La construction d'une mémoire historique à la Martinique : du schœlchérisme au marronisme

Abstract

M.-J. Jolivet — The Construction of an Historical Memory in Martinique. In making Schoelcher the white liberating hero, embued with the power of cleansing the colonial power of its sin of slavery, officiai history responded to the neces-sities of the politics of assimilation. The construction of a particularly ' Creole' identity, i.e. rooted in the slave trade (but not merely the African slave trade), requires an entirely different representation of this history. Lacking a singular hero who could be seen as responsible for a founding epic, the people of Martinique reorganized their 'historical memory' around the collective hero constituted by the slaves in each of their revolts. But in privileging only the hitherto obscured bright moments of the past, this memory maintains contradictory relations with the collective memory which resulted from the daily experience of servile reality and the plantation System. The future of Martinique's identity no doubt rests largely on the evolution of these relations.