The issue of migration must lie at the heart of any project seeking to reconceptualize area studies and concepts of identity. The fact that large numbers of people, as individuals and as part of communities, habitually move from one place to another, from one nation to another both underscores and calls into question ideas of national identity in the modern world. Part of the essence of what constitutes a modern nation is the ability of the nation-state to distinguish between those who are and are not citizens. The fact that it can make such a distinction between individuals who live within its boundaries is crucial to what makes it a nation rather than a group of people who happen to live in the same place. At the same time, the presence of foreigners within the nation (and for that matter the fact that some of its citizens live elsewhere) undermines the concatenation between legal status and culture that is the essence of the modern nation-state. Migration is equally significant for reconsiderations of area studies. How can one define a region if its population is not stable but comes from a variety of different areas? Moreover, if people tend to migrate between two or more areas, to what extent does the study of the area merge with the study of globalization? Finally, migration casts an interesting perspective on both official and vernacular perspectives on national identity. Nation-states frequently organize migratory streams, and almost always regulate (or attempt to regulate them). This constitutes a key means of distinguishing the citizen from the foreigner. This concern with regulating immigration in particular is intensified during periods of national trauma, such as has existed in the United States since September 11, 2001. Yet migration is also a decision made by individuals and communities as a way of asserting their own vision of national identity, an alternative both for the nations they are leaving and for their new "homelands".

Such questions led me to focus on the issue of migration in my contribution to the Collaborative Research Network. It is particularly relevant to the work of the team dealing with France and the French Atlantic. As our very name indicates, our team is wrestling with different geographical conceptions of the nation. Is France simply the European "hexagon", or can one speak of a trans-continental national identity? To put it another way, does the traditional distinction between France and her colonies still hold good, or should one replace it with a more unified conception of imperial France, Francophonie, or some other designation? Migration of various kinds plays a key role in the creation of the French Atlantic. Classically this is seen as the establishment of French control and the transfer of French populations, language, culture, and legal structures to different societies in the Americas. However, one must also consider the reverse flow of peoples and ideas from the American colonial societies back to the European metropole as part of this process of articulating a trans-Atlantic concept of Frenchness.

Of central importance to this process is the concept of universalism, a major factor in French intellectual life and key to ideas of national identity since the French Revolution. The belief that French civilization is universal and constitutes (at least potentially) part of the heritage of all humanity, is a distinctive characteristic of what it has meant to be French in the modern world. Scholars of French life, especially of colonialism, gender, and other questions of difference, have often been at pains to unmask the contradictory nature of a universalism that is nonetheless grounded in a very specific conception of French culture and identity (Todorov, 1993 ; Scott, 1996). My interest here is less to "prove" or "disprove" its validity, and more to explore its utility for both official and vernacular conceptions of French identity.

The history of the French West Indies is crucial to any exploration of French universalism. Martinique and Guadeloupe have been part of the French nation since the early 17th century, longer than parts of metropolitan France. As anciennes colonies their inhabitants gained French citizenship at the same time as did residents of European France, in contrast to the colonial subjects of Africa and Indochina. Indeed, as Véronique Hélènon has shown, the Antillais often served as colonial administrators, representing the reality of assimilation to the nation's colonial subjects (Helenon, 1997). Yet at the same time the peoples of the FWI were not considered equivalent to citizens of the metropole: they were, as the saying goes, "white, but not quite". The FWI had the status of a colony until departmentalization in 1946, and the question of citizenship rights was much more ambiguous than in France. Finally, racial distinctions, although in theory of no consequence, in practice rendered the nation's Caribbean residents French people with a difference. The history of the FWI thus represents an ideal testing ground for questions of citizenship, difference, and national identity, and the way in which both official and vernacular discourses grapple with such issues. Particularly useful in this context is Gary Wilder's concept of "colonial citizenship", in which one's citizenship is in large part dependent upon geographical context. In other words, one may be a citizen in the colony, but in the metropole one is primarily defined as a colonial (and, at least by implication, a "subject"). (Wilder, forthcoming)

This concept illustrates the salience of migration to questions of citizenship and identity in the French Atlantic. My study will concentrate on immigration from the FWI to France, considering the reasons why people chose to migrate, and how these choices were shaped by state strategies. I contend that immigration, more than any other aspect of Caribbean life, brought into sharp relief the contrast between metropolitan and colonial notions of what it meant to be French. Such a study can also add to the literature on immigration in general. Much of the focus of immigration studies has to do with the status of the immigrant as foreign, and how this lack of citizenship often prompts reactions of xenophobia and racism. Immigration from the FWI, however, is internal to the nation-state. Yet, because it involves a population whose citizenship is ambiguous, it not only assumes some of the same characteristics as foreign immigration, but also tests the boundaries of the nation itself, highlighting distinctions between legal and cultural concepts of national identity. It should thus help to examine the interconnections between racial distinction and foreign status, an issue central to many studies of immigration.

There remains the question of the time period to be studied. When I first became interested in this question, I was drawn primarily to the period after 1946, when immigration from the FWI to France began to assume its present massive character. However, after much reflection I decided to shift my focus to an earlier period. Consequently my project will focus on the years 1848 to 1946, from the end of colonial slavery to the recognition of the FWI as full-fledged departments of France. Studying this period presents several important advantages for the broader goals of this project and the CRN in general. These years, during which the residents of the FWI were citizens but their lands were still colonies, represent perhaps the most ambiguous stage in the history of French citizenship in the Caribbean, a period of colonial citizenship when the contrast between France as republic and France as empire was most sharply posed. This period is also intermediate in another sense, between the near-impossibility of out-migration during the slave era and the near-universal character of migration to France in the period after 1946. In addition, this was a period when notions of race and national identity were in flux in both France and the Caribbean, and studying migration during these years should help illuminate the nature of that process.

My working hypothesis will be that one must regard immigration from the FWI to France as both an affirmation of official discourses of assimilation, and as a kind of resistance to colonial status based on a demand for recognition as equal citizens of the nation. At the same time, this migration contributed to a racialization of French identity, setting the stage for the rise of post-colonial conflicts during the late twentieth century. Caribbean migration did bring some escape from colonial status, but at the same time it transferred and transformed a liminal sense of national identity from colony to metropole.

Historical Precedents and Contexts

In addressing the history of Caribbean migration to France, one must consider several contextual frameworks that shaped both official and vernacular perceptions of this phenomenon. The decision to leave Martinique or Guadeloupe for France did not take place in a conceptual vacuum but had a number of historically grounded associations. Similarly, those who organized or welcomed these migrations did so on the basis of preconceived ideas and experiences. In order to determine how both sides understood the meaning of immigration to France, it make sense to consider, at least briefly, some of these historical precedents.

Perhaps most significantly, those people from the French Caribbean who moved to France were overwhelmingly descended from the victims of the process of involuntary migration that was the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Their departure for France represented in effect a new leg of the Triangle Trade, or what some students of the African diaspora have referred to as a process of double diaspora. Just as one cannot understand the modern history of the FWI without coming to terms with its slave heritage, so the history of migration is in particular shaped by that legacy. The fact that this was not the case of people leaving their ancestral homeland for a radically new land, but rather leaving an area to which their ancestors were brought by force makes this a particularly interesting case of migration. Did the slave heritage of the French Caribbean give the act of leaving it, even after the abolition of slavery, revolutionary implications?

The question of slavery and resistance brings up the example of Haiti, to which the modern history of the FWI is so often counterposed. In a sense, Caribbean migration represents the opposite of the Saint-Domingue revolution, an embrace of Frenchness rather than a rejection of it. At the same time, one should also consider the history of marroon communities founded by refugee slaves. Marronage was a well established practice in France's slave colonies, as it was throughout the Americas, and created an important paradigm of flight as resistance. Finally, there is the phenomenon of migration to France itself during the slave era. Sue Peabody has studied the history of those Caribbean slaves who came to France during the 18th century and then petitioned (often successfully) for manumission, on the basis the Freedom principle that banned slavery on French soil (Peabody, 1996). To what extent were people who left the Caribbean for France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries motivated by a similar conception of France as the homeland of universal freedom?

Caribbean immigration was also a product of the official discourses of the French state, and these discourses were varied and to a certain extent contradictory. Permit me to outline three here. First and foremost there was the official belief in universalism, which in this period and context translated into the ideology of assimilation. Citizens of France's Caribbean colonies should have all the rights of any other citizens, including the right to travel and live freely wherever the French flag flew. Opposed to this was the sentiment, prevalent in the Colonial Ministry and among the planter elite of the Caribbean, that the peoples of the FWI were fundamentally different from those of the metropole and thus not suited to life in France. This discourse assumed different forms, ranging from outright racism to association, or the belief in the separate development of different peoples. Finally, there was an intermediate perspective that emphasized the role people from the Caribbean could play in less developed French colonies, so that ideas of migration emphasized sending them to other parts of the empire. The mission of representing the nation's civilization and culture to the "natives" would highlight their own Frenchness.

Debates about military service and conscription illustrate the interplay of these discourses about Caribbean immigration. Although Caribbean migrants in France came from a range of backgrounds, they tended to cluster in a few principal groups: students and intellectuals, musicians, politicians, and soldiers. In terms of sheer numbers, the last group has been the most significant, especially in the 20th century. Tens of thousands of soldiers from Martinique and Guadeloupe fought in France during the two world wars, and numerous war memorials still testify to their contribution. During the decade before the beginning of World War I a debate took place among military and colonial officials about the applicability of conscription to the residents of the FWI. Prompted by the 1905 law mandating 2 years of military service for all young men, this debate revealed the existence of several points of view on the question. For most military officials, application of the law to the FWI was a foregone conclusion, since its residents were French citizens. At the same time, there was much discussion about the quality of Caribbean soldiers, generally comparing them negatively to their French colleagues. Colonial officials demonstrated the most resistance to military conscription, complaining about the impact upon local economies. Resistance was particularly strong to the idea of Caribbean soldiers serving in Europe. Finally, Caribbean writers actively praised the application of conscription to the FWI, emphasizing the desire of its people to serve France. Thus several different perspectives emerged about the nature of Caribbean citizenship and its implications for the migration of citizens to France. At the same time, the French military was also engaged in a debate about the use of colonial subjects as soldiers, in defiance of the revolutionary tradition of the citizen army. This debate was ultimately resolved by the manpower needs of the first world war, which gave a new dimension to the question of Caribbean military participation.

To sum up, the question of Caribbean migration to France during the colonial period raises important questions of citizenship, geography and national identity, and race. One can regard this migration as both an affirmation of Frenchness and a challenge to certain aspects of the universalist tradition. I look forward to exploring these questions in more depth during our meeting next week.


References

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967)

Véronique Hélènon, "Les administrateurs coloniaux originaires de Guadeloupe, Martinique et Guyane dans les colonies françaises d'afrique, 1880-1939", PhD thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Sue Peabody, "There are No Slaves in France": the Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)

Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)