Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Locating Guyane

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/cry071

1477-4542

Robert Aldrich,

Migration and Labor Dynamics

Guyane Française is known largely because of Devil’s Island—part of the penitentiary established in 1851—and the country’s perilous equatorial landscape and climate, though more recently it is associated with the European spaceport at Kourou. Guyane is one of France’s oldest colonies, tentatively settled in the mid-1600s, and since 1946, it has been a département d’outre-mer. With 281,000 inhabitants, it remains sparsely populated, but the territory covers around 90,000 km2, equivalent to fifteen per cent of metropolitan France. There is relatively little academic work on Guyane, and this valuable interdisciplinary volume offers wide-ranging essays that examine stereotypes about France’s Amazonian outpost that go beyond simple images of the country as a ‘green hell’. The introductory chapter by Richard Price reflects on decades of experience carrying out anthropological fieldwork, alongside Sally Price, in Guyane. Sally Price’s own chapter discusses traditional woodcarving, and the marketing and tourist efforts to ascribe deep symbolism to motifs which, in fact, are merely decorative. Several chapters look at the history of Guyane. Silvia Espelt Bombin argues that Amerindian agency played a major role in disputes—not fully resolved until 1900—between the French and Portuguese about delimitation of the frontier between Guyane and Brazil at the end of the 1600s. Jonna M. Yarrington’s fine study shows how competition from metropolitan-produced beet sugar undermined cane sugar production in Guyane (and the Antilles) in the early 1800s, and how the penitentiary promised a new vocation for the colony. Kari Evanson examines varying perspectives on the colony by early twentieth-century grands reporters. Sarah Wood’s outstanding chapter discusses ‘monumentalization’ of Félix Éboué—who as Governor of Chad became one of the first senior colonial administrators to rally to de Gaulle in 1940—with the burial of his remains in the Panthéon in 1949, the erection of statues in Cayenne and Brazzaville in 1957 and the naming of an airport in his memory in 2012. Another key Guyanais figure, the writer and politician Léon-Gontran Damas, provides the subject for Kathleen Gyssels, who focuses on the way Damas’s poetry questions and subverts Antillean-Guyanese notions of gender. Catriona MacLeod and Bill Marshall look at gender in the carnival in Guyane, the former by examining traditions of cross-dressing, the latter by theorizing about ‘queerness’. Antonia Cristinoi and François Nemo trace the evolution of Palikur, a language spoken by around 1200 people in eastern Guyane and Brazil, and Edenz Maurice charts the history of a school established by Boni (or Maroons) and the key role played by a Boni official, ‘Gran Man’ Emmanuel Tolinga.