Must we choose between militancy and repair? The example of Bouba Touré

Bouba Touré (ca. 1948-2021) was a photographer, filmmaker, projectionist, writer, and militant committed to the struggles of immigrant workers in France. Born in Tafacirga, Mali, in the Kayes region, Bouba arrived in France in 1965 and obtained a bed in the Pinel foyer (a type of lodging created specifically for African immigrant workers by the French state) in Saint-Denis. From 1965 to 1970, he worked in the Chausson metallurgical factory and participated in the labor strikes of 1968. During these same years, he began photographing the lives of West African immigrant workers in the Paris region. Starting in 1977, he also used his cameras (still and Super 8) to document the life of the Somankidi Coura agricultural cooperative in rural Mali and the comrades (thirteen other West African immigrant workers he had met in the Parisian foyers) with whom he co-founded it. For the next 50 years he produced tens of thousands of images, many of which he hand-carried between France and Mali, Mali and France.

Bouba left us a multifaceted and militant legacy. His images resound with polyglot stories, instantiate transnational and cosmopolitan commitments, and meticulously plot counter-cartographies of both West Africa and France. Bouba’s work also models for us a kind of lush attunement to aesthetic dimensions of immigrant experience, challenging conventional archival and research protocols. As part of a collective of researchers, artists, and activists with close ties to Bouba (my collaborators are Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Raphaël Grisey, and Soso Soumaré), I am developing collaborative research and practice in his archive in hopes of receiving this legacy.

In this talk, which presents Bouba’s photographs to a U.S.-based audience for the first time, I will trace the militant photo-geographies that Bouba himself devised, in part through the relentless circulation of his images. I will also touch on new questions that are arising as his photographs undergo digitization by the Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, a public departmental archive located in Bobigny, on the northern border of Paris. Ultimately, I will ask whether we must sometimes choose between militancy and repair.

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Jennifer Bajorek is a professor of comparative literature and visual studies at Hampshire College and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg. She is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in photography, art, and literature. Her work includes 20 years of collaborations in West African collections encompassing research, policy work, and conservation and restitution initiatives, and has been supported or recognized by numerous grants and awards, including a 2024 Arthur Rubin Outstanding Publication Award, for Unfixed (2020).

Bajorek is a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Spring 2026. At Princeton, she will complete a manuscript on the materiality of photography in Africa and teach a course on photography, race, and restitution.