Banned Books and Counterfeit Notes: Reading and Writing Against the Penal Colony in French Guiana

Banned Books and Counterfeit Notes examines how convicts sent to France’s overseas penal colony in French Guiana used the colonial postal system together with other, unofficial means of communication, to document and challenge lived experiences of transportation and forced labour. Identifying a series of ‘counterfeit notes’, the forensic aim of the book is to refocus attention on different forms of writing, and reading (including the ‘banned books’ indicated in the title), which occur insid...