Overview

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.”

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9781781383018

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Jacqueline Couti's important book Dangerous Creole Liaisons demonstrates that while a politically turbulent nineteenth-century France was defining itself, in turns, as an empire, a monarchy, and a republic, a corpus of writers in Martinique, mainly white and heretofore little-known, was producing texts that both dialogued with and opposed the prevailing French discourses of nationhood. In doing so, her study counters the received notion that Aime Cesaire (followed by Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant) was the inaugurator of a distinctively Martinican literature, and that his Martinican predecessors were mere imitators, in form and content, of French prose and verse. Couti writes that belying the fallacy of a monolithic French colonial discourse, the writers in question not only divorced themselves from mere imitation, they also introduced distinctive notions of gendered race relations and transatlantic nationalisms that still haunt[] the French Caribbean imaginary and influence Martinican identity construction today. Jacqueline Couti's important book Dangerous Creole Liaisons demonstrates that while a politically turbulent nineteenth-century France was defining itself, in turns, as an empire, a monarchy, and a republic, a corpus of writers in Martinique, mainly white and heretofore little-known, was producing texts that both dialogued with and opposed the prevailing French discourses of nationhood. In doing so, her study counters the received notion that Aime Cesaire (followed by Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant) was the inaugurator of a distinctively Martinican literature, and that his Martinican predecessors were mere imitators, in form and content, of French prose and verse. Couti writes that belying the fallacy of a monolithic French colonial discourse, the writers in question not only divorced themselves from mere imitation, they also introduced distinctive notions of gendered race relations and transatlantic nationalisms that still haunt[] the French Caribbean imaginary and influence Martinican identity construction today.

Author Information

Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French Studies at Rice University. Her research and teaching interests delve into the transatlantic and transnational interconnections between cultural productions from continental France and its now former colonies.

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