Jennifer Boum Make, "Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Mar 4, 2026

Jennifer Boum-Maké, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown, explores decolonial approaches to caregiving in the French Caribbean. She discusses how colonial legacies shape care, literary and visual strategies that resist erasure, the gendered burdens of migration and domestic labor, and how fiction and repair imaginaries reimagine collective healing.

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INSIGHT

Care Can Be Both Sustaining And Violent

Care can be simultaneously sustaining and violent when shaped by colonial systems, producing 'dirty care' focused on survival rather than repair.
Boum-Maké synthesizes Tronto, Françoise Vergès, and Elsa Dorlin to show nursing, reproductive control, and survival strategies under duress.

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ANECDOTE

Model Noir Exhibit Shows Curatorial Double Erasure

The Model Noir exhibit at Musée d'Orsay tried to restore artists' models but often used renaming and question marks without contextualizing racialization.
Boum-Maké calls this a double erasure because curators didn't address archival gaps or France's history of racial categorization.

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ANECDOTE

Humus Uses Fiction To Honor Archival Silence

Fabienne Canard's novel Humus confronts archival silence by inventing polyphonic voices for 14 captives using nicknames like La Muette and La Blanche.
Fiction both acknowledges impossibility and carefully attempts to restore individuality without pretending to fully recover the past.

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Origins and Methodology of Decolonial Care

00:40 • 6min

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Defining Decolonial Care

06:14 • 6min

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Curating Silences and Double Erasure

Fictional Restitution in Humus

18:43 • 4min

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State Migration and the Bumidom

22:40 • 2min

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Texts Resisting Domestic Invisibilization

25:03 • 4min

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Environmental Damage and Care in Morne Capresse

29:03 • 4min

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Tropique Toxique's Repair Imaginary

33:32 • 3min

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Potomitan: Gendered Burdens of Care

36:44 • 2min

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Subverting Potomitan in Contemporary Novels

39:05 • 4min

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Writing as Care and Recovery

Pays en Nous is discussed as a bande dessinée in which Jessica Oublié investigates the Bumidom program through family stories and archival research, visually representing the materiality of archives and the process of reconstruction. The book uses first-person inquiry and interviews to counter the invisibility of domestic care labor, blending personal history with scholarly conversations. Boum-Maké highlights how the graphic form effectively conveys archival searching and the discontinuous nature of family memory. The episode treats the work as an exemplar of medium-specific capacity to portray decolonial care practices.

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Humus

Gaspard Koenig

Gouverneurs de la rosée

Jacques Roumain

Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la Rosée depicts the life of a rural Haitian community confronting social and economic challenges while exploring solidarity and leadership. The novel centers on characters whose labor and caregiving sustain communal life, highlighting themes of self-sacrifice and collective action. Boum-Maké cites it as an example of Caribbean literature rich in caregiving figures who support protagonists and community survival. The work has been influential in Francophone Caribbean literature for its political engagement and literary portrayal of peasant life. Its depiction of caregivers exemplifies the genre's recurring attention to domestic and communal labor shaped by colonial legacies.

La Bonne Histoire de Madeleine Demetrius

Gaël Octavia

Gaël Octavia's La Bonne Histoire de Madeleine Demetrius is discussed as narratively peeling back myths of the perfect, resilient woman to expose complexity, fallibility, and interdependence. The narrator's unreliable voice and candid vulnerability are read as tools to reclaim visibility for women beyond sacrificial stereotypes. Boum-Maké pairs this work with Doudous to show trajectories from self-annihilation toward self-affirmation and collective care. The episode focuses on thematic analysis rather than publication specifics.

Le Livre d'Emma

Marie Célian

Marie Célian's Le Livre d'Emma is referenced by the guest to illustrate how caregiving and nursing can be framed as transmitting legacies of enslavement, with the protagonist refusing to nurse as a form of resistance. The episode does not offer publication details or an extended summary, using the novel as a textual example within a broader theoretical argument about colonized care. Because the transcript provides limited bibliographic information, the book is presented primarily as a supporting literary reference.

Morne Capresse

Gisele Pineau

Gisèle Pineau's novel (referred to in the episode) centers on a leader who returns from France to form a congregation aimed at saving women and land in Guadeloupe, confronting chlordécone pollution and plantation legacies. The narrative charts both hopeful communal projects and how such communities can reproduce oppressive hierarchies, culminating in catastrophe and the possibility of renewal. Boum-Maké reads the book as tragic yet containing potential hope, arguing that catastrophe might open possibilities for repair and living after damage. The novel thus interrogates the limits and possibilities of decolonial care in a contaminated landscape. Exact edition details were not discussed in the interview.

Decolonial Care

Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean

Jennifer Boum-Maké

Jennifer Boum-Maké's Decolonial Care examines how colonialism has shaped caregiving dynamics in the French Caribbean and explores possibilities for reimagining care. The book places postcolonial studies in conversation with care studies to trace how caregiving has been structured by oppression and how narratives and media can model decolonial forms of care. Boum-Maké analyzes a broad corpus—novels, graphic narratives, memoirs, and curatorial projects—to show both distorted, violent forms of care and emergent practices of repair. Chapters address curation and archival silences, state-sponsored migration and domestic work, environmental damage and communal repair, and gendered expectations exemplified by the potomiton figure. The work argues for reorienting attention toward those subjected to oppressive care and for using cultural texts to imagine reparative, collective care practices.

Lettres à Noirs

Letters to a Black Woman

Françoise Ega

Françoise Ega's Lettres à Noirs is referenced as a first-person account where the author takes work as a housekeeper to investigate and expose abusive labor conditions faced by Antillean migrants under the French Bumidom program. Boum-Maké uses the memoir to illustrate how domestic care work is invisibilized and racialized, reproducing colonial power dynamics. The book is framed as an early example of writers documenting state-sponsored migration and its exploitative consequences. The episode does not supply extended bibliographic details, focusing instead on the memoir's thematic relevance to care studies and colonial labor.

Doudous

Fabienne Cancrin (Canor/Canor's Dodoos in transcript)

Doudous (as referenced) presents a protagonist inheriting teachings to maintain silence and family cohesion, showing resilience as an imposed burden that silences women. Boum-Maké reads the book as illustrating the extreme costs of the potomitan ideal: the protagonist sacrifices herself, suggesting the need to imagine alternatives to sacrificial care. The episode contrasts this text with others that offer less catastrophic models of female subjectivity. Bibliographic specifics and exact author name variants are unclear from the transcript, so the book is presented primarily as a thematic example.

Journée ordinaire d'une infirmière

Gisèle Pineau (referred earlier as Gisèle Pinot)

In the coda, Boum-Maké discusses this work (title given in French) by Gisèle Pineau, which recounts experiences as a psychiatric nurse and examines institutional alienation. The author uses writing to disclose the inner life of the psychiatric hospital and to develop attentiveness, shared vulnerability, and self-care. Boum-Maké frames the text as an example of writing functioning as both self-recovery and outward care, linking literary practice to decolonial caregiving ethics. The episode treats the book as emblematic of writing's reparative potential rather than providing full bibliographic detail.

Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

Guest Jennifer Boum-Maké is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. In addition to her monograph, she has co-edited 2025’s Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-Language Bandes Dessinées. In addition to many journal articles and contributions to collected volumes, she serves on a number of editorial boards and is one of the founders of Kwazman vwa: New Paths in Caribbean literature, an online series hosting conversations with ultracontemporary Caribbean writers.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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