Escape from Vichy

About this book

This book follows the wartime escape of thousands of European refugees to Martinique, and the myriad encounters that resulted. This previously untold story speaks to many contemporary concerns, including migration, cultural trends, resistance, encounter, ethnicity and identity, migration and diaspora. The roughly five thousand refugees at the heart of this book, who streamed from Marseille to Martinique in 1940-41 comprised Spanish Republicans, anti-Nazi Germans, Jews, and political and intellectual dissidents of various stripes. Most were wanted by the Nazis. Their desperate quest to reach the Western Hemisphere led them into the limbo of Vichy-controlled Martinique, which for visa related reasons proved easier to reach than New York. There, many forged lasting ties, amongst each other, but also with leading local dissidents, be they Gaullists or young thinkers like the Césaires, articulating their own vision of Blackness at this very time. The book explores the intellectual and artistic convergences that this encounter elicited between Negritude and Surrealism, while bringing to life the particular context of wartime Martinique.--