Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2017

Book Review of Jacqueline Couti's 'Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016)' in Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 8.1 (Spring 2017)

1B-Session/Atelier 2: Race and Racialization/Race et racialisation Salle 10 Chair/Présidence: Arlette Gautier, Université de Brest-LABERS D'esclave à officier ? Ascension, exclusion et racialisation des hommes de couleur dans l'empire colonial français au XVIII e siècle Anna Forestier, Centre Mousnier, Sorbonne Université

French Historical Studies, 2007

, about three hundred slaves attacked eleven plantations near the commercial center of Saint-Pierre, Martinique, as well as three homes in the city. According to official reports and eyewitness accounts, the incident started in the cane fields of Monsieur Perrinelle, a prominent creole, and soon spread as the group of slaves made their way from plantation to plantation. Along their route they invoked the revolutionary fervor that had recently swept France, singing to the tune of the "Parisienne," "march forward against the planters" and "wash our furrows with the blood of whites." On receiving news of the events, Martinique's new governor, contre-Amiral Jean Henri Joseph Dupotet, called the colonial militias-both white and mulatto-and rebecca Hartkopf Schloss is assistant professor of history at texas A&M University. She is writing a book on the construction of white identity in the early-nineteenth-century French Atlantic. the author thanks cyndy Bouton, Anthony Mora, Bill reddy, Steven Schloss, and members of the History Department Junior Faculty and the Melbern G. Glasscock center for Humanities research working groups for their comments on an earlier version of this article. She also extends her gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of French Historical Studies for their many helpful suggestions. the Program to enhance Scholarly and creative Achievement and the Department of History at texas A&M University provided generous research support. Unlike in the British or Spanish caribbean, throughout the eighteenth century and during the first half of the nineteenth century, in Martinique the term Creole always designated a white individual born in the colonies. When used by those born in the colonies, and in particular by the island's elites, it most often was intended as a compliment and implied that the individual understood the complexities of colonial life and, in particular, of the plantation system. When used by a French european, either in the colonies or in metropolitan France, the term Creole usually implied that an individual was uncultivated or uncivilized. Because it is often, though not always, capitalized in the original documents related to nineteenth-century Martinique, i capitalize the term here. For a recent discussion on the use of the term, see carolyn Allen, "creole then and Now: the Problem of Definition,"

2006

Through an examination of two Creole passing subject from literary passing narratives of the twentieth century, this thesis simultaneously treats two problems that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship: the role of the Creole racial identity in the genre of the passing narrative, as well as the possibility of racial passing within the context of a Creole society. In Walter White's 1926 novel, Flight, and Mayotte Capécia's 1950 novel, La négresse blanche, the protagonists' difficulties in negotiating a stable racial identity reveal the inherent weakness of the racial binary that is essential to the very notion of racial passing, and they also show that Creoleness has failed to establish itself as a stable racial identity in the societies represented in both novels.

International Labor and Working-Class History, 1998

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2010

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau's claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.

SX Salon

White Skin, Black Kin: "speaking the unspeakable", 2004

white + Creole + woman. How does one define / theorize a body that is at once visible (in its "native" space) and invisible (in the Western world)? In probing white female Creole identity in the postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean, the multi-layered complexities of a geographically fragmented and imperially constructed region must be considered. Here, a violent colonial history of institutionalized transAtlantic / plantation slavery fundamentally informed by Christianity and patriarchy has shaped a multiracial society in which the white female Creole body becomes the site of simultaneous privilege and marginalization.