ABOUT THIS BOOK

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. In so doing, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Doyle D. Calhoun is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies at Trinity College.

REVIEWS

“Stunning. Doyle D. Calhoun’s The Suicide Archive brings together groundbreaking research, meticulous analysis, and, most importantly, a fully human approach to the most delicate of subjects.”

-- Christopher L. Miller, Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of African American Studies and French, Emeritus, Yale University

“The author-investigator skillfully draws the reader into an enthralling narrative, one in which the evidence and traces retrieved during forensic excursions into archives, images, words, and sounds gradually delineate the contours of The Suicide Archive. In doing so, Doyle D. Calhoun’s book offers an alternative historiography and innovative reading of global literary history, while engaging with art history, film, and performance.”

-- Dominic Thomas, Madeleine Letessier Professor of French, University of California, Los Angeles

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In Articulo Mortis