Heyman Center 2nd Floor Common Room and Virtually
Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
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Between the first and second abolitions of slavery in the French Empire (1794- 1848), an autonomous francophone literary field began to emerge in France’s Indian Ocean colonies.
Marronnage, or the flight of slaves from the plantation to escape servitude, forms the central preoccupation of early Indian Ocean novels. In her reading of novels written by the first Reunionese writers, Pratima Prasad shows how their formulations of marronnage unsettle the two dominant modes of conceptualizing slave emancipation in canonical nineteenth-century discourses: abolition and slave revolt. She argues that by confining marronnage to the realm of mythology, or by considering its practice as a parenthetical interlude in the long march toward emancipation, we risk ignoring its anticolonial political promise.
Speaker: Pratima Prasad, University of Massachusetts Boston
Moderator: A. Véronique Charles, Society of Fellows
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