Between Censorship and Amnesia: The End of The Penal Colony in French Guiana

Abstract

The article focuses on the censorship of Leon-Gontran Damas’s 1937 Retour de Guyane, a searing critique of French administration of this South American colony. The colonial authorities sought to ban Damas’s book, allegedly purchasing and burning 1,000 copies of it (of a print-run, at the author’s own expense, of only 1,500). In this book, Damas targets in particular the failure of the penal colony in the territory and suggests that the institution has impeded the development of the colony. The aim of the article is to read Damas’ work in a wider corpus of texts devoted to the penal colony, most notably Frederic Bouyer’s travel narrative La Guyane francaise: notes et souvenirs d’un voyage execute en 1862-1863 (1867) and Albert Londres’ Au bagne (1923). It suggests, however, that Retour de Guyane was a particularly incendiary text, mixing ethnographic report with anti-colonial essay, unpopular with the authorities in that it linked the collapse of the penal colony to the inevitable end of empire.