Department of French & Francophone Studies

Timothee’s dissertation looks at how Guadeloupean socialists contested the persistence of a colonial order by creating a locally-inflected praxis of socialism anchored in forms of resistance, such as insurrections, associations, and cultural references to Afro-Antillean oral culture in speeches and newspapers. Because the Guadeloupean workers’ movement anchored its political practices at least partially in resistance strategies developed under slavery, he argues that despite the enterprise of dehumanizing black Africans that was at the core of the plantation system, the enslaved not only managed to practice politics in their time but also to transmit such political practices to their colonized descendants.