From Timbuktu to Fort de France: The Iconic Power of Monuments and Their Destruction
<p>We begin this podcast with Bhakti Shringarpure introducing the online journal <em>Warscapes </em>that she founded. The discussion that follows emerges from an original unsuspected dialogue between two articles Bhakti and I wrote in Summer 2012, when Ansar Dine destroyed several Sufi mausoleums and precious manuscripts in Timbuktu. Bhakti had then put back into political and historical context and compared such “rage against the monuments” with the writings of Georges Bataille about the take of the Bastille, considered as the beginning of the 1789 French revolution. In my own article, I had attempted to show how both iconoclasts and iconodules are considered as such because of their deep fathoming of the monument’s symbolical power. We then discuss other monuments’ destruction that might be read through a different post-colonial and/or emancipative ethics: the destruction of statues in particular. We finish this conversation with Bhakti explaining how the iconic power of monuments and space is often transmitted by wartime and post-war literature.</p>
Host: Léopold Lambert
Guests: Bhakti Shringarpure
Part of: The Funambulist Podcast