Podcast Summary: New Books Network Episode Title: Jennifer Boum Make, "Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
Date: March 4, 2026
Host: Gina Stumm
Guest: Jennifer Boum Make (Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Georgetown University)

Overview

This episode features a rich conversation with Jennifer Boum Make about her forthcoming book, Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean. Boum Make and host Gina Stumm dive into the origins and theoretical framework of the project, exploring how care functions as a tool of both oppression and potential repair, particularly through the lens of French Caribbean literature, history, and visual culture. They discuss how colonial histories inform contemporary care practices, the representation of caregivers, and the ways in which archival gaps and silences are confronted or reproduced. Throughout, Boum Make foregrounds her multisource methodology—engaging novels, memoirs, and graphic narratives—to reimagine caregiving beyond inherited legacies of violence and subjugation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Project Origins & Theoretical Approach [00:56–05:58]

• Boum Make discusses the interdisciplinary seeds of her project, rooted in care studies and Caribbean literary analysis. Influenced by Fabien Bourget and foundational care theorists (e.g., Joan Tronto), she became interested in how the "care work labor force" is often defined through raced and gendered histories—especially as they intersect with legacies of slavery and colonialism.
• She notes an early observation: "In a lot of times, there were a lot of amalgamations when it comes to who actually forms the care work labor force...it's basically putting together subalterns and forming this caregiving labor force, which...might appear somewhat vague or at least like unspecific." [02:12]
• The project tracks representations of caregiving (especially women caregivers) in Caribbean texts, thinking through enduring colonial harm and the creative reimaginings offered by literature and visual media.

2. Definitions: What is (Decolonial) Care? [05:58–12:09]

• Boum Make positions care as a field that oscillates between "oppression" and "repair and healing after the damage":
  • "For me...it's more an interrogation than it is a definition...the ways in which we can think about care from care as oppression to care as repair and healing after the damage." [06:21]
• She references Joan Tronto's definition of care as "a species activity that is including everything that we do to maintain, to continue and to repair our world so we can live in it as well as possible." [07:08]
• But, she asks: what happens when care "is defined by means of and through violence, through oppression, through abuse, when care is actually colonized?" [07:39]
• Boum Make engages the work of Francoise Vergès on reproductive labor and Elsa Dorlin's concept of "dirty care" ("a situation in which we find ourselves with our lives at risk...care...is basically becoming a way of attention to others, but only so that you can maintain your life" [09:55]).
• Decolonial care is defined as a "reorientation"—"taking the focus away from those who wield power to those who are subjected to it," and, crucially, reimagining manifestations of care in and through texts. [11:00]

3. Chapter 1: Curating Silences—Restituting Voice, Archival Gaps & Double Erasure [12:09–17:44]

• Boum Make analyzes the Black Model exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay (2019), showing how renaming paintings to remove racialized labels, while well-intentioned, can enact "double erasure"—failing to address deeper historical processes of racialization and the violence of archival gaps:
  • "There is an additional erasure in not addressing that particular gap, in not addressing this particular archival absence...is it not like a double violence to just...be faced with that gap and just dismiss it and write the question mark?" [15:45]
• Contrast: Fabienne Kanor’s novel Humus also confronts archival absence but does so through polyphony—giving the women captives nicknames and recognizing the impossibility of recovering them:
  • "What I really find quite compelling with Fabienne's novel is the ways in which you really see her battling with history...what does it mean to curate a fragmented history?" [19:33]
  • The recognition of silence and absence as the starting point for reimagining care is vital here, as fiction becomes a space for both acknowledging impossibility and imagining alternatives.

4. Chapter 2: The Bumidom and Colonial Legacies of Care Work [21:57–28:18]

• Boum Make traces Bumidom (state-sponsored migration 1963–1982) as both colonial policy and vehicle for gendered, racialized care work—particularly domestic work in France:
  • "Bumidom can be...interpreted as an attempt to evacuate or...stifle pro independence movements...Jobs were low paid, manual jobs with no social or economic mobility." [22:35]
• Texts like Françoise Éga’s memoir Lettre à une femme noire and the graphic narrative Peanut (Jessica Hubliet & Marie-Ange Rousseau) offer alternative narratives:
  • Éga uncovers the "invisibilization...inherent in care work" [25:47]
  • Peanut foregrounds family memory, archival materiality, and the struggle to represent silenced histories visually and narratively: "You see a lot of the materiality of archives in the graphic narrative..." [27:14]

5. Chapter 3: Environmental Catastrophe, Gender, and Repair [28:18–37:21]

Monde Capresse (Gisèle Pineau)

• Explores intersections of environmental and gender violence in the French Caribbean.
• The utopian-seeming community built by the protagonist, Merpakum, turns dystopian as it reproduces oppressive hierarchies:
  • "The world that they were trying to escape, they actually cannot escape...there's also hope in the catastrophe." [31:14]

Tropique Toxique (Jessica Hubliet)

• A graphic narrative that investigates chlordecone pollution, culminating in a visual imagining of repair and civil society:
  • "There is this inquiry at the end...into forms of repair. Question mark. What could that look like?"
  • "[It’s] not an elsewhere...It is very much in the world. And it means that repairing is an imperative and that it's going to be difficult, but we are actually coming together to face that imperative." [36:24]

6. Chapter 4: Gender, The Figure of the Potomitan, & Subversion [37:21–44:00]

• The potomitan (central pillar in Vodou temple) symbolizes Black women's historically sacrificial role in family and community care:
  • "Resilience is not always a good thing...it speaks...to a lot of silencing and abuse as well." [38:09]
• Boum Make reads two novels in dialogue:
  • Fabienne Kanor's Doudouce: Protagonist Frida is crushed by the weight of inherited silence and ultimately self-annihilates, "sacrifices herself...there's hope then, because we could then reimagine something else." [41:52]
  • Gaël Octavia's La Bonne Histoire de Madeleine Démétrius: Contrasts with a more hopeful camera—a vulnerable protagonist reclaims care not through perfection or self-erasure, but by embracing vulnerability and self-affirmation:
    • "She flips...how we understand vulnerability. Vulnerability...would not be a weakness..." [43:18]
• Overall, these texts trace a "trajectory for the restoration of self" that challenges the obliteration inherent in the pothomitan myth.

7. Coda: Writing as (Self & Collective) Care [44:00–46:44]

• Boum Make’s coda looks at Gisèle Pineau’s Folie aller simple, a narrative connecting psychiatric nursing and writing as spaces for healing, attention, and repair:
  • "Writing becomes a way to articulate an act of self-care...a way to craft writing as a form of recovery...internal healing and then hopefully external healing." [45:14]

Notable Quotes

• On redefining care:
  "I'm hoping to show that by taking the focus away from those who wield power to those who are subjected to it. That was a first attempt at reorienting care." [10:55]

• On the danger of unaddressed archival gaps:
  "Is it not like a double violence to just...be faced with that [archival] gap and just dismiss it and write the question mark?" [15:45]

• On fiction’s possibilities:
  "Fiction plays an important role, because fiction is where you can reimagine who these women might have been, but you can also address the difficulty to do so. So it's never just about filling the gaps." [21:20]

• On the pothomitan myth:
  "Resilience is not always a good thing...it speaks usually to a lot of silencing and abuse as well." [38:09]

• On writing as repair:
  "Writing ties into caring because writing becomes a way to articulate an act of self-care...a way to find and hold onto a practice of healing that's both internal...and hopefully external." [45:14]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Origins & Theoretical Approach: 00:56–05:58
• Defining Decolonial Care: 05:58–12:09
• Curating Silences / Archival Gaps: 12:09–17:44
• Successes in Fiction (Humus): 17:44–21:57
• Bumidom & Domestic Work: 21:57–28:18
• Environmental Care & Catastrophe: 28:18–34:09
• Tropique Toxique (Repair & Hope): 34:09–37:21
• Gender/Myth/Subversion (Potomitan): 37:21–44:00
• Coda: Writing as Care: 44:00–46:44
• Upcoming Projects: 46:44–47:35

Takeaway

Jennifer Boum Make’s work invites rigorous questioning of "care" and its historical baggage, especially in formerly colonized societies like the French Caribbean. By reading gaps, silences, and acts of memory as much as overt narratives, her book—and this conversation—encourage both continued critique and creative reimagining of care for more just futures.