Research trip (La Réunion): Languages, Literatures and Cultures Research Fund

Funds were awarded (£1000) to support the travel costs for a research trip to France’s overseas department of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean to complete the fieldwork for a project entitled ‘Mapping Memories of Slavery: Commemoration, Community and Identity in Contemporary France’. A research trip to Reunion Island forms an essential component of this wider project, which is mapping activist networks and patrimonial projects relating to memories of slavery across the French Republic. By conducting fieldwork in Reunion Island, I will not only be able to complete and exceed the project’s aims, but will also be able to respond to a critical absence of information about activism in this area of the world. Importantly, it is by bringing Indian Ocean perspectives into dialogue with the French metropole and the French Antilles that I will be able to explore a geographical area that is nearly always overlooked in debates over slavery remembrance and reparations.