Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean by Christopher M. Church

Nikola Benin, Ph.D

 

Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), by Christopher M. Church explores the impact of natural and man-made disasters in the late nineteenth-century French Caribbean, where a colonial population–predominately former slaves–possessed French citizenship, looking at the social, economic, and political implications of shared citizenship in times of natural catastrophe and civil unrest.

French nationalists projected a fantasy of assimilation onto the Caribbean, where the predominately nonwhite population received full French citizenship and governmental representation. When disaster struck in the faraway French West Indies—whether the whirlwinds of a hurricane or a vast workers' strike—France faced a tempest at home as politicians, journalists, and economists, along with the general population, debated the role of the French state not only in the Antilles but in their own lives as well. Environmental disasters brought to the fore existing racial and social tensions and held to the fire France’s ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship. Christopher M. Church shows how France’s “old colonies” laid claim to a definition of tropical French-ness amid the sociopolitical and cultural struggles of a fin de siècle France riddled with social unrest and political divisions.

Christopher Church is a history assistant at the University of Nevada, Reno. Prior to joining the UNR History Department, I worked as a coordinator of the D-Lab data and coordinator of digital humanities at the University of California at Berkeley Department of History. He is also a member of the Faculty of Cybernetics Center at the University of Nevada. He recently received the Mousel-Feltner Award for Excellence in Research.