Our People
Prof Christine Chivallon
Fellow, Visiting Fellow
Christine Chivallon is both an anthropologist and a geographer affiliated to the “Passages” Research Center, Université de Bordeaux (France), from the 1st of January 2016. She was previously affiliated to “Les Afriques dans le Monde” (Africas in the World) at Sciences Po Bordeaux. She was elected as Director of Research at the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) in 2007 by the “Space and Society” academic committee and was promoted to First Class Director by this same committee in October 2014. She received her “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” in Anthropology in 2012 from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. In 2007, along with the late Prof Barry Chevannes, University of the West Indies, Prof Robert Lafore, Sciences Po Bordeaux, and Prof Justin Daniel, Université des Antilles, she founded the FIFCA (Filière Internationale France Caraïbe), a Joint Research and Teaching Programme in which she is still involved at Sciences Po Bordeaux. The “FIFCA” includes a teaching curriculum for co-diploma BSc/MSc in International Politics and Cooperation and gives access to doctoral studies. This programme receives financial support from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (Department of International Relations), the French Embassy in Jamaica and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme of Paris (FMSH). She is also the founder of the Research Group “Mondes Caraïbes et transatlantiques en mouvement” which brings together several institutions, mainly the FMSH-Paris and the Institut du Tout-Monde founded by the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant. She is responsible for the associated Research Center of the ANR Programme “Alter” (Histoires orales alternatives dans la Caraïbe, XIXe – XXIe).
The research conducted by Christine Chivallon focuses on materiality, space and identity, mainly in the Caribbean societies and through Caribbean migration in Europe, including research on the memory of slavery and cultural trauma. She also works on theories of cultures, production of knowledge and postcolonial controversies. In 2000, she was awarded the Bronze Medal from the CNRS for her body of scientific work. She has been elected a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College since 2013. Among her main works published in English are the following:
2018, « Decoding the diaspora of Stuart Hall, Historicity, performativity and performance of a concept”, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 11(3), pp. 279-292 (En ligne :https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17528631.2018.1451592).
2024 (forthcoming) , « Décoloniser les arts ou décoloniser les institutions de l’art ? », Figures de l’Art, Revue d’études esthétiques, n° 42, « Art & décolonialité »
2024 (forthcoming) « The Palais at la Porte Dorée: From an Unlikely Trilogy to the Shadow of the French Nation » in : Faucquez Anne-Claire, Gosson Renée, Michael Androula (Eds), The Narrativization of Slavery in European Museums: Arts and Representations, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press.
2023, « Archives et traces. Figures visibles et invisibles du passé », Revue Lumi, Revue d’études sur l’âge des Lumières et des Révolutions, numéro sur « La colonisation, fille illégitime des Lumières ? », 2, [En ligne] : https://m3c.universita.corsica/lumi/numero-2/
2021, « Le ‘vrai-faux’ tournant matériel. Comment penser l’humain et le non-humain après le cultural turn ? » in : Hancock C., Géographies anglophones, Nouveaux défis, Presses de Paris Nanterre.
2021, « Le plantationocène » (entretien avec Bérénice Gagne), in : Lussault M., Demoulle J. P. Néolithique Anthropocène. Dialogue autour des douze mille dernières années, Éditions deux-cent-cinq, collection “À partir de l’Anthropocène”, Lyon, pp. 73-83
2019, « En dialogue avec les utopies Africana », Tumultes, 52, pp. 129-145.
2019, « Aux origines du ‘colour blindness’ républicain et du ‘racial thinking’ multiculturel. Approche comparée des Empires coloniaux français et britanniques et de deux révoltes anticoloniales en Jamaïque (Morant Bay, 1865) et en Martinique (Insurrection du Sud, 1870) », (Chivallon, C. & Howard D.), Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire, t. 107, n° 402-403, pp. 151-178.
2018, “Decoding the diaspora of Stuart Hall, Historicity, performativity and performance of a concept”, article pour la revue African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, special issue on “Hybridizing and Decolonizing the Metropole: Stuart Hall, Caribbean Routes and Diasporic Identity”, DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2018.1451592
2017, “Memories of Slavery and Ancestry In Martinique: The Use of Patronymics in the Memory Fabric” Gueye A. and Michel J., A Stain on our Past : Slavery and Memory, Trenton, London, Africa World Press, pp. 47-71.
2017, “Colonial violence and civilising utopias in the French and British empires: the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) and the Insurrection of the South (1870)”, Slavery & Abolition, 38 (3), 534-558.
2016, “Between History and its Trace: Slavery and the Caribbean Archive”, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 24 (1): 67–81
2016, “Trans-Atlantic Black Diaspora” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism, co-edited by John Stone; Xiaoshuo Hou; Rutledge Dennis; Polly Rizova; Anthony Smith: 1-8.
2015, “Universal or Specific Creolization? Perspectives from the New World”, translation by Cairn International, L’Homme, 207-208: 37-74
2011, The Black Diaspora of the Americas. Experiences and Theories out of the Caribbean, Kingston, Ian Randle Publishers
2008, “On the Registers of Caribbean Memory of Slavery”, Cultural Studies, 22 (6): 870-891
2002, “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: the Experience of the African Diaspora”, Diaspora. A Journal of Transnational Studies, 11(3): 359-382
2001, “Religion as Space for the expression of Caribbean Identity in the United Kingdom”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 19(4): 461-483
2001, “Bristol and the eruption of memory: making the slave-trading past visible”, Social and Cultural Geography, 2(3), pp 347-363
Her latest book, L’esclavage. Du souvenir à la mémoire. Contribution à une anthropologie de la Caraïbe, Paris, Karthala, 2012, was awarded the ‘Fetkann!‘ prize from the CIFORDOM in 2013.