Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean

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Description

In the early years of World War II, thousands of political refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique in the French Caribbean, en route to what they hoped would be safer shores in North, Central, and South The us. Whilst awaiting transfer from the colony, the exiles formed influential ties―with one every other and with local black dissidents. Escape from Vichy recounts this flight from the refugees’ perspectives, the usage of novels, unpublished diaries, archives, memoirs, artwork, and other materials to explore the unlikely encounters that fueled an anti-fascist artistic and intellectual movement.

The refugees included Spanish Republicans, anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, anti-fascist Italians, Jews from across Europe, and others fleeing violence and repression. They were met with hostility by the Vichy government and rejection by the nations where they hoped to settle. Martinique, alternatively, provided a web page propitious for creative ferment, where the revolutionary Victor Serge conversed with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Surrealist André Breton met Negritude thinkers René Ménil and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. As Eric T. Jennings shows, these interactions gave rise to a wealthy current of thought celebrating blackness and rejecting racism.

What started as expulsion became a type of rescue, cut short by Washington’s fears that wolves may well be posing in sheep’s clothing.

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