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How Empires Make Peripheries: ‘Overseas France’ in Contemporary History

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BlaisHélène, DeprestFlorence and SingaravélouPierre, eds., How Empires Make Territory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 272 pp., forthcoming, ISBN 9780230300590.
ChurchChristopher M., Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 324 pp., £52, ISBN 9780803290990.
DemmerChristine and TrépiedBenoît, eds., La coutume kanak dans l’État: Perspectives coloniales et postcoloniales sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), 276 pp., €25, ISBN 9782343107189.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2019

Sarah L. Wood
Sarah L. Wood*
Affiliation:
Oak Hall, 365 Fairfield Way, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269, USA
*
*[email protected]
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Extract

The inhabitants of the overseas departments and collectivities of France have, of late, been reconsidering their relationships both to each other and to the former imperial metropole. In 2011 Mayotte, previously classified as an overseas collectivity, acceded to full French and European status as an overseas department of France following a referendum. This decision to, in the words of the social scientist François Taglioni, further ‘anchor’ the island in the republic has commonly been understood as a pragmatic decision as much as an ideological one. It was a way of distancing Mayotte from the political turmoil in neighbouring independent Comoros, as well as an indicator of the improbability of a small island nation achieving full sovereignty in a multipolar, resource hungry world. The narrative that self-determination must necessarily be obtained through national independence is still prevalent in the language of certain independence movements, including that of the Kanak people of New Caledonia. But it has been repeatedly tested at the ballot box, not least in November 2018 when New Caledonians voted in a referendum on their constitutional future. This referendum – and the further two due to follow it before 2022 – will be observed with interest by other self declared nations in waiting. Some anticipate, not a reclaiming of local sovereignty in the event of independence, but rather a transferral of economic hegemony from France to China, a prospect hinted at by Emmanuel Macron during a visit to Nouméa in 2018. However, the demographic minority status of the Kanak people whom the independentist Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste; FLNKS) claims to represent, coupled with divisions within the movement, means it is very hard to predict the contours of a future independent New Caledonian state.

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Review Article
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Contemporary European History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 434 - 445
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 François Taglioni, ‘Mayotte s’ancre dans la république française: un contre-sense de l’histoire?’, EchoGéo (2009), http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/11277 (last visited 14 Aug. 2018). The decision is also in line with the Mahorais decision against independence made in referenda in 1974 and 1976.

2 Patrick Roger, ‘A Nouméa, Macron plaide pour le maintien d’une relation étroite entre la France et la Nouvelle-Calédonie’, Le Monde, 5 May 2018, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/05/05/nouvelle-caledonie-macron-a-ouvea-trente-ans-apres-l-assaut-contre-la-grotte-de-gossanah_5294718_823448.html (last visited 14 Aug. 2018).

3 Connell, John, ‘New Caledonia: An infinite Pause in Decolonization?’, The Round Table, 92, 368 (2003), 125–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. New Caledonia is (in Aug. 2018) categorised as a sui generis overseas collectivity: see Ministère des outre-mer, ‘Nouvelle-Calédonie (2016), http://www.outre-mer.gouv.fr/nouvelle-caledonie (last visited 14 Aug. 2018, and Taglioni, ‘Mayotte s’ancre dans la république française’. The appellation ‘DOM-TOM’, commonly used to refer to overseas departments and territories, was rendered obsolete by juridical reforms in 2003 which reorganised them into departments, regions and collectivities: see L’Institut d’Émission des Départements d’Outre-Mer (IEDOM), Guyane: rapport annuel 2014, 19, https://www.iedom.fr/IMG/pdf/ra2014_guyane.pdf (last visited14 Aug. 2018).

4 Although independentist movements have been more active in Martinique and Guadeloupe than in Guyane and La Réunion, the pattern is much the same: activity peaked during the 1970s and 1980s but remained a minority pursuit, and the overseas departments were subject to Mitterrand’s regionalising projects in much the same way as in the rest of France. See John Vinocur, ‘Caribbean Bombings Pose Questions for Future of France’s Possessions’, New York Times, 4 Dec. 1983; Sarah Wood, ‘Tensions of Development and Negotiations of Identity at the Periphery of France: Guyane française since 1946’, Ph.D diss., University of Manchester, 2015, 118 and Miles, William F.S., ‘The Irrelevance of Independence: Martinique and the French presidential elections of 2002’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 77, 3–4 (2003), 222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Since 2003 adaptations of French law have been permitted ‘according to the characteristics and constraints’ of each locality in the overseas departments and regions. In 2015 Guyane’s departmental and regional administrations were integrated and Guyane became known as a ‘territorial collectivity’, with a single assembly taking the place of the previously separate Conseil général and Conseil régional. IEDOM, Guyane: rapport annuel 2014, 18–21. The French statistical agency INSEE counted 259,865 inhabitants in January 2015 according to Christiane Millet, ‘La démographie guyanaise toujours aussi dynamique: recensement de la population en Guyane’, INSEE analyses Guyane 27 (2018), https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3309060 (last visited 14 Aug. 2018).

6 Ministère des outre-mer, Plan d’urgence et accords pour la Guyane: dossier de presse, online: http://www.outre-mer.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/dossier_de_presse_-_accords_guyane17.pdf (last visited 14 Aug. 2018).

7 Hoefte, Rosemarijn, Bishop, Matthew and Clegg, Peter, Post-Colonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas (London: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar is reviewed here; other recent examples include Bessard, Rudy and Mrgudovic, Nathalie, ‘Horizons régionaux et variations océaniennes des territoires français’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 140, 1 (2015), 5–20Google Scholar; Levine, Stephen, Pacific Ways: Government and Politics in the Pacific Islands (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Daly, ‘Reframing the Universalist Republic’; Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ulrik Pram Gad, eds., European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games: The EU Overseas Countries and Territories (London: Routledge, 2013); Chauvin, Sébastien, Clegg, Peter and Cousin, Bruno, eds., Euro-Caribbean Societies in the 21st Century: Offshore Finance, Local Élites and Contentious Politics (London: Routledge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Ibis rouge, based in Guyane, is well-known in the French American departments for its local histories; notable scholarly studies include Edenz Maurice, Les enseignants et la politisation de la Guyane (1947–70) (2014) and Clémence Léobal, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni: Une porte sur le fleuve (2013).

10 Burton, Richard D.E., La famille coloniale: la Martinique et la mère patrie, 1789–1992 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994)Google Scholar; Redfield, Peter, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (London: University of California Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aldrich, Robert, France and the South Pacific since 1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aldrich, Robert and Connell, John, France’s Overseas Frontier: Départements et territoires d’outre-mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Jean-Claude Guillebaud’s journalistic synthesis of the French overseas presence Les confettis de l’empire (Paris: Seuil, 1976) seems not to have been updated or improved upon in any extended scholarly work, with the possible exception of Aldrich and Connell’s 1992 summary France’s Overseas Frontier.

12 On imperial networks see Lambert, David and Lester, Alan, eds., Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. On French colonial networks, dissent and the reimagining of empire see: Hélénon, Véronique, French Caribbeans in Africa: Diasporic Connections and Colonial Administration, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boittin, Jennifer, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daily, Andrew, ‘Race, Citizenship and Antillean Student Activism in Postwar France, 1946–1968’, French Historical Studies, 37, 2 (2014), 331–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 For example, Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Conklin, Alice, A Mission to Civilize: the Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar and In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Mann, Gregory, ‘Locating Colonial Histories: Between France and West Africa’, American Historical Review, 110, 2 (2005), 409–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the 20th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Wilder, Gary, The Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Saada, Emmanuelle, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Martin, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Chafer, Tony and Keese, Alexander, eds., Francophone Africa at Fifty (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Wright, Gwendolyn, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Jennings, Eric, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940–44 (London: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

16 The book series of which this work forms a part, indeed, aims to encourage such perspectives. See also Bose, Sugata, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Green, Nile, ‘The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean’, American Historical Review, 123, 3 (2018), 846–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 In the latter category, Jennings cites Randrianja, Solofo and Ellis, Stephen, Madagascar: A Short History (London: Hurst and Company, 2009)Google Scholar: Jennings, Eric, Perspectives on French Colonial Madagascar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 229CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Jennings, Perspectives on French Colonial Madagascar, 230.

19 Ibid., 110.

20 Ibid., 106; 223–4.

21 Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004)Google Scholar and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), cited in Church, Christopher, Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Church, Paradise Destroyed, 16; 195–6; 229.

23 Ibid., 83–5.

24 Ibid., 234.

25 Ibid., 5.

26 Nesbitt, Nick, ‘Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization’, L’Esprit créateur, 47, 1 (2007), 32–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Stromberg Childers, Kristen, Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization and Assimilation in the French Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 This vocabulary was deconstructed and its application analysed in Burton, La famille coloniale.

29 Myriam Cottias, ‘Le silence de la nation: “Les vieilles colonies” comme lieu de définition de dogmes républicains (1848–1905)’, Outre-Mers (2003), 21–45, cited in Church, Paradise Destroyed, 10.

30 Ginio, Ruth, The French Army and its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization (London: University of Nebraska Press), 6Google Scholar.

31 This approach has also been adopted recently in Levine, Pacific Ways, in Collomb, Gérard and Mam Lam Fouck, Serge, eds., Mobilités, ethnicités, diversité culturelle: La Guyane entre Surinam et Brésil (Matoury, Guyane: Ibis rouge, 2016)Google Scholar and in Wood, Sarah and MacLeod, Catriona, eds., Locating Guyane (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

32 Yerri Urban, ‘Les Marrons et le droit en Guyane française de 1836 à la “francisation”’, in Jean Moomou and APFOM, eds., Sociétés marronnes des Amériques. Mémoires, patrimoines, identités et histoire du XVIIe au XXe siècles (Matoury, Guyane: Ibis Rouge, 2015), 427, 436; ANR, ‘AUTOCHTOM’. The AUTOCHTOM name is a play on words of sorts and combines the concept of the autochthonous with the acronym denoting overseas territories (territoires d’outre-mer; TOM). See also BenoÎt, Catherine, ‘“La carte n’est pas le territoire!” Coutume, droit et nationalité plurielle en Guyane’, Ethnologie française, 48, 1 (2018), 121–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Richard Price on the recognition of Maroon cultures as deserving of the same protections as ‘native’ ones in Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

33 L’Obs and Agence France-Presse (AFP), ‘Le project minier Montagne d’or “est une catastrophe”, selon Jadot’, L’Obs, 11 May 2018, https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20180511.AFP0419/guyane-le-projet-minier-montagne-d-or-est-une-catastrophe-selon-jadot.html (last visited 15 Aug. 2018); Le Figaro and AFP, ‘Guyane: les autochtones réclament la reconnaissance de leurs droits’, Le Figaro, 10 Aug 2018, http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2018/08/10/97001-20180810FILWWW00021--guyane-les-autochtones-reclament-la-reconnaissance-de-leurs-droits.php (last visited 15 Aug. 2018).

34 Wood, Sarah, ‘Silence, Space and Ecology: Representing the “Amerindian” in Contemporary Guyane’, Modern and Contemporary France, 23, 3 (2015), 351–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Sénat coutumier de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, Charte du Peuple Kanak: Socle commun des valeurs et principes fondamentaux de la civilisation kanak (2014), http://www.senat-coutumier.nc/phocadownload/userupload/nos_publications/charte_socle_commun_2014.pdf (last visited 14 Aug. 2018).

36 Lecompte-Van Poucke, Margo, ‘The Conjunction of a French Rhetoric of Unity with a Competing Nationalism in New Caledonia: A Critical Discourse Analysis’, Argumentation, 32, 3 (2017), 351CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Gérard Thabouillot, ‘Un projet politique et administratif pour l’arrière-pays de la Guyane française: le territoire de l’Inini (1930–1969)’, PhD diss., Université Paris IV (2012).

38 Rothschild, Emma, ‘A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic’, Past and Present 191, 1 (2006), 67–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, ‘Tensions of Development’, 98–132; Lam Fouck, Mam, La société guyanaise à l’épreuve des migrations: 1965–2015 (Matoury, Guyane: Ibis Rouge, 2015), 67–8Google Scholar.

39 Wood, Tensions of Development, 16.

40 Piantoni, Frédéric, Migrants en Guyane (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011)Google Scholar; Léobal, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni; Benoît, ‘Etre de quelque part mais etre né nulle part’; Price, Travels with Tooy; Sally Price, ‘Maroon Art in Guyane: New Forms, New Discourses’, in Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod, eds., Locating Guyane, 168–82.

41 Guillemaut, Françoise, ‘Un “dispositif de sexe et genre créolisé”. L’exemple de la Guadeloupe et de la Guyane’, L’Homme et la société, 189–90, 3 (2013), 163–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hidair, Isabelle, ‘Voyage aux origines du mythe constructeur de l’identité des femmes créoles guyanaises’, Nouvelles Etudes Francophones 23, 2 (2008), 129–43Google Scholar.

42 A political science approach is laid out in Adler-Nissen and Pram Gad, eds., European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games.