Description
Book SynopsisOverseas department of France in Amazonia and ‘ultraperipheral region’ of the EU, Guyane (French Guiana) is at the juncture of Europe, the Caribbean and South America. This collection of essays explores historical and conceptual locations of Guyane, as a relational space characterised by dynamics of interaction and conflict between the local, the national and the global. Does Guyane have, or has it had, its own place in the world, or is it a borderland which can only make sense in relation to elsewhere: to France and its colonial history, for example, or to African and other diasporas, or as a ‘margin’ of Europe?
This edited collection is the first volume to study Guyane from multiple perspectives. It subjects the enduring clichés and negative stereotypes regarding Guyane to critical examination, exploring how discourse on this DOM is, and has been, formed and how it may evolve. Chapters discuss geographical, literary and cultural ‘locations’ of Guyane, past and present, challenging its relegation to the ‘periphery’, whilst also historicizing the production of its marginal status. Finally, the collection aims to outline possible future challenges to the conceptual location of Guyane and possible directions for continued research.
Trade Review'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‘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
‘Overall, with
Locating Guyana Wood and MacLeod have achieved a milestone in the study of French Guyana.’
Fabio Santos, PERIPHERIE'English-language works on Guyane are comparatively few and far between, and
Locating Guyane rectifies a lacuna in the wider scholarship by exploring what makes it distinct from its fellow “old colonies” of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion. Given the volume’s interdisciplinarity and the essays’ breadth, the short volume speaks to a wide range of academic disciplines, and consequently it serves as an excellent scholarly primer on Guyane, its colonial legacy, and its place in an increasingly global, modern world.'
Christopher M. Church,
H-France ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction
Richard Price, ‘The Oldest Daughter of Overseas France’
Kari Evanson, ‘Grand Reporters in Guyane: Bringing the Exotic Back Home’
Kathleen Gyssels, ‘Kor and Karnival, the carnal road of Léon-Gontran Damas: “Evidence of Things not Seen”’
Silvia Espelt Bombín, ‘Frontier Politics: French, Portuguese and Amerindian Alliances between the Amazon and Cayenne, 1680–1697’
Jonna Yarrington, ‘Producing the periphery’
Edenz Maurice, ‘A school in Boniville Political skills and “Primitives’ in French Guiana (1930-1969)’
Sarah Wood, ‘Reclaiming Félix Éboué: Departmentalisation and politics of commemoration in Guyane, 1944-2012’
Antonia Cristinoi and François Nemo, ‘Palikur, a language between two worlds’
Sally Price, ‘Maroon Art in Guyane: New Forms, New Discourses’
Catriona MacLeod: ‘Performing and Parading Gender in Guyane’s Carnival’
Bill Marshall, ‘Equality and Difference: Queering Guyane?’
Conclusion: remaking Guyane?
