African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
202 p, "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 Enligtenment 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." --Jacket.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
210 p., From the days of slavery, the Negro from Martinique has never stopped "marronner", that is to say, to try to escape his condition, winning the great woods, the plebeians districts boroughs or even the neighboring islands. Simon, principal figure of the book, was one of them. He knew in the 17th century the arrival of the first slaves from Africa Guinea, the eighteenth hell of sugar plantations in the nineteenth fever abolition, in the early twentieth that of marching strikes and, at the dawn of XXI, the mare desperadoes of false modernity.