| This dissertation looks ethnographically at the white planter class in Martinique (called Bekes), and questions the group's ever-changing relationship to the plantation past. The plantation is an institution which figures heavily into conversations about the whole Caribbean region. It also serves as a focal point around which Martinicans today center their own cultural self-understandings. Having lost its productive role in the economy, the plantation has left behind its spatial form---sometimes in ruins, sometimes not---which is now filled with particular readings of the past as people use this form as a site through which to negotiate history. This dissertation examines the cultural and historical relationship of the Bekes to their plantation past, specifically in terms of the ways that historical narratives about the plantation serve as a means through which to articulate difference and draw boundaries between themselves and either non-white Martinicans or French metropolitains in the present. Insofar as hierarchies of class and color which organize this society are based upon principles of distinction, this dissertation questions the way that historical representations, or uses of the past, enter in to inform these kinds of distinctions. The present is experienced by the Bekes as constituting a kind of crisis: as Martinique experiences rapid shifts in the material basis for social reproduction because of escalating consumerism, an increase in the flow of goods and people and ideas across borders, and the ever-penetrating role of the French government, the relationship that planters once had to the land has undergone a radical transformation, which in turn has created new meanings and values as well as new relationships to other Martinicans. The move of embracing a particular version of history serves to create a kind of moral authority---which is especially important in a moment of seeming crisis---to back up claims of authenticity and cultural authority, and tends to emphasize racial distinctions over other points of closeness. |
