Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Monographs, Women on 2016-03-15 02:48Z by Steven |
Liverpool University Press
2016-05-02
224 Pages
239 x 163mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781781383018
Jacqueline Couti, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies
University of Kentucky
Dangerous Creole Liaisons explores a French Caribbean context to broaden discussions of sexuality, nation building, and colonialism in the Americas. Couti examines how white Creoles perceived their contributions to French nationalism through the course of the nineteenth century as they portrayed sexualized female bodies and sexual and racial difference to advance their political ideologies. Questioning their exhilarating exoticism and titillating eroticism underscores the ambiguous celebration of the Creole woman as both seductress and an object of lust. She embodies the Caribbean as a space of desire and a political site of contest that reflects colonial, slave and post-slave societies. The under-researched white Creole writers and non-Caribbean authors (such as Lafcadio Hearn) who traveled to and wrote about these islands offer an intriguing gendering and sexualization of colonial and nationalist discourses. Their use of the floating motif of the female body as the nation exposes a cultural cross-pollination, an intense dialogue of political identity between continental France and her Caribbean colonies. Couti suggests that this cross-pollination still persists. Eventually, representations of Creole women’s bodies (white and black) bring two competing conceptions of nationalism into play: a local, bounded, French nationalism against a transatlantic and more fluid nationalism that included the Antilles in a “greater France.”
Table of Contents
- Introduction Chercher la femme: Traces of an Ever-Present Absence
- 1. The (White) Female Creole Body: Bearer of Culture and Cultural Signifier
- 2. Falling from Grace: Creole Gothic, Flawed Femininity, and The Collapse of Civilization Coda I (Re)writing History: Revival of the Declining Creole Nation and Transatlantic Ties
- 3. Sexualizing and Darkening Black Female Bodies: Whose Imagined Community?
- 4. Colonial Democracy and Fin de Siècle Martinique: The Third Republic and White Creole Dissent
- Coda II Heritage and Legacies
- Glossary
- Bibliography