Unlearning the Gaze

During the height of France’s colonial period, museums served as key sites for teaching the public how to see themselves and others through the lens of race and sexuality. This museal gaze continues to haunt representations of Blackness in contemporary France, especially amid intensified debate over the country’s colonial legacy and racial politics. Unlearning the Gaze examines how African and afrodescendant Francophone creators confront, reinterpret, and unsettle these inherited visual regimes.

Focusing on contemporary literary, performance, and visual works by creators such as Bintou Dembélé, Omar Victor Diop, Fatou Diome, and Julien Creuzet, among others, Abigail E. Celis analyzes a corpus that repurposes the tropes and mechanisms of colonial exhibition and collection. Some works depict the inner workings of ethnographic museums or revisit representational forms such as natural history treatises and colonial fairs; others more subtly rework the hierarchies of humanness disseminated through such sites. Celis identifies two broad strategies offered in response to these museal practices: reprisal, which exposes and deconstructs the myths and mechanisms of the racial-colonial gaze, and refusal, which turns toward queer, afrodescendant, decolonial, and ecological ways of seeing. Rather than proposing a singular alternative gaze, the book demonstrates the diversity of aesthetic engagements that unlearn colonial visual biopolitics.

Unlearning the Gaze offers an interdisciplinary account of the afterlives of colonialism and the politics of representation. It will interest scholars and graduate students in Francophone and Africana studies, as well as readers in visual culture, art history, museum studies, and comparative literature.

This book is published in open access thanks to the financial support of the Université de Montréal Libraries.

“In Unlearning the Gaze, Abigail Celis has crafted a groundbreaking and elegantly argued study of how Black French and African artists unsettle – and transform – the colonial gaze. Through luminous readings of literature, performance, and visual art, she offers powerful aesthetic strategies that confront the pathologies of visual biopolitics to reimagine Black presence, memory, and embodiment in postcolonial France. Celis has produced an essential contribution to Black and decolonial studies that resonates across the multiple geographics of the Francophone world.”—Kaiama Glover, author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being

Abigail E. Celis is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the Université de Montréal.

Art History & Architecture

           European

           Modern and Contemporary

           Art Theory & Criticism

Literary Studies

Museum Studies

Critical Race Studies

Africana Studies