Slavery and memory in French Guiana: designing the commemoration of memory at the Loyola cemetery while respecting sensibilities of history

Author(s): Reginald Auger

Year: 2015

Summary

Our paper reflects on the development of a commemoration concept which takes into account the sensibilities of descendants from the slave trade period in French Guiana. Memory of the trade period is indeed a very sensitive issue among residents of most Caribbean Islands and we use sixteen years of research at one site to present the various questions with which we are confronted in order for the local population to appropriate the spirit of place. The Loyola Habitation was located at 10 km from Cayenne, and under Jesuit rule it comprised an area making slightly over 1000 hectares; at one point, there were nearly 500 slaves whom toiled at the production of a number of cash crops such as sugar, coffee, indigo, rum etc. under the supervision of a handful of missionaries. From the remains of the cemetery where approximately 1000 people (Slaves, Amerindian and White land owners) have been interred, our motivation is to draw the fine line between commemoration of memory and glorification of history.

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Cite this Record

Slavery and memory in French Guiana: designing the commemoration of memory at the Loyola cemetery while respecting sensibilities of history. Reginald Auger. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395405)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
South America

Spatial Coverage

min long: -93.691; min lat: -56.945 ; max long: -31.113; max lat: 18.48 ;