A review of ‘Slavery and Post-Slavery’ traces individual destinies

A review of reviews. Since the Taubira Law of 10 May 2001 recognized human trafficking as a crime against humanity, a memorial to the final abolition of slavery in France in 1848 is under study. In 2018, 170 years^e A monument was declared on the anniversary of this event; Two years later, a call for projects was announced to install it in the Jardin des Tuileries. The proposed task was to read the names of the 200,000 slaves who were freed on this historic day. But how to do this on a modest plot provided for this purpose, without encroaching on the garden paths? It quickly became clear that the artists could not reconcile their original designs with this commemorative imperative. On March 8, 2021, the complaint was officially dismissed.

When trying to reconstruct the individual experiences of slaves or their descendants without sacrificing common understanding, research in history and the social sciences faces equally difficult problems. How can we identify each individual without separating him from the collective destiny, and conversely, how can we grasp the collective without renouncing the identification of individuals? The latest issue of the free online magazine created in 2019 is dedicated to this methodological question. Slavery and post-slavery. It was released on May 10 and titled “On a human scale. Individual Trajectories and Group Portraits in the Histories of Slave and Post-Slavery Societies’, he intends to tread a narrow path between the biographical and the social.

“group portrait”

Five participants try their hand at it, from Chile to Kenya via Italy, the West Indies or Brazil, out of 17.^e century to date. Approach by “group portrait” It manages to make visible what “macro” approaches seem to ignore: lived experience, the space of possibilities, the ability to act on one’s own destiny, or, on the contrary, the irresistible weight of limitations.

While such research can be stimulated by the Internet, which allows the publication of online databases of genealogical or prosopographical content, an insurmountable documentary difficulty crosses all these works. Because it is the condition of the slave itself that accounts for the impossibility of conveying his name and his history. Therefore, it is rich and coherent biographies instead “Fragments of Life”, continuous trajectories and point memories given for viewing. To reconstruct them, it is necessary to piece together scattered traces in the archives, or rely on oral interviews with the descendants of slaves – painful life stories in which individuals are trapped in their family, work community or their neighborhood. To this day, slaves are primarily those whose identity is unclear: “products” A delay in the file and a memory crash.