Date/Time: Wednesday 1st May 2019, 1:00-2:00pm

Venue: Old Library Building 2.20

The paper draws on recent fieldwork in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam, as well as readings of a wide corpus of literary and visual culture, to explore the status of French penal colonies as lieux de mémoire. The aim is, in part, to interrogate Nora’s concept, revealing its blind spots in relation to colonial history and postcolonial memory. At the same time, however, the presentation locates the bagne in relation to recent work by Claire Anderson and others on the global history of penal transportation and the existence of a carceral archipelago of transcontinental dimensions. The analysis focuses on specific sites in the former French colonial empire, establishing connections between them whilst foregrounding specific issues – of postcolonial ruination, of dark tourism, of memory politics and multi-layered, multidirectional histories – relating to their afterlives. The paper is part of an attempt to initiate dialogue around the role of modern languages in research on dark tourism and difficult heritage.