Prof. Dr. Anja Louise Bandau 

How did enlightenment discourse mold and channel the way in which the revolution of enslaved people has been talked about or silenced? And how do these forms frame how we perceive and talk about people of African descent, of black bodies today? How is the image and economic situation of a post-colonial state like Haiti related to this history? The recent debate in the New York Times (May 2022) attests to the timeliness of these questions. Finally: How do literary formats undermine or perpetuate social norms and practices that consolidate (post-)colonial societies? Does literary production create horizons of expectation and open up potential spaces for projects of abolition and of inclusion into citizenship?

My project addresses a set of tropes in French-speaking literature that helped create a reservoir of racialized micro-narratives remembering slave revolution until the twentieth century. It contributes to a cross media history of racialized conflict. At the same time, it explores in an exemplary manner the globalizing of modes of representation that can be traced up to the present as the historical conflict is mirrored in current conflicts and negotiations of citizenship.

How not to speak of Slave revolution wants to show how modes of writing circulating between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean reach out into neo- and postcolonial constellations (as the second French colonial empire in Africa, and the postcolonial memory of the Revolution).