Naming the Place and Telling the Story in Demain, demain

This chapter focuses on Demain, demain: Nanterre. Bidonville de la Folie, 1962–1966, by Laurent Maffre, a remarkable graphic novel whose hauntingly evocative title, “Tomorrow, Tomorrow: Nanterre. Shantytown of Madness, 1962–1966,” foregrounds one of the locations that French anthropologist Marc Augé calls non-lieux [non-places]. Very different from lieux anthropologiques and what historian Pierre Nora and his colleagues have described as lieux de mémoire, this chapter focuses on the colonial shantytown, and the historical reality of the unequal colonial relation between French and Algerians in Demain, demain. This chapter points out that the basic socio-historical material was supplied to a considerable extent by Monique Hervo, who was a social worker in that shantytown and documented it at the time through photographs and sound recordings of its inhabitants. Hervo describes the effects of this pressure on the inhabitants of the shantytown: they are hemmed in as bulldozers pile up dirt around them, creating a physical barrier around the shantytown and making movement into and out of the shantytown ever more difficult. In Demain, demain, Maffre presents this constraining movement through subjective images, but also spectacular, panoramic ones, the first of which is a double-page spread laying out much of the sprawling, labyrinthine shantytown. Thus, Maffre uses a graphic novel narrative composed of images and text to investigate the sights and sounds of an infamous shantytown in which many Algerians lived just outside of Paris proper

African history and culture studies · Cultural Identity and Heritage · French Urban and Social Studies · Philosophy