Cet article permet de saisir le contexte d’application des lois Ferry en Guadeloupe, et ses conséquences dans la formation d’un corps enseignant laïc, des années 1880 à 1914. Il analyse les tensions entre les partisans républicains, en particulier les socialistes, et les autorités coloniales, réactionnaires ou cléricales autour de la sécularisation du personnel des écoles primaires et ce qu’elles révèlent des antagonismes liés à la race, la classe et au genre dans la société coloniale. Cette étude s’appuie sur les (...) résultats du traitement informatique des dossiers de carrière des instituteurs et institutrices des écoles primaires publiques, et d’autres sources de type qualitatif (presse, rapport émanant de l’instruction publique, Annuaires de la Guadeloupe, Bulletin de l’enseignement primaire de la Guadeloupe et des dépendances (1899 à 1909), procès-verbal des réunions des professeurs du cours secondaire de jeunes filles de Pointe-à-Pitre, etc.), pour une compréhension plus fine des enjeux autour de la laïcisation des écoles primaires publiques, fréquentées par la population la plus défavorisée. (shrink)

Clara Palmiste : Vous préparez une thèse sur les gens du Gwoka en Guadeloupe (1930-1980). Tout d’abord, pouvez-vous expliquer l’origine du mot gwoka et nous décrire son contexte d’apparition, ses spécificités quant à la pratique, la gestuelle, l’usage. Marie-Héléna Laumuno : Le gwoka se manifeste par des expressions artistiques, des musiques, des chants, des danses. Une grande question se pose à son sujet : « le gwoka est-il seulement un amusement? ». Elle résume mes motivations aiguisées pa...

Dans le cadre d’une éthique préventive, nous serons amenés à valider toute la pertinence que requiert la compréhension des logiques de la non-perception d’un risque de contamination du sida par voie sexuelle dans la population guadeloupéenne. En passant par l’analyse des limites sous-jacentes à la séparation de deux populations, celle infectée et celle non infectée, nous pourrons avancer que la non-perception de ce risque relève d’une construction culturelle et sociale où toute confusion, qu’elle soit sexuelle, corporelle, spatiale, participe à la (...) fois d’un sentiment d’invulnérabilité et d’un sentiment de peur. C’est en tenant compte de cette réalité que les différentes instances décisionnelles devraient agir afin d’enrayer une épidémie déjà bien implantée en Guadeloupe. (shrink)

L’article se propose de voir comment ont été promus par les gouvernements de la Ve République la contraception et l’avortement en Guadeloupe et Martinique entre 1964 et 1975. La volonté de différencier la métropole (politique nataliste) des Antilles (politique néo-malthusienne) a été battue en brèche par le refus de l’Église et de certains partis politiques antillais. Les féministes ont dénoncé ces différences de politique. La contraception a été par ailleurs encouragée par des associations et des médecins soucieux d’améliorer la (...) vie des femmes en limitant les grossesses à répétition. En fin de compte, ce sont les femmes elles-mêmes qui ont décidé (ou non) de limiter les naissances. (shrink)

Le bassin caribéen élaborée par Benoît Berard, MCF en archéologie, université des Antilles. Premières terres abordées par Christophe Colomb dans sa traversée vers les Indes occidentales, point de départ de l’entreprise de conquête du continent américain, enjeu des guerres européennes pour la domination de l’espace maritime atlantique et l’exploitation des « îles à sucre », l’espace Caraïbe s’est retrouvé à la croisée des « mondes » européen, africain, américain, asiatique, dans le circuit de...

SILYANE LARCHER. — La question coloniale ne se pose pas aux Antilles comme ailleurs, puisque la période coloniale ne s’est pas suivie de l’indépendance, mais de l’assimilation juridico-politique faisant de la Martinique et de la Guadeloupe des départements français d’outre-mer, au même titre que n’importe quel département en France. Comment définiriez-vous..

Nearly forty years after his death, social philosopher Frantz Fanon remains a towering intellectual figure. Born in Guadeloupe and trained as a psychologist in France, Fanon rejected his French citizenship to join the Algerian liberation movement in the 1950s. A brilliant scholar who developed the theory that some neuroses are socially generated, Fanon's revolutionary works—The Wretched of the Earth, Toward the African Revolution, and Black Skin, White Masks—spurred an African intellectual awakening. The rebirth of Fanonism today in universities and (...) the English-speaking world is a testament to his relevance. Edited by distinguished African-studies professor Nigel C. Gibson, Rethinking Fanon opens with an authoritative biography which corrects fallacious assertions about Fanon's life, situating him in Marxism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the historical context of postwar decolonization, specifically the Algerian revolution. Section one is highlighted by extended discussions of Marx, Fanon's theories on sophisticated forms of cultural racism, and "true liberation." The next section examines Fanon's humanist philosophy, his philosophical and geographical journeys, and his attitude toward the necessity of revolution. Also included is Homi Bhabha's well-known essay "Remembering Fanon," which contemplates the seeming rejection of Fanon in Britain in the 1970s, in contrast to his major following in America and the influence of Fanon on South African writer Steven Biko. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Edward Said discuss the importance of the 1980s' and 1990s' cultural and literary debates on Fanon. Gates notes that Fanon has been reinstated -not as a global theorist of "third world" revolution, but instead as a critic of English writers and British romanticists. Benita Parry reexamines African nationalism and liberation, and sheds new light on Fanon's questions of identity and agency. This excellent collection reflects the continuing impact of Fanon's thought on African-American and African studies, feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies. (shrink)

While the field known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors — in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet ‘whiteness’ remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly (...) inflected by gender. This article sketches the emergence of ‘white’ femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers. In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha's ‘unhomely’, and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history. (shrink)

The Guadeloupean writer and critic Maryse Condé has for the last twenty-five years divided her time between her native Guadeloupe and the United States. If the author's work has attracted much critical attention in the United States, it is her fictional works that have been the focus of this attention, with these predominantly read in the light of political themes such as identity and resistance. In these intelligent and sensitive readings, Eva Sansavior argues in favour of adopting a broader (...) thematic and generic approach to the author's work. Sansavior accounts for the multiple and oblique uses of literature in Condé's literary and critical work, tracking its complex interactions with tradition, reception, politics and autobiography and also the singular possibilities that these interactions present for re-imagining the ideas of politics, literature, identity and, ultimately, the nature of critical practice itself. Eva Sansavior is Career Development Fellow in French (Francophone Caribbean Studies) at Oriel College, Oxford. (shrink)

Roots are good to think with indeed most of us use them as a metaphor every day. A root can signify the hiddenness of our beginnings, or, in its bifurcating structure, the various possibilities in the life of an individual or a collective. This book looks at rootedness as a metaphor for the genealogical origins of people and their attachment to place and how this metaphor transformed so rapidly in twentieth-century Europe. Christy Wampole s case study is France, with its (...) contradictory legacies of Enlightenment universalism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. At one time, French nationalist rhetoric portrayed the Jews as unrooted and thus unrighteous people. After the two world wars, the root metaphor figured in the new French philosophy (notably Deleuze and Guattari). And recently, Caribbean thinkers in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique have debated whether their roots were in Africa, France, the Caribbean, or in some pan-national network that could not be identified on a map. Walpole argues that while the metaphor was perhaps once useful in the establishment of communities and identities, that usefulness has expired. The longer we remain attached to the figure of rootedness, the more discord it sows. Giving up on the metaphor of rootedness, Wampole urges, allows us to see at last that we are in fact unbound by the land we inhabit.". (shrink)

In 1819, a ship called Le Rôdeur was carrying enslaved Africans from Bonny Island in modern Nigeria to Guadeloupe. The ship’s crew and its enslaved cargo were s.

Between January and February 2009, the longest general strike in French history took place in Guadeloupe and Martinique. The labor movement had far reaching implications for the relationship between France and its overseas departments. In particular, they brought to the fore France’s colonial history in the Antilles, with attendant questions of race, citizenship and sovereignty that highlighted once again the cracks in the image of Antilleans as full French citizens. René Ménil’s essays provide a unique lens through which to (...) read the philosophical underpinnings of the 2009 labor movements in the Antilles. Ménil’s articulation of “a non-mythological elsewhere” posits a three-fold process of excavating history in order to articulate a myth of origin that in turn allows for the possibility of reclaiming a non-colonized identity. (shrink)

The dynamic of social struggle in the French Caribbean What are the dynamics and the context, who are the agents of the major social movements which marked the spring of 2009 in the French Caribbean ? What is the link between the struggle against exploitation and the struggle against the permanence of the region’s colonial structures ? What differences are to be identified, in this respect, between Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana ?. These are the principal questions addressed in this (...) interview. (shrink)