From Antillanité to the Archipelagic

The pervasive patterns of neocolonialism long at work in the Francophone Caribbean, whereby the islands have been overseas departments of France for over seventy-five years, operate through a strategic metropolitan praxis of prohibition and exclusion that has long undermined a functional framework that enables and valorizes local sociocultural self-affirmation. While France has effectively sought to efface Guadeloupean and Martinican discourses of nationalism by integrating them into an overarching metropolitan framework of domination of the Other and the disavowal of difference, carried out as part and parcel of a universalizing French policy of ethnopolitical homogeneity, the articulation of nationalist counterdiscourses and cartographies of resistance aimed at asserting the vibrancy and independence of a Franco-Caribbean identity have strategically shifted over time from the purely political to the domains of cultural identity and its corollaries of philosophy and performance.