1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910461483503321

Autore

Spieler Miranda Frances <1971->

Titolo

Empire and underworld [[electronic resource] ] : captivity in French Guiana / / Miranda Frances Spieler

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, MA, : Harvard University Press, 2012

ISBN

0-674-06287-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (295 p.)

Collana

Harvard Historical Studies ; ; 174

Disciplina

988.2

Soggetti

Captivity - French Guiana - History

Power (Social sciences) - French Guiana - History

Political violence - French Guiana - History

Minorities - French Guiana - History

Marginality, Social - French Guiana - History

Electronic books.

French Guiana Politics and government To 1814

French Guiana Politics and government 1814-1947

French Guiana Social conditions

French Guiana Colonial influence

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.