Mélanie Lamotte first became interested in researching the Black experience as a teenager exploring her own genealogy. Tracing the maternal side of her family back seven generations, she identified an enslaved ancestor, Annerose, forced to work on a sugarcane plantation on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe during the late 18th century. Although Annerose was eventually emancipated, her descendants could not break the chains of economic disparities.
A great grandfather had been homeless, and Lamotte’s mother grew up in a small wooden cabin on a beach in Guadeloupe, along with her parents and four siblings — with no access to electricity, health facilities or indoor plumbing. Her mother immigrated to mainland France in the 1980s and worked as a hotel maid, eventually meeting her father, marrying and starting her own family.
“For seven generations after Annerose was freed, my family was unable to rebuild itself financially,” Lamotte shared. “The former French colonies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean are consistently ranked as the poorest regions in the European Union with a gross domestic product per capita far inferior to that of mainland France — and I wanted to understand why that was.”
The assistant professor in the Department of History initially focused her research on race, colonialism and slavery in Guadeloupe, French Louisiana and Île Bourbon (now La Réunion) but has expanded the scope to include other French colonies in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic world. Her scholarship looks at French slavery through both legislation and the daily life and experiences of enslaved people.
“It’s a different way to approach the scholarship, and my work is being influenced by both avenues of inquiry because I’m interested in the legal framework and policies as well as the experiences of those who were enslaved.”
While researching, Lamotte realized that the transoceanic circulation of ships had a huge influence on racial policies in other slave colonies. For example, a ban on interracial marriages in French Louisiana in 1724 mirrored a ban made the previous year for the Indian Ocean slave-plantation islands of Mauritius and La Réunion.
“We can’t understand the history of one area, for instance French Louisiana, without taking a greater look at what happened in the Indian Ocean,” she shares, “because those ships transported not only enslaved people but also legal documents and correspondences.”
Her upcoming book, “Empire Unseen: A Transoceanic Story of Sex, Race, and Labor in the Early French World,” which will be published by Harvard University Press, focuses on the development of racial categories in colonial discourse and policies, as well as its impact on social relations between the early 17th century and the second half of the 18th century.
A second manuscript, “Freedom in Chains: Daily Lives of the Enslaved in Early French, Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds,” will be a deep dive into the history of French slavery, focusing on the social, economic and cultural lives of enslaved people between the 17th and 18th centuries.
Lamotte is also working on a group exhibit that will run January through December 2025 at Duke’s Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery. On view will be panels discussing the history of slavery in North Carolina, created by Lamotte’s students and supported by a David L. Paletz Innovative Course Enhancement grant. The traveling exhibition Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space will run concurrently in the gallery.
“For a long time, we have been simplifying narratives about slavery and focusing only on topics like numbers in the slave trade or the plantation economy — there is something deeply dehumanizing in that,” Lamotte says. “I want to show that even under the most horrendous circumstances, enslaved people built rich cultures and economies and had social and political lives. This scholarship is a field just starting to develop, and there is much exciting research for us to work with.”
