Women in the Whirlwind: Withholding Guadeloupe's Archipelagic History

This article takes the 1928 Atlantic hurricane, remembered in Guadeloupe as le grand cyclone 28, as the starting point for a selective genealogy of Guadeloupean women in times of catastrophe, following Melissa Harris-Perry's study of women and citizenship during Hurricane Katrina. The essay reminisces and imagines different scenarios of survival and resilience, while analyzing modes of representations of Guadeloupean identities, from the unattributed and undated ID photograph of the author's paternal grandmother to Augustus Sherman's group portrait of migrant workers on their arrival at Ellis Island in the late 1910s, Man Ray's exotica of his métisse muse on the eve of World War II, Sarah Maldoror's filmic depiction of a heroine of the Angolan anticolonial struggle in the 1970s, Alain Foix's recent historical reconstitution of the encounter between Angela Davis and Gerty Archimède, and Joëlle Ferly's "revolutionary" performance in Port-au-Prince in 2011. The article concludes on the impossibility of Guadeloupean identity outside of an archipelagic construction of history.