Download or read book Free and French in the Caribbean written by John Patrick Walsh and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “All the ingredients to become the next important book in the field of postcolonial studies with the emphasis on French Caribbean culture and literature.”—Daniel Desormeaux, University of Chicago In Free and French in the Caribbean, John Patrick Walsh studies the writings of Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire to examine how they conceived of and narrated two defining events in the decolonializing of the French Caribbean: the revolution that freed the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1803 and the departmentalization of Martinique and other French colonies in 1946. Walsh emphasizes the connections between these events and the distinct legacies of emancipation in the narratives of revolution and nationhood passed on to successive generations. By reexamining Louverture and Césaire in light of their multilayered narratives, the book offers a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary phenomenon of “free and French” in the Caribbean. “A fruitful intervention in a growing body of literature and increasingly lively debate on the Haitian Revolution and the figure of Toussaint Louverture, the book also contributes to the emerging scholarship on Césaire, Francophone literature, and postcolonial theory.”—Gary Wilder, CUNY Graduate Center “A valuable contribution to both the rapidly proliferating literature on the Haitian Revolution and the emerging revisionist appreciation of Césaire’s intellectual and political project.”—Small Axe “J.P. Walsh has produced for the nonspecialist reader an excellent analysis of the historiographical discourse on Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire with a focus on the meaning(s) of decolonization in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.”—New West Indian Guide “That Free and French inspires so many questions is testament to its ambition, the provocative parallel at its heart, and the richness of Walsh’s analysis.”—H-Empire

Download or read book A Colony of Citizens written by Laurent Dubois and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti. The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.

Download or read book Non Sovereign Futures written by Yarimar Bonilla and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions—or even paradoxes—in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity—challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution—in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself. Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Exploring the political and historical imaginaries of activist communities, she examines their attempts to forge new visions for the future by reconfiguring narratives of the past, especially the histories of colonialism and slavery. Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, she shows that political participation—even in failed movements—has social impacts beyond simple material or economic gains. Ultimately, she uses the cases of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean at large to offer a more sophisticated conception of the possibilities of sovereignty in the postcolonial era.

Download or read book The Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume 3 AD 1420 AD 1804 written by David Eltis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

Download or read book A Turbulent Time written by David Barry Gaspar and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution." —Choice "[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book." —William and Mary Quarterly This volume examines several slave societies in the Greater Caribbean to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of the revolutionary age on the region. Built precariously on the exploitation of slave labor, organized according to the doctrine of racial discrimination, the plantation colonies were particularly vulnerable to the message of the French Revolution, which proved all the more potent because it coincided with the emergence of the antislavery movement in the Atlantic world and interacted with local traditions of resistance among the region's slaves, free coloreds, and white colonists.

Download or read book Awakening Spaces written by Brenda F. Berrian and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-06-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fast-paced zouk of Kassav', the romantic biguine of Malavoi, the jazz of Fal Frett, the ballads of Mona, and reggae of Kali and Pôglo are all part of the burgeoning popular music scene in the French Caribbean. In this lively book, Brenda F. Berrian chronicles the rise of this music, which has captivated the minds and bodies of the Francophone world and elsewhere. Based on personal interviews and discussions of song texts, Berrian shows how these musicians express their feelings about current and past events, about themselves, their islands, and the French. Through their lyrical themes, these songs create metaphorical "spaces" that evoke narratives of desire, exile, subversion, and Creole identity and experiences. Berrian opens up these spaces to reveal how the artists not only engage their listeners and effect social change, but also empower and identify themselves. She also explores the music as it relates to the art of drumming, and to genres such as African American and Latin jazz and reggae. With Awakening Spaces, Berrian adds fresh insight into the historical struggles and arts of the French Caribbean.

Download or read book Caribbean Discourse written by Édouard Glissant and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

Download or read book Black Skins French Voices written by David Beriss and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About 337,000 people of French Antillean Origin live in metropolitan France today. Unlike immigrants from North Africa, Turkey or sub-Saharan Africa, Antilleans are French citizens with deep roots in French history. Indeed, the Caribbean Islands they come from have been a part of France for over three centuries. Antilleans were for many years an invisible population, dispersed throughout the Paris region, with few community organizations and little political activism. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, activists in the Antillean community began to recognize that their status as citizens would not protect them from the growth of racism in France. From neighborhood groups interested in promoting traditional Martinican and Guadeloupan dance and music to politically charged associations, these new cultural militants denounced French colonialism, challenged racism, and demanded political representation. Black Skins, French Voices is situated at the intersection of changing French ideas and policies regarding ethnic diversity and Antillean demands for recognition. It shows the creative and exciting struggles of Antilleans to remake French culture on their own terms.

Download or read book Claims to Memory written by Catherine Reinhardt and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents—including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases—the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.

Download or read book Creole Economics written by Katherine E. Browne and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2004-11-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the trickster Rabbit, slave descendants, off-the-books economies, and French citizens have to do with each other? Plenty, says Katherine Browne in her anthropological investigation of the informal economy in the Caribbean island of Martinique. She begins with a question: Why, after more than three hundred years as colonial subjects of France, did the residents of Martinique opt in 1946 to integrate fully with France, the very nation that had enslaved their ancestors? The author suggests that the choice to decline sovereignty reflects the same clear-headed opportunism that defines successful, crafty, and illicit entrepreneurs who work off the books in Martinique today. Browne draws on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork and interview data from all socioeconomic sectors to question the common understanding of informal economies as culture-free, survival strategies of the poor. Anchoring her own insights to longer historical and literary views, the author shows how adaptations of cunning have been reinforced since the days of plantation slavery. These adaptations occur, not in spite of French economic and political control, but rather because of it. Powered by the "essential tensions" of maintaining French and Creole identities, the practice of creole economics provides both assertion of and refuge from the difficulties of being dark-skinned and French. This powerful ethnographic study shows how local economic meanings and plural identities help explain work off the books. Like creole language and music, creole economics expresses an irreducibly complex blend of historical, contemporary, and cultural influences.

Download or read book Seeking Imperialism s Embrace written by Kristen Stromberg Childers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1946, at a time when other French colonies were just beginning to break free of French imperial control, the people of the French Antilles-the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe-voted to join the French nation as departments (Départments d'outre mer, or DOMs). Eschewing independence in favor of complete integration with the metropole, the people of the French Antilles affirmed their Frenchness in an important decision that would define their citizenship and shape their politics for decades to come. For Antilleans, this novel path was the natural culmination of a centuries-long quest for recognition of their equality with the French and a means of overcoming the entrenched political and economic power of the islands' white minority. Disappointment with departmentalization quickly set in, Kristen Stromberg Childers shows in this work, as the promised equality was slow in coming and Antillean contributions to World War II went unrecognized. Champions of departmentalization such as Aimé Césaire argued that the "race-blind" Republic was far from universal and egalitarian. The French government struggled to stem unrest through economic development, tourism, and immigration to the metropole, where labor was in short supply. Antilleans fought against racial and gender stereotypes imposed on them by European French and sought to stem the tide of white metropolitan workers arriving in the Antilles. Although departmentalization has been criticized as a weak alternative to national independence, it was overwhelmingly popular among Antilleans at the time of the vote, and subsequent disappointment reflects the broken promises of assimilation more than the misguided nature of the decision. Contrasting with the wars of decolonization in Algeria and Vietnam, Seeking Imperialism's Embrace examines the Antilleans' more peaceful but perhaps equally vexing process of forging a national identity in the French empire.

Download or read book The Creole Archipelago written by Tessa Murphy and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By approaching the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected region, Tessa Murphy recasts small islands as the site of broader contests over Indigenous dominion, racial belonging, economic development, and colonial subjecthood.

Download or read book Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789 1804 written by Laurent Dubois and published by Bedford/St. Martin's. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume details the first slave rebellion to have a successful outcome, leading to the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic and paving the way for the emancipation of slaves in the rest of the French Empire and the world. Incited by the French Revolution, the enslaved inhabitants of the French Caribbean began a series of revolts, and in 1791 plantation workers in Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, overwhelmed their planter owners and began to take control of the island. They achieved emancipation in 1794, and after successfully opposing Napoleonic forces eight years later, emerged as part of an independent nation in 1804. A broad selection of documents, all newly translated by the authors, is contextualized by a thorough introduction considering the very latest scholarship. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus clarify for students the complex political, economic, and racial issues surrounding the revolution and its reverberations worldwide. Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a chronology, and a selected bibliography.--Publisher description.

Download or read book Caribbean New Orleans written by Cécile Vidal and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.

Download or read book French Caribbean Cuisine written by Stephanie Ovide and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This marvellous cookbook contains over 150 authentic recipes from the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Favourites such as Avocado Charlotte, Fish Crepes Saintoise, and Fish Court Bouillon will beckon everyone to the table. Also included are a chapter on local drinks, a glossary on Caribbean food products and a list of sources where speciality ingredients can be purchased.

Download or read book The Haitian Revolution written by Toussaint L'Ouverture and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L’Ouverture’s profound contribution to the struggle for equality.

Download or read book Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World written by Doris Y. Kadish and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve scholars representing a variety of academic fields contribute to this study of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies, which ranges historically from the 1770s to Haiti's declaration of independent statehood in 1804. Including essays on the impact of colonial slavery on France, the United States, and the French West Indies, this collection focuses on the events, causes, and effects of violent slave rebellions that occurred in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In one of the few studies to examine the Caribbean revolts and their legacy from a U.S. perspective, the contributors discuss the flight of island refugees to the southern cities of New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, and Baltimore that branded the lower United States as "the extremity of Caribbean culture." Based on official records and public documents, historical research, literary works, and personal accounts, these essays present a detailed view of the lives of those who experienced this period of rebellion and change.