Jennifer Boum Make, "Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Summary

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.

---

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Welcome to the New Books Network French Studies channel. I'm your host, Gina Stumm, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama. And with me today is Jennifer Boummaquet to talk about her book, Decolonial Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean, out in 2025 from Rutgers University Press. Professor Boummaque is Associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. In addition to her monograph, she has Co edited 2025's graphic narra of advocating for representation and social justice in French language, Bon dessine. In addition to many journal articles and contributions who collected volumes, she serves on a number of editorial boards and is one of the founders of New Paths in Caribbean Literature, an online series hosting conversations with ultra contemporary Caribbean writers. Professor Boomaqui, thank you for joining me today.

[A]

Thank you so much for having me, Gina.

[B]

So to start off with, can you tell us about the origins of this project and how you developed both your corpus and your theoretical approach?

[A]

Of course, yeah. So it was actually back in 2019 when I was working on another project with John Walsh. We had just read together a book by Fabien Bourget and Guillaume Leblanc that was called La Fin de l', Hospitalite the End of Hospitality. And so having read this for a special issue on literature and migration for Crossings, at the time, we thought it would be really nice to actually have Fabienne write the post fast for the special issue. So after this, we asked her, she said yes, which was great. And then we. We kind of like, you know, finalized the project, and I went back to her scholarship after this, right after I started here at Georgetown, actually, and picked up one of her texts, the Ethics of Care. And having read this, having zero background in care studies, I really wanted to continue the conversation with Fabienne. And so I invited her to give a virtual talk at Georgetown in 2020. And I think what happened then is that I just started really taking interest in care studies. I spent most of my first two years of my tenure track kind of like looking at foundational texts by John Tranto, Baroness Fisher, Sandra Laugier, Caroline Niebaus, like Alexandre Geffen, like all of those people that had been writing about care studies since the 1980s all the way into today. Right. And so I think reading about the corpus, familiarizing myself with it, I really realized that in a lot of times, there were a lot of amalgamations when it comes to who actually forms the care work labor force. So who are the people who are taking care who are maintaining the society the way it is, who is receiving care? And what are those care dynamics? And so to just give you an example, you find for instance, in a text by John Pronto and Baroness Fisher, that care is the work, has been the work historically of enslaved people, of indentured servants and of women. And so it's basically putting together subalterns and forming this caregiving labor force, which in some ways might appear somewhat vague or at least like unspecific in many ways. And so that was the first thing that I realized looking into that corpus. The second aspect of the conversation for me was really thinking about some of the Caribbean texts that I had been reading so far, and the fact that a lot of them are actually replete with caregivers. You have so many figures of caregiving figures in literature, in Caribbean literature, and especially women. And so if you think, for instance of a novel like Gouverneur de la Rose by Jacques Roumin, for instance, you can find Deliras and Anais, they're the two kind of unflinching advocates to, to the self sacrificing hero of the Font Rouge community. So that's one example of caregiving figures. I was also thinking back with Joseph Zobel Rue Casnai, where you find the figure of the grandmother who's basically just working away on the plantation cutting sugar cane all day, just so that her grandson can have a future away from the plantation. Just all of those figuration of sacrificing caregivers in Caribbean literature that started really kind of piquing my interest. And I thought that they would be then a very interesting intersection between care, care studies, Caribbean literature, and all of this informed by the enduring legacies of colonialism and slavery. And so that's when I started looking at different interpretations, different manifestations of care in Caribbean context. I just started kind of like tracking them, tracing them in text. And this way, the organization of the book really came out of this particular minute, kind of like really oriented reading practice that I had at the time. And so this way I started highlighting different key contexts that I think really speak to what care is or what care could look like. And so, for instance, I look at care as curation. I look at domestic work, I look at the intersection of care and the environment. And finally, I also look at care focused gender roles around the figure of the potomitant. And so, as you can see here, I'm not going to go into details because I know that you want to talk more about what's in Each of those different chapters later. But just to give you a sense of my corpus, then it's very expansive. I really address a lot of different texts, a lot of different media, both visual and textual. And so, of course, I am engaging with medium specificity in the work that I do in the book specifically. But I think that my overarching focus back then and still today really is on finding narratives that explore the tension between the enduring impact of colonial harm and the possibilities for reimagining caregiving in the present and for the future.

[B]

And do you have an overarching or sort of baseline definition of care that you can. That you develop here and specifically for what it means for care to be decolonial?

[A]

So I'm going to start by my definition and then kind of give you a background for this definition and then go back to the way I use it in my work. So, basically, I think for me, at the start, I was thinking that care in a lot of cases was actually leading to oppression, that care was interweaving a lot of forms of abusive practices. And so what I'm trying to do when I think about care, and I think that is more an interrogation than it is a definition, because it's basically a question that I'm posing when I'm looking at a text, when I'm engaging with a specific corpus, is the ways in which we can think about care from care as oppression to care as repair and healing after the damage. And I think I situate my practice in that kind of definitional shift where it's possible to address the ways in which care has been fundamental in solidifying so many forms of abuse and violence in history, and ways in which care can be liberated in some ways and perhaps then be remobilized to imagine care differently in our world today and also for the future. And so just to kind of like, you know, circle back to the original definition of care. You find, for instance, in the foundational text, like by John Tronto, specifically a kind of a general definition of care. So she basically talks about 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. So that's kind of like the general definition that she gives for us, which might seem sometimes actually quite unsatisfying because it's actually so expensive that it's kind of hard to wrap your head around it. Right. And. And so what I was kind of thinking about reading this definition at the start is, well, what happens in situations when care is defined by means of and through violence, through oppression, through abuse, when care is actually colonized. Because when you think back about the plantation, the way plantation societies organize, and you think about the legacies of that particular mode of inhabitation, you find so many forms of exploitation of labor, right? Like you find so many forms of exploitation of life force, so much so that all of the enslaved population on the plantation was tasked to maintaining the household for the master's family. But then who's actually taking care of that population, right? So that's the first form of abuse that you find on the plantation. Another form of abuse has to do with reproductive labor. And that's something that Francoise Verges actually talks a lot about in her work about decolonial feminism, when she looks at black women's wombs. And she talks about the fact that, well, children of enslaved women, of enslaved mothers would inherit the status of their mothers, right? And that's thinking back to the Black Codes of 1685, and especially like the Article 13, that talks about that specific condition. And actually, one literary example of this or counterexample of this that I find quite interesting is in Marie's novel Le Livre des Mans, where you actually see that legacy of colonized caring in the ways in which Aymar is refusing to nurse the child. So milk, in that sense, almost appears as a colonized substance. So to actually nurse the baby would mean that you're kind of transmitting that legacy of enslavement, or at least that legacy of oppression. And so what you see in a lot of cases when you look at care in those contexts is that it's often distorted. It's going to be deviant, it's going to become violent. And another scholar that I find really interesting in that sense is Elza Dornan, because she talks about care in those specific situations. She defines care in violent context, and she talks about what she names dirty care. And so dirty care is basically a situation in which we find ourselves with our lives at risk, right? Like when basically you're not so much maintaining life than you're maintaining safety. And so care within that particular system is basically becoming a way of attention, a form of attention to others, but only so that you can maintain your life, basically, so that you can prepare for a conflict. And so I was trying to move away from those definitions. I think when I was working on the organization of the book and my theoretical foundation, I was trying to find a way to address both the legacy, this legacy of abuse and oppression, but also ways to maybe reimagine care. Is there a way to evacuate? Or if not evacuate, to look at alternatives to this particular narrative of care. And so what I mean by care as decolonial, then, is very much a reorientation. And so what I mean by reorientation is that I'm hoping to show that by taking the focus away from those who will power to those who are subjected to it. That was a first attempt at reorienting care. And the second decolonial aspect that I find here, and that's really the cornerstone of my methodology, is to elucidate and reimagine manifestations of care through texts. And so I can go into more details here, but I think, because, again, you want to talk about each individual chapter, I'm going to stop here for my definition of. Of care and how it relates to decolonial methodology.

[B]

Perfect. And that leads us right into my questions about the meat of your book. So the literary analysis. So in your first chapter, which you title Curating Silences, you highlight two instances where creators or curators are trying to restitute individuality and voice to enslave people who have been deprived of those things within the historical narrative. And your first example actually illustrates the pitfalls possible in this approach. How can attempting to give a voice result in additional erasure or silencing?

[A]

Yeah, so the first chapter on Kras Curation engages a conversation with the black model curatorial discourse. So that exhibit took place at Le Musee d' Orsay in 2019. And so at the time, I think the project was actually very nascent. Like, that was not defined at all. And I think for some reason, I took a lot of notes at this exhibit. It was really generative in that sense. And a lot of photos, photos of the panels, photos of the different labels that curators were proposing for us. And I think originally what they were trying to do. And again, that's kind of like looking at the catalog and looking at those different labels and panels at the exhibit is really to take a spin on the meaning of models. They were basically looking at instances where black people in art history had basically served as models. That was literally like the literal understanding of model. And second, their interpretation of model or modeling was the way in which black individuals had shaped visual arts at the time. So in the 19th century and tracing this all the way into our contemporary presence. And so what you find at this exhibit is that in a lot of cases, they renamed some of the paintings. So they were trying to remove the racialized labeling. But what I interpret as a form of double erasure here is that this removal happens without contextualizing or explaining the French history of racialization. So the ways in which, throughout colonial history, there has been a creation of colonial hierarchies dating back to the 17th century. There has been a categorization of races. And, you know, also that France has a lot to do to actually address this particular legacy, to address this particular colonial history. And I think basically, just renaming those figures, renaming those models, is creating this other form of erasure. So that's one thing that the exhibit is doing at the start. Another thing that they tried to do is basically take a deep dive in the archive and trying to dig up basically the names of the models, trying to identify the models that were populating those paintings, those artworks. And so that's great. It's a great archival research. But one thing that they're also doing then, is that you find a lot of question marks on the labeling of paintings, and you find them at other exhibits occasionally. But it's just that there's a lot of them at this particular exhibit where you find, for instance, the name of Joseph, who was the model for Leradeau de la Meduse by Gericault. And so you see his name on some of those paintings with Joseph could be him, could not be him. Who knows? Same thing for Laure, who was the model in Olympia's painting by Manet. And again, Laure, question mark, Maybe it's her, maybe it's not. We're not sure. And so there is an explanation for this hesitancy. I mean, we know why there is an absence of archival knowledge. We know why we can't trace back the. The specific identities of those individuals who were posing at the time for those painters. But this hesitancy, this question mark, this persistent question mark is never so much addressed. It's just there. And they're not really speaking to their curatorial process or to their archival research. And the fact that they were faced with holes, they were faced with gaps, they were faced with an inability to basically reconstruct the lives of people in those paintings. And so I think there's an additional erasure in not addressing that particular gap, in not addressing this particular archival absence, because we've already talked about in Frankfurt and postcard studies about the violence of the archive, and is it not like a double violence to just basically be faced with that gap and just dismiss it and write the question mark? Because it's just a good effort on your part, because you've tried, you know, and so that's what I mean by double erasure. And this is why I think this particular attempt at carrying through curation is somewhat unsatisfying. In the case of the Model Noir

[C]

exhibit, my day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym, pre K, pickup back home to meal prep time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius. Got to keep the lights on when the three alarm hits. I'm ready. Celsius. Live Fit. Go grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate [e-mail]

[B]

and you contrast this specifically with Fabien Canor's Humus, which, as you point out, shares some methodological similarities with the curators from that exhibition. But you find her attempt more successful. Why is that?

[A]

Yeah. So Fabien Tenhoff's novel Humus is actually quite interesting because she's faced with the same uncertainties. Right. So going back to this methodology, she went to the archives, Les Archives Departmentale de Nantes, and she tried to unearth the lives of women captives. She tried to trace back the stories of women who were aboard a ship, Le Soleil, that dates back to 1774. And so she was only able to find a note that's mentioning the fact that those women, 14 captives, jump off board, and there's no further mention of them on that particular note. And so, having been in conversation with Fabienne about this and having spent a lot of time just thinking about this novel, she really talks about the fact that she felt really stuck, kind of like, well, what do I do now? And this is when fiction kind of takes over and becomes a space to deal with that absence and to deal with that gap and to try to maybe work it into something else. Right. So we're really struck here with the same things that I think the curators from the model Le Modelle Noir were struck with, which is how much the archive has evacuated the individualities of the captives. But what Fabienne Cador does in Humus is that she basically delivers a polyphonic novel. She's basically dividing the book into several chapters, eleven chapters, if I recall correctly, that are named after those women, but they're given nicknames. So I think this first choice to give them nicknames is a way to symbolize how this fictional voice is chasing after them, chasing after who they were trying to capture who they were. But there's an emphasis, I think, on the attempt, on the trying. Right, because you're never quite getting there. You're just trying to capture who they were and so, for instance, you find chapters named like La Muette, La Blanche, La Reine, La Vieille. And that goes on over 11 chapters. And so what I really find quite compelling with Fabienne's novel is the ways in which you really see her battling with history. You really are confronted, I think, as readers with how much of this history is fragmentary, how much is seen complete. And so then what does it mean to curate a fragmented history? How do you curate a fragmented history? And there's one chapter that I really love in Umus, which is the last one, which is called Levitire the Heiress. And so the narrator there describes being on the seashore in Ouidah, and she's trying to retrace the footsteps of her ancestors. And so she's kind of like walking barefoot on the sand, facing the sea, and trying to again project into that past and trying to again chase after those fleeting figures. But she's faced with silence. Right. And so I think this recognition that at the start you're faced with silence, this is basically your first encounter with an impossibility. And how you're trying to then deal with that impossibility is what I find really powerful. And so I think then 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. Right. And so this is where I think this decolonial care can actually take shape in curation.

[B]

Right. And chapter two discusses representations of the Bumidan. What was this and how has it left a colonial legacy of care work in the French speaking world?

[A]

Right. So, yeah. So the chapter on Bumi Dome and on domestic work more largely speaks to the state sponsored migration that was organized by the French government between the years 1963 and 1982. And so that was basically an initiative that was addressed to young women and young men who were promised to work in mainland France. And what's important to note, it's that it was at a time when you find a lot of attempts at pro independence movements. You see a lot of activity, pro independence activity in Martinique and Guadupa at the time. And so the Bumidam can be also interpreted as an attempt to evacuate or. Or even stifle pro independence movements, because that was basically taking away the use of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Reignon and redirecting them to hexagonal France. And so in a lot of cases, the jobs that people were finding for themselves were Low paid were manual jobs with no social or economic mobility. And so domestic work within that particular ecosystem of exploitation is basically speaking to the fact that a lot of women were sent to specialized centers. There's one that's quite known that's in where they were trained to become domestics, where they were trained to become housekeepers. And so the ways in which you see the intersection of care work and coloniality is through the distribution of that particular line of work along gender, racial, class and geographic lines. And so that distribution of care work reproduces directly colonial power dynamics and forms of oppression. Right. And so that is really how I really inscribe the bumidam within this legacy of exploitation. And also, I think the bimidam speaks directly to the ways in which care work has been colonized as well.

[B]

And how do the texts you read in this chapter provide supplemental or alternative narratives?

[A]

Yeah, so the first text that I include in the chapter is Francoise Hegas memoir Letra Letters to a Black Woman. And so in that particular memoir, he was already in hexagonal France at the time, basically decides to get hired as a housekeeper. She's kind of doing investigative journalism, I guess, at the time. And so she goes into those households in Marseille and she basically comes across the oppressive nature and abusive nature of the work practices that a lot of her fellow Antillian women and just Martinicans and Guadalupians that were arriving in Marseille at the time were facing. And so she talks a lot about the invisibilization that is basically inherent in care work. So the fact that in a lot of times we only see care work when it's not done correctly. Right. So there is really this erasure, this invisibilizing nature that is part of the characterization of care work. And so I think that particular text was really useful for me to identify care work and to identify care work in the context of a colonial venture, which was the bimi d'. Homme. And so after this, I include Payanou by Jessica Aubliet and Marie Ange Rousseau. And so what I find interesting by including this particular graphic narrative is the fact that Jessica Hulier, so she's the centerist for this graphic narrative, and she's basically talking about how she found out about the bimidam. So growing up in hexagonal France, had never heard about it and found out about this at a family meal. It was just kind of mentioned, but just kind of in passing and caught her attention. And she then started digging up more information about this. But really what you're faced with when you look at Peanut first is the discontinued nature of familial memories, the fact that a lot of this history is wrapped in silence. And Jessica Hubliet uses her own familial history to talk about the Bimidam. And so she goes into the Bimidam story from the perspective of her own family legacy, from the perspective of her own family history. And so what I find really striking again, and I think that speaks to the medium specificity here, is the representation of an archival ecosystem in the graphic narrative. Because you basically see this investigation the way she's trying to track down the traces of the Bimidam in her history, but also in a larger national history. And so she's in conversation with people that she knows, but also with scholars who've worked on those questions. And you can see her like, the visual impact of this is quite, quite powerful. I think it's kind of like holding this recorder, interviewing people. You see a lot of the materiality of archives in the graphic narrative because you see some of those archives reproduced as Mariange and Jessica are fumbling around trying to really reconstitute the history of the Bimidame. And so I think this process, this first person narrative for Rogesica and then Marianne Rousseau, also first person in the sense that she is also part of this investigation, is something that speaks to a practice that tries to counter the invisibility of care work by reclaiming this history and actually finding ways to represent this history in the graphic narrative.

[B]

And keeping with your study of Jessica Hublier and Bon Dessinet, but adding to it, you go on in the next chapter to explore care in the context of environmental damage. And the first work that you analyze there is the novel Monde Capresse. And that seems actually to have a very ambivalent attitude to the possibility of escaping ecological and gender based violence. Could you talk a little bit about this?

[A]

Right, yeah. So Giselle Pinault's novel Monique Eprezz is actually a novel that every time I read it, I find both very, very tragic and at the same time really hopeful. So in Morneau Capresse you find this figure, Merpakum, who is the leader of a congregation that's called the Congregation of the Daughters of Sham. And so Mer Pakum is a character that spent a lot of years in hexagonal France working at the era Tepee in a very alienating position and kind of like forgotten from the rest of society, like a very marginalized character. And she then decides to go back to Guadeloupe and tries to find her familial ties. She tries to be reunited with her sisters through this lost family legacy, the Charles de Bourie who was a womanizer, sleeping with a lot of women. And so there's a lot of sisters to be reunited with. And so basically she has this project that consists of saving the daughters of Guadeloupe and also of saving Guadeloupe eventually. And so there's really this intersection of brilliant, both the oppressive and abusive system that endangers the lives of a lot of women in the French Caribbean. And then there's also this inquiry into a contaminated world, a polluted world. And so Mer Pacum is one who speaks about the cloe pollution, for instance. She's one who thinks about also the exploitation of the land. Their community is built on a Marne, on a hilltop, on a former coffee plantation. And so she's basically trying to reimagine relationships. She's trying to reimagine the world, the way we live, the way we grow food. But the problem with this particular society is that we actually see as readers that this. They start reproducing an oppressive system. They basically borrow and reinscribe in their community hierarchies that come from the world below. So the world below is our world. And so they basically have this power dynamic all across the congregation with MERPACOM at the top, and then some of the sisters as being kind of the sub leaders, I guess, of the community. And so the world that they were trying to escape, they actually cannot escape. And this is, I guess, what one can find somewhat tragic. And so eventually there is the fall, like there is the catastrophe. Merpakoum is someone who hears voices. And in this particular episode, she basically lights up the house where she lives, and the whole congregation catches fire, and so they're forced to go down. And so that's why it's quite ambivalent, because there is the soul from this. I mean, from what they were hoping to be a utopian society, but what turned that into a dystopia? Right. But I think what I also tried to talk about in the book is the fact that there might be also hope in the catastrophe. And so when you look at what catastrophe actually means, it means that you fall down, but there's also the hope of renewal. Right? And so this is what I find quite interesting in Mondri Capresse as a movement from, well, trying to reimagine something away from the world to the fact that you're brought back to the world and Then there is this necessity to live in that world, in the world below, and then to figure out what it means to live after the damage has happened, right?

[D]

My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big financial friend Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and one oneplus cancellations paid. Membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.

[E]

Experian Spring is here, and there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness. Dial it up or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender, because this season there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks.

[F]

Your little one grew three inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive. Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees because somewhere a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow and he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth Bird budget secured. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.

[B]

And on the other hand, Tropique d', Oeuxique, which is another work by Jessica Hublier, it differs in both genre and medium from Mal Capresse and as it's nonfiction and it's a bidet, and according to your analysis, it seems to offer a more unequivocally hopeful perspective. How do you read that?

[A]

Yeah, so just to give you a bit of background on Tropique Toxique, it's basically a scientific, social, historical exploration of the chloricon contamination. So there Justiat Aubillier, again in the role of an investigator, goes and interview a lot of different actors in those fields and tries to understand what the chlordecon contamination is, how it came into being, and what the consequences of this contamination are. And so I'm not gonna go much more into detail about this, but take you to the end of the graphic narrative, which is really what I mobilize in the chapter, because I think in those last few pages you see a visual landscape and again, that speaks to the strength of the graphic narrative of the BD here, A visual landscape that attempts to reimagine caring after the damage. So I think really there is this inquiry at the end of Tropique Toxique into forms of repair. Question mark. So what could that look like? What could that be? And there's one image that I really love that you find at the end. And I think it's in the chapter that's called the World after the Mond Epre or something like this. And so you find some of the public figures that were sometimes speaking throughout the graphic narrative. So you find Cynthia Fleury, Gertie d', Ambourry, Malcolm Ferdinand, and some other characters also that you've seen throughout the graphic narrative. And actually, what I love is that it's not necessarily individuals that you are paying attention to as you are flipping through the pages, because that could just be people in the background or people that were just passing by on the streets. But then you actually find them in that gathering space at the end. And so they're all gathered in the morne. I mean, the morne is around them. Like you see a lot of hills in the back, and they're gathered in what I like to read as the world below. The world below of Mons Capresse represented Entropique Toxique. And so I think what I propose here is that we can see the formation of a civil society. We can really start to see how by showing this group of people gathered, there was a way to think about the world of tomorrow, a way to think about what this could look like. And so this is where I situate this more hopeful note. Right. Because what Tropique Toxique does for us, I think, is that it allows space for imagining an alternative. And it's not an elsewhere that you have in Mon Capress. 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.

[B]

And your last full chapter goes back to addressing the problematic side of caregiving, which you evoked at the beginning of this conversation. And this is the Pot aux Mittant woman. What does this figure represent?

[A]

Yeah, so the last chapter that look at the gender distribution of care introduces the figure of the potomitant. And that came to mind pretty much immediately for me when I was thinking about care work. Pothommitant is something that really resonated from the get go. So the Pot aux Mittant literally refers to the central Pillar of the Vodou temple. And that's pretty much what holds the whole structure. Right. And so when you transpose it to women, symbolically, it speaks to the responsibility that women have had historically to maintain the household, to take care of the family, take care of the community, and also to be resilient and strong. And this is when you see that resilience is not always a good thing. Right. Like, we always like to think of resilience as something that's great and it's good to be resilient, but actually, no, it speaks usually to a lot of silencing and abuse as well. And I'm. I'm going to probably just refer everyone back to the work of Sabine Lamour and Stephanie Milot, who do incredible work to situate the pothommitant and to also criticize the figure of the pothommitant. And when you think about this particular symbol, this myth, really there's a way to think with colonial history, There is a colonial legacy to this figure. Because, for instance, when you think back to Edouard Glissant's entire family, that means to be looking at a moment in history where women became the sole provider of care. And so the pothommitant, as something that emerged from that context of anti family, from this plantation society, means that the pothommiton was becoming an example of sacrificial and tough care. And so that was the prime example, I think, for me to then first think around it, think with it, and think against it as well.

[B]

And how do the authors you read here resist and. Or subvert the stereotype?

[A]

Yeah, so I am in conversation with two novels in that last chapter. The first one is Fabienne Canard's Doduce. So in Doduce, you find the character of Frida, and she's basically a character who's inherited from generation of women's teaching that told women to keep quiet, to keep a low profile, to maintain their family unit. And so it's presented as this overbearing burden for Frida. And she's trying to overthrow these teachings. She's trying to find alternatives to. To what she was forced to become. And so at the start of the novel, there is hope in the fact that Frida could succeed in reimagining relationships. And she's really trying to do this through her relationship with a black man who actually turns out to be a womanizer and cheats on her. And so the novel ends with the murder of the boyfriend Eric, and the suicide of Frida. And so I think with this novel there is this annihilation of self for the sake of reimagining the community. So the only way that Kheeda could escape this legacy was through destroying her own life. And so there's actually a very good article by Anita Bete Congolo where she talks about the sacrificial nature of Frida's action. Right. Like she sacrifices herself. But there's hope then, because we could then reimagine something else. We could reimagine relationships away from this particular legacy. And so the end for me then was quite disturbing. And so I tried to then, and that's probably the one text that I had to look for. I tried to find a novel that was proposing something else that did not result in the death of the woman character. And so this is when I turned to Gail, Octavia's novel De Madeleine Demetrius. And so you find a narrator that is a woman. She's the mother of two daughters from different fathers. And she's basically tasked with telling the story of this kind of perfect, strong, resilient woman of this family in Martinique. And so what I love about this novel is that the narrator tells us all about the difficulty to actually tell the story, tell the story of perfection, because actually it is not a story of perfection. And so she starts basically peeling the layers. And so what I find quite convincing here is how this character, this narrator, who's very vulnerable, very capricious, she's unreliable to her daughters. So not your representation of strength necessarily. But basically what happens is that I think she flips. Octavia really allows to flip how we understand vulnerability. So vulnerability in that sense would not be a weakness. But I think what happens in the novel is that there's a way to reclaim visibility and care for women and also for each other. Right. So it's kind of moving away from the self imposed silencing that you had at the start of Dodus, moving into a gesture of self affirmation. And so what I like about putting these two texts in dialogue is that you can see kind of a trajectory for the restoration of self. So that's against the obliteration of self that you have in Dodus and finding a potential way to perhaps reclaim Frida by way of La bonistoire de Madeleine d'. Ametrius. So that's kind of, I guess, my attempt at rescuing Frida from the douce.

[B]

And finally, in your coda, you discuss Giselle Pinault's folie alle Simple. How does this text tech here work together with the work of writing?

[A]

Yeah, so the coda is the part of the book where I mean conversation with Jeanne Ordinaire d' Unfermier d'. Unc. I'm switching to French. So in this particular text, Giselle Pinault talks about the fact that she's. So she's worked as both a nurse in psychiatric hospitals and as a writer. And so I use this particular text as a way to think about writing as care practice. So what Pinault does there is that she's thinking through her work as a nurse and writing about it. So there is a specific context of the psychiatric hospital that's defined since the classical age as a place of exclusion, as a place of marginalization. So the hospital then is not a space to heal. It's a space that keeps away people from society. And so what Pinot does here is actually taking us inside the psychiatric hospital. Right. So inside something that's usually not so much disclosed, not so much known. And she's telling us a lot about the alienating practices that she finds within that space. And so writing then becomes for her a practice that I think is a way to both develop careful attention. So that means to really shape, maintain, and try to restore empathy, find forms of shared vulnerability, pay attention to interdependency, and also have this kind of attentiveness to herself because she actually, I think, very much uses writing as a space for recovery as well, attentiveness to others and more generally, I think the world that we all live in. And so writing ties into caring because writing becomes a way to articulate an act of self, care becomes a way to craft. To craft writing as a form of recovery. And so I think that's a way for us to find and hold onto a practice of healing that's both internal, so internal healing and then hopefully external healing. And so that's really where I see this intersection of writing and caring and repair. Right. And that's why I think Pino's text is particularly revealing in that sense.

[B]

Well, thank you so much for all of your thoughtful and thought provoking answers for us today. And as we come to the end of our time together, do you have any new projects you're working on that the listeners can look out for?

[A]

Yeah, so I'm actually continuing some of the work that I started in the chapter for Jacqueline Couti and Annie Curtius, Transoceanic Entanglements in Frankfurt Settings. And so in this new project, I'm engaging with both diversity and the specificity of outre mer contexts. But I'm also putting them in conversation and so in this new project, I'm hoping to look at the intersection of health, women's health, ill and well being and decoloniality. And so I'm currently working on a couple of individual chapters for this, but the larger project would hopefully become a future book. So thank you so much.

[B]

And if listeners are Interested, I interviewed Drs. Curtius and Coutier a few weeks ago about that book. So that'll be back in the queue if they want to go listen to that. So once again, my guest has been Jennifer Boombake, and the book is Decolonial Care Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean.