CEFRES Team

Michèle Baussant: Research & CV

De-Imperial Europe: a Resentful Confederation of Vanquished Peoples? Raw and Lapsed Memories of Post-Imperial Minorities

Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Contact: michele.baussant@cnrs.fr

Michèle Baussant is an anthropologist, research director at CNRS. She graduated in history and anthropology at Paris-Nanterre University and held a postdoctoral position at Laval University (Quebec) between 2003 and 2005. Her research, since its beginnings, has crossed an anthropological perspective with other disciplinary approaches (history, political sociology, geography, digital humanities) and a comparative and connected vision of her different fields allowing her to grasp her main research topic: the role of memory as a resource for, on the one hand, creating solidarities based on a lived and/or transmitted past, and, on the other hand, producing mechanisms of rejection, exclusion and disaffiliation. This path is, therefore, characterised by the continuity of her fields of investigation, from Algeria in its links with France, to Egypt and Lebanon, and finally to the Israeli-Palestinian spaces.

Her researches belong to the field of memory studies, based on the anthropological approach which has, since its very foundations, considered memory, as a practice, a discourse, a process and a content, as an integral part of the discipline. From 1993 to the present, her work considers this issue from a specific angle, that of the multiple displacements of populations made up, in whole or in part, of migrants who came to Islamic countries during the formation of the European colonial empires in the 19th and 20th centuries and then dispersed, after their independence, outside these countries. By adding other fields, this perspective then enabled her to initiate a larger reflection on the figure of the excluded third and the losers of history that she is carrying out within the framework of the Tandem programme conducted with Johana Wyss. It questions the imperial legacies of old Europe, including the different forms of empires in a connected perspective – intra and extra-European – that have shaped the imaginations and current spaces of the “new Europe”.

This project is in line with the projects she has coordinated or is coordinating, including the ANR MRSEI “Silenced pasts: memories and representations of the past in migratory and collapsed societies”, the programme “Disrupted histories, recovered pasts/Histoires perturbées, passés recouvrés”, jointly funded by the AHRC (UK), Labex Passés dans le présent /Pasts in the present (France) (PI: Sian Sullivan Bath University and Michèle Baussant, CNRS).

Tandem Project : A decolonial Europe? Periods and places for defeated peoples.

CV

Publications

  • 2020: Baussant Michèle, “Who gave you the right to abandon your prophets?” : Jewish sites of ruins and memory in Egypt. In Baussant Michèle, Miccoli Dario et Schely-Newman Esther, Israel : a diaspora of memories, special issue of Quest (n°16), http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/
  • 2018: Baussant Michèle, Foscarini Giorgia, « Memories at stake : Sharing stories and exchanging experiences », Revue Ethnologies, 39-2, p.3-29. (in English and in French)
  • 2018: Basset Karine, Baussant, Michèle, « Utopies, nostalgies : approches croisées/ Utopia and nostalgia : at the crossroads of the present times », Revue Conserveries mémorielles, 22 (in English and in French)

Book chapters

  • 2019: Baussant Michèle, « Ce que les sciences sociales nous disent de la mémoire », in Anne de Mathan et Laurent Le Gall, Mémoires de la révolution française, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes (sous presse).
  • 2018: Baussant, Michèle, « Broken Histories, Silenced memories and reappropriations of the past: The Jews from Egypt and from Islamic countries », in Anne BAZIN et Catherine PERRON (dir.), How to address the loss? Forced migrations, lost territories and politics of history in Germany and in Europe in the XXth century, Oxford, Peter Lang, p.179-198.
  • 2018: Baussant, Michèle, « Marginalisation sociale, marginalisation territoriale : ancrer la mémoire dans les lieux d’un « patrimoine négatif » », in Baussant, Michèle, Chauliac, Marina, Gensburger Sarah et Venel Nancy (dir.), Ethnographie de la mémoire. De Villeurbanne à Valparaiso Territoires, terrains et échelles d’observation, Nanterre, Presses de l’Université de Paris Ouest, p.95-98.
  • 2018 Baussant, Michèle , « Un territoire disparu : quels acteurs en gardent la mémoire ? L’exemple des Juifs d’Egypte », in Baussant, Michèle, Chauliac, Marina, Gensburger Sarah et Venel Nancy (dir.), Ethnographie de la mémoire. De Villeurbanne à Valparaiso Territoires, terrains et échelles d’observation, Nanterre, Presses de l’Université de Paris Ouest, p.153-170.
  • 2018, Baussant, Michèle, Chauliac, Marina, Gensburger Sarah et Venel Nancy (dir.), « Les terrains de la mémoire. Approches croisées à l’échelle locale », in Baussant, Michèle, Chauliac, Marina, Gensburger Sarah et Venel Nancy (dir.), Ethnographie de la mémoire. De Villeurbanne à Valparaiso Territoires, terrains et échelles d’observation, Nanterre, Presses de l’Université de Paris Ouest, p.9-20.

Editing of journal articles

  • 2018: Baussant Michèle, Miccoli Dario et Schely-Newman Esther, Israel : a diaspora of memories, special issue of Quest (n°16), http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/ Basset Karine, Baussant, Michèle, Utopies, nostalgies : approches croisées, Revue Conserveries mémorielles.
  • 2018 : Baussant Michèle, Foscarini Giorgia, Memories at stake: Sharing stories and exchanging experiences, Revue Ethnologies, 2018

Work direction

  • 2018: Baussant, Michèle, Chauliac, Marina, Gensburger Sarah et Venel Nancy (dir.), Ethnographie de la mémoire. De Villeurbanne à Valparaiso Territoires, terrains et échelles d’observation, Nanterre, Presses de l’Université de Paris Ouest.