Location

1The Ariana Museum in Geneva, Switzerland is proud of its collection of ceramics and glass. Representing all the main techniques associated with the art, such as pottery, stoneware, earthen ware, porcelain, and china, it boasts of being the only museum in Switzerland—and one of the few in Europe—devoted entirely to the arts of fire. The collection includes over 27,000 objects, bearing witness to twelve centuries of ceramics in Switzerland, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. For the Museum, this expansive collection is a source of pride. According to the Museum’s account, the Islamic collection, along with the series of oriental porcelains, attests to the interactions between the East and the West, and as a plaque reminds us, constitutes a historical truth in the universal history of ceramics. In addition to the huge collection of pots, vases and plates, the Ariana Museum is designed to impress. Heralded as an architectural marvel, huge colonnades underpin vaulted ceilings filled with stars and artwork, with gleaming marble floors and stained-glass windows providing an added touch of luxury and magnificence.1

2I visited the Ariana Museum sometime in March 2022. Amidst reading and writing on slavery, colonialisms, and dispossessions in preparation for what was to become this project, the Museum visit was meant to provide a brief hiatus, a benign prospect to spend the day marvelling at the craftsmanship, art and beauty these objects represented. And yet, as I began my tour, my eyes soon started to glaze over the neatly labelled and numbered pots, cups, and other figurines. Something was out of place. I felt I was in some way off-course as I made my way through the gallery. My encounter with these objects betrayed the long-cultivated relationship selves and objects are supposed to have. I couldn’t summon the proper dispossession or the feelings the space seemed to demand. Rather than spurring fascination, appreciation or joy, these objects gave rise to a sense of unease. This unease continued to intensify as I made my way from the temporary to the permanent exhibitions, the experience of disorientation, along with a growing sense of negation as I proceeded through the spacious halls with their luminous artwork and tapestry.

3I soon realized that it was the underlying architecture of the museum that was hindering the habitability of my body to its space. This Museum was not built simply to move around or as a container for cultural artefacts. Above all, it was a monument to civilisation, memory, and history with the act of collecting as its centrepiece. Lined throughout the walls of the Museum are testaments to the precocity of collection and the cultures contained therein. But importantly and what the Museum is silent on, is that ‘classification precedes collection’.2 More than a passive act of collections, institutions assemble, preparing facts and sources for historical intelligibility.3 At the edges of this history of collection that the Museum valorises lies sublimated narratives of classification which have historically strived to accommodate, appropriate, and extend taxonomies of humanity and systems of knowledge. To be classified in the Museum and in the world, means being educated into an order of things, an order that distributes mobility, extending the ‘surfaces of some bodies and not others’.4 Navigating the Museum required attuning my body to this field of power that had historically charged itself through notions of racially determined classificatory regimes.

4My unease mounted as I made my way to a section titled ‘Orient-Occident (East-West)’. Despite the now out-of-fashion framing, the exhibition is meant to simultaneously celebrate and attest to the universality of ceramic history. Reciprocity becomes the star theme here. Capital (read through economic and commercial imperatives) intervenes to refashion cultural difference into comforting affirmations around diversity, multiculturalism, and tolerance, silently passing over other translations of classifications and collections. Diversity in the Museum, as with many other institutional spaces, becomes a ‘happy sign’, incorporating the categories and assumptions associated with progress.5 If the twentieth century was grounded in overcoming cultural difference through dreams of modernisation, progress, and the forward march of history, the twenty-first century smuggles in many of the same motifs, redirecting difference by emphasising issues of diversity and multiculturalism. Difference is negated in favour of diversity, for difference is dangerous as it demands confrontation, but diversity is laudable as it can be contained, regulated, and managed. Put another way, diversity yields to tolerance, to the extent that certain differences are seen as non-threatening. Progress still remains a forward march albeit now framed through categories that emphasise diversity and multiculturalism, without the philosophical problem of difference becoming a political problem.6

5Continuing to think with the exhibition, it would seem that the ‘Orient’ finally arrives, finding its way in a metropolitan centre that celebrates cultural differences, but the doubt still persists, is arriving enough? Can difference arrive, and yet the more things stay in place? It becomes important here to consider the East/West, Orient/Occident figuration underpinning the exhibition’s claims. As Edward Said in his magisterial Orientalism noted, Orientalism, more than an elaboration of the verifiable truth of either the East or the West operated as a discourse, as a mode of power inextricable from configurations and assumptions of knowledge, of how things are supposed to be, or of how the world is made up.7 Additionally, as Sara Ahmed has argued, spaces never just ‘are’, but acquire direction by how we inhabit them. By forming relative positions within the exhibition, ‘East-West’ or ‘Orient-Occident’ are presumed to be ready-made categories that are contained within space, rather than contained by space, side- stepping the political question regarding the social construction of these spaces, along with the histories of inequity, racialization’s, and theft contained therein.8 We need to ask what happens when diversity becomes co-opted within these institutions, such that the very real and material demands that differences place, are turned into something that simply ‘are’, and can thus be ‘had’, by taking them ‘in’. We also need to rethink space and by consequence difference, to generate liberating avenues which refrain from drawing lines in space, and instead seek to complicate the relationship between space, histories, and differences.

6As I browsed through the museum, my education forces me to remember other things or to borrow from Aimé Césaire here – histories of ‘thingification’ that lurk uncomfortably within these seemingly progressive gestures.9 I am reminded that more than ceramics construed as commodities, bodies turned into commodities also passed through these circuits. I am reminded of the Africans in the slave hold, the Africans thrown overboard, those who reached the New World under the weight of iron shackles, the banishment and removal of indigenous peoples to fuel plantation complexes, and the subsequent importation of indentured bodies from China and South Asia under the historically contingent and shifting category of the ‘coolie’ to work in these complexes.10 These are histories that are not distant, histories that cannot be safely consigned and frozen in the past, but histories that form the gestation of modern life, its violence bursting into the sinews of contemporary life. Lines of stratification, Black death and deeply embedded racialised beliefs are etched into this genealogy of violence, mendacity, excess and dispossessions.11

7As my tour came to an end, I wondered, if it is indeed possible to tell these ongoing stories within the spatial and epistemic location afforded by the Museum or if these stories were doomed to remain invisible, lying on the margins of our texts, the murmuring of their presence barely discernible when new ways of progress lead to blurred visions of the world. That is, if Museums such as the Ariana Museum serve to materialise memory and enact pedagogies which position viewers to have a certain experience of the past, how does one remember, or more appropriately mourn those pasts which come back to rupture the present. What forms of occlusions stem from the underlying assumptions and design of the museum? Thinking a bit more conceptually, what new stories might emerge when we move from thinking in terms of collections to thinking through the at once fragile and durable traces of these vexed and violent genealogies that get re-activated to remain with us?

8We need new stories of alterity that try to articulate these arrivals which are not-always, not- yet arrivals. These are stories that require, above all, work, for in telling these stories one soon realises, that form and language continuously fracture. As Christina Sharpe in her work on the ongoing orthography of Blackness, slavery, and white supremacy argues, we must become undisciplined to do this work.12 We need to think of difference not as something that arrives as an always self-cohering, ready-made category, but as traces of history bereft of life, body and property. We need to ‘slow down reasoning’, pushing against proposals that gloss over ‘ontological dissonance’, to pursue a new disposition towards reflexivity.13 Most importantly, the question is one not simply around the not-yet arrivals of these not-always graspable differences, but rather one of how we might turn towards them.

Dialogue

9I begin with this extended mediation on the personal, not in order to be parochial, but to connect my specific arrival and the disorientations it generated in a museum in Geneva, to the histories of other unfinished arrivals. The arrivals I have in mind here consist of the interlocking dispossessions of land, body, community, and life that coalesce in the ongoing disaster wrought by the ruptures of Atlantic and Caribbean slavery and its aftermath. These are violent arrivals which leave a trace in the present, traces which return and unsettle the apparent closure of difference under the garb of the universal. As the Haitian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes,

‘The past is only the past because there is a present’14

10It is in this sense that the ‘past has no content’, for the terms through which we as contemporaneous subjects call upon the past depend on our performance of pastness in the present. Put another way, the past isn’t dead, but is contemporaneous with the present, forming a disjuncture of the present within itself. It is these past-present precarities that yield unfinished arrivals that I explore in this paper. Put otherwise, the question I seek to address in the pages that follow is: what different arrivals might come to light if we focus on imaginations of humanity by those excluded, silenced, erased, and above all censured by liberal humanist narratives of freedom, progress, diversity and capital. In particular, I do so through a philosophy (or various philosophies) co-constituted in dialogue with the work of the poet, philosopher and theorist Édouard Glissant. More specifically, by turning to Glissant, I seek to address the ongoing reverberations of histories shaped by slavery, property, and other forms of ‘thingification’ by centring analytical attention on a counter-poetics perpetually in-arrival. In interrogating these arrivals, however, it is not my intention to provide an answer to what these arrivals might finally look like, for the story that follows does not have an allotted designation. Instead, conversing with Glissant, it hopes to discover new ways of arriving, arrivals that consent to the idea of being one and multiple at the same time.

11Taking as its grounding the Caribbean archipelago, this paper exists, in deep relation with Glissant. Following Robbie Shilliam, by deep relation I mean a method which rather than producing or collecting knowledge, seeks to cultivate knowledge.15 In other words, what I pursue here, to paraphrase Dionne Brand, is a dialogical practice of reading, a method of close- narration, which requires sitting in the room of History with Glissant, whereby I enter into a critical dialogue with Glissant, while allowing, in some sense, Glissant to speak back.16 By sitting with Glissant, I seek to discover, map and plot new histories of non-unitary relationalities anchored in an ethico-political bond towards alterity to discover new ways of feeling, inhabiting, seeing and imagining the world. In a way, this allows me to confront the ethical and epistemic status of those we read and research about by not treating Glissant as an object to research and write about, but by imagining Glissant as a figure capable of thinking, writing, and answering back. Sitting with Glissant and at times even against him then, is a deliberate strategy which leads to a broader conversational praxis, limited not just to an exercise in contextualisation, but which becomes a creative pursuit centred around listening closely to how Glissant’s formulations about critique, ontology and poetics might help us devise frameworks which reflect upon related phenomena in the contemporary present.17

12Proceeding with this dynamism, the history that this paper engages with opposes narratives where the past, present, and future cohere to a poetic fragmentation which consists of infinite variations and the multiplicity of contacts, and conflicts. These are temporalities that bind colonial pasts to decolonial presents, as well as persons and communities hitherto separated by colonial logics of division. This history thus encounters difference, not through the logic of Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’, that is the act of superseding by displacement, or for that matter by turning towards comforting affirmations of diversity, but through a process of habitation, where ‘knowledge is creatively released as the practitioner enfolds her/himself in the communal matter of her/his enquiry.’18

13Ultimately, and I must confess, this paper is a provisional effort, for this effort to re-see, re-imagine, and re-inhabit the world might well fall flat. And yet, it is where this paper fall apart that multiple visions of arrival might finally be discerned. By interrupting theories of progress embroiled in still existing teleologies of being Human, I hope this effort could potentially turn out to be something in excess of itself, its ongoing, unfinished and provisional character becoming and providing a productive site and archive to learn and create from.

14What follows then, are a series of hopeful and provisional assemblages of philosophies, conversations, and ultimately relations…