Differing Narratives of the Case of the Jaham Brothers and its Aftermath: Enslavement, Emancipation and their Legacies in Martinique (original) (raw)

This article summarizes the results of two research projects, one about historical slavery and post-emancipation in Martinique (as part of a comparative work referring also to Cuba 1) and one about sites of memory of enslavement on the same island (as part of a study about such sites in France and Spain, Martinique and Cuba). The first project led to the latter. Travelling from archive to archive and town to town on both sides of the Atlantic, I came across many sites connected with the history of the enslavement of Africans where this past was silenced completely or narrated in a distorted version. For instance, tourist sites on former plantations in Cuba, such as Manaca near Trinidad, marginalize enslavement, omit the enslaved as subjects of history and sell dolls representing Afro-Cubans in a racist, caricatured manner. This happens even though the official discourse on Cuban national history defines rebellions of the enslaved as precursors of independence and the socialist revolution (which is, moreover, itself a simplified narrative of a complex history) and the socialist regime pretends to have overcome racism. In the municipal museum of Colón, the museum's guide told me that Chinese labourers had been introduced to Cuba "because they were more intelligent than Africans". In Martinique a Musée de la canne presents sugar production as a technological process in the language used by enslavers and colonial state authorities without focusing on the agency and resistance of the enslaved. 2 Spanish museums such as the Museo de América in Madrid or the Museu de Note: This article is based on the research project 'Memories of Atlantic Slavery' funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation, project no. 393718958). I thank Michael Glencross for the revision of the text and his valuable help with the translations from French to English.