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Chapter 15. Contradicting histories, memories, fictions

A bricolage of slavery in the early-modern French Caribbean
  • Domna C. Stanton
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A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery
This chapter is in the book A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery

Abstract

Now that the debates between history and memory have subsided, their similarities become clearer, notably that history depends on memory for data and evidence. Often ignored, texts that depict seventeenth century French-Caribbean slavery are not only historical and memorial (letters and diaries), but fictive in part as well (Relations, ethnographies and travel narratives). This hybrid corpus is replete with unfilled, perhaps unfillable gaps; and yet it is marked by two salient contradictions: etiological tensions between the empire’s goals of conversion vs commerce; and conflicts regarding slaves’ ontological status as thing or human — both contradictions may function within the corpus’s textual unconscious. Today, Caribbean descendants of enslaved African persons work to fill (but never close) the traumatic, haunting aporias of history-and-memory through writerly reimaginings. Chamoiseau inscribes this individual and collective quest with his own uncertainties and contradictions.

Abstract

Now that the debates between history and memory have subsided, their similarities become clearer, notably that history depends on memory for data and evidence. Often ignored, texts that depict seventeenth century French-Caribbean slavery are not only historical and memorial (letters and diaries), but fictive in part as well (Relations, ethnographies and travel narratives). This hybrid corpus is replete with unfilled, perhaps unfillable gaps; and yet it is marked by two salient contradictions: etiological tensions between the empire’s goals of conversion vs commerce; and conflicts regarding slaves’ ontological status as thing or human — both contradictions may function within the corpus’s textual unconscious. Today, Caribbean descendants of enslaved African persons work to fill (but never close) the traumatic, haunting aporias of history-and-memory through writerly reimaginings. Chamoiseau inscribes this individual and collective quest with his own uncertainties and contradictions.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. Introduction 1
  4. Part One. Counter-Memories and memories of resistance
  5. Chapter 2. “Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake” 24
  6. Chapter 3. Transforming the colonial scene of writing 40
  7. Chapter 4. Commemorating slavery during apartheid 54
  8. Chapter 5. Gothic tropes and displacements of slave rebellion in Matthew G. Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834) 70
  9. Chapter 6. The Memorial ACTe in Guadeloupe 88
  10. Part Two. The body as material archive
  11. Chapter 7. Bio-graphies in the broad sense 112
  12. Chapter 8. Looking at black bodies in pain 130
  13. Chapter 9. Performing the neurotic 148
  14. Part Three. Fictionality as history writing
  15. Chapter 10. Reimagining slavery from a twenty-first-century perspective 168
  16. Chapter 11. Contemporary Scandinavian colonial-historical fiction 188
  17. Chapter 12. The confluence of fiction, historical memory and oral history 214
  18. Chapter 13. Cinematic slavery 229
  19. Part Four. The cultural bricolage of history
  20. Chapter 14. Carrying memory and making meaning 254
  21. Chapter 15. Contradicting histories, memories, fictions 270
  22. Chapter 16. The cultural memory of Roma slavery in Europe 295
  23. Part Five. Authorship
  24. Chapter 17. “From Mary’s own lips” 314
  25. Chapter 18. Self-expression by black Antillean women 330
  26. Chapter 19. Creating a new abolitionist literature for children 349
  27. Part Six. Creative approaches to the memorialization of slavery
  28. Chapter 20. Hair and body fashion identity narratives in The Return of the Slaves exhibition 368
  29. Chapter 21. Filling the blanks in history 379
  30. Chapter 22. A people made of mud 392
  31. Volume 2. Biographical descriptions 409
  32. Name index 415
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.37.15sta

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. Introduction 1
  4. Part One. Counter-Memories and memories of resistance
  5. Chapter 2. “Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake” 24
  6. Chapter 3. Transforming the colonial scene of writing 40
  7. Chapter 4. Commemorating slavery during apartheid 54
  8. Chapter 5. Gothic tropes and displacements of slave rebellion in Matthew G. Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834) 70
  9. Chapter 6. The Memorial ACTe in Guadeloupe 88
  10. Part Two. The body as material archive
  11. Chapter 7. Bio-graphies in the broad sense 112
  12. Chapter 8. Looking at black bodies in pain 130
  13. Chapter 9. Performing the neurotic 148
  14. Part Three. Fictionality as history writing
  15. Chapter 10. Reimagining slavery from a twenty-first-century perspective 168
  16. Chapter 11. Contemporary Scandinavian colonial-historical fiction 188
  17. Chapter 12. The confluence of fiction, historical memory and oral history 214
  18. Chapter 13. Cinematic slavery 229
  19. Part Four. The cultural bricolage of history
  20. Chapter 14. Carrying memory and making meaning 254
  21. Chapter 15. Contradicting histories, memories, fictions 270
  22. Chapter 16. The cultural memory of Roma slavery in Europe 295
  23. Part Five. Authorship
  24. Chapter 17. “From Mary’s own lips” 314
  25. Chapter 18. Self-expression by black Antillean women 330
  26. Chapter 19. Creating a new abolitionist literature for children 349
  27. Part Six. Creative approaches to the memorialization of slavery
  28. Chapter 20. Hair and body fashion identity narratives in The Return of the Slaves exhibition 368
  29. Chapter 21. Filling the blanks in history 379
  30. Chapter 22. A people made of mud 392
  31. Volume 2. Biographical descriptions 409
  32. Name index 415
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