Gaetano Ciarcia

Institut des mondes africains (IMAF), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (France)

Contemporary forms of damnatio memoriae: commemorative places of slavery in Guadeloupe

2024–2025: Spring

Gaetano Ciarcia is an anthropologist and Research Director at the CNRS/IMAF (National Centre for Scientific Research/African Worlds Institute) in Paris.

His current research focuses on the commemorative uses of the transatlantic slave trade and colonisation in Benin and the French West Indies, as well as the history of ethnology and evangelisation in Dahomey, now Benin. He is also interested in the place of fiction in ethnological and heritage discourses.

He is the author of various publications and documentary films on the institution of cultural, political and religious memories in Mali (Dogon country), southern Benin, and France (Bordeaux, Nantes, and Guadeloupe). He is the author of De la mémoire ethnographique. L’exotisme du pays dogon (2003) and Le revers de l’oubli. Mémoires et commémorations de l’esclavage au Bénin (2016) and, with director Jean-Christophe Monferran, three documentary films: Mémoire promise (2014); L’impasse Toussaint-Louverture (2019); Les ancêtres retournés (2020).

Ciarcia has edited or co-edited numerous collective publications. His most recent works include the documentary film Le Dahomey cérémoniel (2022) and the book Le Dahomey cérémoniel. Le cinéma de Francis Aupiais (2024). Since 2017, he has been conducting ethnographic research in Guadeloupe.

Gaetano Ciarcia has been a visiting scholar at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil; the Universidad Nacional San Martín/Istituto de Altos Estudios Sociales in Buenos Aires; and the Université d’État in Haïti. He is the editor of the journal Passés futurs and a member of the editorial board of the journal Cahiers d’études africaines.