Centro de Estudios de la America Colonial

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv8j65s

"This valuable interdisciplinary volume offers wide-ranging essays that examine stereotypes about France's Amazonian outpost that go beyond simple images of the country as a 'green hell'."
- Robert Aldrich, French History

"The book is a fascinating challenge to historiographies of Guyane as it peels off the layers of its changing relationships with France and other places in the world, detangles its history of contact, reveals the actors involved in its many transitions from place of forced exile to high-tech center, highlights the role its penal past has played in making it "periphery", and explains what being Guyanais today entails in a globalized world of flows where local Kreyol traditions and Maroon narratives get reinvented and shaped in the context of cultural commercialism and global art markets." -- Hélène B. Ducros, Europe Now Journal


At the juncture of the Caribbean and Amazonia, Guyane is the only South American territory never to have gained its independence.  It has since 1946 been considered politically fully integrated into the French Republic as an ‘overseas department’, and is now also considered an ‘ultraperipheral region’ of the EU. It has a land area equivalent to that of a European country, but a population that would barely people a European city.  This much-misunderstood place ought to be at the forefront of French Studies, since it is the place where the republican model meets its staunchest challenges. Yet it is rarely mentioned as more than an addendum to the Antilles. Guyane has the highest birth rates in France, but also the highest educational failure rates and some of the highest crime rates. It is a place of remarkable cultural diversity, and is part of Amazonian political ecologies. In addition, a remarkable politician of recent times, Christiane Taubira, comes from the department. And yet, scholars of France and the Francophone world have most often ignored Guyane or assumed it to be relevant only in terms of the penal colony which existed there until 1953 and whose hellish conditions have shaped perceptions of the place as a whole. 

Clichés, misinformation and negative stereotypes have endured, and Locating Guyane subjects them to critical examination. It addresses how and why discourse on Guyane has come to be characterised by paradoxes and lacunae, and suggests ways in which this can be redressed. Chapters explore literary, historical and cultural ‘locations’ of Guyane. They challenge its relegation to the ‘periphery’, whilst also historicising the production of its marginal status. Finally, the collection aims to outline possible future directions for research on Guyane, as a relational space characterised by dynamics of interaction and conflict between the global, the national and the local.

‘Amerindians’ represent only a small proportion – currently estimated at 3-4% - of the sparse but rapidly growing population of France’s South American département d’outre-mer.  Yet the existence of ‘autochtonous’ communities in Guyane presents legal, political, cultural and environmental challenges to the concepts of republican universalism ostensibly established in 1946 alongside its status as an overseas department of France.  Using an Amerindian cultural centre as a case study, this article seeks to explain how representations of ‘Amerindian’ identities in Guyane are constructed both alongside and against a traditional framework of opposition between universal commonality and cultural particularism.  Through engagement with museum ethnography and analysis of personal narrative and collective action, the article traces conflicts and compromises surrounding ‘indigeneity’ and citizenship in the face of state non-recognition of ethnicity.  It argues that the politics of Amerindian identity, from citizenship rights to ecotourism, has increasingly been characterised by an emphasis on ‘ecological’ relationships.

In 1931, French press reported on a trial taking place in Nantes in the wake of violent upheaval in the South American colony of Guyane. This new colonial scandal involved a French businessman named Jean Galmot, his dubious death, and subsequent rioting during which six were killed. Guyane being considered too volatile a place in which to try the alleged rioters, 33 accused were shipped to the former slaving port, of whom 14 were eventually tried and acquitted. This was not the first colonial scandal associated with Guyane: the previous three decades had seen the Dreyfus affair as well as Albert Londres's exposé of conditions in the penal colony. This time, however, responses differed in terms of where they located the scandal and its lessons. On the one hand, the rhetoric employed at the trial in the alleged rioters' defence emphasized injustices perpetuated in Guyane by slavery and its legacies, offering the jurors the opportunity to rectify the Republic's hypocrisies by acquitting the accused. On the other hand, a literary account by the writer Blaise Cendrars, focusing on the life and death of the ill-fated "adventurer" Galmot, depicted in Guyane a missed opportunity to create a more "vigorous" French pioneer society in the Americas.

Comparing these two responses to the "Galmot affair", this article sheds light on competing colonial ideologies during the interwar period. It indicates the existence of a tension between, on the one hand, a growing interest in and sympathy for those afflicted by the legacies of slavery, and on the other hand, an emerging colonial nostalgia on the part of French and Francophone writers. The article then sets these two perspectives on a colonial scandal against the historical context of a prolonged period of significant local upheaval in Guyane between the mid-19th and mid-20th century. Little was – nor even today is - comprehended about these events outside of the particular context of Guyane: a place distant from 'metropolitan' France in terms of both geography and culture. Hence, much was at stake in how and where events were narrated, whether by Cendrars in his novel or by the defending lawyers at the trial of the rioters. The article concludes by considering recent social tensions in Guyane - and the extent and nature of their mediatization - against this historical instance of upheaval, asking what light the two events and their interpretation in France may shed on the complex relationship between 'metropolitan' and South American France.

This article reviews seven recent historical perspectives on the imperial and postcolonial production of French peripheries. These works address transformations wrought since the mid-19th century as subjects became citizens in the so-called “old colonies”, as colonized people participated in the two World Wars and wars of decolonization, and as representatives and inhabitants of French colonies and overseas departments and collectivities subsequently renegotiated their relationships with state and nation. In light of the 2018 referendum in New Caledonia and 2017 protests in Guyane, the article shows how historians can tread new paths in order to understand the reformulations of identity and citizenship occurring in the 21st-century French peripheries.