This unusual issue of Imaginaries engages with a form of historical representation we have not previously addressed: the museum. It does so not with the more familiar means of review but by going behind the scenes of an exhibit about Furcy Madeleine, an enslaved man who sued for freedom in early 19th-century Réunion. Sue Peabody, Jérémy Boutier, and Nate Marvin explain how they translated the conclusions of scholarly monographs to exhibits designed for a broad public, and how they translated Furcy Madeleine’s case from the linguistic, cultural, and historical environment of Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, to that of Little Rock, Arkansas, in the southern United States. In so doing, these historians offer new insight into the global reach of the French past. Quite importantly, they offer readers the possibility of sharing in this project by inviting them to host the traveling Furcy Madeleine exhibit at their own institutions and so further extend the reach of French history. If you are interested in hosting, see the final paragraph of this introduction for further details, including contact information.
Furcy Madeleine’s decades-long freedom suit liberated him and created an exceptionally rich paper trail that preserved information about his life, his enslavement, and his ancestors. Indeed, Sue Peabody tells us, we know more about Furcy than any enslaved person in the Francophone world other than Toussaint Louverture. Furcy’s visibility and determination have drawn the attention of historians, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers. In the conversation that follows, Sue Peabody and Jérémy Boutier draw on their experience collaborating with Gilles Gérard and others on the Étrange histoire de Furcy Madeleine, 1786-1856 exhibit at the Musée Villèle of Réunion to explain the challenges and rewards of representing Furcy’s life to a museum-going public. They describe the delicate process of identifying telling documents, creating illustrations, organizing space, and finding the proper words that might streamline scholarly findings to make visible to museum goers in Réunion and beyond some of the legal foundations of enslavement and the complicated links between race and slavery in the French empire.
Nate Marvin picks up this story to explain how he worked with a team at the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture and students at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, to transform Réunion’s L’Étrange histoire de Furcy Madeleine into Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space. In the U.S. Marvin and his collaborators added panels to the Furcy exhibit that explore the case of Abby Guy, an enslaved person who sued for freedom in Arkansas at roughly the same time Furcy was making his way through French courts. Furcy and Guy’s cases resonate in sometimes surprising ways: neither of them challenged the institution of slavery nor the association of slavery with blackness, but both of these figures, on opposite sides of the globe, were subject to the same laws, due to the astonishing reach of the 18th-century French empire.
The Furcy Madeleine/ Abby Guy exhibits are extraordinary events that bring new audiences to French history in innovative ways, as the tenacity and courage of these historical figures encourage audiences to reflect on past and present, self and society, slavery and freedom.
After closing at UA Little Rock, the exhibit will travel to Duke University and to the University of Virginia. Faculty interested in hosting the traveling exhibit at their institutions should contact the Musée de Villèle representative, Jérémy Boutier, boutier.jeremy at hotmail.fr. The exhibit consists of up to 16 double-sided or 32 single-sided free-standing or wall-mounted 80″ x 32″ panels and up to 9 optional videos that can be displayed on closed-circuit monitors (e.g. mounted tablets, or, to save costs, accessed via links on smart phones). The rights to reproduce the panels, and a set of images for publicity, come free of charge. The cost of hosting is therefore limited to the loan of the exhibit space, local/in-house printing of the panels (estimated at $8,000, depending on format), hardware and labor for mounting the panels, (optional) loan of screens and headphones associated with the videos, and any publicity.
Imaginaries is delighted to help publicize and reflect on this fascinating public research project.
Reflections:
Translating Slavery, Freedom, and Race for French and American Publics by Sue Peabody, Washington State University, and Jérémy Boutier, Université d’Aix-Marseille
Furcy Madeleine and Abby Guy: Translating Histories of Slavery and Freedom in Arkansas by Nathan Marvin, University of Arkansas at Little Rock