Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean: 10 (Polygons: Cultural Diversities and Intersections, 10) - Softcover

"Reinhardt does not fail in her ambitions. Using the theoretical antecedent of rhizomatic memory and reading across the multiple sources this method entails, Reinhardt succeeds in challenging our simplification of historical narratives of abolition in the Caribbean, and our assumptions about the interrelationship between abolition and the Enlightenment...In her reading across genres and realms of memory, this text offers an excellent actualization of rhizome memory...[and] an historical account of slavery in the French Caribbean from a variety of sources ideal for scholars in the area of the history of slavery. Claims to Memory is also engaging reading for scholars in the more general areas of public memory and representation." * The Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie"What is distinctive about Catherine Reinhardt's book is the highly visible place that it gives to the decolonizing of memory in a larger theory of Caribbean postcolonial subjectivity. This makes it a vital contribution to the theory of the postcolonial subject". * Paget Henry, the Fanon Prize Committee, Caribbean Philosophical Association

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.