Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana

Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana

by Miranda Frances Spieler
ISBN-10:
0674057546
ISBN-13:
9780674057548
Pub. Date:
04/23/2012
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10:
0674057546
ISBN-13:
9780674057548
Pub. Date:
04/23/2012
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana

Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana

by Miranda Frances Spieler

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Overview

In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles—outcasts of the new French citizenry—and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between colonial officials, planters, and others, ranging from deported political enemies to convicts, ex-convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, non-European immigrants, and Maroons (descendants of fugitive slaves in the forest). She finds that at a time when France was advocating the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Guiana’s exiles were stripped of their legal identities and unmade by law, becoming nonpersons living in limbo.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but as Spieler shows, it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. Empire and Underworld discovers in Guiana’s wilderness a haunting prehistory of current moral dilemmas surrounding detainees of indeterminate legal status. Pairing the history of France with that of its underworld and challenging some of the century’s most influential theorists from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault, Spieler demonstrates how rights of the modern world can mutate into an apparatus of human deprivation.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674057548
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 04/23/2012
Series: Harvard Historical Studies , #174
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Miranda Frances Spieler is Associate Professor at the American University of Paris and Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Table of Contents

Map: French Guiana, 1789-1870 x

Introduction 1

1 Leaving the Republic 17

2 Strange Dominion 38

3 Free Soil 60

4 Missing Persons 81

5 Idea for a Continent 111

6 Local Arrangements 134

7 The Enormous Room 160

8 Metastasis 190

Conclusion 219

Appendix 225

Notes 231

Acknowledments 277

Index 279

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