GLC@Lunch with Doyle Calhoun: “Silenced Histories: Suicide and Slavery in the French Atlantic”

Using archival materials, literary texts, and physical monuments to the history of slavery and abolition, this presentation examines an occulted history of suicide as a response to French slavery in the Atlantic world. From the African littoral to the Caribbean basin, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, individual and collective acts of self-destruction were one means by which Amerindians and sub-Saharan Africans resisted and contested French colonizing violence. My dissertation, The Suicide Archives: Literary Resistance in the Wake of French Empire argues that African and Caribbean writers and artists bear witness to a history that otherwise recedes from view.