The Chapuizet Affair

This article examines a 1779 legal dispute involving Pierre Chapuizet, a wealthy and well-connected sugar planter of the north province of Saint-Domingue who was denied a commission as an officer in the colonial militia due to allegations of mixed-race origin. Although the Conseil Supérieur of Cap Français had recognized Chapuizet's status as “white and unblemished” (blanc et ingénu) in 1771, the colonial administration and much of the white elite argued that his descent from a Black great-great-grandmother made him ineligible for the honor of a militia commission. This article argues that the Chapuizet affair demonstrates a shift in the boundaries of whiteness in the French Antilles. Traditional “color prejudice,” in which skin color was one factor among many others, such as wealth and family connections, gave way to modern scientific racism defined by biological descent, according to which a single Black ancestor, however remote, sufficed for exclusion from the white elite. Cet article examine une dispute légale de l'année 1779 qui visait à Pierre Chapuizet, un colon riche et renommé de la province nord de Saint-Domingue, à qui on refusait une commission d'officier de milice à cause des allégations qu'il était d'origine sang mêlé. Bien que le Conseil supérieur du Cap Français l'eût reconnu comme « blanc et ingénu » dans un arrêt de 1771, l'administration coloniale et la plupart de l’élite blanche considéraient que son ascendance, notamment son arrière-grand-mère noire, l'excluait de l'honneur d'une commission militaire. A travers l'affaire Chapuizet on constate une modification des identités raciales et du statut de l'homme blanc dans les Antilles françaises. Le « préjugé de couleur » traditionnel, selon lequel la couleur de la peau n’était qu'un facteur parmi d'autres comme la richesse et les alliances familiales cède au racisme scientifique moderne, défini par la filiation biologique, selon lequel un seul aïeul noir, aussi lointain qu'il soit, suffit pour l'exclusion de l’élite blanche.

Music in the Francophone Caribbean

The Francophone Caribbean is a complex region: while it shares a history of French colonialism, it is also marked by divergent political trajectories and profound economic disparities. On one hand, there is Haiti, the first independent postcolonial Black nation; on the other, the overseas French départements of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana. This combination of a shared history of colonial violence (including the genocide of indigenous populations and the enslavement of African people) as well as the diversity of modes and means of resistance against it has made of the Francophone Caribbean a crucible for a rich intellectual, artistic, and musical life. Indigénisme, négritude, marvelous realism, Antillanité, créolité are as many intellectual and artistic movements that have emerged from this crucible to impact intellectual life beyond the Caribbean. Likewise, biguine, konpa, and zouk are just a few of the musical genres whose aesthetic and commercial reach has far exceeded their islands of origin. For all of this musical richness, it is surprising that scholarly literature on music in the Francophone Caribbean has a rather limited scope. In Haiti, it has largely been focused on those practices associated with Vodou (ritual drumming and singing as well as the songs and music of rara) and, in the realm of popular music, with konpa and, to a lesser degree, mizik rasin (roots music) and classical music. Coverage in the French Antilles and Guiana is even more uneven. Guiana has received near to no attention. If scholars have written extensively about gwoka, the Guadeloupean drumming tradition, its Martinican counterpart, bèlè, has received less attention. And if there was a veritable craze for zouk in the 1990s, scholars have not followed Antillean audiences as their musical tastes evolved toward other styles of popular music in the new millennium. Likewise, biguine remains understudied given its transnational circulation in the 1930s. The various sections in this entry reflect these imbalances. If the current entry focuses on Haiti, the French Antilles (Martinique and Guadeloupe), and French Guiana, it should be noted that Dominica and Saint Lucia share the same Creole language, and contribute to the circulation of people, goods, and music in the Lesser Antilles. This being said, because the Oxford Bibliographies entry on music in the Anglophone Caribbean already covers Dominica and Saint Lucia, they have been left out of this overview.

A new deep-water palaemonid shrimp genus and species from the French Antilles, with a new record of Periclimenes milleri Bruce, 1986 (Decapoda: Caridea)

A new genus and species in the caridean shrimp family Palaemonidae is described based on three type specimens collected at a depth range of 208–385 m off Guadeloupe, French Antilles. Zoukaris festivus gen. et sp. nov. shares many characters with several western Atlantic deep-water species currently assigned to Periclimenes Costa, 1844, as well as with the monotypic western Atlantic genus Diapontonia Bruce, 1986 and the Indo-West Pacific genus Echinopericlimenes Marin & Chan, 2014. Zoukaris gen. nov. can be separated from all of them by a unique combination of morphological features, especially the configuration of the dactylus of the ambulatory pereiopods. In addition, Periclimenes milleri Bruce, 1986 is recorded from the French Antilles based on a single specimen, also from Guadeloupe; its colour pattern is illustrated for the first time.