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Doris L. Garraway, Catherine A. Reinhardt. Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean.(Polygons: Cultural Diversities and Intersections.) New York: Berghahn Books. 2006. Pp. xiii, 202. $70.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 4, October 2008, Pages 1121–1122, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.4.1121-a
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In this book, Catherine A. Reinhardt examines late eighteenth-century French literary representations of slavery and slave resistance in the context of Enlightenment philosophy, the French Revolution, and radical anti-slavery movements in the Caribbean colonies. Her aim is to counter the current official French memory of abolition, which in her view attributes the definitive end of slavery to French abolitionism and the Enlightenment legacy rather than to the autonomous agency of the slaves themselves. Framing her study through a discussion of the debates surrounding the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the second abolition of slavery in 1848, Reinhardt maintains that the contemporary commemoration occults the local history of Caribbean resistance in favor of a celebration of Enlightenment ideals. By returning to eighteenth-century literary and archival sources, she sets out to demonstrate the roots of that forgetting by revealing the ambiguity of Enlightenment representations of slavery and slave resistance, as well as the suppressed contributions of slaves to the discourses and practices of emancipation.
