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Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was an international writer best known for his books about Japan. Born on the Greek island of Lefkáda, the son of an Irish father and a Greek mother, he was raised in England, Ireland, and France and immigrated to the United States at age 19. He lived first in Cincinnati, where he landed a job as a journalist, and then moved to New Orleans in 1877, where he wrote for several newspapers. His impressionistic writings about the city caught the eye of editors at Harper's Magazine, which in 1887 sent Hearn to the West Indies as a correspondent. The first part of this book is an account of Hearn's "midsummer trip to the tropics," which took him from New York to the Lesser Antilles, with stops in Saint Kitts, Dominica, Martinique, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Grenada, and Saint Lucia. Hearn was captivated by the French-ruled island of Martinique and its people, where he came to live for two years. The second part of the book consists of 14 sketches of the island, all with French or Creole titles. The book includes photographs, drawings, and an appendix that discusses the music of Martinique and reproduces the melody and lyrics of several Creole songs. In 1890, the year this work was published, Hearn traveled to Japan, where he eventually settled, married a Japanese woman, and became a naturalized Japanese citizen.
In October 1887 the writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn sailed from New York to Martinique. Intending to stay for a few months, he remained for two years. He viewed French-ruled Martinique as an exotic fusion of European, African and Asian influences, the Creole society par exellence. Describing the island's landscape, its flora and fauna, its colonial architecture and rural villages, he provides a picture of a Caribbean colony where slavery was a recent memory and race an all-importan matter of identity.
A midsummer trip to the tropics.--Martinique sketches.--Appendix: Some Creole melodies.
In the research for his book on the opportunities of the black population in Metropolitan France, Shelby T. McCloy found the treatment accorded to people of color in the French colonies so significantly different as to warrant a separate book. This historical study examines the black experience in the French West Indies -- the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Santo Domingo -- from the days of slavery and the brutal Code Noir through struggle and revolution to freedom. McCloy provides a detailed account of the black popluation's increasingly important place in the islands from early in the seventeenth century to 1960.
The first full length inter-disciplinary book to be published on this subject in English, it examines the relationship between politics and society in all three of France's overseas departments in the Caribbean. It has contributions on other salient features of French West Indian society and culture: class and ethnicity, the position of women, relations with Europe, with other Caribbean countries and with the French West Indian community in France. In addition there are also chapters on French West Indian literature and the principal theories of identity in the region, Negritude, Antillanite and Creolite. Among the contributors are French West Indian, British and Jamaican scholars.
The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti. The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.
The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.
Believed to have emerged in the French Caribbean based on African spirit beliefs, the zombie represents not merely the walking dead, but also a walking embodiment of the region’s history and culture. In Haiti today, the zombie serves as an enduring memory of enslavement: it is defined as a reanimated body robbed of part of its soul, forced to work in sugarcane fields. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, the zombie takes the form of a shape-shifting evil spirit, and represents the dangers posed to the maroon or “freedom runner.” The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction is the first book-length study of the literary zombie in recent fiction from the region. It examines how this symbol of the enslaved (and of the evil spirits that threaten them) is used to represent and critique new socio-political situations in the Caribbean. It also offers a comprehensive and focused examination of the ways contemporary authors from Haiti and the French Antilles contribute to the global zombie imaginary, identifying four “avatars” of the zombie—the slave, the trauma victim, the horde, and the popular zombie—that appear frequently in fiction and anthropology, exploring how works by celebrated and popular authors reimagine these archetypes.