Remaking the Caribbean. Student representations and appropriations of macro-regional imaginaries in a postcolonial context (Guadeloupe, Martinique)

Camille Dabestani (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Panthéon Sorbonne / Géographie-cités)   will present her doctoral thesis entitled “Remaking the Caribbean. Student representations and appropriations of macro-regional imaginaries in a postcolonial context (Guadeloupe, Martinique)”, under the supervision of Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau on

27 November
2 pm
Room 0.004
Batiment Nord
Campus Condorcet

Jury

Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau, Professor, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UMR Géographie-cités — Supervisor
Béatrice von Hirschhausen, Research Director, CNRS, UMR Géographie-cités — Examiner
Virginie Mamadouh, Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam — Examiner
Olivier Milhaud Samarina, Associate Professor (HDR), Sorbonne University, UR Médiations — Examiner
Teriitutea Quesnot, Professor, Université Côte d’Azur, UMR ESPACE — Reviewer
Colette Ranély Vergé-Dépré, Professor, University of the French Antilles, INSPÉ Martinique, UMR AIHP-GEODE — Examiner
Marie Redon, Professor, University Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, UMR LISST — Reviewer

Abstract

At the crossroads of social and cultural geography, critical and postcolonial political geography, this thesis focuses on the construction and appropriation of macro-regional imaginaries, identities, and affiliations projected onto these entities. It questions macro-regional imaginaries—the ways in which regions of the world are represented, practiced, and appropriated—in the contexts of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and more specifically among young actors involved in the production of these spaces: students. These macro-regional imaginaries are analyzed as social and political objects, structured by major exogenous narratives and plural colonial legacies.

Based on a two-stage mind map survey, consisting of a digital cartographic questionnaire (2022) associated with the ANR-DFG Imageun project and interviews with students in Martinique and Guadeloupe (2023), this study highlights the processes of construction and expression of their sense of belonging. It questions the methodological challenges of objectifying vague, complex, and subjective spatial entities while understanding them through individual and collective experiences. The aim is to analyze the socio-spatial and political imaginaries mobilized in the Caribbean macro-region and associated spaces (Antilles, Lesser and Greater Antilles, etc.), but also those produced on the Caribbean peripheries (North America, South America, EU, Europe, France, etc.) and their articulations.

These imaginaries—perceived, produced, and experienced—are understood in all their plurality, through the prism of the students’ individual journeys, but also of socio-racial relations and injunctions to mobility. The thesis analyzes the ways in which macro-regional and national imaginaries (institutional, academic and popular knowledge, school) are practiced, interpreted, and appropriated by students in their daily experiences, but also as projections in which the Caribbean takes a central and emancipatory place.