(Re)Reading Contacts of civilizations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, by Michel Leiris. Text excerpts presented by Jean-Luc Bonniol and Ary Gordien

Abstract

On this first issue of Appartenances & Altérités, we have decided to present excerpts from Michel Leiris' book, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, published in 1955 under the aegis of UNESCO. This text seems remarkable to us for the finesse and acuity of its analysis of societies that are historically structured by racial criteria, and for its theoretical intuitions, which were far ahead of their time, at least for French research, in the field of race relations. This text is part of a UNESCO long-term action, engaged at the end of the Second World War, after the Nazi horrors, reflecting on the issue of race. This is evidenced by the declarations on race that followed one another from 1950 to 1967, which are evoked in the interview with Jean Benoist, who participated in the 1964 Moscow conference and in the declaration that resulted therefrom. The issue also includes a series of publications commissioned from top researchers, such as C. Lévi-Strauss, who wrote his famous Race and History (1952) for the occasion, but also Michel Leiris himself, with a text entitled Race and Civilization, published a year earlier, in 1951. At the very end of the 1940s, Leiris already had a recognized literary body of work and a substantial ethnographic background, from his collaboration with Marcel Griaule and the publication of his essay, both literary and scientific, L'Afrique fantôme (1934). It was in this capacity that he was approached by UNESCO, seeking after collaborators for its program on the issue of race, at the instigation of Alfred Métraux, then director of the program, and wrote a preliminary note on "the social causes of race prejudice" ("les causes sociales du préjugé de race"). 2In the early 1950s, the French West Indies, "old colonies" because they were the remnants of the first French colonial empire established in the 17th century, as well as (Re)Reading Contacts of civilizations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, by Michel...