Bøker av Miranda Frances Spieler

Mistaking Paris for a haven of freedom, slaves sought refuge there only to be hunted down, arrested, and deported. Through the biographies of enslaved people who came to Paris from Africa, the West Indies, and the Indian Ocean, Spieler's study reveals the emergence of a new racialized legal culture in the last years of the Old Regime.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but it also invented the noncitizen-the person whose rights were nonexistent. The South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for these outcasts of the new French citizenry, and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups.