Welcome to ‘Podcasts from the bagne’ the podcast where we discuss disease, contagion, confinement and isolation in France’s overseas penal colonies. 

This podcast is part of the Postcards from the bagne research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R002452/1). I'm Ayshka Sené, a postdoctoral researcher on the project, and I work with Sophie Fuggle who is the lead researcher on the project.

In this short series of podcasts, we will be inviting various academics and heritage professionals to discuss the history of disease in French Guiana and New Caledonia, two of France’s overseas penal settlements. The current global context of the Covid 19 pandemic has provoked various comparisons with past pandemics and there are insights to be gained by looking at the management of these outbreaks as well as their effects. Perhaps more interestingly, we feel there has been less comment on the highly racialised stakes of the pandemic and the question of which lives we value and why. Here we can draw comparisons with historic epidemics in France’s penal colonies. We’ll question how pandemics reinforce existing divisions within societies and explore how those suffering from disease in penal colonies experienced a sort of double exile and double forgetting as their stories have faded away whilst others have dominated.

You are warmly invited to join us as we explore these themes. Have a look at our project blog, follow us on Instagram and Twitter to find out more and we will be back with episode 1 very soon.