In the Caribbean, for a long time, many historical events have been muzzled by national governments leaving damaging loopholes as legacies. Against the omertas, echoing several iterations of circular migratory experiences in the Negrified Atlantic, as well as through a hybrid, ethno-iconographic methodology, this article is a topographical exploration of memory. From enslavement to the migrations of the 1960s and 1970s, two migratory dynamics — organised, conceptualised and internalised as deportations — can be observed: the slave trade and the massive post-war migrations of the French public agency BUMIDOM (from the French Antilles to mainland France), the 'Windrush' (from Jamaica and Trinidad to the United Kingdom) and the Haitian 'boat people' (from Haiti to the United States). Starting from an analysis of a certain number of relevant artworks from the French, British and Caribbean-American semioscapes — spreading from and through the postcolonial territories and their former metropolitan colonizing countries, this article proposes the prolegomena (the preliminary inquiries, notions and ideas) of a projected virtual exhibition (research, curation primarily) as a sensorial route to the understanding of those circularities and their aftermaths. The author highlights the characteristics, representations, images, imaginations and the sociology of those deportations (such as their causes, effects, consequences, etc.).
Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette (Mon,) studied this question.