The World in Question

This chapter focuses on deworlding and reworlding the city of Paris through a global microhistory of Narrative Figuration, where the metropolis is both the scene of the crime and the site of transcultural and transversal crossings. Hervé Télémaque was a co-organizer of Narrative Figuration's first official exhibition, Mythologies Quotidiennes, along with the Parisian painter Bernard Rancillac, and the Algeria-born critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot. Télémaque's insight was to bring out the anti-colonial assessment in Barthes' cultural critique, producing work that presciently demonstrated the ambient racism of the everyday. The inequality of wealth and privilege in the emerging postwar order was a central concern for Antonio Berni.