Empire and underworld : captivity in French Guiana / Miranda Frances Spieler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spieler, Miranda Frances, 1971-

Series:

Harvard Historical Studies ; 174

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Captivity--French Guiana--History.

Captivity.

Power (Social sciences)--French Guiana--History.

Power (Social sciences).

Political violence--French Guiana--History.

Political violence.

Minorities--French Guiana--History.

Minorities.

Marginality, Social--French Guiana--History.

Marginality, Social.

French Guiana--Politics and government--To 1814.

French Guiana.

French Guiana--Politics and government--1814-1947.

French Guiana--Social conditions.

French Guiana--Colonial influence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (295 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Leaving the Republic

Chapter 2. Strange Dominion

Chapter 3. Free Soil

Chapter 4. Missing Persons

Chapter 5. Idea for a Continent

Chapter 6. Local Arrangements

Chapter 7. The Enormous Room

Chapter 8. Metastasis

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674062870

0674062876

OCLC:

777266069