“The Legacy of Slavery and Emancipation in Europe and the Americas”
Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe
March 9-11, 2001

The institution of slavery lasted for nearly 400 years in the Americas, and was a crucial force in the development of the nations of Western Europe and the United States. It was a system that depended on, and propelled, the creation and maintenance of racial hierarchies, and it laid the foundation for contemporary attitudes towards and ideas about race in the Americas and Europe. Recently, scholarship in this area has expanded enormously, elucidating a great deal about the social, economic, and political causes and consequences of slavery and emancipation. Yet, understanding the connections between these issues and contemporary problems of race/integration is a complex task. The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the legacy of slavery and emancipation. How did systems of slavery and the process of emancipation influence the development of racial thinking? How can we trace the heritage of these institutions in our contemporary concerns about immigration and integration?

The Guadeloupe conference will be the first of a series of three conferences organized by The Centre d’Etude des Politiques d’Immigration, d’Intégration et de Citoyenneté [a research center located in Paris and under the direction of Patrick Weil, (University of Paris 1-Sorbonne)], Erik Bleich (Middlebury College), Laurent Dubois (Michigan State University), Stéphane Dufoix (University of Paris X-Nanterre) and Randall Hansen (Oxford University); it is funded by a grant from the German Marshall Fund. The overarching goal of the meetings is to provide new perspectives – particularly by integrating the history of slavery, emancipation, and colonization – on contemporary debates about immigration and integration in Western Europe and the United States. The conferences will be organized in a workshop format, with papers distributed in advance. Sessions will begin with brief presentations by the authors of the papers and will focus on discussion. A selection of papers from each conference will also be prepared for publication.