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Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean,Intimate Bondsexplores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world -regardless of their status, gender, or race-negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender. Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships,Intimate Bondsdemonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.

Stagestrucktraces the making of a vibrant French theater industry between the reign of Louis XIV and the French Revolution. During this era more than eighty provincial and colonial cities celebrated the inauguration of their first public playhouses. These theaters emerged as the most prominent urban cultural institutions in prerevolutionary France, becoming key sites for the articulation and contestation of social, political, and racial relationships. Combining rich description with nuanced analysis based on extensive archival evidence, Lauren R. Clay illuminates the wide-ranging consequences of theater's spectacular growth for performers, spectators, and authorities in cities throughout France as well as in the empire's most important Atlantic colony, Saint-Domingue. Clay argues that outside Paris the expansion of theater came about through local initiative, civic engagement, and entrepreneurial investment, rather than through actions or policies undertaken by the royal government and its agents. Reconstructing the business of theatrical production, she brings to light the efforts of a wide array of investors, entrepreneurs, directors, and actors-including women and people of color-who seized the opportunities offered by commercial theater to become important agents of cultural change. Portraying a vital and increasingly consumer-oriented public sphere beyond the capital,Stagestruckoverturns the long-held notion that cultural change flowed from Paris and the royal court to the provinces and colonies. This deeply researched book will appeal to historians of Europe and the Atlantic world, particularly those interested in the social and political impact of the consumer revolution and the forging of national and imperial cultural networks. In addition to theater and literary scholars, it will attract the attention of historians and sociologists who study business, labor history, and the emergence of the modern French state.

An innovative look at the dynamic role of sound in the culture of the African Diaspora as found in poetry, film, travel narratives, and popular music. Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri nègre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today. In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas—a founder of the Négritude movement—and Josephine Baker's performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins's new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.

In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers’s book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged; and both negative and positive contributions of the Catholic Church and the military to operas and concerts produced in the colonies. The author also explores the level of participation of nonwhites in these productions, as well as theatre architecture, décor, repertoire, seating arrangements, and types of audiences. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments, praise, criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers à visage noirs (with blackened faces) present a clear picture of French operatic culture in these colonies. Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of “patriotic theatres,” and their role in fostering support for the king, as well as the impact on subsequent operas produced in the colonies and in the United States.

Over a span of thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe endured natural catastrophes from all the elements-earth, wind, fire, and water-as well as a collapsing sugar industry, civil unrest, and political intrigue. These disasters thrust a long history of societal and economic inequities into the public sphere as officials and citizens weighed the importance of social welfare, exploitative economic practices, citizenship rights, racism, and governmental responsibility.Paradise Destroyedexplores the impact of natural and man-made disasters in the turn-of-the-century French Caribbean, examining the social, economic, and political implications of shared citizenship in times of civil unrest. French nationalists projected a fantasy of assimilation onto the Caribbean, where the predominately nonwhite population received full French citizenship and governmental representation. When disaster struck in the faraway French West Indies-whether the whirlwinds of a hurricane or a vast workers' strike-France faced a tempest at home as politicians, journalists, and economists, along with the general population, debated the role of the French state not only in the Antilles but in their own lives as well. Environmental disasters brought to the fore existing racial and social tensions and held to the fire France's ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship. Christopher M. Church shows how France's \"old colonies\" laid claim to a definition of tropical French-ness amid the sociopolitical and cultural struggles of a fin de siècle France riddled with social unrest and political divisions.

Lors de son voyage dans l’archipel caribéen en 1924, en vue de l’élaboration de son recueil : Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English, la folkloriste américaine Elsie Clews Parsons rencontre Félix Modock. Cet étrange petit planteur en marge de sa société s’avère être un conteur prolifique qui participe à son projet de revalorisation des cultures noires. Alphabétisé, il fixe lui-même à l’écrit une grande partie des trente-neuf contes créolophones qu’il lui confie. Par son geste scripturaire, le conteur-écrivant introduit dans le champ littéraire antillais un répertoire autologographique, œuvre originale qui invite à repenser l’oralité créole et son interprète, le conteur, dont le rôle dans les processus de création est réhabilité.

This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years' War (also known as the French and Indian War). Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America's wartime trade with the French, New York's merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists. Through fast-moving events and unforgettable characters, historian Thomas M. Truxes brings eighteenth-century New York and the Atlantic world to life. There are spies, street riots, exotic settings, informers, courtroom dramas, interdictions on the high seas, ruthless businessmen, political intrigues, and more. The author traces each phase of the city's trade with the enemy and details the frustrations that affected both British officials and independent-minded New Yorkers. The first book to focus on New York City during the Seven Years' War,Defying Empirereveals the important role the city played in hastening the colonies' march toward revolution.

This book provides a history of the French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe from 1789 to 1802. Examining political conflict between white factions, as well as economic, social, and racial tensions, it argues that metropolitan news, ideas, language, and political culture played a key role in shaping the colonial revolution.

Édouard Glissant’s work has begun to make a significant impact on francophone studies and some corners of postcolonial theory. His literary works and criticism are increasingly central to the study of Caribbean literature and cultural studies. This collection focuses on the particularly philosophical register of Glissant’s thought. Each of the authors in this collection takes up a different aspect of Glissant’s work and extends it in different directions. twentieth-century French philosophy (Bergson, Badiou, Meillassoux), the cannon of Caribbean literature, North American literature and cultural theory, and contemporary cultural politics in Glissant’s home country of Martinique all receive close, critical treatment. What emerges from this collection is a vision of Glissant as a deeply philosophical thinker, whose philosophical character draws from the deep resources of Caribbean memory and history. Glissant’s central notions of rhizome, chaos, opacity, and creolization are given a deeper and wider appreciation through accounts of those resources in detailed conceptual studies.

Agricultural activities in the Caribbean, especially banana cropping, are known for their significant use of pesticides. In particular is chlordecone, which was used between 1972 and 1993 against the banana root borer, Cosmopolites sordidus (Germar, 1824). In this context, “Kannari study: Health, Nutrition and Exposition to Chlordecone in French West Indies” was put in place in 2013–2014 to supplement knowledge about the exposure of the population to chlordecone and other organochlorine pollutants. The data collected comprised a dietary intake description, data from biological samples (blood sample), socioeconomic and demographic information, and data from complementary specific items relative to life habits. A total of 742 subjects (292 in Guadeloupe and 450 in Martinique) were included in the impregnation component of the Kannari study. In this study, chlordecone and organochlorine compounds were detected in almost all participants. This result suggests that exposure to chlordecone is widespread, but also to other organochlorine pesticides. Chlordecone impregnation of the majority of the population appears to have decreased between 2003 and 2013, but various subgroups of the population remain highly exposed. The levels of impregnation are determined by dietary exposure and environmental contamination. However, total consumption of fresh fish (all species combined), especially from informal channels, is the main source of exposure to chlordecone. The serum PCB concentrations measured in the French Caribbean Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are lower than those observed in metropolitan France in 2007 (French Nutrition and Health Survey (ENNS)). In contrast, the French West Indies population seems more exposed to lindane than the French mainland population, and this exposure also seems more recent.