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Editorial

Myriam Cottias, Céline Flory et Ary Gordien
Traduction de Eunice Sanya Pelini
Cet article est une traduction de :
Éditorial [fr]

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The editors and authors would like to dedicate this issue to Professor Ibrahima Thioub, who has played a major role in the development of research on slavery in Africa.

1We would also like to dedicate issue 10, which focuses on “African approaches to the abolition of slavery”, to two individuals who have shaped our understanding of slavery on an interpersonal and subjective level.

  • 1 Paris, Robert Laffont. Vol. 1: Les murailles de terre; Vol. 2: La terre en miettes.
  • 2 Paris, Robert Laffont, 1998.

2For scholars of slavery and post-slavery, the memory of Maryse Condé (1934-2024) is firmly rooted in literary works and in an institutional function. The two volumes of Ségou1, a novel and historical fresco based on the research of African historians, were published in 1984 and 1985. In this work, Maryse Condé shows the fall of the Bambara Empire under the disruptive forces of human trafficking, African colonization, and religious strife. Through the story of the deportation of some of the protagonists, she also describes the construction of American, Brazilian and West Indian societies. This groundbreaking work effectively articulates fiction and history and lays the groundwork for the questions raised in this issue, particularly about the organization of the intra-African slave trade and African opposition to slavery at a time when the latter was kept silent. There was silence both at the institutional level and at the family level. In Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer2 (Heart that laughs, heart that cries), Maryse Condé reports that these issues were not discussed in her family, but rather the memory was silenced.

  • 3 Paris, Mercure de France.
  • 4 CIRESC-EHESS/Columbia University seminar, 2010.

3In 1986, Moi, Tituba sorcière noire de Salem3 (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem) was published in a very different setting. Set in Massachusetts in the 17th century, the existence of Tituba, a native of Barbados, although well documented in the archives, is imagined. Both the positioning and the status of this text in relation to history is different. Maryse Condé explained this as follows: “Since history is factual and weighty, it is only through the mediation of aesthetics that the reality of slavery can be translated” 4. We could add that the way in which the text is read influences the status given to it. Angela Davis’s preface to the English edition, for example, describes it as a political manifesto, while Maryse Condé originally conceived it as an outrageous caricature of slave relations.

  • 5 Comité pour la mémoire de l'esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l'esclavage et de leurs a (...)

4The political dimension of slavery as a central element of post-slavery relations, in terms of the structuring of states as well as social relations, was nevertheless fully addressed by Maryse Condé in her role as the first president of the Committee for the Memory of Slavery (later the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery), created after the Taubira Law of 2001. Viewing it as an “intimate, extremely painful history”, she also saw the memory of slavery as a “duty of remembrance”. In her 2005 report5, she explained its importance by pointing out that “the vast majority of our fellow citizens who experienced slavery and its abolition continue to be largely ignored, neglected, and marginalized. These fellow citizens experience this as a denial of their very existence and integration into the Republic”.

  • 6 These include: Planters, Merchants and Slaves. Plantation Societies in the Americas, 1650-1820, Chi (...)
  • 7 Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

5Tribute must also be paid to historian Trevor Burnard (1960-2024), director of the Wilberforce Institute and a renowned historian of Atlantic slavery and its impact on the global economy. One of his most influential works – among an extensive bibliography –6 is Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire. Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World 7 could enter into a conversation with Moi, Tituba sorcière noire de Salem, because it reveals, based on Thistlewood’s diary, the violence inflicted on slaves, especially sexual violence.

6Honor and respect to them both!

7This issue, coordinated by Benedetta Rossi, takes an innovative look at the African continent. Stemming from the research program African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB), the articles in the issue show that political action (indeed, any protest, even at the individual level, is political) against slavery existed within African societies, and that abolitionism, defined as the political mobilization and condemnation of slavery, is not unique to the European world. This research re-establishes the place of Africans and Afro-descendants in the global debate on the abolition of slavery.

8In addition to the thematic dossier, this 10th issue marks five years since the launch of the Esclavages & Post-esclavages journal. In the varia section, Clara Palmiste tackles the delicate and little-known subject of Freemasonry’s relationship with color in the West Indies. Salma Hargal presents an archive: a slave girl from the Ottoman Empire named Tensof demands the freedom promised by her master and proves, as if proof were needed, the struggle waged by the enslaved in all slave societies to defend their rights. Charlotte Grabli’s interview with Mary Caton Lingold focuses on her project “Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica”. The interview shows how the cultural practices of Africans actually influenced the cultural creations of the new slave societies of the Americas beginning in the 17th century. These reciprocal cultural influences, referred to as “syncretism” or “creolization”, have nevertheless erased the bodies and voices of people identified as black who represent authentic political sites. Thuthuka Sibisi, visual artist, musician, and performer, places Black people at the center of his artistic practice. In an interview with Anna Seiderer about his “Broken Chord” project, he explains: “I allow myself to be called, a summoning from the ancestral realm, to assemble and ensemble these voices. What was once removed from the body is then reinserted into another body to make un-dead those that are no longer materially here but spiritually within and with us.”

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Notes

1 Paris, Robert Laffont. Vol. 1: Les murailles de terre; Vol. 2: La terre en miettes.

2 Paris, Robert Laffont, 1998.

3 Paris, Mercure de France.

4 CIRESC-EHESS/Columbia University seminar, 2010.

5 Comité pour la mémoire de l'esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l'esclavage et de leurs abolitions. Report to the Prime Minister, submitted April 12, 2005.

6 These include: Planters, Merchants and Slaves. Plantation Societies in the Americas, 1650-1820, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 2015; The Plantation Machine. Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, co-authored with John Garrigus, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; Hearing Enslaved Voices. African and Indian slave testimony in British and French America, 1700-1848, co-edited with Sophie White, New York/London, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2020; Writing Early America. From Empire to Revolution, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2023.

7 Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

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Référence électronique

Myriam Cottias, Céline Flory et Ary Gordien, « Editorial », Esclavages & Post-esclavages [En ligne], 10 | 2024, mis en ligne le 26 novembre 2024, consulté le 19 juillet 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/11747 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12sh4

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Auteurs

Myriam Cottias

National Center for Scientific Research, UMR 8053 CIRESC-PHEEAC (France)

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Céline Flory

National Center for Scientific Research, UMR 8168 Mondes Américains and affiliate researcher at UMR 8053 CIRESC-PHEEAC (France)

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Ary Gordien

National Center for Scientific Research, URMIS and affiliate researcher at UMR 8053 CIRESC-PHEEAC (France)

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Traducteur

Eunice Sanya Pelini

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