De retour de France métropolitaine : une étude des représentations (post)coloniales et des nouvelles formes d’altérité à la Martinique
The Lesser Antilles Archipelago Martinique is a society born of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery and French colonialism. This Creole society, tied to its metropolis for nearly four centuries, became a French department in 1946 giving its residents the status of French citizens. As a result, migration to the colonial center, Paris and the metropolitan region (Ile-de-France), intensified gradually to the point of institutionalization in the 1960's, thanks to the state agency BUMIDOM. The Caribbean presence in France is now such that the metropolis is refered to by immigrants as a "third island". However, in the contemporary setting there are new transatlantic mobility practices, plural and multifaceted – an integral part of which are centered around return-migration. The protagonists of return, the so-called "returnees" or "négropolitains" encounter several obstacles upon return to their homeland. This study examines the tendency to consider the returnee as a new type of "outsider" – more precisely, as a cultural foreigner; revealing another facet of otherness in Martinique and a new configuration of its postcolonial relationship with the French Republic. Following ethnographic fieldwork with these "returnees" and with the local population, a qualitative analysis of representations of the island and its inhabitants reveals how their experience in the French territory transforms the migrant and their way of belonging to Martinican and/or French culture. The representations and practices of the returnees are examined, shedding light on the emergence of new allied identities and new determinants of otherness at the intersection of these two areas, at once near and far.  Also, we will examine how the prism of return as an object of study, is transposed and reconfigured in the case of Martinique. The return acquires a special dimension for "citizens of color" who often experience social rejection and a double exclusion without stepping outside their national borders.
return migration Martinique Representations Postcolonialisme Postcolonialism Otherness Identity