Eric T. Jennings is Distinguished Professor in the History of France and the Francophonie at the University of Toronto.
A riveting, heart-wrenching story of exile, intellectual
cross-fertilization, and political awakening among refugees from
Hitler’s Europe who escaped together to Martinique. Jennings has
written a brilliant new chapter in the transatlantic history of
negritude, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism.
*Alice L. Conklin, The Ohio State University*
An excellent book. Using a wide array of sources, Jennings vividly
describes a short-lived but important episode in the refugee
experience during World War II—the desperate attempts of those who
went to Marseille in order to emigrate to the French Caribbean. He
examines the cultural creativity that emerged as a result of the
encounter between the refugees, many of whom were Surrealists, and
native black artists and intellectuals on Martinique, especially
Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, the founders of the ‘negritude’
movement.
*Vicki Caron, Cornell University*
Jennings tells the little-known story of the escape route that took
some thousands of Jews, Spanish republicans, and others menaced by
Nazi Germany from Marseille to France’s Caribbean colony of
Martinique. Many of those saved in this way from the clutches of
Nazism were prominent artists and intellectuals, some of
whom—Claude Levi-Strauss, André Breton, Wilfredo Lam—enjoyed, or
would enjoy, international renown. We learn about Martinique’s
complex relations with the United States, which feared that many of
the refugees destined for the island were potential fifth
columnists eager to attack Americans from within. And it is
fascinating to see how the connection between negritude and
surrealism played out in Martinique.
*Edward Berenson, New York University*
[An] eye-opening history of the Martinique ‘refuge’ during World
War II. Escape from Vichy provides a rich social history of one of
the understudied escape routes of World War II, one fraught with
internment camps and Pétainist antisemites, yet one that allowed
some five thousand refugees to flee Nazi-ridden Europe.
*Journal of Modern History*
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