ABSTRACT
Slavery has been recognized as an integral but long silenced part of French history itself, a phenomenon whose present afterlives increasingly reveal the limits of reductive national narratives of the past. The French tendency, evident in the continued monopoly of abolition in commemorative practices and to view the historical process of slavery itself as an extraterritorial issue associated primarily with the history of the Caribbean rather than with that of France itself. Rouch's film suggests that the incendiary legacies of the revolution, embodied most notably in resistance to slavery, risked domestication in the official bicentenary events. Francocentric models of commemoration outlines the possibility of an approach to remembering slavery that will, as the opening epigraphs to this chapter suggest, both recognize and encourage the 'spontaneous evocation' of plural, entangled, coexisting memories.
