BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives: Literature, Memory and Migration
Dr Antonia Wimbush (University of Melbourne)
🗓️When: Friday 25 July, 2:00-3:00pm
📍Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne Parkville Campus
BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives: Literature, Memory and Migration
In 1963, and in response to numerous demographic and economic issues, the French government created the Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer (BUMIDOM), a state migration and labour recruitment agency to move people from the Caribbean to mainland France. The BUMIDOM selected candidates, organised and financed their one-way voyage, and found them housing and work once they arrived in France. In just under 20 years, 160,000 Martinicans and Guadeloupeans migrated to France through this scheme. For some, migration was a positive experience because it allowed them to enjoy personal emancipation and professional success. For many, however, it was exploitative and coercive. In France they were treated as racialised migrants, even though they were French citizens, and thus had every right to live and work in France. In BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives, I trace the history of this scheme, examining why it originated and how it operated. I argue that the BUMIDOM was established in order to exert control over its citizens of colour in the Caribbean. I also interrogate the ways in which the BUMIDOM has been memorialised by cultural practitioners because the French state has refused to do so. Writers, filmmakers, and musicians thus become memory activists, shining a spotlight on this forgotten episode of French Caribbean history. In a period in which Black identity is increasingly entering public debate in France, the book raises urgent questions about what it means to be a French citizen and a racial minority.
Dr Antonia Wimbush is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is author of BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives: Literature, Memory and Migration (2025), Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile (2021) and Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture (2021), co-edited with Polly Galis and Maria Tomlinson. Her research interests include French Caribbean literature, literary representations of exile and migration, memory studies, and gender studies.