Slavery with a Smile

This article is an analysis of the 2011 French comedy, Case départ, in which two contemporary black Frenchmen are sent back in time to the eighteenth-century Caribbean and endure slavery and captivity. The film is placed in the contexts (amnesic and controversial) of the historical and public memory of the French Atlantic slave trade, of the (paucity of) its cinematic representation(s), and of the cultural production of French comedy, particularly in relation to ethnic minorities. After an examination of the film’s reception in the Caribbean, the textual dimension is explored in relation to humour and the communities of laughter the film summons in relation to national identity, and to the time travel genre, via Freud, and Homi Bhabha

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Comedy · Literature · Psychoanalysis · African history and culture studies · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Psychology