Empire and Underworld

Captivity in French Guiana

Bibliographic Data

ID2640367
AuthorsMiranda Spieler (corresponding author), Miranda Frances Spieler
Year2012
Pages296
Publication date2012-03-12
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueEmpire and Underworld (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherHarvard University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.4159/harvard.9780674062870
OpenAlexW564086504
Open LibraryOL29090358M
ISBN9780674062870
LanguageEN
Citations received27

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

Ancient history · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Migration, Identity, and Health · France · French Guiana · Marginality, social · Minorities · Political violence · politics and government · Power (Social sciences) · Social conditions

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