Tyler Stovall lecture
September 19, 2003

The Center’s exploration of the research theme “Geographies of Difference” began September 19 with a well-attended lecture by Tyler Stovall cosponsored by the UWM Department of History and the Center for European Studies at UW-Madison.  Stovall, professor of history at UC-Berkeley, presented material from his new research project on black migration from the French Caribbean to France from 1848 to 1945.  Stovall’s research seeks among other things to test Frantz Fanon’s argument in Black Skins, White Masks that Antilleans identified with whites while in the Antilles but were forced to confront their blackness when they arrived in France.  Following the definitive abolition of slavery in France in 1848, Stovall noted, the black residents of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyane were at once French citizens and colonial subjects; they tended to associate metropolitan France with “liberty” and the Antilles, dominated by a light-skinned élite and a harsh plantation economy, with oppression.  Thus, for the students, soldiers, and entertainers who were able to leave the islands, only the journey to the metropole–always imagined in symbolic contrast to the “middle passage” that had brought their enslaved ancestors from Africa to the Caribbean–could make them full citizens.  Although living in Paris did accentuate their sense of difference, Stovall argues that many black Antilleans experienced it as a significant advance on their former lives, as they forged a complex new set of identities, at once black, French, and Caribbean.

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Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director