French and Francophone Studies seminar

BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives

Abstract

In this talk I offer an overview of my current book project on the memorialization of post-war migration from Martinique and Guadeloupe to mainland France. My monograph, BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives: Literature, Memory and Migration (contracted with Edinburgh University Press), investigates the BUMIDOM, the state-organized migration scheme which brought 160,000 workers from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and French Guiana to mainland France between 1963 and 1982. I argue that the French government has not sufficiently commemorated the BUMIDOM and acknowledged its impacts, because this would mean admitting that participants, who were French citizens, were treated as racialized migrants and second-class citizens. Through a series of original case studies spanning novels, films, life writing, bande dessinée, children’s fiction, and music, the study demonstrates that it is writers, artists, and other cultural practitioners who have responded to this lack of any adequate state representation, and are undertaking this important memory work themselves.

About the presenter

Dr Antonia Wimbush is Lecturer in Global French Studies at the University of Melbourne. She was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Film at the University of Liverpool, where she investigated cultural responses to post-war migration from the French Caribbean to mainland France. Her first monograph, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021. Other research interests include gender, sexuality, and bodily experiences, and in 2021 she co-edited Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture, published with Peter Lang.

For more information, contact: Dr Victoria Souliman (victoria.souliman@sydney.edu.au)

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