International Journal of Francophone Studies - Volume 11, Issue 1-2, 2008

This collection of essays probes the resonances of the sixtieth anniversary of some of France's overseas colonies gaining accession to full integration into the metropole as dpartements. This event stands out in that it marks the only occasion in European colonial history where colonies on the verge of transformation were integrated into the political structure of the former colonial power. The compound issues undergirding the ongoing departmental relationship suggest a hierarchical structure still predicated on neocolonial patterns of domination and submission, centre and periphery. From ngritude through antillanit and crolit, the deployment of various discourses of resistance and identity has not foreclosed the large-scale displacement of French Caribbean subjects to France that followed departmentalization in 1946, resulting in new ethnic and community concentrations and a certain creolization of the metropole itself. It is the tensions arising from these intersections of integration, migration and difference that lead us to interrogate the ways in which this process of exchange produces an increasingly pluralized and, perhaps, polarized metropole and its problematization of French principles of universalism.

At the origin of the Assimilation Law of the four old colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guiana and Reunion, passed on March 19, 1946, is a demand for the assimilation to France that dates back to the seventeenth-century. The ideological content of the concept of assimilation is analyzed in the speech delivered during the aftermath of World War II by Aim Csaire, the deputy from Martinique, before the French Constituent Assembly in his March 12 1946 report. A paradigm for the concept is constructed with terms present in the speech such as integration, equalization, standardization, unification. The terms show the evolution of Csaire's thinking and allow us to clarify political and symbolic aspects of the demand for the departmentalization which are quite specific to the French Caribbean. It reflects a postcontact mentality that is in contrast with the postcolonial mentality being born at the time, in the nineteen-forties, and which expanded throughout the Francophone world in the nineteen-fifties. At the end of the essay, this postcontact mentality is highlighted through a parallel drawn between today's DOM-ROMs in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean and the two French dpartements of the island of Corsica.

This article argues that in his 1981 novel L'Isol soleil, Daniel Maximin implicitly decentres the issue of the 1946 departmentalization law through staging multiple criss-crossings of the Black Atlantic. He is primarily interested in including French-Guadeloupean relations in a broader mapping out of the rhizomatic character of Guadeloupean culture. Because Maximin's rewriting of Guadeloupean history positions it in relation not just to France, but also to other parts of what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic, this article first outlines the similarities and differences between Maximin's and Gilroy's projects. It then investigates one strand in Maximin's Black Atlantic connections, his rewriting of recent Black Panther history. His focus is on the lives and deaths of George and Jonathan Jackson as filtered through the lens of Angela Davis's Autobiography, a major intertext in his novel. It is argued that, through his focus on female narrators, including Angela Davis, Maximin prophetically adds an important feminist facet to Gilroy's subsequent theorization of the Black Atlantic. Maximin's vision of Guadeloupean history and culture goes beyond both Francocentric departmentalization and masculinist versions of the Black Atlantic.

The March 19th 1946 law on departmentalization represents a milestone in the evolution not only of the linkages between France and its four old colonies but of the relations among the DOMs and between the latter and the territories which were not granted a similar status. Since the 50th anniversary of this law which revealed a certain aging of the notion of DOM, a wind of change has blown over the French overseas world, stoked by a wish among French politicians to revisit colonial history. Despite the efforts made by legislators both in metropolitan and overseas France, the opposing tendencies of a search for a common identity on the one hand and recognition for local specificities on the other hand continue to weaken the stability of the whole. One may argue that many of the challenges currently facing overseas France derive from an initial ambiguous positioning in the 1946 law and of reforms since passed. An analysis of the impact of civil servants on economic development, of regional isolation resulting from immigration laws, of conflicts of interest between France and its overseas world and of tensions among within the French overseas world reveal that despite (or because of ?) multiple reforms, the liaisons between metropolitan France and its overseas remain just as unstable as they are dangerous.

First, the acts of vandalism that have been perpetrated against the statues of Empress Josphine, Victor Schoelcher and Thodaure Baude in Fort-de-France, then the bust of Mahatma Gandhi offered by the Government of the Republic of India to the City of Fort-de-France, and finally the project of renovation of the park la Savane in Fort-de-France are the three parameters that sustain this analysis on the various strategies used to remember and reclaim a forgotten and suppressed history and criticize the power of an imposed official French colonial History in the city of Fort-de-France. This article contends that the mutilations and degradations committed against theses statues as well as the addition of new statues in Fort-de-France constitute an historical discourse that reshapes them as significant political places of memory. These lieux de mmoire in turn create a constructive dialogue between an official History and concealed local histories, and fill in the holes of a colonial memory.

This article studies in what respect departmentalization is firstly a conflictual event as much from the point of view of its claim, its reception and its development as from the point of view of its evocation. Secondly, it attempts to demonstrate that the status of France's overseas communities helps to expose the insufficiencies of the concept of national identity and destabilizes the irreducibility of the notion of citizenship. Our ultimate objective is to determine whether, despite the statutory link established by departmentalization, the effects of its application and the various expressions of its remembrance, overseas communities have managed to retain their specificities.

Sixty years after departmentalization Martinique is faced with the consequences of French-mandated modernization. In the face of such assimilationist pressures the tendency among cultural activists like the members of the Crolit movement is to invest in the ideal of a Martiniquan specificity. As opposed to an imaginary that privileges the redemptive heartland and salvaged folklore, Edouard Glissant points to an alternative way of constructing identity that is relational and not rooted. Through his references to Easter Island he has taken the exotic elsewhere of the Surrealists, Oceania, and imagined an exemplary space of errancy which opens Martinique out to a global relational identity beyond its tensions with metropolitan France. Utopian in its thrust, his imaginary focuses on what is missing in the current anti-assimilationist posturing and rethinks the idea of the totemic sacred in terms of a relational sacred.

This essay focuses on the model of Tout-monde (or Whole-World) developed in Gisle Pineau's 2005 novel Fleur de Barbarie. douard Glissant's theories, as developed in Tout-monde and Trait du Tout-monde, inform our interpretation of Pineau's novel. Like Glissant's, Pineau's Tout-monde is a totality that does not lead to totalitarianism, which establishes a series of links between international minor events that challenge the center/periphery model. However, Pineau adds to her Whole-World the crucial element of gender and sexuality absent from Glissant's theory. The study demonstrates how Pineau builds a feminist model of totality, in which women's bodies and sexual politics play a crucial role. Pineau, for instance, constructs a network of feminist intertextual relations by entering into a transnational dialogue with Hlne Cixous's texts and Josephine Baker's songs. Moreover, this essay shows how Pineau's novel extracts Guadeloupe from its peripheral status as Overseas Department by exoticizing the rural region of Sarthe, and by depicting Guadeloupe as a Cosmopolitan Center. Pineau calls her Tout-monde barbarie deconstructing the word barbare before reclaiming it as a pride.

This article examines the work of Elie Stphenson, an important cultural figure in French Guiana. The first part of this essay exposes how Stphenson's poetry subverts the word pays and how the poet denounces the negative effects of departmentalisation through a rather vigorous prose. The second part of the article demonstrates how Stphenson's play entitled Massak offers a new and surprising interpretation of slavery, where slaves are viewed as individuals and as such, they too were faced with existential choices.

This essay studies the tensions and contradictions of the change in status from colony to dpartement d'outre-mer, especially as it affected Caribbean migrants in the hexagon. Athough they became citizens in 1848 with the abolition of slavery, in 1946 they were also henceforth, in theory, domiens rather than colonial subjects. Were these migrants welcomed like the black Americans who travelled to Paris, treated as equal citizens or marginalized because of race? Was their relationship with the pays natal transformed? How did their children who were born in the hexagon define themselves? And how does literature represent the new order? Despite the promises of equality, racism and discrimination persist. Gisle Pineau shows in L'Exil selon Julia how three generations of a Guadeloupean family experience the resulting citoyennet inacheve, thus exposing the gap between the theory of equality and actual practice.

This essay will focus first on the 2006 chikungunya epidemic, then on the 1960s adoption policies that became part of the package of solutions put in place by Michel Debr, the then dput of Reunion, as a means of dealing with the twinned problems of population explosion and unemployment in the department. Reunion Island is the fourth, least visible, most isolated of the four original dpartements d'Outre-mer. Reunion seems to become significant and visible in public discourse only when it is the site of catastrophic natural, medical or political events. This DOM's challenge in the areas of health, life and equality in the face of risk must be grasped on its own terms and within its own contexts, not through the lens of Republican universalism.

This article highlights the consequences of the policy of assimilation applied in the French West Indies after the law of dpartementalisation was voted in 1946 in France. A reading of Ren Mnil's poetic and political works, demonstrates how assimilation amplifies the Antillean's estrangement within their cultural practices and everyday life. Faced with the impossibility of creating their own identity, the Antilleans mimic traditions and habits of the mtropole, consequently denying their own traditions and habits. Indeed, after centuries of colonisation, Antillean society becomes once again entangled in the antagonisms that founded it. Through several texts, Mnil insists on the need, nowadays, for the Antillean subject to build specific traditions for Antillean society rather than mimicking Metropolitan France or looking for foundations of a mythological identity in the past. By arguing for economic and politic autonomy in the French West Indies, Mnil denounces the dangerous aftermaths of the law of dpartementalisation.

The principal theme of this study is a set of French policies that emerged following the year 2000, marked, for us Domiens, in large part, by the lively national debate on slave history and on the role unilaterally determined to be a positive one of French colonization, culminating in a law, since repealed, that was baptized the Law of Shame, vaunting the so-called positive aspects of colonization. This debate saw Martinique, singular little department that it is, resolutely drawing a line of demarcation between itself and the rest of France. For it must be said: Antilleans who live in the hexagon are often assumed to be and thus assimilated as immigrants. The assimilation issue thus alive and rankling. But all this is the product not simply of policy, but of poetics as well. These issues raise grave questions with regard to the place of Antillean literary arts within the sacrosanct ambit of French Belles Lettres.

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