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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks, editors. Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora. (The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World.) Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 335. $39.95.
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| In our era of global migration and identity politics, when entire academic journals are devoted to the theme of diaspora, Huguenot history is particularly interesting to think about. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes sparked one of early modern Europe's largest migrations for reasons of conscience and introduced the word refugee into the English language. For several generations, Huguenots formed a discernable minority group in lands from Prussia to Britain and from South Africa to South Carolina. Then their distinctiveness waned. The late nineteenth century saw new organizational efforts to revive group awareness, as Huguenot historical and genealogical societies were founded in nearly every country where they had settled. But today only a fraction of those descended from Huguenot ancestry claim the honor, and the identity is largely devoid of social and political significance. One contemporary American descendant of Huguenots, the sportswriter Frank Deford, has called the group "a forgotten tribe." |
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Historians have not forgotten it. Both the three-hundredth anniversary of the revocation in 1985 and the four-hundredth anniversary of the Edict of Nantes in 1998 generated a spate of books and conferences devoted to different aspects of the Huguenot experience in France and the diaspora. This is one such volume, the fruit of a 1997 symposium held at the College of Charleston. Its distinctive features lie in its mixture of studies devoted to the Huguenots inside and outside France, its unusually broad chronological and geographical reach, and its novel, if limited, efforts to explore the themes of Huguenot memory and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. |
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