“A Belt of Corpses”: The Burials of Four Caribbean Intellectuals

French territories in the Caribbean have long occupied a peculiar space between Africa and France: as slave destinations, as colonies, and as French overseas departments.  Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals from the French Caribbean explained, reacted to, and lived this middle position in various ways.  Some aligned themselves with France and even served the colonial administration in Africa.  Others were more critical of imperialism and racism, though still trying to reconcile themselves and their ideas within a "Greater France."  Still others committed themselves to a violent opposition of France and its empire.  The tensions of assimilation, colonialism, and decolonization are all apparent in this trajectory.  This paper argues that these same tensions are mirrored in the decisions French Caribbean intellectuals made about their bodily remains―as well as in the ways the French state involved itself in these decisions.  Félix Eboué died in Cairo in 1944 after a long career as a colonial administrator.  He was buried there, but in 1949 his ashes were moved to the Panthéon in Paris.  Eboué's friend and colleague René Maran wanted to be buried in Paris' famous Montparnasse cemetery, and when he died in 1960, Aimé Césaire ensured that this happened.  As for Césaire, he resisted an official memorialization by France and was buried in Martinique in 2008.  However, after his death, a plaque honouring him was put up in the Panthéon.  Finally, Frantz Fanon died in the USA in 1961, but his body was flown back to Algeria and buried there, as he had requested.  Drawing from funeral services, obituaries, unofficial eulogies, and the ways the thinkers themselves talked about their deaths, I am using this "belt of corpses"―Césaire's words―to chart the intellectual evolution of the French Caribbean and also to explore the complexities of colonialism and diaspora.