Over the past decade, the field of memory studies has given rise to a growing body of literature that has responded to the recent boom in memories of slavery and the slave trade. The proliferation of memorial sites relating to Europe's slaving past has largely coincided with two key commemorative dates relating to abolitionism: the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 (UK) and the Abolition of Slavery in 1848 (France). The accompanying literature – not least of which are the extensive studies conducted by Christine Chivallon and Françoise Vergès which bookend the current volume – has served to enrich our understanding of this boom within both Francophone and Anglophone spheres. Within the particular socio-political context of the French Republic, research to date has tended to focus on the so-called guerre de mémoires [‘memory war’] and its relevance to slavery studies, as well as on the (competing) forms of memory work that are taking place within and across distinct regions of the Republic as compared with other nation-states. Yet until now there has been no collective study dedicated to considering how these memorialization processes are operating across multiple Francophone contexts, or rather within and between countries that have a historical connection to France and its former colonial empire. While this volume cannot hope to be exhaustive in its scope, it nonetheless provides an important intervention that foregrounds the multiplicity of memories of slavery within the Francophone world, while also moving beyond slavery and, importantly, towards memories of other forms of colonial labour exploitation that took place in the post-abolition period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As is clearly revealed by the contributions presented here, memories of slavery and its colonial aftermath continue to represent a highly contentious subject of debate and have created complex matrices for the formation of national, regional and transnational identities. Chapters focusing on the French Caribbean and Haiti, West and North Africa, the Indian Ocean and metropolitan France do not simply showcase the breadth of memory work within the Francophone world, but additionally draw out important historical and discursive specificities that relate to the legacies of French-led slavery and labour exploitation. Divided into two parts, this volume highlights the blind spots that have marked public memories of slavery and slavery commemorations in all their many forms.