Invisible Exodus: The Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration (original) (raw)

2004, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies

In the closing piece of the 1995 essay collection Penser la cre´olite[ Thinking Creoleness], the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, also one of the volume's editors, offers her thoughts on the revival of Creole language and culture advocated by the Martinican writers Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant and the linguist Jean Bernabé in their 1989 manifesto, Éloge de la cre´olite´[In Praise of Creoleness]. In her commentary Condé articulates in measured terms her view that, as a cultural movement, cre´olite´remains trapped in an outdated opposition between France and the Caribbean, metropolitan center and tropical margin. 1 Among the main points that she makes in this regard is that although since the 1960s there has been mass migration from the de´partements d'outre-mer (overseas departments, or DOM) of the French Caribbean to metropolitan France, ''la litte´rature de notre fin de vingtie`me sie`cle ne tient aucun compte de ces bouleversements, de ces mutations et de ces rede´finitions d'identite´[our late twentieth-century literature takes no account of these ruptures, these mutations, these redefinitions of identity]'' (Condé, ''Chercher'' 308). 2 Whether or not one agrees with Condé's assessment of cre´olite´, which has given rise to some debate, her observation that migration and the experience of ''Antilleans'' in metropolitan France have not been a source of inspiration for French Caribbean writers is well founded. 3 Her claim can in fact be extended to encompass writers, filmmakers, and scholars from non-Antillean backgrounds, who have also devoted surprisingly little attention to this sizeable migrant population. Similarly, with the exception of a small handful of studies specifically devoted to Antillean migration (including two published since 2004), these internal migrants have largely passed under the radar of sociologists and anthropologists who study race and immigration in contemporary France. 4 In the words of Martinican demographer Claude-Valentin Marie, the forty years of mass migration to the metropole have represented ''Quarante