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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 12 9 They warned that France would abandon its départements d’outre-mer (DOMs) and that Martinique’s economic security, social protections, and acquired rights would disappear.71 This political diagram changed again when in May 1981, following François Mitterrand’s presidential election, Césaire declared a moratorium on efforts to change Martinique’s legal status. This decision to collaborate with the metro- politan state was inspired by the Socialist government’s policy of decentralization through which substantial administrative powers devolved from Paris to organs of local governance in the DOMs. Decentralization, which officially sanctioned the regional “right to difference,” also funded Antillean cultural associations, media outlets, and programs to support cultural diversity and raise cultural conscious- ness.72 The 1980s and 1990s were indeed decades of intensive cultural reclama- tion marked by vigorous debates among metropolitan and overseas Antillean intellectuals and activists over cultural authenticity, whether refracted through négritude, antillanité, or créolité.73 Beginning in the late 1990s, this culturalist 71. On Gaullism in Martinique, see Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 129 – 38; Daniel, “L’éspace politique,” 240 – 47; and Nicolas, Histoire de la Martinique, 64 – 85, 178 – 242. A survey of Antil- lean leaders conducted by Arvin W. Murch in the late 1960s indicated a high level of support for departmental status (“Political Integration as an Alternative to Independence in the French Antilles,” American Sociological Review 33 [1968]: 544 – 62). Such concerns led the Martinican public to vote against François Mitterrand in the May 1981 presidential elections despite the close alliance between the PPM and the French Socialist Party. William F. S. Miles, “Mitterrand in the Caribbean: Social- ism (?) Comes to Martinique,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 27, no. 3 (1985): 63 – 79. The same dynamic appears to have been at work in the December 7, 2003, referendum on whether to create a single territorial council, which was defeated by an electorate reluctant to make any adjustment to the department’s legal status. See Justin Daniel, “Les élus face à la réforme insti- tutionnelle et à l’acte II de la décentralisation: La difficile conciliation d’aspirations contradictoires” (“Elected Representatives Confronted with Institutional Reform and Act 2 of Decentralization: The Difficulty of Reconciling Contradictory Aspirations”), and Ulrike Zander, “La consultation du 7 décembre 2003 et les manifestations d’inquiétude de l’opinion martiniquaise” (“The Referendum of 7 December 2003 and Expressions of Anxiety in Martinican Public Opinion”), in Entre assimila- tion et émancipation: L’outre-mer français dans l’impasse? (Between Assimilation and Emancipa- tion: Overseas France at an Impasse?), ed. Thierry Michalon (Paris: Les Perséides, 2006), 113 – 31, 132 – 51. On this dynamic at work in Réunion, see Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 123 – 84. 72. Miles, Elections and Ethnicity, 230 – 46; Constant, La retraite aux flambeaux, 141 – 221; Daniel, “L’espace politique martiniquais,” 233 – 37, 247 – 52; Yves Bernabé, Viviane Capgras, and Pascal Murgier, “Les politiques culturelles à la Martinique depuis la décentralisation” (“Cultural Policies in Martinique since Decentralization”), in Constant and Daniel, 1946 – 1996, 133 – 52; David Blatt, “Immigrant Politics in a Republican Nation,” in Postcolonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (New York: Routledge, 1997), 40 – 58. 73. Alain Blérald, Négritude et politique aux Antilles (Negritude and Policy in the Antilles) (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1981); Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Antillean Discourse)