At the Limits of Memory

Legacies of Slavery in the Francophone World

Edited by Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson

Liverpool University Press

Francophone Postcolonial Studies LUP

A pioneering volume that brings recent debates about the memorialisation of slavery that have occurred in an anglophone context to Francophone Studies.
Contributors include Francoise Verges, president of the Comité pour la Mémoire et l'Histoire de l'Esclavage.
Essential reading for slavery, French and Francophone and postcolonial studies scholars.

At the Limits of Memory

Legacies of Slavery in the Francophone World

Edited by Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson

Liverpool University Press

Francophone Postcolonial Studies LUP

Description

Recent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France's growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.

At the Limits of Memory

Legacies of Slavery in the Francophone World

Edited by Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson

Liverpool University Press

Francophone Postcolonial Studies LUP

1. Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson, 'Slavery and its Legacies: Remembering Labour Exploitation in the Francophone World'

Part One: The Limits of Memorialization: Commemoration, Musealization and Patrimony

2. Christine Chivallon, 'Representing the Slave Past: The Limits of Museographical and Patrimonial Discourses'
3. Catherine Reinhardt, 'Telling Stories of Slavery: Cultural Re-appropriations of Slave Memory in the French Caribbean Today'
4. Nicola Frith, 'The Art of Reconciliation: The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes'
5. Renaud Hourcade, 'Shaping Representations of the Past in a Former Slave-Trade Port: Slavery Remembrance Day (10 May) in Nantes'
6. Kate Hodgson, 'Haiti and the Memorial Discourses of Slavery After 1804'

Part Two: Beyond the Abolitionist Moment: Memories and Counter-Memories of Labour Exploitation

7. Charles Forsdick, 'Cette île n'est pas une île: Situating Gorée'
8. Srilata Ravi, 'Multiple Memories: Slavery and Indenture in Mauritian Literature in French'
9. Sontonyé Omuku, 'Speaking of Slavery: Representations of Domestic Slavery in the Oral Epics of Francophone West Africa'
10. Inès Mrad Dali, 'From Forgetting to Remembrance: Slavery and Forced Labour in Tunisia'
11. Claire Griffiths, 'Imaging the Present: An Iconography of Slavery in Contemporary African Art'
12. Françoise Vergès, Cartographies of Memory, Politics of Emancipation

Bibliography
Index

At the Limits of Memory

Legacies of Slavery in the Francophone World

Edited by Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson

Liverpool University Press

Francophone Postcolonial Studies LUP

Author Information

Nicola Frith is a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and author of The French Colonial Imagination: Writing the Indian 'Mutiny' from Second Empire to Third Republic (Lexington Books, 2014).
Kate Hodgson is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French at the University of Liverpool.

Contributors:

Christine Chivallon is an anthropologist and a geographer, and is the Research Director of the CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research) in France. Her last book is L'esclavage, du souvenir à la mémoire. Contribution à une anthropologie de la Caraïbe (2012).
Catherine Reinhardt teaches at Chapman University and is currently working on a chapter entitled 'Remembering and Imagining Slavery: Postcolonial Identities and the Memorial Landscape in the Eastern Caribbean', in Anna Scacchi's and Elisa Bordin's Transatlantic Memories of Slavery: Reimagining the Past, Changing the Future (forthcoming in Cambria Press).
Nicola Frith is a Chancellor's Fellow and AHRC Leadership Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and is working on a project entitled 'Mapping Memories of Slavery: Commemoration, Community and Identity in Contemporary France', which is funded by the AHRC. She is the author of a monograph entitled The French Colonial Imagination: Writing the Indian Uprisings, 1857-1858, from Second Empire to Third Republic (2014).
Renaud Hourcade is a postdoctoral researcher with the CURAPP-CNRS, Amiens. He recently published a book on memorialization processes in the former slave trade ports, entitled Les ports négriers face à leur histoire. Politiques de la mémoire à Nantes, Bordeaux et Liverpool (2014).
Kate Hodgson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool and is working on a project entitled 'Haiti and the International Politics of Anti-Slavery', which is funded by the British Academy. Her latest publication is 'Dedicated to the Sound Politicians of all the Trading Nations of Europe' in Lovejoy and Schwarzs' Slavery, Abolition and the Transition to Colonialism in Sierra Leone (2014).
Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool and the Arts and Humanities Research Council Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures'.
Srilata Ravi is Professor of French at the University of Alberta and the author of Rethinking Global Mauritius: Critical Essays on Mauritian Literatures and Cultures (2013).
Sotonye Omuku completed her PhD at UCL in 2013 on a project looking at 'Representations of slavery and the slave trade in Francophone West African literature'.
Inès Mrad Dali is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Sousse in Tunisia. Her latest publication a review of Terence Walz et Kenneth M. Cuno's Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean in Naqd, Ecritures historiennes du Maghreb et du Machreq (2014).
Claire Griffiths is Professor of Francophone Studies and Head of Modern Languages at the University of Chester. Her most recent publications include Contesting Historical Divides in Francophone Africa (2013) and Globalizing the Postcolony: Gender and Development in Francophone Africa (2011).
Françoise Vergès holds the Chair 'Global South(s)' at the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris. Her most recent publication is 'The Sound Like A Rumour' in Kader Attia's Transformations (2014).