Patrick Chamoiseau, Guyane : Traces-mémoires du bagne, Paris, Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 1994, 114 p.

« Le bagne de Guyane est aboli depuis 1945, mais la liberté ne semble s’y être véritablement frayé un chemin qu’à la faveur d’une nature opiniâtre… et de l’oubli des hommes.
De ce lieux d’enfermement et de souffrance mais aussi d’espoir, d’humanité, de dignité, émane une émotion paradoxale dont ce livre, à la fois parcours d’images et texte d’hommage, construit la “trace-mémoires” »
(Quatrième de couverture)

RIVERA, Guillermo Antonio, « Colonialism, Imprisonment, and Contamination in French Guyana : Leon-Gontran Damas’s Retour de Guyane and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Guyane : Traces-mémoires du bagne », thèse de doctorat, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami, 2006, 179 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

###Abstract
Cultural identity in French Guyana rests on an amalgam of racial and social issues shaped by colonialism. The prison established there by the colonial government serves as a locus for reflection and contestation of these complexities. Drawing on postcolonial approaches to slavery, race, and history, I analyze how Damas (1937) and Chamoiseau (1994) each represent and interrogate the prison along with French West Indian identity. Coincidentally, and despite the distance in time, both authors describe the prisoners as signs of the “contamination” brought, according to them, by French colonizers into the colonies. The term “contamination” guides the discussion of colonialism and imprisonment and both authors interpret historic events in the French West Indies using the same parameters. For them, “contamination” translates into a discussion of the prisoners as agents and objects of an infection that is not literal. In Damas’s work, his bourgeois values and ties to the  Négritude  movement appear in the discussion of the prison. Chamoiseau uses the same parameters associated with the prisoners to convey his idea of justice. Despite Créolité’s celebration of diversity, Chamoiseau, like Damas, aims for an idea of a pure pre-colonial moment, before the arrival of “contamination”, brought in by colonization and by the institution of the prison.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement intitutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest###

SILVERMAN, Max, « Memory Traces: Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi’s Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne », Yale French Studies, n° 118-119 (2010), p. 225-238. +++ Article de revue

STAFFORD, Andy, « Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi in the Penal Colony: Photo-Text and Memory-Traces », Postcolonial Studies, vol. 11, n° 1 (mars 2008), p. 27-38. +++ Article de revue

### Stafford, 2008, HTML ###