Presentation of French Guiana (original) (raw)
Related papers
The dichotomy of universalism and particularism in French Guiana
2016
December 2015 was a landmark in the political history of French Guiana with the election of the new single territorial community-the collectivité unique-which enshrined the official demise of the Région and, more pertinently, the Département that had previously embodied the principle of assimilation of this South American French territory to France. Broadly-speaking, the traditional two-tier system-which exists all over metropolitan France, although, in contrast to those overseas, mainland Regions comprise multiple Departments-has been slimmed down and streamlined into a single political body combining the powers of the former two. Martinique undertook the same reforms, albeit with different sociopolitical overtones, while Guadeloupe, which had turned down the offer of institutional change that was put to the Caribbean Overseas Departments in a 2010 referendum, maintained the departmental institution inherited from the 1946 law that had aligned the former colonies to the metropolitan institutional model. Guadeloupe also kept the Région which was established by François Mitterrand in 1982 and extended to the 'four old colonies' (Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique and Réunion). With the former two municipalities of Saint-Martin and Saint Barthelemy which acceded to the slightly different status of Overseas Territories when they split from 'continental' Guadeloupe. France now has five dependencies in the Caribbean region. While ceasing to be a Département, French Guiana still retains the social and symbolic significance attached to departmentalization. But for reasons related mainly to the history of its settlement, it is, of all these 'assimilated' territories, the one where administration-and more generally, French political culture-have gone through the most distortions. Unlike in Fort de France (Martinique) and Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe), French colonization was not accompanied by a creolization process
French Guiana, an Outermost Region of the European Union: issues and challenges in the XXI century
Diálogos, 2020
The Outermost Regions, ORs, are external borders of the European Union, EU. These borders are located in the Caribbean region, in the Atlantic Ocean, and in the Indian Ocean. This study proposes to approach the place of Guiana as a French Outermost Region in three aspects. From a legal point of view, what are the treaties, conventions, protocols adopted by the European Union, and therefore by France, in which Guiana is included as an outermost region. Under the economic and national security aspects, what are the neighborhood relations between Guiana, Brazil and Suriname. Finally, what kind of integration can Guiana aim for on the Guiana Shield given its historical past and geopolitical location. Essentially, our study proposes to analyze the challenges that Guiana has to face in a globalized and socially changing world in the XXI century.
After the Colonial Past: Ambivalences of Assimilation in French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s
Contemporary European History
Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.
French Guiana Between Portugal and France (1814-1817)
After five years of occupation (from 1809 exactly) by Portuguese troops come from Brazil, French Guiana was supposed to be retroceded to France after the fall of Napoleon and the first Treaty of Paris of may 1814. After the flight of the Eagle and the Hundred Days, however, the territory was to remain occupied by the Portuguese troops up to the end of the year 1817 when new French authorities could eventually be re-established in the colony. In my presentation here today, I will only stress some of the problems of this three year period of hesitations between de facto annexation to the Portuguese Empire of Brazil and de jure return to French sovereignty. • first, I focus on what it seems to be : a matter of rivalry between two colonial powers on the South American Continent – including the British, who were deeply interested in the new settlements of 1815 in the Eastern Caribbean, the Guiana plateau, and the Brazilian Empire. • second, I focus on the destiny of the slaves. Some of them were emancipated thanks to the conquest by the Portugueses, but for the most part of them, their condition was not changed by the new rulers of the colony. There was anyway a major interference, I mean the ban on the Atlantic slave trade edicted by the British in 1807 and confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The colonial lobby in Paris claimed for new attempts to provision Guiana with African, Brazilian and Caribbean slaves, and so did the plantation owners disadvantaged by foreign occupation. • third, the conclusion of this period of occupation by the Portuguese is also the issue of the territory situated southwest of the river Oyapock, which was reconfigured by the re-drawing of frontiers in 1814-1817 into a Franco-Brazilian disputed zone for more or less a century : the so-called " contesté " finally obtained by Brazil at the beginining of the twentieth century after an international arbitration ruled by Switzerland.
2015
This thesis addresses the contemporary cultural history of French Guiana (Guyane fran�aise), an ?overseas department? of France and ?ultraperipheral region? of the European Union in South America. Historiographical frameworks of metropole-colony and of the ?French West Indies? (Burton, 1995) have trapped Guyane in historical marginality. I contend that, when studied in the regional context of the Amazonian Guianas as well as in relation to the Caribbean and in terms of its postcolonial or neo-colonial relationship with France, Guyane?s history during this period offers a new and important perspective on postcolonial relationships and identities.The thesis focuses on the period since 1946, when the French government attempted to transpose plans for post-war modernisation and development onto this geographically Amazonian territory. It draws upon archival sources, oral histories and ethnographic analyses to explore how state visions of the place and its future interacted with locally-...