Christine Chivallon

She is currently conducting a study on the links between “power” and the “uses of art” in Martinique which builds on her other research on the erasure or the “making visible” of slavery in museum displays. She is also involved in an action-research project based on earlier work now being revisited with the same interlocutors several years later. In a more epistemological field, she examines the succession of paradigms and the normative variability in the meaning of concepts. Chivallon’s most recent work focuses on “new materialisms” with particular interest in the notion of the “plantationocene”. Furthermore, her approach consistently strives to connect knowledge production with a reflexiveness imperative. Appointed Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, since 2013, she is also the founder of the research network “Mondes de la Colonialité et TransModernité” based in Martinique and Paris.

Chivallon is the author of, among others, “Décoloniser les arts ou décoloniser les institutions de l’art?” (forthcoming 2025); L’humain-l’inhumain: L’impensé des nouveaux matérialismes (Matérialité, ontologie, plantationocène) (Éditions Atlantiques déchaînés, Selles-sur-Cher, 2022); “Decoding the diaspora of Stuart Hall: Historicity, performativity and performance of a concept” (African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2018); “Colonial violence and civilising utopias in the French and British empires: The Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) and the Insurrection of the South (1870)” (Slavery & Abolition, 2017); and “Between History and its Trace: Slavery and the Caribbean Archive” (Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2016).