The contribution to British society and culture of the so-called 'Windrush' generation and their descendants has frequently been documented in literary texts, and canonical works by writers such as Sam Selvon and George Lamming address the issues surrounding migration from the Caribbean to the UK during the 1950s and 60s. These contributions have become even more poignant in the wake of the 'Windrush scandal' which began to surface in 2017, when it emerged that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens, born in the Caribbean but living for many years in the UK, were wrongly denied their legal rights. What is less well-known, however, is that in France, a government scheme was set up in 1962 with the explicit view of encouraging Caribbean migration. From 1962 to 1983, 160,000 people migrated through the BUMIDOM (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d'outre-mer) to strengthen the work force and rebuild infrastructure which had been damaged during World War Two. For some, the BUMIDOM was an opportunity for social advancement; for others, it was exploitative and coercive, famously denounced by Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire as a 'deportation tool'. Since 2010, there has been a surge of cultural outpourings about the BUMIDOM, as writers, artists and filmmakers endeavour to make sense of the long-lasting legacies of this migration scheme on issues of identity and race.
This paper interrogates this surge of interest in the BUMIDOM, and asks whether it is connected to an increase in cultural memory about other transnational movements from the Caribbean to continental Europe. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's work on 'postmemory', I question how the 'generation after' remembers both the BUMIDOM and the Windrush through the stories and images passed down to them by their relatives, and how these descendants translate these images into words. Ultimately, I argue that it is imperative to analyse the entanglements between post-war migration schemes from the Caribbean to continental Europe in order to expose the racialized ideologies at the heart of European post-war migration.
