Empire and Underworld : : Captivity in French Guiana / / Miranda Frances Spieler.
In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles-outcasts of the new French citizenry-and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between...
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Superior document: | Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012 |
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Place / Publishing House: | Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2012] ©2011 |
Year of Publication: | 2012 |
Language: | English |
Series: | Harvard Historical Studies ;
174 |
Online Access: | |
Physical Description: | 1 online resource :; 2 maps, 2 tables |
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Other title: | Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Leaving the Republic -- Chapter 2. Strange Dominion -- Chapter 3. Free Soil -- Chapter 4. Missing Persons -- Chapter 5. Idea for a Continent -- Chapter 6. Local Arrangements -- Chapter 7. The Enormous Room -- Chapter 8. Metastasis -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index |
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Summary: | In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles-outcasts of the new French citizenry-and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between colonial officials, planters, and others, ranging from deported political enemies to convicts, ex-convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, non-European immigrants, and Maroons (descendants of fugitive slaves in the forest). She finds that at a time when France was advocating the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Guiana's exiles were stripped of their legal identities and unmade by law, becoming nonpersons living in limbo.The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but as Spieler shows, it also invented the noncitizen-the person whose rights were nonexistent. Empire and Underworld discovers in Guiana's wilderness a haunting prehistory of current moral dilemmas surrounding detainees of indeterminate legal status. Pairing the history of France with that of its underworld and challenging some of the century's most influential theorists from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault, Spieler demonstrates how rights of the modern world can mutate into an apparatus of human deprivation. |
Format: | Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web. |
ISBN: | 9780674062870 9783110288995 9783110293715 9783110288971 9783110374889 9783110374919 9783110442205 9783110459517 9783110662566 |
DOI: | 10.4159/harvard.9780674062870 |
Access: | restricted access |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
Statement of Responsibility: | Miranda Frances Spieler. |