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The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white - in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic emphasis of Black Studies, examining the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. Their subjects include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. The authors focus on the ways in which their subjects have used the skills and resources they brought with them and the ones they found in each place of arrival to construct themselves and their families as subjects of their own lives, and also what new visions of self and community (or politics) have been enabled by the crossing of borders. The volume is multidisciplinary, and the contributors include a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book presents an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. It shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, demonstrate both the increasing cultural autonomy and the literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors. These Haitian French and Creole texts have been neglected as a foundation of Afro-diasporic literature by former slaves in the Atlantic world for two reasons: they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative (which is rooted in the autobiographical experience of enslavement); and they are mediated texts, relayed to the print-cultural Atlantic domain not by the speakers themselves, but by secretaries or refugee colonists. These texts challenge how we think about authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy in the context of the formerly enslaved, and demand that we reassess our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.

This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787 that was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ideas and attitudes to Africa that underlay the foundation of the settlement, and the part played by the black settlers themselves, London's ‘Black Poor’. Was the settlement based on a racist deportation designed to keep Britain white (as some accounts claim), or a voluntary emigration in which blacks themselves played a part? Once in West Africa, the settlers faced a struggle to survive against often harsh conditions, a struggle that included conflict with slave traders and neighbouring Africans. The settlement's ‘failure’ is perhaps less surprising than its subsequent re-establishment. The last part of the book looks at the nature of the Sierra Leone Company through the debate over its formation.

This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was originally published in Haiti in 1814. Jean-Louis Vastey was the best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after that country’s world-historical revolution (1791-1804). Born in 1781, Vastey was the son of a white plantation owner and a free woman of color; by the time of his murder in 1820, he had authored over ten books and pamphlets, and had become one of the most influential members of the government of King Henry Christophe. His first and most incendiary work, Colonial System Unveiled, provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as an unrelenting denunciation of racial hierarchies and colonial rule that anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Featuring an extensive Introduction and critical apparatus that provides historical and ideological contextualization for Vastey’s book, this edition also includes four supplementary essays on Colonial System written by scholars on the cutting edge of Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical issues normally approached from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. It draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma's (the former Deputy President's) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa. These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural ‘state of the nation’: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses which have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book's focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans' use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalisation and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

This book examines economic relations between Spain and Spanish America in the colonial period, and their implications for the economic structures of both parties from the beginning of Spanish imperialism until the outbreak of the Spanish-American revolutions for independence. Originally published in Spanish in 1992, the text has been fully revised for this first English edition.

This book brings to life the unique contribution made by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. It examines French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years, when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. The book offers readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in addition to which it calls attention to the lives and work of two lesser-known but important figures: Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, the book explores the empathy that daughters show towards blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. These works by French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Francophone texts, and allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women's literature in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. The book contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Francophone writing.

In 1771 Joseph Banks, John Fothergill and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. The name of this collector was Henry Smeathman, an ingenious and enterprising Yorkshireman keen on improving his position in the world. His expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married several times into the coast’s ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a ‘stranger’ bound to landlords and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman’s life and his attitudes to slavery, both African and European, as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts—Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection forged in this period between science, collecting, and slavery. The book also reproduces and discusses Smeathman’s essay describing his journey on a fully slaved ship from West Africa to Barbados, a unique account because it is written by a passenger unconnected to the slave trade. After four years in the West Indies observing plantation slavery Smeathman returned to England to write his ‘Voyages and Travels’.

Our Civilizing Mission is at once an exploration of colonial education, and a response to current anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of the ‘humanities’. On the one hand, focusing in detail on the example of Algeria, it treats colonial education as a facet of colonialism, exploring francophone writing that attests to the suffering inflicted by colonialism, to the shortcomings of colonial education, and to the often painful mismatch between the world of the colonial school and students’ home cultures. On the other hand, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education. Placing writers’ literary and personal accounts of their transformative and often alienating experiences of colonial education in historical context, it raises difficult questions – about languages, literatures, ways of thinking, nationalism and national cultures – that need to be reconsidered by anyone teaching subjects such as French, or English, especially through literature. [160]

This book examines French and Francophone intellectual history in the period leading to the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa (1945-1960). The analysis favours the epistemological links between ethnology, museology, sociology, and (art) history. In this discussion, a specific focus is placed on temporality and the role ascribed by these different disciplines to African pasts, presents, and futures. It is argued here that the post-war context, characterized, inter alia, by the creation of UNESCO, the birth of Présence Africaine and the prevalence of existentialism, bore witness to the development of new regimes of historicity and to the partial refutation of a progress-based modernity. This investigation is predicated on case studies from West and Central Africa (AOF, AEF and Belgian Congo) and, whilst adopting a postcolonial methodology, it explores African and French authors such as Georges Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Chris Marker, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alain Resnais, Jean-Paul Sartre and Placide Tempels. Past Imperfect analyses the legacies of the ‘long nineteenth century’ and the difficulty encountered by these authors to articulate their anti-colonial agenda away from the modern methodologies of the ‘colonial library’. By focussing on issues of intellectual alienation, this book also demonstrates that the post-WW2 period foreshadowed twenty-first century debates on extroversion, racial inequalities, the decolonization of history, and cultural (mis)appropriation.

Recognized as one of the most influential studies of memory in the late twentieth century for its elaboration of a ground-breaking paradigm for rethinking the relationship between the nation, territory, history and memory, Pierre Nora’s monumental project Les Lieux de mémoire has also been criticized for implying a narrow perception of national memory from which the legacy of colonialism was excluded. Driven by an increasingly critical postcolonial discourse on French historiography and fuelled by the will to acknowledge the relevance of the colonial in the making of modern and contemporary France, the present volume intends to address in a collective and sustained manner this critical gap by postcolonializing the French Republic’s lieux de mémoire. The various essays discern and explore an initial repertoire of realms and sites in France and the so-called Outremer that crystalize traces of colonial memory, while highlighting its inherent dialectical relationship with the firmly instituted national memory. By making visible the invisible thread that links the colonial to various manifestations of French heritage, the objective is to bring to the fore the need to anchor the colonial in a collective memory that has often silenced it, and foster new readings of the past as it is represented, remembered and inscribed in the nation’s collective imaginary.

This book turns the postcolonial critical gaze that had previously been most likely to train itself on regions other than Europe, and sometimes those perceived to be most culturally or geographically distant from Europe, back on Europe itself. It argues that racism is alive and dangerously well in Europe, and examines this racism through the lens of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial racism can be a racism of reaction, based on the perceived threat to traditional social and cultural identities; or a racism of (false) respect, based on mainstream liberals' desire to hold at arm's length ‘different’ cultures they are anxious not to offend. Most of all, postcolonial racism, at least within the contemporary European context, is a racism of surveillance, whereby ‘foreigners’ become ‘aliens’, ‘protection’ disguises ‘preference’, and ‘cultural difference’ slides into ‘racial stigmatisation’ – all in the interests of representing the European people, which is a very different entity to the European population as a whole.

This book focuses on the range of trajectories followed by slavery as an institution since the various abolitions of the nineteenth century. It also considers the continuing and multi-faceted strategies that descendants of both owners and slaves have developed to make what use they can of their forebears' social positions, or to distance themselves from them. The book contains both anthropological and historical contributions that present empirical evidence on contemporary manifestations of slavery and related phenomena in Mauritania, Benin, Niger, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, and the Gambia. As a whole, it advances a conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, the book highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.

This book asks why, at a time when East India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism, and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical, and popular discourses that surrounded them, it seeks to uncover the various political, economic, and ideological agendas which allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from its trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, the book uncovers tensions in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called ‘civilising mission’, elucidating the intricate interactions between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies, and imperial imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to provide a trans-national perspective on slavery and abolition in the British Empire, uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with the economic, political, and moral imperatives of an empire whose focus was shifting to the East.

Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century uncovers a fascinating chapter of British and West African social history by re-telling the forgotten history of the Kru, a group of West African labourers and seafarers who formed a significant component of British colonial trade. The study traces the Kru’s migrational flight from their original home in Liberia to Sierra Leone, and finally to the port of Liverpool, and addresses their position as ‘twice migrants’. Drawing extensively on oral accounts given by the Kru themselves in both Liverpool and West Africa, Frost examines the group’s presence in the British colony of Sierra Leone, and emphasises their contributions to British Colonial trade with West Africa. The book also studies the presence of the black and African community in Britain, and explores their presence in British mercantile trade before the mass migrations of New-Commonwealth immigrants in the post-war period. Work and Community Among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century provides a rich and fascinating account of the Kru experience in both the pre- and post-war periods, and demonstrates that the Kru are a group that have remained largely absent from histories of the black presence in Britain.

In most studies of British decolonisation, the world of labour is neglected, the key roles being allocated to metropolitan statesmen and native elites. Instead this volume focuses on the role played by working people, their experiences, initiatives and organisations, in the dissolution of the British Empire, both in the metropole and in the colonies. How central was the intervention of the metropolitan Left in the liquidation of the British Empire? Were labour mobilisations in the colonies only stepping stones for bourgeois nationalists? To what extent were British labour activists willing and able to form connections with colonial workers, and vice versa? Here are some of the complex questions on which this volume sheds new light. Though convergences were fragile and temporary, this book recapture the sense of uncertainty that accompanied the final decades of the British Empire, a period when radical minorities hoped that coordinated efforts across borders might lead not only to the destruction of the British Empire but to that of capitalism and imperialism in general. Exploiting rare primary sources and adopting a resolutely transnational approach, our collection makes an original contribution to both labour history and imperial studies.