A Hundred Years of Emancipation Across Waters: Reflections from Antillean and Senegalese Évolués

• In Event: African-Caribbean Connections

Description for Program

France’s second abolition of slavery in 1848 applied to all enslaving sites throughout the empire, including the Americas, western Africa, and the Mascarene Islands of the Indian Ocean. This paper presentation uses the first hundred years of emancipation as a temporal framework to bracket writings by Black intellectuals, known as évolués, who hailed from different poles of the Middle Passage. Despite their disparate native lands, these authors held colonial citizenship, a resultant of abolition. Through intra-racial encounters in Europe or Africa facilitated by the aegis of empire, this paper examines how writers Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, and Abouldaye Sadji cast slavery’s past beyond maritime dislocation and consequently rupture. This paper goes further to suggest how the imperial intimacies that bind Antillean and Senegalese évolués also provide them with the means to challenge the legitimacy of European colonialism after emancipation.

Author

• A. Veronique Charles, Columbia University