Dual Identities: The Question of ‘Départementalisation’ in Michel Leiris's Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe

Abstract

In Contocts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (1955) Leiris's support for ‘départementalisation’ and cultural assimilation contrasts surprisingly with his previous commitment to celebrating cultural difference and to political independence for France's colonies. It can to some extent be explained by the book's being commissioned as part of a UNESCO project to combat racism by promoting integration, and by the support of the French Communist Party for departmentalisation. But Césaire, Leiris's close friend and Antillean mentor, was already thoroughly disillusioned with departmentalisation; and there was other evidence that it was not achieving the racial and social equality that had motivated the left's support for it. Ultimately Leiris's position can be explained only on a subjective level: the ambiguous identity, simultaneously French and not-French, of the people of the ‘départements d'outre mer’ (DOMs) offered him a particular kind of psychological investment in an uncanny combination of the strange and the secretly familiar.