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.
he author criticizes scholarship by Trevor Burnard and attempts to demonstrate the need to systematize a framework that captures the complexity of West Indian social structure and looks beyond the most visceral racial divide on the one hand or the merely local on the other. Burnard, in his recent book on Thomas Thistlewood, the eighteenth-century Jamaican overseer, pen-keeper, and slaveowning diarist, notes the spirit of egalitarianism that existed among Whites in Jamaica and the absence of class conflict among them, despite clear socioeconomic differences. The argument is clearly correct on a number of points, and not without significant merit and insight, Green argues. The fact that race trumped class in the White créole imagination and that recruitment to political office was of necessity inclusive of "lesser Whites" should not in any way provide an excuse for leaving those inequalities unexamined--especially when they formed a key constitutive element in the production of empire, she continues.;
