”. Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°33, May 25, 1976, p. 21. 31 See, for example, Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°43, August

3, 1976, pp. 20–21. 32 About the reception of the “retornados” in Lisbon airport, see the article named “Um inferno chamado aeroporto” (“A Hell called airport”) in the 3rd issue. Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°3, October 24, 1975, p. 4. 33 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°37, June 22, 1976, p. 21. See also Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°34, June 1, 1976, p. 20.

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the current century,”34 or in describing the decolonization process as “the biggest shame in our annals of history.”35 The revolutionary context to which the retornados returned had repercussions for the construction of their narrative. In fact, they were associated with the Salazar regime by both the metropolitan population and the retornados themselves. In the latter case, we find a letter dated March 27, 1976 in which the author openly expresses his nostalgia of the fallen regime: “The so-called fascists had the vocation to lead a multiracial and pluri-continental country during several happy years.”36 However, if it is rare to find in the retornados ’ discourse such a clearly expressed nostalgia for the former regime, a large number of articles and letters of the Jornal o Retornado do not hesitate to criticize revolutionary Portugal and Communism more broadly. For instance, one reader returning from Angola to wrote about this political context: “As time goes by, I feel more and more ashamed to be Portuguese.”37 However, based on the discourse expressed by the retornados , this association with the Salazar and Caetano regime seems to be more often imposed by the rest of the Portuguese population. From its first issue, the Jornal o Retornado contained articles whose objective was to respond to the attacks directed against the retornados . This can be seen on the front page of the first issue, which bore the headline “Displaced people from the overseas, reactionaries?”38 In fact, one can find many testimonies by retornados who claim to have been called “reactionaries,” “fascists,” “colonialists,” or “black people exploiters.” This association with the former regime was combined with the idea that the retornados , after having taken advantage of the African population, returned to the metropolis to steal jobs from the “honest” and “good” Portuguese people or to live off government subsidies. Faced with such accusations, the repatriated population developed a “line of defense” designed to restore the “truth” about the retornados ’

34 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°34, June 1, 1976, p. 20. See also Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°25, March 27, 1976, p. 20. 35 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°31, May 11, 1976, p. 20. 36 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°25, March 27, 1976, p. 20. 37 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°24, March 20, 1976, p. 20. 38 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°1, October 10, 1975, p. 1.

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condition. To deconstruct the negative image that, according to the retornados , the Portuguese public had of them, the retornados developed a real line of defense on the pages of the Jornal o Retornado that comprised three elements. The first part of this defense consisted in refusing the name they had been ascribed—refusing to use the word retornado—not because of its inaccuracy (some of those so ascribed had never lived in the metropolis before decolonization), but also because of the negative connotation that was associated with it. In this regard, a reader writes: “It’s a humiliating designation to be categorized with so many others […] It would be better if they called us ‘nobody.’”39 Even if they themselves frequently used the term, as evidenced in the title of the journal, they preferred to call themselves and to be called “refugees,” “displaced people,” or even “dispossessed.” The second element consisted in the creation of a dialect using a mirror effect. That is to say, a discourse that—in order to respond to the Portuguese population’s critics—appropriates the same vocabulary, but in doing so imbues it with the positive characteristics of the repatriated population. This discourse points out that instead of looking with a negative eye on the repatriated population, the rest of the Portuguese population should be proud of what the retornados achieved in Africa. According to articles and letters, there was much sacrifice, hard work, and honesty that the retornados brought to the colonies, resulting in a new and modernized Africa. This is an omnipresent strategy in our corpus, one that is associated with another central element, the assertion that the retornados never exploited the native African population, but instead lived and worked harmoniously with all Angolans, of every color. This can be analyzed as an expression of the colonial propaganda impregnated with the luso-tropicalist theories.40 Some readers go further, claiming that the Portuguese from Africa were never exploiters, but on the contrary were victims (even if not the most exploited victims of the colonial system). As one reader declared, “If there has actually been colonialism, we, if not more than the Angolans, were and still are the biggest victims of this Iberian colonialism.”41

39 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°2, October 17, 1975, p. 5. 40 On the supposed inexistence of racism in the Portuguese African colonies, see, for exam-

ple, Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°35, May 8, 1976, p. 20. 41 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°34, June 1, 1976, p. 20.

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It is also remarkable that these discourses fail to mention the violence of the colonial situation. It is as if there existed a certain collective and “selective amnesia” of the kind manifest in romanticized descriptions of the former African colonies as “lost paradises.” For example, a reader of the Jornal o Retornado points to “the friendly relationships between us and our half-breed and black brothers, that are the best.”42 It is interesting to note that even now it is common to find this kind of discourse in informal conversations in Portugal, as pointed out in recent studies (Vala et al. 2008; Valentim and Heleno 2018). Finally, another aspect of the retornados narrative is that at the same time as they were claiming their “Portugueseness,” claiming adhesion to Portuguese society, they also differentiated themselves from the rest of the Portuguese society. They did this by pointing out distinctive characteristics of the repatriated population in opposition to the rest of the population that didn’t participate in the “colonial adventure.”43 Such rhetoric was based on the valorization of the retornados as honest, hardworking people who were not afraid to make sacrifices in their efforts to create from scratch new countries in the colonies. This is an idea found in various articles and letters, such as an article entitled “To the simple men who built Angola.”44 This image of the retornado was presented in opposition to the Portuguese “character,” allegedly lazy and “‘dumb,’ good only at idle talk with his peers.”45 This negative vision was facilitated by the numerous strikes that took place during the immediate period that followed the Carnation Revolution. The image of the retornado as a tireless worker can still be found today in public opinion. From this perspective, the integration of the repatriated population was facilitated through their hard work and adaptive skills.46

42 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°44, August 10, 1976, p. 20. 43 This idea is for example expressed in a letter from February 13, 1976 in which the author associates the Portuguese from the former metropolis with “failed adventurers.” Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°19, February 13, 1976, p. 2. 44 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°1, October 10, 1975, p. 11. 45 Portugal National Library, J. 3548 V.: Jornal o Retornado, n°19, February 13, 1976,

p. 2. 46 https://www.publico.pt/2014/04/20/jornal/retornados-uma-historia-de-sucessopor-contar-28145408, April 20, 2014.

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The Late Retornados Literature As pointed out by Portuguese sociologist João Pedro George, retornado literature has existed since 1976.47 For 30 years however, this literature was almost confidential. It was only in the first decade of the twenty-first century that novels about retornados achieved commercial and literary success and were not confined to the repatriated population. In this section we focus on four influential novels published between 2008 and 2015: Os Retornados: Um Amor Nunca se Esquece [Retornados: A Love Never Forgotten] by Júlio Magalhães (2011) (18 reissues in 10 years); Caderno de Memórias Coloniais [Notebook of Colonial Memories] by Isabela Figueiredo (2017) (eight reissues in nine years); O Retorno [The Return] by Dulce Maria Cardoso (2011) (two reissues and awarded with some of the most important national literary prizes); and most recently, O País Fantasma [The Ghost Country] by Vasco Luís Curado (2015). This analysis allows us to identify new narratives about the returnees, narratives that differ widely from those that obsessively focused on a sense of loss resulting from decolonization. The critical view of Portuguese society during the processes of decolonization and revolution (as expressed on the pages of the Jornal o Retornado), as well as the common idea that the retornados are hardworking people, are to some extent noticeable in Júlio Magalhães’s novel. This can be seen for example in this passage: “He wanted them to see this day as a ‘hymn’ to life, to the tenacity and determination that all of them embody after they had left behind a dream and succeeded to build an equal or better one” (Magalhães 2011: 217). The novels written by Isabela Figueiredo and Dulce Maria Cardoso, both inspired by their personal experience as young retornadas, offer the reader a glimpse of the difficulties the repatriated population faced, in particular the reception from the resident population. The issues in these novels touch on the traumatic aspects of the retornados ’ arrival and settlement in Portugal. For example, “Here they don’t like us anyway,” is the conclusion of Cardoso’s main character (Cardoso 2011: 102), while Isabela Figueiredo explains that “In Portugal I quickly got used to being a laughingstock, for the fact of being a retornada or for dressing in red or purple,” but also that

47 This contradicts the common idea that only recently novels on this question began to be published (see Diogo Ramada Curto, “Os retornados”, Expresso, 2370, Revista, March 30, 2018).

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she was “able to cross, impassive, crowds of accusers” (Figueiredo 2017: 174). Some elements of the narrative expressed in the pages of the Jornal o Retornado can also be found in these novels. However, with the publication of their novels, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Vasco Luís Curado, and Isabela Figueiredo distance themselves from the discourse of victimization that characterizes parts of other retornados narratives. In these three novels, we can see the will and effort to represent the variety of voices and points of view expressed by the repatriated population. For example, in the case of the revolutionary process and decolonization, the authors go beyond the reproduction of a simplifying victimization speech. One finds a radical vision in the Jornal o Retornado and also, to a certain degree, in Júlio Magalhães’s novel, one that presents the same idealized vision of the former colonies. In fact, the novel makes no mention of the situation lived by the native populations under the Portuguese colonial rule in Angola, with the exception of a narrator’s comment regarding one of the characters’ forgetting that “the intense years of the Portuguese colonialism […] in many cases discriminated a lot of black people” (Magalhães 2011: 129) (and in context, this comment is an understatement). For Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, the fact that in the retornados ’ narrative there is little mention of colonial rule and its violence is an absence that highlights the claim that the “memory of Africa in Portuguese society [is] still a conflictive and unshareable” one (Ribeiro 2016: 36). However, some retornados ’ voices emerged through literature, questioning Portuguese colonial past. For her part, Dulce Maria Cardoso integrates some criticism about the Portuguese colonial empire in the speeches of her characters, mentioning, for example, the violence used against Angolan women when an Angolan man says to the narrator’s sister: “Be careful girl, so they don’t do to you what the whites did to our women” (Cardoso 2011: 47). Vasco Luís Curado also relativized this rosy view of the Portuguese colonialism, describing in detail the violence in Angola, whether from the Angolan side, with a thorough description of the 1961 massacres, or from the Portuguese side, with both its military and everyday violence exercised through the colonial system (forced labor, arbitrary detentions, corporal punishment, and so on). However, of the four novels, Isabela Figueiredo’s is the one in which the narrator assumes the clearest position with regard to the Portuguese colonial past. For her teenaged narrator, there is no doubt that Portuguese colonialism is based on racial domination. She expresses her “surprise” to

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see that her personal experience in Mozambique doesn’t quite match the discourse of the other retornados with regard to the question: according to what I came to observe, many years later, the other white people that lived there never practiced colo…, colonia…, colonialism, or whatever it was. They all were nice to black people, they paid them well, they treated them better, and they are greatly missed. (Figueiredo 2017: 88–89)

Still, it is difficult to know to what extent this critical vision is present in the retornados literature as a whole. In terms of identity affirmation, after their arrival in the metropolis the retornados found themselves facing a dilemma: to construct a narrative of adhesion with the rest of the Portuguese community or one of dissociation; that is to say, whether to claim their own identity. It seems that in the process of constructing their narrative, the retornados simultaneously followed both paths. On one hand, they insisted on their belonging to Portuguese society, while trying on the other hand to maintain a distinctive collective memory of their colonial experience. For a small group this dissociation remained rooted in the trauma of exodus and loss, the goods left in the former colonies, or the overall loss of a way of life and what had been achieved in Africa. This collective memory was most successfully shown in Dulce Maria Cardoso’s novel, along with the claim for the recognition of their status as victims. We can also highlight the fact that the Jornal o Retornado itself, and the different associations and committees created by retornados (such as the already mentioned Aeang and Aemo), failed to generalize and disseminate this dispossessed narrative within either the repatriated population or the Portuguese population as a whole. Already in 1976, a reader of the Jornal o Retornado lamented the lack of unity within the repatriated population: “the Portuguese that arrived from the Overseas […] didn’t want or were not able to create and maintain what was imperative in order to allow the defense and survival of their fellows and rights: unity” (JOR, May 11, 1976, p. 20). Counter-Narratives and Identity Conflicts Over the Colonial Past In the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution and the independence of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, Portugal entered a new cycle of its history. In this democratic cycle, the place left for the colonial past

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that for a very long time, and particularly during the New State regime, was a key element of Portuguese national identity, remained important in the national narrative. In the words of Portuguese philosopher Eduardo Lourenço, April 25, 1974 didn’t contribute to the creation of a new democratic culture; rather, it reconnected to the old colonial one (Lourenço 2000). However, since the 2000s a debate concerning the imperial past and its present repercussions has become more and more audible. An academic narrative continues to challenge the way the Portuguese colonial past is remembered. One example is the vivid controversy surrounding the Lisbon City Hall project to build a “Discoveries Museum.” The controversy began with the naming of the museum, as well as with the project itself. More than a hundred social science researchers from Portuguese and international universities signed, in April 2018, an open letter criticizing the choice of name because of its “historical inaccuracy” and its ideological weight. For them, calling this new museum the “Discoveries Museum” was to continue viewing history only through the Portuguese prism, which risks perpetrating a distorting vision of Portuguese imperial history. Such a view, they claimed, focuses on the bright side of the “discoveries,” forgetting some of the consequences, such as the slave trade, colonial domination, and forced labor.48 To deconstruct the myths of Portuguese colonialism, strongly marked by the luso-tropical theories, was also the aim of the historian Fernando Rosas when he, along with the Portuguese public broadcaster, the RTP, created a program intended for a broad public that aired in October 2017 about Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.49 This critical focus on the Portuguese colonial past has a long, though intermittent, history in Portuguese literature.50 In the second decade of 48 http://expresso.sapo.pt/cultura/2018-04-12-A-controversia-sobre-um-Museu-queainda-nao-existe.-Descobertas-ou-Expansao-#gs.XEeyCqo. We can point out that in April 2017, more than fifty individuals from Academy, art and civil society had already published an open letter in the Diário de Notícias, in order to criticize the speech that the Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, made in Gorée Island in which he presented Portugal as a pioneer in the abolition of slavery. https://www.dn.pt/portugal/interior/um-regressoao-passado-em-goree-nao-em-nosso-nome-6228800.html. 49 Asked about the audience of this program during the launch in April 2018 of the book derived from the television program, the RTP representative said that it was one of the most watched program of the channel. 50 A key landmark was the publication, in 1979, of Os Cus de Judas, by António Lobo Antunes, one of the most famous contemporary Portuguese writers.

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the twenty-first century the debate spread to the visual arts. One example is the 2017 film, Cartas da Guerra [Letters from War] by Ivo M. Ferreira. Based on the novelist António Lobo Antunes’s letters to his wife between 1971 and 1973—when he participated as a doctor to the war in Angola— the director wanted to represent his vision of the colonial war, a war he described as “stupid, unfair and completely anachronistic.”51 Something similar occurred in Portuguese theater, where the desire to reopen the colonial chapter of Portuguese history, and to challenge the common narrative, was also expressed. Here one can cite two producers of documentary theater that since 2014 tackled this still troublesome theme: Joana Craveiro and André Amálio. With her play,52 Joana Craveiro questioned the memory and legacy of both decolonization and the African experience of the retornados as transmitted by them to the generation that came after them. André Amálio, himself a son of retornados , presented the work developed in 2015 by his theater company, Hotel Europa, as an effort to “look critically” at the Portuguese colonial past and to go beyond the “commemorative discourses that silenced it for decades.”53 In 2017, the Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba presented her work on colonial and postcolonial discourse in Portugal for the first time. In her opinion, Portugal was not ready to see her work prior to this because of the existence of a “romanticization and glorification of the colonial past.”54 Portuguese Afro-descendants’ associations are also working to challenge the narrative about the Portuguese colonial past and its contemporary consequences, refuting the common view that there is no racism in Portugal, a view inherited from the past. With regard to this issue, the work of journalists also contributes to the debate. We can cite here the work of Joana Gorjão Henriques that analyzes the links between racism in Portuguese colonialism and racism in postcolonial Portugal.55

51 https://www.jn.pt/artes/interior/ivo-m-ferreira-deixa-em-cartas-da-guerra-a-visaoda-guerra-colonial-5358831.html#ixzz4K30LvUTt. 52 Retornos, Exílios e alguns que ficaram, 2014. 53 https://issuu.com/hoteleuropa.pt/docs/hoteleuropa_catalogue. 54 https://www.dn.pt/artes/interior/em-portugal-ha-uma-romantizacao-e-glorificacaodo-passado-colonial-8875420.html. 55 Henriques, Joana Gorjão. 2016. Racismo em Português. O lado esquecido do colonialismo. Lisboa: Tinta-da-China; Henriques, Joana Gorjão. 2018. Racismo no País dos Brancos Costumes. Lisboa: Tinta-da-China.

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With the emergence of a generation of new actors in the cultural scene, the artistic production is able to open, or to participate, along with the academic world and associations, to new debates around colonial and postcolonial Portuguese society, integrating, for instance, the “others” of the Portuguese colonialism. This new questioning of the traditional vision of the colonial past embodied in the national narrative results more from political and civic militancy, and especially from the claims to recognition by groups of Afro-descendants, than from any confrontation with the narratives of the returnees. Its success remains uncertain as it calls into question one of the central elements of all national narratives: the myth of a golden era that guarantees the nation’s pride (Smith 1986: 148). In the case of Portugal, this myth is that of “discoveries,” a term that romanticizes and glorifies the colonial past that is now erupting in the public sphere and being associated with all the ills of the world.

Conclusion: The Scope of Retornados ’ Collective Trauma The identification of both the structure of the shared narratives of trauma at the level of identity and the mechanisms that sustain and generalize it at the social level (as recommended by the theory of cultural trauma), allows us to extend the study of the processes of repatriation by including a new dimension of analysis: the subjective experiences of loss by the decolonization migrants and its impact on the dominant national narrative. For Portuguese retornados , “April 25, 1974” is an event that symbolizes a clear division between “before” (i.e., life in the colonies) and “after” (i.e., life in Portugal). This division expresses a traumatic emotional experience that called into question their collective identification as Portuguese in the colonies. The inability to work through the meaning of decolonization because of their past immersion in an environment of accelerated economic growth, as well as of lack of political debate, intensified this trauma. However, there is no evidence that this intensification corresponded to the generalization of a collective identity supported by reference to trauma, either among retornados or in the Portuguese population as a whole. Instead, there were sectors of the repatriated population that constructed this narrative and lived the collective identity it implied: an identity of the dispossessed. This narrative has all the elements of cultural trauma at the identity level (Eyerman 2012): a tragic event defined as shameful (decolonization), the naming of those responsible for the event (the democratic regime and

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leftist forces), the identification of victims (the retornados ), and a fracture within the national identity narrative that viewed the colonial epoch as its golden era. How do we explain that the narrative thus constructed remained a referent for only a minority among the retornados and is not shared by the whole retornados and the general population? First, there was a lack of adequate fit with the changes that were occurring in Portugal at the time and with the way in which the retornados were integrated into the country. The narrative of collective identity constructed by the radical fringe of retornados was incompatible with what occurred as the result of the victory of the April Revolution and, therefore, hardly shared by the majority of the Portuguese population. As Alexander points out, “in creating a compelling trauma narrative, it is critical to establish the identity of the perpetrator, the ‘antagonist’” (Alexander 2004: 15). In the case of the narrative of loss constructed by the retornados , the antagonist was the new democratic regime emerging from the April Revolution. With this “attribution of responsibility,” it was impossible to generalize the narrative beyond the repatriated population. In addition, there was a growing gap between that attribution of guilt and the experience of integration of the majority of retornados who were incorporated into local networks of kinship and neighborhood. The search for recognition necessary to ensure participation in these networks required a minimum of identification with the new democratic narratives shared in Portuguese society and was incompatible with the demonization of democratic change. The successful integration of returnees, contrary to what is often observed in other migrations, involved the diminishment of intra-retornados networks. However, a new collective identity narrative with weak correspondence in specific spaces of interaction is a narrative with few possibilities of generalization and longterm survival. Second, the lack of carrier groups with the capacity to articulate and generalize a shareable trauma narrative, identified as a crucial variable in cultural trauma dynamics of translation of shared individual experiences in a collective representation (Alexander 2004: 11; Eyerman 2012: 573) weakened the quality of narrative construction and the effectiveness of its diffusion. The circulation of elites that followed the Revolution incorporated many of those who could have been the representatives of a collectivity of retornados , the narrators of their identity, the institutional entrepreneurs of their integration (as defined by Eisenstadt 1980). The coincidence of repatriation with the change of regime in Portugal was therefore fatal for the

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construction of a generalizable and shared collective identity of retornados . It prevented the widespread perception of decolonization as a disaster, enabled the individualized integration and mobility of the majority of retornados , and made it impossible to establish the carrier groups necessary for the interpretation of the emotional experience of trauma and its institutionalization. As Smelser argues, “it is possible to describe social dislocations and catastrophes as social traumas if they massively disrupt organized social life” (2004: 37). In this sense, the subjective experience of loss by the retornados can be described as social trauma. However, in a national collectivity, “a cultural trauma refers to an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole” (Smelser 2004: 38). This durable disruption of the national identity narrative, by confrontation with the traumatic experience of retornados , did not happen in Portugal. The rediscovery of the theme of decolonization and repatriation in literature does not seem to have contributed to the rehabilitation and generalization of a trauma shared by a minority of retornados . Instead, the generational renaissance of the theme has worked much more as a rehabilitator of the image of the retornado as someone who has overcome the initial tragedy of repatriation to become an active agent of its integration rather than as a crystallizer of the traumatic effects of the loss.

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Léonard, Yves. 1999a. O império colonial salazarista. In História da Expansão Portuguesa: Último Império e Recentramento (1930–1998), ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, 10–30. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Léonard, Yves. 1999b. O ultramar português. In História da Expansão Portuguesa: Último Império e Recentramento (1930–1998), ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, 31–50. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Lourenço, Eduardo. 2000. O Labirinto da Saudade: Psicanálise Mítica do Destino Português, 2nd ed. Lisbon: Gravida (1st ed., 1978). Lourenço, Isabel. 2018. Retornados: Representações Sociais na Integração (1974– 79). PhD thesis, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Porto. Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2002. The Moral Economy of Portuguese Postcolonial Return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 11 (2): 189–213. Lubkemann, Stephen C. 2003. Race, Class, and Kin in the Negotiation of ‘Internal Strangerhood’ Among Portuguese Retornados, 1975–2000. In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea L. Smith, 75–94. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. MacQueen, Norrie. 1997. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Magalhães, Júlio. 2011. Os Retornados: Um Amor Nunca se Esquece, 18th ed. Lisbon: A Esfera do Livro (1st ed., 2008). Myrdal, Gunnar. 1957. Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity. New York: Harper & Row. Neto, Maria da Conceição. 1997. Ideologia, contradições e mistificações da colonização de Angola no século XX. Lusotopie 4: 327–359. Newitt, Malyn. 1981. Portugal in Africa: The Last Hundred Years. London: C. Hurst & Co. Oliveira, Pedro Aires. 2014. Um Império para encher o olho (1926–1961)? In História da Expansão e do Império Português, ed. João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, 479–509. Lisbon: A Esfera dos Livros. Pereira, Victor. 2015. La société portugaise face aux guerres coloniales (1961– 1974). Cahier d’Histoire Immédiate 48: 35–58. Pimenta, Fernando Tavares. 2008. Angola: Os Brancos e a Independência. Porto: Afrontamento. Pinto, António Costa. 1999. A guerra colonial e o fim do império português. In História da Expansão Portuguesa. Último Império e Recentramento (1930– 1998), ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, 65–98. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Pires, Rui Pena. 2003. Migrações e Integração: Teoria e Aplicações à Sociedade Portuguesa. Celta: Oeiras. Pires, Rui Pena. 2016. Instituto de Apoio ao Retorno de Nacionais (IARN). In Dicionário de História de Portugal: O 25 de Abril, vol. 5, orgs. António Reis, Maria Inácia Rezola, and Paula Borges Santos, 82–89. Porto: Figueirinhas.

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Pires, Rui Pena. 2018. Retornados. In Dicionário de História de Portugal: O 25 de Abril, vol. 7, orgs. António Reis, Maria Inácia Rezola, and Paula Borges Santos, 174–193. Porto: Figueirinhas. Pires, Rui Pena, et al. 1987. Os Retornados: Um Estudo Sociográfico. Lisbon: Instituto de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento. Ribeiro, Gonçalves. 2002. A Vertigem da Descolonização: da Agonia do Êxodo à Cidadania Plena. Lisbon: Inquérito. Ribeiro, Margarida Calafate. 2016. A casa da Nave Europa: miragens ou projeções pós-coloniais? In Geometrias da Memória: Configurações Pós-Coloniais, ed. António Sousa Ribeiro and Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, 15–42. Porto: Afrontamento. Smelser, Neil J. 2004. Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., 31–59. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Souto, Amélia Neves. 2007. Caetano e o Ocaso do Império: Administração e Guerra colonial em Moçambique durante o Marcelismo (1968–1974). Porto: Afrontamento. Vala, Jorge, Diniz Lopes, and Marcus Lima. 2008. Black Immigrants in Portugal: Luso-Tropicalism and Prejudice. Journal of Social Issues 64 (2): 287–302. Valentim, Joaquim Pires, and Ana Maria Heleno. 2018. Luso-Tropicalism as a Social Representation in Portuguese Society: Variations and Anchoring. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 62: 34–42. Wheeler, Douglas, and René Pélissier. 2009. História de Angola. Lisbon: Tinta-daChina.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion Ron Eyerman and Giuseppe Sciortino

The preceding chapters offer a systematic analysis of the ways in which the end of empire was experienced in six former imperial centers. Our focus is on the role played in their decolonization by the “return” of large numbers of “white” (and sometimes not so white) members of the former colonial population to their “homelands.” Our project builds on the conviction that the comparative analysis of our six case studies, filtered through the lens of cultural trauma theory, can provide a new perspective on one of the most important global developments of our time, decolonization. At the same time, we believe that studying the social and cultural impacts of a similar phenomenon—the mass repatriation of the former colonial population— in several countries can provide a useful comparative exercise to further expand cultural trauma theory. Elaborating this two-way exchange and discussing what have we learned is the aim of this concluding chapter.

R. Eyerman (B) Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Sciortino Universita Degli Studi Di Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_8

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Why These Six Cases? Before discussing the overall findings of our project, it might be worthwhile to summarize why we have chosen to focus on only five European cases (Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands, and Portugal) plus Japan. Other choices were, of course, possible and perfectly legitimate (Grimal 1978; Tsutsui 2009; Steinmetz 2014; Jerónimo and Pinto 2016; Thomas and Thompson 2018). As we were interested in the joint development of postcolonial studies and cultural trauma theory, we decided to select our cases according to a double criterion. First, the choice by the colonists to leave the former colonial territory should have been, at least to a sizable degree, “forced” by actual or anticipated risks of persecution. Second, the return had to be the consequence of a precise—in terms of international law— process of decolonization. These criteria explain why we have not included the former British Empire, the largest and mightiest colonial empire, the one that used to rule the waves.1 Return flows to the British Isles were, in fact, relatively small and rarely felt to be coerced or conducted under duress. A sizeable segment of their colonial population remained in place under various forms of formal or informal arrangements. Many leaving the decolonizing territories chose freely to relocate in third countries. Those who returned to the metropole did not generate—in contrast to postcolonial labor migration to the same destinations—any significant controversy (Buettner 2016). For the second criterion, we excluded—after much discussion—the German Heimatvertriebene, the largest migratory flow in the Western European “reflux” phase (Peach 1997). Heimatvertriebene—the millions of ethnic Germans forcefully expelled from the countries of Eastern Europe (or leaving spontaneously in fear of retribution)—surely changed the demographic composition of both Western and Eastern Germany. They shape the cultural and political system of the Federal Republic of Germany to the present day. They appeared at times sometime culturally alien enough to become the target of special research projects meant to design special “integration policies” (Sciortino 2014). Their “return”—in this case the term is even more problematic than usual—has sometimes been compared to the “return” of some colonial populations to the metropole (Borutta

1 For the cases of the returnees from the British empire, see Buettner (2010).

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and Jansen 2016).2 Still, we felt that their case was difficult to qualify as a case of repatriation caused by decolonization strictu sensu. For the same reason, we ignored the important migrations that have followed the breakdown of the Soviet Union, many of which have seen ethnic Russians—former USSR citizens—leave the newly born republics to “return” to the equally new Russian Federation. Again, their migration has sometimes been compared to the postcolonial repatriations (Bosma et al. 2012). For sure, the USSR was also an imperial project. However, we felt that interpreting the breakdown of the Soviet Union as a case of decolonization required a certain latitude with historical evidence. We decided to restrict ourselves to the six “hard-core” cases, the imperial centers—large and small, strong and weak—that witnessed a process of decolonization that implied, at least from some of their colonies, the mass return of the colonial population under traumatic circumstances. They are surely different in terms of colonial history, as well as the timing and circumstances of decolonization. But they also have several similarities: the collapse of colonial empire, the sudden and unexpected (at least in terms of size) return of large number of colonials, the nearly complete eradication of the colonial population in the former colony, and the lack—or impossibility—of preparation by the receiving homelands. As for collective memory, the colonial past is important to each in a distinctive way with regard to its meaning and place in the respective national narratives (Cornet 2004; Hashimoto 2015; Buettner 2016; Coelho 2019). In all six cases, it is not difficult to believe that the “return” must have been a very traumatic and life-changing event for a large majority of those involved in it. Nor was there any chance for the returnees to manage this trauma through the delusion of a future, near or far, in which their world would be restored or vindicated. In fact, repatriation took place in all six countries while the receiving countries were absorbed by the desire to forget the recent past and adapt quickly to the new global balance of power, with all its specific tensions and cleavages. Former colonial centers quickly discovered that they were uniquely positioned to reap the benefits of the emerging neoliberal trade regime that was developing precisely as a way of dealing with the consequences of decolonization (Slobodian 2018). European nations turned inward toward a new “community,” and Japan turned 2 They have also something in common with the Italians “returning” from the Balkans, as their mobility was also contingent upon the loss of territories that were once included within the borders of the metropolitan state (Bade 2000).

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westward toward the United States. Those repatriated not only had to deal with the indifference, suspicion—or even utter hostility—of sectors of the metropolitan society, they also had to accept from the very beginning of their “new” lives that their previous identities (and the colonial life they represented) were expected to disappear as quickly and quietly as possible. What defined the situation for the returnees—as opposed to right-wing revanchist groups or anti-communist dissidents—was the fact that they had to accept that there was no going back. They had to accept that the new evolving order, international and internal, placed them on the “wrong side of history.” For many of them, these expectations were experienced as a radical form of social misrecognition, a denial of the real solidarity they deserved as worthy victims of an unfair fate. As our studies reveal, the returnees trying to make their trauma felt and socially recognized dealt with this common situation in different ways. Given such context, when and how did such individual and group suffering become—or fail to become—a collective trauma, a narrative capable of providing a shared identity and commanding at least some solidarity beyond the boundaries of those who directly suffered it? How and when did this suffering become part of the collective memory of a larger group? How were the returnees able to shape (positively or negatively, partially or fully, controversially or consensually) the ways in which their respective countries remember their colonial past? Contrarily, when and how was their suffering silenced or fully subsumed into the narrative of a larger, all encompassing, collective pain? These are some of the key questions of cultural trauma theory that the studies here presented explore and clarify.

Decolonization as Collective Trauma Globally, decolonization marked the end of an era. The nations here studied experienced a great shift in self-understanding. While some sense of loss and mourning must have been widespread, in only a few cases did this catalyze cultural trauma. As we have detailed in the introduction, the basic assumption in our theoretical framework is that events are not traumatic in themselves; rather, a cultural trauma is a meaning struggle where social power is an inherent force (Eyerman 2019). For any event or series of events to result in cultural trauma, various factors have to align in a process that incorporates individual (psychological) and collective (social) trauma with the search for a new collective identity.

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This makes the case of the colonial returnees or repatriated particularly interesting for cultural trauma theory. It is beyond doubt that many of the individuals who were forced to flee—sometimes abruptly from places they had lived for years—experienced trauma in the classical meaning of the term. They left behind not only most or all of their material belongings, but also a way of life and a sense of who they were. They experienced, at least in the majority of cases, a powerful process of downward social mobility, suddenly losing their unproblematic, endemic, superior racial status and found themselves in a new environment where they were polluted by their association with what was now a shameful, old-fashioned past. Collective suffering of such magnitude can destroy communities, but it can also create solidarity, strengthen collective identification, and trigger the possibility of collective action. Trauma, as Kai Erikson points out, can destroy a community while at the same time providing grounds for a new one (Erikson 1994). One condition for the latter is the articulation of a trauma narrative, a story that links individual experiences to a shared event or series of events, unifying a group in their suffering, if only temporarily. Such a compelling narrative requires articulators, individuals, and carrier groups powerful enough to make their voices heard while framing a message accepted by those it addresses. This discursive process is seldom univocal. Instead, it is far more frequently a contentious affair as competing groups with differing stories struggle for recognition, rendering the outcome of the process contingent on a number of factors. This process is cultural and traumatic because the loss of the taken-forgrantedness of who “we” are undercuts the foundations of understanding that make social life possible. Such loss evokes a struggle for meaning and understanding as well as the search for new foundations. As such, a central aspect of the cultural trauma process is the attempt to re-narrate and reestablish collective identity, making it possible for a group to go on. The fracturing of the foundations of collective identity sets off a contentious meaning struggle to understand what happened, who is responsible, and what needs doing in order to move forward (Alexander 2004). In looking at colonial returnees, we are well positioned to ask why in some of our cases individual and collective trauma evolved into cultural trauma and why in others it did not. Personal and group suffering was clearly present in all our cases, but cultural trauma occurred in only a few. What are the factors to consider in the making of cultural trauma? In research applying the theory of cultural trauma to six incidents of political assassination, Eyerman identified five factors that explain why cultural

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trauma occurred: (1) the timing of the incident in a distinctive political and social context, (2) how the mass media represents the incident, (3) the performance of responsible authorities, (4) the performance of carrier groups, and (5) the role of collective memory (Eyerman 2011). In the preceding chapters, we bring attention also the importance of the societal context, in both its material and symbolic dimensions. As we will argue shortly, any attempt to perform a successful trauma drama is constrained by both political and symbolic opportunity structures. In our cases, decolonization occurred within a relatively similar international political and social context: the final stages of World War II and the emerging Cold War, which greatly affected them all. World War II exposed the weakness of three European empires to nativist independence movements (Belgium, The Netherlands, and France) while bringing catastrophic collapse to the Japanese and Italian. Military defeat—and the overall carnage of two world wars—helped undercut the ideologies that had justified colonial rule, and it became increasingly difficult to defend the claim to racial superiority and the civilizing mission that had accompanied the use of force. The exposed weakness of colonial rulers gave new confidence to the rising anti-colonial movements, which were further emboldened by the competition between the war’s victorious Allies. In the emerging Cold War dynamics, anti-colonial movements could play one against the other to gain support, a process that also influenced domestic politics in the European nations. The Cold War also had internal implications, as many Western European countries had relatively strong left-wing political parties that often articulated an alternative interpretation of the colonial past (and present). These geopolitical similarities, however, did not automatically translate to similar trauma dramas.

Trauma and Symbolic Opportunity Structures Research on the experiences of the colonial repatriated from the point of view of cultural trauma theory has led to the need to clarify one aspect of the trauma drama that the previous lack of comparative studies had left latent. In a way unappreciated in earlier studies, studying the claims made by the repatriated in several countries helps us realize that groups putting forward their trauma claims have to enter what is usually a fairly crowded arena. In fact, there is usually no scarcity of groups having a rightful claim to trauma, and there are many competing claims concerning the boundaries

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of traumatized groups and their proper place in the wider society.3 The interactional interdependence among a plurality of competing trauma dramas is still only vaguely understood. The development of a trauma drama does not depend only on the quality of the narration or the infrastructure the group putting forward the claim can rely upon. It is also crucially contingent upon the “fit” between the trauma claim put forward and the wider discursive master frames that dominate (or implicitly shape) public discourse. This prospective “fit” helps determine the societalization of certain problems and the sectoral, residual, importance of others. When members of any carrier group argue that their suffering should be recognized as morally worthy and socially binding, they must frame their claim in a way that resonates with the moral master frames recognized (and recognizable) by their audience. Dominant narrative frameworks might be quite receptive to certain forms of suffering, while indifferent or even hostile to others. The importance of master frames has already been noted by scholars of perpetrator trauma, the claims and narratives concerning the pain endured by groups otherwise stigmatized as carriers of evil (Giesen 2004; Tsutsui 2009). For example, the many horrendous events experienced by the German population during World War II—such as the bombing of Dresden—were not, as is widely believed, repressed or silenced. They were, however, effectively marginalized by the compelling pressure to interpret them within the overall frame of the guilt of a nation that had inflicted endless suffering on millions of innocents. Germans experienced horrendous events that would not, and could not, become cultural traumas in their own right, precisely because they were—and are—overshadowed by the foundational memory of the Holocaust (Heins and Langenohl 2011).4 The case of colonial repatriates resembles the template of perpetrator trauma. Repatriates had to present a positive and humane account of their previous lives and experiences to audiences that often believed that those same repatriates had been “on the wrong side of history” from the very beginning.

3 Most intractable conflicts are actually characterized precisely by a plurality of groups claiming their suffering is more significant than that of others (Noor et al. 2012). 4 It is enough to compare Germany with Japan, another defeated nation with a record of heinous war crimes, to realize how dominant discursive configurations sometimes have strongly shaped the possibilities of establishing trauma narratives at various levels of significance (Hashimoto 2015).

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To explore further the role of master narratives in the analyses of trauma drama, we find it useful to think in terms of symbolic opportunity structures, a complement to the better-known political opportunity structure. The latter is a well-known idea in social movement research, quite useful in capturing the limited possibilities collective actors have in putting forward grievances. In its better-known formulations, political opportunity structures shape the dynamics of social movements (and contentious politics more broadly) providing consistent—but not necessarily formal or permanent—dimensions of political struggle that encourage (or discourage) actors from expressing grievances and challenging the existing order of things. For example, social movements with equally important grievances and comparable amounts of resources might fail to obtain results—indeed, might even fail to be heard— within a political system where elites are strongly united. However, they might suddenly find a voice and the capacity to make a substantial impact if this elite consensus breaks down, and they are subsequently supported by one of the elite factions (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996; Tarrow 1998). In our usage, symbolic opportunity structure refers to the discursive opportunities and limitations that carrier groups encounter while competing to be seen and heard. This competition occurs in the arenas where collective identity is articulated and where collective memory is both called upon and reshaped. The concept captures the circumscribed nature of opportunities to articulate a trauma narrative as the communities they engender compete with one another for sympathy and recognition. The exclusionary (and selectively inclusionary) force of symbolic opportunity structures helps to explain the incidence of cultural trauma as it evolves (or does not evolve) out of individual and collective trauma. There are structural as well as social and political forces that limit opportunities to speak and be heard. For example, in Japan—where decolonization occurred in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat and foreign occupation—the stories of those returning from the colonies went largely unheard in a public discourse that was overwhelmed by tragedy and suffering. They were not coercively denied their voice. Rather, their experience was subsumed by the larger catastrophe as only one out of many facets of the national disaster.5 In Italy, the other country where the loss of the colonies took place in the context of the military defeat of a fascist regime, any subsequent 5 Yet, as Hashimoto reveals this silence did not last longer than a generation, when an altered political context opened new possibilities for their trauma to enter public discourse. See Hashimoto (2015).

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form of remembrance of the colonial experience was viewed with suspicion as a potential form of political nostalgia. The repatriated were treated as just one among many groups of destitute citizens to be taken care of (Audenino 2016). The principal political actors at the time largely agreed that the politically sensitive elements of the colonial experience—as well as the war crimes in the Balkans—should be imputed exclusively to the defeated fascist regime, while the new Republic was to be oriented toward a clear-cut democratic future.6 The role played by symbolic opportunity structures in supporting or silencing the trauma claims of the repatriated is particularly visible in the ways in which such claims interacted with the postwar European master discourses. From one side, many repatriated groups tried to align themselves with the emerging frame of the Cold War, describing themselves as victims of an advancing communist evil. For example, French settlers often argued that decolonization was not simply a matter of national concern, for it had the potential to weaken the whole “free world.” The OAS even attempted to garner American support for their fight by framing themselves as victimized Christians and the Algerian fighters as inspired and governed by communist forces. In general, however, the dominant frames worked against the repatriated. For many residents of the metropoles, the repatriated appeared polluted by the symbolic association with an authoritarian, right-wing, past. Moreover, the more the memory of colonialism was subsumed within the brave new world opened up by the Trente glorieuses and the rhetoric of European integration, the more the claims of the repatriated were perceived as irredeemably old-fashioned. The emergence of the “third-world” as a distinctively progressive reality able to shape the future of the world further reduced any sympathy for those who appeared as profiteers of a discredited colonial order (Shepard 2012; Kalter 2016). The symbolic opportunity structure, moreover, plays an important role in understanding why, within the same country, some groups of the repatriated might have enjoyed a comparatively easier access to public attention, often being able to make their experience the template for the ways in which all repatriations should be remembered. Decolonization in France,

6 While effective in preventing further polarization in an already highly fractured and polarized society, this silence allowed the survival and reproduction of the myth of the Italiani brava gente that—in contrast to other countries’ colonial actors—had developed (when not constrained by fascist oppressors) humane and friendly relationship with natives (Ballinger 2012; Labanca 2017).

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for example, implied the emergence of a whole set of groups—pieds noirs, Harkis, veterans, repatriated—that had to negotiate their positions in the public space of the metropolis. All these groups were new in that they were the result of the trauma of decolonization, and their struggle for recognition was circumscribed by an already crowded public sphere. However, they were also endowed with very different amounts of resources, legal standing, and political capital, and were thus positioned very differently with regard to the political opportunities available in metropolitan France. They also occupied different positions within the evolving symbolic order of postcolonial France, their pains and vicissitudes resonating in very different ways in the established politics of recognition (Savarese 2006, 2015). As Pamela Ballinger shows in her Italian study (Chapter 2), those repatriated from the Balkans could claim to be innocent victims of a violence that was at once ethnic and political. They had left ancestral lands on the other side of the Adriatic—bringing with them the holy remains of their saints and the artistic masterpieces of their churches—to escape the persecution of a cruel and bloodthirsty regime that was both Communist and “Slavic.” They were consequently able to garner much more sympathy in government circles (but also more intense hostility from the left) than those repatriated from Africa.7 In 2004, they finally obtained the recognition of their suffering through the establishment of a special memorial day to be observed on February 10, the day that Italy signed the Paris peace treaties. Even though those peace treaties also represent the loss of all the Italian colonies, the Memorial Day is exclusively reserved for those murdered or forced to flee from the Communist regimes in the Balkans.

A Comparative View As already stressed, all the cases we selected stand out as particularly ripe for cultural trauma. They all experienced an emotionally laden collapse of empire and the rapid, unexpected return of their citizens. Yet, only France 7 In addition to the limiting and enabling factors defining the symbolic opportunity structure, it should not be forgotten that there is also an element of choice involved. Hashimoto, as example, argues that the memories of wars, massacres, atrocities, invasions, and other instances of mass violence and death become significant referents for subsequent collective life when people choose to make them especially relevant to who they are and what it means to be a member of that society [Hashimoto, in this volume]. Individuals and groups are not simply “given” an opportunity to seize, but must also chose to do so. Many prefer, in fact, to go on and forget, choosing—particularly when it is easily available—a path of silent assimilation.

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and Portugal endured a highly divisive political conflict over colonial policy, leading to regime change and a (relatively) fractured national identity. Why was this so? France, the Netherlands, and Belgium had been easily defeated and occupied by the German army during the Second World War, and each initially viewed the retention of their colonies as a matter of national pride. Two of them fought protracted wars, conscripting their citizens to retain or regain their colonies and their status as a colonial power. The third, Belgium, tried to avoid this fate, promoting a hurried decolonization that quickly turned into a long-lasting nightmare in which Belgian intelligence forces, its military, and businesses were repeatedly involved. All three countries witnessed emotionally charged struggles that engaged the body politic. As they faced defeat, all were faced with the sudden and unexpected return of large sectors of the colonial population under a cloud of national shame. Decolonization in the Netherlands entailed severing links that had existed for centuries.8 The Dutch and Portuguese empires, in fact, are the oldest among the six cases here considered. The Dutch crown colony— Indonesia—was lost to the Japanese at the same time in which the homeland experienced the humiliating occupation by the Nazis.9 At the end of the war, there were some attempts to retake control, followed by some bungled attempts to retain influence (Oostindie 2011). Global politics and Cold War tensions played a role in this case, as the United States first refused to help the Dutch military and then applied pressure to influence the Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence. All this had the effect of drawing out the decolonization process over a period of years. There was thus no panicked exit, but rather a series of returns. Though reluctant to deal with this situation, political authorities in the Netherlands managed a series of policy implementations that helped prevent active mobilization and collective will formation on the part of the former colonists. As in the Italian and Japanese cases, the few attempts to formulate a full-fledged victim narrative by the repatriated in the Netherlands ran into the obstacle of having to compete with a stronger and larger national narrative formed after the war, according to which all Dutch citizens had suffered as victims of a cruel 8 A very good introduction, through the prism of cultural artifacts is to Indonesian colonization and decolonization is provided by Stevens et al. (2015). 9 This signaled an important difference with Belgium, as Congo remained under the control of control of the Belgium government-in-exile and provided important resources to the war effort of the Allied.

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German occupation. As the returning Jews, the former colonists had to struggle for visibility in the crowded symbolic field of a nation focused on the memory of the World War and national victimhood. There was also little desire to discuss the colonial wars, especially when it might concern the actions of the Dutch military forces. It took decades for the veterans of these wars to find a voice powerful enough to break the silence, as they sought to have their efforts recognized (Oostindie 2011). The issue of “war crimes” or the “excesses” perpetrated by Dutch forces during the colonial wars, which came to light during Dutch protests against the American war in Vietnam, has only recently been reopened, something that could also become part of a wider discussion of the colonial past. Compared with Belgium however, the Dutch have been more open in their confrontation with their colonial past. In neither the Netherlands nor Belgium were the repatriated able to mobilize politically or demobilize quite quickly. In France, on the contrary, many Algerian returnees (some of whom had violently resisted the end of colonial rule) maintained a sense of collective identification rooted in the colonial past that continues to influence national and regional politics. The large size of the group repatriated from Algeria is surely an important factor. Their previous radicalization during the colonial conflict, along with the rapid and panicked nature of their departure, is also an element to be taken into account. Within a short period in the spring of 1962, a large portion of the colonists left Algeria and left behind most or all their property. The matter of timing was critical not only because of its suddenness, but also because the loss of Algeria—considered a part of continental France and the jewel in the imperial crown—occurred just a few years after the embarrassing loss of Indochina. The struggle over its meaning was fought about as much in France as in the colony itself. The year before, the tension between the sizeable number of Algerian workers living in France and the French authorities had been brought to light by the strong repression of one of their demonstrations, an action that had caused the death of hundreds of demonstrators at the hands of the French security forces (House and MacMaster 2006). The reaction had been a general strike called by the Left as part of an increasing cycle of political protests against the police’s failure to act more firmly against the pro-colonial French terrorist organization operating in both Algeria and mainland France.10

10 On the importance of the OAS, organization de l’armee secrete, see Henissart (1970).

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Paul Henissart describes the French political climate on the eve of the mass repatriation through the use of a vivid historical comparison: France had split wrenchingly into two before, in the upheaval of 1789, at the time of the symbol-ridden Dreyfus affair, and during the national humiliation of 1940. An atmosphere of similar fratricidal hatred was seeping into the mainland from overseas, where Frenchmen were killing Frenchmen in a three-sided war in which the Moslems were often all but forgotten. A threat of civil war hung palpably like the smell of snow in the air. (Henissart 1970: 288)

As Sung points out in her study, there were many instances of violence where Frenchmen turned their guns on each other.11 While not all of the pieds noirs supported armed resistance, many or even most shared a sense of betrayal that was further seared into collective memory by incidents such as this. It was these memories and sentiments that helped catalyze the formation of a new collective identity among the returnees, something that was both the cause and effect of being concentrated geographically upon their return. Many of those returning started to self-identify as “pieds noirs,” a highly symbolic name that easily transformed into both logo and rallying cry. On their return, the repatriates situated themselves in the Mediterranean provinces of southern France, not far from where they landed. The articulation of this collective identity was further enhanced by the largely negative reception they received from the French authorities and the metropolitan population (Jordi 2003). They felt, according to many sources, “keenly unwanted” (Henissart 1970: 473). The feeling of separateness between the metropolitan population and the newly repatriated from Algeria is likely to have been quite strong since before their flight. The widow of Albert Camus, testifying for the defense at the trial of an OAS leader, made this clear when she said she felt divided: half French, half Algerian, “dispossessed in both countries which I no longer recognize, since I never imagined them separated.”12 This sense of distinctiveness was strong enough to lead some pieds noirs to claim the French government’s move 11 One of the worst occurred just two months before the mass exodus when, on March 26, 1962, French soldiers fired into a crowd of peaceful pieds-noirs demonstrators killing and wounding scores. the Army reported thirty-six dead and eighty wounded among the demonstrators. European sources in Algiers set the figure at eighty dead and two hundred wounded (Henissart 1970). 12 The quote may be found in Henissart (1970: 374).

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toward Algerian independence and the forceful denial of their own claims had to be considered as a form of genocide. Even before arrival, many Algerian repatriates had developed a sense of difference that was bound to be accentuated by how others viewed them. The eventual formation of hundreds of voluntary organizations served to further this identification. The newly forming group struggled for recognition and reparation by developing a trauma narrative based on a hybrid identification, a unique fusion of metropole and colony. Had the possibility existed in French political culture, they would have formed a category of French-Algerians, a hyphenated identity like those articulated in the United States. This sense of shared past was materialized in a distinctive dialect, cuisine, and ritual commemoration, and it was reinforced through published works and other forms of public documentation. Professional historians contributed scholarship that aided this self-identification. The shared cultural sense of difference left political traces as well. Though the empirical validity of such belief remains disputed, wide sectors of the French public assume that the pieds noirs tend to support conservative and right-wing candidates. They have been labeled the “couscous vote” by none other than Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had been a soldier in Indochina and Algeria (Buettner 2016). Belgium experienced its own panicked departure from its major African colony, the Belgian Congo, two years before the Algerian mass repatriation. At the moment of independence, the Belgian government had assumed that the European population in the former colony would remain in place, leading in the new state pretty much the same life they had lived before (Van Reybrouck 2014). However, immediately after independence, the attempt to maintain the established colonial practices in the new political reality triggered a mutiny within the new Congolese army that quickly transformed into generalized rioting (Monaville 2008). Armed violence and panic spread throughout the European population. Reports of rape and torture headlined the Belgian press and calls for reprisals were loudly made. The Belgian national airline, Sabina, was called into service and an emergency quick-turnaround airlift carried soldiers to the Congo and white settlers to Belgium. By this means, about 38,000 former colonists returned to the metropole in under a month.13 The media orchestration fueled national sympathy as well as the call to defend those remaining in the Congo. Photographic images of women and children under threat rallied this support 13 In fact, the Belgian airlift had been a reference point (and source of anxiety) for French settlers during the last phases of the Algerian war.

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and as much as 16 million francs was raised from small donors (Buettner 2016). This contributed to the sense of a welcome return, as returnees were celebrated as brutalized victims in a national cause. A National Congo Committee was organized to help in their plight. This sympathy, however, never translated into a political opposition to decolonization. This lack of political opposition to decolonization might be explained by important contextual factors. First, the Congo had already been formally declared an independent country, and it was no longer (from the Belgian point of view) a colony. This fact mitigated any sense of emotional “loss” and national trauma for the difficult period that followed independence. Second, the flight of large sectors of the white population from the Congo was only a part—and maybe even a small part—of a much larger international confrontation, the so-called Congo Crisis. Through this prism, decolonization and the struggle for political “independence” was seen from outside nearly exclusively in terms of which side of the polarized world— East or West—the new nation would fall. The repatriated, many of whom had been in the Belgian Congo only a few years, had not developed in Belgium a long-standing collective identity or sustained trauma narrative (Monaville 2015). As in many former imperial centers, there was in Belgium an unspoken desire for public silence about whatever concerned what had once been a source of national pride. This desire for silence was, perhaps, particularly strong in Belgium as compared to the French and Flemish communities. Many crucial archives were closed to researchers or even destroyed, and the colonial museum was “frozen” in its pre-decolonization form for decades. The repatriated quickly realized that their stories were (until very recently) considered of no interest, and perhaps even a nuisance, by the wider public (Dembour 2000; Verlinden 2002; Gillet 2008; Van De Mieroop and Pagnaer 2013). The returnees thus never become a formative political or cultural force, though they did form “communities of remembrance” in their attempt to rehabilitate the colonial past (Monaville 2015). The associational life of the Belgian repatriated, usually confined to cultural initiatives and small-scale sociability, acquired an unexpected visibility in the early 1990s when a series of important controversies —concerning the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the memory of King Leopold’s Congo Free State and the genocide in Rwanda—dissolved the post-1960s silence over the colonial experience. Although settlers in the Congo had historically experienced a strong degree of tension with the Belgian colonial authorities, the associations of former colonial settlers and

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functionaries have shown a strong desire to project an overall positive picture of Belgian colonialism. The conflict over colonial memory, however, has substantially receded again in recent years with the birth of a less polarized and somewhat fuzzier, moderate narrative (Goddeeris 2015). Panicked departure also marked those who left Angola and Mozambique for Portugal as rebel forces armed by competing Cold War powers intensified their resistance. Within the space of one year (1974), between 500,000 and 800,000 people fled these former Portuguese colonies for the homeland. This is even more extraordinary when one considers these repatriations increased the national population of the metropole by around 6%, making the demographic impact much stronger than in France. Also a settler population, these returnees resembled their French counterparts in social status; they were primarily farmers, technicians, small merchants, and lower-grade administrators. Like the pieds noirs, many of these returnees left nearly everything behind, being able to bring only a minimum of luggage. Those leaving the colonies included more than 200,000 Portuguese military personnel as Portugal abandoned its protracted and increasingly bitter thirteen-year long war against local insurgents. The shadow of defeat, as well as panic marked this departure. As the studies in this volume show, the repatriations in Portugal and France differed on two counts. First, French settlers were much more rooted in Algeria; many, indeed most, of them had been there for generations. Although the Portuguese empire was much older, the settler population was, in terms of migration seniority, younger. A large number of them had reached the colonies only a few years before, when the Portuguese state was desperately trying to “modernize” and “develop” them with heavy investments. Second, although wide sections of the Portuguese and the French settlers could understandably share a sense of betrayal by the respective national authorities, their respective attitudes were likely very different. Many of the returning French settlers were embittered by the outcome of the war and were willing, at least in principle, to go on fighting. During the conflict many had radicalized, making it impossible to stay on in an independent Algeria, or at least in an Algeria ruled by the equally violent FLN (that had in the meanwhile all but eliminated all moderating forces). On the other hand, the largely conscripted Portuguese forces were exhausted and glad to leave, as were many conscripts in the French colonial army, where one could mark a clear difference from the professionals. The coup that initiated the successful Portuguese “revolution” was supported

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by younger officers from the colonial forces who wanted to end the war rather than continue it. As opposed to their French counterparts, the Portuguese retornados did not form cohesive communities or develop a strong collective identity after their return. A factor explaining this outcome is surely the revolutionary disdain for the country’s colonial past, where nostalgic settlers were often defined—particularly in the leftist press—as “minions of colonial repression” (Buettner 2016: 245). Such negative portrayal brought many retornados to desire not to be seen as either counter-revolutionary or racist by their fellow citizens. Another factor—well highlighted in the study here published—is the opportunity for social mobility available in the new Portugal. The nation’s expanding public sector and focus on education provided opportunities for the retornados and the hope of social mobility for their children. They had left the poorest and most backward country in Western Europe. After they returned they discovered they could participate in the new opportunities opened by the revolution and by Portugal’s turn toward Europe. Like the Netherlands, Portugal discovered it could raise its standard of living by looking westward, leaving behind the colonies and the imperial narrative of national greatness. As many retornados could still rely on family networks, the former colonists, unlike in France, dispersed rather quietly; their path to assimilation was strongly individualized. Given the revolutionary context and the feeling of bearing the stigma of a disreputable past, many thought the colonial past and their part in it was best forgotten. Despite the traumatic flight and the loss of a way of life, no coherent trauma narrative was constructed that could ground a collective project. There were attempts to develop narratives that might challenge the revolutionary anti-colonialism, but they largely failed because of their close alignment with discredited right-wing nostalgia or because they were too ambivalent, nuanced, and multifaceted (Coelho 2019). Despite this (and somewhat paradoxically), according to some observers the idea of greater Portugal remains somewhat part of the national narrative, giving the former colonists some space in public discourse and memories (Buettner 2016). The degree to which the returnees were easily assimilated seems to be a significant factor in explaining the different outcomes in these post-empire European nations. While the pieds noirs developed and retained a strong sense of distinction within the reconstituted French nation, those returning to Portugal, the Netherlands, and Belgium did not. As Oostindie shows (Chapter 4), the relatively small number of returning ethnic Dutch quickly

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assimilated into established networks, leaving only a trace of their stories of horror during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. While the larger group of mixed-race Indos did construct and maintain a sense of their distinctiveness, partly in response to Dutch racism, this narrative remained more cultural than political, despite some efforts to the contrary. The one group that did manage to retain a strong group identity was the Moluccans, former soldiers (and their families) who had fought alongside the Dutch and subsequently tried to establish their own state in the Maluku archipelago. While their emigration to the Netherlands became inevitable (given the certainty of retribution if they had stayed), it was also largely undesired. Moluccans were considered—and considered themselves—for quite a long time a temporary presence and kept largely segregated from Dutch society. Marked by their dark skin, they also met native racism in the Netherlands. Many of them maintained, at least in the first generation, the delusion of a possible return. When such delusions dissolved, their distinctive identity became grounds for resistance against the Dutch state. None of the other groups coming to the Netherlands retained such hopes, focusing their attention instead on a European future or on migrating somewhere else in the Western world. In France and Portugal we can identify cultural trauma as catalyzed by decolonization, but for different reasons. The combination of the humiliating loss of colonies in Indochina and North Africa (including Morocco and Tunisia, as well as Algeria), the armed resistance that followed that loss, the threat of civil war, and then the panicked return of settlers shook the foundations of the French Republic and set off a furious debate over what it meant to be French. There was an open revolt in the colonial army, assassination attempts on the sitting president, and a sense of a nation under siege that forced political authorities into a struggle to contain what was as much a crisis of identity as a political crisis. In the process, the returnees forged a powerful collective identification and group cohesiveness that was both cause and effect of this crisis. They emerged as a powerful carrier group that sought to influence how the nation thought about itself and its colonial enterprise. In Portugal, the repatriated found a context marked by the lack of any substantial nostalgia for the colonial order. On the contrary, the colonial tradition was considered now the stumbling block that had caused, through the expenses necessary to keep the colonial empire alive, Portugal backwardness.

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Decolonization and National Catastrophes Italy and Japan are two cases with strong similarities that stand in marked contrast with the European cases discussed earlier. Specifically, Italy experienced numerous traumatic repatriations that took place over a long period: they were spread out over more than a quarter-century. While the latter repatriations—for example, the final repatriations from Libya—had strong similarities with the European cases already discussed, the earlier repatriations that took place during the war and in its immediate aftermath are very similar to those of the Japanese case (although much more limited in terms of size). Both Japan and Italy were latecomers to the colonial game, and their empires were relatively short-lived. In both cases, colonial space had been thought as necessary to gain respect from other countries and to provide a dignified form of emigration for their underemployed population. The two empires were consequently strongly oriented toward settlement, although Japan was much more effective in this regard (Labanca 2002). In both cases, the most controversial phase of their colonial experience is associated with the development of authoritarian, militaristic regimes that brought the two countries into the Second World War. Eventually, in both cases, decolonization occurred as a direct consequence of military defeat, a loss that was as much political as military. Contrary to the other cases here analyzed, decolonization did not imply negotiations with native independence movements or engagement in drawn-out colonial wars. Colonial possessions were occupied by the victorious armies and the conditions of decolonization were dictated by the respective powers (with some involvement, in the Italian case, of the UN). An additional similarity can be seen in the traumatic condition in which the repatriation of their settlers took place. The so-called navi bianche, a group of unarmed boats carrying Italian women and children from the horn of Africa to Italy is likely the oldest colonial mass evacuation in the history of decolonization. The second oldest is the frantic flight of Japanese settlers from the Soviet forces advancing into Manchuria and the flight of most Italians from their traditional settlements now ruled by the Yugoslav regime. In both cases, the repatriations operated—within the constraints of the situation—in a way that minimized any risk for the two countries “racial” homogeneity. Helped by restrictive citizenship laws and by already rigid colonial norms, both Italian and Japanese authorities were able to leave behind (as non-citizens) most mixed-race children and nearly all their military collaborators/allies (Bosma et al. 2012; Deplano 2017).

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Given our interest in cultural trauma, another important similarity lies in the symbolic opportunity structure that prevented the emergence of a strong trauma drama concerning the repatriated. In both the Italian and Japanese cases, the suffering of their repatriates—without being denied—was effectively silenced through two rhetorical interventions. It was subsumed within a master narrative of generalized war suffering. Any responsibility for colonial crimes and colonial expulsions was imputed to the defeated authoritarian regime, thus obviating any concerted inquiry into the individual responsibilities of the repatriated themselves. In the Italian case, while the number of repatriated was substantial, their return did not trigger any sustained debate on the history and meaning of colonialism (Cornet 2004). There were several different groups of repatriated Italians, among whom those who had escaped Tito were the most numerous and vocal (Ballinger 2003). All of them put forward distinct claims for being recognized as victims (and for reparations). Postwar Italian governments did in fact promote a variety of social programs targeted—explicitly or implicitly—at the repatriated, easing their ability to find housing and enter the labor market. The repatriated, themselves, however, never coalesced or formulated a unified narrative, nor were they able to advance a claim that could enjoy support across Italy’s main political subcultures. As already mentioned, the repatriated organizations, particularly those from the Balkans, were thought to be closely associated with Fascism, a defeated ideology and a symbol of national shame. Another important reason for such failure was that from very early on, the plight of the repatriated was codified as merely a variant of the national tragedy of fascism, a forced war, and the resulting destruction and defeat. The repatriated could not easily ask for the special status of victimhood, as their conditions were defined as no different from many other categories of war victims. As seen in other countries, the Italian colonial past was soon covered by an active and shared silence. A similar process took place in Japan. The Japanese repatriations were quite extraordinary in size—several million—and in the conditions in which they took place. Very likely, large sectors of the repatriated were traumatized. At the same time, the entire country was devastated by the war, most particularly the cities and industrial regions, and under American occupation. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had died, not to mention the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima that led to the Japanese unconditional surrender. As Hashimoto documents (Chapter 3), the plight of the repatriated was quickly defined as a variant of a war experienced, in

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various forms, by the entire Japanese people. Their trauma became part of a much larger trauma of defeat and humiliation and was unified by a strong victim narrative that largely precluded any discussion of what might have been done to others. As in Italy, there was a sharp separation between the old fascist regime—responsible for having deceived its people into starting a criminal war—and the new Japan, “the closest liberal ally” of the free world. The outcome was a form of shared silence that lasted into the 1970s (Hashimoto 2015). In both cases, however, there is evidence that such silence was never complete. In her study, Ballinger (Chapter 2) suggests that decolonization and its attendant repatriations produced a series of symbolic trauma dramas that, although silenced in the explicit political and cultural life of the country, reverberated anyway in many films, the arts, and novels. Analyzing some of this cultural production, she argues in favor of the existence of a “critical engagement” with colonial and postcolonial issues in the Italian case, at least in the broad realm of popular culture. In a similar vein, Hashimoto (Chapter 3) highlights how the memory of the Japanese repatriated, absent in high-brow political and cultural productions, was often kept alive in popular culture where it could be presented as a matter of humanity, void of dangerous political implications. The framework of cultural trauma and the concept of symbolic opportunity structure have opened new avenues to explore the impact of decolonization. As seen throughout the previous pages, different institutional and narrative environments deeply shape the possibility afforded individual and group suffering and influence how such suffering evolves within a wider cultural framework. In comparing the experiences of various types of repatriation and repatriated groups, we have been able to explore different paths through which victimization is acknowledged or contested, elevated to national symbol or actively silenced. In this we see the present volume as a major step in the analysis of decolonization and the further development of cultural trauma theory.

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Index

A Alexander, Jeffrey, 6–10, 58, 92, 93, 141, 170, 199, 209 Anciens , 111, 112, 116, 125–131 apology, 8, 49, 94, 139 Assman, Aleida, 107

C Caruth, Cathy, 6, 44, 45 collective collective identity, 7, 11, 80, 93, 114, 170, 181, 184, 186, 198–200, 208, 209, 212, 217, 219, 221 collective memory, 5, 7–10, 14, 93, 101, 105, 127, 128, 183, 195, 207, 208, 210, 212, 217 collective narrative, 29, 142, 170 commemoration, 29, 43, 49, 81, 97, 99, 103, 105, 129, 138–140, 162–164, 218 cultural trauma, 5, 7, 8, 11, 58, 59, 69, 73, 76, 79, 86, 92–95, 100, 107,

141, 142, 163, 170, 198–200, 205, 206, 208–212, 214, 222, 224, 225

D drama, 21, 45, 49, 70, 71, 77, 121, 125, 127, 146, 156, 186 social drama, 72, 73 trauma drama, 7, 9–11, 19, 29, 30, 37, 43, 52, 70, 210–212, 224, 225

E Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 199 Elias, Norbert, 179, 184 elite, 12, 16, 32, 60, 65, 67, 68, 70, 77, 88, 89, 113, 114, 129, 173, 174, 176, 181, 199, 212 Eyerman, Ron, 7, 9, 10, 30, 58, 80, 85, 92, 93, 102, 170, 198, 199, 205, 208–210

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds.), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, Cultural Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4

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230

INDEX

F film, 44–48, 52, 59, 65, 68, 70, 106, 154, 197, 225 forget, 9, 99, 106, 125, 141, 207, 214 forgetting, 43, 50, 194, 196

G Giddens, Anthony, 177

H hero, 96 hikiage, 58, 64, 74–76

I identity, 5, 9, 18, 19, 21, 43, 52, 69, 71, 72, 79, 80, 93, 96, 101, 103, 104, 106, 116, 118, 141, 142, 144–147, 149, 153–156, 159, 161, 170, 176, 181, 183–188, 195, 196, 198–200, 208, 215, 218, 222 Indo, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95 Indisch, 5, 87, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 103–106

L lieux de mémoire, 130

M media, 47, 59, 65, 73, 77, 78, 80, 99, 102–105, 118, 121, 125, 138, 140, 152, 159, 161, 164, 165, 175, 180, 181, 184, 186, 210, 218 memoir, 19, 44, 48, 73, 90, 94, 106, 120, 129, 154, 170, 183 memory, 7, 9–11, 14–16, 20, 21, 29, 37, 43, 45, 47, 48, 50–52, 57–59,

65, 67, 68, 70–72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 92–94, 97, 103, 105–107, 111, 112, 116, 120, 122, 124– 132, 139–141, 144, 145, 150, 153–155, 163–165, 170, 172, 184–186, 194, 197, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219–221, 225 metropole, 4, 5, 12, 16, 33, 34, 40, 41, 43, 44, 144, 155, 206, 218, 220 metropolis, 62, 90, 100, 103, 170, 175, 190–192, 195, 214 metropolitan, 1, 12–14, 18, 19, 29, 33, 35, 40, 99, 107, 122–124, 144, 154, 180, 190, 207, 208, 214, 217 monument, 97, 103, 130, 138, 139, 164, 165 museum, 59, 75, 76, 81, 103, 131, 165, 196, 219

N narrative, 6, 8–11, 17, 20, 21, 27, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 59, 65, 70, 76, 79, 81, 92–97, 100, 102– 107, 128, 130, 131, 140–142, 148, 153, 154, 156, 163, 175, 176, 181, 182, 184, 187, 188, 190, 192–200, 207–209, 211, 212, 215, 220–222, 224, 225 nationalist, 31, 32, 81, 89, 95, 118, 143, 154, 173, 189 nationalism, 61, 89 novel, 44, 47, 48, 59, 68–70, 73, 77, 90, 106, 179, 193–195, 225

P perpetrator, 6–8, 10, 60, 65, 68, 69, 71, 74, 79, 102, 199, 211 pied noir, 99, 140, 142, 150, 153, 155, 162, 165

INDEX

R race mixed-race, 15, 16, 34, 48, 91, 117, 118, 121, 175, 222, 223 multiracial, 171, 172, 190 racial, 2, 3, 5, 33, 34, 47, 61, 63, 103, 104, 116, 118, 122, 171, 174, 183, 194, 209, 210, 223 racism, 32, 46, 86, 91, 92, 95, 100, 101, 104, 105, 107, 120, 161, 163, 166, 174, 191, 197, 222 recognition, 6, 7, 11, 12, 17, 20, 21, 33, 34, 43, 51, 66, 94, 97, 98, 107, 114, 116, 138–140, 142, 146, 156–158, 160–162, 183, 186, 195, 198, 199, 209, 212, 214, 215, 218 recognize, 8, 18, 21, 34, 36, 42, 45–47, 51, 66, 96, 101, 107, 113, 116–118, 138, 140, 147, 162, 175, 183, 208, 211, 216, 217, 224 representation, 8, 10, 44, 51, 58, 59, 72, 79, 106, 128, 131, 142, 177, 181, 183, 186, 199 retornado, 170, 179–195, 197–200, 221 Ricoeur, Paul, 127

S Said, Edward, 28 Sciortino, Giuseppe, 7, 9, 10, 93, 205, 206 silence, 14, 15, 20, 37, 43, 45, 62, 121, 122, 126, 129, 155, 163, 212, 213, 216, 219, 224, 225 Smelser, Neal, 7, 58, 170, 200

231

solidarity, 2, 7, 21, 43, 121, 123, 124, 149, 186, 208, 209 T totok, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95 trauma individual trauma, 69, 96, 170 personal trauma, 105 trauma narrative, 57, 59, 70, 80, 81, 94, 141, 142, 155, 165, 166, 199, 209, 211, 212, 218, 219, 221 traumatic, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 20, 31, 44, 45, 48, 60, 92, 101, 102, 107, 141–143, 155, 193, 198, 200, 207–209, 221, 223 traumatic experience, 5, 6, 9, 103, 106, 170, 200 V victim, 7, 8, 10, 18, 59, 60, 65, 66, 69, 72, 76, 78–80, 92, 95, 97, 102, 107, 117, 121, 122, 138, 162, 164, 186, 188, 189, 191, 195, 199, 208, 213–215, 219, 224, 225 victimhood, 10, 17, 97, 107, 188, 216, 224 victimization, 59, 69, 80, 188, 189, 194, 225 W white, 1, 2, 9, 16, 19, 33, 34, 39, 46, 47, 87, 100, 104, 113–118, 120–122, 124, 129, 138, 140, 154, 163, 171–175, 194, 195, 205, 218, 219