Slave-Trade Memory Politics in Nantes and Bordeaux: Urban Fabric Between Screen and Critical Landscape

Abstract

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bordeaux and Nantes were important ports for the French slave trade and colonial traffic. Since the mid-1990s, official memory initiatives and struggles between memory activists have taken place along the Loire and Garonne rivers in postcolonial France. These have led to the creation of a new topography with fresh images contradicting established myths and dominant urban representations. This article combines urban social geography with phenomenological and semiological approaches to address the confrontation of the urban fabric and local authorities with slave-trade narratives and memory practices in Nantes and Bordeaux. This comparison allows us to move past simplifications, underlining the relative autonomy of local powers within the French Republic. This approach also demonstrates the power of places and urban history, not only as stage and performance, but as structuring powers.