Depicting French Caribbean migration through bande dessinée

In the post-war era, Europe relied on Caribbean migration to strengthen its work force, and France was no exception. From 1962 to 1983, 160,000 men and women migrated from Guadeloupe and Martinique to mainland France through the BUMIDOM (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer). Technically speaking, these people were not immigrants because they remained in France despite undertaking a transatlantic voyage. However, the experiences of French Caribbeans in metropolitan France are almost always described as experiences of immigration. There is a distinct lack of Frenchlanguage literature that discusses this state-organized migration, in contrast to a relatively large corpus of texts by anglophone authors (such as Sam Selvon) that examines Caribbean migration to the United Kingdom. This article argues that bande dessinée fills the gap in representations of migration through an analysis of Péyi an nou, written by Jessica Oublié and illustrated by Marie-Ange Rousseau in 2017. Drawing on semiotic approaches to bande dessinée advocated by Laurence Grove, the article contends that Péyi an nou has successfully raised the visibility of migration from the French Caribbean, despite failing to make full advantage of the ways in which meaning is conveyed through the interaction of textual and visual layers.