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Public Culture 130 turn converged with a growing preoccupation with the historical memory of slav- ery, colonial violence, and anticolonial struggles in Martinique. Public debates unfolded over official commemorations and the state’s historical responsibility for past harms perpetrated against Antillean peoples.74 In Martinique there emerged a broad consensus that traversed classes and ide- ological positions and combined the rejection of cultural assimilation, an affirma- tion of regional specificity, and a commitment to ongoing integration within the French Republic. Popular support for the existence of a distinct “nation” grew, while the prospects of national independence or formal autonomy virtually disap- (Paris: Seuil, 1981); Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) (Paris: Gallimard/Presses Universitaires Créoles, 1989); Raphaël Confi- ant, Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Aimé Césaire: A Paradoxical Crossing of the Century) (Paris: Stock, 1993); Maryse Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” Yale French Studies, no. 83 (1993): 121 – 35; J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and Lucien Taylor, “Creolité Bites,” Transition, no. 74 (1997): 124 – 61; Burton, “Idea of Difference”; Giraud, “De la négritude à la créolité”; Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Man- grove,” Cultural Anthropology 12 (1997): 3 – 36; David A. B. Murray, “The Cultural Citizen: Nega- tions of Race and Language in the Making of Martiniquais,” Anthropological Quarterly 70 (1997): 79 – 90; Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices, 67 – 104. 74. Such debates marked commemorations in 1998 of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. This memorial spirit informed the 2001 loi Taubira, which classified slavery as a crime against humanity and mandated that the history of slavery be taught in French public schools. Fol- lowing the recommendations of the Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, whose president was Maryse Condé, President Jacques Chirac established May 10 as an official holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery. The politics of memory also surrounded protests against the reprehensible Article 4 of the law of February 23, 2005, which publicly recognized the “positive” aspects of overseas French colonialism and mandated that they be taught to French schoolchildren. During this period a small but vocal campaign by Antilleans to demand that the state pay reparations to the descendants of French slaves emerged. Beriss, Black Skin, French Voices, 25 – 33, 51 – 54; Laurent Dubois, A Col- ony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787 – 1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 423 – 38; Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l’esclavage et de leurs abolitions (Memories of the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Their Abolition), April 12, 2005, www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports -publics/054000247/index.shtml; Françoise Vergès, La mémoire enchaînée: Questions sur l’esclavage (Chained Memory: Questions about Slavery) (Paris: Michel, 2006); and in Esprit, no. 332 (2007), a special issue titled “Antilles: La république ignorée,” see Daniel Maximin, Stéphane Pocrain, and Christiane Taubira, “Quelle mémoire de l’esclavage? Table ronde” (“Which Memory of Slavery? Roundtable”), 62 – 70; Élisabeth Landi and Silyane Larcher, “La mémoire coloniale vue de Fort-de-France” (“Colonial Memory from the Perspective of Fort-de-France”), 84 – 97; Fred Constant, “Pour une lecture sociale des revendications mémorielles ‘victimaires’ ” (“Toward a Social Reading of ‘Victims’ Memorial Demands”), 105 – 16; and Patrick Weil, “Politique de la mémoire: L’interdit et la commémoration” (“Politics of Memory: Prohibition and Commemora- tion”), 124 – 43.